Noelle Bowles examines Ryan Coogler’s hit film “Sinners,” speaking with Tony Kail, cultural anthropologist and scholar of Hoodoo, about how this story of vampires and the blues in the Jim Crow south faithfully incorporates Hoodoo and rootworking.
Arts & Culture
Classics of Pagan Cinema: The Blood on Satan’s Claw
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There are those who say a witch is born and others who insist a witch is made. This film suggests a third option: that witchcraft can come upon a person as unbidden and inevitable as puberty, and as impossible to understand.
Arts & Culture
Review: Gladiator II and the chaos at the heart of empire
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“Nearly everyone in this film is obsessed with the Rome that was, where the emperor was a scholar instead of a syphilitic club kid in a toga,” writes Meg Elison in her review of Ridley Scott’s new film. “It is much easier to complain about a bad government than to build one that works. See Virgil for more on this. See Hannah Arendt. See Marija Gimbutas. See all of human history. See the news.”
Arts & Culture
Witches on TV: Pop Culture and Power
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TV witches have always captivated me. As a child, I would sit cross-legged in front of the screen, completely spellbound by reruns of Samantha Stephens from Bewitched on Nick-at-Nite. I remember watching her effortlessly clean the house with a twitch of her nose, never realizing that there was something deeper going on in these portrayals of witches.
Arts & Culture
Classics of Pagan Cinema: Hocus Pocus
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“As a nation, we love to cast our projections on the witches of Salem,” writes Meg Elison as she examines America’s favorite film about witches. “What we want from the real people who died by state violence, the places where they hanged, the hysteria that killed them, is fun. We want Salem to be a theme park, to amuse us and titillate us.”
Arts & Culture
Life Itself: George A. Romero’s Theology of the Living Dead
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The more of Romero’s films that I watched – and especially the more of his novel that I read – the more I also found a theology bubbling up through the blood that aligns with my own theology of Ásatrú, a modern religion that revives, reconstructs, and reimagines the ancient polytheism of Northern Europe.