“The premise, a Biblical horror film exploring Jesus’s adolescence, is apparently treated by some as shocking,” writes Manny Tejeda Moreno. “To me, that simply confirms they’ve never read the Bible.”
Arts & Culture
Mojo, Music, and Magic in Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners”
|
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: Rosemary’s Baby
|
“Looking at where the word ‘coven’ comes from, we start with ‘convenire,’ a verb meaning to come together,” writes Meg Elison in this searing reappraisal of the 1968 classic. “When a woman comes together with the devil, we get ‘Rosemary’s Baby.'”
Arts & Culture
Classics of Pagan Cinema: The Cauldron of Cerridwen and “The Sword in the Stone”
|
The legend is always changing from one thing to another, being gobbled up and sweated out, being birthed into new life with new names, being boiled up in the cauldron of Ceridwen to become what it must be next.
Arts & Culture
“Beneath the Trees” (2019): folk horror made with ten tropes and zero soul
|
As the sage Lil Wayne once said, there are two ways to make art: be good or be good at it. A film does not have to be innovative or even have anything new to say for audiences to respond. This film is neither good nor good at it. I didn’t want to sing along, so here I am to heckle.
Arts & Culture
Folk Magic and Hermeticism in “Nosferatu”
|
With its right hand Eggers’s Nosferatu points at all the sex it can, but its left invokes the imagery and the uncanny nature of folk magic.