“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” has for a long time been my favorite “ghost story,” not solely because of how well it is told, but also because it is, for me, a “local” tale, in that I grew up in Harrison, just a few miles from its setting, the villages of Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow,
Once, a long time ago, I lived in a house near the edge of the world. In the winter, when the air was still, I would lie awake at night and listen to the Ocean, to the waves. Relentless. Never-ending. In my mind, I could see them. They would turn and curl and fall forward
I sit and look out my back window into the yard behind my house. It is large and full of trees; a combination of fir and pine and aspen. On this day, early in the morning, it is cold and fog is moving in. The white/grey translucent mist sneaks its way into the yard. It
A long time ago, way back in college, I had an apartment two blocks off Height Street in San Francisco. It was a nondescript thing just a box on the third floor where the “rooms” were defined by how you placed the furniture. But I had a TV and a stereo with large speakers and
Author's note: This was written nearly seven years ago and I must admit my opinion of the Star Wars Holiday Special has softened a bit. Oh, I still think it's awful don't get me wrong, but it has for me fallen into the "so bad it's good" category. Well, sort of. You see while
The Mummy from 1932 is a classic. A flawed classic for sure, but a classic nonetheless. There are parts of this film that are truly brilliant and there are parts that are…well…not. To be honest this is one film that I have had mixed feeling for. I want to love it. I do. But then
An invisible man must be one of the more bizarre choices for a monster. First of all it’s not really a monster, not in the classical sense anyway. He is, after all, just a man. A deranged man, sure, but just a man nonetheless. There is nothing supernatural about him, no unnatural resurrection or
Tod Browning’s 1931 adaptation of Dracula is the granddaddy of them all, the film the launched the Classic Monster films of Universal. The Universal cinematic universe if you will. I try not to judge these old films by modern standards or how a film has come to be perceived over the decades. I attempt,
By 1941 Universal had been making monster movies for over a decade. It had now become a well-oiled machine and while not quite formulaic just yet was well on its way to becoming so. The Wolf-Man still retains the moodiness and the harsh shadows emblematic of German Expressionism that characterizes the earlier films. But
Back when I was in High school I took an art history class where we studied the life and works of artists from the Renaissance to the modern period. I had by this time already fancied myself an artist and had already figured out what was good art and what was not. Modern Art,
