American Race Relations and Juvenile Delinquency through the Lens of J’irai cracher sur vos tombes Cinematic adaptations of books have a long history of being derided by the source material’s author, but few have as dramatic a claim to this ...
Read More »Catch a Shooting Hustler: Yakuza, Borderless Action, and Velvet Hustler
Eight. Nine. Three. In the Japanese card game hana-fuda, it’s the worst hand you can get. Eight, nine, and three—ya, ku, and sa. Japanese organized crime families adopted the name “yakuza” because of this hand. Because you need to be ...
Read More »Franco Meets the Fearmonger: Weird TV, Weird Movies, and The Girl from Rio
Somehow, in the late 1970s, a kinky Jess Franco sci-fi/spy film made it onto broadcast television.
Read More »Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, Pt. 3: It Seems We Have to Storm Hell!
In 1987, maverick filmmakers Tsui Hark and Ching Siu-tung joined forces to make A Chinese Ghost Story, one of the most beautiful and enduring films of the Hong Kong New Wave.
Read More »Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, Pt. 2: From the Old Classics Comes a New Wave
In the latter half of the 1970s, a revolution took place in the Hong Kong film industry. At its anarchic forefront was a shaggy-haired visionary named Tsui Hark.
Read More »Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, Pt. 1: From the Ming Dynasty to the Shaw Brothers Dynasty
A long time ago, Pu Songling wrote a compendium of weird stories about ghosts and monsters. Who knew that one of these short nightmares would lead to such big things?
Read More »Funhouse Madhouse: Nazis, Stalin, and the Hourglass Sanatorium
Allegory, symbolism, fantasy, and surrealism are often the refuge of artists working under the oppressive thumb of authoritarian regimes. Usually, it works, thanks to the average censor being unable to process art on any but the most literal of levels. ...
Read More »Defiant Fairytales: The Prague Spring and Valerie and Her Week of Wonders
Despite finding itself under the thumb of Stalin’s Soviet Union after World War II, grey and miserable Communism never quite took in what was then Czechoslovakia, no matter what the Party or the secret police demanded. There was (and still ...
Read More »Invisible Man in Japan
The Invisible Man (1933, James Whale), based on a story by HG Wells, was one of the early horror films that helped establish Universal as the go-to studio for chilling fare. They were, at the time, locked in a battle ...
Read More »A European Vampire in Japan: Japanese Vampire Fiction and Nobuo Nakagawa’s Lady Vampire
Japan’s occasional flirtations with vampires are, like most things having to do with Japan and Western pop culture, a mix of revulsion and fascination with the foreign, a dichotomy born of the interests of the young simply not lining up ...
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