The myth is that the murdered woman was 'a sex worker, a gangster's moll, or a movie extra yearning to become Lana Turner.' In fact, Elizabeth Short was a young woman who wanted to see more of the world than her hometown offered. She had suffered abuse from her father and dreamed of making a new life for herself in Los Angeles.
Lestat gets an interesting alert on his tablet: a new book by Daniel Molloy called Interview with the Vampire is about to come out. Louis tries to defend himself, claiming he destroyed Molloy's laptop and didn't know the book, written with a cloud-based copy of Molloy's data, was being published until a month ago. But Louis' failure to warn him just bristles Lestat more.
While working on a graduate school paper on the mystical powers of coral, gemologist Anna Rasche ventured deep into the archives of the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum's library. Coral is the most powerful material to ward off the evil eye-a belief Italians have held since ancient times. Romans often gifted newborns coral amulets to prevent sickness and bad luck.
Spider-Noir, the pulpy detective reimagining of Spider-Man starring Nicolas Cage, has received its first teaser trailer, which you can watch below - in both black and white and color. Premiering on Prime Video on May 27th, the Spider-Noir series sort of kind of spins off Cage's voice role as Spider-Man Noir in the animated Spider-Verse film franchise. However, he's not playing the same grizzled Peter Parker here;
Adapted from Julia May Jonas' critically acclaimed debut novel, Vladimir follows an unnamed middle-aged woman (Weisz), a writer, professor, wife, and mother who feels increasingly dissatisfied with her own life. Her husband (Slattery), also a professor, has been accused of inappropriate relationships with former students and is under review. This didn't come as a shock to her, as they have an open marriage, but she dislikes the personal scrutiny it has brought.
Jamie Campbell Bower gave the standout performance as the big bad in the otherwise ho-hum fourth season of Stranger Things, and in this tawdry but fun occult-themed thriller, like Satan himself, he's back to his same old scene-stealing tricks. Once again, he's not the protagonist but a sinister figure first met literally in the shadows, making ominous pronouncements in that posh-boy accent. When finally revealed, he is dipping his chin and looking up with those uncannily blue eyes like a vogue dancer catching the spotlight. If he keeps at it with roles like this, he could be the Peter Cushing of modern horror, but with catwalk-queen hair, or the goth equivalent of the young Ralph Fiennes in his rent-a-villain era. What's not to love?
If Heaven, according to Talking Heads, is the place where nothing ever happens, the Bardo, according to George Saunders, is as jam-packed and frantic as Costco on Black Friday. We Saunders fans have been to the Bardo before that suspended state between life and death where, according to Tibetan Buddhism, a person's self-awareness helps determine what kind of existence they'll enter next.
Glimpse them chatting in a restaurant or posing on Instagram, and you might think they have it all. The pair live in London but often travel, drawing the eyes of other guests, their skin glowing, their limbs artfully at ease. She writes affirmations on hotel stationery; he claims to taste notes of bark and tobacco in his chianti. As Sean Gilbert's dark, observant debut opens in Istanbul, this apparently perfect couple bicker and sweat, for secrets lurk behind their facade and one of them might be murder.
After spotting that Eli's rash guard conceals a red, flaky skin disorder, the boys have concluded that he has the titular plague, a contagious disease that affects social standing as much as it does dermatological well-being. If anyone ever touches him, they must thoroughly wash themselves before they're considered full-blown infected. Even something as innocent as Eli sitting at the same lunch table sends his teammates running and screaming.
Until recently, "liminal spaces" were only known to architects. But on the Internet, storytellers and amateur filmmakers have morphed these ubiquitous places you pass by on errand runs into caverns of cosmic terror. Now, a new A24 film from 20-year-old filmmaker Kane Parsons is set to kick off the summer and christen it the season of liminal horror.
