The Dark Galleries
Pause Play Play Prev | Next The noir and gothic films of the forties and fifties often feature beguiling portraits, paintings that possess a strange power; they inspire acts of fraud, forgery, theft,...
View ArticleSeeing Red
Anticommunism at the movies. You’re trying awful hard with all this patriotic eyewash.—Skip McCoy, Pickup on South Street If you’re feeling polemical, you might argue that all Hollywood cinema is...
View ArticleSorry, Judy
Judy doesn’t even deserve this picnic. I recently had a thought while reading Marjory Hall’s A Picnic for Judy, a YA book from 1955. The premise was promising: a young woman is forced to move with her...
View ArticleFlying Saucers Over the Art Department!
How the book designers of the fifties and sixties tackled alien invasions. A still from Forbidden Planet, 1956. It’s impossible to know what sort of cover design will make a book fly off the shelves....
View ArticleA Lost Exchange Between Burroughs and Ginsberg
Photo: Hank O’Neal. In 1992, five years before his death, Allen Ginsberg visited William S. Burroughs’s home in Lawrence, Kansas. Over the course of four days, the two Beats chatted about everything...
View ArticleScenes Dealing with Walking Dead, Torture, Vampires
In midtwentieth-century America, the appetite for comics was astounding. As many as a hundred million books were sold each month. Whereas the comics of the forties starred talking animals and...
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