Apples Don’t Fall Far from Their Trees There can only ever be so much success in attempting to analyze Twin Peaks. Once you accept that, though, it is possible to uncover all types of meaning in the famously bizarre series, even in its most surreal moments. 2017’s Twin Peaks: The…

Mortensen and Jackson’s Hero Draws Quiet Courage from Optimism and Belief in Good Never underestimate the influence our favorite characters can have on our lives. I was born in 1994, and thus had no lack of potential movie role models growing up. Star Wars was back, and 5-year-old me had…

Christopher Nolan’s Saga Shows that Heroism Means Rejecting Fear and Accepting Truth “All creatures feel fear — especially the scary ones.” This is what Thomas Wayne tells his young son Bruce after his terrifying ordeal falling into a derelict well swarming with bats early in Batman Begins (2005). Fear is…

Heath Ledger’s Villain Stokes Society’s Racial Tensions to Sow the Seeds of Chaos If you lived when Christopher Nolan’s superhero opus The Dark Knight came out in 2008 (or any time since), you heard about Heath Ledger’s remarkable portrayal of the Joker. The performance earned Ledger a posthumous Oscar and…

The Director’s Protagonists Share A Common Signature Weapon Jon Favreau is one of the most popular directors today. The mind behind some of the biggest films and television of the last twenty years, his movies often feature large-scale action spectacle. Even the most creative auteurs have certain tropes that they…

Both are Southern Gothic Horror Stories Commenting on 2017 America Capcom’s Resident Evil 7: Biohazard and Jordan Peele’s Get Out are sort of like fraternal twins: they aren’t identical, but they were born at the same time and go together. Released one month apart in 2017 — Resident Evil 7…

Tearing Down a Web Led to an Important Lesson Last night I went for a walk. In the midst of Texas summer rainstorms, the air feels like you’ve stepped out into a rainforest. So humid your shirt instantly begins to cling to your back, to your armpits, and when you…

Horror Game Channels Rival Series Silent Hill in its Most Horrifying Sequence SPOILER WARNING for Capcom’s Resident Evil Village from here on: Resident Evil Village: I’ll admit here that I call it RE8, though people seem to agree it should just be called what it says; numbered entries are so…

An Open Letter to a Trumpist — I wrote this letter sometime around Thanksgiving, about two months ago, around the time of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s election. I thought that it was okay, but was not sure if it really merited saying out loud or if it was more of a personal therapeutic exercise. And as…