When you mention to people that you are spending your weekend watching a seven-and-a-half-hour-long French silent film, they tend to look at you with an expression that lands somewhere between surprise and horror. And it’s true, a seven-hour movie isn’t for everyone, and a silent one nonetheless — but this…

2022 was a big year for me, film-wise. On a personal note, it was the year I studied for and received a Masters in Film Studies, rediscovered my love of all kinds of cinema and writing, and attempted to take in as many films as I possibly could. By the…

Does sunlight kill a vampire? Must they return to a box of their native soil before dawn? Will the crow of the cock signal the death toll to the undead? These ideas are part and parcel with vampire mythology, and more specifically, with Bram Stoker’s Dracula. But a cursory glance…

There are films we like, films we dislike. Films we love, films we hate. There are films that we have no strong feelings about, they are viewed and easily discarded and we move on. Then there are films that attack their audience, demand attention, and force them to go away…

If you think silent cinema was all slapstick comedians like Chaplin and Lloyd, or romantic melodramas starring Garbo or Valentino, then you’re missing out on some of the most unique films ever made. A time before the advent of sound forced a stronger degree of realism on stories and performances…

D.W. Griffith’s 1915 epic The Birth of a Nation needs no introduction. Set during and after the American Civil War, the film proved instantly influential and controversial, remaining a white elephant in film studies — impossible to circumnavigate but difficult to deal with. Much has been written on the film’s…

Everyone has that moment in their childhood, when a visual is so burned into their mind that even after the context has been forgotten that visual remains. More often than not, these are visuals that inspire fear, terror, horror — that first sublime taste of horror in youth can have…

“Publishable, but worth it?” So went the author’s assessment of his work. How fortunate we are that it was published. How fortunate I am. This book changed me. It is one of the most achingly beautiful works it has ever been my privilege to read, and I shall never forget…

John Millington Synge once said that he did “not believe in the possibility of ‘a purely fantastic, unmodern, ideal, breezy, spring-dayish, Cuchulainoid National Theatre’”. In Synge’s opinion “[n]o drama can grow out of anything other than the fundamental realities of life.” …