Word of warning: The first chapter contains a 45-or-so minute sequence of an experimental theater troupe doing a wordless improv exercise. Like the Tokyo sequence from Solaris, it's both an early elimination round and a way of fine-tuning the audience: If you can pay attention to this, then the 12 hours of paranoia…

You know, we're based in the US and we do sometimes sleep at night.

There are dog attacks, but nothing as gruesome or unsettling as in Green Room.

Next to none. Quite a bit of 1970s porn is lost, and once you start looking at the preceding decades, the survival rate plummets.

The thing about Sturgeon's Law is that it's 100% bullshit. If you don't find most of examples of a thing at least interesting, then you don't really like the thing.

There's only one draft for newswires. Fixed.

That Aladdin was directed by Tim Burton. Almost mentioned it here in passing, as the magic cavern seems like a rough sketch for some parts of Beetlejuice.

Not an Arabic name, but a very specifically Bosniak name. (Actually sort of in poor taste, if you know where Hawkins got it.) And yet Ramirez still speaks Spanish in the movie.

Taking it literally goes against Christian tradition. It's a tenet of dispensationalist theology, which is why it represented such a radical break with the mainstream.

I did feel a little bit like I was violating some kind of unspoken NDA in writing this.

Here are the opening credits, for the curious…

You'd have to be majorly fucked up for Ferrante to work as wish fulfillment fantasy.

Gonna take a wild guess that you have neither read these books nor have the slightest clue what they're about.

You know what would be really great is if the newswire included a link to an article about this exact question in the first sentence.

Quite fond of her performance in Cracks. Also White Bird In A Blizzard. Both intentionally play with campy registers to suggest vulnerability.

She certainly did not. (Believe me, it was a lengthy fact check.)

Not his "most mainstream," but his one attempt at something like a mainstream blockbuster. It's still his highest grossing film in initial release, though it cost way more than any of his other movies (about $100 million in today's dollars).

As @unspeakableaxe:disqus mentioned, Lynch has a rule of having only one cut of his films in circulation, even if he's unhappy with it. This is also why he won't okay an official release of the preliminary TV pilot version of Mulholland Dr..

Let me echo @watcherwatcherwatcher:disqus and say that I think this series has the problem of opening with an episode that represents its creative nadir.

Both my dad and stepdad have younger brothers named Dmitry, so I technically have a False Uncle Dima.