I think she may be part elf herself. She doesn’t seem to have aged visibly in the last 20 years or so.

When my daughter was about 8, she concocted a religion of sorts based on the different religious orders in the computer game Majesty. I think she was chiefly motivated by a backlash against traditional Christianity after my mother passed away (“If that God won’t answer prayers, I’ll make my own”). Being 8, though, her…

This is along the lines of what I find baffling about the more extreme conspiracy theories brewing up around the Las Vegas shooter — Why the hell would the guys in the smoke-filled room orchestrating such a disaster pick such a weird perpetrator who doesn’t fit into any preconceived narrative?

[A]ll these years later, my antiauthoritarian paranoia had put me in the company of Donald Trump, Alex Jones, and Roger Stone, et al., who’d championed the files’ release by way of sowing the confusion and suspicion of the U.S. intelligence community they depend on to operate.

Our house, built in 1940, has bay windows on the front and back. The roofs were painted over long before we moved in, but the front is apparently copper. The back appears to be tin, I guess indicating that people didn’t want to pay full price for a window fewer people were going to see.

Yeah, wouldn’t it be great if we could contribute our own ratings? Pity websites can’t do that.

Yeah, I think hostile behavior really requires some sort of power imbalance to count as “bullying”. But there’s nothing wrong with striving not to be cruel generally.

climaxing with the gory birth of a tentacled demon baby straight out of The Thing that comes bursting out of its mothers’ womb to terrorize a mahjong party.

Casting him with a ballet dancer was a pretty inspired move — his every movement is unsettling.

Some day, when we have holodecks, and can effectively produce any movie we want, at will, I want to see that recasting.

I’m on board with you. I much prefer some “light at the end of the tunnel”, though I’m fine with a “dark” ending that feels like a proper narrative payoff, rather than just arbitrary and nihilistic. Particular favorites would include The Blair Witch Project, Pumpkinhead, and Candyman, with a particular love for the…

I think that was pretty much the result he was shooting for.

It’s a shame Kilmer wasn’t as nice a guy as her Tales of the Gold Monkey co-star Stephen Collins... Oh, right...

Or perhaps, and I know it’s crazy, they might have asked Tracy to not shave for three days...

Apparently the corpse’s breath was wonderfully fresh.

I think more likely “Satyricon”.

The way the crew encounters the thing is the biggest change of Carpenter’s version, and you can see how it doesn’t really make a difference to the story, structurally or thematically.

So they were originally trying to stick closer to the book — shapeshifting was technically out of reach, but they would have kept the tentacles.

One can readily project “commentary and social criticism” on any creative work, but I think it can be easily argued that they’re more integral to science fiction than to horror, as practically any extrapolation of the future necessarily has some social commentary baked right in. Horror can readily be more immediate…

In the days before the internet, maybe that was somewhat less obvious, but surely everyone should be all too familiar with “The Troll Effect” by now.