A Witness for James A. Corry – The Lonely, The Twilight Zone (1959)
The first sound the prisoner makes is a car horn. It arrives early, before we have been told anything worth knowing, and it lands
Journal
Darcked Journal
- All
- Essay
- Short Book
- Film
A Beautiful Voice, and Nowhere to Put It – Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Glass Eye (1957)
Two people are clearing out a dead woman’s room, and one of them admits, almost in passing, that nobody in the family ever knew
Nothing Wrong With You: The Twilight Zone, “Escape Clause,” and the man who required his own death
There is a moment near the beginning of “Escape Clause” when a physician packs up his instruments and delivers the cruelest verdict available to
Nineteen Minutes of Music for Nineteen Players – The Twilight Zone, “Walking Distance” (1959)
A mechanic tells Martin Sloan that the oil change and lube job will take about an hour. Nothing that follows contradicts him. Whatever happens
A Push, No Winner – “Mr. Denton on Doomsday, The Twilight Zone 1959”
The first drink Al Denton takes in this episode he takes off the ground. He has sung for it, in a voice that keeps
The Blood and the Song – Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, the Mississippi Delta, and the Long History of the Vampire
Sinners did not need a vampire to depict the Delta’s dangers. The first hour proves it: an economy of scrip and debt, a legal
The Interested Party – “One for the Angels, The Twilight Zone 1959”
He opens a suitcase on the sidewalk and the street changes shape. People who were walking in a line arrange themselves into a curve;
Someone Was Here a Minute – “Where Is Everybody?, The Twilight Zone”
The coffee is still hot. Before anything larger has gone wrong in the roadside diner outside Oakwood, that small fact is already at work:
Farce: A Critical Study of Frank Capra’s Arsenic and Old Lace (1944)
He is not looking for a corpse. He is looking for his notes.That detail is worth holding onto, because everything that follows depends on
White Cake: The Price of Ownership and Ignorance, and the Squandering of Freedom in Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained
American slavery was not ended by an individual’s revenge; it was ended by a war of unprecedented mass casualty, fought initially by people who
The Useful Lie: Belief, Space, and Judgment in Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight
Belief, Space, and Judgment in Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful EightA room. Eight strangers. A storm that closes every exit. Everyone has a story, everyone
The Width Of The Arc: A Philosophical Reading of Pit and the Pendulum (1961)
Before the film has a landscape it has a temperament. The credits arrive as liquid: pigment blooming and folding into itself, blue devouring red,
The Sound Beneath the Floor: On Roger Corman’s House of Usher (1960)
A rider crosses ground that no longer produces anything. The trees stand, but they stand the way scaffolding stands after the building has been
Presence Without Proof: The Exhausted Archive in “Replay” (The Twilight Zone, 2019)
The first miracle in “Replay” is spent on a shirt. A mother and her son sit in a roadside diner on the way to
Cargo of Foreknowledge: Narration, Credibility, and the Self-Consuming Remake in “Nightmare at 30,000 Feet”
Richard Matheson’s “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” first appeared in the anthology Alone by Night in 1961 and reached television two years later, on 11
Applause for an Empty Stage: The Audience as Supernatural Agent in “The Comedian” (The Twilight Zone, 2019)
“The Comedian” was released on 1 April 2019 on CBS All Access as the opening instalment of the Twilight Zone revival developed by Simon
