Tag: Movies

My First Hobbit.

My first encounter with Tolkien was reading The Hobbit at age 11 or 12. I found it lying around my sister’s house while on a trip there. It was the paperback edition to the left, which was published by Ballantine in the mid-1970s. That’s Tolkien’s own artwork on the cover. For years I thought it …

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The Russian Hobbit, Part 6

I thought I was finished with this series, but there’s just too much good material, and a few book covers I overlooked. So let’s proceed. First of all, it occurred to me I never included pictures of non-Russian hobbits to serve as comparisons. So here’s the first ever, drawn by Tolkien. And isn’t it amazing …

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Too much to drink

Aliens who indulge in too many x’Qyschn shots should be very grateful to have helping hands lead them  home from the bar. (The English translation of this — it’s Dutch — means “Horror on Alpha Centauri” while  “Vlaamse Filmkens” might indicate it was a movie.)

It Came from the Closet [Review]

It Came from the Closet – Queer Reflections on Horror Edited by Joe Vallese The Feminist Press, 2022 Time to squeeze in one more book review for October! It Came from the Closet is a collection of essays by LGBTQ writers about their favorite horror movie and why they like it. That it scares them …

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Worldbuilding Wednesday 10/30/24: Mummies

The 1930s and 1940s were a golden age for horror movies AND graphic design for horror movie posters. Look at the color, the composition,  the pleasing mix of typefaces in the poster above! It’s gorgeous. Which brings me to the subject of mummies. Mummies are part of the rarefied classic movie monster club that includes …

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Worldbuilding Wednesday 10/23/24: Horror Movie Antagonists

As it’s turning towards Halloween, I thought I’d do a post on second and third-tier horror movie antagonists. The human kind, not monsters. There are many versions of Dracula, The Wolfman, and Mummy and even more imitators. From the get-go, the Silent Movie era spawned Count Orlok (Nosferatu, 1922) an adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula …

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Passing Obsessions 7-24

Scandal strikes the SFF world again. Writer Neil Gaiman accused of, but denies, sexually assaulting two women, one of whom was the nanny of his child. The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, an animated film by Warner Brothers based on Tolkien’s work, releases some preview artwork. (It’s anime style.) In related …

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The Little Prince (1974) [Review]

If you were an elementary school student in the 1970s, your school library probably contained a copy of The Little Prince. Written by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, a French nobleman, pilot, and adventurer, and published in 1943, it has since become an oddball but revered children’s classic, standing beside The Phantom Tollbooth, Willie Wonka and the …

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