Culture
Film, TV, books, music and games: the classics, the offbeat and the gloriously odd.
The Art of the Stalk: Looking Back at John Carpenter’s Halloween
A $300,000 independent film, a camera that prowled, a piano tune in an odd rhythm and a phrase coined by a professor: how John Carpenter's Halloween set the pattern for the slasher.
Where Halloween Really Comes From: Samhain, Saints and a Lot of Turnips
Is Halloween an ancient Celtic festival of the dead in a pumpkin costume? Not quite. The real story has a Gaelic harvest feast, a Christian calendar, and a few myths worth retiring.
5 Public-Domain Sci-Fi and Horror Films You Can Legally Watch Tonight
No subscriptions, no paywalls, no gray-area streaming sites — these classics are free because their copyright already ran out.
Spotlight: The Twilight Zone (1959–1964)
Rod Serling used aliens and time travel to say things about 1960s America that network censors wouldn't let him say directly.
Spotlight: Seven Samurai (1954)
Akira Kurosawa's three-and-a-half-hour epic became the template for basically every "team assembles for one last job" movie made since.
Spotlight: Metropolis (1927)
Every dystopian sci-fi skyline owes something to a German silent film that was nearly lost forever.
Spotlight: The Third Man (1949)
A zither, a sewer chase, and the best entrance in film noir — Carol Reed's postwar Vienna thriller still holds up completely.
5 Practical Movie Effects Tricks That Still Hold Up
Long before CGI, filmmakers solved impossible shots with forced perspective, models, and one very uncooperative mechanical shark.