Issue 64: The Uncanny Archives - Bright Wall/Dark Room

Though disguised as a neo-noir, in many ways Minority Report is really a sci-fi allegory about how corrupt systems thrive through the subjugation of women, the exploitation and dismissal of their pain, and the underestimation of their emotions and abilities.

Burt Lancaster in The Swimmer | art by Tony Stella

A Life in the Day: The Masculine Irreality of The Swimmer

Travis Woods·

Issue 64: The Uncanny

Based on John Cheever’s slippery fever dream of a short story, The Swimmer faithfully translates and expands Cheever’s 12 pages of suburban surrealism into a feature-length nightmare of masculine panic.

A Story With a Ghost in It: On Family, Trauma, and Hope in Crimson Peak

Kate Horowitz·

Issue 64: The Uncanny

Crimson Peak hits all the major gothic horror notes: the gauzy nightgowns, the poisoned tea. A little dog trotting curiously down a darkened hallway. Dark legacies. Axe murder. But all of this is beside the point.

An Out of the World Place

Victoria Large·

Issue 64: The Uncanny

The visuals in Yolanda and the Thief take explicit inspiration from the surrealist landscapes of Salvador Dalí, and while it isn’t the most successful of Vincente Minnelli’s celebrated musicals, it is perhaps the most experimental—and, for me an object of fascination.

Fate, Facsimile, and Space Flight in Gattaca’s Uncanny Vision of the Future

Madison Miller·

Issue 64: The Uncanny

In making the strange, familiar (and the familiar, strange), Gattaca forces us to reckon with our own humanity and mortality—and the fact that time is coming for us all.

Step Brothers (2008) | art by Brianna Ashby

Notes Towards a Theory of the Uncanniness of Step Brothers

Ethan Warren·

Issue 64: The Uncanny

Lots of comedies are funny because they’re goofy, but Step Brothers is funny for the liminality of the world in which it takes place, a world hovering between live-action cartoon and kitchen-sink reality so precariously that it almost seems to violate the laws of comedy physics.

Putting Hands Into Glass: Satire in The Killing of a Sacred Deer

Matt Cipolla·

Issue 64: The Uncanny

The Killing of a Sacred Deer provides a deceitfully complex look at a brand of nihilism often adopted by the upper-middle class, used to deflect the threat of domestic banality or subdue emotional threats.

Stoker (2013) | Fox Searchlight Pictures

That’s Me…That’s Also Me: Stoker and the Horror of Growing Up

Kat Mildner·

Issue 64: The Uncanny

Stoker is a film about a girl walking the tight ledge between childhood and adulthood, and trying to construct an identity amidst the chaos.

The Cosmic Jewish Joke

Jacob Mendelsohn·

Issue 64: The Uncanny

A Serious Man isn't just a more personal Coen Brothers film; it is the personal Coen Brothers film, an investigation into their own heritage and what it means to be Jewish in mid-century America.

The Cyclical Entropy of Annihilation, and the Uncanny Within and Without

Roxana Hadadi·

Issue 64: The Uncanny

When your body betrays you, who do you become?

The Devil In the Details: The Stiflingly Chic Interiors of Rosemary’s Baby

Jon Roth·

Issue 64: The Uncanny

In our apartments, we can let our guard down, be ourselves. How unnerving then, to realize you were never really safe there—that what you thought was a wall was a door all along.

The Double Life

Karina Wolf·

Issue 64: The Uncanny

The question of Nocturnal Animals, with its parallel narratives that never quite connect, becomes: what is the urgency of a story in which its greatest violence is called out as fiction?