All in Views
On 15 October, the Tony Award nominations for the truncated 2019-2020 season finally came out. We all knew that it was going to be a different kind of list since so few shows opened between May 2019 and March 2020, but I don’t think anyone anticipated some of the more unusual results.
In 2007, the indie horror game Doki Doki Literature Club! was released to itchi.io. This free visual novel very quickly became popular, especially in livestream and video playthroughs, due to its chaotic style of horror. What starts as a sweet and innocent anime-styled dating sim set around a high school literature club quickly dives into a tale of unimaginable psychological horror.
My experience on TikTok is not the typical experience, what with me being an elder millennial media critic on an app that champions teenagers dancing to the latest hits.
Introducing Spookier Times. This is a new biweekly podcast about everything horror, Gothic, and weird fiction across media. I’m incredibly proud of the project and the opportunities it affords in media criticism.
The big question that always surrounds Poltergeist is essentially an authorship debate. Tobe Hooper, a horror director best known at that point for incredibly violent B-movies like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Eaten Alive, was chosen to direct Poltergeist by producer/screenwriter Steven Spielberg. Spielberg already had a reputation for directing blockbuster pictures that could be enjoyed by a wide audience, like Raiders of the Lost Ark, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Jaws.
