I Love This Shot.

Mythic stories fall into several categories. There are sagas, epics, and fantasy stories called "märchen." These stories depend on something difficult for us to conceive these days: Simplicity or the "Logic of the Fairy Tale." In other words: things are just what they are, because that’s just the way they are.

These stories frequently examine or teach a moral lesson, exalting it or exposing a particular flaw. If the story is a parable or doctrinal, one of its goals is to delineate the characters as "types" in order to illustrate this basic lesson, characters which make the story whole and who are also contained by it. The lives of these "types" can and must have links with the past and the future but their role ends with the story.

In a magic story, the flow is more important than the logic. Man invented monsters to explain the entire universe (Norse and Greek mythology, for example). Once man began to live in an organized way, with a "social contract," an abyss was opened up between his instincts and his thoughts, and monsters started to REPRESENT another universe altogether: man's inner universe. The pagan prefigures the social and offers us a glimpse of the deepest reaches of man's soul, articulating a primordial, savage universe, populated by elves, fauns, ogres, faeries, trolls, and demons.

The Rock by Michael Bay.

A great action movie!! Perfect confection...

For some, this is the one good movie Michael Bay ever gave us (I disagree. I like this film and the first three Transformers movies).

Freaks (also re-released as The Monster Story, Forbidden Love, and Nature's Mistakes) by Tod Browning.

Based on elements from the short story "Spurs" by Tod Robbins.

Step right up and be horrified! Or be sympathetic, that works too. This is a unique film. Believe me, there has never been and will never be a film like this again.

Get this: After the success of Universal's original "Dracula" in 1931, MGM approached its director Tod Browning to make "the scariest film ever made". So what did Browning do? He gathered real circus sideshow performers from all over the country and made the movie "Freaks". The movie's so shocking that MGM was sued by one audience member who claimed that seeing the movie gave her a miscarriage. This movie is so controversial that there are still cities in the United States where it's illegal to even show it!

Just a word of warning before you decide to go see this, some of the people in this movie do look very disturbing. If you'd rather not subject yourself to that kind of imagery, then it would probably be best to not see it. Regardless, this film is full of iconic moments of pure cinema, pulpy horror, carny noir, and perverse melodrama. Freaks is still unclassifiable after many decades. It's still sick, twisted, perverse and profoundly human. It contains Tod Browning's view of the world at its purest.

Fun Fact:

History's greatest hero deserved better...

The ending to Hercules' story is quite a downer. When Hercules was traveling with his new bride Deianeira, they came across a flooded river and the centaur Nessus offered to carry Deianeira across while Hercules swam in front of them. Only when Hercules got to the shore, he saw that Nessus had turned around and tried running off with his wife. So the hero took out one of his poisoned arrows and sent it ripping through Nessus' chest. Refusing to die unavenged, Nessus told Deianeira that she could use his bloody shirt to cast a love spell on Hercules if he ever got bored with her. And years later, she gave it a try, without realizing the shirt had also absorbed the poison from her husband's arrows and so the moment Hercules was tricked into putting the shirt on, his body cried out in pain. The poison entered his bloodstream, causing it to boil and hiss and the tunic grafted itself to his skin. So the only way to get it off was by ripping off his own flesh. Left with no other option, the immortal Heracles made a funeral pyre to burn away his physical form and soon after, his spirit was welcomed to Mt. Olympus.

Aside from Paul Chadwick's Concrete, I strongly feel that this comic series is ripe for adaptation.

I just started re-reading my favorite and, in my opinion, the BEST graphic novel of all time, Jeff Smith's "Bone".

Anybody remember it? If you do and you have read it, you may be wondering why they never did anything with that series (like, it just stopped at comics and two video games). Well, they've tried three separate times to make it into a TV show or a movie.

First, Nickelodeon wanted to make a huge movie out of Bone...and then it got dropped.

And then Warner Bros. wanted to make a trilogy of movies. They wrote up all the scripts...and then it got dropped.

And then Netflix wanted to make a TV series out of Bone...and then it got canceled in 2022.

The first two story arcs (out of nine) were adapted into an adventure game series by Telltale Games in 2005 and 2006. As of now, it's the closest we will ever get to an animated Bone TV series or movie. When is Bone gonna get its justice? Somebody come save Bone...

The works of Jeff Smith are very near and dear to my heart. When it comes to fantasy comics, this guy is one of my personal favorite writers/artists, and the world he created and the stories he crafted are, without a doubt, one of my all-time favorites.

“Our tour begins here in this gallery, here where you see paintings of some of our guests as they appeared in their corruptible mortal state. Kindly step all the way in, please, and make room for everyone. There’s no turning back now.”- Ghost Host

Some adapted superhero movies I love:

Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 1 and 2

Blade

Richard Donner's Superman and Lester/Donner Superman II

Superman Returns

Batman (1989)

Batman Returns

The Dark Knight

Black Panther

Unbreakable

X-Men and X2: X-Men United

Guardians of the Galaxy

Jon Favreau's Iron Man

Logan

Wonder Woman

Doctor Strange

Thor

V for Vendetta

Watchmen

Chronicle

Split

RoboCop

Dredd

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990)

Everyone knows about the Salem Witch Trials, but have you ever heard of the European werewolf trials?

Between the 15th and 17th centuries, individuals across Europe, including countries like Switzerland, Germany and France were accused of lycanthropy, wolf-riding and wolf-charming (wolf-charming meaning they used magic to summon a pack of wolves to attack someone).

The most famous case of someone being charged with lycanthropy took place in 1598. German farmer Peter Stumpp was accused of using witchcraft to turn himself into a wolf and go on a killing spree that led to the deaths of two pregnant women and 14 children. The worst part is they said he ate his victims while in his wolf form. After being stretched out on the rack, Peter admitted to all of the accusations, said he'd been practicing magic since he was 12 years old and that he used a magical belt the devil gave him to take his wolf shape. After his admission, Peter was executed on the wheel where he was skinned alive, had his limbs broken, his head chopped off and his body burned.

Sleeping Beauty (1959).

Based loosely on Charles Perrault's 1697 fairy tale with a number of elements from Peter Tchaikovsky's ballet, including the title, "Sleeping Beauty", the entire musical score, as well as the princess's name, Aurora.

One of my all-time favorite Disney films (along with Fantasia). Sleeping Beauty is a great movie. It's a really simple story, but the art direction and music are really amazing. I mean the art is so unique and beautiful, I can't overstate that enough. No other Disney production really mimics it. The Forbidden Mountain feels like a real place, they totally nailed the mood with this one.

Best character in the movie would have to be Maleficent, the Mistress of All Evil. She looks pretty much like most goth girls. In fact, there's strong evidence to suggest that Maila Nurmi, more commonly known as "Vampira", was used as a live-action reference for the animation. The character is just so sinister and Eleanor Audley's voice is so expressive. She even has a pet raven named "Diablo" (the Spanish word for "devil"), I mean, how much more goth can she be?

Satanism and Witchcraft: The Classic Study of Medieval Superstition by Jules Michelet.

Originally published in Paris as "La Sorcière ("The Sorceress"): The Witch of the Middle Ages" in 1862.

A turning point on the 19th century politics and perception surrounding witchcraft.