The Bachelorette recap is coming in late this week. Just a quick housekeeping thing: this week and next week Bachelorette recaps will be on Sunday because of election stuff throwing everything off. Sorry about that. But on to the recap. Let us take you back to Tuesday when it was still October and things were just a little bit better. And… go!
Read more10 Weeks of Spooktober: The Craft Legacy (Week 10 of 10)
It’s Halloween, which means it’s time to close out Spooktober for 2020. It also means October is coming to an end, which means I’m about to crawl back into my horror hole where I’ll sit and wait until it’s once again the time of year where we can appropriately love ghosts and monsters and witches and blood and death and all that other fun stuff. R.I.P., October. We barely knew ye.
But before we can say goodbye to October for the rest of 2020, we’ve got one more final horror movie to look at. And then at the end, for no reason whatsoever except for the fun of it, I’m going to look back at the second year of Spooktober to examine how successful this Spooktober season was compared to last season. Prepare yourselves.
Cue the creepy, atmospheric thunder and lightning.
Read more10 Weeks of Spooktober: Bad Hair (Week 9 of 10)
The 9th week of Spooktober is coming in hot and really late. Blame election anxiety, friends. I watched this movie last weekend, and I’m finally getting around to writing my review of it. I’m horrible, and I don’t even care. But what movie are we talking about, you ask? We’re talking about Bad Hair, the latest from director Justin Simien, who also directed Dear White People. Among other things. But you probably know him from Dear White People.
Anyway, Bad Hair is a surreal horror film set in 1989. Our main character is Anna Bludso (played by Elle Lorraine). Anna has dreamed of being a DJ since she was a little girl playing with songs on the radio. Now that we’re at the height of music television in the ‘80s, Anna is climbing her way up the ladder at a Black music channel called Culture. There’s only one thing standing in her way from making it to the top: her hair.
Read moreThe Bachelorette S16E2: Show Some Balls
Photo: ABC
Listen: Clare is 39, she’s been to therapy, and she demands *emotional intelligence* from her men. And because of COVID-19 travel restrictions, there is literally nowhere else for the contestants to go but inside their own hearts (ok, or out of their own shorts). Let the games begin between Emily’s men (Team I Just Met My Husband) and Susan’s men (Team Reckless on Instagram)!
Read more10 Weeks of Spooktober: Nocturne (Week 8 of 10)
Welcome back Spooktober fans! Did you miss me last week? I hope you don’t mind Mary filling in for me while I took some time off to vote early and celebrate my birthday. By the way, please vote! If you can, vote early! Let’s do this people. I believe in you.
Okay, on to what you’re all here for. Scary movies.
This week, we’re looking at Nocturne, a new move that is part of the Welcome to the Blumhouse Anthology. Currently, this anthology consists of four films, and I chose this particular movie because I had already heard from many reliable sources that Nocturne is the best of the four. On top of that, this movie was compared to Black Swan, Whiplash, and one of the movies I covered for last year’s Spooktober: The Perfection. So yeah, I thought, sign me up.
Read moreThe Bachelorette S16E1: How Old is Clare Again?
After a long, long, long, long, long wait and many very public rumors, Clare Crawley’s season of The Bachelorette is finally here. We know that things are going to get weird really soon. And since we haven’t been living under a rock, we are aware of some of the very widely shared spoilers about this season. Our recaps are a generally spoiler-free zone, but for certain spoilers about what happens with Clare this season, we will be spoiling those. If you have somehow managed to not get spoiled on those yet, you will get spoiled on them here. So be prepared. Or don’t read. Your choice! As for other spoilers, we will not be sharing those, as usual.
Anyhow, with all of that out of the way, Susan and Emily are ready to draft their teams for the season. Our first post of each season is always drafting our fantasy team, and then more conventional recaps will follow after this week. Whatever conventional looks like this time around.
In other news, can you believe Peter’s season happened earlier this year? Seems like a decade ago, and we still wish it never happened.
Okay, for real. On to the drafting!
Read moreFeatured Bookstore: Thank You Books, Birmingham, AL
Photo: @thankyou_bham on Instagram
One of my favorite discoveries of 2020—and truly, one of the things that has gotten me through the isolation of this year—is Thank You Books. Even while Thank You Books was closed to the public earlier this year, their easy, contactless curbside pickup helped Birmingham keep reading and able to support local small business. Like most bibliophiles, I was dying to get to walk around a bookstore again, but Thank You Books made the waiting bearable and kept people feeling hopeful when we all needed it.
Read moreJudging the 30 Men Who Won't Win and the Dude Clare Chooses: Our First Impressions of the Bachelorette Contestants
Ah, the 2020 Bachelor Mansion…a.k.a. the La Quinta Inn
It’s the most wonderful time of the year: Bachelorette season! We’ve all been starved for Bachelor franchise content in 2020, so we might have been too eager to form our annual snap judgments of the contestants based on bios and photos alone. Before tomorrow’s season premiere, come along with us on a journey through “interesting” facts about Clare’s 31 men.
Read more10 Weeks of Spooktober: Clive Barker's Legacy Lives On in Books of Blood...Sort Of
Welcome to a special guest edition of Spooktober: 2 Spook, 2 Tober. Mary is filling in for Emily this week to talk about one of her favorite horror franchises, and its latest installment. Don’t worry, Emily will be back next week with another installment all her own!
Hellraiser is a special film, dancing the line between the Gothic grotesque and the strangely sentimental. A lot of Clive Barker’s work feels like that for me, torn between genres and worlds, but always horrific, always devilishly pleasurable and campy.
Read more10 Weeks of Spooktober: American Murder (Week 6 of 10)
As has been tradition for 10 Weeks of Spooktober: 2 Spook 2 Tober, we’re just kind of posting these whenever I feel like it throughout the month of October, despite my honest efforts to stick to Saturdays. My bad friends.
And this is also new territory for Spooktober, because this time I’m covering a new Netflix true crime documentary: American Murder: The Family Next Door. Does this fit with a horror movie series? That’s complicated to answer. Some people find true crime really scary. Which makes sense. Unlike horror fiction, true crime… really happened.
I know what you’re saying. “Duh, Emily. We know that. Thanks for the insight.” But I do have a point. In my head, I know that true crime should probably be scarier because they’re events that really happened. And it’s often really messed up stuff. Meanwhile horror story stuff like ghosts may or may not be real (they are real).
And yet I have never been scared by true crime stuff. American Murder: The Family Next Door is no exception. This isn’t scary. To me. I really don’t know why. Maybe somebody in the comments can explain that to me. But I still wanted to watch this documentary and wanted to talk about it. Why? Well.
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