How to Do a Cemetery Photoshoot
Winter is the best time to shoot photos in cemeteries. Depending on your luck and your location, you might be treated to dark, skeletal branches in the trees, snow falling…
Essays
The Cremains of the Day
A mausoleum? In this economy? A full-on shrine in my millennial one-bedroom starter apartment/retirement hovel? A pyramid? On my block in Brooklyn? It is just so inconvenient to try and…
7 Best Found Footage Films About Hauntings
The idea of being haunted and stalked by forces that are aiming to hurt or kill you is terrifying. It’s part of why supernatural horror freaks people the fuck out….
“There’s Something Strange Here” – Tollund Man, Grethe, and Death in a Danish Bog
One day in late winter or early spring, sometime between 405 and 385 BC, a man in his 30s or 40s was hanged near a peat bog in what is…
Growing Up in the House of Grief
I would never have been born if my older sister hadn’t died. Existence is a joke, and most of us aren’t here on purpose. Most of us can’t trace the…
6 Of the Most Unsettling Deaths In the Flanaverse
Horror fans love to gush about Mike Flanagan and there are many reasons that that’s justified. Flanagan has captured the hearts of horror nerds with his clear understanding and passion…
Katabases: 5 Journeys To the Underworld
A katabasis is a descent into the underworld, a journey to the realm of death. The word itself comes from the Ancient Greek κατάβασις, meaning “descent,” or “to go down.” Several stories…
Won’t Move On: Best Songs About Dead Lovers
The song poured out of the FM radio in my mom’s Datsun Z as we drove toward the California sunset. The car was older than me, the song was older than the car. A timeless child, born before the internet, I often had trouble placing events in time. I was too aware of alterity and the intentional reproduction of the past. I thought I Love Lucy was a new show made to look like the olden days in black and white; I didn’t know Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billy Joe” or anything else on the oldies station was playing to evoke a nostalgia for people my mother’s age to recall their own youth. Mine was just beginning, and the world was new
12 Deaths from The Iliad, as Translated by Emily Wilson
The first time I read The Iliad, I approached it a bit like you would approach a text you’ve been assigned to read in school. I wanted to study it,…
One Man; Three Widows
David died on a day so ordinary that I couldn’t find it on the calendar when I looked back. We knew David was going to die. He had been ignoring…