What I'm Reading Now: A Cinema of the Psychic Realm

"The medium of film is ideally suite to render the fantastic world of psi visible. A technique as simple as an off-screen voice-over can simulate mental telepathy. Unusual lighting, set design, fades, dissolves and other optical tricks can conjure clairvoyant visions. The advent of ultra-sophisticated computer graphics and other exotic cinematic techniques have made it possible to picture any conceivable visionary state, no matter how unusual or bizarre."

- Paul Meehan, A Cinema of the Psychic Realm: A Critical Survey (McFarland, 2009, page 2)

What I'm Reading Now: Beyond Hammer: British Horror Cinema Since 1970

"The majority of the films analysed within this book share this essential trait: first and foremost they exist to entertain by terrifying their audience but on a deeper level they are written as a response to the era in which the writer and film-maker are living: The Vampire Lovers blatantly communicates the fear of the emergent independent woman whilst The Descent explores the emotional collapse and consequential regression of one such woman; The Wicker Man critiques a society that embraces freedom and sexual liberation through its very opposite, the repressed Christian; whilst Death Line suggests an examination of societal ignorance towards the poor and the impoverished."

- James Rose, Beyond Hammer:British Horror Cinema Since 1970, Columbia University Press, 2009, page 9.

What I'm Reading Now: The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and Their Meanings (1981)

"We are not aware of our own folklore any more than we are aware of the grammatical rules of our language. When we follow the ancient practice of informally transmitting "lore" - wisdom, knowledge, or accepted modes of behavior - by word of mouth and customary example from person to person, we do not concentrate on the form or content of our folklore; instead, we simply listen to information that others tell us and then pass it on - more or less accurately - to other listeners."

-Jan Harold Brunvand, The Vanishing Hitchhiker (W.W. Norton & Company, 1981, page 1).

What I'm Reading Now: Obscene, Indecent, Immoral and Offensive: 100+ Years of Censored, Banned and Controversial Films

"Since their inception, motion pictures and their content have been at the center of countless legal, political, social , moral and religious battles between the people who make them (filmmakers, studios), those they are made for (the audience), and the institutions (local and state censorship boards, the Roman Catholic Church, etc.), who believe it is their God-given right to determine what movies can and cannot say and show."

- author Stephen Tropiano, from the preface (page viii) of Obscene, Indecent, Immoral and Offensive: 100+ Years of Censored, Banned, and Controversial Films (Limelight Editions, 2009)