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 "The best video essay source on the web." (Roger Ebert) This is a web site built around original video essays and critical, personal writing about movies, TV, music, comics and whatever else interests its contributors. Co-founded by Matt Zoller Seitz, TV critic for New York Magazine, and Ken Cancelosi, it is published by Seitz and Cancelosi and overseen by editor-in-chief Kevin B. Lee and managing editor Max Winter.

Video Essays

  • VIDEO ESSAY: Wong Kar-Wai's Lust for Life
  • VIDEO ESSAY: Directed by De Palma
  • "The First, The Last, My Everything" : Tilda Swinton Da...
  • BADLANDS: Terrence Malick’s “early, funny film”
  • On an Animation of a Sentence by Nathan Englander

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Raised in Fear: The Superdynamational Horrors of Ray Harryhausen

Blogs
You never forget the first time you fall in love, especially in the movies. My moment came when I was eight years old, at a Saturday matinee in a cramped multiplex theater. Setting my sights high, the object of my adoration was Kali, Hindu goddess of Time, Change, and Death, brought to life by the magical powers of Ray Harryhausen
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  • By Jed Mayer
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  • May 10, 2013 8:40 AM
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  • 0 Comments
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Raised in Fear: The Self-Help Horror of Todd Haynes’ SAFE

Blogs
For all its originality, "Safe"'s narrative owes much to the made-for-TV movies that once permeated the airwaves, films like "The Boy in the Plastic Bubble," "The Best Little Girl in the World," and "Brian’s Song" that have been called “disease-of-the-week” movies for their morbid fascination with newsworthy illnesses.
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  • By Jed Mayer
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  • April 16, 2013 8:35 AM
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  • 1 Comment
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Raised in Fear: POLTERGEIST and the Culture of Forgetting

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Poltergeist is a film about the repressed traumas and anxieties underlying the American dream.
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  • By Jed Mayer
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  • April 4, 2013 12:14 PM
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The Bleak Spaces and Blank Faces of FARGO

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When Fargo was released, I felt that my home state of Minnesota had finally been given its "Oresteia," its "Njal's Saga," its "Double Indemnity." Over the ensuing years, however, the popular image created by the Coen Brothers' regional epic has been a questionable inheritance.
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  • By Jed Mayer
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  • March 28, 2013 8:35 AM
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  • 1 Comment
More: Jed Mayer, Joel Coen, Ethan Coen

The Grimm Possibilities of MAMA

Blogs
Though "Mama" does not ultimately succeed as a film, it does offer a set of rich possibilities for the creation of a modern fairy tale, one that, like those told once upon a time, faces the horrors of everyday life head on, also recognizing the power of fantasy to make imaginative sense of those horrors.
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  • By Jed Mayer
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  • January 21, 2013 8:30 AM
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  • 0 Comments
More: Jed Mayer, Andy Muschietti

Raised in Fear: Horror Films as Schoolyard Lore

Blogs
All I really need to know about fear I learned in elementary school.
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  • By Jed Mayer
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  • January 17, 2013 8:55 AM
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  • 1 Comment
More: Jed Mayer, jaws, The Exorcist

Raised in Fear: The Shining as R-Rated Christmas Ghost Story

Blogs
Stanley Kubrick’s "The Shining" is not generally considered a family picture, but it is certainly one of the most brutally honest films ever made about the nature of family relationships. I discovered this when seeing the film for the first time with my father when I was fourteen.
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  • By Jed Mayer
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  • December 20, 2012 8:31 AM
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  • 1 Comment
More: Jed Mayer, Stanley Kubrick

Raised in Fear: Obsolete Technology, Retro-Futurism, Ultra-Violence, and Stanley Kubrick

Blogs
I have always been drawn to visions of the future, but little did I know what brutal images were held on the Beta videocassette of Stanley Kubrick’s "A Clockwork Orange" I rented at the tender age of ten.
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  • By Jed Mayer
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  • December 11, 2012 8:34 AM
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  • 1 Comment
More: Jed Mayer, Stanley Kubrick

Screaming Hides the Sound: John Carpenter’s Death Disco

Blogs
The year after John Carpenter’s "Halloween" left its indelible mark on future developments in film and music, a stadium full of baseball fans would vent their misdirected hatred on a pile of disco records. If this was 1979’s version of 1969’s Altamont, clearly Marx was right when he said that history repeated itself as farce.
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  • By Jed Mayer
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  • November 9, 2012 8:30 AM
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  • 1 Comment
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RAISED IN FEAR: Frankenstein, Dracula, and Other Supernannies

Blogs
Most responsible parents will tell you that using the television as a surrogate nanny is bad for kids, but my own experience as a child would argue against this. My parents were wise enough to know that there were some places in the child mind that parents shouldn't go, and the only reliable guides were creatures of the night.
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  • By Jed Mayer
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  • October 31, 2012 8:02 AM
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  • 2 Comments
More: Jed Mayer, Frankenstein

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