Shahrazad, the intelligent and cunning heroine of the One Thousand and One Nights (or The Arabian Nights), has been recognized in recent years as a feminist literary figure, a woman who uses her abilities to save not just her own life, but the lives of other women.

In the frame story that anchors The One Thousand and One Nights, King Shahriyar discovers his wife in the act of adultery and cuts off her head. Every night for three years, he would take a virgin girl to his bed and then kill her in the morning. …

Synchronicity is a concept I knew nothing about before watching Hellier, a documentary show about a several years long investigation of Kentucky goblins and other strange events. According to the investigative team, synchronicity is what drew them to the investigation and provided an impetus to keep going, even as they faced challenges along the way. In fact, the word “synchronicity” is mentioned so often on the show that my friend and I once joked about turning it into a drinking game.

Hellier has renewed my interest in the paranormal and the weird, leading me to want to explore more about…

A woman in white wakes alone in strange cavern. She crawls over boulders, climbing out into the light, and begins to run — facing a world of monsters all seeking to destroy her.

Stela is a side scrolling puzzle adventure game from SkyBox Labs, available on iOS, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, Microsoft Windows, and Macintosh. Playing as the woman in white, the player transverses various dark and unsettling landscapes, encountering various obstacles they need to get around — rocks to climb, traps to evade, puzzles to solve.

Some of the most dangerous obstacles are the creatures you encounter along the…

“It’s a folktale, a myth.”

The Jersey Devil
Written by Chris Carter, directed by Joe Napolitano
Season 1, Episode 5

Recap

While driving down a wood enshrouded road in 1947, a family is surprised by a sudden flat tower. The father gets out to fix the tire — when something plunges out of the woods and drags him off into the dark.

The next day, a team with dogs searches through the woods for the missing man. They find him — partially eaten.

They also find something else, a creature said to be tall as a house. They begin shooting as it rushes toward them. …

The Haunting of Bly Manor — director Mike Flanagan’s follow up to The Haunting of Hill House — is framed around the art of storytelling, specifically the campfire delight of unravelling a good ghost story, the kind that gets under your skin and makes you jump at shadows. In the opening scenes, a group of family and friend gather for after-dinner drinks. The conversation drifts to the possibility of ghosts, leading inevitably to the telling of tales.

The ghost story at the center of The Haunting of Bly Manor is loosely based on The Turn of the Screw by Henry…

“The boy is the key, Scully.”

Conduit
Written by Alex Gansa and Howard Gordon, directed by Daniel Sackheim
Season 1, Episode 4

Recap

A family camps by a seemingly peaceful lake. A young boy and a teenage girl sleep by a campfire, while the mother sleeps within the camper nearby. Inside the van, the mother is suddenly jerked away by the violent shaking of the camper and a blinding white light. She scrambles to reach her children, who she hears calling for her outside. Grabbing the door knob, her hand is instantly burned by the hot metal.

Outside, her son tells her that Ruby (his sister) is…

It’s a minor miracle that any movie gets made at the best of times. This is all the more true when the filmmaker attempts something as ambitious as crafting an apocalyptic fantasy on a micro-budget.

For Sharon Lewis, the process of adapting Nalo Hopkinson’s novel Brown Girl in the Ring was a nearly two-decades long journey.

The novel is set in Toronto, Canada, following an economic collapse that causes it to dissolve into such chaos that the central city, known as the Burn, is abandoned by Canadian government and walled off. The people of the Burn are left without proper…

“Do you think I’m spooky?”

Squeeze
Written by Glen Morgan and James Wong, directed by Harry Longstreet
Season 1, Episode 3

Recap

Yellow eyes peer out from a sewer drain, watching a business man walk unaware to his car. When the man arrives at his office … something follows.

The wires in the elevator twitch, as if being climbed. The screws on a tiny vent unscrew, something coming inside.

The man enters his office and closes the door behind him. Watching from the outside, we see him thrown against the closed curtains — a struggle so violent, it cracks the wood of the office door.

Blood…