Beyond the Visible: Hilma af Klint
Documentary by Halina Dryschka
Year: 2019; Origin: Germany
Runtime: 93 mins; Color
Language: English, German, and Swedish
Subtitles: English
Studio: Zeitgeist Films
Release date: April 17, 2020

Vasily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian are credited with pioneering the European abstract art movement and their highly influential early 20th century works have long been integrated into our pop culture. But in recent years, it’s come to light that another artist — a woman, in fact — actually began creating abstract paintings before Kandinsky. That person was Hilma af Klint, the subject of a new documentary from Zeitgeist Films.

Beyond the Visible: Hilma af Klint, which opens virtually this weekend, explores the life and works of this truly pioneering Swedish artist, who took her first foray into abstract painting in 1906, several years before Kandinsky. She even died the same year as Kandinsky and Mondrian (1944). So why has this visionary never been credited until recently?

Through interviews with current artists, art and science historians and curators, and af Klint’s surviving relatives, along with up-close looks at and readings from journals entries, sketches, and paintings, director Halina Dryschka seeks to introduce the world to this little-known artist who broke gender boundaries of the time, created a new art style, and died in obscurity.

Violent Delights is a recap podcast where hosts Andrew Sorcini, Dwayne DeFreitas, and Tosin Onafowokan discuss HBO’s Westworld, and the larger questions this ambitious show hopes to tackle.

Shudder Presents: Cursed Films Episode 2 & 3 – The Omen & Poltergeist

Living through the real world horrors of a global pandemic and quarantine makes sitting for horror-based entertainment very interesting, to say the least. Shudder is there for us horror fans, updating their catalogs with a “Halfway to Halloween” theme as well as a new series from writer/director Jay Cheel, Cursed Films. Last week’s premiere episode: The Exorcist, was Shudder’s second biggest streaming debut ever behind their updated Creepshow series last year. This week, we get a two-fer of episodes dealing with two of the most notoriously plagued and cursed productions in cinematic history, let alone horror history: The Omen and Poltergeist.

The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires: A Novel
Hardcover | Kindle | Audiobook
By Grady Hendrix
Publisher: Quirk Books
Release date: April 7, 2020

In the 2016 horror novel My Best Friend’s Exorcism, Grady Hendrix tapped into the “satanic panic” fears of the 1980s with a story set in Charleston, SC, where a high school student must save her possessed best friend’s soul. In the author’s latest novel, The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires, Hendrix returns to the same Charleston neighborhood, but this time to a group of genteel housewives in the 1990s whose only source of entertainment is their monthly book club. That is until James Harris, a charismatic stranger, moves to town with big prospects for the upstanding families that seem too good to be true. And possibly it is, because there’s something strange about this new neighbor who has a condition that makes it difficult for him to be out in daylight, but only one person seems to suspect that something’s amiss.

Violent Delights is a recap podcast where hosts Andrew Sorcini, Dwayne DeFreitas, and Tosin Onafowokan discuss HBO’s Westworld, and the larger questions this ambitious show hopes to tackle.

On this week’s podcast, Andrew, Tosin, and Dwayne deconstruct the fourth episode of Westworld‘s third season, “The Mother of Exiles”, as they ask: who’s in Dolores’ fifth pearl? What does she want with smuggled dead bodies? What’s Musashi-lores’ plan with all the host-making fluid? Is this really the end of the game for the Man in Black…uh, white?