movie review

Pop Studies
by Byshera Williams

Flipping the Script

Get Out, blackness, and horror

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I don’t watch horror movies. Most of them involve demons, too much gore, and unrealistic stupidity that makes you think that the characters must have wanted to get murdered by the serial killer. I also don’t care for the trope of the black character (usually a man) dying first. But once your Twitter is being flooded with everyone talking about a film, it becomes something that you have to see. There was something about Get Out that seemed more complex and even more dangerous than the average man-in-mask-chasing-teens-through-woods kind of movie.

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Byshera Williams

Byshera Williams is a Junior English Major at Drexel University and the current Associate Editor for The Smart Set.

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Noncanonical
by Morgan Meis

Holy Smoke

Alejandro Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain.

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Long ago, in a distant age partially obscured by the mists of time, people made movies like The Holy Mountain. I’m talking about the 1970s here.

In one memorable scene, the Jesus figure (“The Thief”) presides over a colonial war between toads and chameleons dressed as Spanish conquistadors. The reptiles clamber over a scale model of a pre-Columbian city replete with pyramids and temples. At the end of the scene, blood spurts everywhere and the model blows up.

The Holy Mountain is a religious fable that is also about outer space. It is based, more or less, on The Ascent of Mount Carmel by Saint John of the Cross and Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing by René Daumal. Limbless midgets, a group of aliens, and an Alchemist aid The Thief in… More…