#small-town-horror

#small-town-horror

The frontier myth has proven to be one of the most powerful and enduring stories in American history, erasing or altering the history of people of color and women in the West.

Fia Backström describes her experience of West Virginia as akin to being called by aliens, framing the region in a way that echoes a long history of it being seen as strange and backward.

Looking back from 2026, it's almost impossible to believe that video games were once treated as a flippant, dead-end hobby reserved for burnouts and social outcasts.

Nothing, absolutely nothing, turns people into the most ghoulish versions of themselves like threats, real or perceived, to one's property.

When you grow up in a place where everyone's known you since you were in nappies, you carry around hundreds of versions of yourself. Each person you meet has frozen you at a particular moment - the time you threw up at the school dance, your awkward phase when your voice was breaking, that summer you tried to reinvent yourself and failed spectacularly.

The guided one-mile journey takes participants past buildings steeped in decades of dramatic events and reported hauntings while at the same dropping tons of fascinating history of San Jose. The experience began under the prominent arch at Paseo de San Carlos and wound through areas tied to everything from Wild West saloons and brothels to brewery tragedies to sorrows at San Jose State University.

It started as a sworn secret between eight New England artists. In 2003, Michael Townsend and seven friends moved into the Providence Place Mall. They'd discovered an empty 750 square-foot loft space. They hauled up furniture - a couch, a PlayStation, TV, waffle-maker. Hauled up two tons of cinder blocks for an apartment wall. In 2007, mall security discovered the apartment. Townsend was arrested and banned from the mall. He named no names.

Megan Keller was a 21-year-old next-big-thing-on-defense when she won her first Olympic gold medal, in Pyeongchang, the winter before her senior year of college. She was also very nearly the reason her team lost it. The refs whistled her for an illegal hit on Canadian captain Marie-Philip Poulin late in overtime, and her teammates spent 95 chilling seconds on the penalty kill atoning for her sins.

Cupid gets his main-character moment this weekend. We asked New Yorker staffers to help build a playlist befitting his romantic mission. For a classic piece of nineties Brit pop, Oasis's " Slide Away" is basically an absurdly romantic ballad of plain devotion and yearning-which "Wuthering Heights" has established as the emotions of the season. May your Valentine's Day be all about both!- Noreen Plabutong

In 1836, Apaches raided a remote ranch near Janos, a tiny town on the northern fringes of the state of Chihuahua, in the newly independent republic of Mexico. The Natives absconded with some cattle, as well as with a young widow named Camila. Setting off in pursuit was José María Zuloaga, a taciturn lieutenant colonel in the Mexican army supported by a band of irregulars. Among them: a self-possessed teenager who served as an aide-de-camp, a pair of Yaqui brothers whose permanent address was the town jail, and a sharp-shooting nun named Elvira, who was actually a singer of zarzuelas dressed up in a habit.

Amazon has sought a tax abatement that would see its datacenter exempt from paying property taxes for 30 years in exchange for the funding of local schools and infrastructure projects. The people up on city council are, for the most part, good people. They care about the community, [but] they have been taken advantage of by these companies.

The first thing you notice about undertone is how quiet it is; not just in its audio mix, but in how it's shot - primarily steady wide shots that slowly pan across empty rooms, allowing your eyes to frantically scan for something amiss. It's an understated form of filmmaking that allows for the movie's scares to hit all that much harder.

If you were getting pot in the late '70s or early '80s in this part of the country, there's a good chance it may have been coming from these guys. You've got these guys who served decades in prison for marijuana, and now they're getting out into a world where it's legal everywhere.

To pass the time, the pair play a game they've shared since Daughter's childhood, triumphantly rattling off palindromes - words that read the same backwards and forwards, such as "m-o-m," "d-a-d," "s-i-s" and "r-a-c-e-c-a-r." As the game gets increasingly complex ("name now one man"), it becomes clear that Dana's play is a dark palindrome itself, where circling dialog and damaging relationship dramas repeat themselves.

While working on a graduate school paper on the mystical powers of coral, gemologist Anna Rasche ventured deep into the archives of the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum's library. Coral is the most powerful material to ward off the evil eye-a belief Italians have held since ancient times. Romans often gifted newborns coral amulets to prevent sickness and bad luck.

Glimpse them chatting in a restaurant or posing on Instagram, and you might think they have it all. The pair live in London but often travel, drawing the eyes of other guests, their skin glowing, their limbs artfully at ease. She writes affirmations on hotel stationery; he claims to taste notes of bark and tobacco in his chianti. As Sean Gilbert's dark, observant debut opens in Istanbul, this apparently perfect couple bicker and sweat, for secrets lurk behind their facade and one of them might be murder.

Until recently, "liminal spaces" were only known to architects. But on the Internet, storytellers and amateur filmmakers have morphed these ubiquitous places you pass by on errand runs into caverns of cosmic terror. Now, a new A24 film from 20-year-old filmmaker Kane Parsons is set to kick off the summer and christen it the season of liminal horror.

After spotting that Eli's rash guard conceals a red, flaky skin disorder, the boys have concluded that he has the titular plague, a contagious disease that affects social standing as much as it does dermatological well-being. If anyone ever touches him, they must thoroughly wash themselves before they're considered full-blown infected. Even something as innocent as Eli sitting at the same lunch table sends his teammates running and screaming.

I posted a rave review of the new Sam Raimi film, Send Help, the other day and triggered a debate I didn't expect: is it OK for Christians to watch horror films? Send Help a gore-laced plane-crash survival face-off, according to the Guardian review (which was less kind than mine) is more comedy-horror than horror, or maybe horror/thriller. But there's definitely horror there you get the point.

Despite its lurid poster art, as an ursine rampage film this falls closer to the serious Grizzly Man/Timothy Treadwell end of the scale, rather than the Cocaine Bear one. Based on a freak August 1967 tragedy in which two women were separately mauled to death by grizzlies in Montana's Glacier National Park (described here as a trillion to one occurrence), Burke Doeren's debut grips in tooth'n'claw terms, but is considerably less sure-footed when it comes to people.