Tag: Children
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Sinead O’Connor and Five Nights at Freddy’s
Yesterday Sinead O’Connor posted this on her Facebook page: This is a message for parents of young children. There is an online game going round at the moment called Five Nights At Freddiies [sic]. The entire premise of the game is child sacrifice and child torture. An awful lot of kids are playing it without […]
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The Company of Wolves (1984)
Wandering through Kate Bush’s imagination a couple of weeks ago made me think of a peculiarly English brand of dark fantasy that started in the late Victorian era with writers like George MacDonald and Lucy Clifford. These and others managed to write children’s stories possessed of such toe-curling nightmarish terror that they continue to haunt […]
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Paperhouse (1988)
Movies and dreams have always been closely linked. Cinema history is full of movies of dreams, from the films of Georges Méliès and the 1911 cartoon of Little Nemo in Slumberland to the world of Freddy Kreuger and Nightmare on Elm Street. There are two basic approaches – adding dreams inside films as part of […]
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Patrick Woodroffe
I’d already planned on doing an article on the fantasy artist Patrick Woodroffe when the news came in that he’d passed away and so, sadly, this has become my personal tribute to his powerful and often frightening imagination. Patrick Woodroffe was one of a small group of painters and sculptors working in the 1970s whose […]
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Tove Jansson – the Truth about the Moomins
A while back I wrote a post about Tove Jansson’s last Moomin book, Moominvalley in November (1971), pointing out that behind the innocent guise of a charming children’s tale lurked a masterpiece of Nordic existentialism. I had no idea. I’ve just finished Boel Westin’s biography of the author Tove Jansson: Life, Art and Words, translated […]
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Dark Fantasy: is it suitable for the servants?
This week’s post is a guest article by Jane Dougherty, the author of the wonderfully grim fantasy novel The Dark Citadel. First in a series, it tells of a future religious/fascist dystopian society sheltering beneath an immense dome, around which prowl demons and creatures of legend. It’s refreshingly sinister and pulls no punches in its […]
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Flatland 2: Sphereland
Flatland 2: Sphereland is the sequel to the movie Flatland which I mentioned in a blog post last year. It’s a charming 36 minute animated short based on the original novel by Edwin Abbott, and one of the book’s own sequels Sphereland: A Fantasy About Curved Spaces and an Expanding Universe, written in 1965 by the […]
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The Singing Ringing Tree
For a certain generation in the UK, The Singing Ringing Tree, an East German take on a Grimm-style fairy tale is indelibly carved on our psyches, giving us all the screaming habdabs for years. Many of us still wake up crying in the middle of the night over fading visions of large plastic goldfish, grizzly […]
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Nordic Noir – the Moomins
I’m a huge fan of Nordic crime thrillers at the moment. I’ve been reading Henning Mankell’s Wallander books, and watching the Swedish TV version. I’m also slowly working my way through the three series of The Killing. They are all about taciturn detectives struggling to make sense of the darkest reaches of the human soul, […]
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Eagle Book of Spacecraft Models
By the time I was old enough to read the famous British comic Eagle it had folded, so I missed Dan Dare, Police Constable 49 and the inner workings of various planes, trains and automobiles. Eagle was founded in 1950 by a vicar who wanted to get the morals of Anglican muscular Christianity over to […]