Saturday, July 21, 2007

Atheist film festival, Psycho III

Two links from Jim Emerson’s excellent Scanners blog: first, an invitation for entries for a hypothetical “Atheist film festival”. (Read the comments, especially the ones on godlessness in Ingmar Bergman and Woody Allen’s films. Other neat observations include the one about George Romero’s zombie trilogy being atheist because they show that the dead have nowhere else to go.) Incidentally Emerson clarifies what he means by an “atheist film” in this comment: “…not one that says ‘No’ to the question, ‘Does God exist?’ but one that doesn't even see why the question is worth asking.”

The second, related link is about Psycho III, the neglected sequel directed by Anthony Perkins in 1986, two-and-a-half decades after he first played Norman Bates in the Hitchcock classic. I’ve always enjoyed Emerson’s writing when he defends films that haven’t received the acclaim (or even basic attention) that they should have; of course, it helps that our tastes in such films are quite similar. (Here’s an earlier post by him on four underrated horror films.)

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