“Jack and the Devil Herself”

Happy Halloween and Blessed Samhain!
This art is based on the Irish legend of Stingy Jack.
Or as he’s better known, Jack o’ Lantern.

SINNERS (2025) dir. by Ryan Coogler

Annie: There are legends of people born with the gift of making music so true, it can pierce the veil between life and death; conjuring spirits from the past…and the future. In ancient Ireland, they were called Filí. In Choctaw land, they called them Fire Keepers. And in West Africa, they were called Griots. This gift can bring healing to their communities. But it also…attracts evil….

Sinners (2025)

Sinners is horror—damn good horror, at that—and as a horror nerd I know it’ll likely top my end-of-year lists for both the genre and movies as a whole, but it is also a proper MUSICAL. Perhaps it doesn’t meet all of the formalistic criteria for a traditional movie musical like West Side Story, where the characters’ singing and dancing occupy this liminal space between diagetic and non-diagetic and are meant to portray their subjective perspectives and feelings rather than something objective and factual, but 1. Sinners occasionally does do that, namely in the amazing and already iconic “I Lied to You” sequence, and 2. it’s more or less the same kind of mostly-diagetic musical as O Brother, Where Art Thou?, and just try arguing that isn’t a musical.

(related, Sinners and O Brother would make for a banger double feature; there are pretty substantial tonal and genre differences between the two, of course, but they share a time, place, and a ton of musical overlap)

I’m already seeing some “It’s not actually a musical” chatter in various comments sections online, and it strikes me as the similar defensiveness from mainline critics who love a well-made horror movie (The Silence of the Lambs, Get Out) but are hesitant to call it horror because of the low attitude toward the genre and its artistic potential that has plagued a lot of discourse. The irony here is I think this particular defensiveness is coming from horror nerds themselves. There’s a kind of person who dismisses musicals because people suddenly breaking out into song and dance ruins the immersion and/or is too silly for their tastes, and yeah, taste is taste, but I’m hoping the largely diagetic format of the sung and played music in Sinners gets a few people to rethink their genre prejudices.

Anyway, the “Rocky Road to Dublin” scene set my Irish(-Canadian) heart ablaze and is a hell of a villain song.

I can’t get over how Sinners is such a rich text on assimilation and whiteness and the dangers of “civility” and music as a way to look both forward and back

And it’s also a phenomenal vampire movie where a lot of hot people get covered in blood and there’s a B plot about eating out girls

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All the good you’ve done/ will soon get swept away
You’ve begun to matter more/ than the things you say

ID in alt text

“𝙈𝙮 𝙢𝙞𝙣𝙙 𝙞𝙨 𝙘𝙡𝙚𝙖𝙧𝙚𝙧 𝙣𝙤𝙬…”

Takarazuka Flower Troupe’s Castlevania / 愛, Love Revue! Poster CM featuring Towaki Sea as Alucard and Hoshizora Misaki as Maria Renard 🦇

Weekly Showa year 49 Magazine

“The Rose of Versailles Boom Begins”

March 10th 2009

This magazine contains a 6 page feature on the “Rose of Versailles Boom” and how the Takarazuka musicals revitalized their theater and turned The Rose of Versailles into a social phenomenon. As well as a short interview with Riyoko Ikeda.

Showa Trivia:

At the last performance in 1974 lines for tickets the day of the show reached over 1 kilometer, the theater company ended up showing a dress rehearsal prior to the show to satisfy demand. Florists close to the theater made an estimated 3 million yen in that single day from bouquets bought for the stars.

From interview:

“During serialization, I was so engrossed in the work, that I was isolated from the world. When the Takarazuka Revue began the performances in 1974, I was working on the next serialization, so I didn’t realize that "The Rose of Versailles” had become a social phenomenon. Around the fall of that year, on my way back from a long-awaited trip to Europe, I arrived at Haneda Airport and was suddenly faced with a microphone by a TV reporter.“

by far my favourite shot from cinderella’s castle I had to paint it