Horror movies about graduate school speak some of graduate school's darker affective truths more clearly than any other form of discourse.  Graduate school can be scary, and I will let these horror films tell you why.  However, lest you worry, these films also carry valuable lessons to help you get through it.  WARNING: This post contains spoilers about all of these films.

On Valerie Harper....and loving somebody you have not met.

I'd already been thinking a lot about Valerie Harper, when she announced her illness a few days ago.  It started about a month ago, during a bad weekend.  I had writer's block and it was making me depressed, plus J. was away for the weekend.  This combination can get Repulsion-esque.  Desperately surfing Netflix for a cure for my ailments, I found a late '80s TV movie with Valerie Harper that I'd somehow never seen or heard of: 

Shocking the System: The American Horror Film After PSYCHO

My friend Maya Montanez Smukler invited me to do a guest lecture for her online course "This Picture is Condemned! Censorship, Controversy, and the Movies" at The New School University in New York, NY.  The unit was on American horror films in the 1960s and 1970s, and she showed Psycho and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.  In case anybody is interested in what my classes are like, here is my guest lecture:

Watching Psycho in 2013, it can be difficult to understand how shocking, terrifying, and traumatic it was for audiences watching it in 1960.  I first saw it when I was around 11, after having devoured a steady diet of Freddy Krueger and Michael Myers, and I remember thinking "What's the big deal?  It's not so scary."

The Video Stores of My Youth Part III

"You better not never tell nobody but God.  It'd kill your mammy."-Alice Walker, The Color Purple (1982)

"It's too late, Krueger.  I know the secret now...I take back every bit of energy I gave you."-Heather Langenkamp as Nancy Thompson in A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984, screenplay by Wes Craven) 

The Video Stores of My Youth Part II

The Video Stores of My Youth Part I

"Everything was beautiful at the ballet."

-Sheila, Bebe, and Maggie, A Chorus Line (1975, lyrics by Edward Kleban)

"Everything is temporary!" 

-Cosmo Castorini, Moonstruck (1987, screenplay by John Patrick Shanley)

My Los Angeles

When I first moved to Los Angeles I kept thinking over and over again about a Quentin Crisp quote from the documentary The Celluloid Closet.  He says that when his friend first came back to England from visiting the United States, he said "It's more like the movies than you would ever believe."