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Wilmington, North Carolina once had a thriving Black middle class and an elected interracial government. In 1898 white supremacists used violence to overthrow that government, kill Black residents and drive many others from the city.
MORE →Reflects the personal views, recollections, and perspective of the author, Mike Davis.
This is a personal recollection on the Move fire on May 13, 1985
| The Dark and the Wicked | |
|---|---|
 Film poster | |
| Directed by | Bryan Bertino |
| Written by | Bryan Bertino |
| Produced by |
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| Starring |
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| Cinematography | Tristan Nyby |
| Edited by |
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| Music by | Tom Schraeder |
Production companies |
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| Distributed by | RLJE Films |
Release dates |
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Running time | 95 minutes[1] |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Box office | $422,174[2][3] |
The Dark and the Wicked is a 2020 American Southern Gothic supernatural horror film written and directed by Bryan Bertino, starring Marin Ireland, Michael Abbott Jr., and Xander Berkeley. It follows two siblings who encounter a demonic entity at their Texas family farm after the suicide of their mother, who had long been caring for their infirm father.
The film had its world premiere at the Fantasia International Film Festival on August 28, 2020. It was released on November 6, 2020, by RLJE Films.
Siblings Louise and Michael return to their family farm in Texas when their father's chronic illness seems to be reaching its last stages. Their mother seems disturbed at their arrival and expresses a desire for the children to leave. That night, she hangs herself in the barn after (apparently involuntarily) cutting off her own fingers in the kitchen.
As time goes on, Louise and Michael start to understand what happened to their mother. Their father’s nurse confides in them that she heard their mother whispering to their father, but it seemed as if she was speaking not to him but some other presence. Michael finds their mother's diary, which describes her fears of an unnamed and possibly demonic presence preying on her husband.
At their mother's burial, Louise and Michael meet Father Thorne, a priest who claims to have known their mother. Later that night, Father Thorne appears at the farm, beckoning them from outside, asking them if they want some rope, before vanishing before their eyes. Meanwhile, Charlie, a ranch hand who lives on a nearby plot of land in his RV, tries to call Michael, but then witnesses a vision of what appears to be Louise, speaking indistinctly and cutting herself repeatedly with a kitchen knife. The entity drives a distraught Charlie to shoot himself in the head with his shotgun.
Louise is subsequently unable to reach Charlie by phone, unaware that he is dead. Louise calls the phone number that Father Thorne gave her to ask why he visited the farm the night prior. The man who answers claims to have never met her and says that he lives in Chicago and has never been to Texas. Worried for their father's safety, the siblings summon a doctor for a house call and request that he be moved to a hospital. The doctor determines that their father's health is grave and that he is on his deathbed. He tells the siblings that he cannot relocate him to a hospital, as moving him could result in him dying en route.
On the farm, Louise and Michael find that their large herd of goats have all been brutally killed. The two start a bonfire to dispose of the numerous animal carcasses. That night, Michael is approached in the barn by an apparition of his nude mother, who disappears as she approaches him. She appears behind him and the apparition tries to possess Michael and make him to cut his own throat, but he narrowly resists its influence. Later, while Louise lies in bed beside her father, she has a nightmare in which the entity attempts to possess her father, but she manages to block out its presence, before witnessing her father levitating against the ceiling and urging her to flee.
In the morning, Charlie's granddaughter arrives at the farm and informs Louise that he killed himself two days prior. The girl's forlorn demeanor soon turns malevolent, and Louise realizes it is in fact the entity taking the shape of Charlie's granddaughter. She too disappears before Louise's eyes. The nurse arrives moments later to care for Louise and Michael's father. Meanwhile, Louise finds that Michael has fled the farm to return to his wife and daughters, leaving her behind. Michael calls Louise from his cell phone and tells her she too should leave. Moments later, the nurse, possessed by the entity, begins stabbing herself with a pair of knitting needles, attacking Louise in the process, before stabbing herself in the eyes, killing herself.
Michael arrives at his home and finds the dead bodies of his daughters and wife in the kitchen, in what appears to have been a murder–suicide. A distraught Michael cuts his own throat, and moments after, observes that the bodies of his wife and daughters have disappeared. He realizes the entity has tricked him when his wife and daughters enter the house moments later, and find him bleeding to death.
Back at the farm, Louise regains consciousness at nightfall and finds that her father is dying. Moments after he dies, the demon in turn attacks and claims her.
Filming of The Dark and the Wicked took place in Texas at the actual farm owned by writer-director Bryan Bertino's parents.[4]
The film had its world premiere at the Fantasia International Film Festival on August 28, 2020.[5][6] RLJE Films had acquired distribution rights to the film and set it for a November 6, 2020 theatrical release.[7] It was originally scheduled to have its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival in April 2020; however, the festival was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.[8][9]
The film earned $410,787 at the global box office.[2]
On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 91% based on 107 critic reviews, with an average rating of 7.5/10. The website's critics consensus reads: "The Dark and the Wicked delivers on its title with an unsettling horror story whose deep dread and bleak outlook further compound its effective jolts."[10] Metacritic reports a score of 72 out of 100 based on 14 critic reviews, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.[11]
Cath Clarke of The Guardian gave the film a score of 3 out of 5 stars, describing it as "a nastily effective, lo-fi, psychological haunted house horror", and added: "There is possibly not a single scary moment here that will be new to horror fans, but Bertino directs with such technical flair that I yelped at most of them – and half-missed the others, eyes squeezed tight shut."[12] Matt Zoller Seitz of RogerEbert.com gave the film a score of 3 out of 4 stars, writing that it "has enough jump scares to satisfy the 'Yes, but it is scary?' contingent of horror fans. But for the most part, this film ... focuses on atmosphere and creeping dread, channeling 20th century classics like Don't Look Now, The Tenant, the original Alien and The Sixth Sense."[13] Dan Stubbs praised the film, calling it a "relentlessly bleak Southern Gothic horror" portraying the declining mental health of American farmers as a real villain.[14]
Kate Erbland of IndieWire was more critical of the film, giving it a grade of C. She praised Ireland's performance, but wrote that the film "despite a strong start ... never coalesces into anything more than a collection of chilling images and a paper-thin logic."[15]
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Source: Wikipedia. Article content is retrieved live through the MediaWiki API.
The Dark and the Wicked is a 2020 American Southern Gothic supernatural horror film written and directed by Bryan Bertino, starring Marin Ireland, Michael Abbott Jr., and Xander Berkeley. It follows two siblings who encounter a demonic entity at their Texas family farm after the suicide of their mother, who had long been caring for their infirm father. The film had its world premiere at the Fantasia International Film Festival on August 28, 2020. It was released on November 6, 2020, by RLJE Films.
The Midnight Entity is a being that appears in the British science fiction television programme Doctor Who. First appearing in the 2008 episode "Midnight", the Entity attacks a tour bus on the planet Midnight, with the Entity possessing a woman named Sky Silvestry (Lesley Sharp). The Entity proceeds to mimic the voices of the other passengers, including the Tenth Doctor (David Tennant), with the Entity eventually taking control over the Doctor. The passengers on the bus attempt to throw the Doctor out of the bus, but due to the sacrifice of a hostess (Rakie Ayola), the Entity is stopped and the Doctor is freed. It reappears in the 2025 episode "The Well", where, hundreds of thousands of years after "Midnight", it attacks a mining colony set up on the planet. Now hiding behind people and whispering into their ears to play games with them, the Entity encounters the Fifteenth Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa). Though the Entity is seemingly banished back into the titular well, the episode implies it was able to escape onto an expedition team's spaceship, and survive. Created by writer Russell T Davies, the Entity was conceived after he had a conversation with a producer for the series and the two accidentally ended up repeating each other's words. Its return in "The Well" was initially not planned, and only done after a plan by Davies to use Nigerian spirits called Orishas as antagonists fell through. Seeing that the actions of the antagonist in the story fit the general behaviors of the Entity, Davies elected to bring the Entity back for the story. The Entity has been considered one of the most terrifying antagonists in the show's history, with many critics praising the ambiguity of the creature, particularly via its lack of physical form, as helping to create a memorable, impactful antagonist. Its return in "The Well" received more mixed responses; some critics felt it was a solid return for the Entity, though others felt it did not follow up on the initial impact of the Entity in "Midnight" effectively.
Andrew Robert Gallimore (b. 1980 or 1981; age ~45–46 years), also known by his handle Alien Insect, is a British neurobiologist, chemist, and pharmacologist who studies psychedelic drugs, particularly dimethyltryptamine (DMT). He is also a historical scholar of DMT. Gallimore resides in Japan and works at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology. Gallimore and Rick Strassman, author of the 2001 book DMT: The Spirit Molecule, have developed a method of continuous intravenous infusion of DMT that they call "extended-state DMT" or "DMTx". It can extend the duration of a DMT experience from a few minutes to several hours. They intend to use it to study the phenomenology of DMT. Other researchers, such as David Nutt, Robin Carhart-Harris, and Matthias Liechti, are also studying DMT by continuous intravenous infusion. Gallimore believes that DMT experiences are not simply hallucinations. Instead, he suggests that DMT allows the human brain to interface and interact with a deeper level of reality beyond the physical world. Relatedly, Gallimore believes that entity encounters experienced with DMT are real and genuine interactions with beings that he refers to as discarnate intelligent agents. Conversely, other researchers, such as Carhart-Harris among others, believe that DMT entities are merely illusions. In March 2026, a DMTx retreat and research center called Eleusis was launched on the island of Bequia in the Caribbean. Its aim is to study DMTx and DMT entities and to attempt to communicate with these entities. The research arm of Eleusis is overseen by Gallimore's non-profit Noonautics.
A psychedelic replication is an image, video, or audio recreation of the sensory effects of a hallucinogen. They are most frequently recreations of the perceptual effects of serotonergic psychedelics, for instance LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, or dimethyltryptamine (DMT). However, replications can also be made of the sensory effects of other hallucinogens, such as salvia, deliriants, and dissociatives like ketamine. Examples of psychedelic visual effects that have been turned into replications include open-eye color enhancement, visual drifting, tracers or after-images, visual geometry like form constants, environmental texturing and patterning, and pareidolia, among many others. Additionally, replications can recreate closed-eye mental imagery or "internal hallucinations" as well as entity encounters of psychedelics. Replications are created by digital artists, who are sometimes known as "replicators", and posted on the Internet. Some major professional replicators include Symmetric Vision (Raimonds Jermaks) and Loka Vision. Replicators use methods such as image editing, video editing, 3D modeling, and animation to create psychedelic replications. A major community for posting and sharing replications is the r/Replications subreddit on the social media website Reddit. It was founded in 2015 by psychedelic phenomenologist Josie Kins, who also notably coined the term "replication". In addition to founding r/Replications, Kins and her collaborators subsequently developed an artificial intelligence (AI) model using StyleGAN to create rigorous and realistic replications of psychedelic visual effects in 2022, for instance "breakthrough" DMT experiences including entity encounters. The model was trained on a dataset of more than 4,000 works of psychedelic art from the Internet. Kins started a YouTube channel in 2022 and periodically posts her team's replications on the channel, with these videos having received popular media attention. Other creators have also used AI to make psychedelic replications, for instance artist Sara Phinn Huntley. Psychedelic replications have additionally been created by scientific researchers for use in virtual reality (VR) environments. One group has studied psychedelic replications in VR for potential therapeutic purposes in treating psychological disorders such as depression. They have named this Psyrreal and described it as a psychedelic-inspired VR experience. It is freely available online and runs on VR headsets such as the HTC Vive Pro Eye. There is also interest in combining psychedelic drugs and VR as part of psychedelic therapy.
Before the 1921 destruction of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, Black residents had created a remarkable center of business and community life. The district included stores, professional offices, entertainment venues and homes owned by Black citizens. Understanding Greenwood means learning what was built—not only what was burned.
MORE →Mae Jemison, aboard Space Shuttle Endeavour in 1992.