"If you think you aren’t a big fan of Springsteen, let this be your gateway drug. It was for me. The record consists of 8-track demos for what was to be the record. They recorded the record with the full band and then decided that there was something special to the demos and put them out instead. Amazingly the full band recording has still never been released. The record as it stands though is a stark and darkly haunting collection of masterfully told stories of life and death and ill-fated love."

"I really love the enigmatic, haunting approach of this film—how it presents this all-girls boarding school, repressed and rife with secret undercurrents of sexual longing, that then ruptures upon colliding with the mysterious and raw natural world. It’s such a fascinating film to puzzle over, and I find it inspiring how the writer of the original novel, Joan Lindsay, by not providing a solution to the mystery and instead allowing the mystery itself to be the focus, upended narrative expectations and created something so beguiling and unforgettable."

"I love this book because it is a haunting, touching, and beautifully written story about a deeply flawed family. I also love it because it was put into my hands more than 20 years ago by a young woman who said to me: ‘You must read this book.’ Did I ask that young woman to marry me because of McFarland’s book? That might be overstating things. But sometimes when someone changes your life by handing you a great book, she might be there to change your life in other ways as well."

"Terrence Malick is the preeminent practicing metaphysician of the cinema. In his brilliant and haunting first feature, he tells the story of a vicious young serial killer and his impassive underage girlfriend, both perfectly rendered by Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek. The violence unfolds in the context of a vastly uncaring natural world and is relayed to us by the girl through a detached narration utterly innocent of emotion. The result is not a moral inquiry into human action but rather a compelling meditation on the nature of being itself."

"Terry Gilliam’s masterpiece proves he is the only true heir to Fellini (and Salvador Dalì as well). Brazil is over-the-top, terrifying, funny, and moving. A hilarious and violent dystopian tale of the future using elements of the past, it strangely seems more and more like our present. Terrorism, surveillance, cosmetic surgery, hacking, and authoritarian control: Gilliam’s prescience is astounding. Ian Holm turns in one of cinema’s great supporting roles as Mr. Kurtzman, Jonathan Pryce’s sniveling and cowardly boss. And it has one of the most crushing and haunting endings in movie history."

"The first horror movie I ever remember even seeing was The Mummy with Boris Karloff, so that would be my first monster that is beloved to me. Boris channeled something so haunting with that role, and close-ups on his eyes were enough to give me the heebie-jeebies for the rest of my life. The way he physically channeled that walk and the creaky movement of someone who’s been dead for that long and decaying for that long in bandages, he really gave it something beyond that era."