"Here, Vincent Price is reciting all the witches' spells from a place I can't quite remember in England. It was meant to be around a Halloween vibe, which in the Catskills is everything. That's our Christmas, that's our New Year, May Day, Wicker Man… that's our pagan holiday supreme. Holiday ornaments are already out right now - you can go into any store and buy Halloween stuff. Growing up here, it wasn't a stretch that these kinds of records would be played by my mother or at elementary school almost ad nauseam. I became so inoculated to spooky, scary stories that they just became like urban legends. Another case of a children's story narration that was entrancing. These weren't just songs, these were whole inner emotional moments for young kids like me. When you're six and hearing about witches, ghosts and goblins, it's permeating your whole being and likely to shape the rest of your life, certainly in terms of the possibility of a supernatural world. Or probable, in my case."

"I’m going to end this list with a request that you also seek out Kurosawa’s Dreams after you see this movie. Dreams is my absolute favorite film of all time, and when you bookend it with Ikiru, the experience is quite amazing. Ikiru is the story of a long-tenured public servant who discovers he only has a year to live. He makes a last-ditch effort to bring meaning to his existence by working tirelessly to build a children’s playground. It is the work of an artist feeling he has not done enough substantive work in his life—a romanticized notion that our daily routine is often meaningless save for a few charitable acts. It is our fears as a young mind. Over the years, Kurosawa would endure a tumultuous career that nearly ended in an act of attempted suicide. Now consider Dreams, a film coproduced by Steven Spielberg and featuring Martin Scorsese in a cameo as Vincent Van Gogh. These filmmakers, along with George Lucas, would rally behind Kurosawa in the ’80s and help him make a comeback with Kagemusha and Ran (both on Criterion), winning him a Palme d’Or and an Academy Award nomination while also bringing back to light his incomparable portfolio of works (Lucas would very often recount how The Hidden Fortress was the narrative inspiration for Star Wars). Dreams, to me, feels a bit like a representation of the playground that Kurosawa built through his works, and the children he inspired coming out to thank him for it. I can watch this movie again and again forever. Criterion has an amazing collection of twenty-five films by Kurosawa. I cannot recommend watching his entire body of work highly enough, as it is perhaps the best documentation of a commercial artist in the modern age."