As Halloween radio broadcasts go, it would be hard to displace in American cultural memory the adaptation of H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds that aired in 1938. Not every Halloween special can be directed by a young Orson Welles, of course, but that’s hardly a reason to ignore the countless other Halloween broadcasts from the Golden Age of Radio. This year you can tune them in with the Youtube playlist above, which collects 149 such spookiest-time-of-the-season episodes from such beloved shows as Lum and Abner, The Aldrich Family, Fibber McGee and Molly, Our Miss Brooks, The Great Gildersleeve, The Jack Benny Program, The Shadow, and more.

Whether comedy, drama, or another genre besides, old-time radio programs tended to seize upon the theme of every holiday that came down the pike, and Halloween — with its costume parties, ever-present threat of pranks, and door-to-door demands — offered their writers and performers a once-in-a-year opportunity for unwonted degrees of mischief.

For normally lighthearted shows, it was also a chance to go at least a little bit dark; for a […]

As previously mentioned here on OC, the film distributor Kino Lorber has been quietly making complete art films available to stream on YouTube and its own website. In recent weeks, they’ve uploaded to YouTube the documentaries, Beyond the Visible: Hilma Af Klint and M.C. Escher: Journey to Infinity. Now comes Hieronymus Bosch: Touched by the Devil, which they describe as follows:

In 2016, the Noordbrabants Museum in the Dutch city of Den Bosch held a special exhibition devoted to the work of Hieronymus Bosch, who died 500 years ago. This late-medieval artist lived his entire life in the city, causing uproar with his fantastical and utterly unique paintings in which hell and the devil always played a prominent role. In preparation for the exhibition, a team of Dutch art historians crisscrosses the globe to unravel the secrets of his art. They use special infrared cameras to examine the sketches beneath the paint, in the hope of discovering more about the artist’s intentions. They also attempt to establish which of the paintings can be attributed with certainty to Bosch […]

Ding, ding, ding, de de, ding, ding–the bassline for Queen and David Bowie’s “Under Pressure” is simple and unforgettable. In Sao Paulo, ​British bassist Charles Berthoud paid tribute to John Deacon’s riff, performing it with 200 other bassists. Berthoud plays a beautiful lead; the others keep the rhythm going. Evidently, the event was sponsored by Rockin’ 1000, a collective that stages gigs where hundreds of musicians perform rock classics together. You can find more of their videos in the Relateds below.

via Laughing Squid

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It didn’t take long after the invention of cinema for its sheer power of spectacle to become clear. Arguably, it was apparent even in the pioneering work of the Lumière brothers, though they attempted only to capture images familiar from everyday life at the time. But in a decade or two emerged auteurs like Fritz Lang, who, having grown up with cinema itself, possessed highly developed instincts for how to use it to captivate large and various audiences. Released in 1927, Lang’s Metropolis showed moviegoers an elaborate vision, both fearsome and alluring, of the industrial dystopia that could lay ahead. But it also had dancing girls!

Or rather, it had a dancing girl who’s actually a robot — a Maschinenmensch, according to the script — built by the film’s villain in an attempt to besmirch the heroine who would liberate the titular city’s downtrodden workers. (Both the real woman and her mechanical impersonator are skillfully played by Brigitte Helm.)

In the video above, you can see the scandalous and cinematically innovative spectacle-within-a-spectacle that is Metropolis‘ dance scene colorized, upscaled to 4K resolution at 60 […]

The adjective medieval tends to conjure up vivid and sometimes off-putting images, not least when applied to sex. But how many of us have any sense at all of what the real people of the Middle Ages got up to in bed? To get one, we could do worse than asking historian Eleanor Janega, teacher of the course Medieval Gender and Sexuality and host of the History Hit video above, “What Was Sex Really Like For Medieval People?” In it, Janega has first to make clear that, yes, medieval Europeans had sex; if they hadn’t, of course, many of us wouldn’t be here today. But we’d be forgiven for assuming that the seemingly absolute dominance of the Church quashed any and all of their erotic opportunities.

According to the medieval Church, Janega says, “the only time sex is acceptable is between two married people for procreative purposes.” Its many other restrictions included “no sex on Saturdays and Sundays in case you’re too turned on during mass; only have sex in the missionary position, because anything else subverts the natural […]