#Spooktober 3 – A Haunting in Venice

October 3, 2023

I recently went to see this movie with some friends, and it’s perfectly fitting for the haunting season whether you like Banagh’s Poirot or not (I personally have mixed feelings).

It has a couple of things in common with the book of Spooktober Day 1, particularly a detective trying to shed rational light on apparently supernatural events and a general strength in the haunting atmosphere. The story draws from some of Agatha Christie’s short stories and the movie adaptation has a lot of things one might need on a Halloween night: a haunted palace in Venice, creepy masked people, the ghost of a girl who went mad and drowned herself (or did she?), ghosts of orphans out for revenge and an ancient curse, dead flowers and dead bees, a fake medium, a haunted doctor.

The mystery was very Agatha Christie: solidly built, a little obvious once you put the pieces together, with some nice twists you might not expect.

The main weakness, as far as I’m concerned, was the pursue of horror movie tropes, but – CONFESSION TIME! – I really don’t like horror movies. I find them silly. And this movie was a little silly, at times, with its attempt at jump scares.

art and fashion

Brand Brueg(h)el

A.k.a. How a Flemish Family Invented the Franchise and redefined pictorial genres Let’s get the bad news out of the way: the new exhibition on the Bruegel family at Palazzo Reale is small. Not intimate, not focused: just… small. You walk in, you meet the

October 19, 2026 9:00 am

Spooktober

Spooktober 19 – A Tropical Horror

“A Tropical Horror” is a 1905 short story by William Hope Hodgson and one of his earliest published fictions. It first appeared in The Grand Magazine of June 1905, and it is Hodgson’s second published story, but his first sea‑based horror tale. The maritime settings

October 19, 2026 6:00 am

books and literature

Selma Lagerlöf’s The Violin of the Madman

Well, you might now it by a different name, because The Violin of the Madman (Il Violino del Pazzo) is just the Italian title for Selma Lagerlöf’s 1899 novella En herrgårdssägen, usually translated into English as The Tale of a Manor or A Manor House

October 18, 2026 9:00 am