SybilSez...

Sybil Bruncheon has been performing on stage, radio, TV, film, and in various Vaudeville, burlesque, church basement, county fair, and sideshow....uh..."venues" for most of her 29 years. She is available for bookings for just about anything and can be reached at bruncheon@hotmail.com and on her website sybilbruncheon.com. She is a proud member of the Actors Equity Association and the Screen Actors Guild. Her erdo number is 16.

THE HAUNTING (1963), the gold standard...nay! The platinum standard for horror films, if only because so much is left up to your imagination and to the brilliant direction by Robert Wise and the writing of Shirley Jackson. Starring Julie Harris in one of her most definitive roles, Clare Bloom in a provocatively suggestive portrayal of lesbian glamour, and Richard Johnson, Russ Tamblyn, Rosalie Crutchley, and others in supporting parts as disturbing or disturbed onlookers to what appears to be the unraveling of a fragile mind in an appalling house...

But for fans of this film, it touches on bigger and more existential issues. Truly, it is a "modern" horror film; no headless corpses or gratuitous blood. No gouged out eyes or ski masks, no long phallic knives, and nubile high school girls being chased through swamps... Just isolation, rejection, skepticism, mockery, hopelessness, futility, chronic forlorn illness....and the desperate wanting to be loved by someone or something that turns out to be evil....selfishly, completely evil in that blank, flat way that signifies the narcissism and nihilism of the late 20th century. The final lines say it all. More tragedy than horror...

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