Author: Overcoming Adversity | Buteau’s Odyssey

Two jobs are sitting on Curry Barker’s desk, and they could not look more different from across the room. One is a fake haunted house run by two grifters with a fog machine and a bag of cheap tricks. The other is a real farmhouse in Texas where the family eats people. Barker has signed on to both. The first is Anything But Ghosts, the supernatural horror film he directed and co-wrote with his longtime partner Cooper Tomlinson, now in post-production for Focus Features. The second is a new Texas Chainsaw Massacre feature that A24 has handed him to write…

In 1781, after a decade of introspection, Immanuel Kant published a book so difficult that even leading philosophers struggled to finish it. Kant’s friend and rival Moses Mendelssohn described the Critique of Pure Reason as a “nerve-juice consuming book.” Yet, buried within its more than 800 pages is one of the most influential ideas in the history of thought—an idea that Kant himself compared to the revolution begun by Copernicus in astronomy. Previously, everyone believed that the Sun revolved around the Earth. Copernicus (1473-1543) turned the tables by asking how it would be if, instead, the Earth revolved around the…

For weeks the loudest thing about the new Blair Witch was a name that kept not showing up. Two thirds of the original trio signed on. The third stayed quiet. Now Rei Hance, the actress originally credited as Heather Donahue, has filled that silence herself. She is not part of this one. She was offered a deal to come aboard, and she turned it down. Hance laid it out in a Facebook comment reported by Deadline, posted after producer James Wan started speaking publicly about gathering up the people who made the 1999 film. “I want to clarify that I…

This post concludes the three-part survey of musical embodiment—the idea that music isn’t just a mental experience but one that involves our entire body, and how this physical connection shapes our musical preferences. Last month’s post featured the predictive coding model, which asserts that musical preferences are learned and therefore mainly cultural. Because this learning happens in the cortex, the advanced upper regions of the brain, it is called a “top-down” model. We now turn to neural resonance theory, which proposes that our musical preferences are innate and deeply biological. This is a “bottom-up” model since much of the processing…

Picture waking in the dark with your nose a few inches from a wooden lid. You try to sit up and your forehead meets the wood. Your elbows will not spread. The air is close and going stale, and somewhere above you is a layer of packed soil and a small crowd of people who have already cried, gone home, and started sorting through your things. You know you are alive. You are the only one who does. That scene sits under one of the strangest public panics of the modern era. For roughly two centuries, people across Europe and…

Watch STOMACH IT: “Following a prestigious festival run at some of the most renown film festivals in the world, from Oscar-qualifying festivals from Nashville to Screamfest, Comic Con, Indy Shorts, FilmQuest and Panic Fest to name just a few, and now to Cannes, Peter Klausner’s “punch to the gut” film explores the psychosomatic horrors of unprocessed trauma. Melding the practical effects of Nightmare on Elm Street with the psychological decay of Videodrome, Director Peter Klausner delivers a blood-soaked meditation on the essence of detachment and isolation. STOMACH IT premiered on Crypt TV last month and can be viewed directly on Crypt TV…

It’s a timeless topic that perennially gets a new spin: power and authority. We have opinions about who has it, who doesn’t, and why that matters. In Carl Jung’s psychology, power, achievement, and authority figures are often associated in the psyche with the father, patriarchy, and masculine, which are all associated with the proverbial father complex. Carl Jung described complexes as emotionally charged bundles of memories and experiences—“feeling-toned groups of representations”—that cluster together and organize around a core theme or archetype such as “father,” “mother,” or “attachment.” Complexes are shaped through early and ongoing personal, relational, and cultural experiences. They…

Disclosure Day should’ve been called Close Encounters of the Bored KindDisclosure Day is a film that feels like it should’ve come out in 2003 or something. It’s a very dated movie and a weirdly unemotional one — no one in the film seems capable of conveying actual humanity, which makes the film ironic on a couple of different levels. Factor in the ridiculous musical cues that make the Despicable Me movies seem subdued, the gratuitous (over) use of lens flare and some downright DREADFUL CGI effects and you have to ask the question: was this thing actually ghost-directed by M.…

Last month, the Wall Street Journal published an article entitled “The Era of the Tiger Mom Is Over. Enter the Beta Mom.” It refers to a recent TikTok trend featuring moms who reject intensive, highly managed parenting in favor of a more relaxed approach. A Pushback Against Helicopter Parenting The “beta moms” are pushing back against a trend that started in the early 1990s favoring hyper-involved parenting, especially for mothers, stemming from a growing knowledge-based economy that made a lot of parents fear that their children would fall behind their peers if they didn’t have a competitive edge. What we…

Iran and New Zealand will open their 2026 FIFA World Cup campaigns in a Group G clash on June 15, 2026, at Los Angeles Stadium in Inglewood, California on FS1.Iran enters the World Cup continuing a sustained run of consistent qualification, marking its fourth straight appearance on the global stage. They’ve also reached four of the last five World Cups but have yet to advance past the group stage dating back to 2006.The squad is anchored by a core of players from the Persian Gulf Pro League, along with several experienced contributors competing at clubs across Europe. Iran booked its place at…