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H. W. Taylor's avatar

Worth it for this line alone: "I’m doing things in Canva you wouldn’t believe:

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George's avatar

I was just writing about this re The Shining last week!

I think there's also a type of dad that can be found in some of these movies that shades into something else, men who are convinced that their families are the thing that stands between them and their full potential - the family becoming not a symbol of the thing to be protected or saved through Masculine Competence, but rather the thing that gets in the way of whatever the dad's true calling is.

In The Shining, Jack views his duties (both to his job and to his family) as obstacles on the path to his writing career; a similar sentiment can be seen in Anatomy of a Fall, which isn't explicitly a haunted house film but is certainly haunted by the husband's rage. In the end, it comes down to the same thing that this post is discussing: a man's inability to face, articulate, and accept that he can't do something he's scaffolded his entire identity on thinking he can do.

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