phantasmagoria

Lurking behind Foreman’s madhouse phantasmagorias is the mind of the artist interrogating its own secret chambers.

Instead of what you’d expect — legions of them, rising up in gory phantasmagoria — I encountered accounts of very few, chiefly demure lady ghosts, swathed in white, blue, or pink, like Disney princesses.

I can take video of the flashing phantasmagoria displayed in the windows, glowing like screens themselves, and send it to a filmmaker friend — who will be too preoccupied with other moving images to watch it.

David Cronenberg may have seemed like the perfect director to adapt William Burroughs’ pop phantasmagoria “Naked Lunch,” which was published in 1959.

The first word we see written down in “Beau Is Afraid,” Ari Aster’s raging Oedipal phantasmagoria of a movie, is “Guilt,” with a capital “G.”