When I was leaving Wilmington, a friend said she wished she could keep all her friends in her closet. I’ve always been a collector, holding onto unexpected mementos in an attempt to hold the past.

In movies, the writer is always much more confident about their artistic career. Such is the case, to the Oswalt family’s peril, in Scott Derrickson’s 2012 film, Sinister. Ellison Oswalt (Ethan Hawke) has moved his family to the country to investigate a serial killer for his next book with hopes that this might be the case to resuscitate his career. The film opens with haunted house tropes we know too well: a warning comes from the police; husband and wife talk about how this move has to be different from the last one; the daughter acts creepy painting on the bedroom walls, says she doesn’t want to be here.

A retelling of a Japanese fable, Kaneto Shindo’s Onibaba follows two women waiting out the war in the plains of fourteenth-century Japan. To survive, the women have been killing men lost in the fields and trading their gear for food. The bodies, they feed into the pit, and at night they retreat beneath the thatched roof of their hut, ravenously eating before stripping into bed together.