In 1917 sixteen year old Elsie Wright and her nine year old relative Frances Griffith were playing in the Wright family garden in Cottingley, England. Elsie borrowed her father’s camera to take some photos of Frances playing and a few months later she borrowed the camera again with both girls snapping photos. When the photos were developed, both girls but mainly Frances, were seen cavorting with what looked like fairies. Elsie’s father thought the photographs were faked but Elsie’s mother believed they revealed actual sprites and the photos were revealed to the public in 1919, creating an international sensation. The incident attracted the attention and support of the Theosophical Society in Bradford, England and prominent people like author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who was involved in the spiritualist movement, found the evidence convincing. The photographs were also denounced by non-believers like Harry Houdini, who famously campaigned against fraudulent psychics and mediums. For years, the Cottingley fairies remained a source of mystery and fascination and, in 1997, strangely enough, two different movies on the subject were produced and released in the U.K., FairyTale: A True Story and Photographing Fairies.
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Irish Ghostbusters
Can you name five great paranormal comedy movies released in the past decade? I’m drawing a blank. By my estimation, two of the best comedies about the spirit world were released back in the eighties – Ghostbusters (1984) and Beetlejuice (1988) – and there has been nothing to really rival them since then. Of course, if we were to broaden the search to include best horror comedies of the past decade then I would have to pick the 2014 vampire satire What We Do in the Shadows, written and directed by Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi, and their subsequent FX TV series based on the film. If you are fans of those, you will probably get a kick out of Extra Ordinary (2019), a paranormal comedy from Ireland that is almost as witty, twisted and silly as anything the Clement-Waititi team can conjure up. Continue reading

