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Before his career-altering castings on This Is Us and Stranger Things, Chris Sullivan’s biggest break came courtesy of one Steven Soderbergh. In 2013, the Palm Springs-born, Sacramento-raised actor joined Soderbergh’s period medical drama, The Knick, in the series regular role of shifty ambulance driver Tom Cleary. A decade later, in the midst of the SAG-AFTRA strike and Sullivan’s 2023 run on Broadway, the prolific filmmaker called his former collaborator to offer him his most notable film role to date in an inventive supernatural thriller known as Presence. (Soderbergh acquired an interim agreement so the $2 million self-funded enterprise could film during the strike. Neon then purchased the rights out of Sundance for $5 million.)

Penned by decorated screenwriter David Koepp, Soderbergh’s 34th feature film chronicles the Payne family as they settle into a new home following the accidental overdose of daughter Chloe’s (Callina Liang) best friend. As other challenges present themselves,...

Most early photographs look haunted. Perhaps it’s because we view these images with the knowledge that the people inside them are already ghosts. In some early photos the subject had actually already expired at the time of their capture. Photography was expensive and the first and best occasion for many families to pay for a portrait was recently after a loved one died.

But some old timey photos are just ineffably creepy beyond any easy explanation. Consider this snapshot of a surgical operating theater in 1890.

Boston City Hospital operating theater, circa 1890 | A. H. Folsom of Roxbury

The experience of seeing primitive surgeons dressed in angelic white, surrounded by seats of mustachioed men wearing their Sunday best and staring down at a lifeless body is so intensely bizarre. Photos like this are dripping with a grim atmosphere that very few documents or art can really capture. One recent entry into the prestige TV canon,...