After a laborious build-up about plucky young things building a teleportation machine, the revelation of the quartet's transformations feels incongruously macabre, with the faintest overtones of David Cronenberg.
My own troubles start to feel lighter during these macabre reading sessions, as my relatively small-bore moral failings lose their sometimes crushing weight.
The movie nervously skips around in time, trying to trump up a bogus suspense, before it finally focuses on the ritual itself, which feels hollow and macabre.
Although New York may once have felt like a macabre funhouse where anything could -- and did -- happen, compared with recent events in the heartland, the city has suddenly begun to seem like a relatively safe haven.
Ross, a man of many nervous reactions, was made uneasy by what he felt was a macabre streak in Barton's work, and Barton, though a personal friend, was not his favorite artist — Peter Arno was — or anything like as central to the young magazine's workings and look as Rea Irvin.
The wonderful ETA Hoffmann lived for a while in Bamberg and in so much of the town you feel fully engaged with his macabre spirit – strange towers, moss-covered walls and inexplicably designed carvings, shop signs and door knockers proliferate.
On one hand, it is potentially motivated by that morbid attraction, that contradictory push and pull we feel when we encounter other macabre subjects — human sacrifice, or Unit 731.
Visitors who have recently shaved report a macabre, tingling irritation at the site; others feel the spectral presence of sunburnt Germans coated in therapeutic mud.
In the book Something Ain't Kosher Here: The Rise of the "Jewish" Sitcom, Vincent Brook analysed the episode, saying, "Jerry is made to feel guilty for his 'lethal' pony remark, whence the episode's macabre humor; yet the moral in terms of ethno-spatial identity is clear.
