We all know the phrase, even if we don't know where it came from.

Well, it comes from a novel you've never heard of from 1878,

written by a novelist you've also never heard of named Margaret Wolf Hungerford.

But the phrase is,

beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Now, basically for our purposes here, it means that while I may love a film

that we talk about, you might not, or vice versa. For this episode, we have a film that critics loved,

but I did not. In fact, I think it's fair to say that I hate it. I love the director. The stars are great.

It's beautifully filmed. It's wonderfully acted. But I hate it. So much.

But there are a lot of people who don't. And it's not fair for me to leave out a film based on a chilling true story

just because it's a film that I don't like. So here we are. The Lighthouse is a 2019 film

directed and produced by Robert Eggers, who made one of my favorite films a few years before

this, The Witch. He also co-wrote the

screenplay with his brother, Max. The film stars Willem Defoe and Robert Pattinson as 19th century

lighthouse keepers stranded on a remote New England island because of a violent storm.

Now, the initial inspiration for the film was not a true story.

It was based on an unfinished Edgar Allan Poe story that was called The Lighthouse.

Max Eggers began adapting the story, but couldn't figure out what to do with it. So his brother jumped in to help, sourcing the plot from the story of a Welsh lighthouse

tragedy, which for most people would sound tame. It's not. And while the story of Thomas Howell

Thomas Griffith and the Smalls Lighthouse

isn't a story of an unexplained disappearance, a mysterious death, or a brutal true

crime, it's still a horror story that would have been worthy of Edgar Allen Poe.

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