where we're from the birds sing a pretty song

I'm Layla and this blog is about things I love - favorite books, sad songs, old Hollywood, forgotten filmstars, the cats, Twin Peaks, the Black Dahlia, classic horror movies, Junji Ito, the sordid past, obscure 1960s garage rock, vintage erotica, female fronted punk, embroidery, ASOIAF/GOT, odd birds, wicked women and wayward girls.

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[lostmind99]

This makes me happy

[butw0rldenough]

Black cat auditions photographed for Life Magazine, 1961. The auditions were for Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Terror segment “The Black Cat.”

[karnsteins]

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night • Dir. by Ana Lily Amirpour

[georgiansuggestion]

take your carriage very slowly by your rival’s home, that she might see your latest hat

[luckyartisanllama]

Eat your heart Catherine, you toad-eating hag.

[lezcatnoir]

Elizabeth, you must surely be aware that I am unable to view the roads from my apartments due to the vastness of my estate…

[alsuper2]

Oh, please do forgive my mistake, Catherine, I had only assumed you could see from that ostentatiously high pedestal atop of which you have placed yourself

[benafflecks]

She wants to get inside of me. I can feel her.

Suspiria (Luca Guadagnino, 2018)

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Patricia Arquette by Suzanne Tenner / “Lost Highway” / dir. David Lynch / 1997

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Laura Dern, Kyle MacLachlan by Peter Braatz

[hirokazukoreeda]

All of them… All of Them Witches!

[brian-em0]

Visit Original Link

[mysharona1987]

Alfred Hitchcock Presents Lamb to the Slaughter. (1958) - YouTube

One of the best short films ever made. And it got to the point of Roald Dahl’s story.

“I’ve killed him. What do I do now?”  She is anxious and scared through this entire thing. 

The cops vaguely suspect something. Then she literally makes them eat the evidence. 

The way she giggles to herself at the end. She’s won. She knows she has.

As a child, this story terrified me.

[hirokazukoreeda]

Suspiria 1977, dir. Dario Argento.

[thisobscuredesireforbeauty]

[love-gia-carangi]

candid photo of Bettie Page putting on lipstick

[thebarsofhisplight]

A list of insults from Old Hollywood actors

Insults compiled from various books, magazines, newspapers and IMDB.com. 

Bette Davis on Joan Crawford: “I wouldn’t piss on her if she was on fire.” 

Bette Davis on Joan Crawford: “The only male at MGM she hasn’t slept with is Lassie!”

Bette Davis on Joan Crawford: “My mother told me to only speak good of the dead. Joan Crawford is dead. Good.”

Carole Lombard on Vivien Leigh: “That f–king English bitch.” 

Frank Sinatra on Dorothy Kilgallen: “The chinless wonder.”

Frank Sinatra on Dorothy Kilgallen: "If you happen to run into Dorothy Kilgallen, be sure you’re in your car.“

Frank Sinatra on Shelley Winters: “A bowlegged bitch of a Brooklyn blonde.” 

Humphrey Bogart on William Holden: “A dumb prick.”

Joan Crawford on Bette Davis: “She has a cult, and what the hell is a cult except a gang of rebels without a cause. I have fans. There’s a big difference.” 

John Gielgud on Ingrid Bergman: “Ingrid Bergman speaks five languages and can’t act in any of them.” 

John Wayne on Clark Gable: “Gable’s an idiot. You know why he’s an actor? It’s the only thing he’s smart enough to do.”

Laurence Olivier on Marilyn Monroe: “My hatred for her was one of the strongest emotions I had ever felt.”

Myrna Loy on Clark Gable: "He couldn’t act his way out of a paper bag”

Richard Harris on Michael Caine: “An over-fat, flatulent, 62-year-old windbag. A master of inconsequence masquerading as a guru, passing off his vast limitations as pious virtues.” 

Shelley Winters on Frank Sinatra: “A skinny, no-talent, stupid, Hoboken bastard.” 

Sterling Hayden on Joan Crawford: “There’s is not enough money in Hollywood to lure me into making another picture with Joan Crawford. And I like money.”  

Walter Mattheu to Barbra Streisand during an on set argument while making HELLO DOLLY!: “I have more talent in my farts than you have in your whole body.” 

William Holden on Humphrey Bogart: “I hated the bastard.”  

[lauramcphee]

Shelley Winters, 1970 (Jim Marshall)

[secretcinema3]

Classic Scenes #4

The Threepenny Opera, 1931, G.W. Pabst

’But you don’t know who I am sirs…’

Lotte Lenya singing Seeräuber Jenny from G.W. Pabst’s 1931 version of Brecht and Weill’s Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera). It’s her stillness, I think, that’s so spellbinding, and the veiled look in her eyes, like she’s seeing that ship in her mind as clear as a vision, like it’s not a dream but a promise. You can imagine this woman at the French Revolution, at every bloody uprising of the poor and exploited before and since, her vengeance pure and justified, watching tyrants’ heads roll one by one, crying out as each one falls - hoppla!