When we see Tom Hanks in a film, we think of him as a decent, honest everyman in part because we’ve seen him play decent, honest everymen in many other movies. Casting directors choose him in part for this reason — they know that the audience has established a sense of his persona from previous films, and that this affects their perception of him. We all know this; actors are hired deliberately to elicit these effects.

But a movie is fiction, and enjoying it requires restricting our attention to the fictional world in which it takes place. As experienced moviegoers, if we see the hero dangling from a cliff early in the film, we know that he’ll survive, but we repress this knowledge in order to enjoy the suspense that the filmmakers intend. We put our knowledge of movie lore on hold.

But isn’t this precisely the same sort of movie lore that we use when we let a star’s persona fill out the character he or she is playing?

“Why is it appropriate to put our knowledge of star personae to work when watching a movie, but not our knowledge of how popular plots go 99.9% of the time?” asks CUNY philosopher Noël Carroll. “Why is access to one kind of movie lore legitimate and access to the other kind not?”

(Noël Carroll, “The Problem With Movie Stars,” in his Minerva’s Night Out, 2013.)

In honor of Halloween, here’s the first horror film, Georges Méliès’ The Haunted Castle. Originally released in 1896, the year before Dracula was published, it had been thought to be lost until 1988, when a copy was discovered in the New Zealand Film Archive.

Though it’s full of horrific trappings, in general Méliès intended it to amuse and astonish rather than to shock. The filmmaker himself appears as Mephistopheles, and the woman conjured from the cauldron is Jehanne d’Alcy, who would become his second wife.

Played by Japanese priests in the 16th century, taikyoku shogi may be the largest variant of chess ever devised. Each player deploys 402 pieces of 209 types on a board of 1,296 squares to try to capture his opponent’s king(s) and prince(s).

It’s not clear precisely how it was played, but Wikipedia takes more than 10,000 words to describe one likely set of rules.

(Thanks, Alejandro.)

The birdhouse at George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch is a replica of the 50,000-foot main house. Working from the original blueprints, architect Thomas Burke produced the structure in four months and installed it in April 2011. Roughly the size of a Volkswagen Beetle, it has four levels and 50 individual compartments, each with a separate entry made of PVC piping.

(Via Anne Schmauss, Birdhouses of the World, 2014.)

In the first James Bond novel, 1953’s Casino Royale, Bond orders a drink of his own invention:

‘A dry martini,’ he said. ‘One. In a deep champagne goblet.’

‘Oui, monsieur.’

‘Just a moment. Three measures of Gordon’s, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it very well until it’s ice-cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon peel. Got it?’

‘Certainly monsieur.’ The barman seemed pleased with the idea.

‘Gosh, that’s certainly a drink,’ said Leiter.

Bond laughed. ‘When I’m … er … concentrating,’ he explained, ‘I never have more than one drink before dinner. But I do like that one to be large and very strong and very cold, and very well-made. I hate small portions of anything, particularly when they taste bad. This drink’s my own invention. I’m going to patent it when I think of a good name.’

The name he thinks of is the Vesper, ostensibly inspired by the character Vesper Lynd. But in fact the recipe wasn’t original to Bond — Fleming had first received the drink from the butler of an elderly couple in Jamaica — it was named after vespers, a service of evening prayer. Bond says, “It sounds perfect and it’s very appropriate to the violet hour when my cocktail will now be drunk all over the world.” He’d have trouble getting one today — Kina Lillet was discontinued in 1986, and the strength of Gordon’s Gin was reduced in 1992.

In 2002, Melbourne friends Hoss Siegel and Ross Koger were battling with pool noodles and imagined a war fought in the same style. Months later they witnessed two kids beating each other up with cardboard boxes, and they married the two ideas.

The result is Box Wars, an annual free-for-all among combatants bearing weapons and armor made of cardboard. The pastime is now international, with extensions in Japan, the United States, Scotland, the Netherlands, Russia, and Canada.

“The suits,” says Koger, “have gotten more elaborate, as have the crowds, and it’s funny that something which spawned from a stupid idea at a party has become so big.”