amber can walk

Note: This post was originally published on 28th July 2021 but I'm reposting it here because the site it was originally posted to has disappeared. I haven't edited it from the original document so everything should be exactly as it was when it was written, except there are two links in the original post that I can't seem to recover. I didn't keep the source document for whatever reason and it hasn't saved in Google Docs so whatever I referenced at the time has been lost to history. * Whilst the image of the witch has permeated culture as a haggard, ugly woman who is hellbent on causing destruction with her spells, popular depictions of witches have mostly been neutralised as western culture has embraced wicca as a legitimate belief system. It's no longer a character trope that writers are scared to imbue with positive connotations, even in horror. Within the genre, the character of the witch has undergone a transformation, often keeping the same enemy - that bei...

Standish Lawder's short film, Corridor  (1970), is not strictly horror. In fact, it's listed as a documentary under the genre tab on Letterboxd. It's a film without traditional corporeality to it and definitely does not fall under the label of 'educational', and yet, this is what it has been labelled as.    It follows a POV shot, travelling down a hallway towards what appears to be a naked woman. As the camera travels towards the end of the corridor to reach her, the walls seem to flicker and fluctuate - the audience, along with the camera operator, are repeatedly shot back to the beginning, endlessly reaching for the only human in frame that is agonisingly unobtainable.  The dizzying frustration met with dread culminates in something that is akin to horror. You could see this replicated in a traditional horror movie with ease, in a dream sequence or when a character is hallucinating. Without a doubt, a looping, ungovernable environment has featured across genres an...

  Most people watched Hostel (2005) when they were teenagers.  I can't actually verify this statement but there are definitely certain generations of people who came of age during the torture porn boom of the 2000s and tried to watch as many of them as possible to prove how much disturbing and offensive material they could put in their brains before they lost their stomachs. I grew up as a child too young to remember 9/11 and too immature to read the cultural criticism related to the sub-genre, to sit and think about what it was implying about American culture or masculinity or the human body. It was all about affect. And that worked perfectly fine for me at the time. Eli Roth doesn't make movies for adults. You might think that the ratings and content of his films argue against this, but I've never been more convinced watching his 2015 paranoid home invasion gender crisis fable Knock Knock that this man has continually, but not consciously, cultivated an imagined teenage...

Oh hey! I've been away for a while. Had a bit of breakdown and hit a major depressive episode in which I could not get myself to write. I have been around, mostly working on my podcast and trying to be a normal human being again. This very much implies that I was one in the first place which has been hotly debating and regularly debunked. But I have returned for Halloween. 'Tis in fact the season. I've started doing this thing on my side twitter where I create a recommendations thread for Halloween because I love horror films and I want to recommend films people might not have seen. Last year, I did a list of films directed by women . This year, it's the gays . Horror is an excellent genre to explore queer issues because life is a nightmare and queerness is often viewed as inherently abject (particularly recently).  I'll link my full list here  but for now, here are 5 films you should watch celebrate the spooky season: The 4th Man (1983, directed by Paul Verhoeven)...

In a 2007 interview with BAFTA , David Lynch described his first feature film, Eraserhead (1977), as his 'most spiritual film'. When asked to elaborate, he said no, causing the audience to laugh at his bluntness. This would eventually become a meme format, still used today, in response to making outlandish statements and refusing the clarify. Lynch is a deliberately obtuse director when it comes to the meaning behind his films, stating in the same interview that he has given the audience the tools to decipher the film in it, and that he has no more work to do as an artist once the film has been released. As an audience member, I do really love the idea that it's up to me to pull apart what the filmmaker was trying to convey, what they wanted me to feel, and I think this small nugget, this notion of spirituality in the film is a good place to start when trying to explain what Eraserhead is 'about'. He won't give a definitive answer. Neither will I. But I will t...

Source: Roger Ebert What's most frustrating about the representation of the internet in films and on TV is how incurious it is. Generally being portrayed as a vapid outlet for teenagers who are desperate for attention, social media, that is pretty much ubiquitous at this point and almost essential in staying up to date on socio-political issues, is villainised in a way that only comes across as insecure from the point of view of the writers. And I don't want to be ageist, but it does seem like the fear-mongering attitudes of someone too detached from young people's lives to even try to understand what it's function is in them. We're All Going To The World's Fair (2021) is refreshing, not just because of its transgressive use of form, but because it was so obviously made by someone who spent hours on the internet as a teenager, like myself and many other people now in their twenties. Jane Schoenbrun's bizarre coming of age story follows Casey as she plays an ...

Source: Rue Morgue The Velvet Vampire (1971) is a vampire horror hellbent on destabilising heterosexual monogamy through its exploration of desire and isolation. We follow Lee and Susan as their marriage becomes threatened through the presence of the ever-alluring Diane, a mysterious woman, who has invited them to her estate in the middle of the desert. Whilst there, their marriage and respective identities are troubled as they both seem to be attracted to Diane, who they suspect is actually a vampire. Playing on old stereotypes about the evil, promiscuous bisexual and made in a time of political unrest, it seems to be wrestling with the panic of change and the possibility of dual identities, as if those who are marginalised by normative society actually have something sinister to hide. Diane gets to punish those who seek to use her for sex and discard her afterwards and there is a certain amount catharsis that can be had from watching this film as a bisexual woman, whose identity is p...

Women's films are often left out of those lists you see going around of  ' 100 Greatest Films of All Time ' or ' 1001 Films To See Before You Die ', with only 5% of films directed by women being included in the latter. It's true that female directors have often been shut out of the film industry and struggle to get a second feature . All of the above means it's integral to preserve and commend excellent cinema created by women. To celebrate this International Women's Day, I've created a short watchlist of films directed (or co-directed) by women that I think are brilliant in terms of genre and important in terms of cultural significance. Children of Shatila (dir. by Mai Masri, 1999) Source: Mubi This documentary follows the displaced Palestinian refugees occupying the Shatila camp, focusing on the children who had been affected by the massacre that occurred a decade earlier. The director gave the children cameras and allowed them to film their surro...

This post contains spoilers of the above film.  This post also discusses sexual violence multiple times, though no details are described.  If this is something that you are uncomfortable with or unable to cope with, I won't blame you for skipping this post. Take care of yourself. Source: IMDb Deadgirl (2008) is not a film I'd recommend. It fails as an exploration of consent and masculinity, and it fails as a 'disturbing' movie, which is what it's trying to be. I would say that this film is disturbing, as there are numerous scenes of sexual assault and random violence, however it meanders so much that, even as something fucked up that you would watch with friends to prove what you could handle, it's a slog to get through. All this is worsened by the fact that the acting and script are awful, meaning not only can you not be entertained intellectually or viscerally from the sheer affect of what you're witnessing, you also can't enjoy it as a movie that...