amber can walk

This is not a review. About a month ago, I saw The Shrouds (2024) in the cinema for the first time. After ruminating on it, posting a quick review to Letterboxd and eating some very mediocre sushi, I found myself, periodically crying throughout the rest of the evening and well into the early hours of the morning. This, unfortunately, ruined the unintentional double feature I did with Jane Austen Wrecked My Life (2024), a film I remember very little about, but have the vague sense that I did, in fact, like it. It wasn't for the lack of quality that the details of this fluffy little movie slipped away, but rather due to me having what I will euphemistically call a 'bad turn'. I do spiral. I've been known to dwell. I've sunk to depths of depression that I didn't think I was capabale of. I've been triggered by the innocuous and I've been triggered by the terrifying. I've spaced out for days and been knocked back to reality by something as mundane as a ...

Note: This post was originally published on 8th December 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. * Jumbo (2020) is, by all accounts, a classic love story, with its meet cute, its honeymoon period, its 'meeting the parents scene', its breakup, reconciliation and typical marriage ending. The film follows the shy and awkward Jeanne as she starts her job at a fairground and eventually falls in love with one of the rides, who she affectionately calls Jumbo. Where her life was previously grey and drab, she suddenly finds happiness in the bright neon glow of her lover. The story’...

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...

For the longest time, my biggest fear has been forgetting. I started writing a diary at a very young age because I wanted to remember things the way girls in TV shows did - slumped over their desks, dim lamplight spotlighting the page, manic handwriting scratching out the events of the day. I filled endless notebooks with my adventures and, as my feelings became more complex, I wrote about my constant, exhausting feelings. I was fairly convinced I was writing for an audience of the future, who would stumble across my little words and know what it was like to be me. I've really struggled to think of myself as an artist. Writing poetry or film criticism is not what takes up the bulk of my days and, as a result, does not make up the sum of my life. Shifting into 'art production mode' is not something that comes easy to me simply because most of my day is taken up by trying to stay alive. Much of why I stopped writing a diary and, to a lesser extent, stopped using this blog as ...

The past few of years have been marred with a kind of weightlessness. There have been and continue to be people who joke about still feeling stuck in 2019, how it doesn't feel as though it was 6 years ago at all, how it's hard to feel present when time feels like it's constantly being stolen from us. Not just pandemic-wise, but spending most of our lives working jobs we don't like or in bus stations, waiting to get to those jobs or pretty much just anywhere that isn't with people who value us beyond what labour we can provide for them.  As a result, I have formed some theories about why I seek out things I know will disturb me or piss me off. In my abandoned blog post on disturbing media I attempted to write a couple of years ago, I argued that affect is very grounding and that taking the cultural litmus test of what you can and can't endure keeps you assimilated to a certain extent, even if it's based on having an overly negative reaction to a taboo topic. ...

  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...

Last year, one of my most rewatched films was Steven Soderbergh's Sex, Lies and Videotape (1989), a film revolving around four people whose lives become entangled due to their various sexual neuroses. It's a film very interested in infidelity and what it takes to make relationships work. In general, I find the misery of heterosexuality, as portrayed in many a film, tedious. So, I avoided this film specifically because I assumed that it would be another film people enjoyed because it had straight people screaming at each other in it. Sex, Lies and Videotape invited me in through its depiction of loneliness and perversion, both of which are aspects of being alive that are often mocked and derided. The serial killer is lonely and perverted. The stalker is lonely and perverted. Your average middle class married couple are not typically lonely and perverted, not unless the film ends with some kind of violent climax (I'm looking at you, American Beauty !).  The film follows An...