amber can walk

If this were a mirror I’d be floating through the sky   a bird finally       fingers splayed like wings flapping and bumping on a cold breeze   but this is my body          still floating on a large skeleton of water    my eyes wide         pressed up against the window of the surface   a spaghetti string of froth caught in my teeth               prison bars   letting the water in        filling me  up to drown the trapped prisoner the back of my neck though glared at by sunlight   stays solid        white           a block of ice  my body has made a cocktail of the stream   I suppose I won’t really know how big it is  river                     lake              ...

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...

Silly rats - they like to think that they run this town they have small shoes and think that they’re artists because they picked up a bass once your music isn’t even that good                                                    rat bastard ! You’re still admired because you ran away with my pen because you put your arms in my sleeves you didn’t write any of my poems  you weren’t even in the room                                                    rat bastard ! Why am I alone in seeing this ?! I’m overshadowed  I’m enraged at the fact that  he’s using the laundromat despite having a washer dryer                                     ...

As per my Babygirl review , I've been ruminating on the concept of catharsis and whether it's something that is owed to the audience. With that film, I found its all-too-neat and tensionless storytelling frustrating, specifically because it seemed to be terrified to shame or unseat the audience with compelling conflict. More than ever, our tastes have become dictated by algorithms catered to our personal preferences with the intent of keeping us engaged and when we're not raging over pointless nothingness, we are being siloed away from our peers with beige specificity. Following suit are a new generation of storytellers who are being instructed to mould to the streaming model of media production and tick demographic boxes rather than tell stories that are full-bodied and messy. Topicality, as a result, becomes a major selling point of a new TV show or movie and, as cynical as ever, it's not because someone had a humanistic approach to these issues, but rather, these c...