teach me the art of war

Forbidden Fruits 2026: Comedy horror, heavily stylised movie about four young fashion retail workers whose leader, Apple, has them ensnared in a secretive, controlling witches' coven. It was definitely saying something about toxic female friendships, but what exactly that something was, I'm not sure I could tell you. It was very pretty, very vibes-based and not particularly coherent. (Admittedly, I watched it drunk.)

I enjoyed myself anyway, especially because Lili Reinhart is absolutely amazing as Apple. But I was hoping for something more, idk, The Craft meets Mean Girls, which I think is actually what the movie was trying to be, and in the end it just didn't quite get there.

Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022): Also comedy horror. A group of rich, dumb, very dramatic Gen Z friends lock themselves away in a remote mansion for a hurricane party; they are playing what's supposed to be an innocent game of murder in the dark when bodies start turning up for real. This is Glass Onion for morons, in the absolute BEST possible way. I have a lot of affection for Amandla Stenberg from her twin roles in The Acolyte, but she is one of those actors who gives off very strong "knows about TikTok" vibes even when she's running around with a lightsaber, so it was nice to see her sink her teeth into a role where knowing about TikTok was part of the point. She really shone as the troubled, newly sober lesbian protagonist/final girl whose relationships with the group were falling apart even before people started dropping dead.

Us (2019): All horror, no comedy by Jordan Peele starring Lupita Nyong'o. The Wilson family are enjoying a coastal holiday when a family of doppelgängers show up in their driveway hellbent on killing the people whose existence has unwittingly been keeping them enslaved. The doppelgängers, called the Tethered, come from a mysterious underworld and share a soul with their above-world doubles; everything their double does, each of them is forced to perform a twisted simulacrum of, all while trapped in a miserable prison-like space and wearing orange jumpsuits.

I went into this one with extensive spoilers because of the kid characters, and yet I somehow managed not to spoil myself for the final twist, which I'm...not sure if I like or not? I really enjoyed the shock of the reveal, but the longer I've dwelt on it, the more I feel it not just subverts but actually contradicts some of what the movie told us previously. With or without the ending, though, it was a fantastic film and Lupita Nyong'o was breathtakingly good as Adelaide and Red.

Bonus DNF is a thriller, not a horror movie, but I also recently attempted Gravity (2013) - about the sole survivor of an ill-fated mission on the Hubble Space Telescope - and got about halfway through before the stress became too much. Even Sandra Bullock putting in an absolutely amazing performance as a scientist and first time astronaut was not enough to make the sheer cortisol overload worth it for me (and admittedly, my ability to invest in her was hampered by having to fast-forward through her backstory because child death). I love space exploration! I have enjoyed other survival thrillers! But the pacing of this one was just utterly relentless, and the dangers excruciatingly drawn-out, and in the end I couldn't do it.

I've had a run of bad luck with my movie choices lately. There's been nothing since my last horror post that I've really enjoyed, and a few attempts so brief and unimpressive that I won't even count them as DNFs. Here are three I did at least get through:

The Conspiracy (2012): This mockumentary follows two journalists who are investigating the phenomenon of conspiracy theories from a skeptical viewpoint when they unfortunately discover that there really is an evil cabal running the world. Most of this was so well done that it had me feeling momentary genuine sympathy for conspiracy nuts - they made it all sound SO compelling in the collected footage! But the final act was just plain stupid. I'm sorry. There's no other word for it. And it wasn't even particularly scary in the end, because the cabal stuff and the "twist" re: how the documentary supposedly got itself released were so unconvincing that they completely broke my suspension of disbelief.

Evil Dead (2013): Struggling addict Mia gathers two close childhood friends, her brother and her brother's new girlfriend all together at the old family cabin to support her as she gets clean. They arrive to find the cabin broken into, a bunch of dead cats strung up in the basement, and an ominous leatherbound book that has been fastened closed with thick barbed wire. One bright spark from among the group deems it good to break the book out of its restraints, browse through its pages and pages of dire red-inked warnings and gruesome illustrations, then recite aloud an incantation in a mysterious language that some previous user of the book has tried very, very hard to scratch out. You guys aren't going to believe this but it turns out the book is an evil book that summons the devil! Mia promptly becomes possessed, by way of an evil thorn bush that traps her with her legs spread so that an evil vine can crawl up her vagina. Carnage ensues.

This was, as I suspected, too gory for me - but only just! The unpleasant kind of too gory, not the traumatic kind of too gory. I'm slightly annoyed by how little I liked it, because scary occult books and libraries have been a favourite trope of mine since primary school. If they'd spent more time chewing on the lore I'd have probably enjoyed it enough to make up for the violence, which was so gross, brutal and implausably ~creative that it almost tipped over into unintentional comedy. I understand this is a reboot of the 80s trilogy which is actually comedic on purpose, so maybe I'll like that better? But this one was a wash and I honestly only finished it because I'd already DNF'd a couple of movies and I wanted to finish SOMETHING.

Blair Witch (2016): The brother of a woman who went missing along with her documentary-making team while camping in Black Hills Forest takes his own documentary-making team to go camping in Black Hills Forest in the hopes of finding out what happened to her. And, well, he absolutely does find out! This is a direct sequel to (and beat-for-beat rehash of) The Blair Witch Project, and I watched it against my better judgement because a horror youtuber was gushing about how underrated it is. I'm afraid I'll have to side with the majority on this one. The basic premise seems to be that if you take all the ambiguous terror of the original and make it more direct and concrete - "dial it up", or whatever - then you'll get something even scarier. So instead of the victims being bewilderingly lost, unable to keep track of time or distance, we're explicitly told that time and distance are being manipulated by magic. Instead of the Blair Witch being a lurking unseen horror, she appears on screen this time as a fairly bog-standard cryptid. Instead of a short, sharp final foray into the old Rustin Parr house and the descent into insane wall-staring behaviour, we get long chase sequences down indistinguishable corridors and an explanation that the Blair Witch can only get you if you look at her, therefore wall-staring is an entirely rational safety measure. I assume it's clear from the tone of my recap that I did not, in fact, find any of these revisions scarier than the original at all. It was an absolute nothingburger of a film and I don't think my pulse spiked even once.

The worst immersion-breaker, though, was how they did the found footage this time. Again, they seem to have been working from the guiding principle that more is more: instead of the highly realistic, easily tracked camera use of the first film, they now had headcams on every character and a drone overhead that supposedly justified near comprehensive coverage of every scene, with perfectly framed close-ups and well timed zoom-ins and a whole bunch of scenes where I honestly couldn't tell whose camera was supposed to be filming it or how it got into that position. I'm not exactly a cinematographer or a keen observer of technical details, so I feel like if I'm watching your film going "these camera movements just don't make sense", you have probably screwed up something fairly major.

And a couple of notable DNFs: Insidious (I tried really hard to keep going because I've heard such good things, but the stressed-out SAHM and her poor crying baby got under my skin in a way that wasn't fun), Triangle (sad little kid in the very first scene, never a good sign!) and Unsane (I am down for "am I actually crazy" angst under many circumstances, but an upsettingly grounded involuntary psych hold while on the run from a stalker is apparently not one of them). All three seemed like pretty good films so to be fair this is more about my personal squicks than a quality-based rejection, but yeah.

Maybe to break this streak I should go back and rewatch some of the small handful of horror flicks I managed to watch in my whole life prior to this year's sudden hyperfixation. I know for a fact that Psycho is not going to disappoint me, for instance! I remember The Exorcism of Emily Rose being quite good, as well. And I've never seen a Dracula adaptation I didn't like. Or maybe I need a break and to watch some non-horror for a while. IDEK. Maybe I should rewatch some Star Wars! Star Wars never lets me down!

Two new horror films have just opened up in local theatres, and I am debating whether to go and see them. (Saccharine will either be just what I want right now or will set my own body image issues spiraling; Evil Dead Burn is almost certainly too gory for me, but I'm fighting a reckless urge to ~test myself.) In the meantime, here's what I've been watching at home on a smaller screen:

Conclave (2024): The Pope dies; the Cardinals gather at the Vatican to elect a new one; much political intrigue occurs, and much anguishing of consciences. Ralph Fiennes carried this whole film as the convenor of the conclave, while Carlos Diehz supplied the pontifical eye candy as a badass (by ageing Catholic dude standards) newcomer who had been secretly appointed to the perilous archbishopric of Kabul after a career spent ministering in war and disaster zones. Very fun and tense and aesthetic. I do not have much else to say.

Black Death (2010): This entertainingly heavy-handed medieval action/horror stars Sean Bean as a Catholic warrior on a mission to catch a necromancer accused of using black magic to shield a whole village from the ravages of plague, and Eddie Redmayne as a novice from a nearby local monastery who volunteers to guide him to the village. It starts out as a gritty, filthy, dark historical adventure that takes the adventurers' faith very seriously, before eventually dissolving into an unintentional horror-comedy of Evil Pagans(TM) railing against the Church and trying to torture and trying to force the Christians to renounce God under threat of death and torture, while the Christians are all Vaderesque NOOOOOOOOOO, I'll never renounce God!!!!! Carice van Houten (the Evil Pagan(TM) queen) is so attractive it should be illegal. The twist end was...quite satisfying, actually! I can't take any of it too seriously but it was a very enjoyable watch.

Thesis (1996): Spanish horror/thriller about film student Ángela who, while exploring cinematic depictions of extreme violence for her thesis, stumbles across the existence of a snuff production ring operating in her university. Ángela is in deep denial about her fascination with death and gore and seems confused as to her own moral position; her impulse is to bury her head in the sand and forget all about the horrible criminal discovery. Her classmate Chema, an unabashed horror fan and collector of assorted video nasties, feels obliged to investigate. It is all very meta, and at times seems to be deliberately taunting the audience - many a time the camera will pan slowly towards a sight we are told is unspeakably grisly, only to dart away at the last possible second.

And some DNFs: I watched about half an hour of The Rite because I was in the mood for more films in the vein of The Exorcist, but it ended up being so much in the vein of The Exorcist (right down to the sad brown-haired young priest who boxes to work out and is the middle of a crisis of faith) that I was mostly bored by the time a heavily pregnant woman wandered on-screen and I realised I had recklessly forgotten to check if the movie had child death in it, so I paused and checked and...yeah, that's a nope. I started watching Send Help with high hopes, but the first few minutes were devoted to that guy from Teen Wolf being the most infuriatingly horrible business bro and my blood pressure couldn't take it. That is NOT the kind of stressed out I want to be while watching a horror movie! The Invisible Man was also the wrong kind of stressful, in a different way: Imagine you're dating Tony Stark, and he's a complete abusive psycho! (No thank you, I will not be imagining that.) Finally I watched a bit of The Cabin in the Woods, but the Whedonesque vibes just weren't what I was in the mood for - I may come back to this one at a later date, though, since it's such a classic.

Backrooms (2026): I loved this!!! Admittedly, my reception has been coloured by the sheer delight of getting to go see it in theatre; I was able to book the perfect seat in an otherwise empty row, I treated myself to a big cup of mixed lollies in a fit of childlike exuberance, and all in all a great time was had while my husband generously managed the kids' bedtime alone. Under those circumstances the movie would have had to be very bad indeed before it would have dented my joy, but I do think it was genuinely good - especially for something made by a twenty-year-old youtuber.

Based on an internet creepypasta that I'd never heard of in my life but that is apparently hugely popular with Gen Z, Backrooms is about a struggling furniture store owner who passes through a wall in the back of his shop and finds himself in a liminal space of huge, labyrinthine office rooms that are just Not Quite Right: the architecture is all off-kilter, everything is faded yellow, and the space is completely empty aside from the scattering of random items in unlikely places throughout. His therapist gets roped into it as well, and two of his young employees. The ambience and sound design are key to the horror: not a lot of action happens, but the visual wrongness never lets up, and the awful noises made by the Mysterious Thing that stalks the backrooms had me clutching the armrests. If I get a second chance at an evening out then I am going to spend it on Obsession, but a part of me kind of wishes I could go back and see this one on the big screen again.

As Above, So Below (2014): My trip to see Backrooms was a second attempt at an evening out; the first one fell over, and As Above, So Below was my streamable-at-home consolation prize, plucked from a "You're obsessed with Backrooms, now what's next?" listicle. I can see their point, but the tone could hardly be more different and for me this one scratched a completely different itch. It's about a rogue archaeologist and her thrown-together team of urban explorers who blunder into a haunted hell dimension while searching the Paris catacombs for the Philosopher's Stone. It is ridiculous, corny, historically incompetent, and overall spooky as fuck. Someone clearly said, "Imagine if Indiana Jones was a beautiful twentysomething woman! And imagine if her tomb runs were even scarier and more deadly! No, don't worry about the plot, we're going for Vibes here, it doesn't have to withstand even three seconds of scrutiny! Also, I can get us approval to film in the actual real catacombs!" And then they took that as a mission statement and committed to it with their whole heart and soul. It was so dumb. I had such a good time.

The one misstep that I did actually take issue with was the choice to frame it as found footage. I get the vision, I do! But the script and the acting and the overall story are just way too campy to pass as subject matter for low-lit handcams. Absolutely no one is mistaking these people as real. They are actors reading lines. They are so, so obviously actors reading lines. They are having earnest dialogue about Nicholas fucking Flamel! The found footage conceit kept breaking my ability to immerse myself in the camp, and the camp kept breaking my ability to immerse myself in the found footage, and I think ultimately it would have been a much stronger movie if they'd just scrapped the handcams and accepted that nothing about the project was going to lend itself to realism. It should have been shot like the 80s-action/adventure-inspired brain candy it was.

(Yup, still sick and out of commission. Here are three more silver linings.)

Host (2020): As my horror binge has continued, I've already started to notice diminishing returns on the actual fear element - desensitisation, you know? But this one gave me a good hard scare. Set during the COVID pandemic, it's a little under an hour long and confined entirely to a Zoom call between a group of friends who have decided to conduct a virtual seance. The seance works. Aside from being scary as fuck, I really enjoyed how the film made use of the weirdness of life during lockdowns: new relationships forced to turn prematurely cohabitating, established friendships strained by distance, one of the characters reflexively stopping in the middle of a terrifying demonic manifestation to put on her mask before leaving the house. The storytelling is super lo-fi and pared-down, and I think it's a really good example of how a simple idea done cheaply and right can outperform many more lavish productions.

Halloween (1978): I have now watched the first instalments of all the "big three" teen slasher franchises, and this was by far my favourite. Michael Myers is an ontologically evil six-year-old who murders his teenage sister right after she's done having sex. Fifteen years later, he escapes from an insane asylum and goes back home to kill a bunch more teenagers before, during or immediately after sex. Jamie Lee Curtis is such a lovable Final Girl in this, and the music has to be up there with some of the most memorable movie theme songs of all time. I think I disagree very firmly with John Carpenter's conjecture that a pure, inhuman killing machine would be scarier than an actual character with actual motives, but I do admire the total lack of pretence to deeper meaning. Sometimes you want to watch "elevated" horror with Themes and Meaningful Stakes and shit; other times you just want to watch a monster in a mask cut people up for no reason.

White Zombie (1932): Did you guys know that zombies originate from Haitian folklore? Because I did not! In their original form, they are not plague-spreaders or brain-eaters but cheap, mindless labour in thrall to the sorcerers who raised them; early Western use of the lore seems to have revolved around zombies being forced to work on sugar plantations. In White Zombie, the first ever zombie movie, that is exactly what's happening. But one plantation owner takes the exploitation further when he enlists the help of sorcerer Bela Lugosi to zombify Madeleine, the newlywed woman he's obsessed with, and compel her into his romantic servitude. It is a gloriously silly story, shoddily produced by contemporary standards and almost comical by today's; I loved it anyway, not least for the maiden-in-trailing-gown-traipses-sadly-through-massive-gothic-castle vibes it delivered par excellence. And Bela Lugosi is, as always, brilliant. His smug, smirking expressions managed to be simultaneously hilarious and intimidating; I feel like even in intentional comedy-horror, those two emotions usually have to take turns? Good times.

American Psycho (2000): Christian Bale puts on a mesmerising performance as Patrick Bateman, a wealthy young investment banker who moonlights as a serial killer. Bateman is an empty shell of vapid, consumerist narcissism: he obsesses over his personal grooming routine, competes with other men his age on metrics too petty for the healthy human mind to grasp (there's a running bit about business cards, where the mere sight of a shade of off-white deemed more tasteful than his own is enough to send Bateman spiralling in panicked rage), admires himself in the mirror during sex, and romanticises his own dysfunction by inwardly preening over what an emotionless monster he is. He murders with abandon for no reason whatsoever. He is not a reliable narrator. It's a mindfuck, and a biting satire of American business culture, and an all-around rollicking good time.

I really cannot overexaggerate how good Bale's acting is in this. It's his speech pattern that gets me the most: he absolutely nails that weird cadence typical of a certain kind of insecure young man for whom everything is a performance, who is deeply invested in projecting power and status but has no deep-rooted sense of self to draw from and so has to rely on rote imitation of more charismatic speakers. Every word is too polished, too carefully modulated. It's an aural uncanny valley; before you even see him throw a single tantrum about the superior quality of another guy's card stock, just from hearing him speak, you know he's a fucking joke. That said, I understand this film belongs to the same canon as movies like Fight Club and Joker, where a certain (ahem) demographic of the audience has somehow managed to Matrix-dodge their way around the point and adopted the protagonist as an icon of masculinity. I wish that surprised me more, but the world is also full of fascists who unironically identify with Luke Skywalker, so. Some men have simply got their minds made up to be stupid, and no satirical arrow in the world is sharp enough to pierce their armour. Doesn't change the fact that this is a really good movie.

Rogue (2007): When I DNF'd Black Water a while ago, it was because THIS was the crocodile movie I actually wanted to watch and I didn't even know it! A bunch of tourists to the Northern Territory go on a wetland cruise, and their boat gets attacked by a freakishly large, even more freakishly aggressive saltie. They end up stranded on a mud island that's soon due to disappear under the rising tide, desperately trying to figure out a way back to dry land, getting picked off by the croc the whole time. It was epic. If you like straightforward, unpretentious creature horror, this film was it!

Two of these are classic horror movies. One is ??? probably horror but no one's saying it with their chests. One is a biographical crime drama that's not actually horror at all, but it's about a female serial killer, so for the purposes of this post it squeaks in.

The Lighthouse (2019): Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson are 19th century lighthouse keepers who go nuts while keeping their lighthouse. This is a critically acclaimed, multiple award-winning movie, and I am sorry to say that I heartily disliked it; imo it was one of those works of art that is so busy being clever and referential, it forgets to actually say a single word for itself. The production was gorgeous, though. It was shot in black and white with an unusual squarish ratio and the soundtrack was absolutely exquisite: grinding, ominious music; long silences; the endless beating of the sea and the violent, maddening blare of the lighthouse's foghorn. Enjoyable aesthetic experience. Plot-wise, fuck no.

Monster (2003): This is a biopic about Aileen Wuornos, an American serial killer who was executed in 2002 for the murders of seven men who picked her up for sex along highways in Florida. Possibly one of the most harrowing, heartstring-tugging things I have ever watched? Charlize Theron plays Wuornos with a desperately traumatised intensity as she pins all her hopes for love and salvation on her girlfriend Selby, who expects her to support them both through sex work while turning a blind eye both to the terrifying sexual violence Wuornos faces out on the streets and to the brutality of the solution she has found for her own safety. (Selby has her own issues: she's a young lesbian from an extremely strict, repressive middle-class Christian family. She is hopelessly naive and sheltered, completely unequipped to support herself alone but forced to leave her whole support network behind due to their homophobia.)

It doesn't feel right to have ~opinions on something that is true crime based, with families of victims still living. So all I'll say is that I can't actually imagine a version of the Aileen Wuornos story that wouldn't leave me feeling a high degree of heartache for her, whether she killed all those men because they tried to rape her (as she claimed) or out of pure hatred and greed. I daresay I'd be consumed by hate too if I'd led Wuornos' life.

The Fog (1980): On a small US coastal town's one hundredth anniversary, a mysterious supernatural fog rolls in to wreak vengeance for the sins of the founders. This is a fun, silly ghost story with a likeable main cast and some immaculate spooky vibes. I don't have much to say. The villains are ( SPOILER ) and I switched my brain off and enjoyed.

The Exorcist (1973): Twelve-year-old Regan gets possessed by a demon; her desperate mother, tired of endless rounds of agonising medical tests and psychiatric appointments that lead nowhere, finally enlists a Catholic priest to exorcise her. Father Karras has been suffering a crisis of faith, but helping Regan reignites the spark of his vocation. This is a wonderful, psychologically rich and nuanced film with a cast who are all impressively well developed; a lot is going on in their lives, and the plot is a little slow to start because of the time we spend getting to know them first, but I definitely don't think it was time wasted. Father Karras had an electric screen presence; every second he was on screen, my eyes were glued to him. (He was also a sad man with floppy dark hair who could throw a punch, so consider this parenthesis to be my legally mandated disclosure of bias. I am probably not eligible to serve on this jury.) I also loved Regan's mother Chris, and everything about the portrayal of Chris and Regan's mother-daughter relationship: Chris is a single mum with a busy career as a successful actress who relies on a great deal of hired help for childcare and home maintenance, but she is also shown to be a devoted mother. She and Regan deeply love, trust and moreover clearly like each other, and the movie manifested exactly none of the Oh No Working Mothers handwringing I was braced for when she was first introduced.

I did not, regrettably, find The Exorcist very scary, and am metaphorically pouring one out for it and all the other trailblazing movies that get so unfairly eclipsed by later, lesser movies rolling their flashy cars down that nice pre-blazed trail. I've seen all these scares before, and I haven't even been watching horror for that long. It has been too influential and as a sad result I'm too desensitised to fully enter into its intended atmosphere of supernatural terror. But even with all the shock value stripped away, it's still a genuinely excellent film that I'm glad to have watched and can see myself watching again. (And okay, fine, the crucifix masturbation scene did give me one decent-sized scare.)

I've slowed my horror movie roll a bit, mainly because the work I'm doing on my fanbinding project lends itself to the same headspace and timeslot as movie-watching. But I have not lost interest! Today's unintentional mini-theme is toxic female friendship, yay.

Jennifer's Body (2009): A struggling indie band turns to Satan to give them their big break, but the girl they chose for their virgin sacrifice was unfortunately not a virgin. Instead of dying, the ritual causes Jennifer to become possessed by a demon, and leaves her devoted best friend Anita ("Needy") struggling to come to terms with a Jennifer who is mostly the same cool, hot, vacuous, slightly mean teenage girl she's always been, only now she feeds off the flesh of her male classmates.

I'm boggling that I never saw this in cinemas when it came out, because it was fucking laser-targeted at my demographic (emo kids who were coming of age in the late 2000s), but I can't recall any of my friends even talking about it. I recognised almost every band on the soundtrack. I recognised a lot of faces too: Megan Fox, Amanda Seyfried, Amy Sedaris, Chris Pratt, that guy from The O.C. Anyway, it was a great time! If I hadn't been out and rug-munching for several years by the time it was released, that Jennifer/Needy makeout scene would have given me the mother of all sexual awakenings too, lol. Those heady teenage hormones were off the charts.

Fall (2022): A year after her husband's death in a rock climbing accident, Becky allows her best friend Hunter (a youtuber who has built her brand on daredevil stunts) to goad her into climbing a decommissioned TV tower together. The tower is 2000ft/610m high, rusted through, and due to be demolished soon. They tell no one what they're doing and pack no food or survival gear. The ladder gives way beneath them, and the two end up trapped on a tiny open platform right at the top.

I fucking loved this, okay? Looking at reviews after I'd finished watching made me feel kind of dumb, because everyone else was all "too much suspension of disbelief" and "saw the twist coming a mile off" and "leads are so dumb they deserve it" while I was just there like 🤯🤯🤯. Hot women with a dangerous physical hobby! Extreme heights! Confined to a single location with literally no room to maneuver, and somehow still heart-stoppingly tense and exciting the whole way through! Yes the leads are a bit dumb and yes the filmmakers are less than 100% married to realism the whole way through. (There's no point me defending the twist, because I am a very naive viewer; most twists catch me off guard, whether they're well executed or not.) But all I really wanted was attractive, dysfunctional women and vertigo-inducing aerial shots and to spend a decent portion of the runtime yelling "no no no don't do that!" through my fingers, and you couldn't get a purer, more intense experience of those things than this film if you injected them intravenously.

In Fall-adjacent news, I am greatly amused by the existence of this Getting Stuck in Terrible Places Cinematic Universe list on letterboxd. Some of these films I have already seen over the years; some are on my watch list; others I have never even heard of. But a person who can put Saw, The Hunger Games, Snowpiercer and The Blair Witch Project all together on a themed list and have it make perfect, intuitive sense is a person I can respect.

The Dark and the Wicked (2020): The grown children of Texas farmers come home to support their dying father in his last days, but a demonic presence is hanging over the house, filling the family's heads with terrifying hallucinations and the urge to commit brutal acts of self-mutilation. This film is style over substance, but the style was genuinely extremely good, so...I liked it, I think? The plot is paper thin and the veneer of "elevated" horror is hardly worth analysing. It's a haunted house story. Terrible forces do terrible things to ordinary people and there's no way to stop them. But the focus is on slow, building dread over action; the atmosphere is stark and lonely, full of sweeping shots of the farmstead that are sometimes so underlit you have to squint and other times so overexposed it sears your eyes, all clearly done intentionally; the soundtrack doesn't miss a single trick to get your heart beating faster. Everything is beautiful and horribly off-kilter.

Do I see myself wanting to rewatch this? No, probably not. The fucky lighting made my eyes hurt and there's nothing about any of the characters that makes me crave more time with them. But the movie gave me exactly what I wanted: to feel so scared it was a genuine struggle not to close my eyes and cower away from the screen. Only one other movie has so far given me such an intense, lizard-brain fright, and that was The Tunnel. We all have our specific fears; I guess "inhuman figure approaches slowly, jerkily, inexorably out of the darkness" must be mine.

It Follows (2014): Hahaha, and then after that realisation I decided to watch a film where an inhuman figure approaches slowly, jerkily and inexorably for like ninety minutes straight. Three guesses what kind of emotional state I was in after this one. 😅

It was great, though! It's about a murderous horror that is sexually transmitted; once it has latched onto you, the only way to get rid of it is to pass it on to someone else. Until then, it follows you. Everywhere. At a slow and steady walking pace. It can take on any human form, it knows where you are at all times, and it never stops. You can buy yourself time by getting far away, but sooner or later it will catch back up; if it gets its hands on you, it will kill you. So, obviously, our college-age protagonist Jay catches It after sleeping with a guy she's been dating, who it turns out seduced her under a false identity out of desperation to save his own life. Her sister and a handful of childhood friends rally around her, and together they try to find a solution to the curse while staying ahead of the pursuit. It's a really interesting, self-aware but not satirical twist on the "sex = death" slasher trope, and also REALLY FUCKING SCARY. (I mean, we've established that slow pursuit scares me shitless; others' mileage may vary, idk.)

On the other hand, the main girl looked so much like Hilary Duff that it kept throwing me out of the story, and the time period was jarringly out of whack. Everyone drove vintage cars, had 80s wall phones and 90s TV sets on which they watched 1950s horror movies, the internet didn't seem to exist but one character had this bizarre, kitschy little clamshell e-reader on which she was reading Dostoevsky...apparently it was supposed to feel "timeless" and "dreamlike" but I just found it distracting. Not enough to negate how much I liked the actual storyline, but it was an irritating little niggle, and in general I found a lot of the aesthetic choices in this movie odd and unappealing. Horror movies can be scary, thematically interesting AND pretty! This one only scored two out of three, and that just felt like an unfortunate waste.

Hell House LLC Origins: The Carmichael Manor (2023): A true crime vlogger takes her real estate agent girlfriend and her schizophrenic brother to stay several nights at a remote manor that was the site of a grisly domestic homicide, and that also (she learns, to her very great misfortune) turns out to be connected to the infamous Abaddon Hotel tragedy. snickfic promised me 1) a lesbian main couple and 2) even scarier clowns than the ones in the original movie, and has proved faithful on both counts. These were some seriously NASTY clowns, and I really liked the main couple with their Mulder and Scully-Against-Her-Will dynamic. I thought the true crime fan angle was a very good justification for the whole investigation setup, even as it set my teeth on edge (in a fuck-you way, not a scary horror way - I have some strong views on the true crime genre and the fannish community around it, but we are not going to get into that here, because life is short and outrage is cheap and I should be in bed right now instead of blogging about horror movies in the first place).

Anyway, yeah, really enjoyed this! Don't have much to say about it, but really enjoyed it.

Help, I started watching these notorious, near universally panned exploitation films because I was in a bad mood and wanted something to be angry about, except I accidentally ended up thinking they were KIND OF FUCKING GREAT, ACTUALLY, and now I am forced to declare myself a card-carrying member of the Dead Rapists Cinematic Universe fanclub. I swear with hand on heart that I'm not trying to be iconoclastic here. I just. I thought these were good films. I enjoyed them. I can see where the critical consensus is coming from and I don't think it's Wrong, per se, but I also really just completely disagree, which I guess means that I am either a bad feminist or (I'd prefer to think) just vibrating on a different frequency than the mainstream in this case.

Anyway, backing up a bit: I Spit On Your Grave is an extremely controversial rape-revenge horror movie franchise. It's about...well, I guess the genre label is pretty self-explanatory. A rape survivor exacts murderous revenge on her rapists. The original film was released in 1978, and widely banned or censored around the world for its graphic depictions of sexual violence. (A brutal gang rape scene takes up 30 full minutes of runtime.) A remake came out in 2010, followed by a couple of sequels; in 2019, the original director and lead actress returned with a sequel to the 1978 version. So far I have only watched the 2010 remake and its 2015 direct sequel. I plan to watch the 1978 as well but will probably skip the 2019 sequel (which apparently kills my first movie Final Girl blorbo) and am undecided on the 2013 middle movie of the remake trilogy (unrelated plot with all-new characters).

I'm going to put the entire rest of this post under a cut for obvious reasons. But tl;dr, if you can stomach the sexual violence, these movies absolutely have a place in the feminist conversation imo and are very impactful, successful horror in their own right.

( Potentially triggering discussion of potentially triggering films under the cut )

Has anyone else here watched any of these movies? Or want to use my "objectively" bad taste new obsession as a jumping-off point to gush about your own favourite exploitation media? Just tell me I'm not alone here in actually really, really liking something I'm by all accounts supposed to hate.