The Mumpsimus

Through a discussion of something else on a friend's Facebook page, I learned of a tv series I ought to have known about before: The Hunger , which played on Showtime in the US, the Sci Fi Channel in the UK, and The Movie Network in Canada from 1997 to 2000. It was a co-production between Ridley and Tony Scott's company Scott Free and others, and Tony Scott directed the first episodes of the two seasons. It's an anthology show, so has a "host" — in the first season Terrence Stamp, in the second David Bowie. The show can currently be seen on Freevee , Amazon's ad-supported channel. There are many reasons I should have known about this show, but I did not have a tv from 1994 to 2008, so most shows from those years are ones I am unfamiliar with if I did not catch up on them later or have friends who insisted I come over and watch them at the time (and that was basically just Babylon 5 and Battlestar Galactica ; understandably, friends obsessed with one became ob...

Because Goran Stolevsky's astonishing debut feature, You Won't Be Alone , is about a kind of witch, and because there's plenty of blood and guts in the film, it is being marketed as a horror movie — but the expectations that the label horror places on the film do it some injustice. This is more like Terrence Malick's The Witch . The Malick homage is overt in the You Won't Be Alone's reliance on a super-hot-miked voiceover (beautifully recorded, creating a sense of the voice coming from within ourselves while also sounding somehow alien), in its seemingly random shots of nature, and even in its soundtrack, which includes Berlioz's Requiem (as did Malick in Tree of Life ) and a couple of pieces by one of the composers Malick uses most frequently, Arvo Pärt. Malick is not the only homage, though. There is a shot that basically recreates a famous one from Carl Theodor Dreyer's great witchhunt film Day of Wrath . I think it is to Stolevsky's credit tha...

  "If Dahmer sought to get to Hollywood by writing and starring in his own movie, given the fictionalized treament of his actions, he more or less succeeded." —Richard Tithecott, Of Men and Monsters , 1997 "America's serial killer moment has been mined for ore, turned into relentless media, analyzed, obsessed over, given birth to countless podcasts, the sound of droning voices with blood in their throats." —Jarett Kobek, Motor Spirit , 2022 1. When the 10-episode series Dahmer—Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story arrived to Netflix in late September, it quickly became one of the streaming site's most popular offerings. By the end of the second week, it had become, according to Variety , Netflix's "ninth most popular English-language TV show of all time" with "at least 56 million households [having] consumed all 10 episodes (approximately 8.8 hours total) of the limited series thus far." As I write this now, a month after the show's ...

  In the introduction to It Came from the Closet , editor Joe Vallese describes the book as “a collection of eclectic memoirs that use horror as the lens through which the writers consider and reflect upon queer identity, and vice versa.” This is accurate, but not quite specific enough. It Came from the Closet is a collection of twenty-five short personal essays in which queer people remember horror movies that, in many cases, they saw when they were children or young adults—formative years for everyone, but differently formative for people whose sense of self and whose budding desires conflict with those most valorized by society and popular culture. The writers are diverse in identities and backgrounds, and the films that serve as touchstones or anchors for the essays are also varied (within the scope of being horror movies): from Godzilla and Jaws to Get Out and Hereditary to lesser-known movies such as the Cuban psychological thriller ¿Eres tu, papa? ( Is That You? ) and ...

  A certain tendency in recent horror cinema: atmosphere is everything. The tendency shows itself in well-known works of art-horror such as The Witch and Hereditary , and it rears its head also in lesser-known films that live closer to the familiar traditions of horror stories ( The Dark and the Wicked and The Blackcoat's Daughter come immediately to mind). These are films of morbid and sometimes grotesque surrealism, films where story dissolves into association and characters are less people than figures in a landscape of mood. The mood is eeriness, unsettlement, and — more than anything else — ambiguity. Or is it ambivalence?  I am indifferent to these movies, which seem shallow and empty to me, and that sense of shallowness and emptiness is accompanied by a suspicion that the filmmakers are more interested in mood as a free-floating signifier than they are interested in the causes and effects of grief, trauma, pain. I am wary of this supicion, though, because it comes c...