scumbelievable

Deadlights: Fingernails

There is a wide range of physical sensations from the frustrating to the debilitating with which most of us are familiar. We've all stubbed a toe. We've all had a nosebleed, a hangnail, a cut in an inconvenient place. Given that horror seeks to elicit a physical response from its audience, it makes sense to build on this lang...

Deadlights: Oh, the Humanity!

Perhaps the most elementally upsetting concept in horror film is one human doing terrible things to another. Demons, zombies, vampires, and other creatures of the night prey on the living by nature, but human on human violence is outside the logical structure of the food chain and can force us into contact with a variety of u...

Deadlights: You Could Cut It With a Knife

Where does tension come from? How do movies manufacture it? As with most atmospheric effects the answer stems from no single source. Score, storytelling, acting, editing, blocking, and camera work all play a part in creating a feeling of suspense. David Robert Mitchell's It Follows relies heavily on suspense to imbue...

Valkyrie, Chapter V: Hinterberg

Heike watched the countryside go by outside the window of her compartment while its other occupants — a pair of goblin workmen who’d got on at Talfarde and a snoring human barrister whose spectacles were sli...

Deadlights: In the Flesh

In horror a film's events and images unfold outward from a structuring violation. The death of a loved one. Domestic abuse. The mounting violence and/or wrongness of a horror film is in a way an expansion and exploration of this initial wound. In Rosemary's Baby everything that befalls Rosemary, infernal and mundane,...

Deadlights: Through the Looking Glass

There are deeper truths than understanding a character's motivations, deducing what an object means, or tracking a story's progression from A to B. There are more elemental ways of understanding art and horror. Mulholland Drive, David Lynch's famously elliptical, fragmentary movie about jealousy, self-destructio...

In the Flesh: Ad Astra

Imagine if Terrence Malick had exactly the same level of ambition but no imagination whatsoever and you've got a pretty good idea what to expect from James Gray's Ad Astra, a movie about a grown-up boy learning that sometimes it's important to have exactly one feeling. Brad Pitt stars as Roy McBride, a misanthropic a...

Thanks, I Hate It: The Newsroom

It's rare that one can look at a man and know beyond the faintest shadow of a doubt that he has done material damage to the psychological functioning of an entire nation. Aaron Sorkin is that man. His hit series The West Wing induced a kind of national delusion about the nature of politics while also fostering a biza...

Deadlights: Do You See?

Manhunter is a movie about looking deep into the putrid innards of the worst humanity has to offer and examining that welter of gore and bile not with disgust, but with empathy. It's perhaps the single most important lesson horror has to teach: that to dismiss what repulses us out of hand is to foster its growth in o...

The Downton Aberration

CHAPTER ONE: A SPECIES OF WOOD TICK

"You found him like this?" asked Doctor Clarkson, making a note in his little leather-bound book as he stood beside the sickbed of Mr. Carson in the former butler's bungalow. It was strange; the old man's blood pressure, heartbeat, and respiration were as regimented as the Northumberl...

Deadlights: On Dread

Carnival of Souls theatrical poster, artist unknown

A primary way in which horror differs from other genres in that its characters are typically less able to resist or change the world around them. When a threat appears in a horror narrative it is far more likely to injure, derange, or kill the protagonists of ...

In the Flesh: Downton Abbey

Downton Abbey is, like the show of which it is a continuation, best as a strictly sensual pleasure. The camera work seldom inspires, but the costuming and set dressing are beautiful and without a hint of artifice. The actors are charming and fascinating to look at. The dialogue, if not revolutionary, is quick and wit...

Deadlights: Come On In, The Water's Great

Poster art for Jaws by Roger Kastel

Spielberg's Jaws, as ruthlessly streamlined as its ocean-going antagonist, is the perfect entry point into the world of horror film. It includes a smattering of upsetting but not gratuitous gore, a small handful of jump scares, and enough suspense to hang a bridge --...

Deadlights: Why Am I Scared of That?

Cover art to Alien: The Motion Picture Soundtrack, N.C. Winters

The purpose of horror as a genre is to elicit a physical response of revulsion from its audience. There are many ways (some clearly recognizable, others more elliptical in concept or execution) in which horror film seeks to elicit this response. At...

Don't Be Scared of Me: How Horror Brings Us Back Into Our Bodies

Dear Gretchen,

Horror - particularly body horror - has always had a peculiarly healing effect on me. I have never truly understood why; I simply know that watching the protagonist of Revenge impaled upside down on a tree in the desert, blood globbing down her face to fall and crush ants into the sand, makes me ...

Thanks, I Hate It: Donnie Darko

There are things to like about Donnie Darko. Much of the camera work is solid and patient. The science fiction plot is small and neatly executed, if conceptually thin. Jena Malone is there and punching well above the movie's weight class. The elements of a solid independent thriller are all present, including just-sk...

In the Flesh: Rambo: Last Blood

First Blood, the 1982 action-thriller based on David Morrell's novel of the same name and directed by Ted Kotcheff (Wake in Fright, Weekend at Bernie's), is the definitive post-Vietnam movie. It reckons with deep humanity with the government's abandonment of veterans, with the soul-scarring horrors ...

Thanks, I Hate It: The Office

I hate The Office with a pure frustration usually reserved for pop-up ads and those smug door-to-door evangelists who are just so insufferably certain they've got all the answers. I hate it like I hate having dry skin in the small of my back during the winter, or an itch on the bottom of my foot. Its chirpy,...

Thanks , I Hate It: Kingdom of Heaven

Like his earlier film Gladiator, Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven is a period piece firmly entrenched in the values of the present. The film's characters are sharply divided between more or less mustache-twirling medieval brutes and a few benighted secular humanists struggling to overcome the world's barbari...

Thanks, I Hate It: Split

If you'd told me in 2000 that Unbreakable would have two sequels constituting its own little bizarro-world MCU, I'd have told you to get your head examined. Yet for better or for worse, here we are, Shyamalan's Bruce Willis-starring superhero yarn about an invincible, super-strong security guard and his brittle-boned...

Ghost Stories

Art by @horstmannart for an upcoming zine of short illustrated ghost stories.

In the Flesh: IT Chapter Two

This movie prominently features digitally de-aged fifteen-year-olds, which should give you an idea of how much thought its creators put into the process of adapting and filming Stephen King's gargantuan 1986 horror novel. The child actors look like polished plastic cherubs, their faces stiff and uncanny, their voices sped up ...

Dear Gretchen: Can Art Be Evil?

Dear Gretchen,

Are there any movies you consider morally irredeemable? If so, do you  still think that there’s something to be gained from watching them?

-Christian

__________________________________________________________________________________

Thanks for your question, Christian!

The s...

Thanks, I Hate It Directory

A complete directory of every Thanks, I Hate It for the reader's convenience.

2019

January 6th: Heat
January 7th: R...

Thanks, I Hate It: Godzilla

2014's Godzilla, directed by Gareth Edwards and written by Max Borenstein, is a disaster movie. There's nothing inherently wrong with this. Titanic is a good disaster movie. So's Force Majeure. Where both diverge from Edwards' film is in their understanding that it's human connection and psychology ...

Valkyrie, Chapter IV: Coffins

Vampires, Saskia forced herself to remember as she stood by the mountain road’s drainage ditch, staring at the coffin, could be killed. Stanislav had shown her how to do it. Silver garrots, sunlight or, at night, white p...

Thanks, I Hate It: Goodnight Mommy

Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala's Goodnight Mommy owes a lot to the new French extremity, a school of film making primarily occupied with the boundaries of the human body and their violation. Think the waking c-section from L'interieur, or Climax's endless drug-fueled dance scenes in which stroking...

You Only Come to Girls

He ran through the forest with the other boys close behind him. The boughs were greening. The sun shone through them. He crashed through brakes of fiddleheads curled tight in dreams of summer. Blackberry brambles caught at...

SKIN OF IRON, TEETH OF GLASS

I compiled every D&D snippet I've ever written on twitter over the past three years into a single document! Download it here anytime, and consider it a small thank-you for your generosity toward me.

Dear Gretchen: What's the Point of D&D?

Dear Gretchen,

Given your penchant for generating D&D characters for people, I presume you have some affinity or affection for the game. What are your thoughts on D&D's surging popularity and the prevalence of streamed games/shows?

-Paul

_______________________________________________________________...