2025-04-02 12:47:25
Book
The Watchers by AM Shine
Synopsis
Artist Mina is driving through a desolate part of Connemara when her car breaks down, right on the edge of a dense, dark forest. She goes into the woods looking for help. After dark falls, she hears bloodcurdling shrieks from all around, and she finds a stranger urgently rushing her into the only safe place after dark: a plain concrete bunker with a huge glass wall, and a bright light that shines all night to let the unseen creatures of the forest watch the human residents.
Notes
This was another book that was a recommended read in folk horror. I’d say it does qualify as a modern take on folk horror, but I’m wary of saying too much more about it, for fear of ruining whatever it is that makes it work.
And I say “whatever it is” because I’m still not exactly sure how it works. I started the book and was immediately concerned that I was going to have to abandon it, because it was somehow both overwritten and underwritten. It was full of these almost-florid descriptions of things that somehow completely failed to evoke a solid image of anything. It felt as if it were mimicking the action-description-tangential memory rhythm of novels just because that’s what novels are supposed to do. But I thought that’s just the prologue, I’ll see what happens once it gets started.
Then I thought that I was only into chapter 2, but I already disliked the protagonist. The book establishes her as the type of person who takes out a sketchpad in public and stares intently at strangers while she draws them without their permission, and those people are just the worst. And then a few chapters later, I was thinking that the premise seemed kind of implausible, and there had to be a more straightforward way to get a solitary woman alone in a forest. And then I thought that I’m several chapters in, and I still can’t picture the main setting for the bulk of the book from its descriptions, and the only reason I’ve got a mental picture of it at all is from the trailer for the movie adaptation from last year. And then I thought I’m only a quarter of the way through this book, and I can already see the ending coming from a mile away. And then I thought that I was barely halfway through the book, and it seemed way too obvious so there must be something else going on. And then I realized that I’d read three quarters of the book and it was way past my bedtime and I should go to sleep. (And immediately picked it up again and finished it the second I got home).
It’s got this propulsive energy that doesn’t so much make up for my criticisms as it renders them completely irrelevant. I still can’t say I feel any sort of attachment to any of the characters in the slightest, and yet I was desperate to know what happened to them. Does it even make sense for me to complain about clunky passages when I was this compelled to keep reading?
Verdict
One of the damndest experiences I’ve ever had reading a book. My blurb would be “a folk horror suspense thriller in the post-Lost age.” I don’t even know if I’d recommend it, but my experience wasn’t so much reading it as consuming it whole, gristle and all.
2025-04-02 03:36:36
(featured image is from Steve Purcell’s Toybox comic)
When I decided to try going a month without social media (of the infinite-scrolling variety, i.e. Instagram, Mastodon, and Bluesky), I expected that worst case, I’d break down at the halfway point. Best case, I’d end the month like someone who’d been crawling through the desert and had suddenly found a refreshing spring full of life-giving water, and I’d go right back to obsessively spending hours on the apps.
As it turns out, it’s been more like walking leisurely through the desert and happening upon a can of lukewarm LaCroix. I’ve done my best to respond to the comments people have made to my auto-posts over the past month, but I’m not feeling super compelled to resume my old bad habits.
I’m going to try and avoid veering into an evangelist-vegan attitude and tell everybody that they should do it too because I mean to each their own but we all know that my newfound lifestyle of moderate restraint is kind of, you know, better than yours. But for me, at least, it’s been a complete success.
I went back on Instagram, and I don’t miss it. I just feel bad for the dozens of young single women who have spent a month wondering why I haven’t accepted their follow requests.
Over the past month alone, I’ve read more than I did all last year. I’ve finally watched some movies that have been on my to-watch list for years. I get to dinner time without feeling like my brain is too full for anything more substantial than YouTube videos. We finally started watching Severance! (Yes it’s very good and no spoilers please).
One downside to only having this blog as my outlet is that I have been missing the conversations from those auto-posts. Also, microblogging formats are an encouragement to be more concise. It was only after reading a comment about Nosferatu from my friend Rose that I realized I could have condensed paragraphs of what I’d written into the simple observation that “Count Orlok is an incel.”
So my current plan is to keep it up as best I can. Maybe not maintaining the artificial vow of silence, but using social media for conversations instead of time-killers. Avoid installing the apps and just using the web apps. (Except for Instagram unfortunately, since they’ve deliberately hobbled the functionality of the web interface, almost as if they’re a company that has poured tons of money into ensuring app engagement).
And if I’m ever looking for a distraction, open up a book instead of a “quick scroll” through the apps. The new Reeder has been an excellent way to feel less post-apocalyptic, reassured that people are still out there posting away and I’m reading stuff that was written within the past month.
I’d been hoping that a break would help with whatever mental block is keeping me from being able to do any game development after hours, but not yet. At least it’s paved the way, and I can dive back in as long as I keep up the social media abstinence.
2025-04-01 06:44:37
There is exactly one moment in Phantom of the Paradise that works for me, without any kind of reservation or qualification. It’s the press conference where our villain Swan introduces the world to his new performer. “Ladies and gentlemen, I bring you the future: Beef.” The camera pans over to a coffin, which is opened to reveal a curly-haired glam rocker in makeup, who looks to the camera and snarls.
Paul Williams plays it completely straight-faced — as does the movie itself — and even though the previous scene went through a line-up of possible replacements for the nostalgia band that the new act was replacing, the revelation of Beef still came as a surprise to me. It’s a weird, genuinely funny moment that still works over 50 years later.
My enchantment with Beef didn’t last long, since the very next scene shows him to be a stereotype of a queer man that honestly feels too lazy to be offensive. I was going to include a YouTube clip I’d found of Beef’s introduction, but I hadn’t noticed that the description of the video itself has the f-slur. Is it just homophobic, or is it a queer fan of the movie “taking it back?” I don’t care!
I did find an interview with Gerrit Graham talking about the process of coming up with the character, where “process” meant Brian De Palma trying to find euphemisms for what he wanted without actually saying “gay”1, and Graham doing the first thing he could think of, and then sticking with that for his entire performance.2
It felt gratifying to hear that from someone who was involved in the production — instead of someone writing about the movie long after it’d achieved whatever “cult classic” status it has now — because it fit in with the overall impression I had of the movie: ultimately, it doesn’t really warrant all the re-interpretation and analysis it’s gotten over the years, because it’s just hell of corny. It feels like a comedy made by people who don’t have a very sophisticated sense of humor, that happens to include queer characters without actually knowing any queer people.
Beef’s big musical number seemed to me to be what you get if a bunch of extremely straight people tried to make The Rocky Horror Picture Show.3 I’d initially thought it was derivative, but Paradise came out a year before Rocky Horror, but a year after the stage production that became the movie. So instead of going too far down that rabbit hole to figure out the specifics, I’m content to just conclude that they were two projects drawing from a lot of the same inspirations, made with very different mindsets.
The most obvious is that the musical in Paradise is on a set inspired by German expressionist movies, while Rocky Horror pointedly bases itself on more modern B-movies. Brian De Palma was a movie fan making movies filled with references to his favorite styles and directors, making a goofy slapstick comedy musical version of Faust. The glam rock elements were included not because of any higher-minded agenda, but simply because that was the flavor of the moment in 1974, just like Sha Na Na-style nostalgia bands had been previously.
Really, the whole idea of my trying to categorize everything into groups of Gross And Offensive, Fun But Dated Camp, or Genuinely Funny Absurdism is itself a post-Twitter phenomenon. That’s when I started trying to analyze whether I was enjoying stuff at the expense of other people, which most often takes the form of being offended on other people’s behalf.
This is the Sleepaway Camp phenomenon: I feel like there’s a really gross transphobic undertone to that whole movie, even though there are trans people (and plenty of allies) who can acknowledge its problems and still enjoy it. I’d probably have a much better time with camp and exploitation movies if I could resist the impulse to make sure I’ve unpacked everything before I enjoy it. (Even with “permission” to like Sleepaway Camp, though, I still think it’s too gross and amateurish to be fun).
I should acknowledge the sweet transvestite elephant in the room and admit that I’ve got a huge pop-cultural blind spot when it comes to Rocky Horror, since I’ve never actually seen the movie. I’d bet that I’ve seen every scene of it by now, out of order. And I know enough about it to make references and get the overall gist of it. But every time I’ve tried to actually watch it, I bounce off within minutes. I’m just frustratingly unable to connect with any of it (besides “Time Warp”), and have to settle with the fact that, like The Goonies, it’s simply lost to time because I waited too long to watch it.
And there’s probably a past version of myself that would’ve eaten up Phantom of the Paradise as so-bad-it’s-good camp. I know that past version of me would be in good company, because there seems to be a sizable Beef fan club out there, with T-shirts and posters and cosplay and such. But now, even when I try to put everything in the right context and acknowledge that this was just after the age of Laugh-In, and people had a different sense of humor back then, I can’t get past how corny it all is. It doesn’t have the spark of self-aware creativity that makes glam rock itself interesting; it feels more like when The Flintstones would do a gag about surf rock or Bug Music.
Weirdly, though, watching and overthinking Phantom of the Paradise has given be a better appreciation for Brian De Palma’s movies. I still love The Untouchables4 and like Carrie an awful lot, but I started getting into movies right around the time the general impression of De Palma As Auteur started shifting into the negative. (I was around three years old when Paradise came out).
I was only in film school for a year, but I’ve spent decades trying to excise all the remaining aspects of Arrogant Film Student out of my personality. I had a really snobbish disdain for De Palma as overly-referential schlock5 whose best ideas were all stolen from Hitchcock movies. What I’d completely missed is the style and sensibility that De Palma was either inventing or keeping alive throughout the 1970s, while the rest of Hollywood, left unattended, might’ve descended into an irreparable bifurcation between maudlin and artless commercial films vs self-consciously naturalistic and realistic art movies.
But everything that makes the non-Beef scenes work is a result of Paul Williams and Brian De Palma.
Williams not even as much for the music as for the fact that he seemed to understand the tone of the movie better than anyone else involved, including De Palma himself. It’s probably hard for non-70s children to understand how ubiquitous Paul Williams was on TV and just in general back then — countless talk show appearances, variety shows, and appearances on The Love Boat. Seeing him taking an over-the-top villain here and deciding to underplay it with dead-earnest restraint, I can finally see the connection between the guy who wrote “Rainbow Connection” and the guy who said “Hell yeah, I’ll be an orangutan.”
And this is the first Brian De Palma movie I’ve seen where his love of movies really came through as a love of movies, instead of a bunch of references. In the early 1970s, he loved split screens — they were kind of his thing, although I don’t know if he kept it up throughout the rest of his career — and knew how to use them. The split screen moments in Carrie aren’t just affectations, but really sell the idea of a chaotic event seen simultaneously from multiple perspectives, much better than quick edits could have. It’s a style that I sincerely wish would come back more often, as more than just shorthand for “this is supposed to look like the 60s and 70s.”
That kind of thing is all over Phantom of the Paradise — a Rolling Stone cover that spins into view against a black background, an ominous control desk shaped like a giant gold record, a sinister record company office with a halftone logo of a dead bird, a phantom on the rooftop of a gothic New York City building in the middle of a lightning storm. It all feels like he’s just having fun exploring all the things that movies can do. Even when the slapstick doesn’t work for me, I can still appreciate the attempt to squeeze a classic style into what was otherwise a contemporary movie.
In case it’s not clear by now, my take on Phantom of the Paradise is still waffling between “I don’t like it,” “I don’t get it,” and “I would’ve liked this when I was younger.” (At the moment, “I don’t like it” is winning). Even if I don’t love it as the cult classic that I might have 20 or even 10 years ago, the most valuable thing to me now is the reminder to resist the urge to unpack, categorize, and encapsulate everything.
Not to be undiscriminating, but to be less eager to demonstrate that I’ve achieved some level of cultural literacy, by putting a rubber stamp of worthy/unworthy on it. After all, even calling something “so bad it’s good” isn’t nearly as open-minded as it would seem to suggest. It implies that you still need people to know that you can understand and appreciate that it’s bad, instead of not caring what anything else thinks, and just connecting with (or not connecting with) things in the spirit in which they’re given.
2025-03-31 09:17:28
The two most genuinely good and surprising aspects of Death of a Unicorn are the performances of Will Poulter and Téa Leoni as two members of the awful rich family at the center of the plot. They took characters designed to be cartoonishly broad satire and somehow found a hook to make them more interesting.
Poulter does it by taking the familiar rich, arrogant, young dimwit and committing completely to his near-total lack of self-awareness. There’s something vaguely human at the heart of the cartoon, as he makes the character truly awful but somehow understandable: this is the natural result of someone who’s never for a moment in his life wanted for anything. Plus the hilarious detail that he’s perpetually dressed in short shorts.
But I think Leoni is the star of the movie, playing the matriarch/implied trophy wife of the family as a woman who’s spent so long spinning her self-serving nature into a kind of performative compassion that she never turns it off. Her face is perpetually twisted in an expression of heartfelt concern, her voice laden with sympathy as she makes it clear that she only wants what’s best for everybody.
It’s especially neat after seeing Mickey 17‘s much more blunt take on cartoonishly awful rich people. The characters in Death of a Unicorn are clearly horrible, but at the same time personable and even friendly. There’s always a sense that their selfishness and outright evil are enabled by generating enough plausible deniability. And not just for themselves, but for the people who work for them, who can tell themselves that they’re not really that bad, as far as bosses go.
But their performances are really the only inspired aspects of Death of a Unicorn, and nothing else in the movie stands out as original or even remarkable. I definitely wouldn’t call it a bad movie, since it works okay as a violent action comedy, and there are a few genuinely funny moments. It seems like all the elements are there for a can’t-fail, effects-driven black comedy.
You’ve got Paul Rudd, Jenna Ortega, and Richard E Grant as leads, all delivering exactly on the kinds of things you expect them to bring to a movie.1 Even the casting of secondary characters is spot on to the point of feeling like overkill: Sunita Mani is always great, Jessica Hynes is recognizably likable even when playing completely against type, and I was initially excited to see Steve Park, who I know mostly from his unforgettable scene in Fargo. But of everyone, only Anthony Carrigan seems to have enough to work with to turn into an actual character.
So I was more left with the sense that I’m impressed the movie exists at all. You just don’t see this much money and talent being devoted to a comedy these days, especially not one that is violent and gory enough to limit its potential audience.2 I was actually reminded of Death Becomes Her, and there’s even a similar shot to the well-known one in that movie, where a character is framed looking through the gaping hole left in another character’s body.
Before anybody objects to the comparison: this isn’t nearly as good as Death Becomes Her, because it’s not anywhere near as clever, original, and inventive. Also, Death of a Unicorn doesn’t have nearly the budget, even before being adjusted for inflation, so the effects feel more like an independent film than a showcase for ILM. But it feels like the kind of project that was more common in the 1980s and early 1990s: a one-off comedy project that wasn’t fully horror (like say The Substance), or sci-fi (like Mickey 17), or action comedy (like The Author of This Blog Post Is Drawing a Blank At the Moment), but a mix of multiple genres.
It might be damning with faint praise to say that the best thing about Death of a Unicorn is that it reminded me of better movies, but I think it’s more a case of its reach exceeding its grasp. Maybe the fact that the movie doesn’t feel shockingly inventive and original is a sign that we’ve become spoiled for choice in genre fiction, and that the problem isn’t that the concepts are too weird, but not weird enough.
2025-03-31 04:01:23
Book
Wylding Hall by Elizabeth Hand
Synopsis
The surviving members of an early 1970s folk rock band speak to documentary filmmakers about the making of their second album, Wylding Hall. In varying accounts, they talk about the summer spent inside the centuries-old manor house, the unsettling things they encountered inside, their former lead singer’s obsession with the ancient woods around the grounds, and the unexplained appearance of a strange girl in the album’s cover photo.
Notes
This was part of a video of folk horror recommendations on the “Sinead Hanna Craic” channel on YouTube, and I was immediately sold on the concept alone. What if all the imagery surrounding albums like Houses of the Holy and Led Zeppelin IV (both of which are referenced briefly in Wylding Hall) wasn’t just inspired by the growing interest in folk and traditional music at the time, but by ancient spirits who’ve lived around forests and burial mounds for millennia, the original inspirations for those traditional poems and ballads?
The mood of Wylding Hall is set with an evocative cover and the clever inclusion of a Dramatis Personae page. The bulk is presented as if it were almost a transcript of interviews from a documentary, cutting between the various characters as they give their own accounts as the overall narrative drives forward through the summer months they spent making the album.
My hyper-critical side had a tiny bit of difficulty getting into the book, since the artificiality of the format seemed a little too evident, and the different characters’ unique voices didn’t feel sufficiently defined. But this melts away very quickly, and within 50 or so pages, it became a case of can’t-put-it-down, must-finish-before-I-sleep. And the decision ultimately works well and feels natural, since we’ve now been conditioned to think of musicians talking about past events in the Behind the Music format.
I haven’t read much (any?) folk horror before, so I didn’t know what to expect. The vibe here is definitely more unsettling than outright horrifying, since it starts its foreshadowing from the first page and repeats it with casual references afterwards, preparing you for something that’s not startling, but inevitable. Once it gets going, it does an excellent job of maintaining the mood.
Verdict
A great concept and a really enjoyable read. The sense of inexplicable creepiness and unknowable forces at work lingers after you’ve set the book down, and you’re primed to be on the lookout for things that simply shouldn’t be there.
2025-03-29 05:18:06
Kim Deal is currently on tour promoting her solo album Nobody Loves You More (or is the album promoting the tour? I don’t know how the music industry works anymore), and last night we saw the show here in Los Angeles.
I don’t know if spoiler etiquette applies to concerts, but the show had Kim and her touring lineup — including trumpet, trombone, violin, and cello players — play the entirety of the new album, and then two encores with selected songs from the history of the Breeders and her solo singles.
Morgan Nagler is the opening act for the LA-area shows, and I enjoyed her set a good bit. She came back on stage to sing on the tracks she’d co-written with Deal, and I was especially happy that they did my favorite, “The Root.”
It was interesting, because I’d been wondering what distinguishes a Kim Deal solo album from a Breeders album, and the show highlighted the difference. It felt more like the results of Deal collaborating with a bunch of different people over a long career, instead of a specific lineup. Kelley Deal was there singing backup, but she kept to the back mostly, because this was Kim’s project. The exception was when Kim left the stage to do “Bats in the Afternoon Sky,” an instrumental track that was performed by Kelley and another singer, a keyboardist, and (if I remember correctly?) a guitarist. It was difficult to make out what was said in the introduction, but I think they mentioned that the musicians were from the Kelley Deal 6000.
In any case, it was a really great show. I was skeptical how the tracks from the new album would do live, since to me they feel more produced than any of Kim Deal’s music I was familiar with, but the end result was flawless. Highlights for me were “Crystal Breath,” “Big Ben Beat,” “Safari,” “Coast,” and “Off You.”
Something I realized during the Soul Coughing concert last year was that it’s actually a good thing that my music tastes mostly calcified sometime in the late 1990s. It means I’m not only aging along with the band, but with the band’s audience. It’s always nice to see creaky graybeards both on stage and in the crowd, to see equal representation of My People. (Even if it is a reminder that no matter how much I like to think of myself as unique, I’m very much a Type of Guy).
That was in effect for the Kim Deal show, but I guess her audience is more cross-generational, since there were a lot of youths there. And by youths, I mean Los Angelenos probably in their early- to mid-30s, likely going through their own premature life crises. As they violated my clearly-defined personal space boundary, pushing in front of us to stand directly blocking view of the stage and with their backs and asses within inches of rubbing against me, I felt myself going into White Middle-Aged Man Hulk mode. (“You wouldn’t like me when I’m cranky.”) Plus I was getting really hot and my back hurt, so I was happy when the midwesterners-in-their-early-60s on stage decided to end the show after around two hours.