I enjoy a lot of different kinds of horror movies, from lurid giallos to surreal experiments, but nothing — no monster, no killer, no dilapidated mansion or unwanted bodily transformation — will ever scare me as much as the idea of doubting one's perception of reality. It's the core theme of my most vivid nightmares. The reason I watched mother! (and loved it) despite all the bad things I'd heard about it was because I'd had dreams about people I…
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Antibirth 2016
The lost souls of the exurban strip-mall wasteland drink a beer called Route 666 and use garbage fires to illuminate their punk-rock abandoned-warehouse dance parties. They survive by cleaning motel rooms, or selling drugs, or donning nightmarish mascot costumes at a local Chuck E. Cheese knockoff. The TV shows they watch are a psychedelic mélange of cult programming, vintage foreign cartoons and alien-abduction documentaries. Nothing makes any sense; might as well be blitzed out of your gourd all the time…
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Hideous 2022
2023 Queer Film Challenge #22: a film about AIDS.
Beautiful, strange, abstract pastiche. Maybe closer to an extended music video than a short film, and I don't mean that as a criticism — especially since the music is so gorgeous, like a late 70s Bowie updated for an era that knows Anohni and James Blake. Oliver Sim's character, identified only as "the Artist" in the credits, is split apart by both the media landscape and his tormented psyche. He's a…
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By Hook or by Crook 2001
2021 Queer Film Challenge #17: a film by Silas Howard.
This is Americana. Not the mom and apple pie kind, not the eagles and guns kind, but an anarchist Americana of outsiders, like a queer John Dos Passos for the 21st century, or Gregg Araki on a budget of Ziploc bags full of quarters. I'm talking punk rock and minimalist country blues, neon signs and surveillance cameras, petty theft and gay bars. Here in the US a car represents freedom,…
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Laerte-se 2017
2021 Queer Film Challenge #5: a documentary about a queer visual artist.
In her eye-opening book Whipping Girl, Julia Serano discusses how cis filmmakers implicitly frame trans women's femininity as "fake" by focusing on images of us putting our looks together — getting dressed, applying makeup, etc. Laerte-se does just that with its trans subject, coming back again and again to images of her shaving her legs, painting on her eyebrows, and trying on various outfits. The cis interviewer, Eliane…
