GUTTER STUDIES

Starting some time in the last decade or so, we’ve all run into the dreaded phrase “elevated horror.” Sometimes it meant A24. Sometimes it meant horror movies too-obvious in their treatment of grief, trauma, race, motherhood, or family dysfunction. Sometimes it just meant horror movies that critics decided to gush about after looking down on horror for …

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For fifty years, The Rocky Horror Picture Show has endured as a midnight ritual. The first thing any fan or critic wants to talk about is the cult following and audience participation elements: the costumes, callbacks, inside jokes, the flying props. And that’s all good fun. But the carnivalesque cult following around the film often impedes the more interesting critical questions we can ask. After all, what is the text of Rocky Horror actually about? And how does that relate to its cult elements or the cultural situation we live in today?

My new video essay argues that underneath the fishnets and the floor show, Rocky Horror is a timeless story about sexual politics; specifically, about the cycle of radicalism and reaction that drives so much cultural history.

Rocky Horror is about liberation. But it’s also about the price of that “absolute pleasure: the backlash, the violence, the collapse. It’s like a microcosm of the sociopolitical pattern we keep living through, even as we navigate the present transition from the high woke era to the so-called vibe shift.

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We’ve arrived at the final chapter of Sweet Sweet Suffering !

I’ve long had a soft spot for Hellraiser: Bloodline. It features my favorite cenobite, Angelique, and has always struck me as the franchise at its most narratively ambitious.

To this day, Hellraiser: Bloodline has a reputation problem. Pinhead in space, a troubled production, a director who took his name off the film. Critics and fans wrote it off at the time, and it’s been unfairly dismissed ever since. But viewed carefully — and through the lens of Lacanian psychoanalysis we’ve been using — Bloodline is hugely interesting, in my view, actually completes what the first two films started.

Because once you understand the paradox of desire, and once you’ve descended into the system that produces it, a final question naturally follows.

If desire can never truly be satisfied, and if the Real underneath it would annihilate us, how do we live with desire at all?

The answer, according to Lacan, is fantasy.

Not fantasy in the casual sense, but fantasy as a psychological structure: the fragile screen that gives desire a shape, shields us from the traumatic Real behind it, and allows us to keep going, to keep wanting, to keep living.

In Bloodline, this idea takes the form of a type of cenobite we haven’t seen before: Angelique.

This video concludes the philosophical arc that runs across three Hellraiser films. I’ve been a lifelong fan of these films, and even before I started Gutter Studies I always wanted to sit down and figure out what the series meant to me. These three videos are it. I hope these essays have contributed to your own enjoyment and understanding of these movies, some of the most distinctive and fascinating in all of horror history.

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If you caught part one of Sweet Sweet Suffering, you know that Hellraiser is about the paradox of desire. Frank Cotton doesn’t just want pleasure — after finding the ultimate experience, he wants to want again.

Hellbound: Hellraiser II expands the world of the first film in a way that’s easy to miss if you’re watching it as a typical horror sequel. Of course, it dials up the content of the original to even more outrageous, absurd levels. But viewed through the right lens, it’s doing something much more ambitious — it’s attempting to visualize the system that produced Frank’s conundrum in the first place.

Thus, where the first film asked what happens when desire reaches its annihilating endpoint, Hellbound asks the even bigger question: where does desire actually come from? Why do we feel it?

To answer that, we descend into the labyrinth of Leviathan. It’s a place easily mistaken for Hell, but it’s something quite different. We again encounter Julia, who returns from the Cenobites’ realm transformed — no longer an object of someone else’s desire, but a desiring subject in her own right. And we follow Dr. Channard, a man who believes he can study and master the system, who discovers too late what folly that is.

The key concept this time is Lacan’s notion of the Real — the dimension of experience that resists language, meaning, and understanding. The labyrinth of Hellbound, I’ll argue, is one of horror cinema’s most interesting and entertaining attempts to give that ineffable concept, and its impact on the human condition, a visual representation.

Part three, concluding with a reading of Bloodline, drops in two weeks.

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Welcome to Sweet Sweet Suffering: A Three-Part Video Essay on Hellraiser!

In part one, I argue Hellraiser is not about demons. It's about desire, and best understood as mapping to a specific theory of desire from Jacques Lacan, one of the twentieth century’s most provocative and influential thinkers.

Over three video essays, I'll go deep into the Hellraiser franchise — not just as horror films, but as a surprisingly coherent philosophical argument about what it means to be a human being.

Each part focuses on a different entry (parts 1, 2, and 4). (I skip Hell on Earth because I don’t have anything interesting to say about that one.) In my reading, Hellraiser, Hellbound, and Bloodline each elaborates its own Lacanian concept.

Hellraiser is about desire.Hellbound is about the Real.Bloodline is about the role of fantasy.

The first talks about desire as a certain paradox: what happens when you actually get what you want? The second descends into the psychological system that produces desire. The third reveals the fragile illusion that allows us to live with desire at all. The framework is Lacanian psychoanalysis — one of the twentieth century's most challenging and rewarding bodies of thought. But no prior knowledge required. If you love Hellraiser and want to go deeper, this is for you. And if you've always been curious about Lacan but didn't know where to start, it turns out Hellraiser is a fantastic entry point. 🧠

Takes this as an opportunity to revisit one of the most interesting horror films of all time.

Part two, covering Hellbound, drops in two weeks.

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This one took a while.

This is part Three of my continuing series on Carol Clover’s Men, Women, and Chainsaws. And while it follows naturally from the first two installments, it stands completely on its own — you don’t need to have watched the first two videos to watch and understand this one.

The subject is rape-revenge cinema. It’s a controversial and challenging genre, to say the least—dismissed as garbage, celebrated as radical feminism, and analyzed as some of the most ideologically complex filmmaking in American cinema history. As we’ll see, it’s all three at once.

To get here, I watched and revisited around twenty films. The full canon, more or less, plus the films that shaped and surrounded it.

What looks like vile garbage on the surface turns out to be a revenge myth in the most political sense — a story that American culture tells itself to process guilt, justify winners, and make peace with losers. And its roots run from frontier westerns all the way through to #MeToo.

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This is one of the last videos I’ve had in the vault from my Youtube days. It started as a silly idea for a kind of audacious clickbait project. I didn’t realize how wildly time-consuming it’d end up being. And it was kind of a maddening project too. Many times along the way, I felt uncomfortably deranged for even attempting such an obscene exercise. But it ended up being good practice for me as a video editor, since it involved wrangling and sequencing a huge number of clips in specific order.

I can’t say I’m necessarily proud of making this. But I did make it, so here it is for your sick enjoyment.

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In this audio-only episode, I’m joined again by Cynthia to count down the best horror movies of 2025. The conversation is 100% spoiler free—and I think also free of pretentious jargon!

WDYT - was 2024 or 2025 a better year for horror? Many are asking.

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This is part two of my investigation into Japanese nunsploitation. Building on the foundation built in part one—which featured a brief history of pink film and a close reading of School of the Holy Beast, the foundational Japanese nunsploitation film—this video explores six additional pink nunsploitation films. The video also provides additional discussion on the role of censorship in generating pink film aesthetics, and in the end sums the project up with a comprehensive conclusion.

In many ways, I see it as a certain culmination of all my work on nunsploitation over the past few years. Six months ago I somewhat reluctantly undertook this project because I knew my study would always be incomplete without addressing the Japanese school. To my own surprise, in the end I landed on an interpretation applicable not only to Japanese nunsploitation, but the wider nunsploitation genre too, and one that aligns precisely with my big-picture theory of exploitation film.

Timestamps

0:00 - introduction

0: 48 - the role of censorship in pink film history and aesthetics; Day-Dream (1964); Black Snow (1965)

5:37 - Cloistered Nun: Runa’s Confession (1976)

9:21 - “ama” versus “shudojo”; Nuns that Bite (1977); Virgin Witness (1966)

14:10 - Sins of Sister Lucia (1978)

15:25 - Nun’s Diary: Confession (1979)

19:00 - Nun’s Story: Frustration in Black (1980)

21:11 - Nun in Rope Hell (1984)

23:45 - conclusion: understanding the specifically Japanese meaning of nunsploitation

In all likelihood this will be my final video on nunsploitation. Across five videos and a total runtime of almost two hours, I feel I’ve said what I have to say. I hope this one is a fitting conclusion!

If you’ve enjoyed my work on nunsploitation, please consider signing up with your email, making a donation, and telling others about the project.

GUTTER STUDIES is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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This is part two of a video series analyzing Carol J. Clover’s Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. You can catch up on part one here, or you can jump right into this one.

Part one focused on Clover’s classic reading of the slasher film and her coining of the term Final Girl. Part two explores so-called “occult horror,” which includes ghosts, demonic possession, black magic, and the like. Clover’s take on occult horror is a useful complement to her analysis of slasher films, exploring the way male-driven arcs reflect the same underlying tendency we see in the female-driven spectacle of slasher films.

These two currents defined horror movies in the 1970s and 80s, and Clover argues that both draw on the same underlying anxiety: an unconscious fear the two sexes are one.

0:00 - introduction

1:45 - Don’t Look Now (dir. Nicolas Roeg 1973)

2:32 - white science and black magic

3:27 - the too-open female vs. the too-closed male

4:40 - sex in slasher films vs. reproduction in occult horror films

5:54 - The Exorcist (dir. William Friedkin 1973)

7:20 - Witchboard (dir. Kevin Tenney 1986)

9:44 - Possession (dir. Andrzej Żuławski 1981)

10:40 - summary and critique of Carol Clover’s analysis

14:08 - conclusion - slashers compared

I started this project a while back now, and do plan on finishing it out with two more installments. For a change of pace, the next installment will focus on Clover’s chapter on rape revenge films. You can expect a content warning!

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