'God's not supposed to be a hack horror writer'

We compare John Carpenter's metafictional Lovecraft homage In the Mouth of Madness with Richard Stanley's more recent The Color Out of Space. Why does Carpenter's film succeed where Stanley's fails in creating a truly Lovecraftian sense of horror, despite the latter's textual faithfulness? What makes Lovecraft the quintessential author of the 'weird'? And what are the political ramifications of a retreat into fiction, especially in our digital age? 

'I find the trout to be a very Nietzschean fish'

As brilliant as it is bizarre, Bryan Fuller's 'Hannibal' (2013-15) is a psychiatrist's dream, chock-a-block with displacements: psychological, sexual, social, tonal, structural and bodily. How does Hannibal use cannibalisation to evoke the anxiety of de-individualisation in the similitude of corporate America? How has it borrowed from its precursors, Manhunter (1986) and Silence of the Lambs (1991), to flirt with censorship and create subplots into which the queer subtext of the main plot is camply displaced? And what happens when a police procedural takes off its person suit, and becomes something else entirely?

'Is this the cocksucker residence?'

From the shockingly funny filth of cult classic Pink Flamingos (1972), to the dizzy heights of Hairspray (1988), and paying homage to Cry-Baby (1990) and Serial Mom (1994) along the way, we delve into the dizzyingly camp Baltimore of John Waters. What does the director proud that his 'work has no socially redeeming value' have to say to us about race, class and gender, with tongue firmly in cheek? And what does Hairspray (2007) get wrong?

'The world used to be a bigger place.' / 'World's still the same. There's just less in it.'

This episode, we plot our coordinates and set our course for the rosy mists of childhood, taking on the original 'Pirates of the Caribbean' trilogy. Captain Jack Sparrow is constantly dancing before the inevitability of fate, outliving the ephemeral freedoms of the doomed pirate era, as the centre of empire clamps down on the opportunistic flourishings of the periphery. We might find an appealing analogue in this late flourishing of commercial cinema, soon to be extinguished by remakes and marvel movies. Join us to discuss piracy as a vanishing mediator of modern capitalism, the culture war 'at world's end', and how things might be less 'business' than 'personal' after all...

Disneyland? Fuck, man, this is better than Disneyland!

If the period of modernist fragmentation, late-60s political dissolution and present-day, post-end-of-history ennui have one thing in common, it's the anxiety that the end has already come. We trace Conrad and Coppola's respective journeys to 'hearts of darkness', which are revealed as the empty hearts of colonial expansion. We explore 60s counter-culture as a zombie version of itself, in an endless war which has detached representation from its political relevance. And finally, we find analogues for the posthumous culture of endless war in our present: from a regurgitated culture unmatched to the progression of history, to the structure of endless naval-gazing perpetrated by certain online activists...

'I miss the cameras. They used to be heavier than us. Then they became smaller than our heads. Now you can't see them at all.'

We discuss one of our favourites of 2020: Brandon Cronenberg's sci-fi horror film Possessor, in comparison with Leos Carax's rightly-lauded Holy Motors . As they unfold, both films reveal themselves to be concerned with the blurring of selfhood and performance. We ask how these films relate to our corporatized world of global mass surveillance and how much agency we have within this scheme, when our bodies seem to be fated by unseen corporate entities. And ultimately, we must ask: who is this performance for?

Whatever happened to films like Gremlins 2? If the 1990s was a high-point of Western cultural hedonism, apathy and affluence, then it was also the perfect breeding-ground for camp fun for all the family, before such commercial film-making tipped over into the homogenised hits of the 2000s Marvel movie. In fact, in an era in which the Left had been so thoroughly quashed as to no longer be threatening in Hollywood, the very silliness of these rude romps permits them both sparkling moments of innovation, and anti-capitalist satire.

We dissect the recent filmography of filmmaker Josephine Decker, from pastoral genre bender Thou Wast Mild And Lovely to her recent fictionalised  'biopic', Shirley.  Looking at the intricate power relationships and underlying eroticism, we wonder how the films respectively treat the conception of a muse, how far identities become performance, and how far the women in these films are directing their own lives, and if so, who for?

From Greek tragedy’s murderous enchantress Medea to the femme fatales of film noir, the west has a long-running cultural preoccupation with witchy women who kill. Nowhere more so than in giallo, the hyper-violent genre of stylised thrillers that emerged in Italy from the 1960s onwards, famously exemplified by Dario Argento’s cult classic witch-fest Suspiria (1977). But by examining Argento’s earliest film, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), alongside a contemporary feminist pastiche of giallo, Anna Biller’s The Love Witch (2016), we unearth a surprising gender politics, in which giallo’s centres of agency and objectification are not all they appear…

The second season of The Boys (2020) has been making waves in the past few weeks with its wittily brash cocktail of satire, violence and pacey plotting. But to what extent can truly subversive anti-corporate messaging spring from a corporation like Amazon? Can we see through Amazon’s generically pleasing house style to a genuinely consciousness-raising original? And is having your cake and eating it necessarily a bad thing?