Ken Russell’s The Devils was a movie I had never seen the same cut of twice. That it was finally resurrected this year and embraced by an entire new generation of filmgoers is more than heartening. Filmic anarchists only get so many wins and the second life of The Devils is one of them. Despite his unhinged visual palette—opera, Deco, documentary, ecclesiastical—Russell claimed in his autobiography to never have touched a hallucinogen or drug and that his one vice was classical music. Russell was being somewhat disingenuous as he had two very public addictions, both of which led to a wildly inconsistent filmography. First, he grew up in a very alcoholic part of England. It’s called England,1 and his drinking would only increase as his budgets shrank. He was also addicted to filmmaking no matter his economic circumstances, from the moment he started making whimsical documentaries on the lives of composers for the BBC in the early 1960s, to his final film scandals, including driving a screenwriter to an early grave. If you’re looking for another Devils in Russell’s filmography, you won’t find it. But you will find an unerring commitment to the marriage of music to film, a love for subversive sexuality, and a (lapsed) Catholic sense of excess.

The Establishment Years

Women in Love (1969)

By all accounts straight, Russell also allowed a queer and campy part of his soul to thrive in his art. (And fashion. According to The Devils’ production designer Derek Jarman, Russell could look like “The mad empress from some B movie — waving his cane, his long hair flowing, wearing a smock and enormous rings on every finger.”) Along with screenwriter Larry Kramer (later of The Normal Heart fame), Russell filled out D.H. Lawrence’s vivid, but ponderous novel about the sexes with biographical details, like the infamous nude wrestling scene between Oliver Reed and Alan Bates. It all made for a lusty and alive literary adaptation that took Russell to Oscar glory and respectability, if only for a few years.

Mahler (1974)

In a way Russell never stopped making biographies. In Mahler, Russell zooms forwards and backwards through his favorite composer’s life, most notoriously in a fantasy battle where the recently converted Mahler confronts anti-Semite Cosima Wagner, decked out in an early Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren costume that would make Elon Musk tremble with strange desire. Mahler is both complicated and romantic about the impossibility of making art outside of politics and it’s the closest Russell ever came to a perfect marriage of film and music.

The Platform Shoes Years

Tommy and Lisztomania (1975)

With both films starring The Who’s Roger Daltrey, it’s impossible to tell my memories of these two spectacles apart. Mileage may vary depending on your tolerance for exuberance-over-coherence, but it’s interesting to note Russell’s most lasting impact was on live musicals, not on filmmaking. (You just can’t imitate Russell films. Exhibit A: The Apple.)

The Wilderness Years

Altered States (1980)

After Network, screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky was both invincible and in the throes of a messiah complex. What else can explain the writer of Marty taking on dramatically DOA concepts like “the death of god” and “the meaning of consciousness?” Chayefsky threw himself into researching and writing Altered States, giving himself a heart attack by the time the film was green-lit under the dubious idea it was an effects-driven tentpole film. He had the power to fire the director and did so with original helmer Arthur Penn. Also, not a word of the script could be changed. (That works with theater. Far less so with film.) Enter 27th directorial pick Ken Russell. Stuck with a verbose script, Russell had the cast race through the dialogue, drunk or while eating, in order to make space for the film’s trip scenes. (Imagine Kenneth Anger given a Warner Brothers budget and access to ILM.) Chayefsky accused Russell of being a drunk—true—while Russell had Chayefsky banned from set. After the film’s premiere, Chayefsky removed his name from the film and fell ill from stress, eventually dying five months later. The tragedy is that Russell knew what Chayefsky wanted from Altered States more than the screenwriter did.

Crimes of Passion (1984)

Red Light Los Angeles was an odd place for Ken Russell to land but after the debacle of Altered States, he had gone without a picture for four years. Then he was offered Barry Sandler’s script where the writer of Making Love transposed his experiences from pre-AIDS cruising life to the character of China Blue: a fashion designer by day/prostitute by night played by Kathleen Turner. With the exception of a street preacher/stalker played by a popper-huffing Anthony Perkins, Crimes of Passion is essentially plotless, but still fun, as if Vincente Minnelli directed Vice Squad. However, the brazen sexuality of Crimes of Passion went off like a bomb at the peak of Thatcher and Reagan’s stranglehold on culture. Most notoriously in the uncut version where Kathleen Turner earns the nickname “Nightstick” during a date with a submissive cop. Keep in mind that Romancing The Stone, your mom’s favorite movie of 1984, had opened only months before, with the smash hit anointing Turner as America’s sweetheart. This timing, along with the ratings battle and Russell’s on-set drinking, meant Hollywood was done with him.

The Vestron Years

If you were a VHS kid in the 1980s, Vestron was your A24. That cheesy animated “V” and sizzling synth line announced everything from a Clive Barker oddity like Rawhead Rex to Dirty Dancing. And in 1986 Ken Russell signed a three picture deal with them after the surprise video success of Gothic. Russell’s low-budget phantasmagoria has a perfect cast with Gabriel Byrne as Lord Byron and Natasha Richardson as Mary Shelley at Byron’s opium-driven writing retreat, but it doesn’t quite hold up beyond being on in the background.

Then there’s Lair of the White Worm from 1988. According to Hugh Grant, Russell declared the script—based on a forgotten Bram Stoker novel—to be “pure shite” and spent lunch every day with the cast, drinking and improvising scenes and dialogue. What results is a hilarious, pervy tribute to pagan Britain and Russell’s own filmography, given that it’s almost The Devils recast as a chic comedy. (With early performances from Grant, Peter Capaldi, and Amanda Donohoe as a posh vampire.) That the film is so enjoyable makes Lair of the White Worm the cinematic equivalent of a drunk in a midnight choir stumbling in and hitting every note.

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Even after 16 years of living in New York City and seeing it all, we can admit it: 2026 has been a tough one for Canadian-American relations. When looking for a movie that we could riff on, and explore our alienated expat condition, Atom Egoyan’s 1994 breakthrough film Exotica seemed the perfect pick. Set in a tattered and otherworldly Toronto strip club, Egoyan took a narrative leap from his early experimental films to tell the story of a dancer, an emcee, a customer, and the horrific crime that connects them. With an incredible all-Canadian cast of Mia Kirshner, Elias Koteas, Bruce Greenwood, Victor Garber, and a teenage Sarah Polley, Exotica propelled Egoyan to his next film, the Oscar-nominated The Sweet Hereafter. As we dug in, we realized that researching the human condition at a strip club was a very Canadian pursuit. After all, Emily and I came of age in Canada’s sin city, surrounded by the sex industry, and the knowledge of where those loonies and twoonies really get to, eh.

Brian J Davis: Welcome to Canada, the world’s biggest small town with secrets!

Emily Schultz: So we’re going to have to think about what’s popular in Canada in 1994.

BJD: Well, let’s see: murder, Quebec separatism, and Mia Kirshner! At the time, this would have been my last year of high school. My best lesbian friend brought me to see Exotica.

ES: That tracks with you.

BJD: Because she was obsessed with Mia Kirshner! Because of Love and Human Remains.

ES: What’s funny is I saw that movie on a date. But I never saw Exotica until this year.

BJD: And of special note: Exotica was such a hit in Canada that it played in IMAX.

ES: In IMAX?

BJD: Yes! The first time I saw this, I felt the stories were too disconnected. But on subsequent viewings, it’s amazing, because what starts off as inscrutable for the viewer is actually quite rewarding. A lot of other people forget to put their puzzles together. You can see this in the literature as well.

ES: Linked short stories, except actually they’re not linked.

BJD: As an adult, this movie is so fucking good. But we should pause and explain why we’re going to sound like strip club experts. My family is from Windsor, Ontario, and Emily and I both ended up going to school there. It’s a very unique, rust-belt border town tethered to Detroit. Windsor had at the time, per capita, the most strip clubs in the world.

ES: Enough that years later it still got an “all nude” shoutout on the Kroll Show.

BJD: All nude is legal there, and the drinking age is 12.

ES: It’s 19!

BJD: But it was a San Diego/Tijuana set-up with an American student invasion every weekend. All this meant everyone there knew someone who danced. You lived with someone who danced, or someone’s mom was a dancer. You’d go to someone’s home and there’d be G-strings drying everywhere. What Americans call the sex industry... In Windsor, or Montreal, it’s just industry!

ES: Even my first gynecologist in New York said, “I went to University of Michigan. I remember Windsor.”

BJD: Arghh!

ES: What’s funny is the first time I went to a strip club in Canada I was told to get American singles because...

BJD: Because loonies and twoonies shouldn’t be thrown at humans! Okay, one girl I dated in college had a roommate who danced at the gay clubs, but had to quit because he couldn’t stand customers trying to tuck loonies between his butt cheeks!

ES: That’s terrible. How could you even dance?

BJD: Carefully. I hope Americans never look at their change from Tim Horton’s in the same way again. Much like Atom Egoyan wants you to look at strip clubs in a different way!

ES: And rituals. We’re watching performances within performances, right?

BJD: These people are all traumatized and performing through their trauma. You have Elias Koteas as the emcee, he’s the most revolting character in the movie. Then there’s the owner, Arsinée Khanjian, and Mia Kirshner, in a schoolgirl outfit dancing to Leonard Cohen’s “Everybody Knows.”

ES: It’s not really what you think of when you think of strip club music.

BJD: My cousin dated a dancer whose signature song was “The Hanging Garden” by The Cure. A mournful drone song about animals dying after mating.

ES: And she got away with it?

BJD: Canada!

ES: Exotica is a tough watch, all this male gazing. But then there’s the owner of the club. A woman in control of things, and also watching.

BJD: And the emcee is the unreliable narrator of it all. Here’s customer Bruce Greenwood dropping off a young Sarah Polley.

ES: She lives above a roti restaurant. For a moment I was: I miss Toronto roti. But then I thought: wait, what’s going on? Because it’s 14-year-old Sarah Polley in a car being paid by Bruce Greenwood.

BJD: We’ll what’s going on is different from our expectations. But how do you like sleight of hand as a viewer? Because I know you love it as a writer.

ES: I do love it as a writer because I’m the one getting to play with your expectation. Maybe I have to acknowledge that my squeamishness here is intended, right?

BJD: Definitely. Now, you are an Elias Koteas fan?

ES: I am. Wig or no wig! What’s really great about this scene with him and the owner is in movies you usually have women that are the wrong amount of pregnant for what the story requires. And in this, because she was pregnant, it’s so accurate.

BJD: Egoyan has talked about how his one regret was he didn’t realize the effect it would have on his wife, Arsinée Khanjian, to be in a strip club full of naked women for two months while pregnant.

ES: That’s a lot. But here’s how matriarchal those clubs can be. I had an assistant editor at a magazine I ran. They came out as queer after visiting their mom’s strip club for the first time at age 19, when they were swarmed by naked French-Canadian dancers kissing them and cooing “Bebe.” They were like, yep, this is it.

BJD: Now Bruce Greenwood, the club customer, is investigating Don McKellar, the pet shop owner and animal smuggler, and the story starts to twist together. I don’t want to get into a dicey territory, but Canada Revenue is not the IRS. Canada Revenue is closer to the FBI. They are that intense. In Canada, not only do you know a dancer or someone who’s worked in a strip club, you also know someone who’s been audited. Emily?

ES: I don’t want to talk about it.

BJD: But this plays into a solid piece of writing advice. Every character should have a job that fits their obsession or neuroses. Don McKellar is all about secrecy. He’s a closeted wildlife smuggler. And Bruce Greenwood’s an auditor who can’t accept his daughter has been murdered. So he goes through these motions of having a babysitter. Or going to visit his daughter’s former babysitter at a strip club.

ES: This is someone who investigates, but who can’t accept tragedy. And now we see how Koteas and Kirshner met: at a search party.

BJD: So I guess I’m going to talk a little bit about the Bernardo and Homolka case here. Delicately, because I don’t want to ascribe any intention to Egoyan that wasn’t there. This is completely me just comparing dates. But for the two years before this movie, murdered schoolgirls had haunted Ontario. Then, while Egoyan was writing this screenplay, Bernardo was arrested. So there is something powerfully evil in the air at the time.

ES: That also maybe plays into my apprehension when watching this film. It’s still a haunting case for me because I was the same age as the girls.

BJD: Grade 13?

ES: I was not in grade 13. I fast-tracked.

BJD: Canadian brag! I still want to unpack that discomfort because I feel Canada, and specifically Ontario, has since memory holed anything to do with Bernardo and Homolka because of the collective guilt over how the police and prosecution messed up the case. To quote author Kirk Makin, “There is probably only one convicted serial killer living free in the world and that’s Karla Homolka.” I believe that’s why Canada decided: We’re never going to talk about it again. Canadians take the failings of the state personally.

ES: Right, with the protests later against American Psycho being filmed in Toronto.

BJD: I was marginally on that crew as a less-than-PA! I was on location cleanup. But my favorite Bernardo and Homolka fact is that they were such avid fans of Saturday Night Live they would race home at 11:30, no matter what they were up to. So if anyone wants to go the “blame media consumption” route....you have to include early ’90s SNL.

ES: As if to say Chris Farley made them kill?

BJD: Yes. So seeing some kind of early processing of that crime in Exotica—it feels like coming across samizdat. That said, there is humor in the movie and we’re not talking about it. The fact that Don McKellar and the guy investigating him for exotic animal smuggling actually become buddies, and it’s kind of hilarious, right?

ES: It’s interesting in a movie about people who don’t connect, that they seem to connect the most. They found their similarities—they’re both compromised. Wait, Mia Kirshner is back on.

BJD: Are you gazing Mia Kirshner dancing in Doc Martens?

ES: This movie makes everyone a hypocrite.

BJD: Have we discussed how in the movie lap dances are five dollars! The price of a pack of Player’s Light at the time!

ES: The one time I went to a club was in the aughts and it was 20 bucks. Why do people stare at mirrors so much in this film?

BJD: Before phones, we only had two way mirrors to analyze our souls, Emily! Actually one of things I love most about this movie is seeing intimacy between people, and it’s not sex.

ES: Right, Don McKellar and Mia Kirshner are having a real conversation during a lap dance. That’s transgressing the rituals this film has established. My dancer only told me to not get married!

BJD: And back with Sarah Polley. She’s the only character in the film who doesn’t want to play along with fantasies. For her, it doesn’t make sense what she’s doing for Bruce Greenwood.

ES: The wonderful thing about kids is how direct in their questions they are, and in stating the obvious.

BJD: Here’s the thing I want you to talk about, because never have I been a babysitter and then gotten a ride home from a dad.

ES: I have. And it’s like: I’m alone with an adult man. And sometimes they get flirtatious.

BJD: Flirtatious or they need to talk to someone anyone?

ES: As a 16-year-old girl you’re not always sure which it is. And you’re also sometimes a little bit like, wait, how many drinks did you have? And you’re actually driving me somewhere? And then he hands you money!

BJD: Cash, at that.

ES: There has to be some trust there. And you also have to know when to get out of the car.

BJD: How good is Mia Kirshner in her second movie? This isn’t a “that person is going to be good one day” performance. It’s just phenomenal. And here’s Elias Koteas putting on a perfect Québécois accent to fool Bruce Greenwood in the restroom.

ES: They said washroom, Brian!

BJD: I won’t go back! Ever! It’s bathroom, goddammit! But here is where the movie pivots and until now Koteas’s emcee character is so loathsome. But this is a movie about people getting tired of their fantasies. He’s about to smash this guy’s world, take away the safe place of this club for him, and...

ES: I’m listening.

BJD: And is it actually kind of a gift in a way?

ES: Because Bruce Greenwood is stuck in this fantasy world?

BJD: And as it turns out Koteas and Kirshner were the ones who found his daughter’s body.

ES: Do you think this is Atom Egoyan’s best movie?

BJD: Yes. But I have a soft spot for Chloe because Chloe is all his skill set from this movie, but brought to bear on a Brian De Palma-esque Euro thriller.

ES: My Chloe story is funny. I was pregnant. I was staying with your mom. And she was watching a Twilight movie on basic cable. But I kept flipping it back to Chloe when she left the room. But then I didn’t want her to catch me watching it, so then I’d flip it back to the Twilight movie!

BJD: My mom would have loved Chloe! My funniest watching-a-movie-with-my-mom story was when she came home from the video store with Cut and Run. She picked it because she thought former child star Willie Aames was cute and it looked like an action movie, but little punk ass horror kid me knew it was directed by Ruggero Deodato, who also did Cannibal Holocaust. “Sure let’s watch the Willie Aames movie” I said. She wasn’t a fan.

ES: So Bruce Greenwood is banned from the club and now he wants to get evidence against Elias Koteas?

BJD: He’s blackmailed Don McKellar into recording Mia Kirshner and then Greenwood has to hear his life story as told to a stranger. And Greenwood’s acting: so good. Again, this movie is so good I’m angry. How long did it take for you to write something good?

ES: Years. Okay, so there’s a family dynamic going on here. That they’ve been brought together by tragedy but they have these roles they also kick against.

BJD: And these are both inherited business. Arsinée Khanjian inherited the club from her mother. Don McKellar inherited the pet store, and gun, from his father.

ES: That itself is very novelistic. The idea of what you inherit. Oh, she’s doing her signature song, Brian.

BJD: I want to point out that you, in your one and only drag performance, also did a Leonard Cohen song!

ES: I did! I did “I’m Your Man.”

BJD: And now this Canadian ending where there’s about to be a gun murder, but then two men express their feelings instead. And have a hug.

ES: I love this scene so much it’s why I don’t care for the final flashback of Greenwood dropping Kirshner off at home.

BJD: I love the flashback. But they go a little too far in styling her as 16 in this scene. The acne.

ES: The retainer!

BJD: Importantly, this scene implies that maybe Greenwood helped her out of an abusive home. And that’s why she later takes care of him, in her own way, through his own tragedy.

ES: I do love that they used 1980s Canadian money in this flashback. And the backpack she has is the same one she uses on stage later!

BJD: So she walks into her house and it’s uncomfortable how long they hold on the house and how slow she walks in. She doesn’t want to go in.

ES: It makes the audience trauma bond with her and we are truly are all connected.

BJD: Except not by the Queen Car. I’m so sorry!

ES: No, you won. That’s the ending now.

Exotica is available on disc and streaming at Criterion

As Pauline Kael once wrote, “If you’re afraid of movies that excite your senses, you’re afraid of movies.” This proves most true with audiences when it comes to horror and thriller films. That’s why last year we created a list of films that will let you take a calculated risk while getting away from the same safe picks on the seasonal lists. We’ve also added new films this year to help you plan your watch parties, no matter who you’re watching with.

WATCH WITH A FRIEND GOING THROUGH DIVORCE: THE BROOD

Often considered within David Cronenberg’s filmography to be the white-haired rage child hidden in a chalet, The Brood is due for rediscovery in this era of maybe you’re all doing therapy a little too hard. Coming out of his own acrimonious divorce, Cronenberg was never this vulnerable again as a filmmaker and the script and performances remain astonishing. Oliver Reed is the most frightening therapist ever but it’s Samantha Eggar, as a woman who gives birth to literal rage babies, who should have won an Oscar for that placenta scene alone.

WATCH WITH YOUR FRIEND WHO IS MOST FREAKED OUT BY AI: HARDWARE

Seeing Richard Stanley’s debut movie is the moment Brian can personally pinpoint going from a Fangoria subscriber to a Flipside subscriber. A music video wunderkind, Stanley scored cameos from oldsters like Iggy Pop and Lemmy along with the insurgent music of the coming 1990s, including Ministry, Gwar, and Psychic TV. They’re all perfect for this near-future story of a genocidal war drone inadvertently brought to sentient life in a London squat of artists and immigrants. Movies should be cool, and Hardware­—relentlessly trippy, violent, and roughhewed—is still cool thirty-five years later.

WATCH WITH YOUR MOM: THE FINAL GIRLS

The Final Girls came out well before Happy Death Day but while that much more lucrative time loop film stayed in the slasher lane, Todd Strauss-Schulson’s film gleefully goes everywhere from meta-levels to cheap jokes. The cast is full of alt comedy pinch hitters like Adam DeVine and Alia Shawkat, but the realistic relationship between Taissa Farmiga and her scream queen mother Malin Åkerman is what makes this genre riff so special. Come for the machete battle, stay for the hugs.

WATCH WITH DRAG QUEENS: SLEEPAWAY CAMP

Tasteless, offensive, indefensible, and absolutely fun, Sleepaway Camp is the Johnny Guitar of slasher films. It pulls a gender inversion on the genre, with all the cast acting like it’s a regional production of Suddenly, Last Summer. There are pervy flashbacks and a twist ending that gay-married your brain forever if you watched this back on VHS. Emily distinctly remembers being shown this one as a teen and a friend saying, “I really want to know what you think of Sleepaway Camp.” That’s called profiling.

WATCH WITH YOUR ANTIFA SOCCER LEAGUE: BACURAU

Equal parts acid western and The Wicker Man, this movie is pure tension as the audience teases out the mystery of what’s happening in Bacurau, a fictional town in the back country of Brazil. What makes it a great film is the patience directors Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles take in showing us the town. By the time the ugliest Americans since Cannibal Holocaust show up, we are living in Bacurau and know all the gossip. When the locals are forced to defend their town there’s no question whose side we’re on.

WATCH WITH YOUR WANNABE INFLUENCER FRIEND: NOPE

Nope was technically a hit but we’ve long had a feeling that it went over the audience’s heads with a Kubrickian leap. It may take years for us to catch up to how unnerving and subversive Nope is, especially in what it says about being seen/not being seen as a core part of human nature. That Jordon Peele does this all at a rollicking Spielberg pace only adds to the sense of mystery and genre mash-up. There’s also an alien that looks like a Björk dress.

WATCH WITH YOUR CANADIAN DAD: MY BLOODY VALENTINE

“My Bloody Valentine has a whimsical level to it. Like if Bill Forsyth made a slasher film.” Read our epic talk about Canada’s contribution to the slasher canon here. But be aware that if you watch this with your Canadian Dad he’s going to interrupt with wandering digressions about Moosehead beer, or say things like, “That ain’t no way to wear a safety helmet.”

WATCH IF YOU’RE 1980s OBSESSED: DEMONS 2

Demons, the first one, is a classic of a different kind of Italo-horror film. Demons 2, however, tones down the gore and cranks up the new wave and post-punk soundtrack for total hairspray chaos. Plot? Sure, let’s try. Residents of a high-tech condo tower in Hamburg are watching a documentary about, um…the first Demons movie? From there, fiction crosses over to reality through the power of a sad birthday girl listening to the Smiths, and soon all the tenants—including the armed patrons of a muscle gym—are under siege by demons. Really, the less sense it makes the more fun you’re having.

WATCH IF YOU’RE ON OZEMPIC: THE STUFF

Larry Cohen’s The Stuff opens at a mining site with a liquid bubbling up that turns out to be delicious, and addictive. From there, it’s a quick rise to the number one selling food in America and a lot of questions, including: Is the Stuff not just alive, but sentient? No one combined grind-house commerce with satirical anarchy like Cohen did and the charm of The Stuff is it’s both polished—they hired a Madison Ave. firm to create the branding for the fictional food—and rough around the edges. As if Cohen was too excited to fill out his one-page pitch to script length and just started filming.

WATCH WITH YOUR SIBLINGS: RAISING CAIN

What could drive Brian De Palma, in mid-career, to make his craziest, most belief-beggaring thriller? Maybe even his masterpiece? Becoming a new father! An act that’s apparently traumatizing for many artists. From there, just add an ensemble cast of John Lithgow, John Lithgow, John Lithgow, John Lithgow, and John Lithgow.

WATCH WITH A CLASSICS MAJOR: THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS

With the most apocalyptic ending since Planet of the Apes, this story of a girl being transported across a world destroyed by a zombie-generating fungal infection—no, it’s not The Last of Us. Instead, Girl With All the Gifts is based on a British novel that came before the video game and proudly wears its own references on its sleeve, from The Day of the Triffids to I Am Legend, and the Pandora myth. By the time you finish, you’ll have earned your A levels.

FOR DADS TO WATCH WITH THEIR DAUGHTERS: CRAWL

It’s called kin work, and it inordinately falls to women, especially when they must save their estranged fathers from being trapped in a basement full of alligators during a hurricane.

WATCH WITH THE KIDS: NIGHT OF THE ZOOPOCALYPSE

On the face of it, Night of the Zoopocalypse is a remake of John Carpenter’s The Thing for the Pixar age bracket, which is cool enough. And it is a fun, gorgeously animated film. But within the story are more radical themes of society, wildness, and identity, played out in a zoo setting. Look at the writing credits and you’ll see Clive Barker, who probably gave the story its Nightbreed “Fuck the law” energy.

WATCH WITH YOUR BEST FRIEND: GRETA

We’ve already discussed why Greta is the greatest psychological thriller you’ve never seen so now it’s up to you to make this a true cult classic. Bring on the 4k boxsets, the drinking games, the Isabelle Huppert costumes!

WATCH WITH A CANCELLED FRIEND: DREAM SCENARIO

This story of Nicolas Cage as mild-if-annoying professor Paul Matthews haunting the dreams of strangers arrived maybe a year too early. (Taylor Swift however has better timing.) Still, it’s an amazing follow-up to Sick of Myself, Kristoffer Borgli’s breakout film. Working now on a studio scale, Borgli builds Dream Scenario into a Scandinavian version of Nightmare on Elm Street and the film isn’t afraid of the cringe—the date fart!—or truly unnerving dream sequences.

WATCH IF YOU THINK YOUR FRIEND IS A SOCIOPATH: DON’T DELIVER US FROM EVIL

Notorious as “The French film banned in France!” Don’t Deliver Us From Evil walks a fine line between exploitation and arthouse as it follows two schoolgirls who read Les Chants de Maldoror and decide to become evil. Drawing loosely on the real-life Parker-Hulme murder, director Joël Séria imbues the film with a spirit of genuine anarchy, from the scene of the giggling girls biking away in joy from their first murder to their performance art finale that anticipates Big Black’s Kerosene by 15 years.

WATCH WITH YOUR WELSH SEPARATIST FRIENDS: THE FEAST

We’ll just say it: the “folk horror” revival of the 2010s was the “college rock” of horror films—a term that codified legit practitioners but mostly served to excuse a lot of boring films with no sense of purpose other than “someone wanders a forest, fearing something something.” Released in 2021, The Feast may look like that, but it’s not. It’s like the unholy child of Lars von Trier and Takashi Miike, performed entirely in Welsh. Myn diawl!

As the film opens, Cadi is the temp help for a wealthy and dysfunctional mining family’s very important dinner party. She’s impassive, mostly silent, and also trails black dirt behind her. After a Kubrick-uncanny opening act, with jaw-dropping cinematography, The Feast becomes a blood-drenched fairy-tale, proving that mining power is no match for witch power.

WATCH AFTER A THREE-HOUR CALL WITH YOUR HEALTH INSURANCE PROVIDER: THE TOXIC AVENGER (2023)

Like its 1984 source film, Macon Blair’s The Toxic Avenger is full of ultra-violent provocations and stupid-on-purpose humor. Where it bests the low-budget original is the performances, with Peter Dinklage alongside a perfectly cast David Yow and an obviously having-the-time-of-his-life Kevin Bacon. There’s also the gooey beating heart that the film wears on its sleeve. Even Emily, who had never seen the original, was won over by this film’s love letter to outsiders and its (severed) middle finger to power brokers.

WATCH WITH A FRIEND WHO WON’T SAY WHAT THEY DO FOR A LIVING: FRANKENHOOKER

There’s no gloss on a Frank Henenlotter film, especially one with the tagline “A terrifying tale of sluts and bolts.” But all his films have an honest humanism that carries far past the exploitation and dumb humor. Frankenhooker is no different and it might have one of the most accidentally feminist endings of any horror movie.

WATCH WITH A VENTRILOQUIST DUMMY NEXT TO YOU: TOURIST TRAP

The Elder Gods among our readers may have memories of this PG (!) rated film from childhood. If you don’t, trust us, this combination of evil doll film and Texas Chainsaw Massacre is still terrifying, as if it was completely made of cursed images.

WATCH BEFORE YOU BUY A $1 HOME IN ITALY: THE HOUSE WITH LAUGHING WINDOWS

Like film noir, Italy’s giallo genre has a steep quality drop-off after you hit all the classics. But there are still buried nuggets like Pupi Avati’s 1975 film about an art restorer summoned to a village—with secrets!—to work on a disturbing mural of Saint Sebastian. Less a mystery and much more a demented gothic thriller, House with Laughing Windows explores deeper themes of sadism and corruption. Avati had co-written Salò with Pasolini a few years before, and you could almost call Laughing Windows an answer film about artistic morality. Still, it’s as Italian as talking with your hands and surprisingly creepy—all the way to the twist ending that passes go and is sent straight to gender studies.

WATCH WHILE EATING CHEESY GARLIC BREAD: NIGHTMARE CITY

In a world of crazy Italian zombie movies it pays to be the craziest. And Umberto Lenzi’s Nightmare City most definitely is. After a radioactive plane full of generals and politicians lands, a toxic strain of zombie-ism spreads through Rome. Noted for being the very first fast zombie movie, the undead also look ridiculous here, with what can only be described as burnt mozzarella on their faces. Come for the aerobics studio massacre. Stay for the earnest message about nuclear war.

WATCH WITH A NEW YORKER: C.H.U.D.

Believe me, C.H.U.D. is way better written and better acted than any film called Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers needs to be. I also firmly believe it’s in the same cinematic universe with Martin Scorsese’s After Hours, given that it shares the same 1983 Soho/East Village locations, and John Heard.

WATCH WITH AN INDIE FILMMAKER: BAGHEAD (2008)

As far as we know, Baghead is the only mumblecore horror film and it somehow works. This early Duplass Brothers joint with Greta Gerwig manages to capture cabin-in-the-woods creepiness at the same time as taking the piss out of the pretensions and petty rivalries of no-budget filmmaking.

WATCH WITH YOUR FRENCH BOYFRIEND: DOUBLE LOVER

In François Ozon’s horny tribute to De Palma’s Sisters, Chloe is a docent in Paris with phantom stomach pains no one can diagnose. As a last-ditch effort to understand the cause she’s sent to Paul, a psychiatrist played by Jérémie Renier. His brand of therapy is saying very little and being very handsome. Paul also has a secret twin brother, Louis, but that’s the least of the twists in Double Lover, so be prepared. There’s even a twist ending after the twist ending.

WATCH WITH A THEATER MAJOR: PEARL

Ti West’s prequel to his hick horror tribute X turned out to be a truly moving, unnerving story about psychopathy and how outsiders are made. Mia Goth’s country girl Pearl dreams of dancing in Hollywood against the wishes of her icy German mother. The audience wants Pearl to succeed, except she is in no way sane and she knows it as much as we do. (We won’t spoil the scarecrow scene.) As a movie, Pearl is patient and loving with all its characters, even when it dispatches most of them in a climax that has the moral symmetry of a Flannery O’Connor story.

WATCH IF YOU HATE DINNER PARTIES: THE INVITATION (2015)

If there’s a horror movie list on the internet it will invariably contain Jennifer’s Body. And you know what? Karyn Kusama has made other movies, goddammit. Great ones, like The Invitation. As a concept it looks even more prescient ten years later with its Hollywood Hills death cult. Kusama and her writing partners Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi work the limited location with ruthless efficiency until the ending, which uses a simple symbol to suggest a global catastrophe. Never has surviving one night of terror felt so much like losing as in The Invitation’s final seconds.

WATCH WITH A NOVELIST: IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS

We love this late-period John Carpenter banger, even if the idea is silly that a novelist—a novelist—is so influential he could drag humanity into Lovecraftian-madness and call forth the end of the world. Most novelists emotionally shut down if asked for a blurb, let alone when asked if they could take in some shoggoth rescues.

WATCH WITH THE ROOMMATE WHO STOLE YOUR HAIRSTYLE: SINGLE WHITE FEMALE

Barbet Schroeder’s Single White Female is always unfairly lumped in with the erotic thrillers of the early 1990s gang. While there are butts to be seen, Single White Female aims to be a real movie and succeeds. Schroeder definitely saw Persona, the acting battle between Bridget Fonda and Jennifer Jason Leigh is intense; it’s lensed by Argento collaborator Luciano Tovoli; and the script by Don Roos knows when to be logical and when to take the audience into horror and slasher territory. One lingering question: where to find an apartment that big in New York?

WATCH WITH YOUR POD DURING THE NEXT PANDEMIC: REC

The found footage horror movie might be on its last recording seconds, but if you go back to its early days you’ll find that REC is in its own nonstop terror class. A news crew is trapped inside a building being sealed off from the world during what looks like an outbreak and all the fun tropes are there including “Keep filming!” But the demented twist in the last act could only happen in a Spanish film.

WATCH WITH A LETTERBOXD SNOB: PSYCHO (1998)

Artists have been as drawn to Hitchcock as much as filmmakers have. (I’ve seen Douglas Gordon’s numbingly meditative 24 Hour Psycho video installation.) Gus Van Sant’s shot-for-shot remake of Psycho exists somewhere between the disciplines—a conceptual studio cash grab that was critically savaged for it at the time. It’s easy to focus on the intended differences: the camp colors, the subliminal inserts. But what alters the DNA of the original the most turns out to be the performance choices. A young Vince Vaughn goes full demon twink as Norman Bates, while Julianne Moore plays crusading sister Lila Crane as…neurodiverse? Repeat these talking points and claim it’s better than the original and you’ll be a true Cinema Dirtbag!

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In spring 2023 Hannah Meyer was 26 and living with a girlfriend when she had taken to DMing semi-strangers and asking them for coffee. Emily Schultz was one of the semi-strangers. We first met at a literary reading on a cold night and Hannah assumed we would get a single coffee, exchange a handful of messages, and that would be it. Instead, it would be two years before we would break up and eventually start writing this article together, processing how and why our age-gap relationship happened.

A San Francisco by-way-of Boise, Idaho transplant, Hannah was due to start the MFA program at NYU. Emily was 49 and just about to publish her fourth novel. Hannah was surprisingly nervous on the first date. Emily asked her what she wanted to drink and told Hannah to find somewhere in the café to sit. As Emily ordered coffee, Hannah pretended to rifle through her bag, eager to give her hands something to do. “I might as well have mouthed peas and carrots like a background player.”

Hannah and Emily talked about writing, queerness, and art modeling. Emily let slip that her marriage was open. Later Hannah wrote in a novel she would send to Emily to read, “I felt the particles between us condense and quicken.”

Within 30 minutes of leaving the café, Hannah had texted her cousin, asking:

How old would u date?

Not sure. Sixty? No, too close to my parents age. Are you seeing someone older?

Maybe.

Send pic.

Not sure how old she is.

SEND PIC.

Hannah sent her a photo and she approved.

Emily had been out as queer since Hole’s “Miss World” topped the alternative charts. She later partnered with a man, Brian, and then felt a little bit invisible. When she became a mother, even more invisible. After the pandemic Emily and Brian had decided to open the relationship again. They’d done so a few times before, sloppily, and well before polyamorous jargon was popular. Back then they were just slutty and unusually honest about it. Now, they agreed to solo-date (meaning they wouldn’t date the same person). One of the mature things they discussed this time around was what if something became love? “We’d try to have that person be part of the family,” Brian said. “How?” Emily asked. They didn’t exactly hash out a plan.

Emily had her old radical beliefs that love shouldn’t be possessive, while Hannah was fluent in contemporary relationship discourse. But for Hannah, the age-gap attraction went deeper than politics. It spoke to her first inklings of being gay. “I was 12 at the time, and the first woman that I had a crush on was born in 1975. She was my voice teacher. I didn’t know exactly how old she was then, but I knew that we were certainly of a big and legal age difference. I would bike downtown hoping to run into her. It was a romantic blueprint because I admired and was attracted to her.”

At first, Hannah had referred to herself as a “late Millennial” and Emily did hopeful math. That could mean early thirties, she thought. After making out with Hannah on the lawn of the Ramble one afternoon, Hannah revealed her age: 26. “Twenty-two years difference?” Emily said as she sat up. “You are the age of my abortion.”

When Emily told Brian Hannah’s age his eyebrows raised for a long beat, then he laughed. “You got yourself a cub!” But Emily hadn’t forgotten less positive age-gap references, like her own when she was 20 and dating a person in their thirties. Then there’s Marc Maron’s “Doomed Clown” stand-up bit.

The bit goes, “I hate when people see an older dude with a younger woman, like, ‘I know what that’s about.’ No, you don’t…If you ever see an old guy with a younger woman, just picture him as a doomed clown.”

Doomed clown or not, there was something about Emily’s dark Gen X sensibility Hannah was drawn to. She might admonish Emily about her molestation jokes when showering together, but Hannah could look into Emily’s eyes and see countless wars protested, economies collapsed, hopes drained like a bottle of Fruitopia.

We introduced each other to new music. Sometimes it took and sometimes it didn’t. Emily took Hannah to a Patti Smith show one New Year’s—“Hannah was a bigger fan and knew more about her than I did. Once, I texted her a cover of Bruce Springsteen’s ‘I’m on Fire’ by Electrelane. My grandma likes that song, she texted back.”

“Emily had experienced many things that I hadn’t. A C-section. Back tattoo. Marriage.” Hannah secretly assumed Emily was going through a mid-life crisis. A spiritual reckoning. Marital problems. Why else would she want to have sex with a 26-year-old on a beanbag chair in her writing office?

From the start, Emily saw Hannah as smart, talented and ambitious. In her journal she also troubled over what Hannah might want from her: networking or a novelty thrill. “I always thought a more interesting version of The Graduate would be from Mrs. Robinson’s perspective,” Emily said. “I didn’t know I’d end up living it.” (Emily first saw the film on VHS. Hannah first watched it on streaming.) We began the relationship with a lot of optimism, but Emily realized she had never felt so old before. Trying to keep up was thrilling, but exhausting.

“I didn’t know what I was or what I could be to her,” Hannah continued. “Emily said writing was like an addiction for her, while I second guessed every third sentence. Writing, like love, like everything else in life, seemed to come easily to her. The only thing that I was better at was running.”

“I should’ve known something was up then,” Emily says. “I was hoping for a jog and talk at the McCarren track, but Hannah decided to smoke my ass.”

The biggest change in the first year of our dating was when Hannah became “single.” She broke up with her girlfriend and moved into an apartment in Bushwick, Brooklyn. While sex on a rock in Central Park was on Emily’s bucket list the reality, and arthritic pain, of these hookups was more uncomfortable than the fantasy. Emily looked forward to spending time at the apartment but realized this too could also get complicated. “Hannah was now in an apartment with three roommates: bartenders, baristas, and young men recovering from Mpox. To be fair, it was exactly how I’d lived in my twenties.”

“I never lived with a bartender,” Hannah corrects.

“What did that one girl do, the one who tried to steal my bagel?”

“She worked at the UN.”

One evening we were lying in Hannah’s bed, post sex, talking about books and writing. “We were in the slow stages of getting dressed when we heard voices. ‘Is that your roommate?’ I asked. When we walked out to the living room, I saw a guy in their kitchen. He looked around my age. That’s not a guy, that’s a dad, I realized. I wasn’t meeting someone her roommate had brought home—but her entire family. Don’t shake my hand, I thought. Thankfully no one else did.”

Hannah was also on dating apps, looking for someone more full-time to come into her life. She wasn’t ready for what came with dating someone whose time was taken up with a child. “I felt there were rules. Stated or not,” Hannah said. “We could text at certain hours. Hang out 1-2 times a week. And sleepovers were rare. I am not a particularly jealous person, but became incredibly jealous of her and her life. I both wanted her and wanted to be her.”

Psychologist Justin Lehmiller writes that a significant predictor in happiness in age-gap relationships is how other people perceive the relationship. Among Hannah’s friend group Emily was known as “Hannah’s Mommy Girlfriend.”

Emily’s son met Hannah and we tried to do movies and museums together as a way to bond, but our trio didn’t really get the ah’s and nods of rainbow family approval that one gets in New York. Instead, people saw Hannah as the older child when we were out together.

Despite the complexities, Hannah and Brian had become friends. (To Emily’s consternation they have exactly the same boundary pushing personalities.) “I now had three people to make happy,” Emily realized. “It’s easy to assume the person with two partners is getting double benefits from the situation. The truth is multiple people are asking for consideration at the same exact time.”

Over time, Hannah realized her own insecurities prevented her from seeing Emily clearly. In her mind, she did fashion her into Mrs. Robinson. “An older woman who was using a younger man to sublimate. I rewatched the film midway through our relationship and was struck by how mean Mrs. Robinson was to Benjamin.”

Given all these pressures, Hannah and Emily broke up…for a day. Brian ended up sitting them down for a counseling session, telling Emily and Hannah that to succeed they had to find the overlaps in our lives and focus on those. “The big thing in common would be writing but as I learned in these talks for the article after, Hannah was intimidated by my career,” Emily says. “I didn’t understand—I saw we had no reason to compete.”

In September 2024, Hannah and Emily’s family traveled to Provincetown, Massachusetts for a long weekend. It was an attempt to prove this relationship structure could work. We all stayed in a two-bedroom cottage near the ocean where it was post-season idyllic, yet Hannah wondered how the dynamic would evolve had we all been there for three weeks or three years instead of three days.

Hannah and Emily played with her son in the pool then dropped him off with Brian before heading to the beach to watch the sunset and smoke pot. “I was shivering after the pool and Brian had given me his Irish fisherman sweater to wear.”

Behind an abandoned boat on the beach later that night Hannah was feeling too stoned. “I was extremely conscious of the parts of my body that were touching sand and the ones that were touching Emily’s skin. While we were having sex, I became conscious of the fact that I was only wearing Brian’s sweater and my socks. After, Emily seemed nervous and I became nervous.”

“I was actually hallucinating spiders in the sky,” Emily amends.

For Hannah, this last trip was one time in a handful in which our roles were reserved, in which Emily seemed much younger. “I felt panicky and aware that she was higher than I was, so I gave her my own solid option, ‘Do you want to go inside?’”

Normally, the sexual and the familial were separated by a 45-minute drive between Greenpoint and Bushwick, and now the distance was a five-minute walk from the beach to the cottage. “I kept trying to swallow my lips to keep from laughing. Their son was sleeping and Brian immediately seemed to read the situation. Emily: really high. Me: Less high but unable to formulate a plan. He put on the TV and settled on The Lost Boys, according to Emily, ‘a Gen-X classic.’”

And there it was for Hannah. She saw an intuition and understanding of another person that she did not have with Emily or anyone else at that time. Hannah recalls, “Ironically, the closer that I got to Emily’s family the more I wished I had already found a primary partner. It was difficult to observe a solid life partnership play out in front of you and not feel as though your own chance was slipping away.”

Realizing from this vantage point that maybe she wasn’t poly after all Hannah can admit, “I was only able to have feelings for one person. The real problem was that I wanted a wife and I didn’t know how I would find one.”

The tragic thing about all breakups is these kinds of obvious reasons only present themselves after everything is done. Lacking clarity, our relationship limped along for a few months after the trip, then we broke up for real.

Besides the poly stress, one of our biggest challenges was our different communication styles. Hannah had a cell phone from age 12 on. Emily grew up with a landline in the family home, and wasn’t allowed more than a 20-minute call. Hannah likes to diagnose and analyze whereas Emily prefers to treat feelings like a Midwesterner talking about the weather: worth remarking on but not for long. Hannah says, “When I texted asking her how are u feeling? She would say Good if she was feeling positive, and Okay if she was upset. Emily preferred ‘not to get into it’ in text.”

A year after we broke up, Hannah was graduating from her MFA. The room at NYU was bright with energy that day and Hannah thanked Emily from the stage before she gave her reading, “Which of course she nailed, making everyone in the room laugh and lean in. I felt elated for her to have this moment,” Emily recounts. “Her father David and I sat together, meeting for the first time in the three years of knowing Hannah. I was surprised at how kind he was; I hadn’t expected her parents would accept me, even as the now-platonic much older friend. Although I was nervous, he was an easy person to feel comfortable with and converse with, just like Hannah. Afterward at drinks, he said to me, ‘I want to thank you for being there for Hannah.’”

Emily was touched by the acknowledgement and she realized the problem with the Mrs. Robinson narrative is that it ends abruptly, without understanding of who Benjamin and Mrs. Robinson were as people, what they gave each other before moving on in their lives. She hadn’t been able to give Hannah everything, yet with her father’s words, Emily saw that she had at least been able to give something.

Looking back Hannah says, “One thing that Emily said to me was how in long relationships, there are old, long-standing resentments about things that you never bring up. On one hand, this feels generationally opposite to how I was taught to approach relationships: by talking about every little thing. Now I think there is something to be said for accepting a person’s flaws and limitations and taking them as they are.”

When questioning her continued desire to date “the olds,” as Hannah still calls them, she wondered if what she enjoyed was their experience, the lack of tentativeness. Emily always thought her lifestyle as a novelist made her less mature than her peers, but she is starting to accept that experience displaces youth, no matter what.

In the deepest part of our relationship, we each wanted the other to be our age, to see the world as we saw it. A fantasy, since neither of us would be who we were if that could come true.

Hannah Meyer is a writer from Boise, Idaho based in Brooklyn. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from New York University. Her essays and short stories are published in Hobart, Literary Hub, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Lilith Magazine, La Petit Mort, and elsewhere.

Emily Schultz is the author of the novels Little Threats, and The Blondes, which was an NPR Great Reads selection. Her forthcoming novel is Miss Psycho. A cofounder of Joyland Magazine, her writing has appeared in Elle, Slate, Vice, Writer’s Digest, and Prairie Schooner. She lives in Brooklyn.

It’s The Devils, plural, for a reason. Not only was there director Ken Russell, working through the end of his faith by adapting Aldous Huxley’s novel about a medieval convent taken over by sexual hysteria. There was also Derek Jarman, plucked by chance from experimental theater anonymity to design the 1971 film’s sets. And what sets. Unlike in most films the sets became part of The Devils’ spell. In Jarman’s hands the town of Loudun is the psychogeographical model of its denizens’ madness: the white fortress walls, the tiled torture chambers, its crucifixion fields. With the 4k restoration of the uncensored version now touring, Medium Cool is excerpting Jarman’s diaries from the making of Russell’s film.

Reading these entries now I’m struck by the studio-ness of The Devils: epic sets, the department squabbles, the suit visits. It was a major co-production, making Russell’s surprise at how much the studio loathed the completed film seem genuine. “They read the bloody script didn’t they!” he was reported to have yelled. With the director later begging Jarman to design his adaptation of The Who’s Tommy, Jarman would have been poised for his Hollywood debut as a designer. He decided otherwise, and embarked on a career of his own as a resolutely independent director, video artist, discoverer of Tilda Swinton, and LGBTQ activist before his death in 1994. But here, back before The Devils was the most notorious studio film ever made, read about champagne-soused takes, wasps invading the production, and the director accidentally blowing up the set.

The Devils restoration screens at Lincoln Center as part of the 2026 New York Film Festival and opens in wide release on October 16th. The following are entries from Dancing Ledge, by Derek Jarman.

January 1970, Upper Ground: I was dreading coming back to London as by Christmas I had very little money and no way of heating the warehouse at Upper Ground, with the exception of the small office I’ve made of my bedroom. I can just afford to keep the ‘pither’ stove going, but it does nothing except keep the water from freezing in the lavatory. The old coke water-heater swallows up fuel, and you have to lay in at least half a ton at a time. The holiday in Excelmans [Paris] solved the problem for a couple of weeks as the fridge was well stocked and the building centrally heated. On the train waiting to return home, I noticed a girl carrying two heavy suitcases. Something about the way she was dressed and her long hair told me she was English, so I shouted out of the window that there was a spare seat in our carriage, and she clambered in. Throughout the eight-hour journey we chatted about the theatre and painting. Janet Deuter was teaching at Hornsey in the experimental light and sound department. She was a friend of Ken and Shirley Russell so she told me of their new film project, The Devils. When we parted company she told me that she’d tell Ken about me, as she was convinced we would get along.

I soon forgot about this. But a day later the phone rang and Ken asked me if he could come over — ‘Tomorrow’. OK I said. ‘I’ll be there at eight in the morning,’ and at eight he arrived in the freezing empty warehouse at Upper Ground. He was bowled over by the building and while we huddled over mugs of tea I pulled out the odd drawing from Jazz Calendar and the Don, plus various other projects I had worked on. After looking at them briefly he asked me to design The Devils. I was quite taken aback by the suddenness of this offer, as I’d promised myself that after Don Giovanni I would never design again. I asked him if I could think it over, and he gave me twenty-four hours. ‘In the meantime can Shirley come to tea to meet you?’ In the evening I rushed out to see Women In Love. On the strength of that, and conversations with a few friends, I decided to plunge in...

February 1970 Ladbroke Grove: I sit up stairs on the livingroom floor among the bric-a-brac which invades every corner of Ken’s home. His latest addition is a portrait of Hedy Lamarr. Shirley makes coffee while Ken and I thrash out ideas. My architectural history, the years with Pevsner, stand me in good stead.

The town of Loudun is an enormous task. There’s the exterior as well as the interiors to consider, and also a large number of sets for Louis XIII’s court in Paris. I’ve brought a bottle of sepia ink ink and the finest rapidograph, which I use to make meticulous drawings of the sets, stone by stone, after initial (very rough) sketches. An art director, George Lack, is drawing these up into proper plans and elevations, and students at the Central are building a scale model of the exterior.

The whole lot is to be built at Pinewood. My source books are Ledoux, Boulee and Piranci’s prison series. All detail is sacrificed to scale as I want the sets as large as possible, and as forceful as the sets from an old silent.

May 1970, Pinewood: The journey out to Pinewood Studios is a nightmare. I’m usually up by 5.30 to get there by 8.30. So much of the time is spent waiting for trains and in the evening it’s worse unless I manage to hitch a lift. Yesterday I came out with Ken in the white Rolls for a meeting with the American investors — a gang of Hollywood mafia, who took the model of Loudun up to the lot where it was dismembered with a breadknife while they argued about its size. They posted studio assistants to mark its limits on the ground. They spent half an hour dissecting three months’ work, and at one point attempted to jettison the cathedral. The set is apparently going to be the largest since the ill-fated Cleopatra. Later, Ken called to say he’d been battling with them all day. Although he’s saved Loudun, we’ve lost the sets for Louis XIII’s palace, except for the theatre and perhaps the library; so the original design will never be realized — a historical film shot entirely in sets.

17 August 1970, Pinewood: We started filming after months of preparation. The great white city is nearly complete on the lot and has become a tourist attraction. You could almost pay for it with visitors’ fees. It cost £97,000. The finish of the white machine bricks (rather than the stone of the drawings) was decided upon in the plaster-rooms where they have brick and stone moulds of every description. I had various sections painted with more usual brick colors — yellows and reds — but looked dowdy on the glittery surfaces. Today we take up the catafalque with its shrouded figures: the whole of the studios are devoted to us as we’re making most of the props and furniture as well. A few special pieces, amongst them the life size crucifixes of the nuns’ chapel, are being sculpted by Christopher Hobbs; the crucifix is from the Isenheim altar (in polystyrene with a gesso finish). We found an authentic sixteenth century brank, a skull mask made in limewood. It’s in fragments but we’re going to restore it for the burning sequence, for which Christopher is also making a half burnt Oliver Reed out of latex.

The bald nuns have caused quite a stir. At first they refused to have their hair cut off, but the producer bribed them with an offer of 150 pounds and two wigs each.

September 1970, Northwood: I just picked up the tail-end of a conversation between my parents, who are washing up in the kitchen having insisted on me leaving it to them. Whatever Dad had said, Ma replied, ‘I’m so glad our children haven’t grown up normal, they’re so much more interesting than their friends.’

Lunch with Max Adrian, which brightens up the day no end. I found him in bed with the lady who is covered with the most revolting plague sores, eating a sandwich lunch on set. He said why didn’t I join them, as she couldn’t go to the restaurant looking like that: it would put everyone quite off their food. Max sat at lunch today eating cherry pie surrounded by empty plates. When I asked him what the plates were for he said, ‘For the bones.’ He recalled that at his twenty-first birthday party his mother looked him up and down and said, ‘Max, you are really quite ugly but at least you’re clean.’

Work is a minefield: the courtiers came down to the set this morning with horrible plastic roses in their hair. I told them to take them out, which most of them did quite willingly— but alas I didn’t know that the designer’s powers do not stretch to hair and a dispute began which came within an hour’s breadth of stopping the film. The whole thing was conducted with the utmost pettiness. The extras can be as stubborn as mules. They insist on wearing watches, never take off their rings and carry newspapers around with them, which come out the moment Ken shouts ‘Cut!’

Rushes are like bingo. Each of us votes for his favourite — one, three, four or whatever. Ken sits at the back with the lighting cameraman, David Watkins, who usually gets his way. Watkins, who always wears plimsolls, reminds me of a bad-tempered sportsmaster. One expects him to take out a whistle and blow it. He doesn’t like me very much, probably because everyone calls me ‘the artist’ and the sets, rather than his lighting, are the continual topic of conversation.

Today, Charlton Heston was sitting in the projection-room — he has a hide like tanned leather.

Revolting afternoon at the plague pit: it is composed of dummies and extras made up as corpses. Ian laid in gallons of real blood from the abattoir — splashed all over the place, it attracted clouds of wasps which made it almost impossible to act dead. Ken, as usual, stormed around, the bodies shifting as a wasp flew too close even when the cameras were turning. Nothing was right; the blood was a disaster. In the end he made me bring bottles of ketchup from the kitchens, which made everything worse as the wasps preferred it to the real thing. There was a huge row this morning about the houses on the lot. I’d taken down some shutters without consulting Ken. He’d seen them at an early stage of the design, and was expecting them on the buildings. ‘I can’t trust you, I can’t trust you. In future you’ re going to bring me everything to be signed.’ He looked like the mad empress from some B movie — waving his cane, his long hair flowing, wearing a smock and enormous rings on every finger. He left the set shouting to the air, everyone looking at each other rather embarrassed. I quietly carried on and tried to ignore the whole affair.

October 1970, Pinewood: The wilder scenes in the film are fueled with champagne, which sometimes arrives with breakfast. In the cathedral Ken has a drum-kit
brought in and drums away loudly to whip up fervour. The set is closed, and there are wild rumours all over the studio about ‘orgies’.

I’m back at Bankside every night, exhausted, often as late as ten. I’m up at 5.30 to reach the set by 7.30. Ian Whittaker picks me up in his car, on Southwark Bridge, bleary-eyed at about six. I work most Saturdays and often Sunday. Life as I knew it has ceased to exist.

May-September 1970, Ladbroke Grove: Ken asked me what would most upset an English audience. Louis XIII dining al fresco, carelessly shooting peacocks on the lawn between courses. ‘Impossible,’ said Ken. ‘How would you do that?’ ‘Make some dummies, stand them on the lawn and detonate them. ‘No, you’d have to shoot real peacocks. It wouldn’t work otherwise.’

Later, this scene crept into the film in the garden at Pinewood. Ken dressed his Huguenot extras as blackbirds, which the king shot while nonchalantly talking to Richelieu. At one moment our Louis said campily, ‘Bye, bye blackbird.’ ‘Marvellous,’ said Ken. ‘What do you think of that, Derek?’

‘Oh I suppose it’s OK,’ I said half-heartedly. I didn’t want to be the kill-joy. The idea had transformed from the steely, vicious concentration of a scene from The White Devil to a farce. ‘Do it again,’ said Ken, and into the film it went. My sensibilities about what was appropriate were violated. A flip joke in a nasty little garden at Pinewood, instead of a great abstract topiary set with strutting peacocks. In a very dark mood I returned to Bankside.

December 1970, Pinewood: Ken and his camera crew were tempers frayed come the end of filming in December. When the day for the great detonation of the walls of Loudun arrived, when all the charges were laid and we were ready to go; Ken, who had been very moody, said, ‘I’m not having this fucked up’ and climbed on to the camera to film it himself. The signals that had been organized to let the explosives experts know we were rolling were primitive; and Ken, waving his arms in the argument around the camera, set the whole lot off. The camera stood idle, and as the dust and debris descended from the massive explosion everyone stood around dumbfounded. The next ten days were spent restoring the walls to get the shot.

Almost every waking moment of 1970 was spent working on The Devils. When I began in January I had no idea that a film of this size completely usurps your life. And by the time I emerged from Pinewood in December, the easy life of the sixties — designing and painting — had gone for ever. It was now impossible to pick up all the threads. Painting was the major victim: I continued it over the next ten years very sporadically. After the intense pressure under which a film is made, it seemed undemanding — and the isolation in which it was pursued, enervating. However, in the autumn the first of my own films took off with the help of Malcolm Leigh; to be followed by a whole series of Super 8s which gradually, without my realizing it, relocated my work. Although much of my time at Pinewood was spent in the constructions of sets, every now and then my presence on the set was necessary. In fact, Ken attempted to keep me there full-time; and I discovered (imperceptibly) how a feature film ran. There was no better director to learn from, as he would always take the adventurous path even at the expense of coherence.

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The 1990s may have been the golden era of the commentariat gravely asking in editorials and special reports, “How far is too far?” But so many of the films from that time seem deflated after losing the contexts they sprung from. Then there’s Crash. Unlike other transgressive movies of the era, David Cronenberg’s adaptation of the J.G. Ballard novel about the collision of sex drive with four-wheel drive has only grown in both esteem and prescience. In its own cold, metallic way, Crash continues to tell us about ourselves and where we’re going. Despite being a teenage Ballard obsessive, I hadn’t revisited Crash until last year and was stunned at the precision of the film, and the still intense sexual content. Emily Schultz had never seen it before, making this a perfect pick for Cinema Dirtbag.

As it turns out we both have very personal stories to share about Crash, including that time we almost got in a car accident with Cronenberg.

Brian J Davis: I am at an advantage here. You’ve never seen this film, and J.G. Ballard was for me probably what Tolkien was for you growing up. So ask me anything.

Emily Schultz: Let’s start with the basics. When you saw the film what was your reaction? Being a Ballard fan.

BJD: I didn’t like this film the first time! While watching it I couldn’t suppress the visuals of the novel in my mind. Ballard is not a very emotive writer, to say the least, but he was incredibly lucid and visual. Ballard himself thought this film was better than his novel and having seen this a couple of times in the last few years, I now agree. It’s stunning and the thesis of this movie is only getting more correct.

ES: I can see how you managed to have an in-theater “experience” with this movie — I mean it’s the first 10 minutes and we’ve seen three sex scenes and all these people talk about are their orgasms.

BJD: If you think your friends’ polycules are too much, be thankful they’re not crashing cars…yet.

ES: I’m quite shocked by this movie already. And by all that light traffic in Toronto.

BJD: Here’s Ballard’s point. In the early ’70s, he saw how technology and media was starting to alienate us from our bodies, and culturally he saw this in advertising: how cars and sex were being combined. Think of Helmut Newton’s infamous Citroën ad. The car crash as sexual climax was Ballard’s way to open everything up. The violence would break through the alienation.

ES: I remember the first time I understood that the word “sexy” actually referred to sex, the act. It was when I was 10 and saw an ad featuring a woman wearing leather on a motorcycle. It just clicked for me.

BJD: Maybe a couple of things clicked for you with that.

ES: Very true!

BJD: You shared, so I’ll share my story of getting it on in a theater during Crash. And I will do my best to protect the identity of the other person— they’re kind of famous now. First, this is the important part of the story: I was at my peak transgressive, more alternative-than-thou stage, but I brought the most normal person I knew to see Crash, and I do remember wondering, how is this going to go? We’re watching it and I’m like, I’m not connecting with the film but slowly I realize that Crash is, completely unexpectedly, driving my date into such a state that by the final reel way too much is happening in the theater, and it was definitely finished in the car afterwards and…wait for it…that was in the parking lot of a mall.

ES: You were still young though, like 19 or 20?

BJD: Don’t try to defend me.

ES: Where would you rank this with Cronenberg films?

BJD: Again, as I’ve revisited this movie it’s now up there with The Fly or Dead Ringers, and maybe his best. But what’s interesting is you would think this had been some long gestating passion project for Cronenberg, but he was relatively unaware of Ballard. It was really producer Jeremy Thomas’s project. And there is a great, idiosyncratic documentary out now that I recommend, The Storms of Jeremy Thomas. But both of them are absolute gear heads.

ES: Now let me tell our Cronenberg story. Okay, it was our last day of living in Toronto before moving to New York.

BJD: We were living in a warehouse across the street from Deluxe, the film lab.

ES: We were walking past the parking lot and I have to say, this was completely our fault because we probably were arguing about some travel detail, and not looking. Then this outrageous silver sports car—

BJD: I described it at the time as an Italian Batmobile.

ES: It stops just in time before hitting us. Like an inch from our shins. Thank God there’s a great driver. But we all look at each other, very Canadian and apologetically, and then I realize, that’s David Cronenberg in that car. The day I’m leaving Toronto and it’s David Cronenberg!

BJD: And I look at David Cronenberg and I swear he and I had the exact same thought at the exact same time, which was: Damn that would have been ironic because he/I directed the movie Crash.

ES: There’s a lot of realizations in the moment you’re about to be hit by a car. I know!

BJD: I do think that this is some of the best usage of 1990s Toronto in a film. The east side is still the east side, and all this concrete brutalist scenery is shot in North York. It’s all soulless expressways and towers. That Toronto turned out to be the perfect Ballard city.

ES: What I find interesting about James Spader and Holly Hunter, having been in the same accident and now meeting at the junkyard and being turned on, is this idea that your most traumatic experiences could emerge as a part of your sexuality. That is brave storytelling.

BJD: You’re absolutely right—that very contemporary idea is why this film has had a reputational rebound, because it continues to speak to us. It had its defenders at the time and won the Special Jury Prize at Cannes but the press, especially in the UK, loathed it and its US release was delayed by a year of just ratings battles.

ES: Where is Holly Hunter in her career at this point?

BJD: I believe she went right from Home for the Holidays with Robert Downey Jr., to Crash. And that, kids, is called range. Roger Ebert had the best compliment of Crash. He said it was as if an AI looked at our culture and determined we like cars and sex, and outputted this film for us. And that is down to Cronenberg’s obsessive detailing in this film and the way scenes are built so coldly and logically. This is not a verbal film; it could almost work as a silent film.

ES: So they’re joining this sort of underground club that recreates famous celebrity car accidents?

BJD: Just think of it as Crash Club.

ES: Got it.

BJD: I do wish there was more of this celebrity obsession material from the novel. Spoiler alert that Elias Koteas’s character dies in a crash…at the end of a movie called Crash. Grow up, people. But in the novel his character Vaughan dies while trying to crash into Elizabeth Taylor’s car and that was probably too high a legal bar for the film to suggest. Fair enough, but the ending does lose some conceptual power.

ES: Can we talk about Elias Koteas?

BJD: The Canadian De Niro.

ES: He’s great in Zodiac. But I think the first time I was aware of Elias Koteas was in Some Kind of Wonderful.

BJD: And he was in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles at the same time as being in early Atom Egoyan films. My favorite Koteas performance is as the DJ in Exotica. We should continue this “Toronto Ennui” series, and do that film next.

ES: I probably wouldn’t have been able to watch Crash in 1997. I was happier with, like, Go Fish. This part is really sinister: Spader is watching his wife’s car being crashed into by Koteas. It’s like a cuckolding with cars. And now they’re racing through Cherry Beach.

BJD: With wantonly displayed Ontario license plates. This film is openly Toronto…except for this scene. I know this only bothers me but the translight outside their condo set is totally New York City.

ES: I’m too busy watching this extremely explicit sex. Actually, I’m almost starting to get bored with how much sex there’s been.

BJD: That’s part of it. The film wants to have the numbing effect of too much sensory input. But I also suspect that the next time I see you in a car you’re going to be revving the engine for an extra minute more than you need to.

ES: Should I tell my story about being hit by a car?

BJD: Yes and—I’m asking this merely because Crash is currently playing in front of us—was it sexy?

ES: It actually was bonding. I had been out with an ex-boyfriend, and we had discussed a lot of the things that had happened in our relationship. We were quite drunk and had completely come to peace about everything. We were crossing the street and a car was making a left-hand turn. We didn’t see him. The next thing I knew I was on the pavement looking at my friend and one of us asked, Did we just get hit by a car? We both blacked out on impact. The car hit me, and he blacked out on impact from the force with which I hit him.

BJD: Oh wow. And the driver of that car was Denis Villeneuve?

ES: No! It was a car of college kids. But the amazing thing is nothing happened to us! We were fine. We did go to the hospital and get x-rays. My knee hurt for a month but that was it.

BJD: I find it so interesting that your car accident had this emotional dimension to it. That’s not that far away from this film.

ES: It changed my life because I really took a serious career turn after. I remember right before the car hit us, we were talking about, of all things, Who was that Christian metal band that dressed in yellow and black?

BJD: Stryper!

ES: Right? And what if my final thought on Earth was something so stupid? So I started writing my first novel that month.

BJD: I think one of the magnificent things about the movie is the tone—it’s sustained from beginning to end. It’s almost if you’re watching the movie with a concussion, in terms of how slow and methodical it is. It’s a consistent wobbliness.

ES: Oh what just happened?

BJD: Vaughan crashed, off screen. Which was probably both a stylistic choice, and to save money. And again, one of the only flaws in an otherwise fantastic adaptation is that his ending in the film lacks the power it has in the novel.

ES: Now James Spader and his wife are chasing each other. Notice they never wear their seatbelts?

BJD: That’s kind of like going raw for them.

ES: Now he sent her car down a hill.

BJD: Consensually.

ES: One flaw with this final crash scene is this. Where are the dozens of Canadians trying to out-helpful each other?

BJD: James Spader hasn’t blinked for a whole minute while he’s seeing if his wife is dead or not. And it’s not concern, it’s excitement. That is some acting. And it’s very much Cronenberg’s ending—something that would be very difficult to convey in a novel.

ES: I do get this ending. When I got hit by that car, I suddenly had an awareness of death that I had not had before I was 27 years old.

BJD: So a traumatic experience can become part of you in a way not entirely negative?

ES: True, but I don’t think I needed to have sex after getting hit by a car.

BJD: Don’t knock it till you try it! Which is what I think the tagline of Crash should have been.

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I cut Ducks using the most recent Blu-ray edition of the series, and Adobe Premiere Pro. All footage comes from season one of HBO’s The Sopranos. Some foley and transitional music cues were added to patch the scenes together.

Black and white was both an aesthetic choice and a necessary one as the pilot episode has completely different cinematography than the rest of the season.

Of course, a go ham-fair use experiment like this would have the lifespan of an FBI informant on Youtube. But you can always share or download Ducks from Vimeo here.

We’ll be back in September with weekly content including film commentaries, author interviews, and more!

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During FIFA Women’s World Cup of 2023 Emily Schultz and I watched two of the most intense films about soccer: Alan Clarke’s The Firm from 1989 and The Damned United from 2009. Here’s a replay of that post, though in retrospect we also want to recommend, as a chaser to these profiles in psychopathy, the nicest film about soccer: Bill Forsyth’s Gregory’s Girl.

Alan Clarke’s final film, The Firm (1989) is a sustained 90-minute heart attack of class resentment and knife violence. Gary Oldman plays Bex, a football hooligan and real estate agent navigating his double life in yuppie-ascendent Britain. In Clarke’s Elephant—his most known film—he used the poetry of the Steadicam to implicate the viewer in a relentless murder tour of Belfast during the Troubles. In The Firm he uses it to sync our pulse rates with Bex as he sprints from failed rumbles and Stanley knife slashes with other aging football gangs, to a final breakdown with his wife, played by Oldman’s then real-life partner Lesley Manville. Not much of it is about the game itself, and that’s the point.

The Damned United (2009) is a graceful and gritty adaptation of the novel by David Peace that details the 44 days of Brian Clough as failed manager of Leeds United, the most feared British team of 1974. Michael Sheen has a blast with the dogged and aggravatingly confident Clough while screenwriter Peter Morgan reaches the peak of his historical theatre-stylings that began with The Queen.

Both films are about love—point of fact, The Firm opens with “That’s Amore!” over images of vandalism and window smashing. But it’s obsessive, corrosive love that hides just under fandom’s tear-streaked face.

We’re in the New York, so we’re calling it soccer for most of our discussion, excepting for quotes and specific references. Please don’t jump us in the car park after.

BRIAN J DAVIS: Emily, you’re coming into this commentary recording right from having played your best game of the year?

EMILY SCHULTZ: It should have been 2–0. But we won at 2–1. I really don’t enjoy The Firm, by the way. Technically, it’s masterful, but the violence is so…first personal.

BJD: It’s true. When we first watched this, you were watching through your hands and asking things like, “Is the baby okay?”

ES: It really is the filmmaking. It’s so intense.

BJD: I now understand sports through you. I never in my life got it before. And I enjoy watching soccer with you. I enjoy it until they pan to the fans and I see flags painted on faces and I cringe so much.

ES: You like sports but not fandom?

BJD: I love the drama of sports but something strange happens in the stands. And here’s our first look at young Jay Simpson, who you may know as Foz from Peep Show, or Rod Senseless in Black Mirror.

ES: Is that it for actual soccer in the film?

BJD: That’s it. It’s all knife crime from here on in! And that’s the point. That these gangs ruined the game in the ’70s and ’80s.

ES: I relate to the game. I do not relate to these….

BJD: Yobs? Bootboys? Shitmunchers?

ES: I’ll bring the soccer. You bring the British.

BJD: I’ll use this moment to explain the absolute shallow depth of my connection to the United Kingdom. When I was twenty, I had dropped out of art school — please sit with that for a moment.

ES: Quite the accomplishment.

BJD: Thank you, it gets even more shameful. And after a year of me doing nothing, my family was concerned, and my brother was living in Brixton then, so they borrowed money from my grandmother to send me to the UK so I could “find my roots.” And that wasn’t the best thing for me at the time, because apparently my roots included: getting tossed out of a party at the ICA, then throwing up behind one of the lions in Trafalgar Square and passing out. And I remember this giant of a man, maybe not even a “bobby,” it could have just been someone who wanted to murder me asking, “By any chance are you an American?” And I mumbled, “Canadian” to which he replied, “Jolly good. Carry on.”

ES: That didn’t happen!

BJD: Totally did! We have to talk about the filmmaking. This is what Alan Clarke did so well. Like Elephant, it’s immersive trauma.

ES: He’s very much, How about a cup of tea and some trauma, love?

BJD: It’s so focused though.

ES: It’s honing in on one character, Bex (Gary Oldman), at one particular point in his life.

BJD: As he makes horrible decisions. And this is really what was happening then with football gangs. They were taking on the vestments of yuppies, taking middle-class jobs.

ES: But like functional alcoholics going on a bender over the weekend?

BJD: Exactly.

ES: Sorry I have to stretch.

[Break for Emily to stretch her soccer injuries.]

BJD: This is my favorite Gary Oldman performance of all time, by the way.

ES: He’s great, but this character is so loathsome.

BJD: This is what I was left with the last time I watched this. Here you have working class gangs with their own shadow leagues—local and even international—and their own celebrity captains. It’s their way of clawing power back from the submissiveness of fandom. They’ve made themselves stars and negated the game.

ES: What we would now call toxic fandom?

BJD: One of the things England is actually good at is subcultures.

ES: You learned some things passed out in your own sick in Trafalgar Square! It was good for you.

BJD: Here’s the most chilling scene. Bex lives two blocks from his parents still. He’s in a very small world. And in his childhood room, full of football posters still, he has his weapon stash of knives, and axes and then he practices!

ES: I love this scene. It’s almost novelistic in how alone we are with him.

BJD: This is one of the most terrifying things I could think of: Gary Oldman practicing beating someone with a telescoping baton. Imagine seeing that face right before you die.

ES: Wait, where is this actor from?

BJD: Nick Dunning from The Tudors! Literally every co-star in this film went on to The Tudors, The Crown, or Game of Thrones.

ES: I have such a wife-connection with Lesley Manville. She is the only woman in this world of men and she just doesn’t want the football gang meeting to wake the baby up.

BJD: She carries a lot here as the only person with sense.

ES: The knife tattoo scene. I can’t watch. There are far too many blades in this film.

BJD: The rumble scene. This kitchen sink handheld approach is much more intense than any studio fight scene. You feel everything.

ES: I don’t like this part. [The youngest member of the gang has his face slashed.]

BJD: And the fact that the rival gang look like members of an over-the-hill New Romantic band makes it so much scarier. Like, they should be singing “Don’t You Want Me” in a Dorset pub instead of doing this.

ES: I’m so glad they don’t show the revenge face slash scene. And to be honest, they do cut away from the worst throughout.

BJD: It’s that immersive Steadicam filmmaking. But yes, from here on in this feels like a horror film, just in terms of dread.

ES: I understand anger. I don’t understand ritualized violence.

BJD: I think it goes back to this attempt at power. This is their revenge against the degradations of the class system. Bex’s life looks okay, but the reality is he’s in a terraced house and—oh shit, no, no, not the scene of the baby finding the Stanley knife! I’m looking away.

ES: Goddammit, I saw it!

BJD: They’re back from the hospital and now the great Lesley Manville scene. She just slaps the shit out of Gary Oldman while shouting, MY baby! MY baby! Like she’s firing him from parenthood itself.

ES: No one fights on screen better than actual couples. Now he’s at his parents and this scene got to me as well. You want his parents to tell him to cut this shit out but…

BJD: His father is helping him plan what will be his final fight! It’s multi-generational. And now he confronts his nemesis Phil Davis, who would later be a teacher in the magnificent and underrated Notes On a Scandal.

ES: The first time I saw this I did not see this ending coming.

BJD: Here’s the kicker. No pun intended. The film switches to mockumentary and during the interviews his gang declares Bex a martyr. I seriously thought that it was going end like Cannibal Holocaust, where the camera crew-within the film are torn apart.

ES: Really?

BJD: I mean, it is a pub full of drunk men chanting “England!” while wearing Union Jack shorts. Nationalism is not only evil and infectious, but also utterly ridiculous.

ES: This is such a well-made, well-acted movie…I still don’t enjoy it.

BJD: Going from that, to The Damned United, which we just started, I want to say the United Kingdom, maybe, just maybe, takes football a little too seriously. Probably to the detriment of their mental health.

ES: And it opens with a title card: The nation is in trauma after having failed to qualify for the World Cup. Hope that doesn’t happen to us this week! [Ed. note: The US Women’s team failed to advance to finals, setting off Emma Haye’s dramatic turnaround of the team.]

BJD: Since this is a biopic, technically, let’s circle back to that for a second. The way to do it is to take the “make shit up” route. Like this movie.

ES: It’s so much better to be able to write that way.

BJD: You don’t get a lot of protagonists named Brian in films.

ES: Were you named after Brian’s Song?

BJD: I was absolutely named after Brian’s Song.

ES: Why aren’t we watching that?

BJD: It’s terrible. And The Damned United is key for me understanding you and sports. Brian Clough really believes in sportsmanship and the beauty of the game and teamwork, and believes that’s what wins at the end of the day. That’s you! You are just like that.

ES: I won the sportsmanship trophy in high school.

BJD: Of course you did! This movie is also Moby Dick set in British football. Man gets obsessed with white whale—taking over Leeds— and is dragged down by it.

ES: He comes off as a bit of a cock during this first act. But that changes once we flashback and see his journey from the bottom division.

BJD: This is the beginning of Brian Clough’s psychic wound. They’re a bottom ranked team and they’re playing Leeds United, the top ranked. And the Leeds manager, Don Revie, snubs him, thereby setting a years-long resentment in motion.

ES: We were the bottom ranked team tonight and beat the top ranked.

BJD: And what was the score again? Tell us!

ES: Should’ve been 2–0.

BJD: His downfall with managing Leeds was his obsession with Don Revie. Nemesis is such a classic story device. It shouldn’t be slept on! And this nemesis started out as a love object.

ES: He’s leaving fresh oranges for the visiting team and polished wine glasses for the manager. It’s date planning. For a man who won’t pay any attention to him!

BJD: Without getting too esoteric, I think obsession ends up taking us away from the thing we love.

ES: I’d completely agree with that. Wow. Look at Brian Clough’s playing. Damn, those legs!

BJD: Are you exclaiming about Michael Sheen’s legs and ball play?

ES: Going to be honest. They’re very: nice to see you!

BJD: He’s trying to change how Leeds plays and again this so you. He hates cheating and so do you. I think it actually breaks your heart.

ES: In soccer yes. I feel if you have skills, you don’t need to cheat. But in life…there is cheating involved.

BJD: Maybe that’s where you two differ. Every great character has a flaw and his is that he believes the world should think like him. He’s shocked that it doesn’t.

ES: Okay. I hate saying this. These men look a little too old for professional soccer. Maybe it’s the chain-smoking.

BJD: They were an aging team, and it is the ’70s in Britain. Self-care was basically Dunhills and Chivas Regal. I like that they give us the final grim score just as they’re screaming and fist-pumping on their way out to the field. It’s hilarious.

ES: And it’s cheap. They don’t have to show the game and crowds.

BJD: There’s nothing scarier than when the coach gets quiet, is there? He looks so unhinged and it’s so great for Michael Sheen to get to play such a nice guy/psychopath.

ES: When it comes to soccer it’s a fine line. Wait. They won. 2–1!

BJD: You just jumped up and fist-pumped like you’re watching a real game.

ES: I did! But you know I really enjoy playing much more than watching as a fan.

BJD: It’s the same with novelists. If reading other writers was a prerequisite for the job, a lot of writers would be in trouble!

ES: New topic! He just told his team to smile more. Telling people to smile does not go over well.

BJD: Especially with people from Leeds.

ES: This is really a love story between him and two men. His assistant coach is almost his first partner and Don Revie and Leeds—

BJD: His new one! I think what makes for an unhappy relationship is simply that someone chose the wrong person. This also reminds me that this is the third Timothy Spall film we’ve seen this month.

ES: We really should do the Dream Demon/Spencer double bill.

BJD: Brian Clough! This is a biopic sin. Calling the character by his full name, constantly.

ES: And in the third person.

BJD: He has the egomaniac tendencies towards that. But there’s even other characters saying things like, I have advice for you, Brian Clough.

ES: He doesn’t change in this film. I do kind of like that and that’s a very novelistic thing.

BJD: He never stops shooting his mouth off. He just refines it. And we haven’t mentioned it yet but this is a well-crafted film. Everything’s spot on for recreating the 1970s. And the cinematography is the right kind of good looking: smoky and handsome.

ES: He can’t let go of Don Revie. He’s reading about him on the beach in Brighton. I wish he had a social media blocker to use.

BJD: When you’re starting your career it’s so easy to think you have this one special nemesis, and you don’t realize you in fact have many. You have nemesi.

ES: It’s more that it’s easy to think there’s no room for you if other people are already in those positions.

BJD: That’s a very polite way of saying I would murder my rival.

ES: Oh my God. He states his own full name while being fired! Brian Howard Clough. He one-ups biopics.

BJD: Take this scene at BBC Leeds where he’s booked to be interviewed the day he’s fired and they secretly bring on Don Revie to be interviewed beside him. This is the one thing I thought could never be historically accurate and I even said out loud. Come on! And it one hundred percent happened.

ES: This is an on-air slide tackle he’s about to experience!

BJD: What would you score these two films in a game?

ES: I don’t know. This one is the easier watch, but The Firm is such a ferocious character study, even if I watched it through my fingers.

BJD: How about 1–1?

ES: 2–1. Because The Firm would definitely cheat.

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Crust punk. Rave twink. Middle-aged Substacker. I have more identities to answer for in my life than Bob Dylan does. Yet around Y2K I was mostly pretending to be an adult—that stage you do right after your teen years that also allows space for the next generation to be stupid. That means I missed out on the worlds of nü metal and its hip-hop cousin, Eminem.

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When writer Peter York first published Dictator Style in 2005 there was no way he could have predicted this look’s American revival in 2024. And there is a cheekily elegiac tone to his book, as if to say there was a sunsetting of dictatorship culture. After opening with a quote of “In Every Dream Home A Heartache” York points out the then-dominant billionaire taste was “the dressed down wooden beams of new Silicon Valley money.” At the time, no one rich and all-powerful wanted to actually look it. Fast forward a few election cycles.

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Madonna is back and she’s releasing a new album this summer, Confessions 2. Much like Madonna, we’re relaunching too, and while Medium Cool is under renovations we wanted to re-post one of our wildest talks on Cinema Dirtbag, when we worked our way through Madonna’s 1990s filmography.

For our generation, talking about Madonna is like early humans discussing the Sun. It’s going to involve a lot of gesturing and pointing at something we don’t quite understand but regard as lifegiving, albeit in a terrifying way. Especially as Emily and Madonna are homegirls—Madonna’s family being from Pontiac, Michigan and Emily’s being from Berkley, a mere 20 miles away. That’s why we thought doing a 1990s Madonna movie installment of this column would result in a passionate conversation between myself and Emily. It eventually did, but only after spending three months struggling to land on a film good enough to talk about. We were reminded that cinema was the one media Madonna could never quite conquer as a lead actress. It seemed a matter of bad timing and chronic miscasting, combined with a backlash from the pearl clutchers of the Clinton era who were pushed over the edge by her brand masterpiece, Sex.

As it turns out, Madonna’s greatest performance was a version of herself in the 1991 tour documentary, Truth or Dare. Countless celebrities, from Bob Dylan to Taylor Swift, have attempted to frame their own narrative through self-produced documentaries, but it’s never been as quotable, filthy, and fun as when Madonna did it.

BRIAN J DAVIS: Should we give a warning to all the new subscribers from your popular essay? That usually on Medium Cool we’re doing things like talking about Madonna for two hours?

EMILY SCHULTZ: I think people like both Madonna and abortion rights!

BJD: Madonna was probably your last pop star. Right before you got all very serious.

ES: I was already very serious by the time this movie came out. I was moving into my depressing music era.

BJD: I don’t think there would have been Riot Grrrl in the 1990s without Madonna in the 1980s.

ES: Hmm. Keep going.

BJD: The part of Riot Grrrl and Madonna that’s shared is that they’re both about the revolutionary power of the brat—and way before anyone else tried. They both present teenage-centric feminisms.

ES: I mean at age 13 my friend Kristy was the one of us that was big into Madonna and because of Madonna, and especially True Blue, we had conversations about abortion where she had views that surprised me that then opened my mind. We had conversations about sexuality, the fact that Madonna thought it was okay to be queer. True Blue was actually the first album I ever bought.

BJD: I didn’t realize Madonna’s genius until the 1990s. I disliked 1980s Madonna, and it’s not because I was a tiny punk snob. I loved pop music too—I did do Belinda Carlisle drag for lip syncing at school.

ES: I’m sure you knew every word.

BJD: That the Go-Gos wrote themselves! Okay, I guess I was a tiny snob. But it was around Like a Prayer that Madonna started changing how she worked. She was sort of pulling a Bowie by doing his hustle of Victorian collecting of different subcultures. Here’s some alternative hip-hop. Here’s some ballroom culture. And it’s all going through the Madonna-mill. That made her incredibly successful, and artistically successful as well. There is nothing better than “Like a Prayer.” But it also opened her up to the criticism that stuck with her: the queen of appropriation.

ES: That drove many, many cultural studies classroom discussions at the time.

BJD: Let’s restate our mission to find a good Madonna film. What I’ve realized after we gave up is that quite simply the universe said to Madonna Louise Ciccone of Pontiac, Michigan: You’re going to be successful at most everything in life…except film. Stay away from film and you’ll be fine. More than fine actually.

ES: I suppose we have to get Dangerous Game out of the way first.

BJD: Even though I loved most of Abel Ferrara’s berserk 1990s films, I had never seen Dangerous Game until last week. And I like the filmmaking of Dangerous Game—but I hate the ideas in the movie. It is truly an ugly film for its ideas.

ES: I hated every minute of it.

BJD: But at the same time, we both said… best Madonna performance ever?

ES: They put her through things that they should not have.

BJD: I think it’s fair to quote Madonna in full on Dangerous Game and leave it at that.

“You have control over your performance when the camera is going, but you can take that performance in the editing room and completely change the character. That’s what happened to me with Abel. Because it was an entirely different movie when I made it —it was such a great feminist statement and she was so victorious at the end…He took my words off me and turned me into a deaf mute, basically. When I saw the cut film, I was weeping. It was like someone punched me in the stomach. He turned it into Bad Director. He’s so far up Harvey Keitel’s ass, it had become a different movie. If I’d known that was the movie I was making, I would never have done it, and I was very honest with him about that. He really fucked me over.” —Madonna

BJD: So from the peak of Truth or Dare—which was the highest grossing documentary of the decade—to the Sex book and Dangerous Game, which was barely released, and then Body of Evidence, and League of Their Own—it was only 24 months!

ES: That’s insane. So peak Madonna was all in two years?

BJD: You know I have such a soft spot for 1990s erotic thrillers. Even the bad ones. Even Jade I can say nice things about. But Body of Evidence was like an erotic thriller written by an A.I. It’s not fun, and it was filmed in Portland. Portland!

ES: From the long tradition of Your honor, she killed him and the weapon was…her body! I think that’s just Madonna catching things at the end of the cycle, right?

BJD: Exactly. That’s the problem of being at the rarified level of pop culture. You’re going to be out-of-touch quicker than most people. Madonna makes an erotic thriller, but it’s at the end of the cycle, after all the good scripts are gone. She makes a violent indie movie, but it’s not with Tarantino. It’s with an actually insane director.

ES: But look how much fun she’s having in Truth or Dare.

BJD: I know the feeling of being able to say “This is our last night in fascist Toronto.”

ES: Now I’m trying to remember how explicit this simulated masturbation scene during “Like a Virgin” is.

BJD: Oh, there’s some reaching.

ES: I mean, is it any different from Mötley Crüe?

[Emily is genuinely impressed as the choreography progresses.]

BJD: I’m so thankful for being groomed by Madonna.

ES: I really do like this next part of the film, though. It’s her homecoming to Detroit. I might cry.

BJD: It’s the homeland. And this would be classic reality TV now, right? The constructed moment that is felt authentically, but is also completely contrived.

ES: Right, like her brother being there—Martin, the problem brother.

BJD: You worry about the sex scenes in your books and your family reading it. Madonna’s worried about her family. She’s just like you!

[Her stepmother complains about the intensity of the show.]

BJD: Oh my god, that is a Michigan mom. “It was just exhausting, the show. Just exhausting to watch it. It was like being stuck on the Lodge.”

ES: She didn’t say that last part!

BJD: I think this movie does capture Madonna as a person. She’s fucking hilarious, and filthy, and quite frankly a goofball.

ES: And that’s what I was going to say about Dangerous Game. The scenes where she was the best are where she’s actually being herself. Whereas the other roles she went after… I mean, Evita of all things?

BJD: It’s genuinely difficult for one of the most famous women in the world to disappear into a role. Good god, the high school best friend scene!

ES: This is pre-Facebook and Madonna has to literally deal with this woman, in person.

BJD: And this poor woman, this moment is probably the highlight of her life.

ES: Hey, she made it into the movie, with her kids, and she’s telling the story of her and Madonna’s friendship. This is such a wonderful setup where they’re interviewing them separately about what they remember.

BJD: And now she’s asking Madonna to be the godmother to the new child she’s pregnant with. And Madonna responds with such a perfect, see you next Tuesday-deflection. “That’s a very important decision so I’ll think about it. And my assistant has all your numbers.” This is how you do fame: brutal yet humane at the same time.

ES: She tells her she loves her, though.

BJD: I do believe it’s an authentic scene. I know we keep saying that this is the roots of reality TV. But there’s no reality TV as good as this movie.

ES: Okay, can we... Oh, my God, the mother’s grave montage.

BJD: “I wonder what she looks like now. Just a bunch of dust.” You know there’s such a naiveté about Madonna. She almost gets away with everything. So this is the famous scene where her then-boyfriend Warren Beatty warns her against doing this all on camera. He’s not wrong, per se.

ES: No, he is wrong! Because look what’s preserved. Magical moments that will never be again. Madonna in her youth, being sassy, having fun. And owning the room every single time. Now we have New York Pride in 1991.

BJD: It should be said that this documentary is so iconic that there is a documentary about this documentary, that follows the dancers and the effect the film had on their lives. And make no mistake, this is the real reason for the critical backlash against Madonna. From the right-wing, because she put scenes of New York Pride—of her dancers being out—in a wide release movie. Then you had the media getting a bit fancy with their stank and saying it’s all contrived nonsense. In between there are people who were like, to be honest I am a little freaked out by the Sex book.

ES: My friend Kristy saved up her babysitting money for weeks and bought Sex on her 18th birthday, the day she was legally allowed.

BJD: All right, what’s your favorite photo from the Sex book?

ES: You’re putting me on the spot. What’s yours?

BJD: Maybe the urinal photo? The Udo Kier sequence?

ES: I think there was one of her squeezing a bottle of sunscreen onto a woman and she’s holding it like it’s a penis.

BJD: Pop stars of this level do not take Madonna-sized risks anymore, let alone humping a rotating bed on stage.

ES: Wait, music on, please!

[Emily cranks the volume for “Holiday.”]

BJD: Okay, newly blonde Emily. Blonde versus brunette Madonna?

ES: It sets up a dichotomy of the authentic brunette Madonna who’s taking on serious material and compositions versus—

BJD: Oh shit, it’s the fellating-an-Evian bottle scene. I just noticed the waiter behind in the background just staring.

ES: How happy do you think Evian was with this scene?

BJD: Like, high-fiving across the board table happy. But I think we could have done without this ten-minute-long Fosse tribute ending.

ES: It’s a lot of theater kid energy. It’s getting pretty sappy here, actually. We might need to do some shit talking.

BJD: Okay, at the end of the day, did Madonna make a movie about how much her employees love and need her?

ES: They didn’t make it themselves, did they?

BJD: “Hey Madonna, we made this thing for you. It’s about how awesome it is to be around you. When we just want to sleep.”

ES: Ouch.

BJD: Oh, we’ve been way too nice to Madonna.

ES: We probably have.

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With producing work taking up my summer this will be the last Monday column until September, when we’ll also launch a Medium Cool revamp.

This spring I started a novel days after finishing a different novel. I know! I thought it was a strong concept, got a few chapters in, right around the deciding mark—which for me is fifty pages. Then I realized, “Wait, I feel like I’m watching a two-star movie on a flight. How am I not interested in my own story?”

There was nothing technically wrong with it, but there was a cardboard cutout feeling to my avatar who I had no connection with; she just felt, well… dull. In other words, I let myself get carried by the idea, and the idea wasn’t original enough.

If you let this kind of malaise stand it could affect the overall health of the work. At the risk of sounding cynical, every editor or producer has seen ten different versions, this month, of whatever you’re working on. Be that a novel, short story, or spec script. Thinking …

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You’re not crazy. The blurb industrial complex has gone into overdrive in the last few years and part of every book’s publicity plan is getting upwards of ten new blurbs if possible. This has meant pressure not only for those who ask for blurbage, but those who get asked. The tide may be turning but the pressure is still there. In my 15-year career I have accrued 10 pages of pull quotes, written by reviewers I don’t know from major publications around the world. Some of them are even complimentary. I also already have blurbs from absolute giants of both literature and the bestseller list, and I went through Preston Sturges–levels of striving and screwball comedy to get to them.

But there’ll always be the request: Nah, we’re going to need blurbs that mention this new book specifically.

So then I’m off to talk to the only people as awkward as I am: other writers. The sad thing is the quest for my own blurbs has started to take up the emotional space that I used…

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TV series and Marvel movies have lied to you. No one cares about a minor character. Your main character is your star and that star expects the best lines and most screen time, or in this case, page time.

A successful novel needs a POV in all meanings of the term. Your world needs an entrance point through a character, as well as the novelist having a voice of their own to make their writing stand out.

Putting aside linked short story collections, the sure sign of a weak novel is too many characters, diffuse action, and a wandering eye. This applies whether it’s a literary novel or a genre book and please know I speak from the experience of having written a 500-page historical novel with eight goddamn individual POVs. At the time I thought I wrote a “brilliant ensemble piece” but the truth is I wrote a novel without committing to who the book was really about.

But let’s look at someone who continues to get away with it… Agatha Christie. Don’t even think of the movies, because every adaptation cuts or amalgamates two or three characters from the novels. You can’t call any of her supporting characters deeply written, but they are acutely described and do the job of fulfilling a type. The real stars are always her detectives, whether that’s Miss Marple or Monsieur Poirot.

So how do you find who your star is and how do you treat them?

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If you’ve read this newsletter for a while you might know that we have a son named Henry, and Henry is autistic. Nothing has changed our creative lives like Henry has, but we generally don’t foreground that in our conversations or professional talks. We made the decision long ago to always try to put Henry’s voice first and make sure his struggles and hard work, going from nonverbal to speaking, mattered more than anything we experienced as parents. But as Henry has grown older, his agency has also grown. One of those ways has been through filmmaking, where he’s learned the tools of communication, storytelling, cooperation, and flexibility. (And the occasional star fit—also an important skill.)

Three years ago Brian came back from a two-week location shoot and Henry, then eleven, asked “Can I make a movie too?” We gave him a budget of $100 and a choice of neighborhood locations in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. He sat beside us and, with a few prompts, wrote script directions and suggested dialogue. Henry’s biggest inspiration was The Bad Guys book series, resulting in his own self-contained mythos, which is now at thirteen installments of freeform genre mashups. Like his inspiration, the Australian writer Aaron Blabey, Henry is aiming for twenty volumes. Perhaps not coincidentally, Henry and the Last Dinosaur 13: The Land Down Under is set in Australia. Though we filmed it in an old quarry in the Hudson Valley.

Early on, Henry began to build his life around film. (Wonder where he picked that up from?) Time had been a hard concept to grasp due to his autism and he used to hate it when we looked back at old photos. If we talked about the past, he would proclaim, “Back to the future now.” But writing down film release dates on the calendar for movies he wanted to see became his own understanding of how time works. Making films, and putting up with everything from our scheduling to waiting for batteries to charge, has taught him what time is: patience and effort.

While making his first films, dialogue was still difficult for Henry to perform and we had to help with voice over. Three years and many episodes later the budgets are still—mostly—$100, and filming days last about one hour of acting for him. But Henry is performing all his lines now and there is one more important milestone to this episode. This is the first script that Henry wrote completely—so we held back on adding notes like, “Are you sure you need another dinosaur battle?”

With the exception of a few improvised Australian beer jokes here, this is all Henry. We asked him for a message to the viewer, and he said: “Thank you! It’s awesome you’re watching my newest and latest release. I hope to see you again next time.”

He just came back to add, “Please subscribe to my channel” because he is our child.

Many thanks to Hannah Meyer, Olivia Jampol, Roberta Colindrez, Jennifer Makholm, and JD Davis for their help over the series.

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When A24 announced last month they were rebooting The Texas Chainsaw Massacre into several properties to be developed by Glen Powell, it came out in conversation that Emily Schultz had never seen Tobe Hooper’s 1974 film.

I think “film” is reductive here in describing Chainsaw. It’s more like Hooper weaponized experimental cinema and soundscapes to trap us in the worst day of anyone’s life, all to chronicle the downfall of the American dream. It’s an experiment in creating antimatter that has never been replicated. When Emily suggested Chainsaw as a Cinema Dirtbag commentary, I demurred. I thought maybe Emily was a better person for having never seen it. Then I watched Chain Reactions, a fascinating documentary that interviews superfans Patton Oswalt, Karyn Kusama, Takashi Miike, Stephen King, and critic Alexandra Heller-Nicholas— the film writer who has most altered my way of thinking about genre over the years.

Heller-Nicholas recalled the gatekeeping she experienced as a young girl, how boys thought she could never handle Chainsaw and when she did watch it she realized, “This is for me too.” Having now called myself out on the fact I was replicating that gatekeeping with Emily, I cued up a destroyed 35mm grind house scan of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. (One of the cooler special features of Dark Sky’s blu-ray of Chain Reactions.)

In the words of the film’s tagline, who will survive and what will be left of them? Read on to find out.

EMILY SCHULTZ: I should say that I did see the ending of Texas Chainsaw Massacre—I walked in on my brother watching it and he was like: This isn’t for you! And I was banished out of the room.

BRIAN J DAVIS: And that is exactly what Heller-Nicholas was talking about! It’s almost “This isn’t for you, Dewy” from Walk Hard. Now, the interesting thing is your novel Little Threats—can we do spoilers five years on?

ES: Sure.

BJD: It ends with a chainsaw accident! A sudden, shocking comeuppance by chainsaw if you will. And if I recall, this was never mentioned in any review!

ES: The only person who mentioned it was one of my ex-girlfriends! She liked it. She is also Australian. But I will say, I do think the imagery from that one brief glimpse at age ten stayed with me—enough to creep into my work.

BJD: I lucked out in that I didn’t see Texas Chainsaw Massacre until I was like, a solid fifteen. And I could actually appreciate the weird artistry of it and why Tobe Hooper was doing what he was doing. By fifteen, I’d seen Stan Brakhage movies from the library and taken out Edgard Varèse albums.

ES: I don’t think I saw Stan Brakhage movies until my late twenties.

BJD: These are just the facts of a Brian conversation—I’m going to drop shit like that. But Tobe Hooper was an underground hippie filmmaker in Austin. His film before this was called Eggshells and it is a beautiful, tedious, mix of James Broughton and Brakhage, set at a commune. And it was actually filmed in the same house as the nightmare family house in Chainsaw. I recommend watching it to see an almost mirror reverse film. But they wanted to make money, a PG horror movie that could play drive-ins.

ES: So it’s kind of like when we try to sell out. It goes bizarrely wrong?

BJD: Exactly. And they’re vegetarians also. And they think, “Wouldn’t it be funny if people were treated like cattle?”

ES: I imagine that humor doesn’t come through?

BJD: It does not. There’s not a lot of onscreen violence in it because they really were aiming for PG. The violence ended up in the filmmaking itself.

ES: And my impression, having not seen it, I always assumed that this was going to be the goriest movie there is.

BJD: So I wonder for you if this is going to be like how I didn’t see Citizen Kane until I was thirty-five?

ES: You didn’t. That’s right. I came from a black-and-white household.

BJD: And I realized there’s nothing in Citizen Kane that has not been picked to the bones.

ES: Oh, speaking of which, it’s a dug-up corpse. Well, this would have frightened me at the time.

BJD: Essentially what they did is they combined the story of Ed Gein with the Manson family, and ambient 1960s anger still lingering.

ES: Okay, this is an art movie.

BJD: Shots of solar storms, that atonal soundtrack. They’re getting at some Herzog-ian take on nature. That everything is chaos and terror or…maybe it’s just really sunny in Texas.

ES: This is going to be a talkie movie, is it?

BJD: All human communication and rationality will leave this film soon so ask your questions now.

ES: Okay, I’m getting ready for it. Oh, no.

[The Hitchhiker starts cutting his wrist and performs rituals in the van.]

BJD: Oh, you lived through the ’90s. In ’94, the Hitchhiker would have been an opening act in Lollapalooza. He would have had a spoken word album on Sub Pop.

ES: He’s gonna keep the picture in his mojo bag.

BJD: Being photographed is tantamount to being cursed, so therefore everyone in this movie is now cursed.

ES: Why did the Hitchhiker take such a disliking to Franklin in particular?

BJD: I think you just had a player-know-player moment. Why are insane people really attracted to you the most?

ES: Well, Franklin was the nice one making conversation with him. I feel like this could be a Flannery O’Connor short story.

BJD: Good catch. Like in a Flannery O’Connor story, there is a morality to this movie. Just not an easily recognizable one.

ES: Could you have a more obvious butt shot?

BJD: That’s not even the most famous butt shot in the movie.

ES: I just don’t understand why Franklin didn’t get out to wash off the cut.

BJD: Come on. We’ve toured a lot. Have you ever been to a gas station that makes you feel dirtier after using it?

ES: I forgot about Lodi, New Jersey.

BJD: As you can see, this is really a landscape movie. Like a Herzog or Terrence Malick film.

ES: It feels like it’s unfolding in real time. That’s adding to the immersion.

BJD: Time is how Tobe Hooper messes with us the most. Going from the pastoral pacing to well…we’ll get there. But as an adult, I see how bold a decision it was to have a disabled character in this movie. He’s experiencing a different movie than the rest are, and we’re feeling it.

ES: A built-in empathy?

BJD: I don’t want to ascribe empathy to this movie. I don’t think that’s one of the qualities! But I love Franklin. He’s the actor here who should have been a star.

ES: He’s starting to get paranoid about the symbols surrounding him.

BJD: He’s the only one reading the scene.

ES: You know, I have stopped at a farmer’s shed to get gas.

BJD: Like this hippie about to die?

ES: Yes. The guy that I was with, he was driving his mother’s vehicle, and the gas gauge wasn’t working properly, so we ran out of gas. And we had to go to a strange farmhouse.

BJD: And how’d that transaction go?

ES: Well, I just stayed in the car.

BJD: Smart!

ES: The tooth falling? Oh, that’s great. That’s creepy. They’re not going to get gas and then go see Macbeth like I did.

I’d much rather be traumatized by art than people. In fact, traumatizing myself with art over decades has taught me how to avoid being traumatized by people.

ES: I guess I’m not talking anymore.

BJD: I just was enjoying you being speechless during the scene. The first installation art murder set in film.

ES: Oh my God. Well, this is fucking terrifying.

BJD: They thought “As long as we don’t show much blood, we’ll get a PG rating.”

ES: They didn’t get a PG rating did they?

BJD: No, they did not.

ES: Not the guy who looks like Fred from Scooby-Doo! Before he goes into the house, he has to find something that will make him pause.

BJD: So I see the movie is now officially playing you like a piano…made of bones.

ES: I know! Even though I know exactly what will happen next I’m still “I really hope he doesn’t go into the house.”

BJD: I like to consider this movie from Leatherface’s perspective. As a few people have pointed out, it is a home invasion movie from his perspective and he’s just trying to survive. I think that’s part of the Flannery O’Connor vibe you’re picking up on.

ES: But he had that little feature wall with antlers drawing people in too.

BJD: Gunnar Hansen was the actor who played Leatherface. He was a local poet and really took the role seriously and he actually volunteered at a home for autistic adults to study their mannerisms. And the performance hits me a little different as an adult.

ES: As a parent now with some knowledge and understanding of autism, you can see that he’s playing it as if he’s dysregulated.

BJD: Exactly. And I accept that as part of the all-around discomfort of this film. Like you have to process the discomfort of watching this as a woman. But in most other films where it’s done lazily, it’s something I can’t stand anymore—the horror trope of the disabled child becoming a monster or killer.

ES: Was the idea of disability a discussion during the filmmaking?

BJD: I don’t think so. I think when you’re operating from a place of originality, things are going to happen, because you let them. We like to think there’s a grand plan to original, maverick art but it’s just that the people who made them were open to doing things differently.

ES: I have to ask you, since we’re watching a horror movie and she just ran away while her brother was getting cut up, what would you do? Would you run?

BJD: I think any Texan can see a chainsaw sticking out of someone and declare “Ain’t no intervention here.” Wait. Are you calling Sally “yeller” for running?

ES: I’m just saying, do you run towards the chainsaw or away from the chainsaw?

BJD: That’s the choice in life. Either you run towards the chainsaw or you run away from the chainsaw.

ES: So wait, she’s running to the house, not knowing what’s inside. So this is like the original slasher?

BJD: That’s debatable. I would say that Mario Bava’s Bay of Blood is the first. But this is definitely the first Final Girl.

ES: She’s got lots of pans in there though. I’m like, Get yourself a pan, girl.

BJD: See, you have the wisdom of fifty years of Final Girls to draw on. You read that frame in a primal second and said “Cast iron will kill. Check. Chili will scald an attacker. Check.”

ES: What is the radio saying…?

BJD: The radio throughout is nothing but murder news. Hooper is using every avant-garde technique, all of the senses, to alter our consciousness while watching. And of course a part of this was that there was terror in the production: 18-hour days, 90 degrees at night plus these hot tungsten film lights, in a house full of scavenged roadkill.

ES: Hear me out. Wouldn’t it be nice if he just tied her up, put her in a burlap sack to subdue her so that he can drive her out of here so that Leatherface doesn’t know that he’s got somebody in the truck with him?

BJD: Are you fantasizing about a happier ending? That’s the bargaining stage.

ES: Oh, is that the guy that they picked up? Wait, he’s not going to turn around and be a hero, is he?

BJD: No hope. Sorry.

ES: You had said earlier, quoting the critic, that boys would tell girls they couldn’t watch this movie. And that happened with my own brother. I kind of get that now during this dinner scene. The usual slasher films fall within my understanding of teenage horror movies. In this, you’re in a real nightmare. Which maybe you don’t want to know that feeling?

BJD: I kind of do. I’d much rather be traumatized by art than people. In fact, traumatizing myself with art over decades has taught me how to avoid being traumatized by people. Look, they’re bringing Grandpa down.

ES: Oh, that’s creepy. Everything in this movie is so creepy. Is she tied over top of another person?

BJD: She’s in an armchair made of arms. I’ve always likened this movie to that time I did PCP by mistake, thinking it was mescaline, but then I just kind of committed to it. Not an easy experience, but holy shit was it a trip.

ES: Oh, okay. Second window jump!

BJD: Admit it, if they did a third window crash it would have been hilarious. She’d be like, “Damn. I am good at jumping through glass windows.” But now, the artifice of filmmaking is coming back after that dinner scene.

ES: When I first walked in on the ending, I came in on that scene where Leatherface’s leg gets cut. And is that how this ends? She’s escaping in the back of truck, but now insane and he’s dancing with the chainsaw?

BJD: It’s a nice touch isn’t it?

ES: Holy shit. Just holy shit.

[After some processing time.]

ES: I would say it’s a very unique horror movie in that it does capture the psychotic violence that takes place in America that you’re always hoping you’ll never encounter. And I think that’s why I felt it so much at the end from her perspective, because this is your fucking nightmare. That you’re going to be captured, tortured and nearly killed, screaming in the back of a truck, being driven away after a night of terror. But let me ask, how was it to watch the movie with someone who hadn’t seen it before?

BJD: Exactly what I thought would happen happened. The film is kind of weird at first, and kind of stoner-ish and real-time, which let us make jokes with a false sense of security. And that would slowly fade away as the utter terror of the movie took over. So, hypothesis proven. Conclusion?

ES: Well, at least I can say I’ve now seen the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

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This Monday writing prompt is for paid subscribers. Paid subscribers can also book a one-on-one chat or Zoom with Emily, schedule permitting. Book it here.

Putting books aside for a moment, I also write scripts with my partner. Some are adaptations, some are originals. People ask me how does that literally work? As if they envision us side-by-side at the laptop like the Gershwin brothers with all hands on the keys.

The truth is most of the work is first done on a beat board—index cards taped to a board or wall to hash out the major beats. (Skip this step of screenwriting at your own peril.) We’ll drink Red Bulls, discuss, act out, argue, and move cards until we’re both happy enough to start writing. And the writing stage? It’s passed between us by the act. He takes the Final Draft file, then I take the Final Draft file and so on. That means there are days at a time we don’t know what the other is up to and that’s when things happen, as it did with an original script this week.

Emily: How is the draft going?

Brian: We’ll need a new final act.

Emily: Why?

Brian: The antagonist and protagonist became friends.

Emily: How?! They wanted to kill each other.

Brian: They started talking and they ended up getting along.

While writing a novel, it’s not that much different. The distinction is just the person you might be arguing about the next plot turn with is yourself.

I generally have two parts of myself when I’m at the computer: the part that wants to do everything as I envisioned it and take the straightest road to my destination, and the part that wants to rebel. She’s the one letting scenes run too long, dialogue get crazy, and the characters do things I didn’t mean for them to do! Both sides are important. The editorial taskmaster can’t win every time, or the book will be a drag—for the writer and the reader. There’s something to be said for letting the characters or the plot persuade you to take a twisty and even treacherous path once in a while. A novel without spontaneity can feel very, very dull. Like being on a guided tour for 300 pages.

You have a certain obligation, I think, to protect your work even from yourself—to guard its originality, and not allow yourself to dampen its spirit by chopping out all of the impulsive or curious moments.

This week…

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I think I fell into being a novelist because serial relationships have always kind of suited me. And the relationship with a novel you’re writing—six months to two years—has around the same lifespan.

We covered when to know your book is done, as in pencils down. But pros here know that’s only the start of a book’s life. There’ll be agent submissions, and agent edits, then publisher’s edits. And then hopefully publicity. That’s when it goes right, and it is still a lot of work. It’s easy to stay stuck in a novel, especially during the submission and edits stage—unready to move on. You can feel like you’re in a time loop of small changes and final touches.

But you have to keep writing, so when do you let your head turn and start working on that new thing? (And I know you nonfiction writers are staring at your slutty writing schedules packed with book proposals, articles, and pitches, and asking what’s the big deal? For fiction writers, it is different.)

One of the reasons novelists have to start right away on a new project is to avoid large gaps in our careers. Because of publishing’s still-seasonal schedule and the length of time it takes to set up a book deal and then get it out in the world, you really must keep writing. If you get caught up in promoting and haven’t started anything new, it’ll take you awhile to come back down to earth again, and get back to your regular life before you roll up your sleeves.

For me, with my new novel, this happened once I got agent notes back — and two final notes from my partner — that wound up being MSG for the whole book. A couple of hours of final touches and it felt like the book was ready. And the very next day I wrote the first fresh page for something completely different. Now, a single page isn’t a relationship of course. But you never know what it could become.

As an exercise…

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A lot of times we start writing with a big concept in mind rather than the details: the conflicts, nuances of a character or their story. That’s understandable. Concepts are exciting. But a concept can quickly put down its foot and say, “I’m the most important thing here.” And yet, a job or career is instant world-building and also puts your character in interaction with others.

Not only will your character’s chosen field free up your narrative space for other things, it’s something you can always come back to when you’re lost. What are your character’s actual life skills? Who do they tend to meet or cross paths with, and how can you use those to accelerate the plot?

This is far from nonnegotiable—sometimes you’re writing a character ungrounded in life—maybe their path is still uncertain. And yet a job can be easy shorthand for your character’s desires: thwarted, achieved, or otherwise.

That said there are possible downsides. Since writers do stick to what they know more often than not, the campus novel is well-covered territory. Likewise, giving your characters the job of “novelist” isn’t the flex you think it is after fifty years of postmodernism. To do either means you should try for a big swing. I already took “Campus novel but add a rabies-like virus.”

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