iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Ross Sutherland @imaginaryadvice.bsky.social · 23/11/2025

The fooking cops are fooking keen to fooking keep it fooking clean...

Ross Sutherland @imaginaryadvice.bsky.social · 14/11/2025

New #audiofiction this coming Monday: the upsettingly named LEAKER (sorry). A 60min story, presented as a lost VHS horror film, complete with fake trailers. [Subscribe to Imaginary Advice via yr usual podcatcher of choice]

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Ross Sutherland @imaginaryadvice.bsky.social · 01/09/2025

My Patreon podcast UNTITLED HORROR SCREENPLAY has a bumper new episode today. I'm looking into The Living Dream: films in which dream-world & real world have become inextricably entangled There's a long discussion of Jacob's Ladder, then in the second half I pitch a new movie idea in the same genre

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Ross Sutherland @imaginaryadvice.bsky.social · 14/07/2025

New episode of Imaginary Advice out today! Another anthology episode: two stories and an essay. It was originally called SHIP OF THESEUS but I've rewritten this thing so many times who knows what to call it anymore 🤡 on.soundcloud.com/sf5qGCd7p4vC...

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Ross Sutherland @imaginaryadvice.bsky.social · 13/05/2025

I am available for hire and my rates are extremely reasonable

Final Reckoning, last scene:
Ethan Hunt has been crucified.

QUIET EVIL GUY: At last, we won. We killed movies and started world war three. Hang on-

He removes Ethan's mask. Underneath, the face is his own.

QUIET EVIL GUY: The fuq. Then who am I?

Cut to: the real ETHAN, watching the scene through binoculars on a motorike.

ETHAN: (smiles) Temporary dialogue to be redubbed later.

FIN

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Ross Sutherland @imaginaryadvice.bsky.social · 25/04/2025

Pleased to announce my new #audiofiction miniseries THEY WILL / THEY WON'T is an official selection at Tribeca this year. Both parts will be hosted on my Imaginary Advice podcast. First part released May 12th. Then the concluding part comes out on Jun 9th, during the festival.

Cover art for THEY WILL / THEY WON'T. A wedding invite spattered with black ink. Written by Joe Dunthorne and Ross Sutherland

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Ross Sutherland @imaginaryadvice.bsky.social · 04/04/2025

For the past 4 months I've been developing horror film treatments for my Patreon-only podcast UNTITLED HORROR SCREENPLAY. Each treatment is loosely adapted from an existing one-location movie. For the next 30 days my Patreons can vote for which story I develop further... patreon.com/rossgsutherl...

Images from the following films: Twelve Angry Men, Last Year at Marienbad, The Exterminating Angel, Shiva Baby, Hands on a Hard Body, My Dinner With Andre

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Ross Sutherland @imaginaryadvice.bsky.social · 18/02/2025

My documentary INFINITE SCROLL is being repeated on Radio 4 tonight at 11:30pm. It's a story about sleepless nights, phone addiction & falling into infinite space. Perfect listening for lying wide-eyed in bed, having a nervous breakdown. Enjoy! www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p...

My hand holdong my phone, displaying the BBCs page for the documentary. The embedded image on the page is also my hand, holding a phone (which also displays my hand holding a phone, and so on, etc, all the way down)

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Ross Sutherland @imaginaryadvice.bsky.social · 17/02/2025

This always make me think of The Numskulls comic in The Beano

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Ross Sutherland @imaginaryadvice.bsky.social · 27/01/2025

Theres a bit of one of my poems on the wall of Peterborough Lido. If Gary Oldman blows a guy's head off in front of it I will be an AppleTV subscriber for life

Headline: "Plan to attract more TV and movie Productions to Peterborough- as Apple TV show Slow Horses, starring Gary Oldman, is set to film at Lido"

Me standing in front of a mural at the lido. The mural reads, "Blue is the colour we escape to / when we give up on the rest of the colours"

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Ross Sutherland @imaginaryadvice.bsky.social · 23/01/2025

Just discovered you can get a free ride out of a Hello Kitty Rock'Em car by switching it off & on at the plug & I think this might be my supervillain origin story

Scene of the crine: the Hello Kitty RockEm car.

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Ross Sutherland @imaginaryadvice.bsky.social · 19/01/2025

"Jay can I leave you in charge of the backdrop for our new Paddington bench display?" "Yep" "Great Just paint something vaguely Paddington-y. You know, something that adds a bit of additional story to the bench." "Yep" "Amazing. I'm off on holiday so can't wait to see what you've done when I return"

A Paddington statue on a bench, dwarfed by a 20ft mural of a horny giraffe face

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Ross Sutherland @imaginaryadvice.bsky.social · 13/01/2025

Yes I think black metal sounds right

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Ross Sutherland @imaginaryadvice.bsky.social · 13/01/2025

Just a heads-up that Swedish ultra-metal band Morbid are playing in London on the same night as a once-in-a-millenia planetary alignment. So be wary of fiends, hell-witches, portals to the abyss, etc, in the tufnell park area

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Ross Sutherland @imaginaryadvice.bsky.social · 14/12/2024

I made a TV Go Home text template so I could write my own Christmas Radio Times

7.00 RAT SANTA. Animation. A RAT discovered the long-dead remains of Father Christmas and decides to make a nest in the skull cavity. Voiced by David Walliams

7.45 CELEBRITY CARPARK INSPECTORS. Paddy McGuinness finds something extremely nasty in the lift of a multi-storey carpark in Paignton.

8.45 CHIMPS PLAYING MONOPOLY. Tinsel-festoomed privates run amok in the studio, shrieking through months stuffed with fake money.

10.45 FUCKING KILL ME. Christmas horror. Ten stars of reality TV descend on a nursing home. Musical guest: the tolling of the bell.

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Ross Sutherland @imaginaryadvice.bsky.social · 01/12/2024

On today’s episode of UNTITLED HORROR SCREENPLAY, I took three films set in a single location & re-developed their concepts into horror-movies: MY DINNER WITH ANDRE 1981), TWELVE ANGRY MEN (1957), and HANDS ON A HARDBODY (1997). To listen to the whole podcast series, join my Patreon (link in bio)

Andre Gregory looking intense in a still from the film My Dinner with Andre.

Still from the film Twelve Angry Men. The jurors sat around the deliberation table

Still from the documentary Hands on a Hardbody. Three contestants stood with their hands palm-down on a Nissan Hardbody looking bored AF

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Ross Sutherland @imaginaryadvice.bsky.social · 28/11/2024

Anyway this is the account. Not much I can do except tag @safety.bsky.app

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Ross Sutherland @imaginaryadvice.bsky.social · 28/11/2024

The award-winning novelist "Rose Tremain" sent me some weird DMs. Somehow I cant report the fake account cos it blocked me first, which feels like a bit of a design flaw.

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Ross Sutherland @imaginaryadvice.bsky.social · 18/11/2024

Chilling with my cat. Nature is healing

Shitty photo of my asshole cat who won't sit still and let me take one good photo of him FUCK I hate him I hate him so much

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Ross Sutherland @imaginaryadvice.bsky.social · 01/11/2024

31. THE MIDNIGHT HOUR (1985) Young LeVar Burton stars in this goofy made-for-TV horror comedy about a small New England town overrun by extremely low-budget makeup effects. That aside, it has a huge heart & the melancholy ending really got to me. A nostalgic ode to teen romance.

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Ross Sutherland @imaginaryadvice.bsky.social · 31/10/2024

30. NIGHT OF THE CREEPS (1986) Sorority House of the Dead. The film knows its fun to blow the heads off zombified jerk fratboys & absolutely delivers. Tom Atkins is having the time of his life.

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Ross Sutherland @imaginaryadvice.bsky.social · 29/10/2024

29. THE BOXERS OMEN (1983) Jodorowsky's Rocky. A boxer is forced to learn level 10 Bodhisattva magic in order to defeat a group of black magic sorcerers. Some of the craziest stuff I've ever seen on screen. A delirious decent into hell. Full film: youtu.be/B1e7rywL-lU?...

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Ross Sutherland @imaginaryadvice.bsky.social · 29/10/2024

28. EYES WITHOUT A FACE (1960) French classic. A plastic surgeon seeks to steal the faces of young women, attempting to create a perfect face-graft for his recently disfigured daughter. Even hidden behind a mask, it's an incredible performance by Édith Scob.

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Ross Sutherland @imaginaryadvice.bsky.social · 27/10/2024

27. LORD OF ILLUSIONS (1995) Its my birthday so I'm pulling out a bottle of something special: Clive Barker's twisty gross neo-noir about stage magicians & black magic cultists. Like Hellraiser/Nightbreed, there's such specificity to Barker's shadowy worlds. MVP = Famke Janssen, selling every scene.

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Ross Sutherland @imaginaryadvice.bsky.social · 26/10/2024

26. THE THIRD PART OF THE NIGHT (1970) First film by Andrzej Żuławski, set in occupied Poland during WW2. After his family are killed by Nazis, a man slowly loses his mind, lost in the backalleys of Krakov, surrounded by doppelgängers of the dead. A horrific death-dream.

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Ross Sutherland @imaginaryadvice.bsky.social · 25/10/2024

25. THE SHOUT (1978) John Hurt makes avant-garde music by recording bees in a bottle in his lovely Devon home. One day Alan Bates invites himself to dinner and claims he knows Aboriginal magic and can shout someone to death. Also features a beautiful young Tim Curry in cricket whites.

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Ross Sutherland @imaginaryadvice.bsky.social · 24/10/2024

24. VAMPIRE HUNTER D: BLOODLUST (2000) I'm an anime noob & have no knowledge of the Vampire Hunter D canon, nor any of its contemporaries. Still, I can confidently say: this film is the Chinatown of post-apocalyptic vampire hunter films. It fucking rocks.

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Ross Sutherland @imaginaryadvice.bsky.social · 23/10/2024

23. FASCINATION (1979) I try to do a Jean Rollin film every year. Theres always time for an unsettling conversation with a pair of lesbian vampires in a crumbling French château. I love the dreamy melancholy of these films. Also Brigitte Lahaie as a scythe-wielding maniac = hot.

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Ross Sutherland @imaginaryadvice.bsky.social · 22/10/2024

22. CHIME (2024) No one does inexplicable unsettling horror like Kiyoshi Kurosawa & I've missed it. Chime is set in a culinary school, surrounded by gleaming knives. Only 45mins long, but thats enough. [Annoyingly, only available via a Japanese trading site but worth the hassle] bit.ly/3UdGZfh

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Ross Sutherland @imaginaryadvice.bsky.social · 21/10/2024

21. IT'S ALIVE 3: ISLAND OF THE ALIVE (1987) Only Larry Cohen could pull off a horror series about monster killer babies & inject it with such humanity. This time, the babies have been dumped on a Hawaiian island. A traumatised father comes to their aid, w/ help from the cuban revolutionary army

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Ross Sutherland @imaginaryadvice.bsky.social · 20/10/2024

20. LET THE CORPSES TAN (2017) Crime film set over one scorchingly hot day on the island of Corsica. A hyperviolent assault on the senses, filled with endless epilepsy-inducing montages of body parts and bullet recoil. Feels like watching an extremely upsetting firework display

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Ross Sutherland @imaginaryadvice.bsky.social · 19/10/2024

19. FIVE DOLLS FOR AN AUGUST MOON (1970) "I like men, but I like them to be...alive". Another coked-out Agatha Christie island whodunnit from Mario Bava. I needed the Wiki open to track who-was-sleeping-with-who. Incomprehensible, horny. Edwige Fenech melts the screen, as always

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Ross Sutherland @imaginaryadvice.bsky.social · 18/10/2024

18. CALL OF CTHULU (2005) Lovecraft's famously "unadaptable" story gets turned into a 1920s-era silent film and incredibly, it works. Unspeakable horror becomes literally unspeakable. Film ends on the fictional island of R'lyeh, whose non-Euclidean geometry is rendered a la Cabinet of Dr Caligari

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Ross Sutherland @imaginaryadvice.bsky.social · 17/10/2024

17. GRABBERS (2012) Set on one of the beautiful Aran islands off the coast of Galway. A community discovers the only way to survive an infestation of bloodsucking tentacle monsters is to stay pissed at all times. The cast sells it 100%

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Ross Sutherland @imaginaryadvice.bsky.social · 16/10/2024

16. A BAY OF BLOOD (1971) Mario Bava does Crystal Lake. You get a crash zoom approx every ten seconds, 13 bodies, a classic Giallo pretzel plot & seven near-identical suspects (all middle-aged men in brown jackets) running around the woods in the night.

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Ross Sutherland @imaginaryadvice.bsky.social · 14/10/2024

OK, that's (finally) the end of Week 2. The search for a good scary house movie proved far more gruelling than expected. Time for a vacation I think, so for Week 3 I'm popping on the Jimmy Buffet & setting my clock to island time. Seven island horrors coming up...

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Ross Sutherland @imaginaryadvice.bsky.social · 13/10/2024

13. HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL (1959) After a rough week of house-hunting, I finally hit gold: William Castle's camp masterpiece, set in that bizarre Lloyd Wright house in Los Feliz. When Vincent Price looks directly into the camera & says "I wonder how it will end" = automatic five stars

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Ross Sutherland @imaginaryadvice.bsky.social · 12/10/2024

12. THE SILENT HOUSE (2010) Low budget one-shot from Guatemala. A young girl creeps around a house, inspecting weird shit and being stalked by something. Pretty tense, great set design & performances but the ending was extremely frustrating. Like, "it was all a dream" level bad.

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Ross Sutherland @imaginaryadvice.bsky.social · 11/10/2024

11. GRANDMOTHER'S HOUSE (1988) Uncle Leo from Seinfeld lives on a sun-dappled farm. There's a drugged woman locked in his fridge. An ominous / boring mystery unfolds. Feels like a dream where you're trying to cross a road but somehow never get there. Also, geese = libidinal violence

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Ross Sutherland @imaginaryadvice.bsky.social · 10/10/2024

10. MADHOUSE (1981) Having escaped a sanatorium, Julia's evil twin + her puppet rottweiler cause mayhem at the local deaf school. Film ends with 20 solid minutes of the murderer cackling nursery rhymes. Sigh. Riz Ortolani is here, ripping off his Cannibal Holocaust score. I guess thats something.

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Ross Sutherland @imaginaryadvice.bsky.social · 10/10/2024

9. THE LEGEND OF DOOM HOUSE (1971) Belgian gothic horror. Bed-bound Orson Welles traps his family in his labyrinthine mansion & forces them to act out scenes from Greek mythology or die mysteriously. Every frame looks like a painting by Jordaens. Beautiful but generally baffling

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Ross Sutherland @imaginaryadvice.bsky.social · 09/10/2024

8. THE HOUSE THAT SCREAMED (1969) Lili Palmer stars as the headmistress of a 19th century boarding school for troubled girls, who appear to be mysteriously vanishing. There is SO MUCH waiting around in the middle then the film explodes into insanity for the final minute

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Ross Sutherland @imaginaryadvice.bsky.social · 08/10/2024

Right: into week 2 of #31daysofhalloween. This week I'm watching HORROR FILMS WITH THE WORD "HOUSE" IN THE TITLE. I feel like I've already seen some of the more obvious ones in this category, so this will require some digging. Any recommendations re: haunted architecture, gratefully received

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Ross Sutherland @imaginaryadvice.bsky.social · 07/10/2024

7. THE VIRGIN SPRING (1960) Hard to imagine Bergman's filmography gets much darker than The Virgin Spring: a medieval rape revenge story that leaves every surviving character so traumatised with guilt that the sadness triggers a religious experience

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Ross Sutherland @imaginaryadvice.bsky.social · 06/10/2024

6. THELMA (2017) Probably one of the best films I've seen this year. Not really a horror film as it turns out, but is all the better for it. The generic horror film version of Thelma would be so cliched & naff. Hey maybe I don't like horror after all? God damn it why am I doing this to myself.

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Ross Sutherland @imaginaryadvice.bsky.social · 05/10/2024

5. GOOD BOY (2022) Like my last two watches, Good Boy is another "Horror of Manners". This time it's about going home with a posh lad & being too polite to react to his dog being a man in dog costume. It's played for discomfort over laughs, though after Speak No Evil everything feels like a comedy

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Ross Sutherland @imaginaryadvice.bsky.social · 04/10/2024

4. SPEAK NO EVIL(2022) You know something horrible is coming for this family from minute one. Almost every scene is an opportunity for them to escape their terrible end, but they never take it. Being too polite to prevent your own death is a pretty upsetting premise for a horror

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