iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Willow Catelyn Maclay @willowcatelyn.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

L'AVVENTURA (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960) I like a bit of everything in cinema, but the films that really make me think and feel are usually a little boring. They let you wander, rather than hold your hand. Feel the time, rather than dispose of it.

a still image from L'AVVENTURA of Monica Vitti at the water

3241

Willow Catelyn Maclay @willowcatelyn.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

A sample paragraph on my essay can be found here: My essay on HALLOWEEN 3: SEASON OF THE WITCH should be up on Monday or Tuesday. I love that one.

The trouble with the second Halloween film is that it takes place minutes after the conclusion of the first film, and that it had to look and feel like Carpenter’s original. Cinematographer Dean Cundey returned to shoot the film in the hopes that it would feel seamless. The connective tissue in the aesthetic through the familiar set-ups, choices of deep, shadowed lighting, and Michael’s place within, should make the film work exceptionally well in theory, but in practice, something is missing. The images look almost the same when comparing this film to the first one, but Carpenter’s forcefulness, his sense of play, and his ambiguity between the lines give sturdier meaning to every inch of the frame. He doesn’t call attention that meaning either. He assumes we’ll get it by watching and that it doesn’t need to be said out loud. Watching Halloween and Halloween II back to back really stresses the validity of the auteur theory in the case of some directors. Carpenter’s way of looking and presenting a myth is more dynamic because it can feel central. After watching Halloween, one might wonder how we ever got on as a society without it, until one realizes that the story was embedded in life already; think of the comparison that I made in the first piece to everyday experiences of women who know what it’s like to cross the street when getting bad vibes from someone following. The difference between reality and this artificial retelling of it involves the introduction of the camera, and when one is asked to look, they are culpable with who and what they are asked to identify with, and what they are being asked to see. This proposition is likely too intellectualized for Carpenter, who’d probably call it phoney-balooney. He often said he was just trying to do the job. He can get excited about how the camera moves as evidenced on his many director commentary tracks, but he doesn’t intellectualize why the camera moves this way or that. It has to move because there has to be im.

080

Willow Catelyn Maclay @willowcatelyn.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

MARNIE (Alfred Hitchcock, 1964) Its strangeness pierces through AH's usual clockwork precision. There's an unbridled, uncomfortable, raging thing boiling underneath. It is at once exceptionally problematic while also suggesting that we empathize. The rare Hitchcock film not designed for everyone.

$a still image from MARNIE of Hedren and Connery in fractured close up$

3172

Willow Catelyn Maclay @willowcatelyn.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

THE WIND (Victor Sjöström, 1928) The howling void

a still image of a pale white horse from THE WIND (1928)

1100

Willow Catelyn Maclay @willowcatelyn.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

KERMIT KERMIT KERMIT KERMIT KERMIT KERMIT

This is Kermit, god's favorite orange tuxedo cat as he crushes a duck plush while laying on top of a table

2834

Willow Catelyn Maclay @willowcatelyn.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

For my essay on HALLOWEEN, I looked at Carpenter's form, and how it does so much of the heavy lifting in cementing the legacy of Michael Myers as a cultural boogeyman. www.patreon.com/willowcately... Sample paragraph below:

Carpenter and co-screenwriter Debra Hill are more interested in the primal qualities of monstrosity—the ghost story, the campfire tale, the boogeyman—but it is more than a little ironic that Halloween begins with an homage to Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960). Powell’s film was one of the very first slasher films to consider the psychological ramifications of a murderer, and he used the camera as a vessel to evoke the voyeuristic impulses of an audience who had a growing desire for blood and guts. In the early 1960s, mainstream English-speaking horror films were still usually taking place inside of the castles and the crypts, but with stronger implications of dissection and desecration in the form of Hammer’s pseudo-blood-soaked re-imaginings of Dracula and Frankenstein. Powell had been a director of great class, and respect in England, but was blackballed for Peeping Tom, and it’s numerous P.O.V. shots that put the gaze of the camera directly behind the eyes of a serial killer. Carpenter does the same thing to open Halloween. On a quiet, fall night, Michael Myers walks around the perimeter of the family home, ventures inside, dons a clown mask, selects a kitchen knife, walks up the stairs, and promptly stabs his sister again and again and again. Through the purview of the camera, we can see that he doesn’t focus on the anguish of his sibling, but of the repeated gesture of the knife going up and down. His upper-class parents arrive home that evening, and find that their son has undergone a transformation into a monster. A crane shot follows that pulls away from the home, with mother, father and child, all frozen in position. Rob Zombie’s Halloween opens with an inversion of this same shot, but instead of moving away from the home, he ventures inside. His vision was granular, heavily detailed with psychological and emotional foundations and imbued with realism. Carpenter’s is no less detailed, but the gesture of the camera moving away from the home suggests a ...

2165

Willow Catelyn Maclay @willowcatelyn.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

My newest reader's choice poll is up, and contains a multitude of significant horror films that I've never written about before at length. Options include DON'T LOOK NOW, CURE, THE DEVILS, THE VANISHING and much more. www.patreon.com/willowcately...

a still image of DON'T LOOK NOW. The image is of a little blonde girl at the edge of a body of water. She's wearing a red leather coat, and her pastoral homefront can be seen in the wide frame.

161

Willow Catelyn Maclay @willowcatelyn.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

I wrote about EIGHT TAELS OF GOLD, and Mabel Cheung's extraordinary abilities to tell romantic stories. She's an unbelievable director and I hope she will be widely rediscovered someday. www.patreon.com/willowcately...

The organic quality seen in her pauses, her integration of characters within the space, and the accumulation of little moments building to a whole is also emblematic of the strengths in her romantic film Eight Taels of Gold. Some films feel as if they hold the entire world in the frame, because they are so lovingly detailed that our emotions feel as though they emanate from the characters. We’re right there with them. Cheung’s characters in these two films encounter the great swell of meaning that can be achieved through romance, and her characters grasp its greatest possibilities of fulfillment and heartbreak. This sometimes even occurs in the same scene. The great David Bordwell called the temperament of Hong Kong cinema, “an unabashed appeal to emotion.”, and I think about this movie when I read that phrase. Romantic films are usually prone to contrivances of separation and reintegration—those operas of want—and while Cheung’s films may seem like they contain those devices of conflict, she makes them seem quotidian. It is a very hard trick to pull off, but she does so with the elegance of a David Lean, whose Brief Encounter (1945), remains the model for all romantic films.

a still image from EIGHT TAELS OF GOLD of a young couple (a man and a woman) approaching an older man who is sitting by a tree.

2207

Willow Catelyn Maclay @willowcatelyn.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

CLEARCUT (Ryszard Bugajski, 1991) It is powered by bad history and things that movies rarely have the stomach to look at honestly. It is at once ethereal and brutal. Graham Greene gives one of the most gripping performances of the era. His sturdy masculinity recalls Mitchum. He goes very very deep

1190

Willow Catelyn Maclay @willowcatelyn.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Cheung's eye is exquisite, especially with the wider frame. Her films are both realistic and highly expressive. She has a way of making the quotidian seem magical and the magical seem quotidian. Her films swell with great emotion & she uses the contrivances of the romance in a way that feels refined

a still image from EIGHT TAELS OF GOLD. A wide frame of characters approaching a tree

a still image from EIGHT TAELS OF GOLD of Sammo Hung approaching Sylvia Chang at twilight

a still from EIGHT TAELS OF GOLD of Sylvia Chang skipping rocks into the water at night

a still image from EIGHT TAELS OF GOLD of Sylvia Chang framed in a windowsill

080

Willow Catelyn Maclay @willowcatelyn.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

PERSONAL SHOPPER (Olivier Assayass, 2016) I tend to be drawn to movies that deal with metaphysical topics. Movies that seem to take place inbetween states, that build and then rupture and then change. IRMA VEP is like this too, but I feel this one more deeply.

a still image from PERSONAL SHOPPER of shadows dancing on the wall

3230

Willow Catelyn Maclay @willowcatelyn.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

THE DEVILS (Ken Russell, 1971) It works as well as it does because Ken Russell actually believes he will go to hell for making the film. Real stakes. In this way, it is a true blasphemy that incidentally underlines the existence of God. The rosary scene in MULTIPLE MANIACS does the same thing.

a still image from THE DEVILS of nuns lined up in rows. Vanessa Redgrave is in the center of the frame and her head is tilted.

1554

Willow Catelyn Maclay @willowcatelyn.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

I wrote about RIVER'S EDGE. I've always thought RE was a spiritual sibling to TWIN PEAKS for the corpse that suddenly, shockingly makes the world strange, and for its teenagers without answers. It feels like it belongs to the 90s, but it only makes sense in the 80s. www.patreon.com/willowcately...

A still image from RIVER'S EDGE of the teenagers who do not know what to do about a corpse.

$The Replacements 1982 sophomore album “Stink” doesn’t open with the screeching sound of Bob Stinson’s aggressive live or die guitar playing, but with the shrill intercom of a Minneapolis police officer announcing over a telecom that the party is over, and no one has to get arrested if they do what he says. The beer-swilling bastards of young can be heard booing in the background, and this goes on for another thirty or forty seconds, until the song kicks into high gear. The song is called “Kids Don’t Follow”, and it’s a fist pumping guitar-driven car-crash of an anthem about growing up hard. It could be called punk rock, but it’s also fitted with an undercarriage of ugly beauty thanks to vocalist and lead singer Paul Westerberg’s poetic turns of phrase, “In my face, out my ear, kids won’t follow, what you’re sayin’, we can’t hear.”. The underground 80s—the stoners, the deadheads, and the kids who were having trouble—are not the pretty plastic people of the popular John Hughes films that have become shorthand for the yuppie decade. There had to be a heavy contrast for what those films suggested, and it had to emanate from somewhere displaced, forgotten, rotten, but true. The disconnects and fractures of the monoculture were apparent in that decade, and they were quite pronounced in the true-crime moral fable of River’s Edge. Director Richard Linklater called it a teen movie for the end of the world, and critic Roger Ebert asserted that it was the best true crime picture since In Cold Blood. Shot in Nowheresville, California, but looking a lot like the Pacific Northwest of Twin Peaks, and the stomping grounds of Soundgarden, Nirvana and Mudhoney, River’s Edge foreshadows the decade to come by being honest about the decay of the 80s. It opens with a pubescent boy, androgynous in denim, and with a Jane Fonda in Klute hair-cut, taking a doll belonging to his little sister and dropping it into a muddy, raging river. This symbolic image is the movie in miniature....$

2345

Willow Catelyn Maclay @willowcatelyn.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

It's a movie whose beauty is only matched by its disgust. The melodrama is pummeling, but it keeps fracturing in the mise-en-scene // mirroring her sense of self (and Fassbinder's identification w/ her) & for most of the film she seems so fragmented in the frame, too far away. can't be saved.

a still image from IN A YEAR OF 13 MOONS of a man and a woman in a hallway that keeps going on and on

a still image from IN A YEAR OF 13 MOONS. A wide frame of rectangular lines revealing at the back of the frame a trans woman in a visible vertical space

$an image from IN A YEAR OF 13 MOONS of lines, carved up, the right end of the frame a square, the rectangle on the left is thin, in the incoherent shape of the frame a trans woman stares up a mirror that appears fractured, but is not.$

0110

Willow Catelyn Maclay @willowcatelyn.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

IN A YEAR OF 13 MOONS (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1978) I sort of hate this movie, but it's a hate that I respect a great deal. It makes me deeply uncomfortable, because the shape of its pain is true and revealing. CASTRATION MOVIE 2 gives me that same itchy, uncomfortable, nauseated feeling.

a still image of Elvira in close up in IN A YEAR OF 13 MOONS

1130

Willow Catelyn Maclay @willowcatelyn.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

SHINING SEX (Jess Franco, 1977) A funny thing happens after you've seen too many films: Jess Franco starts to feel like the finest artist in the medium. I can only describe the phenomenon as akin to music listeners getting into free jazz or Captain Beefheart This is his UNDER THE SKIN. It rules

1272

Willow Catelyn Maclay @willowcatelyn.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

I tend to like the RESIDENT EVIL movies, and I liked this one too, but in a disposable sort of way. It's certainly one you'll want to see with an engaged crowd. www.patreon.com/willowcately...

There’s a tense action sequence in Resident Evil when the fuckboy protagonist Bryan (Austin Abrams) finally figures out how to use a pistol, and he uses the last bullet to great effect and he triumphantly shouts “video games!”. It’s meant to signal that at last video games and cinema have become bedfellows. The truth of the matter between video games and cinema is far murkier, and has a complex history of its own. The prevailing idea for decades has been that video game movies are routinely bad, and while this is essentially true, it is not entirely comprehensive either. There have been imaginative directors who brought their own spin to the source material of video games to great effect, including Paul W.S. Anderson’s numerous Resident Evil films. Anderson’s pictures were intelligent about the respawn mechanic in video games and showcased this through the heroine Alice (Mila Jovovich) and her increasingly fragmented and warped sense of identity. By the time of Resident Evil: Retribution and The Final Chapter they had become downright Oshii-ian in her search for closure around her identity as a woman, a hero, a program and a mother. Those films were not especially well regarded in gaming communities because they never directly addressed what it was like to play a Resident Evil game, and they were not especially interested in recreating the narratives of those games either. Anderson’s films were better regarded among modern genre fans who saw the idiosyncrasies of his work and analyzed them in the growing kineticism of the language of action movies alongside directors like Tony Scott and Michael Bay. The conflict, perhaps, between those who have been saying that director Zach Cregger has finally gotten a video game movie right, and those of us who have found things to admire in video game movies of the past, seems to come from a question of grammar: “Must a video game film look or behave like a video game?”. I’m inclined to say no.

1235

Willow Catelyn Maclay @willowcatelyn.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

I wrote about David Cronenberg's THE FLY for my reader's choice series. I compared it with Kafka's "The Metamorphosis", and how Cronenberg usually approaches stories of transformation and identity. This movie rules. www.patreon.com/willowcately...

In Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” Gregor, a young man, living a banal life as a travelling salesman spends a night at the family home in Prague, and wakes up the following morning having transformed into a very large beetle, probably of the scarab family. One might expect that the natural conclusion would be horror upon this realization, but Gregor situates into his new insect context with bemusement. He approaches the day like he would any other, and his internal monologue shows him thinking with some urgency about his need to catch the train for work. Meanwhile, he can’t seem to rock his hard-shell back with enough force to roll over so that his many wriggling insect legs can send him on his way. The horror is reserved almost exclusively for Gregor’s family, who react to their new insectoid houseguest with disgust and confusion. It is darkly humorous that they concede that this large bug must be their lovely Gregor, but they cannot entirely adjust to his new reality. Gregor’s younger teenage sister is the only member of their bourgeoisie family that tries to engender a sense of connection for their new reality when she leaves out various food scraps and moves the furniture around Gregor’s room to better accommodate the new facts of his mobility. Kafka does not induce a binary of strictly human-or-bug upon Gregor, and over the course of the novella there is an obfuscation that occurs between the stated realities that a bug or human life might imply. Gregor undergoes a series of miniature realizations and deaths to his identity without subsuming his humanity entirely. For example, he realizes that he cannot see very well out of the window that he once cherished, or that he now gets more pleasure from crawling up the wall and hanging from the ceiling, diminishing the burden of the heavily weighted-shelled back he now possesses.................

a still image from THE FLY of Geena Davis and Jeff Goldblum in bed with one another

2336

Willow Catelyn Maclay @willowcatelyn.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME (David Lynch, 1992) The image below is the film in miniature. Laura, frozen in fear, staring up at her father. Sarah looks on. There's no place like home.

an image from TWIN PEAKS FIRE WALK WITH ME

1536

Willow Catelyn Maclay @willowcatelyn.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

LET ME DIE A WOMAN (Doris Wishman, 1977) When I was a teenager this film was positioned alongside SALO, IN THE REALM OF THE SENSES and FACES OF DEATH as the hardest of the hardcore, and it's sort of funny that it earned that reputation because of vaginoplasty. Meanwhile, I'm watching it like "neat"

a still image from LET ME DIE A WOMAN of shocking newspaper headlines like TRANSEXUALS WANT BIRTH CERTIFICATES CHANGES

2231

Willow Catelyn Maclay @willowcatelyn.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

I wrote about THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER for my horror column. I feel as though this is one of the best pieces I have written this year. It is always an energizing experience to write about a film that I consider an all time great. www.patreon.com/willowcately...

a still image from The Night of the Hunter. Robert Mitchum is in silhouette in a bedroom with sharp angles pointing upward. It has both the feel and the temper of a sacred space, perhaps a church, perhaps a womb. Shelley Winters lay on the bed. He is about to do something bad to her

The Night of the Hunter’s legacy is intertwined with the Southern Gothic, and it may in fact be the primary film befitting the categorization, but when director Charles Laughton set out to make his feature directorial debut, the notion of the Southern Gothic was one that was unfamiliar to most audiences. Hunter is adapted from Davis Grubb’s 1953 novel of the same name, and the text is widely considered a modest example of a genre that contains such powerhouse writers as William Faulkner and Flannery O’Conner. It’s possible that Laughton may have been familiar with these titans of the South’s tortured conscious, because he initially sought out Tennessee-born writer James Agee to adapt the screenplay. Agee had previously found success with John Huston for The African Queen, but his prose for Hunter proved unwieldy. He turned in a 254 page behemoth that was reportedly magnificent, but it had to be trimmed down for the picture. Laughton eventually ended up ignoring the script and began carrying around the novel on-set, along with the Bible, which he was reading continuously at the time. Laughton’s position as a closeted gay man, but one who was fascinated by God and religion provokes ample contradictions in The Night of the Hunter; something like an intellectual who has convinced himself of the primacy of spirituality. The film is driven by a childlike wonder, and eager to indulge in fantastical fairy-tale imagery and morals, and he found the bedrock for Hunter’s gripping images of black and white silhouette, and light and shadow, by looking back to the heydey of silent film. A seance for the old language. During production, he sought out the films of D.W. Griffith in particular; a director whose own lineage with the American South is central and problematically racist. Laughton wanted to make a movie that would grab audiences by the collar and never let go. The trouble was that no one ever saw The Night of the Hunter when it eventually came out.....

219646

Willow Catelyn Maclay @willowcatelyn.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER (Charles Laughton, 1955) God fearing

a still from Night of the Hunter of Shelley Winters being ritualistically slaughtered in an expressionistic image that recalls the Church.

1262

Willow Catelyn Maclay @willowcatelyn.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

THE WOMAN IN BLACK (Herbert Wise, 1989) Give me a creaky gothic nightmare built entirely on chilling vibes and I am in heaven.

a still image of a woman in black floating on a lake from the movie THE WOMAN IN BLACK

2270

Willow Catelyn Maclay @willowcatelyn.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Coming up this month on my reader's choice series: a pair of classics from 1986 www.patreon.com/willowcately...

2262

Willow Catelyn Maclay @willowcatelyn.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

I love Avalon Fast and Jillian Frank's new film DRINKING AND DRIVING. It is having its New York premiere on September 6th as part of Musclefest ( @muscledistribution.bsky.social )at the Roxy Cinema. I encourage everyone to go I wrote about the film here: www.patreon.com/willowcately... (no paywall)

a still image from DRINKING AND DRIVING of two girls walking in a field, with their backs to the camera. The place is littered with motorhomes and cars. The evergreen forest is behind them and the sun is ringing off the frame in approaching sunset.

I find the films of Avalon Fast and Jillian Frank overwhelmingly emotional because they understand that life happens to us whether we want it to or not and we are often unprepared for it. The pair have been working together since they were in High School, and with Honeycomb and Camp, they created a language their own that they called “girl horror”. These films disappear into the rhythms of the girl groups that occupy the narrative, and straddle the line between low-budgeted realism and a fantastical reverie of shimmering possibilities. The films are often melancholic, but emanate on a complex wavelength, because they are driven by a nostalgic glow, even for times that were difficult. I find their work exciting because I struggle to think of a comparison point to another director from the past who made movies like they do. They’re modern in the best way, and in their newest film Drinking and Driving, they’ve captured a rural poem following two twenty-something women caught in the slipstream of suspended adolescence and dealing with isolation and intimacy in a small island town in B.C. While sunbathing by a creak-bed in the forest, Palmer (Fast) asks Iris (Frank) if she ever gets bored of hanging out with her, and Iris says no, but that it would be nice if they had other people like themselves around. They long for more, but they love each other. The line between attraction and close friendship is hazy, and it’s a queer story without being completely upfront about it. They don’t really have the language for how they feel, and even if they did, it remains disorienting for them. They behave like passengers to any given moment, and they let their days string together with too much drinking, casual drug usage, and the potentially bad decisions that most write off as a natural part of being in their twenties. --------------

2194

Willow Catelyn Maclay @willowcatelyn.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

Since this post is popular, I'm going to share my husband's ( @tjamesdobbin.bsky.social ) BUGS BUNNY series below. He's an animation scholar and everything that I've ever learned about animation is something that he taught me. strawberrypenguin.ca/the-bugs-bun...

032917

Willow Catelyn Maclay @willowcatelyn.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

We are looking at 1986 this month on my site!!! The latest poll to decide coverage is now live if you'd like to vote. 1986 kind of rules. THE FLY, A BETTER TOMORROW, PEKING OPERA BLUES, GOLDEN EIGHTIES, ALIENS, RIVER'S EDGE and so much more www.patreon.com/willowcately... (no paywall)

a sample image of Prince and Jerome Benton in under the Cherry Moon. Prince is in the bathtub.

091

Willow Catelyn Maclay @willowcatelyn.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

I wrote about BOUND for my reader's choice series. This essay is an expanded version of the ideas that I initially proposed in our book Corpses, Fools and Monsters, but with some newer thinking regarding the film & how it fits as a beacon for the New Trans Cinema. www.patreon.com/willowcately...

The modern trans filmmaker is often didactic due to their histories as viewers, cinephiles, and as political beings. There can be an unfair onus on these filmmakers to liberate an insidious history of negative trans film images in the mainstream by remixing them for their own purposes (Camp Miasma, T-Blockers), or a duty to comment on the ongoing political backlash facing trans people in many countries throughout the world (Castration Movie 2, T-Blockers). These patterns of interrogation resemble the way that gay filmmakers in the shadow of the AIDS crisis were similarly didactic and working through their own negative histories of onscreen depiction in Hollywood films. The truth of the matter is that Hollywood and Queer cinema will never rightly cohere, but the Hollywood machine can reveal fascinating things through the distinct languages of queer filmmakers who smuggle their ideas into the system. These filmmakers are not free from criticism if they fall short in some manner, or, god-forbid, if they are crucified for selling out their identities, but their status as queer filmmakers within that system may still create a valuable dissonance at a high-budget. Still, I cannot imagine how strange it must be to work under those circumstances, with the weight of an expectant and starved community of queer viewers imprinting their own needs and desires onto the art that a queer filmmaker wishes to make. The New Trans Cinema does not have much access to the Hollywood system, but these filmmakers at a micro-budget are still approaching their material with the weight of history and politics influencing the shape of narratives and their visual grammar. If there is one exception to the rule of the economically disadvantaged trans filmmaker, it is the Wachowski sisters, who worked for many years while closeted, and, in hindsight, were also grappling with histories of disreputable trans cinematics, while investigating the nature and meaning of becoming....

“The relationship that I have with the story [of Bound] really begins with me struggling with the depiction of people like me in media. I watched Psycho. I watched Dressed to Kill...,Sleepaway Camp, and just the endless films that are trans people as psycho killers, and chopping people up. And it really hit me the hardest with Silence of the Lambs...and Silence of the Lambs is made by an amazing, brilliant filmmaker [Jonathan Demme] and it has Jodie Foster and I love her so much, but the film just made me physically sick. I couldn’t even sit in the theater and I ran outside and I went to the bathroom. I’m crying in the bathroom, and I just sat there and I was trying to think of like one film that was set inside of a genre world where an LGBT character won and went off and lived happily ever after. And I’m sitting there racking my brain and I can’t think of one and then I was like...in this tiny, icky sticky bathroom I thought...I’ll make it.”
-Lana Wachowski, 2019

24212

Willow Catelyn Maclay @willowcatelyn.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

David Cronenberg seems to always bring out the best in me, and it is always a joy to come back to his work. I wrote about CRASH for my reader's choice series. It might be my favorite film of his. www.patreon.com/willowcately...

Prose stylist of the modern avant-garde, J.G. Ballard began writing “Crash” in 1969 after staging an exhibition of three wrecked automobiles at the New Arts Laboratory. These vehicles were presented without context in order to test his hypothesis that a repressed fascination lay behind conventional attitudes of technological death and violence. He believed that this fascination was obsessive, and must have contained a sexual charge. As an additional element to the exhibition, a topless woman interviewed visitors on a closed-circuit television broadcast, and the event reportedly devolved into barbaric drunken chaos. Ballard believed this was evidence enough to prove that his hypothesis was true. Ballard came back to the motor-vehicle as a source of truth throughout the years of the late 60s and well into the 70s, for essays that became the foundation of “The Atrocity Exhibition”, his collection of prose experiments in pursuit of a language of modern ills, and taboo excitements. In one essay, from 1971, “The Car is the Future”, Ballard wrote, “We spend a large part of our lives in the car, and the experience of driving involves many of the experiences of being a human being in the 1970s. The 20th century reaches almost its purest expression on the highway. Here we see, all too clearly, the speed and violence of our age.”. He goes on to call it a strange love affair with the machine, and, conceivably, with our own death and destruction. He suggests that if anyone actually feared the crash, then most of us would be unable to look at a car, let alone drive one. When David Cronenberg became interested in adapting another unfilmable source (he adapted William S. Burroughs’s “Naked Lunch” in 1991), he was warned by his agent at CAA that it would end his career. Cronenberg found a new agent, and went on to make what might be his greatest film.

a still image from David Cronenberg's CRASH of Rosanna Arquette in a backbrace, draped over the interior of a new car

16712

Willow Catelyn Maclay @willowcatelyn.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

i wrote about LET THE RIGHT ONE IN for my horror column. For this essay, I dove into the aesthetics of loneliness, and cold horror films, how they can feel very intimate, and how LTROI remains one of the best horror films from the late 00s. www.patreon.com/willowcately...

a still image of Oskar and Eli in LET THE RIGHT ONE IN.

Eli is first shown as a shadow on the monkey bars, illuminating her differences through a technique of disembodiment without calling attention to her status as a member of the undead. Oskar recognizes that she is uncanny, like he, a maladjusted loner, and they are receptive to each other’s malaise. Alfredson is careful and considerate when crafting the blossoming chemistry between Hedebrant and Leandersson. They are both soft-spoken performers who take to whispering, or gently touching. Eli is fascinated by Oskar’s puzzle device, and he tells her that she can borrow the Rubik’s cube if she wants. He has struggled with it, only managing to complete two sides of the cube, and when Eli begins to twist and turn the device, Oskar’s eyes float over Eli’s matted hair. It’s the exact moment that he falls in love with her. Oskar’s anguish feels as though it dissolves up and out of his body. With this single gesture, we see that he can bear the remoteness of this place, and of his soul, if he can find someone who will help carry the burden of time. Connection and understanding in the pre-adolescent mindset is a vital tool of exploitation in cold horror films such as Let the Right One In, The Curse of the Cat People, and The Sixth Sense. Parental figures are sometimes kept off-frame, or placed into the position as figures of misunderstanding, which ushers in a romantic, or found-family figure. It is the ghost of the shapeshifter Irena for the strange child in The Curse of the Cat People, the childhood psychologist in The Sixth Sense, and, in Let the Right One In, it is Eli. It is fascinating that all of these characters are, or were, monster character types like ghosts, vampires and beasts. It speaks to seeing oneself in the guise of an uncanny figure like Oskar does in the case of Eli. In this respect, Let the Right One In is not only a romance between two odd children, but also the lonely viewer with the apparatus of the horror film.

2447

Willow Catelyn Maclay @willowcatelyn.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

I am revisting some horror movies from the 2000s this months for my horror column. First up is REC. www.patreon.com/willowcately...

a still image from REC of lead character Angela standing in front of a chaotic scene inside of an apartment complex

2355

Willow Catelyn Maclay @willowcatelyn.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

I wrote about CAMP MIASMA, its playful eroticism, the trans killer in horror, Jane Schoebrun's intelligence in suggesting the spaces between fantasy and identity, and their preoccupations with a necrotic nostalgia for all things analog. www.patreon.com/willowcately... (no paywall)

a still image from Camp Miasma of two women embracing in a magical snowy forest. The texture is like Guy Maddin meets Lisa Frank

Jane Schoenbrun has become an easily recognizable figurehead of the New Trans Cinema, because they have focused so intently on creating a cinematic language of disassociation and dysphoria. Richard Brody called them a “poet of solitude”, but any trans viewer will tell you that the solitude of their prior films is born from a multitude of factors; brought on by feelings of discomfort in ones own identity they were assigned at birth, and the sociopolitical anxieties that breed ambient, and sometimes explicit forms of violence upon trans people. I Saw the TV Glow’s Owen (Justice Smith) is frozen for this reason, but because Schoenbrun obfuscates the touchstones of cliche trans narratives by filtering them in genre elements, their films can also be saying more than just what is easily understood by trans viewers who recognize the similarities between their characters and our lives. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is like this too, and is still driven by questions of bodily discomfort, while also alluding to the way that cinephilia can disorient queer people who take in bad images—like that of the transphobic serial killer—and find recognition due to a paucity of other images. Schoenbrun’s excellence has always been akin to a magic trick of serving two audiences at once: the trans viewer who picks up the coded language of their pictures, while also, at the same time, presenting a narrative that could be legible for an audience who is not trans. We saw so much writing about I Saw the TV Glow from cisgender critics who believed it was about the perils of nostalgia, and analog preoccupations, and many of those findings were true, but the trans response to the film was treated as an almost holy experience by many who had never encountered a film that spoke so deeply to their experiences before.

416342

Willow Catelyn Maclay @willowcatelyn.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

"Oblivion is freedom. Nothing lasts forever" -David Cronenberg, and our Printer

a still image of David Cronenberg at a press event. He doesn't look like he wants to be there

040

Willow Catelyn Maclay @willowcatelyn.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

I haven't liked a Refn film in quite a long time, but I loved HER PRIVATE HELL, and I tried to figure out why. The film is a fantasy of busted binaries, and characters whose sexuality, gender identity, kinks, and persona are in a state of symbolic impermanence. www.patreon.com/willowcately...

a still image of Sophie Thatcher in close-up in HER PRIVATE HELL. She is draped in heavy pink-blue-purple bisexual lighting

In Her Private Hell, Sophie Thatcher plays an actress and model named Elle, and her character is unusually fixated on her leather-clad father Johnny Thunders (Dougray Scott). She puts her arms around more than just her memories of her patriarch, and Freudian motifs-in-the-form-of-genre-pastiche examine the liminal undercarriage of a woman whose identity is less than concrete. Echoes of a prowling leather-man emanate from the fairy-tale mythology of the pink mist in the high-rise city. Tales of a strong, handsome phantom, in search of his lost daughter, is the favorite rumor of Elle, and her sorority of impossibly beautiful, and dead-pan model friends. Refn can be tacky, and obscene, dull, and meaningless, but the provocations of Her Private Hell are sticky and inviting. Her Private Hell came to Refn after a near-death experience, and the borderline of life and death in this movie is alluringly suggestive. The glass-towers and crackling diamond-speckled city-scape is a purgatory in its own right, and Elle wanders in and out like a strobe-light of a person, with her influencer friends, and they wonder when the Leatherman might come to rescue them from their own malaise. I’ve been cool to Refn for quite a while, but I found myself on the wavelength here—more willing to see it for what it was—something so fake it felt real. A director friend of mine was at the Fantasia Film Festival screening and informed me that Refn claimed he made the movie as both and neither gender, and the plastic elastic women and the grimdark macho hunks that preside over this film are so performative that it felt familiar. Drag, a series of poses, where gender was hazy, and I was being asked where my gaze fit into the blurry mayhem of this erotic giallo wonderland.

47917

Willow Catelyn Maclay @willowcatelyn.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

FURIOSA (George Miller, 2024) It's funny that I did not like this when I saw it in an IMAX with a raucous crowd. I was feeling hormonal & I was pissed off at everything, including the film. I rewatched it six months later and thought it ruled. Some Sergio Leone shit. ZARDOZ IN THE WASTELAND.

a very wide still image from FURIOSA of a ritual crucifixion. Lil Furiosa is being made to watch as they make a martyr of her mother

4594

Willow Catelyn Maclay @willowcatelyn.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

Newest reader's choice poll is up and we are going to be looking at 1996 this month. CRASH, BOUND, TRANSSEXUAL MENACE, THE BIRDCAGE, TRAINSPOTTING, and much more. Vote if you'd like! www.patreon.com/willowcately...

a still image of Rosanna Arquette in CRASH. She's lovingly draped over a car, in her braces and leather.

0131

Willow Catelyn Maclay @willowcatelyn.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

DER FAN (Eckhart Schmidt, 1982) The unnatural conclusion to images of British girls screaming and weeping over the Fab Four.

a still image from DER FAN of a teenage girl shoving her face into a mirror and kissing her reflection

180

Willow Catelyn Maclay @willowcatelyn.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

I wrote about THE ADOLESCENCE OF UTENA. I've loved this one for a long time. Some of the most pleasurable animation of the late 90s. www.patreon.com/willowcately...

$I became enamoured with the stylistic flourishes of Kunihiko Ikuhara when anime began to appear on Cartoon Network in the late 90s. I was drawn to the excessively feminine style of Naoko Takeuchi’s Sailor Moon. I wanted to live in that world of bold, primary pastel colors, and fashion-forward teenagers fighting off astrological nightmare demons inside of malls and high schools. It was like catnip for me, and Ikuhara was one of the primary creatives working on the anime. Ikuhara also directed my favorite of the eventual film adaptations. Sailor Moon R: The Movie – The Promise of the Rose is something of a precursor to the more experimental, but no less excessively feminine Revolutionary Girl Utena series that they eventually adapted for their own studio Be-Papas. Sailor Moon R: The Movie is awash in gardens, flowery symbology and suggestive queer coupling brought about by transformations. All of these factors are shared with the Utena series and movie, but the primary difference between Utena and Sailor Moon is that the beauty of the images can sometimes have a negative connotation in Utena. Utena is not beholden to adolescent fantasy, despite what its title suggests. The morbidity and potential dangers of growing up and learning who you are is centralized by the crushing rigidity of the shifting nightmare architecture of the Castle Ohtori Academy and the secrets it entails. Ikuhara said of the series and film, “In Utena, we wanted to express a negative beauty as well as positive beauty throughout”, and this is foregrounded in moments of deep psychological fracture and melancholy. The Adolescence of Utena is shaded in mystery, as if the creators are invested in hiding the most horrific truths that haunt these characters. On the surface, it’s about Utena, a pink-haired tomboy, who dresses in a boy’s uniform, and pulls a sword from the beating heart of her beloved Princess Anthy, and fights for the right to her hand as lovers, but there are plenty of suggestive nightma$ a still image from The Adolescence of Utena of two characters dueling on a platform

a still image from The Adolescence of Utena of two characters dueling on a platform

12610

Willow Catelyn Maclay @willowcatelyn.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

THE QUIET MAN (John Ford, 1952) The greatest film of all time to include a WWF style brawl.

a still image of goddess Maureen O' Hara staring out a window. The technicolor photography is marvelous and creamy.

4312

Willow Catelyn Maclay @willowcatelyn.bsky.social · 25/07/2026

I wrote about THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2 for my reader's choice series. Slasher summer concludes with this one, which is kind of funny because it refutes everything about the structure of slashers for a wacky Grand Guignoi freakout www.patreon.com/willowcately...

Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 was not taken very seriously when it was released in the late summer of 1986, and this was partially by design. The marketing team cooked up the idea for the poster of the film to be a spoof of John Hughes’s The Breakfast Club (1985), and it made sense considering those pimple-popper yuppies would resemble the new targets of Texas Chain Saw’s family of Ed Gein’s. Hooper took it as seriously as he could, but he wanted it to seem like a deliberate choice to maximize the black comedy of the original for this sequel. Roger Ebert compared it to a carnival, referring to it as a “geek show”, and he was not wrong, but if it seemed disgustingly grotesque then it was merely a side effect of how Hooper viewed the United States in the deep years of Reagan’s conservative plan. It’s a film about the hippie dream rotting away under the capitalist hellscape of the 80s, and transforming into a garish display of modernity. This is seen most clearly in Bill Mosely’s Chop-Top character; a Vietnam vet, whose antics as a metal-plate having, brain-picker madman are introduced to us through the character detail of his Sonny Bono wig, and, moments later, his theft of Beatles records at the K-OKLA record station where our final girl Stretch (Caroline Williams) works as a DJ. The casting of Dennis Hopper as “Lefty” also has a shrewd brilliance, considering his cinematic image is tied to the motorcycle men living outside society in Easy Rider(1967). Hopper plays a former Texas Ranger, reborn as a vigilante in pursuit of those who killed his beloved Franklin a decade ago. The only cast member from the original film who returns is Jim Siedow, calling himself Drayton Sawyer (pun intended), and he has found a lot of success selling his cannibal chili to College Football fans ahead of the big game. He’s fashioned to look more than a little like Reagan. Perhaps people bounced off the film so severely in the mid-80s because it isn’t scary at all...

a sample image from texas chainsaw massacre 2 of Leatherface holding a chainsaw

410425

Willow Catelyn Maclay @willowcatelyn.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

POINT BREAK (Kathryn Bigelow, 1991) The platonic idea of the Dad Rock action movie.

a still image of POINT BREAK featuring Keanu Reeves and Lori Petty in bed with one another. They look a little bit androgynous. On black sheets

3220

Willow Catelyn Maclay @willowcatelyn.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

My column on acting is back. This is the start of a two part series on the great character actor Tom Noonan. This first essay is about his work as Francis Dollarhyde in MANHUNTER. One of the more beguiling villains to ever appear onscreen. www.patreon.com/willowcately...

a still image of Tom Noonan in a medium close-up as Francis Dollarhyde in MANHUNTER

It is a credit to the actor when a viewer feels like they understand a character, and when I was revisiting Manhunter for this essay on Noonan, I thought about the limits of identification with serial killer characters, and how challenging it must be for an actor to go to those places. I thought, how many serial killers do we actually understand in the history of cinema? Now, how many feel like they’ve transcended cliche? That’s a very short list, and Noonan’s Francis Dollarhyde is on it. Before the film went into production, Noonan read a book on serial killers, and felt horrible, and came to the conclusion that it would be a dead-end to copy these people. It is ultimately key that Noonan is not playing an idea of a serial killer, as we had come to learn about through tabloid psychoanalysis and books about behavioural psychology. He was playing an emotional state of shame and loneliness and alienation, which is always what he was best at, from this point, through his directed effort What Happened Was., and in his pictures with Charlie Kaufman. Being a serial killer is incidental to what Noonan is showing us in Manhunter. There are two sides to Noonan as an actor that I find particularly compelling: the Killer and the Romantic, because he will sometimes approach the two in a similar manner, and the emotional distinction between his characters that fall into those categories can become blurry. As Francs Dollarhyde, the two are combined.

49922

Willow Catelyn Maclay @willowcatelyn.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

TROPICAL MALADY (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2004) The previous film on this list was #100, but let's keep doing these. I love movies, you love movies, we all love movies.

a still image from TROPICAL MALADY of two men on a staircase in a forest

2131

Willow Catelyn Maclay @willowcatelyn.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

I have some more Criterion news! They are releasing THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS on 4k this year, and I wrote a booklet essay! This was a collaboration with my CORPSES, FOOLS AND MONSTERS co-author Caden Mark Gardner, and we are excited for folks to check it out. www.criterion.com/films/528-th...

Deleted scenes
Interview from 2005 with Demme and Foster
Four documentaries featuring hours of interviews with cast and crew
Behind-the-scenes featurette
Storyboards
Trailer
English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
PLUS: An introduction by Foster; two essays, one by critic Amy Taubin and one by critics Willow Catelyn Maclay and Caden Mark Gardner; pieces from 2000 and 2013 by author Thomas Harris on the origins of the character Hannibal Lecter; and a 1991 interview with Demme

3804

Willow Catelyn Maclay @willowcatelyn.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

We are looking at slasher films this month on my website, and first up is Wes Craven's A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET. It is possible that I have seen this film more times than any other. I have liked it for a long time. www.patreon.com/willowcately...

While Craven’s The Last House on the Left gestures towards a Bergman-ian denouement, A Nightmare on Elm Street is more like his Bunuelian ode to American perversity. On a grand scale, it is about the sins of one generation bleeding into the next, but on a more microscopic level, it is fuelled by subconscious and Fruedian imagery, born of teenage hormones, and the realizations of sex and death. If that sounds too intellectual for you: A Nightmare on Elm Street is also about a finger-knived monster with third degree burns killing a group of teenagers one by one in their dreams. We meet Tina first (Amanda Wyss) in the midst of a nightmare. She’s blonde, and wears only a white nightgown. The room she finds herself in is covered in steam, and she’s exhausted, as if she’s been running for a long time. The man chasing her is named Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund), and he stretches his arms further than anyone should be able, and he carves up the walls with those finger-knives of his. His skin is marked by heavy burns, and his voice is a madman’s seduction, his smoker’s lungs, a demonic baritone. Craven frames him with the camera a little low to the ground to make the already impressively tall (for an actor) Englund, seem even larger. Tina is pulled out of her dream abruptly, but not before he can have a slice at her lacy bedtime onesie. She wakes up, and realizes the carvings have come with her, and her gown is ruined. Craven uses the rug-pull from Psycho to introduce us to a character who seems like the main character. She’s classically positioned to be the heroine in a horror story like this one: she’s blonde, a little tough, a little smart, and comes from a middle class family. An all-American girl next door, but she’s merely the first victim.

a still image of Freddy Kreuger in A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STEET. He is in silhouette and has long terrible arms and he is coming to get you

4617

Willow Catelyn Maclay @willowcatelyn.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

Have y'all ever read Kael's POPEYE review? She's mixed on the film, but she *adores* Shelley Duvall. She goes on and on and on like this, and Duvall deserves this much praise. It really is one of the finest performances in that era of movie-making. scrapsfromtheloft.com/movies/popey...

There are no forebears or influences that would help to explain Shelley Duvall’s acting; she doesn’t seem to owe anything to anyone. She’s an original who has her own limpid way of doing things—a simplicity that isn’t marred by conventional acting technique, but that by now she has adapted to a wide range of characters. In the new Robert Altman film, Popeye, from Jules Feififer’s screenplay, in which she plays Olive Oyl, she sings in a small, wavering voice, and she hits tones that are so flat yet so true that they are transcendently comic. Her dancing has the grave gentleness of the Laurel & Hardy soft-shoe numbers, though she doesn’t move anything like either of them. She’s Olive Oyl of the long neck and stringbean body and the clodhoppers, and at the same time she has a high-fashion beauty. The screwed-tight hair twisted into a cruller at the neck seems just what Olive needs to set off her smooth, rounded forehead. She curls her long legs around each other—entwining them in the rubber-legged positions of the cartoon figure—and it seems the most natural thing for her to do.

0215

Willow Catelyn Maclay @willowcatelyn.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

It is very surreal that I can now say I've written a booklet essay for a Criterion Collection release. It was an absolute joy to work with everyone at the company. You can read the essay now on their website: www.criterion.com/current/post...

a still image of Dil from the crying game with the headline THE CRYING GAME'S LEGACY AS TRANSGENDER REPRESENTATION BY WILLOW CATELYN MACLAY

8473106