Congrats :D
12.03.2026 18:34
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Congrats :D
you are not prepared for the soundtrack
I highly recommend Tom Noonan's film WHAT HAPPENED WAS. He was a fantastic writer and director in addition to being one of the great character actors his generation. WHAT HAPPENED WAS is a romance for people who have been worn down by life and themselves and who don't trust love, but still want it.
Movie description of the B horror move Death PhD. Gawdawful movie.
Now this is a movie plot!!! Someone understands grad school.
It's a really cool, oddball film. Really underseen little giallo gems (amongst many, there's tons of delightful, weird films that get so lil' exposure in the genre). Makes a lot of sense when you learn that the director was the co-writer of Pasolini's "Salo"! XD
a still image from RETURN TO SILENT HILL of James Sunderland clasping his face in front of a mirror caked in mildew
The quiet elegance of the inviting fog, and Carol Spier’s equally entrancing Francis Bacon-inspired set designs of rust and blood from director Chrtistophe Gans’s Silent Hill (2006) are absent in his follow-up picture in the series. Return to Silent Hill is only vaguely similar to the fantastical, and Clive Barker-leaning style of the first film. It’s as if the mise-en-scene has been tossed into a wood chipper, and the results are crude and ugly, and obvious, with the tag-line for the film clearly spelling everything out for the would be viewer. “Guilt is a place you can never leave.”. There is not an ounce of beauty in that sentence. It’s phonetically clumsy, and born of a bad idiom, but Gans operates well within the proposed metaphor. Horror doesn’t have to be scary in order for it to be proactive, and it’s actually quite limiting to expect that from every film in the genre. Gans has never really been interested in delivering a movie of immediate fright. Return to Silent Hill ignores the conventions of ghost stories, and the action thrills of survival horror. Gans opts for an observant and curious eye at sickness, traumatic abuse, and death. He consistently finds disquieting images that are repulsive. Images that are honest about the frailty of the spirit, and the possibilities of disgust that are capable of manifesting with the unwanted appearance of a slow burning necrosis in the body of a beloved, romantic partner.
Gans’s Return to Silent Hill presents the story of grieving boyfriend James Sunderland (Jeremy Irvine), and his psychological transformation in processing the loss of his girlfriend Mary (Hannah Emily Anderson). He has made a film whose repeated notes of despair accumulate, and he layers James’s inability to move on into those of the damned he meets as he strides further into Silent Hill. There’s graveyard loomer Angela, who has a knife sheathed in her boot, and keeps her distance from everyone, and eight year old Laura, who carries a ratty teddy bear, and claims to know Mary. Most beguiling of all is Maria, who looks a lot like Mary, and teases James about his grief. Hannah Emily Anderson plays Maria and Angela, and Gans’s boldest differentiation from the source material (Silent Hill 2) is his choice to indicate that Angela, Laura and Maria are all Mary. By doing so, he not only made James’s grief more palpable with a Dickensian approach of visiting spirits, but elaborated on the wounded feminine element that was usually only subtextually resonant in the series. Suffice to say, Return to Silent Hill is the most melodramatic, but emotionally intelligent Silent Hill film to date. I found it unusually, and viscerally moving, and I felt opened up, and exposed by what it showed me. I walked out of the theater having felt that rare, but wonderful disorientation, and delusion that cinema can offer when it feels like a movie is speaking directly to parts of myself that I like to keep hidden.
My Silent Hill series concludes with RETURN TO SILENT HILL.
I loved this movie, and I hope it finds its audience someday.
www.patreon.com/posts/monste...
This post points out something I’ve said before: the best Silent Hill film is I Saw The TV Glow
Wes Craven’s #Scream academic conference alert 🔪 on 16 Dec 2026 at Bangor University UK. Deadline for is 1 Jun. Information attached. This looks like it will be a grand time. If the conference dinner isn’t a murder mystery featuring Ghostface, that’ll be a missed opportunity…
Been watching through some Tobe Hooper movies I haven't seen in the first few days of the new year and I'm fond of MORTUARY. A horror movie for kids about the horrible creeping rot of small town America. SALEM'S LOT is about the same thing & so is POLTERGEIST & TEXAS CHAINSAW & oh you get the idea
My New Year’s resolution is to be even more of a hater to “A.I.”
A soul-murdering scam to create a generation of dead-inside drones - if you use it on the reg you’re a clown at best and if you promote it you’re lower than the shit on Satan’s hoof, sorry I don’t make the rules etc.
A list of the user's favourite repertoire films of 2025.
A list of the user's favourite films of 2025.
Arbitrary as the exercise is, did enjoy compiling a lil' list of my favourite first-time watches from last year and another one of my favourite films of 2025. Here's to more.
You can’t even lure children into your gingerbread house to eat them any more without being cooked in your own oven. I blame Hansel culture
Sending thoughts and prayers 🫡
Apparently I'm out in paperback! And it looks to be on sale, so if you're looking for a £35 stocking stuffer, boy do I have a recommendation for you... #fanstudies
Francis Fukuyama ...? Francis "The End of History" Fukuyama ...?!
Historic run of terrible ideas with that one man, damn.
Young Rosa
RIP Rosa von Praunheim, truly one of the best to ever do it. A brilliant provocateur, an artist of the highest order, forever eager to mash genres, someone who wanted more and better for queer people, someone not afraid to stand against the tide and be proven right again and again. Thank you. ♥️
Every time I hear someone talk about the state of modern cinema I want to shout ‘watch better films then!’, there’s no need to ever talk about a disney produced film from an artistic standpoint, watch In Fabric, watch La Chimera, watch Decision to Leave, watch The Peasants, watch Boy and the Heron
Only the truth! And with reason, it's incredible. Directing is not showy, but the way it slides in and out of the past using mirrors and stuff just feels ... incredibly resonant and evocative when it comes to the gnc experience and the whole sort of idea of queer time, a la Halberstam :D
Among many other things, it put me onto "Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean Jimmy Dean", which has to be one of the best films by a major American director no one ever seems to talk about.
A stellar read, and one whose concepts around the idea of trans "film images" over trans "representation" are stuff that I'd love to see disseminated and used in criticism/academia.
Had a great time talking about transgender haunted houses at @hauntedfutures.bsky.social today! Thank you for having me, and to my excellent co-panelists :)
Three panel comic meme. First panel has a cartoon dog furry captioned "that one furry academic you know". Second panel has a generic person with two eyes captioned "you just existing". Third panel has both cartoon dogs looking at each other captioned "suddenly you are also furry academic".
How furry research is spread
I've really enjoyed not playing these games and just getting drip-fed mounds of insane lore about this ... time-travel yaoi vampire epic? ... by cultural osmosis, I've got to say.
For @bcmcr.bsky.social - wrote about the our university's reading group's thoughts on a book about populist feminism, resistance against anti-gender thought, and affect-based politics. It was a fun conversation!
bcmcr.org/research/cul...
Want to do a (funded for UK students) PhD with me? If you're interested in games, posthumanism, avatars, affect, embodiment or any of the other stuff I do (or my colleagues do for that matter) take a look! www.bcu.ac.uk/research/doc... #PhDfunding #PhDstudentship #AHRC #DoctoralFunding #GameStudies
The opening slide to a conference paper, showing Milla Jovovich, as seen in "Resident Evil: Retribution", standing in front of a patterned red and white background. Left, the title "State-Sponsored Nostalgia: Resurrecting the Past in George A Romero's Land of the Dead and Paul WS Anderson's Resident Evil Retribution".
Very much enjoyed presenting my work at this morning's Birmingham Cine-Excess symposium! Many thanks to my excellent co-panelists and to moderator extraordinaire @danieljsheppard.bsky.social <3
It'll be fun! I am excited :3
If someone wants to wake up for 10am on a Thursday in October, they can hear we warble about the greatness of Resident Evil: Retribution, one of the masterpieces of modern arthouse cinema.
... And George Romero too, I guess.
My friend and colleague @lerelle.bsky.social needs research participants for their PhD project. The research focuses on intersectionally minoritised queer people's experiences using dating apps. So could you please take a look at this and share it if you can? (1/3)
