The only reason I was able to watch 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple with confidence is because I had 12+ hours to kill on the trek back from Japan. It was a good time to rewatch 28 Days Later — and get into 28 Weeks Later and 28 Years Later — only because zombies couldn’t get me up that high.

But after watching Maya Annik Bedward’s Black Zombie, I have a whole new appreciation for this horror subgenre.

I figured that this documentary would tell me about the racist origins of the zombie, but I didn’t expect for Bedward to thread the needle between negative perceptions of indigenous Black folks and African traditional religions, in the powder keg of the colonized Carribbean.

Well, despite colonization and the push for Catholic conversion, Haitians held fast to their religious beliefs, including vodou. It’s here that Bedward, scholars, and Erol Josué, executive director of the National Bureau of Ethnology and a vodou priest, provide context for how Haitians see death. They talk about the concept of “traversé” or someone having crossed over. Oftentimes, death is the one way for people of the African diaspora to be able to return to the motherland.

As a Black person who has come home to African traditional religions, I loved hearing about this from a Haitian perspective. I’m a hoodoo practitioner, but even non-witchy, super Christian African-Americans call funerals “homegoing” services. This Black tradition of seeing death as a middle ground — not a finite state — has undeniably given rise to the concept of zombies and kept the story alive.

There are so many twists in the narrative of truths uncovered by Black Zombie. Sure, the flames of the zombie myth were stoked by Christian White saviorism and ATRs get a bad rap, but zombies are also real.

Instead of a feat of magick or some indigenous science, the fugue state was actually the mentally and physically debilitating curse of slavery.

Likewise, black magick is real, Black Zombie posits. But vodou practitioners, as a whole, are as good or as evil as any Christian, Jew or Muslim.

✩ read my full review here ✩

I got a lot out of Bedward’s documentary, even as someone who’s a bit skittish around zombies. I think, of course, that’s because this documentary is such a delightfully nerdy exercise in African diaspora studies, film history, literary tea and the occult — things I’m already obsessed with and things I know y’all love, too.

When I think of my fellow horror-loving friends, 90% of them hope to one day direct a horror feature film or publish the next Great American Horror Novel. If you count yourself among such creatives, watching a film like Black Zombie is a must. I love a behind-the-scenes moment as much as the next cinephile. But it’s not every day horror fans get to have a documentary about the genre — certainly not one as well-executed or as deep as Black Zombie. Bedward really gets to the psychology of fear, which is so useful for aspiring horror storytellers.

If given the chance to see Black Zombie, jump at it. It’ll forever change your perception of horror and will make your critical love for the genre that much richer.

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ADDITIONAL READING:

I come to your inbox, like a beggar in tatters, hoping to subtly remind you that I used to be the King of Ithaca. I know I’ve been gone for a while. But Telemachus (the schedule Notes function) held it down to keep the suitors (Substack’s algorithm) appeased.

And oh, Penelope, how I missed you. This time apart was filled with myths of old, fearsome monsters, devilish tricks. I’ve been thinking about it a bunch and gathered my thoughts on the massive, terrifying spectacle below.

review: odysseus is a final girl

Sitting in the theater last week, I couldn’t help but think about how life isn’t linear, but it damn sure is circular. On Saturday night, I linked up my homethorls for game show trivia. We were rolling deep, intellectually, our knowledge pool widened by our hyperfixations: Space, math, anthropology, democracy, trade, cinema, mythology.

I felt my heart swell with pride when one of my teammates hit the buzzer fast, spit out the winning answer: “Demi-god.” Camp Half-Blood in the buildingggg, I hollered, with Greek lore and early 2000s nostalgia top of mind.

I was a voracious reader of Greek mythology and classic literature in general as a kid. But unfortunately, one of the few K-12 texts I ever skimmed, in any capacity, out of the hundreds of books I read as a child and teenager, was The Iliad. That, and WWII Siberian survival memoir The Endless Steppe (sorry to that diva).

But with my adult eyes, last week, I became enamored with Homer’s brilliance. What Christopher Nolan has given us gave me the same euphoria I felt when I finally got to see William Shakespeare’s works on stage when I lived in London the first time. It just made my understanding of the source text that much richer. It made me respect the author that much more. It inspired me to revisit the text again, with renewed enthusiasm.

Ironically, these Shakespeare adaptations were the sliced-and-diced, chopped-and-screwed, modernized, gender-swapped versions of the Bard’s and I adored them. Female King Lear. Black and Asian family members, à la Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella with Brandy and Whitney Houston. AK-47’s and Spider-Man pajamas in Macbeth.

I watched with wonder, saying to myself, “Oh, I didn’t even know that was an option!” And you know, even then, spoiled brats with access to world-class theatre bitched about those adaptations — even though they were co-signed by the premier British arts organizations and, in many cases, performed at thee Globe Theatre.

I was completely unsurprised that people are complaining about Lupita Nyong’o as a gorgeous, darkskinned Helen of Troy. I’m a veteran of the internet. I remember clearly that people had disparaged Halle Bailey for winning the role of The Little Mermaid, even though real ones had already revered her angelic voice, showcased so well throughout Chloe x Halle’s discography. I remember clearly that people had disparaged Idris Elba — not just for buzz around James Bond, but when he was cast as the god Heimdall in the Thor slice of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

At the end of the day, we’re talking about myths and magic, but all of a sudden, people on the Internet are sticklers for supposed factual accuracy — but just through the lens of racial purity. OK, let’s just say for a single second that I’m rocking with y’all’s neo-eugenicist views. Everyone’s sudden imperative to cast Greeks in Greek roles doesn’t even make sense; a lot of y’all racists are holding up Diane Kruger, who played Helen of Troy in Troy (2004), as the gold standard. But Kruger was nobody’s Greek princess. I need white supremacists to at least get on the same page with their racist crusades.

Likewise, I felt like premature Elliot Page slander was equally bonkers, especially because Page’s role was so much bigger than his off-screen gender identity. In fact, as a trans person, I have to say this was the first time I was really satisfied with the casting of a trans actor in a film — especially a fellow transmasc non-binary person. In Hollywood, we’re like Laestrygonians. Known, but sequestered. A source of fear.

I was heartened to come across the following essay from a history nerd cutting to the truth of the matter: That accuracy itself is a myth, especially when you think about the etymology of mythology. Mythologia (μυθολογία) comes from mythos (μῦθος) and logos (λόγος). Story speech. Words of the people. Oral histories, which is why Nolan chose to have a rapper, Travis Scott, as a bard.

does accuracy matter in the odyssey?

“While we won’t ever be able to recreate exactly how The Odyssey or other Greek texts would have been performed, modern theatre and its stylised, surrealistic approaches to Ancient Greek plays seem more comfortable with leaning into the text’s absurdity,” the author wrote on Bond & Grace’s Lit Society blog.

“In the process of trying to weigh accuracy in an adaptation of a text as influential as The Odyssey, I realized that accuracy, perhaps, doesn’t live in direct realism at all, but rather, in a willingness to lean into the fantastical nature of mythological stories and make something genuinely new from a story we already think we know.”

When I consider the racist commenters flocking to Nyong’o’s posts or throwing unchecked in certain cinephile circles, the idea of “lean[ing] into the fantastical nature of mythological stories” is something that feels so crucial to me. Because what’s the point of adapting a work that has been adapted a million times and doing it in the exact the same way your predecessors have?

I can’t think of a better perspective to have on Nolan’s version of events — for the good of cinema and to simply add some levity to the human condition. Let’s just have fun at the movies, for once. Let’s enjoy the spectacle. I think that’s what Homer would have wanted.

Cinephile’s bookshelf: Bonus reads to check out about Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, the state of summer blockbuster zeitgeist and modernists’ takes on Greek mythology

♡ Which Odyssey translation is for you? (Lit Society by Bond & Grace)

♡ There is no Ithaca (Genevieve Yue for Film Comment)

♡ the odyssey & the magic of horror ( of Girl at the Movies)

♡ Review: The Odyssey ( of Genius of Loathe)

♡ The Odyssey Review ( of See You at the Movies)

♡ Are children the perfect audience for Greek tragedy? (Lit Society by Bond & Grace)

♡ It’s 3am. Do you know where your cinephiles are? (Ezgi Eren of )

It was dope to be joined for this month’s discussion on women-directed horror by a director, , who writes The Blood Shed on Substack. Amid the Backrooms and Obsession craze, Mary Beth has been writing some solid essays critiquing aspects of the Youtube creator to feature film director pipeline in horror — and forecasting what’s next in digital zeitgeist horror.

Variety featured Mary Beth on its list of most impactful people in horror last spooky season, alongside Ryan Coogler on his legendary Sinners run, Zach Cregger post-Weapons and Nia DaCosta as she took the 28 Years Later reins from Danny Boyle.

Mary Beth is currently working on her second feature film and has a book about Paranormal Activity in the works. As always with our guests, it was a delight to hear cool, smart people talk their shit about horror movies, with the utmost thoughtfulness and joie de vivre.

Takeaways from Caro (they/them) ｡⋆‧₊˚♡˚₊‧｡⋆

Getting to watch American Psycho again was such a treat for several reasons. Get into this Patrick Bateman Halloween costume; thangya! Likewise, the same way we spookymoviemaxxx every September to November, I try to catch up on all the gay films that I can during Pride Month. This June, I attended my first Tribeca Film Festival (eeee!) and traveled for my day job, too. So I didn’t get to marathon as much LGBTQ+ media as I wanted, but I made every little piece of gay in June count.

In between seeing midnight movies at Tribeca and running down blood-soaked, glitter-stained homosexuals for The Vampire Lestat coverage, I got a chance to interview thee Mary Harron about her film I Shot Andy Warhol (thank you, Janus Films). I also asked Harron about the American Psycho remake rumors and who she’d cast as Patrick Bateman today.

Her response? She told me that Christian Bale was “so firmly set in my mind, I can’t imagine anyone else doing it.” Having just rewatched the film for Strawberry Cinema Collective, I agree. It takes a special director to adapt a satirical novel to screen and to guide this perfect crew of actors in this exercise in camp.

During our Substack Live, Maria asked Mary Beth and me very real questions about how the queer, feminist origins of the American Psycho narrative and how that perspective seems to have gotten lost. For the uninitiated: Alt-right types, manosphere devotees and aspiring “sigma males” have appropriated the imagery in Harron’s film to advance their ugly, hateful ideals. (There are some interesting discussions about the rise of the sigma male on TikTok taking place on Reddit.)

Blame it on the literacy crisis — not so much American reading levels, but the ability to understand facetiousness, nuance, that portrayals don’t equate to co-signs — but it bothered us that all this rich texture from Ellis’ book and Harron’s film got watered down into visual shorthand for toxic male dominance.

Takeaways from Maria (she/her) ⋆｡𖦹°⭒˚｡⋆

This June, we celebrated Pride with American Psycho. Despite its reputation of being loved by incels and widely considered the quintessential evil film-bro piece of media, American Psycho is directed by a woman and the original novel that the film is based on is written by Easton Ellis, a gay man. We talked all about queerness, social class and elitism, prejudice and privilege.

I found our discussion about the ending scene especially insightful, because I felt like I was able to look at the film from a new angle I never really considered before. I had always kind of taken the ending at face value, and hadn’t questioned it very much outside of what the film tells us. To use the same language that I did during the live video, I thought Patrick was a loser, and that he was too much of a punk to do murder.

However, as we discussed, I felt more and more that he might have actually committed these crimes and gotten away with it due to the horrific culture of NYC finance and real estate businesses. Especially looking at it through a modern lens, that seems completely plausible within the story.

Despite the tough subject matter, Caro and our lovely special guest, Mary Beth McAndrews, had me giggling the whole time with some of the funniest moments we’ve had so far during our film club.

It’s great to hear a summary, but I think it’s even better to hear from our speakers themselves and to chat about these films in real time.

Up next: “Bodies Bodies Bodies” (2022) dir. Halina Reijn

Full of queerness, class divides, friend group drama, Gen Z dialogue, and murder, this film is a favorite of ours. We’ll be joined this time by Nic from Girl at the Movies.

Here’s a little intro from our upcoming speaker:

Hi, I’m Nic! (she/her) I’m a writer, editor, and film lover based in Orlando, Florida. When I’m not watching movies with a bag of Peanut M&Ms in-hand, I’m writing about them for my Substack newsletter, Girl at the Movies. Horror is my favorite genre — especially horror focused on women and our experiences — but I’ll watch pretty much anything that isn’t “You’ve Got Mail” with a smile on my face. Can also be found on the rock climbing wall, reading horror novels, and sinking an embarrassing number of hours into Fortnite.

Come chat with us!

With our shift to the live stream format, we want to make sure to encourage everyone to participate, because what makes this club cool is that we get to hear from so many different people. We want to hear your questions, comments, opinions, or just your random thoughts.

If there’s a topic you want to make sure we focus on, you can let us know at any time before (or during) the discussion.

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For more updates on the movie club, check out our Instagram! ♡

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Like I said in my last film round-up, I spent my formative time in undergrad with art school lesbians — the kind that had dreads, wore Vans religiously and used SoundCloud. I spent a lot of time on Tumblr while in college. Chicken-or-the-egg type thing, right?

I got familiar with Cindy Sherman, Marina Abramović and Jenny Holzer of course. As I keep living through an APUSH textbook’s worth of unprecedented events every two months, especially in the information age, I keep thinking about the most iconic phrase from Holzer’s decades-long “Truisms” work: Abuse of power comes as no surprise.

I think there’s a reason why, like the equally punchy and thought-provoking work of Barbara Kruger, that Holzer’s truisms, including “Raise boys and girls the same way,” sticks out in my mind.

Writing for e-flux, ​R.H. Lossin points out that “making strange claims in the form of a brief declarative statement or maxim draws attention to the ways that sense becomes common (or doesn’t).”

Breaking down our main phrase in question, Lossin says that it’s obvious. “But then again, abuse of power is almost always a surprise or it wouldn’t be legible as abuse.”

Lossin goes on further to say: “And then we might ask: What power is not abusive?”

The following films remind us to ask that very question.

After the Hunt, dir. Luca Guadagnino

It’s ironic that a critical moment involving hegemonic structures of oppression IRL eclipsed the actual, serious press around the movie. And even then, the Rotten Tomatoes review aggregate for After the Hunt is overwhelmingly negative:

Read more

Anyone who’s a cinephile and attended any of the 32 Cowboy Carter dates last year clocked that Beyoncé Giselle Knowles-Carter and David Lynch are cut from the same cloth.

Recurring themes throughout Lynch’s work and the Cowboy Carter tour alike are a romanticization of Americana: Burning rubber on the wide open road, cozy down home diners, steamy little laundromats…

Seedy motels, sexy dive bars and the twinkling night sky.

So much of the imagery I saw at the Cowboy Carter tour was right in line with what I’d glimpsed in Twin Peaks, in Lost Highway, in Blue Velvet, in Mulholland Drive even.

Surrealism, grit and sex appeal abounded.

How Beyoncé brought us into her dream-like western

How did Beyoncé build the kind of world where a cover of “In Dreams” by Roy Orbison would have made perfect sense? Paying homage to old-school artists, such as Linda Martell, the first Black woman in country music to play the Grand Ole Opry, was a start.

When Beyoncé dropped her trailer for Act II in early 2024, she introduced us into her Americana fantasy. Dusty roads, small towns, bolo ties, one-eyed men, scandalous sex appeal: She told us from Day 1 what was on the menu for the next album cycle.

To bring us into the darker version of her narrative, Blair Caldwell photographed Beyoncé as a rodeo queen, doing her victory lap at night. Caldwell has a penchant for glamorous minimalism, not unlike Lynch himself.

A lot of his visuals for Cowboy Carter are glamorous and eerie, putting you in the mind of the nighttime scene in Mulholland Drive where Adam is threatened by the Cowboy to recast his lead.

Another close Beyoncé visual collaborator is director Melina Matsoukas, whose directorial debut was the Lena Waithe-penned Bonnie and Clyde caper, Queen and Slim. Recently, Maggie Gyllenhaal cited Queen and Slim as inspiration for The Bride! She also cited Lynch’s Wild at Heart.

Long before Queen and Slim, Matsoukas directed several iconic Beyoncé music videos. Most notably, Matsoukas shot “Kitty Kat,” which feels like it could have taken place in a radiator in the Eraserhead universe and “Diva,” which could have happened in that same haunted backlot from Mulholland Drive.

Matsoukas’ work becomes more singular and embedded in the Americana fantasy with Beyoncé’s Levi’s campaign.

Adding a dark twist to the American Dream

Beyoncé’s ad campaign spanned the whole gamut of emotions and tones, which also another Lynchian hallmark.

In an interview with American Cinematographer, Fred Elmes, ASC, discussed his objective in filming Blue Velvet.

“My goal is to take the audience through a story in such a way that there’s a change, so that there’s a beginning, a middle and an end visually,” Elmes told Ron Magid in 1986. It feels like Beyoncé’s creative team took the same approach, ensuring that there isn’t just one note in the Cowboy Carter show.

Since the story, to me, is about a young man’s descent into a world he’s never been exposed to, a world that is frightening and intriguing in the same sentence, I somehow had to capture the fact that he’s going through a change.

— Fred Elmes on Blue Velvet, American Cinematographer (1986)

A key moment in the Cowboy Carter concert that felt like a direct parallel to Lynch’s obsession with performance and voyeurism was the infamous Peepshow Interlude.

No YouTube video can do the experience of watching this visual passage, against the glittering night sky, justice, but alas.

In the Peepshow Interlude, there are two Beyoncés. She is the pervert who is the patron and she is the siren on display in the booth. We see Beyoncé get off on herself in a dizzying surrealist fever dream.

It’s crucial that concert attendees have this moment, along with heartfelt odes to family and triumph over evil. The show doesn’t feel too wholesome or too salacious — Cowboy Carter strikes the right balance, like Blue Velvet.

Lynch and Beyoncé remain two sides of the same coin

Apart from the actual visual texts, Beyoncé and David Lynch have so much in common. At the risk of being glib, you might even be able to trace it back to their birth charts.

They’re both earth signs: The late Midwestern auteur was a Capricorn, born on January 20, 1946, and the “Virgo’s Groove” crooner was born on September 4, 1981.

Lynch and Beyoncé have managed to create work that sticks with us, in no small part due to their love of their respective crafts and their mastery of them. They both achieved this through meticulous attention to detail.

And both worked tirelessly to bring the go-getters, free thinkers and star-crossed dreamers the best possible art — at risk of their health — without hardening their hearts.

I’ll leave you with this: When researching this piece, I was struck by this tidbit from Peter Deming, the cinematographer for Lost Highway. Writing about the film, Stephen Pizzello characterized its scenes as having the “febrile quality of a dream.”

Ultimately, Deming said, "Film noir has a mood that everyone can feel… It's people in trouble, at night, with a little bit of wind and the right kind of music. It's a beautiful thing."

And if that doesn’t describe the feeling of Cowboy Carter don’t know what does.

“Make your daddy dead… Real dead.” Just like with Sinners, I knew from the first 20 minutes that I was witnessing cinematic history in the making. I could feel the air around me crackling with magick. I could tell the people seated nearby were sitting up a little bit straighter. I could tell this revenge thriller about two Black girls in the South was going to be deeply personal to me, but I could also tell that we were witnessing a cult classic in the making.

And yet, even though the divine download I was receiving was similar to the one I got last April, my viewing experience of Is God Is was very different than that of Sinners. I didn’t see Is God Is in my local Alamo Drafthouse’s room for “The Big Show” on opening night. I saw it in a teeny-tiny private screening room in NYC, surrounded by other cinephiles, who all had some kind of professional interest in Aleshea Harris’ film.

The post-film debriefs were small in the number of participants, but went absolutely crazy in terms of depth. Even beforehand, I had a very rich conversation with a film critic who had been in the game for 10 years. I got the real sense that alternative action movies were his wheelhouse and he was the kind of blerd who could talk shop about anime for hours.

On the flip side, I talked at length with a senior journalist at a Black-run magazine, whose outfit oozed flyness and said, “I’ve been on a million BET red carpets before.”

And then there was me, a horror girlie and your self-proclaimed Scarrie Bradshaw; me, who is obsessed with all things Southern gothic; me, whose niche interest is twins in media; me, who is always rooting for a Black final girl.

A couple of months ago, I had proclaimed that Is God Is was the horror movie audiences need right now. I was so relieved to be in that tiny Manhattan theater, finding out that my Good Movie radar and overall divine intuition ain’t never failed me yet.

What’s nuts is that Is God Is actually exceeded expectations for me, in myriad ways:

Equal parts terrifying and funny, Harris’ Is God Is feels so artful because the plot is heavy on spiritual decay, but presented in such a pleasing way. The movie could arguably feel like any other gritty family drama. But Harris builds tension in a decidedly horror-movie fashion — lensing stomach-turning events with glamorous camera work. Harris deserves all the kudos because she never falls into the trap of “style over substance” that bests so many horror directors.

I could wax poetic about this movie forever, but mainly because it’s taking an age-old type of narrative (revenge drama, which is pervasive in horror) and making it fresh — and doing it with such panache.

Is God Is builds on the so-called feminist legacy of extreme horror like I Spit on Your Grave and the decidedly feminine rage of a film like American Mary. What’s dope is that this time, a Black woman gets to make an entry into the Good for Her cinema canon.

✩ read my FULL review here ✩

Even outside of comparisons to Sinners — as in, folks saying that Is God Is will be the spiritual successor to Ryan Coogler’s film, a statement with which I can agree in certain ways — people who saw Is God Is this weekend can all agree that Harris’ film with leave you with a lot to digest.

I count myself lucky to have been able to process this film by asking the director of Is God Is my burning questions. You can watch Aleshea Harris give me some insight in the following interview clips below.

Feel free to leave a comment on Instagram and let me know what you think!

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Welcome to SENSUAL TERRORS: musings on creativity, movie culture, and some strange bits of life.

Whether it turned you on or gave you the ick, Wuthering Heights was the sexual conversation starter of 2026. When , cinema marketing genius, and I yapped about Emerald Fennell’s earnest but misguided commitment to horniness, we determined that the film leveraged “Safe Horny.”

Still, even though many believed Fennell could have flown her freak flag higher, I saw myriad married women — whose goth or cottagecore or princesscore wardrobes permitted it — asking their man to hoist them up by the corset strings on TikTok.

But just as Heated Rivalry was history-making in the world of horny prestige TV (but not IRL so was Wuthering Heights.

It’s not the first movie to be wanton in its sexual desire. It’s also not the first movie to do so that rubbed people the wrong way, be they sex-positive radical feminists or the more puritannical viewer.

The following syllabus features films I’ve watched recently that were seminal to me becoming the patron saint of sensual terrors across cinema.

A lot of films that normally get put on such lists will be not be explored on SENSUAL TERRORS. I’m not going to delve into Eyes Wide Shut, which was a recent waste of time…

Or Blue is the Warmest Color, which meant a lot to me as a baby gay who went to undergrad in the 2010s and hung out with art school lesbians instead of the J-school normies…

Or The Dreamers, which felt like an edgy watch as a teenager but feels a little too incestuous for me…

Or Nymphomaniac, which me and the girls (gender-neutral) living on my freshman year floor thought would be a great pick for movie night in the common room with glass walls and transparent doors.

And because you know what type of time I was on in undergrad, it should come as no surprise that I watched Adore with my devout born-again Baptist bestie, and that I watched Gaspar Noé’s Love long before it had that trending TikTok moment during lockdown.

Safe to say, I know my way around the horny movie canon. Let me show you the ropes, no shibari.

Belle de Jour (1967) dir. Luis Buñuel

I’ve decided take you on a horny cinematic journey in chronological order and it just so happens we’re starting with a movie that I refuse to kick out of my Letterboxd Top 4 no matter how hard I try.

Belle de Jour follows a Parisian housewife, played by the original bad bitch Catherine Deneuve, who decides to take up sex work in the afternoons — partly out of boredom and partly out of a lack of sexual fulfillment. Obviously, I don’t condone cheating and this is such a privileged approach to a lack of sexual satisfaction in your. marriage, but set that aside for a moment.

Hands down, this is the kinkiest film on this list — which is remarkable to me because it’s the oldest. It’s actually so bonkers to me that Boomers pretend to be so good and pure, when there were so many weird and freaky films that are their age or older.1

I love how sexual daydreams, from humiliation and degradation to ravishment fantasies, are conveyed in such a frank and contemporary way — which is why this film will always have a piece of my heart.

Videodrome (1983) dir. David Cronenberg

Like every Cronenberg movie I’ve ever seen, Videodrome changed my brain chemistry…

I never shut up about Jenny Odell’s book on the attention economy, and I was fresh off of reading that life-changing book when I watched Videodrome, which follows a chaotic man in Toronto running a pirate TV station that shows snuff films.

He meets a sexy radio host (played by Debbie Harry), hits it off with her, and their life is turned upside down by sentient, evil technology.

If you like body horror and bodily fluids in equal measure, Videodrome is your type of film.

Blue Velvet (1986) dir. David Lynch

Unfortunately, Blue Velvet was my comfort movie all last year. Maybe because it feels like blue velvet — melancholy, soft, gentle, beautiful. The world feels less scary when I watch Jeffrey Beaumont, played by the ever-dreamy Kyle MacLachlan, bite off more than he can chew when a murder mystery literally falls into his lap.

I mean, watching Laura Dern get fumbled makes me feel good about any past doomed situation that came to an end, and seeing Isabella Rossellini’s hard edges and soft vulnerability on display makes me feel better about my own complexity, which makes me feel borderline unlovable at times.

The sexiest part of Blue Velvet, outside of the film’s literal textures and lighting, is how there’s emotional depth to every interaction. The most mundane moments feel carnal and the sex scenes reveal to you the soul of each character. More than Mulholland Drive, this Lynch film is my standout in the sexy movie canon.

Showgirls (1995) dir. Paul Verhoeven

So I had just finished watching the following “sexy movie” on Tubi and Showgirls came up next. I just let it autoplay, because I needed something a little light while I finished up an edit.

It was only upon second viewing that it clicked for me. Showgirls is a hot ghetto mess, but not just a hot ghetto mess. It’s a well-produced, well-choreographed, beautifully shot and beautifully designed hot ghetto mess.

As if the spectacle of costumes, hair and makeup, and music weren’t magical enough, there’s an interesting philosophical feminist experiment at play. It makes Showgirls richer than the fellow ratchet Cinderella stories, such as Coyote Ugly (2000) and Burlesque (2010), that followed suit.

Showgirls does it all. It showcases the fierce women who comfortably flaunt their sexuality, the greedy men who seek the opportunity to gain sexual gratification from these women and bleed them dry financially in equal measure, and the way these women leverage these dynamics, abuse and coercion bedamned.

As a viewer, you can’t help but lean into your id desires. If you have any sense of joie de vivre, it’s hard to hate a movie that has 80s glam metal; aggressive dancing à la Britney Spears on Instagram; a wealth of fur, feathers and face gems; the hard nips

Buffalo ’66 (1998) dir. Vincent Gallo

When I finally watched Buffalo ‘66 this year, I was so disturbed to remember that so many of my Tumblr compatriots had reblogged this movie saying “goals” some 15 years ago. But I can’t blame them: I, too, was an angsty teenager letting it all hang out on the Internet and exploring my sexuality through cinema.

This film is painful to watch as an adult, especially as one who has had their fair share of sexy-until-it’s-not situations. There’s nothing redeeming enough about how Billy Brown is written that can even tap into our porn brains, in my humble opinion. But if pinch-faced sleazebags are your thing — and have a dollification kink and humiliation kink in equal measure — Buffalo ‘66 is your thing.

Romance (1999) dir. Catherine Breillat

TRIGGER WARNING: DUBIOUS CONSENT & ASSAULT

If someone put out this movie in 2026, they would definitely get cancelled, I re-iterated to my homegirl over the phone when recounting my recent watches. “But you rated it four stars on Letterboxd,” she said and I still stand by that.

Our protagonist Marie is in a sexless situationship-turned-romance, so she starts seeking out physical intimacy in all the wrong places. She reminds me of that woman who, medically, has no self-preservation instinct, whose story was going a bit viral last year.

I was impressed by how Breillat confronted the indelible truth of women’s sexual repression, and showed us what it would look like if one woman ripped off the Band-Aid of sexual double standards and purity culture.

There are some undeniably hot moments, like the café meet-cute or the initial tenderness of the shibari scene. But ultimately, juxtaposed with the clinically white, Gen X soft club aesthetic, the contents of the film feel more nihilistic than a turn-on.2

I loathe “Red Scare” types or any kind of alt girl pick-mes who engage in dirtbag left edgelording, to be clear. But I liked this film because it feels like a spiritual successor to Buñuel’s Belle de Jour and an obvious contemporary to…

The Piano Teacher (2001) dir. Michael Haneke

TRIGGER WARNING: DUBIOUS CONSENT & ASSAULT

If I never say “piano teacher” again this year, it would be too soon. As many of you who follow me on Instagram know, I have been talking at length about how I felt when I finally finished this film. It’s another disturbing treatise on how it feels to go 0 to 100 mph, in regard to your sexual exploration.

I think experimenting with kink is one of life’s supreme joys. But it’s crucial that you take baby steps, getting comfortable with sex in a vanilla context before you jump into BDSM — and that no one should be “jumping” into anything, really.

And without victim-blaming one bit, I can also, in the same breath, say that this film is a cautionary tale on why it’s important to embrace what BDSM practitoners call RACK (risk-aware and consensual kink) or SSC (safe, sane and consensual) sexual dynamics.

Secretary (2002) dir. Steven Shainberg

This was one of the horny films I started crossing off my watchlist in a direct response to Puppy Play Weekend, which is what I have been calling Valentine’s Day 2026 when I saw Wuthering Heights and Pillion back-to-back.

I decided to watch Secretary because there were references I missed in Wuthering Heights and it was being lauded as the OG horny romance.

But once again, I was watching the film with former sex educator eyes, and I was startled by the lack of consent in Secretary, which is how I felt when watching Pillion.

Lee and Grey are a hot mess, but maybe that’s also intentional, just as it seems to be the case with Colin and Ray. Maybe the true reading of these films is that the folly of youth is compounded and complicated when BDSM is added into the mix.

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One beef I have with this Secretary, besides the blurred lines of consent, is that a history of self-harm seems to be a BDSM co-morbidity. (We also see this in The Piano Teacher.)

When I was a sex educator, the sexologists, licensed marriage and family therapists, romance experts, sex workers and BDSM practitioners I encountered all agreed that no good would come of trying to pathologize our sexual desires, LGBTQ+ orientations, or kinky tendencies.

This was, I’m sure, a safeguard against shame sprials. No good comes of perpetuating the “I’m fucked up” or “I’m damaged goods” narrative, based solely off of what someone enjoys in the bedroom involving consenting adults.

So I’m uncomfortable with how Haneke and Shainberg imply that self-harm and kink go hand-in-hand. But alas, I can play devil’s advocate and see that maybe, for some people, BDSM is a better avenue for getting the physical pain they need to ground them.

Disobedience (2017) dir. Sebastián Lelio

Long before Mary spit into Stack’s mouth, we had Rachel Weisz and Rachel McAdams swapping spit under Orthodox Jewish walnut-black bussdowns. This movie left a strong impression on me for many reasons, enriched by the circumstances around my seeing it in theaters.

I was summering in Florida, as I often did when I was with my Floridian ex-girlfriend. Their parents had just split. Her mom was gallivanting in other states, so her dad became her primary parent. He had also moved on quickly, eager to make this blended family work.

It’s how I ended up hanging out with my then-partner’s new siblings, to the point where one of them volunteered to come with me to this sleepy retro theater, in the middle of the day, to see this random European lesbian movie — since my ex-girlfriend didn’t have much taste for indie film and all.

At that point in both my cinephile journey and my journey as a queer person, it was a rare experience for me to experience a film that balanced queer shame and queer desire so evenly. It struck me how the Gen X repressed, British, Jewish lesbians, and the zillennial witchy African-American faggot and Gen Z Wonderbread White atheist heathen baby bi were worlds apart.

But in that moment, we were the same: LGBTQ+ people living on the same timeline, wanting desperately to love and be loved, and wrestling with shame around our embodied desires.

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Note: The next three films were a part of a generational run. I experienced them through the lens of a gay cinephile rite of passage: With a strong-thighed, self-loathing, hairy, mulleted vers top, with tiny tats and a slutty mustache, at my side.

We don’t talk anymore — perhaps thanks to one of the following films — but I wouldn’t trade that era of my life for anything. I will always have the memory of seeing these insanely horny films for the first time in my coochie and in my heart.

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Passages (2023) dir. Ira Sachs

For fans of Blue, you’ll be heartened to see Adèle Exarchopoulos back on your screen in a real Parisian ménage à trois. Passages tells the story of a tense, oftentimes jealous, queer love triangle, but the film’s message is so much bigger than the sum of the triangle’s points.

It’s interesting to see the hinge partner of the polyamorous couple, who is a man, pulled between another man and a woman. So often, in real life, it’s the bisexual woman in straight-passing couple who has to do the heavy lifting of keeping her husband happy and making the girl who’s the unicorn feel less like a unicorn.

Not only was it titillating for me to watch this film in a cozy little gay microtheather with my crush, where you could hear everyone’s hitched breath and sighs when this film’s sexy plot unfolded, but it was also somewhat cathartic, too.

I had broken up with my boyfriend shortly before because he had brought some mess to my doorstep involving a threesome. I was feeling a bit faithless about polyamory and open relationships.

Passages reminded me that while we should never strive toward mess, there’s beauty in the mess and always a lesson to be learned.

Mutt (2023) dir. Vuk Lungulov-Klotz

Mutt will always mean a lot to me. This slice-of-life film follows Feña, a trans man who is juggling a strained relationship with his father, his ex-boyfriend and his younger half-sister.

As someone who had been re-navigating their relationship with their father, post transition, and grappling with a sense of survivor’s guilt regarding “leaving” their sibling “behind,” Mutt hit me like a ton of bricks.

Also, this film depicted my very unique experience of being a trans man who wants to get railed by trade. #RepresentationMatters

All jokes aside, this sexy but heart-wrenching watch is a big deal because lead actor Lío Mehiel was the first trans person to win the Special Jury Award for Acting at the Sundance Film Festival.

All of Us Strangers (2023) dir. Andrew Haigh

Now that my frontal lobe has developed, I have very publicly rebuked yearning. But three years ago, I was at the beginning of my Saturn return, and oozing both want and melancholy.

Unfortunately, Andrew Haigh’s haunting ghost story flush with queer longing caught me at the wrong — or is it right? — time. Making this more complicated was the double whammy of Paul Mescal and Andrew Scott. Normal People had primed my brain for to associate Mescal with horny languishing.

Meanwhile, fuck a Hot Priest Era: I had been heavy on Scott’s body since the BBC Sherlock days. I saw this one dark January, where my coochie and my tear ducts twinged bar for bar.

This film got me so riled up that it set in motion the events that led to the mulleted bisexual twunk being blocked on my phone as we speak. The film is ripe with horny black magick. Proceed with caution.

Lurker (2025) dir. Alex Russell

Lurker is the kind of thriller that gets under your skin — even if, unlike myself, you don’t have a history of observing entourages of up-and-coming artists, Soundcloud rappers with suspiciously suburban backgrounds, or nepo babies doing a terrible job of hiding their famous parents.

It’s so strange to move through spaces where the super-rich and ultra-cool are cosplaying down-and-out underdogs, but there are a few hungry bastards in the group who know what it’s like to go without. That always leads to trouble.

For the most part, the sexiness in Lurker is divorced from the scariness. (Although, remembering how indie darling Archie Madekwe got down in Saltburn might evoke some muscle memory.)

Still, the thinly-veiled homoerotic desire takes a turn from breezy and catty to dangerous in the end.

The tone of Lurker and how its plot unfolds kind of reminds me of when I went to the sex club, and I let a couple tie me up and tickle me for 30 minutes. First, it was funny. Then, the overstimulation weirdly turned me on. Then, I wanted to kill somebody.

But I never called my safe word.

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What’s next in the world of Freaked Out Film?

Some films that are on my sexy movie watchlist are:

• Body Double (1984) dir. Brian De Palma: I’ve heard this is an Alfred Hitchcock homage, so count me in.

• Bound (1996) dir. Wachowski sisters: As an alt sapphic, it feels like an oversight to have not seen this. It’s like The L Word for goths and biker babes, no?

• Y tu mamá también (2001) dir. Alfonso Cuarón: One of my favorite QTBIPOC podcasts has a running bit about this film, so it’s always top of mind.

Drop your horny film recs — whether you adore the film or just think it adds something noteworthy to the Freaked-Out Film Canon — in the comments.

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I had an inkling of what Emma’s secret would be in The Drama early on; unfortunately, being chronically online in cinephile spaces from Letterboxd to Reddit, I saw that a Columbine victim’s parent was not fucking with The Drama. I remember sitting with this knowledge at the bar, kiki’ing with my fellow film-loving friend. We were still a little stumped as to what the secret could be, even with that context.

We toyed with sexual perversion or a hit-and-run… surely it couldn’t actually be related to a school shooting.

The Drama had been slightly spoiled for me, but nothing could prepare me for how it felt to hear Emma (Zendaya) make her confession in the moment.

I even remember feeling a pang of anxiety as the lights in our theater dimmed, where I turned to my homegirls and said, “There’s Before This Movie and there’s After This Movie.” And seeing all the discourse on Substack, I can confirm that this is true, and I’m delighted.

We were discoursed half to death during the 2025 awards season. Along with Wuthering Heights1, The Drama shows that 2026 will be full of movies that wake the girls up, in a playful campy way. If that was A24 and Kristoffer Borgli’s goal, they nailed it with The Drama.

Relating to Zendaya’s character in The Drama

As we reel from the weight of Emma’s secret and wrestle with whether it’s worse than what Rachel (Alana Haim) did to that neighborhood kid, all we can do now is try to breathe through it — to grin and bear like Charlie (Robert Pattinson).

Like Charlie, I thought we would right the ship, so to speak, and like Emma, stuff down the bile that rises in our throat. But this movie is co-produced by Ari Aster, a sick fuck who is a master of embodied memory on screen. As much as they, we, try to live in the present, we keep getting pulled into flashbacks. We keep getting… triggered.

It’s through these snatches of memory that I felt like I was looking into a Pensieve.

I’ve written at length on Substack about how I had very few lifelines as a weird, Black alt kid coming of age in the South.

I was the kind of teenager who long held The Dark Knight as their favorite movie. I had to survive Charleston in the 2010s; young Emma (Jordyn Curet) had to survive Baton Rouge at the same time.

In another life, I could have even seen me and The Drama’s young Emma being Tumblr mutuals. Hell, in many ways, high school Caro could have been portrayed by Curet as well.

We surely were listening to the XX and Grimes and Die Antwoord and Sky Ferreira at the same time. We probably nicked our yuppie moms’ Avon gel eyeliner at the same time, piling it when we were home alone after school only, for fear of our high school’s disciplinarian. We both wore skeleton gloves and did our best to wrangle our kitchens into an emo hairstyle.

The difference between me and young Emma from The Drama:

Read more

Welcome to SENSUAL TERRORS: musings on creativity, movie culture, and some strange bits of life.

I’m sorry, but y’all can never make me hate Cardi B. And as someone who ran Invasion of Privacy into the ground in 2018, it gives me great joy to have seen Cardi B live this week.

Part of what drew me in on this album is the horrorcore imagery. Cardi has survived a lot of very public heartbreak and betrayal. And just as she bares her soft belly to her fans on Instagram Live, she bares her teeth in the recording booth.

The album imagery immediately made me think of Edgar Allan Poe, among horror allusions. But most of Cardi’s album reads like a slasher, with our central anti-heorine relishing in bloodshed and revenge.

Here are 13 terrifying movies that are perfect for the Cardi B in all of us.

1 ✥ Cardi B’s album rollout ✥The Birds (1963)

The crow on Cardi’s shoulder immediately brings to mind Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds.

Thousands of birds flock into a seaside town and terrorize the residents in a series of deadly attacks.

If you can believe it, the creative at the center of Am I The Drama? literally brought a crow as an accessory to Schiaparelli’s Paris Fashion Week show last summer. Absolute cinema.

2 ✥ Cardi B’s album cover ✥ Crimson Peak

Cardi’s album cover feels dark and isolating, with its dark skies and surrealist landscape cut through with a literal red streak. Naturally, I can’t help but think of Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak.

In the aftermath of a family tragedy, an aspiring author is torn between love for her childhood friend and the temptation of a mysterious outsider. Trying to escape the ghosts of her past, she is swept away to a house that breathes, bleeds… and remembers.

If nothing else, Cardi’s album is gothic horror at its finest: Opulence and bravado that seeks to distract you from deep dark secrets.

3 ✥ Cardi B’s conversation with Kelly Rowland ✥ Suspiria (1977)

A lot of the surrealism in Cardi’s B Spotify interview (!!!) of all things, reminded me of René Magritte’s sky paintings and Nine Inch Nails’ music video for “The Perfect Drug.”

As far as horror films go, the wide open space and the witchy B-roll reminded me so much of Dario Argento’s Suspiria. Think darkly beautiful set design as our gothic heroine journeys into the belly of the beast.

An American newcomer to a prestigious German ballet academy comes to realize that the school is a front for something sinister amid a series of grisly murders.

I was tempted to go with the 2018 version, because mirrored surfaces were a big visual motif in Luca Guadagnino’s work. But the violently bright red and blue is very giallo-coded. Daria Argento would be proud.

4 ✥ “Dead” ft. Summer Walker ✥ American Mary

The beginning of Am I The Drama? starts with a news anchor’s impassioned voiceover…

Grammy-Award-winning recording artist Cardi B, known for her chart-topping hits, now stands accused of a crime spree that has left a trail of devastation and the fear. The national rap superstar is on the run after being linked to a series of brutal killings. Report any sightings immediately.

Cardi B takes the horrorcore theme even further on “Dead,” rapping:

I’m collecting body bags like they purses
I don’t even rap no more, I drive hearses

Likewise, bodybags are on the brain in American Mary, oft-seen as the spiritual successor to American Psycho.

A young medical student struggling to pay tuition is drawn into the shady world of underground body-modification.

As one Letterboxd user puts it simply: She performs surgery in high heels. If you listen to the first track of Am I The Drama?, you could easily see an alternate timeline where the same could have been said by Cardi B.

I wanna pull their lace fronts off they heads
I want all these bitches dead

5 ✥ “Hello” ✥ Elvira: Mistress of the Dark

Big boobs, fly dresses and a silly little attitude: Am I describing Elvira or Cardi B? Cassandra Peterson has a long list of credits in character as the Mistress of the Dark, but the eponymous film is such a fun horror comedy.

Arriving in the small town of Fallwell, Massachusetts to claim her inheritance, horror hostess Elvira receives a less than enthusiastic reception from the conservative locals, including her sinister uncle Vincent.

I can’t think of a film that better embodies the playful, flirty vibes of Cardi B’s “Hello”:

Cause it be me poppin' out, shittin' on these hoes (It be me)
It be me, my body tea, I'm bitches' goals, look (It be me)
It be me with my skin glowin' in the sun (It be me)
I'll tell a nigga's mama raised a bum, yeah (Yeah)
It be me just lookin' perfect, head to toe, look (Uh-huh)
It be you out here lookin' regular ho, ayy (Uh-huh)
It be me just poppin' out, just lookin' fine (Just lookin' fine)
It be me lookin' better than all you hoes combined, yeah (Yeah)

Both Cardi and Elvira love to wake the girls up.

6 ✥ “Magnet” ✥The Love Witch

I won’t shut up about Cardi B and I can’t shut up about The Love Witch. For the uninitiated:

A modern-day witch uses spells and magic to get men to fall in love with her, with deadly consequences.

Not only are both Cardi B and Elaine Parks real lovergirls, but both Anna Biller’s movie and “Magnet” are both works of art clearly about glamour magick.

Face pretty, I know I could probably win a pageant, baby
They say I'm attractive, I be feelin' like a magnet, baby
I'm just young and ratchet, baby, love it when you smack it, baby
Streets is callin' me and they keep sayin', "Let's get active, baby" (Wait)

I genuinely wouldn’t be surprised if Cardi has seen this film and loves it, especially she’s a hopeful romantic and Libra’s Libra.

7 ✥ “Pick It Up” ft. Selena Gomez ✥ May

As someone who loves to yap at the intersection of my dating life and freaky film, May is one of those movies where I kicked myself for not watching it sooner:

A socially awkward veterinary assistant with a lazy eye and obsession with perfection descends into depravity after developing a crush on a boy with perfect hands.

Weirdly, both “Pick It Up” and May are about being dizzyingly, ardently in love — and waiting patiently or not-so-patiently by the phone.

I’m so obsessed
You got me checkin’ my phone every second like
I hope you ask if I’m home
So come over so I can prove it to you
Said you’re on my mind, I just can’t let it go

If Cardi is just a girl, May is just a girl.

8 ✥ “Pretty & Petty” ✥ Ginger Snaps

I can’t think of a phrase that describes the vibe of 2000s teen movie mean girls and Katharine Isabelle takes the cake in Ginger Snaps:

The story of two outcast sisters, Ginger and Brigitte, in the mindless suburban town of Bailey Downs. On the night of Ginger’s first period, she is savagely attacked by a wild creature. Ginger’s wounds miraculously heal but something is not quite right. Now Brigitte must save her sister and save herself.

I had to bring up Ginger Snaps in relation to “Pretty & Petty” if for no other reason, as well, than Cardi’s dogged viciousness in dragging BIA and the literal allusion to dogs.

I'd rather die on the surgery table before I gotta walk around here lookin' like you
You wanna beef with me, are you sure? (Sure)
Do she even got a BET award?
Sweat me 'cause you bored just a big lap dog
Bia, be a labrador, grrr

9 ✥ “Better Than You” ft. Cash Cobain ✥ Maxxxine

If there’s one cinematic bitch who thinks she’s a goddamn star and better than you, it’s a toss-up between Maxine Minx, the lead of the second half of Ti West’s X trilogy:

In 1980s Hollywood, adult film star and aspiring actress Maxine Minx finally gets her big break. But as a mysterious killer stalks the starlets of Hollywood, a trail of blood threatens to reveal her sinister past.

Beyond Cardi’s main refrain of “Better than You,” the song’s verses have the cockiness that reminds you of Farrah Fawcett hair, mink fur coats, 6-inch heels and a million-dollar porn star face:

You know these bitches, they got no taste
You know these hoes ain’t got no place
You know these hoes ain’t got no style
I’m thot-thot when the crowd go wild

I show them how to be sex-sexy
She ain’t dressed like that before she met me
Baby I’m crying, I’m dead, I’m weak
Bitches wanna steal my whole technique

Now that got it, baby I’m polished, can’t be modest
I’m too poppin’

Shout out to the sex workers and strippers, who are forever on our moodboards.

10 ✥ “ErrTime” ✥ Forbidden Fruits

Forbidden Fruits was an absolute riot. Especially with its discussions about main character energy, the alternate title for Meredith Alloway’s film could have been Am I The Drama?

Free Eden employee Apple secretly runs a witchy femme cult in the basement of the mall store after hours – with fellow fruits Cherry and Fig. But, when new hire Pumpkin challenges their performative sisterhood, the women are forced to face their own poisons or succumb to a bloody fate.

Likewise, there’s nothing that embodies being the baddest bitch on the block and making fierce good use of it like Forbidden Fruits and “ErrTime.”

Bottle after bottle after bottles in this motherfucker
All my friends tens, look like models in this motherfucker
Hoes throwin’ ass, need some dollars in this motherfucker
Bad yellow bitch, look like Latto in this motherfucker

Somebody better get her ‘cause she out here lookin’ fine
Better pop your shit because I’m out here poppin’ mine
The way these diamonds hittin’, bitches damn near goin’ blind
Look, ‘cause Don Julio gon’ do the trick every time (Yeah)

Bonus rec: The absolute coven energy of the Latto remix of Cardi’s song.

And BTW, who’s going to dress up like the Fruits with me for Halloween?

11 ✥ “Check Please” ✥ Infinity Pool

If I had picked The Menu, it would have been a bit too punny and on the nose. Instead, I’m highlighting Brandon Cronenberg’s Infinity Pool, which changed my brain chemistry in the worst way:

While staying at an isolated island resort, James and Em are enjoying a perfect vacation of pristine beaches, exceptional staff, and soaking up the sun. But guided by the seductive and mysterious Gabi, they venture outside the resort grounds and find themselves in a culture filled with violence, hedonism, and untold horror. A tragic accident leaves them facing a zero tolerance policy for crime: either you’ll be executed, or, if you’re rich enough to afford it, you can watch yourself die instead

Gabi’s taste for luxury reminds me so much of this line from “Check Please”:

I got champagne in the fridge, you know how I live (Live)
My crib look like the mall, the mall look like the crib (Crib)

And likewise, Gabi’s flirty penchant for violence is also so incredibly Cardi B-coded.

I been feelin' like a bad bitch all goddamn day, huh
If you ain't my bitch, you just a bitch in the goddamn way
You say you'd die for your respect, let's find out and see
They say Red Bull give you wings, so does Cardi B (Cardi B)

12 ✥ “Trophies” ✥ Companion

If ever an unconventional final girl existed, it’s Iris from Drew Hancock’s Companion.

During a weekend getaway at a secluded lakeside estate, a group of friends finds themselves entangled in a web of secrets, deception, and advanced technology. As tensions rise and loyalties are tested, they uncover unsettling truths about themselves and the world around them.

And if ever a song from Am I The Drama? that showcased righteous paranoia and blood-soaked grit, it’s “Trophies” by Cardi B.

Look, bitches whack when Cardi is back, they taking place again
Bitches is safe, bitches got germs, I can not play with them
Shopping bag then back outside, I'm in they face again
They all lying, they talking crazy, nurse she escaped again

13 ✥ “Killin’ You Hoes” ✥ The Craft

There’s a reason The Craft is in my Letterboxd Top 4:

A Catholic school newcomer falls in with a clique of teen witches who wield their powers against all who dare to cross them – be they teachers, rivals or meddlesome parents.

The film shows how chaotic and dark girlhood can be, contrary to men’s beliefs. The concept of female rivalry, especially one that turns violent, is right in line with Cardi’s “Killin’ You Hoes”:

Bitches swear they will, but I know these bitches won't
I hope my name turn into glass in their throat
When I put my hands on her, she gon' say it's some unprovoked, look

And the latter half of The Craft mirrors Cardi’s bars about the ultimate betrayal:

Everything about you bitches fake, I don't like that
Bitches tell you to feel where to put the knife at

And just like the film, the song wraps up with a reminder that our final girl will always be the last one standing…

Bitch make no mistake I'm killing you hoes

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At Strawberry Cinema Collective, we support women’s rights and wrongs all year long, but we wanted to pick a film this month that centered wild, violent reaches of womanhood, in honor of Women’s History Month.

A title in the Good for Her cinema canon that has meant a lot to both Maria and me is The Love Witch, directed by Anna Biller. I can’t think of a film that is more iconic when it comes to its strong visual identity — which happens to be distinctly feminine and was clearly the result of astute research — and its plot, which feels familiar to any witchy crashout queen.

TL;DR: Anna Biller, you will always be famous, mamas.

Still, as iconic as this film is, our re-watch and discussion wasn’t without critique.

Takeaways from Emme (she/her) ⋆｡𖦹°⭒˚｡⋆

My main takeaway was that it’s super interesting to hear three people’s opinions on a movie, versus people just giving their “reviews”. Our conversation led to discussing more abstract thematics and stylistic critiques, which I really appreciated!

I also loved how we all brought our unique lived experiences with dating and identity to the conversation.

If you’d like more insights from Emme, check out her Substack film diaries here. First up: Hagsploitation.

Takeaways from Maria (she/her) ⋆｡𖦹°⭒˚｡⋆

I’m sorry to admit it, but I definitely went into this discussion feeling a little judgmental of Elaine. I don’t tend to get along with people who are too male-centered, so a lot of her behavior — like saying women need to perform the fantasies of men, as well as her general desperation for a relationship with a man — was really off-putting to me.

That’s not to say I don’t like the movie. I think it’s gorgeous. But as much of a fashion icon as she is, I just think Elaine is a little bit annoying.

However, I think our conversation really altered the way I thought about the film. One of our main topics (among other tangents of our zodiac big 3—which was so fun~!) was wehther this film was a feminist work. We discussed Anna Biller’s intentions behind it, which seemed like she wasn’t necessarily setting out to create a feminist work, and whether a piece could still be feminist if the director did not consciously intend for it to be.

I think what convinced me that it was, was a comment that Caro made. Caro asked the question, “Do you think a film has to portray a perfectly feminist woman in order to be a feminist film?” Which I thought was a really good point.

I don’t think we necessarily need to have a “perfect” woman in order to create a good piece of feminist art. And although I may not particularly like Elaine and her attitude towards relationships, there are several aspects of the film I can recognize as feminist ideals.

Despite Elaine’s insistence of traditional, conservative gender roles within her own relationships (which I found annoying) the film itself wasn’t saying that these roles were correct. In fact, it showed that these ideals lead to tragic consequences for both parties. Elaine doesn’t find love, and none of her relationships work out the way she wants them to.

I loved chatting with everyone, especially with all of the wonderful participation from everyone tuning in for the discussion. This was one of my favorite conversations so far, mostly because I could talk with such intelligent and thoughtful cinephiles who were able to challenge my initial thoughts about a movie, and help me learn through film analysis.

Takeaways from Caro (they/them) ｡⋆‧₊˚♡˚₊‧｡⋆

Rewatching this film now that my frontal lobe has developed is a trip. I used to watch Elaine’s lovelorn shenanigans and think “She’s so me!”

Even then, it was hyperbole, because even as someone who practices hoodoo, I would never engage in a spell involving another person — “positive” or “negative” without their consent.

Long before I became deeply interested in African Traditional Religions, I knew the basic laws of witchcraft: In order to get something, you probably have to give up something, too. The physics theory of witchcraft is seen in a movie like Practical Magic, where magickal trial and error are driving plot point of this spooky movie.

When I looked deeper into hoodoo, brujería and all kinds of spiritual practices, I read anecdotes of the most common way a love spell can go wrong, especially if the attraction is one-sided: You end up more “Crazy in Love,” à la Beyoncé, and the object of your affections remains generally unmoved or unchanged.

Or worse, the object of your affections becomes violently obsessive: We see this in The Craft, when Sarah brings harm to herself by casting a lovespell on Chris.

I’m not healed and I’m not perfect, but I’m happy to say I’m no longer in an Elaine Parks state of mind. I was heartened to hear Maria and Emme say that I seem level-headed in my approach to dating — it’s taken lots of tears, journal pages, hours of therapy and milligrams of medicine to get here.

My main takeaway from this re-watch of The Love Witch: Elaine is desperate pick-me who should have just listened to her landlord Trish in the tea room. Essentially: Girl, you gotta stop focusing on men.

But I’ll take Trish’s loving concern for Elaine a step further: Girl, you are the magic.

More of us girls (gender-netural) need to realize that sometimes, we have an exhilaratingly flirty conversation or a fun first date or really good orgasm not because of the other person, but because we made that magic ourselves. The Love Witch seems like a metaphor for that — and a cautionary tale of what can happen when you forget that you are the prize.

Be sure to tune in next time! We will be taking a break in April, but will be back with another woman-directed horror film in May. For now, we’ll leave you with some recommendations.

From Caro:

• Reading: “was he special, or are you just good at making things feel special?” by

• Wearing: about-face matte fluid eyepaint in “Daytripper”

From Maria:

• Reading: A (not so) brief history of blue eyeshadow: From the 2010’s to present day by

• Note: This is one installment in a five-part series about blue eyeshadow!

From Emme:

• Watching: Any film by John Waters

• Watching: Viva, dir. Anna Biller

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For more updates on the movie club, check out our Instagram! ♡ If you’d like to read more about the intersection of sex and horror, check out this essay I wrote for Dread Central.

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It’s been a month since we think-pieced Emerald Fennell to death, but not enough people are talking about the genius marketing that made Wuthering Heights the most talked-about new release yet — second only maybe to the equally visually striking and equally memeable, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple.

This conversation I had with about movie marketing was such a treat for me. The marketing expert, who calls Philly home, has been working in the film space for several years now.

Most notably, Swabreen was a marketing and engagement director for BlackStar Film Festival. Between event activations and ad campaigns, Bakr garnered the BlackStar brand dozens of press mentions and millions of media impressions, along with a 21% increase in attendance, 85% increase in pass sales and 64% ticket sales year-over-year for the film festival.

You can really see her expertise in pieces like “What’s the Deal with Movie Marketing Lately?” It’s a case study of the marketing around Kiss of the Spider Woman, Roofman and The Running Man, all up against Marty Supreme.

Beyond the obvious chops, Swabreen has a sixth sense of how marketing resonates with audiences, even in unexpected ways. I loved her piece about bad reviews being good for business through the specific lens of the hot gay mess that is Ryan Murphy’s All’s Fair.

Another project leveraging messy femininity is Wuthering Heights, whose global marketing campaign would be nothing without:

♡ Charli XCX’s soundtrack

♡ The slutty açaí bowl from Oakberry

♡ Hair products to get the Catherine Earnshaw look

♡ Hair motifs around everything, actually, including Margot Robbie’s Dilara Findikoglu dress and Brontë sister bracelet

♡ Jacob Elordi beating the “bummy red carpet look for the male lead” allegations

♡ The sensation play Cheetos ad

♡ The influencer activations, which continue to help studios shape the narrative around films — especially when influencers get the greenlight to put out sponsored or gifted movie content at least a week before the real journalists’ embargo lifts

We get into it all in this first-ever video installment of AUTOPSY.

Picture it: Summer, 2025. I’m lying in the grass with my best friend, soaking up Doechii’s gleaming purple skin against neon, Carnivale hues. Capital Pride, where Doechii will be performing tomorrow, is right around the corner. (I won’t be going because I literally have to have all of my shit out of my apartment by then.)

And we’re all sweating our tits off. And mosquitos are sucking our blood with gusto. Yet the allure of being Outside and soaking up all the sun we can before it starts to get dark at 4 p.m. ET seems like the best use of our time for now.

I’m keeping my girl, who is living in Baltimore at the time, company. Her man is getting a dragonfly poked and prodded and tapped into the softest, whitest part of his skin downtown, and together we’re killing time.

At some point, we make our way to one of my favorite coffee shops. Not only do they serve a mean fried-chicken Cobb and an excellent assortment of seltzers, but so many sexy dads co-work there, and so many MILFs close their laptops early to sip on some sauv blanc.

I started going here because the deliciously hairy, deliciously dark he/they boricua at the other indie cool coffee shop in this neighborhood was flirty with me, so keen on exchanging numbers and Instagrams — only to fumble when it came down to something.

The unhealed part of me had taken great joy in asking out this 6 ft plus, leather-clad aviation engineer biker on their (R’s) shift.

I had taken even more perverse joy when the engineer was flirting with me right in front of R1 at the late-night latte art competition. Dozens of people packed into the café way past business hours made the space tense, giddy, almost delirious with erotic energy as the bodies steamed up the windows and pulsed around the wet bar.

The unhealed part of me took pleasure in keeping things with R brief, because the engineer couldn’t keep his eyes off of me and was hanging on my every word.

The healed part of me moved on from them both. There was another café in the same neighborhood, anyway. It was the coffee-shop-by-day-wine-bar-by-night with the DILFs and wino mommies.

What with me and my homegirl reading Cosmopolitan and killing time in the neighboring grass, getting food at the wine bar made sense.

On that hot, sticky afternoon, I saw the reason I kept coming back, besides the gritty green smoothies and the overpriced, undersauced salads.

The lust turned my blood icy…

Read more

Welcome to the weekly dispatch, SENSUAL TERRORS: musings on creativity, movie culture, and some strange bits of life.

Shuffling uncomfortably in the downtown D.C. fluorescent lights, all I could say was, “You win some, you lose some, right?”

My head was spinning after another Oscars watch party in the books. Things were better than last year all-around: I had attended with my best friend, not a random beautiful dyke I had a crush on; I had watched all the Best Picture noms and then some; I liked my outfit a lot better because it fit my spirit and championed Autumn Durald Arkapaw.

But because I was more invested, especially in the success of Sinners, I was feeling more emotionally raw.

In my prime social justice warrior era, some 10 years ago, I too had been tweeting under the #OscarsSoWhite hashtag. (One of my journalism first clips, lost to history due to messy undergraduate archiving, was about Giulana Rancic’s thinly veiled racism toward Zendaya’s dreads on the Oscars red carpet, for crying out loud.)

The disappointment in the Academy that I’ve been toting around for a decade now just feels like anger and annoyance. It feels like the early days of desegregation, as Black people are scooping up “firsts,” almost a hundred years in to this awards ceremony. We get some gains, but our facilities are still shitty and subpar.

I had been telling anyone who asked that I knew Sinners wasn’t going to get all or even most of its nominations, and I knew in my heart that One Battle After Another would win best picture, because it was the ultimate project to pander to left-of-center White men of a certain age. That’s usually your best practice for winning an Oscar.

I wasn’t mad that the Ruth E. Carter and the Sinners camp lost the Best Costume Design and Best Makeup & Hairstyling categories, because Kate Hawley is a genius and Team Frankenstein did their big one.

But it’s sick that Delroy Lindo lost the category of Best Supporting Actor to Sean Penn, of all people. But it’s sick that Miles Caton, who channeled the spirit of Robert Johnson and all the ancestors of the South, lost Best Original Song. But it’s sick that Wunmi Mosaku lost Best Actress in Supporting Role.1

But you lose some, you win some. Just like at the BAFTAs,2 Ryan Coogler won Best Original Screenplay and Ludwig Göransson won Best Original Score on Sunday. Best Cinematography went to Arkapaw and Michael B. Jordan won the award for Best Actor in a Leading Role, of course.

These wins or losses, while they can have real weight in the film industry, are mostly just signifiers of the cultural moment, as dictated by the dominant culture, the White heteropatriarchy.

But Sinners will always be the most important film that came out in 2025 and no one can take that away from Black people. And for the witchy kind, the most important character in the most important film from last year was a hoodoo, and no one can take that away from Black spiritualists.

As a hoodoo with Gullah Geechee roots, I never felt more seen — and I know I was far from alone in feeling this way.

Last year, I interviewed several Black spiritualists about what hoodoo means for them, in honor of Hoodoo Heritage Month.

I asked everyone not just about their own relationship to hoodoo and whether it’s a closed practice, but also about their feelings on hoodoo representation in the media.

The latter part of my conversations with these spiritualists didn’t make it to the original post, so in honor of the nominations Coogler’s film won in our hearts, I’m sharing the reasons why Black spiritualists believe we should celebrate Sinners forever.

1. Mawiyah Kai EL-Jamah Bomani (she/her) ✢ New Orleans, LA

Mawiyah Kai EL-Jamah Bomani is an Olori and an Iyanifa, which means she is a chieftain and High Priestess in the Yoruba society of Ifa. Bomani is a self-proclaimed “spiritual disruptor,” as well as a conjuring rootworker and a death doula. She helps people get in touch with their past lives, messages from the dead, rituals, herbal work and “good old-fashioned common sense advice,” in her own words.

How do you feel about representations of hoodoo, particularly in visual media? ✢

I cringe when I watch ghost-hunting shows, and Hoodoo or any ATR pops up. I know the words out of the narrator’s mouth will include demonic. I fucking hate that label. The privileged know that any practice not rooted in idolizing white folks is a problem.

When we begin to see ourselves as enough and our beliefs as potent and spiritually nourishing, then we become editors of a story plagued with typos and deliberate racist tropes.

How did you feel about the way hoodoo was represented in Sinners? ✢

Hoodoo in Sinners was presented as Salvation Magick. It was protective and nurturing to those included in the fold. I thought it held its own as a character since it was an accessory to the story.

I spoke with a representative from the cultural division at Warner Bros., as they were working toward a way of marketing the film to the press, and the decision was made to encapsulate the serious approach to Hoodoo as a practice. So the press would interact with a movie that captured salvation magick in its realness.

Oppression and colonization were represented by the vampires’ desire, while salvation was found when the old world was allowed to flourish among those who shared its DNA.

The church couldn’t do it, not white Jesus — there had to be an understanding of the past and an acceptance to overcome the white man’s spiritual deceit.

I loved what I saw and respected every inch of it. Child, my husband and I cried tears of joy when the KKK got shot up.

2. Alysa L’se (she/they) ✢ Atlanta, GA

alysa l’se is a poet and communications organizer at a nonprofit for queer advocacy and equity; she is also currently pursuing her degree in African American Studies. Her writing and work primarily centers the Black, Queer experience and Black Feminist Theory.

She is an aleyo in an Afro-Cuban religion, Lucumi, with a background in the Southern Baptist Church. In their daily practice, they are venerating and honoring their ancestral and spiritual court, through both African and African American traditions, respectively.

How do you feel about representations of hoodoo, particularly in visual media? ✢

I have a lot of mixed emotions about this, honestly. I feel like there are way too many people offering the same things when we need their connection to Spirit and this work in different spaces.

Everyone who can translate cards into a message isn’t meant to be a diviner.

Everyone who can make a bath or candle isn’t meant to be selling them.

Some of these folks are great writers, artists, and community leaders, and capitalism has pushed many to go the routes that don’t fully reflect the ways in which they are needed by the collective.

But to answer your question, I do think there have been people making beautiful art telling the story of Hoodoo be it through film, photography, paintings, poems, et cetera, which has done a lot for people both learning and practicing the tradition.

While it can open doors for more to feel they have a right to something they know little about, which happens naturally with anything that feels mysterious to people, it does open the door for people to ask questions and prayerfully — find answers in the right places.

How did you feel about the way hoodoo was represented in Sinners? ✢

I think Hoodoo was represented beautifully in Sinners. My favorite thing was that Ryan wasn’t only intentional about studying the tradition and being guided by seasoned practitioners of it, he wrote the film to translate the magnitude of these practices without revealing the work that is kept for those who need it.

I think it told a beautiful story about the way Hoodoo and African Traditional Religions as a whole have been laced throughout our cultures and translated over time.

The story Delta Slim told Preacher Boy about the Blues being something that belonged to us, paying homage to the roots we carried pre-colonialism and carrying them on long after was very important.

So many don’t have the slightest idea about the real beauty of Hoodoo and I do think Sinners gave those who were willing to receive it a different perspective on why it is such a pillar in African American culture.

3. Tyla Harrington (she/her) ✢ New York, NY

Tyla Harrington is a photographer and the founder of Viewhouse Films.

How do you feel about representations of hoodoo, particularly in visual media? ✢

I think that hoodoo is special and doesn’t need to be put on blast through media. I feel that there are good representations. It’s not as dramatic as what they’ve done with Vodou.

How did you feel about the way hoodoo was represented in Sinners? ✢

I think they did a great job. It didn’t feel forced. And also, it kept the practice still closed.

4. Honey Hera Jupitera (she/they) ✢ Detroit, MI

Following their time in the pastoral space, as a pre-school teacher and as a end-of-life nurse aide, spiritual consultant Miss Honey is a hoodoo practitioner who writes about her spiritual practices on Substack and runs Chapel of Honey, a prayer service.

How do you feel about representations of hoodoo, particularly in visual media?

I love the representation in Eve’s Bayou — not that I would consider it a perfect or explicitly hoodoo representation.

There’s a scene that always got me: Mozelle gets the box off of a little table when there’s an older woman going to see her for some counseling, she takes out a lodestone or a root, and she teaches her how to dress it.

It’s obvious to me that she doesn’t always do that for everyone. It was that space of providing somebody with the medicine and the listening ear that they needed.

And then also the understanding of, you know, the way justice moves. That young baby said, “Oh, I think my father hurt my sister. I’m gonna go ahead and take care of that promptly.”

Now we know by the end of the movie that it didn’t quite go down that way, but Daddy was cheating up a fucking storm and something came to collect him.

How did you feel about the way hoodoo was represented in Sinners? ✢

In Sinners, I love how it is represented as protection. I loved how at the end, right when Annie’s already gone, the baby’s gone, he’s just there about to clean up the rest of the klan. [Smoke] sees her in white, and he’s like, “You know what? Wait one minute. Let me handle this.”

Peaceful, serene, beautiful… We get all these ideas of hoodoo and how it can be scary, how the Crossroads can be scary, and how we got that sauce. “I’m not afraid to put a chicken foot on somebody”— and those things are all true and beautiful too.

So far, I don’t think that there is enough representation of the beauty, of the softness, of the holiness of it. You can’t tell me that that wasn’t holy when [Annie] showed up in all white with the baby, healthy and blessed and able to receive him. And he did not do anything unholy by taking the fuckingkclan up before he went.

5. Jeida K. Storey (she/hers) ✢ Bay Area, CA

Jeida K. Storey runs the YouTube channel “Storeytelling Tarot,” where she offers free and paid tarot readings and content. She’s a diviner and a spiritual coach who wants to help people “alchemize their lives into joyful, courageous, and empowering experience.”

She is ½ of the Twin Hoodoo Muthas with Saint Xolani, co-hosting in-person and live Hoodoo events that seek to uplift, invigorate and educate the Black community.

How do you feel about representations of hoodoo, particularly in visual media? ✢

I trust Hoodoo in the hands of Hoodoos. I trust Hoodoo in the hands of Black American artists who love the ancestors, the land, and the people.

Following the explosive success of Sinners, it’s been healing to see Hoodoo represented as a tradition of love, survival, grit, justice, beauty, family, ritual, and ancestors. To see it revered and respected.

We know art is good when spirit is in it. We can all feel it when we see it. It moves us because it’s alive. It’s a channeling, a seance, a gathering of the spirits when we engage with art like that.

Which is why I do not support AI-generated media or the insistence that it’s art. In the current age where AI usage is spreading as viciously as COVID, it’s refreshing to see Black visual artists conjure within their medium. AI is fraudulent and a bastardization of our ancestral creativity.

AI is empty and cold; Hoodoo is alive and well.

How did you feel about the way hoodoo was represented in Sinners? ✢

Ryan Coogler successfully showed on film what my spirit knows and has experienced time and time again. That scene in the juke that we all love and speak highly about accurately depicts non-linear time, ancestral memory and presence all at once.

He showed us what happens when time moves backward, forward, and stands still simultaneously. That’s what happens when Hoodoos conjure, call down, and come together.

And as I said earlier, even the non-Black community members in the film benefitted from Sammie’s conjuration. That’s the power that Hoodoo has in the community.

6. Nikki Buchanan ✢ Brooklyn, NY

Nikki Buchanan is a hoodoo practitioner, Orisha devotee, and I am a scratched initiate of Palo who runs Soul Things Botanica.

How do you feel about representations of hoodoo, particularly in visual media?✢

Two movies that I truly enjoy for the representation are Daughters of the Dust and Eve’s Bayou.

Daughters for obvious reasons. I’m of Gullah Geechee ancestry, and I just love how groundbreaking that movie was — especially for the time that it came out. We still really haven’t seen anything like that.

Eve’s Bayou because it shows, like, yes, it could be scary sometimes to have visions. Anybody who’s prophetic has had a moment in their prophecy journey where they were seeing scary stuff and not knowing how to process it.

I love that the protagonist [had] her aunt there to guide her through. Even the aunt having her issues of her husband’s dying… At the end of the day, you know, hoodoo is community. There’s no such thing as a solitary practitioner, truly — you’re always going to need people.

How did you feel about the way hoodoo was represented in Sinners? ✢

I love Sinners. I thought it was fantastic. I seen it three times. I was a little concerned when Annie was busting the Mojo bag and she said, “Ase.” What does that got to do with a mojo bag? Nobody would say “ase.”

I know what they tried to do, and I think that they did it beautifully. I loved how she was a person that had the knowledge… I feel like that’s pretty much how it is in a lot of families, like Big Mama says something, everybody listens.

There is something to be said about things being shown in a tasteful way, that’s not disrespectful, but also leaves room for questions — because it is a closed practice.

You can’t show all of our business in a movie like that. It wouldn’t make sense to really sit there and be like, “This is how you construct a mojo bag.”

7. Tiana I. (they/she) ✢ Richmond, VA

is a self-identified “part-time artist, full-time diva” who is an illustrator and graphic designer, as well as a Hoodooist and practitioner of Lucumí (or Santería as it’s more commonly known in the states).

Their belief is that “Hoodoo is the Black American ancestral wisdom, relationship with the land, and belief in one’s personal power to support oneself and their community,” with the tenets of “patience, a soft heart and open mind, humility and good character.”

How do you feel about representations of hoodoo, particularly in visual media? ✢

Hoodoo representations in visual media have been interesting. Some have been very beautiful and respectful, while others have been blasphemous and foolish.

How did you feel about the way hoodoo was represented in Sinners? ✢

The way Hoodoo was represented in Sinners was absolutely gorgeous. It didn’t give up a lot of the business while giving the audience just enough.

I loved the way Annie had such deep faith in her roots and herself to work them. She was so knowledgeable and sure of what she was doing, it wasn’t for play with her. It wasn’t just aesthetics. 10/10!

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As a slut and a member of the LGBTQ+ community, I’ve held my tongue long enough.

Heated Rivalry wasn’t all that blistering hot.

Let me explain.

Just because something is sexual doesn’t mean it’s sexy. And what’s sexy to one person isn’t sexy to another.

For example, even if you’re Team Slow Burn, Heated Rivalry can hit different for you, depending on whether “slow burn” means the amount of time that passes in the narrative vs. how slowly the intimacy is built.

I definitely think the show Heated Rivalry was tantalizing, and I love the fact that its brazenness hit home so deeply for young women — that alone speaks volumes.

At a time when conservatism is a global albatross around women’s necks, there’s little mystery as to why media depicting unabashed and wanton sexual desire is popular.

See: the viral popularity of Ellen Hutter’s perversion in Nosferatu, made manifest through Count Orlok, and the monster-fucker thirst sparked by GDT’s Frankenstein.

Lukewarm takes on Heated Rivalry do nothing to push LGBTQ+ liberation forward

I largely ignored the discourse around Heated Rivalry that accused women of undue voyeurism — arguments about who’s doing the looking, and if they deserve to look.

There’s inherent consent to be viewed, because this is a work of fiction that took an enormous effort to be created. Moreover, Heated Rivalry is a queer text written by a bisexual woman, adapted to screen by a gay, involving actors who are queer.1

I understand the trepidation that Heated Rivalry can cause — especially for the tenderqueers who are obsessed with identity-policing and gatekeeping, anyway.

I get it. We want to move past the Gay Best Friend archetype and the idea that non-gay men should only keep twinks around as their cunty Labubus.

It’s why GLAAD has been monitoring LBGTQ+ media for years, collecting its findings in its Where We Are on TV reports and its Studio Responsibility Index. It’s why their awards feel as good as the NAACP Image ones. It’s an honor to be a part of projects that push the liberation movement forward.

Beyond fears that a woman’s view of gay men is reductive, I have sensed a particular fear around straight women here in particular.

I tie this (very valid) irritation back to conversations about who gets to go to the gay club. We all know why straight women go to the gay club — to be able to queen out, of course, and if they encounter men, they’re the non-threatening kind.

I once saw a cis gay male TikToker say he was sick of the consequent vibe shift that happens because of this phenomenon.

Straight women come to the gay bar, without or without their Good Judies, because they could throw it back without the fear of being assaulted.

Then straight men come to the gay bar, with or without their girlfriends, because that’s where the hot, cool girls are.

Now the gay bar, which should have been full of butch queens and dykettes has a 2:1 ratio of straight people to gay people.

This causes all sorts of problems, because straight men are suddenly surprised when queer men are innocuously and understandably hitting on them.

But I don’t think that the popularity of a gay male romance with women viewers means more straight people in the club.

But over on Reddit, we literally have Heated Rivalry detractors writing things like:

to me, it’s very similar to how straight men very often tend to fetishize two women being together. when you look at her catalogue, she has literally only ever written books about queer men. again, to me that screams fetish.

Heated Rivalry haters think it’s reductive to depict gay men’s sex lives on screen, but I think it’s reductive to treat the women enjoying Heated Rivalry as if they’re heterosexual culture vultures.

Everyone I know who thinks the show is sexy as hell is all up and down the Kinsey scale — and if they don’t use they/them pronouns themselves, they’ve at least eaten a they/them thussy.

And beyond the fact that some of y’all are splitting hairs about voyeurism and exhibitionism in a fictional gay TV context, I’m annoyed that Heated Rivalry discourse paints the show as revolutionary when it comes to sex, especially queer sex.

To be honest, the so-called sexual depravity and utter freakiness depicted in the show are… table stakes for many queer men’s sex and dating lives.

Maybe not in the dive bars and drag brunch spots filled to the brim with fag hags, but at the rest of gay clubs, watching the object of your desires jack himself off because you told him to do so is an average Tuesday morning for a gay man.

‘Heated Rivalry’ isn’t the peak. It’s the baseline.

Far be it from me to reduce gay men to their sexual acts.

Trust that I understand how that is harmful, especially in the today of things, as the LGBTQ+ community grapples with K-12 bathroom wars, and organizations that warrantlessly paint my fellow trans sisters and drag siblings as pedophiles.

The need for safe spaces is why LGBTQ+ nightclubs, bars and speakeasies proliferated in the early 20th century. This is why mainly LGBTQ+ spaces that were quite necessarily underground, including Stonewall Inn, were raided by police, under the guise of cracking down on alcohol served without a liquor license.

But for better or for worse,2 a big part of being a cisgender gay man is one’s sexual expression. And it’s for this reason that I know what we saw in Heated Rivalry was light work.

Just so I can beat the Overly Freaked Out allegations — and I recognize that this disclaimer is my conservative Catholic upbringing rearing its head in a decidedly unsexy way — I want to clarify that I am a former reproductive health journalist, wellness educator, pleasure advocate, and sex-positive content creator.

I have seen it all, truly.

So when I watched Heated Rivalry’s sex scenes, the main thing I was thinking as a (trans) man who has sex with men, was…

Oh yeah, I remember that!

and also

As someone pivoting to the film industry, with a background in sex education, I would love to be an intimacy coordinator.3

I wasn’t screaming, crying and throwing up over Heated Rivalry the way a lot of y’all are because it was my lived experience. But I think even if I wasn’t a member of Team MSM or Team MLM, I would have still been having sex that rivals Heated Rivalry.

Why ‘Heated Rivalry’ wasn’t that spicy to me

I didn’t have this realization until recently. I watched Heated Rivalry later than everyone else; when it premiered, I was head down writing for my day job and finishing up freelance assignments, and spending my time constantly in motion between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

This clarity on my view of Heated Rivalry — and exhaustion with the negativity around it — comes courtesy of a fellow horror journalist, BJ Colangelo. Her video about how Heated Rivalry viewers can just be a freak IRL — and don’t have to let their dreams be dreams, essentially — making me think critically about why Heated Rivalry wasn’t that revolutionary for me.

I hate to flex on y’all, but I have never had a bad hookup in my life.4

And it’s not always about me getting my nut, either.

Being queer and trans — and at times poly, and actively in therapy, and studying human sexuality and romance for a living — rewired my brain when it came to sex.

Orgasm gap who? Because even if I was hooking up with penis-owners, even if they were cis men who lived their life on the straight “side” of the spectrum, PIV sex was never the finale, priority or even the main event.

When I was sexually active, I was always really frank and up front about my desires — in a respectful way, of course, and after those conversations had been greenlit with enthusiastic consent.

Sex was kind of like being in a jam band. We knew what part to play, the parameters and the key of the music. When we finally linked up, we could freestyle — and the music was beautiful.

It’s because of this approach that I went into hookups with little expectations but mutual enjoyment.

And even if sex acts on the set list didn’t “work out” for some reason — dryness, tightness, anxiety, the physical mechanics of old age — we still could revel in the intimacy of skin-to-skin contact and human vulnerability.

With that being said, I think media like Heated Rivalry can be an entrypoint into more joyful, more expansive, more emotionally fulfilling sex for people who don’t have that lived experience.

And maybe, just maybe, Heated Rivalry did strike a really big chord with straight women or with people who date straight cis men for this specific reason.

Just as voyeurism can be a positive act in the bedroom or at a play party, I think voyeurism can be positive in media, too. LGBTQ+ gatekeepers, hush: The world could learn a thing or two from gay men.

An average Tuesday morning

When I was first making my foray into the IRL sex positive spaces, going to the local sex club was a huge Event for me.

I signed up online for my membership and paid; I got to know the people in the reception area and I could tell they were doing a gut-check on all the newbies. It was clear that we were freshmen because no one knew our faces; some regulars had been coming for decades.

Everyone had to take the 101 class first before playing, to make sure they were abreast of physical and psychological safety protocol.

I was also nervous, despite being excited. I was comfortable with my body, especially having made carefree sponsored content with sexual wellness brands. But I was in awe of the people who were confident in their sexual abilities, and knew how to create the kind of BDSM that didn’t just hit for their partner, but commanded an entire room.

Through conversations at the sex club and with my (gay male) therapist, I learned that these kinds of spaces existed outside of this particular establishment — and not just in NYC or San Francisco, which is what I had thought from poking through LGBTQ+ history archives. And I’ve been delighted every time I have visited them.5

People who are uncomfortable with the raw sexuality seen in Heated Rivalry would be horrified to find out how often gay men really get it poppin’ and to what degrees. What happens at your local Eagle or any gay bar that has an underwear night would make you clutch your pearls.6

People who think Heated Rivalry is reductive probably don’t know about circuit parties. They don’t know about the years-long traditions of slutty, sticky glamping weekends on Memorial Day weekend…

or the no-phones group play sessions at mansions in the suburbs (here, in NoVa), ticketed via Eventbrite with the most vague name ever, but those who know know…

or the nudist collectives erected to jerk each other off in the woods..

or Fire Island…

or the hanky code…

or Sniffies… or Scruff…

or the history of cruising in bars, and saunas, bathhouses, and gyms, that still lives today, where secrecy is maintained but mating calls are presented in plain sight.

If Ilya Rozanov stroking it in the shower scandalized you, you’d go into a coma if you knew what the beautiful gays of Manhattan are doing in the Equinox locker room.

The whole point of Heated Rivalry is to let go of shame. The LGBTQ+ community has often dulled its sparkle or made itself more rigid in order to gain respect — essentially “I’m not like other gays” behavior.

Think: Masc gay men who say “no fats, no fems,” the studs and butches insisting on womanhood in a way that is disparaging to genderfluid sapphics or TERF lesbians, famous Black gays who would never date within their race, old-school T girls who’d make fun of their trans sisters for looking clocky.

Even if Heated Rivalry wasn’t revolutionary for me, it serves as a reminder of how pleasure should be prioritized. And even if Heated Rivalry wasn’t revolutionary for me, I would never shit on the women, queer or straight, who truly felt an awakening watching Shane Hollander get his cheeks clapped.

At the end of the day, if you’re genuinely hating on Heated Rivalry for the aforementioned reasons, I hate you.

A lot of these negative takes are reductive, as if Gender Expansive Queer people who are Overly Freaked Out don’t exist. I’m about to start marching on Washington for our rights…

Join me?

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You can, with Strawberry Cinema Collective — a project that is the brain baby of me and the endlessly cool, endlessly stylish, endlessly astute of Writer? I Hardly Know Her!

All throughout 2026, we’re focusing on horror movies directed by women. And of course, our first meeting kicked off with an iconic entry into the Good for Her cinema canon: Jennifer’s Body, written by Diablo Cody and directed by Karyn Kusama.

Takeaways from Caro (they/them) ｡⋆‧₊˚♡˚₊‧｡⋆

The cultural impact of Jennifer’s Body is long-lasting, for weird uncool girls, feral hot girls, and people who have a soft spot for both. More specifically, Jennifer’s Body belongs to the queers — a thread that was teased out for the first iteration of Strawberry Cinema Collective’s movie night.

I’m glad we got to bring of phantom bound, a Substacker who focuses on queer horror media, into the fold. They kicked off our discussion on how Karyn Kusama and Diablo Cody’s work made room for the monstrous feminine.

Apart from whether we see Jennifer Check as exclusively good, solely evil or reveling in that delicious grey area, one of my favorite conversations was about Jennifer’s bisexuality.

Even though Jennifer’s Body gets lumped in with other “lesbian (horror) movies,” she doesn’t fit into neat little heteronormative or homonormative lines.

This was touching to me, considering the rise of the Mean Lesbian™ and, contrary to popular belief, younger, chronically online LGBTQ+ people seem increasingly anal about labels, gatekeeping aspects of queer culture and identity policing.

Takeaways from Maria (she/her) ⋆｡𖦹°⭒˚｡⋆

What I loved the most about our discussion last week was that I got to hear all of these new and interesting views from such smart and thoughtful people.

I’ve seen this movie probably dozens of times. Like Caro said, Jennifer’s Body is a piece of quintessential queer media, and I couldn’t help but love and relate to it.

That being said, I noticed our film club members bringing up things I hadn’t thought of before, like the question of Jennifer’s agency throughout the film.

We initially began by asking the question: “Is Jennifer a villain?”

The conclusion from everyone seemed to be “no,” that the bandmates were.

Where this conversation took an interesting turn was when we examined whether Jennifer had any choice in her killings or if she was purely a victim of circumstance.

The fact that her innocence is often questioned — and that she is so often referenced as the villain of this story — makes her an example of the too-common phenomenon of blaming the “imperfect victim” in cases of sexual assault.

I liked that our conversation left me with new ways to think about this well-loved film. I feel like the next time I rewatch it, I’ll have gained a new perspective.

Up next: “Candyman” (2021) dir. Nia DaCosta

From Caro: As a Black horror fan, Nia DaCosta’s Candyman was seminal in deepening my relationship to the genre. I can’t wait to use February, Black History Month, to platform Black voices — especially now. I’m happy to share space with of Black Women Directors, who is a wealth of knowledge here.

From Maria: I’m also super excited that this month we actually have two speakers instead of just one! That second speaker is someone who I think is super cool and awesome: My dad! You’ll be hearing from of Draw is Life. He grew up with the original Candyman, so we’ll get a perspective on how this version differs from the original.

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For more updates on the movie club, check out our Instagram! ♡ If you’d like to read more about the intersection of sex and horror, check out this essay I wrote for Dread Central.

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On Jan. 14, when I dragged my bag of bones across the DMV during rush hour for an early screening of Ryan Prows’ Night Patrol, the digital and literal streets had already erupted in mourning for real tragedy. Renée Good had been senselessly killed by United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement a week earlier.

But that was far from the first person, this year alone, who had faced bodily harm from ICE. And Good wasn’t the only person that ICE had killed lately.1

Earlier, on New Year’s Eve 2025 in Los Angeles, an ICE officer fatally shot Keith Porter, a Black man, outside his apartment. There is no footage of what happened or how the situation escalated that night, but we have fragments of the truth.

Porter fired shots in the air; his family says he was harmless in his actions; their attorney says that an arrest, at most, by the Los Angeles Police Department, would have been warranted, possibly.

And somehow, this man ends up murdered by an off-duty ICE agent.

At a time when the evils of the police state are top of mind, Ryan Prows’ Night Patrol (2025) is in theaters at exactly the right time.

The No. 1 Thing You Should Know about ‘Night Patrol’

Night Patrol combines all your favorite gnarly pop culture moments, all while managing to be completely original.

Plainly put: If you love gang-war media, films depicting Black life in a way that revels in the gray area, and anything that embraces the gritty underbelly of Los Angeles, Night Patrol film is for you.

Who is ‘Night Patrol’ for?

I consider Peaky Blinders an all-time favorite TV show, I loved the first installment of Starz’ Power franchise, and I have a soft spot for Sons of Anarchy. Surrealist, Black-led media like Sorry to Bother You, Atlanta, and of course, Sinners, changed the trajectory of my life.

And as is the case for many Black folks of a certain age, Dope and Insecure and now One of Them Days bolstered my love for the messy, vibrant culture of African-American Los Angeles. Combined with my penchant for police dramas such as Training Day, Night Patrol film was truly up my alley.

Plot of ‘Night Patrol’: A

What is the movie Night Patrol about? Two cops, played by Jermaine Fowler and Justin Long, navigate some of the biggest gangs in Los Angeles: the Bloods, the Crips, and the LAPD.

Both are enamored with the eponymous subdivision of their police force, and both cops are vying for a spot on this mysterious task force for very different reasons.

Cast of ‘Night Patrol’: A

The mix of actors in the project is fascinating. Rappers like Freddie Gibbs and YG move through this paranormal Los Angeles with ease; Flying Lotus, having already dipped his toe in horror by scoring and directing 2025’s Ash, rounds out Night Patrol’s musician bloc.

Most importantly, RJ Cyler makes a fantastic Final Boy. I loved the heart and range of microexpressions he brought to the role. He made his character easy to root for.

Given that Cyler was already in the Scream TV series, I can’t wait to see him in more horror roles.

Nicki Micheaux played a fierce mom who exhibits a lethal blend of African traditonal religion and the opposite of “gentle parenting.” Think Angela Bassett as Marie Laveau in American Horror Story: Coven and that brand of supernatural tough love.

Of course, Long has a horror career that reads like a rap sheet: Jeepers Creepers in 2001, Drag Me to Hell in 2009, Tusk in 2014, Barbarian in 2022 and the Goosebumps series reboot in 2023.

Cinematography of ‘Night Patrol’: A

I normally consider the production design and cinematography of a film hand-in-hand — the same way one considers the set design for a play and its blocking.

The infrastructure of a film like Night Patrol includes drive-by street corners, abandoned basketball courts, and the courtyards of the projects. And all of these things are made beautiful by the cinematography, which makes the mundane feel like an urban fairytale.

‘Night Patrol’: Final Takeaways

We didn’t need a paranormal police procedural to tell us that state-sponsored surveillance, systemic oppression and fatal violence was bad and very real.

But as always with horror, some 90 minutes of fake horror in a cool dark room becomes the perfect distraction from real-life, perpetual horror with no end in sight.

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Night Patrol Movie Diaries: In honor of YG, a vampire-inspired GRWM set to his music | Thanks to Shudder: My first time at an AMC movie theater in years | Loved seeing fellow Black horror critics in action after the screening ♡

28 Days Later has always been the baseline, the blueprint, That Girl. Even early on in my horror journey, I decided that the 2002 movie, directed by Danny Boyle and written by Alex Garland, was an example of elevated horror.

I don’t mean “elevated” in a stush or distincly A24 way, but “elevated” in that it took a thoughtful approach to scary, gory material.

The film didn’t try to be anything it wasn’t. Its gritty texture, both thematically and visually, reflected the darkness of the rage virus timeline it was depicted.

Ultimately, 28 Days Later was undeniably stylish in its own avant garde, grungy way — all while being delightfully and unapologetically British.

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, while directed by the indomitable Nia DaCosta, feels like a return to form that is equal parts silly, tender and terrifying.

No. 1 thing you should know going into ‘28 Years Later: The Bone Temple’

Plainly speaking: If you love Alex Garland’s penchant for chaos (hello, Warfare) and Danny Boyle’s penchant for ghetto mess (hello, Trainspotting), you’ll love The Bone Temple. Garland wrote the script, Boyle produced it and it shows.

Likewise, if you loved the stylish claustrophobia of the Candyman reboot, then you’ll squirm at DaCosta’s darkly beautiful 2026 film. And can you believe DaCosta churned out five feature films in less than 10 years?

Cast of ‘The Bone Temple’: A+

Jack O’Connell and how Jimmy runs the Jimmies is the embodiment of ghetto mess. It’s White audacity. It’s White entitlement to power. It’s White ratchetness. It’s White fragility and White meaning-making, through indignant Satantic anti-authoritarianism.

All of Alfie Williams’ micro-expressions as Jimmy, née Spike, show that he was the right pick to carry this new 28 arc.

But truly and honestly, it’s Ralph Fiennes who continues to be a light in the darkness as Dr. Kelson. His character is a case study in unfathomable tenderness and Fiennes carries that well.

I loved seeing Erin Kellyman display her quiet strength on screen. To be frank, having seen The Falcon and the Winter Soldier long before One Battle After Another, Chase Infiniti actually reminded me of her.

Plot of ‘The Bone Temple’: A

The film picks up where the last one left off, with Spike voluntarily thrusting himself into the lion’s den, in hopes of cementing his spot in Jimmy’s wolf pack.

While Rudyard Kipling’s “Boots” set the tone for the last 28 Years Later, the second installment reminds of a line from T.S. Elliot’s “The Hollow Men”:

This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

The first kill of The Bone Temple is incredibly bloody, but it comes as a whimper, not a bang. It’s a slow trickle that turns into a sputtering river of red.

It’s the kind of violence that both turns your stomach and is difficult to look away from — the first paradox Spike faces among the Jimmies.

And despite this dark tone set and maintained throughout, as always in the 28 Days franchise, little flecks of levity are visible in the fabric of primal rage.

Cinematography of ‘The Bone Temple’: A+

Amidst the barbarism, we get the romance of open skies, whittled bones at rest and lush flora, shot wide so you can feel how expansive and endless this post-apocalyptic world is. Even Fiennes remarked on DaCosta’s visual choices, noting “incredibly striking camera angles.”

But this romanticization through the lens also feels like an intentional choice, showing us what a de-industrialized earth looks like.

We can see the twinkling stars again and embrace a more verdant world. And we can’t talk about the cinematography without discussing…

Production for ‘The Bone Temple’: A+

The centerpiece is literally in the name. The Bone Temple is truly an architectural marvel, and the way it’s shot truly gives honor and glory to the space.

It makes me sick that, as far as I know, I will never visit any version of The Bone Temple. I see it less as a monument of death and more as a testament to the temporal beauty of life, and now I have my marching orders to find a place IRL that reflects this balance.

‘The Bone Temple’ sound track : A

The use of music was so artful in this film. The needle drops in this film managed to be fun but not heavy-handed.

Also, I’m sure all the analog-obsessed girlies who put “physical media” on their 2026 “ins” list will swoon over Dr. Kelson using a hand-cranked record player to listen to his bunker vinyls.

SLIGHT SPOILER: More than Duran Duran and Iron Maiden, I was hyped to hear the swell of “In the House - In a Heartbelt” toward the end. This nod to the OG 28 Days Later is perfectly timed.

Final Takeaways of ‘28 Years Later: The Bone Temple’

This “zombie movie” won’t be at all what you expected, but it will be what you need.

In an increasingly dark world that feels stripped of its humanity, run by people in power who seek to dehumanize those with less of it, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple feels like a dirty mirror and a brimming beacon at the same damn time.

In the Book of Caro, history was made one year ago today. I published my very first post on SENSUAL TERRORS. Months ago, I would have said I was channeling Pearl with this post.

I felt deeply rejected and hurt by the recruiters for a dream gig who had, for all intents and purposes, ghosted me. Hungry for some kind of “in” to the film industry, I decided to let that pain of rejection spur me to action.

If you’re looking solely at the above post, though, I was just channeling the literary-it-girl Substack thought daughters who I’d seen go viral on this platform — the ones who championed self-reliance, self-determination and self-righteousness in the face of hustle culture.

They charged full steam ahead, heavy on style and low on substance — leaving punctuation and cohesive arguments at the front door, and celebrating said sloppiness.

The crux of my first post was a series of empty platitudes, but I didn’t know it at the time: Face your fears! Be your own muse! Let it all go, you overthinker, you! Learn to be carefree!

Sure, these are noble pursuits and valuable areas of mastery. But — and I hate to say it — nothing is achieved without hard fucking work.

It wasn’t until later that I was actually channeling Pearl.

I became relentless: Along with writing weekly dispatches about film culture, I also stayed devoted to bringing y’all GUT REACTIONS columns, which contextualized my gory first-time watches with their cultural significance.

I was raw and vulnerable, in often uncomfortable ways. I wrote about romantic daydreams, interwoven with the sensuality of body horror.

I was pulling up on niggas: I traveled for damn near half a day by Amtrak train to Pennsylvania, alone, in the wee hours of the night —and stayed in a veritably haunted Airbnb — to interview horror scholars about Blair Witch Project, vampires, werewolves zombies and diversity in film.

I was driving my pitchfork into the flesh of my desires and other people’s desires, too. I wrote about the sexiness of tortured partners on screen and excavated my own attraction to darkness.

I started the year investigating y’all’s attraction to Count Orlok and ended the year looking for answers to a pivotal question: Is Frankenstein hot?

This year, I’m ready to be less Pearl and more Maxine Minx.

I’m determined to move past the victim narratives I have constructed for myself. I don’t mean what conservatives deem victimhood: My Blackness, my transness and my disabilities are superpowers.

I mean the victimhood that I love to worry like a stone. I mean the victimhood I like to gnaw out of anxious habit.

Instead, I want to effectively run from the past — without forgetting where I came from.

I want to actually trust the timing of my life. Moreover, I want to have real conviction that it will all work out — that everything I desire, that is destined for me, will come to me.

I want to continue to do the work and feel good about doing the work — to never feel guilt for believing in my ability to make beautiful, thoughtful art by myself and with others.

And I actually want to lean in to the deliciousness of my life — and all that the film communities online and offline have to offer.

I truly saw the power of Filmstack in the virtual space. I had fun producing and moderating “BLACK GXRLS ON…”, which was a series of Substack Lives, where Black women and non-binary people joined me to discuss film culture.

This year, I’ll be focusing on the newly minted monthly movie club I’m co-hosting with Maria Hawthorne of Writer? I Hardly Know Her. Let me know if you’d like to join!

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In 2026, I’m also excited to do more film stuff in in-person! Last year, I covered the DC/DOX Film Festival.

Likewise, I attended “The Other America: A Cosmology of Jordan Peele’s Us” at the Lincoln Center. Do you know what it’s like to see one of your favorite films of all time on that absolutely huge screen in the Walter Reade Theater?

So far, the Atlanta Film Festival is the big cinematic event that’s on my roster.

I have this thing about collecting favorite theaters, and I’m glad to have an excuse to visit the Plaza Theatre and the Tara this year.

It’s too late to register for Sundance or Berlinale, but there’s still time for Cannes, TIFF, Locarno and Brooklyn Horror Film Festival… I could truly talk about this forever.

Believe when I say: I truly can’t wait to see what other huge IRL opportunities 2026 has in store for me.

Whether you’re an old friend or a new one, thank you so much for subscribing! Feel free to give me a shout on Instagram.

You can also come hang out with me on TikTok — I’ll be posting reviews of all the new horror releases on there in January and throughout the rest of the year. ♡

Content warning: While this does not include any excessively bloody images, this installment includes historical and contemporary imagery of wounds, including a religious painting, a prayer book illustration, and screencaps of SFX from the late 1980s.

The best part of my lore is that I am a lapsed Catholic. If you want to understand my pious neuroticism, aesthetic hedonism, and most importantly, my tortured relationship with sexuality, then you have to understand that I was Catholic for about 10 years.

That Catholic guilt and self-flagellation is real: Everyone is a liberal, bra-burning feminist until you have to go get your STI test and you randomly burst into tears because your intrusive thought is, “What if God gives you cervical cancer to punish you for having faggot-y premarital sex?”

And somehow, despite all my programming, I was brave enough this year to go out on a limb and use the term “wound-fucking” in an essay.

But I can’t think of a better word to describe that imagery from David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983). It was the second Cronenberg film I watched, following Crimes of the Future (2022), and I peeped Cronenberg’s game quickly: A little bit of innuendo, a lot of overtly slutty energy.

I clocked an undeniable BDSM undercurrent to the snuff videos that get broadcast on the fictional TV station at the center of the movie. And that detail alone adds an extra layer of taboo for me as an IRL journalist. I went to J-school right when Nightcrawler came out (2014) and captivated me,1 and we were told how to handle the old adage “If it bleeds, it leads” with tact.

Airing snuff, even on a “pirate” TV station, is unimaginable to me. So is the way protagonist Max Renn hooks up with his frenemy, Nicki Brand — a seduction highly screencapped and gif’d by freaky cinephiles from Tumblr to Instagram.

I count how many times I’ve seen the bit where Max emphasizes that the videotapes at his house feature torture and murder, to which, Nicki, played by the mesmerizing Debbie Harry, responds, “Sounds great.”

“Ain't exactly sex,” Max says.

“Says who?” Nicki quips.

Cronenberg, the master of perversion, layers sin on top of sin, and that’s how we get to the wound-fucking. First, there’s regular fucking, then you fall down a rabbit hole of sin.

Tech feels like flesh. Movies are sentient. Digital networks are leveraged for mind control. You can penetrate your skin and live to tell the tale of the agony over and over again.

That’s how a man ends up with a fuckable wound on his stomach.

After I watched Videodrome for the first time this year, I was thrilled to stumble across , who has written at length about wounds as visual allegories for internal sex organs.

Zoe’s essay on the literary function of cannibalism thrilled me two-fold.

1. First, Zoe’s writing gave me the courage. I thought to myself, “Wow, there is room for critical thought like mine, that wants to go deep on the weird, wonderful, mystical, perverse and divine in art.”

2. Secondly, I thought to myself, “So I can write about horror beyond palatable final girls. I can write about the deeply uncomfortable films that showcase, romanticize and even eroticize gore.”

And as a lapsed Catholic, my curiosity was piqued by the Holy Side Wound of Christ, as mentioned in her Zoe’s cannibalism essay.

“The wound, in taking on a distinctly vaginal look, becomes invitational. We ascribe it the feminine quality of the suggestion of being able to be penetrated,” Zoe writes. “It is an invitation to eroticize and queer the body of Christ, specifically the wounds inflicted on him during the passion.”

As someone who spent a lot of time thinking about saints and holy death as a teenager, this wound brought to mind another Catholic work which has lived rent-free in my imagination since high school: The death of St. Sebastian.

It is an event that has been depicted countless times — from the Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian by Andrea Mantegna (c.1480) to Esquire’s Esquire’s depiction of Muhammad Ali.

More than the ropes evoking shibari-esque imagery, it’s the entry points of the arrows that stand out to me. My first thought seeing Sebastian’s arrows is that they evoke a ticklishness in me.

While being tickled is not one of my kinks, I did sit for a tickling session at the local kink club’s open house once. This was the same night I laid in a coffin, by the way.

Anyway, being tied down and tickled by an effusive older White couple was not on my bingo card, but it was fun in very playful, carefree way.

I had an ongoing conversation with friends earlier this year about whether kink could be non-sexual. I don’t know if I have a definitive answer to that question, even as a former sex educator. But there was definitely a strong energy exchange — an arguably religious euphoria — to being caressed by the tender arrows of the couple’s roving hands.

Weighing the death of St. Sebastian, remembering how it feels to be pinned and penetrated, and recalling Catholicism’s emphasis on the Seven Sacraments of “outward signs of inward grace,” it’s not hard for me to wrap my head around the pulsing sexuality inherent to Max Renn’s gaping stomach.

This train of thought became even more delicious and layered when I realized that some people read Max Renn as a Christ-like figure, and there has been ongoing debate about Videodrome against or within a Christian context.

I go back to Zoe from zombie grrrl zine2, and the way she digs in further on Christ and his wounds:

Christianity presents us with instances wherein the potential for something to “get in” is something that is welcomed: it introduces a sanctity/holiness in consumption, penetration, and suffering.

Christianity sanctifies the transgression of borders, the welcoming in of something: inhabiting that liminal space becomes something positive.

With Christ, the consumption of his body and blood through communion is viewed as a way of allowing him to live on through another body.

I find Videodrome so interesting because of the ongoing transformation of Max’s body, a site of evolution and destruction involving foreign objects.

I can’t help but think of Zoe’s observation of Christ’s physical form, as depicted in religious art: “The body’s surface/border is crossed, and by inhabiting another body (through being consumed), the object exists through the subject.”

Who knows if Cronenberg looked to the Prayer Book of Bonne of Luxembourg or Catholicism as a whole for his inspiration.

But at the very least, centuries of religion have surely laid the foundation for our fascination with embodied gore — the kind that’s all up and through Videodrome.

For more on the queering of religious bodies through wound imagery, I recommend “Mysticism and queer readings of Christ’s Side Wound in the Prayer Book of Bonne of Luxembourg” by Dr. Maeve K. Doyle.

So you’ve seen Frankenstein (2025) — God willing, you were lucky enough to see it in theaters. And you’ve established that you want to smash the Creature, once he can read classic literature and verbally give consent, of course.

Now what?

If you’re anything like me, you’ve picked up a copy of Frankenstein, either physical or digital, to get into Mary Shelley’s source text. But if you’d like to keep the party going beyond Shelley, you’re in luck: There are plenty of Frankenstein adaptations and homages to cross off your list.

I also asked six horror creators about their favorite books and films that explore monstrous transformations and carnal desire.

Here are my freaky Creation myth recommendations and theirs.

Caro C. (they/them) ✥ @delicatehoodoo ✥ WASHINGTON, D.C.

What else can I say about Frankenstein that I haven’t said? Except that on second watch, I like this movie even more than the first time.

1. Frankenstein (1931), dir. James Whale: “This film was literally okay, but it’s the OG adaptation so I think it’s worth watching at least once.”

2. Weird Science (1985), dir. John Hughes: “This film is problematic, but it’s definitely fun in an 80s romp kind of way. It’s directed by John Hughes, if that’s your thing.”

3. Frankenhooker (1990), dir. Frank Henenlotter: “If you love the 80s, this movie has everything from bodybuilders, to cone bras, to well, weird science. You probably saw all the horror baddies — cc: horror writer Tori Potenza —dress up don their perwinkle bundles and lilac get-ups and serve all spooky season long.”

4. American Horror Story: Coven (2013 - 2014): “The embodied trauma and mother wounds in this film reminded me so much of GDT’s Frankenstein. TW for sexual assault and graphic racial violence, because we just let Ryan Murphy get away with anything in the 2010s.”

Emme R. (she/sir/her) ✥ @plzpresspause ✥ CHICAGO, IL

Part of the brilliance of GDT’s Frankenstein, in my opinion, is how it reflects the romantic and sexual possibilities available in horror. Emme agrees.

“I think that horror and feminism go hand in hand. So even though horror can often be violent toward women/femmes, it can also be a space for women, femmes, enbys, queer folks to explore themes of body, religion, sexuality, kink in a safe space,” she told me.

5. Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), dir. Jim Sharman: “For a direct Frankenstein reference through the queer lens.”

6. Companion (2025), dir. Drew Hancock: “For a more modern-day take on how ‘monsters’ can become relevant to our sexual and emotional lives.”

Jessica (she/her) ✥ @darkbecomesher ✥ QUEBEC, CANADA

As a dark romance Bookstagrammer, Jessica had some interesting insight into why these kinds of narratives make such an impact on the people daring enough to try them out.

Calling them empowering, Jessica said, “In dark romance or monster romances, you can always find new kinks that you would have never thought about. It allows you to explore, even if you aren’t exactly sure. It lets you dip your toe in.”

7. There’s Howl for the Gargoyle by Kathryn Moon

8. Knot Today Satan by Calliope Stewart

9 & 10. Swipe Right for Monsters & Download for Demons by R. O’Leary

Meredith (she/her) ✥ @hotbookishgirl ✥ CHICAGO, IL

Beyond being a mutual, Meredith’s social media posts caught my attention because like me, she’s embarking on a Frankenstein marathon where she catches up on adaptations.

Overall, her picks for what to watch and read varied widely, including:

Books

11. Our Hideous Progeny by C.E. McGill

12. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

13. Monstrilio by Gerardo Sámano Córdova

14. Carmilla by J. Sheridan Le Fanu

Movies

15. Crimson Peak (2015), dir. Guillermo del Toro

16. The Shape of Water (2017), dir. Guillermo del Toro

17. Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), dir. Francis Ford Coppola

18. Poor Things (2023), dir. by Yorgos Lanthimos

Aaron R. (he/him) ✥ @aaronloveshorror ✥ Los Angeles, CA & Denver, CO

Aaron, who also recommended The Shape of Water and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, said that he had marveled at Frankenstein at first viewing.

“I worship the gothic within literature, as well as visuals that combine beauty with the grotesque, and existential themes,” he told SENSUAL TERRORS. “Frankenstein (2025) had all three.” His monster thirst syllabus includes:

Books

19. Parties by C.M. Nascosta

20. Morning Glory Milking Farm by C.M. Nacosta

shop the book recs on bookshop.org

Movies

21. Your Monster (2024), dir. Caroline Lindy

22. Nightbreed (1990), dir. Clive Barker

23. Hellraiser (1987), dir. Clive Barker

24. Queen of the Damned (2002), dir. Michael Rymer

25. Hellboy (2019), dir. Neil Marshall

26. Edward Scissorhands (1990), dir. Tim Burton

27. The Fly (1986), dir. David Cronenberg

Abbey (any pronouns) ✥ @thehauntedabbey ✥ CONNECTICUT, US

Abbey had much to love about the new Frankenstein: “Utterly stunned, enamored, charmed by the extent of practical effects used in production. I love Del Toro. Crimson Peak and Hellboy (2004) are on my chronically rewatched list, and if I could get my hands on a Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) DVD it would easily enter the rotation.”

But what did he love about Frankenstein (2025) most? “The humanity and care with which Del Toro handled The Creature,” they said. Her book recs include:

28. Burn for Jack by Aiden Pierce

29. Eyetooth by Mars Adler

30. The Possession of Alba Díaz by Isabel Cañas: “Even though there isn’t explicitly a monster, there is a bit of forbidden romance and an ultimately very satisfying ending.”

Lex (she/her) ✥ @finalgirllex ✥ SoCal

Lex told SENSUAL TERRORS that she’s all about “dark, moody stories,” and the melange of “beauty and dread.”

And vampire flicks truly take the cake: “I can’t get enough of them. There’s something so stylish and dangerous about vampires that makes them endlessly fascinating,” she said.

Her favorite films are equal parts eerie and romantic — and definitely supernatural. Her monster thirst recommendations include:

31. The Phantom of the Opera (2004), dir. Joel Schumacher: “Erik, the Phantom from The Phantom of the Opera is an obvious choice. Gerard Butler absolutely melts me in that role.”

32. From Dusk Till Dawn (1996), dir. Robert Rodriguez: “There’s Santanico Pandemonium: She is absolutely hypnotic!”

33. The Lost Boys (1987), dir. Joel Schumacher: “Of course, my favorite vampires. All of them… That cast is hot.”

Overall, Lex told me, she was “completely blown away” by the new Frankenstein, despite having always loved del Toro. “You can tell this was a passion project for him, and it really paid off in my opinion,” she said.

“The film feels rich, emotional, and visually stunning, and I think it will appear in many Letterboxd top 4s,” Lex continued. “As someone who’s obsessed with gothic horror, this was everything I hoped for and more.”

May we continue to be endlessly inspired by gothic romance and the reigning king of it on the silver screen, Guillermo del Toro.