We Don't Go Back #90: Requiem (2018)

Crikey, how long is it since I did a We Don't Go Back post? Obviously that's because other book projects are in the way. Still, from time to time I'm still going to pick up on stuff I missed or stuff that matters. Like Requiem, BBC1's prestige folk horror serial of 2018. For those who care, I should note that this is possibly one of the most spoilery essays I've ever done. Seriously, the spoilers start in the very first sentence.

On a Thousand Walls #18: Personal Shopper (2016)

Usually when I write a response to a film, I tend to avoid looking too hard at the technical stuff, things like the specifics of direction, mise-en-scene, the edit. And that's partly because I'm sort of laser focussed on writing, acting performances, and the tastiest, sexiest bit of all, the subtext. And that's partly because this technical stuff is right outside of what I call my field of expertise. And of course the shortcoming of my approach is that a film is an entire artefact. All of these things work as part of the story told by a film or a TV show. Consider how with selective editing reality shows routinely make friends appear to be enemies or entirely innocuous social cues to be actions of calculating villainy: fictions are like that too. The truism with conversation also holds with visual media – it's not what you're saying, it's how you're saying it.

And this is where I get to the films of Olivier Assayas, and Personal Shopper in particular.

On a Thousand Walls #17: The People Under the Stairs (1991)

So. I'm a Bram Stoker Award Nominee. We Don't Go Back: A Watcher's Guide to Folk Horror got the nomination for Superior Achievement in nonfiction after all, and holy crap, is all I can say. No chance of going to Michigan for the ceremony, but still. I get a certificate and everything. In the meantime, let's get back on the horse writingwise.

I haven't managed much the last couple of months, for various reasons, not least a bad case of shingles, but let's start strong and ideological and everything with Wes Craven's chucklesome yet political horrorshow,which is a film about racism (which means that people in it do racism) and features some miserable child abuse (so you have been warned). Of course there are spoilers.

The Gospel According to Me

(another repost)

Ninja Postman

(Until very recently, this was, I honestly thought, the thing the most people would remember me for)

Rebecca and the King of All Snails

(Reposting. This was written some years ago as a birthday gift for my friend Rebecca Lowe.)

On a Thousand Walls #16: Gremlins (1984)

When Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel originally reviewed Gremlins, Ebert described the film as a haunting. It haunted the portrayal of Small Town America, he said, to which Siskel replied, “It's like a Norman Rockwell painting, where there's blood on the turkey.” And that's pretty insightful because Gremlins is, for all of its eighties wackiness, a haunted film, one that engages with the history of the Cinematic American Town, and its subset, the Small Town Christmas Movie; issues of class and economic injustice are raised and not solved; post-war urban myths pepper the whole thing.