scumbelievable

In the Flesh: The Favourite

There's an emotional distance to Yorgos Lanthimos' films, whether it's the stylistically flattened affect of The Lobster or the haunting, stunted range of Dogtooth. His latest, The Favourite, may be quicker and more expressive with its dialogue and hew a little more raw than his other work, but that clinical remove is still there. In his fisheyed, bulging shots of Queen Anne's palace (the real-life Hatfield House) and his cool but never dull or stately party scenes,...

Thanks, I Hate It: Interstellar

“What if Kubrick had made 2001 as a Lifetime original movie?” isn’t a question I think needed answering, but in 2014 Christopher Nolan stepped boldly forward to do just that with his sweepingly sentimental sci-fi flick Interstellar. It’s an ambitious movie, to be sure, and in the anxious vastness of its water planet and Matt Damon’s wild-eyed performance as an astronaut left alone at the ass-end of the universe for just a little too long you can see hints of someth...

The Curing House

Calm down. She put her hand on the latch and closed her eyes, gulping sour air. Clean it. Just clean it. How bad could it be?

Joan opened the door. A thick, ripe reek that brought her gorge at once into her mouth boiled out from the gloom within. Flies rose like a living carpet from the bloody workbench and the packed dirt floor. They beat against her. They crawled over her skin and worried through her hair. Don’t scream, she thought as she squeezed her eyes...

Thanks, I Hate It: Wonder Woman

At a German gala held by the High Command at the height of World War I, American infiltrator Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) flirts by the fireplace with Isabel “Dr. Poison” Maru (Elena Anaya), a badly disfigured chemist manufacturing chemical weapons for the Axis Powers. In Anaya’s performance you can see that she knows, on some level, that she’s being played, but that the intoxication of emotional intimacy—and, implicitly, the prospect of sex—are so alluring to this isolated, unwanted...

Thanks, I Hate It: Mad Max: Fury Road

There are impressive things in George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road. The stunt work is astounding, for one. The scene in which Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne) watches his soldier Nux (Nicholas Hoult) eat dirt while attempting to board a moving war rig and shouts with gleeful disgust “Mediocre!” before abandoning the kid to his fate is both hilarious and a genuine gut-punch. But the rest? The rest, gang, is bullshit.

If you’re going to reboot a beloved geek dude series of ...

Tom Horstmann's Cover

Here it is, ladies and germs. Tom Horstmann's (@horstmannart on twitter) staggering fucking body blow of a cover. We're so close to the finish line on this.

Thanks, I Hate It: Requiem for a Dream

If I were given total authority to wipe any art I chose out of existence, Requiem for a Dream wouldn’t exist. That’s it. Forrest Gump? Dumb, but it can stay. Mein Kampf? Whatever, he’s dead. Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties? I think we can survive it. No, it’s Aronofsky’s insipid anti-drug PSA, dripping with cautionary moralizing and D.A.R.E-league scare tactics, that really deserves the ax. There’s something to the much-celebrated bodycam shots,...

Thanks, I Hate It: Michael Mann's 'HEAT'

I love Manhunter. Mann’s Red Dragon adaptation is smart, taut, empathetic, and stars the electrifying William Petersen, one of Hollywood’s great could-have-beens. The whole thing is so insightfully tense, not a moment or expression wasted. Then there’s Heat. It’s tough to express how boring and devoid of psychological insight this movie is, even before you get into Mann’s total disinterest in its women. Al Pacino plays an L.A. cop whose devotion to his car...

Welcome to the Black Banquet

Permanent link to our discord for talking shop, shooting shit, sharing work, etc.

Introducing "Thanks, I Hate It"

In the new year I'll be writing 1-2 short Patreon-exclusive essays a month on movies I can't fucking stand. When time and money permit, I'll make it weekly, but the general idea is that "Thanks, I Hate It" will be a way for me to communicate what I can't stand about film just like I've analyzed why I love it with "In the Flesh". 

The first one drops next week and it's going to be about Michael Mann's "Heat". I hope you like it <3

The Birth

“She’s not an ox,” said the midwife. “You can’t work her day and night when she’s so near her time.”

Arsène’s face was flushed. “Will she live?”

“She might. Oughtn’t get a child on a slip like her. Too thin. Hips that narrow; the babe could die before it passes through.”

“I didn’t ask for your cheek, woman.”

“No, but you’ll have it, or I’ll not bloody my hands for you or yours again.”

Joan, walking up and down the hall, pa...

CHAPTER I: THE SUITOR

“He’ll have you without a dowry,” Joan’s father said from where he lay in his bed beside the window. “We won’t see another offer like it.”

Joan bit her cheek and tasted blood. The air in her father’s bedchamber was suffocating, rank with the smell of his rotting leg. The curtains were drawn. Coals glowed hot and sullen on the hearth. Leeches squirmed on the pale, swollen trunk of his thigh. 

Her mother stood beside the fire, a vision, youthful face framed ...

SKIN DEEP

The inner cover for my comic about dysmorphia, written by me and drawn by Garrett Young. 

FLENSING

Joan gathered herself and walked to the table, knotting her wet hair behind her head. Two knives lay beside the corpse. One was little more than a sharpened spike covered in pits and scratches. The other, long and curved, had a polished horn handle and an edge too sharp to catch the light.

She took up the first knife. Its grip was cool, its weight surprising. The wolf’s fur was soft and dusty to the touch. Coarser between the shoulders and along the spine. She doesn’t look old, th...

EHL Cover Preview

Early days on Tom Horstmann's beautiful cover for Ego Homini Lupus. Tom does unbelievable work and I'm very lucky to have snapped him up for this. You can find him on Twitter at @horstmannart.

BIRTH

An excerpt from my upcoming novel Ego Homini Lupus. Trigger warning for body horror, incest, gore.

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