"[T]he movie is structured to be moving towards these multiple climaxes, to put it in the parlance of the female orgasm."--Jane Schoenbrun, on Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma
Spending several years watching 30+ horror movies each October put me in solid standing for Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, the new film from trans indie director Jane Schoenbrun (We're All Going To The World's Fair, I Saw The TV Glow). Really, Teenage Sex and Death felt like a culmination of the whole process for me, and maybe a bit of a relief, like, oh thank satan I haven't just been wasting my time with this garbage. The film, after all, represents a seemingly quite personal engagement with horror as a genre, and the pleasures of flesh and fluids. The protagonist of the film, Kris, is a trans indie director (you see?) tapped to make the long running Camp Miasma slasher franchise palatable and fresh for contemporary audiences. They reach out to Billy, the reclusive star of the first film in the series, who turns out to be holed up in the camp used as the former film site.
And that's mostly what I'm going to give you, if you haven't seen the film yet. Well, a couple more things, maybe. First, a genre pitch cobbled together from several other descriptions I've seen, that will either set expectations effectively or totally baffle you. This film is perhaps the first ever stoner romcom age gap yuri eroguro.
A dozenish recommendations drawn from my own explorations of horror comprise the rest of this article. See, I've been compiling a list, a very comprehensive list, an authoritative list of horror films drawn from these seasonal marathons. It began as a list with 93 entries (which I invite you to consult if some of the films referenced in the text below are unfamiliar). It has since grown to around 200, though that full version is not yet publicly accessible. It is simply too curséd and hainted. This fix-up of disparate reviews presents an elevator pitch for each film with a sketch of its connection to Teenage Sex and Death, with the longer review placed discretely under an expandable details element.
So assuming you've not tasted Teenage Sex and Death yourself yet but have stuck around, I have one last map to guide you on your way, before you brave the back roads despite the warning that you are doomed... It is the first of these reviews, which may help you understand the film better. It is:
Friday the 13th Part 8 Jason Takes Manhattan Act 2
For a Friday the 13th that fell auspiciously during Halloween Month, when we do a whole horror movie marathon, it seemed only fitting to do a sub-marathon of Friday the 13th movies. So, we watched 1, 2, 4 The Final Chapter, 6 Jason Lives, 8 Jason Takes Manhattan, and Jason X. I came away from this pretty strange and excessive experience with a graph of the franchise that looks something like this:
Notice that stuff like "theme" or "political insights" didn't make it onto this graph. These are films plugged straight into the id. When I say "horniness" too I'm talking about both sex and death. I think we can be honest about the shared appeal of both nude swimming scenes and geysers of fake blood, and as far as I can tell they both develop basically along the same arc as the series progresses, which makes this bogus graph even easier to draw.
The base appeal of the films makes some sense. After all the franchise didn't really start with a movie per se but as a marketing ploy, a mandate to do a movie like what John Carpenter and Wes Craven were doing, massaged around the discovery that Friday 13th was an unclaimed branding opportunity. The plot is a pretty naked inversion of Psycho's twist: Jason's just the impetus in the first movie for a vengeful mother to murder every camp counselor she can find. Then, the Zombie Kid Jason stinger at the end of the first film, seemingly a dream sequence tossed in because they wanted to copy that trick from Carrie, gets taken seriously in the later films as literal, and suddenly Jason's the villain. It's a film made of other films. The franchise takes a core of a bunch of random murderous vignettes strung vaguely together into a narrative, and sort of flounders its way towards actual film plots, somewhere in the middle of the franchise's history. Not that I could explain what those plots are. This is one of the downsides of watching Friday the 13th movies for 11 straight hours: they all sort of mush together--kinda like Jason after he gets dumped in the toxic waste that flushes through New York's sewer's every evening at 10pm--but we'll get to that.
What's clear though is that as the films progress they get steadily more willing to show tit and ass, and show people getting sharp weapons lodged in them. Well, for a while. 4 in particular is a weird movie tonally, kind of the peak of this and maybe the point where the films start really developing the most recognizable actual horror movie structure. The kills are clever and inventive--the series finally catches up to Halloween and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre here--and there's something resembling an arc. Now, don't ask me who the teens are, how many there are, and what their relationships are to each other, because I truly could not keep track of who was who (besides the delightfully autistic Crispin Glover). But I think that's the clear peak of how entertaining the films are to watch on the scale of both "something resembling an actual plot like what movies have got" and "Jason making funny murders happen".
You may be scrolling back up now to the title, frowning to yourself, and wondering why I am not talking about Friday the 13th Part 8: Jason Takes Manhattan "Act 2" whatever that means. Well you see this is the part of the franchise after they've sort of lost track of both the horniness factor--weirdly if anything the films get less "trashy" and therefore, frankly, less satisfying as time goes on--and their brief flirtation with coherent plots (6 for example has a plot but it's "guy who accidentally resurrected Jason by getting him struck by lightning in his grave has to kill him again", making the whole thing sort of a shaggy dog story). It is also the part where they're starting to get a bit desperate for conceptual freshness and start reaching for gimmicks as a substitute for the simple pleasure of asses and fake blood.
So.
Jason Takes Manhattan is a whole movie and then an entire other movie happens after it. The first part of the movie is actually pretty good. Jason on a cruise ship. That's a fun concept and they occasionally manage to do some fun stuff with it, like him stuffing a guy's chest with a blazing hot sauna rock. And... he throws a guy off the boat? Oh, he flash steps (Jason can pop up basically wherever he feels like at this point, like a dang Weeping Angel) up to the crow's nest and tosses a guy down to get impaled on a radio array. That's pretty good. I guess it's more a sketch of an idea that will more successfully find its place in Jason X, where he just turns into Alien from Alien, and instead of a cruise ship he's on an actual god damn space ship 500 years in the future. I think it's pretty apparent why I placed the peak of the weird conceptual nonsense curve with Jason X.
Anyway, this 8th movie in the franchise is fine, entertaining enough, sort of balancing the gimmick concept with the fading glory of the franchise's more visceral impulses. Jason gets on a boat, kills a bunch of people, and the survivors make it to-- wait, isn't the film called *Jason Takes Manhattan?*
Uh oh!
Yep, after this basically complete movie and concept, there is an *entire second movie* about Jason wandering around New York City following the survivors of Act 1. This half-film starts inauspiciously, with the Last Girl getting captured by Urban Gang Youths immediately, forcibly injected with DrugsTM, and then almost raped before Jason kills her attackers. (She gets over the drugging basically immediately because I guess the film forgot about it.) Now, admittedly, there is something funny about the way a bunch of hollywood guys decided that New York is a hellscape where no one bats an eye at Jason, they flood the sewers with flesh melting acid every evening, and barrels of toxic waste are just sitting around. But it does start to feel more than a little Reaganite after a while. These films have a reputation for applying moral punishments to louche teens but I'm not sure I see it. Both Mrs Vorhees and Jason kill pretty much everyone they can get their knives into. The image of the Inner City as a place of depravity, pollution, corruption, and indifference to violence, where Jason barely registers as out of the ordinary, though? THAT feels moralizing in a way that sits pretty uncomfortably.
It doesn't help that the film's progression doesn't make an awful lot of sense and drags on. It turns out that doing a whole second movie after your first movie makes both feel much longer than they actually are--particularly since both feel a bit padded, despite their I guess roughly 50 minute runtime each. It also feels like a bit of a bait and switch. Jason and his mom were an opportunity killers, wiping out everyone in a small geographical area. What happens when this indiscriminate murder machine drops into da greatest city on earth, da big apple? Not much, he pretty much just chases the Final Girl and Boy for the whole rest of the movie, only killing reluctantly when someone actually gets in his way.
I've learned from blasting my brain with these films that it doesn't actually take a lot to satisfy me, when it comes to this kind of genre schlock. A baseline competent story to hang some low brow lizard brain satisfying mayhem on? Great, I'll take it. A premise pushed to its most unlikely, daft conclusion, where the serial killer is also a zombie and then goes to space and then becomes the Terminator due to nanomachines? Pour it directly into my mouth. The second half of this film, unfortunately, sits in the awkward trough between those tendencies, not creatively crass or basically competent enough to make one of the earlier films, but not yet in the heady, exhaustion-hallucination state of the franchise's end where sense goes completely out the window.
It's maybe the greatest betrayal that a film like this, or other disappointments like, say, the recent Street Fighter movie, can inflict on an audience: you're making a movie about funny murders happening, and you don't even seem like you're having that much *fun* with it!
SHORT PITCH: The slasher classics. This is core Teenage Sex and Death source material, but I recommend reading my review here instead of watching all these stupid films. 4 and 6 are probably the best of the bunch if you want to watch some; X is the one where he's in space and watching it will contextualize just how wacky these franchises-in-decline can get, but reading the review should help you understand what Teenage Sex and Death riffs on.
Is the conceit clear? Good. And you've set off on your journey? Oh, they haven't heard me. Well. Some will probably make it back... in some form or other, eh heh heh...
For the rest of you: notes on the following, presuming you have familiarized yourself with Teenage Sex and Death.
None of these are quite in the same tonal space as Teenage Sex and Death, which as noted feels more like a stoner romcom than an outright horror film. Many of these are feel bad movies, and stuff more in its tonal range (Lisa Frankenstein, Tragedy Girls) didn't make the cut. This choice might result in a somewhat discordant experience, following a film about queer actualization with a series of queer people experiencing Bad Ends, but it felt in keeping with the film's own ethos of exploring extremity through the safe vehicle of fantasy. If it gets too real, you can always turn it off.
Nor is this list, aside from the necessary engagement above with the Friday the 13th series, really interested in either the mainstream canon of slasher films (Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2, Halloween), or schlock cult classics-or-otherwise (Chopping Mall, Night Train to Terror), with a couple exceptions that seemed pertinent to my actual cluster of interests. The list is idiosyncratic, thematic, and aesthetic, and mostly films that I'm just super jazzed to tell people to watch. Cause, like, if you want a checklist of Essentials, there's gotta be dozens of those algorithmically sorted by various measures of quality on Letterboxd, right? You're here reading a blog post in 2026. You're a sicko.
First and foremost, then, this is a list of films that compel me as a transsexual lesbian with an art history degree. It's only fair. Teenage Sex and Death feels like a film specifically made for transsexual lesbians who have spent too much time in the Liberal Arts trenches and, like Kris, need to get out of their own heads a bit. Teenage Sex and Death is a film about embracing your kinks, and I would say this list is fairly unapologetic on that front. Not that I can escape the intellectualizing exercise, mind. I planned my after-the-fact rationalization for my picks on my whiteboard, and got midway through writing the word DESIRE when I realized Schoenbrun had set me up, preempted my whole deal, with a joke about Kris doing exactly that. (I underlined it twice in homage.) It felt good, though--clarifying. Because these films first and foremost trigger my feelings of recognition, whether it be the direct excitement of a problematic lesbian relationship, of forbidden gender euphoria, or of monstrous femininity. I could have composed an intellectual and academic list, and references to other films throughout this suggest a constellation of other possibilities... but these were the films that felt right.
These are also films that engage in some way with horror, though I'd hesitate to call them "meta" for the same reason that Kris resists that term when they describe the truth of Little Death. I don't think that Teenage Sex and Death is primarily a film about media or fandom, for reasons I won't get into here because I basically already made all the same arguments in my coverage of TV Glow and Vera Drew's The People's Joker. This film cares less about nostalgia or whatever, and more about living an inauthentic life. Relatedly, many of these films engage with horror because it enthralls the characters themselves. Like me, Kris, Billy, and perhaps you, these characters cannot look away. There is, fittingly, a similar interest in the non-naturalistic, gore and effects and sets that don't become invisible and immersive but instead assert their producedness. Because being in love with the aesthetic is its own kind of immersion, maybe more real than reality. We are, after all, just the film that Little Death is watching. Perhaps through watching too, we tap into his reality.
Enough preamble, then! Let the films speak for themselves. I'll leave the last word on all this to a quote from the first film on the list:
"There are some states of being for which there is no name, because the people who experience them do not come back."
Dr Caligari
There's a contingent of queer people grinding a moral axe against Rocky Horror Picture Show for its alleged problematic contents: its treatment of villainous transsexuality, its many instances of dubious consent, the purported "hatred" it and its (nonbinary, estrogen-taking) creator has for trans women, and so on. I'm a known Rocky Horror and Shock Treatment adorer and I don't think most of these complaints hold water or have been presented particularly fairly.
No, if folks wanted a film to be upset about, Dr Caligari should have been their top pick! The turn in the film's plot, after all, comes when Caligari--descendant of the original doctor of the classic expressionist film, a domineering psychologist whose lab coats sport padded shoulders and exposed breast forms--swaps brain chemicals between a nymphomaniac housewife and a cannibalistic serial killer. You may be unsurprised to hear this makes them both much worse, but in very entertaining ways. If depictions of feminized men mincing about in hyper-exaggerated form make you uncomfortable, this film will be like needles on a chalk board. I find something cathartic in it, and I wouldn't be recommending it if it didn't feel deeply a part of queer artistic culture.
Caligari's producers previously worked mostly in porn, and this film is right on the edge of outright pornography, though maybe not conventionally so, what with the giant tongues, weeping sores, and people being roasted on spits. You must also picture it visually as the intersection of postmodern 80s Memphis Style (before it cleaned itself up and went Corporate, think these vibes) and the original film's jagged German Expressionism. Imagine that, but people have their breasts out and sometimes mutilate each other. Like Rocky Horror and Shock Treatment, though, it's far more than just exploitation, featuring delirious monologues on unsatisfied desire, gender dysphoria, and the sadistic nature of psychiatry.
Do a midnight screening of this one, if you think you can come away unscathed.
SHORT PITCH: No, not that one. This is the one filmed by a gay porn director. Caligari is a sadistic and profoundly unethical genius, sort of if Hannibal Lecter was a sexologist, and the film is a surreal romp as she toys with her prey inside her 80s cocaine pop psych ward. I actually sincerely love the monologue I pulled the opening quote from, as an exploration of queer subalterity. I also like the same character's monologue about cooking a young woman up in a tasty stew. It's that kind of film.
Ginger Snaps
Jennifer's Body feels like a last gasp of good cinema for a while post-9/11; Ginger Snaps is almost perfectly the last gasp pre-9/11. (Probably notable that Ginger Snaps is Canadian, but maybe less notable than Canadians would have you believe.) It's a grungy, nasty film in a lot of ways. Jennifer's Body gets some catharsis into the mix; Ginger Snaps by the end really is a horror movie, a rolling tragedy that gradually loses all the Heathers-esque snark of the opening for real sincere sorrow.
The central metaphor of Ginger Snaps--lycanthropy as STD and/or the onset of puberty--feels obvious and on the nose, but the fact that it can't quite make up its mind which of those things it represents makes the metaphor significantly more interesting. This isn't a film that lives or dies on the strength of its metaphorical representation. Rather, it lives (and dies) with the apocalyptically codependent relationship between its two main characters, the titular Ginger and her sister Brigitte. The adolescent sexuality stuff is just the grimy water in which the two girls tread.
It connected for me because I was also a weird morbid kid, though I was nowhere near as talented as these two. And god damn they are talented: mostly they spend their time producing extremely elaborate horror movie polaroids of their own murders and suicides. Like, real professional grade stuff. I never felt like the film was pathologizing that impulse in particular, and the film is very interested in Ginger as a tragic figure.
It is also, however, a film primarily from Brigitte's perspective as she slowly comes to terms with a realization I think anyone who grew up with goths and metalheads and people who read Johnny the Homicidal Maniac will be familiar with. It is the realization that the person you thought you were playing a game with does, in fact, mean it. That someone you love might be, if not a bad person, then at least a dangerous one, someone who can and will hurt you. "Toxicity" gets thrown around in a fairly obnoxious way these days, one of the many words the internet discourse has rendered meaningless through overapplication, but the relationship between Ginger and Brigitte turns increasingly toxic as the film goes on and Brigitte realizes that their maxim of "out by sixteen or dead on the scene, but together forever" is less a vow of staying true to themselves and each other than it is, sincerely, a suicide pact Ginger takes very seriously. And like Jennifer's Body, the film is messily wrapped up in queer desire all the more troubling for its incestuous nature.
If Ginger was just a monster, or the love between the sisters was less sincere, the film wouldn't work at all. The murkiness of its metaphors, the absence of straightforward heroes and villains, the way that Ginger, much like JD in Heathers, is plausibly charismatic and relatable, the way it's hard to tell how much of Ginger's bloodlust was always there and how much is the result of her tragic accidental werewolfism... all of these things make the film compelling to think about. But ultimately all this complexity relies on a very simple story: realizing that someone you love might just be a monster, but still not wanting to let go, even at the cost of your own life.
SHORT PITCH: A classic of uncomfortable adolescent teenage sex and death, Ginger Snaps is the story of Ginger, snapping, i.e. becoming a ravening werewolf, much to the consternation of her beloved sister. It's a darker take on strikingly similar material to Teenage Sex And Death, particularly the two girls' hobby of producing brilliant gory special effects, which resonated with me as someone who got into ghosts and ghouls at around age 7. The codependence of the two main characters is enthralling and tragic, giving the film more of a pointed edge (for lesbians, probably) than its relatively mainstream success might suggest.
Belladonna of Sadness
The murky pool of social media periodically burps up another trending hashtag about how animation is for adults too, and I'm always disappointed people mean "I'm 30 and think Inside Out is High Art" rather than films like Belladonna of Sadness deserve more attention. This is assuredly an Animation For Adults, a dark fairytale whose inciting incident is the gang rape by a king and his courtiers of the titular heroine. She responds by making more and more dramatic pacts with a phallic devil to ultimately become a witch.
The film is profoundly psychedelic. Much of the music is solidly late 60s/early 70s pop music, but will at moments of extreme crisis or action spin out into a full on early Pink Floyd style freakout (and indeed, some of the visuals in the film are suspiciously similar to animations and designs in The Wall). The music is nothing compared to the visuals, though, which range from panned-over still storybook illustrations used to provide visuals for long narration passages, to astonishingly fluid painterly animation, to strange collaged visuals. There are moments in the film that are like nothing else I've seen, attempting stuff like animating the pure negative space obscuring the action. It's a film bound to rewrite your conception of what is visually possible.
I wouldn't recommend watching it on psychedelics, though, what with all the sexual violence, regular violence, and plague death. It is at times a somewhat harrowing movie, though it always feels like it has a *point*. What point that is can be complex--Jeanne is a complex antihero, and the film at times seems to take on the perspective of her persecutors. She is, after all, a witch who consorts with demons. Part of the fascinating push and pull of the film comes from moving beyond knee jerk moralizing to see her--much like The Bride in Kill Bill, or Female Prisoner Scorpion--as heroic and cool as hell. And without spoiling it, the film absolutely takes the long view of the fable and its place in history, in a way that might be a little baffling but is a real gutsy thematic swing.
The film was a commercial failure that bankrupted its studio. As a corrupt priest in the film proclaims, however, the soul of a witch killed while she still retains her pride will live on to haunt the world. Belladonna of Sadness feels like it haunts works like Revolutionary Girl Utena and its countless followers, living on in the deep unconscious of contemporary comics and animation.
SHORT PITCH: One of the most astonishing animated films of all time, Belladonna of Sadness chronicles the brutal rape of a peasant woman and her subsequent deal with a demon that will grant her revenge. A production doomed to commercial failure, every frame boils with a psychedelic longing for some kind of liberation, even as its liberation unleashes monsters.
The Company of Wolves
I don't understand why this film doesn't have a deranged cult following like that of Labyrinth.
Well, that's not true. I do get it. Labyrinth and The Company of Wolves both are fairy tales about adolescent desire and fantasy, the onrushing terror of the adult world, and, reflexively, about the fairy tales we tell about those things. They're about dangerous strangers and their allure. But Labyrinth tells, relatively, a straightforward story with one protagonist vying against one villain. Company begins in the present day with one character, sinks into a dream world of a medieval village where that viewpoint character takes on the role of a peasant girl, and then is subsumed further into multiple different folk tales recounted to the peasant girl by various characters. Structurally, it's bizarre and can feel disjointed as it pushes and pops between narrative layers.
Company is also a story about werewolves, and in fact is (eventually) a very winding adaptation of Little Red Riding Hood. Labyrinth has some maybe frightening moments, and there is an ever present sense (once you're old enough to see it) of the sexual threat and attraction of David Bowie's Jareth. Company of Wolves on the other hand has a guy clawing his scalded face off and transforming horrifically into a werewolf of naked muscle and bone, and much more directly utilizes its wolves as metaphors for sexual predation.
I can see it being a bit of a hard sell.
Yet. When we finished I said I wasn't sure if Company of Wolves was a "good movie". Sarah replied that if it wasn't, we need to redefine what "good movie" means. It's 36 on this version of the list so I guess I agree with her! There's just something so compelling about seeing a fairy tale that really is for adolescents and adults, like for actual for real. This is a film that gleefully refuses to simply resolve its internal contradictions and difficult moments. It feels like a strange evolutionary bridge from 80s dark fairy tale fantasy to contemporary folk horror (compare: November, The VVitch). Its most mesmerizing story is about a young werewolf girl who can't quite find a place in the overworld of the village, and it shouldn't come as any surprise that it resonates strongly as a trans allegory, as explored in this mesmerizing video essay on it/its pronouns.
And, look sorry to keep coming back to Labyrinth but, while trying to avoid spoiling anything, the two films have *essentially the same ending*, but whereas the Labyrinth is an empowerment fantasy where its protagonist realizes her conjured fantasy man has "no power over me", Company concludes with a vision of wolves rampaging through a mansion and the sense that fantasy has broken its borders and burst terrifically/terrifyingly into the real world. I don't think this is a condemnation, however. Rather, the film luxuriously expresses the full danger and thrill of fantasy, the way a folktale or legend or passed on wisdom can turn and twist and take on new, scary morals. It doesn't hurt that the film feels like a panacea in an age of awful lighting imposed on actors standing in front of green screen cgi sets. Everything from giant mushrooms and oversized toys to werewolf snouts protruding horrifically from a human's mouth are lush, practical, real, lovingly hand produced.
I still don't know if The Company of Wolves is good, and it's certainly one you shouldn't go into expecting easy morality or comfortable situations. But I think it might just be great.
SHORT PITCH: A winding, nested series of fairy tale fantasies where terror and adolescent desire mix as the protagonist explores the allure of the Werewolf. I don't know if this influenced Schoenbrun or if they've even seen it, but it feels like a critical precursor to Teenage Sex and Death. Though, I can't help but wish they'd had the budget and technology to realize its apparent original vision for the ending: a shot where the floor of the protagonist's room turns to liquid and she jumps through, out of the film entirely (perhaps to Little Death's home in the lake?). As it is, the film still has enough arresting images to be worth your time.
Daughters of Darkness (1971)
Faster.
I'm not sure I can do justice to this film, which has grown in my mind since watching it. It's one of those films whose images are simply so mesmerizing that they burrow into your brain--fittingly, for a film about a young couple being seduced by Elizabeth Báthory.
We must arrive before day.
The film itself, mind, isn't all that complicated in its basic premise. A young couple, Stefan and Valerie, check in to an off season hotel in Bruges, Belgium, empty for the winter. She wishes to meet his aristocratic mother; Stefan, from the outset giving off shady vibes, demurs. They cross paths with the Countess Báthory--previously of Kamelot fame--and her young companion (lover) Ilona, and are gradually seduced by the (stop me if you've heard this one) ancient vampire. Meanwhile, naturally, mutilated corpses of young women, drained of blood, appear around the city...
Faster. Faster.
This film is like a tack stuck in a high quality candy. It's succulent to look at, yet nasty to watch. The seduction is stylized, camp, and glittering. The rapes are brutal and unflinchingly sadistic. A long film, Daughters of Darkness gives you plenty of time to linger on the unravelling of the characters' psyches. I'm not sure I can honestly even claim the film isn't noxiously homophobic, given the reveal halfway through the film that Stefan's "mother" is really an aristocratic older man who seems to be Stefan's dom. I don't think heterosexuality as a concept really comes across much better than homosexuality, though, on the whole. Really the whole world seems to be made of glittering corruption, with Valerie seemingly the only person who hadn't noticed till now. I know my experience of the "mother" reveal was a thrill of recognition. The booklet of essays accompanying Radiance's release of the film includes a piece on the film's BDSM themes by Joseph Dwyer, and I'll just repeat what he says of the visuals and dynamics it presents: if you know you know.
Don't let the light catch me, don't.
The film has a fixation on time, time deferred. Stefan putting off his phone call and the departure to England, Elizabeth dragging a traumatized Valerie away from her train and back to the hotel, endless nights... and the cursed life Ilana complains of when she wishes she could die. The dawn and sun are a sign of time progressing, the one thing Elizabeth cannot countenance. And through it all there's this sense of lingering aristocracy, hanging on to power, always reincarnating to use normal people as playthings.
Power feels primordial in this. Oh, there's plenty to be said about gender and sexual orientation (it's the dominant theme of the Radiance essays), but these identities melt away, night by night, into the deeper night of power, which can slow time, become invisible to consequence and punishment, and feed freely on the flesh of mortals. It's seductive, power, and director Harry Kümel knows perfectly well what kind of film he's making. You don't put that much vaseline on the lens to shoot your vampire hostess, dressed head to toe in a glittering sequined dress, every reflected candle flame becoming a star, as she casually demonstrates she has become mistress of the young bride and seized her from her husband, if you don't intend to make a kink film.
My love, my only one, there's so much of life still to taste-
One more essay in the Radiance collection, by Mairead Roche, is actually fully devoted just to the vampire's cloak as trope, noting it's one of the only really on the nose bits of vampire iconography the film uses. Really, it's an entire essay built on the strength of one scene, my favorite scene, probably everyone's favorite scene, where silhouetted on a bluff against a deep blue sky, Elizabeth spreads her theatrically bat-winged cape and embraces the lightly dressed Valerie. The film's vampirism, then, is the same as its kink, a game played with the audience. If you know you know. So I talk about the film's ugliness in the spirit of disclosing the intentions of a scene before play begins. Maybe you'll feel as compelled and drawn in by the mix of eroticism and death as the characters themselves were, and as I was.
So many nights, tumbling and tumbling away, into the abyss of time, faster, faster, eternally.
SHORT PITCH: Gorgeous and nasty. I don't think I can describe this film, about an engaged couple stuck in a desolate hotel in the Belgian winter who run afoul of Countess Elizabeth Bathory and her nubile consort, better than the line in the long review: this film is like a tack stuck in a high quality candy. It doesn't get much more "age gap yuri" than a relationship with an ancient embodiment of aristocratic excess and predation, though. I don't really get it myself or think it really fits the film's ideas at all, but I've seen people wish that Teenage Sex and Death's ending was a little more fucked up. If you want the Bad End version, may I offer Daughters of Darkness.
Reanimator and Bride of Reanimator
Surprise, it's a science fiction double feature! And fittingly, the antihero of these movies, Herbert West, Reanimator, is a little- well, look. It's going to be hard to get through this without using ANY slurs but I'm going to do my best. Technically West isn't even the "hero". That's Dan, the young medical student who becomes West's roommate, and who West gradually seduces into his macabre innovations in raising the dead. The films run on West's performance: he's cruel, arrogant, prone to doing ill advised things when he thinks it will further his ends or, frequently, when he's simply bored, and clearly besotted with Dan. He is played with electrifying camp, and it should come as no surprise that he's become a bit of a Bad Queer Icon (at least, he has among MY friends). Come for the ludicrous amounts of fake blood; stay for all the ways Herbert is constantly communicating with Dan by clinging to him, touching his shoulder, &c.
Both films are a blast, and they've wound up stitched together in my mind. I can't help but parse West's jealousy and possessiveness in the first film in the context of the carrot he dangles in front of Dan in the second film: the creation of a frankensteined together perfect woman for him. The second film probably isn't as good, for whatever that's worth, as the first--it's got a bit of a meandering plot and often lacks clear character motivations. But it's maybe more interesting and poignant than the original, centering after all on the production of The Idea Female, in explicit defiance of God, by a character who's aggressively queer coded. Moreover we get to see a delightful variety of freaks, the result of what Dan derisively calls Herbert West's "morbid doodling", a pair of words that feel immediately iconic.
An awful lot of contemporary horror, even horror that features seduction or deals with metaphorical or literal devils, seem not to understand why anyone would WANT to, say, summon a Cenobite and get shown such sights. These films are so high on the list precisely because they take such ghoulish delight in their subject matter. Herbert West has his offputting moments but he's also a delight to watch, fun in a way that retains an edge a lot of more self consciously goofy horror comedy lacks. In a time when horror films often feel more like DARE lectures or after school specials than jaunts into the darker part of human experience, it feels refreshing that these films carry out their morbid doodling with glee and, sometimes, jaw dropping bad taste.
I am, of course, my own frankensteined together perfect woman, or at least I'm trying to figure out what that means as I construct myself on the fly in response to a load of social pressures and expectations, so there's also a layer of pathos in the climactic creation of Dan's bride in the second film. But also, what can I say? The top tier of this list is full of films that run very close to the metal in the circuitry of my brain. Herbert West belongs on my kin wheel, a character that prompts for me questions like "could estrogen have made her worse?" These are films at their heart about being a weird little freak. I guess it's true what they say: representation matters.
SHORT PITCH: Herbert West Reanimator has invented a goo that brings back the dead, and he's so eager for his new definitely-not-boyfriend to help him change the world. Shenanigans ensue. Of the two films, which I've reviewed together, Bride of Reanimator is the real show here, though Herbert West is marvelously camp in both. In the sequel, he's using his glowing green juice to slowly build and reanimate the Perfect Woman for his definitely-not-boyfriend, while sculpting morbid freaks on the side for fun. This is another one on the list because of how I see myself in its monstrosity: a woman who is the product of modern science, yet received with horror upon her assertion of personhood? Hah hah, well! Welcome to being a woman, sweetie.
The Vourdalak (2023)
The metatextual commentary on the horror genre looms large when people talk about Funny Games (1997), and understandably so. It doesn't take long after the first literal wink to the camera for meta stuff to take over, and for the commentary on horror fans to get pointed. But I was struck, while watching, by a different aspect of the film: politeness and middle class social convention setting traps as diabolical as any Jigsaw ever designed. The characters sleepwalk their way into their gruesome torturous deaths in part through politeness and forbearance. indeed the serial killing duo that torments them seem almost like an infection spread from one household to the next via the same social niceties, polite introductions transmitting them from one group to the next.
So: The Vourdalak.
The titular monster in The Vourdalak is a puppet, and an almost muppet-esque one at that. Like, we're not talking near-naturalistic animatronics here, we're talking a puppet that can flare his eyes open, and open and close his mouth, and otherwise acts through the body language artistry of puppeteers. It's incredible to look at, and totally not even remotely a little bit believable as a person. And yet, the entire family that Ambassador from the King of France Marquis Jacques Antoine Saturnin d’Urfe encounters in the wilderness of (maybe) Serbia seems paralyzed by the apparition of the household's patriarch. Despite the man's own firm warning not to trust whatever comes back from the woods wearing his guise, they sit this grotesque, obviously dead puppet down at the table, offer it food, and force the family closeted transsexual to shoot the family dog at its behest, all while Jacques Antoine Saturnin d'Urfe sits there in his poncy white makeup and blush and wig all but looking right at the camera helplessly. It's horrific, and also completely ludicrous.
The absurdity of it is part of what makes it horrible: even though everyone involved (except perhaps the drunken, pathologically devoted son Jegor) can see something has gone catastrophically wrong with grandfather Gorcha, their filial duties render them powerless to halt what's happening. They're also profoundly vulnerable: Piotr is at minimum a cross dresser, Anja is cowed by her husband Jegor and must look after her young son Vlad, and Sdenka is trapped in a futureless morass after the murder of the stranger who promised to take her away from the village. Also, the village has been seemingly wiped out by bandits, making the Vourdalak's presentation of the bandit leader's head impressive but pointless, and rendering the cast profoundly isolated.
Even Jacques Antoine Saturnin d'Urfe is hampered by being just the wettest protagonist. The man is a floppy noodle in period accurate caked on makeup. Wildly out of his element, he summons periodically the gumption to chase after Sdenka (she responds by nearly tricking him into falling off a cliff) but otherwise just minces about rather aimlessly, too out of his depth and paralyzed by social convention to put up much resistance to the blood sucking revenant. I didn't hate him, mind--part of the humor and horror of the story comes from watching this high society guy bumble around in the 18th century equivalent of a backwoods hick horror film. It's clear he wants to do the right thing, and shows the Vourdalak's prospective victims sympathy alien both to the monster and to Jegor. He just happens to be about as effectual and plausible an opponent to the undead as a peacock dipped in a particularly muddy puddle.
This year we also watched the 2001 French adventure horror period film Brotherhood of the Wolf, and it's interesting that for all its attempts to feel contemporary to 2001, it mostly feels… very contemporary to 2001, if you get me. I mean, credit where it's due, it CLEARLY inspired a significant part of the look of Bloodborne, but in trying for a modern glitz it winds up embodying not just a bunch of aesthetics (ZOOMS! FAST CUTS! THE MATRIX JUST CAME OUT EVERYBODY LET'S SPEED UP AND SLOW DOWN THE ACTION SCENES!) that are very locked into their time, but a bunch of tropes that feel similarly dated (the Wise Native American Sidekick, the love interest menaced by a disfigured and incestuous brother, sssssome sort of position on the French Revolution that's kind of hard to figure out?).
The Vourdalak, in embracing an already "outmoded" form of puppetry, and cleaving closer to the alien high class aesthetics of the 18th century that Brotherhood replaces with their more hip take, feels like it's destined to age a bit better. The strength of the fable helps. When in one of the most truly wretched scenes of the film the Vourdalak picks up a shotgun and blasts a hole in poor Piotr's skull, it feels discordant that this gothic horror should be wielding modern weaponry. But it also feels perversely fitting: the patriarch simply makes use of whatever tools are at his disposal to keep the family disciplined. The Vourdalak is said to prey first on its closest loved ones. Jacques Antoine Saturnin d'Urfe does such a good job of being a polite guest who doesn't make waves that the Vourdalak can't help but see him as one of the family. I don't expect this narrative of being sucked (hah) into complicity losing its bite anytime soon.
SHORT PITCH: A Frenchman in period-fitting thick makeup finds himself stranded in the Eastern European woods, and entangled in the affairs of a family whose patriarch is... well, he's obviously a cursed undead. I mean, he's portrayed by a cadaverous puppet, making this another example of the Aggressively Non-Naturalistic Horror thread across these recs. This is perhaps the least directly related film of the bunch, but it feels like a heightened expression of the violent retribution against the queer and sexually deviant that boils under the surface in Camp Miasma.
Doctor Jekyll and SISTER Hyde
Brilliant biochemist Doctor Jekyll realizes that estrogen has anti-aging properties and transitions into an extremely hot murderess in a red dress in a quest for the elixir of life. Yep, this film is exactly what the title implies. It's quite problematic, and unfortunately I kind of love it.
It's also Hammer Horror so it's got all the English obsessions you would want. Obviously there's the psychosexual fixation on transsexualism, but there's also the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen style desire to throw all the period narratives together, so Hyde is also sort of Jack the Ripper, and she's employing notorious corpse thieves turned active corpse producers Burke and Hare. She's out there seducing Jekyll's horny male friends, doing horny duck face at people, admiring her breasts in the mirror, it's kind of everything you'd expect. It's also pretty relatable, aside from the murders--which, frankly, Jekyll is just as if not more responsible for, as he still wants that elixir of life and he needs fresh young corpses to get it! But the allure of becoming Hyde, the need for that beauty, that transformation... ahhh, I get it, friend. I understand.
If you can stomach the inevitability of a Bad End for the sex-changing duo, and are looking for a film to supplement and flesh out the queer horror rotation alongside Rocky Horror or more exotic fare like Dr Caligari, this would fit right in.
SHORT PITCH: Our friends at Hammer Horror dare to ask: what if the Robert Louis Stevenson story was about a guy becoming Jack the Ripper (or Jill the Ripper I guess) in order to procure female sex hormones... STRAIGHT from the SOURCE ah hah hah hah!!! Our watch group was surprisingly enthused by this one, and it weirdly felt way less offensive than it could've, leaving us hooting and hollering at Sister Hyde admiring her new enormous breasts. Welcome to being a woman, sweetie (positive version)!
She Is Conann
This gender swapped take on Conan the Barbarian features seven different actors in the title role, and its French director has written a Manifesto for his film style. This is an elevator pitch for one part of the audience, and a "this is not a place of honor" radioactivity warning for another part of the audience. You can decide which side you fall into.
More helpful information. I thought this probably wouldn't get on the list this year, as the trailer looked more like a deliberately practical effects forward psychedelic female empowerment deconstructive fantasy film. When the group selected it, I went in thinking, ok, this might be fun but probably isn't a horror film. Then Conann's mother gets sliced in half vertically in front of her in the first few minutes, and I said, ok, maybe this selection works better than I thought. By the end of the film I genuinely asked myself whether making art in this dreadful fallen world just added more to the net barbarity of existence (the film's overarching motif). At one point one of Conann's lovers finds her in bed with the transmasc-coded dog demon Rainer, and reprimands her: "We said we were free to live without more constraints. Only rule was no animals." They're stunt actors in 1990s New York at the time. This is a totally berserk movie, gorgeous to look at, downright grueling to experience by the end, a cycle of queer damnation that spans realities. If you're disappointed at the lack of New Wave sci fi/fantasy influences on the silver screen historically, this might be exactly what you've longed for, but you know what they say about being careful about wishes.
SHORT PITCH: Conann (she/her) traipses through a dream world of alternate possibilities, killing her past selves to be born anew (played by new actors), finding new forms of barbarity every step of the way, and new forms of lesbian excess, her dog-faced transmasc-coded eternal companion and tormentor, the demon Rainer, guiding her towards apotheosis. It's French, it's aggressively non-literal and phantasmagoric, it's at times absurd and at times horrific, and it seems to both love and despise its own medium and the whole process of making art. This might rank at the number 2 slot for "hey you NEED to watch this if Teenage Sex and Death spoke to you about art."
Vampyros Lesbos (1971)
Vampyros Lesbos is so good it makes me want to revisit Daughters of Darkness in case I undervalued that film. Well, ok, good-asterisk. Good with caveats. What I really mean is that this film, also from renowned schlock and exploitation director Jesús Franco, is mesmerizing and great to look at and has a bunch of lesbian sex, and that lesbian sex, unlike in the soft focus Daughters, is actually a lot of fun to look at, and all that... is sometimes exactly what I want. (And also, since I don't have anywhere else in the review to mention it, it has a psychedelic freakout score that sounds like Saucerful of Secrets era Pink Floyd, and sometimes that's also exactly what I want.)
Vampyros Lesbos opens with a burlesque sequence in which one woman (in fact, the lesbian vampire of the title) does a strip tease while another woman stands motionless, nude. She is playing a mannequin on stage, and as the first woman strips down she drapes her clothes on the mannequin, then dresses her in her own lingerie. The mannequin seems to come haltingly to life to embrace her owner, and the two end the performance entangled on the stagefloor, the mannequin still in a stiff rigid pose. The film cuts throughout this to a woman in the audience who watches the performance exactly as transfixed as I was. The performance repeats later in the film, which feels like a deliberate attempt to pad out a pretty thin plot to an 89 minute run time, but which I was fine with for two reasons. First, I am a lesbian, and this is very hot lesbian soft core pornography. Second, at the end of the repeated performance the vampire rips into the throat of her co-star on stage, to the applause of an oblivious audience. It's a great trick, one that either inspired Anne Rice's Theatre des Vampires, or emerged out of the convergent evolution of gothic perversity.
Most of Vampyros Lesbos's most brilliant ideas come hand in hand with a frank mercenary desire to show softcore pornography. Like, these are sun-friendly Mediterranean vampires who live by the seaside, which is really convenient for a scene where the vampire Nadine Carody coaxes the protagonist Linda to bathe naked with her. The psychic connection between Nadine and her victims allows for extensive scenes of sexual half-nude writhing in an asylum cell for the character Agra--like Linda, a blond woman, causing me to think the two were the same character for, like, 20 minutes. What I'm saying is, the film is perfectly willing to abandon narrative clarity for the cool shots and heady eroticism it's actually interested in.
To an extent this naked intent even has a nasty underside: lesbian sex might be presented for enjoyment, as long as the lesbians come to ruin at the end and safe heterosexuality reasserts itself. God, I've got it on as I write this and a doctor just did a "PULL YOURSELF TOGETHER!" and smacked a woman having a fit. I'm not gonna defend this film as a bastion of progressivism! I came to this via a sadly removed video from Hazel's youtube channel that recommended several of these lesbian vampire sexploitation films, and like her I have to stress that enjoying this film means suspending judgment of its reactionary gender politics in the name of sensual pleasure.
I wouldn't even say it's purely unintellectual pleasure either. This is another film that transposes gothic castles for gothic modernist mansions full of abstract expressionist art, for one thing. There's these tantalizing bits and pieces, like the recurring b roll of scorpions, butterfly symbolism, a servant named "Morpho" who wears large tinted bug-eye glasses... I don't expect it'd hold up to much scrutiny but it's got a heady surrealist intuition for slamming novel images together. I want a horny trans lesbian to remake this film. The People's Vampyros Lesbos, you know? I Saw The Vampyros Lesbos Glow. I suppose this puts it in the category of a film that mostly makes me fantasize about a different, better movie, but that's a fair sight better than fantasizing about getting to turn the film off. Mostly I'm grateful I got to fantasize about being a hot sun-kissed lesbian vampire's living mannequin, and you can't say that about many other movies.
SHORT PITCH: This film is here because I think lesbian vampires are hot, and it is exactly enough of a real film to merit inclusion. There's like, weird symbolism! And nice camera angles! Oh who am I kidding, this is here because I think the human mannequin burlesque scene is brain-meltingly hot. Definitely read the full account of this one for subject matter warnings, but I think you'll have a pretty good idea for yourself if this is what you need. Wait let me see what I wrote in the long review. Oh, I literally made a joke about a queer director redoing this and called it "I Saw The Vampyros Lesbos Glow"? Absolutely......... phenomenal, past Samantha Keeper. You were handed, for a brief moment, the gift of prophecy, and caught a glimpse of that scene where Kris is running in slow motion in their underwear. I'm so glad.
Knife + Heart
A lurid modern exploitation film set in a gay porn studio, Knife + Heart really defies my ability to describe it easily. It embraces the brutality contemporary horror indulges in, and I imagine the first kill, where an angelic boy is strapped face down and stabbed repeatedly with a dildo concealing a hidden blade, will filter many viewers. Exploitation, though... what do we do with that word exactly? The film never feels, to me at least, like something produced from the outside looking in, gawking at the homos. (Director Yann Gonzalez is gay.) The antihero of the film, a predatory older lesbian who casually exploits the news for film plots and is locked in a toxic situationship with her editor, feels familiar and well realized. Familiar too is the sense that the queers are on their own and must navigate this new predation without help from the disdainful police. Its free blending of the lives of these characters with fantastical elements feel like the film taking advantage of genre to just freely explore its ideas. I've watched a lot of queer horror recently, and queer erotic horror at that, and with a film like this it feels as though any exploitation is mutual. Horror and porn (and melodrama, the cousin of both) are the places our lives find so much of their expression artistically, because that's where we're permitted. And so we exploit those genres too, seizing hold of their visuals, tropes, and willingness to introduce cockamamie nonsense like magical blind rooks that burn death away with the heat of the sun in order to express something otherwise inexpressible. If the ending is a bit obscure to me, it just adds to the film's overall fascination.
There's also a dashing young man in this for one scene who has a bird arm, because he's turning into a bird. Kino.
SHORT PITCH: I actually am sort of shocked I haven't seen more people draw parallels between these two films. Sure, it's a French exploitation homage set primarily in a gay porn studio featuring a bunch of brutal homoerotic/homophobic murders and a deeply troubling conclusion, so I can see how that, uh, might have limited its reach somewhat... but it's also the film on this list besides She Is CONANN that feels most directly like it's doing the same shit as Teenage Sex and Death. If what you're looking for is a direct engagement with genre and queer monstrosity and the collapse of the real into the cinematic, this is the one to pick. The antihero is a lesbian producer of gay male porn, trying to unravel the mystery of a serial murderer preying on the queer community, while also driving her own productions ever onward, even at the cost of her crew's lives.
A Last Word on Teenage Sex and Death
I was going to let the selection of films elucidate my takes on Teenage Sex and Death but I found myself jotting more specific thoughts on my mastodon account (Reminder that you can follow me there from any fediverse-enabled system! Plug https://slime.global/@samkeeper into your search bar and see if our instances federate!). I thought I'd preserve these thoughts in sketch form here.
There's a hole in the middle of the lake where the movies come out, right? And all the characters, and maybe all of us, are the films that Little Death comes out of the hole to haunt, produce, provoke, invoke, and consume. Cool. Kris is self-evidently a representation of Schoenbrun in various ways, if you know anything about Schoenbrun's career. (The details are a little unclear to me because no one fucking links their sources, but it seems like someone at least considered having Schoenbrun reboot the Leprechaun franchise of all things.) But if Little Death is the director, if all the characters in the film are characters in a film (which they are), then the person who is Little Death... is Jane Schoenbrun.
This feels sort of obvious to point out, given that it's just a statement of facts then drawing a line from A to B, but still kind of a giddy thing to ponder. It makes sense there'd be this duality. Kate pointed out quite obviously that Kris can only come when partly inhabiting the perspective of Little Death. The self-insert characters are maybe one and the same, at least sometimes. (Does Billy make up the third part of a trinitarian whole?) This tickles me because it emphasizes the self indulgent nature of the film. Why are characters running around in their underwear, tits bouncing, and dying in explosions of fake blood? Because The Director thinks it's entertaining and hot!
I think it's genuinely heroic that a trans director, at this particular moment, put out a work that doesn't so much argues as simply embodies this notion of art for the libido. They spend an entire film's worth of narrative work and scaffolding getting there, but I found the ending felt less like the final smug points of a thesis and more a thrilled flowering of possibility. Its unreality and points of friction just helped me relinquish the control that comes from formalist critique, letting me feel the film's erotic catharsis.
And on the note of eroticism: it's not wrong to say this is a film about kink, but it's also a kink film. The moment where Kris realizes they can and should strip down and run through the woods half naked, tits bouncing in slow motion, for no reason other than because they think it's hot, is a fantasy. This is Kris's kink scenario she's exploring with Billy, right? And on a level the film is about her exploration of that. But from our perspective (and Little Death's) this is no more or less real than anything else happening in the movie! It's a film, remember? And that moment can both be funny, and also, a thrilling new spin on sexual peril bimbofication kink, the thoughtful intellectual reduced to just being another silly slut. Have you ever fantasized about telling someone your fantasies? Gotten off to the thought of whispering in someone's ear all the awful things you'd like to do to them--things that you would never do in real life? Those might be "meta" fantasies, second order fantasies, fantasies about sharing fantasies... but they're still jerk off material all the same.
So what we've got is a trans filmmaker saying, at a moment of extreme stigmatization and scrutiny of us, that it's ok to make art like this... and then doing it, making art that is both an argument for itself, and an embodiment of its anti-repressive ideals. I think that's incredibly brave and beautiful and I'm so grateful to her.
I went into this piece feeling like, ah, yeah, I guess a logical and kind of cynically strategic thing to do right now is repackage older work to fit this theme, make a little fix-up listicle. And then I went and wrote 3000 words of supporting material anyway, and did a bunch of elaborate html and some supporting css. Whoops! Because ultimately underlying the topicality is sincerity. This is a tribute to Schoenbrun in the best form I can conjure: a selection of other films that grabbed me by the hen and made me feel.
This Has Been
If You Like Teenage Sex And Death
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