Waiting on the Worms

For some incomprehensible reason, my local Pride celebration was held this year on the first weekend of October. The organizers and the local LGBTQ+ community center partner with our local art house to show queer-themed films in the run-up to the event. This year's slate includes a pioneering lesbian rom com (Saving Face), a key film of the New Queer Cinema of the 1990s (My Own Private Idaho), and the recent trans horror film, T-Blockers (2023, directed by Alice Maio Mackay). This last film kills three birds with one stone for me: I get to support art made by trans people, I get to support my local art house, and I get to add it to the pile of horror movies for this year's spooky season. Of the three, the first two are more important than the last, particularly in the present political moment. T-Blockers is in a tradition of DIY filmmaking that exists at the fringes of the horror genre and on the fringes of cinema itself, a swamp previously inhabited by the likes of John Waters, Russ Meyer, Kenneth Anger, Joe Christ, Maya Deren, Ed Wood, Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett, and The Blair Witch Project. This is not a commercial cinema, though some movies and filmmakers do sometimes escape into a capitalist marketplace. There are so few resources available to filmmakers in this sector that it's a miracle anyone makes any films at all here, so it is with some admiration that I note that Alice Maio Mackay has made six films before she turned 21, all while transitioning. That she is trans is an extra pair of concrete shoes to wear during the process. Maybe things are different in Australia, but the obstacles in her path have defeated more talented directors than her. T-Blockers is a bit of a mess, but it exists outside the demands of what constitutes a well-made movie. That it exists at all is a feat of will that most filmmakers could not muster. It goes to show that if you really want to make a movie, nothing can stop you.

Nota bene: you may find this post overly political. What can I say? I am a trans person living in 2025 America writing about trans art. If you don't want the politics that entails, you might be more interested in my posts on classic Hollywood films. Or engaging somewhere else entirely.

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Eye of the Beholder

The plot of The Ugly Stepsister is Cinderella as seen from the point of view of Elvira, the elder stepsister. As the film opens, Elvira's mother, Rebekka, has married Otto and moved herself and her girls into his house. At the wedding feast, however, Otto dies of apoplexy. This sends Otto's own daughter, Agnes, into a depressive spiral, and in one such mode, she tells Elvira that her father only married Rebekka for her money. "What money?" Elvira declares before storming off to tell her mother that her dead husband wasn't rich after all. The entire family is now in dire financial straits, because Rebekka is already negotiating the sale of the estate's assets to pay its debts. A glimmer of hope arrives in the form of an announcement from the palace. Prince Julian is to wed and will choose his bride from the virgins of the kingdom. Elvira adores Prince Julian. She reads his poems from a book she keeps with her all the time and aspires to marry him even before the palace announces its wedding ball. Agnes is indifferent. She's got a beau, but she's also penniless, so she plays along. Rebekka will only support Elvira's chances though, even when faced with Elvira's shortcomings. She sends her to Dr. Esthetique for a make-over--removing her braces and resculpting her nose among other things--and then packs her off to finishing lessons under the strict eye of Madame Vanya and her partner, Sophie von Kronenberg. There, she learns deportment and grace, but she's initially hopeless. She also comes into possession of the egg of a tapeworm, which she swallows in order to lose weight. The mountain seems too high to surmount, though, because Agnes is too perfect and she overhears the Prince out in the woods commenting on her appearance with the vow that he could never "fuck that!" Elvira has fortune on her side, though, and Agnes is disqualified from attending the ball when Rebekka discovers that she is not a virgin. She keeps her in the house as a scullery rather than have a scandal on the eve of the ball. She destroys Agnes's dress and leaves her at home. Agnes has help, though, when the ghost of her mother summons silkworms to weave her a new dress. At the ball, Elvira's "improvements" catch the prince's eye and he chooses her for the dance. Elvira is not well, though. The tapeworm has sapped her nutrition and there are ominous rumblings from her stomach. She holds it together long enough to see a mysterious veiled stranger enter the ballroom and sweep the prince off his feet. When the veil is momentarily lifted, only Elvira sees that it is Agnes come to thwart her. But Agnes's enchantment ends at midnight and she flees the ball, losing one of her shoes. The prince vows to marry the girl who fits the shoe. At home, Elvira wrestles the other shoe away and finds that her foot is too big for it. Drastic action is required...

A warning to the curious. I am a jaded viewer of hundreds, maybe thousands, of horror movies. There are things in this film to shock even a jaded viewer like me. The filmmakers don't pull their punches here. If you are sensitive to this...well, don't say I didn't warn you.

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True/False 2025: Silent Movies

I dimly remember the events at Gallaudet University covered in Deaf President Now! (2025, directed by Nyle DiMarco and Davis Guggenheim), in which the student body closed down the campus when the Board of Trustees foisted yet another hearing president on them after over a hundred years of existence. The result was a week-long stand-off in which neither side would budge and a key turning point in the struggle for disability rights. The film presents a microcosm of activism along multiple axes of oppression, and ponders questions of assimilation versus visibility, self-determination versus a permanent state of custody by an abled majority. This particular story takes place in the deaf community, but I see echoes of it running through other communities, too. The overriding message of the film and its subjects is that no one is ever going to give anyone rights; you have to take them by force.

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Flesh of My Flesh

My first impression of Suitable Flesh (2023, directed by Joe Lynch) during its first act was that it didn't feel like a horror movie at all. It felt like one of those direct to video "erotic thrillers" of the late 1980s/early 1990s. Do you know the ones? They often starred former centerfold Shannon Tweed (who in her defense was a pretty good actress in a limited range) or Andrew Stevens. Suitable Flesh has the same shot on video look to it and the same baffling erotic impulses. I mean, sure. The film starts with an autopsy about to begin, and a psychiatrist visiting her friend and colleague after that colleague has been locked in a padded cell. And this all happens at "Miskatonic Medical School." But once that mental patient begins her story, you can queue up the candles for a night of soft-core. Or maybe not. Because this film doesn't get very naked, even if it does include oral pleasures. And once the film gets to the horror parts of the program, it goes at it full bore. It goes so over the top that I found myself giggling at two of its more outre` set-pieces. The second impression I had in its early going was that this was a film with a serious case of gender. The source material is Lovecraft's "The Thing on the Doorstep" which has as protagonists Lovecraft's usual neurasthenic male academics. This film gender swaps the leads and then mixes the novelty of female sexuality into the story's body-hopping shenanigans. Old Howard would run screaming from this, I'm sure.

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The Prodigal Daughter

One of the first questions I asked myself about Monica (2022, directed by Andrea Pallaoro) as the projectionist closed the curtains to narrow the screen was, "why is this in the Academy ratio?"* The flippant answer I gave myself is that transgender people don't get widescreen epics. Upon reflection, that's not far off. The frame of the film constrains its central character as much as her circumstances. It creates a claustrophobic space for her to exist in with no obvious room to transcend that space. The second question I asked myself, mid-film, was "why is this character a sex worker?" I know the answer to that, too, but it would be a huge relief to see a film about a trans woman who wasn't a sex worker. No shade toward sex workers, or trans women who are sex workers, but I think I can name three films this century where a trans woman character wasn't a sex worker when her occupation was known to the audience. Maybe. The third question, and it's one I asked about the similar A Fantastic Woman a few years ago, was, "is there no possibility for joy for this character?" Monica veers perilously close to trans misery porn. But then its B-plot is about a woman dying of brain cancer, so these things are relative.

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You Inherit the Flames

Daddy worked his whole life for nothing but the pain
Now he walks these empty rooms looking for something to blame
But you inherit the sins, you inherit the flames
--Bruce Springsteen, Adam Raised a Cain

I don't know if Clive Barker was ever a Catholic, but if he wasn't, he sure expresses some of the baggage of Catholicism. The idea that the slightest slip from the path of righteousness, even if you don't know you've slipped or don't know the rules, will land you in eternal damnation is a thread that runs through Barker's The Hellbound Heart even without the trappings of the church. Barker transmits this theme to the Hellraiser movies more or less intact, though films subsequent to the first two Hellraisers are less rigorous in their exploration of this idea, if they're aware of it at all. There's a queer layer to this, given Barker's sexuality and, um, colorful history working at gay leather clubs in the 1970s. His Goth-bondage demons seem tailored to a queer man's self-loathing, where his demons flog not only himself for his deviance, but everyone around him. Sin, it seems, has collateral damage.

The new version of Hellraiser (2022, directed by David Bruckner) has a different set of sins and a different source of self-loathing for its protagonist, but the idea is largely the same. In the Hellraiser universe's framing, basic needs when taken to extremes will land you in hell, whether it's a need for kinky gay sex or for pharmaceutical kicks. All human needs are addictions of a sort. The sins committed by Hellraiser's explorers of the frontiers of experience are a stand-in for any "sin" you like, however small and trivial. The fallout for the people around an addict is usually more dire than for the people around a self-loathing gay leather boy. So, sure. Why not. But there's a downside to this idea. It takes a property that, for all its flaws, originated as outsider art and frames it as mainstream product. Addiction narratives are mainstream films--everyone in Hollywood makes addiction movies eventually. All queer films, even today, are outsider art. You see the dichotomy, right? And this transcends the relative production values and even the competence of the filmmaking. This film has the most technically competent director who ever came near the series not excluding Barker himself, and production resources that dwarf any previous edition, and yet this fails to pull itself away from its progenitors.

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The Future is Now

There's a sense of the world moving on in David Cronenberg's new film, Crimes of the Future (2022). A lot of Cronenberg's films seem like they depict a world on the brink of collapse, but this one seems like it takes place afterwards, rather than on the brink. The director has watched the world tumble over the falls in the decade since his last movie, precipitated by many of the very things that make up the unease and horror in his earlier films: a pandemic, right wing conspiracies, unfettered capitalism, a brain-washing media landscape. The various apocalypses postulated in the director's earlier films are a fait accompli at the present historical moment. In Crimes of the Future the director says, "yeah, all that happened and this is the result: a world in which no one can feel anything anymore. "

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New Flesh for Old

Although the real world caught up with Videodrome (1983, directed by David Cronenberg) a long time ago, in the late 2000-teens, it seems especially prophetic. What is the work of Russian bots and Cambridge Analytica and Fox News but the exact same "philosophical" signal as the one behind Videodrome? The Videodrome conspiracy is a right wing authoritarian fantasy made flesh as gooey cyberpunk hallucination. The real world version is, perhaps, even scarier and more insidious, one that has already wormed its way into every corner of the world's media. One lone assassin is never going to take it down, though our real-world Videodrome continues to manufacture assassins all its own. Sometimes on a daily basis.

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Death and the Maiden

Somewhere in the middle of A Fantastic Woman (2017, directed by Sebastián Lelio), I began to get irritated at the miseries heaped on Marina, its titular heroine. In my head, I began to ask of the film: "Is no one going to be kind to this woman?" Is being transgender such a mark of Cain that it encourages everyone in Santiago, Chile to view her as a punching bag? There's a certain level of hopelessness in this depiction that is suggestive of the reasons trans people attempt suicide at such appalling rates. This, in spite of the fact that Marina is not a stereotype. She doesn't fall into the specific fallacies of transgender depictions. She is never shown putting on make-up even though she wears it (you have no idea of how much of a relief this is, o cis reader). She has a profession that is not serial killer or sex worker. She even has someone who loves her as the movie begins. This does everything "right," or as right as you're probably ever going to get from a filmmaker who isn't trans. Certainly, star Daniela Vega's fingerprints are all over this. She was originally hired for the film as a consultant on the trans community before director Sebastián Lelio realized that she was the perfect actress for the role, so there's more to their collaboration than what is usual between a trans actress and the director. There is certainly a level of rage involved that might elude a cis actor in the role as an equivalent collaborator. Speaking as a trans person myself, I found the film deeply infuriating, which is admittedly part of the film's design. It also made me deeply unhappy, which is probably not part of the film's design. I suggested on social media that a more accurate title for the film would be "Fucking Cis People!", but I'm sure that would be a provocation that's more headache than it's worth. Eventually, the film relented on its version of the story of Job and did allow someone to be kind to Marina, and then someone else, but it so front loads its whips and scorns that by then, it almost doesn't matter.

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Trans in Africa

There is a scene in The Pearl of Africa (2016, directed by Jonny von Wallström) in which the film's transsexual heroine watches the news as her country, Uganda, passes a bill outlawing homosexuality in a way that will surely get most gay people executed. This scene provided me with a dark shock of recognition. Watching it, I felt again how I felt on the morning of November 9, 2016, when I realized that I had awakened into a world that is now more hostile and inimical to my continued ability to live a full and happy life. I was reminded, not for the first time, that American evangelical leaders were the architects of Uganda's "kill the gays" bill, only now colored by the realization that these same genocidal "Christians" had ascended to the top of the American system thanks to this election cycle. Uganda was a proving ground. Now we move to the main event. Now we see if they can implement such a thing in America. Now there is no other United States to intervene to save us.

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Trans Women Scorned

It's been a while since I've been as conflicted about a film as I am about Tangerine (2015, directed by Sean Baker). It's a film that pulses with cinematic invention. Famously filmed on iPhones, it's a film that pushes at the edges of the ever-advancing boundaries of what low-budget filmmakers can do. In spite of its formal qualities, though, it's a film that gets snarled in the politics of representation. True, its various trans characters are played by actual trans people, and it forgoes that laziest of trans storylines, the process of transition. But troublesome representations remain.

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Dying in Dallas

I've been dreading Dallas Buyers Club (2013, directed by Jean-Marc Vallee). I always dread films made by cisgender filmmakers in which transgender characters feature prominently, especially if those trans characters are played by cis actors (as they almost always are). Someone in the activist spaces I frequent once mentioned that consuming media while trans is like playing Russian roulette, though lately I've been thinking that it's like playing Russian roulette with a live round in every chamber. You're going to take a bullet to the brain without fail. It won't be random. It's just going to happen. The cause for my concern with Dallas Buyers Club is Jared Leto's character, Rayon, a trans woman character constructed by the filmmakers for reasons I'll get to in a bit. She's fictional even though the film itself purports to be based on fact. Leto has been getting Oscar buzz for his performance, and why not? It's a character and performance that's almost a parody of Oscar bait: straight actor playing gay? Check. Playing trans? Check. Dying tragically? Check. Dramatic weight loss? Check. It's almost diagrammatic. (As I write this, Leto has just been awarded Best Supporting Actor by the New York Film Critic's Circle, which isn't a bellwether by any means, but still...) Of course, star Matthew McConaughey does the weight loss thing, too. This is a film full of scarecrows.

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Second Verse Same as the First

Back when Escape from L.A. (1996, directed by John Carpenter) was in theaters, a friend of mine suggested that John Carpenter, Kurt Russell, and the late Debra Hill had photocopied the screenplay for Escape from New York, whited out all mentions of New York, and penciled "L.A." in its place. Certainly, the scenario is the same, if adapted for the left coast. The two films are similar, too, in so far as they're both films with ideas that exceed the reach of their available resources. This is perhaps an exaggeration. Escape from New York was a far more serious-minded exploitation film than its sequel. Escape from L.A., on the other hand, seems like some kind of demonic parody of the original film, of tough-guy action pictures in general, and of the body politic in 1996.

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A Road Not Taken

Somewhere in the middle of Gun Hill Road (2011, directed by Rashaad Ernesto Green), my viewing companion commented: "No way she survives this movie." The scene we were watching involved a young transsexual girl who was buying black market hormones from an older trans woman. After the transaction, the older woman asked her if she'd like to be "pumped?" Both my friend and I flinched at that. "Pumping," for those who aren't immersed in trans culture, is the practice of injecting silicone into areas of the body in order to give them a more feminine shape, usually the ass and hips, but sometimes the breasts and face. This is a profoundly dangerous practice, since the silicone that is often used is not medical silicone. Sometimes, as in this film, it comes from a caulk gun. Seriously. A cisgender audience is likely to react with horror and disgust at such a practice, even if they succumb to the freakshow attraction of it. Why would someone do that? Both my friend and I are trans, though, and I think we both understand the desperation gender dysphoria instills in trans people. The desperation and the poverty and the pressure to conform to beauty norms. My reaction to this movie is largely personal, so you'll have to pardon me when I wonder what I might have done to myself had hormone therapy not reshaped my body to my satisfaction. Don't get me wrong: there's still horror. We've both seen the results of pumping gone wrong, but we're both reasonably educated and possessed of white privilege. The character in Gun Hill Road, though? She's from a completely different cultural paradigm.

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Head in the Clouds

Almost all movies fracture time. It's fundamental to the art of film. We're used to it now. We don't always know that they're doing it because the language of film has evolved to make it seem invisible, but even movies that adhere to a strictly linear chronology omit things in order to move from significant action to significant action. Sometimes the gaps between significant actions are long, sometimes as long as eons. How long is the gap between the second and third acts of Spielberg's A.I., I wonder? Geological epochs, methinks, but the film is not particularly confusing. Some movies fracture time and rearrange events so that they appear on screen in achronological order. Some films return to a specific event again and again like someone is hitting a reset button. Some films take place over the course of many years. Some are made in "real time." This isn't always the province of experimental films. Movies in the mainstream are as likely to eviscerate the flow of time as art films. I wonder, then, why it is that some audiences--including the one I was sitting in--have such a hard time with Cloud Atlas (2012, directed by Lilly and Lana Wachowski and Tom Tykwer). It's not like what they're doing is actually new, even considering the wide gulf of time the movie encompasses. D. W. Griffith made more or less the same movie nearly a hundred years ago.

I'm exaggerating, of course, though not by much.

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Welcome to the Dollhouse

Has there ever been a more drastic and perverse evolution of a horror movie franchise than the Child's Play movies? When most movie franchises reach their fourth or fifth entry, the well has been poisoned and the concept has entered an unpleasant kind of unlife. But not the Chucky movies. This is a franchise that doesn't really come to any kind of life until its fourth, much belated entry. And the fifth entry, 2004's Seed of Chucky (directed by Don Mancini), veers so far away from its origins that it seems to exist in an entirely different universe.

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Document

This is part of the Queer Film Blogathon hosted by Caroline over at Garbo Laughs.

Transgender people have featured in exploitation films since at least the 1930s. There's a hermaphrodite in the circus in Tod Browning's Freaks, though ze doesn't play a prominent role in the film. There's also a genderqueer element to James Whale's horror comedy, The Old Dark House, in which the patriarch of the film's looney family is played by a woman in old man drag. Whale liked to tweak gender norms in his movies sometimes. The golden era of transgender exploitation began in the 1950s, though, when Christine Jorgensen's gender surgery became a seven day wonder. One of the first films to take on the subject of transgenderism was Ed Wood's legendarily bad Glen or Glenda (1953, aka: I Changed My Sex). It's easy to mock Wood and Glen or Glenda, what with its weird assemblage of stock footage and with Bela Lugosi playing a god who composes boys and girls out of snips and snails and sugar and spice, to say nothing of its litany of angora sweaters and grossly misinformed pronouncements on the causes of transgenderism. Hell, you can even play the transgender documentary drinking game while watching it (Glen or Glenda is a documentary of sorts, after all).

What's that? Transgender documentary drinking game? Oh, yes. The tropes of the trans documentary are so calcified that you can get good and sloshed if you follow along with alcohol. The original version was authored by Gwendolyn Ann Smith, and you can read it here. Others have added to it over the years.

Anyway...

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Open and Shut

This is part of the LBGT Blogathon hosted by YAM Magazine. It's also a prelude to next week's Queer Film Blogathon hosted by Caroline over at Garbo Laughs.

The problem with wishing for something in a movie is that once you get it, you start wishing for more. Some people--me, for instance--are never satisfied.

I'm hard pressed to think of another movie that's as sensitive to the diversity of bodies and expressions of sexuality or lived experiences than Open (2010, directed by Jake Yuzna). More than that, it doesn't punish its characters for their bodies or sexualities, either, though it does complicate their lives in ways that are inextricably linked to body and sexuality. At a very basic level, this is a movie about longing for love and not finding it, or about finding love only to find it fleeting. I think these are universal themes, even if the characters experiencing these are probably alien to a hetero and or cis audience. I think this is a good thing. This is something I long to see in movies about trans or non-cis people but never really get. That it confronts the audience with sometimes alien expressions of love and intimacy is even sweeter.

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Top and Bottom

This is part of the LBGT Blogathon hosted by YAM Magazine. It's also a prelude to next week's Queer Film Blogathon hosted by Caroline over at Garbo Laughs.

Nobody in movies knows anything, if you believe William Goldman. For instance, no one in their right mind would have predicted that the highest grossing movie in the history of Korean cinema would be a queer-themed historical drama. And yet, that's what happened. The King and the Clown (2005, directed by Jun-ik Lee), an unassuming "small" movie, somehow tickled the Korean popular imagination and became that blockbuster.

The story follows the friendship of two itinerant "clowns," though "clown" is an English descriptor. They are more like traveling acrobats and actors, whose plays are ribald. These are the rough and tumble Jang-sang, the frontman, and the androgynous Gong-gil, who specializes in playing women. When the film opens, their manager finds that he can make more money by pimping Gong-gil to the local aristocrat than he can from the play. This infuriates Jang-sang, who rescues a not-exactly unwilling Gong-gil from being sold for the night. The two escape from their troupe after killing the manager and head to Seoul, where pickings for traveling players are slim. The king has driven out huge chunks of the population to increase his hunting grounds, and there is no longer a show district where Jang-sang and Gong-gil can ply their trade. They're basically for the street, where they fall in with a rival company and stage a play mocking the current king. They make a lot of money, but the run is short.  They're arrested for treason. In the course of being punished, Jang-sang challenges their jailors that the king himself should judge them. If he laughs, they're off the hook. If not, heads roll. Miraculously, they make him laugh, but then things get hairy, because the king has cast his eye on Gong-gil. So, too, has his consort. Meanwhile, the king's ministers begin using the troupe as pawns in the intrigues of court...

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Boys and Girls

This is part of the LBGT Blogathon hosted by YAM Magazine. It's also a prelude to next week's Queer Film Blogathon hosted by Caroline over at Garbo Laughs.

I'm not really sure how to take Tomboy (2011, directed by Céline Sciamma). It's one of the most carefully observed movies about childhood in recent memory, lovingly mounted and beautifully performed. It's also infuriatingly coy about what it's about.

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