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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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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Cuts Like a Knife

Knife + Heart (2018, directed by Yann Gonzalez) begins with one of the horror genre's better visual jokes. The slasher film and the giallo mystery before it are notorious for their use of knives as the weapon of choice for their mad killers, presumably for their phallic symbolism. Knife + Heart takes this out of the subtext and makes it literal by hiding a stiletto in a dildo. It's right up front, too, at the start of the movie. It would be pretty funny if the murder involved wasn't so nasty. Knife + Heart is a movie that connects the fetishy nature of the giallo mystery with their black-gloved killers and posh bougie chic fashions with the equally fetishy world of gay porn, all while taking the "bury your gays" trope to such a height that it collapses on itself in the end. It works surprisingly well, mostly because satirizing and deconstructing the slasher/giallo movie isn't all that it has on its mind.

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Mystery and Manners

Good Manners (2017, directed by Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutra) is the best werewolf movie anyone has made in the last 37 years. This is, admittedly, a low bar to clear, given the preponderance of Howling sequels that form the backbone of werewolf cinema during that time frame, but it's better than the Ginger Snaps movies, too, and those are pretty good. It might even be better than those two pillars of werewolf cinema from 1981, The Howling and An American Werewolf in London, but I won't swear to that. Like Ginger Snaps, this is a distaff horror movie that finds some of its horror in the biology of women, and some more horror in the social roles women often occupy, salted with problems of class and race.

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