scumbelievable

Thanks, I Hate It: IT

IT: Part 1, the recent Andrés Muschietti-helmed adaptation of Stephen King's seminal thousand-plus page horror novel, is perfectly good fare for a sleepover filled with 13-15-year-olds. In spite of its intermittent corniness it manages to capture at times the wild and wordless feeling of teetering on a knife's edge between childhood an...

SKIN OF IRON, TEETH OF GLASS: Making D&D Characters

I compiled every D&D snippet I've ever written on twitter over the past three years into a single document! Download it here anytime, and consider it a small thank-you for your generosity toward me.

Dear Gretchen: Why Should I Eat Trash?

Dear Gretchen,

You've written about trash recently. Could you talk about what makes trash trash and what makes good trash please?  (p.s.I love your shit)

-Tony

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Hey Tony, thanks for your question, and for the compliment! 

Tra...

Thanks, I Hate It: Green Room

Here's a movie I should love. Patrick Stewart playing against type as a dead-eyed father figure to a backwoods Washington state white supremacist movement? Savage, desperate ultraviolence? Punks versus Nazis at a scummy boots-and-bracers music venue? Instead I walked out of the theater feeling like I'd swallowed a bad oyster. The A24-standard bl...

Dear Gretchen: On Witchcraft

 Dear Gretchen, 

What role, if any, do the the occult and magic have in your art, writing, and, if you want to get into that, your personal life?

-Sebastian

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Thanks for your question, Sebastian.

I'd say the occult has a promi...

Thanks, I Hate It: Birdman

Alejandro González Iñárritu's Birdman is exactly the kind of movie that wins an Oscar for Best Picture. Smug, tedious, shallowly preoccupied with the making of art as an endeavor at once grand and grubby, and proud of its technical conceits even as the practical and fictional limits of its faux single-shot format are stretched far pa...

In the Flesh: Crawl

It's not often you get to see a solid B-movie these days, but in Crawl director Alexandre Aja delivers exactly that. It's a straight creature feature, its cast minimal, its budget shoestring, its flimsy script buoyed by incredible set-dressing, staggering Foley work, and a rock-solid sense of movement through a single rigorously defined...

In the Flesh: Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood clocks in at a meandering two and a half hours, following an ensemble of freaks, goofy film industry old-timers, and burnt-out B-listers as they circle the uncomfortable truth of their own growing irrelevance. Tarantino's discursive, lived-in dialogue is slightly pruned back here, the gripping intensity and...

Thanks, I Hate It: Stranger Things

As my good friend and fellow critic Sean T. Collins says, horror is a genre constantly in conversation with itself. The Babadook echoes Poltergeist and Rosemary's Baby. Midsommar consciously connects itself to The Wicker Man and Kill List. It Follows touches on many of the same themes and ima...

Dear Gretchen: The Best of Boardwalk Empire

Dear Gretchen,

Which characters on Boardwalk Empire stood out to you the most, and what do you wish viewers could’ve seen if they hadn’t done the seven-year time skip between seasons 4 and 5?

-Tim

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Thanks for your req...

Dreadnought, Prologue: The Pimple

August 3rd, 1994

It was Leah’s thirteenth birthday and all she could think of as she made her way hand over hand along the rope that stretched from C Block to Main, snow up to her knees and more blowing against her in white sheets, was the pimple to the right of her nose. It was fat and red and it throbbed in time with her heartbeat. The...

Valkyrie, Chapter III: Golem

Fort Feldkirk’s courtyard was painted in blood. It was splashed in drying fans across the bay doors of the motor pool and dribbled in the shade down the windows of the colonel’s study. It ran in the cracks between the yard’s paving ston...

Thanks, I Hate It: Black Swan

Yes, flat affect is a common symptom of psychosis. No, neither actress Natalie Portman nor director Darren Aronofsky manages to make it interesting to watch. Maybe it's the deeply square nature of her character's descent into madness, which includes a scene in which her going down on Mila Kunis is shot like some kind of lurid PSA against opium d...

Imagine That You're Killing Him

Imagine hooking your cruel fingers up into his nostrils, listening to his screams turn nasal and thin as he chokes on his own breath, as his sinuses bend in ways that they were never meant to until with a crunching, sticky ripping noise a chunk of his face comes off in your hand. Imagine his slobbering terror as blood pours over his lipless gums...

Thanks, I Hate It: The Conjuring

James Wan's surprise horror hit The Conjuring is one of the emptiest movies I've ever seen. Its threat is a sort of anti-family, a lone woman who preys on children for occult purposes, positioned against the wholesome white picket fence dream of the haunting-afflicted Perron family and the clean-cut paranormal investigators, the Warrens...

Thanks, I Hate It: Star Trek Into Darkness

The idea that the Star Trek movies have to play as pure sci-fi action to attract an audience has led to some phenomenally bad movies. The franchise's appeal has always rested in its philosophical underpinnings and the overt, thoughtful ways in which it expresses them. Anti-war sentiment, non-human personhood, diversity, and anti-capital...

In the Flesh: Midsommar

Much of horror deals at a fundamental level with the tension between catharsis and repression. Midsommar, Hereditary writer-director Ari Aster's sophomore horror flick, approaches this elemental subject matter without much in the way of framing, depicting a failing relationship between a needy, grief-stricken woman suffering from anxiet...

Thanks, I Hate It: Parks and Recreation

If the world's comedians were given my psychological profile, a hundred million dollars, and a mission to give me a rage stroke, Parks and Recreation seems like the most probable result. This show gives me hives. It makes me think less of human beings as a species. It makes me want to dig my nails into my palms until my fingertips burst...

Thanks, I Hate It: Prometheus

"What if I deliberately watered down the iconic images of my sole good film and its sequels such that building back up to them could be stretched over multiple films and treated as a story worth telling in and of itself?" isn't exactly an artistically electrifying idea. It's sort of like inventing the car and then thirty years later you reveal y...

In the Flesh: John Wick 3: Parabellum

In its centerpiece action scene John Wick's latest outing juxtaposes ballet and bloodshed before bringing the two together. The crack in its analogy isn't that the meticulous and often inventive choreography of the movie's action scenes isn't art but that ballet uses bodies in motion to tell stories, to explore through formal p...

Our History Is Written in Both Cum and Blood: Modern Rejection of the Queer Grotesque

Photograph: Phillip, Legs on Toes by Robert Mapplethorpe.

"[It is] the teaching of safe sodomy."

-Phyllis Schlafly on Everett Coop's AIDS education program for children

"All America and all the world will hear what the people have said, and with God's continued help, we will prevail in our fight t...