Shelley Duvall had some of the most beautiful eyes in Hollywood history; Bette Davis eyes, Ella Purnell eyes, Emma Stone eyes, Anya Taylor-Joy eyes. Indeed many of her early roles counted on the sex appeal those eyes radiated. But by taking on Wendy Torrance, Duvall showed she was fully aware of her physical instrument’s full range of capabilities. The same eyes that seduced half the male cast of Nashville, say, could also be used to convince an unsuspecting audience that your son was communicating with the spirit world, that your dry-drunk husband had gotten into a spectral bottle and grabbed a weapon to wield against you, that things had gone so wrong that the world itself is bleeding. That’s a special gift, one without which — without Shelley Duvall —  the greatest horror movie ever made would be measurably less great. 

I wrote about Shelley Duvall’s tremendous performance as Wendy Torrance in The Shining for Decider.

I’m very happy to have appeared on Jesse Hawken’s fine podcast Junk Filter to talk about the two Road House movies, Pain Don’t Hurt, and related topics. I hope you enjoy!

In the years since its release, Road House became the most basic of basic cable pleasures. A perpetual fixture of weekend afternoon timeslots on commercial cable networks that air movies for dudes, it won over a generation with its neo-western vibe, its assortment of colorful (read: weird) characters, and its unceasing onslaught of people getting struck in the head. Not even the censorship of the film’s colorful language and gratuitous nudity, male and female alike, kept it from achieving this life after theatrical death.

Along the way, cult comedy icons like the Mystery Science Theater 3000 crew and Clerks director Kevin Smith sang the movie’s praises. Kelly Lynch started telling a well-received anecdote about how Bill Murray and his brothers call her husband any time they catch her big sex scene in the movie on cable. And a growing legion of fans discovered you can’t find its unique blend of sturdy construction and cockamamie content anywhere else.

So when Amazon announced plans for director Doug Liman—an action-filmmaking expert with Go, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, and the Bourne franchise on his resume—to helm a remake starring Jake Gyllenhaal in the Swayze role, the reaction from certain cinephile quarters was as if someone decided to take a crack at Citizen Kane. How could anyone hope to recapture the goofy glory of the original?

Turns out you can’t—and that’s exactly the strength of the new film, out on Prime Video on March 21. Liman, Gyllenhaal, and company recognize that what made the original Road House so delightfully stupid won’t quite work in 2024.Their version ends up being a sweet-natured, hilarious, and, of course, psychotically violent tribute to an unlikely masterpiece, and the creators’ affection for the original article shines through in every frame.

I wrote about Road House old and new, Swayze and Gyllenhaal, “Rowdy” Herrington and “Doug” Liman, for my debut at Time.

The Siegel house, intended to evoke comfort, safety, and the capital-G Good life due to its fancy pants and ultimately pointless “passive house” environmental certification, is where you feel that malevolence the strongest. The place the Siegels themselves designed to make them feel their safest and best is where they are most keenly and cruelly observed by the camera, and where they are, in the end, most harshly punished by whatever force exists to do so in their world. The family home is central to the middle-class dream; it is just as central to the nightmare of surveillance cinema.

I wrote about the “surveillance cinema” of Nathan Fielder’s The Curse, Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, Kyle Edward Ball’s Skinamarink, and Alan Resnick’s This House Has People in It for the Welcome to Hell World newsletter. Scroll down to read it!

In offering the biscuit to Ole, Dorothy is essentially rewriting the very similar sequence from No Country for Old Men, in which the freakish and seemingly unstoppable hitman Anton Chigurrh (Javier Bardem) pays an identically menacing visit to Carlar Jean Moss (Kelly Macdonald), long after his business with her husband Llewelyn (Josh Brolin) seemed to have concluded. Like Dorothy tells Ole, Carla Jean tells Anton that his strange code of honor isn’t some binding thing placed on him from some external authority — it’s a choice he makes, or doesn’t make, to continue hurting people. He could stop if he wanted, stop right then and there.

The Coens’ oeuvre and the Fargo TV show alike are full of characters like this — strange, implacable killers who seem like visitors from another world. (Indeed, they usually are alien to “normal” American culture in some way, in terms of nationality or subculture.) No Country’s Chigurrh, Raising Arizona’s Leonard Smalls, Miller’s Crossing’s the Dane (J.E. Freeman), a character I won’t spoil for you in Barton Fink. On the show, you’ve got Season 1’s Lorne Malvo (Billy Bob Thornton), Season 2’s Hanzee Dent (Zahn McClarnon) and the Kitchen Brothers (Brad and Todd Mann), Season 3’s V.M. Varga (David Thewlis) and his henchmen Yuri (Goran Bogdan) and Meemo (Andy Yu), Season 4’s Constant Calamita (Gaetano Bruno), plus the recurring character of Mr. Wrench (Russell Harvard). Whether they live or die, these men all have one thing in common: Ain’t no one serving them biscuits. No one’s telling them they can refuse to swallow the shit the rich and awful make us eat. No one’s telling them they can be forgiven.

I went long on the end of Fargo Season 5 for Decider. (You can skip the servicey bits if that’s not your thing.)

The main characters of Godzilla Minus One are a kamikaze pilot living with the shame of refusing to kill himself to kill others, a survivor of the Tokyo firebombing who found herself caring for the baby of a woman she watched die, a sailor who wishes he’d been old enough to fight and a crew full of navy veterans who tell him he should be “proud,” in their words, to never have fought at all. I cried when the traumatized pilot twice had mental breaks in which he was convinced Godzilla had actually killed him years earlier. I cried when the orphaned little girl asked for her dead mother. The day I was found sobbing in front of the open produce drawer I had cried in the shower earlier over a different song from the score, “Resolution,” which sounds like all of humanity inhaling and exhaling as one. (I hear Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians and Bernard Herrmann’s Taxi Driver “Main Theme” in the song just for starters.)

Yamazki’s film is the best and worst of humanity refracted through a radioactive green lens. It’s uranium glass. It makes you feel the colossal weight of the crimes committed by both sides in World War II, embodies them in the form of Godzilla, and unleashes it on people who do not deserve to suffer and die. What more could you possibly ask from a horror movie?

My piece on Godzilla Minus One for Luke O’Neil’s Welcome to Hell World is now available to read for free, without a subscription!

Sometime last week my wife returned home from an appointment to find me sitting on the floor in front of our open refrigerator, surrounded by the groceries I hadn’t finished putting away, sobbing into my hands. I was crying, hard, because I was listening to the song “Last” from Naoki Sato’s score for Takashi Yamazaki’s Godzilla Minus One, released the weekend prior. I was crying because the song is a sonic last stand, the musical expression of a distant final hope for the survival of some beautiful doomed thing. In Yamazaki’s film the beautiful doomed thing is the population of World War II era Japan — fed into a meat grinder by a government so indifferent to their lives it had an entire program dedicated to killing its own pilots on purpose, subjected to the fires of creation itself by their swaggering conquerors, horrifically traumatized by what they saw on the front and what they survived in the rubble of their homes. An enormous monster that kills everything it sees is on its way to add more misery, destroy more families, rain more pointless death upon an exhausted people. And some of those people will give up their lives — instantly, reflexively, without thinking — to save the lives of others.

I’m pleased to be making my full-fledged debut at Luke O’Neil’s Welcome to Hell World with an essay on Godzilla Minus One, one of the best films of the year, and on Godzilla in general. The piece is for subscribers only, but great news: Luke has been generous enough to donate 7-day free trial coupons for anyone who wants to read it.

Spectacle is the language through which art communicates when the vocabulary of the everyday fails us. Fantastic fiction, an inherent trafficker in the unreal, says as much through spectacle as any art form this side of musical theater, in which excesses of emotion transcend dialogue and emerge through the eruption of song and dance. That Act Two showstopper speaks to us (or rather sings to us) because we recognize what it is to be so in love; so enraged, so bereft, so drunk on the possibilities or vicissitudes of life that mere spoken words could never capture it. Only an explosion of sound and movement will do.

So it is with genre. The dragon, the android, and the vampire embody fears and dreams either too delicate or too overpowering for realism to express. Ratcheting up the scale and stakes of ideas and imagery like these to the level of spectacle renders them capable of handling even more intense feelings and fantasies. A trip beyond the infinite, a monumental horror-image like a wicker man aflame, a last terrible battle between good and evil: Such spectacles describe our desire and capacity as people to do things so great or terrible—or so great and terrible—that they stagger the mind.

Before they assayed updating a country’s biggest pop-cultural icon and helming the first large-scale battle on what was rapidly becoming television’s biggest show (respectively), Hideaki Anno and Neil Marshall were past masters of this technique. Anno’s Neon Genesis Evangelion pitted giant robots against increasingly bizarre godlike beings in battles that directly reflected the titanic scale of its protagonists’ adolescent angst. Marshall’s The Descent plumbed the depths of its heroine’s grief in a literal bloodbath.

Importantly, they each recognized the role of beauty in such spectacularly grim visions. From Anno’s awe-inspiring animated angels to the firelit scarlet of Marshall’s subterranean charnel pit, the gorgeousness of it complimented and enhanced the terror rather than canceling it out. Beauty is the sea salt in the caramel of horrific spectacle.

Both filmmakers applied these lessons to the biggest assignments in their careers. In 2012, “Blackwater,” his directorial debut on David Benioff & D.B. Weiss’s blockbuster fantasy series Game of Thrones, Marshall depicted the horror of war with an explosion that beggars anything seen on television before, and most of what has come since. In 2014, Anno and co-director Shinji Haguchi’s satirical but harrowing update Shin Godzilla destroyed Tokyo with an alien dispassion that reignited all the majesty and menace felt by filmgoers when the king of the kaiju first emerged decades earlier. And despite their differences, the techniques used by each to convey the magnitude of these unnatural disasters and the people they befell are strikingly similar.

I wrote about Hideaki Anno’s Shin Godzilla, Neil Marshall’s “Blackwater” from Game of Thrones, and the horrible beauty of spectacular violence for Blood Knife.

The demimondes depicted by the American master Martin Scorsese vary widely — his New York stories alone span three centuries — but they have one common requirement: It takes intelligence, of one kind or another, to navigate them. His protagonists are smart, street smart, shrewd, skillful or some combination of those qualities as a rule.

That rule is broken in “Killers of the Flower Moon.” Normally, a character like Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) — a World War I veteran turned henchman in a plot to murder Osage people for their oil profits in 1920s Oklahoma — would either rise to the top of his uncle Bill Hale’s organization, or wise up and fight to stop it on his own. Ernest does neither, precisely because he lacks the qualities Scorsese has spent a lifetime depicting.

I wrote a little visual essay about Killers of the Flower Moon and Martin Scorsese protagonists for the New York Times.

Scorsese and Lynch share in the recognition that there are tragedies that cannot be undone, that there are wounds that cannot be made whole, that some tears in the fabric of human decency are permanent. By facing the horror of violence head on, they raise the curtain, turn on the spotlight, and allow the preciousness of life to take center stage.

I wrote about Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon and the work of David Lynch, particularly Twin Peaks, for Decider.

And the thing looks so expensive. The casual ease with which it depicts the most expensive place to film in America getting completely destroyed by a gigantic entity and the United States military is mindblowing, especially after 15 years of bland destructive spectacles in superhero movies shot either on streets in Vancouver or in warehouses in Atlanta. I watched it with my 14-year-old kid, who at times literally couldn’t believe what he was seeing. “How the hell did they film this?” he asked, completely baffled — and awed.

I wrote about Cloverfield, an excellent and extremely effective giant-monster horror movie that deserves reappraisal, for Decider.

If you’re a horror person, it’s as fun (“fun”) to watch as anything; it wouldn’t have made major bank at the domestic box office if it weren’t. But at heart, it’s a film about suffering, about our compulsion to inflict it in ways both large and small, political and personal, extravagant and intimate. If it is indeed torture porn, it’s not here to jerk you off, metaphorically or otherwise. Hostel has a lot to say, as long as you have the stomach to listen.

I wrote about Eli Roth’s Hostel for Take 2, Decider’s series on films that deserve a second look.

Me and Stefan Sasse were going to make our Boiled Leather Audio Hour discussion of Barbie a Patreon subscriber exclusive, but then we said no, the people need this. Go listen for free, and consider subscribing for more like it!

If I’d blinked I might have missed it, and this was Friedkin’s intent. He meant for the shot to be nearly subliminal, and he would come to rue the technology that allowed people to rewind and freeze-frame on that ghastly visage. After all, it’s just Ellen Dietz, Linda Blair’s stand-in, wearing some corpse paint — a rejected design for how Regan herself would look when possessed, created by the film’s makeup-effects genius Dick Smith. 

I didn’t know any of this as that terrified teenager. All I knew were two things. This was the scariest thing I’d ever seen, and I needed to see it again immediately.

So I rewound that VHS tape. I watched the dream again. And I forced myself to look as that eighth-of-a-second view of the face of pure evil popped back up on my screen before disappearing back into the unnerving expressionism of Karras’s dream. 

To this day I couldn’t tell you exactly why, except to insist, contra Friedkin, that it was not to conduct aversion therapy on myself. This wasn’t a situation where I thought repeated viewings would leech the Face of its power. The exact opposite, in fact. I knew it would scare the living shit out of me all over again — like, real fear, not roller-coaster fear, not spilling-your-popcorn fear, but heart-bursting adrenaline-dumping fear — and I did it anyway. 

I wrote about William Friedkin, The Exorcist, and the scariest shot in movie history for Decider.

All art has an element of the autobiographical. It is not special in this regard. Art has this in common with all fields of human endeavor, in which past experiences influence present actions. A teacher revises his lesson plan based on the previous class’s response, an Uber driver takes a different route because she ran into construction the day before — or a nuclear physicist designs the most dangerous weapon in the history of humankind because his brain is uniquely wired to understand the process, and because his Jewishness and left-wing politics drive home the terror that if he doesn’t do it, the Nazis will. In all cases choice is involved, and the work you make, including creative work, is not simple regurgitation; talent, skill, and imagination all come into play, and can be honed and sharpened to make better work over time. 

So I think it trivializes neither the hard work that artist Christopher Nolan poured into Oppenheimer — nor the grievous actions depicted in the film itself — to suggest that Oppenheimer, too, is reflective of the life of its creator. (He did cast his own daughter as the woman whose face peels off in the title character’s horrific vision of what he has wrought in an admittedly unconscious expression of his horror of the bomb, so I don’t think I’m going too far out on a limb.) Here, after all, we have the story of a brilliant technician, preeminent in his field, successful in ways few of his colleagues can hope to emulate. He is tasked with the completion of a tremendous project that will change the world forever, which he completes with nearly (but not quite—ask Jean Tatlock) monomaniacal furor even when the need that initially drove him to do so subsides. Unleashed upon the world his project is an even bigger success — from the perspective of his bosses, if not that of humanity in general or the people of Japan in particular — than he imagined. And for one reason or another, he will regret that success for the rest of his life.

I wrote about Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan, and the explosion (and implosion?) of the superhero boom for Decider.

Time and again, Reubens and company picked up on the kinds of incidents that would haunt little minds well into adulthood. Think about it: However old you are now, do you not remember suffering a humiliation as mortifying as a whole crowd of tourists laughing at you because “There’s no basement at the Alamo”? I sure do! In my case, it involved mistaking a “Chinese yo-yo” on a Memorial Day fair prize table for a bottle rocket, only for an adult I didn’t know to sneer “Firecrackers are illegal!” at me, Jan Hooks–style. God, how I hated that for Pee-wee! How I wanted there to be a basement at the Alamo after all!

In honor of Paul Reubens I wrote about the horror of Pee-wee’s Big Adventure — of its exploration of children’s fears both real and imagined — for Decider. This piece is for former kids who were scared by both Large Marge and the prospect of a bunch of adults laughing at you because you didn’t know there’s no basement at the Alamo.

Somehow I was the target demographic for all of these blockbusters, despite the fact that if I’d addressed many of their images and themes to my folks in the form of direct questions I’d have been as summarily dismissed as I was when I first asked if Santa Claus was real. I had discovered a societally sanctioned way to see things I wasn’t supposed to see, hear things I wasn’t supposed to hear, think things I wasn’t supposed to think, feel things I wasn’t supposed to feel. I’d cracked the code. I’d beaten the game. I’d gotten to stay up past my metaphorical bedtime. 

That’s not a phrase I throw around lightly. Watching Sam Malone make preposterous passes at Diane Chambers or Rebecca Howe was one thing; I knew it was just 9:07 P.M. and my dad had his favorite show on and I happened to be watching on my way upstairs to dreamland. But these movies were for me, for us, for kids, even when the material in them wasn’t. Whether because they had faith in our intelligence or blithe unconcern for our moral fiber was immaterial. They were giving us something we needed without knowing how bad we needed it: a taste of the adult, in the form of “Hey, kids! The movies!”

Barbie is a return to this grand tradition. Directed by Greta Gerwig from a script by herself and her frequent collaborator Noah Baumbach, it’s a throwback to the kid-appealing adult blockbusters of yore.

This Ken has no dick: I wrote about Barbie, Ghostbusters, and the era (and return?) of the edgy kinda-but-not-quite-for-kids blockbuster for Decider.

But the erotic thriller is truly defined by the second half of its sobriquet. Such stories typically revolve around a femme fatale—sometimes calculating, sometimes unhinged, always dangerous—and the poor sap who’s both lucky and unlucky enough to be fucking her. Sometimes, as in The Last Seduction (1994), the dangerous woman gets away with it and the patsy is left wishing he’d never met her. Other times, as in the original Fatal Attraction, the monster gets what’s coming to her and the status quo of the family man she led down the path of sin is restored. (In rarer cases, the villain is an outside force not represented by the female half of the sexual dyad—Body Double, say.) In all cases, erotic thrillers use tension and suspense to build to a good-versus-evil resolution, and no matter which side comes out on top, sexuality is on the side of sin.

Yet there’s an adjacent genre that does away with those conventions, as easily as Catherine Tramell bumps off her lovers: a genre of tragedy. In these films, sexuality pervades, not as a troublesome interloper, but as an all-consuming directive; like hunger, it is dangerous only when thwarted. It refuses to be relegated to the shadows. Like buried trauma, sex demands an audience. The perennial discourse of the plot-relevant sex scene—does it or does it not exist, and should it?—can find no footing here: sex is the plot, and it does so much more than titillate. It communicates. There is not just the soft-focus romantic lovemaking we’ve come to expect on-screen; there is also fucking for anger, shame, sorrow, and all the ugliness of which we fear to speak in the light of day. There is transgression and discomfort. There are real taboos hard at work between the sheets.

What there aren’t, though, are thrills. These sex tragedies are downbeat, enervating to the last frame. Call this genre the “erotic bummer.”

Like their erotic thriller cousins, these films combine sex and death too, but the balance is shifted. Sex is prioritized in the plot, drives the plot, often becomes the plot, so the erotic component is stronger than ever. But the violence inherent in erotic thrillers is transmuted into something morbid rather than thrilling. It’s as if the characters’ growing appetite for ever-intensifying sexual intimacy devours them until there’s nothing left. No mind games, no cat-and-mouse chases through expensive apartments, no fundamental battle of good versus evil; the erotic connection between the characters is beyond good and evil, and is itself their undoing, leading inevitably to tragedy, isolation, and death.

Unlike the erotic thriller, which, until its recent revival, was essentially a discreet Hollywood phenomenon that existed from Reagan through Clinton, the erotic bummer manifests itself in a much wider range of modes, styles, countries, and time periods. This ad hoc genre spans from European art films of the 1970s (The Night Porter in 1974, Last Tango in Paris in 1972, the French-Japanese co-production In the Realm of the Senses in 1976) to erotic-thriller-adjacent Jeremy Irons vehicles in the ’80s (Dead Ringers, Damage) to turn-of-the-millennium period-piece Oscar bait (Atonement in 2007, The End of the Affair in 1999, The English Patient in 1996) to stylish psychological horror (Possession in 1981, Mulholland Drive in 2001) to divisive 21st-century art-house fare (The Brown Bunny in 2003, The Piano Teacher in 2001, Antichrist in 2009). In addition to jettisoning the erotic thriller’s default neo-noir template of murder plots and their resolution, the erotic bummer is less dependent on violating the specific sexual mores of “Morning in America” and its aftermath. Forget AIDS, NC-17, the Parents Music Resource Center: the erotic bummer posits that anyone, at any time, can fuck themselves to death.

My wife Julia Gfrörer and I wrote about a genre of horny, depressing movies we call “the erotic bummer” for our debut at the Los Angeles Review of Books.

In short, the show is about pregnant women, and the legal, medical, ethical, moral, and political issues that swirl around them. Needless to say, this significantly shifts the framework of the original. Jeremy Irons’s Mantle twins are misogynists who see women as both sexual playthings and medical tools against which they can sharpen their genius. The misogyny present in Rachel Weisz’s Mantle twins, as well as in characters like Rebecca and her ghoulish circle of rich women, is internalized, though it’s no less present for that.

In both versions, the female body is a commodity to be experimented with, and on, but changing the gender of who’s doing the experimenting changes almost everything else. But only the TV show expands this into a multifaceted feminist critique of the economic and political forces surrounding the issue: America’s murderous for-profit healthcare system and the women who’ve girlbossed their way to its apex; racial and class discrepancies in maternal healthcare outcomes; the fascist anti-abortion movement’s pas de deux with advances in care for premature infants; the objectification and infantilization of women during the process; and probably more I’m missing. All of this emerges naturally through story and character, which is a pretty staggering achievement in itself.

I compared the David Cronenberg/Jeremy Irons Dead Ringers film to the Alice Birch/Rachel Weisz Dead Ringers TV series for Decider.

I was so pleased to appear as a guest on Road House Minute, Marcie & Roger Wistar’s podcast dedicated to going through Road House one minute at a time! I pop up during the closing credits, so we talk a bunch about Cody and just generally wax rhapsodic about the whole film. Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts!