There’s a wrestler in AEW by the name of Adam “Hangman” Page, who works a cowboy gimmick by way of Red Dead Redemption iconography. (One of his finishing moves is called the Dead Eye, presumably after RDR‘s targeting system.) During one of his promos a few months back now, he promised one of his enemies that in their upcoming match he’d see Page do some real “cowboy shit.” Ever since, fans have chanted “COWBOY SHIT! COWBOY SHIT!” when Page takes the ring or uncorks a successful offensive maneuver. It’s charming.

It’s less charming when I think about “cowboy shit” as the animating force and raison d’être of Vince Gilligan’s El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie.

It occurred to me that despite writing about Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul for years, I never wrote anything about the BB sequel movie El Camino. Well, over at my Patreon, now I have.

Horror is a genre of worst-case scenarios, narrowly avoided or not. The monster must feed, the slasher must kill, the demon must possess, the alien must infect, and we mortals, we normals, must defend and escape or die trying. There’s a reason that one of the most recently popular and influential movies in the category named itself after this imperative, boiled down to two simple words: Get Out.

Not all horror stories work that way. In some, the protagonist does not escape from or kill the beast, but nor is she simply killed in turn. In these stories, the protagonist enters into a state of communion with the very horror that has spent the rest of the movie threatening her life and her sanity. The process may be voluntary or not. The embrace of the evil may be gleeful or reluctant, and the outcome may be triumphant or tragic. But in the end, the dangerous, deranging, demonic forces at work are greeted not as destroyers, but as liberators, freeing the human protagonist from his human concerns once and for all, the life he once led forgotten in favor of a supernatural, superhuman new state of existence.

This is transcendental horror: stories that climax with the protagonist entering a state of ecstatic or enlightened union with the source of the horror they’ve experienced.

I wrote about a phenomenon I’m calling Transcendental Horror for The Outline. It’s extensively spoilery, but if you’ve enjoyed any recent horror movies it’s worth taking a peek!

I’ve made my triumphant return to the Delete Your Account podcast to talk to co-hosts Roqayah Chamseddine and Kumars Salehi about the year in movies, the decade in TV, the horror renaissance, the Star Wars situation, and more!

Ever since he strolled across the landing bay of the second Death Star in Return of the Jedi, ever since I held him in my five-year-old hands as a hefty hunk of Kenner-manufactured plastic, I have adored the Emperor. I’ve tried the other Dark Lords, and much as I might enjoy them, they’re just not the one: Sauron is a giant flaming eyeball, Voldemort is just Ralph Fiennes with no nose, Thanos is a finger-snappin’ Genocide Fonzie. But Star Wars’ Emperor Palpatine, the ruler of his galaxy and the series’ ultimate villain, is a star — pure evil in the form of a weird, wrinkly old fart who can shoot lightning from his fingers.

The Emperor rules. Figuratively, I mean, not just literally. And I didn’t need JJ Abrams to resurrect him in The Rise of Skywalker — now disappointing fans in a theater near you! — to convince me.

Why? Because he’s not just evil. He’s a dick about it. And that’s an evil I recognize.

I’m very excited to announce I’m now a columnist for the Outline! I kicked things off with an essay on why the Emperor rules and why, in The Rise of Skywalker, he rules less.

44. The Return of the Sith (Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker)

Much of director J.J. Abrams’s course-correction of a final installment in the sequel trilogy aims for a grandeur and scale that came much more naturally to George Lucas & Co. a long time ago. But there’s definitely one place he nailed it: in the depths of the temple beneath the surface of Exogol, the Sith home planet. When Rey arrives to confront the reemergent Emperor Palpatine before the Sith throne, the camera whirls to reveal that she’s standing in the center of an entire arena, filled with the emperor’s black-robed acolytes. Much like the absolutely massive fleet of planet-killing Star Destroyers hovering above, it’s a vivid demonstration of the power and reach of the dark side.

I’ve once again revised and ranked my list of the 50 Best Star Wars Moments for Vulture, this time taking The Rise of Skywalker into consideration.

I’ve started a new column about film called My Favorite Movies, which will cover exactly that. The inaugural installment: Eyes Wide Shut. It’s available for my Patreon subscribers at the $5/month tier. I hope you dig it!

With that in mind I’ve experimented with making my pro wrestling column, Sweeping Up the Eyeballs, free this week. I hope you dig that too!

“They will not fail!”

The deluded denialism of Lord Summerisle and his people is made terrifyingly clear. In the nobleman’s piercing, clarion voice you can all but hear him clinging, white-knuckled, to the edifice of ideology he himself helped construct and enforce. He cannot admit that he’s wrong, can’t even brook the possibility. He’s telling himself the sacrifice will be accepted and the crops will return as much as he’s telling Howie or the assembled islanders. He’ll commit murder, doom his community to collapse and his people to starvation, before admitting the truth.

I think about those four words, and Christopher Lee’s perfect delivery of them, a lot. I hear an entire mindset, the complete conservative worldview, in those four syllables.

I wrote about my favorite line from The Wicker Man and why it’s the key to so much that’s wrong with our world for Polygon.

The Joker debuted in Batman #1, the Spring 1940 launch of the Dark Knight’s dedicated comic-book series; it also revealed the superhero’s origin for the first time and contained the first appearance of Catwoman. (Batman first appeared in a separate series, Detective Comics, which gave DC Comics its name and in which he still stars to this day.)

But the creation of the Clown Prince is shrouded in controversy, with the three men involved — writer Bill Finger and artists Bob Kane and Jerry Robinson — each offering a different account of how the Joker came to be. The exact order of events varies depending on who you believe, but in essence, the character was a hybrid of influences. Robinson produced a joker playing-card design. Finger provided inspiration in the form of a clown-face logo from Coney Island and, crucially, a picture of actor Conrad Veidt playing the disfigured, permanently grinning title character in the 1928 horror film The Man Who Laughs. Both Robinson and Kane, who for decades received sole credit for the creation of Batman, designed the character on the page, while Robinson and Finger helped develop the concept of the Joker as Batman’s nemesis. The result was a villain unlike any of the gangsters and mad scientists Batman and his recently added sidekick Robin had ever faced before.

I compiled the history of the Joker for Rolling Stone. I love these assignments because, in a culture that treats corporations and brands as creators, they’re a chance to give credit where it’s really due. (Yes, even to Bob Kane.)

“…Sam Harris, a neuroscientist; Eric Weinstein, a mathematician and managing director of Thiel Capital; the commentator and comedian Dave Rubin…the evolutionary biologists Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying; Jordan Peterson, the psychologist and best-selling author; the conservative commentators Ben Shapiro and Douglas Murray; Maajid Nawaz, the former Islamist turned anti-extremist activist; and the feminists Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Christina Hoff Summers.”

– Bari Weiss, “Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web,” The New York Times, May 8, 2018

“I do many, many things. I am a writer, a doctor, a nuclear physicist, a theoretical philosopher … but above all, I am a man. A hopelessly inquisitive man, just like you.”

– Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman) in The Master

These quotes introduce a new essay I wrote about The Master in the Intellectual Dark Age of Trump for Polygon. Special thanks to my editor Matt Patches for the inspiration.

Since I first saw the movie with a bunch of drunk, high, hooting and hollering friends over a decade ago, I’ve watched it dozens of times with dozens of people. I never get tired of the bone-crunching action, the sweaty neo-western sex appeal, the cockamamie dialogue (“Are you gonna fight, dickless?” “I sure ain’t gonna show you my dick!”), the peculiar performances, and the overall vibe that anything can happen at any moment. I always find new things I never noticed, or old things I never fully appreciated.

In other words, this great bad movie functions, in a lot of ways, like a great great movie. I’ll never stop watching it. Now, thanks to its presence on that big red streaming service, you never have to stop watching it either.

Road House is on Netflix now, so I wrote a guide to its wonders for Decider.

When I love a horror film, I want to live in it. I mean this as a physical proposition. If a horror movie I adore has a great scene set in a memorable enclosed space, my instinct, no matter how awful the things that happen in that space are, is to walk right into it. I’d like to be in Leatherface’s bone room, in the Overlook Hotel’s elevator lobby, in the bare wooden attic where the Cenobites kill Frank Cotton, in Scarlett Johansson’s black liquid void. I want to feel the walls, tap the floor with my foot, smell the viscera. You know, make myself at home.

I’d eventually like to leave again, of course, which is usually what separates me from the people who do visit those places within the movies themselves. But there’s weird, cold comfort in those spaces. They’re inviting, to me anyway, and it is not my custom to go where I am not wanted.

From the Red Room in Twin Peaks to its blue counterpart Club Silencio in Mullholland Drive, David Lynch has created many of these spaces. As a director, Lynch is to ambient room tone what Martin Scorsese is to gangsters listening to “Gimme Shelter.” Evoking a sense of space, and what it’s like to be within four particular walls (curtains optional), is a major part of his project.

In one such space, he even threw a party.

I wrote about the Mystery Man scene from David Lynch’s Lost Highway for The Outline.

46. Paul Giovanni – The Wicker Man (1973)

The Wicker Man is never what you expect it to be. Like its hero, a Scottish police sergeant trying to find a missing girl in a pagan community, the New York musician Paul Giovanni was a stranger to the old Celtic folkways he was hired to investigate for Robin Hardy’s haunting horror film. His outsider’s ear for both the then-booming British folk scene and its ancient antecedents made the music he composed the ideal mirror for such a twisted journey. The opening song is a tightly harmonized adaptation of Scottish poet Robert Burns’ “The Highland Widow’s Lament,” nearly abrasive in its mournful mountain-air beauty. Sex is a frequent topic for the film and music, rendered in forms both profane (the absolutely filthy drinking song “The Landlord’s Daughter”) and sacred (“Willow’s Song,” the set’s dirty-minded but gorgeous standout). Rousing community singalongs and sparse hymns of ritual sacrifice weave conflicting narratives of their own. It’s a soundtrack that casts strange shadows and remains ungraspable, like a tongue of flame.

I reviewed the soundtracks for The Wicker Man, GoodFellas, and This Is Spinal Tap for Pitchfork’s list of the best soundtracks of all time.

I wrote about 28 Weeks Later… in the context of Bird Box and A Quiet Place and survival-horror films with children at the center for the New York Times’ free Watching newsletter, which you can subscribe to here!

If the Man gave Marvel its persona, he also created his own. Born Stanley Martin Lieber in 1922, he adopted his pen name in part because he held out hope of becoming a serious writer under his real name. Meanwhile, he was cranking out comics of every kind for his uncle Martin Goodman’s publishing company, which eventually evolved into Marvel. That name and everything that came with it — the jocular personality, the never-changing look, the vague but unmistakable air of creative wizardry — was as grand an identity as any superhero’s.

Of course, he had a secret identity too. He was a hopelessly devoted husband to his wife Joan, a British ex-pat whose death in 2017 seemed impossible for Lee to ever truly wrap his mind around. And as recent exposés and interviews have illustrated, he was subject to the same depredations of age as any other person — confusing legal disputes with business partners, elder-abuse allegations — a sad coda to a life lived large.

And he was Stan the Company Man as well. Ask the late Jack Kirby, the creative dynamo (he helped invent both Captain America and romance comics with writer Joe Simon, long before he and Lee teamed up), who by all accounts did much of the heavy lifting not just as artist but as co-writer during their fruitful collaboration, despite Lee earning the lion’s share of the credit and compensation. Kirby’s legacy as “The King of Comics” includes a lengthy legal war against Marvel for rights, royalties, and even the physical pages he drew on. Though Lee assiduously pointed out the role his collaborators played in the formation of the company and its characters during interviews later in his life, he usually took Marvel’s side in these battles when they occurred. To many within comics, “The Man” has the same pejorative connotations it does when used to describe politicians or police.

But whatever his faults (many) and autumn-years misfortunes (also many), Lee’s ambition, imagination, and ability to combine high melodrama, high-octane action and playful, personable banter on the comics page was the foundation upon which the entire Marvel empire was built. And most importantly, long before his characters ruled the box office, they populated the back pockets and bedroom floors of countless kids, thirsty for adventure and desperate for connection. Peter Parker, Tony Stark, T’Challa, Natasha and the rest of the gang brought incalculable hours of enjoyment to their readers, and eventually their viewers. All of it based on Lee’s basic premise, reflected in his own life in so many ways, that radioactive spider bites or not, heroes are only human.

Without Stan Lee, it would be a poorer, lonelier, drearier life, in which picked-on kids would dream fewer dreams. Forget the Marvel Universe. Stan the Man reimagined our own.

After his death, I wrote about Stan Lee for Rolling Stone. I tried to be specific and fair about his faults and achievements.

I don’t think I’ve seen “Naked” more than three times. And yet, “Naked” is one of my favorite films. How can both statements be true? Because like Johnny, the human vortex of misanthropy at the heart of this scathing, haunting film from Mike Leigh, “Naked” arrives unexpectedly and does enough psychic damage to mark you for life.

Played by David Thewlis in his breakout role, Johnny is a shuffling, shaggy-haired native of Manchester, now down-and-out in London after fleeing the consequences of the sexual assault that opens the film. (The merciless tone is established from the start.) With his cruel intelligence, dizzying monologues and trademark black trench coat, he upends the lives of old friends, acquaintances and total strangers alike.

The film’s devastating final shot casts Johnny as a sad-sack Satan wandering the world, unwilling to accept either punishment or forgiveness for his sins. When FilmStruck vanishes from the internet, it will take this unforgettable portrait of humanity as a failed state with it for now — but the film will remain lodged in my mind forever.

I wrote about Mike Leigh’s brilliant film Naked for the New York Times’ tribute to the late great streaming service FilmStruck, alongside a murderers’ row of other critics.

And since it’s been a while, I’ll note that I still contribute movie recommendations to the Times’ free streaming-advice newsletter Watching. I think I’ve covered The Love Witch and Eyes Wide Shut since last time. Click and subscribe for free!

Before he was a character, Venom was a costume.

Imagine if the Joker started out as a clown outfit that Batman wore for circus-themed missions and you’ll have some idea of just how odd the path that this character took to antihero superstardom really was.

Back in 1982, comics reader Randy Schueller submitted an idea to Marvel for a storyline in which Spider-Man acquired a black costume (with a red spider logo, rather than the familiar white one) made of “unstable molecules,” i.e. the Marvel Universe material from which the Fantastic Four’s Reed Richards made his team’s uniforms. More than mere fabric, this outfit would be able to adjust to Peter Parker’s needs, as well as enhance his powers. Controversial Marvel editor-in-chief Jim Shooter bought the idea from Schueller for a cool $220.

It took a couple of years for the new white-on-black look to make its first chronological appearance in the pages of the company-wide crossover “event comic” Secret Wars #8, courtesy of a design by artist Mike Zeck and a script by Shooter that saw the Webslinger acquire the costume on an alien planet.

Though the issue came out in December 1984, the costume had popped up several months earlier — first as a sketch in March’s comic-length newsletter Marvel Age #12, then in a Spidey story set after the events of Secret Wars in May’s Amazing Spider-Man #252, plotted by Roger Stern, written by Tom DeFalco, and illustrated by Ron Frenz.

… And also an alien parasite.

During their Amazing Spider-Man run, DeFalco and Frenz fleshed out the origin of the liquid-like black outfit, which would respond to Peter Parker’s thoughts; it would even hijack him in his sleep for late-night crimefighting binges. Sure, it looks badass, but it’s not merely a futuristic crimefighting costume or the self-repairing clothes writer/artist John Byrne had devised for the martial-arts hero Iron Fist (an influence on Stern’s concept for the costume). It’s a sentient, symbiotic alien entity, one which bonds to a human host and bestows them with incredible powers while still maintaining a mind of its own.

That “mind of its own” thing is the rub. Though he digs the power-up, Parker quickly learns that this “Symbiote” wants to bond to his body permanently. By exploiting the alien’s vulnerability to fire and sonic energy — and with a little help from the Fantastic Four — Spider-Man separates himself from the costume, which slithers off to find another host to inhabit.

I wrote a quick cheat sheet to catch people up on the history of Venom in comics and film, just in time for the new Tom Hardy movie, for Rolling Stone. I like doing pieces like this because it’s a way to give some shine to the writers and artists who made this multibillion-dollar industry possible.

Better to be a king for a night than a schmuck for a lifetime!
—Rupert Pupkin, The King of Comedy

Laugh and the world laughs with you!
—The Joker, Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Robert de Niro will soon co-star in a film about a deranged man who fancies himself a comedian and is driven to crime by a late-night talk show host.

This time around, however, de Niro isn’t playing the insane up-and-comer, as he did in Martin Scorsese’s 1982 black comedy classic, The King of Comedy. Rather, rumor has it, Bobby D will be the superstar who spurs Joaquin Phoenix’s descent into madness in director Todd Phillips’ stand-alone movie about the Joker, nemesis of Batman and anyone taking Jared Leto seriously alike.

That distinctive chemical odor you’re smelling isn’t Smilex gas, but an air of superfluousness surrounding the whole project. The movie exists in parallel to the DC film universe, where Leto remains attached to both a Suicide Squad sequel (where his take on the character debuted) and in his own stand-alone Joker movie. Nor is it simply that the work of Martin Scorsese is cited as an inspiration anytime Phillips’ movie pops up in the trades. To an extent, that stands to reason: Scorsese is the film’s executive producer, and his signature star is in the cast. “Grim and gritty,” Taxi Driver, ’70s/’80s noir — word on the street, including what Polygon has heard from crew members, is that the Joker movie is an extended Marty homage.

Here’s the thing: The King of Comedy already is a near-perfect Joker movie. (It’s a near-perfect movie in general, but it’s a Joker-specific one, too.) It’s a glimpse into the mind of a man who’s convinced, despite all evidence to the contrary, that he’s one of the funniest people in the world, and who’s determined that the world must be made in on the joke. Beneath the purple suit, green hair and greasepaint-white skin, that’s what makes the Joker tick.

I’d like to thank Joaquin Phoenix’s upcoming Joker movie for giving me the excuse to write at length about Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy for Polygon. Guest stars include Robert De Niro, Sandra Bernhard, Jerry Lewis, the Clash, Grant Morrison & Dave McKean, Alan Moore & Brian Bolland, Frank Miller, and a lengthy encomium to Jack Nicholson’s Joker in the first Tim Burton Batman movie. Rupert Pupkin, ladies and gentlemen!

I wrote about Jonathan Glazer’s incredible British gangster movie Sexy Beast for today’s edition of the New York Times’ “Watching” newsletter, which features recommendations for streaming shows and films three times a week. If you sign up for it today (it’s free) you can read what I wrote. Enjoy!