Willow Catelyn Maclay
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willowcatelyn.bsky.social
Willow Catelyn Maclay
@willowcatelyn.bsky.social
16K followers 710 following 4.8K posts
Film Critic (Film Comment, Reverse Shot, etc). GALECA.

Co-Author of CORPSES, FOOLS AND MONSTERS: THE HISTORY AND FUTURE OF TRANSNESS IN CINEMA
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willowcatelyn.bsky.social
Willow Catelyn Maclay @willowcatelyn.bsky.social · Oct 17
Every time there's a Twitter purge, I share the link to my book. I co-authored "Corpses, Fools and Monsters" and it is about transness in cinema. People seem to like it!

www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/725695...
Corpses, Fools and Monsters by Willow Maclay, Caden Gardner: 9781914420580 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books
A radical history of transness in cinema, and an exploration of the political possibilities of its future. In the history of cinema, trans people are usually murdered, made into a joke, or viewed as ...
www.penguinrandomhouse.com
willowcatelyn.bsky.social
The most Important thing to know about Kermit is that he is an orange tuxedo cat and he is perfect
KERMIT, THE ORANGE TUXEDO CAT, LOUNGING ON A BLUE BATH MAT KERMIT THE ORANGE TUXEDO CAT LOUNGING ON A CAT TREE KERMIT THE ORANGE TUXEDO CAT GIVING US ALL A LOOK OF SASS KERMIT THE ORANGE TUXEDO CAT LOUNGING ON A PINK SAILOR MOON BLANKET
January 22, 2026 at 9:01 PM
willowcatelyn.bsky.social
KERMIT KERMIT KERMIT KERMIT KERMIT KERMIT KERMIT
This is Kermit! God's favorite orange tabby tuxedo cat. He is laying on a cat blanket, and he is sooooooooooooo sleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeepy
January 22, 2026 at 8:55 PM
willowcatelyn.bsky.social
I have not seen all of the best picture nominees but I did watch the S.O.V. spandex giallo KILLER WORKOUT on TUBI last night. I'm positive it's better than at least two or three of them.
January 22, 2026 at 7:40 PM
Reposted by Willow Catelyn Maclay
veradrew22.bsky.social
TUBI or not TUBI? lolzzzzzz that's right THE PEOPLE'S JOKER is now available to watch for FREE on TUBI! We also just dropped a bunch of new merch at the yeyostore (check it below). It's the best day of your life!
January 21, 2026 at 8:34 AM
willowcatelyn.bsky.social
I caught up with FINAL DESTINATION: BLOODLINES as part of my reader's choice series. It's exactly what you'd expect with the exception of one scene near the end featuring the late great Tony Todd

www.patreon.com/posts/148723...
Like any good millennial with a taste for blood on the screen, I used to really like the Final Destination movies. I admired the way they approached the slasher formula with an eye towards mousetrap contraptions that resulted in the best of beautiful young Hollywood falling prey to the reaper’s scythe. I enjoyed their cruelty, and their immovable predestined dalliances with the grave. Death is inevitable, after all, and I believed that those earlier movies took to it with an eye for Looney Tunes tomfoolery, and with the tongue-in-cheek charm of a piano falling from a skyscaper and hitting a deadly note on the concrete below. As I’ve grown older, my tolerance for this sort of thing has diminished, but not vanished entirely. There’s still a part of my sick lizard brain that finds avenues for humor in the bloodshed, but my admiration for movies like this has evolved as I’ve become aware of the fragile nature of life. This essay is not going to be a screed against movies with a high body count—god forbid—but rather, a desire for my time to be less predisposed to diversions with art that has very little to say. These movies have always been stupid, but I feel that there was an integrity to the stupidity earlier on that is largely missing in Final Destination: Bloodlines. In these movies, a character eventually becomes aware that they are being hunted by death, and are then prone to seeing death everywhere in the minutiae of modern day life. The issue with this version, is that every character behaves as if they are in on the formula of the movie, and have a level of self-awareness at a scripted level, that implies they are in on the joke. This almost always happens when horror movies get this deep into seqeulitis, but that self-awareness makes the enterprise tumble like a poorly manufactured glass tower, aloft in the sky with hundreds of dancing CGI persons. a still image from FINAL DESTINATION BLOODLINES. A low-angle shot full of CGI embellishment at a party. A blonde woman in a light blue gown is visible
January 21, 2026 at 8:50 PM
willowcatelyn.bsky.social
Well, well, well if it isn't Edward Hopper with his latest beautiful painting of someone looking out of a window
January 20, 2026 at 11:44 PM
willowcatelyn.bsky.social
Last night my husband and I got caught up in a nearly hour long conversation about all the lovely things that Dougie Jones gave people in Twin Peaks. The surprise green tea, the Mitchum Brothers & their cherry pie, the older lady & Mr. Jackpots. How wonderful it all was.
January 20, 2026 at 9:26 PM
Reposted by Willow Catelyn Maclay
mikexnichols.bsky.social
Jennifer Lynch on her father David Lynch “People can also follow Agent Cooper's advice and give themselves a present every day. My father could not believe what was going on in the world politically, and it was very upsetting to him. People can be kind to each other. As much darkness as he was able to swim in and express, there was so much more light in his work. People can do nice things for other people in his name. That would make him very happy.” Source: https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/story/jennifer-lynch-on-david-lynchs-art-and-life-he-loved-being-alive
April 19, 2025 at 4:01 AM
willowcatelyn.bsky.social
The next Silent Hill essay will be up in a couple of days. In the meantime you can catch up with my work on SILENT HILL 2 & SILENT HILL (2006) if you'd like.
willowcatelyn.bsky.social Willow Catelyn Maclay @willowcatelyn.bsky.social · 9d
The second essay in my four part series on SILENT HILL is live. This time around I looked at the Christophe Gans adaptation from 2006. I've been a fan of this movie since it came out and I am still quite fond of it.

www.patreon.com/posts/148139...
There is a monument to a bible verse on the outskirts of Rosa Da Silva’s (Radha Mitchell) hometown. It catches the eye, Corinthians 6: 2-3, “Do you not know that we will judge angels? Do you not know that the saints will judge the world?”. Paul wrote these messages to the Corinthians after he reconfigured himself as a fire and brimstone messenger of God, and much of his scripture acts as a prelude to all the gnashing of teeth and plagues in the book of Revelations. His faith is the threatening sort, (if you don’t behave exactly like how I say then you will be damned) and his prophecy is a favorite among Southern Baptist preachers who use ideology to punish those who are different. Rosa’s adopted little girl Sharon (Jodelle Ferland) sleepwalks and seems disturbed by memories that aren’t hers. In her waking sleep she screams for the abandoned mining town of Silent Hill, and director Christophe Gans’s adaptation of this popular video game begins with the beckoning of mother and daughter to this haunted place. In the midst of an elegant prologue on a cliffside, the camera lifts into a crane shot and into a wide frame of the horizon, and in the deep dark of night, a cross can be seen shining in the horizon. Mother, daughter, and father Christopher (Sean Bean) shield themselves from despair by latching onto one another in close-up. Gans, being a Frenchman of taste, and an obsessive fan of genre, was certainly familiar with the socio-political aesthetics of horror filmmaker Jean Rollin, and this particular bit of scene setting, with the cross, and the family, lurches forward with the same unsettling and provocative thematic integrity of his work. The prologue also allows us to observe the intimate details of a protective mother, and a wounded child, and it is an image that Gans returns to with some frequency. When they are separated from one another after arriving in Silent Hill, the negative space of the distance between them endows the film with genuine torment. a still from Christophe Gans's 2006 adaptation of SILENT HILL. It's a wide frame, foggy and Radha Mitchell is in the center, moving forward, looking for her daughter.
January 20, 2026 at 8:58 PM
Reposted by Willow Catelyn Maclay
willowcatelyn.bsky.social
There are a lot of essential films about civil rights leaders on TCM today that everyone should check out.

They include
KING: A FILMED RECORD...MONTGOMERY TO MEMPHIS
I HEARD IT THROUGH THE GRAPEVINE
MALCOLM X
UPTIGHT
THE MURDER OF FRED HAMPTOM
BLACK PANTHERS
January 19, 2026 at 4:40 PM
willowcatelyn.bsky.social
Thinking about when David Lynch tweeted: "Dear Twitter Friends, I have made friends with a hummingbird"
January 19, 2026 at 5:54 PM
Reposted by Willow Catelyn Maclay
odienator.bsky.social
UPTIGHT is a must-see. Booker T. and the MG's song TIME IS TIGHT comes from this film. Has a fantastic performance by Raymond St. Jacques. Max Julien is great in it as well. Hell, the entire cast is awesome. Co-written by Ruby Dee. I wrote about it in my book, BLACK CAESARS AND FOXY CLEOPATRAS.
willowcatelyn.bsky.social Willow Catelyn Maclay @willowcatelyn.bsky.social · 3d
There are a lot of essential films about civil rights leaders on TCM today that everyone should check out.

They include
KING: A FILMED RECORD...MONTGOMERY TO MEMPHIS
I HEARD IT THROUGH THE GRAPEVINE
MALCOLM X
UPTIGHT
THE MURDER OF FRED HAMPTOM
BLACK PANTHERS
January 19, 2026 at 4:52 PM
Reposted by Willow Catelyn Maclay
kjshepherd.bsky.social
See you tomorrow!
kjshepherd.bsky.social KJ Shepherd @kjshepherd.bsky.social · 14d
This month at @ifccenter.bsky.social, CRUISING THE MOVIES honors the recently departed Rosa von Praunheim with his masterpiece I AM MY OWN WOMAN--one of the few trans biopics to truly feel as radical and as original as its subject.

Join @schlockvalue.bsky.social and me as we celebrate an all-timer.
IFC Center - I Am My Own Woman
Tuesday, January 20 at 7:00: Introduction by Elizabeth Purchell and KJ Shepherd East German trans icon Charlotte von Mahlsdorf guides filmmaker Rosa von Praunheim through the retelling of her incredib...
www.ifccenter.com
January 19, 2026 at 4:37 PM
willowcatelyn.bsky.social
There are a lot of essential films about civil rights leaders on TCM today that everyone should check out.

They include
KING: A FILMED RECORD...MONTGOMERY TO MEMPHIS
I HEARD IT THROUGH THE GRAPEVINE
MALCOLM X
UPTIGHT
THE MURDER OF FRED HAMPTOM
BLACK PANTHERS
January 19, 2026 at 4:40 PM
willowcatelyn.bsky.social
Caught up with PRIMATE and DEAD MAN'S WIRE at the cinema yesterday. Both are worth watching. Did not expect a visual homage to the ghostly Aurore Clement bedroom scene from APOCALYPSE NOW REDUX in the killer monkey movie, but it's awesome.
January 18, 2026 at 7:59 PM
Reposted by Willow Catelyn Maclay
tjamesdobbin.bsky.social
My Bugs Bunny Project reaches its 10th installment and enters 1942 with an unusual cartoon from Friz Freleng and Michael Maltese.
The Wabbit Who Came to Supper (1942)
Bugs Bunny fanatics had three full months to wait after Wabbit Twouble (1941), with nine other Warner cartoons – starring the likes of Porky, Daffy, Conrad the Cat, and sometimes no character…
strawberrypenguin.ca
December 12, 2025 at 1:46 PM
willowcatelyn.bsky.social
I wrote this a few months after David Lynch passed away. I will love him forever, and I feel like the way that he approached life fundamentally reshaped mine for the better. I love the way that he thought about art, and about people, and cherishing life's small joys.

www.patreon.com/posts/148384...
"Fix Your Hearts or Die": Remembering David Lynch | Willow Catelyn Maclay
Get more from Willow Catelyn Maclay on Patreon
www.patreon.com
January 16, 2026 at 6:18 PM
Reposted by Willow Catelyn Maclay
mulderbatflip.net
Good articulation by Willow that the joys of Lee are now perhaps accessible only to the auteurists. It’s not late style, it’s old style
willowcatelyn.bsky.social Willow Catelyn Maclay @willowcatelyn.bsky.social · 10d
I'm catching up with some films that I didn't review last year. I liked HIGHEST 2 LOWEST & I'm always eager to see Spike Lee add to his canvas

www.patreon.com/posts/148050...
Notions of a film being good or bad are largely uninteresting to me when a director reaches the point in their career that an artist like Spike Lee has. When a filmmaker has made this many films it’s usually more prudent to quantify the way he does and doesn’t fit into the cultural landscape, and how he is, or is not, evolving alongside it, or rebelling against it. Lee is one of the most important American artists of his generation, and he’s still on his own wavelength, against the wind, but his centrality within his own aesthetic is worth celebrating. As is his distinct point-of-view, his personality, the way he repeats his prized images, or modifies them only slightly. A Patrick Ewing Jersey has transformed into a Jalen Brunson one, and Larry Bird is still the enemy. Lee remains true to the integrity of what he wants to communicate, even if his communication surrounding certain trends can be read as cringy. In his Akira Kurosawa remix Highest 2 Lowest, he approaches the material with an old-man’s paranoia at what he’s seeing in the modern world, but that anxiety breeds fruitful results of personalization within the text. Denzel Washington plays Y2K-era record producer David King, and the glory days of his Stackin’ Hits record label are behind him. They want him to sell the company to a venture capitalist who sees A.I. as the future, and King gets riled up at the thought, “Hits with no soul! No voice!”, and he’s right to be angry sitting in his office with portraits of geniuses of the craft like Curtis Mayfield, James Brown and Run D.M.C. resting behind him like saints in his church of sound. The money he’s made in the decades since making it big has made his golden ears ring, and he can’t find the hits anymore, and everyone is telling him that the only way forward is liquidation. One last sum of money for all his work, transferred in exchange for the dream he made true. He could ride off into the sunset and listen to the old songs, but something nags at him a still image from HIGHEST 2 LOWEST of Denzel Washington in a subway car in New York. He's dressed all in black and wearing a yankees cap, diamond stud earring, and black hoodie and black sunglasses
January 14, 2026 at 3:23 PM
Reposted by Willow Catelyn Maclay
feminaridens.bsky.social
PREMIERING THIS MONTH

'The Power of '73 Compels Us: A Year in Film Pod'

each month, @palguy88.bsky.social & i will discuss a 1973 double feature. we've got over 40 curated, several years of eps!

an intro ep will drop this month, including the line-up reveal, and we'll start proper in february!
logo for The Power of '73 Compels Us: A Year in Film Pod', a new podcast hosted by katie stebbins and bri
January 14, 2026 at 2:34 PM
Reposted by Willow Catelyn Maclay
willowcatelyn.bsky.social
The second essay in my four part series on SILENT HILL is live. This time around I looked at the Christophe Gans adaptation from 2006. I've been a fan of this movie since it came out and I am still quite fond of it.

www.patreon.com/posts/148139...
There is a monument to a bible verse on the outskirts of Rosa Da Silva’s (Radha Mitchell) hometown. It catches the eye, Corinthians 6: 2-3, “Do you not know that we will judge angels? Do you not know that the saints will judge the world?”. Paul wrote these messages to the Corinthians after he reconfigured himself as a fire and brimstone messenger of God, and much of his scripture acts as a prelude to all the gnashing of teeth and plagues in the book of Revelations. His faith is the threatening sort, (if you don’t behave exactly like how I say then you will be damned) and his prophecy is a favorite among Southern Baptist preachers who use ideology to punish those who are different. Rosa’s adopted little girl Sharon (Jodelle Ferland) sleepwalks and seems disturbed by memories that aren’t hers. In her waking sleep she screams for the abandoned mining town of Silent Hill, and director Christophe Gans’s adaptation of this popular video game begins with the beckoning of mother and daughter to this haunted place. In the midst of an elegant prologue on a cliffside, the camera lifts into a crane shot and into a wide frame of the horizon, and in the deep dark of night, a cross can be seen shining in the horizon. Mother, daughter, and father Christopher (Sean Bean) shield themselves from despair by latching onto one another in close-up. Gans, being a Frenchman of taste, and an obsessive fan of genre, was certainly familiar with the socio-political aesthetics of horror filmmaker Jean Rollin, and this particular bit of scene setting, with the cross, and the family, lurches forward with the same unsettling and provocative thematic integrity of his work. The prologue also allows us to observe the intimate details of a protective mother, and a wounded child, and it is an image that Gans returns to with some frequency. When they are separated from one another after arriving in Silent Hill, the negative space of the distance between them endows the film with genuine torment. a still from Christophe Gans's 2006 adaptation of SILENT HILL. It's a wide frame, foggy and Radha Mitchell is in the center, moving forward, looking for her daughter.
January 13, 2026 at 6:58 PM
Reposted by Willow Catelyn Maclay
marshlands.bsky.social
according to tsui hark the villain of dragon inn (1967) was an overzealous dolly grip who died his own hair yellow and became a legend
January 12, 2026 at 3:08 AM
willowcatelyn.bsky.social
Thrilled for these lesbian dolphins
January 13, 2026 at 8:35 PM
willowcatelyn.bsky.social
These images are in the essay but here are some artistic points of influence in SILENT HILL
Utagawa Kuniyoshi's portrait of Oiwa. Dahlia in Silent Hill Francis Bacon "Lying Figure in a mirror" straight jacket monster from Silent Hill 2
January 13, 2026 at 7:38 PM
willowcatelyn.bsky.social
The second essay in my four part series on SILENT HILL is live. This time around I looked at the Christophe Gans adaptation from 2006. I've been a fan of this movie since it came out and I am still quite fond of it.

www.patreon.com/posts/148139...
There is a monument to a bible verse on the outskirts of Rosa Da Silva’s (Radha Mitchell) hometown. It catches the eye, Corinthians 6: 2-3, “Do you not know that we will judge angels? Do you not know that the saints will judge the world?”. Paul wrote these messages to the Corinthians after he reconfigured himself as a fire and brimstone messenger of God, and much of his scripture acts as a prelude to all the gnashing of teeth and plagues in the book of Revelations. His faith is the threatening sort, (if you don’t behave exactly like how I say then you will be damned) and his prophecy is a favorite among Southern Baptist preachers who use ideology to punish those who are different. Rosa’s adopted little girl Sharon (Jodelle Ferland) sleepwalks and seems disturbed by memories that aren’t hers. In her waking sleep she screams for the abandoned mining town of Silent Hill, and director Christophe Gans’s adaptation of this popular video game begins with the beckoning of mother and daughter to this haunted place. In the midst of an elegant prologue on a cliffside, the camera lifts into a crane shot and into a wide frame of the horizon, and in the deep dark of night, a cross can be seen shining in the horizon. Mother, daughter, and father Christopher (Sean Bean) shield themselves from despair by latching onto one another in close-up. Gans, being a Frenchman of taste, and an obsessive fan of genre, was certainly familiar with the socio-political aesthetics of horror filmmaker Jean Rollin, and this particular bit of scene setting, with the cross, and the family, lurches forward with the same unsettling and provocative thematic integrity of his work. The prologue also allows us to observe the intimate details of a protective mother, and a wounded child, and it is an image that Gans returns to with some frequency. When they are separated from one another after arriving in Silent Hill, the negative space of the distance between them endows the film with genuine torment. a still from Christophe Gans's 2006 adaptation of SILENT HILL. It's a wide frame, foggy and Radha Mitchell is in the center, moving forward, looking for her daughter.
January 13, 2026 at 6:58 PM
willowcatelyn.bsky.social
Beavis and Butthead are out there somewhere laughing over the new 28 Years Later movie title, and this brings me some measure of joy in these dark times.
January 13, 2026 at 4:46 PM