Willow Catelyn Maclay
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willowcatelyn.bsky.social
Willow Catelyn Maclay
@willowcatelyn.bsky.social
16K followers 710 following 4.9K posts
Film Critic (Film Comment, Reverse Shot, etc). GALECA.

Co-Author of CORPSES, FOOLS AND MONSTERS
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willowcatelyn.bsky.social
I am very excited to announce that I'm going to be hosting a Miskatonic Institute lecture on March 16th, and I'll be talking about the Trans Feminine Grotesque. Full details below:

miskatonicinstitute.com/events/gazin...
a still image from LONGLEGS A still image from SLEEPAWAY CAMP A still image from THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS
January 28, 2026 at 5:49 PM
willowcatelyn.bsky.social
Kermit is eternally a baby because he always wants to attack his own tail
Kermit, GOD'S FAVORITE ORANGE TUXEDO CAT, stares at his tail with menace
January 26, 2026 at 9:40 PM
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My Silent Hill series concludes with RETURN TO SILENT HILL.

I loved this movie, and I hope it finds its audience someday.

www.patreon.com/posts/monste...
a still image from RETURN TO SILENT HILL of James Sunderland clasping his face in front of a mirror caked in mildew The quiet elegance of the inviting fog, and Carol Spier’s equally entrancing Francis Bacon-inspired set designs of rust and blood from director Chrtistophe Gans’s Silent Hill (2006) are absent in his follow-up picture in the series. Return to Silent Hill is only vaguely similar to the fantastical, and Clive Barker-leaning style of the first film. It’s as if the mise-en-scene has been tossed into a wood chipper, and the results are crude and ugly, and obvious, with the tag-line for the film clearly spelling everything out for the would be viewer. “Guilt is a place you can never leave.”. There is not an ounce of beauty in that sentence. It’s phonetically clumsy, and born of a bad idiom, but Gans operates well within the proposed metaphor. Horror doesn’t have to be scary in order for it to be proactive, and it’s actually quite limiting to expect that from every film in the genre. Gans has never really been interested in delivering a movie of immediate fright. Return to Silent Hill ignores the conventions of ghost stories, and the action thrills of survival horror. Gans opts for an observant and curious eye at sickness, traumatic abuse, and death. He consistently finds disquieting images that are repulsive. Images that are honest about the frailty of the spirit, and the possibilities of disgust that are capable of manifesting with the unwanted appearance of a slow burning necrosis in the body of a beloved, romantic partner. Gans’s Return to Silent Hill presents the story of grieving boyfriend James Sunderland (Jeremy Irvine), and his psychological transformation in processing the loss of his girlfriend Mary (Hannah Emily Anderson). He has made a film whose repeated notes of despair accumulate, and he layers James’s inability to move on into those of the damned he meets as he strides further into Silent Hill. There’s graveyard loomer Angela, who has a knife sheathed in her boot, and keeps her distance from everyone, and eight year old Laura, who carries a ratty teddy bear, and claims to know Mary. Most beguiling of all is Maria, who looks a lot like Mary, and teases James about his grief. Hannah Emily Anderson plays Maria and Angela, and Gans’s boldest differentiation from the source material (Silent Hill 2) is his choice to indicate that Angela, Laura and Maria are all Mary. By doing so, he not only made James’s grief more palpable with a Dickensian approach of visiting spirits, but elaborated on the wounded feminine element that was usually only subtextually resonant in the series. Suffice to say, Return to Silent Hill is the most melodramatic, but emotionally intelligent Silent Hill film to date. I found it unusually, and viscerally moving, and I felt opened up, and exposed by what it showed me. I walked out of the theater having felt that rare, but wonderful disorientation, and delusion that cinema can offer when it feels like a movie is speaking directly to parts of myself that I like to keep hidden.
January 26, 2026 at 5:26 PM
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Feels very silly and useless to be posting right now, but here's the third essay in my four part series on SILENT HILL. This piece is on SILENT HILL: REVELATION and its trans allegory, which is sometimes resonant

www.patreon.com/posts/148966...
Writer and Director M.J. Bassett was in an unwinnable position when she agreed to take over the reigns of Christophe Gans’s Silent Hill sequel after he sought to adapt the video game Onimusha. She has said that if she had been left to her own devices then she would have liked to have made a straight adaptation of the third video game in the series (her favorite). Silent Hill: Revelation was to be a continuation of the 2006 film while including elements from that game. Like Gans, she came to this series as a fan, but the expectations were different for her, and she has been on record since that the film didn’t turn out the way she wanted. Bassett was a closeted trans woman at the time, and she came out shortly after the release of the film, and with this information, it might lead the viewer to look for clues that might resonate under the scope of transgender allegory. It doesn’t absolve the film of its incoherence, or its stiff characterizations, but it does engender an urge in myself to give it some grace that I otherwise didn’t when I saw it in 2012. Gans’s film is expressionistic and occasionally bears the same poetic quality as the games, and while Bassett’s film is lacking in beauty, its images are searching, and grasping for a meaning that comes through here and there in fragments. The period shortly before coming out can be one of dishonesty—perhaps going through a last ditch effort in refusing to admit the truth to yourself—and I get that sensation when watching Silent Hill: Revelation. The truth comes through in the images that are charged, such as a lingering shot of a woman paralyzed on a gurney, and screaming as she transforms into a mannequin from her feet up, while the camera tracks up her evolving plastic body. The lie is in the business as usual approach to the coverage shots that comprise so much of the image-making. In this respect, Silent Hill: Revelation’s best qualities cohere most clearly with I SAW THE TV GLOW a still image from Silent Hill Revelation of two female characters embracing
January 24, 2026 at 7:21 PM
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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
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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
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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
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COME BACK TO THE FIVE AND DIME, JIMMY DEAN, JIMMY DEAN (Robert Altman, 1982)

Endowed with so much nostalgia for itself, until someone shows up and challenges the notion of whether those past glory days were worth cherishing. Move on, transform, live whatever you have left of your life.
a still from COME BACK TO THE FIVE AND DIME of the two way mirror trick with the full cast in frame. Sandy Dennis is holding a picture and the image in the frame is the full cast picture that we see in the back
January 18, 2026 at 10:36 PM
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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
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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
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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 12, 2026 at 5:45 PM
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My horror column is back, and I'm looking at SILENT HILL 2, my relationship with the games, and the horrible shape of its camera, its angles, and its symbolic monsters.

www.patreon.com/posts/147573...
My first experience with Silent Hill came when I was visiting my Uncle when I was eight or nine years old at the end of the 1990s. I was rummaging through a cabinet in his bedroom trying to find a sports video game for us to play together on his PlayStation, and hidden among the lighters, CDs and packs of cigarettes, was a game called Silent Hill. My uncle was around fifteen years my senior, and indulged in a lot of the off-putting retrograde culture of the late 90s like South Park, Eminem, and the WWF, but that sort of thing rarely spilled over into our childhood experiences with him. He seemed a little more open to showing my brother and I a thing or two from his pop culture interests in horror. Whenever we saw him, it wasn’t strange for us to overhear from across the hall, the blasting away of zombies in Resident Evil, or the muffled splatter ambience of Doug Bradley and his cenobites in Hellraiser. In hindsight, his taste seemed built on popular extremes, and that’s certainly something that we eventually shared in common when I got into bands like Slipknot, and movies like The Devil’s Rejects. My uncle would struggle with drug addiction in the following decade, and while he certainly had his demons, whenever I think of him, I am pulled to memories of video games and horror movies and easygoing experiences. I can remember pulling the Silent Hill case from his drawer and asking him what it was about, and if we could play it. He warned me that it was really scary, but he would show it to me if I promised not to tell my mom and dad that we played it. If I’m remembering correctly, I don’t believe I ever took the controller when he offered it to me, because I was too scared, but I couldn’t look away either. Inside of this heavily pixelated world of fog and ash and rust and blood was something truly terrifying, and real. I was enamored with the howling static, and the paralyzing overhead cranes drifting down long, misbegotten alleyways, and how they cut into new, str a still image from SILENT HILL 2 of Angela in a wide frame holding a knife. She has a look of desperation and resignation on her face. The colours have been desaturated in the frame and it is nearly black and white.
January 6, 2026 at 6:31 PM
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And here we are

The final essay in my TWIN PEAKS series. Episode 18.

Let's return home.

www.patreon.com/posts/147251...
an image of the Palmer household from the final episode of TWIN PEAKS All the cliche’s about what a home should feel like are true. David Lynch had a tranquil and lovely childhood by all accounts, and while his family bounced around the United States due to his father’s government job, he could rely on the concept of home through the stability of his family. But when he was young he became curious about what it must be like to live in a home that wasn’t stable, and his imagination was alight pondering what secrets would be revealed if he knew what was going on behind the closed doors of his neighbors. He was inquisitive and pulled to that central taboo in his artistic pursuits. While growing up, he loved the paintings of Edward Hopper, because his art contained a dimension beyond the painting through the usage of windows, or secondary action in the background of the painting, that suggested a secret quality, and he loved Francis Bacon because he laid bare everything surreal that a closed door could shield from day-to-day life. Lynch wanted to take us inside of private spaces. Through the intimacy of the home, he showed us people who were experiencing things that were horrible, but inside of that darkness that he gravitated towards, there was also the potential for beauty. He found that in the case of a troubled woman, he could paint a canvas where both of these elements were present at the same time. Perfect, blonde, beautiful All-American Prom Queen Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), was often disembodied, behind a pane of glass, inside a locket, in a painting and in a dream. In low-angle establishing shots, the foreboding, and haunted Palmer home fills every inch of the frame, from time to time, in so many episodes of Twin Peaks. Lynch rarely started from the outside in when showing us the home, only in the pilot, beside mother Sarah (Grace Zabriskie), frantically dialing everyone she knew to find her daughter, or running up the stairs, past the ceiling fan, and calling out, “Laura”, as an incantation to halt what she already knew
January 2, 2026 at 6:02 PM
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a still image from ZOMBIE FLESH EATERS of a beautiful blonde woman about to have her eye driven into a plank of exposed wood. She is terried, mouth agape, her big beautiful eye wide and open and ready for what's about to come next
January 1, 2026 at 6:43 PM
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This January, I'll be returning to SILENT HILL for my horror column
poster of SILENT HILL 2006 Poster of SILENT HILL REVELATION Poster of RETURN TO SILENT HILL
January 1, 2026 at 5:33 PM
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TWIN PEAKS ends on Friday

www.patreon.com/willowcatelynmaclay
an image from TWIN PEAKS THE RETURN of Laura Palmer's prom picture smashed
December 31, 2025 at 7:20 PM
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Did you guys know that BLACK CHRISTMAS is my favorite movie about abortion? I wrote about it from that angle and how the violence of the picture overlaps and is linked to the central question of the right to choose. It's one of my favorite movies in general.

www.patreon.com/posts/patron...
a still of Olivia Hussey in close up answering a phone in BLACK CHRISTMAS. Her eyes are wide with disbelief Black Christmas begins with this promise, and consistently avoids the cliche’s of the slasher film, because those tropes didn’t exist yet. This is not a picture that rises and falls with each set-piece of murder, but stews in a miserable mise-en-scene of shifting subjective camera techniques, occasionally, with the victim, and other times, with the killer. The viewer is always one step ahead of the victims, and we are made to wait until the inevitable reveal happens. We know that the killer is calling from upstairs, but Barb, and Jess, their friends Phyl (Andrea Martin) and Clare (Lynne Griffith), and their den mother Ms. Mac (Marian Waldman), do not. We know that he’s in the attic, because we see him kill virginal, innocent, Christmas loving Clare in a startling P.O.V. shot. We watch the life drain out of her brilliant, ever-widening eyes. She’s surprised at her own death. Whatever survival instincts she was taught as a young girl didn’t prepare her for the shock of fighting for her life. With a long plastic bag made for gowns wrapped around her face, she’s left gasping for breath, until she can’t anymore. The killer (he calls himself “Billy”) places her in a rocking chair with a view out the window. Our eyes do what her dead eyes cannot, observing through the deep focus through the window, that it’s a lovely winter night. The moon is reverberating off of the snow and making the evening a little brighter. Perfect for Christmas.
December 22, 2025 at 9:00 PM
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DESPERATE LIVING (John Waters, 1977)

"Go home to your mother! Doesn't she ever watch you? Tell her this isn't some communist daycare center! Tell your mother I hate her! Tell your mother I hate you!"

www.youtube.com/watch?v=mc3Q...
Mink Stole, stark raving mad and airing her grievances in DESPERATE LIVING
December 22, 2025 at 8:00 PM
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SHUTTER ISLAND (Martin Scorsese, 2010)

I don't think it's worthwhile to look for realism or answers in the scripted logic of SI, because the emotional truth keeps returning. It's about running into the shadows to get away from what you've seen & felt before. It's a Val Lewton technique.
a still image from Shutter Island of Leonardo DiCaprio's character cradling Michelle Williams's. She is crumbling to ash, and the ash is falling like snow all around them. He weeps. She's almost gone.
December 21, 2025 at 7:15 PM
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FRAGMENT OF SEEKING (Curtis Harrington, 1947)

This short grappled with Harrington's anxieties of masculinity as a gay man in the 1940s, but it can also be viewed through a trans feminine lens of someone struggling to catch up with the woman they wish they were. TEA AND SYMPATHY aches the same way
a still image from FRAGMENT OF SEEKING of Curtis Harrington in a trenchcoat staring at a young blonde woman (also Harrington)
December 15, 2025 at 9:40 PM
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I wrote about RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD 3 for my ongoing horror series. This is one of my favourite curios of cheap 90s horror. It may seem slight, given the title, but there's a lot that is true in the film about relationships, life and death and addiction.

www.patreon.com/posts/145701...
a still image of Julie with blood smeared all over her lips from RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD 3 The pilot, Stephen “Flyboy” Andrews (David Emge), is bitten by a zombie after a seemingly routine mission goes wrong around the mid-way point of George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978). He had a brash, maverick personality, and deemed himself indestructible until he wasn’t. He’s the sort of guy that would drive you nuts if you had to spend more than five minutes with him, but he’s the type you want on your team at the end of the world. He knows what’s coming, but even with death coiling up his body many days later, he remains absolute in his belief that he won’t come back. He’s boyish when he looks up into the eyes of his right hand man Peter (Ken Foree), and he tells him that he’s going to try to beat this thing. For a minute or two, Dawn of the Dead takes on the characteristics of a medical drama, and the spare cot in the attic of the zombie-infested mall is the new anti-septic hospital room. There’s the cliche’s of Flyboy’s rattling and shaking and protestation of what he knows to be true about his dying body, but Romero’s doomsday prophecy turns to the abject strange when Flyboy finally succumbs. Peter has been cradling a nearly empty bottle of Jack Daniels, hunched a few feet away from his friend with a pistol in his other hand. He’s a tired man, and will be for the rest of his days. He knows that whatever is going on is the new status quo, and he shows he’s a good man by his willingness to sit and wait for what he must do. Flyboy dies quietly and comes back without a fuss. He rises gently, almost peacefully, and his eyes move a little from left and to right, and there’s a miserable look of awareness draped across his wrinkled, grey face, and he knows that he failed. He wanted to die completely so his friend wouldn’t have to shoot him. Despite being a zombie, there’s a flash of personality behind the eyes. Romero moves between his close-up and Peter’s. And then a gunshot. The zombie film isn’t necessarily despairing because of the horde, and in the end of all things, but through the unwilling necrotic transformation of one person. We are spared the agency of what it’s like to live inside of a dead body, but we live knowing that we will die. The zombie film is capable of having elastic metaphors for the times we live in, but their strength is in the fundamental facts of life and death. In zombie movies, sometimes, we are asked to wonder how wrong it must feel to be aware of that moment when the division between those two planes becomes hazy. Return of the Living Dead (1985) was a comedy that deconstructed the genre for the zany hijinks of the gory 80s horror movies of the period, but in 1993, in-demand horror maestro Brian Yuzna directed a straight to video sequel that tapped into the melancholy of Flyboy’s soul being trapped behind his eyes right before it all went dark. Return of the Living Dead 3 (1993) follows Julie Walker (Mindy Clarke), in leather jackets and boots, of teenage gumption, and dreams of finding her people in Seattle. She has an L7 poster on her bedroom wall, and like those ladies of grunge, she has a take no shit demeanor. At 17, or 18, or 19, she has everything in front of her, and she’s the type to charge into the pitfalls of life without much worry for how she might land, but she dies before her time. Her neck is broken after her boyfriend Curt (J. Trevor Edmond) wraps his motorcycle around a guardrail and she collides with a power pole. His father is a military man running experiments to create super soldiers who can come back to life to continue fighting (the only connective tissue to the first film). He takes Julie to the lab, and miraculously, his father’s test works on her. She comes back, and everything seems fine, until she realizes how cold she feels.
December 12, 2025 at 6:15 PM
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Here's me on EYES WIDE SHUT In honor of the recent Criterion 4k release of the film & our presentation of it this week for my little movie club in my hometown.

curtsiesandhandgrenades.com/index.php/20...
a still from of Nicole Kidman in a little black cocktail dress in EYES WIDE SHUT
December 11, 2025 at 6:17 PM
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This month I'll be writing two Christmas themed essays and they couldn't be more different from one another.

www.patreon.com/c/willowcate...
a Japanese poster of Black Christmas (1974) a still image of the VHS tape for A MUPPET FAMILY CHRISTMAS. I only now realized it is for the German release! Too bad it isn't Swedish
December 9, 2025 at 8:34 PM
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I wrote about SALO for my reader's choice series. I hadn't seen the film since I was a teenager, and rewatching it was a necessary, difficult experience. It's something we should all probably do every ten or fifteen years. It's not the easiest movie to write about!

www.patreon.com/posts/145367...
The powerful truth at the center of Salo is that its findings about the psychology of fascism are directly intertwined with viewer desire to see just how far a group of people can go in games of abject degradation. Salo has a structure that’s deliberately easy to understand, and its basic qualities at a level of plot, are legible by design. At the beginning, the Four fascist leaders (dubbed The Duke, The Bishop, The Magistrate and The President) demand their foot-soldiers to round up 9 young men, and 9 young women, and they proceed to subject them to 120 days of sadistic physical, mental and sexual tortures. The “Ante’s Inferno” title-card stokes the curiosity of viewers who might wonder how each “circle of hell” may expand upon the intensity of the heinous depiction. The discernible qualities of the structure invite the viewer to engage in the depravity, and perhaps even enjoy the excessive qualities through pitch black comedy. But in doing so, Pasolini walks a fine line of danger, and it is something of a miracle that the film doesn’t get swallowed whole by what it shows—though it comes close at times in the “Circle of Shit”. The accumulation of excess breeds disgust, and when treated with Pasolini’s decadent, beautiful compositions that evoke Visconti’s dedication to the painterly qualities of his pictures about the bourgeoisie, it begs us to start asking questions about what we take from cinema, and what we might desire in life, and what he challenges us to reject. Pasolini’s rebuke of cinema doesn’t end with Visconi, but includes neo-realist directors of the common-man like Roberto Rossellini. Near the beginning, a wailing mother runs to her son, who has just been recruited to act as a soldier in duty to the fascist leaders that we soon meet, and she wraps a scarf around his throat to keep him warm. It’s almost an exact homage to Rossellini’s martyred woman in Rome, Open City, but now from an angle of utmost blasphemy in showing that resistance was conditional. a symmetrical and perfectly balanced wide angle frame from SALO of a huge room with people gathered to the left and to the right, awaiting a woman atop a stair-case in the center of the frame who is dressed in an elaborate gown. She is the master of ceremonies for the wretched games they will soon play.
December 8, 2025 at 5:19 PM
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The newest reader's choice poll is up and we are looking at Christmas movies this month. I've never ran a Christmas themed poll for December before, but this should be fun.

www.patreon.com/posts/145080... No paywall
a still image of Gizmo from Gremlins
December 4, 2025 at 7:51 PM