Tadd Adcox
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inauthenticity.bsky.social
Tadd Adcox
@inauthenticity.bsky.social
1.6K followers 970 following 1.2K posts
work in X-R-A-Y, 3:AM, Granta, n+1 // website jamestaddadcox.com // editor @alwayscrashing.bsky.social // DENMARK: Variations now available https://www.hempressbooks.com/shop/p/denmark-variations
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inauthenticity.bsky.social
I laughed for like 5 minutes, I had somehow completely forgotten this bit
The Wizard of Oz? NO! Zardoz!
December 6, 2025 at 2:23 AM
inauthenticity.bsky.social
Date night
Zardoz
December 6, 2025 at 2:20 AM
inauthenticity.bsky.social
Arguably though the only good adaptation of a iPhone game
Screenshot from "Alpaca Evolution," the game that obviously inspired Color Out of Space
November 18, 2025 at 2:10 AM
inauthenticity.bsky.social
look I think we all know the real answer
Bubba Sawyer
November 15, 2025 at 4:53 AM
inauthenticity.bsky.social
???
Bubba the Love Sponge, pointing to a picture of Bubba the Love Sponge
November 15, 2025 at 4:48 AM
inauthenticity.bsky.social
I think he probably blew somebody else named Bubba
guy standing up meme
November 15, 2025 at 2:34 AM
inauthenticity.bsky.social
...Horror, and particularly B movies or junk movies, are where you're most likely to encounter a true other, something that sticks out in a way that, for reasons of art or ineptitude, we cannot fit into our comfortable picture of the world as we understand it
Ralphus shaving the critic, while Sardu looks on
November 1, 2025 at 2:30 AM
inauthenticity.bsky.social
Early on, my now-wife asked me why I like horror films, as someone whose values are generally leftist, I suppose, and anti-violent. It was a good question. The answer, I think, was that horror movies are the genre in which you're most likely to see something you haven't seen before...
Ralphus and Sardu drinking beer from big ole steins
November 1, 2025 at 2:06 AM
inauthenticity.bsky.social
For me, this was the one wrong note the book really struck. Not just that this wasn't *my* reasonf or watching junk film, but I wasn't really convinced it was Coldiron's, either. It felt a little too proper, too respectable. It felt like an excuse.
A critic, hung up by his wrists
November 1, 2025 at 1:41 AM
inauthenticity.bsky.social
In Katherine Coldiron's Junk Film--which overall, I'd recommend unreservedly--she argues that the reason, or at least a major reason, to watch bad movies is because they teach you what good film is...
Sardu, facing the camera; torture instruments and women in lingerie behind him
November 1, 2025 at 1:38 AM
inauthenticity.bsky.social
Oct 31 is Blood Sucking Freaks, a movie which I first encountered as the B movie in a Joe Bob Briggs double feature, during the pandemic, a week or so after the birth of my first kid. I was pretty sure I was hallucinating while I watched it. Maybe I was? 1976, dir. Joel M. Reed
A man drilling into someone's head
November 1, 2025 at 1:10 AM
inauthenticity.bsky.social
...a term which continues to have relevance even as its opposite, the "feature film," no longer functions as anything other than, perhaps, as a pretentious synonym for "movie of a certain length"
One of many shots in Robot Monster of the titular Robot Monster roaming through a grassy area, in long-shot, looking for--victims? A plot? Meaning of some kind?
November 1, 2025 at 12:55 AM
inauthenticity.bsky.social
Even as the original economic conditions of the B movie faded into history, we continued and continue to need a term to describe this "other" of respectable cinema--something to capture the Tromas, the Full Moons, the Corman productions...
Dinosaurs fighting
November 1, 2025 at 12:48 AM
inauthenticity.bsky.social
My partner HM has suggested an analog in the Greek satyr plays, a requirement of Greek drama, in which tragedy was accompanied by the raunchiest, most taboo-breaking works possible--that the sacred, in other words, must be accompanied by the wildly profane
The robot monster confronting a woman who is clutching the straps of her dress tightly to herself
November 1, 2025 at 12:39 AM
inauthenticity.bsky.social
The interesting moment for me is when the B movie becomes interesting *in itself*, rather than simply as a description of cinematic filler--when the "B movie" transitions from its original, literal definition into a genre which might exist independently of any main feature
Some sort of strange ray, causing the picture of the Robot Monster to be replace with the film's negative
November 1, 2025 at 12:32 AM
inauthenticity.bsky.social
B movies were originally intended to be what we’d now call content (disparagingly)--if the main feature was what got audiences in the door, the B movie was what assured them they were getting their money’s worth by filling up X amount of time. Whether the movie was good was beside the point
The robot monster--ie, dude in a gorilla suit with a space helmet--standing next to the bubble machine, in front of the cave
November 1, 2025 at 12:22 AM
inauthenticity.bsky.social
"B movie" is a term that has significantly outlasted the conditions of its original usage, when a B movie was the second and usually lesser movie in a double feature (similar to the "B side" of a single).
Little boy asleep in front of a bubble machine in front of a cave
November 1, 2025 at 12:20 AM
inauthenticity.bsky.social
So what is, or what was, the B movie?
Little boy dressed up like a spaceman pointing a toy gun at a little girl
November 1, 2025 at 12:18 AM
inauthenticity.bsky.social
Finally another from @ergot.bsky.social: "A Haunting," inspired not so much by the movie Ghosthouse (though I love the movie Ghosthouse) as by the experience of having watched the movie Ghosthouse too many times

www.ergot.press/authors/Jame...
and he began to wonder if perhaps the unease which he felt when thinking back to this movie, and which he had previously ascribed to some overlooked brilliance in the film itself, were not in fact attributable instead to the very dullness of the movie, which by slipping so cleanly from his memory left in its place something like the residue of a nightmare, encountered after awakening not as a coherent narrative but in a series of images or memories throughout the day that one cannot quite catch hold of, triggered seemingly by the act of wiping a soap stain from the edge of a glass or opening one’s dresser drawer to search for something lost, though the nature of the relationship between triggering action and half-remembered dream-image remained obscure.
November 1, 2025 at 12:09 AM
inauthenticity.bsky.social
"City of the Dead," which doesn't especially feel like fiction these days, + 2 others at 3:AM Magazine

www.3ammagazine.com/3am/three-st...
It is this, one suspects, which accounts for the popularity, even ubiquity, of applications which, for a small fee, or more often at the price of gathering certain personally identifiable information, construct an AI replica of the now-dead relation, animating old photographs, answering questions and otherwise conversing in a text-based chat generated from the corpus of recorded communications, including letters, emails, direct messages, voicemails and other audio, social media posts, and snippets of video uploaded to the cloud, all of them gathered while the relation in question was alive; and which explains the fact that these services continue to grow, year after year, even though surveys of the public, including a significant number of those who subscribe to these services, describe them as “morbid,” “disquieting,” “icky”; despite the fact, indeed, that the vast majority of users for such services say that, prior to subscribing, they did not consider themselves the sort of person who would sign up for such a service, and having signed up, they report they take little or no comfort in the interaction, finding it as unsettling in practice as they previously found it in theory. Yet each day more and more of these avatars are created; more and more of the internet is filled up with the nearly although not exactly perfect motions of the dead...
November 1, 2025 at 12:04 AM
inauthenticity.bsky.social
"The Darkness Retreat," in Propagule, a story based on a phrase overheard from a news story that I otherwise wasn't particularly paying attention to

www.propagule.co/fiction/the-...
Herodotus writes that Psamtik I was originally one of twelve kinglets of Egypt, all of whom, upon receiving a prophecy that one kinglet would turn upon the others, banded together to build a labyrinth as a symbol of their enduring friendship. Still, Psamtik I betrayed them, and became the ruler of Egypt. The maze was built at the entrance to the City of Crocodiles, whose inhabitants worshiped the sacred crocodile Petsuchos and allowed His brethren to roam freely, adorned with gold. After the death of Psamtik I, the maze too was overrun by crocodiles, cutting off the city from the rest of the world; the inhabitants within grew strange; when, at last, an adventurer from Greece, a student of a student of Herodotus, found his way into the city, he discovered a people who spoke in the guttural groans and barks of the crocodile, and lacerated their skin to resemble scales. Something in the darkness approaches, singing, in a language we do not recognize.
October 31, 2025 at 3:55 PM
inauthenticity.bsky.social
Here's "The Murder Ballad" and "The Remaining Child," both published in @hungermtn.bsky.social:

hngrmtn.org/issues/hunge...
The Remaining Child He had a dream that one of his sons died. This even though, outside of the dream, his son was an only child. In the dream, he and his remaining child talked about the lost son, what it meant for the still-living son’s brother to be dead. They mourned together, each in his own way, the father, for example, by looking at photographs of his two sons together at the lake house their family owned in the dream (which may have been a lake house the father had once visited when he was a boy), the remaining son by placing trucks or blocks on the now-empty bed of his brother, as though attempting to include the missing child in his play.
October 31, 2025 at 3:47 PM
inauthenticity.bsky.social
Oct 30--second to last night!--is the 1953 film Robot Monster, AKA Monster from Mars, produced and directed by Phil Tucker, a movie that makes a solid claim to being, in a decade that also includes Plan 9 from Outer Space, the Worst Film of the 50s
The robot monster! By which I mean a guy in a gorilla suit wearing a space helmet, for some reason
October 31, 2025 at 12:25 AM
inauthenticity.bsky.social
Cutting out bats for a trunk or treat while simultaneously mad about the idea of a trunk or treat
Black paper bats, scissors
October 30, 2025 at 3:18 AM
inauthenticity.bsky.social
Forgot about the wildly Yuzna-esque ending on this one. Hadn't occurred to me until just now, but Frankenhooker is, in addition to whatever else you might say about it, a solid work of cosmic horror
Muscle Freddie Mercury fighting with various Boschian mix-matched body parts A mouth on definitely the wrong part of a torso A sort of flesh sculpture; looks like it's screaming or singing
October 30, 2025 at 2:41 AM