Willow Catelyn Maclay
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willowcatelyn.bsky.social
Willow Catelyn Maclay
@willowcatelyn.bsky.social
13K followers 690 following 4.5K posts
Film Critic (Film Comment, Reverse Shot, Polygon etc). GALECA.

Co-Author of CORPSES, FOOLS AND MONSTERS: THE HISTORY AND FUTURE OF TRANSNESS IN CINEMA
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ANCHORESS (Chris Newby, 1993)

A possession tale in the old superstitious world that uses the tricks of a possession film and the cultural ostracization therein, but does so through a woman housing the spirit of God rather than the devil. One of my favorite discoveries of the last few years
a b&w image from ACHORESS from low angle of a woman speaking to a man wearing a shroud.
November 14, 2025 at 10:03 PM
willowcatelyn.bsky.social
DIE MY LOVE seems to be a love it or hate it movie, and I loved it.

www.patreon.com/posts/143518...
In a former life, Grace (Jennifer Lawrence) and Jackson (Robert Pattinson) were hip New Yorkers—she, a writer, and he, a drummer—but they’ve found themselves transported to the wide-open spaces of Montana after he came into possession of his Uncle’s two-storey home. Their economic need to retreat from the Big Apple insists something unexceptional about their artistic ventures, but sometimes life throws you a curveball in the form of a gift, and maybe it was too good to refuse. A millennial couple owning a house in 2025, what a fucking concept. Director Lynne Ramsay is a genreless filmmaker, but there’s touches of the modern Gothic in Die My Love. We quickly learn that the house was inherited after Jackson’s uncle committed suicide, and when Grace and her hubby settle, one of the first things they hear are the rats scurrying upstairs. The first shot of the film is from a locked position at the end of a hallway as the two venture into their abode, and Ramsay wanted it to feel ominous, as if the house were alive itself, and staring at them. The house hears their hope, and their best case scenario, “There’s an office upstairs. You can write all day and night here, no distractions. I’ll get my drum kit. We can do what we like”. They christen the home with sex, their beautiful youthful bodies, sculpted and clean, and their animalistic passion brings a child into their family in short order. Before we can blink, Grace has grown bored, been stricken with writer’s block, and inside their happy home, there’s both too much to do, and too little. Much has been said about the post-partum blues that Grace experiences, but Die My Love is most affecting when viewed primarily as love story of rigid, fragmented, unease that is maddening, humorous, failing, and occasionally enchanting. a still from DIE MY LOVE of Robert Pattinson and Jennifer Lawrence in close-up. They're about to kiss, and the image has a lovely cool sea green tint washed over the lighting.
November 13, 2025 at 8:12 PM
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I liked IF I HAD LEGS I'D KICK YOU. In this piece, I wrote about how the film uses the aesthetic legacy of ERASERHEAD to say something new. Go see it in the cinema if you can.

www.patreon.com/posts/143134...
November 8, 2025 at 6:33 PM
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I wish I liked Guillermo Del Toro's FRANKENSTEIN more, because I tend to love adaptations of this story. I think it's only partially successful, because the monster's appearance and behavior don't create enough contradictions for our empathy to be challenged.

www.patreon.com/posts/142836...
Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein features a dedication to Mary Shelley, Boris Karloff and James Whale. This story, and the 1931 film adaptation, are sacred to him, his sensibilities as an artist, and to the shape of his life. He’s been very open and honest about how that film, and Victor Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive (1973)—a wartime picture set during the opening stages of the Franco dictatorship of Spain, and featuring a visit from The Creature—were fundamental in shaping the person that he became. Shelley’s story is a religion for Del Toro, and his fairy-tale belief in empathizing with monsters, while distrusting man, has become the dominant narrative focal point throughout his career. While watching Del Toro’s passion project I thought about religious pictures, and movies about Christ. Del Toro’s most tantalizing image connects that religious symbolism by showing The Creature hung on a cross before being shocked into life. Lazarus and Christ as one. Shelley’s story is so provocative because she manages to evoke sympathy in the reader through her examination of the unnatural perversion of sustained mortality in a creature who never asked to be born, but, importantly, shows us the violent capabilities of the monster too. Del Toro perhaps loves the monster too much, and it prevents the film from forcing viewers to be confronted with dual truths. In most films about Christ, he’s positioned as only God, but the Bible stresses that he was God and man. Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ (1987) was a lightning rod of controversy, because it presented both sides of Christ’s condition, and because he did, it made the sacrificial crucifixion resonate with a genuine grappling of what it meant for his divinity. It’s a film that works whether you believe in God or not, because the human element that was cast aside is tied to the sacrifice, and it could realistically stand in as a moral tale for anyone. Del Toro’s picture comes up short... a still image from Guillermo Del Toro's FRANKENSTEIN of Victor (oscar Isaac) working on the creature in his Gothic castle lab.
November 4, 2025 at 6:47 PM
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We are going to be looking at movies from 1975 this month on my website. But which ones? In the running are a bevy of classics from THE MIRROR to SALO to DOG DAY AFTERNOON and more. Vote in the poll if you'd like.

www.patreon.com/posts/patron... (no paywall)
November 3, 2025 at 9:34 PM
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My prime time program with TCM on November 17th covers Robert Altman's COME BACK TO THE FIVE AND DIME and the Gay Bar Christmas Picture SOME OF MY BEST FRIENDS ARE. SOME OF MY BEST FRIENDS ARE doesn't screen anywhere very often and doesn't have a DVD in circulation.
an image showing the TCM program on the night of November 17th.
November 2, 2025 at 7:02 PM
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We are concluding our month of John Carpenter with a look at PRINCE OF DARKNESS. None of Carpenter's movies from the 80s are underrated anymore, but this one remains a little elusive, and a little strange. I love it.

www.patreon.com/posts/patron...
Superstition and mumbo jumbo can go a long way with enough assertion of legitimacy. John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness doesn’t make a lick of sense, and when looking at the loose identifiers of the plot:“ancient cylinder, green goo, liquid, sentient embodiment of the anti-God...Satan, maybe?”, it doesn’t exactly strike fear into the heart. However, the film remains one of Carpenter’s scariest with its Lucio Fulci-esque descent into an apocalyptic inevitability, brought on by a forward momentum of images that immediately inform the viewer that it’s already too late. The very first image of the film is a wide frame of a Cardinal at the Vatican who has succumbed to disease on his death bed, and lying on his stomach is a small chest containing a message. “The sleeper awakens”. At the time of production, Carpenter was having his mind blown by Quantum mechanics, and he threaded those theoretical ideas around a story of science and religion becoming bedfellows to fight an inexplicable evil, but being a John Carpenter movie, the end of the world is certain. In a prologue over the opening credits, we see a constellation of images that tell us things are beginning to happen on Earth that are not right. A Jim Danforth matte painting of the sun and a half-moon in conjunction spells out an astrological riddle of looming extinction. Prince of Darkness uses numerous images of bugs gathering in wait to devour the human race. The creeping necrotic sensation of their desire to feast on the flesh of this ensemble of scientists and religious men is showcased through a battalion of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of ants rushing over one another, and in another image of worms wriggling up the window-sills of a monastery. A group of young physicists and religious experts have gathered in an enormous old church to find the answer to the dead cardinal’s message in the form of an ancient book, and the arrival of a gigantic cylinder in the bowels of the place of worship. a still image from jOHN Carpenter's PRINCE OF DARKNESS of the basement of a church. The walls are brown, candles are lit everywhere and there's a large cylinder containing green goo on the right side of the frame
October 31, 2025 at 5:04 PM
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THE DEAD (John Huston, 1987)

It's somehow as astonishing as the Joyce short story. The finest scene that Huston ever filmed was his daughter hearing a song attached to an old memory, and in that moment, it feels as though the character's private memories of lost love are legible to us all.
a still image from THE DEAD of Anjelica Huston staring up as she hears a song. She's dressed in black, with a shawl wrapped around her head, and the image feels religious, with her standing at the top of a stair-case and in front of a stained glass window.
October 28, 2025 at 3:46 PM
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My TWIN PEAKS series continues with Season 3, Episode 17. We approach the curtain call, and everything feels wrong.

www.patreon.com/posts/twin-p...
a still image from Season 3, Episode 17 of Twin Peaks: The Return. It's a wide angle image of Dale Cooper at the Twin Peaks sheriff station, and superimposed in the background is a frozen dissolve of Cooper's worried face. The final two episodes of Twin Peaks: The Return aired together, and I felt a sensation of dread on the morning of the finale. It didn’t seem like there was enough time to get to where the series was going, and a final encounter between Mr. C and Dale Cooper (Both played by Kyle MacLachlan) was supposed to resolve what exactly? I began to question the impetus for the series, and the urge of viewers to go back to this place, and to experience more time with these characters. By dredging up the graves, what would come slithering out? David Lynch and Mark Frost exploited the assumptions of nostalgia to make bolder statements on topics of time, memory, and the traumatic underbelly of unresolved violence at a community, and global level. In the previous episode when Dale Cooper triumphantly regained consciousness and stated he was the FBI, and intended to go back to Twin Peaks to settle things, it felt ecstatic, and momentous and hopeful, but the status of those three letters in the body of a hero should have been read more closely. Cooper hadn’t done enough to earn that trust. It was evident in how Twin Peaks didn’t become a better place at the conclusion of the Laura Palmer investigation, and how it only bred more law enforcement, and more miseries behind locked doors for this logging town. Punishment instead of sympathy, and heroism instead of help, fell more victims. The original series ended with Cooper’s failure and his descent into monstrosity. It draped all over this community in the negative space of the years that we didn’t see, and Twin Peaks initially concluded in its entirety in 1992 with a film about Laura Palmer’s death. It was perhaps foolish to think that it could end in any other way.
October 27, 2025 at 5:43 PM
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CELINE AND JULIE GO BOATING (Jacques Rivette, 1974)
DUELLE (Jacques Rivette, 1976)

White Magic & Black Magic
a still from CELINE AND JULIE GO BOATING of to hands clasped a still from DUELLE of two women about to clasp hands in front of a dark background. They're wearing golden gowns
October 26, 2025 at 5:28 PM
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YOU ARE NOT I (Sara Driver, 1981)

Into the deepest recesses of her mind. With careful consideration of who the character is, and how she sees the world, Driver evokes the singular world of this character's subjectivity.
a B&W still image from Sara Driver's YOU ARE NOT I of a woman wandering in a wooded area that's littered with junk (ex. an old TV set)
October 22, 2025 at 2:21 PM
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I wrote about John Carpenter's THE THING for my ongoing horror column, and how the there's a strange sensation of intimacy and disembodiment reverberating through the film. I love this movie so much.

www.patreon.com/posts/monste...
My favorite contradiction of John Carpenter’s The Thing is that its palpable intimacy—brought on by the close quarters of an Antarctic research facility, and a whiteout snowstorm—is confined to an ensemble who are purposefully unrelatable. The ethos is every man for himself, but they’re so close to one another in the frame, and through a mutual understanding of the shape of each other’s fear and paranoia that it breeds a fraternal melding of all involved, while the audience is held at arms length from the conveyor-belt of corpsification. In this way, it’s not at all like Alien (1979), which seems to be a similar picture on the surface, with its cloistered space-ship and haunted house trappings, but whose characters all carry a desperation to live, and a sense of community in their joint survival. Alien was fresh in the minds of audiences in 1982, and David Clennon, who plays one of the ensemble in The Thing, spoke about their differences in The Village Voice, “That film was very effective because you had a clear fix on who each of the characters were. So when the alien was stalking a particular crew member, you had an emotional investment in that character. Take Harry Dean Stanton and his kitten, for instance. You really didn’t want the alien to shred him or his kitten. In The Thing, [screenwriter] Bill Lancaster had written scenes that introduced each of the 12 men. And we shot those scenes — maybe two, three minutes total — but John left that material out during editing.[.].Then again, The Thing has its own integrity. It’s a colder, harder, darker world. The outpost culture is totally male, and the outlook at the end is grim and pessimistic.”.In this ensemble, there are loners, a pair of alpha males, many thinkers with brilliant minds, but we don’t really manage to know anyone in The Thing. The characterization is so subtle that it’s barely there, but Carpenter’s attention to the blocking of the actors gives off the illusion of camaraderie for the audience who mi a still image from John Carpenter's THE THING. It's a wide frame of a group of men gathered in a circle to burn the body of one of their crewman.
October 20, 2025 at 5:48 PM
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Today is my birthday!!!! Buy CORPSES, FOOLS AND MONSTERS! Subscribe to my patreon! Tell my orange cat he is wonderful and perfect!!!!!! Root for the Jays tonight!!!!!!!!! Tell a trans woman in your life that she is a beautiful genius!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! LISTEN TO KATE BUSH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
BIG ORANGE TUXEDO CAT WHO IS PERFECT. HIS NAME IS KERMIT AND HE IS AN ANGEL.
October 19, 2025 at 4:01 PM
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It is John Carpenter's THE FOG for my reader's choice series.

"The Fog, like all of Carpenter’s great films, is a testament to unending subliminal threat."

www.patreon.com/posts/141450...
a still image from THE FOG. It's a wide frame of a nighttime sea-line draped in fog On the early end of that spectrum was The Fog, a campfire delight about supernatural pirates preying on the small town of Antonio Bay to seek their revenge over gold that was stolen hundreds of years ago. It sounds silly when the plot is laid out, but the eerie macabre of Carpenter’s ghost story hums along with an elegance that is equally startling and beautifully composed. It is the rare film of his that is without a central character, or group, and instead opts for a characterization of the prevailing legend of Antonio Bay as an aesthetic trap that ensnares those who call this place home. The mise-en-scene is luxuriant, dappled in shadows, and with a sharp variance between the wide frames. Perhaps most importantly, the schlocky story is powered by the decisions of form, rather than the aesthetic being handcuffed to narrative exposition. Cinematographer Dean Cundey, argued that The Fog became literary, and timeless, because of its images, not its words. Many modern horror films could learn something from such an ethos. Curiously, through the image, Carpenter and his crew do pay tribute to the inherent power of a good ghost story. The film even begins with an Edgar Allan Poe quote “Is all that we see or seem but a dream within a dream?”, and a dusty old campfire prologue, but whatever might be thought of as old fashioned fades into the ambience of Carpenter’s careful, and haunted imagery of a quiet town that will have to inevitably face whatever is coming.
October 17, 2025 at 4:48 PM
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BLACKOUT (David Lynch, 1993)

There is a light up ahead
a still image from David Lynch's "Blackout" of a man staring out of a window. It has a strange Douglas Sirk quality.
October 14, 2025 at 10:00 PM
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She was capable of profound dramatic complexities. Her face in this scene from SHOOT THE MOON is bearing the weight of an entire lifetime for her character. There's regret, there's wonder, there's wistfulness. Diane Keaton 💔
a still image of Diane Keaton from SHOOT THE MOON. She is in a bathtub and holding a cigarette in her raised palm.
October 11, 2025 at 7:38 PM
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FRANKENSTEIN CREATED WOMAN (Terence Fisher, 1967)

Two things which are obvious, and true
*Every movie in which a character experiences a transformation is trans
*Every Frankenstein movie is trans
a still from Frankenstein Created Woman
October 10, 2025 at 6:04 PM
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I wrote about MAY for my horror column. This movie was a favorite of mine when I was a teenager, and I wrote about why and how it spoke to me then, and how my relationship to the film has evolved in the time since.

www.patreon.com/posts/monste...
a still image from Lucky McKee's "May" of Angela Bettis in a near close-up as the titular character. She has her thumb in her mouth. She is in a veterinary clinic and the details of the room are out of focus. Ginger Snaps and May were two of my favorite movies when I was fourteen years old. They helped me deal with with the two dominant feelings of my adolescence: gender dysphoria and loneliness. Those two feelings tend to intertwine for young trans people. In my own experience, they did so ruthlessly. My dysphoria negatively impacted my life to such a degree that I was home-schooled from the age of fifteen or sixteen (I genuinely can’t remember), put on a heavy anti-depressant and had to routinely see a childhood psychologist to figure out what was wrong with me (it was dysphoria, but I wasn’t in a safe situation to bring it up). Being taken out of the public school system made it much more difficult to create lasting friendships, which exacerbated my loneliness and inability to relate to others. Homeschooling me was a decision that was made without my consent, and it hampered my skills of socialization, and the friends that I did have in middle school eventually stopped seeing me. I’ve gotten better at being a person, and forging relationships with people since transitioning, but I have still retained some of those bad habits and coping mechanisms that I instinctively learned when I was a teenager. One of those coping mechanisms was cinephilia. I felt like I didn’t have anyone to talk to, but I had movies. It worked for me then, but now I can look back on it and realize that it was a pretty sad state of affairs. I’m still trying to find the balance between living my life, and watching movies. Lucky McKee’s May was one of those films that I luxuriated in. Angela Bettis’s strange, anti-social veterinarian technician, who wanted nothing more than to have a boyfriend, and friends to call her own, was disarmingly familiar. I treated watching it like soaking in a warm bath. Revisiting it this week, felt odd, like coming back to an old habit better left in the rear-view, but I still liked the taste. May begins with a brief prologue that shows the start of her difficulty socializing with her peers. The film takes viewers all the way back to elementary school, and May, with very long blonde hair, is wearing an eye-patch to obscure her lazy eye. Her mother—a cosmopolitan type—implores her to cover the eyepatch with her hair so her classmates will treat her equally. She ignores this advice until a young boy approaches her and innocently asks if she is a pirate. She shakes her head no. The bell rings. And she drapes her hair over her eyepatch. May’s mother keeps a prized doll locked in a glass case, and the doll itself is exquisitely Gothic, with a red gown, raven’s hair, and pale features. May fixated on this lovely creature, and substituted her need for friends with a budding relationship to this plastic creation. We never see May converse with her mother, but she gravitates to the doll in her worst moments. The film never shows the doll speaking, but May can hear her, nagging her insecurities, bringing her inner turmoil to her teeming, embodied psychosis. This is ostensibly a slasher film wearing the skin of a Frankenstein-riff, as May kills acquaintances of hers, severing her favorite body parts, and building a best friend of her own. But because the film is so careful, and precise about showing viewers the integrity of May’s inner-life, it is in actuality the rare horror film to genuinely grapple with the horrible shape of catastrophic loneliness.
October 8, 2025 at 2:59 PM
willowcatelyn.bsky.social
We are going to be looking at John Carpenter this month on my patreon. My reader's choice poll is now up.

www.patreon.com/posts/140445... (no paywall)
a still from John Carpenter's HALLOWEEN of Laurie Strode and Michael Myers
October 4, 2025 at 5:28 PM
willowcatelyn.bsky.social
My TWIN PEAKS coverage continues. In this essay I look at Season 3, Episode 16, and say goodbye to Audrey Horne.

www.patreon.com/posts/140188...
a still image from Twin Peaks The Return of Audrey Horne in close-up dancing at the Roadhouse. A beautiful girl, covered in blood, ambles out of the darkness. She’s lit up by the high-beams of a convertible, and the wafting, romantic chords of Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game” can be heard reverberating out of the speakers. Tthe dreamy uncanny of midnight revelations. On-the-run lovers Sailor (Nicolas Cage) and Lula (Laura Dern) have spent the first hour of Wild at Heart (1990) rampaging down their own yellow brick road, making stops to mosh, and fuck, and truly luxuriate in the endlessness of their love. David Lynch loved the deep darkness of a late night and placing a camera on the hood of a car, and letting the head-lights carve up the night, going on and on, forever and ever. It’s an ethereal space he came back to again and again. It’s easy to give yourself over to the haze of Sailor and Lula’s tunnel of love, and hope that they never come out the other side and into reality. Knowing this motif of Lynch’s, makes the clothes they come across, littered all over the pavement, the worst possible wake-up call for these love-birds. The girl who has trudged into their lives is the victim of a terrible car crash, and she just wants to find her bobby-pin. She is in shock, and she does not realize that the sands in her hourglass are quickly running dry. Sailor and Lula try to calm her down, and get her into their car in an attempt to rush her to safety, but she is an apparition that will haunt them for the remainder of the film. She doesn’t see them, and she veers back and forth between screaming for her boyfriend Robert, panicking about losing her purse, and then calmly rubbing her exposed skull, and whispering about the red sticky stuff that’s in her hair. They watch her spirit be pulled from her body. Lula doesn’t realize it, but when she goes to hug Sailor for comfort, she presses her bloody palm onto his back, and lightly stains his snake-skin jacket. The symbol of his individuality is no longer only his. Their honeymoon is over. That stain won’t be coming out. This dying girl is played by Sherilyn Fenn, and prior to this moment, she was primarily known as the brash, confident, high-school femme fatale Audrey Horne. In Twin Peaks, she frequently played with fire, and managed to get out of dangerous situations through a combination of guile, street smarts, and dumb luck. Audrey was above being a “girl in trouble”, because she made the trouble, not the other way around. It seems wrong to watch her be brought low. Like we’ve gone in a wrong direction and gotten lost somewhere. As if seeing her be anything but in control is to bear witness to some alternative reality where everything is askew, but looks familiar. It feels like things were not supposed to end the way that they do for Audrey Horne, and it is one of the great tragedies of Twin Peaks that she finds herself at the mercy of BOB, trapped somewhere beyond recognition, and with a laundry list of forgotten dreams.
October 1, 2025 at 2:47 PM
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i am joining the chorus in cheering for Paul Thomas Anderson's ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER. This film is a small miracle considering the state of big budget American movies.

www.patreon.com/posts/140015...
From the very first frame, it is clear that nothing will be held back in Paul Thomas Anderson’s hilarious, and action-packed One Battle After Another. I’ve gotten so used to modern big-budget Hollywood movies having little, or nothing to say about the worsening and unjustifiable living conditions in America that the immediacy of Anderson’s newest was shocking. We catch up to the leftist revolutionary group the French 75 in the process of preparing to liberate a migrant detention center. The group’s ostensible Alpha is Perfida Beverly Hills (played with motherfucking swagger belying a hidden vulnerability by Teyana Taylor), and she is coaching Rocket Man (Leonardo DiCaprio) on his duty to their mission. He was never the most agile, or the finest at carrying out the on-the-ground work of liberation, but he was the guy who came with the fireworks. He signed their actions in cursive with an explosion after the deed was done. They have chemistry, but Anderson’s camera is preoccupied with more than their lust. His early trademarks for intense continuity and stunning feats of aggressive, and nervous mise-en-scene rumbles with a newfound confidence, and there’s a palpable sense of danger in the freeing of these caged people. His tracking shots—perhaps the hallmark of his style—rush through with an agile sense of purpose alongside the young revolutionaries. It’s unbelievably exciting to see them accomplish what they set out to do, and, in turn, cathartic in its directness of grappling with the unending images of imprisonment and state violence that have become commonplace since the current President’s second term. It is made even more prudent by Anderson’s understanding of history, and with the fact that the film begins sixteen years ago, many years before our present, but looking a lot like right now. It feels like Anderson is getting away with something in the manner of Alex Cox’s attacks on the Reagan administration in the 1980s. a still image of Leonardo DiCaprio in a bathrobe and holding a gun on a desert highway from ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER
September 29, 2025 at 3:49 PM
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It's so amazing that I get to live my life with this little dude. He's just walking around the house chirping or dozing on the couch or longing for murder in a windowsill. Oh how I adore him.
THIS IS KERMIT. HE IS AN ORANGE TUXEDO CAT AND HE IS AMAZING. HE HAS BIG MOON EYES AND A SOFT WHITE BELLY. IN THIS PHOTO HE IS LAYING DOWN ON A BLUE BLANKET AND LOOKING DIRECTLY INTO THE CAMERA
September 27, 2025 at 5:20 PM
willowcatelyn.bsky.social
It's been a little while since I've written a theoretical piece about Transness in cinema, or about transness in general. This one is about ghost stories, phantoms, and feeling embodied through disembodiment. It would be revealing to to screen FRAGMENT OF SEEKING in front of I SAW THE TV GLOW.
I’ve been wondering if queer people feel an intrinsic pull towards ghost stories after witnessing Jane Schoenbrun’s haunted, and unnervingly familiar I Saw the TV Glow. (2024) I have questioned my own cinephilia in the wake of the all the ways it ruptured how I processed my relationship with art, and I came to a breakthrough that I never feel more embodied by cinema than when a character is disturbed by their own feeling of disembodiment. For I Saw the TV Glow’s Owen, and his wandering eye pinned to the television set, it gives him an excuse to ignore himself, but the film is telling us over and over again that he is haunted by his very existence, and everything seems strange as a result. I wrote in a journal of mine after seeing the movie for the first time that “Val Lewton lives in the aching, tormented heart of a little boy who is haunted by himself.”. The most appropriate film to pair with I Saw the TV Glow is likely Lewton’s The Curse of the Cat People (1944), and that hymn for strange children is a sister film in my canon to Terence Davies’s first installment of his trilogy of life, which chronicles abusive fathers and guardian angels. I have dreamed about all of these movies, and sometimes the memory of my dreams has gotten tangled up in the facts of what was filmed. This has given me a strange layering of real and unreal alongside my perception as a viewer, and admirer of these films. What they ultimately have in common is an awareness at a young age of being separate from the status quo, and how that can create a subconscious feeling of being disembodied while one is in the pursuit of, or rejection of, an identity. The social repression of queer people is cauterized in cinema by tales of phantoms, and the provocative, sometimes troubling answers therein are nonetheless relevant in coding and feel.
September 26, 2025 at 5:52 PM
willowcatelyn.bsky.social
I am very excited to announce that I worked on @arrowvideo.bsky.social upcoming 4K release of the Italian Gothic classic THE HOUSE WITH LAUGHING WINDOWS. I contributed an essay to the booklet. The film is now available for pre-order for a December release.

diabolikdvd.com/product/4k-t...
a still image of Arrow's upcoming 4k release of THE HOUSE WITH LAUGHING WINDOWS
September 26, 2025 at 2:51 PM
willowcatelyn.bsky.social
THE RAPTURE (Michael Tolkin, 1991)

Now that we've gotten all of our jokes out of the way.

I love this strange movie and the conclusions it reaches. I wouldn't dare spoil it for anyone. Mimi Rogers gives one of my favorite performances in any film.
a still from The Rapture of a mother and daughter staring at a light up ahead in an otherwise dim vista
September 24, 2025 at 5:19 PM