Category Archives: Essays

Capsules, Essays

SITGES FILM FESTIVAL 2026 RECAP

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As a lifelong fan of horror, I’d been longing to attend the Sitges Film Festival for a few years, but  for one reason or another I never had the chance. At last, with my best friend in tow, this year I jumped at the opportunity to experience the 59th edition of the festival and secured seats for five screenings. While the festival started on October 8 and ended on October 18, I spent the long weekend of October 9-12 there, coinciding with Spanish regional and national festivities.

Sitges itself is a quaint coastal town with peaceful white streets that, in line with the film festival, were decorated with skeletons or monsters. Main streets were crowded with both locals and foreigners, and posters along the street announced the festival. This year, the main focus was the celebration of the 50th anniversary of Carrie, alongside the recent rise of religious horror. A festive atmosphere hung over these streets, and T-shirts reflected a love of horror and fantasy cinema.

My friend and I stayed in a  hotel close to the three main venues premiering movies: Auditori Melià, Casino Prado Suburense, and L’Escorxador. Melià is the largest venue, L’Escorxador the smallest—it’s a former slaughterhouse, which feels appropriate for the festival. These venues are only a 10-minute walk away from each other, and you can enjoy nice views of the beach and sea on your way to Auditori Melià, and stop at stands selling merchandise, meeting points for fans, or just have a drink. There’s a street food area on a hill where food trucks sell expensive—albeit somewhat healthy—fast food, both salty and sweet.

Having familiarized ourselves with the area, we went to our first movie at Auditori Melià at 11pm: Joshua Giuliano’s River, starring Jany Levy and Jessica Rothe. Naturally, such iconic names and an intriguing premise—three siblings grieving over their dad’s death are stalked by a faceless killer on a river—had us hyped up in advance. Unfortunately, this first film was the greatest disappointment of our festival experience, but at least it made us hopeful that the next four movies would be an improvement! The problem lies not in the acting, which is great, as one would expect from the cast, but in the many plot holes and unexplored links. Scenes honoring previous classics can be easily detected, but River struggles to get its own story right in this mix of references, leaving viewers with many questions as to what the movie was about. It felt like it was trying to communicate something about trauma and the passing down of harmful Continue reading SITGES FILM FESTIVAL 2026 RECAP →

Capsules, Essays

REPORT: BACKROOMS: EVERYTHING MUST GO EDITION (2026) REVEALS TENSION IN THE FRANCHISE

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Backrooms  is available to purchase or rent on-demand (without the “Everything Must Go” bonus content).

In 2019, A24 briefly released an extended director’s cut of the unexpected horror hit Midsommar to theaters between its regular run and its home video debut. This year, the even more surprising success of the YouTube “liminal horror” adaptation Backrooms—which has, shockingly, become the studio’s highest grossing film of all time—inspired them to take a similar marketing tack. This time around, however, the offering was not a true extended cut, but rather the original theatrical release with a 15-minute bonus short set in the Backrooms universe playing after the credits rolled. In the theater I saw it in, less than half the audience stayed for the bonus film (presumably because they didn’t know it was coming—without researching it, you would not expect the extra content).

backrooms everything must go edition (2026) promotional stillYou likely missed Backrooms: Everything Must Go Edition in its one-week theatrical run (which is already over). The good news is that, although there was originally some question as to whether this short would be a theatrical exclusive, we now know that it will (soon) appear on director Kane Parsons’ YouTube channel. The other good news for those with Backrooms FOMO is that “Everything Must Go” is as inessential as inessential can be: it chronologically and temporally links the web series to the feature film, but it offers little excitement on its own.

The “Everything Must Go” edition exists only because of Backrooms’ strange journey to theaters. To recap quickly for those out of the loop: it began as a “creepypasta” digital legend about a man who discovers an endless labyrinth of rooms. Other users picked up the story and elaborated on it—most notably, a 16-year old named , whose original liminal space found-footage “Backrooms” YouTube short picked up 90 million views (and a Weirdcademy Award) before being further expanded into a 24-episode webseries. The series eventually centered around the corporation ASYNC’s exploration of the Backrooms—an endless series of rooms with improbable geometries, surreally anomalous items, and dimly glimpsed monstrous entities. In yet another surprise in this constantly astonishing phenomenon, in 2023 art-house/elevated horror studio A24, fresh off a best picture nomination for Everything Everywhere All at Once, announced that they would sign then 17-year-old Parsons to direct a Backrooms feature film, with the backing of ‘s Atomic Monster productions. Again defying the odds, the Backrooms feature film was a blockbuster.

And thus we come to the present. The purpose of the “Everything Must Go” edition—besides the obvious cash grab—is, as noted, to Continue reading REPORT: BACKROOMS: EVERYTHING MUST GO EDITION (2026) REVEALS TENSION IN THE FRANCHISE →

Essays, Miscellanea

PETE’S PERVERTED PIX: A MANIFESTO

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Let me share some statistics with you:

  • This 2017 survey says “40% of your fellow Americans identify as kinky,” with 25% citing a specific fetish
  • This nationwide survey says “over 36% of Americans identify as having a specific kink or fetish and over 27% of Americans in a relationship have a sex act in mind that they want to introduce to their partner, but haven’t”
  • This 2026 Fast Company article claims “nearly half of people practice kink, but nontraditional sex still carries a strong stigma”
  • The Fifty Shades of Grey book trilogy, a romance series with a BDSM focus (albeit a blind and clueless depiction of the lifestyle), had sold over 150 million copies worldwide by October 2017. Its film adaptation raked in $569 million on a $40 million budget.

The success of Fifty Shades, printed upon trees tragically killed for the purpose, exposed something very odd in our culture. Apparently a lot more people than we’d imagined were starving for kink smut.

You don’t hear about kink relationships every day. You do hear about LGBTQ+ relationships. A 2025 Gallop poll says 9.3% of Americans identify as LGBTQ+. That’s the whole rainbow flag there, trans and non-binary and genderqueer and all.

It’s amazing how much time we spend fighting a worthless culture war about less than a tenth of the population. I look forward to the day of pansexual acceptance. Not because I’m a bleeding-heart liberal; I just want the dumb war over. People like different things, let’s get over it.

With that said: Go to the back of the gender spectrum closet and knock at the hidden door there, and you’ll find the BDSM closet. Gays and lesbians fight to have their lifestyle normalized, but the scary, kinky people have still years to go before they can glimpse sunlight—even though the overwhelming majority of the kinksters are straight. It’s equally amazing how at least a third of the population partakes of the exotic thrills of sadomasochism, and yet it’s an even bigger taboo to talk about.

I love taboos. They’re like sore pressure points you can lean on just a little and make everybody squirm. Sure, we’ve made some progress in pansexual acceptance, but the fact that we can’t handle a simple fetish without ridiculing it (or eroticizing it) shows we have a way to go, even as moral crusaders blow their big bazoos about men holding hands in public, before returning to their Fifty Shades copy dog-eared to the part where Christian pees on Anastasia.

BDSM pride flagIsn’t that weird in and of itself? It got me wondering, since the BDSM people mobilize for kink-lifestyle acceptance on Fetlife and have their own pride flag and everything, where is the normalized depiction of a dominant/submissive relationship in media? My quest for such a film is documented in my Medium essay “BDSM in Mainstream Cinema | Will Kink Ever Get Any Respect?”

There, Secretary (2002) wins my award for “most down-to-earth depiction of power exchange relationships.” A runner-up happens to be a weirdie reviewed here as well, The Duke of Burgundy. Yes, as bizarre as that film is, it’s still a pretty even-handed depiction of a domestic role-playing household, and a lesbian one at that—two alternative lifestyles for the price of one!

So now I might as well finish my quest and review the other half of the BDSM-genre films, the highly abnormal depictions. The weirdest possible, of course. I’ll document my thoughts here, and we’ll re-huddle at the end to inventory our new insights into the freakiest, most broken, most perverted, most inhibited species on Earth: people.

Join me on my safari into the weird Leather Underground!

Movies reviewed in the series:

Essays

GREEK WEIRD CINEMA BEFORE THE “WEIRD WAVE”

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Greek directors were weird long before made his feature debut with Kinetta (2006) and soon after found great success with Dogtooth (2009). From the late ’60s and 70s, while Greek commercial cinema was in decline, new directors emerged with singular voices and a modernist approach, many of them inspired by the teachings and international appeal of the Nouvelle Vague. Among these unique visions, there were many controversial ones, and even some really weird ones. This article is a short introduction to the weirdest aspects of Greek cinema of the 20th century, through five notable examples that traverse a wide range of styles and genres, each weird in its own unique way.

Let’s leave films that are just subversive and creative aside, and focus on movies with a WTF-level of weirdness. Subversiveness in Greek cinema starts about 1967 with works like Nikos Papatakis’ The Shepherds of Calamity, a drama famous for its social critique through the controversial portrayal of a slightly kinky love affair between a poor peasant and a girl from a wealthy family. It was a favorite of Lanthimos. In the following decade, many movies used an eccentric style to portray the rock and roll spirit, or to tackle subjects regarding Greek counterculture, like ‘ The Wretches Are Still Singing (1979), or ‘ entire filmography. As both these directors have been mentioned previously on this site, I won’t expand on them. There are many more and bizarre hidden gems out there, waiting to be discovered!

Still from Idlers of the Fertile Land (1978)

Let’s start with Idlers of the Fertile Land (1978) by Nikos Panayotopoulos, a director clearly inspired by the style of . This film more closely resembles the contemporary Greek Weird Wave in the way it builds an elliptical allegory of the absurd. We follow a wealthy family, a father and his three sons, as they isolate themselves in a mansion along with a maid played by sensual Olga Karlatos. They decide to pass the rest of their lives by sleeping and by doing literally nothing else, becoming increasingly idle. The central concept of rich guys isolating and destroying themselves by indulging in their vices is of course similar to ‘s La Grande Bouffe (1973); it’s a caustic morality tale parodying laziness in exactly in the same way Bouffe parodies gluttony.

Still from Mania (1985)

Our next selection is Mania (1985), an anarchic and oneiric parable commenting on our need to escape from “civilized” society, even if just for a bit. Haunting shots follow a young woman named Zoe, a program analyst for a big company, who finds herself in a series of escapades and dreamy encounters while strolling at a park. Her Bacchanalian odyssey and transformation have been compared with “Alice in Wonderland.” Suntan director Argyris Papadimitropoulos claims this movie as a favorite. As Zoe navigates through her surreal experiences, she grapples with the constraints of her daily life, leading to moments of profound introspection and liberation. This film’s rich visual style and evocative storytelling invite viewers to question the boundaries between reality and fantasy, making it a memorable exploration of the human psyche.

Continue reading GREEK WEIRD CINEMA BEFORE THE “WEIRD WAVE” →
Essays

PARALLEL CINEMA OF THE LATE SOVIET UNION

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Ed. Note: There is an undercurrent of Russian film that is totally unfamiliar to most viewers, awaiting rediscovery. Eugene Vasiliev describes the “cine-samizdat” movement of Parallel Cinema, which subverted the official Soviet Union aesthetic of Socialist Realism. Although these films were made in the underground and still have not been officially released (at least, not in the Western world), copies of several of them can be found through a YouTube search. 

Eugene’s latest project is the English-language YouTube channel “Cinema for the End of Time“.

Parallel or “perpendicular” cinema was an elusive star that slipped away from the mainstream of Soviet movies. It shone through the tattered veil of the cultural climate, defiantly refusing to bow before the crushing weight of conventional Soviet film production. It was the cinematic equivalent of a secret society, existing just beyond the reach of those willing to conform. Yevgeny Yufit, Pyotyr Pospelov, the Aleynikov brothers, and Boris Yukhanov were major figures: each one a true alchemist of surrealism, conjuring images as if plucking them from the depths of some kaleidoscopic, psychedelic dream.

At the heart of parallel cinema is a movement known as Necrorealism.

NECROREALISM

It’s the early 1980s in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), and a little film movement is scooting away from the mainstream, bubbling up from the gooey underbelly of Soviet cinema like an old, ratty corpse. Welcome to necrorealism. Don’t let the name fool you—it’s not some low-key meditation on life’s fleeting nature. No, no. This is shockingly avant-garde cinema. Death here is not the poetic “life is but a dream” kind of death, but rather the “let’s zoom in on the slow decay of the human form and blurt out how messed up it all is” kind of death.

Necrorealism was cinema that aimed to rip away the rose-colored glasses we wear when thinking about life and death to show us the grimy, decaying truth underneath. So, who’s behind this snide brand of films? The main authors are Evgeniy Yufit, Andrei Kurmoyartsev, and Konstantin Mitenev. These guys weren’t just making weird films; they were practically twisting the very idea of cinema into a grotesque, feisty art project. If you walked into a necrorealist film expecting a feel-good drama, you’d leave questioning your life choices and maybe even your grip on reality. These films weren’t designed to uplift. Instead, they said, “Death and decay? Let’s make it a fun, twisted art project.”

Still from Papa, Ded Moroz is Dead Papa, Ded Moroz is Dead [i] (1984) is one of the most offbeat features of the necrorealist movement, far away from anything remotely resembling conventional cinema. It is loosely based on A.K. Tolstoy’s “The Family of the Vampire.” Picture this: an old man and a kid, grinning in a dark, Continue reading PARALLEL CINEMA OF THE LATE SOVIET UNION →