Hey, it's me. The woman this film column is named after. 

Long time no see, eh?

That's one-hundred percent my bad. I meant to write a Cinevangelism last year, I really did. Wrote a whole re-introduction to it and everything. You might have read it.

And yet, all the same my favourite pages in which to pontificate lay un-inked for the better part of the publishing year. Not even for lack of trying, I might add!

At one point I wrote a zealously self-confident (some might say imprudently so) outline for the installments of Cinevangelism I was definitely going to write in the next month(s), which I invariably never got around to doing.

"Such is life," they say, and life was indeed a big part of it.

In the time between now and the last (official) installment of my off-kilter film column a lot of very monumental things happened to me.

For one: I started taking graduate classes despite being saddled with a course load twice that of most grad students, which made the time l devoted to my job by necessity focused on such things as hiring, advertising, writing our newsletter, wrangling our staff, covering events our staff refused to cover, copy editing, making graphics for our staff, and general a glut of things more pressing than writing self-indulgent navel-gazing masquerading as film criticism.

Other things equally contributed.

In March I had to go to the ER because I had a sinus infection so bad I could barely breathe, and I felt as though my head was disassembling itself from the inside out. 

Couple this with another bout of COVID-19 this summer, and I spent several weeks this year immobilized in bed feeling guilty about being immobilized in bed doing things like watching multi-hour YouTube videos about crypto scams as opposed to doing anything “productive.”

Oh, I also started going out with a woman.

Being as the bulk of my offerings in the period of time the year previous from when my girlfriend and I had started dating were morose, self-absorbed (if vaguely poetic) “Platitudes,” it is perhaps unsurprising that finding myself lavishing in human connection did much to mollify the more venomous manifestations of my “femcel swag.”

Like all self-righteous critics who style themselves as tortured artists, my own experiences are inseparably enmeshed within that series of simmering electrical impulses streaking betwixt our synapses which we dismissively call “personality.” Considering the fact that my personality sucked was half the reason people read this nonsense, I feared losing readership should I suddenly decide to review Anyone But You.

More than anything, though: I simply stopped watching as many movies. 

I stopped consuming as much media full-stop, in all honesty.

Not watching movies tarnished my ability to think critically about them. This, in a viciously cyclical way, made me less inclined to want to watch movies at all.

What few movies I did watch were for preliminary research in the 15,000 word research paper I wrote about Lesbian vampires, of all things. Most of my time not spent in class or at work was spent working on that paper. Most of the time not spent writing that paper besides that (a significant sum, for the record) was spent worrying about the prospect of writing that paper in the first place, and whether or not I had made a terrible mistake.

In the end, I used none of the films I watched in the final paper. Having written magnitudes more than the word count I had to mercilessly cut tens of thousands of words—some I thought better than the stuff that made it in—including a thoroughly awesome chapter about the 1980s era of lesbian sexploitation films.

However, you're not getting a Cinevangelism about The Bloodsucker Leads the Dance in recompense for this dishonourable thesis omission because:

1) it's bad and I can’t in good conscience recommend it, especially because this is supposed to be a film column saying nice things about films;

And 2) I am a gatekeeper, and I want to keep at least some of the things I like to myself, because the last thing I need is someone I barely know trying to engage me in conversation in a coffee shop lineup or piss-drunk at the Social about an Italian slasher movie they haven't actually seen, just because they read about it in my film column.

But hey, I spent too much of last year marinating in my own misanthropy and that’s why this summer I decided to make a big change: I started going to the movies again.

Last summer I finally managed to beat my streak of pandemic-begotten cinema celibacy so as to wash the taste of the last film I’d seen in theatres before the pandemic—Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker—out of my mouth. 

This summer, I entered my cinema slut era.

I had, in all fairness, a lot of good reasons for doing so. Haven’t you heard the good word? Movies are good again!

Well, I say that, but the Eli Roth film Borderlands did in fact come out this year. So maybe the movie industry in general remains festering in the same ditch it stumbled into sometime in the 2010s, but there is at least one genre that has been doing something right as of late, and it just so happens to be my bread and butter.

Horror movies in the last ten years have tended to occupy one of two extreme and opposite polarities: phenomenal films filled with legitimate artistry, thoughtful writing, and loads of delicious, repulsive gore; and Blumhouse low-budget slop typically directed by James Wan.

So it was that when I saw the trailer for Longlegs earlier this year, I knew that something had changed.

Let’s back up a minute.

I first saw the trailer for Longlegs at Galaxy Cinemas, having paid more than $40 to see the anniversary edition of Innocence A.K.A. Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (because I am weeb trash). I’d known for months that Osgood Perkins was making a new movie but, because I hated the idea of an Osgood Perkins movie getting a mainstream release, I had resolved to hate it.

You see, Oz Perkins is a man who makes weird movies about women being sad. You might know him from that Netflix Hansel & Gretel adaptation, or from I Am The Pretty Thing That Lives In The House.

Personally, I know him for his first (and best) film, The Blackcoat’s Daughter. That film is in my top four on Letterboxd, so you know I mean business when I say that. I take my Perkins very seriously. He might just be one of the best directors working today, at least to all four people who know of him.

Perkins’ work feels like a secret onto which I cling until I’m trying to impress a woman on a third date. To see him in a movie theatre felt—to misanthropic past me—like sacrilege.

Having watched the trailer to Longlegs, however, I was forced to put my apprehensions about a mainstream Perkins outing starring Nick Cage aside and admit “Okay, that looks pretty good.” I do genuinely like Perkins’ work, after all, as opposed to only pretending to because RedLetterMedia told me too. It’s no surprise, then, that I caved and redownloaded the Cineplex app to buy tickets.

Turns out, I wasn’t the only one. This movie made like $100 million! That doesn’t sound like a lot of money when every new film Disney craps out seems to break a billion at the box office, but unlike a lot those films, this movie didn’t take five-hundred shitmillion dollars to make!

It helps, too, that this movie is really good. What can I say, girls? The angel from Quigley has still got it!

Longlegs, like most Perkins ventures, is the spiritual successor to a lot of worse movies that people like a lot better. In its case, said films are The Silence of the Lambs, David Fincher’s Se7en, and a handful of Giallo movies.

Whereas The Blackcoat’s Daughter is a film that firmly cements itself in the vibes of a bleak winter, Longlegs is the closest Perkins gets to a summer romp. Hell, the movie starts with a T-Rex song. I don’t care that Longlegs is set in January (Perkins can never really escape the bleak midwinter), this is a summer movie to me.

Maybe it's something about the premise—cop movies are always big summer outings—or the setting, in all of its wood-panelled 90s glory. Maybe it's something about DoP Andrés Arochi’s cinematography, whose palette spans from rich blacks to fiery reds to muted browns as though the grading were hand-picked from the end of Sorcerer (1977).

In any case, Longlegs released in the middle of July, and in so doing kicked off what I will call, for the purposes of this column, “Rot Girl Summer.”

You see, not only is horror back in a big way, so too are women. Sure, last year we had Barbie and Anatomy of a Fall to advance the cause of women’s suffering, but they were outnumbered (and Barbie, at least, outclassed) by a bunch of sadboy movies about men (and also Oppenheimer).

Not so this year! It’s a woman’s world, and we’re lucky to be living in it. When Charli XCX declared “It’s so confusing sometimes to be a girl,” Osgood Perkins was more than happy to step up to the plate.

Horror has always had a soft spot for the female condition, after all. Throw a rock at the horror genre and you’re bound to hit a woman. I’m talking Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, the original Suspiria, Alien, Aliens, Guinea Pig 2, The Shining, Halloween—all of them are preoccupied, to some extent with what’s inside a girl.

The recent mainstream horror revival has largely kept to this pattern, even with its bi-polar split. Good movies like It Follows—the movie which kicked off this whole post-A24 boom—are just as frequently female-fronted as terrible ones like Wish Upon. Feminism, folks: it’s happening right now!

This summer in particular has elected to put final girls on full display. I mean for Goddess’ sake, the two movies besides Twisters vying for second at the box office to Deadpool and Wolverine are independent horror thrillers released by Neon starring respected, if on the come-up, actresses.

The woman apart from Maika Monroe’s Special Agent Lee Harkey in Longlegs is, of course, none other than Hunter Schafer in Cuckoo, a movie I conveniently also happen to have seen!

Fittingly for the theme of this entrée, Cuckoo is a movie I actually saw with a woman. While back in my hometown of Ottawa this past week, an old high school friend and I trekked down to the ByTowne Cinema to watch Tilman Singer’s new offering. 

It was bad! I enjoyed it immensely.

Cuckoo (not to be confused with the book, confusingly) is a very stupid movie with a lot of very good actors doing bad European accents. Hunter Schafer is not doing a bad European accent, but honestly I might have enjoyed it more if she was.

I’m not really sure what it’s about, because the movie didn’t entirely make sense, and for once it wasn’t because I was completely hammered.

Cuckoo isn’t good, but I’d be hard pressed to say it’s not amazing. It feels like the product of a simpler time, when you were allowed to do cocaine on the set of the film you were shooting, and where six weeks on location and *vibes* were sufficient substitutes for such trifles as “plot.”

If there’s one thing that Cuckoo and Longlegs share in common (besides their production company), it’s that: a feeling of being holdovers from a different period of filmmaking. Respectively they represent opposite sides of the artistry split as it existed prior to It Follows—Longlegs the Exorcist III to Cuckoo’s Sleepaway Camp.

Whereas Perkins’ film is preoccupied with rigorous attention to detail and thematic layering stemming from his own father’s background in horror (oh yeah, his dad is the guy from Psycho, by the way), Cuckoo has the delightful feel of watching people throw shit at the wall to see what sticks.

Longlegs has the feeling of care, and craft. Cuckoo has the feeling that cocaine was somehow involved in the production.

They are both equally compelling.

It’s rare to see one, let alone two horror movies come out in what is considered the “off season” before Halloween. It’s a relic of when you could make movies for six beers and a fiver, back when Friday the 13th movies were still in theatres. 

The phenomenon of the horror blockbuster is something that has disappeared as the genre has increasingly sort itself into this implicit “high art/low art” split. It’s something that works both to the detriment of the genre itself, and to the people who love it.

Horror has always permitted marginal voices and inventive, daring filmmaking decisions. That’s something that I see in the phenomenon of Rot Girl Summer—a trans woman heading a horror flick, an art film darling making a certifiable hit.

This summer is the most alive the movies have felt for me in decades. Just as Ti West’s X trilogy seemed poised to derail the A24 money train and I was ready to declare the genre in dire straights, this summer breathed new life into dumb, fun, schlock horror, as well as the idea of doing that with even a little budget, for a bit more of a mainstream audience.

That, in my mind, can only be a good thing. I would love to see what Perkins could do with more money, or what Singer could do with a better script. I would love to see Hunter Schafer in a bigger movie with a wider release.

Hell, I’d love to see just about what anyone could do if they were given 10 lbs of cocaine and told “go shoot a horror film.” Reject Blumhouse, return to tradition. 

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Oh, also: I’m not going to see Alien: Romulus. Stop asking me. Ridley Scott can blow my flacid cock. Now that’s feminism.