Horror is for Grrrls

                         There’s a phenomenon amongst film enthusiasts that may surprise you. A whole lot of people, otherwise sane and of good taste, willingly seek out and choose to watch bad movies, the worse the better. I am one of those people, and, what’s more, I regularly coax my friends into subjecting themselves to bad movies alongside me. If you’re not one of my fellow cultists, this may seem like the height of poor entertainment choices. I disagree.             In this essay, I want to argue that bad movies do the same thing that experimental films do, only by accident. They challenge the aesthetic and formal standards that we normally apply to film and in that way challenge our ideas of what makes movies ‘good’ or ‘watchable,’ entertain us with the unexpected, and challenge our aesthetic categories. I also want to argue that not all bad movies are e...

            Almost two weeks ago now, some friends and I went to an exhibition at the Met Breuer called Like Life. The theme was sculpture of the human form, spanning an extraordinary time frame and organized thematically rather than chronologically. It’s taken me a while to write about the exhibit, in part because it made such an impression and left me with so much to think about. It was going to be difficult to describe it to you as a series of sentences, rather than a series of questions. Secondly, because the exhibition has recently closed, you will not be able to verify what I tell you about this work. Instead, you will just have to believe me. Believe first, that there are unbelievable things in this exhibit, things you would anticipate more in one of the many sculpture-themed horror films than in the actual halls of a museum. A bust of the artist’s face made of his own blood. The skeleton of a famous philosopher within an i...