Horror is for Grrrls

cw: mention of sexual violence. One of my first reading assignments when I started taking French was a French storybook version of Little Red Riding Hood, with the assumption that the story was familiar enough for us to muddle through the unfamiliar vocabulary. It’s simplicity and it’s sing-song climax make it memorable, it’s threat of violence offers a transgressive thrill to little children who may grow up to love horror or fear wolves. It’s usually interpreted as a stranger-danger warning to kids; in more specific and darker readings, the wolf is a sexual predator. His tempting Red off the path is a mock seduction, his visceral interest in bodily consumption represents violently untamed sexuality. The heroic woodsman who appears at the very end is perhaps a more appropriate romantic interest, and offers a male heroism where otherwise the only male character is bestial. In its basic form, the story has a conservative bent, but its simplicity and ubiquity make it easy to re...

...the manosmyth if you will Guys, I love bad movies. Like, really bad movies. Bizarre dialogue, chronic overacting, chronic underacting, visible set errors, police officers scratching their heads with prop guns – I love it all. I’ve been watching a hearty stack of some of the worst films ever made this summer and amongst the suffering I have stumbled upon a treasure, my pick for the worst film of all time: Manos: The Hands of Fate Made in 1966 by El Paso insurance salesman Harold P. Warren on a bet, Manos is special because not only does it have the script and acting problems we expect from terrible movies, it shows supreme incompetence at the most technical levels of making a motion picture. In part due to the dirt poor budget and having to rent all the equipment etc. etc. only about thirty seconds of footage could be shot at one time and everything had to be dubbed in later by a handful of actors. This leads to painfully long reaction shots, conversing characters being ob...