Admit One Round-up

A curated selection of articles, podcasts, and other good bits from the Internet.

At the movies, you want to look at the terrible thing and you also want to stare at the seat in front of you until it’s over. So too do we want to know what’s going on inside us and we also want to ignore it, because the fact of all that preposterous squelching gore, and everything that could go wrong with it, is frankly more than any person should be casually expected to take in. Accepting the fact of oneself as a body and therefore a thing with insides, with guts, is accepting the fact of oneself as a thing that can degrade, mutate, unravel.

Guts by Julia Armfield (author of Our Wives Under the Sea) writes this essay about her own health issues, merged with her love of horror movies. It’s probably the best thing I’ve read all month.

A little bit of self-promotion: I went on BBC Radio 4’s Start the Week with writer George Saunders and historian Dr. Helen Rappaport to discuss horror movies, Russian émigrés and short stories.

I wrote about the power of masks in horror movies for WePresent

It’s a very critic thing to declare new waves, and I’ve done it for MUBI Notebook. There’s a new wave of Spanish strange and it’s exciting.

I’m quoted in Harper Bazaar’s investigation into why we like being scared. Appreciate the kind words about the podcast.

The BFI have put out a mammoth list of best horror movies since 1922, one per year. I contributed some capsules on some cherished favourites, from The Uninvited to Cemetery Man. This one is bound to generate discourse.

A beautiful piece on the demise of EIFF and Filmhouse with a follow-up about the projections organised by filmmaker Mark Cousins.

I’ve absorbed cinema so fully that the work has unavoidably been influenced by it. The way Warhol focused on people and turned them into goddesses still has an effect on me. Antonioni, Visconti, the colors of Sirk—they still have an effect on me. Cassavetes is actually the common denominator in many periods of my life.

Nan Goldin on the films she carries for Criterion

This episode of Pop Culture Happy Hour on the freaks (like me) that collect physical media.

I revisited Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s 28 Days Later for the first time in years (and for the first time on the big screen), so the timing of this Faculty of Horror episode is perfect.

For Spanish-speakers, a thread of horror short stories written by Latin American writers

On the making of the Lovecraftian fuck monster from Possession.