alex hall

Very excited that my first narrative film is not only premiering on @shudder.com tomorrow, but that it's also getting so many screenings!! Being a 30-minute film I didn't expect it to get any theatrical play, so the fact that all these venues programmed it to support features is a huge deal to me.🖤

The strange queer powers of ‘The Craft’ | Xtra Magazine How a coven of magical teen misfits sparked my ’90s coming out story

"We recognized something queer about the film’s brand of teen girl defiance and anger," writes @lezzie-borden.bsky.social about watching 'The Craft' as a teen.

Sex Won’t Kill You, But Something Else Surely Will Ti West’s X (2022)

New My Favorite F***ing Movie is out! I originally wrote this essay for Daily Grindhouse when X first came out. I think this is such a special movie & I really love what I wrote about it, so I’m happy to be giving it a second life as part of this series.

Likes/shares/subscribes very appreciated 🖤

When a trans woman dies of natural causes, at an age greater than 75, having lived more than half her life as herself, that is cause for celebration, not mourning.

Thank you, Miss Major.

How it’s going: open.substack.com/pub/myfavori...

YouTube video by NirvanaVEVO Nirvana - School (Live At The Paramount, Seattle / 1991)

Happy first day of the fall semester, lads. youtu.be/DeoWhvsyOZ8?...

Actually very proud to announce that I am doing a thing: a new book series called "TV Matters" with Intellect! Television / media / pop culture scholars, take note and get in touch if you wanna write about TV! Please share far and wide.

Going to be sending out our (long-delayed) first newsletter in a couple of hours, if anyone would like to still sign up — will contain some catalog updates and teases for what’s coming up next!

Subscribe here:
muscle-distribution.us10.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=...

We’re thrilled to say that our new digital restoration of Doris Wishman’s last-completed feature, DILDO HEAVEN (aka DESPERATE DESIRES, 2002), will be having its world premiere at Fantastic Fest in Austin next month.

Charlie Kaufman's new movie is getting released straight to libraries How to Shoot a Ghost will be free to watch if you have a library card

Kanopy rules www.polygon.com/charlie-kauf...

The world was still very cruel to Showgirls when I became serious about movies in the early years of the 21st century. It had a reputation like Citizen Kane, but on the opposite end of distinctions about quality, and it still remains very difficult to engage with the picture beyond its reputation as an object of scorn, or, more recently, one of rehabilitation and rescue. Call it the last great cult object, the Moby Dick of bad taste, or the masterpiece of shit. The shadow of Showgirls’s history is so enormous that it seems nearly impossible to find any new revelations about the picture on the critical front, and one must look into the specificity of a personal reaction in order to contend with what it has to offer. Many critics before me have made good arguments that it doesn’t suck, or that it’s about mirrors, or All About Eve, or a critical text within the explicit carnival creepshow of Paul Verhoeven’s America. What seems doable to me as a critic and a viewer is to be completely honest about my fascination with the picture, and how I remain charmed by Nomi Malone, and by extension Elizabeth Berkley’s performance. She goes way out there, further than actors usually do, and paid mightily in the public sphere, and within the industry for the risks she took, but it’s a performance that I love. Its closest contemporary is Isabella Adjani in Possession, another performance that audiences routinely laugh at, and with, and I have such affection for actors who go beyond reason to show us whoever it is that they are playing.

a still from SHOWGIRLS of Elizabeth Berkley in close-up as Nomi Malone

I wrote about my beloved SHOWGIRLS for my reader's choice series. It's sort of funny that this is the longest essay I've written in a little bit, and it feels like I barely scratched the surface.

www.patreon.com/posts/patron...

pleased to report the apricots are just as iconic as i needed them to be this summer (ft a diy filter of a sunscreen & sweat)

1000 Women in Horror From the silent era until today, the nightmares that have haunted our screen have been sculpted and embodied by women, but many of those artists have gone....

🚨 Big news 5 years in the making: some friends and I made a documentary! 1000 WOMEN IN HORROR hits Shudder soon, directed by Donna Davies and inspired by my 2020 book of the same name

If you are in Australia, I hope you can make it to the world premiere at the Melbourne International Film Festival

Whoever blasted Skeeter Davis' End of the World at the pool the other day really knew what to give the Girl, Interrupted fans what they wanted.

the cherry trees are poppin' off this year fyi! and the apricot trees better, too. or else 😤😤

It's that time of year again when my routes around the city are pre-determined by the location of different neighbood fruit trees

Happy Pride to Rosemary’s baby who’s due date was the 28th of June, 1966 (06/66)

It’s also the anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, which took place just a few years following the birth of the antichrist.

It's no surprise that we’ve always had Satan on our side 👹🌈

Happy birthday to Kathy Bates, who made a sledgehammer scene Oscar-worthy 🔨✨

If you read/liked this stunning piece on 28 Days Later, a reminder that hot @harmonycolangelo.bsky.social who wrote this co-authored an essential book on Sleepaway Camp with her equally hot wife @bjcolangelo.bsky.social, its just hotness all the way down with these fucken two 💜

Notes On The Howling's Werewolf Jonestown by Sara Century Sara Century published a post on Ko-fi

I'm slowly pulling together a book of essays about how horror movies portray the media, this article is part of that. ko-fi.com/post/Notes-O...

WELCOME CANCER SEASON! CARE MORE! FEEL IT ALL! MOODY! DEFENSIVE! NEEDINESS AS A LOVE LANGUAGE! INSTEAD OF BILLIONAIRES WE COULD HAVE HOUSING! AND HEALTHCARE! AND CHILDCARE! AND FOOD FOR ALL! EMO AS AN EXTREME SPORT! ABOLISH ICE! FREE THEM ALL! ARMS EMBARGO! WAR IS OVER! WAR IS OVER! WAR IS OVER!

An assembly line of "Why Self-Publish Under Fascism?" booklet covers (which are rubber stamped, dated, and initialed on the cover by me.)

Since May 1st I've printed, assembled, and mostly distributed over 700 copies of my booklet "Why Self-Publish Under Fascism?" This coming week I plan to make something new but you can still get these for $3.00 (or $2.00 if you buy 10 or more) from: halfletterpress.com/why-self-pub...

Our June series FIX YOUR HEARTS OR DIE: A TRANS CINEMA CELEBRATION starts Tuesday with Ed Wood's GLEN OR GLENDA on 35mm at Nitehawk Williamsburg.

did some illustrations for this piece!

We’re thrilled to announce that we’ve picked up North American rights for @weard.moe’s epic-in-the-making CASTRATION MOVIE — and — it’ll be having its U.S. festival premiere at Frameline next month.

More info:
www.muscle-distribution.com/films/castra...

Jonathan Glazer’s visual style comes into focus on the “Karma Police” music video that he directed for Radiohead. In that video, a camera was placed behind the driver’s seat as a car lurched forward on an abandoned road, during the darkest hours of the night, with the headlights carving up midnight in pursuit of someone or something. The car moves along for quite a while until there’s a glimmering mothlight gleaming ahead steadily transforming into the shape of a man. Glazer is captivated by the shape of blank spaces, and he’s very sure about images that lack clear definition. At heart, he’s best suited for the avant-garde, but he began in commercials and music videos, and he’s never completely abandoned the populism of the forms where he began. This has resulted in him straddling both the art world and the mainstream cinema to the surreal effect of having his experimental film about the Jewish concentration camp at Auschwitz, The Zone of Interest, being available at the multiplex at the same time as superhero movies and Disney animations. In addition to having obvious avant-garde sensibilities, he is also beholden to horror filmmaking, without being a director who cherishes the genre, or has much interest in what that visual language might entail. He’s closer to Michael Haneke or Stanley Kubrick than he is John Carpenter or Dario Argento, and the effect of his unfaithful adaptation of Michael Faber’s “Under the Skin” had a profound effect on the genre moving forward. It was the first a24 horror film, and beckoned an era where the expressive qualities of horror became internalized through the traumatic emotions of characters, rather than the external properties of gore, violence and death. Under the Skin remains the high-watermark for this type of horror film from this era.

a still frame from UNDER THE SKIN of a silhouette of a woman pulling stockings up her legs

I wrote about UNDER THE SKIN, and Jonathan Glazer for my reader's choice series. This is a special movie for my own personal canon.

www.patreon.com/posts/129041...

[W4G] [05/20/25] PRE-RELEASE Franklin, Kamau, Micah Herskind, Mariah Parker (eds): No Cop City, No Cop World: Lessons from the Movement Haymarket Books, paperback Publication Date: May 20, 2025 Publisher Marketing: A collection of essays from the Stop Cop City movement on the fight for police abolition and for a liveable planet for al...

No Cop City, No Cop World is officially out today :) it was a massive collective effort, not to give a definitive account of a movement that could never be fully captured in a book, but to document tactics tried, lessons learned, & successes & failures.

Order supports @workshops4gaza.bsky.social:

the real rites of Spring is hearing The Offspring blasted out some car's window for 20 years in a row