Engineered Criticism

1. A House Falling Upon You I tend to take general horror criticism with a grain of salt. The horror genre at large seems to be treated with disdain, a lower form of art, a genre meant to titillate rather than educate, enlighten, etc. So every once in a while, there will be a movie released which is hailed as A Great Horror Film. It Follows certainly had a number of people calling it “refreshing” and saying it was maybe the best horror films in recent history. Do I believe this? Not at all. I think – and this isn’t a particularly uncommon thought, from what I’ve read and heard – that part of the reason horror is looked down upon is because it is what is called a “body genre,” meaning that it plays on our visceral reactions rather than our thoughts and brains. It feels like there’s an almost puritanical drive against horror. In the same way that sex is regarded as “sinful” or “impure,” so too, we are to believe, is horror. It, too, is a passionate and emotional g...

I’d like to say something along the lines of, abuse – the nature of abuse, the experience of abuse, the trauma of abuse, etc. – has been on my mind a lot lately, but the truth is I never exactly stopped thinking about it. I suffered from emotional abuse for the better part of two years. It began the same way I hear many people describe it: it seems like love at first. Someone who seems to know you at your core. Someone who promises to help you be the best version of yourself, to paraphrase a line from yet another of the great movies about abuse, Lady Bird . It just doesn’t take too long for I can help you be your best self to become you’re no good as you are, you’re worthless, and you’re lucky to have even me. I was talking recently with a friend of mine about the nature of abuse and abusers, and out of this conversation came an insight about abuse that I had never considered before – abusers are, in fact, highly empathetic people. It’s this empathy that allows them t...

The family sits at the center of much of human society as one of its most fundamental social institutions. The form and shape of families varies from culture to culture and over time – from the traditional large, multigenerational family, to the “nuclear family” which bonds much of the modern social fabric, to our current plethora of vaguely defined and diverse types of families that can include distant relatives, partners, or others that live and care for each other. All of these family types come with a shared experience, a shared life, and, more often than not, shared trauma, trauma that runs down the family tree. Alcoholics beget alcoholics. Abusers beget abusers. Each person carries the weight of decades and centuries of damage from people they may never have known. Horror and the fantastic reflect this trauma in different ways. Things horrifying, fantastical, or abject can either be the product of, or an escape from, families that are oppressive. As we see in movies like Raw...

1. Tonya Who? Oh boy, I, Tonya … So it’s been brought to my attention that literally every other human in the world knew about Tonya Harding previous to this movie, and everyone had their opinions set in stone. Strong opinions about this Olympic figure skater. But I learned all this after the fact. So many that colored my view of this movie. Am I gonna try to take sides on the entire debate one way or the other? Fuck no. The movie certainly doesn’t try to tell you what’s true. It’s extremely straightforward about that fact. Hell, Tonya Harding (Margot Robbie) turns toward the camera near the end of the movie and directly says as much: “there’s no such thing as truth! I mean, it’s bullshit! Everyone has their own truth, and life just does whatever the fuck it wants.” Somehow it’s less important what exactly happened. Did Tonya fire a gun at Jeff Gillooly (Sebastian Stan)? Does it entirely matter? This story is about the cycles of abuse, it’s about passion and trau...