Happy October—here’s a list of 100 avant-garde horror films I recommend, and links to watch the large majority of them.

we made a pumpkin-caramelized onion risotto with fried sage and hazelnuts

much respect to this guy hamming it up with a Donald Pleasance impression for a Librivox recording of Freud lectures

I wrote about Rhayne Vermette’s feature film Levers which just premiered at Toronto and will be at NYFF next month. My “analysis” feels wholly inadequate, but that’s appropriate for such a willfully hazy work. It’s really good. notreconciled.substack.com/p/levers-rha...

I wrote about Basma Alsharif’s latest film, which is one of the best of the year

I wrote about the films in the second Wavelengths program as part of this dispatch inreviewonline.com/2025/09/11/t...

@afields9.bsky.social, @joshuapeinado.bsky.social and I took several passes at Crossroads 2025. Ch-check it out. inreviewonline.com/2025/09/01/c...

Is there a worthwhile “best horror films” critics poll out there or should I conduct one before October

anyone have access to a digital version of any of these books? Pontormo & Rosso: Diverging Paths of Mannerism Noa Turel - Living Pictures David Ekserdjian - Parmigianino Lucy Davis - Rubens: The Two Great Landscapes Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer - Theodore Gericault

Michael Baxandall describes a form of cultural knowledge that was lost for over four centuries after the Italian Renaissance, until the films of Straub-Huillet:

I have not been keeping up with festivals or screeners the last few months, and I’m interested in anyone’s short lists of the best avant garde films of the year so far so I can prioritize catch up

It’s ironic that Kant specifically uses wine as an example of a merely agreeable/interested liking as opposed to beauty/aesthetic judgment, because the Critique of Judgment is the best book ever written about wine

Emerson on social media: “their every post chagrins us”

there’s something funny about the moment in an RPG when, after hearing for ages about some dreaded immortal being, you find out how many hit points they have

“From this, it can easily be seen that…” -Immanuel Kant after writing the densest, most abstract, most syntactically indecipherable paragraph in western history

I no longer have access to an academic library and can’t afford to buy every scholarly book I want to reference. If anyone has PDFs of any of the following I would be very grateful

Apropos the USA in 2025, I’ve been thinking of the passage in Minima Moralia where Adorno says (I’m paraphrasing) that the supporters of fascism are so desperate for a blow to be struck against their ill-defined enemies that when it happens they cheer it on even if it’s they themselves being struck

I’ve been casually working on an all time favorite albums list, posting this rough top 12 now in honor of the goat Michael Hurley. RIP

all the sets I saw at Big Ears ranked

The legacy of John Fahey is alive but it is not well

there are occasional things worth living for, like getting to see the best rock band of the last decade and the best jazz ensemble of the last decade (still house plants / ahmed) back to back in my lil city in Appalachia

I interviewed Brìghde Chaimbeul, one of my favorite artists in the contemporary folk scene, before she starts her first ever North American tour this weekend at Big Ears toneglow.substack.com/p/tone-glow-...

Gillian Rose summarizes Ernst Bloch on Utopia and fascism. Seems familiar/relevant

First single from Brìghde Chaimbeul’s upcoming album out now I first heard this tune on a 1994 album by Bonnie Rideout in a set with Drowsy Maggie and Sleepy Maggie, I used that CD to teach myself all those tunes on fiddle as a kid youtu.be/4KImkTRY4iM?...

Freud and Lacan may have discovered the sex-death drive but it was David Cronenberg who taught us that indigestion is the third point in this triangle

Brecht privately making fun of Stalinism in 1938, according to a memory from Walter Benjamin:

I made a thoroughly half assed (but ranked) list of my favorite comedies. I will not defend this list if anyone questions whether these are really comedies or why I didn’t include other stuff, but I do think these are all good movies

One fun thing about my Twitter posts regularly blowing up now is discovering fun people like the guy whose whole personality is rambling about Fred Jameson being an evil Stalinist who wants to conscript 16 yos to military service (the guy also likes bluegrass tho so it’s cool)

As a public sector union officer I think it’s bad that the federal government is just declaring public sector union contracts void and canceling their grievances

Important theoretical texts on horror film: Carroll - Philosophy of Horror Clover - Men Women and Chainsaws Creed - The Monstrous Feminine Grant (ed.) - Dread of Difference Jameson - Historicism in The Shining Kristeva - Powers of Horror Wood - Robin Wood on Horror What else?

I like every version of this song I’ve heard but this one is an all timer youtu.be/isUDQyGSAZw?...

What are the most substantial attempts in literary/cultural theory to account for the internet era from a Marxist (or at least broadly materialist) perspective? Like has anyone tried to write the equivalent of or an addendum to Jameson’s Postmodernism or Williams’s Television in the last decade?

*Marxist teacher voice* Don’t forget to struggle today, class

Every Ford film is a battle between the utopian aspirations of American liberalism and the historical realities that undermine them. He’s the most Hegelian Hollywood director, dialectical in the sense of adopting a viewpoint to locate and confront its contradictions

Horror as a modern genre emerged as a Romantic reaction against the bourgeois rationality of the Enlightenment, a reopening of mystery beyond human understanding. How ironic then that horror itself is increasingly rationalized in contemporary film

I made a Letterboxd list of films produced by the Barcelona School, a group of experimental and underground dissident filmmakers working in the later years of the Franco dictatorship. Might be regrettably relevant for Americans before long!

Statement from APWU president Mark Dimondstein on Trump’s plans for a hostile takeover of the Postal Service

I’m watching the Socialism vs. Barbarism game and Barbarism has a huge lead with only a few minutes on the clock

Newly updated for 2025 boxd.it/t2Fhe

I bet the Lacanians lined up for Carpenter’s film in Germany

I don’t care if people watch 16mm films on scans or cam rips or whatever but I’m organizing a movement to boycott 2D screenings of 3D films Perhaps I’m the only person willing to die on this hill; so be it, I’ll die alone

Lenin weighs in on recent events at karagarga

I unironically think the enthusiasm for AI is tied to a hatred for meaningful human engagement with art, that it’s what AI destroys that these people love and not what it makes possible

When I was like eighteen and met with the mandolin professor at the music school I was planning to go to, he asked if I played jazz and I said no. Later he asked if I was interested in improvisation and I said yes, and he said “I thought you didn’t want to play jazz.”

It took me until my mid 30s to finally admit I should be invested in critical theory and psychoanalysis but since I forgot how to read I’m having to make do with the half dozen passages that stayed with me from my undergrad philosophy major

My partner’s coworkers got library patrons to make a Brakhage vimeo.com/1052294106

Riveting ball game tonight youtu.be/jZZglHLkKDQ?...

What would it even look like for someone to write comedy as well today as Preston Sturges did 80 years ago? It’s unimaginable

I have a few dozen tabs of new release music from this week open but they’re gonna have to wait while I listen to Oklou’s “harvest sky” on repeat for the next 72 hours

I keep getting involved in discourse on the other site and relearning the hard way that my audience there is way bigger now than the 100 ppl deep into experimental film that I think it is. Moral of the story is I should post here more instead