By Payton McCarty-Simas While Oedipus Rex is the most obvious reference point for Toshio Matsumoto’s 1969 film Funeral Parade of Roses,… Read more “The Blade and the Executioner”: Funeral Parade of Roses, Psycho, and Queering the Monstrous Other

By Johanna Isaacson The following is excerpted from Stepford Daughters: Weapons for Feminists in Contemporary Horror (Common Notions Press). You can purchase… Read more Precarious Performances: Unplannable Lives of Emotional Laborers in Parasite

By Trey Taylor In a 1985 essay entitled ‘Photography and Fetish’, the visual theorist Christian Metz ventured a number of… Read more Photography, Politics, and Death in All The Beauty and the Bloodshed

By Madeline Lane-McKinley “Don’t misunderstand me, I have no hope,” Marc Maron tells his audience at the outset of his… Read more Maron’s Third Act

By Hunter Bivens (after Heiner Müller’s “The Father”)  On a Tuesday morning in October of my tenth year in California,… Read more NOTES ON A DEAD FATHER

By Madeline Lane-McKinley The following is an excerpted chapter from Comedy Against Work: Utopian Longing in Dystopian Times (Common Notions… Read more The Stand-Up Artist in the Age of Gigification

By Johanna Isaacson I was recently asked an impossible-to-answer question: what five films would you recommend to a social-justice minded… Read more Political Horror 101: Reclaiming the culture we love for the world we want to see

By Madeline Lane-McKinley In her 2021 book Work Won’t Love You Back, Sarah Jaffe makes the convincing case that “work… Read more Laughing at Work: The Genre-Creep of Anti-Workplace Comedy in 2022

By Jess Flarity Swedish screenwriter and director Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness (henceforth, Triangle) was a controversial Palme d’Or winner… Read more Selling Yourself for Pretzel Sticks: Masculine Crisis in the Dystopian Triangle of Sadness

By: Payton Alexa McCarty-Simas Quentin Tarantino, auteur director of such hyper-violent, exploitation-inspired films as Inglourious Basterds (2009), and Django Unchained… Read more Flirting With Empowerment: Quentin Tarantino’s Troubling Depictions of Sexual Assault