GUTTER STUDIES

For fifty years, The Rocky Horror Picture Show has endured as a midnight ritual. The first thing any fan or critic wants to talk about is the cult following and audience participation elements: the costumes, callbacks, inside jokes, the flying props. And that’s all good fun. But the carnivalesque cult following around the film often impedes the more interesting critical questions we can ask. After...

We’ve arrived at the final chapter of Sweet Sweet Suffering ! I’ve long had a soft spot for Hellraiser: Bloodline. It features my favorite cenobite, Angelique, and has always struck me as the franchise at its most narratively ambitious. To this day, Hellraiser: Bloodline has a reputation problem. Pinhead in space, a troubled production, a director who took his name off the film. Critics and fans w...

If you caught part one of Sweet Sweet Suffering, you know that Hellraiser is about the paradox of desire. Frank Cotton doesn’t just want pleasure — after finding the ultimate experience, he wants to want again. Hellbound: Hellraiser II expands the world of the first film in a way that’s easy to miss if you’re watching it as a typical horror sequel. Of course, it dials up the content of the origina...

Welcome to Sweet Sweet Suffering: A Three-Part Video Essay on Hellraiser! In part one, I argue Hellraiser is not about demons. It's about desire, and best understood as mapping to a specific theory of desire from Jacques Lacan, one of the twentieth century’s most provocative and influential thinkers. Over three video essays, I'll go deep into the Hellraiser franchise — not just as horror films, bu...

This one took a while. This is part Three of my continuing series on Carol Clover’s Men, Women, and Chainsaws . And while it follows naturally from the first two installments, it stands completely on its own — you don’t need to have watched the first two videos to watch and understand this one. The subject is rape-revenge cinema. It’s a controversial and challenging genre, to say the least—dismiss...

This is one of the last videos I’ve had in the vault from my Youtube days. It started as a silly idea for a kind of audacious clickbait project. I didn’t realize how wildly time-consuming it’d end up being. And it was kind of a maddening project too. Many times along the way, I felt uncomfortably deranged for even attempting such an obscene exercise. But it ended up being good practice for me as a...

In this audio-only episode, I’m joined again by Cynthia to count down the best horror movies of 2025. The conversation is 100% spoiler free—and I think also free of pretentious jargon! WDYT - was 2024 or 2025 a better year for horror? Many are asking. Get full access to GUTTER STUDIES at gutterstudies.substack.com/subscribe

This is part two of my investigation into Japanese nunsploitation. Building on the foundation built in part one—which featured a brief history of pink film and a close reading of School of the Holy Beast , the foundational Japanese nunsploitation film — this video explores six additional pink nunsploitation films. The video also provides additional discussion on the role of censorship in generatin...

This is part two of a video series analyzing Carol J. Clover’s Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film . You can catch up on part one here , or you can jump right into this one. Part one focused on Clover’s classic reading of the slasher film and her coining of the term Final Girl. Part two explores so-called “occult horror,” which includes ghosts, demonic possession, black mag...

I’m proud to give you the first in a two-part video series covering Japanese nunsploitation film. This first video provides a thorough introduction to the wild and perverse world of pinku eiga , providing key context we’ll need to even begin to understand strange, surprising phenomenon of Japanese nunsploitation. The second half of the video then proceeds to a close reading of the foundational cla...

This is video takes a close look at the nunsploitation work of Italian trash-cinema legend Bruno Mattei. Filmed at the same time, with the same cast, and the same set, these two movies provide a useful contrast when it comes to the variations on nunsploitation. Both are atmospheric and provocative in their own way; one offers psychologically complex and cerebral sexploitation; the other is a full-...

Russ Meyer once claimed that his films dealt in female archetypes that went “beyond women.” This video attempts to understand what he meant by that. I’m reposting this one from the Gutter Studies vault in honor of Tura Satana’s birthday last week. Tura is best remembered today as the star of Faster Pussycat , and she remains an icon in exploitation film history. This was actually the very first vi...

I’m happy to post the final chapter of my continuing series on Jean Rollin. This segment is about what became of Rollin’s career following the fallout of The Living Dead Girl , and how is final stretch of movies were organized around themes of nostalgia and self-referential pastiche. I argue that in Rollin’s career, we can see a clear passage between two cultural epochs: from the modernism of his...

Jean Rollin’s early work featured repeated imagery of renegade female pairings and doppelgängers. In those films, like Shiver of the Vampires and Requiem for a Vampire , the motif was employed as a surrealist technique for communicating fairytale wistfulness, imperiled innocence, and a sense of the uncanny. But in his more mature work, Rollin explored a series of female relationships—including sex...

To honor the passing of Pope Francis, I’m reposting a nunsploitation video I did back in my Youtube days. Every if you followed my work back then, it’s possible you haven’t seen this one. I have a strong suspicion that this is the video that got my channel banned. It was starting to blow up for a day or two before the ban. The discussion here is a sequel to the video I did providing an overview of...

In this third segment of Voluptuous Melancholia: A Critical Examination of the Films of Jean Rollin , we not only encounter some of Rollin’s very best work, but also reach the fullest exploration of his most important artistic theme. Following his early vampire cycle, Rollin’s work took a new direction. His work became more intensely personal, as he struggled to express something profound about th...

This is part two of our ongoing series VOLUPTUOUS MELANCHOLIA: A CRITICAL EXAMINATION OF THE FILMS OF JEAN ROLLIN . In this segment, we dive into the first phase of Rollin’s career, which was comprised of four vampire films in a row. We’ll see his style emerge almost fully formed from the very beginning, beginning with the chaotic Dadaism of his first feature Rape of the Vampire (1968), through to...

Welcome to VOLUPTUOUS MELANCHOLIA: A CRITICAL EXAMINATION OF THE FILMS OF JEAN ROLLIN ! Our first installment provides a thorough introduction to Jean Rollin, and is appropriate for both beginners and those already familiar with Rollin’s work. The video introduces some biographical background on Rollin, as well as a discussion of the French film culture that he emerged from in the 1960s. As we’ll...

Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu (2024) inspired a strongly negative reaction in me. But it was a reaction that arose from a tangle of mixed feelings. I’ve continued to circle and reconsider my take on the movie—not only because my network of friends and amateur critics largely seem to have enjoyed it—but also because of the particular subject matter and style on display. In many ways, Nosferatu is not o...

This is the first video in a planned series on nunsploitation cinema. One of the most notorious and mischaracterized subgenres of exploitation film, nunsploitation movies offer complex and provocative treatments of themes like desire, taboo, and transgression. For many years I was not a fan of these movies. The reason for this, I discovered a few years ago, was that I just wasn’t digging deep enou...

This video offers a detailed interpretation of Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession (1981), viewed through the lens of Lacanian psychoanalysis. My hope is that it works both as a close reading of Żuławski’s film, which can be baffling as much as it is beloved, as well as a primer on the work of Jacques Lacan. No prior understanding of psychoanalysis or Lacan is necessarily. It’s strongly recommended, how...

This essay interprets two films— The Witch (2015) by Robert Eggers, and Antichrist (2009) by Lars von Trier—through the lens of the existentialist feminism of Simone de Beavoir . Note that the discussion involves heavy spoilers for both films. GUTTER STUDIES is 100% free. Subscribe for updates and to show your support! Timestamps: 0:00 - Introduction 3:04 - The Witch (2009) 5:45 - The existentiali...

For the holiday season, I’m reposting my Christmas horror video from last year. I’m glad to do so, because when I first tried posting to Youtube, the platform’s capricious AI copyright monitoring wouldn’t let me include the segment on Christmas Evil . That’s perhaps the strongest part of the video, and the most popular film analyzed here, so it was a shame. I’m delighted now to present my full ana...

From the Gutter Studies Vault, this is a video summarizing and discussing the first part of Carol Clover’s book Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Clover is best known for coining the term “final girl”, a rare example of a phrase that has come into popular usage from film theory. The video covers both this concept and Clover’s wider theory about the horror genre as a retur...

In this second episode of GUTTER TALK, I chat with lifelong horror fan Cynthia Rzucidlo about the year in horror. Cynthia counts down a top 13 horror movies on the year, and we compare notes along the way. At the end, we also talk about the horror movies we’re still looking forward to as the year comes to a close. Follow Cynthia on Instagram. Get full access to GUTTER STUDIES at gutterstudies.subs...