protean depravity

Hey all, I hope you're doing great! Here we go, finally some book reviews on this blog, and there are more to come, please do enjoy!

There's no shame in wondering about the background of people who do terrible things, and the extensive coverage of the lives of shooters, monsters or serial killers in the news, in literature, and especially in cinema is proof of that. Schroeder certainly isn't the first book to explore the mind of a killer, and yet I feel unusually torn thinking about this tormented character and the one fateful day in his life, his very last day after the last straw broke the camel's back.

Ah, the woman’s search for eternal beauty… The trope as old as time has always been a grab bag for storytellers, but in the last couple of years it has been seeing a true revival explosion, especially in horror. The wish to hold on to the one source of power granted to her in a world in which she is sexualized and measured by her youthfulness, fertility and sex-appeal is naturally a huge source of anxiety. Efforts to stop her body from aging and decaying, to appear desirable and pretty, not to lose “it” and not to succumb to cruel reality, and all this eventually leading to her self-destruction, are all themes organic to horror. Add to it a little snip snip here, a nip tuck there, a little blood, a couple of needles into the flesh, some body modification and you have yourself the perfect template for a class A body horror story that reminds us that ultimately we are nothing but meat. Books like Natural Beauty (Ling Ling Huang), #thighgap (Chandler Morrison) or Rouge (Mona Awad) disc

It always sucks a little bit when the summer ends; the days get darker and shorter, the weather gets chillier, the city gets fuller, the leaves change colors... But pre-fall, September and early October, is still a nice enough time before hell ascends to Berlin and stupid winter begins. And this year it's an even better time than usual, because there's so much going on that it's head-spinning!

Since its emergence in the early 70s, the rape-revenge trope has become a staple of horror fiction equally hailed as loathed. A painfully necessary and yet controversial evil to tap the full cathartic potential of the genre, it usually relies on exploitation, provocation, transgression, shock-value and preferably lots of gore, over the top and graphic sexual violence, and bad taste in order to point at a specific social ill . Critics rail at a certain kind of voyeurism as well as instrumentalizing, making light of, and even glorifying of sexual violence against women while others, such as Australian scholar Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, call for film-specific interpretations. Although meant as a negative opinion on the subgenre, instrumentalizing or exploiting a subject in art, no matter how hideous, traumatic, and real it is for its survivors in real life, are valid and effective ways of handling that subject and should be seen in an objective light. All the more in the case of the l

And here I go with the second part of my favorite FFF movies of this year's 38th edition. While writing these I realized that I watched and really enjoyed a lot of French and French language movies this past week. Having studied and spoken French for my whole life, but not being able to connect with the country per se, I actually miss French, just not the French, lol. I also enjoyed watching light-hearted movies and laughed a lot during this festival. Here are some more reviews, some funny, some serious.

Another September, another Fantasy Filmfest. And it has already ended, damn! As I mentioned before, I didn't find the lineup as a whole unanimously interesting, but a few picks ended up being partly OK, partly great for me, so let's take a look at them. There may be mild spoilers in what I discuss here, but I'll never give away the punchline of the respective films.

Hey everyone! Despite the ongoing Fantasy Fimfest fever I found some time to quickly post some of my latest write ups, I hope you enjoy just as much as I enjoy the hot weather in Berlin!