notes from a summer ill-spent

it has occurred to me, just recently, that summer, whilst technically the anti-horror season, is actually pretty horrific. perhaps i’m thinking this just now because it’s september, or because it being september has made it impossible to walk down the street without being assaulted by advertising copy for the movie practical magic 2 (2026). either way, my point is is that “spooky season” (stop using this phrase) may only just be upon us, but there is nonetheless something to be said for the idea of summer as a site of less immediately tangible horrors. i mean this, of course, in the most topical sense - vis apocalyptic heatwaves and the palpable end of the anthropocene - but it’s present too in subtler guises. there is something, i think, to the strange perma-twilight of the days directly before the solstice. something, too, about a half-deserted august commuter train, about brown grass and air-cooled supermarkets, about the sense you sometimes get that the person you’re speaking to is only half there. horror movies set in the summer are not, in themselves, so uncommon - at least if you consider the thematic prevalence of both the summer camp and the concept of knowing what somebody did last summer - but the unnerving permanence of summer daylight is a lesser-used trope. we might, for instance, spend our summers at camp crystal lake or camp arawak or that camp where wednesday addams tries to kill the counsellors because they make her act in a play, but we spend them, by and large, in semi-darkness. in fact thinking about it, beyond midsommar (2019) and the noonday witch (2016), i’m hard-pressed to think of many recent horror movies that make creative use of summer sun. which is honestly quite a weird this to realise, because surely if the texas chainsaw massacre (1974) taught us anything, it’s the tight, oppressive power of a baking summer day. and also to properly cure your meats.

anyway.

summer or not, i have been patchy with my horror-watching, just recently. my letterboxd, because i and indeed all of your boyfriends have a letterboxd now, informs me that over recent months i have revisited such classic non-horror gems as two weeks notice (2002), her* (2013) and magic mike (2012), and found them to be respectively still good, still stupid and still a movie about what if you had gigantic heaving breasts and were a man. i rewatched the movie the novice (2021), which i think is just incredible and also stars isabelle fuhrman of orphan (2009) frame, only this time she is monomaniacally pursuing the art of rowing, rather than the concept of having sex with her adoptive father and being secretly 35. with regards to actually new media, backrooms (2026) was bad and i did not like it, camp miasma (2026) was good and i did like it, and obsession (2026) remains a mystery to me because i sort of just couldn’t be arsed. i am looking forward to watching the movie leviticus (2026), and also insidious: out of the further (2026), although having had it recently brought home to me that patrick wilson friend of the blog is not in the latter, i am now somewhat less compelled.

anyway, that’s how it goes for me at the threshold of spooky season (stop using this phrase). and how are you?

*her in particular is an exceptionally creepy movie to watch with the benefits of hindsight, knowing as we do now that the disembodied voice of hottie ai scarlett johansson wouldn’t be spending her time whimsically composing piano ballads and talking to brian cox but would instead be telling joaquin phoenix to kill himself and endorsing racist pseudoscience.

+

oh i should also say.

the other thing that happened to me over the summer is that i happened to be in the room whilst my wife watched six or seven episodes of the final season of the summer i turned pretty, which is to say that i happened to become progressively more and more involved, then chilled, then massively disturbed by this authentic ken russell pervert snuff film horror psychedelia masquerading as a normal tv show for your nice friend. the fact this television show caused me, when recommending it at a recent wedding, to honk across the table IT’S THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER, like i was mike flanagan standing outside your window throwing rocks at 2am, should go some distance to indicating how strongly i feel about this. the fact that this show - which, for the uninitiated, is about what if you had recurring hallucinations about an insane dead woman telling you only to marry someone you consider to be as good as a blood relative, and every time you tried to date someone outside of your direct gene pool the final destination music started playing - has been presented to us all as a nice programme someone in your office might like, has sent me so completely west i no longer have any grip on the concepts of tone or reason or whatever the fuck the straights seem to think is normal drama. i simply cannot stress enough that this is allegedly a cultural artefact for normal people and it is sicker than the sick things i get up to in my sick media, and i can’t believe it’s happened and that i ended up watching it all.

so there’s that.