Gretchen Felker-Martin

Yes, good God. The scene where she's sniffing her pussy in the bathroom. Yeah. Come on. That's like, it's so real. You know, who has not been that dyke? Who among us has not sniffed a body on this person?

His face just gets better every year.

It's awesome.

Yeah. She did Saint Maud, which I also love. Love that one.

I really enjoyed Cuckoo.

I didn't see it coming.

Like, I don't even know how... I mean, in a lot of ways, it's like a straightforward creature feature. Okay. But it's so specifically situated. It's like so concerned with sound and with particular kinds of German culture. Yeah. It's creepy. Tillman Singer, I think, is German and... I grew up next to a German family and they're exactly like that. Just like weirdly manic and punishingly unfun.

What?

Really? And they run into something that's hunting them.

It is so good. It is so scary.

Superficially, I would say it's similar to Prey, but it's doing very different things.

Just incredible.

I have to confess, I am a long-standing The Terrifier hater.

All right.

I will do that. The first two are absolutely... I will do that for you. Literally no one else could compel me to this.

That's fantastic. And you know, I have to say... Even if I don't personally like it, I'm always glad to see the freaks win a round.

What are we at? Eight?

All right. The first omen. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. If I'm like rolling back over this, I might even move it up the list. It was so good. I was shocked by how good it was.

Yeah, that really got me. Nell Tiger Free, who I think before this had only... ever done like a bit part on game of Thrones is so fucking good.

Yeah.

Yeah. And you know, another, another fantastic horror movie directed by a woman. Um, it's, it's been an absolute banger year for them.

I can't remember her name, unfortunately. And The Devil's Bath is also co-directed by a woman. Oh, that's right.

Women do. It's a year of women's wrongs. Yes.

This will be number nine. We've actually got two more. That's all right. That's all right. Let me see. Got my little list here. Number nine would be the Vordelok.

So cool. I was so impressed. I was so impressed.

Just like... First of all, it's actually about things. Yeah. You know, I was I heard like the conceit of the monster as a puppet. And I was like, oh, this will be like a neat little, you know, showcase for someone's craftsmanship. And the puppet is great. And the decision to have the characters treat the puppet like it's a normal human being. Terrifying. It's so scary.

I'm actually in Michigan visiting my girlfriend.

And after three... Are we sure? Are we sure that's dad?

Yeah, it really does work. It's so surprising.

And it's, you know, it has some like really sharp, interesting things to say about gender and sexuality in class too.

I love the protagonist is like this ridiculous fop who, you know, accidentally falls in love with a cross-dresser.

Yeah, he does, which is really impressive. Yeah, he's fabulous. Fabulous film. Just a great vampire movie. Yeah. And I would probably give my final slot to Infested. Oh, ooh.

I do reside in Worcester, yeah. Okay.

Yeah, just a movie that made me want to get into bed, tuck the covers in at every corner and never touch the floor again.

It's like... Yeah, there's no contest between this and the next scariest spider movie.

Oh, it's my favorite. It's great. It's a dump, but it's my dump.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Ooh! Oh, it's so scary. It's so scary. The effects are so good.

They're like those little foam caplets you throw in the bath and they turn into a rhinoceros.

And it's like, Oh God, it's so nasty. It just, it, you know, in so many ways, insect horror is all about the fear of being penetrated because they're small enough to do that. And this movie just plays with that so cleverly and remorselessly. It wants you to feel bad. It wants you to develop a phobia.

No, it's under my own name, Gretchen Felker Martin.

Yes, I can. I can finally talk about it. Lily Wachowski and I are adapting Manhunt for television.

Over the moon. I'm over the, I could never have imagined this would happen. And if it did, I certainly wouldn't have imagined it happening with someone as incredible and as influential to me personally as Lily. She's just, she's been amazing to work with.

Yeah, we've certainly got a lot of hurdles ahead of us, but I'm really hopeful it'll get picked up.

I definitely watched worse movies than this, but I think the one that got me personally angriest was Alien Romulus. Because first of all, you do not fucking dig up my boy Ian Holm with this AI bullshit and make me watch his janky computer animated face jerk around for an hour and a half. And second of all, what happened to the back half of your movie?

You had a whole script for 45 minutes and then it just blows out the fucking airlock and there's nothing.

Yeah. I mean, don't bother. Okay.

I hated that movie.

I felt like a, I felt like an absolute fucking lunatic watching people call it smart. Yeah.

Eating that weird breakfast.

Yeah. Yeah, just like a really incurious, dull movie that keeps going with a format that's not actually doing anything after the first twist.

Absolutely. I've got two for you. One, Green Fuse Burning by Tiffany Morris. This is a book about a Mi'kmaq indigenous woman who is super, super, super depressed after her estranged father's death. And her pushy white partner sends her to this art residency on the edge of a lake, and she has this complete and total breakdown.

There's fungal horror, there's like nasty, fucked up animals, and it's so cloying and claustrophobic and upsetting. I really dug it.

And my second recommendation is Augustina Baz Sharika's Tender is the Flesh, which I think... doesn't have real competition for the best horror novel of the past 10 years. Really? It is astonishing. It has one of the greatest final lines in recent fiction. It's brutal. It's nasty. Is it cannibalistic? Yeah. It is. It is. It's about, it's about institutionalized cannibalism in the future.

I am updates only on Twitter, but you will find out what I'm working on there. And I'm scum believable or just my own name there. And same on blue sky.

Thank you so much for having me.

It was... A real feel bad classic.

Yeah, so The Devil's Bath is set in the German Middle Ages, and it's about the historical practice of suicide by proxy, in which women who were going through really intense mental illness and...

were suicidal because they were so afraid of going to hell after committing suicide instead they would go and commit a mortal sin and then confess immediately so that they could be absolved and then executed by the state and the most common crime was infanticide or murdering a young child

Yeah. It is so. No, I mean, it's.

It's a great system you've built there, guys.

Yeah, absolutely. If that's how you believe the world works, that's what you should do.

You both go to heaven. Great. Oh, my God. That ending scene is so upsetting. It's so nasty.

We're going best to worst.

Yeah. Which is just like so mind-meltingly ghoulish.

What an awful... awful picture of like celebrity obsession and depersonalization and desensitization to the suffering of other people.

Yeah. That actress is really doing something really, really special. Yes. Disturbingly special. She's such a great combination of like normatively, marketably beautiful and just obviously insane.

I would have to say my number three spot goes to I Saw the TV Glow.

Oh, my God. So it's sort of like, it's by Jane Schoenbrun, who did We're All Going to the World's Fair. And they just do such a beautiful job sketching this portrait of someone who realizes as a teenager that... she's trans and then just stagnates and never emerges from that cocoon and becomes this miserable, self-minimized nothing of a person. It's also really sweet and hopeful and beautiful.

Some really horrific special effects.

oh my god okay so next i gotta what that's on my list what's what's next i would i people would probably fight with me over whether you could classify the whole thing as is horror but certainly the second entry is straightforwardly horror and i think you could you could make a case for the whole thing kinds of kindness the newest uh yorgos lentimos movie i I was blown away.

I really liked Poor Things last year. I really enjoyed it. And I thought this blew right past it.

Yeah. Interesting. Just incredibly smart, incredibly enigmatic, really unafraid of presenting mysteries and then just walking past them. Yeah.

I love her.

I mean, when. I want to turn on my TV. I want to have to pick between Hong Chao movies. Yeah.

It's incredible. It's so wild. That's incredible.

It's weird.

Oh, it's very weird. It feels in a lot of ways like sort of a great mid-century short fiction collection, you know, by G.K. Chesterton or like if O. Henry went insane.

Oh, it's so good.

That's just another thing I really love about Yorgos Lanthimos is that he's just really unashamedly horny.

And as a freak, I appreciate that.

It is. Substance is here. The substance is, in fact, my number five pick.

Fucking love this movie so much, Gretchen.

I had such a good, listen, it does, you know, like what are they trying to say with her eating all that food and stuff? Right. What does that mean? Who cares? Who cares? A great movie can have one nonsense failure and the substance is great. It is so mean. It is so dumb. I love it.

The beginning, I was a little... I was a little hesitant getting in. And then we got to the Margaret Qualley scenes and immediately the director just starts treating her like she's a living blow up doll with like no humanity, no interiority. And I started to see what they were doing. And I was like, Jesus Christ, this is great. These people are totally empty and dead. There's nothing.

You know who really blew me away, though, was Dennis Quaid. Ugh, that fucking shrimp.

Just the most revolting performance I've ever seen.

Nasty. Oh, God. His metal heels. Yeah. The smile. The horrible tan. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, you know, that's like the whole movie is just like, wow, I guess we're just going to deform and terrorize and murder ourselves in service to the dumbest thing imaginable. And we'll feel nothing about it. You know, we won't be happy.

Oh. I would say next is probably Love Lies Bleeding. I loved this movie. Katie O'Brien and Kristen Stewart. Amazing chemistry. It's very funny. It's nasty. It has really unexpected moments of bizarre hyper-violence.