Please note that the Horrorverse team is taking off next Friday, May 22nd for Memorial Day weekend.
We look forward to seeing you on Friday, May 29th.

Intro by Brian Cartwright | Bluesky | Letterboxd | Website

I am Brian Cartwright, a film critic, and I maintain the oft-neglected website rewindfee.com. I’m taking over this week because when I visited Los Angeles I discovered the city was in my blood and soul and I wager with reflection you’ll find it in yours too.

The first time I visited Los Angeles in February 2005, it rained while I was at Hollywood Forever. I had not rented a car and got caught in the downpour, where the atmosphere felt less like a tourist destination and more like a site of active, ancient defense. Angry geese guarded Hattie McDaniel’s monument, and Mel Blanc’s headstone offered a grim recontextualization of a cartoon sign-off I’d known since childhood. But it was the graves of Douglas Fairbanks Sr. and Jr. that truly shook me. With the elegant reflecting pool merging into the gray deluge of the storm, the site looked less like a tomb and more like an altar. Standing there, soaked and isolated, I felt as if I had stumbled upon the high holy place of a forgotten religion.

This is the headspace I occupy when I think about Hollywood as folk horror. Folk horror is often defined by the "Old Ways," which are rituals and belief systems that the modern world has consciously abandoned but which still hum beneath the surface. In Los Angeles, these Old Ways are not found in cornfields or apple orchards. They are found in the seemingly endless supply of murals of old Hollywood and the sacrifices made to maintain the image. The institution demands offerings. It requires the consumption of figures like George Reeves and Marilyn Monroe to sustain its own mythic weight. It is about the boundary between the human being and sacred idol.

Hollywood is a landscape of precarity governed by a cycle of constant immolation. It is an industry that routinely consumes past versions of itself, burying the history of places like Edendale to pave the way for the next iteration of the dream. This is a geography built on the unfulfilled promise of fantastic riches. It is a legacy of the postwar real estate boom where the silhouettes of oil derricks stood like skeletal totems promising wealth that rarely trickled down to the faithful.

The city has always been a hotbed for fringe beliefs, a place where the line between a studio and a sanctuary is dangerously thin. From the rattlesnakes Synanon mailed to its enemies to the paranoid compounds of the Manson Family and the sprawling, corporate hagiography of Scientology, Los Angeles functions as a laboratory for the desperate.

You put your identity into the machinery by working two or three jobs just to survive in the city while balancing the grind of auditions and callbacks. You participate in acting classes that range from worthless to outright scams. You wrestle with the temptation to cross over to the Valley, where the adult industry offers immediate money but threatens to burn any chance for mainstream legitimacy. You do all of this in the spring, hoping for a harvest of fame in the fall, a bounty of sweeping spotlights, screaming fans, and your name etched above the title on a glowing marquee, all while navigating a landscape haunted by its own foundational myth.

Brett Petersel | Bluesky | Instagram | Letterboxd & Sarah Stubbs | Bluesky | Instagram | Letterboxd | Website

Vinegar Syndrome and OCN Distribution are having their inaugural at Barnes and Noble through June 7th! Select titles are up to 50% off! Shop now!

Chattanooga Film Festival has announced their final wave of programming for this year's festival! The cinema suplex includes 3 more world premieres and a US premiere! You can get the full details and buy badges on their site!

While this news has popped up numerous times over the past few years, we finally have an update on the third Happy Death Day film. Jessica Rothe is on board for a third film, as is director Christopher Landon, for the at-this-moment titled film, Happy Death Day to Us.

It worked for American Psycho and The Evil Dead, so why not Paranormal Activity? That’s right, a stage adaptation of the popular 2007 film will be heading to New York City’s Broadway, where it will begin previews in mid-August before officially opening in mid-September.

Are you ready to ring in the new year with Art the Clown? After taking over Halloween and Christmas, Terrifier writer and director Damien Leone confirms (via Instagram) that Art will terrorize unsuspecting victims around New Year’s Eve! Returning are David Howard Thornton as Art the Clown and franchise favorite Lauren LaVera!

What do an early aughts Dracula film, a genre bending silent film, and an Italian self exploration by way of horror film have in common? They were all movies on Sarah's April Recommendations! You can read more about them and others in her full article!

HORROR FILMS THAT TAKE PLACE IN LOS ANGELES

Los Angeles is a hotbed of altars and sacrifices in the name. Brian Cartwright and the Horrorverse team have assembled a list of some of the best horror set in the city of stars! Check out the list on Letterboxd.

Jordan Peele’s NOPE captures that specific Los Angeles delusion: the belief that if you can just get it on film, the industry won't eventually consume you, too. It centers on the wreckage of Hollywood’s sacrificial history, specifically the erasure of the black jockey who served as the industry’s first literal motion picture. Framing the Hollywood machine as a biological predator, a hungry god demanding constant attention, the film turns the act of looking into a survival gamble. There is something profoundly unsettling about how the characters attempt to commodify a nightmare, treating lethal atmospheric terror as another production hurdle to be cleared. Check out the list on Letterboxd.

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Candi Norwood | Bluesky | Instagram | Letterboxd | StoryGraph | Website

As an East Coast human, my idea of LA is a bit of hand-wavy bottom half of California, so if my locations are inexact, maybe you should have thought of that before having California take up 2/3 of the U.S. Pacific coastline. That said, I do know that only a portion of Reluctant Immortals is in LA, but I’m still counting it.

Bury Your Gays by Chuck Tingle- Bury Your Gays is queer, funny, campy, horrifying, and full of Hollywood satire. Just when it seems Misha is about to achieve his ultimate goal – an Oscar win – he is asked to kill off the gay characters of his streaming series “for the algorithm”. Soon after refusing, he realizes he’s being stalked by monsters, but not just any monsters –he’s being attacked by his very own creations.

Maeve Fly by C.J. Leede- Playing a “theme park” (read: Disney) princess is enough to drive anyone off the edge, but I’m pretty sure Maeve started there. She’s actually really good at her job, and the kids love her, but this princess has a dark side. This is a wild, bloody ride and it won’t be for everyone, but if you don’t mind unlikeable main characters and your sex and (especially) violence on the extreme side, the dark humor is worth the novella length read.

Reluctant Immortals by Gwendolyn Kiste- If feminist Gothic horror is more your speed, check out Reluctant Immortals. Lucy Westera and Bertha Mason are undead immortals living in 1967 Los Angeles when the men who were responsible turn up in San Francisco, and they band together to go confront them. Who are those men? You may have recognized these women’s names – Lucy is one of Dracula’s victims, and Bertha is the “mad” attic-bound first wife of Jane Eyre’s Mr. Rochester.