Halloween Streaming Report 2026

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Halloween is rapidly approaching, which means many cinephiles & genre nerds out there are currently planning to cram in as many scary movies as we can over the next month. In that spirit, here’s a horror movie recommendation for every day in October from the Swampflix crew. Each title was positively reviewed on the blog or podcast in the past year and is currently available on streaming. Hopefully this helps anyone looking to add some titles to their annual horror binge. Happy hauntings!

Oct 1: Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983)

“I’ve been toying around with creating a bit of an ’80s kid horror syllabus’ lately, which has involved a first-time watch or a rewatch of some of the mini-genre’s greatest hits: The Watcher in the Woods, Labyrinth, Return to Oz, Paperhouse, The Dark Crystal, and, regrettably, Transylvania 6-5000. I remember being somewhat less than impressed with Something Wicked upon first viewing, but this time around, I found myself utterly captivated by it.” Currently streaming on Disney+

Oct 2: Demon Pond (1979)

“A surprisingly romantic Japanese folk horror with a moody Moog score. Floats somewhere between The Wicker Man and Wizard of Oz for most of its runtime, then it’ll swerve into a special effects showcase sequence unlike anything you’ve seen anywhere else.” Currently streaming on The Criterion Channel

Oct 3: The Doll (1962)

“A Swedish attempt to class up Psycho for the arthouse crowd that accidentally invents Peter Strickland’s whole deal in the process.” Currently streaming for free (with ads) on Tubi

Oct 4: Ramekin (2018)

“If Julio Torres and Quentin Dupieux were to collaborate on a project (with no budget), this would probably be the result. The ramekin, like the tire in Rubber, is a menacing figure despite being a faceless, inanimate object, but its ordinariness is exactly what makes it so strange.” Currently streaming for free (with a library card) on Hoopla and (with ads) Tubi

Oct 5: Flesh Eating Mothers (1988)

“Descriptions across different film-oriented websites vary, but all manage to touch on the major plot elements: across a small suburb, a series of women are all having affairs with the town horndog, eventually contracting sexually transmitted cannibalism, which the kids in the town must then try to cure. What that undersells is that this ‘cannibalism’ is sentient, self-aware zombism in all but name, and also that the ‘kids’ are, politely, not very convincing as high schoolers.” Currently streaming for free (with ads) on Tubi

Oct 5: I Married a Vampire (1987)

“You’re not going to get a lot of butts in seats for a movie in which a woman marries a vampire without titling that film I Married a Vampire, but that reveal would be a little more fun if you were able to go into a screening without that knowledge. Of course, the fact that marriage to a bloodsucker is the inevitable outcome of this story is made clear from the outset, when young Viola picks up her parents from the airport in an unnamed city; they’ve arrived in town after learning secondhand from Viola’s sister that she’s gotten married and are insistent on meeting her new husband. Of course, before she brings mom and dad home, she’s got to give them the whole story of how she met her undead husband …” Currently streaming for free (with ads) on Tubi

Oct 6: Habit (1995)

“Oh no, did I get so drunk last night that I had risky public sex with that mysterious hipster vampire chick? Again?!?” Currently streaming on Shudder and for free (with ads) Tubi

Oct 7: El Vampiro (1957)

“An early Mexican vampire movie that bridges the gap between classic Universal Monster & Hammer Horror aesthetics. Doesn’t do anything you haven’t seen before, but it’s got an excellent sense of Halloween decor. It’s the kind of movie where every surface is veiled behind a thick layer of cobwebs regardless of whether someone’s “living” in the space. It’s a pure pleasure for anyone who enjoys hanging out on foggy sound stages with flapping rubber bats (i.e., cool people, sexy people).” Currently streaming for free (with ads) on Pluto TV

Oct 8: The Vourdalak (2023)

“I know people in the industry are already struggling enough, but I really do believe all movies should be required to replace at least one human actor with a puppet, the more prominent the character the better.” Currently streaming on Shudder, for free (with a library card) on Kanopy & Hoopla, and (with ads) on Tubi

Oct 9: Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964)

“If the play and film Gaslight had never been produced, the psychological term that we take from it would instead be called ‘Sweet Charlotting’ or ‘Hush Hushing.'” Currently streaming for free (with a library card) on Hoopla

Oct 10: Relic (2020)

“Dementia is represented as a haunted house, although the early stages of the haunting present very similarly to demonic possession, which also gives this 2020 picture the feeling of being a more sensitive, more expensively shot Taking of Deborah Logan. It excises Deborah Logan’s found footage elements and is instead shot more traditionally, which makes for a more sumptuous viewing experience and, one might argue, a better movie.” Currently streaming on Shudder and for free (with a library card) on Kanopy

Oct 11: Tombs of the Blind Dead (1972)

“Horror nerds have already thoroughly mined every last golden nugget of vintage Italo horror schlock, so all that’s left to pick through is their Spanish equivalents. For your giallo fix, you can look to The Corruption of Chris Miller, and for your next late-night zombi flick you can look here.” Currently streaming on Shudder

Oct 12: Maniac Cop (1988)

“Whereas Larry Cohen’s It’s Alive asks, ‘What if there was a baby who was an ugly, homicidal maniac?’, his script for Maniac Cop asks, ‘What if there was a cop who was an ugly, homicidal maniac?’ It’s a surprisingly effective venture since, as you know, all cops are ugly, homicidal maniacs, which makes its source of fear lastingly relatable.” Currently streaming on Shudder, on Amazon Prime, for free (with a library card) on Kanopy, and (with ads) on Tubi

Oct 13: Species (1995)

“Decent enough for a mid-budget/mid-90s creature feature, but much more fun as a novelty mutation of the era’s erotic thriller craze. The only bummer is that we didn’t get even more movies based on Giger designs, so that this would feel less like an Alien knockoff and more like a routine entry in a wet-nightmare Gigersploitation subgenre.” Currently streaming on MGM+, for free (with a library card) on Kanopy & Hoopla, and (with ads) on Tubi

Oct 14: The Host (2006)

“In 2006, this was undoubtedly seen a bold new monster movie, but it lacks the timelessness of some of Bong’s other works; or perhaps what I mean to say is that if you already know Bong as an auteur after seeing some of his other films, this one may be a letdown, but if you approach it as a straight monster movie, you’re more likely to be satisfied.” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime and for free (with a library card) on Kanopy & Hoopla

Oct 15: Terror of Mechagodzilla (1975)

“Ishirō Honda exits the Godzilla series on a serious note, keeping all of the space alien invaders and remote-controlled kaiju that had crept into routine formula over the years but deciding to play them straight instead of goofy. He even makes the recycling of previous films’ footage feel elegant, playing it back in a 4-way splitscreen layout. His sincerity makes for some surprisingly compelling drama, to the point where you forget he also directed a couple of Godzilla’s silliest, flimsiest outings (namely King Kong vs Godzilla and All Monsters Attack).” Currently streaming on The Criterion Channel, on HBO Max, and for free (with ads) on The Roku Channel

Oct 16: Gorgo (1961)

“The poster promises monster mayhem “LIKE NOTHING YOU’VE EVER SEEN BEFORE”, then the monster looks exactly like Godzilla (now with ears) and the opening credits shamelessly borrow the King Kong font. Really makes you think.” Currently streaming on Shudder, for free (with a library card) on Hoopla, and (with ads) on Tubi

Oct 17: Demonwarp (1988)

“A bugnuts alien invasion movie hiding in plain sight as a mediocre sasquatch movie.” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime and for free (with ads) on Tubi

Oct 18: Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers (1988)

“Angela skips several rites of passage in the slasher villain evolutionary chain and goes straight into ‘Ain’t I a stinker?’ goofball mode.” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime and for free (with ads) on Tubi

Oct 19: Death Metal Zombies (1995)

“An SOV backyard metalsploitation relic that’s way more interested in quirky character comedy than it is in staging the expected gore gags. Wall to wall metal tunes playing over the goofiest line readings this side of Motern Media. In a word, adorable. Evangelical Christians who believe metalheads are devil worshipping, child murdering psychopaths should be forced to watch this so they can see the truth: they’re just dorks in black t-shirts.” Currently streaming for free (with ads) on Tubi

Oct 20: Nekromantik (1988)

“A German geek show about a perverted couple who use a human corpse as a marital aid in bed. I don’t say this lightly, but the most shocking thing about it is how tender & sensual the ‘threesome’ sex is in practice, despite it also being, you know, unforgivably vile.” Currently streaming on Shudder

Oct 21: Phantom of the Opera (1925)

“Okay wow this really is a macabre masterpiece, to the point where no Best of All Time horror list is complete without it. It’s not just on those out of duty & obligation & kudos for Chaney’s makeup.” Currently streaming on Shudder, for free (with a library card) on Kanopy, and (with ads) on Tubi

Oct 22: The Mummy (1932)

“A harrowing reminder to never pilfer cultural artifacts for museum exhibits, never dismiss ancient curses as ‘mumbo jumbo’, and never forget to wear your sunscreen.” Currently streaming on Peacock

Oct 23: The Mummy (1999)

“A lot of the CGI here will look dated to the modern eye, even to those of us who remember this as being an extravaganza of realist effects. A lot of it still works because its uncanniness can be excused as a matter of course for a horror flick, but the CGI Thebes stands out as particularly video game-esque. The rewatch of this was prompted by the recent release of Lee Cronin’s Mummy, but the timing happened to align with Passover having recently happened, and I realized I had always thought of this as a kind of Passover movie, a secular alternative to The Ten Commandments that also happened to contain the plagues. (Toads and frogs are one of the ones that are left out, presumably because every amphibian wrangler in Hollywood was working on Magnolia at the time.)” Currently streaming for free (with ads) on Tubi

Oct 24: 13 Ghosts (1960)

“Plays like William Castle’s backdoor pilot for a Munsters/Addams-style spooky TV sitcom.” Currently streaming for free (with ads) on Tubi

Oct 25: The Invisible Man (1933)

“Sure, The Invisible Man is an unrepentant mass murderer, but he also mostly uses his invisibility powers to slap around and humiliate cops, so I don’t have it in my heart to condemn him. This quite possibly the greatest mad scientist film of all time, and if it’s not that’s only because James Whale already bested himself with Frankenstein.” Currently streaming on Peacock

Oct 26: Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954)

“Gorgeous picture. I wonder if James Cameron struggles with the knowledge that underwater 3D filmmaking was already perfected months (months!) before he was born.” Currently streaming on Peacock

Oct 27: Forbidden Planet (1957)

“Flying saucers, laser battles, psychic monsters, synthesizers, a cute robot, a mini-skirted alien babe, mid-century modern decor: the Platonic ideal of Atomic Age sci-fi.” Currently streaming for free (with ads) on Tubi

Oct 28: The Toxic Avenger II (1989)

“Much more wholesome than the Toxic Avenger’s first outing. It’s mostly a Troma travelogue, with Toxie reporting on his Tokyo vacation with the same childlike cadence as Big Bird traveling on assignment.” Currently streaming on Shudder, on Amazon Prime, for free (with a library card) on Kanopy, and (with ads) on Tubi

Oct 29: Brain Damage (1988)

“Incredibly funny to discover the monster sounds like That after so many years of only seeing him in still images. It’s the kind of vocal performance you’d expect in a Rankin Bass cartoon and not the sleaziest horror comedy to ever disgrace the streets of NYC.” Currently streaming for free (with a library card) on Kanopy

Oct 30: Evil Dead II (1987)

“Only a fool would wait decades for a Hollywood studio to remake their calling card indie film with bigger, slicker production values. Best to scrape the money together to do it yourself before anyone else gets to it.” Currently streaming on HBO Max and for free (with a library card) on Kanopy

Oct 31: Orgy of the Dead (1965)

“I found this punishingly boring as a college-era VHS rental, outside a few Criswell line readings that we would quote from time to time. Now that I’m 40, there’s nothing I’d rather be doing than watching an endless nudie cutie striptease on an ooky-spooky graveyard set. Glad to know I’ve matured over the years.” Currently streaming on Mubi

-The Swampflix Crew

Hope (2026)

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Hope is the latest film from The Wailing director Na Hong-jin. Early reactions were fairly mixed, and now having seen the film myself, I can understand why. For much of its run, Hope is an exciting action thriller, with thrilling chase scenes, suspenseful sequences, and quiet moments of humanity. All of this works quite well, especially when we see less of the monster(s) that are running around and causing trouble, but once we do see them, it takes a downhill turn before ending on a truly bizarre note, one that comes after a film that’s a little too long for its own good.

Ko Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min) is the police chief of Hope Harbor, a South Korean village that abuts the Demilitarized Zone, the population of which is made up largely of elderly people and supermodel-hot younger folks. He’s summoned by his cousin Ko Sung-ki (Zo In-sung) to the site of a mutilated cow that Sung-ki and his fellow hunters discovered in the middle of the road. The cow’s corpse shows evidence of being attacked by some large animal with razor-sharp claws, which the hunters convince Bum-seok a tiger must have been responsible for despite the unlikelihood that a large cat would have been able to cross the minefields that lie between them and the rest of the continent. Upon returning to town, Bum-seok learns that several other locals have been killed, and his attempts to call in additional manpower are rebuffed due to wildfires that are raging elsewhere, prompting him to ally with a retired colonel named Ahn Nak-yeon (Lee Sang-hee), whom he finds hiding in a culvert after his own encounter with the monster. Out of sight, the monster rages on, as it leaves a trail of broken bodies and buildings in its wake. After Bum-seok accidentally shoots and kills a local who was hiding from the monster, he ends up facing the creature itself and narrowly escapes only because of assistance from his rocket launcher-toting rookie, Im Sung-ae (Jung Ho-yeon). After a long and costly conflict, the monster is killed, and its body turned over to a local surgeon to perform an autopsy, although she’s not able to cut through the creature’s hide with anything less than a chainsaw. Sung-ae assists with triage in a makeshift hospital, where she learns from one of the locals that he had seen several of the creatures in the woods, indicating that the danger is far from over. Elsewhere, Sung-ki and his hunting buddies are still looking for the tiger that threatens the village when they stumble upon a crashed spaceship in the forest, one that has a control room that features seating and buttons for very, very large crewmembers.

The creatures here are the film’s weakest point, in multiple ways. The alien designs are unique, and it’s a mark in the film’s favor that they’re individually designed with distinctive textures and faces, but that does not necessarily mean that they’re good. Western actors like Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander, and Lost in Space’s Taylor Russell are credited here, and I suppose you can see the resemblance between them and the aliens that they voice (in an alien language) if you look hard enough, but I’m at a loss to understand what they bring to the film other than marquee appeal outside of Korea. The quality with which they are rendered on screen varies wildly from scene to scene, with some sequences looking like they were built for a PS2 game while others are smoother and more convincing. They’re a much more threatening presence when they’re not onscreen, when dismembered bodies are discovered in collapsing buildings or the only evidence of their presence is the far-off sounds of gunfire cut short by screaming. Characters can see over rooftops that cars are being thrown around like toys, and it’s quite effective.

I can concede that it’s likely that we’re meant to find the aliens uncannily human but off-putting considering the revelation that they are intelligent creatures seeking a lost child, who has already been killed by a hillbilly taxidermist named Yang-bae (Eum Moon-suk, a handsome former K-pop star who’s saddled with goofy teeth). The intention is to induce fear and then humanize them; I get that. I just don’t feel that it’s very successful, and it’s not all entirely down to the design. For one thing, this isn’t exactly new ground, given that the “man is the real monster” isn’t a novel monster-movie concept at this point, and the reason it’s so well-worn is because it forces the audience to look inward at their own prejudices. Here, however, the blame for the interspecies conflict falls solely in the lap of a trigger-happy bumpkin. No one is going to look at this man onscreen and see themselves, and it’s a change from the formula that demonstrates why the trope exists in the first place. There’s also a lot of sudden and unexpected lore that ends up being shoehorned in during the film’s final act, belabored exposition that largely comes via the form of not-very-interesting dialogue between Vikander and Fassbender (I mean, um … let me check my notes here … “J’aur” and “Ma’veyyo”). Some of it re-establishes what we’ve already gleaned from the scenes with our human characters, including their search for the missing alien child, but it also drops several extra-terrestrial proper nouns that are a lot to try and take in after two hours of runtime that was mostly a humans-versus-monsters movie. 

This is a film that feels incomplete, and it’s not just the cliffhanger ending that gives it that quality. Hope doesn’t feel like half of a narrative; it feels like a 95% complete monster film and a 35% complete sci-fi epic. That adds up to more than 100%, of course, which is reflected in the film’s whopping 156 minute runtime. That should be more than enough to tell a complete story, but it doesn’t. There are dangling plot threads on the human side that are left to be resolved in a sequel if one is made, most notably the fallout of Bum-seok’s shooting of a non-combatant, but it’s almost all the way there. The alien side of things is just getting started, with the sudden crashing of another, larger spaceship into a mountain on the horizon near the film’s conclusion, and all of the political machinations that are implied by the too-late info dump, which isn’t of interest to me in the slightest. Given that Na is known for releasing films at a glacial pace (the aforementioned The Wailing was his last picture, and it was released in 2016), it’s strange to me that he would create a film so open-ended and demanding of a sequel. Worse, Hope features such great action sequences that it demands to be seen on a big screen, but the ultimate experience is so taxing that it is a film that will work best when you’re at home and can take bathroom breaks, where the horseback battle with a galloping alien creature isn’t going to hit as hard. 

All of this sounds pretty negative, but I’m not trying to talk you out of experiencing the film. Reports that it is the best monster movie in years are no more an exaggeration than critical responses that the film is an overlong, narratively confused beast. Going in with that knowledge, I think you’ll still find plenty to enjoy; just caffeinate beforehand and feel free to run to the restroom when the aliens start talking to one another.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Resident Evil (2026)

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Screaming Mad George passed away this year, and there hasn’t been nearly enough public mourning over that loss for my taste. The 80s gore wizard was so uniquely talented as a visual artist (as especially evident in his collaborations with director Bryan Yuzna) that he would get special title card credits like “surrealistic make-up effects by Screaming Mad George” or “surrealistic visual design by Screaming Mad George,” each well earned by the mutant freak shows that would follow in all-timer gross-outs like Society, The Guyver, and Freaked!. The recent announcement of George’s passing was quietly received by the general movie-loving public, so it was nice to see him finally, properly honored by the surrealistic gore effects of Zach Cregger’s new Resident Evil adaptation, even if the homage was unintentional or indirect. The snowbound setting, mutated dogs, and tentacled humanoids of Resident Evil are naturally drawing a lot of comparisons to Rob Bottin’s legendary creature effects for The Thing, but I still felt the presence of George’s screaming-mad spirit in the theater opening weekend. There’s something about the anything-goes nightmare reconfigurations of the human form in Resident Evil‘s creature designs that can’t help but recall Screaming Mad George’s calling-card works in addition to Bottin’s, and I think it’s beautiful that you can now find the fucked-up surrealistic ideas he developed in a major studio adaptation of a video game playing in every multiplex across America. It used to be that you had to go to the video store to rent disreputable schlock like Silent Night Deadly Night 4: Initiation to see what screaming-mad stuff George was cooking up; now it’s being projected on thousands of screens nationwide.

It probably says something about the current moment in mainstream filmmaking that a splatter-gore horror comedy based on a video game feels like a no-brainer sure thing for a major studio to produce, when a few decades ago it would’ve been budgeted as a direct-to-video B-picture. Zach Cregger cashed in his industry clout after the unlikely success of his Oscar-winning whatsit Weapons to make the grossest, gnarliest horror comedy he could manage, timed perfectly to the industry’s current shift away from superhero actioners to memeable horrors and video game IP. There are no discernible themes or metaphors behind most of the imagery in Resident Evil. Instead of playing into the “elevated” trauma-metaphor horror trends of the past decade, it operates on pure video game logic. Weapons favorite Austin Abrams stars as a gig-economy worker who’s tasked to deliver a medical cooler to the zombie shoot-em-up game’s infamous Raccoon City headquarters, where a science lab is desperately awaiting his arrival. Along the way, it becomes clear that Raccoon City is ground zero for some kind of body-transforming virus breakout, making the delivery comically impossible as Abrams is attacked by one undead mutant freak after another. Structurally, it’s an all-in-one-night story built on crisis-to-crisis problem solving, like an absurdly gory redux of After Hours or Miracle Mile. Experientially, it feels like playing a video game as an unskilled novice, with Abrams’s in-over-his-head delivery driver voicing the audience’s overwhelmed, underprepared reactions to each unholy tentacled beast that lunges at him as if he were operating a game console controller instead of a real-world human body. Everything that happens to him is a nightmare, but it’s all for our low-stakes, time-passing entertainment.

It may sound like I’m downplaying Resident Evil‘s artistic merits by characterizing it as a themeless video game playthrough, but that is not my intent. It took Paul W.S. Anderson and Mila Jovovich five Resident Evil adaptations before they realized that this premise plays best as a playthrough spookshow in 2012’s Retribution, whereas Cregger’s vision for the property is immediately, sharply clear-eyed. Video-game storytelling tropes are a major asset to making sure this latest adaptation feels fresh and of-the-moment. In most instances, a CGI-animated throwback to practical gore effects of the Screaming Mad George era would feel disappointingly stale, but Resident Evil is just inventive enough in its constantly mutating creature designs and just modern enough in its video game puzzle-solving narrative to dig itself out of that 80s nostalgia pit. In a time when most directors are afraid to set their horror stories in the current moment because of the intrusive presence of smartphones, Cregger is one of the few who understands how those phones can add to his movie’s scares instead of detracting from them. The cold, isolated beam of the flashlight app on Abrams’s phone as he navigates the haunted house setting of each video-game-level sequence is essential to the movie’s visual palette and, by extension, to its modernity. Likewise, there’s something of-the-moment in the delivery dude’s under-his-breath jokiness as he’s assaulted by one brain-breaking mutant monstrosity after another, since that’s just what it feels like to leave the house to accomplish any basic task in recent years. All public life is an anxiety-inducing horror video game, but you do have to play along (if not only to make a little money), so the only option, really, is to joke to yourself along the way. I won’t claim that Resident Evil is the first or the best movie to modernize that screaming-mad 80s splatterfest sensibility to the current moment; it’s got titles like Deadstream, The Substance, and Cregger’s own Barbarian to compete with for those superlatives. It is super impressive to see that sensibility blown up to this major-studio scale, though, and it’s a hoot to holler at with first-weekend horror crowds instead of quietly watching it alone on a rented VHS tape.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: The Trial (1962)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss Orson Welles’s surreal legal-thriller Kafka adaptation The Trial (1962), starring Anthony Perkins as Josef K.

00:00 Welcome
04:50 Fan Fiction: A Mem-Noir (2021) by Brent Spiner
12:02 Deathtrap (1982)
23:46 Slacker (1990)

36:08 The Trial (1962)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Cigarettes in Paradise

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How Many Cigarettes? is the dirtbag slacker equivalent of fellow movie-metric website Does the Dog Die?. Instead of measuring movies by their tally of potential trauma-triggers (such as gratuitous canine deaths), How Many Cigarettes? tallies the number of cigarettes smoked onscreen. If its characters rip enough cigs to reach a one-smoke-every-5-minutes runtime ratio, a movie automatically qualifies as “A Real Smoker Movie,” since its audience could conceivably chainsmoke throughout it without ever having to smoke alone. How Many Cigarettes? is a decidedly tongue-in-cheek project, one my friend Leigh started as an ex-smoker who still recognizes the allure of a cinematic cigarette and a life-pausing smoke break. The project is even more thorough than it is silly, though, capturing dozens of screengrabs each from hundreds of movies so people can get a quick glimpse of how many cigarettes are smoked in classics like Jurassic Park (7), GoodFellas (53), Mulholland Drive (7), and Casablanca (124!). As arbitrary as that metric may seem at first, it has forever altered how I watch movies. Once you start looking for cigarettes, it’s hard to stop. I remember sitting next to Leigh at a local screening of Almodóvar’s High Heels and had to ask if the pregnant woman smoking onscreeen counted as two cigarettes, since she was technically smoking for two. He seemed amused by the question, but my guess is that the hardline answer is it only counted as one cig. When you’re collecting raw data for “Real Smoker Movie” metrics, these distinctions really matter.

The How Many Cigarettes? project reached its natural zenith this week when Leigh presented a Gap Tooth screening of Aki Kaurismäki’s dead-eyed 1986 romcom Shadows in Paradise at The Broad. He introduced the film—Kaurismäki’s finest work, from what I’ve seen—as a core title in the Real Smoker Movie canon, citing it as the movie that first inspired him to start counting cigs in the first place. There are 71 cigarettes smoked in Shadows in Paradise, which is impressive for a film only 74 minutes in length. In the hand-illustrated zine he produced to accompany the screening, Leigh writes, “The number of cigarettes smoked here seems like a joke. Almost every scene has between 1 and 9 people smoking cigarettes.” He’s right. Once you start counting, the rate of cigarettes being lit from scene to scene becomes outright comical. Every single conversation is punctuated with the flick of a lighter, pulls on a filter, and the stamping of a cherry. And yet, it’s honestly something I didn’t notice the first time I watched the film back in 2021, alongside the other Kaurismäki classics The Match Factory Girl, The Man Without a Past, and The Other Side of Hope. Growing up in the 80s & 90s, chainsmoking just seemed like a normal, everyday part of adulthood, back when my dad would smoke entire packs of Marlboro Golds indoors, as if he were enjoying a snack or a soda. So, watching the despondent, lovelorn characters of Kaurismäki’s Helsinki chat over a constant procession of smoke breaks just felt natural to the movie’s time & place. Rewatching the movie through the How Many Cigarettes? filter, though, some of the cigarette-specific images do feel intentionally comical, like when Matti Pellonpää appears smoking while wearing sunglasses indoors, hiding his romantic heartbreak behind a costumey idea of vintage rock ‘n’ roll cool. The cigarettes are both artificial movie props and natural urban decor. They are essential to the movie’s mise-en-scène.

Something I did notice about Shadows in Paradise the first time I watched it was all the trash. There are enough standalone shots of wet garbage in the film to inspire a How Many Cigarettes? sister site that measures movies by their literal trashiness, per-pound. Pellonpää stars as a lonely garbage man who slowly, carefully sparks a romance with a jaded grocery store clerk, played by fellow Kaurismäki regular Kati Outinen. In genre terms, it’s an awkwardly stilted romcom, delivered in a proto-Wes Anderson flat affect as the blue-collar pair gradually earn equal footing in each other’s esteem one smoke break at a time. From a broader view, it offers stray documentary glimpses into 1980 Finnish waste treatment processes, trailing Pellonpää from dumpster to dumpster as he hauls away endless heaps of trash. His social status as a garbage man directly plays into his dateability too, as his only viable romantic foil is a middle-manager yuppie dipshit who lords over a trendy clothing store. Outinen seems a little embarrassed to be dating a garbage collector, but it’s still instantly obvious that she won’t be able to make it last with the yuppie, because it’s impossible to picture her sharing a cigarette with him behind a grocery store dumpster. Pellonpää knows his way around an ashtray, though, and his social status as a trash-hauling beer guzzler can be adorable in its own way, once you get past the smell. There’s a pitch-black urban despair to Shadows in Paradise that echoes throughout Kaurismäki’s other works, but it’s mostly one of set dressing & social circumstance, as typified by its empty beer bottles and crushed cigarette butts. It’s ultimately a very sweet love story, though, a romcom that deals exclusively in deadpan whimsy.

If there’s anything direct Kaurismäki was attempting to signal to his audience through all of the onscreen trash & cigarettes, it’s that Shadows in Paradise is meant to be a love story for The People. He even went as far as to group it with The Match Factory Girl & Ariel as his official “Proletariat Trilogy.” It probably means something, for instance, that when Pellonpää & Outinen exit the film via cruise ship for a makeshift honeymoon, the vessel is decorated with the Communist hammer & sickle. Likewise, How Many Cigarettes? is a movie database for The People, decidedly unpretentious in its selections and open for collaboration with its patrons. Leigh has opened the database up for volunteer contributions, which you can find information about on the site’s About page. Even more generously, he has uploaded a printable copy of the “Every Cigarette Smoked in Aki Kaurismäki’s Shadows in Paradise” zine, which includes a brush-pen illustration of every cigarette smoked in the movie, along with a leaderboard of some Real Smoker Movie heavy-hitters like The Bikeriders (104), Road House (71), The French Dispatch (86), and Smithereens (37). Print yourself a copy and poke around the website the next time you’re bored on a smoke break or just looking for your next Movie Night selection, to be determined by one absurdly specific metric.

-Brandon Ledet

Nuclear Missed Connections

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Ross McElwee’s landmark 1985 documentary Sherman’s March is now back in circulation, pristinely restored and streaming VOD for anyone who’s already watched every episode of How To with John Wilson and is searching for their next softspoken doomsayer fix. At first glance, Sherman’s March appears to be wryly narcissistic, with McElwee spending nearly three hours overanalyzing his own trivial romantic foibles instead of directly tackling the historical topic he was granted money to document. It’s not so much the Civil War military campaign of Sherman March‘s title that has been lingering with me in the weeks since I first saw the film, though. I’ve instead found myself dwelling on the significance of its subtitle, A Meditation on the Possibility of Romantic Love in the South During an Era of Nuclear Proliferation. Like everyone else raised during the existential uncertainty of the Cold War, McElwee can’t help but filter his personal decisions and worldview through the lens of imminent nuclear annihilation. What, ultimately, would be the point making a romantic connection in the end times of the 1980s, given that the push of a few buttons could end all human existence the entire planet over at any given minute? In practice, the potential for nuclear war doesn’t directly affect McElwee’s love life all that much in Sherman’s March, except during the stretch where he romantically pursues a nuclear disarmament activist. The threat of nuclear holocaust does quietly hum in the background throughout the picture, though, as intentionally provoked by its subtitle. It was, presumably, a constant hum in the background of everything in that era, as I’ve continued to hear it humming in the couple other late-80s, early-90s titles that I’ve happened to catch in the past couple weeks since writing about Sherman’s March.

I mostly threw on 1988’s Miracle Mile because it offered a rare opportunity to see Anthony Edwards in a lead role outside the television show I’m currently binge-watching: ER. Even better, Edwards’s love interest in the film is played by Mare Winningham, who had a brief run as Edwards’s maniacally obsessed stalker on ER and who also recently married him in real life after a long-simmering infatuation. That odd, bittersweet connection between the two actors is only amplified by Miracle Mile, which initially plays like a video store-era romcom before it blows up into a nuclear disaster epic. Edwards stars as a bitterly sarcastic Los Angeleno who finally finds a woman he vibes with in the desperately lonely, phony West Coast city — a devil-may-care free spirit played by Winningham. Unfortunately, they only go on one sweetheart date before Edwards receives the payphone call that ruins everything.  A stranger on the other end of the line tells him that the world is about to end and the bombs are already on their way, so Edwards scrambles to recruit a crew of fellow survivors from an all-night diner to escape the fallout, in a prototype for Gore Verbinki’s recent apocalyptic satire Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die. Only, no one can manage to catch the first helicopter out of town because everyone has someone in their life they want to take with them to safety, delaying departure to disastrous results. For Edwards’s sadsack lead, that special someone is a girl he just met, which would be sweetly romantic if it weren’t for the fact that both of their faces will likely be melted off by a nuclear blast before they get a chance to properly smooch. If it weren’t for Miracle Miles‘s moody synth score from Tangerine Dream, you could mistake its opening half for an old-school Hollywood romcom. Once the bombs are on their way, though, things get increasingly bleak, and the “possibility of romantic love in […] an era of nuclear proliferation” only gets bleaker by the minute until the story abruptly ends at the bleakest moment imaginable.

In the broadest terms, Miracle Mile does function as a comedy, but it’s also a city-wide portrait of a Cold War community in distress. Tonally, it’s the Los Angeles version of Scorsese’s After Hours, just as funny as it is stressful. The geographic specificity of its setting and the maniacally episodic nature of Edwards’s interactions with his fellow freaked-out Los Angelenos also reminded me a lot of McElwee’s romantic missed connections in Sherman’s March in ways I didn’t expect, given the disparity in the two films’ chosen genres. Likewise, I didn’t expect to be dwelling on that same topic yet again while watching Richard Linklater’s 1990 debut Slacker, which recently screened at The Broad’s repertory Gap Tooth series. Linklater himself appears on camera in the opening scene of Slacker to lay out the film’s episodic structure. He plays an aimless Gen-X slacker who’s too overwhelmed by the infinite possibilities of life to make any significant choice about what to do with himself, since every path he could take is just as valid and justifiable as the other. This apparently extends to his indecision on what story to tell, as Slacker spends an entire day hopping from one conversation to another down the sun-damaged streets of Austin, Texas, eavesdropping on a nonstop parade of absurdly verbose underachievers as they ramble about whatever’s on their empty minds, one thought at a time. Like the regional South of Sherman’s March and the late-night Los Angeles of Miracle Mile, the Austin of Slacker is revealed to the audience through broad communal portraiture, with every chatty loser who crosses the screen just as worthy of their own day-in-the-life portrait as the next. Like in the other two movies, Slacker also finds its community psychologically fucked up by the constant threat of nuclear obliteration, as expressed in random characters’ paranoid political rants and in one specific weirdo’s video-art instillation that loops nuclear test footage across a haphazard collection of cathode-ray TVs. Only, Linklater’s proudly unambitious characters appear to be preemptively operating as if the world has already ended, without waiting for the bombs to actually go off. It’s long been over, and everyone who’s left hanging around after our undetected apocalypse has their own crackpot theories on how it happened and how humanity can best spend our time toiling in the rubble.

I was a lot more charmed by Slacker than I usually am by Linklater’s low-effort Gen-X posturings, if not only because its turned-on, tuned-in, dropped-out hipsterdom spoke to a larger political sentiment within its contemporary moment (something his later, bigger-budgeted works would repeatedly attempt to recreate with no discernible thematic point at all). As one Austinite slacker puts it, “Withdrawing in disgust is not the same thing as apathy.” Admittedly, I also enjoyed the movie simply because I enjoyed hanging around the late-80s Austin scene populated by its various losers & eccentrics. Sure, it’s overrun with twentysomething stoner philosophers who are way too confident that they understand How the World Works for kids who haven’t yet lived a real life, but there’s something undeniably charming about their zen-like collective naivete. I also found myself getting excited by minor details specific to that exact Austin moment, like the deranged conman rant from Butthole Surfers drummer Teresa Nervosa or the brief sound of Daniel Johnston’s chord organ playing in a passing car (or, even more particularly, the appearance of Johnston’s one-time girlfriend Kathy McCarty, who gives extensive interviews about his life & art in The Devil and Daniel Johnston). It’s impossible to love every crazed Austinite who spouts their own personal conspiracy theories about our post-apocalyptic planet in Slacker, but it’s easy to love the city that allows them blow around in the Texas breeze like human tumbleweeds, jobless and relatively carefree. The same goes for the late-night diner patrons of Miracle Mile and the genteel, Southern-accented women of Sherman’s March. As individuals, they can be grating or alarming, but as broader communities, they’re a joy to spend time with. That’s why it’s so tragic that time is running out for them, that the doomsday clock is tirelessly ticking away. Each of these Cold War communal portraits find their doomed citizens scrambling to make meaningful connections with each other while the threat of nuclear apocalypse looms outside the frame. They all make a point to portray a version of humanity that is worth saving while also acknowledging that it’s likely too late to stop the bombs from going off anyway. Thank your lucky stars that it’s not the 1980s anymore, and it no longer feels like we’re living pointless lives in the earliest hours of the apocalypse. It might be difficult to fully enjoy each other’s company knowing that we’ve already reached the beginning of the end.

-Brandon Ledet

Welcome Space Brothers (2026)

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It’s been a good year for new documentaries about vintage public access television. The succinctly titled Public Access offered a broad retrospective of public access TV in NYC’s punk & hippie days, the Robin Byrd profile Bang My Box took a deep dive into the pornier waters of those NYC TV shows, and now the UFO cult profile Welcome Space Brothers has jumped coasts to cover the Californian public-access cinema of the Unarius Academy of Science. Well, calling Welcome Space Brothers “new” is somewhat of a stretch. It has spent several years in distribution limbo since its initial festival premieres (the same limbo where Public Access now lingers), but the warm-hearted UFO cult documentary is currently enjoying a city-by-city road tour and recently screened at The Broad. Like this year’s other public access TV docs, it introduces an alluring archive of outsider-art filmmaking from America’s recent weirdo past: a series of indoctrination videos from a Californian cult who believe space aliens are arriving soon to free mankind from the intergalactic trauma echoing from our past lives. It might be the most useful of the trio for audiences who like to do their own exploring, though, since some of the psychotronic “psychodrama” movies it covers are accessible on The Internet Archive instead of being trapped on a private collector’s moldy VHS tapes. You can easily go learn the “science fact” of Unarius’s science fiction UFO-landing movies anytime you’re bored enough to open your heart to another world.

From the outside, Welcome Space Brothers might appear to be a true crime exposé of a shadowy cult organization with a nefarious leader and brainwashed membership, but it’s immediately apparent that Unarius is largely harmless as a collective. It says a lot that the cult itself has been promoting this documentary’s various screening dates through their mailing lists, which I know first-hand as a subscriber who was auto-enrolled after buying a copy of their most notorious production, 1980’s The Arrival, from their archaic website. To the cult, Welcome Space Brothers is a potential recruitment tool, amplifying the reach of their cosmic message far beyond the puny broadcasting capabilities of San Diego-era public access channels, where they started. To most audiences, it reads as a true crime picture without the crime, exposing a secluded community of mysterious cultists as a kind of eccentric art collective. Instead of blowing the doors off Unarius headquarters to reveal abuses of power hidden inside, it mostly just finds a collection of lonely dorks making psychotronic video art together about their favorite subjects: the trauma of their own past lives and the space aliens who are soon to liberate us from those recursive shackles. They’re mostly playing arts & crafts, developing their own unique house style of gawdy drag revue sci-fi kitsch, as beautifully captured in their 70s & 80s heyday of backyard communal filmmaking. As the title suggests, they have nothing to hide. They’re welcoming you in.

Welcome Space Brothers is most useful as a guided tour of Unarius’s pre-existing cinematic output, which can be bewildering to outsiders. It’s not especially substantial as a standalone piece, but it does a great job chronicling the various inner-circle power struggles that shaped Unarius’s golden years, which is essential insight for fully comprehending the communal therapy aspects of the group’s psychotronic theatre. It’s an insular scene with its own designated faces & heels, as lorded over by the cosmic fairy godmother Ruth “Uriel” Norman, whose space-alien drag queen persona was in itself a communal art project. It’s clear when you spend some time with Unarius’s cinematic output that The Arrival is their most fully realized grand-scale art project, reaching delirious heights of video art sci-fi psychedelia the group never achieved before or since; it’s just not clear why until you better understand the behind-the-scenes dynamics of the various weirdos who made these pictures, since everyone but Uriel was stripped of personal attribution in the credits. Welcome Space Brothers explains the real human drama behind the major Unarius titles, which initially earned their ironic so-bad-it’s-good notoriety from local stoners who caught them out of context on late night public-access broadcasts. You could even feel that shift happening in real time at The Broad, where the crowd’s initial titters & jeers at the cult’s absurdity slowly quieted down as we got to know the eccentric characters as individuals, each worthy of intergalactic love & empathy. They’re the only cult I’ve ever trusted with my home address, and I’m excited to be further indoctrinated by their psychodrama videos now that I better understand them as communal diaries rather than as pure aesthetic objects.

-Brandon Ledet

Onslaught (2026)

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How much of a purist are you about Halloween? Do you wait until October 1st to start your annual horror movie binge, or does Spooky Season start in your household the second summer ends? Regardless of your personal timetable, the new Adam Wingard actioner Onslaught has already officially fired the starting pistol for this year’s Halloween season. The genre-ambiguous John Carpenter homage opens with actress Adria Arjona aiming automatic assault rifles at her backyard collection of Halloween-branded jack-o-lanterns, spraying the desert landscape with pumpkin guts and bullet casings. It’s an image that calls into question whether Onslaught will be veering more towards action, horror, horror-action, or action-horror, then declares, “Who cares? Let’s get out there and smash some pumpkins!”

Wingard reteams with screenwriter Simon Barrett to indulge in the same action-horror mixture they played with in previous cult breakouts You’re Next & The Guest, this time applied to a limited-location siege picture set in a rural trailer park. After a nearby top-secret government science lab (headed by Dan Stevens as a Nazi mad scientist) loses track of its collection of undead supersoldier mutants in an experiment gone horribly wrong, a single mother (Arjona) finds herself defending her modest trailer park fiefdom and the poor innocent souls who reside there (most importantly, Eric Warheim as the local deputy drunk and Reginald VelJohnson as the war vet with a heart of tarnished gold). The world of Onslaught is sparse and underpopulated, but the personalities who fill it are cartoonishly big, especially the Nazi mutant killing machines that attack innocent civilians with a chainsaw, meat cleaver, and guns galore. It’s a military thriller shot and edited like a monster movie, with constant stylistic references to Carpenter’s oeuvre in its synths, text, and squibs.

Onslaught makes some vague onscreen gestures towards contemporary political commentary, but they’re more implied than explored. The opening credits play over a chaotic crash course in the past few decades of American military evils, catching the audience up to the exact fascistic moment we’re currently suffering: the one where the government has deployed a heavily armed, morally unscrupulous army of subhuman freaks against its own everyday civilians. The roided-out zombie mutants that escape containment in the first act are mostly hidden from view as shadowy silhouettes, presented as a force of supernatural evil devoid of any discernible humanity. Once we get a good look at them, though, it’s clear they’ve been costumed to recall federal ICE agents, with makeshift face coverings continuing to obscure their personhood and only the pinhole lights of their inhuman eyes left visible to the public. They make for legitimately scary movie monsters, and they directly echo imagery recently broadcast on the national news.

Politically, I don’t think Onslaught has any more to say about ICE’s state-sanctioned public executions than the vintage VHS title Maniac Cop had to say about maniac cops; it just recognizes that these militarized mutant C.H.U.D.s are scary to the average everyday citizen and exploits that fear to spin an entertaining yarn. Emotionally, there isn’t much to latch onto in the film either. Our gun-nut heroine’s hyperviolent efforts to protect her daughter and her tenants get the heart pumping by injecting it with adrenaline, not by pulling at the strings. This is largely a for-its-own-sake stylistic exercise designed to stoke easy nostalgia for action-horror-loving mouthbreathers, pitched at a DTV-tolerant audience but performed by grossly overqualified cast & crew (including brief glimpses of Rebecca Hall as the Nazi scientist’s wife/dominatrix). It is delicious, though, like a piece of Halloween candy unwrapped a month early in overeager giddiness for the holiday.

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #273: Woodstock (1970) & Hippie Concert Docs

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Welcome to Episode #273 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, and Britnee discuss a grab bag of concert films documenting classic hippie rock festivals, starting with the 4-hour Oscar winner Woodstock (1970).

00:00 Welcome
01:17 Nothing But Trouble (1991)
04:18 Antz (1998)
08:40 Heel (2026)
12:40 Slanted (2026)
16:38 Welcome Space Brothers (2026)

24:05 Woodstock (1970)
57:15 Monterey Pop (1968)
1:09:40 Gimme Shelter (1970)
1:24:09 Festival Express (2003)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Podcast Crew

Rep Report: Back to (Film) School

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The New Orleans social calendar never feels emptier than it does in the summer, when it’s too hot to do much outside the house and anyone with real money leaves town to cool off anyway. As a result, I haven’t been catching many repertory screenings in recent months, as there haven’t been many enticing opportunities on offer. Smaller series like ScreamFest NOLA and Gap Tooth Cinema have been on summer hiatus, and the legacy institution of the Rene Brunet Classic Movies series has been on TCM-programming autopilot. Now that summer is officially over, though, the city is coming back to life, and the local classic-movies scene is waking up along with it. After only catching three rep screenings all summer (one-off showings of All the President’s Men, Under the Cherry Moon, and Sleepaway Camp), I’m once again hitting up my regular rotation of classic-movies hot spots. It’s like the fall semester of film school just started, with a randomized syllabus of vintage movie titles worth experiencing big & loud with a studious crowd. To that end, here are a few quick reviews of the local repertory screenings I happened to catch over the past couple weeks, now that school is back in session.

Jason and the Argonauts (1963)
@ Rene Brunet’s Classic Movies (The Prytania)

One of the biggest new releases of the summer—both in production scale and in box office returns—was Christopher Nolan’s ensemble-cast adaptation of The Odyssey, which The Prytania tirelessly ran on a 70mm film print every night for a solid month. The Odyssey also seemingly inspired a recent selection for their Classic Movies series: 1963’s Jason and the Argonauts, another sword-and-sandal action epic inspired by Greek myth & poetry. The two behemoth actioners made for an instructive contrast-and-compare exercise, illustrating how Hollywood spectacle has changed over the years. Jason and the Argonauts boasts all of the island-hopping special effects showcases of Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey without any of the procedural justification weighing down the bookends. Nolan makes you spend a tedious amount of time farting around a banquet hall with Tom Holland & John Leguizamo before he rewards your patience with the monsters, witches, and goddesses that liven up the middle stretch of The Odyssey, while older modes of Hollywood action filmmaking don’t feel the need to justify the indulgence. Jason and the Argonauts throws giants, harpies, and hydra heads at its audience as quickly as it can, only pulling away from the action to show the gods watching it unfold in amusement on their divine television. Once Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion skeleton army is defeated at the climax, the movie ends abruptly, knowing better than to bore its audience with the journey home. You’ve already gotten what you paid to see, now be on your merry way.

Black God, White Devil (1964)
@ Gap Tooth Cinema (The Broad)

One movie that’s in less of a rush to satisfy or entertain is the 1964 arthouse Western whatsit Black God, White Devil, which played to an unusually quiet crowd at its recent Gap Tooth screening. In Western terms, it’s helpful to think of it more in parallel with Jodorowsky than with Eastwood, since it’s more interested in the mood & iconography of the Western than any of the genre’s narrative payoffs. Black God, White Devil is not a proper Western so much as it is a Brazilian class-politics screed melted down in the midday sun and then loosely remolded into the vague shape of a Western. Landlords, cult leaders, outlaws, and bandits roam the draught-stricken 1940s Brazilian backcountry (the sertão), establishing a make-it-up-as-you-go version of justice as they murder each other for one personal wrong after another. Its violence can be shockingly gnarly, including acts of genital mutilation, flesh flaying, and ritualistic sacrifice of a newborn baby. At other times, its violence is pure genre pastiche, with individual episodes of religious or capitalist injustice being interrupted by unseen six-shooter gunfire while the camera waves around wildly and everyone scrambles for cover. For the most part, though, the movie is interested in talking out its violence in barely coherent mumblings about life’s many cruelties, each player in its wasteland crime saga dehydrated to the point of raving delirium. Its scene-to-scene logic is difficult to follow, and its donkey-trot pacing is brutally slow, but its political anger is clearly communicated through every frame all the same.

Elevator to the Gallows (1958)
@ Films on the Green (Alliance Française)

As the temperature cools in early fall, people start hosting free outdoor screenings of cinematic classics around New Orleans’s various social hubs, usually marketed as family-friendly movie nights showing recent animated favorites. On the more daring end of that fall-semester ritual, the French cultural hub Alliance Française is hosting a series called Films on the Green this month, which they kicked off with 1958’s Elevator to the Gallows. Their introduction to the film claimed that Louis Malle’s first narrative feature was also the first film of the French New Wave, which feels a little historically dubious but spiritually true. Elevator to the Gallows opens with an amoral yuppie executing a fairly convincing plan to kill his boss and run away with that boss’s widow but then gets stuck in an elevator car mid-escape, leaving him vulnerable to discovery & arrest. Meanwhile, his mistress (the effortlessly chic Jeanne Moreau) and the neighboring flower shop girl are left distraught by his unexplained absence, going mad in the late-night hours waiting for his return. The lovelorn teenager and her reprobate boyfriend steal the amateur assassin’s car and commit other crimes under his alias, while Moreau listlessly wanders the rainy streets of Paris to an improvised jazz score from none other than Miles Davis. Elevator to the Gallows truly is a perfect encapsulation of the French New Wave project in the way it uses noirish American crime thriller tropes as an excuse for high-style, street-level renegade filmmaking, even if Malle’s name is far from the first to come to mind when citing the pioneers on the inside of the movement: Varda, Godard, Truffaut, etc.

Pandora’s Box (1929)
@ David Bradley’s Classic Silent Films (Zeitgeist Theatre & Lounge)

If the jazzy arthouse noir flourishes of Elevator to the Gallows trumpeted the earliest notes of the French New Wave, then 1929’s Pandora’s Box signaled the arrival of an even earlier icon of cinematic cool. There’s something undeniably foundational about Louise Brooks’s gothy flapper vibe in this silent-era German classic, to the point where it’s almost Biblical. If I could quote Genesis, “On the eight day, G.W. Pabst said let there be a party girl with a blunt bob, and there was a party girl with a blunt bob. And people saw the bob and saw that it was cool as fuck.” Of course, no pleasure-seeking woman of the silver screen gets by without being punished for her hedonism, so Brooks’s iconic character Lulu is inevitably put through the ringer in the second half of Pandora’s Box, after the audience gets plenty of time to celebrate her for being the coolest woman who ever lived in the first. She drinks, she dances, she parties, she sleeps around, and then she temporarily lucks into marrying a wealthy man before being forced to shoot him dead. On the run from the law, her fabulous party girl lifestyle quickly falls apart, and the “Fucking Around” opening half of the film is equally balanced out by the unavoidable “Finding Out” concluding half. You can always tell that these classic road-to-ruin cautionary tales never really believe their own bullshit; they have way too much fun indulging in hedonistic excess for the audience to fully believe the tragic cosmic punishments that follow in moral rebuke. That aspect of Pandora’s Box was only underlined by its live-piano scoring at the Zeitgeist, which had to compete with the booming sound of bounce DJ sets from the party venue next door. Even when the mood got somber in the more dramatic back half, the first-half party still persistently echoed in the room. No matter what happens to her, Lulu remains aspirationally cool and fun to be around – poor thing.

-Brandon Ledet