At its simplest each newsletter is some writing on a few films, organised around a theme, looking at how they bear the marks of cultural anxieties relating to climate change and general ecological distress.
The aim is to journey through films of the past 50 years or so and trace the marks of this distress, looking at how our changing relationship to the natural world has shaped cinema. The hope is that over the course of the newsletter, these separate essays will paint a picture of this relationship in fragmentary, cumulative brush strokes.
Stephen King said that “horror films serve as a barometer of those things which trouble the night thoughts of a whole society”, and due to the subject matter – a kind of large-scale, growing societal trauma - a lot of these essays are at least horror-adjacent, but there are no restrictions on genre.
There are normally details about the films and any articles or books etc. that really influenced the thinking behind the individual essays so that you can go deeper if you like.
There will be cults, fires, sustainability, apocalypses, some theory, a lot of films, Nicolas Cage duelling with chainsaws, Toni Collette crawling up walls. It will be grief and violence and love and hope and it will arrive in your inbox once a month.
