Authors — Payton McCarty-Simas
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Point of No Return: Digital Nostalgia in Backrooms
Like the internet lore for which it is named, Backrooms (2026) encapsulates a paradox of embodiment and time. Kane Parsons’s feature film—an adaptation of his cult YouTube series of the same title—has its origins in a photograph of a former furniture store undergoing renovations in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, taken in 2003 and uploaded to 4chan in 2019. This unlikely source became the starting point for a diffuse, Lovecraftian latticework of anonymous mythmaking and creepypasta, whose locus eventually migrated to Reddit, where it split into separate communities of originalists and revisionists. Their prolific output is a striking example of hypermodern digital creativity predicated on […]
by Payton McCarty-Simas on Jun 2, 2026 -
Inspired by Meatloaf: Alice Maio Mackay on The Serpent’s Skin
It’s been a whirlwind year for Alice Maio Mackay. Her latest film, The Serpent’s Skin, has been a darling at festivals from London to Montreal, and her next one—her seventh before the age of twenty-two—is already in the can. This one’s a supernatural romance about two queer women, Anna (Alexandra McVicker), innocent and extremely new-in-town, and Jen (filmmaker Avalon Fast), a mysterious goth tattoo artist, who discover they share magical powers and have to fight a demon that’s possessing Danny (Jordan Dulieu), the dreamy alt-boy-next-door who Anna’s recently friend-zoned. With this sweet, sharply witty romp, the twenty-one-year-old Australian filmmaker, both […]
by Payton McCarty-Simas on Mar 27, 2026 -
With The Bride!, Maggie Gyllenhaal Clumsily Exhumes 200 Years of Zombie Girls
Whether Doctor Frankenstein likes it or not, the zombie story has always belonged to women. Ever since teenaged political radical Mary Shelley (daughter of feminist pioneer Mary Wollstonecraft) poured her maternal anguish into the party game ghost story that eventually became Frankenstein, this cultural lodestar has come heavy with feminine, not to mention feminist, valences. Perhaps it’s no wonder, then, that when Elsa Lanchester rose from the dead in 1935, screaming her way off the slab and quickly back into the grave again in James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein, she herself birthed countless generations of rictus rebel daughters in under […]
by Payton McCarty-Simas on Mar 18, 2026
