That Very Witch is finally out! It’s pretty surreal to share this one after so many years of working on it, and I have so many people to thank from all those years! Endless appreciation for @lunapresspublishing for supporting the vision, my agent @101minerva for helping get this project off the ground, and @shdwbxng for the stunner of a cover! Also for my friends, former professors, and mentors who met this work with so much curiosity and warmth. It’s been a dream come true starting my book tour off in NYC this week, and I can’t wait to keep the sabbath going! Up next: Fantasia Fest😈🤘🔮🍂🧹🐈⬛
It’s been such an amazing week celebrating the release of my first book!!! This project has been a particularly (and fittingly) esoteric journey down the rabbit hole— stealing the declaration was the least of it— and I couldn’t be more grateful to the wonderful folks at the @brooklynrail and @autonomedia for helping me make it happen! I also want to thank my two amazing illustrators, the fabulous @hauntlove for his pitch perfect cover, and the incredible @getarealjobkid for his kickass collages. You can get a copy of One Step Short of Crazy on Amazon (link in bio), through Autonomedia’s website, or at one of several bookstores in the city! 🇺🇸👁️🫡
It was such a treasure to be a juror at this year’s Overlook Film Fest in gorgeous NOLA alongside @misssharai and @bubblegumandblood ! Congrats to all the fantastic filmmakers whose work we got to enjoy, and thanks to the @overlookfilmfest team for having me! You can also find my coverage of some of the features on @ruemorguemag and @filminquiry . I found it impossible not to love the Big Easy so much that I accidentally took way more pics outside than at the fest, so here’s a smattering of the week🖤 swipe for the best gumbo ever served in a coffee cup at a karaoke bar…
Fabulous trip to Charlotte this weekend to give a lecture at UNC and host a That Very Witch series at the Independent Picture House! Thanks to the @iph_clt team for inviting me out to Queen City and thanks to everyone who came to check out the series!👑
March recap! Museums, meditations, movies, meanderings, and an all around magnificent time with friends! Check out my latest words in @filmmakermag , @letterboxd , @ruemorguemag and others, plus an especially disgusting short story in the fabulous @bloodlettermag and our 2025 year in film video on my Vimeo!
Just a smattering of all the work and sweet, vampiric vibes from this Valentine’s Day season🥀🫀🍑Particular thanks to everyone who came out for the @anthologyfilmarchives Valentine’s Day Massacre, and to @morbidanatomy for giving me the opportunity to teach a course on my book for the past six weeks!
VALENTINE’S DAY MASSACRE 2026
February 12 – 22
From 2013-19, Anthology marked Valentine’s Day by presenting a series called “Valentine’s Day Massacre”. The heart (so to speak) of the series was the pairing of Maurice Pialat’s grueling, autobiographical study of a dysfunctional off-and-on relationship, WE WON’T GROW OLD TOGETHER, and Albert Brooks’s hilarious yet no less painful MODERN ROMANCE. These two films are like flip sides of the same coin: Pialat’s may depict brutal emotional violence while Brooks’s is explicitly comic, but look past their disparate tones and you’ll find that the two films are nearly identical. Both focus with almost unbearable intensity on a pair of mismatched lovers and their perpetual conflict, dissecting male narcissism, insecurity, and egotism with surgical precision and self-deprecatory ruthlessness. And when you factor in the subterranean vein of absurd humor coursing through Pialat’s film, and the frank confrontation with the tragedy of contemporary relationships that underlies MODERN ROMANCE, the two films become even more closely intertwined.
We soon expanded the series to include, most importantly, Andrzej Żuławski’s POSSESSION, a batshit crazy depiction of an imploding marriage that’s perhaps the ultimate dysfunctional relationship film. These three films became the core lineup of “Valentine’s Day Massacre”, with guest-appearances from a revolving selection of additional films in the subsequent years.
We put the series on ice during the pandemic, but now, in collaboration with author (“That Very Witch”), programmer, film critic, and video artist Payton McCarty-Simas, we’re bringing it back. For the 2026 edition, we’ll be supplementing the OG Pialat/Brooks/Żuławski lineup with a selection of similarly cracked takes on romantic relationships hand-picked by McCarty-Simas, including the “video-nasty” THE WITCH WHO CAME FROM THE SEA (1976), the twisted German cult film DER FAN (1982), and Carlos Saura’s classic contribution to the Spanish quinqui genre, DEPRISA, DEPRISA (1981).
Special thanks to Payton McCarty-Simas; Brian Belovarac (Janus Films); Bret Berg (AGFA); Dave Jennings (Sony); and Jacob Perlin (The Film Desk).
Why is the witch the horror archetype most intimately tied to feminism?
This Monday, January 12, author and film critic Payton McCarty-Simas will draw on research from their book That Very Witch: Fear, Feminism, and the American Witch Film to guide students through the history of American politics, using the witch as a guide, bellwether, and harbinger of things to come.
Each session will examine a different era’s vision of the witch—often fraught with contradictory feminist (and anti-feminist) politics—through the sociological lens of horror cinema, often described as culture’s “collective nightmares.” Payton will help students develop the ability to read films as cultural texts—works whose themes and political resonances reach beyond their surface narratives. Students will leave class with a deeper understanding of the relationship between pop-cultural trends and the broader political landscape as pertains to the witch and beyond.
Comment “Witch” for a link to class sign-up for check out our website under “Events” for more!
Bell, Book and Candle. Directed by Richard Quine. Columbia Pictures, 1958.
#MorbidAnatomy #MorbidAnatomyLibrary #Cinema #Witch #Archetype
There’s really no way to sum up what was probably my best year ever, so in lieu of photos from the wedding/book tour/film festivals/new work/etc. here are some luminous moments from December and some accountings of the beautiful art I had the pleasure of taking in this year
