I had too many favorites this year, too many books and comics and movies and TV, and to be honest, I know there’s more I haven’t gotten to that I should have gotten to and would doubtless be on this list if I had, but guys, I guess this is why we make these lists in the first place. There is too much and life is too much and the end of capitalism is too damn much so here. A list! Order to the chaos! Priority for the eyeballs and the earholes! Yes. This is what I would foist on you, were you a visitor to my home, were you a visitor to my very heart. Be they acclaimed or straight to streaming, franchise or niche, these are the stories from 2023 I am taking with me into 2024 and the rest of my life.

Slasher: Ripper (Shudder, 2023)

An anthology series like American Horror Story, Slasher poses a different take on a masked killer spree every season, featuring a brilliant cast of regulars, thoughtful queer storylines, and stunningly cruel torture-murder set pieces. I fell in love with the Slasher series when it moved from the Chiller cable channel to Shudder a couple years ago. That first Shudder season was subtitled Flesh and Blood, and it involved a despotic, dying patriarch (David Cronenberg) pitting his family against each other in Saw-like games on a private island while a masked killer also stalks them behind the scenes. It was too much, but I could not get enough, and it’s still probably my favorite season. 

Ripper is the first historical set piece for the show, going back to 19th century Toronto, where a masked killer called the Widow is painting the streets with their insides of the rich and powerful, in what the show wants us to think of as an inversion of Jack the Ripper stalking prostitutes in London’s West End, but soon feels more like gory Robin Hood, or Das Kapital in the form of a Scream sequel. The plot got a leeeeeetle too much at times and for me the twist was less successful than previous seasons, but even after you figure out who the Widow is, the show still keeps you guessing who will die by what horrible method all the way to the end.

This season also welcomed Will and Grace’s Eric McCormack to the cast as publishing titan and sneering villain Basil Garvey. I was unprepared for how much I would love him in this role. Give that man more scenery to chew; I love to watch him eat. Another new addition, Thom Allison as magician and spiritualist Georges Rondeau, stole every scene he was in. I so hope he’s back next time.

30 Coins, season 2 (Max, 2023)

Much like Slasher, the first 30 Coins season won me over with a genius cast and sheer naked audacity, pitting morally-conflicted exorcist Father Vergara and true love adulterers Paco and Elena against an international conspiracy of Judas Iscariot acolytes to collect the 30 Coins Judas was paid for betraying Christ. (In the 30 Coins universe, the pieces of silver basically work like Dragonballs.) You want gunplay? You want giant spider monsters? How about cows giving birth to human babies? Beautiful people trying to sublimate their lip-biting UNF? Exorcisms? Okay, that’s episode one.

More happens in a single episode of 30 Coins than happened in the entire 2005-2020 run of Supernatural. And they also have a hot (fallen) angel. For season two, they somehow doubled up on all of this, made it crazier, more revelatory, raised the stakes. Vergara and the anti-Pope may be dead at the beginning of this season, but that doesn’t mean they’re any less main players. Plus they added Paul Giamatti and the Necronomicon. Álex de la Iglesia has gifted us with the best show in the world, and I can’t wait for season three.

Sure, I’ll Join Your Cult: A Memoir of Mental Illness and the Quest to Belong Anywhere by Maria Bamford (Simon & Schuster, 2023)

Please note I received a review copy of this book.

Maria Bamford has been a successful stand-up comedian for decades, voicing over-the-top characters in shows like Bojack Horseman or playing versions of herself, including her semi-autobiographical Netflix series Lady Dynamite and Ask My Mom on YouTube. Her style of comedy blends the absurd and the deep dark confessional, then ties it all up with an unmatched gift for bon mot profanity.

Sure, I’ll Join Your Cult is both a memoir and a travelogue of sorts through OCD, eating disorders, addictions, self-destructive behavior, suicide attempts and ideation, charting these struggles through all her earnest attempts to find salvation through self-help. Lit throughout by Maria’s cheerful nihilism and gallows humor, this book is very much not for everyone, and I suspect the conversations around suicide, trigger warninged as they are, prompted maaaaany editorial reviews over at Simon & Schuster. But Maria’s testimony here, at once blunt and razor-sharp, is the real deal. You’ll snort laugh, you’ll do the white guy blinking meme, you’ll nod a lot, especially if you’ve had more than one SSRI in your life. Get the audiobook! Having her read it is its most natural format.

Mary: An Awakening of Terror by Nat Cassidy (Tor Nightfire, 2022)

A middle-aged lady memoir of a different kind, I guess; this one is a little bit of a cheat, since it came out in 2022, but…hell, it’s a novel, it takes a while to read those, and if it makes it at all more palatable, I am currently reading Nat Cassidy’s 2023 release Nestlings, and oh, God, it’s every bit as good for much the same reasons.

Mary is about Mary, a frustrated, nebbish-y perimenopausal lady who is living a pretty unremarkable life as a bookstore clerk in New York. Except for the hallucinations. And the voices. (Not like Maria Bamford voices.) And her habit of talking to her collection of porcelain figurines. When Mary is fired from her job, she returns to her Arizona hometown to take care of her foul-mouthed and foul-tempered convalescent aunt, hoping to reconnect with childhood memories and make a new beginning from this crossroads in her life.

She doesn’t not get that. But there’s also flayed corpses, serial killings, a doomsday cult, and so much more. Mary herself turns out to be far more badass than she suspects, exactly the kind of tarnished, self-doubting but well-meaning character you’re going to want leading your prestige cable shows. (Mary series when? It is only a matter of time.) Cassidy’s writing is fast-paced and visceral, so easy to believe and easy to devour. By the time you realize how original and messed up it is (in a good way), you won’t be able to read fast enough. And the characters will linger with you. With or without skin.

Blacula: Return of the King, written by Rodney Barnes, illustrated by Jason Shawn Alexander (Zombie Love Studios, 2023)

Blacula–the character–has never yet had his moment. I love the movies, I love William Marshall, but everything Marshall accomplished in those films was in spite of the jive turkey world. African prince/vampire king Mamuwalde is still owed the platform he deserves. That moment is hopefully coming, and Rodney Barnes’ graphic novel is a good start.

The comic sees Mamuwalde escape hell itself to revenge himself on Count Dracula. Meanwhile, as usual, humans are getting underfoot. Our main human characters are Tina, a reporter specializing in the paranormal, and Kross, a young man leading a group descended from survivors of Mamuwalde’s brief reign on earth. Here Blacula: Return of the King suffers from one of the films’ main drawbacks–that Mamuwalde himself is magnificent, but the people opposing come off a bit more rote, but then again, this is a medium where we can–and I really hope we do–develop these characters along with their relationship to the vampire king. Barnes is clearly aware of the contradictions of Mamuwalde’s character onscreen (especially once he starts enslaving vampires in Scream Blacula Scream) and wants Mamuwalde to earn back the natural heroism which is fundamental to the character. The real Big Bads he pits himself against are not the humans, after all, but Dracula and the Devil. Feel sorry for them.

I really hope this series goes on from here. It absolutely deserves it. Go find Blacula at your local bookstore or library!

When Evil Lurks, written and directed by Demián Rugna (IFC Films, Shudder, 2023)

Please note I received a review screener of this film.

Somewhere in rural Argentina, two brothers discover a dismembered corpse. This leads them to a house, where an aging mother nurses her pestilent possessed son. The corpse was that of an exorcist; with no more help coming, the brothers find themselves drawn into increasingly desperate measures to dispose of the possessed man and to escape the infectious demon within him. They aren’t very good at it. 

When Evil Lurks is topping a lot of end of year lists for good reason. It’s weirdly beautiful, absolutely savage, and impossible to walk away from unchanged. Some will find the despair suffocating; some will find it validating. It’s going to be a love it or hate it movie for sure. In addition to being generally relentless, it’s all the trigger warnings. Don’t ask if the dog lives, if the kid lives, if anyone lives, although it does have its own take on hope. I’ve seen some critics discuss how it works as a metaphor for the COVID epidemic, and that definitely scans. Part of what makes this film so annihilating at the end, not unlike COVID or any disaster or life-altering loss, is how you can still go on.

Infinity Pool, written and directed by Brandon Cronenberg (Elevation Pictures, 2023)

Brandon Cronenberg, man. Every dang film, he finds a new way to make the severance of human body and mind simultaneously a plausible fetish and gut-churning repugnant. And this time he does it by putting Alexander Skarsgård in a dog collar. 

Infinity Pool sees uninspired writer James (Skarsgård) vacationing with his wife Em in the island of Li Tolqa. Their relationship is strained by James’s financial dependence, as well as his general lack of self-worth. He’s a sponge and he feels bad about it. And so, cue the tumescent ego when they meet a fan of James’s novel, Gabi (Mia Goth), and soon the couple is partying with Gabi’s group. Rich people frolics take a handbrake turn when James hits and kills one of the locals on the drive back to the hotel, earning a summary judgment and the death penalty. But fortunately, there is a loophole in the law if you have enough cash–you can have a clone of yourself killed instead. In no time at all, James and Gabi’s group are dancing like no one’s watching and killing like no one’s living, and it just goes on from there. You want to see how inhuman people can get? Brandon Cronenberg provides.
I love Cronenberg’s visuals as much as his unflinching determination to see his premises through to their unnatural conclusions, and he absolutely exploits the setting to juxtapose gorgeous scenery, luxury, and beautiful people with the long dark downward of his Philip K. Dick-ish story. I think Antiviral might be my favorite of his films just as a matter of my own weird taste, but Infinity Pool is the one I would recommend as his highest achievement. So far.

Subspecies V: Blood Rise (Full Moon Features, 2023)

Once upon a time, there was a thing called video stores, and it was during this time that the vampire Radu Vladislas (Anders Hove) and his giant claw hands held sway over entire shelves in the horror section. The story goes that after murdering his father and brother to possess the Bloodstone, Radu rose as a ruthless, all-powerful vampire scion…although we still got three movies worth of him not being able to close the deal with his vampire fledgling Michelle. We haven’t heard a lot from Radu in the years since the death of Blockbuster, so it’s a little weird to get a prequel now, but dang it, it was worth waiting for. THIS IS HOW YOU DO A RETCON. Are you listening, JJ Abrams? 

JJ is not listening. But hear me when I say this prequel-sequel that tells the story of Radu’s birth, training as a vampire killer, and ultimate downfall into, well, the Radu we know and love is executed with consummate care and thoughtfulness, managing to give everything that came before (and technically comes after) Blood Rise layers of subtext and tragedy. It’s glorious. It is the performance Anders Hove has been waiting 30 years to give. And I suppose it proves it really is never too late to make a new beginning. Happy New Year, Radu.

Hell House LLC Origins: The Carmichael Manor, written and directed by Stephen Cognetti (Terror Films, Shudder, 2023)

Please note I received a review screener of this film.

In which those damn clowns get an origin story, I stg.

The Carmichael Manor is more found footage spooky stuff from the Hell House series, and if you haven’t seen those, you don’t have to in order to appreciate this one, but I would recommend it. If only so you can FULLY APPRECIATE the the hardest working clown mannequins in show business.

Much like Subspecies V, Origins is building the franchise by adding lore to the front end, rather than making a straight sequel. That said, it’s not a period piece exactly, as it’s a present-day documentary about an ill-fated group of paranormal researchers discovering the details of a cold case from the 80s. It’s a found footage nesting doll. The relationship to the cursed haunted house attraction in Hell House is tangential, but CLOWNS. It’s always the damn clowns.

If you enjoy found footage and spooky ghost documentaries in richly appointed haunted houses, this is spooky jump scare manor in its purest form. It’s more of a ride than a film, but incredibly fun, and it’s the best Hell House since the first Hell House.

You Must Remember This: Erotic 90s (2023)

Speaking of found footage…I love the YMRT podcast, and while I am not normally a podcast recommending sort of person, I become one for YMRT. I follow probably eight or so other series, fiction and non, but YMRT is the only one I have to listen to the instant it hits every week. The scholarship, the analysis, the creativity. Every season has a theme, and then host Karina Longworth digs deep into several films that explore that theme, and it’s done with love and a deep appreciation not just for film as an art form, but the social context that produces films and filmmakers.

Last year saw the follow up to 2022’s Erotic 80s series, Erotic 90s. Both series broadly looked at the ways adult-oriented content has been championed and challenged in either decade, talking about things like the creation of the MPAA ratings system, the Reagan-era unification of sex and affluence, the proliferation of home video in normalizing adult content, and the homophobic slant shared by critics, the ratings board, and mainstream American culture in the 80s and 90s. This is all stuff I was alive for, but was too young, too uncritical and unschooled, to understand at the time and often simply never reevaluated. I am happy to consider the cultural context of a horror movie from 1974, but “Justify My Love?” No. And yet “Justify My Love” more directly shaped me.

And whether Longworth is discussing films I already adore–Boxing Helena and Crash (1996)–or films that totally escaped my interest–everything starring Richard Gere–the depth of the scholarship draws me in. It’s quite accessible scholarship, too. After all, she’s talking about films that have already made a mark in some notable way. It’s exciting to reconsider these pieces and to realize what you thought you knew has depths and facets you’ve never seen.

~~~

Angela would also like to give big recs to [takes deep breath] films Saw X, Evil Dead Rise, The Watcher, The Outwaters, and Unwelcome; video games Resident Evil 4 remake, Witchy Life Story; TV series Poker Face, Star Trek: Lower Decks, and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (especially the musical episode!)