Carol Borden was editor of and a writer for the Toronto International Film Festival’s official Midnight Madness and Vanguard program blogs. She is currently an editor at and evil overlord for The Cultural Gutter, a website dedicated to thoughtful writing about disreputable art. She has written for Mezzanotte, Teleport City, Die Danger Die Die Kill, Popshifter and she has a bunch of short stories published by Fox Spirit Books including: Godzilla detective fiction, femme fatale mermaids, an adventurous translator/poet, and an x-ray tech having a bad day. Read and listen to her other shenanigans at Monstrous Industry. For her particular take on gutter culture, check out, “In the Sewer with the Alligators.”
Nocebo (Philippines / Ireland, 2022) is a blend of Gothic manor house horror, Southeast Asian witchcraft movies, and horror set in the world of fashion. Instead of focusing on connivances and cruelties within the world of haute couture fashion houses, like, say, Mario Bava’s Blood and Black Lace […]
This is not a spoiler-free essay. There is a lot of discussion of plot elements. If you like to go into a film blind, you will want to wait to read this piece. ~~~ These are the stories of the robots: They resent us for creating them. They […]
I know it’s a bit late for a list of things I liked in 2022, but here at the Gutter we do what we want. And like Angela Englert and Sachin Hingoo, I am taking care of some end of year business. Besides, what if you discover something […]
Travis Stevens’A Wounded Fawn (USA, 2022) is entirely my thing. It’s a nice mix of art house and genre, which is one of my favorite things. It blends fine art—in this case the art of Surrealists (and friends) Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo and Kati Horna—1970s horror/giallo, Classical Greek […]
The Gutter’s own Carol Borden joins Emily Intravia to discuss A Christmas Village (2018) on a Stocking Stuffer episode of the Feminine Critique. “Is it love, or just a head injury? Such are the questions asked on this special visit to A Christmas Village, a 2018 film made […]
I’ve been thinking about what “disreputable art” means in a time when nerds, fans, and geeks have won a kind of cultural hegemony. It was different when the Cultural Gutter was founded in 2003, before Iron Man (2008) launched the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the Force awakened, and the […]
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The Cultural Gutter 