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.”
This year marks the 20th anniversary of The Cultural Gutter. Author and game developer Jim Munroe founded The Cultural Gutter and posted his first essay here on May 22, 2003. In 2004, Jim invited comic artist and critic Guy Leshinski to join the Gutter. They created a manifesto […]
For this year’s Switcheroo Month, I decided to write about a lesser known film by one of the most reputable directors around—Akira Kurosawa’s The Bad Sleep Well (1960). Set in then contemporary mid-Twentieth Century Japan, The Bad Sleep Well is the story of Koichi Nishi (Toshiro Mifune) seeking […]
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 […]
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