venusinmyrrh

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congratulations to all haters and philadelphians

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PENNY DREADFUL 1.02 NOSFERATU (2024)

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the Venn diagram of people who were absolutely feral for Vanessa Ives and the target audience for Nosferatu (2024) is a circle

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You have your evil dark wizard who starred in King’s Man, and I have mine.

i had to ask @venusinmyrrh one time who my most hear-me-out is, because i am no judge of what’s actually outré versus what’s merely eccentric, and she advised me without hesitation that it is rasputin as played by rhys ifans in the king’s man, which. fair enough.

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And what’s mine?

i had to ask @venusinmyrrh one time who my most hear-me-out is, because i am no judge of what’s actually outré versus what’s merely eccentric, and she advised me without hesitation that it is rasputin as played by rhys ifans in the king’s man, which. fair enough.

[venusinmyrrh]

I've made a post about great lesser-known noirs, but it occurs to me that some of you might not be familiar with the classics, and might want to know where to start. This is a ridiculously short list- I have a million more to talk about- but here are some of the big stars of the genre.

The Maltese Falcon: Sam Spade, a clever but callous private detective, gets wrapped up in intrigue relating to an artifact that is functionally cursed. If he's an unscrupulous character, just wait until you meet everyone else. The whole damn cast is electrifying, lending charm and cruelty in equal measure.

The Big Sleep: Philip Marlowe, a kinder and more poetic detective for Humphrey Bogart to play than Spade, is called upon to deal with a wealthy, dysfunctional family, and it keeps on getting weirder from there. Is the sharp-tongued Vivian Sternwood the femme fatale she seems, or is she just another person trying to find the right thing to do in desperate circumstances? And will she and Marlowe keep their hands off each other until the plot has had its last twist?

Double Indemnity: Rich housewife Phyllis Dietrichson and sleazy insurance agent Walter Neff are, by their own admission, rotten people. It's only natural that they should plot a murder together, and that they should turn on each other the very second things go wrong. Every single domestic murder movie since 1944 has ripped this off.

Kiss Me Deadly: This is nominally an adaptation of a Mike Hammer story. Screenwriter Bezzerides hated Mike Hammer. As depicted here, he is one of the worst people in the world. Depending on the cut of the film you see, he may inadvertently cause the nuclear apocalypse. (For once, the theatrical cut is darker.)

Sweet Smell of Success: Cruel, all-powerful columnist JJ Hunsecker wants his sister's boyfriend out of the way (for reasons that are, um, ambiguous.) To accomplish this, he enlists the biggest weasel in New York, Sidney Falco, and the two completely deserve each other as they spend the rest of the movie trading elaborate insults. Popular on tumblr for its dialogue and chemistry between the leads.

Sunset Boulevard: Broke screenwriter Joe Gillis thinks he can con a has-been into hiring him as a script doctor, and that's the last free decision he ever gets to make. From then on, his life is in the hands of Norma Desmond, silent film starlet turned crazed recluse, terrifying yet intensely pitiable. This is as much gothic horror as noir.

Ace in the Hole: The story of a man trapped in a cave is turning out to be a big hit in the newspaper, and if the publicity will make a reporter's career, then what's the harm in delaying rescue just for a little while? This is as vicious as noir gets, but damn it, you've just got to see what happens next. (Watch Jacob Geller's video Fear of the Depths after this.)

Sorry Wrong Number: Of all the films on this list, this is the one that really scared me. In the days of switchboards, a rich hypocondriac woman is connected to the wrong phone line and overhears a murder being planned. It doesn't take her long to figure out she's the intended victim, and each call she makes or recieves makes the situation darker. But how can she escape her fate if she can't- or won't leave her bed?

The Asphalt Jungle: The heist movie. Maybe the only heist movie ever made. Every line is quotable. Every member of the team is an unforgettable personality. When things go wrong, they go horribly wrong. One minute you're laughing, and the next minute you think you'll never laugh again.

Gun Crazy: Laurie and Bart, two practiced sharpshooters, are perhaps the most perfect match in all of noir- and that's a bad thing. When one half of the duo gets a criminal idea in their head, the other can't say no. When the opportunity to ditch her man like a sap comes up, the femme fatale throws it away to be doomed at his side. He fell in love with her when she first aimed a gun at him. Quentin Tarantino kissed star Peggy Cummins's feet at a showing of the film, and I hope she kicked him in the head.

Laura: Everyone was in love with Laura Hunt, and somebody killed her- or did they? Did they get the right person? Is the cop on the case in love with a dead woman? Was her columnist mentor just her gay best friend, or was there something darker beneath that facade? And what would Laura think of all this? A big inspiration on Twin Peaks.

In a Lonely Place: Bogart isn't at all heroic here, as a screenwriter with a drinking habit and a violent temper. He's obviously a bad idea to date, but just how bad an idea? He's not the type of guy who'd kill a woman, is he? Bogart and Gloria Holden give perhaps their best performances here, and they'll wound your soul.

Touch of Evil: A Mexican cop (played, unfortunately, by Charlton Heston) finds out a nasty secret about the big hero cop Hank Quinlan: he's framed the culprit in most of his cases. Not because he's crooked, but because his intuition tells him they're guilty. Director Orson Welles as Quinlan is frightening, grotesque, and a little bit tragic in what some consider the last classic noir.

The Killers: The first twenty minutes or so are an adaptation of a Hemingway story, where out of town hitmen gun down a man so depressed he won't even bother to run from them. The rest of the film is an investigation into how he got that way. It had something to do with a radiant gangster's girl, and something to do with a few botched crimes. Sometimes a man can die before the bullets even touch him.

The Third Man: Everybody is lying about the whereabouts of an American expatriate named Harry when his friend comes looking. Did they do something to him? Or, more frightening still, is he the one who's been doing things to other people? Orson Welles is a more charming monster than he was in Touch of Evil; the light and shadows on his face cast him as a vampire, while his fingers sticking up through the sewer grate look like something terrifying emerging from the earth.

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The Fall of the House of Usher 1.08 | The Raven (2023)

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Sprezzatura— the ancient art of seemingly effortless style— is both a status symbol and a way of turning a uniform into a mode of personal expression. It involves a fine balance of care and carelessness; respect and irreverence for older dress codes. There are rules, but rules are made to be broken— as long as they are broken in the right way, demonstrating mastery and casual disregard as opposed to either ignorance or belligerent defiance.

Richard Thompson Ford, Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History (2022)

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If we do our jobs right, at one moment the audience is going to be really turned on and in the next minute the audience is gonna be like laughing hysterically. — NATALIE DORMER & DAVID OAKES | Venus In Fur

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how do people not know where the clit is like it’s right there. it’s not even funny it’s right there

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Great Directors, 2009 (dir. Angela Ismailos)

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Although one finds it difficult to imagine Cleopatra afflicted with jealousy (the notion is ludicrous, rather like imagining her laid up with migraine on that perfumed barge, equipped with Fiorinal and an ice bag), she wanted to know the height of Antony's bride, to know the colour of her hair - betraying her vulnerability even as most of us have done. Imagine anyone who has not known jealousy. "He had betrayed me and wanted to shame me besides," cried Iseult the Fair (quite unfairly) of her doggedly faithful Tristan; "I may never believe you," said Guinevere, although the facts belied her, to Launcelot. A few centuries later, Emma Bovary would insist hysterically that "there are more beautiful women, but I know how to love better."

What each of them has suffered is not, no matter what the love songs say, jealousy. They have suffered instead the inability to cope with jealousy, the incapacity to control an impulse common to us all. The love-death is literary convention, a delusion of courtly love, and few die of jealousy. Anna Karenina, but there you are.

Because extraordinary beauty or intelligence or success in anyone, however deserving, presents a subtle threat to our self-esteem, we love best those possessed of some fatal flaw, some saving evidence of their own mortality. Few could be jealous of Elizabeth Taylor's beauty when she was ill: few could fail to see the ritual logic in Marilyn Monroe's inability to find the bluebird. Our favourite stories prove again that man was driven out of Eden: consider Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Charles Lindbergh, the Titanic.

Jealousy is commonly harboured for people one does not know: for the golden girl, the apparently totally blessed. To cure that jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self, an impossible claim that one should be at once Rose Bowl princess, mediaeval scholar, Saint Joan, Milly Theale, Eleanor of Aquitaine, one's sister, and a stranger in a pink hat seen once and admired on the corner of 55th and Madison.

Joan Didion, “Jealousy: Is It a Curable Illness?” (Vogue, June 1961)

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三船敏郎 // MIFUNE TOSHIRO 醉いどれ天使 // Drunken Angel (1948)

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Obcessed with Spirit Bag from La Lune SS25

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RHYS IFANS as Howard Marks in MR. NICE (2010)

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working title: the last words of lachlan malory

magdalena thought she left her past behind when she left malory manor, sent abruptly away by her uncle lachlan after the mysterious death of her brother. but now, over a decade later, with her marriage on the horizon, the old ghosts have begun to stir anew, and magdalena finds herself back at the old family home to face the terrible truth: the most dangerous branches of the family tree are the ones yet living.

“you are what i love the most— you are the knife i turn inside myself…”