JANUARY 2025 WAS A MOVIE
Here are the movies I wrote about on Substack this month, the ones I *didn't* write about, and the soundtrack to my January 2025.
WAS A MOVIE is the recap of my life lately, the movies I watched, and the bits that made my life feel cinematic.
When I started using Letterboxd for real the last week of December 2024, I was stunned by how many movies I watched last year.
There are a handful, like Fear Street and the Ti West-Mia Goth trilogies, that I got too lazy to catalog because I was tired of being a forensic scientist. I literally went through my texts, emails and calendar invites to find dates of viewing.
Can you blame me? I lost steam because I watched, quite literally, dozens of movies last year.
I was on the fence about posting this. It felt indulgent when SENSUAL TERRORS is supposed to be about film criticism, and how body horror and psychological thrillers leave an indelible mark on our lives.
But reading
’s field notes for January encouraged me to blow the dust off of this draft and hit upload.Besides, Substack is my main form of social media. I don’t post on Instagram1 or TikTok anymore, for the time being.
Maybe it’s worth corralling my life updates into blog post form.
Movies I mentioned in my Substack posts this month
Pearl dir. Ti West
Little Women dir. Greta Gerwig
Blue Velvet dir. David Lynch
Mulholland Drive dir. David Lynch
Crimes of the Future (1970) dir. David Cronenberg
Crimes of the Future (2022) dir. David Cronenberg
Scanners dir. David Cronenberg
Videodrome dir. David Cronenberg
The Substance dir. Coralie Fargeat
Movies I watched this month that I didn’t write about on Substack
I Am Andrew Tate, dir. Marguerite Gaudin
Le Bonheur, dir. Agnès Varda
Blink Twice, dir. Zoë Kravitz
The Curious Case of Natalia Grace, dir. Christian Conway, Jackson Conway
Dead Ringers, dir. David Cronenberg
It Follows, dir. David Robert Mitchell
The Killing of a Sacred Deer, dir. Yorgos Lanthimos
The Lighthouse, dir. Robert Eggers
Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind, dir. Laurent Bouzereau
Nosferatu the Vampyre, dir. Werner Herzog
Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields, dir. Lana Wilson
Run, dir. Aneesh Chaganty
Sex and the City 2, dir. Michael Patrick King
Smile, dir. Parker Finn
Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, dir. Pedro Almodóvar
Soundtrack to my month: Portishead
What are movies without music? Even outside of composer contributions, artists like Linkin Park, Paramore and Kendrick Lamar architected the soundtracks that live in our heads rent-free.
I mean, I just got tickets to Nine Inch Nails and I hope they do “Repress/Compress,” inshallah.
But coming off of Brat Summer — where I put something like “Big Tashi Duncan” energy in my Feeld bio, where I went to SWEAT and hours later woke up at LAX, where I rode the rave energy into having two different fruity goth he/they DJ’s chains dangling in my face this fall — I’m enjoying being soft and quiet.
I’m listening to a lot of demure indie and dolorous jazz and sleepy R&B.
And as someone immersing themselves in the velvet-lined world of David Lynch these days, I find myself obsessed with Portishead’s 1994 album Dummy.
“Glory Box” especially: I love the languid, deliberate pace of the strings and the percussion — an Isaac Hayes sample. It inspires nostalgia for a time when I didn’t exist: 1994, and then 1971.
I also can’t stop listening to “Sour Times.”
I’m not sure why Beth Gibbons’ lament of “Nobody loves me / it’s true / not like you do” hits me so hard. I’ve never felt deeply loved by any potential or confirmed romantic partner. That affection and care, to use bell hooks’ words, have always felt tortured, surface-level and tenuous at best.
Maybe it resonates deeply because I’m the only one who has ever loved me best. Maybe it’s because I’m the kind of lover who is incomparable in terms of intention and tenderness.
Movie moment: In pursuit of physical media…
This past weekend, I went to the new Maryland location of Joint Custody, a popular record store in downtown D.C. I went as revenge.
One of the fruity ravers who is always leaving me on read promised they’d take me there for our next date. That was months ago. (They also said they wanted to see NIN with me in Baltimore. Whatever!)
I got coffee at my favorite local roastery on Saturday. Lattes were $4 to mark the shop’s four-year anniversary. It was hopping. I spent an hour or so journaling about Blue Velvet, only to look up to see someone wearing an Eraserhead shirt — which was a fun little synchronicity.
I told myself I was just going into Joint Custody to browse, but the cassette tapes caught me by surprise. By the time I got to the CD’s, I was a goner. I also enjoyed being in the giddy energy of two dewy young Black women, excitedly yapping about neo-soul records and old-school funk.
Sadly, I put Confessions by Usher back — I wasn’t entirely convinced that I had a tape player2 — and collected CDs from Garbage and Soundgarden instead.
As I was pouring meticulously over the stacks, lo and behold:
I do occasionally yap on Threads. I made one for SENSUAL TERRORS to connect with horror fans, but I’m mostly just connecting to Black lesbians in the D.C. Metropolitan area. C’est la vie.
Get this. Confirmed that my Crosley record player has CD, radio and tape-playing capabilities!