Willow Catelyn Maclay
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willowcatelyn.bsky.social
Willow Catelyn Maclay
@willowcatelyn.bsky.social
14K followers 700 following 4.6K posts
Film Critic (Film Comment, Reverse Shot, Polygon etc). GALECA.

Co-Author of CORPSES, FOOLS AND MONSTERS: THE HISTORY AND FUTURE OF TRANSNESS IN CINEMA
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willowcatelyn.bsky.social
Found this at a Flea Market recently for $2. I haven't seen it, but now after reading your piece, I'll definitely be watching it soon.
a vhs tape of The Compleat Beatles
November 28, 2025 at 8:17 PM
willowcatelyn.bsky.social
My TWIN PEAKS series is nearing its conclusion. The penultimate essay is live, and it is the first of two features on episode 18. I wrote about Diane, the structure of the 18th episode, the context of Laura Palmer's experiences, and how they are reflected in Diane's.

www.patreon.com/posts/twin-p...
TW: Discussions of Sexual violence There is too much text in the paragraph for me to copy paste all of it. I apologize for any inconvenience. If you click the link in the post you can go to the page and maximize the size of the font if that helps. <3 a still from TWIN PEAKS THE RETURN of Diane (Laura Dern) in an office. She's grasping at her throat, and confessing to a past experience with Cooper. She's wearing a blue dress with a slit in the cleavage, and a white bob wig. She has red and yellow armbands
November 28, 2025 at 6:06 PM
willowcatelyn.bsky.social
BLOOD TEA AND RED STRING (Christiane Cegavske, 2006)

I love stop-motion. It's entirely artificial, but because it's so hand-made, down to every last detail, it is an entirely pure expression of artistic creativity & effort. The girl in this is also artificial, but then, she isn't.
a still from Blood Tea and Red String. It's stop motion and a young doll woman is hung on a tree
November 25, 2025 at 4:54 PM
willowcatelyn.bsky.social
I wrote about DOG DAY AFTERNOON and its complicated legacy among trans viewers for my reader's choice series. My co-writer Caden Mark Gardner will be discussing many of these same topics tonight on TCM before this film is shown. Please tune in!

www.patreon.com/posts/144308...
The phone call between Sonny and Leon is so disarmingly beautiful that the context of what I know to be true about this story, and the legacy of Dog Day Afternoon within my community, momentarily fades away. Pacino has two performances in the 70s that are as strong as performances can be, and this is one of them. The other is Michael Corleone in the first two Godfather films. That performance is an internal one, with evil festering in his blossoming inhumanity, flickering out in a handful of wonderfully expressive moments of what he has chosen to become (his murder of Sterling Hayden’s character in The Godfather & Fredo’s final scene in The Godfather Part Two). Dog Day Afternoon is almost a composite opposite of what he accomplished as Michael. Everything is leaking out of him, and when they put the camera on him in that phone call he can’t hide from anyone—let alone Leon. Those big soulful, searching eyes, taking on water, looking for a way out. He’s mesmerizing in the visibility of his love for Leon that’s spilling all over the place—almost embarrassingly so. Sarandon isn’t a very good trans woman, and he doesn’t feel like the gay men of the era either. His queer creature doesn’t make any sense at all until Pacino is on the phone with her, and the cuckoo qualities of their relationship and this story cohere in a strangely magical moment. It’s fair to say that when modern queer audiences gravitate to the true story of John Wojtowicz they aren’t reacting to the man that actually robbed the bank (he was a chaser who consistently misgendered Liz. They didn’t live happily ever after.), but to Pacino’s performance, and the bare minimum facts of the reasons for the robbery. a still of Al Pacino on the phone from DOG DAY AFTERNOON
November 24, 2025 at 6:03 PM
willowcatelyn.bsky.social
The second in my four part series covering the great dramatic performances of Diane Keaton is live. In this one I look at her work in Gillian Armstrong's illicit romance MRS. SOFFEL.

www.patreon.com/posts/144104...
Diane Keaton took a huge performance risk as Kate Soffel, and it could have sunk the film in its discordancy to the genre and period. Set in 1901, she plays a frigid woman in a fuckless marriage, and she’s introduced to us in bed suffering from an undisclosed illness that could reasonably be chalked up to a malaise brought on by the punishing boredom of her lifestyle. Gillian Armstrong’s true-crime fable captures bible-thumping moralist Pittsburgh beset by dreamy, beautiful, snowy landscapes, and the billowing factory smoke of the soon-coming industrial revolution. Kate is married to the local warden Peter Soffel (Edward Herrmann), and when she’s healthy she fills her days at the prison, giving testimony to the condemned, and sliding pocket-sized Bibles through the metal bars. She’s a true believer, but there’s something nagging inside of her that feels just as trapped by scripture, as her marriage, her role as a mother, and the make of society. Keaton opted to play the role with modern tics, and neglected any notion of realism indebted to the stuffier socialization inherent to the women normally in pictures such as these. At first, it clangs against Armstrong’s austere images, and one wonders if the mighty Keaton had finally made a wrong step, but when she makes her escape—following her heart with the promise of a fling with accused murderer Ed Biddle (played by Mel Gibson, during the era when he was marketed as a hunk)--the performance reveals itself as one characterized by her out-of-time personality. When the film was released, many critics referred to it as a half-baked Bonnie and Clyde, but Mrs. Soffel was opting for something more distinctly middle-aged and riddled with the crisis of a woman’s growing realization of stagnation and invisibility, and cannot imagine a scenario that may unleash her free-spirit, let alone, her childish screwball memories of adolescence. Keaton chose to play the character as if Kate were post-women’s lib, and was transported... a still from MRS. SOFFEL featuring Diane Keaton in close-up framed in front of prison bars
November 21, 2025 at 7:31 PM
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MS. 45 (Abel Ferrara, 1981) // FEMALE CONVICT SCORPION: BEAST STABLE (Shunya Ito, 1972)

In 2015, a man on twitter told me that I shouldn't like movies like these because people wouldn't take me seriously as a woman, and I told him that only women could really understand these movies.
a still image of Zoe Lund from MS. 45. Wearing a nun's outfit and leaving a trail of red lipstick on the shaft of a bullet a still image from Female Convict Scorpion: Beast Stable of Meiko Kajii in a graveyard. She's huddled beside a grave stone and eating human flesh
November 19, 2025 at 9:33 PM
willowcatelyn.bsky.social
I wrote about my lifelong history with TCM, co-hosting a night of programming on their channel, and the lovely experience that I had.

www.patreon.com/posts/my-lov... (no paywall)
a still from last night's TCM broad cast that reads WITH DAVE KARGER & SPECIAL GUEST WILLOW CATELYN MACLAY
November 18, 2025 at 6:49 PM
willowcatelyn.bsky.social
One of my favorite photos of Candy Darling was this publicity shoot for SOME OF MY BEST FRIENDS ARE, which is screening rn on TCM.
an image of Candy Darling surrounded by many of the other actors in SOME OF MY BEST FRIENDS ARE
November 18, 2025 at 3:54 AM
willowcatelyn.bsky.social
LOST IN TRANSLATION (Sofia Coppola, 2003)

Another formative film. You're 12 years old. Everyone tells you to watch Tarantino. The new hotness is Nolan & Aronofsky. You don't realize how little space was made for femininity until you watch her movies and fall in love with cinema in a new way.
a still from LOST IN TRANSLATION of a Subway whipping by. Scarlett Johannson is seen inbetween the cars for the briefest of seconds. The camera can't focus on her entirely. She's almost like a ghost
November 17, 2025 at 6:25 PM
willowcatelyn.bsky.social
BLADE RUNNER (Ridley Scott, 1982)

I watched this film when I was six, and I think the specific way that I loved it (feeling a sense of embodiment through characters who were functionally disembodied or ostracized for their bodies) influenced the trajectory of my cinephilia more than any other film.
a still of BLADE RUNNER featuring the character Rachel (Sean Young)
November 16, 2025 at 5:49 PM
willowcatelyn.bsky.social
ANCHORESS (Chris Newby, 1993)

A possession tale in the old superstitious world that uses the tricks of a possession film and the cultural ostracization therein, but does so through a woman housing the spirit of God rather than the devil. One of my favorite discoveries of the last few years
a b&w image from ACHORESS from low angle of a woman speaking to a man wearing a shroud.
November 14, 2025 at 10:03 PM
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DIE MY LOVE seems to be a love it or hate it movie, and I loved it.

www.patreon.com/posts/143518...
In a former life, Grace (Jennifer Lawrence) and Jackson (Robert Pattinson) were hip New Yorkers—she, a writer, and he, a drummer—but they’ve found themselves transported to the wide-open spaces of Montana after he came into possession of his Uncle’s two-storey home. Their economic need to retreat from the Big Apple insists something unexceptional about their artistic ventures, but sometimes life throws you a curveball in the form of a gift, and maybe it was too good to refuse. A millennial couple owning a house in 2025, what a fucking concept. Director Lynne Ramsay is a genreless filmmaker, but there’s touches of the modern Gothic in Die My Love. We quickly learn that the house was inherited after Jackson’s uncle committed suicide, and when Grace and her hubby settle, one of the first things they hear are the rats scurrying upstairs. The first shot of the film is from a locked position at the end of a hallway as the two venture into their abode, and Ramsay wanted it to feel ominous, as if the house were alive itself, and staring at them. The house hears their hope, and their best case scenario, “There’s an office upstairs. You can write all day and night here, no distractions. I’ll get my drum kit. We can do what we like”. They christen the home with sex, their beautiful youthful bodies, sculpted and clean, and their animalistic passion brings a child into their family in short order. Before we can blink, Grace has grown bored, been stricken with writer’s block, and inside their happy home, there’s both too much to do, and too little. Much has been said about the post-partum blues that Grace experiences, but Die My Love is most affecting when viewed primarily as love story of rigid, fragmented, unease that is maddening, humorous, failing, and occasionally enchanting. a still from DIE MY LOVE of Robert Pattinson and Jennifer Lawrence in close-up. They're about to kiss, and the image has a lovely cool sea green tint washed over the lighting.
November 13, 2025 at 8:12 PM
willowcatelyn.bsky.social
I liked IF I HAD LEGS I'D KICK YOU. In this piece, I wrote about how the film uses the aesthetic legacy of ERASERHEAD to say something new. Go see it in the cinema if you can.

www.patreon.com/posts/143134...
November 8, 2025 at 6:33 PM
willowcatelyn.bsky.social
I wish I liked Guillermo Del Toro's FRANKENSTEIN more, because I tend to love adaptations of this story. I think it's only partially successful, because the monster's appearance and behavior don't create enough contradictions for our empathy to be challenged.

www.patreon.com/posts/142836...
Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein features a dedication to Mary Shelley, Boris Karloff and James Whale. This story, and the 1931 film adaptation, are sacred to him, his sensibilities as an artist, and to the shape of his life. He’s been very open and honest about how that film, and Victor Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive (1973)—a wartime picture set during the opening stages of the Franco dictatorship of Spain, and featuring a visit from The Creature—were fundamental in shaping the person that he became. Shelley’s story is a religion for Del Toro, and his fairy-tale belief in empathizing with monsters, while distrusting man, has become the dominant narrative focal point throughout his career. While watching Del Toro’s passion project I thought about religious pictures, and movies about Christ. Del Toro’s most tantalizing image connects that religious symbolism by showing The Creature hung on a cross before being shocked into life. Lazarus and Christ as one. Shelley’s story is so provocative because she manages to evoke sympathy in the reader through her examination of the unnatural perversion of sustained mortality in a creature who never asked to be born, but, importantly, shows us the violent capabilities of the monster too. Del Toro perhaps loves the monster too much, and it prevents the film from forcing viewers to be confronted with dual truths. In most films about Christ, he’s positioned as only God, but the Bible stresses that he was God and man. Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ (1987) was a lightning rod of controversy, because it presented both sides of Christ’s condition, and because he did, it made the sacrificial crucifixion resonate with a genuine grappling of what it meant for his divinity. It’s a film that works whether you believe in God or not, because the human element that was cast aside is tied to the sacrifice, and it could realistically stand in as a moral tale for anyone. Del Toro’s picture comes up short... a still image from Guillermo Del Toro's FRANKENSTEIN of Victor (oscar Isaac) working on the creature in his Gothic castle lab.
November 4, 2025 at 6:47 PM
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We are going to be looking at movies from 1975 this month on my website. But which ones? In the running are a bevy of classics from THE MIRROR to SALO to DOG DAY AFTERNOON and more. Vote in the poll if you'd like.

www.patreon.com/posts/patron... (no paywall)
November 3, 2025 at 9:34 PM
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My prime time program with TCM on November 17th covers Robert Altman's COME BACK TO THE FIVE AND DIME and the Gay Bar Christmas Picture SOME OF MY BEST FRIENDS ARE. SOME OF MY BEST FRIENDS ARE doesn't screen anywhere very often and doesn't have a DVD in circulation.
an image showing the TCM program on the night of November 17th.
November 2, 2025 at 7:02 PM
willowcatelyn.bsky.social
We are concluding our month of John Carpenter with a look at PRINCE OF DARKNESS. None of Carpenter's movies from the 80s are underrated anymore, but this one remains a little elusive, and a little strange. I love it.

www.patreon.com/posts/patron...
Superstition and mumbo jumbo can go a long way with enough assertion of legitimacy. John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness doesn’t make a lick of sense, and when looking at the loose identifiers of the plot:“ancient cylinder, green goo, liquid, sentient embodiment of the anti-God...Satan, maybe?”, it doesn’t exactly strike fear into the heart. However, the film remains one of Carpenter’s scariest with its Lucio Fulci-esque descent into an apocalyptic inevitability, brought on by a forward momentum of images that immediately inform the viewer that it’s already too late. The very first image of the film is a wide frame of a Cardinal at the Vatican who has succumbed to disease on his death bed, and lying on his stomach is a small chest containing a message. “The sleeper awakens”. At the time of production, Carpenter was having his mind blown by Quantum mechanics, and he threaded those theoretical ideas around a story of science and religion becoming bedfellows to fight an inexplicable evil, but being a John Carpenter movie, the end of the world is certain. In a prologue over the opening credits, we see a constellation of images that tell us things are beginning to happen on Earth that are not right. A Jim Danforth matte painting of the sun and a half-moon in conjunction spells out an astrological riddle of looming extinction. Prince of Darkness uses numerous images of bugs gathering in wait to devour the human race. The creeping necrotic sensation of their desire to feast on the flesh of this ensemble of scientists and religious men is showcased through a battalion of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of ants rushing over one another, and in another image of worms wriggling up the window-sills of a monastery. A group of young physicists and religious experts have gathered in an enormous old church to find the answer to the dead cardinal’s message in the form of an ancient book, and the arrival of a gigantic cylinder in the bowels of the place of worship. a still image from jOHN Carpenter's PRINCE OF DARKNESS of the basement of a church. The walls are brown, candles are lit everywhere and there's a large cylinder containing green goo on the right side of the frame
October 31, 2025 at 5:04 PM
willowcatelyn.bsky.social
THE DEAD (John Huston, 1987)

It's somehow as astonishing as the Joyce short story. The finest scene that Huston ever filmed was his daughter hearing a song attached to an old memory, and in that moment, it feels as though the character's private memories of lost love are legible to us all.
a still image from THE DEAD of Anjelica Huston staring up as she hears a song. She's dressed in black, with a shawl wrapped around her head, and the image feels religious, with her standing at the top of a stair-case and in front of a stained glass window.
October 28, 2025 at 3:46 PM
willowcatelyn.bsky.social
My TWIN PEAKS series continues with Season 3, Episode 17. We approach the curtain call, and everything feels wrong.

www.patreon.com/posts/twin-p...
a still image from Season 3, Episode 17 of Twin Peaks: The Return. It's a wide angle image of Dale Cooper at the Twin Peaks sheriff station, and superimposed in the background is a frozen dissolve of Cooper's worried face. The final two episodes of Twin Peaks: The Return aired together, and I felt a sensation of dread on the morning of the finale. It didn’t seem like there was enough time to get to where the series was going, and a final encounter between Mr. C and Dale Cooper (Both played by Kyle MacLachlan) was supposed to resolve what exactly? I began to question the impetus for the series, and the urge of viewers to go back to this place, and to experience more time with these characters. By dredging up the graves, what would come slithering out? David Lynch and Mark Frost exploited the assumptions of nostalgia to make bolder statements on topics of time, memory, and the traumatic underbelly of unresolved violence at a community, and global level. In the previous episode when Dale Cooper triumphantly regained consciousness and stated he was the FBI, and intended to go back to Twin Peaks to settle things, it felt ecstatic, and momentous and hopeful, but the status of those three letters in the body of a hero should have been read more closely. Cooper hadn’t done enough to earn that trust. It was evident in how Twin Peaks didn’t become a better place at the conclusion of the Laura Palmer investigation, and how it only bred more law enforcement, and more miseries behind locked doors for this logging town. Punishment instead of sympathy, and heroism instead of help, fell more victims. The original series ended with Cooper’s failure and his descent into monstrosity. It draped all over this community in the negative space of the years that we didn’t see, and Twin Peaks initially concluded in its entirety in 1992 with a film about Laura Palmer’s death. It was perhaps foolish to think that it could end in any other way.
October 27, 2025 at 5:43 PM
willowcatelyn.bsky.social
CELINE AND JULIE GO BOATING (Jacques Rivette, 1974)
DUELLE (Jacques Rivette, 1976)

White Magic & Black Magic
a still from CELINE AND JULIE GO BOATING of to hands clasped a still from DUELLE of two women about to clasp hands in front of a dark background. They're wearing golden gowns
October 26, 2025 at 5:28 PM
willowcatelyn.bsky.social
YOU ARE NOT I (Sara Driver, 1981)

Into the deepest recesses of her mind. With careful consideration of who the character is, and how she sees the world, Driver evokes the singular world of this character's subjectivity.
a B&W still image from Sara Driver's YOU ARE NOT I of a woman wandering in a wooded area that's littered with junk (ex. an old TV set)
October 22, 2025 at 2:21 PM
willowcatelyn.bsky.social
I wrote about John Carpenter's THE THING for my ongoing horror column, and how the there's a strange sensation of intimacy and disembodiment reverberating through the film. I love this movie so much.

www.patreon.com/posts/monste...
My favorite contradiction of John Carpenter’s The Thing is that its palpable intimacy—brought on by the close quarters of an Antarctic research facility, and a whiteout snowstorm—is confined to an ensemble who are purposefully unrelatable. The ethos is every man for himself, but they’re so close to one another in the frame, and through a mutual understanding of the shape of each other’s fear and paranoia that it breeds a fraternal melding of all involved, while the audience is held at arms length from the conveyor-belt of corpsification. In this way, it’s not at all like Alien (1979), which seems to be a similar picture on the surface, with its cloistered space-ship and haunted house trappings, but whose characters all carry a desperation to live, and a sense of community in their joint survival. Alien was fresh in the minds of audiences in 1982, and David Clennon, who plays one of the ensemble in The Thing, spoke about their differences in The Village Voice, “That film was very effective because you had a clear fix on who each of the characters were. So when the alien was stalking a particular crew member, you had an emotional investment in that character. Take Harry Dean Stanton and his kitten, for instance. You really didn’t want the alien to shred him or his kitten. In The Thing, [screenwriter] Bill Lancaster had written scenes that introduced each of the 12 men. And we shot those scenes — maybe two, three minutes total — but John left that material out during editing.[.].Then again, The Thing has its own integrity. It’s a colder, harder, darker world. The outpost culture is totally male, and the outlook at the end is grim and pessimistic.”.In this ensemble, there are loners, a pair of alpha males, many thinkers with brilliant minds, but we don’t really manage to know anyone in The Thing. The characterization is so subtle that it’s barely there, but Carpenter’s attention to the blocking of the actors gives off the illusion of camaraderie for the audience who mi a still image from John Carpenter's THE THING. It's a wide frame of a group of men gathered in a circle to burn the body of one of their crewman.
October 20, 2025 at 5:48 PM
willowcatelyn.bsky.social
Today is my birthday!!!! Buy CORPSES, FOOLS AND MONSTERS! Subscribe to my patreon! Tell my orange cat he is wonderful and perfect!!!!!! Root for the Jays tonight!!!!!!!!! Tell a trans woman in your life that she is a beautiful genius!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! LISTEN TO KATE BUSH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
BIG ORANGE TUXEDO CAT WHO IS PERFECT. HIS NAME IS KERMIT AND HE IS AN ANGEL.
October 19, 2025 at 4:01 PM
willowcatelyn.bsky.social
It is John Carpenter's THE FOG for my reader's choice series.

"The Fog, like all of Carpenter’s great films, is a testament to unending subliminal threat."

www.patreon.com/posts/141450...
a still image from THE FOG. It's a wide frame of a nighttime sea-line draped in fog On the early end of that spectrum was The Fog, a campfire delight about supernatural pirates preying on the small town of Antonio Bay to seek their revenge over gold that was stolen hundreds of years ago. It sounds silly when the plot is laid out, but the eerie macabre of Carpenter’s ghost story hums along with an elegance that is equally startling and beautifully composed. It is the rare film of his that is without a central character, or group, and instead opts for a characterization of the prevailing legend of Antonio Bay as an aesthetic trap that ensnares those who call this place home. The mise-en-scene is luxuriant, dappled in shadows, and with a sharp variance between the wide frames. Perhaps most importantly, the schlocky story is powered by the decisions of form, rather than the aesthetic being handcuffed to narrative exposition. Cinematographer Dean Cundey, argued that The Fog became literary, and timeless, because of its images, not its words. Many modern horror films could learn something from such an ethos. Curiously, through the image, Carpenter and his crew do pay tribute to the inherent power of a good ghost story. The film even begins with an Edgar Allan Poe quote “Is all that we see or seem but a dream within a dream?”, and a dusty old campfire prologue, but whatever might be thought of as old fashioned fades into the ambience of Carpenter’s careful, and haunted imagery of a quiet town that will have to inevitably face whatever is coming.
October 17, 2025 at 4:48 PM
willowcatelyn.bsky.social
BLACKOUT (David Lynch, 1993)

There is a light up ahead
a still image from David Lynch's "Blackout" of a man staring out of a window. It has a strange Douglas Sirk quality.
October 14, 2025 at 10:00 PM