So here's the deal
The future of Ichi the Chiller
I had big plans for October. I finally hit my stride and had a regular schedule locked in with a massive to-do list for the blog. I was deep in multiple projects and was preparing to also start writing reviews for my friends Andy and Tyson’s lit mag Wiener’s Digest. Ari and I had multiple episodes of our podcast recorded and I was getting ready to start editing them. And for spooky season, I was getting ready to go absolutely ham, beyond what I’ve ever done since starting this. I had a long list of slashers I hadn’t seen before ready, 2023 horror movies to catch up on, a deep dive into Hammer horror movies, and so many other movies to watch. On October 1st I hit the ground running, going to a six movie marathon of Hong Kong action horrors at my favorite theater, the Spectacle. I was having serious back pain, but I pushed through for the cinema. I loved everything they showed. Here’s a little ranked list for you:
Ichi the Chiller’s Official Ranked List of The Spectacle’s Fright Church marathon:
The Holy Virgin vs the Evil Dead (Tony Lou Chun-Ku, 1991)
The Nine Demons (Chang Cheh, 1984)
Kung Fu Zombie (Hua Shan, 1981)
Exorcist Master (Wu Ma, 1993)
Demon Strike (Mun Yiu-Wah, 1979)
Kung Fu from Beyond the Grave (Charles Lee Chiu, 1982)
I walked home with some dumplings from Vanessa’s, excited to keep the streak going. The next day I would watch Exorcist II: The Heretic before going over to my friend Ryan’s apartment to watch The Exorcist III. As many of my readers know, this wouldn’t end up happening. For those who don’t know, Ryan was killed in the early hours of October 2nd, days before his 32nd birthday. I had spent almost every day of the past five years with him, and just like that, he was gone.
It’s been difficult to start putting myself back together. I’ve been scared to watch a lot of movies. Obviously, I won’t be watching some of the movies that would directly trigger his traumatic death for a long time, but even movies I used to go to for comfort look like emotional minefields now. We watched a lot of movies together that I would later start referring to as Miller Lite movies, inspired by Ryan’s drink of choice. He loved rom coms. He was supposed to be a guest on Ari and I’s podcast to talk about Wild at Heart and Debbie Does Dallas, the latter to tell lore of our esteemed college. His voice is captured in some of our other episodes as he’s getting something from the fridge or refilling his water bottle, almost always making fun of us for podcasting. He made a joke about me starting to post porno posters on my Instagram and then I started incorporating porn into the things I watched for the blog and planned on doing a series on different genres of porn movies (like golden age hardcore, Skinemax softcore, pinku, etc.).
One of his favorite directors was Woody Allen. We were slowly making our way through his filmography, we were especially excited to watch his movie with Jason Biggs. Hannah and Her Sisters was his favorite, but I think we both agreed one of the funniest scenes ever made was the opening of Bananas, a parody of an ABC Wide World of Sports broadcast showing the assassination of the leader of a fake Latin American country and the ensuing fascist coup. I’ll never be able to watch it without hearing him howling with laughter the first time we watched it.
Some of the movies I’ve watched since October 2nd went in one eye and out the other (sorry for that mental image), like House Party (Reginald Hudlin, 1990), Knock at the Cabin (M. Night Shyamalan, 2023), and Priscilla (Sofia Coppola, 2023). I rewatched a few bangers with my friends like Grizzly Man (Werner Herzog 2005), Crank (Mark Neveldine & Brian Taylor, 2006), and Crank: High Voltage (Mark Neveldine & Brian Taylor, 2009). I watched Joe Pera’s new comedy special, Slow & Steady (Marty Schousboe, 2023). I recognized some of the bits from when Ryan and I saw him open for Casiotone for the Painfully Alone in 2021. I cried watching David Byrne’s American Utopia (Spike Lee, 2020) in Cape Cod. I may or may not have cried watching Frozen II (Chris Buck & Jennifer Lee, 2019) with my niece. If I theoretically did, it happened when Olaf says “I just thought of one thing that’s permanent . . . love,” which you can never prove happened because I absolutely did not cry because of fucking Olaf and under no circumstances did I tear up writing that right now.
All of this is to say I haven’t really been able to do any of what I’ve wanted to do with this blog. I started writing poetry again for the first time in over two years. It’s been weird. I have the foundations of a full length book. The floodgates have opened and I’m not only writing work about what’s happened in the wake of Ryan’s death, but about things I haven’t been able to write about extensively like Eli and The Walk. I’m also writing poems I think are good fucking poems, a rare feeling for me. I gotta ride this wave. For Ryan. For our friends. For myself. Writing poetry takes a lot out of me though. Even when I do reach the point where I’m watching movies like I used to, I won’t have it in me to write about them as long as I’m also writing this book. I don’t know how long it will take me to write and I don’t know how much it’s gonna take out of me, but it’s going to be a while and it’s going to be a lot. So that to-do list isn’t gonna happen. I’ve got a few months worth of round ups that will start being posted in the next couple of days and one big blog post about shark movies that I almost finished that will come out at some point in the not too distant future. Then it’s time for the dreaded “indefinite hiatus.”
So basically, this is a long and fucked up way to say that if you’re a paid subscriber, I VERY STRONGLY urge you to change into a free subscriber. Like for real. It was weird enough for me to have people paying for this when I was posting sporadically, don’t make this harder. It’s okay, I promise.
Thank you so much. I’ll be back when I’ve picked up the pieces again.