#113: Gays, sex, horror, and gay sexual horror
Maddie's Secret, I Want Your Sex, Leviticus, and Stassi's horrifying return to TV...
Death by Consumption
7/28/26 - 8/3/26
Those of you who have been following my 9-month stye saga will be THRILLED to learn that it’s gotten worse, somehow. At my last checkup the doctor was hopeful that we were moving in the right direction, but cautioned me that it looked like a second stye was forming. Well, her ominous warning was correct, and the two styes have now merged into a super-stye that has almost swollen my entire eye shut. What I’m saying is: I’m serving Quasimodo tea boots the house down, hunni!!!!!!! But seriously, should I just scoop my eyeball out? When does this end???
This week: I watched three new gay movies, I was sent into a blind rage by a new reality show that may be the worst reality show I’ve ever seen, I read a fun horror novel set in the 1300s, and I also read a brilliant book about a professor who’s obsessed with working out.
Maddie’s Secret (2026) — on Apple TV
This is, essentially, a John Early and Kate Berlant 3-minute YouTube video stretched to 2 hours, and your reaction to that description will tell you everything you need to know about whether this is the film for you. The commitment to the bit is everything here, with John playing Maddie — a recipe tester and content creator tormented by her bulimia, lol — as straight as possible. I have to imagine a lot of people who watch this movie will be like………………………...what? It’s very funny to imagine my parents watching this.
The film walks such a wild, confusing line between sincerity and parody, which is essentially the old-school kind of camp described by dear old Susan Sontag, before people started applying the word “camp” to anything gay people did. I went into this expecting more of a broad comedy, but there are surprisingly few laughs in the entire second half, when the film goes full melodrama. The overall tone takes a bit to get used to, and your enjoyment of it will depend almost entirely on how well you adjust. Even in its most serious moments, though, I was still having a great time throughout (but if I were going to have a complaint, I do think a good, like, 10 minutes could have been nipped and tucked here and there, but I feel that way about every modern film except The Odyssey).
But is it any surprise that Kate Berlant is proven yet again to be the comedic genius of our time? I was in the palm of her hand, laughing at literally anything she did in this — her performances during both of the film’s dance sequences (yes) should get at least a Gotham Award, but in a just world the Oscars would recognize Kate for her role as Maddie’s frighteningly obsessed best friend.
Anyway, this is all to say, I had a realization this weekend that hit me like a thunderbolt, like a divine revelation striking me in an instant: Oh, Mary! should cast John Early as Mary and Kate Berlant as Lincoln. Do I have to think of everything around here???
I Want Your Sex (2026) — at Nitehawk Prospect Park
Sorry to Anne Hathaway, who is starring in 50 movies this year, but 2026 is the year of Olivia Wilde. Between the genius of The Invite and now I Want Your Sex, she appears to be having a better time than anyone — she’s finally free from the boring clutches of Jason Sudeikis, she’s hotter than ever, and she’s exclusively taking big swings while making fun of her public image. The only people having a better year than her are, I guess, Jalen Brunson and possibly Zohran Mamdani? But being mayor seems kind of shitty because everyone is mad at you all the time, so let’s say the official “Having the Best Year” rankings are currently at: 1. Jalen, 2. Olivia, 3. Zohran. Congrats to the nominees!!!
In Gregg Araki’s I Want Your Sex, she’s a sex-addicted modern artist who turns her intern, Cooper Hoffman, into her personal boy toy, and this may be an even more fun role to watch her in than her stellar work in The Invite. She’s hilarious and gets to wear cunty outfits and say scandalous things while spanking Philip Seymour Hoffman’s son. Basically: she’s living every Gen Z girly’s fantasy. Maybe your fantasy, too!
But the real breakout here is Cooper Hoffman, who was good in The Long Walk despite that movie sucking, and finally gets a movie worthy of his talents here. Cooper is a reminder that every once in a while a nepo baby is a very welcome addition to the culture, and at just 23 years old (how???) he’s already shaping up to be a great actor. (No comment on the other nepo baby, Mason Gooding’s, acting in this film…) You could practically feel everyone in the theater rooting for Cooper throughout the movie, and when the credits rolled a man looking at his phone in the back of the theater blurted out, “That was Philip Seymour Hoffman’s kid?!” (Just look at the comments of his visit to the Criterion Closet — everyone really wants this kid to succeed!) Cooper is the anti-Gracie Abrams, a nepo baby welcomed with open arms, the true people’s princess. I’m so happy for him!
Leviticus (2026) — on Apple TV
A solid gay horror concept — two boys undergo conversion therapy, which unleashes a demon that takes the form of the boy they most desire — that’s undone by the boys acting like the most braindead idiots you’ve ever seen. The whole point of this demon is that it tricks you into getting near enough to kill, by looking like the person you desire most. The boys figure out that key fact pretty early on, and yet there are at least 5 different scenes in which the monster is like, “Hey, it’s me, your real lover, not the demon who can look like him,” and the boy is like, “I completely trust you, let me start making out with you now.” I swear, this demon must have been feeling like he hit the fucking jackpot with these two dumbasses. So if you like gay horror and yelling at idiotic characters, this is the film for you! Still, the concept was smart, and the bogan Australian setting is shot beautifully, so it’s not a total wash, but is it too much to ask for the gays in my gay horror to not be such fucking morons?
House of Stassi, season 1 episodes 1-2 — on Hulu
This may be the most annoying show ever made. The entire premise of the show is that Stassi — a demonic entity who was fired 6 years ago from Vanderpump Rules for being racist — wants to be famous again, so she convinced Hulu to give her a show. That’s it. That’s the entire premise of the show. Sure, we’re ostensibly here to follow Stassi’s life (I cannot imagine a more terrifying person than someone who genuinely wants to follow Stassi’s life), but the only thing happening in Stassi’s life is… she’s filming the very show you are watching. And boy is she happy to tell you all about what it’s like to film a reality show!
This show-about-a-show concept makes House of Stassi feel like the anti-Comeback, an extremely unfunny, un-clever, entirely too meta, boringly self-referential waste of energy and pixels and dollars (the only time I’ve ever been mad about Disney wasting money is when that money is going straight into Stassi’s pockets). The premiere is spent, exhaustingly, with Stassi walking us through how and why she’s assembled this cast. The cast is mostly built around her extremely annoying family members, because, as she reminds us 500 times, Stassi’s goal is to become Kris Jenner, and this TV show is the first step in her nebulous plans for media domination. Thankfully, based on the first two episodes — the only amount of the show I could actually stomach — I do not think Kris Jenner has anything to fear from Stassi.
On the glory days of Vanderpump Rules, Stassi was an asshole, but she was in an ensemble of assholes, so it worked. On House of Stassi she’s the queen of assholes, and it could not be more unpleasant spending time under her reign. Now that she is returning from her 6 years of cancellation (“When I was 9 weeks pregnant, I was canceled,” Stassi says, which is both a hilarious way to phrase it — as if her cancellation was a lightning bolt on a clear day, something that just happened for no reason — and a sad attempt to get sympathy for her racist actions; she was 9 weeks pregnant and you heartless animals canceled her!), Stassi has grown into a more smug, less funny version of her younger self.
Back in the good old days of 2014 Bravo, Stassi was able to effortlessly fire off a great, bitchy one-liner, like when she dismissed waitress Scheana mid-fight with a succinct, “I’m not sure what I’ve done to you, but I’ll take a pinot grigio.” But now all she’s got are sad, flailing attempts to reclaim her former glory — in House of Stassi, she excitedly tells us how she’s meeting up with “the Mormon Wives” and other Hulu talent in Las Vegas, because, “Synergy loves a pinot grigio!” Synergy… loves… a pinot grigio? Synergy loves a pinot grigio. This nonsense line is delivered with all the self-satisfied smugness of some of her most iconic lines, and yet it makes zero sense on a comedic or even linguistic level. Synergy loves a pinot grigio!!!! Why is Stassi speaking like ChatGPT trying to write copy for fridge magnets?
And the synergy of it all is even more insulting than the pathetic attempts at humor. As you can tell from the “synergy loves a pinot grigio” of it all, House of Stassi establishes up front that we’re going to do things… a little differently around here, not like those other shows. You see, Stassi is up front about the fact that she’s making a show, so when there’s Hulu network synergy happening, they’re just going to call it out. And boy do they call it out, over and over and over again. Did you know Stassi is making a TV show? And that it’s on Hulu???
The smugness of the entire enterprise is what ultimately drove me to the brink of madness. Stassi is so excited to tell you that she’s breaking the fourth wall, but she’s acting as if we’re all too dumb to understand that the other reality shows we might watch are also produced. Whenever a Housewife references another Housewife from another city, or promotes her Bravo-owned podcast or Bravo-owned brand partnership, we don’t need the show to literally pause the action to tell us that what we are watching is brand synergy. We fucking get it! The Real World and Road Rules started doing crossover episodes literally 30 years ago — we’ve been in this game a long time! This is not a big, unspoken secret that Stassi is bravely exposing. We’re not fucking idiots. And, ironically, the more House of Stassi obnoxiously and blatantly breaks the fourth wall, the more it proves that we actually need a fourth wall on reality TV. Because when it’s gone, then you’re just making a show about making a show. And who the fuck cares about that?
The core of the drama in the premiere is that Stassi is worried that her husband and family are not ready to be on reality TV (and it’s worth noting that, for all the attempts to be “more authentic” by breaking the fourth wall, this exposes how deeply artificial Stassi’s show is — if you were actually worried they weren’t ready for this, they wouldn’t be in front of your cameras right now! Stop lying to me, you’re not that good at it!!!). So she decides to call up an old pro: Katie Maloney, her former frenemy from Vanderpump Rules, who abandoned Stassi post-cancellation to wedge herself up Ariana Madix’s ass, only for Katie be abandoned herself by Ariana post-Scandoval, when Ariana became the most famous woman in the world and Katie found herself randomly running a sandwich shop in West Hollywood (and if you understood everything I just wrote, please seek treatment).
What I’m saying is: Kris Jenner launched her family’s career via her daughter’s scandalous celebrity sex tape. If Stassi wants to take the Jenner-Kardashian crown, she’s going to need something a lot bigger than filming a tepid sit-down with a local sandwich shop owner…
But anyway, we finally get the long-awaited-by-no-one sit down between Stassi and Katie. “Do you want to do this show with me?” Stassi asks Katie, who is actively, at that very minute, doing this show with her.
“I don’t know how I feel about doing reality TV…” says Katie, who has been on reality TV for the past 13 years — who would have been filming Vanderpump Rules at this moment if she hadn’t been fired last year, in fact — and who is, need I remind you, doing reality TV as she says these very words.
What are we doing? Why is this happening? Who is this for? You can feel Stassi picturing this sit down between her and Katie Maloney as some sort of Avengers assemble moment, but for gay people and basic white women, but is there anyone out there who was clamoring to watch Stassi and Katie pretend to play coy about being on the show they both clearly signed contracts for? The only part of the show that felt somewhat true was when Stassi says reality TV “traumatized me, but I can’t stay away from it,” telling us that the reason this show exists was because she couldn’t let Vanderpump Rules be her legacy. “I had to make this happen,” she insists. This is exactly the same logic that led to Trump running for a third time — it’s an asshole’s refusal to just go away and be rich and annoying in private. But at least with Stassi I have the freedom to change the channel. So I refuse to participate in this any further. Let me know when the House of Stassi falls.
Between Two Fires, by Christopher Buehlman (2012) — library ebook
Though this book was published over a decade ago (self-published, even, I think!), it only surged in popularity in the past year. It’s a horror novel set in the Black Plague-ravaged France of the 1300s — I don’t understand why a book set in a world in which disease, war, and evil rulers are destroying society would resonate with people now! What a mystery! This is a fantastic setting for a horror novel, and the book is full of creepy, disgusting sequences, like Game of Thrones mixed with Lovecraft. And if you’re a real freak like me, you’d pair this with A Distant Mirror, the best actual history book about all the true insanity that went in on the 1300s. I guess things could always be worse?
Muscle Man, by Jordan Castro (2025) — hardcover
I will warn you that this book will not be for everyone, but I read it giggling and kicking my legs the whole time, tearing through it in just 24 hours. The book’s plot is practically nonexistent: a college professor waits for a meeting to start while wishing he could be working out instead, and then he works out after the meeting. That’s the plot! Throughout all the non-action, we’re trapped with nothing but Harold’s own thoughts, a hilarious swirl of manosphere-adjacent insecurities. Harold is both a very funny caricature of this type of guy (“When his eyes focused on his phone, his brain seemed to shoot to the front of his forehead, then thud against the bone, causing his lips to curl—he loved the weightlifting meme accounts”) and a tragic emblem of the — say it with me — male loneliness epidemic:
Harold had always known he had a great mind, which he’d tried to explain to his friends growing up, when they would taunt him and call him “gay.” He tried to put it in a way they’d understand. “With a book,” Harold told his best friend, “you can communicate with the smartest people, without being oppressed by any kind of obligation to them. You can just put them down and pick them up. Imagine that power: being able to pick up and put down the greatest thinkers in history. Living people swarm you and try to suck you like mosquitos. They want and ask and smell. With books it’s a whole different thing.” Harold’s friends still didn’t care. “It’s even better than that,” he continued to push, “because you can actually take dead people’s brains and get them into your head” He had been waiting to pull this out as a last resort. His friends looked at him uneasily.
I can see why people would hate being trapped in Harold’s brain for the length of the book, but I found him, unfortunately, very funny. His insecurities are laid bare and raw, as he violently seesaws between self-doubt and lashing out at paranoid, invented threats. At one point, while waiting for his meeting to start, a group of college boys accidentally comes into the room, has a confused conversation with him, and then leaves. It’s all very normal, but to Harold their confusion at being in the wrong room is a mockery of him, somehow, or even a threat: “These weasels were always waiting for their days of glory, when they could finally have an excuse to topple someone like him…” This book could, I think, change the lives of many actually toxic men, if only they actually read books. Oh well!
There are so many little moments that made me actually laugh out loud as I read, something I haven’t done in… decades? Call me toxic all you want, but I never got sick of Harold’s paranoid delusions and pointless anger — in fact, and this is probably something I should unpack with my therapist, I kind of loved him! There’s a little Harold in all of us, or at least all of us men. I mean, read this section and tell me with a straight face you haven’t once had this exact same line of thinking:
Nearby, a thin white kid also did curls, wearing a beanie and over-car headphones. Harold could tell instantly and with 100 percent certainty that he was evil. Often, it was not the strongest but the weakest who were the most cruel. The kid’s head accessories, in addition to the fact that he was making a “sexy” face in the mirror—leaning his head forward and angling it to inspect his jawline, while looking directly into his own eyes, and curling one side of his upper lip—betrayed a terrifying inner life. He had undoubtedly been bullied, Harold thought, and had undoubtedly deserved it. He looked like he’d be fun to bully. He was probably sixteen.
Harold is a wounded animal, a total idiot, a sad little boy trapped in a muscle man’s body, and the perfect avatar for our times. The book’s brilliance is in treating him with equal parts relentless scorn and empathy, and never too much of one or the other. We live in an age of toxic men, like it or not, and before I read this book I would have laughed at the idea of spending even more time with their awful thoughts, but now that I’ve finished Muscle Man, I could have happily spent more time in the mind of Harold. I’m going to leave a copy of this book on every machine and bench at my gym.