Life is short. Things change in an instant. Just because you’re able to do something today doesn’t automatically mean you’ll be able to do it tomorrow.

I have a lot of stuff on my to-do list that have been piling up lately, like looming grant deadlines and writing this post.

So this is for me as much as it is for you.

I got some potentially scary health news last week. I’m not ready to go into it here now, but it will eventually make its way into my film, Grief Alchemy Project.

I could let it derail me from my aforementioned list, but I’ve decided instead to use it as a catalyst.

Here’s how we can all make sure to keep moving our projects (and lives) forward, even when things feel like they’re falling apart.

• Stop ruminating and make one small move towards your end goal. Even the tiniest step is progress. Action begets action.

• Break big things up into small steps. Make lists so you can cross things off. This will make you feel productive.

• Remember that we all have a finite amount of time on this earth. You don’t know when that time will expire. What do you want to accomplish while you’re here — finally reaching the end of your Instagram feed? No? Then put your phone down and focus on what you actually want to create.

• Ask yourself: if I knew I only had a couple of months left, would I feel like I’ve completed everything I’m supposed to complete? If yes, amazing. You should celebrate. If no, see above. Nothing is as scary as dying without having realized your full potential.

• Meditate. Ten minutes a day is great, twenty is even better. I’ve been doing TM for about a year now, but any kind of mindfulness practice will help you focus and de-stress.

• Exercise. Get into your body and out of your head.

• Know when you need to rest.

And most importantly, be kind to yourself. You are wonderful and you deserve it. Also if you beat yourself up for not being productive enough during hard times, you won’t get anything done at all.

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Now let’s all get some shit done.

Until next time,

Tara

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The Santa Ana winds were blowing last week. Maybe that’s why I've been feeling unsettled and a bit bleak.

I’ve felt a kind of paralysis move in, likely the result of the general overwhelm of having thirteen thousand things to do every day which never all get done. Things are feeling stagnant when they need to be moving forward.

I think I might need an energetic clearing.

And with the equinox coming up next week, it feels like the perfect time. You spring clean your house, so why not your energetic field?

Let’s do it together.

First things first. Deep clean your physical space.

If your home is dirty or cluttered, you will be surrounded by stagnant energy. As above, so below — so get that shit moving.

My porch and front doorway had a bunch of cobwebs all over the place because I was out of town for so long. No wonder I’ve been feeling stuck.

If you have a car, clean that too (inside and out.)

Once everything’s clean, make a simple witchy floor wash by pouring a little hot water over some hyssop and lavender, let it steep like a tea, then dilute it. You can add some lemon peel if you like. Now, mop your floors with it.

Open all your windows and doors. Light some palo santo (or sage or copal) and smudge your house going counterclockwise. Get in all of the corners and dark spaces.

You can envision the smoke loosening up any stuck energy and pushing it out the doors and windows.

Purge.

Get rid of anything broken (unless you will realistically fix it within the next couple of weeks.) I’ve been hanging on to this broken plate that I want to kintsugi (can that be a verb?) so I will make myself do that this week.

Pick one item of clothing that represents a self you have grown beyond. If it can be useful to someone else, give it away. If it’s in tatters or holds heavy energy of a traumatic time, get rid of it.

Take a bath.

Toss some sea salt and lavender into the water. When you’re in the bath, imagine the water absorbing anything stagnant or negative in your energetic body.

Relax. You will know when it’s time to get out.

Once you’re finished, drain the tub and visualize all of the negativity leaving with the bathwater.

If you don’t have a bathtub, you can use a body scrub and do the same thing in the shower.

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If anyone has any other rituals they do for spring cleaning their energetic fields, I’d love to hear about them. Let me know in the comments.

Until next time,

Tara

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The first floor of my childhood home has more doorways than interior walls.

To move through that space is to constantly cross from one threshold to the next, to exist in a state of perpetual transition.

I’m back in LA now and have been thinking a lot about this idea of New Jersey itself as a liminal state.

Figuratively for me currently — the house is mine but not mine, the house is empty yet full, the house will soon be sold. When I’m there, it functions as a kind of cocoon from which I will emerge a new person on the other side of all of this.

But also liminal in a literal sense — New Jersey exists between New York and Philadelphia. It’s mostly suburbia, a place for gestation. People move from the city to raise their kids, the kids grow up and move back to the city.

I had really wanted to unpack the idea in this post, but it’s already way late (sorry) so I’m going to have to figure out New Jersey in a future essay (is there enough there for a whole book?? Lmk your thoughts in the comments.)

Instead, I’ll tell you about what I was doing in New Jersey over the last couple of months. I’m overdue for an update on Grief Alchemy Project, the film I’m making as part of the NonDē 50 Films Project for 2026.

If you’re new to A Woman Under the Influence, you can read my first post about the film here:

Now, for the update.

After encountering a couple of hiccups with cinematographers, I found a great one and we spent the second week of February shooting at the house.

We shot on the Arri Alexa Mini LF with Leica prime lenses. I love love love the Alexa Mini for its dynamic range and the way it performs in low light.

We mainly shot interiors. Scenes of me packing things into boxes, talking on the phone, clearing out spaces. Next month I’ll shoot the strange surreal scenes where I process emotions in each room of the house.

The shoot went well, but it was a lot. Emotionally and practically, since I was directing and also producing and also in it. I’d only met my DP once before we shot, and I hired a sound person for one day who I met for the first time on set, which was also weird because the film is so personal and requires me to be quite vulnerable.

But whatever, I chose to do this so I’m doing it!

While I was prepping for the shoot, I found these two apps to definitely be worth the money: Flim1 and Cadrage.

Flim is a visual library that lets you describe what you’re looking for in any terms you want and then returns results that are way better than what you’d get from a search engine. It pulls from films, music videos, commercials, TV shows, and photos. Every image’s source is credited, and if you see something that’s close, but not quite right, you can then search for similar images.

It’s great for putting together a lookbook.

Sometimes I’ll have shots from specific films in mind that I know that I want to reference, but other times I have an idea in my head and then need to find the right image to match it.

Like I have a shot in mind for one of the scenes I’ll shoot in April, but I couldn’t think of a film to pull it from. It’s something like this, which I found by typing “a woman in a dark basement with a spotlight shining on her” into Flim’s search bar:

Cadrage turns your phone into a director’s viewfinder so you can create and export a PDF of your shotlist — complete with photos — directly from the app and visualize your framing on set. It comes with a bunch of different camera package and lens settings so it’s customizable. It’s very intuitive to use, and embeds all of the essential information — camera, lens, aspect ratio, field of view, bearing, location, date — into the image file.

Since I was living in my location, this app was especially great. I spent a couple of days before the shoot observing the house at different times of day and trying out framing possibilities, and found it to be quite accurate during production.

Here’s a test shot from Cadrage:

And here’s a still from the footage we shot (obviously not color corrected):

I also shot some Super 8 film myself.

I rented a Canon 1014 xls from a place called Du-All Camera in North Jersey because I couldn’t find any rental houses in the Philly area that carried them.

I liked the camera and would rent it again. One thing to note for next time is that the motor locks up in really cold weather. I shot a couple of rolls outside in the dead of winter and at one point the camera stopped working.

It had been a really long time since I’d shot Super 8 and I forgot how many things you have to remember to do when you’re not just shooting on your iPhone.

I didn’t check the gate (ever) and you can see in the third shot below there’s a scratch running down the left side, so I guess at some point something got in there. But whatever, the beauty of Super 8 lies in its imperfections.

The footage above is Kodak Vision3 500T (again not color corrected.)

Since I couldn’t find anywhere in the Philly area to process and scan my film, I sent it back to Pro8mm in Burbank and it was ready for me when I got back to LA. I did the full format overscan (the above export was cropped to 1:85) at 4K with the DPX codec.

The different file formats will be kind of a big B in post, but I have made peace with that. I am a perfectionist and I want the film to look as good as it possibly can.

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Overall, I’m really happy with everything I’ve shot so far.

Now I need to prep for April. It’s gonna get weird. I can’t wait.

Until next time,

Tara

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Hope you enjoy them.

Mariner of the Mountains (2021), Karim Aïnouz

Karim Aïnouz’s intimate travel diary centers around the Brazilian director’s first trip to Algeria, the country his father comes from. He interweaves past and present to explore his parents’ relationship and his own family’s history. Watch it on Mubi.

Okurimono (2024), Laurence Lévesque

After years of living in Montreal, a woman returns to Nagasaki to sell her late mother’s home, and grapples with the horrors of the city’s past and how the atomic bomb affected her family’s history. Watch it on Kanopy.

Beba (2021), Rebeca Huntt

Filmmaker Rebeca Huntt weaves her own coming-of-age story with her parents’ past to examine race, identity, and inherited trauma in America. Through archival footage and personal reflection, the film interrogates how history lives on in the body. Watch it on Hulu.

Pictures of Ghosts (2023), Kleber Mendonça Filho

Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho explores the history of movie theaters in Recife as a way of tracing personal memory and collective loss. The film becomes an elegy for disappearing cultural spaces and the ghosts they leave behind. Watch it on Mubi.

Beaches of Agnès (2008), Agnès Varda

Agnès Varda reflects on her life and career. Playful and deeply personal, the film blends autobiography, cinema, and art into a self-portrait of a singular creative life. Watch it on Criterion.

The Two Faces of a Bamiléké Woman (2017), Rosine Mbakam

A Belgium-based Cameroonian filmmaker confronts her divided identity by returning to her home country with her young son after living abroad for seven years. Through interviews with her mother and other female relatives and the director’s own self-interrogation, the film examines the tensions between diaspora, tradition, and self-definition. The opening scene is mesmerizing. Watch it on Mubi.

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Until next time,

Tara

This is not a political newsletter.

But when ICE murders two people in three weeks, it’s impossible to think about anything else: American democracy is coming undone.

In the first few weeks of 2026, the United States military abducted Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Donald Trump threatened to take Greenland the easy way or the hard way, and ICE continued to occupy cities across the country, their brutality culminating in the killing of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.

Meanwhile, late stage capitalism has made manifest a world in which you can bet on it all while rotting in bed.

Add to this the mass surveillance we’ve all accepted in the name of convenience and suddenly it appears we’re living in a technofascist state.

I keep asking myself the same question: how will I know when it’s time to leave?

I like to imagine I’ll feel it in my chest, something passed down from one displaced generation to the next.

But my ancestors didn’t know. They stayed too long. Centuries on the same land grew roots strong and deep. By the time they came loose, it was too late. My family had to run, leaving everything behind.

My roots are shallow but spread out, something more like a desert plant.

I can’t help but wonder — was it my father’s childhood uprooting that made it easier for him to leave India for the United States?

My mother used to have a recurring nightmare where futuristic tanks rolled down our street during some kind of military occupation. When Tesla came out with the Cybertruck, she was floored.

“That’s the tank from my dream,” she said.

* * *

I’m still in New Jersey, in the house I grew up in, where I’m getting ready to sell it after the unexpected death of my mom. I’m also making a film about the whole process — a lyrical hybrid documentary on grief, loss, and the meaning of home — as part of the 50 NonDē Films for 2026 Project.

The spine of the film is me clearing out the house and selling it, and through it I’ll weave my ancestors’ parallel stories of exile. The sale of the house was supposed to function as a metaphor for displacement, but with everything happening in the U.S. right now, it may actually become more than that.

My parents are gone. Soon the house will be gone. If there was ever a time to leave, this feels like it.

I always like to say I come from a long line of flee-ers on both sides. Maybe my part of the story is fleeing my own country of birth.

I don’t want to leave. I want to live in a country that values human life, and I have so much respect for everyone in Minneapolis protesting in subzero weather right now.

But I fear the window to stay and resist is closing.

If I do go, I want to leave on my own terms, with a plan. I want to go before the flights are grounded and the borders are closed.

The hard part is figuring out exactly when that’s going to be.

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Until next time,

Tara

The other day I drove a couple of pieces of artwork up to an auction house in Lambertville for consignment. One of them was called “Exactitude.” On the way back, I listened to an astrology podcast that I like and the host said the word “exactitude” three times.

This is either a sign that I should not sell “Exactitude” at auction or it’s confirmation that I should sell “Exactitude” at auction.

The interpretation depends on my worldview.

If I believe the universe works in my favor, conspiring to help me at all times, then it means the latter. But if I believe that the world is unpredictable, or worse, malevolent, then it’s the former.

Of course there’s a third choice, where signs don’t exist and the repeated use of a word that would never come up in casual conversation is just a meaningless coincidence.

But I don’t think that’s true.

Like Carl Jung, I believe in synchronicity. I wonder what he would make of this particular instance.

I have a feeling he would encourage me not to see it as an omen at all. Instead of letting the unexpected presence of this word affect my decision making process in the mundane world, I should consider what internal situations it might correspond to.

In this sense, it’s a call to do things quite precisely and accurately in the upcoming weeks. I do have a lot on my plate right now, and all of the things I need to do would benefit from exactitude. Making my film, for one — the universe is reminding me to put in the work and planning in pre-production so I’m set up to get exactly what I need. Going through all of the objects and boxes of papers and photos in this house is another.

Delivering the print to the auction house was crossing a threshold of sorts — this is the first large piece we’re parting with — so it makes sense that a synchronicity would appear in such a situation.

Also, the fact that the host said “exactitude” three times is interesting in itself. Three is a powerful number, a magic number. The holy trinity, three act structure, the number of time — past, present, future.

Once might be random, twice coincidence, but three times is an invocation.

When I finished that podcast, I listened to the other astrology podcast I like. The host of this one said that my words would be magic this week.

I’ll take all of this to mean the universe is giving me a “you’re on the right track” vibe (pun intended) and I’ll cast this spell:

Exactitude, exactitude, exactitude.

Until next time,

Tara

It’s both wildly strange and perfectly natural to spend so much time here, and it’s been making me think a lot about how a place — whether it’s a house, a town, a city, a state — can shape a person.

Who would I be if I hadn’t grown up in an old Victorian house in South Jersey?

What if we’d never left New York and I grew up in the city?

I found a letter in the attic that my dad had received from a company in India when I was a kid, discussing a prospective job opportunity I’d never known about. Imagine who I’d be if we’d moved to Bombay.

Maybe all of these personas exist in different timelines. It’s fascinating to think about.

Yesterday (in this timeline) I took a bunch of old money I found in the house to get appraised at a coin dealer in Philly.

It turned out not to be worth very much, but when I was looking up directions, I came across something priceless: there is a restaurant in Philadelphia called Shit Steaks.

Anyone else from the area will immediately understand the inevitability of a restaurant called Shit Steaks existing here.

This is the city that birthed such wonders as the great tradition of getting shitfaced on New Year’s Eve and staying that way until the 2nd of January, a landscaping company that doubled as a Trump administration press conference site, and the chaos demon on ice skates that John Oliver loves to talk about.

Shit Steaks is deeply Philadelphian.

It is at once uncomplicated and confounding — why are you calling your own steaks shit?

Did you mean “THE SHIT Steaks”? “No Bullshit Steaks”?

Maybe the thought of steaks excites you so much that you forgot to use any punctuation at all, but really you meant “Shit, Steaks!”

Or maybe you’re just daring the public to eat your food?

I know what you’re thinking, and no, I didn’t do it. It was 12:30 p.m. and I’m part vegetarian. I can’t imagine eating any steak in the afternoon, let alone a Shit Steak. Also, Google said it was closed.

I did, however, do a shallow dive when I got home, and as it turns out, Shit Steaks1 isn’t just some place on Market Street with a fucked up name.

It’s more mysterious than that.

Their website is actually quite earnest — its tagline is not the “Fuck Around and Find Out” that I expected. It is, in fact, “Savor the Best Steaks in Town.”

From their website:

At Shit Steaks, our mission is simple: serve the best damn steak you’ll ever eat. We use only the absolute best, locally sourced prime beef—hand-selected every single day to guarantee unmatched quality.

Also, it’s not even an actual restaurant — Shit Steaks is a pop up that’s constantly moving from one secret location to another. How synchronicitous, then, that it appeared on the map right in the area I happened to be searching.

Shit Steaks is my Brigadoon.

Of course I DM’ed them about getting a reservation.

I’m still waiting to hear back. I’ll let you know what happens.

My overall assessment is this: the word shit here is not a value judgment but a tone. It is adjectival rather than diagnostic. It doesn’t mean the steaks are bad; it means they’re unpretentious. In fact, they’re possibly excellent, and they certainly don’t need your validation.

In other words, these steaks are 100% from Philly.

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Until next time,

Tara

P.S. If anyone is familiar with Shit Steaks, please tell me all about it in the comments.

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I was lucky. I wasn’t evacuated. I didn’t lose anything, physically anyway, but the emotional toll a disaster like that takes on the collective psyche of a city is no joke.

It feels at once a lifetime ago and like it just happened. It was the start of this great shedding that’s been continuing for me, but that I hope will wrap up as the Year of the Snake comes to an end in February.

But who knows — we’re only a week into 2026 and it’s already shaping up to be a hell of a year. The U.S. military kidnapping Nicolás Maduro and his wife with Trump yet again shamelessly saying the quiet part out loud about taking Venezuela for their oil, not mention people making a shitload of money by betting on it, and ICE agents fatally shooting a woman in Minnesota for literally no reason.

Is this going to be the year I have to strip both the house I grew up in and the country of my birth from my life? It’s a lot to deal with.

The other day, in that liminal space between waking and sleeping, I heard my dad say my name and it woke me up. Later, I got the feeling that my mom was mentally saying to me, “Get outta here!” but not in the context of leaving the U.S., rather, I think she meant wrap this shit up with the house already.

I’m trying, Mom!

Which brings me to this month’s update on Grief Alchemy Project, the experimental hybrid doc I’m making as part of the NonDē 50 Films Project for 2026 organized by .

If you missed my first post about it, you can read it here:

I’ll start off with a logistical recap: I’ve shot four (less than full) days so far of verité footage and b roll. A town-wide yard sale we participated in, a visit with a specialist from an auction house who came to take a look at my parents’ collection of prints and antique rugs, me packing up some things around the house, and some b roll of houses in the neighborhood decorated for Halloween and lit up for Christmas to signify the passage of time.

This weekend I’ll shoot some Super 8 footage myself. Interiors and exteriors. Sunlight shining through the lace curtains in the dining room window casting patterned shadows on the patterned rug. Bare tree branches and blue sky. Artwork that’s been hanging in the same spot on the wall for forty years. Etc.

I’ve also been working on a detailed outline and started writing voice over so I can figure out how I want to shape the film.

I had an idea for a series of shots that will be interspersed throughout — I will sit in all of the main eight rooms (living room, dining room, kitchen, TV room, and four bedrooms) and let the emotions contained in each room pass through me so I can process them. Each room will be filmed in a single static wide, impeccably framed and beautifully lit, so it almost looks like a painting, or a photo.

This will be shot on 4K — Alexa Mini, unsure about the lenses currently — and will be super cinematic.

I had this idea because as I’ve been in the house, I’ve had these experiences where I feel like I’m taking on emotions that aren’t my own. They’ll hit out of nowhere and I’ll be completely overwhelmed (and usually cry/sob, although today I felt a crazy bit of anxiety) and if I let myself just kind feel them as much as possible and then let them pass through me, they do. And I feel like I’ve released them.

Strange, I know, but this is a grief alchemy project, right?

Another thing I want to do is use mirrors and reflections as a motif, to make things feel a bit disorienting and also give a stylistic call out to the fact that I’m a filmmaker documenting my own experience.

And finally, I’ll leave you with a few interesting finds from the house:

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Until next time,

Tara

Not like houses or cars or forests or anything insane. Just a piece of paper — a list of things and behaviors I want to release.

Sometimes I’ll do it on the solstice. Sometimes I’ll do it on New Year’s Eve.

Then on New Year’s Day, I like to do things that I want to make a habit out of doing the rest of the year. It’s something I like to do on my birthday too, because as a friend said to me a long time ago, “Your birthday is like your own personal New Year’s.”

A couple of years ago, I was in New Jersey over New Year’s and I made my mom do the list burning thing with me in the backyard on the eve and then on the day we had brunch reservations at a restaurant in Philly on Rittenhouse Square.

If you’re from Philly, right now you might be thinking, “Um, what about the Mummers?”

According to Wikipedia, the Mummers Parade is “the longest-running continuous folk parade in the United States.” It happens on New Year’s Day and it goes right through Center City, like blocks away from the brunch place we picked, and both my mom and I completely forgot it was happening until we drove over the bridge into a shitload of traffic.

In my mind, we both simultaneously gasped and said, “Oh my god, the Mummers.”

We ended up having to park and walk through the parade to get to the restaurant.

This parade is insane. It’s mainly a lot of drunk costumed people with their faces painted dancing down Broad Street next to a bunch of Eagles-themed (the football team not the band) floats.

Everyone is just partying in the streets and it’s fine. As we were eating brunch, a woman walked by outside drinking wine straight from the bottle.

It was hilarious and chaotic and fun to run into the parade that day.

And looking back, that year ended up being one of the most chaotic, but hilarious and fun, years of my life.

Coincidence? I don’t know.

I woke up this morning to a light dusting of snow on the ground and a brand new year. I don’t know what 2026 will have in store for me, but I have a strong feeling (hope?) that it will be leaps and bounds better than 2025.

So this New Year’s Day, my plan is to do one of the intense Lagree(ish) workouts I have a love/hate relationship with, only eat food that my gut microbiome will appreciate, write at least one sentence I love1, do one thing I’ve never done before, publish this Substack post, and shoot some b roll for Grief Alchemy Project, the doc I’m making as part of the NonDē 50 Films Project.

In my mind it didn’t really sound like very much stuff, but as I’m reading it over it actually does sound pretty legit. So maybe I should add acknowledge that I am a high functioning person to that list.

What are you all doing on this New Year’s Day?

Until next time,

Tara

A few years ago, I read an article1 about the connection between Santa Claus and Amanita muscaria mushrooms.

In it, an anthropologist and an ethnomycologist,2 through their own individual research, had separately come to the same conclusion — Christmas is totally psychedelic.

Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but basically, a lot of the imagery we now associate with Christmas may have originated with the pre-Christian winter solstice ceremonies and celebrations of indigenous people living near the Arctic Circle in what is now Siberia.

On the night of the solstice, the shamans of certain groups would collect Amanita muscaria mushrooms (usually growing at the base of pine trees) with the intent of using them in ritual psychedelic journeys.

But the mushrooms are super toxic to people, so before they could ingest them they had to either eat pine needles (they have some chemical in them that counteracts the toxins in the mushroom), feed the mushrooms to reindeer and then drink the reindeer’s pee (reindeer are able to process the toxin that humans cannot and then pee out only the mushroom’s psychotropic substance), or put the mushrooms in a sock and dry them out over a fire.

The shamans would go on their journeys, learn a bunch of shit, and come back and give their gift of information to the community.

Also, the yurts that people lived in had their entrances in the roof because it snowed so much — people would come and go through a hole in the ceiling.

And finally, the Amanita muscaria itself is red and white.

Similar winter solstice rituals made their way into Nordic and Druid culture, then the church rebranded those pagan holidays as their own, and eventually the symbolism began to take on a different meaning: now, Santa’s flying reindeer take him from house to house, where he slides down a chimney, leaves some presents under an evergreen tree and stuffs others into stockings hanging over the fireplace.

Is Santa’s origin story really psychedelic? Unsure, but I love that for him.

I’m more interested in the meaning behind the rituals.

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WHY THE WINTER SOLSTICE?

Winter is a time of shedding and release; a time of literal and metaphoric death. Animals hibernate. Daylight wanes. The trees have lost their leaves.3

When humans still had an intimate connection to the earth, we understood that we, too, were a part of nature, and that the nature of nature is cyclical. Life, death, rebirth.

During the dark nights, people across cultures incorporated fire into their rituals and celebrations — the Yule log, the lighting of candles during the ancient Roman festival of Saturnalia — to call the sun back from the underworld, a reminder that after the darkest times, the light would return.

The winter solstice on December 21 is the longest night of the year. The culmination of the season’s release — its turning point.

It makes sense, then, to choose such a night to turn inward on a psychedelic journey. To embrace the shedding of self, the ritual death of the ego.

Time to let go in order to begin again.

The psychedelic component in Amanita muscaria isn’t psilocybin, it’s muscimol, and its effects sound pretty different. It transports you to a whole new world that seems completely real. Like one minute you’re sitting in your living room and then suddenly it becomes a field and there are small mushroom people talking to you and telling you to follow them. So you do, and then they teach you all sorts of things about life and death and the nature of the universe.

Part of me thinks that these entheogens like mushrooms or ayahuasca or peyote actually transport you to a different realm and let you communicate directly with the plants.

In ancient religions, nature itself was god. Deities were inseparable from the cycles they governed. The sun, whose death and rebirth structured the year itself, made winter one of the most sacred thresholds of all.

In the later Roman Empire, December 25th was actually celebrated as the Birthday of the Unconquerable Sun. The church then reframed the birthday of the Sun God into the birthday of the son of God.

When we bring these ideas of release and renewal into the current moment, they take on even more significance. We are, after all, in the final months of the Year of the Snake, a year whose themes are transformation and rebirth, like the way the snake sheds its skin.

We also have the last new moon of 2025 happening in Sagittarius on Friday December 19th.

I don’t know about you, but for me, this year (honestly the last couple of years) has definitely been one of intense shedding. And I can feel that it’s not quite done yet.

This is the time to slough off any remaining actual or metaphoric dead skin.

Then we can plant the seeds that need to be nurtured until spring, and we will be ready to emerge anew in 2026 and beyond.

A SIMPLE RITUAL FOR THE SOLSTICE

• Start by clearing your space from clutter. This includes your mental space and your digital space. For example, I went through old folders on my desktop and trashed stuff that I’m not working on anymore.

• Make a list of things in your life that no longer serve you. These can be literal things or behaviors.

• Light a fire. If you have a firepit or fireplace, great. If not, you can simply light a candle.

• If you are using a candle, gather a heat safe bowl and a glass of water.

• Call upon your ancestors. Thank them for everything they have done for you and ask them to help you shed the remaining things you want to shed.

• If you’re using a firepit or fireplace, throw your list into the fire. If you’re using a candle, light the edge of your list on fire, then drop it into the heat safe bowl and watch it burn. Throw the water on the fire to put it out if necessary.

• Now make a list of the seeds you want to plant for the new year. You can think of these seeds as things you would like to manifest. Keep the list with you and refer back to it as 2026 progresses.

And if you like, you can watch the winter solstice sunrise livestreamed from Stonehenge.

Happy solstice.

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Until next time,

Tara

Yesterday was supposed to be the second shoot day of my NonDē1 doc, Grief Alchemy Project,2 but, because of circumstances beyond my control, it couldn’t happen as planned.

So instead of telling you about the shoot, let’s talk about the importance of being flexible as a filmmaker.

There are so many moving parts involved in making a film, it’s inevitable that at some point, something is going to go awry. Especially in the world of NonDē, where budgets are non-existent and schedules are tight and you can’t just throw money at a problem to make it go away. You need to have a contingency plan for the contingency plan for the contingency plan, and even then you’ll probably find yourself in a situation where the shit hits the fan and you just have to make it work.

If you’re scheduled to shoot exteriors and you were expecting a sunny day but you get a rainy one, find a way to work the rain into the story or grab an interior if you can. Your crew’s on set and ready to go but your lead actor gets sick and can’t work? Shoot b roll or reimagine the scene so it can work without them. Whatever you do, just shoot something so you don’t lose money. (I say this now, but that’s not what I ended up doing — more on this later.)

The difference between a shoot devolving into a complete shitshow and walking away with a movie instead of a mess comes down to your attitude. So much of producing and directing is problem solving. If you can roll with the punches and think on your feet, the thing you thought was a disaster might actually turn out to be better than your original plan.

A classic example is Jaws — the animatronic shark didn’t work properly, so Spielberg had to shoot around it, which actually created those iconic suspenseful sequences in open water. Turns out it’s much scarier to imagine something terrifying lurking beneath the surface of the ocean than it would be to actually see the thing.

Which brings us to my second shoot.

When I found out yesterday morning that a huge wrench had been thrown into my shooting plan, I had two choices: freak out or figure it out.

The latter is always the way to go.

After considering my options, I realized that the tiny size of my film was actually a benefit. With a crew of two (including me) and a location that I’m staying in and also now own, it seemed like pushing the shoot was the smartest option. A few phone calls and emails later and I was able to reschedule for next week and even get a refund on my insurance premium.

Money lost was zero.

The delay has also given me more time to consider certain ideas I’ve been kicking around — I want the film to have a very specific visual language, and I’m still working out what that will be.

I’ll share some of these ideas with you.

From my notes:

• Mirrors & reflections as motif

• Scenes where I interact with others are more visually grounded and immediate (handheld, verité)

• Scenes where I’m alone more abstract and ethereal (static, action playing out in reflections, impeccably composed frames that look like paintings, disorienting frames, divided frames, action playing out half off camera)

  

• I have a shot in my mind – a slow zoom in from outside the house at night looking in through the kitchen window. I’m sitting at the kitchen table, framed in one window. Sitting across the table from me and framed in the other window, is the ghost of one of my parents

• Gimbal shots floating down hallways and through rooms like the POV of a ghost

• Maybe the house can also have a POV. What would that look like? Where would it be centered? The top of the stairwell? Above the ceiling lamp in the hallway?

• Anthropomorphize the house in exterior shots – windows that feel like eyes, etc.

One last thing — the one day that worked for the reschedule was December 8, which also happens to be my mom’s birthday.

Does it mean something? I guess we’ll see.

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Until next time,

Tara

1

, who coined the term NonDē, defines it as films that are non-dependent on (as opposed to independent from) the studio system. Read more about Ted’s perspective on creating a new cinema ecosystem:

Hope For Film

The best is yet to come... How do we work together to TRULY help each other out?

I believe in saying what you will do and then doing what you say…

Read more

4 months ago · 30 likes · 3 comments · Ted Hope

2

Which I am making in conjunction with ’s brilliant idea of organizing 50 NonDē films for 2026:

Let's Go Again

50 Films: Let's Organize for the 2026 NonDē Film Movement

We are waiting for something…

Read more

6 months ago · 72 likes · 124 comments · Courtney Romano

I’m spending this holiday in Lansing, Michigan, with some of my all-time favorite people, two of whom live here. We’re going to make a delicious vegetarian Friendsgiving dinner (the star will be a root vegetable puff pastry mound, hopefully in the shape of a turkey), tour this rust belt city’s most beautiful dive bars, and maybe get matching smokestack tattoos.

I asked my friends to help me put together a list of anti-capitalist holiday gift ideas for everyone out there who’s sick of over-consumption— things to make or stuff to spend your money on that aligns with your values and supports small businesses over huge corporations. Enjoy!

Things to buy

Certain Days calendar

The Certain Days Calendar is a collaboration between organizers and current and former political prisoners, and features 11 essays and 12 pieces of artwork. All the proceeds support political prisoners and grassroots organizations working to end mass incarceration.

Anti-Work Hoodie

Lux Magazine’s Anti-Work hoodie also has an excerpt from Lux magazine’s “Move Slow and Break Things” essay on the arm.

MESA fundraiser shirts

Support the Middle East Studies Association with one of these Defend Academic Freedom shirts.

La Mano sweatshirt

This sweatshirt from the Texas AFT Union.

Things to make

Limoncello from foraged lemons

I made limoncello for the first time like seven years ago and every year since then I say I’m going to make a bunch of liquor infusions and give them as gifts and then every year I forget to start infusing until it’s too late. Don’t be like me.

In this excellent recipe, you suspend whole lemons in cheesecloth over the vodka so it comes out lighter and smoother than soaking the peels in it.

For the ultimate anti-capitalist limoncello, use the falling fruit map to gather lemons from your neighborhood and steal the vodka.

Macramé anything

I taught myself how to macramé and made this wall hanging using only one kind of knot. I bet you could do it too.

The perfect mixtape

Years ago, a bunch of us went to Austin and a friend who lived there gave us all the same mixtape he’d made. This tape was so good we still talk about it. Make a tape like that.

Matching stick-and-poke tattoos

Give each other the gift that will last a lifetime.

Any other ideas? Let me know in the comments!

Until next time,

Tara

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Wenders left a list of questions in the room. The main one:

Is cinema a language which will disappear, an art which is dying out?

Godard’s answer is peak Godard: “I’m going to die, why shouldn’t my art?”

Herzog has to take his shoes off before he answers.

In 1982, the concerns were about TV and home video changing audiences’ relationship to cinema:

Films increasingly look like they were made for television, in terms of lighting, framing, and pacing. It seems that for audiences around the world, television aesthetics have replaced cinema aesthetics.

Wenders deliberately leaves a TV on in the background of all the interviews so the viewer is forced to choose what to pay attention to — can you focus on the filmmakers’ words about the potential death of cinema or are you hypnotized by the images on the television screen?

The central anxiety of the moment is staged as an aesthetic battle for your attention. Sound familiar?

Godard talks about how people seem to prefer to watch a small image from up close rather than a large image from far way. The small image feels safer than the big one, easier to consume. Herzog likens the television to a jukebox: As the viewer, you’re in a more mobile position. You can turn it off. You can’t turn off the cinema. But, he says, “none of it worries me too much.”

Then Spielberg comes in and immediately starts talking about money — how much his films make, the size of budgets, the size of audiences. While everyone else speaks about the future of cinema like they’re defending a sacred art, the American speaks the language of the studio system itself: metrics, appeal, universality. He wants the broadest possible circle of viewers. And this is not where art can live.

More than forty years later, we’re still having the same conversation, but now the competing screens are even smaller.2

Godard says, quite presciently, “Hollywood’s dream is to make one film, produced by TV, and release it everywhere.”

Film exists at the intersection of art and commerce and it’s this tension that leads every generation of filmmakers to think they’re witnessing the end of cinema.

The threat mutates — television, VHS, cable, YouTube, streaming, TikTok, verticals, AI3 — but the conversation is cyclical. We’re always on the precipice of disaster. Just like humanity has always believed the end of the world is imminent. But maybe it’s this very instability that generates new forms, new aesthetics. Creation and destruction are inextricably linked.

So what does all this have to do with the new moon in Scorpio that occurred on November 19th (which also happens to be my birthday, feel free to post belated birthday wishes in the comments :) ), besides the fact that Room 666 was recorded in the most Scorpio of all room numbers?

Well, this new moon is all about deep transformation. It’s asking us to go inward, excavate our psyche, and bring the dregs to the surface so we can let go of what no longer serves us. Mine the depths. Be ruthless. Lasting transformation requires a dissolution of the old self.

Think of it as less a death, and more an evolution. A clearing of space so something new and beautiful can emerge from the ashes.

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Until next time,

Tara

Last night I went to a talk about the artist as magician at one of my favorite places in LA at the moment, the Philosophical Research Society. For those of you who are unfamiliar, it’s an organization founded by esoteric author and scholar Manly P. Hall in the 1930s, when Los Angeles was deep in its occult era. These days they’re programming super interesting films, events, and lectures like the one I went to yesterday.

Pam Grossman, a writer and witch, gave the talk based on her new book, Magic Maker: The Enchanted Path to Creativity. I haven’t read the book yet, but she spoke about so many of the things that I’ve been obsessed with currently: the artist as a medium of sorts, channeling their work from the ether while simultaneously shaping it into something only they could create, the alchemical process of bringing a work into being, creative rituals, calling on ancestors for inspiration, etc.

She gave some interesting examples of high profile artist/magicians — Patti Smith as necromancer, transmuting her grief into great works of art, David Bowie’s use of a bespoke computer program called the Verbasizer to generate cut-ups that he then turned into song lyrics as a kind of channeling.

Afterwards, my friend told me about a séance that was happening in a couple of weeks (at a different venue) and asked if I wanted to go. I, too, had read about a guy who was doing séances in LA and I assumed it was the same one.

But I was wrong!

That’s right, there are multiple highly advertised (at least on Instagram) séances happening across Los Angeles right now. Which got me thinking — are we in the middle of an occult revival?

In the 1920s, occultism exploded in Los Angeles. Spiritualism was everywhere, the Theosophical Society established its headquarters in Beachwood Canyon, and groups like the Golden Dawn and Ordo Templi Orientis were growing in popularity. Perhaps it was a cultural reaction to the horrors of World War I and the 1918 flu epidemic — people were searching to find meaning in a world that was making increasingly less sense. Séances flourished because grief needed a language, and magic provided one.

If that’s true, it would make sense for us to be experiencing an occult revival right now. After years of global instability, political upheaval, climate dread, pandemics, and the strange disorientation of living so much of our lives online, people are reaching for things that feel older, deeper. Technology has given us unprecedented access to information, but it’s also created a culture of overwhelm. Our devices can do everything except tell us who we are or why we’re here. No wonder we’re seeking enchantment.

But something about this current moment feels a little different than the Spiritualism craze of a century ago. The contemporary occult revival seems to also be about getting in touch with the creative self. The séance as metaphor for artistic practice.

I love the idea that creativity itself is a form of magic, one that anyone can practice but few take the time to ritualize. It’s especially relevant now, when the threat of A.I. looms over every creative industry. If artists really are magicians, no computer program can replicate that magic.

I’ll leave you with these three new(ish) works that feel, at least to me, like they were created with magic.

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The Red Sea Makes Me Wanna Cry

Faris Alrjoob’s short film about a woman coping with grief feels like a ritual — it’s meditative and beautiful. I’ve watched it twice now. You can stream it on Mubi.

This band Ak’chamel actually terrifies me. They are more shamans than musicians, they wear ancient-looking masks and robes and their music definitely feels channeled from another plane. Most of it is too intense for me (like I don’t know what will be conjured if I listen to it!), but this one song feels like it’s coming from a good magical place.

Melissa Broder’s novel about a grieving woman who finds a world inside a giant cactus in Death Valley feels very alchemical.

So what do you all think? Are we in the middle of another occult revival? Let me know your thoughts in the comments.

Until next time,

Tara

Those of you who know me know that the last few years have been less than ideal for me.

Like, a lot less.

I lost both of my parents unexpectedly within three years of each other, and now my sister and I have to clear out and sell the house we grew up in.

Back in June, I wrote a post about alchemizing grief. Now I’m putting that post into practice.

Which brings me to this — I have a new project in the works.

It’s a personal, lyrical hybrid documentary. The working title is (surprise surprise) Grief Alchemy Project.

I’ll share my logline with you:

In Grief Alchemy Project, a first generation filmmaker intertwines her ancestors’ parallel stories of exile from Sindh and Ukraine with the process of selling the house she grew up in – her late parents’ old Victorian in suburban New Jersey – transmuting personal grief into a cinematic ritual spanning continents and generations: a meditation on home and homeland, memory, and the inherited trauma of displacement.

It’s going to be a mix of present day verité footage, historical and personal archival — think old family photos, slides from the 1970s/80s, super 8 footage, & VHS tapes — and something I’m calling “film as ritual” (more on this in future posts) tied together with some (hopefully) poetic voice over.

I’m envisioning it as a kind of memoir, but in film form.

We shot one day in October and I’m planning three more shoot days before April.

This film, by its very nature, is what producing icon and FilmStack architect would call “NonDē,” as in non-dependent. The name might be hard to type, but Ted’s take on the principles behind it are easy to understand:

The sustainability of the art, artist, and ecosystem is the primary goal of NonDē.

We will no longer neglect — as So-Called “Indie” Film (aka SCIF) has — what is necessary to build to make our cinema ecosystem work well for all participants. NonDē commits to the improvement of the product, process, environment, and experience through delivering a regular cadence of operational improvements to the cinema ecosystem.

Full post here.

So, when I saw that fellow FilmStacker is organizing this movement to make 50 NonDē films in 2026, I knew had to jump on board!

I’ll write about the process here from time to time (maybe monthly updates if people are interested?) and organize the posts under the Grief Alchemy Project tag so you can follow along.

If there are any aspects in particular that people are curious about, let me know in the comments, and I’ll do my best to talk about them.

Here we go!

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Until next time,

Tara

Last week, I got together with a few friends to carve pumpkins. One asked about the significance of the jack-o-lantern, and someone responded that in Pagan times, people carved horrific faces into pumpkins to scare away evil spirits that wander the earth on Samhain.

There are a few other variations of this origin story — an Irish legend about a guy named Stingy Jack, the Celtic tradition of carving faces into root vegetables — but they all involve fire, light, and a time of year when the dead can interact with the living.

That time is Halloween.

Today is the day when the veil between the worlds is at its thinnest. It’s a time for conjuring and divination; a time for celebrating ancestors and communicating with those who’ve crossed over.

I’m going to do a simple ritual to honor those who came before me. Perhaps you’d like to the same.

Ancestor Ritual

Walk around your living space, taking in its energy. Is there a spot that feels warm and comforting? A spot that feels most like home in your home?

Make this the spot for your ancestor altar.

It can be as large or small as you’d like — a corner of a bookshelf or an entire table. Whatever you feel called to do.

Gather some photos and objects that represent or belonged to your ancestors and arrange them in this space.

Put out some flowers and sweets, and anything else you know your ancestors like(d). This could be a cup of tea, a glass of wine, a specific perfume.

Light a candle.

Acknowledge your ancestors.

Thank them for existing because without them you would not be walking the earth.

If there is anything you need to say to one of them, do it now. You can speak out loud or simply say the words in your mind.

Ask them to give you any messages they want you to receive.

The messages may come through tonight in your dreams. When you go to bed, put a notebook and pen within reach so you can jot down any insights if necessary.

What to watch when you’ve seen every horror movie

I love to watch horror movies all October long. It’s great but then I inevitably get to the point where it feels like there’s nothing left to see.

In honor of that, here are six Halloween deep cuts. They may not all be traditional horror, but they’re totally worth watching.

House (1977), directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi

I wrote about this one in my post on haunted house films. It’s a very strange movie about a house that kills. The first 20 or so minutes are really bizarre (and not necessarily in a good way), but if you stick with it, it gets better! It’s so weird it’s amazing. That’s all I’m going to say.

The Transfiguration (2016), directed by Michael O’Shea

This film about a troubled teenage boy in Queens who’s convinced he’s a vampire premiered in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes. It’s slow and lyrical, but intense and visually quite beautiful.

Omen (2023), directed by Baloji

Ok, this is not the film about Satan’s spawn Damien, nor is it really a horror film. But the above still is creepy AF and it’s about a man who returns home to the Democratic Republic of the Congo with his Belgian wife after living abroad for years, and grapples with the fact that his family has been accusing him of being a sorcerer since he was a child. It’s pretty great.

Without Name (2016), directed by Lorcan Finnegan

This Irish psychological eco-horror film about a surveyor measuring an ancient forest for a land developer gives Nicolas Roeg in sequences with eerie nature shots and mesmerizing sound design.

Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person (2023), directed by Ariane Louis-Seize

Sasha is a young vampire who doesn’t want to kill people. When she meets Paul, a human who doesn’t want to live, it may just be a match made in heaven (hell?) This one’s more coming-of-age than horror, but I’m not mad at it.

A Dark Song (2016), directed by Liam Gavin

A grieving mother brings an occultist to a remote estate in Wales to perform a ritual that will enable her to speak to her dead son. Very creepy.

Hope at least one of these films was new to you!

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Happy Halloween!

Until next time,

Tara

A couple of years ago, I worked on one of the most interesting shows I’ve ever been a part of. It was called Queer for Fear, and it’s a doc series on the history of horror told through a queer lens. I directed the fourth and final episode, which traced the trope of the dangerous queer woman through horror history.

One of the subjects we explored was the strange boom of lesbian vampire exploitation films in the 1970s—a moment when horror cinema became a mirror for both erotic fantasy and male anxieties.

If you’re not familiar with these films, they’re pretty great in a grindhouse/ exploitation kind of way. Some lean towards the arthouse or experimental space, like Roger Vadim’s Blood and Roses (made in 1960 so this one’s actually more of a precursor to the exploitation boom) and, to a lesser extent, Jesús Franco’s Vampyros Lesbos (1971), and others pretty much veer towards straight up porn, like Franco’s Female Vampire (1975).

The explosion of these films emerged on the heels of the second-wave feminist movement and post-Stonewall gay rights movement, and, I’d argue, can be viewed as a backlash against both. It was an era of seismic social change that threatened the patriarchal order, and as a result, birthed a new villain: the liberated—and deadly—lesbian vampire.

Where earlier films like the pre-code campy classic Dracula’s Daughter (1936), depicted female vampires as repressed and trying to sublimate their desire to feed, the 1970s vampires fully embraced their nature.

Almost all of the 1970s lesbian vampire films were directed by men—the only one I know of that was directed by a woman is Stephanie Rothman’s The Velvet Vampire (1971)—and designed for the male gaze.

These films, like Vampyros Lesbos, Jean Rollin’s Shiver of the Vampire (1971), Roy Baker’s The Vampire Lovers (1970), and Vicente Aranda’s The Blood Spattered Bride (1972), feature super stylish and hot femme vampires who seduce women and lure them away from their male partners—in other words, they embody the trope of the “dangerous lesbian” or “shifty bisexual.” Men are simultaneously titillated and horrified by the lesbian vampire because she’s a woman whose desire exists outside of their control.

The bite of the vampire is a penetrative act, so we can view the female vampire’s bite as an inversion of the sexual script in which men are the ones who enter, dominate, and consume. Scenes of feeding are filmed with fetishistic intensity—the camera lingering on the neck, the mouth, the moment of surrender. The vampire’s teeth become a kind of erotic weapon, and to the male imagination, this reversal of sexual agency is horrifying.

A scene towards the end of The Blood Spattered Bride explicitly states these fears: the vampire Carmila urges newlywed Susan to stab her husband, yelling, “Kill him! Put an end to his arrogance! Destroy his masculinity!” We can link this to male anxieties around liberated women in general, and queer women in particular. The lines feel like an echo of second-wave rhetoric refracted through male paranoia — the women’s movement becomes literalized as bloodlust.

The trope of the new bride being corrupted by the vampire comes up in a bunch of these films, including The Shiver of the Vampire (which btw has some of the most iconic and absurd visuals, like the vampire emerging from a grandfather clock and popping out from behind a tapestry hanging over a bed). We can view this as a metaphor for a queer sexual awakening — these women think they’re straight until they have an encounter with the lesbian vampire. The lesbian vampire, then, is a projection of the nightmare that women might not need men at all.

In many of these films, the vampires are able to visit the women in their dreams, where they can kind of mind control and lure the women towards them. I think this speaks to a male fear of women’s intuition. In Vampyros Lesbos, for example, Linda dreams of the vampire Nadine, who telepathically draws Linda to her island home, where she seduces and feeds on her.

Vampyros Lesbos, like many of these films, is loosely inspired by the story of Elizabeth Bathory, the seventeenth-century Hungarian countess accused of murdering and bathing in the blood of young women to preserve her youth. Historians now question the charges against her, suggesting they were politically motivated—a campaign to destroy a powerful, wealthy widow whose independence threatened the men around her. Her supposed “bloodlust” reads as an allegory for the punishment of female power itself.

There’s so much more I could write about this topic, but alas, this post is already a day late. If you’re interested in the horror trope of the dangerous queer woman and want to know more, you should check out episode 4 of Queer for Fear.

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Until next time,

Tara

I remember when I first saw the original Night of the Living Dead. I was in film school at the time and I was a little high (no, I didn’t go to class stoned, I was watching it at home thank you very much) and it kind of blew my mind — it was the first time I truly recognized the power of metaphor in horror films.

George Romero’s quintessential zombie movie came out in 1968, when the U.S. was deep in the throes of social upheaval as young people rebelled against the the fierce conservatism of the previous decades — the civil rights and women’s movements were in full swing and protests raged against the Vietnam War. It was also the year of two high profile assassinations — that of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy.

The zombie is a mindless entity incapable of reason whose sole purpose is to feed on and infect the living, thereby creating more of its kind. The creature, then, becomes the perfect vessel upon which to project the fears and anxieties of society at large in specific moments in time.

In the case of Night of the Living Dead, we can view the ghouls as the embodiment of racist ideology and antiquated conservatism.

Among the protagonists are two young people — a Ben, a Black man, and Barbara, a white woman — who are separately traveling through rural Pennsylvania when the zombie apocalypse breaks out. They get trapped in a farmhouse along with a few others as dead white men reanimate and climb out of their graves to attack and eat the living.

Ben alone survives the attack only to be murdered at the end by a mob of white rednecks, including cops, who mistake him for a zombie. His death can be seen as a stand in for MLK’s death, and the film’s takeaway is a bleak one: we may think we have eradicated racism, but it still lives beneath the surface, waiting for the right moment to emerge and infect the masses.

In Romero’s 1978 sequel Dawn of the Dead, the protagonists barricade themselves inside a suburban shopping mall as the zombie apocalypse rages on. This time, the film is a critique of capitalism, with the zombies representing mindless American consumerism.

Yeon Sang-ho’s Train to Busan (2016) uses the zombie to explore the fractures within modern South Korean society — not just the lingering shadow of North–South tensions, but also class divisions, moral decay, and the emotional bankruptcy of late-stage capitalism. The film’s central metaphor lies in its confined setting: a high-speed train hurtling toward Busan as society collapses outside.

The zombie outbreak exposes what’s already infected the living—greed, selfishness, and the erosion of empathy. There’s also a powerful undercurrent of political and national anxiety — the fear of contagion as a stand-in for infiltration, mistrust, and contamination, whether from the North or from within.

In Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2002), the zombie metaphor evolves once again, reflecting a post-9/11 landscape of fear and surveillance. This time, the zombies are infected with the “rage virus,” which we can link to the United States’ launch of the Global War on Terror. In this case, I would argue that the zombies represent any extremist ideology, whether that is terrorism itself or a glorification of the military-industrial complex.

The sequel, 28 Weeks Later (2007), directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, shifts the horror from biological to political. The “rage virus” has been contained, and NATO forces attempt to repopulate and rebuild London — a metaphor for Western military interventionism masquerading as humanitarian aid.

In 28 Years Later (2025), Boyle explores how, decades after the virus first emerged, people are now essentially dealing with two viruses — the rage virus and a disinformation virus. We can equate this to our own post-Covid current reality.

I’ll wrap this up with a quick note about The Last of Us. I know people love this show, but I couldn’t get past the first episode, not because I thought it was boring or poorly executed, but because I found the premise to be deeply conservative and fiercely anti-mushroom (earnest).

First of all, the zombie outbreak is caused by the cordyceps mushroom (a really great mushroom btw!!), and it starts in Austin, Texas, a very liberal outpost in a very conservative state. I don’t think it’s a stretch to equate cordyceps with psychedelic mushrooms (although, fine, cordyceps don’t have psychedelic qualities), and the mind expansion that one typically experiences when you eat them. The show appears to condemn this. I would go so far as to say the zombie virus is a stand-in for the “woke mind virus” conservatives rail against, and a perceived liberal invasion spreading across Texas, and across the U.S.

Am I wrong? Should I watch more? Someone who’s seen them all tell me in the comments.

All of this is to say: zombies might be mindless, but a well-crafted zombie movie definitely is not.

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Until next time,

Tara

What makes a witch?

A couple of weeks ago, I wanted a candle to light on the new moon. So looked online and found what I like to call a witch store (they refer to themselves as a metaphysical shop, so I guess I should stop saying that) here in a nearby New Jersey town.

It seems like witches and witch stores are everywhere today.

This place had everything a witch store/metaphysical shop should have — a store cat (black), tarot readings in the back, a wall of herbs, crystals, candles, etc.

It also had two teenage girls who were talking to the owner as they checked out in front of me. It was their first time in the store, and it was like a scene in any classic teen witch movie/show.

I love a good witch movie. I’m pretty sure I could watch The Craft (the original) every day and not get sick of it. Maybe it has something to do with my own inherited predilections.

Here’s the thing, though — underneath the mystique of candles and spells lies a darker truth, one about the projection of male anxieties and fears. We can think of the witch as a scapegoat, a mirror in which patriarchal culture has long reflected its own terror about female power, pleasure, and autonomy.

In other words, the witch is never just a witch.

The Archetype of the Witch in Horror

“[T]he presence of the monstrous-feminine in the popular horror film speaks to us more about male fears than about female desire or feminine subjectivity.”

– Barbara Creed, The Monstrous Feminine

The cinematic witch descends from a deep history of violence against women, starting around the 1400s with the witch hunts of early modern Europe. Around 100,000 people were prosecuted for witchcraft, 80% of them women. These trials were designed to suppress female autonomy and enforce new forms of patriarchal control — the targets were women who had knowledge that threatened church or state authority, women like midwives, herbalists, and healers. The “witch” is terrifying because she possesses too much — too much desire, too much knowledge, too much power — and as such, the patriarchy cannot allow her to survive.

In Pagan times, these women were revered for their intuition and connection to nature; some were the shamans of their communities, flourishing in societies that revered the Goddess, the earth as Great Mother. But around the time of the Scientific Revolution, European laws were created that declared the act of “witchcraft” a crime punishable by death. A shift was occurring, one where prioritizing the feminine connection to nature was being replaced by masculine logic and rationality.

In the OG witch movie Häxan (1922), Benjamin Christensen’s silent doc/fiction hybrid, the director explores the history of witchcraft with surreal imagery — women fly, copulate with the devil, and give birth to monsters. The film suggests that the witch trials may have stemmed from misinterpretations of mental illness which led to a kind of terrifying mass hysteria.

In other words, men persecuted women because they feared them.

This primal fear is on full display in Robert Eggers’ The Witch (2015). Set in 1630s New England, the film centers on witchcraft as metaphor for the ultimate Puritan nightmare: burgeoning teen sexuality.

A family has been banished from their village because their father refused to capitulate in some kind of religious dispute with the town leaders, and now they live on the edge of a dark wood, which is possibly inhabited by witches. The woods are mysterious, dangerous, and vaguely evil; the children are forbidden from entering them.

When the youngest child disappears, the family begins to turn on one another, eventually blaming the eldest daughter, Thomasin—a teenager who’s just entered puberty—and accusing her of witchcraft.

So the father has led them out to this dangerous place, and then blames his daughter when things go horribly wrong.

There’s a lot going on metaphorically in the film about how the Puritanical repression of nature — human nature and Mother Nature — leads to the family’s destruction. Spoilers ahead.

Thomasin is the only one who embraces both her own nature and the natural world, and she’s the only one who survives.

Early on, Thomasin had taunted her younger siblings by claiming to be the Witch of the Wood and telling them she was the one who took their baby brother. “I am that very witch,” she says. “When I sleep, my spirit slips away from my body and dances naked with the devil.” But really, it feels more like she’s just being a bitchy older sister trying to scare her awful younger siblings.

Later, while doing her chores, Thomasin drops an egg on the ground and it cracks open, revealing a bloody dead chick. She then tries to milk the cow, but the milk comes out as blood. We can link this imagery to menstrual blood, and, in turn, link puberty to corruption and sin — female sexuality itself is what terrifies the patriarchal order.

We see the same correlation in Carrie — even though I wouldn’t technically call her a witch. She does, however, have supernatural powers that rapidly escalate when she gets her period.

It’s no accident that so many of these movie witches are teenage girls. The adolescent witch is the embodiment of women’s sexuality turned against itself. There’s a scene towards the end of The Witch where Thomasin’s father creepily rubs her arm while pushing her to confess to witchcraft. Grown men, terrified by their own inappropriate desires, created the teenage witch, branded her as a seductress, and burned her at the stake.

The witch, then, is the embodiment of what the Puritan mind most feared: prioritizing the pleasures of the body over the strictness of the mind.

Thomasin’s teenage brother Caleb has his own encounter with the witch when he goes into the woods looking for his dog. The deeper he goes, the denser the trees get, until he finally has to crawl through the tangled branches of the forest’s earth womb. He emerges in a clearing, where the Witch of the Wood waits. The witch kisses him, and with this act is able to steal his essence. The forest, then, becomes a site of both erotic awakening and mortal danger, an image of nature’s fertility and corruption.

This idea of nature being evil, the realm of the witch, is also seen in Black Philip, the goat that whispers to Thomasin’s younger siblings, and in that strange rabbit that makes the father’s rifle misfire.

By the end of the film, Thomasin’s entire family is dead. She rips off her corset, unbinding herself.

That night, she tries to talk to Black Philip like her siblings had done.

The goat whispers back, “Wouldst thou like the taste of butter? A pretty dress? Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?”

If you were a young woman living in 1630s Puritan America, wouldn’t you say yes to that? Of course she signs his book.

If we think of Black Philip as representing not the devil, but Pan, the god of the wild, then the end of the film — Thomasin signing Black Philip’s book and rising naked into the night sky to join the witches—isn’t damnation, it’s liberation. She can finally live her best life, free from the suffocating constraints of the patriarchy.

We see a similar kind of empowerment in Andrew Fleming’s The Craft (1996.) Four teenage girls use magic to take control of their lives, their bodies, their desires—and in doing so, they expose how female power is policed and punished. Nancy goes too far, and her power eventually destroys her, but Sarah’s able to keep and develop her powers.

In both films, witchcraft becomes a metaphor for the thing patriarchy fears most—women who know their own power. The witch’s magic is knowledge, intuition, creation.

Elizabeth Sankey’s Witches documentary ( (2020) pushes this metaphor even further, reframing witchcraft as a response to female suffering.

Exploring her own postpartum depression through the lens of historical persecution, Sankey suggests that women have always been pathologized for their pain, othered for their intuition, and punished for their difference. In this sense, witchcraft becomes a language for female survival, a way to reclaim what was once used to condemn.

So what, then, makes a witch?

A witch is someone who unapologetically embraces their own power.

Whether you find that terrifying or fascinating says more about you than it does about the witch.

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Until next time,

Tara

In honor of the season of the witch, this month I’ll be writing about all things horror. Today I’m kicking it off with one trope I’ve been thinking a lot about lately — the haunted house.

I’m currently cleaning out the house I grew up in. And while I wouldn’t say this house is haunted, there’s definitely a lot of emotional energy tied up in here. The house feels like a living being, or at least like it contains a piece of me and every member of my family who’s lived here.

All spaces hold energy. Even if you consider yourself a rationalist, I’d be willing to bet that at one time or another, you’ve walked into a place and thought “this feels warm and inviting” or “the vibe is off in here.” Or perhaps you spent a weekend spring cleaning, and afterwards your home felt like it took on a bright new life.

That’s the energy of the space speaking to you.

So how is this energy represented in horror films?

Haunted Houses and the Architecture of the Psyche

When we look at the trope of the haunted house in film, we can consider the house as metaphor for the psyche.

You are the house, and the house is you.

From a Jungian perspective, the first floor represents conscious awareness, the rooms where daily life plays out. These are the public facing rooms, the ones we allow everyone access to. Bedrooms are more intimate — they symbolize our private thoughts, the parts of the psyche we keep reserved for ourselves and those closest to us.

We can understand the basement, then, to represent the deep unconscious —the shadow realm. Basements terrify us because they contain everything we’ve repressed — primal desires, grief, our collective fears.

This is why so many haunted house films stage their most frightening scenes in basements.

In the original The Amityville Horror (1979), George and Kathy Lutz get a great deal on a house in upstate New York because a young man named Ronald DeFeo had murdered his entire family in it a few years earlier. (I would never buy a house like that, but you do you I guess.)

Turns out the house is haunted.

After experiencing a series of paranormal events, the Lutzes discover a secret room in their basement that had been walled shut — a literalized portal to hell, constructed many years ago by a known Satanist who once lived there.

What’s concealed in there, in the unconscious, eventually must come out.

In the film’s climax, the walls bleed and a black primordial ooze fills the basement. George falls into this sludge pit but is able to escape — unlike the Ronald before him, George has faced his own shadow and integrated it — and the Lutzes flee the house, leaving all of their things behind.

This model—trauma made spatial—runs through nearly every classic haunted house narrative.

In Robert Wise’s The Haunting (1963), Eleanor, a lonely, repressed woman, arrives at Hill House for a paranormal study. It’s clear that she’s attracted to Theo, another woman who’s there for the study, but Eleanor won’t allow herself to embrace her desire.

The haunting occurs when Eleanor’s sublimated emotions and repressed sexuality begin to bubble up through the psychic realm and manifest in the physical as uncanny disturbances: pounding doors, groaning walls, whispered voices.

As her desires move closer towards conscious expression, the walls of the house undulate and threaten to burst. The haunting is Eleanor’s repression externalized; Hill House becomes a projection of her psyche, its violence a reflection of her inner turmoil.

Where The Haunting suggests the house as projection, Nobuhiko Ôbayashi’s epically strange House (1977) takes it one step further. The house is not occupied by an energy that haunts it, but the house itself has become the haunting.

The film follows Gorgeous, a teenager who brings six friends to her aunt’s isolated country home. But this is no ordinary domestic space. The house is alive, ravenous for the essence of youth, and overflowing with the aunt’s grief.

Many years ago, the aunt’s fiancé was drafted into the war, and they made a promise to wait for each other. But he died in battle and she never left — instead, she’s merged with the house. She speaks to the appliances like they’re alive, saying things like, “the young woman will warm you, dear stove.”

The house feeds on the girls, literally — a piano eats one, a mattress consumes another — and redistributes their energy back into the aunt, who becomes younger and healthier until she’s able to take over Gorgeous’s body altogether and finally leave, trapping Gorgeous inside to continue the cycle of living as the house. The haunted house is no longer a structure containing trauma but a living archive of it.

Unlike The Haunting, where the house is a mirror of repression, Ôbayashi presents the house as a site of intergenerational trauma. The aunt’s wartime loss—the death of her fiancé and the subsequent erasure of her place in the social order—mutates into an architecture that consumes the next generation. Trauma becomes not just inherited but embodied in space itself.

This tradition continues into contemporary horror. In Remi Weekes’s His House (2020), the haunted house becomes a site of displacement trauma.

A South Sudanese couple seeking asylum in England are given a dilapidated government house, but what haunts them is not the peeling wallpaper or flickering lights—it’s the trauma they carry with them. A spirit, the apeth or “night witch,” crosses the ocean with them, a manifestation of guilt, loss, and the violence they endured in order to survive. The film literalizes the impossibility of starting over without confronting the past: to repress trauma is to invite it to infest the home.

So then, to enter a haunted house is to confront the ghosts we all carry within us.

The house is never just a house. You are the house, and the house is you.

Until next time,

Tara

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