Good evening and welcome back to Sunday Scaries, biweekly edition. Today was our city’s annual holiday parade through downtown celebrating the destruction of our economies and communities via late-stage capitalism. Everyone wore red hats trimmed in white fluff! It was very festive. Those of you with children should be sure to put one aside for Krampusnacht on December 5 as our favourite Yuletide demon is bound to be extra-hungry this year.

Breaking news: this year’s Fogfest award winners have been announced, and Justin Oakey’s remarkable feature film Hangashore was chosen Best Feature Film by the jury, with Best Director, Best Cinematography, Best Score and Sound Design, and also received the Audience Choice award. This is a beautifully crafted Newfie-Noir chiller about a struggling seal fisher whose love affair with a haunted young Icelandic woman sets events in motion that imperil every aspect of his life and livelihood. Moody and desolate, it slowly tightens its grip on the audience as it builds to a terrifying finale amidst actual storms and fog banks, some of which the director captured as B-roll before the feature actually began shooting. I hope these awards help secure distribution for the film, as it deserves to be seen by audiences the world over.

More Breaking News: My good friend Willow Catelyn Maclay, who was a commentator on TCM this week alongside her Corpses, Fools and Monsters co-writer Caden Mark Gardner for a film series based on their book (more on this below), has been named as a contributor on the upcoming 4K release of the absolute batshit 1979 Europudding cosmic horror classic The Visitor, coming soon in a lush restored limited edition from Arrow.

Killer birds! Psychokinesis! Satanic conspiracies! Exploding basketball hoops! Ice skating! Escalators! A bizarre collision of The Omen with Close Encounters of the Third Kind and The Exorcist, The Visitor combines stunning imagery and breathtaking setpieces with a jaw-dropping cast that includes John Huston, Mel Ferrer, Glenn Ford, Shelley Winters, Sam Peckinpah and Franco Nero as, um, Space Jesus. Preorders are now open!

TCM’s series on Trans Images in Film would be a significant feat of television programming even if we weren’t in the midst of a horrendous backlash against trans and non-binary people, their gender identities, experiences and cultural contributions. The channel showed a total of 11 films highlighting various aspects of trans history, expression and aspiration, including some rarely-seen films that are not officially available in any digital or modern physical format. I won’t list all of the films here, but I highly recommend seeking out a few underseen gems:

Some of My Best Friends Are… (1971) - What’s more scathing and upsetting than a Stonewall-era birthday party with eight gay friends and a himbo hustler? How about Christmas Eve in a gay bar with 20 relative strangers, an attention-grabbing ‘fag hag’, a circumspect trans woman and a hustler who hates himself? Grim and melodramatic as some of it might be, this hard-to-find film, written and directed by Mervyn Nelson, is still a milestone in gay cinema and well worth seeing, surprisingly enough, for its quartet of women—Fannie Flagg, Sylvia Syms, Rue McClanahan (YES!), and the extraordinary Candy Darling—as well as soon-to-be stars Gil Gerard and Gary Sandy and a large cast of lesser-known but quite credible men who were willing to put themselves on camera being themselves at a challenging time in queer history. I hope this gets a proper release soon!

Funeral Parade of Roses (1969) - Another foundational risk-taking work of queer cinema, Toshio Matsumoto’s loose adaptation of Oedipus Rex, set in an underground gay bar in Tokyo, is a stylish multi-textured impressionistic portrayal of queer life in an oppressive culture, with lines blurring between gender, identity and reality in all directions. Stanley Kubrick claimed it as a direct influence on A Clockwork Orange, and there’s no doubt that its fingerprints can be found on countless other experimental and mainstream works through the decades.

Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982) - A neglected gem, directed by Robert Altman and adapted for the screen by Ed Graczyk from his Broadway play, this reunion drama centres on three once-close friends (Sandy Dennis! Karen Black! Cher!) who come together after years of estrangement to resurrect their James Dean fan club on the 20th anniversary of his death. As you might expect, they reminisce, tell uncomfortable truths and confront their most painful moments, in the great American theatrical tradition, but they do so with panache. Here is another film that deserves a revisit, ideally with a special edition.

I also heartily recommend Willow’s and Caden’s accessible and engaging book, which illuminates the trans experience in cinema and in everywhere around us. Makes a great Christmas gift!

Currently watching: Okay fine, Heated Rivalry. A true Canadian success story. You won’t find this on CBC.

Currently reading: I am making my way slowly through the Seth-illustrated series of Ghost Stories for Christmas, published in tiny perfect individual volumes by Windsor bookstore/publisher Biblioasis. I just finished Shirley Jackson’s weird tale A Visit, and it was an eerie treat. This year marks the 10th anniversary for the series, which revives the Victorian tradition of creepy tales on Christmas Eve in a strikingly designed easy-to-digest format. Perfect as stocking stuffers.

This week in horror: Breathtakingly brilliant stage and screen writer Tom Stoppard has died at age 88. I was surprised to discover that he did some work on the script for Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow. Udo Kier also left us after an incredible career in hundreds of genre and arthouse works: Flesh for Frankenstein, Blood for Dracula, Lars Von Trier’s The Kingdom, Suspiria, Shadow of the Vampire, Cigarette Burns, the list goes on and on. Stream some Udo today! In other news, black holes can apparently be tiny, at least in theory. What if a tiny black hole shot through your body? Something new to worry about when you lie awake at night!

Cool story, bro: The Clown.

That’s all for this week and that’s plenty. I’ll be back on December 14 but in the meantime: “My body can’t take ziss treatment anymore. Ze blood of zees whoo-ers iss killing me!” Same, Udo. Same.