For those familiar with me, I’m sorry.

For those unfamiliar with me, hi. I’m Quinn Bailey. I’m a filmmaker, writer, and editor in the Los Angeles area. I make horror, write electronic music, and watch way too many movies on a weekly basis. I’m still sorry.

“Okay, but why are you doing this?” you probably ask. Easy: social media is awful now. I am tired of committing my life to a yawning AI-powered void of fascism and advertising. I am tired of seeing the very cool things that my friends make get buried by an algorithm. Also, I want to write about movies.

I will fully admit that I’m going into this without much of a plan; the most I have is a name and a twice-monthly schedule. That said, I’ve got a few things I at least want to highlight moving forward:

1) Things I like. Music picks, books, etc.

2) Projects friends are working on that you should support with money and likes and so on.

3) More in-depth film reviews and recommendations; at least one per newsletter, ideally.

4) Personal updates. Cool projects I’ve worked on/am working on - announcements, festival dates, streaming premieres, etc.

Expect a lot more details next time around; for now, though, I may as well close this one out with one of those recommendations I mentioned above…

TODAY’S RECOMMENDATION - Dead of Night: “The Exorcism” (1972)

“The Exorcism” is one of only three surviving episodes from Dead of Night, an early-70s horror series produced by the BBC. (Any Doctor Who fan can probably guess why it is only one of three surviving episodes.) I picked up a collection of the remaining episodes sight unseen at a record store a few weeks ago; if “The Exorcism” is anything to go by, it was a good investment.

Written and directed by 70s TV-theatre stalwart Don Taylor - himself a horror anthology veteran thanks to his work on “During Barty’s Party”, the standout episode of Nigel Kneale’s Beasts - “The Exorcism” plays out much like a filmed stage play: one cramped set, four actors, and an approach that puts atmosphere above effects. Our setting is the British countryside, where married couple Rachel and Edmund (Anna Cropper and Edward Petherbridge) have invited friends Margaret and Dan (Sylvia Kay and Clive Swift) over for a Christmas Eve dinner. As you can expect, things take a turn for the strange, starting with cut phone lines before escalating into territory I hesitate to spoil.

“The Exorcism” is admittedly a bit misleading with its premise; our title refers not to demons but to hauntings, as the grim history of Rachel and Edmund’s home slowly unfolds before our leads. There’s a lot of shared DNA here not only with Lawrence Gordon Clark’s yearly A Ghost Story at Christmas series, still in its infancy at the BBC, but with another Nigel Kneale classic in The Stone Tape (itself originally intended as a Dead of Night episode before being expanded to feature length!). In “The Exorcism” and its peers, history is a ghost in itself, something violent and terrible echoing up from the foundations of our modern world, inevitably repeating itself in new clothing.

What separates “The Exorcism” from those peers is that it’s much more bluntly political, tying its horrors to poverty and class struggle. Our cast is firmly upper-middle class, financially comfortable enough that they don’t need to worry about the world - as the story progresses, however, that world soon forces itself upon them. A Christmas dinner sours in the four’s stomachs as Edmund’s wine turns to blood in his glass. A late-game reveal brings in direct parallels to The Exterminating Angel as the house reshapes itself around its inhabitants, shaking off its renovations and sealing them inside. A long-dead inhabitant of the house speaks through Rachel in a powerhouse monologue from Cropper, recounting her final days of starvation and desperation. Even an on-the-nose ending narration can’t quite break the spell of the episode’s last twist, a gleeful slice of karma that’d make EC Comics proud.

“The Exorcism” is certainly going to be a bit too slow for some tastes, but for those who’ve already plowed through Ghostwatch and The Signalman and are searching for more British horror in the same vein, it’s eerie enough to make it worth the watch. Dead of Night can be found on YouTube or the Internet Archive, albeit via lower-resolution uploads; a higher-quality restoration exists on DVD courtesy of the BFI, but is only available on a region-locked disc as of right now.