<3 Valentine's Mixtape // xoxo
It's Valentine's week, and I'm thinking about final couples, being thrown together after a plane crash, and erotic dreams (real spoilers for My Bloody Valentine (1981), quite light spoilers for the rest). I'm also making a mixtape of love songs with the links in the titles of every paragraph below . . .
From the Grave.
Three ideas from horror cinema's past.
◆ My Bloody Valentine, dir. George Mihalka, 1981.
- How Deep Is Your Love. My Bloody Valentine was filmed in a real mine, and it comes across on screen, a testament to the power of shooting on location. A mine is deathtrap, even when there’s no killer stalking the tunnels, and the realities of the location structure the film—darkness, a reliance on technology (headlamps, mining cars, elevators), labyrinthine tunnels, and unstable passages. A real mine is a terrible place to be hunted.
- This Must Be The Place. It’s rather charming that the young people, when their Valentine’s dance in town is cancelled, move the party to the mine—not your typical venue. This is framed as a mistake, but My Bloody Valentine’s partiers are simply trying to live in a world made dangerous by the older generation—specifically by unprocessed trauma passed down from the past. This is the confined world they've been given: a world where their nighttime escape is the very same place which, in its regular function, has been the engine of the town’s troubles.
- I Wanna Dance With Somebody. My Bloody Valentine has no final girl but instead a "final couple." It’s fitting for a Valentine’s Day movie to end with a comfortable pairing, but it means that the couple—TJ and Sarah—share some of the traditional final girl duties. Sarah is instrumental in getting them out alive, but she also has less agency than a standard, solo final girl—she's often relegated to being protected by the guys. She’s given more power, though, when it comes to love. My Bloody Valentine has its love triangle, with Sarah at its center, and, instead of letting either TJ or Axel “win,” she’s open about the fact that she likes them both. Later, she puts them both in their place when their rivalry becomes too much. “I just don’t care anymore,” she says, “[j]ust leave me alone,” after yet another testosterone-fueled altercation. She maintains a degree of independence to the end. After Axel is unmasked as the slasher and there’s a cave-in, it becomes apparent that he’s still alive on the other side of the rubble. “T.J. I have to see him!” she cries and rushes back to get a final look. Sarah might wind up in the "final couple," but she's never subsumed by it.
Right Behind You.
A thought on horror's present.
◆ Send Help, dir. Sam Raimi 2026.
- Just The Two Of Us. Send Help, a comedy of forced marriage, is Raimi’s Swept Away, lighter on the psychosexual dynamics—though they’re there—and heavier on goopy, eye-popping spectacle. This is not a knock, just a difference. Power reversal drives the action in both. The class, culture, and situational differences push the two stories in different directions. In Swept Away, we have a wealthy vacationer and a yacht crewman. Here we have business colleagues of different rank. The former relationship is more intimate, more personal—and so too is its reversal. In Send Help, the hierarchy’s instead mediated by bureaucracy and corporate norms. These are very different starting-off points.
Living Deliciously.
A recommendation.
◆ Somna: A Bedtime Story, written and drawn together by Becky Cloonan & Tula Lotay, 2024.
- Dreamlover. If your ideal Valentine’s Day features a good dose of the erotic, Cloonan and Lotay’s Somna would make excellent reading this week. A story about misogyny, historical witch trials, and sex dreams, eroticism here is a doorway to escape and liberation—but also to danger—in a world of misguided and untrustworthy men and women. Cloonan’s stark images conjure the historical and the folkloric. Lotay’s intense colors, and her wet, misty pages make gothy, sensuous dreams.
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