Preorder POST-SELF: 25%-off at B&N

My forthcoming book Post-Self: Journeys Beyond the Human Body, which Repeater Books will be publishing in December, is 25%-off at Barnes & Noble from July 8-11 (use code PREORDER25)!

Previously published by punctum books as Escape Philosophy, this new expanded and updated edition includes new additions to each chapter, a new Foreword by Mark Dery, a new Afterword by me, and is now named after an album by its metal muse, Godflesh.

We are all perpetually holding ourselves together. Our breath, our blood, our food, our spit, our shit, our thoughts, our attention—all tightly held, all the time. Then at death we let it all out, oozing at once into the earth and gasping at last into the ether.

The physical body has often been seen as a prison, as something to be escaped by any means necessary: technology, mechanization, drugs, sensory deprivation, alien abduction, Rapture, or even death and extinction. Taking in horror movies from David Cronenberg and UFO encounters, metal bands such as Godflesh, ketamine experiments, AI, and cybernetics, Post-Self is an exploration of the ways that human beings have sought to make this escape, to transcend the limits of the human body, to find a way out.

As the physical world continues to crumble at an ever-accelerating rate, and we are faced with a particularly 21st-century kind of dread and dehumanization in the face of climate collapse and a global pandemic, Post-Self asks what this escape from our bodies might look like, and if it is even possible.

Advance Praise:

“Too often philosophy gets bogged down in the tedious ‘working-through’ of contingency and finitude. Post-Self takes a different approach, engaging with cultural forms of refusal, denial, and negation in all their glorious ambivalence.” — Eugene Thacker, author, In the Dust of This Planet

“Using Godflesh—the arch-wizards of industrial metal—as a framework for a deep philosophical inspection of the permeable human form reveals that all our critical theory should begin on the street where wasted teen musicians pummel their mind and instruments into culture-shifting fault lines. Godflesh are not just a ‘mirror’ of all the horrors and glories we can inflict on our bodies, but a blasted soundscape of our moans. Roy Christopher’s book is a thought-provoking and delightful crucible of film, music, and the best kind of speculative thought.” — Peter Bebergal, author, Season of the Witch

“In his trademark breezy yet precise style, Christopher discusses everything from stimoceivers to Southland Tales, everyone from Henry Lee Lucas to Brummbear, and all without ever losing sight of his central points of reference: our all too malleable somatic limits and Godflesh’s Streetcleaner. And the combination here could not be more apposite, for however much we stretch and augment the reaches of our physicality, imagining ourselves the theophanies of some as yet speculative deities, we get no closer to getting away from ourselves, becoming Godly it seems only in the sense of becoming increasingly empty.” — Gary J. Shipley, author, Stratagem of the Corpse

“Through the lenses of Godflesh, J.G. Ballard, UFO phenomena, psychedelics, serial killings, and so much else, Christopher investigates humanity’s growing inclination to escape our bodies, to escape our species, to escape life itself.”  B.R. Yeager, author, Negative Space

“A peculiar hybrid of Thomas Ligotti and Marshall McLuhan.” — Robert Guffey, author, Operation Mindfuck

“An interesting read indeed!” — Aaron Weaver, Wolves in the Throne Room

Preorder yours now!

Thank you!

Friday the 13th, I’m in Love

I was a frightened child. I would be accosted by a clip or a trailer from a horror movie while watching TV and then freaked out for weeks. You’ve already read my reaction to seeing Bambi in the theater. That experience did nothing to encourage my movie watching, much less scary-movie watching. I distinctly remember glimpses of It’s Alive (1974), The Legacy (1978), The Fog (1980), The Children (1980), and Friday the 13th (1980) tormenting my young mind.

The final icon: Ken Kirzinger as Jason Voorhees in Freddy vs Jason (2003).

A decade or so ago, my sister and I were digging through DVDs at a pawn shop and came across six Children of the Corn movies. It was the franchise in its entirety at the time. Those movies are probably not the best place to start as several of them are just a retelling of the original Stephen King short story, but they set me on a path of watching slasher franchises. Soon to follow were A Nightmare on Elm StreetHellraiserHalloween, and others, but it was Friday the 13th that I found most compelling, perhaps because the trailer had so terrified me as a child, but maybe there’s more to it than that unshakeable memory.

There are different schools of thought about when the slasher subgenre emerged. Some cite proto-slashers like Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) and Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960). Some say the first true slasher was Bob Clark’s Black Christmas (1974), and others say it was Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), but most people agree that the movie that really launched the subgenre proper was John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978). After Michael Myers terrorized the babysitters and children of Haddonfield, Illinois, a flood of holiday-themed slashers emerged: Prom Night (1980), New Year’s Evil (1980), My Bloody Valentine (1981), Graduation Day (1981), Happy Birthday to Me (1981), and Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984), among many others all celebrated their respective holidays with bodies, blood, and some slice-happy killer. Non-holiday slashers followed Halloween as well. They included Fred Walton’s When a Stranger Calls (1979), Abel Ferrara’s The Driller Killer (1979), Bill Lustig’s Maniac (1980), and the future-star-studded The Burning (1981; the movie debut of Holly Hunter, Jason Alexander, and Fisher Stevens).

Even among such a saturated line-up, Sean S. Cunningham’s Friday the 13th was 1980’s most commercially successful slasher, grossing nearly $60 million worldwide. It was also the first independent horror film to secure distribution by a major studio in the United States.

Friday the 13th posters from the vaults of the Logan Theater in Chicago on display in 2017. Original illustrations by Alex Ebel.

There are better original slashers (Halloween) and better franchises (Scream), but something about watching the first few Fridays find their feet is way more intriguing. In the pantheon of slasher killers, Halloween is built around Michael Myers, Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street is nothing without Freddy Krueger, and in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre the chainsaw is brandished by no one but Leatherface. But on the Mount Rushmore of these murderers, there was one late arrival.

In Friday the 13th, Jason Voorhees only has a cameo in the first movie, he doesn’t become the machete-wielding killer until the second movie, and he doesn’t don his signature hockey mask until the third. What we talk about when we talk about Friday the 13th took at least three movies to fully form. The 2009 reboot combines elements of the first four movies into a foggy, nihilistic film with an extremely territorial killer, unlike the original lumbering menace in the woods around Camp Crystal Lake. The remake lacks any sense of levity, which I think is a major misstep. Horror and humor are adjacent universes with a very tenuous separation. That separation is even smaller between slashers and slapstick.

Horror and humor: my mashup of Friday the 13th and the Cure.

Another difference between Friday the 13th and most other slasher franchises: The first movie isn’t the best one. Most fans agree that even if a franchise comes back with a decent second and maybe third movie, the original is still superior (Silent Night, Deadly Night doesn’t get really good until deep into the franchise, but that’s for another discussion). HalloweenA Nightmare on Elm Street, and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre all have decent follow-ups, but none can touch the first of the bunch. Not so with Friday the 13th. The second movie is the best, and again, Jason had just become the killer, and he hadn’t even found his iconic hockey mask yet (There is an argument for The Final Chapter and Jason Lives being better and scarier, but that’s also for another discussion).

Aside from the successful and superb Scream and Terrifier franchises, most would say that the slasher era is far in the past. Yet send-ups like The Cabin in the Woods (2011) and The Final Girls (2015) and arty updates like Midsommar (2019) and In a Violent Nature (2024) show that where there are weapon-wielding maniacs hiding in the shadows and brutally innovative ends awaiting adventurous young people, we’re still watching.

Of Wands and Winds: That Lynchian Sound

Accompanying their stunning, fever-dream visuals, the films of David Lynch roar with sound, what Madison Bloom at Pitchfork calls a “bowel-deep grumble.” From visceral, industrial rumbles to crackling near-silence, sound is an aspect of his movies that he valued as much as the images. “The sound design can be subliminal where you barely hear it, or sometimes you can get hit over the head with it,” said his main composer and collaborator Angelo Badalamenti in Brad Dukes’ Reflections: An Oral History of Twin Peaks (Short/Tall Press, 2014). “He creates a remarkable aural experience.”

David Lynch as the “King of Wands” from the Philly Tarot Deck by James Boyle and Gina Tomaine.

Though I watch his movies and shows regularly, since his passing I’ve been revisiting them anew. Understandably, most of Lynch’s critics and fans focus on the visuals of his work, but there’s been a renewed interest in his attention to sound. “All the way back to Eraserhead,” said Badalamenti, who, starting as Isabella Rosselinni’s vocal coach on 1986’s Blue Velvet, composed music for almost all of Lynch’s projects. “David has loved to play and experiment with music and sound,” he said. Lynch said repeatedly that Badalamenti was the one “who really brought me into the world of music, right into the middle of it.”

Lynch explained the sound of Eraserhead in a 1977 interview:

Alan Splet and I worked together in a little garage studio with a big console and two or three tape recorders, and worked with a couple of different sound libraries for organic effects. Then we fed them through the console. It’s all natural sounds. No Moog synthesizers. Just changes like with a graphic equalizer, reverb, a Little Dipper filter set for peaking certain frequencies and dipping out things or reversing things or cutting things together. We had a machine to vary the pitch but not the speed. We could make the sounds the way we wanted them to be. It took several months to do it and six months to a year to edit it.

In the 2016 documentary David Lynch: The Art Life, Lynch told the story of how he first conceived of film and sound through painting:

I was painting a painting about four-foot square, and it was mostly black, but it had some green plant leaves coming out of the black. And I was sitting back, probably taking a smoke, looking at it, and from the painting I heard a wind, and the green started moving. And I thought, ‘oh, a moving painting, but with sound.’ And that idea stuck in my head. A moving painting.

Miguel Ferrer, who played the principled and persnickety Special Agent Albert Rosenfield in all three seasons of Lynch and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks said, “The music was unlike any music you’d ever heard on television. […] It was so radically different and so evocative. It almost became another character.” Frequent musical collaborator Julee Cruise added, “You could scan the channels and know it was David Lynch, just three seconds in and you knew who it was. He pushes everything to the metal.”

“Oh, just let it float, like the tides of the ocean, make it collect space and time, timeless and endless.” — David Lynch describing a composition to Angelo Badalamenti

In addition to Badalamenti and Cruise, Lynch worked with Toto and Brian Eno (on the Dune soundtrack), Chris Isaak (both as a musician on Wild at Heart and an actor in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me), Trent Reznor and Marilyn Manson (on Lost Highway), Karen O (sang on Lynch’s “Pinky’s Dream”), Moby (DJed his wedding), Lykke Li (sang on Lynch’s “I’m Waiting Here”) and his own band with Badalamenti, Thought Gang (named after the Tibor Fisher book?). Almost every episode of 2017’s Twin Peaks: The Return ended with a different musical act performing at the Roadhouse: everyone from acts he’d worked with before like Rebekah Del Rio (who performed in Lynch’s Mulholland Drive and, perhaps as an homage, on the Treer Jenny von Westphalen Megazeppelin in Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales, easily his most Lynchian film), Cruise (in two episodes), and Reznor and Atticus Ross (as the Nine Inch Nails), to newcomers like the Veils, Lissie, Eddie Vedder (as Edward Louis Severson III), Au Revoir Simone, and the Chromatics (in three episodes).

Beyond the Beyond: Music From the Films of David Lynch (Hat & Beard Press, 2016).

Emerging from an event at the United Artists Theatre in Los Angeles on April 1, 2015, the book, Beyond the Beyond: Music From the Films of David Lynch, edited by J.C. Gabel and Jessica Hundley (Hat & Beard Press, 2016), explores the music Lynch loved and the transcendental meditation he practiced for most of his life. As the above list of artists and collaborators indicates, Lynch was one heck of a curator. Beyond the Beyond includes interviews with many of his musical collaborators, followers, and fans.

“Haunting” is an easy but apt description of Lynch’s own music but also the music he chose from other artists. He used songs by This Mortal Coil, Roy Orbison, and many others, but Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game,” which appeared in Lynch and Barry Gifford’s Wild at Heart (1990), is perhaps the best example. Somehow both twangy and gothic, with its deep sense of longing and loss, the song was not only a big hit for Isaak but struck the core musical chord for Lynch’s on-screen images. His own “Ghost of Love” echoes a lot of Isaak’s aching darkness, billowing like a cold wind blowing through your bowels.

“I play the guitar upside down and backwards,” Lynch said in Beyond the Beyond. “I’m not a musician. It’s more about sound effects for me. I just love the sound of it.” His pure ear for sound is obviously astute. The etherial vocals of Julee Cruise illustrate the point. She put an otherworldly lilt to several of his most iconic projects.

Cruise sang on a song for Blue Velvet called “Mysteries of Love,” and her song “Falling” from her 1989 debut record Floating Into the Night, which features compositions and production by Badalamenti and Lynch, became the main theme for Twin Peaks. About that record, she told Trey Taylor at Dazed and Confused, “I’m so proud that so many young girls have picked up on it, like Lana Del Rey. And fuck anyone who says anything bad about her, because she always credits me and I think that’s the greatest honor I’ve ever received.” The clip below is from “Industrial Symphony No. 1: The Dream of the Broken Hearted,” a play directed by Lynch, with music by Badalamenti and Cruise.

So, rest in peace to David Lynch, Angelo Badalamenti, Julee Cruise, Frank Silva, Jack Nance, Frances Bay, Catherine E. Coulson, Pamela Gidley, Peggy Lipton, Lenny Von Dohlen, Miguel Ferrer, Walter Olkewicz, Kenneth Welsh, Tom Sizemore, Piper Laurie, David Bowie, Warren Frost, Michael Parks, Don S. Davis, Robert Forster, Harry Dean Stanton, and all the other passed-away alumni of Lynch Land. As Lynch himself said in a BBC interview upon the passing of Badalamenti, “I believe life is a continuum, and that no one really dies; they just drop their physical body, and we’ll all meet again, like the song says. It’s sad, but it’s not devastating if you think like that […] It’s a continuum, and we’re all going to be fine at the end of the story.”

The joyous noise they must be making…

My Two Days in Television

Two clichés describe the experience of making television shows fairly accurately: It’s always “hurry up and wait” for people on both sides of the camera, and the production side is always “herding cats.” Hundreds of people of different backgrounds and skill-sets have to coordinate their efforts and come together in precisely the same moment — over and over again. There are so many junctures at which mistakes and frustration could take over, so many opportunities for things to go completely wrong.

The Exorcist cast

Based on the original 1971 novel by William Peter Blatty (Harper & Row), The Exorcist is being made into a TV series for Fox this fall. By sheer coincidence, I am friends with two of the Assistant Directors on the show. I was booked as a featured extra. I play a Papal Emissary. I spent two full days on set, and it was one of the most inspiring experiences in my recent memory.

The ExorcistThe crew on The Exorcist is such a solid collection of humans. Everyone from the Director (Michael Nankin) and the main cast (I was in scenes with Geena Davis, Alfonso Herrera, Kurt Egyiawan, Kirsten Fitzgerald, and Brad Armacost among several great others) to the ADs (I worked with my friends Jimmy Hartley and Lorin Fulton), PAs (Ben, Chelsey, Patrick, et al.), award-winning make-up artists (Tracey Anderson and Tami Lane), Wardrobe (Laura), Props (Jeff), and extras (Kevin, Chuck, Dale, Tim, Phil, Bill, and Jennifer, among many others) was there to get the work done. No ego. No bullshit. Aside from being the most hectic, it was the most positive working environment I’ve ever been in. The fact that it was both simultaneously is utterly astounding.

I’d been out for roles before. I had a speaking part in with Tom Green in his movie Road Trip (2000), but filming happened during midterms at my first attempt at grad school in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Georgia. I was buried by studies I couldn’t handle. At the time, I was still trying. I dropped out not long after though. Then I was up for a co-hosting role on a show called Paranormal Investigators with Kevin Nealon on TLC. I ended up in second place for that spot. I did screen tests for Smallville and Charmed, but never followed through. This was my first experience with a show that will actually show my face on the small screen.

On my way home from the set on the second day, I was riding my bike along a busy Milwaukee Avenue when another cyclist cut me off. He then proceeded to hold me up because he was unable to negotiate the traffic at a timely pace with his giant handlebars and mirrors. I put this up to his inability to predict the narrowness of the path ahead when he passed me. Then, when he blew a red light and nearly mowed down a pedestrian in the process, I knew he was just an inconsiderate asshole. No one needs to behave that way toward anyone else. I had to remind myself of what a positive, supportive environment I’d just been a part of. And I continue to remind myself of that everyday.

Many thanks to Jimmy Hartley for taking care of me and for getting me on the show in the first place, 4 Star Casting for handling everything, and everyone on set for an amazing two days in television. See you when the Pope comes to town!

———–

The Exorcist premieres tonight at 8pm/9c on Fox! Lily and I are in Episode 3, which airs Friday, October 7th.

Thanks to this experience, I am now represented by Bravo Talent Management and will hopefully be appearing in other things soon.