Sightlines · a viewing thread

The Grotesque Sublime

Watch these when you want cinema that pushes the body to hallucinatory, grotesque extremes — each a lurid transformation, half ecstasy and half horror, that dares you to keep looking.

Cult provocations and midnight-movie legends rather than crowd favorites; not slow or difficult so much as demanding of the stomach — come when you want to be dazzled and disturbed in equal measure.

• The Substance (2024)
• Altered States (1980)
• Pink Flamingos (1972)
• Nowhere (1997)
• Female Trouble (1976) — The Divine vehicle that's the direct bloodline to Pink Flamingos — pull it down if that one thrilled you, for Dawn Davenport's lurid arc from tantrum to glamour-crime to the electric chair, beauty and grotesquerie fused exactly as this thread demands.
• Desperate Living (1977) — The most forgotten Waters on your list and the most fully grotesque — Mortville's garbage-built underworld of criminals and rebellion rhymes with Pink Flamingos' dare-you-to-look filth, the deep-cut to finally admit if the trash-sublime is your register.
• The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) — The midnight-movie legend itself, sitting half-watched on every list — Frank-N-Furter's flamboyant body-making and pansexual transgression put it right beside Nowhere and the thread's ecstatic-grotesque spirit, the one to finally see start to finish.
• Castration Movie Anthology i. Traps (2024) — If Waters' Female Trouble and Desperate Living landed, this is the recent transgressive queer provocation to pull down next — a Vancouver shock-anthology that follows a trans sex worker with the same gleeful, stomach-testing outsider abandon.