I’m very excited to say my Super 8 cosmic horror film SUNGAZER is included as the bonus film on this limited VHS release of Louise Weard’s amazing cyberpunk body horror featurette COMPUTER HEARTS!

Copies are available via the distributor here: https://lunchmeatvhs.com/collections/featured-products/products/computer-hearts-vhs

I generally enjoy assembling these sorts of lists more than I do explaining them, so I’ll keep it brief. This year I read a good amount of books and watched an excessive amount of movies. These are the best new to me reads and watches of each. I had a great time diving deeper into the works of some favorite artists such as Hisayasu Satô, Edogawa Rampo, David Peak, Takashi Ito, and Akira Kurosawa. My favorite artists I ‘discovered’ this year were Marcel Brion, Yokomitsu Riichi, John Hawkes, Jacques Rivette, Deborah Stratman, Kobo Abe, Hans Henny Jahnn, Henri Michaux, George Trakl, J.G. Ballard, and Thomas Wiloch.

It’s hard to overstate how happy I have been to read Monika Angerhuber’s Nocturnal Products this year, and how often I plan on revisiting it next year.

Not applicable to this list, but certainly worth mentioning, were frequent and refreshing revisits to the works of established favorite artists Takeshi Kitano, Thomas Ligotti, Bruno Schulz, Shinya Tsukamoto, Dario Argento, the Quay Brothers, David Cronenberg, Mamoru Oshii, and Apitchapong Weerasthakul.

BOOKS

Strange Tale of Panorama Island (Rampo, 1926)

The Complete Stories (Kafka, 1946)

Catastrophe: And Other Stories (Buzzati, 1966)

Insect Literature (Hearn, 1921)

All God’s Angels, Beware! (Crisp, 2009)

Piano Stories (Hernández, 1993)

You With Your Memory Are Dead (Shipley, 2016)

Waystations of the Deep Night (Brion, 1942)

Modanizumu: Modernist Fiction from Japan 1913 – 1938 (Ed. Tyler, 2008)

Paris Spleen (Baudelaire, 1869)

Hangsaman (Jackson, 1951)

Adventures in Immediate Irreality (Blecher, 1936)

Corpsepaint (Peak, 2018)

The Exalted and the Abased (Murphy, 2021)

The Box Man (Abe, 1973)

The Lime Twig (Hawkes, 1961)

Darkness Moves: An Henri Michaux Anthology, 1927-1984 (Michaux, 1994)

Aiaigasa (Crisp, 2018)

The Living Are Few, the Dead Many: Selected Works of Hans Henny Jahnn (Jahnn, 2012)

The Tunnel: Selected Poems (Edson, 1994)

The Unyielding (Shipley, 2017)

Altmann’s Tongue: Stories and a Novella (Evenson, 1994)

The Best Short Stories of J.G. Ballard (Ballard, 1978)

The Trouble With Being Born (Cioran, 1973)

American Stories (Kafū, 1908)

Sea Shells (Valéry, 1937)

Dreams Like Enigmatic Paintings (Michaux, 1972)

The Walking Man (Taniguchi, 1990)

The Thief and Other Stories (Heym, 1913)

Arthur Machen (Valentine, 1996)

The Hill of Dreams (Machen, 1907)

The Quay Brothers: Into a Metaphysical Playroom (Buchan, 2011)

Coma Crossing: Collected Poems (Gilbert-Lecomte, 2019)

The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt (Eisner, 1952)

Autumn Sonata: Selected Poems (Trakl, 1998)

Screaming in Code (Wiloch, 2006)

The Ship (Jahnn, 1949)

A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East (Krasznahorkai,, 2003)

House of the Sleeping Beauties and Other Stories (Kawabata, 1961)

Nocturnal Products (Angerhuber, 2002)

FILMS

Memoria (Weerasethakul, 2021)

Himiko (Shinoda, 1974)

The Bad Sleep Well (Kurosawa, 1960)

Night on the Galactic Railroad (Sugii, 1985)

Profound Desires of the Gods (Shinoda, 1968)

The Story of Yanagawa’s Canals (Takahata, 1987)

Gauche the Cellist (Takahata, 1982)

Duelle (Rivette, 1976)

Whisper of the Heart (Kondō, 1995)

Bruges-La-Morte (Chase, 1978)

Stray Dogs (Tsai, 2013)

How High (Dylan, 2001)

Kummatty (Aravindan, 1979)

Ludwig (Visconti, 1973)

Kotoko (Tsukamoto, 2011)

Mr. Klein, (Losey, 1976)

The Moon (Ito, 1994)

The Servant (Losey, 1963)

Zone (Ito, 1995)

Dizziness (Ito, 2001)

The Four Times (Frammartino, 2010)

Army of Shadows (Melville, 1969)

Howl’s Moving Castle (Miyazaki, 2004)

Malcolm X (Lee, 1992)

Mirrored Mind (Ishii, 2005)

Rhapsody in August (Kurosawa, 1991)

August in the Water (Ishii, 1995)

Crimes of the Future (Cronenberg, 2022)

Turtle Vision (Satô, 1991)

Tongues Untied (Riggs, 1989)

Not I (Page/Beckett, 1973)

Nocturne (Solomon, 1980)

Belle De Jour (Buñuel, 1967)

Maps to the Stars (Cronenberg, 2014)

Secret Garden (Satô, 1987)

Celluloid Nightmares (Satô, 1988)

The Elephant Man (Lynch, 1980)

In Order Not to Be Here (Stratman, 2002)

Céline and Julie Go Boating (Rivette, 1974)

Charisma (Kurosawa, 1999)

Bringing Out the Dead (Scorsese, 1999)

The Mystery of Picasso (Clouzout, 1956)

Harakiri (Kobayashi, 1963)

Hedgehog in the Fog (Norstein, 1975)

The Unchanging Sea (Griffith, 1910)

Whispering Pages (Sokurov, 1994)

Everything Visible is Empty (Matsumoto, 1975)

T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G (Sharits, 1969)

Ugetsu (Mizoguchi, 1953)

Take the X Train (Rintaro, 1987)

I’m very excited to say that my story ‘Brighter Than Stars’, first published in Baffling Magazine No. 6, has been nominated for Tenebrous Press’ first annual Brave New Weird Awards. The winners, announced next week, will be included in an anthology of the year’s best New Weird Horror of 2022. Fingers crossed!

Brighter Than Stars is available to read at Baffling here: https://www.bafflingmag.com/issue-six/bright-than-stars