No film writing like it

Saturday 4/25/26

No writing of any kind like any of it. The last writer. The only one that could never be mistaken for AI. Whatever he's writing. It could only be him, and nothing else and no one else.

This is from a lengthy work on spring horror films, which will also be in the horror film book, pertaining to David Gladwell's 1964 short film, An Untitled Film. But obviously a lot more as well.

Fall is the most aromatic season, but spring is the runner-up. We know the smell of spring well enough, suggestively enough, to experience it through our memories as we do each year in real-time, only differently. The petrichor, the dampened earthiness of the soil, that waxy, budding of the leaves, so many flowers, even a sort of musk carried on the breeze from animals we don’t see. To cast your mind back to grammar school is to engage your olfactory sense as it functions in the remembered past. There you were looking out the window at the rain before heading off to get the bus. You could practically smell the front lawn with its earthworms that you’d you’d shortly see in the flesh having broken through the surface.

Spring is an intensely somatic season. We smell it, feel it, and taste it by breathing it in. It gets to the mouth in ways winter doesn’t unless there’s snow or a preponderance of rock salt, which doesn’t count. Simple spring moments that actually aren’t so simple—like waiting for a bus, sliding in the grass and spraying mud, discarding a jacket for the first time that year—become embedded in our psyches, replayable by choice, but more commonly without intention, until we become more intentional in these reflective matters because of what we feel we need, or are missing, in relation to that stage of our life.

David Gladwell’s nine-minute An Untitled Film is the cinematic equivalent of the above: an eternal spring moment, which is what spring moments, after a fashion, are. It’s also folk horror at the root. A young man working on a farm burns brush—slowly—as the film, a beat in time, begins. This is a moment being made to last, the eidetic power of cinema conceptually fusing with memory’s own time-delayed, dilatory power, but rather than nibbling at Proust’s madeleine, we’re out in nature, with the disclaimer that this is a portion of it in which man is the sovereign shot-caller.

An earthly paradise for someone can be someone else’s—or something else’s—earthly hell. We’re often lax in our definition of nature, thinking it solely that which occurs out of doors pertaining to flora and fauna that isn’t us. But the workplace is nature. The home is nature. The relationship is nature. Rearing is nature. Marriage is nature. Sex is nature. Reaping is nature.

An Untitled Film suggests James Agee’s short story, “A Mother’s Tale,” in which a cow relays a story about what really happens at slaughterhouses. For their human minders and eventual executioners, the cows represent a part of the job and money in the pocket. Business booming for the one is worse than a nightmare for the other.

This concurrency, a staple of nature, is the heart of Gladwell’s film. The smoke from brush burning at the piece’s start is sufficient to make us feel like we’re standing beside a crofter’s fire or else been plunged into the witchy doings of 1960’s The City of the Dead. The individual versed in Shakespeare may be reminded of the three weird sisters and the vapors emanating from their cauldron on the blasted heath. We’re peering through the mists of passed and passing days. A dog plays. A boy watches. A cat skulks. Chickens feed and squawk. Additional vegetation is consumed. The cat leaps. The boy falls from his perch in a tree. A chicken is killed and dropped to the ground, this act having been observed by the boy.

How do we quantify these actions? How effective are our measurements of time in attempting to do so? What does a second really mean given everything that can occur within it? For this boy, the routine farm scene is the horror film. He’ll shake it off and go about his life just as we shake off The Birds and set about ours.

A horror film, though, like our memories of spring, has an ability to lodge within us. To be toted around over the duration of our journeys. Which is how both first whiff of newly mowed grass in May takes us back to a place we also never truly leave and the opening fanfare of Tod Browning’s Dracula restores us to a broken battlement in Transylvania as another version of home.

The seasons that follow spring are essentially different stages of spring before it, and life, comes full circle again. What is summer but fully ripened spring? What is autumn but withering spring having become wiser than it was six months ago? And what is winter but the fallowing of spring before she comes alive again? And what is An Untitled Film but a timeless spring horror movie that happens to have a running time but no real ending?