PicoBlog

I was at a low point in my life when I paid for a Cameo from Juliet Landau. At the time, I was rewatching a whole lot of Buffy the Vampire Slayer to get the most out of my Hulu free trial and escape gnawing feelings of anxiety about the future. I’ve always used fandom to escape anxiety about the future and pretty much everything else, so by the time I had re-embraced her haunting portrayal of the vampire Drusilla, it felt natural to fork over a modest sum for a message under the category “pep talk.” She’s so beautiful. I can’t even write intelligently about her, I just melt into fan mode and forget words. But I managed to talk to her in full confident sentences this morning! After a remote post-screening Q&A that was less a Q&A than the world’s most effective global support group. But before we go there, we need to talk about this film. Not just because Anne Rice is in it, though Anne Rice is in it, looking preternaturally fabulous. But because the film is incandescently on theme for our purposes here.

I had no idea what to expect from A Place Among the Dead. When I found out that Juliet had set me up with a comp ticket, I was over the moon, and that was before I knew I would get to see Anne Rice in full diva mode, lighting up the screen in the only scripted film she’s ever been in. I’m glad I have top-notch headphones, though, because every breath between words mattered in this movie; at one point, you actually hear the soft click of a bare bulb turning on. Horror, at its best, is an intimate genre, at the same time that it thrusts you into the thick of larger-than-life externalities. With all the poetic unpredictability of the best experimental film and all the urgent immediacy of a realtime documentary, Landau takes us on two simultaneous and harrowing journeys: one, to the core of an unsolved mystery wherein a string of young women appear to have been murdered by someone who believes he’s a vampire, and one through the sharp corners and meandering corridors of her own mind. The former trajectory is more in-your-face, of course, and almost lyrical in the brutality of its images — but the internal thoughts, expressed in whispered voices of the protagonist’s emotionally abusive parents, really get under your skin.

Some of this negative talk, we’re all (sadly) used to: You’re nothing. You’ll never be anything. You don’t deserve anything. You’re disgusting. You’re hideous. But there were several lines that stood out to me, because this is the kind of talk I thought only I had ever heard inside: You’re crippled. You’re meant to be crippled. Yes, you’re crippled, isn’t that nice? Doesn’t that feel right?

No one who knows me will be surprised that I raised my hand — my actual hand, not the cartoon Zoom-hand — immediately when our virtual Q&A session began. I told the room I’m a disability activist and I was born with cerebral palsy (I always have to announce this on Zoom, because you can’t tell by looking at me when I’m sitting, and having to inform people looking right at me that I’m physically disabled set off a full-on identity crisis in 2020), and I had a long history of struggling with learned helplessness, of confusing destructive conditioning with the limits of my disability, which, I’ve discovered, doesn’t actually limit me much at all. I had to ask her why those words, and she opened beautifully to the room about the ways her narcissistic mother systematically dimmed her spirit for so long, caring for her only when she seemed to be dependent or in need.

Then she did something I could never have predicted: she asked me to share what it was that helped me overcome that learned helplessness. Juliet Landau and her equally talented husband Dev are experts at creating a truly warm, open, nourishing space, so it felt entirely natural for me to tell 32 complete strangers and one actress I’ve admired now for more than half my life that Ian helped me get past that shit, starting, simply, by pointing out how fluidly I hiked when we moved to Seattle. “You’re really athletic,” he told me, and that stunned me into truly unprecedented silence. Athletic? Me? I was literally removed from PE class and put into extra English classes because no one thought I could “do PE.” Athletic?! What became my weekly workout-highs started there, in those deep green Pacific Northwestern wilds, when my partner who recently biked 86 miles without even being aware of how far he went essentially told me that my body can do what his can do. No one in my family had been willing to say that, largely because I’ve never been even remotely related to anyone who works out, but there were other reasons. My body inspired fear in my family. It was seen as frail and fragile and in some ways prematurely old. I still get angry about this. But I’m less so now. I’m less so now after watching A Place Among the Dead, because that’s the sort of thing art can help us heal, if the artists are willing to go deep enough.

Juliet Landau is an artist who will go wherever a project demands, and she’s now got a community of people, called A Place Among the Dead-heads, who will follow her there, sometimes literally to screenings in various locales. I took an instant place among them, and was given a compliment I won’t soon forget by one of my fellow viewers. In the Zoom chat he wrote, “Sarah Sunfire has the most appropriate name.” Then he said, “It’s a beautiful name, if it’s a real name. If it’s not, you should change it.”

When I was 22, I told my dad I was going to get my name legally changed to Sarah Sunflower Sunfire Marie, and he said, “You’re such a hippie!” to which there was no response but “OH HI KETTLE, YOU’RE LOOKING RATHER CHARRED THIS EVENING.” Those sunflower petals, though? I was pleasing my mom with those. I was pleasing a lot of people with my insistent adherence to reaching toward the sun, rubbing gold dust in my eyes. I couldn’t see very clearly in those days. Seeing was for other people. Learned helplessness indeed.

Sunfire is me. I write that name on everything but my MFA applications these days. The first one I filled out, I stopped myself from writing it under “other names,” because I realized just in time that they were talking about other names my recommenders might refer to me by or other names under which my materials might arrive. My transcripts are not Sarah Sunfire’s academic record. (Though of course, technically they are.)

Ian doesn’t like my name. The only reason this is not a point of contention between us is because I haven’t brought it up since he’s made this known. Normally, if Ian doesn’t like something I like, I ask him why, and I generally end up sincerely altering my opinion because he’s always considered something I haven’t, without fail. There are things I can comfortably like that he doesn’t like — Buffy and Cameo and assorted other frivolous vital things — but I don’t need to hear his reasons for this one. I don’t need to hear anyone’s reasons for this one. If someone decided they didn’t like your name, would you wanna hear about it?

It’s because of the vulnerable and deeply connection-based Q&A brought on by A Place Among the Dead that I’m not just thinking about this but sharing it. I don’t think I’ve ever seen as naked and raw an emotional performance as the one Juliet Landau gives in this film, which also happens to be her directorial debut. Her eye for image is remarkable: despite the fact that I was sitting at my desk with myriad possible distractions, watching it on a high-res but small screen, I could not look away. I was mesmerized. To truly mesmerize someone by immersing them in narrative in this day and age is an achievement I didn’t know art could still rise to anymore.

I’m a lot more hopeful about everything now that I’ve seen this take-no-prisoners horror film in which evil manifests itself in no uncertain terms. My only issue, and I don’t expect to speak for the majority here, is with its portrayal of people who are inclined to drink blood. I kept thinking, “You don’t have to kill or do anything nonconsensual to enjoy that,” which is demonstrably true, but it’s also a form of representation that no large audience is clamoring for. That’s fine. You can all go about your lives with your non-erotic associations with blood-drinking, I’ll just—

Wait. Hear me out.

There is so little that we all concretely share, and there is so little that truly courses through your entire body, and so, blood is, by definition, intimate, right?

and a lot of people understand tattoos and piercings to be sources of nigh-unparalleled endorphin-highs. Both processes necessitate sharp pain.

A deliberate, careful, sterilized blade doesn’t hurt any more than that. It’s not supposed to. And the commitment you’re making or you could be making if you taste the one thing that all of us—

I’m trying to explain, not persuade, but suppressed longing is blunting my ability to do either. (Ian, like most of the world’s population, does not see bloodplay the way I do.) When I started this Substack, I felt very clear about what I didn’t need to tell you, and now I feel like testing those bounds. Why? Probably because you’re still here. I’ve been writing these more and more often and you’re still here. That means you like me. And feeling like my life is missing something without bloodplay — admitting, in fact, that I have passionately felt this way for the last 20 years — well, that’s me. That’s me, like Sarah Sunfire is me, and Ian has embraced everything about me more readily than anyone I’ve ever known, far more readily than I was ready to embrace myself, but those two things? My name and the bloodplay? Well. I keep those anyway. Because.

Juliet Landau said that her goal with A Place Among the Dead was to include the viewer as an active participant, not a spectator. As we travel with the characters and enter their emotional lives, she wanted us to look within at the same time, reflect on what’s formed us, what we need to let go of, what we need to bring to the fore. It worked. I wanted to tell you all how fantastic this movie is so that you’ll see it, but I ended up talking about myself in some ways I have not publicly done, because this is a film that helps viewers face truth. So often, we see “facing the truth” as something painful, something that shows us our inner-monstrousness, or the monstrousness of others. I’ve faced a lot of that. But sometimes? Facing the truth can be a joyful act. There are people out there who won’t ever understand how anything involving a sterilized blade can be a joyful or loving act, but I’m not asking to be understood.

For the first time in possibly my whole life, I’m not asking for anything.

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