Tuesday Night Movie Night will always offer free movie recommendations to all. Monthly supporting members make it possible (with money). If just 1% of our subscribers participate, we break even, and we can keep doing this forever and ever and ever and ever…

Each week, Drew creates a watchlist with film recommendations provided by you.

A spoiler-free description of the movie.

A hopeless romantic makes a wish for the affection of his crush.

→ Plain-and-simple horror. Obsession is beautiful in its simplicity. There’s no complicated lore or unnecessary expositions. It’s just constant tension, dread, a little social commentary, and plenty of payoff.

→ It’s a love story, not a romance. Not all love stories are romantic. And this one certainly isn’t.

→ When female leads steal the show. It’s hard to overstate just how important Inde Navarrette is to the success of this film. And her performance is genuinely perfect.

Did you know that the Mayo Clinic recommends you do three sets of 10-15 Kegel exercises every single day to strengthen your pelvic floor and also improve the rigidity and integrity of your anal sphincter? Relevance forthcoming.

Curry Barker’s Obsession is the tense, pulpy horror flick that I’d have wished for, if I wasn’t afraid of the unforeseen consequences of a wish. The director is yet another sketch comedian poised to become a horror film auteur, following in the footsteps of Jordan Peele and Zach Cregger.

Barker’s feature-length theatrical debut finds horror in a refreshingly simple narrative, mostly through the use of keen editing, sound mixing, and well-planned misdirection. The film entirely hinges on Inde Navarrette as Nikki, who gives an award-worthy performance, joining a long string of recent standout horror actresses like Mia Goth in Pearl and Amy Madigan in Weapons.

Perhaps most importantly, your author submits that sitting for Obsession results in enough involuntary (butt) clenching and unclenching that you can just about do all the Kegels you need to for the year. It’s true, and I’m living proof of it.

New monthly supporters get an (optional) one-time single sentence feature in a TNMN edition. Say anything, and Blake must include it in a future edition. Here’s an example:

A fact or two about the production that makes you say “oh, neat.”

FINGERS.

It’s been eight and a half days since I’ve written a story I am remotely proud of. Eight and a half fucking days. I’ve always wanted to be a real writer, but no one told me it’d feel like this.

Since then, I’ve only been able to write the first half of a hundred different stories. The first half always comes so easily. It’s always inspired and beautiful and, I suspect, award worthy, if only anyone would ever read it. But the second half is nowhere to be found. The moment I finish a workable first half, the faucet runs dry and my mind pivots to the beginnings of different stories.

How can I expect anyone to give me the time of day if I can only promise them the beginning? Sigh.

Do you have any idea what that feels like for a writer? You obviously don’t because writer’s brains work in a very particular way, and frankly you could never understand, no matter how willing you are to try. You probably think writing is easy. Think of the words. Type the words. Press enter. Rinse and repeat until you have a final draft.

Explaining it to you would be wasted effort, really, but humor me. Imagine you’ve been jailed and you don’t know why. Your captor slams the cell door open and hands you a jar of 2,500 pistachios. He looks you up and down and says, ‘eat every pistachio and I will set you free.’ By the time you eat 1,125 pistachios, you’ve vomited several times over, and you’re not sure you can take much more. You soldier on, and then just as you get over the hump, the captor returns and takes the pistachios away. He hands you a new jar filled with jelly beans and says ‘I meant to give you the jelly beans.’

This is what it’s like to stop and start story after story, minus the vomiting. Eight and a half days of it. Imagine it.

Writing is for the strong willed, and I’m not sure I have it in me anymore. I’ve grown more and more anxious every day, and it’s nearly certain I’m a fraud at this point. So, today I spent hours since the sun rose sitting in front of a blank page.

I picked and picked at my cuticle, so furiously that I broke skin. Blood welled up where the dry skin used to be and I pointed my thumb upwards and watched it overflow and then trail down my right hand, gravity doing most of the work.

I noticed a thin sliver of dead skin hanging from my cuticle. And then, the strangest thing happened. You know when you do something that makes almost no sense, because it’s just you, all alone in a room? You sing or talk to your dog or do a little dance? 

Well, today, I pulled the hanging skin right off and winced (only a little) from the pain and then dropped it into the glass of water next to my computer. 

You wouldn’t believe it, but right then and there the water in the glass began quivering and from the nearly translucent skin grew part of a thumb, but just barely a finger tip. Certainly not enough to write home about.

I pondered the importance of such a discovery and ran to my kitchen. I grabbed a glass and tossed an oversized square ice cube into it and it clinked and spun into the bottom of the glass. I nearly tripped over my own two feet fetching a bottle of whiskey, and then I poured it over the ice cube and listened to the ice cube crack and wilt from the warmth. Like the crunch of a well-made keyboard. I snagged the eight-inch chef’s knife from the cupboard and ran back upstairs.

I kneeled down in front of my maple desk so the glass of water where the fingertip had grown was at eye level and I chuckled nervously. It had grown a touch more, but still not enough to write home about. I downed the glass of whiskey, refilled it again, and downed another. Then, I poured a little on my sore thumb, closed my eyes. Chop. Thud. My right hand suddenly felt like it was conducting all the electricity in the world.

Now, prior to this moment, I thought that writer’s block was the worst pain a writer could know, but I’ll admit (reluctantly) that I was wrong. The worst pain a writer can feel is when their thumb is dangling from their hand by a few stubborn tendons which, apparently, a dull chef’s knife (this is why my mother always said don’t forget to sharpen the knife before carving the brisket) couldn’t quite sever. I screamed in agony as I yanked the thumb from my right hand and dropped it into the glass of water.

I poured some whiskey over the wound where my thumb used to be and wrapped it up with some old medical dressing I found in the closet. My right hand shook from the trauma and I watched as the water glass shattered and from it grew a whole human being that looked identical to me.

He was naked and dripping wet and everything about him looked like me down to the freckles and where they were placed.

“What’s your name?”

“Jerry.”

“I’ll call you Jerry Two. Do you know how to write?”

“I love to write!”

And he did love to write. Because in a matter of hours, he’d completed three short stories with my byline, and I was able to submit every one of them to small publishing houses. 

“How are you coming up with all of these ideas? Aren’t you tired of writing?” I pleaded for answers.

“I’ve never written a day in my life,” Jerry Two exclaimed proudly. “I’m not sure I’ll ever get tired of this feeling. It’s wonderful!”

They say it’s a game of numbers, and what would happen if his stories weren’t accepted by publishing houses? How much could Jerry Two really write before becoming a shell of himself like I was? You have to understand, because I’d been through it, I already knew the outcome was inevitable unless I could manage his workload somehow. The solution was obvious, and so before I knew it I was kneeling down in front of nine more water glasses. Chop. Thud. Chop. Thud. Chop. Thud. Nine more crudely severed fingers in nine more glasses. Enough wound dressing to wrap both hands completely. The pain muddled from repetition. 

Writers are as adaptable as they come. We have to be.

And so alongside Jerry Two I set up Jerry Three through Eleven at their own respective workstations. Each was outfitted with the same laptops and tchotchkes that I knew they’d like because they were me. A picture of our son and wife. Stress putty to play with when the ideas took a leave of absence. And a Rubik’s cube to fiddle with when they needed a break.

Every two hours, I gave one Jerry a break and moved to the next one. 

You have to be careful not to overwork any of your Jerrys, otherwise they’ll end up like me, entirely hopeless and pitiful and unable to write a single meaningful story from start to finish.

By the end of the first week, my Jerrys produced over one hundred and twenty stories. Their output was enviable. I read each story end-to-end, and not every single one was a triumph, but that’s okay. The rate of output was so high, that the occasional miss could easily be discarded without much thought.

I stood behind all ten of my Jerrys as they wrote and wrote, like a proud farmer seeing a season’s yield for the first time. I couldn’t contain the joy. I smiled down at my bloodied and fingerless hands: This is what it was supposed to feel like to be a real writer.

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