Stink-O-Vision

Audiences who saw the horror film Dead Lover in cinemas earlier this year were given scratch-and-sniff cards, in a revival of a gimmick first used by John Waters for Polyester in 1981. Waters called the format Odorama, and the producers of Rugrats Go Wild used the same term for their scratch-and-sniff cards in 2003.

In 2011, the fourth film in the Spy Kids franchise was also released with scratch-and-sniff cards, a format that they called Aroma-Scope. In 2023, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was rereleased with scratch-and-sniff cards branded as Stink-O-Vision, and Dead Lover has now borrowed that name for its black scratch-and-sniff cards.

The first experiments with scented cinema occurred sixty years ago, when smells were wafted through cinema air-conditioning vents to accompany the documentary Behind the Great Wall (via the Aroma-Rama process) and piped to cinema seats during the thriller Scent of Mystery (using the rival Smell-O-Vision system). Like Cinerama and 3D, they were Hollywood’s attempts to lure audiences away from television.

Harpy: A Manifesto for Childfree Women

In Harpy: A Manifesto for Childfree Women, Caroline Magennis argues that woman need not feel guilty for not having children. After searching for an appropriate description of herself as a woman without children, she settled on ‘harpy’: “I had tried on different words, and none of them stuck until Harpy.”

Although a harpy is generally depicted negatively, as a winged monster, the book attempts to redefine the term: “Through the harpy I want to find a way to turn both the passive-aggressive and direct stigma into something that felt like it had a terrifying power... The harpy came to mean, to me, all the ways in which we had been depicted but also a way out, even if we had to fly away and use our claws to get there.”

Magennis shows how childfree women are demonised by popular culture (specifically, tabloid newspapers and Hollywood films). She cites Lady Macbeth as “the epitome of the ruthless childless monster”, though she also highlights negative cultural archetypes such as wicked stepmothers.

Hags:The Demonisation of Middle-aged Women

Hags, as its subtitle makes clear, is a study of The Demonisation of Middle-aged Women. Author Victoria Smith explains that her purpose is not to reappropriate the word ‘hag’, nor to self-identify with the characteristics it evokes: “This book is not a celebration of our hag status.” (In contrast, Sharon Blackie — who trademarked the portmanteau word ‘hagitude’ — and fashion designer Batsheva Hay are self-proclaimed hags.)

Smith opposes the concept of linguistic reclamation, arguing that the process is impossible, as some men continue to use the contested terms as pejoratives: “call yourself what you like, but when others call you a witch or a slut, they mean it. We can act as though the words can be fully reclaimed, but they can’t. Those who dislike and fear us are using them too.”

Karen Stollznow made a similar observation about another misogynistic term: “Unfortunately, the ways women try to reclaim bitch do not diminish its stigmatizing power in the hands of others, and especially men.” Smith’s book shares its theme with The Crone, written by Barbara G. Walker in 1985, and the two books also have similar chapter headings.

Barry Lyndon

Stanley Kubrick’s classic Barry Lyndon will be shown in Bangkok on 3rd May, at GDXperience. The screening is part of Reading Cinéma, a short season organised by Doc Club with the Books and Belongings bookshop.

GDX is a screening room at Stadium One, a new mall dedicated to sports shops and fitness centres. Reading Cinéma runs from 1st to 3rd May. Barry Lyndon was previously shown at Chulalongkorn University in 2023.

There has been a revival of critical interest in Barry Lyndon over the last decade, with three documentaries on the making of the film: the radio programme Castles, Candles, and Kubrick, an episode of the TV programme Hollywood in Éirinn, and Making Barry Lyndon on the Criterion blu-ray. There is also a book on the film, The Making of a Masterpiece, by Alison Castle.

500 Must-See Movies

Total Film magazine first published its 500 Must-See Movies special issue in 2017, listing 500 films classified into five genres: horror, science-fiction, thrillers, action movies, and comedies. A second edition was published in 2022, with a handful of changes.

Since then, ‘new’ editions have appeared each year, without any further changes to the selected films. This year’s sixth edition features only one substitution: in the thriller category, Performance has been removed and replaced by a new entry, Oppenheimer.

Empire and Us Weekly magazines have also published top-500 film lists, as did the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph newspapers. Empire later revised its list for its Australian edition, and published a collection of 500 five-star reviews. Dateline Bangkok also has its own list of 500 classic films.

Total Film’s previous greatest-film lists are: The 100 Greatest Movies of All Time from 2005, The Top 100 Movies of All Time from 2006, and 100 Greatest Movies from 2010. It also compiled a list of The Sixty-Seven Most Influential Films Ever Made in 2009.

Slags on Stage: Class, Sex, Art and Desire in British Culture

Katie Beswick’s Slags on Stage: Class, Sex, Art and Desire in British Culture, published last year, “offers a personal and cultural history of the word ‘slag’,” a misogynistic slang term that implies both promiscuity and worthlessness. Beswick discusses the representation of female characters in popular culture (such as the self-defined “total slag” Kat Slater in EastEnders) and female artists (such as Tracey Emin, whose tent installation Everyone I Have Ever Slept With exposed her sexual history). The book’s cover illustration is from Kelly Green’s performance art production Slag.

Beswick briefly considers the reappropriation of ‘slag’, arguing that this is not yet possible: “We are not at the stage of reclaiming slag... or even being able to weaponise it effectively as resistance — and yet its complexities must be acknowledged in any reckoning with the term.” She conducted a survey of 169 people’s attitudes towards the word, and only two respondents “expressed a sense of reclamation”. A more common response was that “unlike other offensive sexist words, such as ‘slut’ and ‘cunt’, ‘slag’ was unable to be reclaimed, and therefore felt worse as an insult.”

Gao Zhen

Artist Gao Zhen, who has been detained in China since returning there from the US in 2024, was subject to a one-day trial on 30th March on charges of defaming Chinese national icons. The trial took place in camera at Sanhe, in Heibei province.

Prosecutors cited three satirical sculptures of Mao Zedong created by Gao with his brother Qiang. The Execution of Christ is a 2009 installation of seven Mao statues forming a firing squad to shoot Jesus. Mao’s Guilt is a statue of Mao kneeling in repentance, also from 2009. Miss Mao is a bust of Mao with female breasts and a long Pinocchio-like nose, produced in various versions since 2007.

The law Gao has been accused of breaking came into effect in 2018, long after Gao’s sculptures were made. A Chinese comedy talent agency was fined the equivalent of more than $2 million in 2023 under the same law, after a stand-up comedian made a joke about the Chinese People’s Army.

Fenian

Fenian, the new album from Irish band Kneecap, will be released on vinyl and CD on 24th April. In an Instagram post on 28th January, the band explained that the album’s title is a reappropriation of a word that has become an anti-Irish pejorative: “Now we’re using it to name everyone speaking truth to power.” The first single from the album, Liar’s Tale, features a blistering criticism of the UK Prime Minister: “fuck Keir Starmer... Better off as compost for farmers”.

A terrorism charge against Kneecap member Mo Chara was dropped last year due to a legal technicality. Paul Goldspring, chief magistrate for England and Wales, dismissed the case on 26th September 2025, noting that his written ruling “is not about the defendant’s innocence or guilt rather only whether this court has jurisdiction to hear the case.” He concluded that the court had no such jurisdiction, as the charge had been filed one day after the six-month statute of limitations had expired: “As such, the proceedings were instituted unlawfully and are null.”

The charge related to a Kneecap concert in London on 21st November 2024, at the O2 Forum Kentish Town during the band’s final show on their Fine Art Tour, when Chara appeared on stage draped in the Hezbollah flag saying: “Up Hamas! Up Hezbollah!” Hezbollah is classified as a terrorist group under UK law, and the Metropolitan Police charged Chara with displaying the flag “in such a way or in such circumstances as to arouse reasonable suspicion that he is a supporter of a proscribed organisation”.

Police also investigated Kneecap’s performance at last year’s Glastonbury Festival, after another band member, Móglaí Bap, called for fans to “start a riot” outside court when Chara’s trial began. After realising that his comments could be construed as an incitement to violence, Bap explained that he wasn’t literally asking people to riot, and Avon and Somerset Police dropped their investigation into the incident.

Cunt Is the Word

Anne Kernan’s Cunt Is the Word project began in 2021, when she designed a new image featuring the word ‘cunt’ every day, “using graphic design, photography, photo manipulation and craft.” In 2024, Kernan published 102 of those images as a photobook.

The book is beautifully packaged: wrapped in tissue paper and accompanied by five postcards. There are 100 copies, each of which is hand-numbered and signed by the artist.

In Defence of Witches: Why Women Are Still on Trial

In her introduction to In Defence of Witches: Why Women Are Still on Trial, Mona Chollet discusses historical and contemporary examples of women self-identifying as witches for feminist rather than occult reasons. These include second-wave feminist publications such as the WITCH Manifesto — which is quoted in the book’s epigraph — and Sorcières (‘witches’) magazine.

Surprisingly, she begins with a relatively unknown figure who has since become famous as a fictional archetype: “The first feminist to disinter the witches’ story and to claim this title for herself was the American Matilda Joslyn Gage, who... inspired the character of Glinda, the good witch in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which was written by her son-in-law, L. Frank Baum.” Given the success of the film adaptation of Baum’s book, The Wizard of Oz, Chollet argues that its director, Victor Fleming, “created the first ‘good witch’ in popular culture.”

In Defence of Witches was originally published in French as Sorcières: La puissance invaincue des femmes. Its American edition has a slightly longer subtitle (In Defense of Witches: The Legacy of the Witch Hunts and Why Women Are Still on Trial). Two other recent books have embraced the word ‘witch’ in both the feminist and occult senses: in Witch, Lisa Lister writes: “Witch... is now being reclaimed”, and in Witches, Sluts, Feminists, Kristen J. Sollée credits Gage as “the first known suffragist to reclaim the word ‘witch’.”