Listicle: Gothic Themes & International Films Part 2
Medusa / Μέδουσα (1998) dir. George Lazopoulos
Country: Greece
Genre: Drama/Horror-Fantasy
Age: Adult
Format: Feature Film
Runtime: 87mins
Blurb: In this wry retelling of the ancient Medusa myth, strange, clothed statues of men are appearing all over Greece. Only Perseus, a leader of a gang of modern Athenian thieves, with a strange childhood, holds the answer to the mystery–and it has something to do with beautiful, long-haired women in black. One night his group breaks into the house of one such creature. Filled with low-key humour and suspense, Medusa unfolds in a simple and tantalizing way.
Firstly, Perseus as a street thug is basically correct, and that’s something I really appreciate. ‘Heroes’ are mainly a bunch of dicks. I really liked that update. I also liked how it made the story more about working class Greeks, although Perseus was from a more affluent background to begin with. I also absolutely love the way the gorgon abilities are handled here – we know what happens when the gorgon looks at a man, but what happens when she looks at a woman? This is Human-Passing Monster and Haunted by the Past in spades, and I also really enjoyed the mountain village and large old house setting. So much atmosphere.
NOTE: this takes from the Greek version of the myth, not Ovid’s retelling of that myth. There is no sexual assault involved in the original.
If you like films with mummy issues to the max, the unstoppable force that is the monstrous feminine, and another example of Greeks telling and retelling their own stories, give this a go.
Only streaming on YouTube, full movie with English subs available via the Greek Cinema channel
Looking for a book?
Try I, Medusa, by Ayana Grey (Random House, 2025).
Blurb: From New York Times bestselling author Ayana Gray comes a new kind of villain origin story, reimagining one of the most iconic monsters in Greek mythology as a provocative and powerful young heroine.
Meddy has spent her whole life as a footnote in someone else’s story. Out of place next to her beautiful, immortal sisters and her parents—both gods, albeit minor ones—she dreams of leaving her family’s island for a life of adventure. So when she catches the eye of the goddess Athena, who invites her to train as an esteemed priestess in her temple, Meddy leaps at the chance to see the world beyond her home.
In Athens’ colorful market streets and the clandestine chambers of the temple, Meddy flourishes in her role as Athena’s favored acolyte, getting her first tastes of purpose and power. But when she is noticed by another Olympian, Poseidon, a drunken night between girl and god ends in violence, and the course of Meddy’s promising future is suddenly and irrevocably altered.
Her locs transformed into snakes as punishment for a crime she did not commit, Medusa must embrace a new identity—not as a victim, but as a vigilante—and with it, the chance to write her own story as mortal, martyr, and myth.
Exploding with rage, heartbreak, and love, I, Medusa portrays a young woman caught in the cross currents between her heart’s deepest desires and the cruel, careless games the Olympian gods play.
The Outwaters (2022) dir. Robbie Banfitch
Country: USA
Genre: Horror
Age: Adult
Format: Feature Film
Runtime: 110mins
Blurb: Close your eyes. We dare you.
Deep in the Mojave Desert, under a scorching blood-red sun, four travellers have set up camp to make art. One fateful night, the group is thrust into a feverish tornado of flayed flesh and mind-boggling monstrosities, the likes of which mere humans simply cannot fathom.
I can’t rewatch this; it contains pretty much all the things I can’t cope with in one film. It’s the best example of ‘weird landscape will fuck you up’ that I can think of, so it’s included in this list, and I know some friends of mine absolutely love how extra this gets. It’s incredibly disorientating, with messed up timey-wimey looping, doppelgangers, future and past selves colliding in visceral, brutal ways, and natural sounds causing physical and mental confusion, psychosis, and possibly even physical transformation. It turns into a gore-fest of body horror at the end, including disembowelment and self-castration. This body horror, and the confusion over what’s happening, I think also qualifies it as ‘Human-Passing Monster’ as well. I’m not going to rewatch it to check, so you can judge for yourself.
The first half is a very naturalistic dialogue heavy, which I don’t mind, but I know some people don’t vibe with. The second half, or last third, possibly, goes full extreme horror, and goes hard. The whole film is Found Footage, and that’s even worse, because at no point are you entirely sure what you’re seeing, or what’s going on, and you need to piece it all together. I think I would agree that this film is way too long, but if you’re a fan of the slow natural found footage build up, then you may enjoy it more than I did!
For all streaming options and links, check out JustWatch.
Looking for a book?
Try Spread Me by Sarah Gailey (Nightfire, 2025) – desert weird fiction with body horror.
Ages: Adult
Blurb: Kinsey has the perfect job as the team lead in a remote research outpost. She loves the isolation and the way the desert keeps temptations from the civilian world far out of reach. When her crew discovers a mysterious specimen buried deep in the sand, Kinsey breaks quarantine and brings it into the hab. But the longer it's inside, the more her carefully controlled life begins to unravel. Temptation has found her after all, and it can't be ignored any longer. One by one, Kinsey's team realizes the thing they're studying is in search of a new host-and one of them is the perfect candidate....
Goodreads / Amazon / Waterstones / USA Macmillan: Where to Buy
Rift / Rökkur (2017) dir. Erlingur Thoroddsen
Country: Iceland
Genre: Drama/Horror/Mystery
Age: Adult
Format: Feature Film
Runtime: 111mins
Blurb: Months after they broke up, Gunnar receives a strange phone call from his ex-boyfriend, Einar. He sounds distraught, like he’s about to do something terrible to himself. Gunnar drives up to the secluded cabin where Einar is holed up and soon discovers that there’s more going on than he imagined. As the two men come to terms with their broken relationship, some other person seems to be lurking outside the cabin, wanting to get in.
TW: CSA, tragedy
This is a deeply unsettling and sad tale that is stronger as a relationship drama than a mystery, but it worked for me. It’s an exploration of guilt and loneliness, the silence around trauma, and broken relationships. Thoroddsen was influenced by the classic film, Don’t Look Now, and his homage to that is the red hooded jacket that Einar wears, and the red jeep that appears at certain points throughout the film, more as foreshadowing and symbolism than as a part of the mystery. There are many unanswered questions at the end of the film, but you are then left to piece together the fractured timeline of events, and whether Einar was ever alive in the first place.
It stands up to multiple rewatches, and, for me at least, is a queer gem of Icelandic noir cinema.
For all streaming options and links, check out JustWatch.
Looking for a book?
For a modern take on queer experiences and relationships in the Arctic Circle, this time in Greenland, try Crimson by Niviaq Korneliussen, translated by Anna Halager (Virago, 2019).
Ages: Adult
Blurb: The island has run out of oxygen. The island is swollen. The island is rotten. The island has taken my beloved from me. The island is a Greenlander. It's the fault of the Greenlander.
In Nuuk, Greenland:
Fia breaks up with her long-term boyfriend and falls for Sara.
Sara is in love with Ivik who holds a deep secret and is about to break promises.
Ivik struggles with gender dysphoria as their friends become addicted to social media, listen to American pop music and get blind drunk in downtown bars and uptown house parties.
Then there is Inuk, who also has something to hide - it will take him beyond his limits to madness, and question what it means to be a Greenlander, while Arnaq, the party queen, pulls the strings of manipulation, bringing a web of relationships to a shocking crescendo.
Crimson weaves through restlessness, depression, love and queer experiences to tell the story of Greenlanders through a unique and challenging form. The original text was written and published in the Greenlandic language.
The Woods (2024) dir. Sarah Lyons
Country: USA
Genre: Drama/Horror/Mystery
Age: Adult
Format: Feature Film
Runtime: 76mins
Blurb: A woman on a true crime podcast recounts the mysterious story of a hike that resulted in the death of her best friends several years earlier.
I’m including this one as it’s an indie, microbudget film, and the debut film for Sarah Lyons as director and screenwriter, not to mention debut film performances for much of the cast. For a microbudget, I was really impressed with the effects and the cast (I’ve seen much, much worse) and I enjoyed it overall; at no point did I feel the need to DNF due to the acting (which was pretty decent for the most part) or the script (also pretty good as Lyons’ first script).
If microbudget films are not for you, I’d give it a pass, but if you’re into this side of the horror scene, this one has its moments, for sure. It certainly ticks off ‘Gothic landscape’, as the woods are the site and catalyst for stirring up anxieties about friendship, the fragility of social cohesion, and being Othered. They are also deeply strange, and a place where people change, and disappear. The framed narrative of the woman on the true crime podcast certainly ticks off ‘Haunted by the Past’. I think we also arguably get ‘Human-Passing Monster’ in this one as well, whether we’re blaming the woods themselves, or psychological issues, or something else. It’s a bit of an uneven watch, but the framed narrative is a good idea, and for a debut film, not just for Lyons as a debut director and debut screenwriter, but also for a lot of the cast, it’s pretty solid.
For all streaming options and links, check out JustWatch.
Looking for a book?
For more friends fighting for their lives in the woods when they thought it was going to be a fun bonding activity, try The Black Hole by L. Marie Wood (Mocha Memoirs Press, 2022).
Ages: Adult
Blurb: A group of friends head out to enjoy a much-deserved night out and paintballing is on the menu. But the team they are playing against has something entirely different in mind.
The friends find themselves in a battle for their lives in unfamiliar terrain against well-equipped opponents whose motivations are both irrational and lethal. Considered, “… a true trip into the darkest depths of what mankind is capable of at its worst,” by Midwest Book Review, this story is a classic tale of prey combined with slasher film “edge-of-your seat” vibes with a little modern-day relevance to keep you unsettled.
Told two ways in this ground-breaking screenplay/novella combo, The Black Hole will keep you guessing, engaged, and very, very scared.
Goodreads / Amazon / Mocha Memoirs Press
You Won’t Be Alone (2022) dir. Goran Stolevski
Country: North Macedonia/Australia
Genre: Drama/Fantasy Folk Horror
Age: Adult
Format: Feature Film
Runtime: 108mins
Blurb: It’s a wicked thing this world.
In an isolated mountain village in 19th century Macedonia, a young feral witch accidentally kills a peasant. She assumes the peasant’s shape to see what life is like in her skin, igniting a deep-seated curiosity to experience life inside the bodies of others.
This is another slow journey through the landscape and lives of others, exploring communities from the outside, learning and relearning what it is to be human, in a visually poetic arthouse way. This fits with ‘Human-Passing Monster’, but like Edge of the Knife, community has the power to draw the isolated and feared things of the world into new appreciation for themselves and for others. The witch constantly returning and trying to draw the protagonist back into isolation definitely fits ‘Haunted by the Past’, and that’s also I think a metaphor for the psychological forces that can drive people away from society and into themselves, like depression.
I enjoyed this a lot more than I expected to, and the domestic abuse in the villages was more a locus of horror for me than the shape-shifting and mild body horror aspects.
For all streaming options and links, check out JustWatch.
Looking for a book?
Try the short story, free to read, “Cicadas and their Skins” by Avra Margariti (Strange Horizons 29, July 2024)
Ages: Adult
Blurb: A 5.3K word short story about a skin-wearing witch.
Story link / Book Riot: 100 Must-Read Books About Witches
Listicle/Mini-Reviews by C.M. Rosens
@cmrosens.com – Bluesky
@cm.rosens – IG, Threads, TikTok
