The Troye Sivan Songs, Cenobites, and ‘Bright Young Women’ That Got Us Through the Week

It’s been a horrifying and heartbreaking week, and today’s internet can quickly leave you feeling like Jon Stewart in that The Daily Show clip that’s going viral again. It’s also been a big week for trials, Nicole Kidman’s AMC, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Republicans are spending millions to lie about abortion; we’re stuck hearing Kari Lake’s name for the foreseeable future; Kendall Jenner is possibly trying to run for president; and Florida remains a state. Overall, we’re left with the question: Why aren’t there more fight clubs for women?

It’s overwhelming, to say the least. So here are the books, movies, and music we’ve been using to get off the internet and give our brains a rest.

Jessica Knoll’s third novel is an enraging and thrilling read that takes our culture’s enduring obsession with Ted Bundy and sets the record straight: He wasn’t some mastermind criminal who escaped prison twice after brilliantly evading authorities. He was a creepy weirdo “run-of-the-mill incel” who likely made the women he approached feel bad for him (rather than smitten), and who managed to escape a couple of low-security jails because the police were incompetent.

Specifically, Knoll tells the story of Ted Bundy (without ever mentioning his name) through the eyes of his victims—a perspective that’s almost never been considered. (There are at least 10 movies and countless books on the type of person Bundy was.) Filled with tons of snarky exchanges and descriptions of dumb powerful men that belittle them to their rightful size, it’s a triumph of a novel that was an equal parts infuriating and cathartic read. I devoured it in two days. —Lauren Tousignant

In case you haven’t noticed, everything is uncannily horrific at the moment. Fortunately, Troye Sivan just decided to drop a very good album and–more importantly–a music video in which he’s dressed in tried and true pop girlie drag and mounting Disney’s own, Ross Lynch. “Give me a call if you ever get desperate/I’ll be like one of your girls,” Sivan croons on “One of Your Girls.” It’s enough of a sonic siren call on its own, but then Sivan slides on fingerless gloves and a false eyelash and it becomes something else entirely. I can’t get enough of it. —Audra Heinrichs

The shadow of Halloween is extended before us which means it’s the perfect time to recommend a scary movie that came out in 1987 but that I watched for the first time this week: Hellraiser! First of all—if no one has told you how horny Hellraiser is, let me tell you: a woman fucks her soon-to-be husband’s brother on the day of her wedding on top of her wedding dress! Hot! In general, there’s a lot of fucking in this scary flick, for love, lust, and revenge. It sort of mixes up all of the senses in your body the way a good body horror movie ought to. Pleasure and pain, baby! —Kady Ruth Ashcraft

Activist Mohammed El-Kurd was 24 years old when, in 2021, he published Rifqa, a poetry collection named after his grandmother who he describes as older than the state of Israel. El-Kurd’s simultaneously crushing and beautiful prose portrays the harshness of life in occupied Jerusalem, as he tells the gutting story of his family’s displacement by Israeli settlers decades ago, the ongoing brutality of Israeli occupation to this day, and its impact on the soul. In the poem “Wednesday,” he transports us to a hospital where he glimpses “death in the eyes of this newborn.” A nurse pronounces, “If I were a stupid flower, I’d wither under the rain.” When she’s asked “What’s wrong with the flower?” El-Kurd wonders why the question isn’t, “What’s wrong with the rain?” —Kylie Cheung

I’ve written a lot about A24’s foray into the Hollywood musical, adapted from Josh Sharp and Aaron Jackson’s UCB show Fucking Identical Twins. And yet, I still can’t quite wrap my head around how ingenious Megan Mullally’s lisping turn as the batty Evelyn, who has sex with tchotchkes, dresses like Miss Gulch on a Brontë sisters kick, and carries her vulva around in her purse. It’s an absolutely feral turn for Mullally, who’s similarly brilliant (and very very different) in Chelsea Peretti’s First Time Female Director (which premiered earlier this year at the Tribeca Film Festival and will stream next year on Roku). I know that Sharp and Jackson had full faith that Mullally could deliver something so unhinged (they said as much when I talked to them), but I had no idea that she had it in her. I think many will be surprised, as well at this potential dawn of a Mullallaissance. —Rich Juzwiack

This eerie, slow-burn thriller is the type of movie where the main character’s anxiety and hopelessness feel so palpable, you forget you’re not actually the woman being stalked by a serial killer in a foreign country.

Julia and her boyfriend have just moved to Romania—where he’s fluent in the language and Julia is not—after he gets promoted to his company’s Bucharest office. The city is in the midst of trying to capture a serial killer, dubbed by the media as “the Spider,” who’s been brutally decapitating his victims. One day, Julia starts to notice a male figure in the apartment across the road seemingly staring at her. She then catches a man following her in the supermarket. Soon enough, she’s seeing him everywhere. Her paranoia slowly grows while her boyfriend’s patience quickly wanes, as he dismisses her concerns as a product of sitting in an apartment by herself all day with nothing else to do. His conversations with cops, neighbors, and coworkers are all in Romanian, sans subtitles, so, along with Julia, we also have no idea what’s being said, just that it’s being said about us…I mean, her.

Multiple reviews mention how well the movie is made even if it doesn’t have any surprises—but who needs jump scares when the feeling of being stalked by a man, and the desperation that comes from no one believing you, is terrifying enough? —LT

If you like either soccer or the Spice Girls, you will love this four-part series about David Beckham becoming a superstar and courting and falling in love with Posh Spice, aka Victoria Beckham. The series has thrilling game footage and fascinating old interviews, plus Victoria is an absolute riot, as you may have seen from clips of her calling her family “working class.” (And the director and interviewer is Hugo from Succession if his voice sounds familiar.) The press was unbelievably cruel to David but he responded by being excellent. I didn’t know half of this stuff as a school-aged Spice Girls fan but it makes the couple’s story even more incredible. —Susan Rinkunas