Dear Yuletide Writer 2025

[skazka]

God, it’s that time of year again, isn’t it! This letter is extremely under construction; more TBA.



General Likes:

Some general things I dig:

- historical details, material culture, pop culture
- in-universe documents (letters, manuscripts, academic journals, social media, etc.)
- allegiances and loyalty (especially loyalty kink!)
- dreams and nightmares, feverish visions, neurasthenia, the intersection of psychological phenomena and physical ones
- psychological horror
- captivity, whether literal or metaphorical (house arrest, claustrophobia, bonding with one's captors/captives, bogus politeness from host to 'guest', being technically free to physically leave but psychologically restricted)
- ghosts (poltergeists, spirit visitations, seances, 19th century Spiritualism, vengeful spirits, protective spirits)
- body horror (surprise new orifices, involuntarily changing bodies, parasites, viral transformations, losing control over your own body and mind, etc.)
- gothic horror tropes (mystery, wonder, and the macabre, decaying old houses, ancestral curses, family secrets, etc.)
- noir tropes (doubles! identity trouble! perversity, pessimism, fatalism, and menace!)
- politics, treachery, backstabbing, institutional drama, farce
- alternate history and historical canon divergence
- claustrophobia, doubt, guilt, decay
- conversely, characters with unusual or offbeat viewpoints being businesslike, confident, and competent
- trauma and PTSD, memory and personal baggage
- disability and the body
- road trips and travel
- character death
- angst — tormented ladies! tormented dudes! stoic suffering!
- sturdy muscular women with tender hearts
- spooky atmosphere -- decaying hotel rooms, sinister places, oppressive atmospheres
- cozy atmosphere -- small-scale domesticity, hospitality, characters looking after each other, running a household, making a home
- goofy or dark humor, humor in general
- religious themes and elements
- family relationships and parental baggage
- unusual formats — interactive fiction, illustrated fic, etc.

Ship-wise, I dig intimacy between friends and allies, and screwed-up bleak bad-guy hatesex, and just about anything between those poles, really. I especially enjoy:

- loyalty kink
- emotional repression
- friends-to-lovers, enemies-to-friends-to-lovers, enemies-to-lovers-while-remaining-enemies
- agonized pining both reciprocated and unreciprocated
- one-night stands with complicated emotions attached, or purely sexual relationships leading to unexpected feelings
- hurt/comfort -- one or more parties getting tragically roughed up or whumped to hell and back and needing stoic ministrations; h/c where a rough or unpleasant person is the recipient of the comfort whether they like it or not; h/c where a villainous character is doing the comforting; cautious or grudging h/c
- quarrelsome but ride-or-die friendships and family relationships
- sex making everything awkward afterward
- characters who just can't stay away from each other
- domesticity and tenderness coming before characters become lovers

If you're interested in writing smut, I love:

- size differences
- age differences
- body worship
- oral sex (cunnilingus, fellatio, rimming)
- handjobs, fingering
- too-big dicks and hole stretching
- attention lavished on breasts — fondling, sucking, biting, tit torture, tit worship
- object insertion
- frottage and non-penetrative sex
- clothed/semi-clothed sex
- fancy clothes, uniforms, layers, dressing and undressing
- hatesex and fighting-turned-fucking
- breathplay
- inhibitions and interpersonal baggage in the bedroom
- anonymous or pseudo-anonymous hookups (especially in semi-public places -- public parks, train compartments, dormitories and barracks)
- noncon and dubcon
- painful/clumsy but fun and tender sex, OR, tragically clumsy fail sex
- wound fingering
- characters seeking sex for comfort
- characters having sad sex while thinking of other people (especially if it's two people thinking about the same person!)
- sadomasochism
- rough body play and manhandling
- kink with and without conventional sex acts involved
- smoking/sharing cigarettes/cigarette burns
- time-period-specific sexual practices and meeting places.

I love reading about all kinds of consent issues, especially mutually antagonistic or psychologically muddy angles, trauma bonding between perpetrator and victim, connections between victims of the same perpetrator, and characters making difficult bargains using sex. I appreciate a focus on difficult/complicated emotions and internal conflict -- a character having sex they don't straightforwardly desire but that they believe will help them achieve some goal, for instance, or sex under conditions of mutual desire but where some level of coercion is baked in. I don't care as much for ravishment tropes where the victim secretly wanted it all along despite token protests, scenarios where afterward the rape is a non-issue for everyone involved, or where rape results in unambiguous true love and a happily ever after. (Fucked-up trauma bonding between perpetrator and victim, however, is another story.)

I'm fine with all different formats and structures for fic, from casefic to character study to domestic fluff to plotless porn. Ensemble pieces are very welcome, as are stories exploring my requested characters from the perspective of others. Pairing-wise, I've tried to make mention of specific ships I'm especially fond of, including those that extend beyond requested characters, but I'm not monoshippy in any fandom and I'm pretty open to whatever pairings you want to bring to the table. I dig slash, femslash, het, gen, and anything else; feel free to write any kind of pairing you like or none at all, as well as multiple pairings, OT3s and poly relationships, infidelity, past relationships, etc.

Any level of intensity or non-intensity with regard to sex, violence, character death and other dark stuff is fine by me, including major character death and downer endings on a character-specific scale. A lot of my canons deal on some level with real-life social issues (homophobia, sexual violence, domestic abuse, etc.) and I often appreciate that as an element of these canons' texture; you're welcome to incorporate those social factors in fic or pass by them as you're comfortable.

I'm totally on board with alternate universes of all kinds. Canon-divergent and for-want-of-a-nail AUs are very welcome, as well as alternate settings, alternate time periods and genre/pastiche AUs. Let the world be your oyster there. I especially enjoy AUs that racebend characters, always-a-girl genderswaps, and fic where characters are written as trans, with all the ways that might impact a character's lived experience.

I'm happy to receive crossovers and fusions that center on my requested characters -- if you're not sure if I'm familiar with a fandom judging from my AO3 fandom list or past request letters, feel free to ask via a mod. I'd also be happy to receive poetry, but would rather not receive free verse -- other metrical forms are fair game.

I usually do the fun mini-challenges that accompany Yuletide; once they’re up, I’ll link them here. If you want to check out my past exchange letters, you can find them here. EDIT: Here we go! Crueltide, Yuleporn.

I would prefer not to receive:

- Free-verse poetry
- High school or high school teacher/student AUs
- Harry Potter AUs/fusions
- Focus on pregnancy/childbirth or OC offspring
- Unrequested incest or child sexual abuse
- Depictions of self-harm via cutting or of disordered eating
- PIV sex with transmasculine characters being penetrated vaginally
- explicit sex involving characters under 16.

This year I would also prefer no focus on contemporary 21st century tragedies (ex. real life school shootings or transphobic legislation); noncanonical police violence, or real-life modern-day hate groups/far-right political movements.




Cuckoo (2024)
(Cuckoo is a standalone feature film — if you’re in the US, it’s currently on Hulu as of 10/19/25.)

- Gretchen Vanderkurt
Signup Prompts: Explore the film’s offbeat atmosphere even before sinister SF stuff starts happening and the ways Gretchen occupies herself at her unwanted European summer vacation job. Writing song lyrics, smoking in the woods, spying on the guests, getting laid! I loved her hooking up with Ed and her pursuit of this sexy smoky mystery woman in ways that have pretty massive consequences for the film’s plot but not <em>because</em> they’re both women — if you want to write fic for this film that’s just f/f teen sex comedy/romance/romantic sex comedy against the oddball backdrop of a really weird sci fi conspiracy I would be all about it. Gretchen and Alma bonding as siblings after the events of the film, or missing scenes from their time together at the resort where things aren’t so grim. I get the impression Alma’s parents think they’re doing her a favor by isolating her from the truth of Gretchen’s mom being dead — when she’s older, can the two of them connect about that, along with the whole summer-we-escaped-from-a-bird-cult thing? Are there other ways Gretchen could get in contact with her late mother? Both in a supernatural/SF sense and a more general sense of the ways people get a handle on grief. I’d really be interested in a canon divergence where Gretchen successfully brings Beth into the loop or Beth otherwise is following the same clues to what’s really happening around the resort. Or, hell, where Beth is aware of the whole cuckoo plot and her own eerie violation (or where she got knocked up with bird goo voluntarily) but she’s still pitted against her stepdaughter as the conspiracy members try to keep a lid on what’s really going on. The film’s sci fi elements are odd enough that I would really love fic with Gretchen navigating another spin on them, aliens or sirens or some other kind of being. (Or werewolves. Not on-brand with the whole “cuckoo” thing but I do think Gretchen would make a great dirtbag teen werewolf.) Or, of course, horror — psychological horror, body horror, erotic horror! — stemming from the way Gretchen finds herself landing in the lap of some kind of conspiracy or the way the bird-people both resemble and depart from boring baseline human physiology. Despite the gnarliness of their method of reproduction I admit I get a little sad when the bird-women die — could they and Gretchen ever have made allies with one another or found another way of sharing the planet that isn’t König’s whole approach? How do her sympathies pan out with these lonely specimens of a misunderstood species, or how would things go if she weren’t having to fight to protect Alma? Could the bird conspiracy/cult have brought her in on the whole thing from the jump? What if Gretchen’s parents were knowingly on board with the whole thing and want her to get in on the family business? This one’s unexplainable but I would love to see this canon refracted through the prism of different historical AUs — Renaissance aristocrats hiding out from the plague in an isolated hunting lodge, 1830s bourgeoisie on vacation, sanitariums and spas throughout the ages.

This film’s ambience is so up my alley — I love the retro flavor and off-kilter atmosphere from the jump, I love love love Gretchen as a female surly dirtbag protagonist of the kind there are way too few of in cinema — riding her bike, playing the bass, playing with her cool butterfly knife, bagging really hot babes and uncovering a mystery that’s like a classic X-Files episode, Euro edition. Accordingly I would be totally happy to read fic that’s just Gretchen exploring the resort and its surroundings. There’s such a pull to the idea of getting lost in the surrounding nature — I enjoy the film’s tension between the manicured, sometimes kitschy spaces of the resort (its honeymoon suites!) and the encroaching wildness of its surroundings, and I really want more of that, especially with König as a sort of mad naturalist or conservationist.

I’d also love to see Gretchen getting up to some Gothic heroine shenanigans — getting menaced by Herr König, getting caught up in peril in a different way than she already does in the film, running (or biking) away from spooky buildings, etc. The isolated resort milieu in such gorgeous surroundings gets me hankering for some kind of historical AU where the big-r Romantic elements can take the wheel, so maybe a 18th/19th century thing, or a medieval pilgrimage?

I’d love to see more of Gretchen interacting with her stepmom— I get why for narrative reasons Beth isn’t in the loop on the whole birdperson conspiracy plot, but I’d be really interested in all the ways things could go off the rails (or go better, fix-it style) if Gretchen was able to get her onboard as an ally. Also, Trixie! Trixie gives me such Twin Peaks vibes and I’d love to see more coworker bonding between the two of them/missing scenes/alternate outcomes.

I love Gretchen’s slowly building connection with Alma — feel free to continue that post-canon and explore Alma growing up and navigating her differences (I loved that she got to have assistive tech and it seems like her parents are doing a pretty good job supporting her) or give Alma’s POV on her reluctant big sister. I do really enjoy Gretchen being understandably sulky and disgruntled feeling like her mom’s been replaced by her stepmom/her grief and her needs are getting pushed out of the way (pushed out of the nest, as it were) to make room for what Alma needs — ultimately she’s able to break out of that shell of grief and take action to keep Alma safe, and it seems like fertile ground for the two of them as secret-keepers for one another or on the run together. Or go fully slice of life with it and explore any of the normal stuff that can happen later down the line when you have a much younger sibling entering their messy teen years right when you’re leaving your own. (Even when that younger sibling isn’t an ethereal birdperson, that can be messy.) I’d love to see the two of them making music together, exploring art, or finding ways to talk about their weird summer experiences even if they can’t necessarily blow the whistle on a whole shadowy bird cult with a body count. When I watch this film I interpret Gretchen as a trans girl like her actress (though that doesn’t need to be central to your story or narratively relevant in any way) and I feel like the two of them could connect over the shared terrain there — having your differences probed and medicalized even as you’re still trying to explore them yourself, figuring out who and what you are and how you want to move through a world that wasn’t necessarily made for your kind of person.

On a very different note: whump! I have a secret love of heroines going through some grueling shit and this film delivers in a big way. Gretchen really gets put through the wringer physically in this film and I’d love to read something where she gets to catalogue her wounds or to keep fighting through injuries and heroically collapse. (With or without getting hurt/comfort action from the characters of your choice.) Or in the aftermath of the film’s events, recovering on her own time and living with any kind of chronic/ongoing aspects of those injuries.

The moment of connection Gretchen has with the teenage bird-girl is so fascinating to me — just that moment has crazy chemistry and while I get why the movie’s internal monster logic makes it not a possibility really I would love an AU where that bird-girl survives and Gretchen busts her out to introduce her to the outside world, or where the two of them have to work together. The bird-women are so lonesome in their way, and while I can fully buy that König thinks his custodial/paternalistic approach is necessary I find them too compelling as tragic features in their own right to be happy when they get bumped off. Gretchen doesn’t need to be motivated by selfless impulses (she has no idea what’s up through like 75% of this film, she just knows something seriously fucked up is going on) but I would be really interested in anything where she uncovers more about the bird-people phenomenon and their history. How far back does the conspiracy around their “conservation” go? Could Gretchen get roped in as a custodian of this alpine bird-fuck cult? Goddess figurehead worshipped by a cadre of freaky bird-women, vengeful liberator burning it all down, trying to figure out wtf all this means for Alma and her future?

…and on the flipside, this fandom would be great for some spooky xeno fingerbanging or general sexual exploration with the interspecies factor in play. I’m not overly concerned with the nuts and bolts of three-way bird person reproduction since the film gives it a very surreal atmosphere; while I’m not interested in fic that focuses on actual childbearing I am totally fine with slippery ooey-gooey attempted birdperson fpreg.

Ship-wise, I would love to see more of her relationship with Ed (post-canon running away together?) or shipping her with either (or both!) of the bird women, original characters, and/or König... maybe in in a dirtybadwrong birdperson-fpreg-for-science threesome kind of way.

Fandom-specific DNW: I’d be happy to receive fic where Gretchen is explicitly transfeminine but I don’t want to read fic featuring misgendering by other characters/sexual partners being shocked or surprised by her transness. Please don’t kill off Alma. (While she’s still a kid, anyway.)

*

FX's Legion (2017-2019)

(Legion is a closed canon TV show — three seasons, twenty-seven episodes. As of this letter’s writing, if you’re in the US it’s available streaming on Hulu; knowledge of the X-Men comics is a fun bonus but not required.)

- Amahl Farouk
Signup Prompts: Parasite, deity, man about town! I’m interested in anything about this character, his wicked sense of joie de vivre, and his relationship to identity and embodiment given the nature of his powers and the predicament in which he initially finds himself. (Absolutely through the consequences of his own actions, of course.) I got the sense from the way he and Charles discuss their shared power set that mutants as a category aren’t really a thing yet when the two men meet in the 1950s — hell, based on the grim status quo and the absence of any X-Men as such by the time of s1, they might not be a thing then either — so what has Farouk been doing for his solitary existence up until that point? How has he understood his own nature? The kingdom he claims is so freshly and so ruthlessly usurped that he may not have been in Morocco long at all. How has he balanced his own nearly-peerless power as a telepath against the kind of malaise, loneliness, or sheer boredom that makes you start holding amateur theatrical performances for your army of child prisoners? I’d love to see more of his relationship to travel, language, imperialism, and politicking — his different self-presentations to different audiences, his weird sense of whimsy, the pleasure he takes in music and language and intricate psychological cruelty. What was his actual idea of a good time like before losing his body? He claims to David that if restored to that physical form he’ll live pretty modestly as far as self appointed gods go — <em>”When I find [the monk] and he tells you where your body is, what are you gonna do with it?” / “Live in it, my dear. South of France. Women. Money. Power.”</em> — does that vision look anything like the palatial sunny prison he keeps Lenny and Oliver in? Or explore his other mental landscapes (the Eiffel Tower penthouse, the nightclub full of languid babes) and how they relate to his desires, his vices, and his own self-inflicted imprisonment inside David’s mind. How did he experience being David’s parasite, anyway? He at least implies he was aware of his (apparently) lifeless body being buried even as his consciousness was having to pal around with an elementary schooler to leech enough power to rebuild itself — what the hell was that like? What was really going on behind the scenes of David’s scrambled childhood memories? His relationship to David (psychic torments, gaslighting, manipulation, pet names, kinky psychic battling, hard truths, eventual self-sacrifice) is really interesting to me in all its messy glory. I ship them, but any treatment of their relationship would be up my alley, all the twisted closeness and passionate anger. How has David changed him and vice-versa? What does he see in David when he’s finally engaging with him face to face? What does he think they can be to one another? What about the post-s3-finale version of Farouk who has his other self’s memories and whose newfound swelling emotions (grief, regret, affection, something else, all of the above...) are still tempered by wanting to shoot his shot vis-a-vis David growing up to join him and rule the universe together? More about his relationships to his chosen pawns and the people he possesses or manipulates — whatever seriously dark stuff played out with him and Lenny, his overtures toward Syd (both her present-day self still reeling from being violated and her future self with even more horrible stuff on her plate); the insidious way he digs into Oliver’s psyche while using him as a host, what he calls up and manipulates with Melanie in the post-s2 interim. (He doesn't get to interact with Ptonomy or Cary & Kerry much here in canon, or Clark & co. but I would love that too.) How does he navigate his supposed subordinate role within Division 3? How do they treat him as an existential threat turned temporary ally? How is he adjusting to being back in his own body? What was his villainous endgame supposed to look like? What kind of queasy alliances has he built with Melanie and Syd to achieve it? Is it lonely there at the end of the world?

Excerpts from Division 3’s dossier on Farouk, or vignettes/historical materials referring to his past before Charles Xavier shows up. Canon seems agnostic on whether Farouk’s claims of being 2000+ years old are bluster or the real deal; I personally lean toward reading him as being a fair bit younger than that (coming of age and discovering his own powers in the 18th century) but regardless this puts him in a really interesting gray area for mutants before the modern era. When did Farouk find out his body is invulnerable to destruction attempts, or did he know at all before? How did other people like the Mi-Go Order find out he can’t just be chopped up or burned?

Or scenes of Farouk as a world traveler, past and present — his elegantly nasty dandy thing and his love of language suggest really interesting things about his past and I’m interested in his complicated relationship to language, culture, and imperialism. (With a further wrinkle in it caused by the fact that he himself is a major-league bastard totally comfortable with tyranny as long as he’s the tyrant — both things can be true!) I’m also curious about what exactly he’s doing post-s1-finale that takes him to… nightclubs? Real and/or fake astral nightclubs? Dance battles optional. What’s he up to while trying to track down the location of his own corpse?

I find the way Farouk’s modus operandi — as a parasite, as a manipulator — incorporates a sort of telepathic identity theft to be fascinating, and I would be really interested in fic that explores that, especially the moments where his victim’s personality and knowledge seems to be spilling over. How much of s1’s fake!Lenny is anything like Lenny Busker at all? How much is even like Farouk? How much of it resembles Benny the always-smiling pusher at all? How much of Farouk is left in Lenny even once she’s broken free or been cast out? I find this totally creepy from a psychological horror POV but I’m also curious how everyone involved experiences it. Farouk’s possession or influence seems to meld his victims’ frame of references with his own — he’s like a magpie collecting shiny stuff however incongruous (Frankie Goes To Hollywood!) or inappropriate. I’m interested in the intersection between the mundane real-life phenomena his influence can be read as a metaphor for (mental illness itself, cognitive distortions and toxic habits, poisonous parents, all kinds of abuse dynamics) and the emphatically fantastical, supernatural reality of being a mutant who really can do these things, no metaphor necessary.

Farouk wins, gets his body back, rules the word… now what? What does he expect or want for his endgame there and does he enjoy it as much as he thinks he will? I’d love to see some bad-guy-wins AU stuff where one of Farouk’s several gambits in canon works out to his satisfaction — or at least in a way he thinks will satisfy him.

Scenes from pocket universes, fantasies, dreams, illusions, all the kinds of not-quite-real reality that comic books do so well — I am a huge sucker for how the show plays around with symbolism and heightened realities

The dynamic between David and Farouk is so up my alley and I’m interested in any explorations of the dynamic between them. These two lend themselves to really mindfucky noncon/dubcon — I love that it’s impossible to tell how sincere Farouk ever is about anything until the very end, and even if he’s grown attached to David that hasn’t stopped him from putting him through hell, so either and/or both of these guys doing monstrous things for love (or at least desire) is my favorite thing. I’d also be interested in seeing what kind of preamble would be necessary for David to reciprocate or at least tolerate Farouk’s attraction — what would need to change, or what kind of deception would need to take place?

Similarly I love the horror/intimacy/horrifying intimacy/intimate horror of engaging with someone who’s known you while you haven’t had the same privilege — or conversely, Farouk catching actual feelings for someone (even nonsexual feelings for the guy he’s seen as a clueless pawn at best and a human prison the rest of the time!) and freaking the fuck out about it. Do with that what you will. Or dirtybadwrong and/or emotionally confusing (on both sides) business with David — I’m kind of fascinated by how readily Farouk will flip from acting like the archest of arch-enemies toward David to an indulgent father to a long-suffering wronged lover, and it seems like really ripe territory. I’m not so much interested in fic where Farouk really did literally raise David in the conventional sense or where any sexual interest in David comes before David’s ~16 or so but that messy, dirtybadwrong gray area (Farouk saying he’s tried to force David to love him ”for 30 years, since you were a baby… my baby” in s02e11, my god!) is right up my alley.

Post-s3-finale fic set in the timeline version where David’s raised by Charles Xavier — how does Farouk metabolize all that information and memory his future!self imparts to him? How does he feel about David (either timeline’s David) with what he’s seen and what he’s experienced?

Farouk getting to know Syd face to (real) face in between seasons 2 and 3 — super emotionally and psychosexually fucked on a lot of layers! She’s met the fake Lenny in s1 and she’s seen Farouk’s impact on David’s life, what does she make of the actual guy? What does he make of her? Or with the postapocalyptic sadder-but-wiser future version of Syd — does Farouk think he can seduce her to his way of doing things, or mindfuck her?

Farouk’s dynamic with Lenny is also amazing and totally creepy — I’d love to see more from that sunny, picturesque gilded cage and his unsettling dynamic with both Lenny and Oliver. I’m especially interested in exploring the pretty tough implications of how Lenny narrates her experiences both as they happen and when she’s in Division 3 custody — rape doesn’t sound out of line with the kind of nastiness the Shadow King enjoys perpetuating, but none of the characters ever mention it again (even Lenny) and there’s a lot of space for character studies, psychological horror, and/or weird depressing porn there.

Farouk relating to Oliver as a fellow telepath with an entirely different philosophy and approach to their conflict, Oliver clearly fearing and hating him even through the haze of faux affability… Or his encounters with Melanie, who crucially isn’t a mutant at all, where he plays on her resentments and griefs totally mercilessly — is he acting on her, through her, or something in between? I’m also intrigued by the way he acts toward Switch, and I’d love more of Farouk getting his hooks into Melanie or exploiting her vulnerabilities

I’d love to see Farouk in one of the timelines of the various alternate Davids — what’s his relationship to his host like when David’s a cozy idyllic suburban dad, or a ruthless corporate overlord, or a drifter with a meth problem? The easiest explanation for the happily partnered dad timeline would be no Farouk at all, but what fun is that, I ask you… what kind of bargains have the two of them made?

Ship-wise, I especially enjoy shipping this guy with David, Syd, and Oliver, as well as anybody and everybody else. (Including OCs/fleshing out his astral hotties as actual people or whatever he had with Geraldine. Well, “relations” is what he claims to have had with Geraldine, but whether that was more of a romance or… something else.)

Fandom-specific DNWs: I’m interested in fic that weaves in X-Men comics canon in all its many facets, including comics characters who don’t appear in the show proper — what the fuck is Magneto doing during all this? -- but I’m not interested in fic that incorporates the regular MCU or for the Fox/Disney X-Men films.

*

Peeping Tom (1960)

(Peeping Tom is a standalone feature film available wherever films of its era generally are, but as of this letter’s posting, if you’re in the US and have a library card you may be able to watch it free on Kanopy.)

- Mark Lewis
Signup Prompts: Mark is both so seethingly horny and so wretched that he makes Norman Bates look positively happy-go-lucky in comparison — I love that combination and the way the film crystallizes both his lust and his damaged psyche around the medium of photography/the fetish object of the camera. (With the ultra phallic murder tripod, naturally.) More scenes from Mark’s darkroom/editing bay/scrupulously orderly house of photographic horrors, communications with other hobbyists, sourcing materials, experimentation in Mark's grim and solitary pursuit, the rituals of developing and cutting and splicing. Supposing he keeps a lid on his murderous impulses long enough to become a director -- what the hell is this guy's filmography like if he goes legit? Or explore Mark’s whole deal against the backdrop of different eras of photography and filmmaking — cased daguerreotypes, indie student pictures shot on video, the silent film era. I’m really interested in Mark’s relationship to the women in this film — there’s a lot of menace baked in there from the film‘s first shots, watching Mark stalk a victim even as she understands him to be just another man on the street trying to pick her up for sex, and the movie is a snapshot of a really specific moment in cultural attitudes about sexuality and gender (magazines with girls on the front covers and no front covers on the girls) that feels so tightly wound and claustrophobic. At the same time, the way fear and sex are intertwined for Mark goes back to earliest childhood, and I'm really interested in the internal dynamics of that shift from victim to perpetrator, from being the subject to being the one behind the camera, doing the gazing. The models Mark photographs are framed in a very circa-1960 way, brassy and wounded, but they have a bitterly funny fierceness that I love -- who is Mark to them when he's not on the other side of a camera? How do they understand his oddness and the threats he poses? How did Vivian come to trust him enough to film her screen test, even if her trust is ultimately betrayed? Which brings me to Helen -- I can't tell where his attempts to connect with her end and his attempts to terrify her begin. Is there a way things could have gone differently with Helen? Or at least have gone equally badly but in a different direction? It's heartbreaking that she asks <em>"please help me to understand this thing"</em> when Mark shows her his record of his profoundly bizarre childhood -- what's it like to have a witness? Even if he were able to keep from harming Helen herself, I don’t think Helen (or her mother) would ever be able to overlook his shocking crimes, so I’d be interested in really messy emotional outcomes as well as fix-its where no one gets killed in the first place. (This would be a great fandom for a really downbeat time loop fic, it occurs to me…) What does Mrs. Stephens know or suspect about Mark? I find the surveillance setup of the whole house deeply creepy (as well as a bit silly if I stop to think about the practical logistics side of it) but its tie to Mark’s father as the original owner of the house makes me wonder about the timeline there. I’d love to see more scenes of interaction between the two of them, or her awareness of the way he’s beginning to hover around her daughter. Hauntings, specters, unexplainable phenomena — photography as a medium has been identified with ghosts for a long time (even without the snuff film element of Mark’s oeuvre, doubling sex and death) and it seems like a great fit for the feverish mood of this film. Mark haunting Helen (sadistically? out of loneliness?) or Mark’s victims haunting the film stock that their final moments are preserved on, Mark's father continuing to exert his cruel influence from beyond the grave. Treats are welcome! <em>Fandom-specific DNW note:</em> Readings of the Lewis family milieu as incestuous/sexually abusive are welcome here. I'd prefer not to read explicit on-the-page depictions or flashbacks.

This film frames Mark’s intense fetishistic focus on film and the camera as painful as well as pleasurable — the sheer force of his desires seems to overwhelm him but whether that lands as more pitiful or more monstrous probably depends on the viewer. Mark has this disarming mix of earnestness and overwhelming compulsions to violence, and I’m really interested in how those go together. What’s the Watsonian explanation for Mark’s accent? Did he ever spend time outside the house where much of the film’s action take place? His father seems to have treated their home as a controlled laboratory space for his wildly unethical experiments; how did the world outside it enter in to Mark’s childhood, if at all? What’s the deal with his stepmother? Did she know about the extent of the experiments? She could be enthusiastically complicit (like many seem to have been — the scene where Mark seeks out the psychoanalyst only to hear him praise his father’s research, my god!) or a horrified opponent or somewhere (anywhere) in between those two poles — there’s something unsavory there that’s ready to be picked apart.

One thing I find interesting about this film is how oddly removed and distant Mark is with the women he both photographs and kills -- it's like he can only engage with women comfortably through the tidily negotiated relationship of photographer and subject, which... yikes! There’s a real atmosphere of weird sex in this film that surprised me even coming to the film through its influence on later, much raunchier pictures — the juxtaposition of tightly buttoned-up discomfort and repression with overt, sometimes garish come-ons is certainly a big element of the film’s social commentary. How might this manifest in Mark’s relationship to Helen or her expectations (maybe fears) as they become closer? What’s Mark’s relationship to the prospect of actual partnered sex with another person like? You can read his murders as oblique depictions of sexual encounters (or sexual assaults) through the symbolic language of film or as a total substitution for the act itself — his relationship to physical intimacy is deeply awkward and I could be persuaded of just about any conclusion here. Similarly, I feel like the film is pretty bold for its era in conveying how the traumas of Mark’s childhood have shaped his relationship to sexuality and intimacy, in a range of ways — I’d be interested in a reading of his relationship to his father as one of incestuous abuse or something uncannily close to it, a kind of unnameable horror that’s hardly any easier to convey or to process in this lonely and repressive milieu. How might that surface as he goes about his unhappy, obsessive work?

I’m really interested in the history of photography and its societal impact, and that’s a playground this film is clearly having so much fun with, from the newsagent’s shop full of cheesecake photos to the film studios where poor Vivian just wants a damn screen test. (In the screenplay I got the implication from Vivian’s guarded comments that other photographers have expected her to trade sex for their services and that she’s glad Mark hasn’t even as their relationship has a pretty intimate, borderline flirty edge. God, that’s sad!) Compulsive re-takes and replays, framing and editing, imposing narrative upon events by the act of viewing them and following them… all the good stuff if you like films about filmmaking that are also films about trauma and fetishism and haunting! I would be interested in Mark’s intense fetishism translated to an earlier era of photography or a somewhat later one — I don’t know that the brutal entwining of sex and death in this film would be nearly as shocking to audiences if the film came out just ten years later but that in itself says something fascinating about uniquely British attitudes toward sex, violence, and the photographic image. I adore the thought of this film’s plot and themes playing out against the backdrop of other eras and their relationships to media, pornography, gender, sexuality, depictions of violence. For one option, Böhm’s performance in this film — haunted, urgent, frightening yet pitiful — reminds me so much of Peter Lorre in M, and I could see him in the context of 1930s Weimar Germany and its complicated relationships to true crime, Lustmord, the photographic image, violence, women, and of course human cruelty. Or the second half of the 19th century, where the meaning of the still image (including the images of the beloved dead, like the clips of young Mark viewing his mother’s body, and the images of victims of violence and war) is getting negotiated even as the mechanics of the art form and its techniques are blossoming

Anything involving Mark’s fetishistic relationship to camera equipment — as a phallus, a weapon, a scrutinizing eye, a thing to spend all his wages on! I would love to see this interwoven with the camera/filmmaking enthusiasts of the era, hobbyism, correspondence and shopping and working over the mechanics of film photography. This description of Mark’s workroom in the screenplay — Some of the equipment is ancient - but none of it is old. All of it glistens with the affection of its owner. — is so interesting to me, but all this has a sting in its tail where the original photography enthusiast in the house was Mark’s monstrous father.

All this makes fertile ground for supernatural stuff exploring the intersection of haunting and the recorded image… I’m always down for ghosts, metaphorical and literal, and they’re a natural fit for the film’s themes around obsessive repetition and the past enduring into the present.

Mark’s relationship with Helen is so up my alley — if you want to explore alternate ways this story could go, please be my guest, I find her earnest good-hearted attempts to reach out to this oddball neighbor of hers to be really moving even as the film wastes zero time in showing how they go badly awry. What does Mark see in her and the world she represents? How could things have gone differently between them, and how is Helen different for what she’s experienced at the end of the film? Similarly, his interactions with Mrs. Stephens, who experiences Mark’s disturbed interior life in such a hands-on way — she’s the first one to clock something’s up, and I’m really interested in the way that awareness for her seems to involve both her parental/social instincts and her experience of navigating the world while blind. I’d be very interested in anything exploring her outside POV on Mark, the things she may know about the history of the building in which she and her daughter live that poor Helen doesn’t, or different scenes from their acquaintance. I love how salty, wounded, and yet clearly affectionate Mrs. Stephens is, and can’t help wondering what kind of chord she strikes with Mark’s rampant mother(/stepmother) issues. Their climactic scene together is so nightmarish on so many levels and a big part of that is the viewer’s awareness of all the ways this situation could go fatally wrong for both of them; how could that have gone differently?

Something to do with the strange working relationship between Mark and the models he photographs — many of which he ends up murdering. I would be really interested in an account of Mark’s crimes or even just his odd comings and goings from one of their POVs. One of them being interviewed (by the press? By the cops?) after his gruesome end, a memoir after they get famous, a letter to a friend — I really want to know how he’s perceived and how his deeply weird presence and his crimes have impacted how these women — and many others — must experience the world after all this. I’m also really interested in Mark’s response to Lorraine — shock, fascination, instantaneous repulsion-obsession-desire, spurred not so much by Lorraine’s disfigurement as by her anger and fierceness in the face of unwanted intrusive gazing. How does she perceive him and his immediately, deeply weird reaction to her?

For in universe fic of a different kind, I need to know what an absolute nightmare story the events of Mark’s childhood as an experimental subject and the existence of a photographic record of its cruelties must be in the whole medical-academic sphere his father was once esteemed in. Even if Mark didn’t grow up to be a serial killer, those facts would be pretty appalling! I’d be interested in reading about the film’s events through their impact on different disciplines/professions or how the in-universe public reacted to the whole “unwittingly renting a house secretly wired for video and sound by a murderous perv” thing.

Ship-wise, I’m open to anything or nothing, including relationships with OCs, but I’m especially interested in his relationships with Helen, Vivian, Lorraine, Milly, and Mrs. Stephens.

Fandom-specific DNW note: Readings of the Lewis family milieu as incestuous/sexually abusive are welcome here. I'd prefer not to read explicit on-the-page depictions or flashbacks.