Comfort Viewings #1: House of 1,000 Rewatches

This piece is part of our series Comfort Viewings, where we ask filmmakers, fans, and writers to talk about what they're finding comfort in right now, while we live through a real-life horror film. The first one comes from one of The Final Girls and self-isolating cat lady, Anna Bogutskaya. 
 

I really thought I’d be hyper productive right now. 

The first week: I painted two rooms in my flat, ordered a kettlebell, signed up to a video skills-learning website, wrote a bunch of pitches, planned the next series of The Final Girls podcast, and completed a bunch of errands that I’d been putting off for weeks. 

And I made a hyper-ambitious viewing list. “I’ll watch all the things,” I thought, “because I finally have time.” 

Making time for things, especially for watching films and series for pleasure and not just work, was always an issue. If there’s no deadline looming, what’s the point? 

I didn’t watch a single film in that first week. 

The second week, I tried to crack my watchlist. I gravitated towards the genre that has often offered me the most comfort: horror. But I couldn’t crack it. I would fall asleep trying to get through Come to Daddy (2019). I had to watch Bliss (2019) in twenty minute chunks. I half-watched some terrible B-movies (do not, I repeat, do not watch The Night of 1,000 Cats, a film about a sleazy playboy who feeds women to his cats) but only because I was texting with someone about how terrible they were, stopping the film every once in a while to take a picture with my phone and send it to them. It’s hardly proper ‘viewing’, barely deserving of logging it onto my Letterboxd (I still did, though). 

There’s nothing wrong with these films - except The Night of 1,000 Cats, there’s a lot of things wrong with that one  - so there must be something wrong with me. Why couldn’t I just find comfort in what I love the most, cinema? I’d often complain about not having time to watch all the films, new and old, that I’d wanted to. And here I am, with buckets of time, piles of DVDs and Blu-rays around me, all the streaming subscriptions my bank account can take, access to preview links… and yet I couldn’t get through even fifteen minutes of a film without fidgeting, losing interest, getting distracted, or just abandoning it. 

This, from someone’s whose idea of a great day was watching seven films back-to-back, and whose job it is to watch films, seemed troublesome. 

But I could watch a whole season of The Twilight Zone (1959-1964), non-stop. I’m rewatching The X-Files (1993-2018), taking in four or five hours at a time. I rewatched The Godfather (1972, Part II, 1974 - not Part III, I’m saving that for a particularly desperate day). I’m rewatching American Horror Story (2011-), from the very beginning, and only one episode at a time, for a new podcast project. I rewatched Under the Shadow (2016) and The Invitation (2015), and took pleasure in this unintentionally perfect isolation double-bill. I’m rewatching witch films, like Black Sunday (1960) and The Witches (1990) and The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016), for our podcast. 

Re-watching seems to be the only thing I can focus on for longer than an hour. For someone who watches films for a living, there is usually a deadline imposed on viewing, and a certain competitiveness that arises within the film community and festival goers, Did you get to the first screening of [insert established auteur]? No, I was busy watching that [insert obscure up-and-coming new talent]. Re-watching something seems like a luxury. It’s watching for pleasure, purely. Okay, well, sometimes for a podcast. But without the pressure of a release, a copy deadline, an event, a Q&A to host, or any other ‘ulterior motive’, re-watching is bringing back the comfort that I originally found in cinema. 

There’s no competition, no deliverables, and no hot takes to disagree with. Rewatching is, to me, at this moment, akin to reconnecting with old friends, or unearthing old photographs. I remember images, particular shots, music cues, or, sometimes, even the way the film originally made me feel when I first saw it, and I think of that time and place. When I re-watch A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), I can vividly picture the tiny VHS TV on which  my older cousin showed it to me, and I recall the bright summer’s day and how I looked to right of the TV when Tina’s body was dragged along an empty high school hallway, as I tried to see where it went. I remember watching The Godfather for the first time in a hotel room in the Dominican Republic; I was on  holiday with my parents and stuck inside because I was sunburnt to the point of looking like a pre-teen lobster. I can’t remember my closest friends’ phone numbers but I do remember these details - go figure. 

Sure, rewatching is a part of any film nerd’s life. We’re a specific breed: aiming to watch as much as possible knowing it’s physically impossible, obsessively cataloguing our viewings and opinions for an audience of no-one, cramming in additional content (Twitter, podcasts, think pieces, listicles, etc.) to extend the viewing experience. Going back to rewatch something you’ve already seen, catalogued, discussed for no particular reason seems self-indulgent - the cinephile’s version of a second helping when you’re already full. 

I don’t need a reason to rewatch all of the original The Twilight Zone, I just want to. And right now, that feels like the greatest comfort I can find. 

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