My earliest memory is of watching a movie. That’s as it should be. For all of my life, movies have been the most important thing to me: movies fill the time, stimulate my thinking, teach me about places I’ve never been and people I’ve never met.

Movies are, in a direct sense, what I do, and the only thing I have ever done: I went to Northwestern University as an undergraduate to learn how to make movies, and when that never panned out, I ended up at University of Wisconsin-Madison to learn how to teach movies and study them. I am, as you might say, a “film scholar”, and damn proud of it.

But don’t worry! I’m not here to impress you with giant words and inscrutable concepts. I’m here to share a deep, abiding love of film as both great entertainment and great art, and to invite you to think about film in a passionate, probing way. The only thing better than watching movies is sharing them, and I can’t wait to share them with all of you. (Twitter) (Letterboxd) (iCheckMovies)

I was raised by movies. That’s not to say my family, friends and others didn’t play a pivotal role in my development, but when I think about aspects of my personality, viewpoints and how I interact with the world, it is all inexplicably rooted in cinema.

This is due in large part to the fact that I spent the first 25 years of my life glued to a television spending every waking moment devoted to watching movies. I loved movies so much that I worked at both Hollywood Video and Blockbuster simultaneously to maximize the amount of free rentals I could take home on a nightly basis.

(Twitter) (Letterboxd)

Like movies? Sure!  I like lots of things.  I did think there was a chance that after seeing 100’s of movies and spending 100’s of hours talking about them that I might somehow morph into a cinephile.  I’m here to report, it’s just never going to happen.

But I’m here for the chat, and what I love most about being a part of AE, are the efforts to open my eyes to films I wouldn’t have otherwise seen, the acceptance of my (many) missteps and my greatest joy is when I say things that make Tim go slack-jawed, without ever really knowing why.

And the wine, I’m still here for the wine.

(Letterboxd)

My love of film blossomed the summer before my senior year of high school, when I saw the trailer for Scream 4 and thought “Hey, that looks neat! What the hell is a Ghostface?” I spent that summer prepping by watching all the Scream movies, and then all the movies that those movies referenced, and I have been devouring slasher and horror films ever since.

I went to film school the next year, which opened my eyes to the fact that there are also good movies where people DON’T get stabbed. Well, some. And here we are!

My tastes are ecstatically random (my ultimate 70’s double feature is The Muppet Movie and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre), somewhere probably halfway between Rob’s populist sensibility and Tim’s esoterica. I love good movies, bad ones, weird ones, and everything in between. I especially love the weird ones, though. My ultimate goal in watching a film is to have no idea what is going to happen to my eyeballs in the next thirty seconds. If that sounds appealing to you, then I think we will get along very well!

You can find me trawling all over Alternate Ending, filling in for reviews of films that Tim wouldn’t touch with a 10-foot pole (ie. Netflix rom-coms), hosting our Bride of AE horror pod and Patreon movie trivia nights!

Gavin McDowell is a Hoosier by birth and French by adoption. While his formal training is in biblical studies rather than film, the School of Life has conferred on him honorary degrees from the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center, the Jerusalem Cinémathèque, MK2 Bibliothèque, and Cinéma Cartier, where he has collectively seen hundreds of movies. He currently works out of Cinéma 7 Batignolles in Paris, France. He has a predilection for films that are animated, about God, and about four hours long. At Alternate Ending, he writes a monthly column on religion and film called Sects, Lies, and Videotape. He also runs a book club out of Alternate Ending’s Discord, where we read novels and short stories that were later adapted to film. For more of his unprovoked movie opinions, see his Letterboxd account.

Mandy teaches high school English and watches movies – mostly bad, occasionally good – in the psychedelic swamplands of South Florida.  She is especially fond of 1970s horror and high-sincerity, low-talent vanity projects.  You can listen to her and her husband talk about Star Trek: Enterprise on their podcast At Least There’s a Dog! 

Parker is a queer filmmaker, with an affinity for horror stories. He’s been making movies since he was 15, and now, he’s writing about them too.

You can find his successful short horror films on YouTube and follow on Twitter.

Rex is a lover of horror, comedy, and being perpetually horny-on-main. He’s not afraid to dive into the nitty-gritty of any film, and perhaps not afraid enough to share his grotesque and carnal joy at watching Willem Dafoe on a leash in The Lighthouse. Follow her on Twitter and Letterboxd for a front row seat at the debauchery.

Rioghnach lives in Chicago, where she spends 70% of her waking hours dissecting the mindsets of fictional characters; the remaining 30% go toward rubbing her palms together in doomed attempts to generate heat. She writes books under the pen name Riley Redgate, most recently Alone Out Here (Disney Hyperion/2022), and she has also written for The Onion, America’s finest news source. You can find her on Instagram, Tumblr, Letterboxd, or her website.