#76: Zohran Mamdani, Survivor fan CONFIRMED
Death By Consumption
10/14/25 - 10/20/25
An evening email, how luxurious! I am sending you this after nightfall, under the cover of darkness, to get you into the Halloween spirit, NOT because I'm a procrastinator who keeps getting buried under a nonstop avalanche of work. As Halloween this year I will be dressing as Cathy, but to do it I won't be getting into a costume, I'll just embody her by being STRESSED. ACK! (To all the glamorous and youthful Gen Z readers who don't get the reference: Cathy was a comic character whose whole thing was always being stressed and having body dysmorphia. If Cathy had had access to TikTok she would have become a suicide bomber.)
This week: I watched 4 semi-scary movies, I was happily manipulated by Zohran's new Survivor ad, and I spitefully got drunk at an annoying restaurant.
The Blair Witch Project (1999) — on Apple
Due to being a scared little baby, I had never actually seen The Blair Witch Project. But now that I'm a brave old man I knew I could handle it. It's one of those movies that's been buried under its own impact, with the knockoffs and parodies almost overshadowing the original at this point. But I'm nothing if not an investigative reporter, so I went straight to the source, and I was pleasantly surprised by how well it held up.
It's a very well-done little movie, and you can see why it had the impact it had. It still feels groundbreaking, in fact! The casting is fantastic, particularly a lot of the weird locals interviewed in the beginning about the stories of the Blair Witch — they, more than anyone else, help sell the story that this is a real documentary. Some of the people feel so real, in a backwoods way, that I could only wonder if there was a line item for meth in the budget. As for the main trio, they were surprisingly better actors than I expected, but they're probably some of the most annoying characters in any horror movie. At a certain point I had no choice but to root for the witch.
In retrospect, why are we all surprised by the disinformation crisis we're in now? The same generation who fell for the idea that The Blair Witch Project was real are now all grown-up and sharing Haitan cat-eating fake news stories on Facebook. I guarantee if you scroll past a person unironically sharing an AI video of Trump bench-pressing a liberal, or an AI image of Chuck Schumer carrying an old lady across the street, or whatever — you can bet that person fell hard for the marketing of this film 25 years ago. In the end, we kind of all ended up trapped in the Blair Witch's basement, staring at the wall.
[REC] (2007) — on Criterion
Is it a requirement that found-footage horror films feature only the most annoying characters ever created? [REC], a Spanish Blair Witch Project, follows a "documentary film crew" who embed with a firefighter crew overnight, and get trapped inside an apartment building, where bad shit goes down. A few of the visuals are genuinely terrifying, even if they rely too much on the classic horror tropes of a scary old lady in a nightgown, or a dead-eyed child. Two very overused horror motifs, and yet these Spaniards put both in their film! That takes cojones, I guess.
Where The Blair Witch Project handled its hand-held camera style much better, [REC] was much more... nauseating? The camera jostles and bounces far too much, which does make it feel a bit more real, but at the potential cost of losing your dinner. Far too many scenes consist of shaky, indecipherable camera footage, accompanied by loud and obnoxious screams, and nearly every interaction between characters involves them hysterically shouting into each other's faces. The entire cast is at volume 11 and never once tones it down, which becomes incredibly grating. Unfortunately for [REC], I don't care how scary the visuals are, if I'm spending the whole time yelling, "Shut the fuck UP," at the characters, I'm going to start begging for them to all die a little bit faster.
Prince of Darkness (1987) — on Criterion
Now this is a horror film — a John Carpenter classic I had never heard of, which starts as the slowest of slow burns before all hell literally breaks loose. Prince of Darkness follows a group of researchers summoned to a Catholic monastery, to investigate a gigantic glowing vat of liquid which is pretty quickly discovered to contain, I guess, the liquid essence of Satan?
No offense to the great city of Los Angeles, but it feels right that Satan is hidden in a church basement there. Satan is trapped inside a canister that's several million years old, and only capable of being opened from the inside which, of course, means Satan starts to get out. The way he does that? He BLASTS a spray of liquid directly into people's mouths in order to possess them. Satan is kiiiiinky! (It's either a biting bit of commentary or a rude level of bigotry that, while everyone else has to ingest Satan to get possessed, every homeless person in Los Angeles is just... naturally Satanic? Yikes! I bet John Carpenter is very excited about a Gavin Newsom presidential run!)
Prince of Darkness is a fantastically campy horror film, one that never reaches the genuine chills of John Carpenter's more famous work, but there are some beautifully trippy sequences, plus that classic 80s horror movie theme we all know and love: simmering homosexual tension! And for all its big, strange ideas that are just thrown out there (they seem to imply, for a hot second, that Satan and Jesus were aliens? Ok!), he nails the ending in a way I didn't see coming. I miss when horror used to be this stupid!
Speak No Evil (2024) — on Apple
Of course, most horror movies would be uneventful short films if the heroes just got in their car and drove away, but no movie is more egregious with that concept than Speak No Evil, this English-language remake of a Danish-Dutch horror film, which mostly serves as a 2-hour display of James McAvoy's newly beefy body. (In this movie he's really putting the daddy in daddy issues.)
The hero couple and their daughter are given literally every chance to leave the farm in which James McAvoy and his wife are clearly doing very bad shit, and at every turn the couple decide, "You know what? Another night in your creepy murder house sounds lovely!" It's hilariously infuriating — I can't imagine how loud the crowds must have been in theaters, screaming at these people to just drive their shitty little Tesla out of there. Halfway through, I needed these people to die, just so they'd finally learn a lesson. But, I also kind of get it: I'd have a hard time saying goodbye to James McAvoy, too.
Zohran's Survivor ad — aired in the NY Metro area during Survivor 49
Zohran Mamdani understands better than most politicians the unstoppable power of mentally ill gay people, which is why he went straight to the source with his Survivor-themed campaign ad that aired during last week's episode of Survivor 49. Sure, I've heard rumors of straight people watching Survivor, but would a straight person recognize Maddy Pomilla, Stephanie Berger, or Josh Canfield? Absolutely not, and yet those are the Survivor players Zohran chose to film cheeky confessionals in which they vote Cuomo off the island. I know Zohran was targeting gay Survivor fans specifically, because he understands that we all have fake jobs and lots of free time, and will therefore become his most loyal and tireless soldiers.
I see now why the real estate industry is spending zillions to try to defeat him — this man already understands how to wield power to a terrifying level. This was a targeted strike into the heart of NYC queerdom, a wake-up call to tens of thousands of gay sleeper cells in every corner of 2-3 boroughs. We have received your instructions, Zohran, and we are activated.
Corn husk meringue — at Cosme, in Manhattan
Before I go into this story, I need you to know two things: 1) the bill for this dinner, including tip, was something like $600 for 2 people; and 2) we went because Justin had $200 off, so thank god we didn't pay that full price. The food was good, but not worth the insane prices, or the incredibly rushed vibe of the entire restaurant. I realize the restaurant industry is tough, and table turnover is key, but Cosme was egregious, bordering on actively hostile. It felt like, if the hostess had had a gun, she would have marched us out of the restaurant at gunpoint.
And before you ask: no, we were not egregiously lingering at our table! The hurrying started with our very first dish, a nearly $30 bowl of guacamole (what does a $30 bowl of guacamole taste like? Guacamole, it turns out!). We had nearly half the bowl still left, but a server grabbed it from the table. We asked her if we could finish it, and she set it back down and ROLLED HER EYES.
Rather than a one-off thing, this happened with literally every dish. Before you could even get to your last bite, someone (usually the same eye-rolling woman) would try to snatch it off the table, and then act like you're being such a diva by asking to finish your $50 bowl of 3 ingredients. I'm not exaggerating when I say she would try to take your dish away while you were mid-bite. And every time we'd say, "Oh, can we please finish that?" and she would HUFF AND PUFF. At first, we were paranoid that we had done something to offend her, only to realize what the restaurant's scam is, when she pulled the same move on the tables on either side of us, forcing the tables to finish their last drinks at the bar, in order to seat another table, no matter how quickly you had eaten. This place charges you $112 for a few tacos (not an exaggeration — $112!), and still expects to do Taco Bell-speed turnover on their tables.
So, of course, Justin and I decided to slam the brakes. We slooooowed way down, so by the time we got to dessert — an actually, genuinely transcendent corn husk meringue, one of the best desserts I've ever had in my damn LIFE, credit where it's due — we were taking smaller and smaller bites. We also ordered a new round of drinks, just to really drag it out (we hadn't even been there 2 hours, the typically agreed-upon time for two diners at a restaurant, so we felt more than justified in being DICKS — I swear we were not lingering for hours and hours, which would also not be a crime, by the way!). By the end, we were taking laughably tiny bites of our dessert, and would have continued to split it into molecular level bites, down to the very last atom, if we had the tools to do so. Anything to drive this woman crazy.
While getting slowly, spitefully drunk and laughing at the restaurant's obsessive hovering over our table, I eavesdropped on the two bros at the table next to us, who were also slowly eating their dessert while shooing away the desperate waitress's hands attempting to yank their food off their table.
One of the bros was rambling on about how Mitt Romney was the perfect candidate, making me wonder if I had fallen into a wormhole, before the other friend tried to steer the conversation to something more fun: "So wait, you skirted the question earlier. How's the dating life?"
"It's crazy, man," the Romney bro said, before launching into a story about having lots of boring first dates with women, until he went to a wedding and, in his words: "I saw the first guy I've ever been attracted to."
Now, I've never been privy to a bro coming out to his bro, so I was floored, and forced Justin to just murmur a bunch of nonsense sentences at me to provide cover for my eavesdropping. I didn't want to miss a word.
His friend maintained an impressively neutral face as the Romney bro unfurled a wild story about meeting this guy at a wedding and realizing, as he phrased it: “I don’t know if I want to hold a guy’s hand, but gay sex? Absolutely.” I was, of course, completely on the floor at this point, as he continued to explain how he and this guy went to a batting cage together, where he was tantalized by the man’s gender-neutral descriptions of all his previous dates, getting his hopes up, until the guy dropped the dreaded "she/her" pronouns about his date, and this poor boy's dreams of gay sex evaporated.
Unfortunately, that's where the story ended (bros need to get better at asking their newly gay bros more questions, in case there are any prying ears nearby!), and I was shaken by the knowledge that we were in the presence an actual, living and breathing bisexual Romney voter in 2025. Like encountering a snow leopard in the wild!
Meanwhile, the waitress was fed up with our shit and finally tattled on us, sending the manager over, who leaned down and asked us to please finish at the bar, which was where the rest of the diners who had finished before us were banished. So, my advice: do not eat at Cosme, do not even think about getting a table. Just go in, sit at the bar, have a single cocktail and the unbelievably good corn husk meringue dessert, and then get out. A drink and dessert alone will still probably cost you over $100, and they'll probably push you off your barstool after 20 minutes, but trust me that it's better than the full experience. And if the Romney bro is reading this: I hope you find the man of your dreams! Try holding his hand, too!