A Twisted Love Letter From the Cinematic Underground

Vancouver-based filmmaker Louise Weard is well aware that her multipart, epic-length, half-complete anthology project is an alienating, even trying experience. “I want to sell T-shirts that say, ‘I survived ”Castration Movie,”‘” she says. The title “Castration Movie Anthology” signals intent well enough, but few things can prepare an audience for sitting through the two parts released so far — which clock in at 4½ and five hours each — and whose content pushes the bounds of extremity, never mind stylistic abrasiveness. Shot on a nothing budget and an old Hi8 camcorder, with visuals that look like the worst home movie from the ’90s you’ve ever seen, Weard’s trans cinema opus is subversive, underground cinema at its finest, and a project that has found a small but fervent audience, along with critical acclaim, including notices from industry trades like The Wrap. Hardly the typical reception for films that feel like they were found in a box of tapes discarded in a ditch somewhere.

What “Castration Movie” actually is is tough to describe, especially in its currently incomplete form. “Part i,” released in 2024 and alternately titled “Traps” and “The Fear of Having No One to Hold at the End of the World,” features two chapters. In the first, “Incel Superman,” a straight, cisgender young man slowly radicalizes into becoming an incel as his relationship and work life fall apart around him. The second chapter, “Traps Swan Princess,” follows Michaela “Traps” Sinclair, played by Weard, a hilariously caustic trans woman mentoring a friend only recently out as trans through a pursuit of sex work. The hallmark of the anthology, aside from its grody, grimy, low-tech visual style, are its long, extended — almost distended — scenes, which feel purpose-built to test the audience’s patience, while confronting them with complicated, often relentlessly unpleasant people engaging in even more relentlessly unpleasant behavior.

“Castration Movie” was born out of a distinct combination of success and anxiety. “I’d been working in film for almost 10 years by the time I transitioned,” says Weard, who first caught serious attention for her 2015 short film “Computer Hearts,” but suddenly started getting a lot more work in the industry after her transition. “It was, psychologically, really harrowing to look at it being like, ‘OK, am I only taking off because I’m transgender now?’” Weard admits. The psychological turmoil was only exacerbated by the small pond that is trans filmmaking. “There’s not a lot of trans filmmakers, and I had already had a 10-year career,” she explains of the leg up she had, though she knows there was more to it. “The honest reason I think my career took off is just because the timing ended up being right for the work I was doing,” Weard says, pointing out that 2020, when she came out publicly, was a uniquely fertile moment for trans culture. “Now, politics are completely the opposite.”

It was in that stew of swinging politics that Weard came up with the idea for “Castration Movie.” In 2022, with some of her early work being rediscovered, Weard was commissioned to do a “100 Best Kills” mash-up for Fantastic Fest, and made it distinctly her own. “I was deconstructing the history of penis mutilation on camera,” she recalls. After being interviewed by a reporter at Sundance a few months later, she discovered the resulting article mostly mentioned her in relation to the themes of castration in the video mixtape. “OK, well, I guess I’m just the girl who makes castration movies,” Weard thought to herself. “That’s where the title of ‘Castration Movie’ comes from,” she said.

The goal for her planned four-part anthology was immersion. “I wanted to create something that has a similar effect to throwing on a four-hour video essay,” Weard says. More than that, she wanted to create a cinematic space to depict complicated aspects of trans experience, free from the dictates of the dominant culture. “I think that a lot of marginalized people are filmed with a tourist or ethnographic gaze,” she explains, “whether that’s people with disabilities, or sometimes race, depending on who the filmmaker is and who’s being represented. So [the goal] was trying to disentangle that, specifically around gender.” In her freedom, Weard has been crafting a bold series of films, often hysterically funny and surprisingly affecting, but just as often nasty, ugly and outright grating, reflecting the range of experiences she has seen and felt as a trans woman in the world.

In “Castration Movie Anthology ii. The Best of Both Worlds,” released this fall, Weard pushes her project to more severe extremes. Set in New York, the anthology entry consists of just one chapter, the five-hour “Polygon!!!! Heartmoder,” about a trans woman who finds herself living in a cult with several other trans women in a Brooklyn basement apartment. The atmosphere of that basement is claustrophobic and oppressive in the extreme, and what emerges is a startling, uncomfortable, highly charged tale of detransition and intra-community abuse. The film opens with a quote from a tweet directed at Isabel Fall, the writer of a 2020 short story called “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter,” its title referencing a popular anti-trans meme. After the story’s publication, many in the trans community took it to be transphobic, taking to social media to castigate and harass Fall, a trans woman herself. Fall checked herself in to a hospital with thoughts of suicide and, still early in the process of transitioning, she decided to abandon transitioning. “I wanted to make a trans horror movie, and I couldn’t think of anything scarier than that sort of thing,” Weard says. “You’re trying to find this community and fit in, and then you’re pushed out by people who otherwise should be in your community.”

For five hours, Weard places the audience within the mental and emotional turmoil experienced by someone trapped by the very circumstances she thought would allow her the freedom to be herself. It’s upsetting, painful and extremely difficult to sit through; scenes of abuse and coercion play out at length, often in long takes with no cuts to provide even a momentary escape. Suffocating, in other words. Yet, it is utterly gripping, even as you’d be forgiven for wanting to get the hell out of the theater as soon as possible and take a shower. 

“I came from a background in underground filmmaking,” Weard says, noting that early in her career she even worked with an effects artist who had helped out on the infamous “August Underground” movies, a series of violent horror movies done in the style of snuff films. “Castration Movie” is no fake snuff film, but it often feels in keeping with the ethos. “I connected to it because there is both an inwardly and outwardly directed anger, but also [a] sense of community depicted in the world of underground, offbeat and outsider cinema,” Weard explains of her affection for these kinds of movies. “I felt a degree of isolation from the mainstream, because I had extreme tastes in art and also, as a closeted trans and queer person, I wasn’t seeing a lot of places for me to fit in.” 

Underground cinema, following in the traditions of Troma and the Guinea Pig films, became that place. Weard came up working with the late FX legend Ryan Nicholson, known for gross-out, grindhouse-style horror movies like “Gutterballs” and “Hanger,” which was banned in Australia for depictions of unsavory things like a back-alley abortion, which the classification board said “offend against the standards of morality, decency and propriety generally accepted by reasonable adults.” With her filmmaking partner Dionne Copland, Weard produced a number of features and shorts, including the 2016 no-budget queer slasher “Cuties.” “It was lots of outcasts and weirdos, and I’m working on set with people who are sex workers or addicts, or heavily marginalized people, who are all coming together to make art and do something special with it,” Weard says of coming up in that filmmaking environment.

There are dangers working in the seedier, outsider spaces, though. “In the lead-up to the first time Trump got elected, you started to see the true colors coming out around a lot of people in that community — in the audience for it, especially,” Weard says. Similar to perennial issues within the punk music scene, it is sometimes hard to tell when cathartic, subversive expressions of rage simply become fuel for reactionary politics. “When we’re doing a movie where we’re killing a transgender person or something, there’s a sense of humor to it,” Weard says. “I’m feeling part of the fun, because I’m being represented.” But she started to notice that for some in the audience, the fun was simply seeing trans women, sex workers and others tortured and killed.

Other artists and filmmakers seemed to be going down the neo-Nazi and MAGA road, or at least willing to take their money. “I suddenly felt very alienated looking around me at the community,” she recalls. The nadir was 2022’s New People’s Cinema Club festival, a Peter Thiel-backed venture that became known as the Anti-Woke Film Festival, and saw the participation of numerous artists Weard liked and respected. “I was so fucking mad about it, like it was honestly something that really pissed me off,” she says. “This thing that I grew up loving so much was now becoming just outright fascist.”

“Castration Movie” became a way for Weard to reclaim the space of underground filmmaking, to “pull it back onto my side,” or what she refers to as the underground movement’s roots in “morally left-leaning libertarianism.” Amazingly, she has found an audience for it. When the first film arrived in 2024, it was in good company. “‘The People’s Joker,’ ‘I Saw the TV Glow,’ ‘Stress Positions,’ ‘Castration Movie’ and ‘T Blockers’ were five trans woman-directed movies that all came out within the span of three months,” she says, which helped shine a light on her film, the most outright challenging of the bunch. The audience quickly grew. “Castration Movie” has been touring theatrically, almost entirely instigated by fans and programmers demanding screenings. 

“These movies are so funny with a crowd,” Weard says of their theatrical appeal. Of course, the length and intensity of the films is part of the outsider appeal, too. “Watching it with a bunch of people, it feels like you all went and ran a marathon together,” she says. More important than anything, though, is the audience itself, which has been predominantly trans at almost every screening. “Cinema has not traditionally treated trans people super well as a medium,” Weard says. “So I think there’s something that stands out about ‘Castration Movie,’ where you can go have a 70% trans audience showing up to a screening. It’s such a unique place to get a bunch of trans people together in a room.”

Creating spaces like that is Weard’s mission, to build a community around art that expresses the complicated realities of existing as an outsider, a trans woman, including the artistic challenge to the audience that entails. “That’s what underground art is for: to depict things that can never be in a mainstream context. And the politics should be allowed to be messy and weird and sometimes ambiguous,” Weard says. “A big part of what ‘Castration Movie’ represents is putting a scene together among a lot of artists who are working today, and establishing what a new underground looks like.” The third installment in the “Castration Movie Anthology” is expected next year, and will feature three chapters, with one more installment on the way after that. All told, Weard expects the full anthology to reach around 20 hours, which she intends to be watched in one go. A true marathon, perfect for anyone looking to test their cinematic limits.