My Favorite F***ing Movie: All the Boys Love Mandy Lane

I have Covid right now—get vaccinated kiddos, it’s still a thing!—so I wasn’t able to finish the essay I had planned on posting this month. Instead, enjoy this essay that originally appeared in the now-defunct We Are Horror Magazine (shout-out to an outlet that actually paid me to write about horror movies), albeit in a slightly different form. It’s about sex, power, and teenage girls.

My Favorite F***ing Movie is a personal exploration of sex through film, released monthly.

“Mandy Lane! Someone got fuckin’ hot this summer.”

That bit of dialogue is hurled at the titular character in All the Boys Love Mandy Lane with aggressive enthusiasm, cluing the audience into the fact of Mandy’s recent metamorphosis and the general reaction of the student body. Her entrée into popularity is hinted at in a series of shots lingering longingly on Mandy’s nubile curves and coy expressions—evidence of her pristine hotness, and what the complimentary jock is so obviously excited about—as she walks down the hallway of her high school.

Ethereally backlit, blonde hair fanning out in the late summer light like a halo, Mandy is a teenage fantasy, with her inscrutable, beautiful face. The other students, boys and girls alike, stare in awe as she walks by, but she ignores them, seemingly oblivious to their adoration and desire.

Or maybe, as I would come to believe later, impervious to it.

Mandy agrees to attend the jock’s party where, in a foolish attempt to garner her attention, he’s goaded by another boy into leaping off the roof of the house and into the pool, to his accidental death.

Before he jumps, he shouts out her name—Mandy Lane!—like an exaltation.

I remember the summer I got hot.

That’s how it felt, anyway…

Read the rest at My Favorite F***ing Movie (and if you like it, maybe consider subscribing!).