Ballingrud has created, with Wounds, a deep and exciting mythology in which Hell is very much a real place and it’s surprisingly easy to get there.

The collection is, hands down, one of the best short story collections I have ever read. This past April, Ballingrud released Wounds: Six Stories from the Border of Hell, a collection including The Visible Filth. The Visible Filth was great and I wanted more. Ballingrud’s prose was full of equal parts wit and poetry, creating an intoxicatingly sinister world through which his characters stumbled. If I was in love with the movie, I was smitten to death with the novella. On the flight home from Sundance, I devoured the novella - finishing it before my plane hit the ground back in Houston. On the walk back to my hotel, I looked up the novella on Amazon and, seeing it was less than $5 via Kindle, I snatched it up in a hurry. The film moved so quickly, delivered so many insane developments that I felt like there was something going on that, in a sleep-deprived state that I often find myself in at film festivals, I overlooked or blinked through that would have answered some of the questions the movie left once the credits rolled. I loved the movie deeply but I couldn’t help but feel I was missing out on something. A cross between Hellraiserand The Ring, Woundsis a briskly paced supernatural freak-out with some weirdo worldbuilding involving the idea that you can commune with angels through the worship and devotion of raw, gaping wounds. From there, the movie descends into pure madness, with Hammer delivering a fantastic performance as somebody quickly losing his grip on reality. After hacking the phone, Will discovers it is full of strange videos and photos of disembodied parts of humans, hideous wounds and what appears to be full-blown supernatural shenanigans. Curiosity gets the better of Will after the phone begins receiving strange texts from somebody claiming to be in danger. One night, after a violent scuffle among a handful of the bar’s patrons, Will discovers a cell phone left on the floor by a group of underage students.

In the movie, Armie Hammer stars as Will, a New Orleans bartender who is dating a college student played by Dakota Johnson but spends his nights trying to woo one of his bar’s regulars (played by Zazie Beetz). The object of my affection? Babak Anvari’s Wounds, a follow-up to the filmmaker’s excellent 2016 Djinn horror film Under the Shadowand an adaptation of Nathan Ballingrud’s novella The Visible Filth. In January I sat in the Metropolitan Holiday Village 4 Cinemas at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival and, over the course of 94 minutes, fell head over heels in love.

Wounds by nathan ballingrud