This article discusses bulimia, child sexual abuse, self-harm, and suicide. Its explicit intent is to criticize a filmmaker, not to publicize his work. The author has personal experience with some of the issues discussed. Comments have been disabled.

His name is Shawn Fedorchuk. It’s the name on his birth certificate. It’s the name he uses to sign for deliveries. It’s the name a tipster gave to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, reporting the sexual messages he exchanges on Facebook with girls as young as fourteen. Those girls do not know him as Shawn Fedorchuk. They call him Lucifer Valentine. 

I won’t. I’m not doing him a kindness, although it might seem that way–simply calling him Shawn Fedorchuk instead of the mortifying pseudonym he’s chosen. His nom de plume is the stuff you find in school shooters’ spiral notebooks. In ballpoint pen missives on bathroom stalls. In the suicide notes of girl-children who love Lana Del Rey and hate themselves in equal measure. 

These girl-children are Shawn Fedorchuk’s victims, and they are his biggest fans. Not of the work he produces under his real name–three Emmy nominations, this guy has, for editing on shows like True Blood–but for the execrable “films” he releases under his pseudonym. Reviewers can find no evident narrative arcs in Slaughtered Vomit Dolls, Slow Torture Puke Chamber!, or ReGOREgitated Sacrifice–the three films that comprise his Vomit Gore Trilogy. 

These films follow the sadistic torture of a runaway teenage stripper. They star a real-world runaway teenage stripper of Shawn Fedorchuk’s acquaintance. He came to know other of his actresses through Facebook, where he is said to diligently message each teenager who gives his page a like, and to entice them with offers of film stardom. He has them sign unenforceable contracts authorizing him to do whatever he likes to them, and then–allegedly, sigh–he does whatever he likes to them. 

None of this is legal. All of it is awful. I am an irregular and skittish viewer of horror films, but even the genre’s most die-hard fans, the men and women for whom Saw is baby stuff–they can’t stand Shawn Fedorchuk. Take this half-star review from an adult woman who lists The Wicker Man as her favourite film on Letterboxd: 

I used to think ‘Saw’ was the pinnacle of unendurable gore.

Then I saw ‘The Human Centipede.’

Then I Saw ‘Hostel.’

Then I saw ‘Martyrs’.

Then I saw ‘Cannibal Holocaust.’

Then I saw ‘Salo.’

And now I’ve seen ‘Slaughtered Vomit Dolls.’ If it can be topped, we shouldn’t even try to stop the fire in the Amazon because humans deserve death.

Hers is the mainstream view. ReGOREgitated Sacrifice is, at 1.9 stars out of 5, the highest-rated entry in the Vomit Gore Trilogy. The people who dole out these near-zero ratings offer sophisticated critique and stuff like “step away from the camera dude don’t even think about picking it up again please.” 

What interests me, and what I’d like to talk about, are the five-star reviews, which are written by the suicidal girl-children I mentioned before, and for whom I care deeply, because I was one, once. 

One fan goes by Claire. She is eighteen years old. She has logged ReGOREgitated Sacrifice on Letterboxd eight times. In her first review, she simply quotes a segment of the film’s “dialogue”–

“oh my god. this is how i feel inside: i believe in you. yeah i do. i love it when you beat me up. i like it when you rape me. because it feels good. because i know that you care about me as youre doing it because thats what you like, and you still like me, youre not doing it because you hate me. like everybody else in this goddamn life.” 

–which another reviewer alleges originated during a young woman’s moment of genuine distress, filmed by Shawn Fedorchuk, and presented as if it were fictional, scripted. 

In her second review, she writes: 

needed this… if youre a boy go fuck yourself. 

Another reviewer, who has also logged the film eight times, and who goes only by the knife emoji, wrote the following in Review #2: 

i dont want to feel anymore

In Review #3: 

this shit hits so much harder after bulimia relapse

In Review #8: 

i havent felt more dead ever my wounds wont stop bledding and i threw up aagin ive lost 6 pounds this week im a fuckjng mess and im an awful digusting person i dognt fuckign care aboit anyone anymore thhiugh fuck people im so tired of geting attsched and then getting my heart broken everyone. is the fuckign same and no one can convince me otherwise i just want one person yo always be there 4 me and listen 2 me and csre 4 me and never ever leave me i want someone 2 be witj me forever and help me runaway nad heal me i wanna be able. 2 eat without feeling guilty 4 breaking a fast or a diet ad not have to purge any of my bignes out sll the time im so tird of it snd my cuts sting so bad i only did it hours ago andn it stil hurds and i didnt do any afetrcare and my parents went through my room and found my drugs idk what im going 2 fucking do ive fucked my life up snd i hvae 2 accept that im never gonna get anywrhe in my life and that nobodys gona help me through that 

These girls are in pain. It seems to me that queueing up ReGOREgitated Sacrifice for an eighth viewing is, for them, compulsive, maladaptive, a form of self-harm. I ache for them.

In public discussions of Shawn Fedorchuk’s films, one sees David Lynch brought up quite a bit–a point of comparison, but also a measuring stick. In most viewers’ estimation, Fedorchuk comes up short. But one girl, whose username on Letterboxd incorporates “Del Rey,” and who hints at personal experiences of bulimia, writes: 

[The protagonist of ReGOREgitated Sacrifice] may be one of the most important characters i’ve ever witnessed. she’s right up there with laura palmer. 

Poor old Laura Palmer, dragged into this like she hasn’t suffered enough already. She is, rightfully, beloved by girls and women who survive sexual abuse. They find comfort and strength in the narrative of Twin Peaks, in the indictment of her entire town, in detective Dale Cooper’s vigilant journey to the ends of the earth and beyond in pursuit of justice for her. 

“Lynch is about… both innocence and damnation; both sinned-against and sinning,” wrote David Foster Wallace, in his landmark essay on Lynch. “Laura’s muddy bothness… required of us an empathetic confrontation with the exact same muddy bothness in ourselves… [Fire Walk with Me requires that these features of ourselves and the world not be dreamed away or judged away or massaged away but acknowledged, and not just acknowledged but drawn upon in our emotional relationship to the heroine herself.” 

I doubt Shawn Fedorchuk is about anything more than jerking off to the suffering of young bulimics. His films evidently cast his personal demons into teenage girls too vulnerable to mount any kind of resistance; he recruits them as fans, then as actresses. His evil is a relay sport. His suffering protagonist passes the torch through the screen to another suffering girl.

I get the sense that the walls are closing in. The girls and women he’s abused profess to be afraid of him, but I’m not. Confronted recently by a gonzo YouTuber, he is a pathetic old man visibly in poor health, a deep triangular recession in his grey hair. He squints paranoically through the just-cracked door of his apartment. In a later encounter, he doesn’t even step outside: we hear him breathing heavily, eye at the peephole. May he never emerge again.