Stef's TV & Movie list

A little window into me, through the stories I love. I tend to sort things by how they feel more than by genre — so that's how this is laid out.Where I go for comfort: the dark stuff 🖤This is going to sound backwards, but darkness is where I feel most at home. Not gore, not shock — I mean the kind of horror that's really about grief, and dread that's earned. Stories that sit with deep sadness and treat it tenderly. When a show understands that kind of pain, I feel seen.Mike Flanagan is my favorite creator — he turns grief and family wounds into horror that's gorgeous and devastating. In order of how much I love them:- The Haunting of Hill House — my favorite "real scary" horror. A family and a house that won't let go.
- The Fall of the House of Usher — not very scary, but exquisitely made. There's a Poe poem in it that made me cry.
- Midnight Mass — quieter and mournful, about faith and grief and a small community coming apart.
- The Midnight Club — a haunted hospice where dying teens tell each other ghost stories. The emotional depth got me.A few more that live in this register:
- Bates Motel — genuinely creepy, all about an unhealthy, enmeshed family dynamic.
- Penny Dreadful — fog-bound Victorian gothic, literary to its bones, with Eva Green giving one of the great anguished performances. Queer, lush, and aching.
- The Sandman — Neil Gaiman's dream-king mythology. Melancholy, mythic, beautiful; the atmosphere stays with you.When the darkness has a wicked grin 😈I love a dark, gritty story with a streak of the absurd — and I have a soft spot for the kind of moment that's so brutal-out-of-nowhere it loops back around to funny. (Earned, though. Always earned.)- The Penguin — Batman's world is the sad, dark corner of superheroes, which is exactly why I like it. Gritty, and weirdly hilarious in places.
- Joker — a grim, aching character study. You really feel his pain.
- Weapons — a creepy mystery that builds and builds and pays it all off. Scary, fun, and a little funny.
- Sinister — straightforwardly scary, and I was completely in.
- The Gentlemen (the Netflix series) — a fun, thrilling, dark-ish ride with humor that makes you gasp "I can't believe he did that." (Yes, there's a guy in a chicken suit with a shotgun.) Bonus: the lead is Theo James, who I also loved as Sidney in Sanditon.Smart shows being gloriously stupid 🪿My other half. I adore silly, playful, lighthearted comedy — the dumber and more earnest, the better — as long as it's got a warm heart and isn't mean. (Cruelty for laughs is the one thing I can't sit through.) Honestly this is the genre I most want to share with someone: a show projected on the ceiling, holding hands in bed, laughing together. Low effort, high connection — my favorite way to recharge.- I Think You Should Leave — pure escalating absurdity. I'm obsessed.
- Norsemen — deadpan Viking comedy; a smart show pretending to be stupid. I laughed myself silly.
- Our Flag Means Death — a gentle, queer pirate comedy with the most lovable weirdo lead.
- Swiss Army Man — Daniel Radcliffe plays a flatulent corpse. It's bizarre and secretly tender. (Radcliffe doing strange things is a recurring theme for me — see also Weird and Miracle Workers.)
- Flight of the Conchords — two hapless musicians, deadpan and ridiculous.
- What We Do in the Shadows — vampire roommates bickering through eternity. So funny.
- UHF — I still randomly yell "Spatula City!" decades later.
- Rick and Morty — absurd sci-fi, crude in a way I don't mind.
- Bee and PuppyCat — gorgeously strange little animated thing. PuppyCat is grouchy in the most endearing way, and underneath the weirdness it's about being loved for exactly how strange you are, and getting coaxed out of your grumpiness into friendship. I'm a sucker for that.Sci-fi, where I go to feel inspired 🖖Different kind of comfort — competent, kind people, and a sense of possibility. And the best of it carries grief gracefully underneath the wonder.- Star Trek — my long-running comfort. Especially Deep Space Nine, Strange New Worlds, The Next Generation, Voyager, and the silly delight of Lower Decks.
- Doctor Who (2005+) — whimsical and silly and sci-fi, but the Doctor carries real grief in his hearts. It threads everything I love at once.Living in another time 🎩📚Here's a real special interest of mine: I'm endlessly drawn to what it actually felt like to be alive in another era — the texture of daily life, how society was put together, what an ordinary day held. I'm not a history buff in the dates-and-battles sense; it's the lived experience I want to climb inside.A Masterpiece adaptation of Les Misérables cracked this open for me — I'd never explored classic literature before, and afterward I fell hard for 19th-century French writers: Hugo, Dumas, Balzac, Proust. I especially love Balzac's almost anthropological eye for how post-Revolution French society was structured. (The Revolution itself ran 1789–1799; what fascinates me is the world that came after it, across the 1800s.)And a set of documentaries that are honestly foundational for me: the BBC historic farm series — Tales from the Green Valley, Victorian Farm, Edwardian Farm, and Secrets of the Castle (where they build a medieval castle in France from scratch). Historians live and work a full year using only the tools, food, and methods of the period. It's the purest version of the thing I love: not facts about the past, but what it felt like to live there.- The Count of Monte Cristo — a man loses everything, endures, and rebuilds himself from nothing on his own timeline. This one resonates with my whole life.
- Marie Antoinette (Masterpiece) — lavish Versailles drama; court intrigue and personal struggle. I loved Season 1.
- Poldark (Masterpiece) — I've been savoring this one slowly for years, and I've started the novels too. What gets me is the emotional journey of a marriage — heartwarming when they connect, gut-wrenching when they're in pain; you're right there with them. Plus characters who make me laugh, including a gloriously petty, egotistical villain.
- Sanditon (Masterpiece) — a reimagining of the Jane Austen novel she left unfinished. Mixed feelings, honestly — the overall story didn't fully satisfy me — but the character relationships are rich, the family dynamics deliciously dysfunctional, and I watched Season 1 twice. No regrets. (Also Theo James, the Duke from The Gentlemen.)Anime that stuck with me 👹I can't keep up with subtitles the way I used to, but these stayed with me:- JoJo's Bizarre Adventure — weird and wonderful, and really about fighting spirit forged out of pain. The tenacity in it speaks to my own.
- Castlevania — gritty gothic vampire dark-fantasy. There's something seductive about it — it calls me to embrace the dark.
- Demon Slayer — gorgeous and sad; a boy trying to save his sister, and a villain whose damage you actually understand.
- One Piece (the live-action) — dumb in the best way, and so big-hearted. The found-family love is the whole thing for me. (Sanji — fiercely loyal, deeply attuned, devoted to his people as an expression of love, never a chore — is basically my ideal. I'm out here looking for my Sanji. ☕)
- One Punch Man — a hero so overpowered nothing's a challenge. Delightfully absurd.A few that moved me, off on their own 💔- Frankenstein — slow to start, but when the monster told its story I cried.
- The Skeleton Twins — brought up big feelings; siblings and old wounds.
- Russian Doll — loved it enough to watch it twice in a row.
- Fleabag — sharp, fast, raw, and deeply felt under the wit.Documentaries 📚- Julius Caesar: The Making of a Dictator (PBS) — the fall of the Roman Republic. It made me cry when Brutus betrayed him, and I watched it with real trepidation seeing the parallels to today's populist leaders. But mostly it scratches a deep itch of mine: the curiosity to stand inside another time and wonder what it was actually like to live then.If a lot of this resonates with you, we'd probably get along. ✨