The Blood Knife

There’s this thing called a blood knife. Or sometimes a “bleeding knife,” or—if you want to keep it really simple—a prop knife. (I’ve never worked in film, so this is all completely second-hand.)

Whatever the name, it’s a fake knife that squirts blood. The sort of thing you might find in live theater, or maybe a low-budget slasher film from the era when that sort of stuff was crunchy and practical, rather than done with CGI.

The purpose of a blood knife is to simulate the appearance of a deep wound. It looks like it’s doing some damage, but it’s all just a show for the sake of the audience. Get past the subterfuge, and it’s all completely nice and safe and predictable.

And this, essentially, is the state of so much pop culture and media analysis. Like the aforementioned movie prop, it doesn’t really cut deeply or incisively—it just gives the audience the illusion that it did.

So much of our media analysis these days is fundamentally driven not by any sort of critical edge, but by marketing or clickbait or other agendas, all of which tend to be diametrically opposed to actually writing anything interesting or unique. When an essay goes searching for themes or meaning, it’s often just validating something that’s been heavily featured in marketing material since the film or show was first announced. It’s more part of the marketing cycle for the film than it is any honest, real analysis.

And that, in short, is what Blood Knife is trying to fix, at least a little bit. We’re here to publish the kind of stuff that normally comes along only every so often. Because, yeah, a mainstream outlet will run the occasional leftist media thinkpiece. But good luck getting them to run another one any time soon!

There’s another goal. Writing, and journalism especially, is in dire straits. The pay is awful, the market barely exists, and nobody seems able to figure out how to make any damn money. You’d have to be a fool to try and make money with a magazine.

So, well, we’re not going to—try, that is.

Our goal is not to make a profit, or grow our staff, or indeed to do anything other than pay more writers and artists. Think of us as a pass-through for anyone who can help us make a really good anti-capitalist, anti-racist, anti-fascist sci-fi / fantasy / horror magazine by contributing original content.

As I finish writing this (frantically, at the literal last second), let me just stop and thank, sincerely, everyone who has helped bring this together. Whether that’s those early subscribers on our Patreon who are already contributing a quarter of our monthly budget, or especially our first batch of authors—Lindsay Lee Wallace, Karlo Yeager Rodriguez, Robert Oliver, and Will Solomon, who all took a big leap of faith by contributing essays to a totally unknown outlet and trusting they’d actually get paid.

And also, of course, thank you to anyone reading this, for coming by and giving our newborn magazine a shot. We hope you enjoy it.

If you have thoughts, or feedback, hit me up at kurt@bloodknife.com, or yell at me on Twitter.

Oh, and one last thing. The “blood knife” thing—totally after the fact justification. The true story is that it’s just two words that sound cool together, and made a weird, cool image pop into my head, and nobody owned the domain. (So now who’s doing superficial subterfuge for the sake of an audience?)

Stay sharp!

— Kurt