He Never Dies—A Four Film Cycle by Kalil Haddad is currently streaming in the Movie Club through October 31st
by Alexander Mooney
Kalil Haddad has spent years transforming archives of pleasure into mosaics of pain. The filmmaker’s best-known works—strung together from repurposed fragments of adult films and skin mags—can be tenuously characterized as found-footage horror; Haddad’s shuddering, form-smashing short films evoke the violence and exploitation that forever haunt the annals of gay porn, with the raw materials serving as a textural canvas for formal experimentation. From 2022’s fleet and flooring The Taking of Jordan (All American Boy) to his swooning, downcast latest, My Secret Boyfriend Died in a Mass Shooting (2025), this provocative filmmaker shrewdly retools iconographies of desire into sites of doom and death.
Challenging inherited frameworks for gay aesthetics and rewriting them on his own ineffaceable terms, the Toronto-based avant-gardist has emerged as one of the most exciting voices in every scene he’s stepped in. His four-part series, “He Never Dies”—also comprising Victim of Circumstance and The Boy Was Found Unharmed (both 2024)—has been touring North American screens in various shapes and forms for the past several months.
Now, these films are streaming online through the end of October via Movie Club. To mark the occasion, I spoke with Haddad about the impulses that shape his work. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
AM: What led you to these pornographic archives as a site of creativity?
KH: I really became interested in the material when I came to recognize it as an integral piece of queer history. These forgotten films and magazines existed at a time when there were no other forms of mainstream representation. So approaching them as artifacts of a culture and a people who are in some ways no longer with us… I find that fascinating.
Can you tell me about the connection between your academic research and these found footage shorts?
The “He Never Dies” cycle—as it stands now with these four films—was made as my Masters thesis at York University. So a lot of research went into the films, because I was really trying to understand the environment of that period and the culture and the people that inhabited it. Especially in relation to the stars of the period, who in their own day were gay celebrities and are kind of lost to history now, but were such a pivotal front-facing part of the community at that time.
Your films don’t shy away from their frequent depictions of real suffering and death. Can you walk me through your thought process during editing when you’re deciding what to show, what to elide, and what to suggest?
I think a part of it is not wanting to be too obvious with the material and the way that it’s being spoken about. There’s some things that, for an audience that’s aware of queer history, you don’t have to overstate and over-explain. It’s just inherent, in the way that I would also say that these are inherently political works.
For me, part of the shocking nature of it is to wake an audience up, to force them to confront what they’re seeing. It’s easier, especially in a contemporary time, to want to ignore or turn a blind eye to these uncomfortable parts of the past. But those things are what queer history is built upon. It does us a disservice and it perverts the efforts and sacrifices of those who came before us, and those we have lost, to ignore this because it makes us uncomfortable. It is a reality of that time. The things depicted in some of these films—and especially Victim of Circumstance which I see as the most pointedly political film—like queer youth homelessness are still very much prevalent today. A majority of homeless teens are queer teens. That’s something that we were seeing 40 years ago, and it’s something we’re seeing now.
Ignoring those parts of our history, I think, has to do with how we want to represent ourselves to straight people. That’s the main concern, because I make my films first and foremost for myself. They’re things that I would like to see on screen that I feel like I haven’t seen. I make them for me before thinking about any specific audience, but because I’m making them for me, they’re inherently for a queer audience, that’s who I’m speaking to. A lot of other people resonate with the films, of course, but I think queer people understand what I’m talking about thematically on a deeper level.
What I try to do with all of my films is to create a formally expressionist world where we can understand the character internally from the way they’re being represented. So it’s really about trying to create a sense of empathy and understanding with these characters and some people maybe see these films, and if it doesn’t align with their specific queer experience or their heterosexual experience, they take issue with it.
A lot of your strategies are aimed at overwhelming or unsettling the viewer. Deafening soundscapes, strobes, etc. Do you ever find it distressing to put these films together?
Yes, very much so. The experience of making Victim of Circumstance was very harrowing. They all were in their own ways, which I think is necessary, but because Victim of Circumstance was made over a 2-year period, while I was also producing other films, it was a lot I had to sit with for a very long time. I had to inhabit this world mentally, and in wanting to create an expressionist piece I was really trying to engross myself in the emotionality of these characters through my research and editing process. I want the form to have the affect of the experience depicted. And to create that, I need to allow myself to feel it.
I usually edit late into the night, and there’s that very long intense strobe scene in Victim of Circumstance, and I’d be watching that at like 4 in the morning on loop over and over again. So even though it was difficult to make, it was actually very rewarding because this is the kind of material that you need to feel to be able to represent in an authentic and lived-in way. Otherwise, if there’s no empathy behind it, then it does just sink into shock value. I wouldn’t call any of my films shock value—they don’t shock for shock’s sake—but I want to force people to confront what they’re seeing, to wake an audience up.
The images you borrow from other films are often lent your personal stamp through your editing techniques. What guides your impulse to alter an image or to leave it untouched?
A lot of my editing is lyrical and based on intuition and in trying to shape a film to elicit affect. It really is a process-based edit, a lot of experimentation, playing around with little moments. “Does the image hit on this beat or on this beat?” kind of thing. And if it hits here, how does that play with the audio, how does that alter our emotional reading? The image and the audio, the sound design, which I did myself as well for Victim of Circumstance, are all being created in tandem.
All of these films are being edited, scored, and written at the same time. So I come into these films with an idea of what I want to do, what I want to say, how I intend to say it, but then I also allow the process to guide me further—the act of creating the film informs the finished product.
You’ve noted that in the 70s and 80s that porn was the primary form of onscreen representation for gay men. That’s a big thing to unpack and your films do a great job of it. How do you think the psychological effects of that have changed in an era where representation is more widespread and multifarious?
Queer representation has changed in a major way even from when we were kids. We are more visible than we have ever been in mainstream media, and that’s amazing. But that’s also why it’s necessary to be able to revisit the past as well. It’s easy to think that the queer struggle is no more. Even if you stepped into a rural part of Canada, you would see that isn’t the case, right? It’s not that easy. A lot of people, and a lot of film people, are very metropolitan. It’s easy to forget what it’s like to be a 17-year-old in the middle of nowhere Ontario as a gay person. So even though Victim of Circumstance is a period piece, it very much speaks to life now. It is a film about contemporary culture and the things that still exist, but looking at it through the lens of the past.
I think about this almost in the same way that I think about Cruising. That film was protested by the gay community in its day because it threatened to be the only mainstream representation of queer people and it was one of violence and depravity. I understand, in that period, why it would be an issue to release that movie representationally even though now we see it as a very pivotal document. But today, it’s necessary to go back to some of these darker subjects. If these were the only films about queer people being made now, it would be a different story. But we are so multifaceted. There’s so many queer subcultures, we should be able to approach ourselves in a nuanced way. Let’s stop pigeonholing ourselves just to be approachable or acceptable to a straight audience. Let’s speak from our actual experience and be who we are because to ignore these realities doesn’t help that kid in the middle of nowhere Ontario.
Confronting these things head on and recognizing them for what they are is how we’re able to grow from them, work through them. There’s things that happened in the 80s that are still happening now. There’s still things we haven’t grown from. You hear gay people say that almost everyone they knew back then isn’t here anymore. The people who experienced the things that are discussed in Victim of Circumstance might not be around to tell those stories anymore. So all we can do now is look at what was there historically and try to speak to that.
In the early 70s, a lot of men who were getting into porn were doing it because it was almost like an extension of gay liberation: “we’re out here having sex, look at us, deal with it”. That really is how I feel my films function, too, where it’s like, a straight audience might feel uncomfortable seeing this. Get the fuck over it, and deal with it. We’re here.
And even though we have a lot of mainstream representation now, I feel like so much of it now is condescending or neutered for a straight audience.
The “tender” industrial complex.
Exactly. There’s so much tender queer focus now. That’s why it’s funny when I hear people critique Victim of Circumstance as regressive because I think in its own way a lot of queer representation now is even more regressive in its insistence on negating these conversations. I make gay films for gay people that speak directly to issues that they relate to.
One of those issues is, of course, censorship. Vimeo recently shut down your entire account.
A week before the tour kicked off, I was finishing up My Secret Boyfriend Died in a Mass Shooting. I had been uploading cuts of that film as private links just for myself throughout the editing process like I always do. I uploaded the final cut of the film and almost immediately it was flagged and removed. They sent an automated reply to my appeal, and then maybe 2 days later my entire account, that I’ve had for almost 10 years, was removed from Vimeo. Maybe the appeal got them to scour the rest of my account. Thankfully I have all my stuff backed up on hard drives so I didn’t lose anything.
It was just very surprising, though. Everyone I know who makes films uploads their stuff to Vimeo because they’re so much more lenient than YouTube. I’ve seen sexually explicit stuff on Vimeo before.
My Secret Boyfriend isn’t even one of your most explicit films.
That’s what’s so ironic—I created My Secret Boyfriend as the antithesis, in a lot of ways, to Victim of Circumstance. The process of making that film was so heavy and troubling, I wanted to make something that would be fun, more light-hearted, and focus on the romance of queer life. But again, as I worked through the edit, it matured into being quite a dark film, as well. But it still functions in a very different way of course. It’s much more of a love story, and I think in that way, works more as an epilogue to Victim of Circumstance.
But yes, it’s not one of my most explicit ones, and that’s why I thought it was so funny that after all this time uploading all these other movies, this is the one that gets it flagged. I’ve been working around it though, getting films out in other ways. That’s why I’m grateful to Ultra Dogme for programming these.
Your films, put simply, are pretty heavy. Do you see major shifts in tone or format in your future?
I always try to do something new with every film. In terms of shifts across films, I would say that all of them do something different, whether formally or in narrative perspective. Perhaps similar moods and affect will persist, but they’ll function differently, explore new territory.
There’s even a noticeable shift in My Secret Boyfriend.
Exactly. That’s like more of a romantic, vaporwave-y thing. I see myself continuing to work in the cycle, but regardless I’ll be going in different directions, doing different things. Before these, I had always shot films with actors—I haven’t made a drama like that since His Smell two years ago and so returning to that mode is something I’m currently exploring. It might not be as dark as this but…it’s not that I’m interested in dark material, for its own sake. I’m interested in conflict, which is what drives all great drama, all great storytelling. I could make lighter gay movies, but why would I do that? What purpose would that serve? It’s just not interesting to me. So, there’s many other kinds of films and different things I want to do, different directions, emotionally, formally, but I want to continue exploring these challenging subjects because they fascinate and haunt me. And I think it’s those ideas that won’t leave you that are most vital to tell.
During the Q&A on your tour, were there any questions that really challenged the way you think about your work?
Some reactions I received were really interesting because there seemed to be a bit of moral projection within the questions themselves. Especially towards Victim of Circumstance—I heard some people say that they find the film to be sort of ambivalent, and I don’t necessarily agree, but I can maybe understand the perspective in terms of how it presents information and invites you to draw some of your own conclusions. I think in some ways judgment on the film’s morality has more to do with how the person asking the question is already prone to look at gay people, even unconsciously. If you’re saying “you’re making gays look disgusting and dirty”—well, I don’t think I am. I’m showing gay men having sex. I’m showing things as they were, sometimes still are, and that’s not always necessarily going to be pretty. So I think to interpret ambivalence as an indictment or moral judgment speaks more to the inner world of the person asking that question. These things are only dangerous if you’re already afraid.
Something to unpack, for sure. A lot of people go into a Q&A and they don’t really want to hear the filmmaker talk, they want to hear themselves.
Yeah. They want to tell you what they like and don’t like.
What would you say in response to claims that your films depict gay sexuality in a negative light, and that they embody conservative anxieties in their tendency toward horror and tragedy?
That’s the thing, I don’t feel like these films are conservative in any way. I think censoring ourselves, and making queerness docile, is conservative. Real progress isn’t catering to perceived notions of “respectability”. That’s why it’s so funny when I hear these films being called anti-porn or, god forbid, anti-gay. It’s such a facile critique. The fact that anyone could think I would sit with this material for 2 years because I dislike it.
I’m presenting these films in a confrontational way because I’m not re-representing the original films. I’m representing the experiences that they portray and how those experiences may have felt. The people on-screen don’t actually exist, but the actor underneath does. What led him here? Where did he go? I’m interested in that humanity, divorced from the constructed fantasies that outlive these men.
I found the material really mind-blowing when I first encountered it, because it felt like there was an entire genre of films that was only for gay people and that represented how gay people actually lived and breathed, even if under the scope of sexuality. It felt indicative of a certain people and their time and place. I find that really beautiful. For me, my two favorite things are film history and queer history. This cycle is a marriage between them.
It’s also a way to uncover a long-forgotten piece of film history. It’s really eye-opening to see the craftsmanship and the work that went into making these films, because I do think they are very beautiful. More beautiful than what we see in contemporary pornography, even if it now allows the performers more freedom.
That’s what troubles me about this older material. The cycle came out of my interest in hauntology—the idea of these men still existing, frozen in time, frozen in celluloid as their “perfect selves,” and the reality of what might have happened to them behind all that. And where they would be today had they been allowed to stay with us. A lot of these men came from troubled backgrounds and met really tragic ends. That’s what inspires me about the material—wanting to treat them with respect.
In My Secret Boyfriend, you see the footage of the mass shooting, but it’s all blurred. This is two-pronged; formally, it feels more like a vision, more like a dream that this psychic character is seeing. But at the same time, it’s more respectful to obscure our view of these victims. In The Taking of Jordan, the red bars allow all the boys to be one boy, but it also masks the identities of these actual kids who died that the stories are based off of. It all allows me to represent them in a more respectful way. So, yes, they’re shocking. Yes, they’re disturbing, but at the heart of it, I always want to approach it with empathy and respect for the subjects and the real people whose stories I’m telling. These films don’t represent the lives of all gay men. Far from it. We were as varied then as we are now, but these films do represent some of us. And I think that’s worth immortalizing.
Alexander Mooney is a Toronto-based critic and filmmaker whose writing has appeared in Reverse Shot, Slant, The Globe and Mail, Documentary Magazine, Screen Slate, and more.
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