Carmen Maria Machado on Writing Porn
Carmen Maria Machado is the award winning author of short story collection Her Body and other Parties, which won both the Shirley Jackson Award and the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction and of best-selling memoir In The Dream House, which won the Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Nonfiction as well as being declared Book of The Year by The New Yorker, TIME Magazine, New York Times, Vogue and others. In her writing, she is no stranger to the weird, spooky, and the erotic. Her writing has become a go-to for queer folks as an exploration of the strange, wonderful, and sometimes horrifying capabilities of human bodies and the way society often hides away from this or rejects it.
Now, she’s teaming up with queer ethical porn company Aorta to make a spooky ghost-hunting porn film. This will be the first of the company’s new Induction series which will see them invite great minds from adjacent creative fields as guest collaborators.
Aorta Creative Director Mahx Capacity explains the ethos behind the project: “Through this program, we hope to expand the cultural understanding of what porn can be, not just for queer people, but for everyone. In partnering with visionary artists, we’re engaging in intentional conversations around pornography’s formal, artistic, and cultural capabilities – both internally within our creative process and externally with the public.”
The project started off with a KickStarter, which smashed its goal of $20,000, raising a total of $24,114. Now, they’re in the casting stage, and aim to release the film, called ‘Haunted’, in early 2025.
We caught up with Carmen Maria Machado to find out more about the project, and what to expect from the film.
Material Queer: How did this project come about and what made you want to work with Aorta?
Carmen Maria Machado: Years and years ago, Mahx Capacity, the director of at Aorta, had reached out to me and basically said, like, we're big fans of yours at Aorta like if you ever wanted to do this project we’re cooking up, let us know. Kind of like that. And I was like, you know, I'm really interested in how pornography gets made and I didn't know that one generally wrote scripts for porn. It's so interesting. Then, some time after that, I went to a queer film festival in New York and Aorta showed one of their films. Andit was this really great film with this whole concept that I just loved. After that we started really talking earnestly about it. The rest is history. Really, it was Mahx’s idea, but I thought it was really exciting and just immediately said yes, absolutely.
MQ: What was the writing process like? How was it different to things you usually write?
Carmen: Writing porn was a very different kind of script work to, say, writing a TV show. There were technical aspects of it that I’d never thought about before. For example, we hadn’t cast it yet, so when I’m writing about people… how do you do that, you know? I had to ask Mahx for a lot of advice on those kinds of aspects of it. And also there are a lot of rules about stuff like, showing blood, for example. We’d also decided pretty early on that it would be something horror adjacent, and we decided to make it a ghost hunting thing. But then, from a sexual consent perspective, we can’t have a person possessed by a ghost. Narratively speaking, and legally speaking, there were so many things I’d never even have thought of. There are all these kind of antiquated fuckup laws that govern porn and that really affected what could be included.
MQ: Did you feel constrained by those limitations?
Carmen: I love a constraint. I am very into constraint based writing like, you know, it has to be exactly this number of words, or it has to have this thing etc. In that sense, the constraints are interesting, but then also it did seem really weird. You can't have blood? That seemed weird. On a personal level it was fine, but I do wish we didn’t have such antiquated laws governing all kinds of things to do with sex work.
MQ: For you, what are the most interesting things about the way horror and queerness come together?
Carmen: I mean, I think horror is such a subversive genre that deals with so many kind of base instincts, a lot of impulses, fears and anxieties. It’s always been subversive for this reason. The way that horror and queerness, and the history of queerness in the media, acth, just feels really instinctive to me.
MQ: Can porn be art? And if it can, what makes it art?
Carmen: I’ll always give the same kind of answer on this, regardless of what we’re talking about, right? I mean, is a novel always art? No. Sometimes a painting isn’t art. And so on. And, I mean, I’m certainly not an authority on what is and is not art, but I’d say, to take the example of a novel, the attention to the sentence is a good indicator. And so, in film, including porn, there might be similiar indicators, like the camerawork, the attention to detail at the craft level and the intentions of that filmmaker. Attention to style in detail. What is happening f on a metaphorical level, what's happening underneath the surface? I think those are the interesting questions to ask.
MQ: So what kind of vibe should we expect from the film?
Carmen: Spooky and sad.
MQ: Interesting. Sadness isn’t an emotion many people would associate with a porn film?
Carmen: I sort of operate under the same assumption as I operate by in my fiction which is that contrasting things heightened the effect of each other. So, like, sadness and sexiness go so well together because they heighten. Like salty and sweet.
The Induction series, starting with ‘Haunted’, to be released and premiering in early 2025, will be available on the Aorta films website which streams exclusively to members. All-access membership starts at $8/month (billed annually) and includes a catalog of over 80 ethically produced independent films, and a semi-annual film festival.