Inside a dark theater in Midtown Manhattan, Allison McCulloch watched “Kraven the Hunter,” an origin story for the obscure Spider-Man villain, while jotting notes on a white piece of paper smaller than a Post-it.
Fur clothing.
Taxidermied animals.
Characters eating steak.
McCulloch is the Roger Ebert of vegans, a dedicated cinephile who cares as much as anyone about acting and cinematography — and more than almost anyone about onscreen portrayals of dairy, poultry and beef.
In the short reviews she writes for the app Letterboxd, she includes her overall critique as well as “vegan alerts,” flagging signs of animal products in a one-woman quest to highlight animal welfare onscreen, even in details most viewers would overlook.
“People might think a glass of milk is innocuous,” she said. “It’s not. It’s full of violence.”
McCulloch has documented her opinion on 24,082 movies on her Letterboxd account, putting her in the top 100 out of the app’s more than 18 million members. Movies starring animals are almost a lock for vegan-friendly ratings, with films like “Flow” and “Kung Fu Panda 4” getting four stars.
“Kraven the Hunter,” about a criminal-tracking vigilante played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson, flopped by traditional measures (“incomprehensible plotting and dodgy one-liners,” Robert Daniels wrote in The New York Times). But it worked on some level for McCulloch, who was surprised by how it framed Kraven as a kind of conservationist who shares a supernatural connection with the creatures he encounters, and hunts criminals instead. She even gave the movie one “vegan point” for Kraven’s decision to not shoot a lion.
Often it is the dissonance between the characters’ kind treatment of animals and their consumption of animals for food that bothers McCulloch.
“I don’t think the writers really considered Kraven’s compassion for the animals, because they show him saving the animals and eating steak,” she said, adding, “Maybe they didn’t see into the heart of Kraven.”
McCulloch alerts her readers to extended sequences of animal violence or food preparation, as well as more oblique offenses. “Nosferatu” was dinged for “vampire stuff,” horse-drawn carriages and a man biting off a pigeon’s head, though it did earn a vegan point because the “locals discuss using garlic.”
She considers her rulings to be somewhere between trigger warnings and moral judgments. The intended audience is not vegans looking to avoid uncomfortable material, she said, but people who eat animal products and could stand to think harder about what they are watching.
Animal welfare in Hollywood has increased considerably from an era when creatures were treated as expendable: At least 100 horses died during the making of “Ben-Hur” in the 1950s.
But McCulloch was baffled by the credits of the 2018 thriller “Destroyer,” which included an assurance that “no animals were harmed in the making of this film.” She wondered: What about that rack of roasted ducks in the background of a Chinese restaurant while Nicole Kidman’s character confronts her daughter? Didn’t they count?
“I was just doing this as a new vegan, trying to figure things out for myself and starting to notice how Hollywood treats animals,” she said.
McCulloch began issuing vegan alerts in 2017 after watching “Amnesia,” about an intergenerational friendship between a young man and an older woman in Ibiza. In one scene, the young man catches and guts a fish to use as bait.
The quiet moment was “brutal” for McCulloch. Having already removed fish from her diet over mercury concerns, she had recently turned to veganism for health reasons.
Seeing the fish flayed open was too much.
“It made me, I don’t want to say nauseous, but it was intense,” she said. “I can handle violence, but this was violence of another kind.”
McCulloch, 42, lives in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan and works as a nanny during the day, infrequently making money by writing reviews for small blogs. A serious-seeming woman, she remains a fervent wearer of face masks indoors to avoid contracting and spreading Covid-19. That she thinks this deeply about the ethics of films is not surprising to those who meet her.
“Knowing her sense of humor and attention to detail, I could tell that was just something that factored into what she thought about what was going on onscreen,” said Daniel Thom, who met McCulloch at a film festival around 2010 and became a frequent moviegoing companion when she lived in Los Angeles.
During “Kraven the Hunter,” McCulloch noted tiger skin rugs, meaty dishes and, at one point, a character “yelling at a dog.” Yet there was nowhere near the amount of animal violence she expected from the movie’s title and trailer. “I did sort of brace myself, so that was a nice surprise,” she said.
McCulloch’s reviews can inspire strong reactions online, including mockery on other social media platforms. That is in part because she unapologetically flouts popular opinion; she gave Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now” 1.5 stars, citing the “unacceptable” death of a real water buffalo during filming in the Philippines.
She said she had received several death threats in the comments of her reviews, which disturbed her enough that she now only allows comments from people she follows.
One supporter of McCulloch’s mission is People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, which has its own Letterboxd account to recognize the winners of its annual “Oscat” awards for animal advocacy in film.
Lauren Thomasson, the director of PETA’s Animals in Film and Television division, said in a statement that McCulloch was “a great resource for kindhearted cinephiles who want to watch movies that match their morals.”
If a movie is set in the culinary world, McCulloch knows to be on high alert. For “The Taste of Things,” a sumptuous French romantic drama about a cook and her employer that McCulloch called “full of death,” her vegan alerts read like a menu of the dishes prepared by Juliette Binoche and Benoît Magimel: Loin of veal. Scaled fish. Short ribs. Smoked bacon. “It was just too much,” McCulloch said.
This is not exposure therapy at the box office. McCulloch said she was not traumatized by vegan-unfriendly films, just made mildly uncomfortable by some sequences. She usually steers clear of movies she predicts will produce copious vegan alerts. (She was not originally planning on seeing “Kraven” until a reporter suggested it.)
In her twenties, McCulloch would binge-watch movies. But she now focuses on what she wants to see rather than trying to document every release’s sins against the animal kingdom. She is a cinephile — logging awards season contenders, art house picks and international films — but not a snob.
One of her few five-star films last year was the box-office bomb “Madame Web.” Favorites do not get a pass, though: Vegan alerts for that movie include a dead bird and a meat kebab.
Modern movies involve special effects and props, so onscreen butchery may not represent real harm toward animals. “Gummo,” Harmony Korine’s portrait of two Midwestern youths who hunt stray cats and sell their meat for money, has an endorsement from American Humane that affirms the movie used prosthetic and already dead cats and simulated any violence to real ones. Despite that assurance, McCulloch said she thought the film was in terrible taste.
Even fictional beasts, McCulloch said, can expose an ideology that animals are meant for human exploitation.
“Luke Skywalker milks the teats of this walrus-looking creature,” McCulloch said of a scene in “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” where he drinks the green milk of a thala-siren. “It’s not even a real creature. Why is he so interested in its milk?”
Matthew Strohl, a philosophy professor at the University of Montana, said he could not wait to read McCulloch’s assessment after watching last year’s “Nightbitch,” about a mother who begins to turn into a dog, developing a taste for raw meat and a desire to attack possums.
Strohl had written an extended defense of McCulloch’s vegan alerts in 2022 after some screenshots of her reviews made the rounds on social media with mocking commentary. His arguments emphasized the importance of aesthetic diversity and the interplay between “her moral convictions and her taste in film.”
“I got this picture of her as an obsessed person, which I would relate to because I’m an obsessive person,” Strohl said in an interview. “I think that often obsessive people are the people who come up with the most interesting things to say.”
McCulloch is aware how some of this comes across, so she likes to have fun with it. “It can be construed as humor, but I’m serious,” she said, before citing a quote attributed to the filmmaker Billy Wilder as well as the writers Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw: “When you tell people the truth, make them laugh so they don’t kill you.”
The vegan alerts for “Nightbitch” and its cavalcade of animal violence read as you would expect — dead mouse, dead rabbit, raw red meat — but also include Amy Adams’s character calling her cat stupid.
The list ends simply with “eggs.”
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