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Animals Were Probably Harmed
Meet Allison McCulloch, the world’s most prominent vegan film critic
“Vegan alert: Blair wears ‘real’ mink eyelashes,” warns Allison McCulloch’s review of the Netflix original romantic comedy Someone Great. Her review of 2018 Best Picture Oscar winner Green Book notes that there are “hamburger and hot dog eating contests.” In Jim Jarmusch’s zombie comedy The Dead Don’t Die, she cautions vegan viewers that “a man tastes cat food” and “the hermit eats squirrels and insects.”
McCulloch, 37, a voracious cinephile and film scholar living in Los Angeles, is one of the most popular users on Letterboxd, a growing social-media site for film fans. She’s amassed more than 12,000 followers thanks to her combination of smart, accessible opinions on movies and her amusingly exhaustive “vegan alerts,” which she includes on nearly every review she writes.
It all started in July 2017 with, of all things, Barbet Schroeder’s period drama Amnesia, a relatively obscure film about electronic dance music and the complicated legacy of Nazi rule in Germany. “Basically a man caught a fish and then scaled it and gutted it,” McCulloch recalls, “and it was the first time I really had a reaction to seeing something like that in the movies, and just thinking, I don’t want to see that.”
So she went home and wrote up a short review on Letterboxd. “Interesting topics explored,” she wrote, and then added: “Vegan alert: I saw this movie as a new vegan and found the fishing/fish grilling scenes to be a bit disturbing. Kind of like a former smoker that can’t stand being around smoke.” From that brief comment, McCulloch began cataloging every instance of animal products and animal cruelty in every movie she sees, from graphic depictions of animal slaughter to characters wearing watches with leather bands or drinking glasses of milk.
“Even if it’s a glass of milk, it can be offensive to me, just because there are a lot of people who are vegan or who don’t want to partake in the dairy industry,” McCulloch says. “It’s so pervasive in this society that it makes it more socially acceptable. To me, meat is…
