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.”
