Acclaim

Press

The shock was the easy part to see. The writers who looked harder left a record.

The critical champion

The most serious champion of the work was Alfred Eaker, who made the case for Zex in two 2009 essays for 366 Weird Movies. Eaker died in 2023; his advocacy remains part of the record it helped create.

A kindred spirit to Georges Méliès, Kenneth Anger, and Ernie Kovacs.
Alfred Eaker · 366 Weird Movies (2009)
Horrifying, perversely amusing, and intensely contrarian — Zex at his most quintessentially bizarre.
Alfred Eaker, on Checkmate · 366 Weird Movies (2009)

In the canon

Brooklyn’s Spectacle Theater placed Zex in the national canon of public-access auteurs, programming him in the 2019 series “Public Access, Private Desires” alongside David Liebe Hart, Concrete TV, Harvey “Job” Matusow, Splendid Recipes — and reviving the work for an encore in January 2025. He is also listed as a notable artist by Marquis Who’s Who.

Local memory

If you ask just about anyone who lived in Columbus at the time, they have at least one Damon Zex story.

Add your Damon Zex story →

Artifact

Tyler Peck's 2019 Spectacle screen-print for Damon Zex
Tyler Peck’s 11×17 screen-print for the 2019 Spectacle retrospective.