When death is cheap, lives become fungible

The 2023 films Restore Point (titled Bod Obnovy in the original Czech) and Aporia (a fancy word for "paradox") both tell the story of a widow grappling with the convoluted ethics of a form of technology that can reverse death. Interestingly, in Restore Point it is maternal feelings that set the whole plot in motion, while in Aporia maternal feelings provide the motivation for the ending. It seems one can't talk about cheating death without involving the creation of life.

In the future world of Restore Point, increased crime in Europe has prompted the mass adoption of periodic brain scanning as insurance against violent death. The service is provided by the government, although the institute that performs the resurrections has begun negotiations to be privatized. The murder of a high-ranked resurrection scientist who incongruously didn't have a brain copy stored in file triggers a protracted manhunt that ends in the not too surprising revelation that the institute itself has been igniting mass panic about crime in order to attract more subscribers and improve the chances of a juicy privatization deal. What's a few false flag terrorist attacks against millions of safely stored customers? Well, the detective whose husband was killed in one of those attacks may have something to say on the matter.

Aporia has a more modest reach, but a deeper emotional punch. Our protagonist has spent the last eight months trying and failing to adjust to widowhood, and she's reaching her wits' end, what with having to raise alone a kid who is crumbling under the weight of grief while the criminal trial against the drunk driver who killed her husband is getting nowhere. As it happens, her husband was a quantum physicist, and his former colleague has finished building their project: a machine that can shoot a particle into the past to create a mini-explosion. Yay, we can give the drunk driver a stroke before he kills anyone. Boo, the drunk driver had a wife and a kid of his own. Yay, we can continue violently altering the past to improve that family's life. Boo, the butterfly effect has decreed that our protagonist now has an entirely different child. Should she keep detonating the past to try and set things right this time?

In both movies, the lead casting is impeccable. As the detective in Restore Point, Andrea Mohylová walks the tightrope of a righteous champion working to protect a system that broke her life. Her performance conveys an unstable fragility built of learned toughness barely containing a deluge of unprocessed fury. (It doesn't hurt that the makeup department gave her a look uncannily reminiscent of Agathe Bonitzer, who did a phenomenal job in the French technothriller Osmosis.) Where Mohylová's acting style in Restore Point is controlled, understated and reliant on implied meanings, Judy Greer gives us in Aporia an unbridled ride through all the feelings. Her performance glides like a kite in the breeze, and generously invites us to glide with her, from brokenheartedness to despair to disappointment to shock to disbelief to ecstasy to bliss to remorse to compassion to hesitation to resolve to panic to horror to shame to scruples to resignation to bittersweetness. Her inner arc is an open book the spine of which holds the movie's entire edifice.

To the extent that a work of art expresses a stance about life, it's useful to ponder for a minute how we go about dealing with life. There's a theory in social psychology that proposes that the bulk of human culture revolves around trying to placate the fear of death. Our dreams, our traditions, our laws, our vocabulary, our desires, our civilizations—it's all an anxious effort to not have to think about death, to keep the inevitable out of sight. According to this theory, the always present, always ignored certainty of our coming death is why we make art and make love and make war. It's why we went to the moon and defeated smallpox. It's what makes the world go round.

And yet, over and over again, stories that imagine victory over death tend to add the complication where judgments begin to be made on the question of whose lives are disposable. Instead of turning you into the savior of the world, a technology capable of reversing death would force you to triage. Once you have control over death, every death you passively allow is one you're responsible for. You can either pretend to not see this power or embrace it with open eyes, and both alternatives are morally outrageous. In Restore Point, it's a utilitarian calculation on a mass scale: a few random victims for millions of terrified customers. In Aporia, the calculation is personal: this one guy's life is worth this other guy's. Traditionalists will protest that by claiming mastery over death we would lose our humanity, but more probably it's claiming mastery over the worth of life that does the deed. It's the dilemma faced by every self-proclaimed savior of the world: the unthinkable, unavoidable choice of whom not to save.

--

Nerd Coefficient:

Restore Point: 7/10. There are some plot holes that hamper suspension of disbelief.

Aporia: 9/10. Keep your box of tissues at hand.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

This very thing, right here, is what cinema was invented for

Somehow it never occurred to me, after watching the criminally underrated medical/surreal/thriller The Cell, that its director Tarsem Singh might have gone on to make more movies. Maybe it was because The Cell has ended up unjustly ignored in the public consciousness, overshadowed by the more explosive blockbusters of the early 2000s. But this year, out of nowhere, Mubi announced they'd rescued from oblivion Tarsem Singh's second movie, 2006's The Fall. With this decision, they not only do a service to viewers, but to the archival memory of cinema.

The Fall tells the best kind of story: one about stories. It openly admits its massive debt to the 1981 Bulgarian film Yo Ho Ho, but the same core plot is dressed this time in majestic clothes: a colossal, unbroken dune that burns the screen in dark orange; an entire city painted in blue; a burial robe dripping in vivid red; a hidden pasture so alive with green that you forget the endless desert just outside. Tarsem applies here his exquisite sense for location scouting and invests with epic grandeur what on its surface should be a ridiculous tale to keep a child enthralled.

The frame story, set at some point in early 20th-century Los Angeles, centers on Alexandria, a little girl recovering from an arm fracture at a hospital, where she meets Roy, a movie stuntman recovering from both a paralyzing injury and a broken heart. In the middle of his suicidal depression, Roy decides to trick Alexandria into getting him enough morphine for an overdose. To gain her trust, he makes up a whimsical tale of adventure, danger, romance, betrayal, mystery, honor, heroics and tragedy. The actual plot is extremely basic, but Roy, experienced in the magic of moviemaking, knows the tricks to make the story breathe. Without meaning to, he becomes a reverse version of Scheherazade: he's the one who wants to die, but he sparks Alexandria's interest in the tale so much that she wants him alive to keep telling it.

The cinematic version of Roy's story is peppered with elements from both his and Alexandria's imagination. The interplay that develops between them as they contribute their respective plot ideas is the most fascinating part of the movie: faces and clothes from their real life are transmuted into protagonists and battle uniforms in the narration. The dreamlike landscapes that fill the screen feel all the more fantastical when you remember they're actual locations. Moreover, as Inception taught us, the narrator cannot keep his personal demons out of his story, so through Roy's invention we gradually learn small details about the circumstances that led him to that hospital bed.

His emotional arc is simple but effective. After losing his mobility and his girlfriend, Roy is convinced he no longer has anything to live for, but his manipulation of Alexandria pushes her toward a kind of danger he realizes he can't inflict on a child. She will probably never know how powerfully she cast her own spell on him to the point of saving his soul. With a child's capacity for genuine wonder, she makes Roy's tale hers and gives it a new ending.

The stories that Roy knows how to tell are adventure movies, so let's take a moment to reflect on what The Fall seems to be saying about the magic of moviemaking. As a stuntman, Roy is one of the most artificial parts of the craft; he makes us believe in real danger. We fear for the hero, but Roy is the one who takes the bullets, the punches, the kicks, the falls. His task is to offer his real body in sacrifice to create an illusion. The Fall seems to be saying that to tell a story capable of capturing your audience's heart requires you to risk something of yourself. You can use all the artifice you want, but what you say with it must be honest, must expose a vulnerable part of you. The one thing you must not do, the mistake Roy makes with Alexandria, is let another take the fall for you.

Watching The Fall is a delight on every level. Lee Pace's acting as Roy is a punch in the guts: he's charming and devious, as convincing in his lovability as in his self-loathing. Catinca Untaru as Alexandria is a literal bundle of joy, effortlessly enrapturing the viewer with her spontaneous bursts of feelings and her insatiable curiosity.

And then there's the pure visual pleasure. The Fall abounds in unforgettable images that make you feel lucky to live at a time when movies exist: a temple full of swirling dervishes; an aquatic ride on an elephant; a bottomless pit made of crisscrossing stairs; a communal dance that makes a map appear on the body of a half-dead man; a mystic, born of a burning tree, out of whose mouth birds fly to freedom; a coral reef in the shape of a butterfly; a blood-red pendant, as tall as fifteen men, flapping in the desert wind. The Fall is a feast for the eyes, a balm for weary spirits, and without one mote of exaggeration, a monumental entry in the history of movies.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Francis Ford Coppola's first film in 13 years is ambitious, messy, cheesy at time, confusing, breathtaking, and weird as hell. Is it fun? Oh yes. Does it make sense? Absolutely not. Is it worth seeing? I'm not sure.

I had many thoughts during this 2 hour and 20 minute movie. They include:

• Is this the same man that directed the back-to-back Oscar-winning Godfather movies?
• Is that eyebrowless man...Shia LaBoeuf? (It was, and it took me an hour to recognize him.)
• Why is Jason Schwartzmann just wondering around here? (Oh, Talia Shire is here, and that's his mom.)
• Is Adam Driver handsome or is he just tall?
• Do I just want to get up and walk out right now?
• Why are there essentially powerpoint slides and historical quotes scattered throughout this film? (To call it didactic would be the understatement of the year.)

The high-level plot

Caesar Catalina (Adam Driver) is a brilliant designer looking to transform his city of New Rome, but at every turn he's stopped by the mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito). Catalina is a genius that can stop time (which is used mainly as a little treat to do things like kiss on precariously dangling construction beams off of the Chrysler building, where his office is). 

That's the main plot, as bare as I can make it. Where the story gets confusing is all of the side plots Coppola manages to squish into it and these include:

• A dead wife mystery haunting Catalina 
• A teen singer scandal / rebranding effort a la Jo Jo Siwa
• A family drama involving a boner joke and an old-timey bow-and-arrow
• A hostile bank takeover
• A dangerous USSR satellite falling out of orbit and destroying New Rome
• A love story between Catalina and Julie, Cicero's daughter and played by Nathalie Emmanuel, who I most instantly recognized as Misandei from Game of Thrones. 
• A science story involving megalon, a new material that can do...basically anything?

The characters

The characters are, arguably, the most interesting part of this movie, and even that's not enough to save it. Every single person is acting like they're in a different movie. This includes the old veterans like Jon Voight, Dustin Huffman, Talia Shire, Laurence Fishbourne, and Esposito. But it's also got younger folks ranging from Driver and Schwartzman to Aubrey Plaza.

Final thoughts

 --

The Math

Baseline Score: 6/10

Bonuses: The cast is superb; the amount of time spent in the Chrysler building made me happy; I will always, always celebrate new stories versus just having another Spiderman reboot.

Penalties: Too many to list. 

POSTED BY: Haley Zapal is a lawyer-turned-copywriter living in Atlanta, Georgia. A co-host of Hugo Award-winning podcast Hugo, Girl!, she posts on Instagram as @cestlahaley. She loves nautical fiction, growing corn and giving them pun names like Timothee Chalamaize, and thinking about fried chicken.

Working forwards and backwards in time to tell the story of a city and the demon who loved/loves it.

It seems Nghi Vo possibly likes to play around with the scale of her stories. In The Empress of Salt and Fortune, the small becomes the large; items spiral out to become stories. In her new novel (a short one, but she assures us, definitely a novel), she plays something of the reverse trick. Or possibly both at the same time. The story follows a demon, Vitrine, in the city she has helped shape for many years, a city that welcomed her as a refugee from her original, fallen home. She has curated it, whispered in the ear of its leaders, artists, librarians and pirates, sculpting it like a gardener with a well-tended hedge. And then, right at the start of the story, it is destroyed. Angels sweep in, unexplained, and put it to fire and the sword. All her work is gone. The story is of the aftermath, her memories and gried sweeping her up, telling stories of the large, spiralling down into the smallness of one single existence - her own - while reciprocally telling that grander scale through the moments of its individuals, day by day and year by year.

If it brings to mind anything - I'm not sure it truly does; it's a singular book in many ways - it is The City of Last Chancesby Adrian Tchaikovsky. At the simplest level, they are both stories of the soul of a city, told through a chorus of its inhabitants. The difference, however, is a big one. Where for Tchaikovsky the story of the city is the purpose in and of itself (and a very well executed one), for Vo here, the story of the city is only a half of what's going on. The rest is the story of Vitrine herself, and her care at that macro scale, using the humans that inhabit her city - and she is fiercely possessive of it, even after its downfall - as tools to shape it, things that can be discarded, that will pass even as the city endures, not stories or ends themselves. Vitrine lives outside of the scale of human life, and so the story must expand outwards, beyond those boundaries, to attempt to contain her.

This presents itself both subtly and unsubtly throughout. One of the most pleasing reflexes of it is the offhand remarks about how long Vitrine takes applying herself to a given task - stretched out into the days, weeks or months as debris falls and bodies rot around her in the aftermath. We observe the story through Vitrine's scale, experiencing events in a way that feels natural because it is natural to her, but then are jarred into awareness by these little comments, slipped around the edges, reminding us that nothing about her sits naturally with us, however it may feel in the moment. This is someone who can remain sat in one place for months, who can wait out a river. Vo manages to marry an extremely human and an extremely extra-human sense of wonder and scale throughout, with Vitrine's emotional reactions - intense, moving ones - lending accessibility to the broader scope of the story.

Where Tchaikovsky gives us the full view of his city by using multiple viewpoints, seeing it differently through each new set of eyes, Vo does is by using the same eyes, but seeing those people. There's a continuity that brings - Vitrine has been there and can keep on seeing, so can pull herself out of the "now", because she too experienced the "then". She can see change on a scale inaccessible to a mortal.

Even if it were only that, even if it were just a story of one demon's grief of her lost city, and the back and forward tale of its past and future circling around its apocalypse, it would be interesting enough. The prose is lovely, often bringing up moments of beautiful description, especially of colour and texture. You get a sense of the city as a physical place, as well as a cultural one, and for the complex mass of people moving within it. The beauty slips in even in the darker, more visceral moments of death and destruction and dismemberment. It is a lovely thing to read, just to exist in its descriptions and flowing use of language, just to be embedded within Vitrine's perspective on the world, swinging between abject sorrow, rage and a sort of wry humour about herself and the people she has experienced in her city.

For example:

Like comets who found the earth too cruel

or:

She was a thing that had been pared down by pain until there was only a sliver of her left, and everything she had regained, from the top of her dark head to her gleaming black eyes, to her sharp white teeth to her brown skin hectic with a madder blush, she had made herself.

For a story so concerned with the grander scale, it is one profoundly unafraid of the physical, and it is enriched by it.

But it is not only that - the city, at the start of the book, is destroyed by angels, but not all of those angels escape unscathed by the angry demon who tries to stop them. One, cursed by Vitrine, returns. Keeps returning. And so, as well as the story of her city, it is the story of these two immortal beings, tied together by a cataclysm that was almost beyond human terms of reference, that they both lived through (though no unscathed). Theirs is a complex relationship outside of the usual human frame of reference, and one that takes the whole book to develop, not reaching its climax (no, not like that) until the very end of the story.

I want to stress here, it's not a simple enemies to lovers type of romance story. Whatever they are moment to moment, neither Vitrine nor the unnamed angel (she is not particularly interested in small talk with him) exist on a human level, with human emotions on a human scale. Whatever they experience with, through and around each other somewhat defies description. It is just that - experience. It is a string of captured moments that become something more, but evade categorisation. 

Which makes it rather hard to review. I don't, honestly, quite know what I think ultimately passes between these two characters, by the end of the story. It feels profound. It feels intense. But I don't think I entirely understand it. Instead, it sits in my head, making me wonder, making me chew at it, considering. I want to reread it, to ponder it again. It is the good sort of incomprehension, of a thing that may be currently evading me, but is graspable, and will be worth the time spent in reaching for it.

What I do know, even without that understanding, is that Vo has done a fantastic job in capturing a sense of two beings beyond the scale of human lives, who nonetheless interact with them. Vitrine and the angel feel different to one another, and yet also similar, tied to the same outsideness, that immunity to mortal scale, that makes them both alien and compelling to the reader. The holy is a rare sight in SFF - even more so than the religious - but there is something of it here, in the unknowable actions of powers beyond mortal control, seeking to reckon with one another in rules that are never stated, with powers that exist within a framework of intuition, not hard logic. They are as they are, and do as they do, and exist together, in this space for a little time, as we observe them, but cannot grasp them. The scene early on, in which Vitrine witnesses the destruction of her city, is powerful for its distance, its cold incomprehensibility. It's awful. But it also has the feeling of something so utterly beyond human power that nudges into the sort of boundaries quite apart from "magic" in the commonly used modern sense. If it is magic, it is at a scale beyond the individual, and thus its grandeur.

Wholly different from her other work, there is nonetheless an extremely distinctive feel of Vo here throughout, the deftness of her descriptions, the fierceness of her protagonist. It is a beautiful, sad, evocative story, that manages to compress something enormous and otherworldly into something graspable and personified, in a way that seems quite unique. It is thoughtful, provocative, and full of depth, and a story I think will reward multiple reads, and intensive discussion. I enjoyed it immensely.

--

The Math

Highlights: beautiful prose, unusual framing, a complexity that keeps on giving the more you think about it

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

Reference: Nghi Vo, The City in Glass [Tordotcom, 2024].

POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroformtea.bsky.social

A compelling, moving chronicle that over-performs on every level

Do you know Vampira? If so, maybe you know her, like me, from Tim Burton's 1994 film Ed Wood, in which she is never referred to by her actual name—Maila Nurmi. Or maybe you know her from the Misfits song. Or maybe you know of her only vaguely, from the gauzy way in which her name has been attached to that of Elvira.

It is hard to overstate just how famous Vampira was for one vanishingly brief window of time in 1954. The creation of an essentially unknown actress, Maila Nurmi, Vampira was the host of a late-night program on Los Angeles' local ABC affiliate ABC 7, in which she showed public domain horror films starring the likes of Bela Lugosi and offered innuendo-laced commentary. From the launching pad of local late-night television, she wound up on live, nationally broadcast variety shows, and was featured in national magazines and papers across the country. And then a contract wasn't renewed, and... poof. Later, in the 1980s, there was a new spark of interest in the name, but soon it was attached dismissively to a failed lawsuit against Elvira, and the connotation was that some has-been was trying to cash in cynically on a new performer's success.

I have written on this site many times about the impact watching (and re-watching ad infinitum) Ed Wood had on me and the direction of my professional and creative life. So I feel like going into this book I knew maybe as much about Vampira as anybody who didn't know Maila Nurmi personally. She was the actual character model for Disney's Maleficent, in addition to her TV show. But after the limelight of the 1950s faded, she was reduced to dire poverty, living by herself in an apartment that sometimes didn't have basic utilities. In her later years, Maila sold jewelry on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles, made friends with a few people, like the comedian Dana Gould, who both helped her as her physical ailments overwhelmed her, and also were sometimes on the receiving end of her mercurial and curmudgeonly temperament. When she passed, there were online fundraisers, in the days when MySpace still stalked the Earth, for her interment and headstone, in which I participated. About ten years ago, an excellent documentary called Vampira and Me came out, which includes the only surviving kinescope footage from her TV show. I knew all of this going into Glamour Ghoul, but friends, I was not prepared.

This book was written by Maila's niece, Sandra Niemi, the daughter of Maila's estranged and never-reconciled brother. She and Maila only met once, when Sandra took a sightseeing trip to Los Angeles. Sandra is neither a writer, historian, nor researcher, so I have to admit, my expectations going into the book were pretty low. As it happens, Maila had been working off-and-on at an autobiography for many years. She kept stacks of notes and diaries, and some cassettes on which she'd recorded aspects of her story. Sandra worked through all of this material to tell a profoundly engaging story with a final emotional punch that I won't spoil, but recounts a circumstance that simply wouldn't have ever happened if the author had not undertaken the writing of this book.

Maila Nurmi grew up in a Finnish immigrant community where her most likely prospect for the future was working in a fish canning factory. So in 1941, at age 18, she got on a bus for Hollywood. A stunning beauty, it didn't take her long to catch the attention of people like Orson Welles, who impregnated her and then vanished from her life. In interviews in later years, Maila would discuss being seduced by Welles, and claim that he gave her the clap. This book reveals that instead, this was Maila's little personal code for "child," and a way to throw shade at Welles without revealing the true nature of their relationship, and the pain involved in giving her child up for adoption.

Maila Nurmi, 1947

As the decade rolled over into the 1950s, Maila became a fixture of Googie's diner, which was both a social scene and the inspiration for an architectural style. She became close friends with Marlon Brando (the book does not discuss whether or not their relationship exceeded the bounds of friendship, but given Brando's reputation, it seems like a reasonable conclusion), and was perhaps closer to James Dean than anyone else. His death destroyed Maila, and left her feeling completely unmoored, coming in close proximity to the loss of her show. Brando seems to have done all he could to help—paying for her to go to therapy and paying her phone bill for years so the two of them could stay connected and Maila could stay connected to the outside world, from which she was withdrawing.

After sliding deeper and deeper into poverty, the book discusses the afternoon where four weird-looking guys showed up at her apartment and peered through her window. When Maila went to chase them off, she discovered they were... The Misfits. They adored Vampira, and asked her to come make an appearance at their record release show that night in Hollywood. This began a return to the spotlight, and kicked off new interest in the character.

This is where the book does a tremendous service to the memory of Maila (and Vampira). Sandra dives deep into the circumstances leading up to the lawsuit against ABC 7 and Elvira, and the lawsuit itself. Contrary to the popular understanding of the suit, ABC 7 actually approached Maila and Cassandra Petersen about launching a new version of the Vampira show, in which Vampira would be Elvira's grandmother. Negotiations went on for some time, contracts were signed, but then ABC 7 decided to go ahead with the show without Maila. Cassandra Petersen became Elvira and continues her success with the character to this day. Sandra reveals through documentation that Maila was the victim of her own poverty, having to rely on ineffectual lawyers who missed deadlines and misfiled paperwork, leading to the dismissal of the suit (did didn't lose on the merits) and her being cut out of participation in the Elvira show that she was entitled to.

Even though Maila never truly rose out of the poverty that dogged her, the resurgence of Vampira's name recognition, coupled with the attention to Edward D. Wood, Jr. that came about largely as a result of the Tim Burton movie, did allow Maila to make meaningful connections with a younger generation of fans and friends. After she passed and Sandra received all of her papers and recordings, Sandra did some digging into things that Maila never had access to, and uncovers a truly powerful revelation that literally left me in tears as I finished the book.

In the end, this book is a gift to fans of old horror movies, fans of Hollywood history, and in a very real sense, to a few specific individuals who have a greater understanding of themselves in the world as a result of this book.

The Math

Highlights: A loving but nuanced portrait of a complicated individual, amazing 1950s old Hollywood vibes, unequalled context added to a pop culture mystery that seemed straightforward

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

Reference: Niemi, Sandra. Glamour Ghoul: The Passions and Pain of the Real Vampira [Feral House, 2021].

Posted by Vance K—resident cult film reviewer and co-founder of nerds of a feather, flock together

A joyous, enthusiastic time-travelling galactic-sized saga that is just not very good

Have you ever been to a 6-year-old’s dance recital? A 10-year-old’s orchestra concert? A 16-year-old’s theater show? Young artists in the making tend to lack skills but not enthusiasm, and they throw themselves into their performances with a wholehearted earnestness that can be incredibly endearing. But for all that, they are not (yet) good dancers, violinists, or actors, and it shows.

This book is that. The author describes in her author’s notes how she started writing it as a 16-year-old, and that alone explains so, so much about this book. It explains the sprawling, ambitious plot, in which tropes are evoked with such an ardent embrace that they almost feel fresh and new. A Chosen One? Yes, please—in fact, how about three Chosen Ones? No—wait—make it nine! And reincarnation! And cyclical prophecies, and the fate of the galaxy and an evil empire and time travel and found family and teleportation and secret libraries and queer love and coming of age and fighting back against oppression and and and and and and...! I don’t want to say that only a teenager could be responsible for such a bursting profusion of familiar tropes played so fervently straight, but the fact that a teenager was originally responsible for this bursting profusion explains a lot.

It explains the odd technical details, like robots which apparently have retinas, because they need to get past retinal scans. It explains the writing style, in which a teenage Chosen One who has only ever known a life of oppression laments never having an opportunity to feel ‘normal’—as if she can know any meaning of normality that is different from her entire life hitherto. It explains why characters from 1812 talk about being each other’s ‘boyfriends’—a word whose usage to mean ‘male lover’ was not attested until 1906. (A more accurate term would have been sweeting, or paramour, or lovemate, or honeybird, or sprunny. Yes, you read that right, sprunny.) It explains the extremely odd understanding of history, in which an ailing King George III laments the loss of the American colonies as evidence of the decline of the British Empire, when in 1812 it was only just getting started. Although perhaps we’re in an alternative timeline, since there’s another George—George V??—floating around the joint, son of the regent George IV; and this George, as far as I can tell, never existed. And speaking of monarchy, it explains an odd conversation, in which a king, hearing of unrest among his people, muses that perhaps this is simply the moment when the people rise up and decide to govern themselves, and is that really so bad a thing? This king would not be so blithe, I imagine, if he had heard of what typically happens to monarchs when the people decide they’re ready to rise up and govern themselves. But because he’s a Good Guy he must necessarily despise all things monarchical and be willing to see it go away, because Monarchy Is Bad and 16-year-olds struggle with complexity.

Here’s the plot. In the future, the year 6066, a teenage girl, Asha, has lived her whole life on a planet that is crushed under the rule of an evil galactic emperor. Through cleverness and persistence she works out a plan to steal a spaceship and escape the planet. This plan is put into action when a mysterious visitor arrives, tells her that she is a Chosen One, and that she must find her sister, who was also kind of a Chosen One, but maybe not. It’s all very cryptic for reasons that are never explained except that you can’t explain everything on page 25.

Narratively meanwhile, in 1812 London, Obi is a time traveller who has fallen in love with Prince George. We know that they are in love with each other because they have a very long, tedious conversation about that fact, which serves no purpose beyond establishing their fraught relationship. Oh, and also that George doesn’t like being a prince, because Monarchy is Bad and George is a Good Guy and therefore cannot possibly think otherwise. Then Obi, who has difficulties controlling his time travel, accidentally time travels to the future, landing in the midst of Asha’s escape attempt, where he helps her avoid capture, and they fly away together.

(Oh, and speaking of the spaceships! If the galactic empire is so huge that your spaceships need to be hyperspace-capable to get anywhere, then I have difficulty imagining someone ‘gently steering’ the ship in normal space. Steering around what? A stray hydrogen atom? And why does the hyperspace-capable spaceship need wings?)

An incredible amount of not-terribly-functional plot occurs afterwards. Daring, cinematic escapes, betrayals, chases, rescues. We eventually learn the whole story of the various Chosen Ones—including a kind of cool moment when one previous Chosen One decides he’s not okay with having a role forced upon him, and decides to make trouble. This could be an outstanding opportunity to engage with the Chosen One trope and explore the effect of cosmic determinism on the psychology of the pawns of fate, but remember that 16-year-olds don’t do well with complexity, so instead we get a pretty dull antagonist. We learn through document fragments that the whole story of various Chosen Ones is bound up in a kind of reincarnation thing, so that legends of the previous instantiations of the Chosen Ones portray versions of the same adventures that Obi and Asha experience in the pages of the book. This is rather neat, until eventually it gets repetitive and tedious, and finally culminates in a huge revelation scene, in which Asha discovers how it all works and marvels at something that we, the reader, have known for a few hundred pages already.

Now, to be fair, there were some excellent touches in this book, hints of the kind of writer that Jikiemi-Pearson might become. The resentful Chosen One and the reincarnation of story events I’ve mentioned, but there was also a lovely moment between Obi and Asha, in which they have been rescued from some Bad Guys and have a quiet moment together. Obi braids Asha’s hair for her, in a way that she can’t quite manage herself, and explains that this hairstyle is not meant to be done by oneself. The expectation is that you have someone to help you. I was very touched by this scene—a reaction immediately undone by Obi going off to the bathroom to give himself a face mask, leaving me wondering at what point he managed to find himself travel-sized spa kits in the midst of escaping from prison ships.

There’s a truism floating around SFF writer circles that you have to be a bad writer before you can become a good one. Brandon Sanderson describes on his Writing Excuses podcast that he had to write 7 or 11 or some very large number of novels before he managed to sell his first published one, Elantris. You have to write a million bad words before the good ones start flowing, he says.

I can see the good words getting ready to flow in Jikiemi-Pearson’s writing. But I think there’s still a few hundred thousand bad ones that have to be flushed out first. And fortunately, given her eager, sincere, wildly ambitious approach, she’s well on her way there. But this book is not there yet.

Nerd Coefficient: 5/10, problematic, but has redeeming qualities.

Highlights:

•     Tropes played earnestly straight
•     Black teenagers saving the world
•     Many, many Chosen Ones

Reference: Jikiemi-Pearson, Esmie. The Principle of Moments [Gollancz, 2024].

This movie rushes through its vampire-infested, small Maine town, eschewing exposition in favor of trying desperately to come off as a Mike Flanagan project

Spooky season is upon us! And Max has finally released its modern retelling of Stephen King's classic vampire novel. Interestingly, this movie was shot in 2021, but it's only just now being released. Something definitely happened in the interim, as there are glaringly huge holes in the storytelling—release the 3-hour director's cut now, cowards! After all, the novel on which Salem's Lot is based is incredibly dense, and the 1979 TV-movie version (directed by Tobe Hooper of Texas Chainsaw Massacre) was 2 episodes long and 183 total minutes.

The plot

Ben Sears, a famous writer, has returned to his hometown in Maine to get inspiration for a new book—specifically the old spooky Marsten House. Vampires start showing up, however, and quickly the locals all begin to get turned into bloodsucking, ghoulish creatures of the night. Ben teams up with a shockingly competent child, a local woman, a doctor, and a high school teacher, and together they battle the undead and try to convince the cops to do something.

What works

This movie is slick, and it definitely has some very cool practical effects re: vampire faces. The overall vibe is fun and spooky, and the way crosses light up when vampires are near is very cool. Lewis Pullman—most recognizable as Bob from Top Gun: Maverick—anchors the film very well. Fun note: While watching, I was like, "Man, he looks like Bill Pullman! Wait...Pullman..." then I checked Wikipedia and sure enough, Lewis is his son!

What doesn't

Unfortunately, this new retelling is almost all style and no substance. It wants desperately to be as engaging as any one of the recent Mike Flanagan Netflix shows—think Haunting of Hill House, Bly Manor, and Fall of the House of Usher—but it doesn't quite hit the mark.

The main issue with this movie is that when you adapt a Stephen King novel, you have to spend some time with characters. King creates characters not out of thin air, but out of pages upon pages of fully realized backstory. Either you love it or hate it, of course, but you'll never be able to say that he doesn't make a fully lived-in feeling in his worlds. The parts they do keep tend to be King's rather dated, somewhat clunky dialogue. They should have updated that, too, since they changed other parts.

Salem's Lot (2024) doesn't do this. The film sacrifices tons of much-needed exposition for basically just spooky vampire moments. And even though I hadn't read the book in a few years, I could tell that missing links between characters were just glossed over. Ben and his romantic interest, Susan, have maybe one date and then they're just together. (Interestingly, I was transfixed by the actress who played her, Makenzie Leigh, because she has the most intense case of iPhone Face I've ever seen. (What's iPhone Face, you ask? It's when a modern actor looks a little too modern—as if you're unable to believe they've never not seen a smartphone and are thus out of place in films set in more analog times. The exact of opposite of iPhone Face? Jon Hamm, Eva Green, Keira Knightly).

Reader, even national treasure Alfre Woodard (with a Maine accent) couldn't save this movie.

It's not horrible—you'll have fun on a cool October night if you just want some spooky vibes. But don't expect a lot of backstory or depth. Think surface-level vampire frights that won't keep you up at night.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

POSTED BY: Haley Zapal is a lawyer-turned-copywriter living in Atlanta, Georgia. A co-host of Hugo Award-winning podcast Hugo, Girl!, she posts on Instagram as @cestlahaley. She loves nautical fiction, growing corn and giving them pun names like Timothee Chalamaize, and thinking about fried chicken.

An intriguing deconstruction of the “modern military vs. fantasy creatures” sub-sub-genre

You’ve probably seen the trope before, as it is a not uncommon theme in military fantasy novels. A military unit from our world has to suddenly deal with supernatural creatures, sometimes in our world, sometimes in another dimension. AR-15 rifles versus dragons. Mortars versus orc fortifications. Cavalry charges against entrenched army units. You know the drill. While it is more common in straight-up military SF, there is a burgeoning military sub-sub-genre in fantasy environments as well.

The authors of The Runes of Engagement tackle this theme in an evolving and even deconstructive way. We layer up the background of the story in the opening and throughout the book to get a sense of how and why and what the scenario is. A picture emerges of a world like ours which suddenly was attacked from another realm. There clearly is an Evil Overlord who decided to expand their domain by opening a front onto our world through magical portals. While the Overlord has been beaten back into his original realm, the costs were high enough that America and other forces have gone across to the other world themselves. Modern military forces on the ground in another dimension, with all the problems that implies.A firebase in a hostile environment, surrounded by enemies, is something armed forces know all about, even if it is in another dimension and the hostiles can do magic.

The actual plot spurs from this point on. Various world governments have forces in the alternate dimension and have been seeking allies and connections to help control the portals to Earth and to take the fight to the Overlord. Our focus is on the members of a Marine unit led by one Staff Sergeant Cale. Cale and his forces have been tasked with bringing an important diplomatic asset, Lady Wiela, a Princess in fact, to the portal to Earth. The goal is to get her to negotiate a treaty to gain her and her Elven realm as an important ally against the mutual Dark Overlord enemy. Needless to say, what seems like a complicated but doable trip in helicopters across a short distance to the portal turns into a much more complicated situation. And as always, it is the ground troops, in this case Cale's soldiers, who have to deal when things go sidewise. And they go so very sidewise, as the Marines have to deal with a radically changed mission, dwindling resources, and fearsome opponents.

Where the authors differ from many books in this subgenre, and make the book more open and more interesting to more mainstream SFF readers, is primarily in the tone, as well as the characters and composition of the army, its allies and associates. These are Marines of a modern mindset and era, rather than the more retrograde armed forces of earlier eras which seem to wrongly display themselves as the default mode of military SF and fantasy.

It’s not only that this is a military more in line with modern sensibilities, but the characters are also genre-aware and the authors make excellent use of that. A major throughline across the book is that the Marines, having grown up with (and in some cases been “forced fed”) fantasy books and movies, are most definitely tuned into genre stereotypes and ideas. No one needs to be explained who Tom Bombadil is, they know a 20 on a roll in D&D is a critical hit, and don’t need to be told that orcs are dangerous.

The fun that the authors have with this is that the fantasy realm that the characters are in only sometimes conforms to Tolkienian stereotypes, and sometimes those stereotypes are thrown right out the window. Trolls, for instance, are very much in the mode of Tolkien: dangerous, potent, but vulnerable to sunlight. On the other hand, Ents are not the friendly Treebeard types you find in The Two Towers. Time and again, the characters, genre-aware as they are, comment on what they are experiencing, especially when they are behind the eight ball.

This places The Runes of Engagement in a recent crop of books that is engaging with, deconstructing, commenting on and thinking on the rise of a general consciousness of epic fantasy tropes, ideas, characters and worldbuilding that has infused the mainstream. It’s coming at that consciousness from a different, military-focused angle (and in a real sense trying to drag that subgenre into the more general flow of SFF), but books such as How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying by Django Wexler, or Long Live Evil by Sarah Rees Brennan, among others, are part of this bit of genre conversation. The context of that conversation between these books is still being worked out.

However, it is clear that there is a meta-moment of epic fantasy and fantasy in general inside of the genre, and The Runes of Engagement, with its Marines dumped into the deep end of a situation and a world that only sometimes conforms to their expectations (and is deadly dangerous when it does NOT) is part of that meta-moment. Buckell and Klecha, along with Wexler, Brennan and others, have grown up in a world where genre fantasy is a completely and utterly mainstream mode, and thus can reflect on what that means when perceptions of fantasy for characters or a society run up against an actual fantasy world. This is seen both in the large and small details; the latter, for example, as code phrases are lifted from lines of fantasy books; as well as the characters wondering and speculating why this realm aligns, however imperfectly, with Tolkien and other fantasy works.

Beyond this question of metafiction and the novel’s place in that part of the genre conversation, the book is a highly entertaining narrative of a small unit of soldiers put under stricture and having to work their way through it when things go wrong. The research and getting into the mindset of soldiers is a key to really making this novel feel authentic and relatable. As an example, early in the book, as air support for the Marines, a set of A-10 Warthogs show up to help push back the enemy. Any reader of Mil-SF, or more importantly, anyone who has experience with modern combat in the last 50 years on a battlefield can appreciate the presence of the “infantry’s friend” (and then showing how vulnerable they can be on a modern battlefield when not supported properly). The authenticity of the details of the military experience both big and small is presented for fantasy readers as a piece of worldbuilding that is rendered accessible for anyone who has puzzled through a chunky SF or fantasy novel, rather than incomprehensibility meant only for fans of the subgenre.

And it is a relatively lighthearted, at points funny, novel, and intended to be. Sure, Cale and his Marines are in tight spot after tight spot, but the authors leaven their predicaments and their encounters with good doses of humor, sometimes very dry. After all, the title itself is a pun.

The Runes of Engagement works very well for readers who are not immersed in the tropes and expectations of its subgenre, but are cognizant and immersed in the fantasy tropes that have infused popular culture. The novel stems from a short story and comes to a satisfactory conclusion (with some interesting questions raised). I’d read another novel set in this universe.

Highlights:

We'll valiantly face the terrors we've been lucky to avoid

Carve your pumpkins and don your trashiest costumes! It's the season of vampires and witches, of demons and werewolves, of haunted houses and walking corpses. It's the season when a strange impulse leads otherwise reasonable people to willingly pay for a ticket so they can sit in a dark room full of strangers to watch two hours of entrails being ripped and/or slashed and/or devoured. Come and make yourself comfortable. The dead will rise, blood will spurt like a fire hose, heads will roll.

A few months ago, Nerds of a Feather ran the First Contact series, where our team caught up with a few of the prominent classics that for whatever reason we hadn't had a chance to get to know. This time, we're repeating the experiment, but with Halloween classics: those ugly, scary, big bad monsters with which we've so far had the good fortune of not crossing paths.

Even as I prepare to push play on this rich history of frightening stories, I keep wondering why I'm doing this to myself. I'm a complete chicken when it comes to horror. To this day I still tremble at the memory of that puppet cyclops bird from the 1986 remake of Babes in Toyland, and that scene in V where the alien ate a whole mouse left permanent scars. My generation spent its budget of screams on Freddy Krueger and Michael Myers; I simply have no stomach for whatever happens in Saw or The Conjuring. In theory, I ought to be the last person to want to go through a crash course in horror.

In pragmatic terms, my main reason for doing the First Scare series is the same reason why I did First Contact: the desire to broaden my knowledge of what is out there. But also, my lifelong aversion to horror could use some challenging. Of course, I'll be doing it under controlled conditions, in the safety of my living room, preferably not at midnight. The popularity of horror has always been a mystery to me, so maybe it's time to test for myself what draws people to want to experience fear for fun.

What with taste being subjective and all, it's a possible outcome that I don't succeed at learning why so many enjoy the self-torture of watching expertly filmed stabbings and slashings and curses and exorcisms. It may very well be the case that there's a certain incommunicable something that naturally gifts you with a high tolerance for the sight of blood and rotting guts. Or the taste may be an acquired one. Hoping that it's the latter, I'm going to start at a prudent pace. I don't want to regret the experiment. The family member who without warning introduced me to Cannibal Holocaust certainly didn't have my sensibilities in mind.

Instead, I'll be watching selections from among the early classics, those that form the baseline education of the average horror fan. My fellow reviewers at Nerds of a Feather will surely be at other positions in that ladder, so they're choosing their own starting points. This is also part of the learning process; I expect horror directors to have very different things to say on the same topic before versus after the Satanic Panic, for example.

I'll also be paying attention to which specific elements of the horror aesthetic are those that frighten us. I love the Doctor Who episode "Blink," but I don't find it particularly spooky. Many years ago, I attended a public showing of a slasher movie at a community center. I went with a blind friend, and as I was narrating the movie to him, I realized how boring it was. "The killer runs after her. She runs away. She falls. She stands up. The killer runs after her. She runs away. She falls. She stands up. The killer runs after her..." On the other hand, I have a friend who tells me that the absolute most terrifying movie I've ever shown him was Idiocracy.

So... who knows. This is the rare kind of experiment where the interesting result is the one that's not replicable. As a kid, I had lots of fun with The Twilight Zone, but one episode of The Pink Panther gave me nightmares, and I waited until adulthood to watch Aliens. Now, from here to Halloween, we'll be subjecting ourselves to all forms of monstrosity and evil. I literally don't know what I'm getting into or what I should expect or what the risks are. I suppose that's the right mood for an innocent newcomer entering the horror realm.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

A sprawling, exhaustive (and exhausting?) documentary about folk horror films

This three-plus hour documentary was not what I was expecting. I went into the 2021 documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror expecting something along the lines of a modern-day Haxan, the Danish/Swedish silent 1922 documentary/dramatization discussing the roots of local legends surrounding witches and witchcraft, dating back to the Middle Ages.

Instead, what I got was a survey of some nearly 200 films from (one of my favorites) Robin Hardy's The Wicker Man (1973) all the way through contemporary films like Ari Aster's Midsommar (2019). How they managed to license clips from so many films, from so many countries, to visually tell the story of folk horror films in this documentary is a wonder. I say in all seriousness, hats off to the distributor's legal team. Without the absolute waterfall of clips included in this documentary, the proceedings would be extremely dry and I don't think the film would offer the viewer anything approaching the same level of engagement.  

Written and directed by Kier-La Janisse, the film begins with the "Big Three" of folk horror, Witchfinder General, Satan's Claw, and The Wicker Man. The film touches on the actual events that inspired the first two films -- a depraved religious zealot who exploited the societal breakdown of a civil war in England to amass power to himself and torture people he deemed "witches," and a true-crime case of a child who committed murder and was rumored to be involved in demonic cult, respectively. The popular conception of folk horror films begins with these, and in the minds of most casual viewers familiar with the subgenre, hews mostly to stories set in the British Isles, and usually involving some type of ancient pagan practice persisting unnoticed into the modern day.

But over the next three hours, Wilderness Dark and Days Bewitched then widens the lens beyond the British Isles, and I think this is the real mission of the documentary. It explores films either produced in or set in England, the United States broadly -- its previous colonial incarnation and various Native cultures, New England, and the American South -- Australia, Brazil, Mexico, Russia, Japan, the Philippines, and within Nazi Germany's occult fascination (while gesturing at by not including the Indiana Jones films explicitly). 

The central conversation of folk horror is one between the present and the past. One aspect is that change itself is frightening, both because of the unknown looming on the horizon, but also because of what has been forgotten from the past. There may be traps set, there may be poisons latent in the land itself, in the primordial soup from which modern culture evolved that lie in wait or, worse yet, bear us ill will. The horror comes from our inability to resist these things because we are ignorant of their possibility. This tension exists in every culture, it seems, and so the film makes a compelling argument that folk horror is a global phenomenon.

The film does stumble, however. In some ways, it falls beneath its own weight. Even at 3+ hours, it feels like it merely scratches the surface, and films are mentioned in a clause of a sentence and then gone before much can be done to link them to a larger thought. The documentary may have benefited from a closer look at fewer films in order to tell a more focused story. That lack of focus manifests in another quirk of the film, as well -- the writer/director is one of the interviewees featured throughout, and she is not identified onscreen as the filmmaker. I found myself wondering at the creative choices that led to the author being presented as one of many, rather than a guiding presence. I think the film may have benefited from a stronger authorial voice, rather than the presentation it ultimately went with. 

The breadth of films included also, I think, weakens the central argument of the movie. Here is a sampling of just some of the movies I've seen personally that were excerpted in this documentary: Witchfinder General, The Wicker Man, Burn Witch Burn, Night of the Demon, Dunwich Horror, Lair of the White Worm, Suspiria, The Witch, Let’s Scare Jessica to Death, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Messiah of Evil, The Lottery, Deliverance, The Shining, Poltergeist, I Walked with a Zombie, Serpent and the Rainbow, Ganja & Hess, Candyman, Hour of the Wolf, Midsommar, Black Sabbath. At a certain point, it starts to feel like if everything is folk horror, nothing is folk horror.

The overall impression is of a film that is both too much and not enough, one that introduces compelling ideas but leaves them largely unexplored. Here is a nice YouTube examination of some of the specific areas in which it does that. That said, the steady stream of titles and concepts does propel the documentary, and I found myself not regretting, or even really noticing, the long running time, which I spread out over two evenings.

--

The Math

Highlights: If you like folk horror, or the even-more-specific category of daylight horror, this doc is a revelation of film recommendations; a specific focus on widening the lens to be more inclusive and thoughtful about traditions that are often excluded in film discussions

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10

Posted by Vance K—resident cult film reviewer and co-founder of nerds of a feather, flock together

From king of the world to a cog in the system, Play Nice blows open Blizzard's rise to fame and its fall from grace

Play Nice, the most recent book from renowned journalist Jason Schreier, says all in the title. The book follows the Blizzard from inception to acquisition to scandal. Though the future for the company is rather uncertain (what with the recent Xbox acquisition), the past holds a lot of dramatic development fuel (at least enough for an almost four-hundred-page book). Though I’ve never been a hardcore Blizzard fan, I’ve sunken many hours into Overwatch and was curious to see how some of their development choices unfolded. Instead, I got a whole lot more that I didn't know I wanted.

Schreier begins with Allen Adham and Mike Morhaime’s (Blizzard’s co-founders) initial foray into the industry and hits on every success, cancellation, and acquisition that comes their way. The industry darlings of the 90s continued to pump out hit after hit after hit. The Warcraft, Diablo, and Starcraft franchises were all massive successes, but the history behind each plays out here. For instance, the Diablo team was originally a separate studio that was brought into the company. Play Nice details how Blizzard’s primary Irvine offices contrasted with the Blizzard North, how the two companies’ ethos were at odds, in some cases, with their newly acquired brethren, and at other times in harmony.

Schreier, to his credit, paints this era of booze-fueled frat fantasy video game development in vivid detail, partly from his own description, but mostly from the quotations he managed to secure from the many past and present Blizzard employees. At times the book gets crass, though that is in line with the content being represented. Schreier’s commentary is often comical. At one point he references a past advertisement/mantra that came into being from a past World of Warcraft customer service call. In the background of the call, a man’s wife claims: “This game is why we don’t have sex anymore.”

But the book covers more than the early days. The transition from fraternity game developer to full-time publicly traded company brings with it many issues. Sometimes the dream of becoming big has an entirely different reality, and Schreier finds quotes to help nail that sentiment. The consistent rotating door of executives, owners, and employees left me (never mind the company) on unstable footing. So many names are introduced and quickly discarded that I had to do a double take (or at least flip a few pages back to see if I was still reading about the same person from a few pages ago). Schreier will build up an employee with a bit of backstory, and then not mention them for a while (or ever again), while others stay in the periphery, bouncing back into view every so often. It’s a bit disorienting, but completely understandable considering the company’s thirty-plus-year history of confusion, success, and most recently, scandal.

As someone who is opposed to CEOs making hundreds of times what their workers make, I found it tough to read about the disgusting practices carried out by Activision and Blizzard’s upper management. Developers found it difficult to live while their bosses made millions of dollars. While Schreier brings in voices from all tiers of development, the main focus, especially later on, comes from those affected by the poor policies implemented to ensure that Blizzard would become a profit-first company (as opposed to their initial player-first mentality). Arbitrary rules put in place would see employees compete in unhealthy ways to keep their jobs. Not to mention, all the time that Blizzard continued to put out hit games with commercial success (including in their early days), their staff was paid less than other studios. To work for Blizzard was its own sort of payment.

One of my main issues with the book is the inconsistent timeline. The book, overall, is chronological, following the earliest days of Blizzard to the recent Microsoft acquisition and layoffs. At some points, however, Schreier goes back in time to discuss other projects and put emphasis on things in a time that I thought I had already moved past. So, like with the many different employees that are mentioned and dropped, I found myself flipping back to make sure I knew where I was chronologically. Again, it's hard to fault Schreier for this, considering the studio had multiple projects in the works, and he tried his best to cover each with their own highlight. Despite some of the timelines coming into conflict, it’s digestible, even if I needed to take a few moments to review my notes. Minus some poor fool pressing Enter and starting a new paragraph instead of the space bar multiple times, another issue I have is how Schreier ends each chapter. Almost every chapter ends with what feels like a dun, dun, dun… To Be Continued. Look, I get it, but the content is interesting enough. It isn't necessary, and eventually comes off as unintentionally comical.

Discovering many of the intricacies of not only Blizzard, but Activision, Vivendi, and Davidson & Associates (Blizzard’s original parent company), and how the company and its parent companies work (or don't work) was incredibly insightful. The constant bureaucracy from Blizzard’s owners and eventual erosion of what made the studio unique and successful slowly begins to creep up on you as you read through the book, and it’s quite fascinating to see it unfold. From the sexual assault scandals to poor implementation of morale-destroying policy to leeching almost all creative juice from the teams in favor of profit, Play Nice covers one of most influential video game studios of all time with vivid clarity. Thanks to the many interviews Schreier conducted to make this book, it feels like a triumph for those poorly affected by ABK’s (Activision Blizzard King) harmful policy and in some cases inadequate response to employee grievances. While I think Schreier should have waited a bit longer to see how Microsoft and ABK’s merger plays out over a longer period, the content here is informative and reflective of an ever-changing industry. If one wants insight into how one of the most beloved developers in the world has become a shell of what it once was, this is the best way to do it.

Posted by: Joe DelFranco - Fiction writer and lover of most things video games. On most days you can find him writing at his favorite spot in the little state of Rhode Island.

A creepy character study that holds up over time

This year marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Oscar-nominated cerebral horror film The Sixth Sense. I consumed a fair amount of Bruce Willis content during his heyday, but this one escaped me. At the time, I wasn’t in the mood for creepy content, so I took a pass. Over the years, the film became a classic, showing up on best of lists, particularly for best plot twists. Thanks to the internet and repeated discussions of the film, many elements of the story were unavoidable even for non-viewers. As a result, the “twist” at the end was spoiled for me long before I saw it this month. But instead of making me less interested, the fact of the twist made me more fascinated by a story that I previously imagined as creepy and subdued. Now, in honor of our First Scare project, I have finally watched M. Night Shaymalan’s award-winning The Sixth Sense.

The story follows Dr. Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis), a successful child psychologist in Philadelphia, who works with troubled children. The film opens with Malcolm celebrating a prestigious lifetime award for his work in child psychology. His loving wife Anna (Olivia Williams) is proud of him even though she notes that his success has come at the cost of putting other aspects of his life second, including her. However, she says it’s worth it for the children he has helped. This comment serves up an ironic twist of fate: their celebration is cut short when Vincent Grey (Donnie Wahlberg), a former patient, breaks into their home and accuses Malcolm of misdiagnosing him and failing him. The psychotic, distraught, mostly naked teen suddenly shoots Malcolm and kills himself while Anna rushes to stop Malcolm’s bleeding.

Later we see a recovered Malcolm starting to work with another troubled little boy, Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osment). Grade-school-aged Cole has what seems to be delusions and is generally maladjusted and often bullied by other children for his odd and awkward behavior. Malcolm wants to focus on helping Cole as a way to atone for his perceived failure with Vincent Grey. In the process of visiting and interviewing Cole, we meet Cole’s stressed single mother, Lynn (Toni Collette), trying to support her emotionally troubled son. As the therapeutic meetings continue, we also see the world through Cole’s eyes and discover the first plot twist of the story and the explanation for Cole’s stress: as Cole himself explains it to Malcolm, “I see dead people.” Throughout the film, through Cole’s eyes, we see glimpses of half-burned people, hanging people, bloodied or poisoned people lurking around Cole and sometimes interacting with him. The sudden appearances are nicely creepy and provide quite a lot of jump scares. Later we find out why the child is haunted, and we find out a second important plot twist detail about the ghosts surrounding him.

In addition to his work with Cole, Malcolm also struggles with his relationship with his wife Anna. She seems to be distant from him and is generally melancholy to the point of ignoring him. Ironically, the child Cole, at the end of the film, is the one able to give psychologist Malcom advice on how to reconnect with his wife. That reconnection leads to the last big plot twist.

The most powerful thing about the film is Haley Joel Osment’s stunning child acting. His somber, melancholy, moody portrayal of a little haunted boy is quietly mesmerizing, poignant, and creepy. At times, his sweet, young face and soft voice are tragically endearing. At other times, he becomes angry and cruel, adding an extra layer of scariness and complexity to the story. Mostly, he is coldly and defeatedly accepting of his fate of suffering in a world of abusive children and disbelieving adults. The film has a lot of great (but likely unintentional) messaging about the importance of listening to and believing suffering children. The other excellent aspect of the film is Toni Collette. She delivers a great performance as Cole’s long-suffering mother, who is trying to protect her son from bullies while dealing with her own frustrations at his inexplicably odd behavior.

My least favorite aspect of the film was, ironically, Malcolm. My issue is not with Bruce Willis himself—he does a fine job playing basically the same type of character he normally plays (from Moonlighting to Die Hard). But the character of Malcolm is written in a way that is mildly annoying. His handling of the break-in is confusing. His decision to help Cole is ultimately a self-serving way to try to clear his conscience. But when things get tough with Cole, he decides to abandon the child. Ultimately it is the child, Cole, who helps Malcolm find peace, and Cole is most helped in the end by his final emotional exchange with his mother.

The Sixth Sense is my favorite kind of horror film, quietly cerebral and creepy. I’m surprised at how well it has held up over time. For a film that’s twenty-five years old, it still feels mostly timeless rather than dated (other than some passing comments on divorce and a surprising lack of diversity for a story set in Philadelphia). Despite knowing the big twist in advance, I still felt engaged with the main character, Cole. And for me, it’s all about character, even in a horror film.

Highlights:

POSTED BY: Ann Michelle Harris—Multitasking, fiction-writing Trekkie currently dreaming of her next beach vacation.

The one with the intense stares

Tod Browning's Dracula is derived from a 1924 stage adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel, and it shows. It keeps several of the hallmarks of a traditional theater script: lengthy infodumps via dialogue; time jumps that relegate some plot developments (especially the violent ones) to the implicit space between scenes; extended, continuous use of the same set for several consecutive conversations; and a marked preference for telling over showing. I understand that Western theater has a long tradition of keeping the violence offstage; what I cannot understand is how, when you translate the stage play into a movie, you produce what eventually becomes the most memorable, most revered, most iconic interpretation of The vampire without showing me one single instance of biting.

It goes without saying that Bela Lugosi carries this movie on his shoulders. Despite the excessive wordiness of the script, the obviously fake bat puppets, the lack of a music soundtrack, and the scattered, ill-advised attempts at humor, it only takes one look at the titular vampire's intense gaze to fall under his spell. When he's not engaged in the social pantomime of small talk, in a strenuous but futile effort to pass as a hot-blooded, cheerful human, his presence fills the screen with an unblinking, commanding aura of evil. Wikipedia tells me that almost a dozen actors were considered for the role, but now that I've seen the movie, the possibility of giving the Count any other face strikes me as inconceivable.

Fancy clothes and impeccable haircut aside, this version of the vampire is still very close to Nosferatu, an almost irrational monster guided by the hunting instinct, without the sentimental appeal that later reinventions would add to the archetype to create a more relatable figure, desperate to find love but cursed to see people only as food. When his character is free from the need to pretend to be a normal human, Lugosi puts on the face of a predator, giving his victims not the natural recognition of a fellow person but the hungry stare of a beast preparing to jump. He delivers a terrific performance, which anticipates later occurrences of the single-minded, uncaring killer that can be found in Alien or The Terminator.

The liberties taken with the source material are a double-edged sword. For one part, the early scenes about a real estate lawyer visiting the Count's castle are given to Renfield instead of Jonathan Harker, a change that strengthens the causal cohesion between the first and second acts. Also, Dr. Seward, who is in charge of the hospital where Renfield ends up locked in, is rewritten to be Mina's father instead of Lucy's suitor, which gives the Count a convenient reason to get close to Mina. The downside is that the role of Jonathan Harker is greatly diminished, Mina is reduced to sexy lamp status, and Lucy's death and subsequent undeath lose the weight they should have in the plot. There isn't even a scene to purify Lucy's corpse; she's simply forgotten halfway through the movie.

From our position in this century, accustomed to hundreds of variations on the vampire mythos, it would seem easy to forgive such misfires; there's always another version out there with its own aesthetic, its own vision, its own reinterpretation of the story. But in 1931, Dracula was yet to enter the public domain. The choices made by Universal Pictures did more than express artistic freedom: they set canon. There's an entire period in the history of horror during which Universal's Dracula was the only authorized Count on screen. Just like the present generation only knows Ian McKellen's version of Gandalf, and will forever think of Gandalf in that image, there was a generation whose idea of the Count was shaped by Bela Lugosi's acting style. It's the kind of first-mover advantage that forces every subsequent moviemaker to make their art as a response to it.

The irony is that Nosferatu came first, however illegally, which makes Universal's Dracula, for all its intentions of defining the character on its own terms, a response. Whereas Orlok is a cadaveric nightmare heralded by pestilence, Lugosi's Count comes across as a dusty relic of the Ancien Régime, a ruler over the human heart who repays obedience with madness. Both are corrupted, bloodthirsty abominations, but Lugosi's version knows the tricks of a stage magician, most notably the dramatic effect of a well-timed fog machine. Moreover, Nosferatu is silent, while Dracula lets Lugosi make full use of his heavy Hungarian accent to leverage the audience's learned Orientalism. Orlok feels like the fearsome Other because he's a walking corpse; Lugosi's Count feels like the fearsome Other because he's a foreigner with weird tastes.

My notion of the vampire was shaped by the film adaptation of Interview with the Vampire and Coppola's reinvention of Bram Stoker's material (plus smatterings of The Munsters Today, Forever Knight, Count Duckula, Drak Pack, and Scooby-Doo and the Ghoul School). Somehow I never came into relevant contact with Dark Shadows, Salem's Lot, Hellsing, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Castlevania, True Blood, or The Vampire Diaries. I did meet Blade, Underground, Vampire: The Masquerade, and Twilight, although at an age too late for them to influence my personal mythology. (Namely: if you ask me to think of vampires, the thing about sunlight that hurts them is not the UV light, they are not at war with werewolves, they have no connection with Biblical characters, and they Do. Not. Sparkle.) I don't view vampires as tragic figures or forbidden seducers; I view them as the perfect symbol for the parasitic nature of aristocracy.

Alas, I am a child of my time. This version of Dracula didn't particularly frighten me. Some of the scenes where the Count uses his mind control powers straddle the very thin line between the sublime and the ridiculous, and the uneven editing kills all sense of dramatic momentum in the last third. Worst of all, in consonance with the theatrical conventions of its time, but absurdly for a big classic of horror, we're not allowed to see the Count die. I feel sorry for the masterful lead actor who was dragged into this less than expertly made movie.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

The new law of the jungle is survival of the kindest

With an eye-catching art style reminiscent of its earlier masterpiece Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, DreamWorks' adaptation of Peter Brown's 2016 novel The Wild Robot gives off a warm aura that soothes and uplifts the weary soul. This is a surprisingly deep story for such a contained scenario: it begins in the near future, when a shipment of domestic helper robots crashes against the rocky coast of a small island, leaving only one surviving robot. The emotional nucleus of the movie concerns the incompatible values between a creature built to serve and the law of the jungle.

For all the cuteness in its visual design, the island is not a safe place: every creature there seeks its own survival, and that pursuit is often bloody. Inasmuch as the island can be said to constitute a society, it's one built on mutual hostility. It's eat or be eaten. And here's where our protagonist, which doesn't need to eat and cannot be eaten, will try to find a place and a purpose.

In the original novel, the author's note explains, "animal instincts are kind of like computer programs." Both computers and animals have certain core routines that they follow automatically. The relevant instincts/programs in dispute here are, on one side, those of the wildlife, organized around relations of competition and predation; and on the other side, those of an obedient machine, designed for relations of altruism. Will the friendly newcomer succumb to the hierarchy of violence, or will the ubiquitous hostility of nature adapt to accommodate a gentler touch?

What ends up happening is that the two types of programs exchange useful routines. Our protagonist, the stranded robot, acquires a new type of relation: responsibility. After accidentally destroying a goose nest, the next logical task is to take care of the only surviving egg. And the closed environment of the island also acquires a new type of relation: openness. The robot's presence and the way it disrupts the usual flow of the circle of life force the various creatures, big and small, to reconsider the roles they've been unthinkingly performing up to that point.

By the rules of the jungle, that egg ought to have perished. But our robot, without realizing it, introduces love into the cold equations of survival. For their part, the animals in the island do have some inborn notion of emotional attachment, but it's restricted to members of their respective species. It ought to be unthinkable for a goose to love a being that is not-a-goose. And yet, the miracle happens. A piece of machinery with no role to play in the food chain becomes a friend, a mother, a leader, a heroine. What until then had been a battlefield of all against all becomes a home.

One has to allow for a certain measure of poetic license in a story like this. The characters that the movie presents as becoming companions forged in adversity include several natural enemies; while witnessing the formation of a cross-species alliance to defend the island, one isn't meant to think too hard about which of those comrades the bear and the fox will need to eat tomorrow.

No, there are more urgent concerns. Our protagonist has owners, and they're eager to recover their property. Scattered hints indicate that this world has undergone a serious climate catastrophe, and the robot helpers are crucial to maintaining the standard of life of what appears to be a very limited human population. On top of that, this particular robot has learned to communicate with animals and earn their cooperation, making those digital memories valuable beyond measure. The threat left unspoken is that the same humankind that let ecological disaster happen at a global scale wouldn't recoil at the chance to turn the animal kingdom into another tool to control.

The movie doesn't lose sight of these macro events while it aims a finely sharpened scalpel at the audience's heart with its poignant interpersonal drama. The anxieties of sudden parenthood and the insecurities of growing up feeling different don't change substantially when your family is composed of a gosling that can't figure out small talk (let alone swimming and flying), a fox that used to try to eat said gosling multiple times, and a helper robot that inadvertently killed the gosling's family. And these messy, profoundly incompatible, woefully unprepared characters manage to create exactly the kind of unbreakable love bonds that can save a community.

All this is clothed in the most exquisite colors digital cinema is capable of. The Wild Robot is not only a hard punch right in the feels; it's a banquet of textures and shapes and deftly timed movement. One is simultaneously overcome with the personal catharsis evoked by the main family plot (complete with tears of bittersweet self-recognition) and a sense of historic good fortune for being alive at a time when such heights of visual artistry can be reached. Combined with its spectacular soundtrack, the experience of watching this movie is, without exaggeration, unforgettable.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

The one sadly afflicted with pink eye

A few years ago, I did the experiment of watching all three film versions of Carrie on one day. It taught me a lot about the minutiae of adaptational choices: what effect it has if a certain dialogue scene is moved to a different moment in the story, what actions need to be condensed if a location is removed, how far an emotional setup needs to be from its eventual payoff. (My verdict is that 2013 has the best Margaret, 1976 has the best Carrie, and 2002 has the best prom massacre.) Watching various adaptations of Dracula is turning out to be a similar learning experience, with Terence Fisher's 1958 film a fascinating example of how drastically you can strip down a story while keeping its core intact.

If I was surprised by how much the 1931 film shuffled around the novel's characters, this version goes even further: Renfield and the sanatorium are entirely removed, as is Dracula's journey by ship, while Dr. Seward is reduced to a very minor role. Arthur is now Lucy's brother instead of suitor, and he's married to Mina. The bulk of the action is moved from England to Germany so that trips to and from Transylvania are less impractical. The most consequential change is that Jonathan Harker doesn't visit Castle Dracula as an innocent clerk bringing paperwork, but as a sort of secret agent already tasked with killing the vampire. This means that it's not the Count who lures Jonathan to his land, but Jonathan who takes the initiative to seek the Count. It also means that the Count's evil nature is known all along, so he doesn't get to mingle with human society.

Removing the Count's pretense of being a normal human massively reduces the contact he can have with the rest of the cast, which forces the director to make the most of his very few on-screen appearances. The tradeoff works: this is one of those monster movies where we get to see the monster very rarely, but each time we do, it lands with full impact.

The changes to the whole Jonathan/Mina/Lucy axis help provide a practical solution to the biggest loose thread in the novel: why did Count Dracula want to leave Transylvania in the first place? In this interpretation, Jonathan sneaks into the castle crypt in the first act and kills the Count's bride, who may or may not be desperate to be rid of the vampiric curse. This event gives the Count a clear motivation: you take my bride, I take yours. And that's why he goes after Lucy, who in this version is Jonathan's fiancée.

Jonathan doesn't make it past the first act alive (for which I was thankful, what with actor John Van Eyssen being rather mediocre in the role), so the film promptly shifts to introducing Dr. Van Helsing, who ends up being the true protagonist. As Van Helsing, Peter Cushing does a stellar job. He's helped by the script, which cleverly remolds the novel's crusader/pest exterminator into a detective-esque figure. He's apparently been on Dracula's trail for a while, and he frames his mission in terms of protecting the world from what could become a plague of vampirism.

However, precisely because the story has been stripped down to the basics, this whole talk of a threat to the world sounds incongruous. The action is confined to about half a dozen sets, beyond which the rest of society might as well not exist. Van Helsing does visit a customs officer and an undertaker in the course of his investigation, but those spaces just play their part and are quickly done with. If not for the dialogues, we wouldn't even know that Arthur and Mina are living in Germany instead of England. And the Count doesn't help sell his menace factor either; he's more interested in replacing his dead bride than in going on a biting rampage. The main conflict in this film is a strictly private affair, but the dialogues insist that Dracula sits at the head of a "reign of terror" that must be defeated yet is nowhere to be seen.

So instead of the usual dynamic in a Dracula story of the foreign Other quietly invading the civilized metropolis, here we have the civilized heroes going out into the land of the foreign Other to stamp down the threat it represents. Not a very subtle sentiment for a film produced while the Cold War was getting started (it doesn't escape the viewer that the undertaker's shop where the Count first goes to hide has the last name Marx, of all things).

This version of the vampire doesn't bother with theatrics. No beastly transformation, no fog cloud, no magical stares. His power is raw, brutal hunger (and his female victims welcome his assault with equal hunger). When he finally meets Van Helsing, he doesn't try to control his mind, as in the 1931 movie; here he goes straight for the jugular, and is only thwarted because he lets himself grow overconfident.

For a limited special effects budget, Dracula's death in this movie is impressive. Instead of erupting in flames when exposed to the sun, he simply crumbles down into a pile of ashes. It's very simple, very repulsive, and very effective. Unfortunately, the Technicolor process left many scenes more illuminated than they're implied to be, which makes it look like Dracula is walking outdoors under more sunlight than he should, so the dramatic shock of having the sun hit his face at the end is somewhat less effective. Still, this is a enjoyable watch. It's like going to the doctor's office for a needle jab: just the briefest glimpse of blood, and it's over before you feel any pain.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

This Japanese cult classic is a psychedelic romp that doesn't so much scare as bewilder

I'm a haunted house aficionado. I love all the tropes—the happy family finding a deal despite a sordid past, the bad smells, the stopped clocks, the distant fathers who can't stop chopping wood. I love it all. If we're being completely honest, The Conjuring is my idea of a perfect scary movie. Spooks, vibes, demons—that's what I'm looking for in horror.

But at this point, finding a haunted house movie from a different culture and time period felt like a must-do. House had always been on my periphery, though I'm not very knowledgeable on Japanese horror (apart from crossover hits like Ringu). Needless to say, I was prepared for some very grim and dark storytelling.

I went in blind, of course, but no one told me that it's technically comedy horror. That's a horse of a different color! House is like someone mixed together a Luis Buñuel film, a Benny Hill short, and an after-school special from the 1970s— complete with schlocky rock soundtrack.

It's known as a beloved as a cult classic in Japan, and I can definitely see how that came to be. I, too, have my cheesy Halloween movie from the past that I adore: It's The Worst Witch, featuring Tim Curry and a young Fairuza Balk.

House was directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi, who was approached by Toho studios in the '70s with the instructions to "make a movie like Jaws." It's unclear how he took that direction, exactly, but I will say that he definitely made something unlike anything I've ever seen.

The film follows a group of schoolgirls who travel to visit the reclusive aunt of one of them and spend the night in her huge house in the countryside. It's very clearly haunted, and over the course of the evening, girls disappear and die in mysterious ways—namely through traumatic deaths featuring household items such as:

• Mattresses
• A piano
• A grandfather clock
• Lamps

While it definitely won't scary anyone, I recommend that everyone checks out House, if only for the sheer surreal experience of it.

POSTED BY: Haley Zapal, new NoaF contributor and lawyer-turned-copywriter living in Atlanta, Georgia. A co-host of Hugo Award-winning podcast Hugo, Girl!, she posts on Instagram as @cestlahaley. She loves nautical fiction, growing corn and giving them pun names like Timothee Chalamaize, and thinking about fried chicken.