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tlbodine · 5 months ago

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Fae Horrors: Pyewacket & The Wretched

The loose theme this week was "stuff in the woods, and kids not being taken seriously." We're in North America for a change this time around, with a pair of films I quite liked!

Pyewacket (2017) is a Canadian horror-thriller written and directed by Adam MacDonald. It's about a gothy-witchy teenager, Leah, who's having a tough time with her mom after her dad's death. Her mom is an erratic mess whose grief has made her selfish and resentful, and she's making Leah's life hell as a result. When she decides (without consulting her kid) to uproot their lives and move into a remote cabin in the woods for a fresh start, Leah retaliates by performing a ritual to make her mom go away.

It works, in the worst way imaginable.

This was really good. It's a slow burn and there are some places I think could have been explained better, but the characters feel real and relatable. Fair warning when you watch this that if you have problems with your own mom or emotional abuse that this could be a rough watch.

In terms of fae creatures, this one is more of a demon summoning, although it's kind of vague what exactly is being summoned and what the rules are. As with Errimentari the week prior, I'm including "demons" in the fae bucket as long as they can be bargained with, because I think demonic pacts and fae bargains are essentially the same thing from an anthropological and folklore perspective. See my latest Patreon post for details.

Films with similar vibes:

The Craft

Goodnight Mommy

Next up is The Wretched, 2019, written and directed by The Pierce Brothers. I'd seen this one floating around but avoided it out of fear it would be yet another "wendigo" story, but I am happy to report that for once we have white filmmakers using the imagery of Creepy Deer Thing In The Forest in a non-appropriative and actually imaginative manner! Do wonders never cease!

Story here has a cool framing device - it's primarily through the POV of a teenager spending the summer with his dad, but most of the action is next door where a family has unwittingly invited Something inside. The creature is a body-stealing, memory-modifying hag that likes to eat children, and our intrepid teenage hero might be the only one who sees what's happening.

This movie is great, through and through. The writing is tight and clean and the story fits together neatly, and I really enjoyed the characters, particularly the pathologically responsible lead. I ALSO respect a child endangerment film that isn't scared to straight up murder kids once in a while. Highly recommended.

Films with similar vibes:

Sinister

Bagman (but don't watch this, watch The Wretched instead)

A Tale of Two Sisters

#horror movies #fae horrors #the wretched #pyewacket #horror

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bereft-of-frogs · 6 months ago

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disorganized best (and worst) books/films/shows of 2024

I finished 68 books, watched 105 films and 35 TV shows, and finished 3 games.

Honestly, the math might be off because it turns out this was a terrible idea. At the start of the year I was like 'oh it will be fun to do one big list!' It was not fun to do one big list. It was really hard to keep count. I already have a plan for next year, it's going to be much more organized. If you can decipher these lists feel free to ask me for a review about any entry on the list.

This isn't really going to be a top 5 or 10 or anything because I felt like it would be more fun just to kind of highlight my favorites (and least favorites) rather than forcing myself to pick a specific number. Fits the theme of disorganization like the lists above.

Onwards!

I had a really good TV year, book and film were a little more meh, not a lot is sticking out in the same way the best TV shows are:

SILO!!! (AppleTV). I'll be real honest, I started watching this because post-Dune Part II, I had a crush on Rebecca Ferguson. It had NO BUSINESS being this good for a show I was exclusively watching disrespectfully for Rebecca Ferguson wearing tank tops. That doesn't usually work out this well for me. But it is so good. There are flaws but also no there aren't, because it's made so earnestly that some of the shakier acting performances and awkward dialogue moments just don't matter to me. It's almost like the shows I used to watch on SyFy Fridays except with AppleTV money and production values. Which makes it so fun.

Severance (AppleTV). This is where I really knew I was in trouble with AppleTV. I was not going to be cancelling that free trial. This show is SO good and I cannot wait for the new season in a couple weeks.

AppleTV honestly kind of killed it this year, I also really enjoyed Dark Matter and Constellation, which both meet my criteria for multiverse shows, aka 'could these be branches of The OA's multiverse tree'. I've also been really enjoying Shrinking, even though it's not my usual genre. I'm so mad I signed up for a free trial and then got so completely hooked on the quality of their shows that I've continued to subscribe long after the trial ended. Outrageous. How dare they be making such excellent, high quality television. I'm appalled.

Giri/Haji (Netflix). It turns out that the show that keeps appearing on 'hidden gems of streaming' is good actually. WHO KNEW? The excellent characters and performances really elevated this gang war crime drama.

Scavenger's Reign (Originally HBO, but I watched it on Netflix). This show was gorgeous and so creative. I'm so sad they're not getting a second season. I cried twice. It was short but it made an impact.

Special Film Category: Films that Actually Scared Me.

Since I mainly watch horror, I significant marker of quality for me is if I actually get scared watching a movie and two movies genuinely freaked me out this year: Oddity (2024) and Pyewacket (2017). For both, there were moments where I was like 'oh no I don't want to go to bed alone tonight'. Normally I love living alone. Regretted it only after these movies. The concept of the murder in Oddity was enough to freak me out but even outside of the inciting incident, it kept delivering with the deeply unsettling scenes. Pyewacket wasn't perfect, I think Adam MacDonald is the kind of filmmaker who builds a whole film based off one scene he has in his mind and the rest of film isn't quite as strong as that one scene. But that scene is so disturbing and I haven't stopped thinking about it. (Same with his Backcountry (2017), it was fairly weak except for this ONE scene that I'll never get out of my head.)

Also Dune Part II was pretty great, super glad I saw it on IMAX and I'm pretty sure it's like half the reason Hans Zimmer ended up on my Spotify top 5 this year. (Interstellar was the other half, SO glad I finally after a decade got to see it on IMAX!)

For books, I really enjoyed The Fishermen by John Langan. It's a great meditation on death, AND had a dark ocean, which you know I love.

Silver In the Wood by Emily Tesh's only crime was how short it was! I do still have to pick up the sequel, but I was definitely down for a full length novel of this.

This was the year I also discovered I CAN listen to audiobooks, which is part of why my count is higher than ever. I'm not done with this but I've been listening to Leviathan Wakes by James SA Corey and really liking it. I'm hoping to read the whole of that series in 2025.

Also, of course, while the quality of the individual books varied, my marathon of the Star Wars High Republic series was probably the most fun I've had with a series in years. Looking forward to the last couple books in 2025, though I'm sad to see it end.

worst of the year + notable DNFs under the cut so you don't have to scroll past my griping if you want to stay positive on this New Year's Dat. I'll reveal the list here in case I am saying mean things about your fave and you don't want to click the readmore: The Acolyte, Ronin by Emma Mieko Canton, City of Brass by SA Chakraborty, Aurora by David Koepp, Episode Thirteen by Craig DiLouie

The Acolyte (Disney+). Ok first off, I don't want to downplay that the experience of watching The Acolyte was one of my top of the year. Watching and theorizing week-to-week, live reaction posting, my High Republic book marathon leading up to it, those parts were SO fun. However. The longer I think about this show, the more I just cannot ignore how bad the structural issues are. This is even setting aside my personal issues with the show -- mainly the second-half pivot toward the enemies-to-lovers romance that really didn't land for me, and the treatment of Vernestra's character, and some of the things Headland said in interviews. The two full flashback episodes with no framing devices or any content in the present is just...bad television structure. I mean the first one just dumped on us was bad enough, but the second one where the episode before looked like it was setting up a framing for the flashback, only for the finale to be like 'never mind, that's not what was happening at all', was absurd. I dream of living in the branch of the multiverse where this is properly edited. Imagine how good it could have been, if the flashbacks were properly cut into the primary story, and we had more development of all the characters? Every time I watched something this year with extensive flashbacks (The Head, Dune: Prophecy, Black Doves, Giri/Haji) I thought 'alas, what if??' I think what happened though is Headland came up with the Rashomon comparison early and didn't change when the story would have been better served by not doing the conflicting perspective Rashomon thing, and using a more normal flashback structure.

There were good things! The fight choreography was truly excellent, episode 5 was a standout, and it didn't deserve the hate it got from toxic fans, but ultimately it had more downsides for me than up and I can't say I was particularly disappointed when it wasn't renewed. Though even that wasn't really deserved because it's FAR from the only Disney+ show to have really deep structural issues. Most of their series actually just aren't very good television. This isn't even the first time I had a great experience watching something and was engaged enough to write fic for it, only to in hindsight realize how flawed it was. (Loki came first, then Obi-Wan Kenobi, though the fic inspired by The Acolyte is shaping up to be the longest -- the others really only got short oneshots, I'm looking at a beast with this fic, 40k and counting!) And unless Disney+ makes some major changes in the TV production wing...I doubt it will be the last.

Ronin by Emma Mieko Canton (DNF). Technically, I would say this book isn't bad and why I labeled this section 'notable DNFs' as well. I think it's a good example of the way that concepts work really well in some formats, and don't translate well to others. I LOVE Visions, and I love "The Duel", specifically because the studios aren't bound by Star Wars canon. The open creativity of that series is a feature, not a bug. But I didn't find it translated well to the longer format of the book. I would follow the plot for a while and then get absolutely thrown by worldbuilding or backstory I couldn't follow. I think it needed more exposition. It was kind of odd that it was written like any other licensed book that didn't need exposition, but it was so different from standard canon it was hard to follow and I ended up giving up.

City of Brass by SA Chakraborty. I tried, babes, I tried. Everything said to make it to 50% and it would get better but I just could not do it. Nahri was so deeply annoying and I wasn't engaged enough in the rest of the plot to keep going. If she 'realized' one more thing I was going to lose my entire mind. I'm sorry.

Aurora by David Koepp. This is another where, like Ronin, it's not technically bad. I just ended up getting kind of pissed off by the end. It felt like it was trying to be Station Eleven but was too cynical. And maybe just now because my parents live in an area that gets a lot of power outages, I was kind of pissed that he reduced the accomplishment of getting the power grid working again to one line towards the end. I would have been way more interested to hear about that collective effort over the 'the suburbs make a utopian commune while all those scary urban people immediately descended into chaos' thing.

Episode Thirteen by Craig DiLouie. I feel so bad for saying this, but Craig DiLouie just wasn't intellectual enough to achieve what he was aiming for in this. Or at least he didn't put enough time or effort in to developing th? It couldn't counteract the truly stupid moments like the time when a character says he's going to shoot a ghost. But hey, it did lead to a reread of House of Leaves and further appreciation for one of my favorite underrated found footage films, As Above So Below. Because that was the crux of my problem with this book, that it wasn't well thought out enough to be House of Leaves and it didn't have enough heart to be As Above So Below.

I don't know why almost all of my least favorites this year were books, I guess I just have a lot of opinions on books. I also tend to DNF books less, so I end up having more negative thoughts about books, whereas with TV or film if I don't like it I just don't finish it or don't pay attention.

Congratulations for getting to the end. Again, feel free to ask thoughts about anything else on the list if you want (and can read it). I promise it will be more organized next year. Happy New Year! What were your favorite/least favorite things this year?

#2024 wrap up #silo apply tv #severance apple tv #giri/haji netflix #scavenger's reign netflix #oddity #pyewacket #silver in the wood #the high republic #the fisherman #long post

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