#gets eaten by the love interest who plot twist is an alien

[stevesbipanic]

Joe Quinn is gonna start getting type cast as the actor that gets eaten by monsters.

[rallamajoop]

...and the unironic joys of better living through chemistry

How do I love Venom: The Hunger, let me count the ways…

It’s by far the shippiest Venom/Eddie story to come out of the character’s heyday. It’s the only story of the era to treat Venom’s violent wild-animal instincts not as an immutable fact, but as something that can be managed. It pulls off an aesthetic like nothing else that was being done at the time.

And then there’s the way it says, Does the world around you seem sinister and foreboding? Do you lie awake at night contemplating metaphorical oceans of despair? Well shit, son – have you considered you may be suffering from a mundane neurochemical imbalance, and a round of the right meds could clear that right up for you?

It does all this without breaking the atmosphere, without a whiff that our story has been interrupted for a Very Special Message about mental health.

In the near-decade since I was first prescribed anti-depressants, I don’t think I’ve read another story that lands the message “Sometimes, it’s not you, it’s just your brain chemistry,” so well.

Fair warning: if you have not read The Hunger, I am about to spoil every major plot point. If you have, well, maybe I can still give you a new appreciation for a few details you might have missed.

It’s a strange book, whatever else you take from it. It’s almost the only thing either author or artist contributed to the Venom canon, and it’s so different stylistically and tonally from the 90′s Venom norm that it feels like a tale from some noir-elseworlds setting instead of 616 canon. When you take risks that big with a property, you leave yourself precious little landing space between 'unmitigated triumph’ and ‘abject failure’: if this book hadn’t absolutely nailed it, I’d be dismissing it as edgy, OOC dreck. Fortunately, if The Hunger is nothing else, it is a story that $&#@ing commits – to basically everything it does.

Now, I'm not going to tell you Venom: The Hunger is a story about overcoming depression, because I don't know whether author Len Kaminski even thought about it that way while working on it. There's always space for other readings, and this one take is not gospel. That said: holy shit is this thing unsubtle with its metaphors. And with that in mind, let’s start by talking a little about Kaminski’s take on Eddie himself.

As I may have mentioned before, I like to divide 90′s Eddie into two broad personas: the Meathead, and the Hobo.

Kaminski’s Eddie nominally belongs in the angsty, long-haired Hobo incarnation, but that’s a bit of a simplification: this version certainly has plenty of angst and plenty of hair to his name – but nowhere, not even at his lowest ebb, does he doubt that he and his Other are meant for each other, which is usually Hobo!Eddie’s primary existential quandary.

He’s also taken up narrating his own life like a hardboiled PI.

So that’s... novel.

The only other time Eddie’s sounded like this is, er, in that one other Venom one-shot Kaminski penned (Seed of Darkness, a prequel that sadly isn’t in The Hunger’s league), so I think we can safely file it under authorial ticks.

Then again, Hobo!Eddie’s always been one melodramatic SOB, so maybe this is just how he’d sound after learning to channel his angst into his poetry. You can’t argue it fits the aesthetic, anyway.

We’d also be remiss not to mention Ed Halsted’s art, which I can only describe as gothic-meets-noir-meets-H.R.-Giger. Never before or since has the alien symbiote looked this alien: twisted with Xenompoph-like ridges and veins.

But Halsted doesn’t treat Venom to all that extra detail in every panel. Instead, the distortion tends to appear when the symbiote is separated from Eddie or out of control – and I doubt you need me to walk you through the symbolic importance of that creative decision. More importantly, Halsted’s art provides exactly the class of visuals that Kaminski’s story needs.

Did I mention this is a horror story? You might be surprised how few Venom stories really fit that genre, but if all those adjectives about Halsted’s style above didn’t clue you in, this is one of them.

Anyway, with that much context covered, let’s get into the main narrative of this thing.

As our first issue opens, Eddie’s world has become a dark and foreboding place. He’s not sleeping, though he mostly brushes this off. (Fun fact: trouble sleeping is one of those under-appreciated symptoms of depression. Additional fun fact: the first doctor ever to suggest I might be suffering from depression was actually a sleep specialist. You can guess how that appointment was going.)

Just to set our scene, here’s all of page 1.

Eddie’s narration has plenty of (ha) venom for his surroundings, but the visuals are here to back him up: panels from Eddie’s POV are edged in twisted, fleshy borders and drained of colour, the people rendered as creepy, goblin-like creatures. A couple of later scenes go even further to contrast Eddie-vision with what everyone else is seeing:

As depictions of depression go this is a little on the nose, but then, you don’t read a comic about a brain-eating alien parasite looking for subtlety, do you?

Eddie  doesn’t see himself as depressed, of course. As far as he’s concerned, he’s seeing the world’s true face: it’s everyone else who’s deluding themselves. He’s still got his symbiote, so he’s happy. He’s yet to hit that all-important breaking point where something he can’t brush off goes irrevocably wrong.

But he’s also starting to experience these weird... cravings.

He just can’t put a name to exactly what he’s craving until a routine bar fight with a couple of thugs takes a turn for the horrific.

(I include this panel partly to point out even in The Hunger, the goriest of all 90′s Venom titles, you’re still not going to see brains getting eaten in any graphic detail. We don’t need to to get the horror of the moment across. The 90′s were a more innocent time.)

Eddie himself is horrified when he comes back to himself and realises what he’s done.

Or rather, what his symbiote’s just made him do.

Kaminski doesn’t keep us in suspense about why, though. Eddie may have just done something horrific, but there’s a reason, and it’s as mundane as a vitamin deficiency. He’s bonded to an alien creature, after all, and his symbiote is craving a nutrient which just happens to be found in human brains. And if Eddie can’t or won’t help it meet that need, it’ll do so alone. 

Now, giving us that explanation so quickly is an interesting creative decision: this is a horror story, and horror lives in what we don’t know. Wouldn’t it be all the more horrifying had the symbiote been unable to explain what’s going on, leaving Eddie without the first real clue as to where this monstrous new hunger had come from?

The Hunger doesn’t take that route though, and I love it. Eddie isn’t a monster, this isn’t his fault: he has a fucking condition, and wallowing in his own moral failings is going to get him nowhere. You might as well try to cure scurvy or rickets with positive thinking. Just like depression can make you feel like an utter failure at the most basic parts of being human, and all the affirmations in the world won’t fix it when it’s fundamentally your brain chemistry that’s the problem. Or like addicts aren’t weak-willed for struggling not to relapse, they’re dealing with genuine chemical dependency – or even like how someone who’s trans isn’t at fault for being unable to reconcile themselves to the bodies and the hormones they were born with by pure force of trying. Free will is more than an illusion, but we’re all messy, biological organisms underneath, and your own brain and biochemistry can and will fuck you over in a hundred wildly different ways for as many wildly different reasons and it’s not your fault.

We aren’t monsters. But if we do, sometimes, find ourselves identifying with the monster, there might be a reason for that.

(Ahem)

I’m just saying, that’s fucking powerful, and we need more stories that say it.

Anyway, in case you missed it during that tangent, issue #1 closes with the symbiote having torn Eddie’s heart in two itself free to go hunting brains without him.

I’m trying not to get too sidetracked at this point talking about Kaminski’s take on the symbiote itself. Suffice to say there are broadly two schools of thought on how it ought to function while separated from its host: the traditional ambulatory-slime-puddle version, and the more recently popular alternative where anything-you-can-do-with-a-host-you-can-also-do-without-one. I’m not much of a fan of the latter, personally: if your symbiote doesn’t actually need a host, I feel you’ve sort of missed the point. (The movie takes the route of saying symbiotes can’t even process Earth’s atmosphere without a host, which is a great new idea that appears nowhere in the comics, and I love it. Hosts or GTFO, baby!)

Kaminski has his own take, and I can only wish it had caught on. Without Eddie, the symbiote becomes an ever-shifting insectoid-tentacle-snake-monstrosity, driven by an animalistic hunger. It’s many things, but it’s never humanoid.

If you absolutely must have your symbiote operating minus a host, I feel this is the way to do it: semi-feral, shapeless and completely alien (uncontrollable violence and cravings for brains to be added to taste).

Issue #2 comes to us primarily through the perspective of the mild-mannered Dr. Thaddeus Paine of the Innsmouth Hills Sanitarium (yes, really).

Yeah, he’s not fooling anyone. Meet our official villain! He joins our story after Eddie is picked up by the police and handed off to the nearest available institution, on account of how completely sane and rational he’s been acting.

Naturally, Dr. Paine soon has copious notes on Eddie’s ‘crazy’ story about his psychic link to a brain-eating alien monster. Fortunately for Eddie, Paine also runs some tests and makes an interesting discovery. 

Congratulations, Venom: the ‘vitamin’ you were missing officially has a name!

Finding the right meds isn’t always this easy. I got lucky – the first ones my psych put me on worked pretty well – but I have plenty of friends who weren't so lucky. In fact, the treatment for Eddie's problems is so straightforward it arguably has more in common with, say, endocrine disorders like thyroid conditions or Addison’s disease, which differ from clinical depression but present many similar symptoms (but can sadly be just as much of a bitch to get correctly diagnosed – please do read author Maggie Stiefvater’s account of the latter when you get the chance, because forget Venom, that is a horror story).

‘True’ depression remains much less well understood by medicine, either in its causes or how to effectively treat it. But simply having a name for what was wrong with me made so much difference, and that’s an experience I imagine anyone who’s dealt with any long undiagnosed medical condition could relate to. It put my life in context in a way nothing else had in years.

(I can’t speak to the accuracy of the way phenethylamine is portrayed in this comic – a quick google suggests there may be some real debate that phenethylamine deficiencies have been overlooked as a contributor to clinical depression, but having no medical background, that one’s well beyond me. Either way, scientific accuracy really doesn’t matter in this context – it’s how it works in-universe for story purposes that we should pay attention to.)

Since this issue is mostly from Paine’s POV, we don’t get Eddie’s reaction to having a healthy amount of phenethylamine sloshing around in his brain again, just the assurance that treatment appears to be ‘completely successful’.

He’s still a paranoid, hostile bastard though. Meds can turn your life around, but they won’t make you not you.

But even if Eddie’s feeling better, he’s still psychically linked to someone who isn’t. Symbiote-vision still comes through drained of colour and edged in viscera.

That’s the thing about meds: they won’t solve all your problems overnight. If you’ve been depressed for a while, there are good odds you have problems stacking up. But working meds can be a godsend when it comes to getting you into a space where you can deal with your problems again, whether said problems are doing-your-laundry or all the way into not-giving-up-completely-and-just-accepting-you’ll-die-alone-on-the-street.

For Eddie, ‘dealing with his problems’ begins with stealing a keycard and busting out of the asylum.

Of course, that’s the easy part. How do you solve a problem like a feral symbiote? Like any good 90′s comic book protagonist, Eddie tackles it by putting on his big-boy camouflage pants and kitting himself out with weapons and pouches while quoting “If you live something, set it free. If it doesn’t come back, hunt it down.”

We can add this to the list of things I love about this comic. Even if The Hunger is a weirdly-stylistic tract about depression at heart, it’s also still a goddamn 90′s Venom comic, and not ashamed to be.

We’re into issue #3 now, and back to hearing the story from Eddie’s POV.

Eddie is very much aware that his symbiote has murdered innocent people while they’ve been separated. Even if this is the result of extreme circumstances, there’s a good case to be made that the symbiote is too dangerous to be allowed to live. Plenty of heroes would treat it like a rabid dog at this point.

But Eddie isn’t a hero, he’s a mess of a character and an anti-hero at best, so we don’t have to hold him to the same standard. He’s well aware his symbiote may be too far gone to save, that he may have to put it down – but that’s only his backup plan. He wants to help it. He wants it back. He’s down in that sewer with screamers and a flamethrower because he knows all his symbiote’s weaknesses, but he’s also carrying a large jar of black-market synthesised phenethylamine, because if he can just get close enough...

Depression can’t make you a literal monster, but it can make you an asshole. Miserable to be around, lacking even the energy to care who else you’re hurting. The depression doesn’t excuse that, but it makes everything harder, and it’s that much easier to sink back into your spiral when everyone around you has given up. It can make you think everyone around has given up even if that isn’t true.

So to have Eddie here say, in effect, I don’t care how many people you’ve eaten, I know it wasn’t your fault. I still love you. You’re still worth fighting for – god, does that get me right in the id.

There’s still a whole issue left at this point – we’ve still got to deal with our real villain, Dr. Paine, who we’ve just learned is into eating brains himself and torturing his patients recreationally, and who wants to capture the symbiote for his own purposes. There’s the scene where Eddie and his symbiote finally bond again, and Venom beats up all Paine’s goons while singing David Bowie because like I said, this is still a 90′s superhero comic and this is what Venom does.

But for our purposes, I'm going to skip to the penultimate page of the story, because the way it mirrors our opening page is really lovely.

Remember that shot of Eddie dealing with a beggar back at the beginning of the story, thinking about how these people would 'get their despair all over you'? Here he is again, cheerfully forking over the last dollar in his pocket to the next man to ask him for change. For all the gothic atmosphere and gore, it’s moments like this that make The Hunger easily one of the most positive, uplifting Venom stories ever written. Funny, that. (I could probably write a whole other essay on sympathy for the homeless as a recurring motif in Venom stories, but that... well, whole other essay and all that.)

What’s Eddie learned from this experience? Don’t take your symbiote for granted. Is ‘symbiote’ a metaphor for mental health here, is paying attention to its needs an allegory for paying attention to your own? I still don’t know how literally Kaminski meant us to take this, but it’s a lovely note to end on no matter how you parse it.

At the end of the day, The Hunger isn’t flawless. The conflict with Paine ends on a thematic but slightly unsatisfying note. Eddie makes much of his symbiote's loneliness and desire for union, but when the two of them are finally reunited, the only reaction comes from Eddie's side. In fact, the symbiote seems to have no response to being able to return to Eddie at all, and that’s an omission that bugs me.

But Kaminski is more interested than any other writer of the era in the truly alien nature of the symbiote, in its relationship with Eddie from Eddie’s side, and though plenty of others talk about the symbiote's love/hate relationship with Spider-man, no-one else had the guts to portray their relationship this much like a romance.

And Venom: The Hunger is no less interesting in the context of Len Kaminski’s other work. You don't have to look far into his Marvel and DC credits to pick up that the guy has a real thing for monsters. (“All of my favourite characters are outlaws, misfits, anti-heroes,” he says, in one of the very few interviews I could find with him, “I wouldn't know what to do with Superman.”) He's written for vampires, werewolves, victims of mad science, and all of three at once, littering his work with biochemistry-themed technobabble, melodramatic monologues, gratuitous pop-culture references, and protagonists who must learn to embrace their inner demons. So The Hunger represents more than a few of his favourite running themes.

For our context, his more notable other work includes Children of the Beast, in which a werewolf must make peace between his human and animalistic sides, and The Creeper, in which a journalist must make peace with the crazy super-powered alter-ego sharing his body. In fact, The Creeper and The Hunger share so much DNA (including an evil doctor posing as a respected psychiatrist who uses hypnosis on our hero while he's trapped in a mental institution) that it’s quite the achievement that they still feel like such very distinct entities beyond that point.

The human alter-egos of both werewolf and Creeper even use prescription meds while wrestling with their respective dark sides. The difference, in both cases, is that these are stories where meds play their traditional fictional role – and that's a role that could be as easily filled by illegal drugs or alcohol without making any substantive difference. You see, if a protagonist is using them, it's a sign of unwillingness to tackle their 'real' problems. Even among work by the same author in the same genre, The Hunger represents an outlier. And that's just a little disappointing – at least to me.

In real life, of course, prescription meds are no magical cure-all elixir. Depression meds that work for one person may not work for another, or may not keep working in the longer term. Everyone has heard stories about quack doctors who prescribe them to the wrong patients for the wrong reasons, about lives ruined by addictions to prescription painkillers, or the supposedly-damning statistics about how poorly SSRI's perform in rigorous clinical trials. The proper way to treat depression is obviously with lifestyle and therapy. People will still airily dismiss medications that we all know previous generations got along just fine without, or suggest that figures like Van Gogh would never have created great art if they hadn't been mad enough to slice off an ear. I mean, the fact you think you need those bogus mediations is probably the best possible sign of just how broken you are, right? Who do you think you’re kidding?

Our popular fiction loves stories about manly men who bury their trauma under a gruff, anti-social exterior and come back swinging at the world that broke them, bravely refusing even painkillers that might dull their manly reflexes. Other genres make space for broken people confronting their demons in grand moments of catharsis, finally breaking down into tears when someone gets through to make them face their problems. "I could barely make it out of bed in the mornings until I found a doctor who started me on this new prescription" is not only wildly counter to the accepted social narrative, it's a hard thing to know how to dramatise.

 Even other Venom comics have been guilty of this.

Believe me, I recognise all of this, and just how much progress we've made in the last few decades. But I haven't the slightest doubt that for so many vulnerable people, the stigma against prescription medications does infinitely more harm than those same meds could ever do. And just having the right to externalise my problems into it's not you, it's your brain chemistry, may have helped me more than the meds themselves.

(And again, no, being prescribed SSRI's didn't fix me overnight, but I honestly don't know if all the talk therapy and tearful conversations with family members in the world could've got me as far as I've come without them.)

I love Venom: The Hunger. It's no-one's idea of high art, but it doesn’t need to be. There is a whole other post’s worth of things I love about it that I’ve already cut out this one as pointless tangents, and that may actually be it’s biggest drawback as a go-to example: I fully recognise that I would not be making this post if The Hunger hadn't also also grabbed me as a great bit of Venom canon, being the massive fan and shipper that I am. Other people who are just as desperate as me for more stories with the same core theme, but not into weird 90's comics about needy goo aliens, probably won't get nearly as much out of it as I have.

But if it sounds anything like your jam, maybe you'll enjoy it as much as I did.

If nothing else, it proves that you can make a viscerally satisfying story out of a message that shockingly unconventional. And you may even have people still discovering it and falling in love with it 25 years after the fact.

[chiseler]

Ophelia By the Yard

Cobwebbed passages and wax-encrusted candelabra, dungeons festooned with wrist manacles, an iron maiden in every niche, carpets of dry ice fog, dead twig forests, painted hilltop castles, secret doorways through fireplaces or behind beds (both portals of hot passion), crypts, gloomy servants, cracking thunder and flashes of lightning, inexplicably tinted light sources, candles impossibly casting their own shadows, rubber bats on wires, grand staircases, long dining tables, huge doors with prodigiously pendulous knockers to rival anything in Hollywood.

Here was the precise moment — and it was nothing if not inevitable — when the darkness of horror film, both visible and inherent, leapt from the gothic toy box now joined by a no less disconcerting array of color. The best, brightest, sweetest, and most dazzling red-blooded palette that journeyman Italian cinematographers could coax from those tired cameras. Color, both its commercial necessity as well as all it promised the eye, would hereafter re-imagine the genre’s possibilities, in Italy and, gradually, everywhere else. 

When color hit the Italian Gothic cycle, a truly new vision was born. In Hammer films and other UK horror productions, the cheapness of Eastmancolor made it possible for blood to be red. Indeed, very red. And, while we shouldn't underestimate the startling impact this had, it was a fairly literal use of the medium. In the Italian movies, and to a large extent in Roger Corman's Poe cycle, color was an unlikely vehicle to further dismantle realism rather than to assert it. Overrun with tinted lights and filters, none of which added to the film’s realistic qualities, the movies became delirious. In Corman's Masque of the Red Death, we learn of an experiment that uses color to drive a man insane; it seems that filmmakers like Corman and Mario Bava were attempting the very same trick on their audiences.

The application of candy-wrapper hues to a haunted castle flick like The Whip and the Body adds a pop art vibe at odds with the genre, and when you get to something like Kill, Baby...Kill! the Gothic trappings are barely able to mask a distinctly modern sensibility, so much so that Fellini could plunder its phantasmal elements for Toby Dammit, fitting them perfectly into his sixties Roman nightmare.

Blood and Black Lace brings the saturated lighting and Gothic fillips into the twentieth century -- a sign creaking in a gale is the first image, translated from Frankensteinland to the exterior of a contemporary fashion house. A literal faceless killer disposes of six women in diabolical ways. The sour-faced detective remains several deaths back on the killer’s trail because the movie knows its audience, knows that it has zero interest in detection, character, motivation — though it’s all inertly there as a pretext for sadism, set-pieces of partially-clad women being hacked up, dot the film like musical numbers or action sequences might appear in a different genre. 

Since the 19th-century audience for literary Gothic Horror was comprised of far fewer men than women, would it be fair to ask whether Giallo’s advent might be an instrument of brutal violence, even revenge against “feminine” preoccupations? Consider 1964’s Danza Macabra, the film’s amorous vibes finding their ultimate source in that deathless screen goddess named Barbara Steele, whose marble white flesh photographs like some monument to classicism startled into unwanted Keatsian fever. Her presence practically demands that we ask ourselves: “Who is this wraith howling at a paper moon?” In other words, is it a coincidence that Steele’s “Elizabeth Blackwood” — a revenant temptress and undead sex symbol — hits screens the very same year as Giallo, which would transform Italian cinema into a decades-long death mill for women? 

The name “giallo”, meaning yellow, derives from the crime paperbacks issued by Italian publisher Mondadori. The eye-catching covers, featuring a circular illustration of some act of infamy embedded in a yellow panel, became utterly associated with the genre of literature. These books were likely to be by Edgar Wallace, the most popular author in the western world, or Agatha Christie: cardboard characters sliding through the most mechanical of plots; or classier local equivalents, like Francesco Mastriani or Carolina Invernizio. The founding principles laid down concerned the elaborate deceptions concealed by their authors, traps for the unwary reader, and the use of a distinctive design motif. The tendency of the characterisation to lapse into sub-comic-book cliché, the figures incapable of expressing or inspiring real sympathy, was, perhaps, an unintended side-effect of the focus on narrative sleight-of-hand.

When Italian filmmakers sought to translate sensational literature to the screen, they looked to other filmic influences: American film noir, influenced by German expressionism and often made by German emigrés (Lang, Siodmak, Dieterle, Ulmer); and the popular krimi cycle being produced in West Germany, mostly based on Edgar Wallace's leaden "shockers." These deployed stock characters, bizarre methods of murder, deceptive plotting, and exuberant use of chiaroscuro, the stylistic palette of noir intensified by more fog, more shafts of light, more inky shadows. A certain amount of fun, but different from the coming bloodbath because Wallace, despite somewhat fascistic tendencies, is anodyne and anaemic by comparison. No open misogyny, a sadism sublimated in story, a touching faith in Scotland Yard and the class system. In the Giallo, Wallace's more sensational aspects are adopted but made to serve a sensibility quite alien to the stodgy Englander: people are generally rotten, the system stinks, and crime becomes a lurid spectator sport served up to a viewer both thrilled and appalled. 

The Giallo fetishizes murder. But then, it fetishizes everything in sight. Every object, every half-filled wine glass and pastel-colored telephone, is photographed with obsessive, product-shot enthusiasm. Here, it must be emphasized that design implicates the viewer as the Italian camera-eye gawps like some unabashed tourist. Knife, wallpaper, onyx pinky ring — each detail transforms into an object made eerily subject: a sentient and glowering fragment of our own conscience, staring back at us in the darkened theater and pronouncing ineluctable guilt. And yet, for the directors who rode most dexterously the Giallo wave, homicide was something one did to women. Indulging in equal-opportunity lechery was merely an excuse to find other, more violent outlets for their misogyny. Please enter into evidence the demented enthusiasm for woman-killing evinced by Dario Argento, Mario Bava, Lucio Fulci, et al. — whatever trifling token massacres of men one might exhume from their respective oeuvres are inconsequential. Argento’s defense, “I love women, so I would rather see a beautiful woman killed than an ugly man,” should not satisfy us, and hardly seems designed to (also bear in mind Poe’s assertion that the death of a beautiful young woman was the most poetic of all subjects).

Filmmakers like Argento have no interest in sex per se. Suffering seems inessential, but terror and death are key, photographed with the same clinical absorption and aesthetic gloss as Giallo-maestros habitually apply to their interior design. Here, it must be emphasized that design implicates the viewer as the Italian camera-eye gawps like some unabashed tourist. Knife, wallpaper, onyx pinky ring – each detail transforms into an object made eerily subject: a sentient and glowering fragment of our own conscience, staring back at us in the darkened theater and pronouncing ineluctable guilt. That’s one important subtlety often lost amid Giallo’s vast antisocial hemorrhage.

Like a river of blood, homophobia, in the literal meaning of fear rather than hatred, runs through the genre. Lesbians are sinister and gay men barely exist. As we try to work out what in hell the Giallo is really up to, little dabs of dime-store Freudianism seem sufficient.

The filmmakers’ misogyny could be suspect, a sign of compromised masculinity, so they need fictional avatars to cloak their own feverish woman-hating. The subterfuge is clumsy at best, the desultory deceit embarrassingly macho. Giallo’s visual force, powerful enough to divorce eye from mind, is another matter, leaving us demoralized and ethically destitute; our hearts beating with all the righteous indignation of three dead shrubs (and maybe a half-eaten sandwich).

The Giallo is founded on an unstated assumption: the modern world brings forth monsters. Jack the Ripper was an aberration in his day, but now there's a Jack around every corner, behind every piece of modular furniture, every diving helmet lamp. Previously, disturbing events arose from what Ambrose Bierce called The Suitable Surroundings, or what the mad architect in Fritz Lang's The Secret Beyond the Door termed, with sly and sinister euphemism, "propitious rooms." There's the glorious line in Withnail and I: "That's the sort of window faces appear at." But now, in the modern world, evil occurs in the nicest of places, and tonal consistency died in a welter of cheerful stage blood. One needn’t enter an especially Bad Place to meet one’s worst nightmare, or perhaps better to say: the whole bright world qualified as a properly bad place. Imagine the pages of an interior design magazine invaded by anonymous psychopaths intent on painting the gleaming walls red.

Though the victims are overwhelmingly female and their killers male (Argento typically photographed his own leather-gloved hands to stand in for his assassin’s), when the violence becomes over-the-top in its sexualized woman-hating (like the crotch-stabbing in What Have You Done to Solange?), it’s usually a clue that the movie’s murderer will turn out to be female: a simple case of projection. Only Lucio Fulci, the most twisted of the bunch, trained as a doctor and experienced as an art critic, not only assigns misogyny to a straight male killer (The New York Ripper) but plays the killer himself in A Cat in the Brain. Though, in another self-protecting twist of narrative, all psychological explanations in Gialli are bullshit, always. Criminology and clinical psychology are largely ignored, and Argento has a clear preference for outdated theories like the extra chromosome signaling psychopathy (Cat O’Nine Tails). Did anybody use phrenology, or Lombroso’s crackpot physiognomic theories, as plot device?

A tradition of the Giallo is that the characters all tend to be dislikable, something Argento at least resisted in Cat O’ Nine Tails and Deep Red. With disposable characters, each of whom might be the killer and each of whose violent demise is served up as a set-piece, this distancing and contempt might just be a byproduct of the form rather than a principle or ethos, but it’s of some interest, perhaps mitigating the misogyny with a wash of misanthropy. A Unified Field Theory of Gialli would find a more deep-seated reason for the obnoxious characters as well as the stylized snuff and the glamorous presentation. What urge is being satisfied, and why here, now, like this?

Class war? Though prostitute-ripping is encouraged in the Giallo, most victims are wealthy, slashed to ribbons amid opulent interiors. Urbane characters who might previously have graced the sleek “white telephone” films of forties Italian cinema were briefly edged out by neo-realism’s concentration on the working class. Now these exquisite mannequins are trundled back onscreen to be ritually slaughtered for our viewing pleasure.

Victims must always be enviable: either beautiful and sexy or rich and swellegant, or all of the above, so the average moviegoer can rejoice in their dismemberment with a clear conscience. Mario Bava bloodily birthed the genre in Blood and Black Lace (1964), brutally offing fashion models in a variety of Sade-approved ways, the killer a literally faceless assassin into whom the (presumed male) audience could pour their own animosities without ever admitting it, with the female killer finally unmasked to provide exculpatory relief.

If narrative formulas absolve the straight male viewer, compositions have a way of ensnaring him. Beyond that omnivorous indulgence of sensation for its own lurid sake one finds in Giallo, there is a more gilded emphasis placed on Beauty (in the Catholic sense), and it is only the women who are mounted upon its pedestal. That these avatars of beauty are to be savored, ravaged, and brutalized — in that order — is what concerns us. But the sex and the suffering that captivates most sadists is never what registers; no, it is the instance of death, the terror that afflicts the dying woman’s face that resonates. Once again, physical interiors become a negative form of emotional interiority, rooms amplified for the sole purpose of grisly annihilations; a kind of heretical, strictly anti-Catholic transcendence through amoral delight in what otherwise falls under trivial headings, either “the visuals” or “color palette” – neither of which touch the essential nerve endings of Giallo.

Swaddled inside an otherwise hyper-masculine castle lies a windowless chamber with feminine, if not psychotic, decor. Before he tortures and stabs her to death, “Lord Alan Cunningham” (fresh from his sojourn in the asylum) brings his first victim to this pageant of off-gassing plastic furniture, the single most obnoxious vision ever imposed on gothic environs. Risibly overblown ’70s chic rules The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave with nods to Edgar Allan Poe, as the modish Lord juggles sports cars and medieval persecution. Laughs escape the viewer’s throat in dry heaves when each new MacGuffin devours itself without warning. Take “Aunt Agatha” (easily two decades younger than her middle-aged nephews) suddenly rising from her motorized wheelchair, clobbered from behind seconds later, her body dragged into a cage where foxes promptly munch her entrails. Nothing comes of this. The phony paralysis, the aunt’s role in a half-dozen mysteries, which include a battalion of sexy maids in miniskirts and blonde Harpo Marx wigs – all gulped, swallowed.

About the only thing we know for certain is that “Aunt Agatha” is gorgeous. Though, in the end, she’s another casualty of the same nihilism that crashes Giallo aesthetics headlong into Poe country. That is into “Lord Alan” and his gaudy room crowded with designer goods to be catalogued in a horror vacui of visual intrusiveness – a trashy shrine to his late wife, the titular Evelyn. If lapses of good taste define The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave, they also reflect Giallo’s abiding obsession with real estate. After all, this Mod hypnagogia has to fill the eye somewhere. Why not bang in the middle of a castle? Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher features a wealthy aristocrat burying his twin sister alive, thereby entombing his own femininity.

Evelyn represents both Usher’s primary theme of the divided self and the obdurate refusal to learn from it. “Alan,” who emerges a moral hero in the end (after his shrink aids and abets his murder spree), remains just as ornery, alienated, and vainglorious as Giallo itself. We’re never told precisely what the film’s fetish objects are supposed to mean. And since the camera seizes upon each one with existential grimness, we’re left with a visual style that begs its own questions.

Function follows form into the abyss. One Ophelia after another dies to satisfy our cruel delectation, even as will-o’-the-wisp light, taken from the bogs and neglected cemeteries of Gothic Horror, finds itself transformed into a crimson-dripping stiletto.  Evelyn stands in for all Gialli, a genre which redefines film itself on the narrow front of visual impact: stainless steel cutlery and candy-colored light enact a sentient agenda as color becomes an instrument of hyperbolic misogyny that fills the eye and then some.  

As with certain other Italian genres, notably the peplum, smart characterization, solid performances and decent dialogue seem not only unnecessary to the Giallo but unwelcome (the spaghetti western, conversely, in which many of the same directors dabbled, seemed to demand a steady stream of good, cold-blooded wise-cracks). Argento, in pursuit of that “non-Cartesian” quality he admired in Poe, took this to extremes, stringing non-sequiturs together to form absurdist cut-ups, torching his stars’ credibility merely by forcing them to utter such nonsense. And this wasn’t enough: from Suspiria (1977) on, the psychological thriller (which the Giallo is a sub-genre of, only the psychology has to be deliberately nonsensical) was increasingly replaced by the supernatural. So that the laws of nature could be suspended along with the laws of coherent motivation.

In Suspiria and its 1980 quasi-sequel Inferno, the traditional knifings are interspersed with more uncanny events, as when a stone eagle comes to life and somehow makes a seeing-eye dog kill his owner, and there are also grotesque incidents with no relation to story whatever: a shower of maggots, or an attack by voracious rats in Central Park. The Giallo’s quest for a solution, inspired as it was by the old-school whodunits, is all but abandoned, replaced by the search for the next sensational set-piece.

Argento’s villains are now witches, but, abandoning centuries of tradition, these witches show more interest in stabbing their fellow women with kitchen knives than with worshipping Satan or riding broomsticks. Regardless of who they’re meant to be, Argento’s characters must express his desires, enact the atrocities he dreams of. And inhabit places built for his aesthetic pleasure rather than their own. Following Bava’s cue, he saturates his rooms in light blasted through colored gels, making every scene a stained-glass icon, no naturalistic explanation offered for the lurid tinted hues. Just as no explanation is offered for the presence of a room full of coiled razor-wire in a ballet school, or for the behavior of the young woman who throws herself into its midst without looking.

Dario Argento’s true significance, at least with respect to Giallo, was perceiving in the nick of time the almost incandescent obviousness of its limitations; that Italian commercial cinema’s garish, polychromatic spin on the garden-variety psychological thriller – departing from its forebears mainly in the rampant senselessness of its “psychology” – had Dead End written all over it. It could never last. On the other hand, Giallo does take a fresh turn with Argento’s Inferno, thanks in no small measure to a woman screenwriter who sadly remains uncredited. Daria Nicolodi explains that “having fought so hard to see my humble but excellent work in Suspiria recognized (up until a few days before the première I didn’t know if I would see my name in the film credits), I didn’t want to live through that again, so I said, ‘Do as you please, in any case, the story will talk for me because I wrote it.’”

Daria Nicolodi

Nicolodi’s conception humanizes (it would be tempting to say “feminizes”) Argento’s usual sanguinary exercises du style, while at the same time summoning legitimate psychology. This has nothing to do with strong characterization – indeed, the characters barely speak – and everything to do with the elemental power of water, fire, wind.… Inferno rescues Giallo by plunging it into seemingly endless visual interludes, a cinema that draws its strength from absence.

by The Chiselers

Daniel Riccuito, David Cairns, Tom Sutpen, and Richard Chetwynd

[dillydedalus]

january reading

why does january always feel like it’s 3 months long. anyway here’s what i read in january, feat. poison experts with ocd, ants in your brain, old bolsheviks getting purged, and mountweazels. 

city of lies, sam hawke (poison wars #1) this is a perfectly nice fantasy novel about jovan, who serves as essentially a secret guard against poisoning for his city state’s heir and is forced to step up when his uncle (also a secret poison guard) and the ruler are both killed by an unknown poison AND also the city is suddenly under a very creepy siege (are these events related? who knows!) this is all very fine & entertaining & there are some fun ideas, but also... the main character has ocd and SAME HAT SAME HAT. also like the idea of having a very important, secret and potentially fatal job that requires you to painstakingly test everything the ruler/heir is consuming WHILE HAVING OCD is like... such a deliciously sadistic concept. amazing. 3/5

my heart hemmed in, marie ndiaye (translated from french by jordan stump) a strange horror-ish tale in which two married teachers, bastions of upper-middle-class respectability and taste, suddenly find themselves utterly despised by everyone around them, escalating until the husband is seriously injured. through several very unexpected twists, it becomes clear that the couple’s own contempt for anyone not fitting into their world and especially nadia’s hostility and shame about her (implied to be northern african) ancestry is the reason for their pariah status. disturbing, surprising, FUCKED UP IF TRUE (looking back, i no longer really know what i mean by that). 4/5

xenogenesis trilogy (dawn/adulthood rites/imago), octavia e. butler octavia butler is incapable of writing anything uninteresting and while i don’t always completely vibe with her stuff, it’s always fascinating & thought-provoking. this series combines some of her favourite topics (genetic manipulation, alien/human reproduction, what is humanity) into a tale of an alien species, the oankali, saving some human survivors from the apocalypse and beginning a gene-trading project with them, integrating them into their reproductive system and creating mixed/’construct’ generations with traits from both species. and like, to me, this was uncomfortably into the biology = destiny thing & didn’t really question the oankali assertion that humans were genetically doomed to hierarchical behaviour & aggression (& also weirdly straight for a book about an alien species with 3 genders that engages in 5-partner-reproduction with humans), so that angle fell flat for me for the most part, altho i suppose i do agree that embracing change, even change that comes at a cost, is better than clinging to an unsustainable (& potentially destructive) purity. where i think the series is most interesting is in its exploration of consent and in how far consent is possible in extremely one-sided power dynamics (curiously, while the oankali condemn and seem to lack the human drive for hierarchy, they find it very easy to abuse their position of power & violate boundaries & never question the morality of this. in this, the first book, focusing on a human survivor first encountering the oankali and learning of their project, is the most interesting, as lilith as a human most explicitly struggles with her position - would her consent be meaningful? can she even consent when there is a kind of biochemical dependence between humans and their alien mates? the other two books, told from the perspectives of lilith’s constructed/mixed children, continue discussing themes of consent, autonomy and power dynamics, but i found them less interesting the further they moved from human perspectives. on the whole: 2.5/5

love & other thought experiments, sophie ward man, we love a pierre menard reference. anyway. this is a novel in stories, each based (loosely) on a thought experiment, about (loosely) a lesbian couple and their son arthur, illness and grief, parenthood, love, consciousness and perception, alternative universes, and having an ant in your brain. it is thoroughly delightful & clever, but goes for warmth and humanity (or ant-ity) over intellectual games (surprising given that it is all about thought experiments - but while they are a nice structuring device i don’t think they add all that much). i haven’t entirely worked out my feelings about the ending and it’s hard to discuss anyway given the twists and turns this takes, but it's a whole lot of fun. 4/5

a general theory of oblivion, josé eduardo agualusa (tr. from portuguese by daniel hahn) interesting little novel(la) set in angola during and after the struggle for independence, in which a portuguese woman, ludo, with extreme agoraphobia walls herself into her apartment to avoid the violence and chaos (but also just... bc she has agoraphobia) with a involving a bunch of much more active characters and how they are connected to her to various degrees. i didn’t like the sideplot quite as much as ludo’s isolation in her walled-in flat with her dog, catching pigeons on the balcony and writing on the walls. 3/5

cassandra at the wedding, dorothy baker phd student cassandra returns home attend (sabotage) her twin sister judith’s wedding to a young doctor whose name she refuses to remember, believing that her sister secretly wants out. cass is a mess, and as a shift to judith’s perspective reveals, definitely wrong about what judith wants and maybe a little delusional, but also a ridiculously compelling narrator, the brilliant but troubled contrast to judith’s safer conventionality. on the whole, cassandra’s narrative voice is the strongest feature of a book i otherwise found a bit slow & a bit heavy on the quirky family. fav line is when cass, post-character-development, plans to “take a quick look at [her] dumb thesis and see if it might lead to something less smooth and more revolting, or at least satisfying more than the requirements of the University”. 3/5

the office of historical corrections, danielle evans a very solid collection of realist short stories (+ the titular novella), mainly dealing with racism, (black) womanhood, relationships between women, and anticolonial/antiracist historiography. while i thought all the stories were well-done and none stood out as weak or an unnecessary inclusion, there also weren’t any that really stood out to me. 3/5

sonnenfinsternis, arthur koestler (english title: darkness at noon) (audio) you know what’s cool about this book? when i added it to my goodreads tbr in 2012, i would have had to read it in translation as the german original was lost during koestler’s escape from the nazis, but since then, the original has been rediscovered and republished. yet another proof that leaving books on your tbr for ages is a good thing actually. anyway. this is a story about the stalinist purges, told thru old bolshevik rubashov, who, after serving the Party loyally for years & doing his fair share of selling people out for the Party, is arrested for ~oppositional activities. in jail and during his interrogations, rubashov reflects on the course the Party has taken and his own part (and guilt) in that, and the way totalitarianism has eaten up and poisoned even the most commendable ideals the Party once held (and still holds?), the course of history and at what point the end no longer justifies the means. it’s brilliant, rubashov is brilliant and despicable, i’m very happy it was rediscovered. 5/5

heads of the colored people, nafissa thompson-spires another really solid short story collection, also focused on the experiences of black people in america (particularly the black upper-middle class), black womanhood and black relationships, altho with a somewhat more satirical tone than danielle evans’s collection. standouts for me were the story in letters between the mothers of the only black girls at a private school, a story about a family of fruitarians, and a story about a girl who fetishises her disabled boyfriend(s). 3.5/5

pedro páramo, juan rulfo (gernan transl. by dagmar ploetz) mexican classic about a rich and abusive landowner (the titular pedro paramo) and the ghost town he leaves behind - quite literally, as, when his son tries to find his father, the town is full of people, quite ready to talk shit about pedro, but they are all dead. it’s an interesting setting with occasionally vivid writing, but the skips in time and character were kind of confusing and i lost my place a lot. i’d be interested in reading rulfo’s other major work, el llano en llamas. 2.5/5

verse für zeitgenossen, mascha kaléko short collection of the poems kaléko, a jewish german poet, wrote while in exile in the united states in the 30-40s, as well as some poems written after the end of ww2. kaléko’s voice is witty, but at turns also melancholy or satirical. as expected i preferred the pieces that directly addressed the experience of exile (”sozusagen ein mailied” is one of my favourite exillyrik pieces). 3/5

the harpy, megan hunter yeah this was boooooooring. the cover is really cool & the premise sounded intriguing (women gets cheated on, makes deal with husband that she is allowed to hurt him three times in revenge, women is also obsessed with harpies: female revenge & female monsters is my jam) but it’s literally so dull & trying so hard to be deep. 1.5/5

the liar’s dictionary, eley williams this is such a delightful book, from the design (those marbled endpapers? yes) to the preface (all about what a dictionary is/could be), to the chapter headings (A-Z words, mostly relating to lies, dishonesty, etc in some way or another, containing at least one fictitious entry), to the dual plots (intern at new edition of a dictionary in contemporary england checking the incomplete old dictionary for mountweazels vs 1899 london with the guy putting the mountweazels in), to williams’s clear joy about words and playing with them. there were so many lines that made me think about how to translate them, which is always a fun exercise. 3.5/5

catherine the great & the small, olja knežević (tr. from montenegrin by ellen elias-bursać, paula gordon) coming-of-age-ish novel about katarina from montenegro, who grows up in  titograd/podgorica and belgrad in the 70s/80s, eventually moving to london as an adult. to be honest while there are some interesting aspects in how this portrays yugoslavia and conflicts between the different parts of yugoslavia, i mostly found this a pretty sloggy slog of misery without much to emotionally connect to, which is sad bc i was p excited for it :(. 2/5

the decameron project: 29 new stories from the pandemic, anthology a collection of short stories written during covid lockdown (and mostly about covid/lockdown in some way). they got a bunch of cool authors, including margaret atwood, edwidge danticat, rachel kushner ... it’s an interesting project and the stories are mostly pretty good, but there wasn’t one that really stood out to me as amazing. i also kinda wish more of the stories had diverged more from covid/lockdown thematically bc it got a lil repetitive tbh. 2/5

[allthehorrormovies]

A+1 - A blend of American Pie and Scream, but surprisingly better than that sounds. Outlining the plot would give away the twist, which tips its hand early on, yet ends in a gratifying manner. 4 out of 5 pumpkins. Make love, not war.

Alien - A friend remarked how this film likely wouldn’t be made today. It’s shot too dark. It’s quiet, purposefully. There’s no action for much of the first half; more a study in isolated labor and worker exploitation. And there’s not a “star,” outside of teenage dreamboat Harry Dean Stanton. Actors like Sir Ian Holm Cuthbert were selected for their ability, not their stature within Hollywood, as production took place in London. As Robert Ebert said, “These are not adventurers, but workers.” We’re lucky it was made, supposedly, in part because the success of Star Wars pushed the studio to quickly release their own space movie. 5 out of 5 pumpkins. Sigourney Weaver is the ultimate Final Girl.

Aliens - The deliberate, slow pace of Alien is replaced by James Cameron’s grandiose action, backed by four times the original budget. Like Terminator 2: Judgment Day, it’s amazing that both films avoid “the disease of more.” Cameron’s characters are too often weighed down by punch-line dialogue, but all the elements together somehow work. Ripley’s character begins to move past being a simple pilot and into a warrior woman, for better and worse. The studio originally tried to write her out of the sequel due to a contract dispute, but Cameron thankfully refused to make the film without her. There are people out there who prefer Aliens to Alien, and that’s fine. They are wrong, but that’s fine. 4 out of 5 pumpkins.

Alien³ - David Fincher has famously disowned his directorial debut, citing studio deadlines for its poor quality. Compared to the first two films, it certainly is a failure. Though gorier, the scenes with the digital alien look terrible upon re-viewing. The various writers and scripts, some potentially interesting—especially William Gibson’s version, and changing cinematographers and the insertion of Fincher late into production doomed the project from the start. All that said, the movie itself isn’t terrible—parts are even good, but what feels like a midway point in Ripley’s saga is ultimately her end, and that feels cheap. 2 out of 5 pumpkins.

Alien: Covenant - The maddening mistakes of Prometheus absent, this sequel is a tense, action-packed killer of a flick. Scott claims a third prequel is in the works that will tie everything back to Alien, which is . . . fine? It’s just that the first film was so great and everything else since then seems so unnecessary. 3 out of 5 pumpkins.

Alien Resurrection - The aliens look better than ever before, but Joss Whedon’s dialogue is simply annoying and the casting is horrible. Ripley has super powers and kills her large adult alien son. Winona Ryder decides crashing a space ship into Paris, killing untold millions, is the best way to get rid of the aliens for some reason. It’s fucking dumb and cost $70 million to make. 1 out of 5 pumpkins. In the special edition intro, director Jean-Pierre Jeunet says he didn’t change much in the re-release because he was proud of the theatrical version. Baffling. 

Amer - This Belgian-French film is a tribute to the Italian tradition of giallo, a stylized, thriller told in three sections that directors like Suspiria’s Dario Argento pioneered. Mostly wordless, there’s not much plot, more a series of moments in a women’s life revolving around terrifying, sexual moments that ends in murder and madness. There are some terrific scenes, but it’s more of an art piece than movie. 3 out of 5 pumpkins.

An American Werewolf in London - Funny and scary all at once, setting the bar almost impossibly high for all that followed. Rick Baker's special effects catapult this movie into greatness. 5 out of 5 pumpkins. Ebert was right, though; it doesn’t really have an ending. 

Annihilation - Perhaps more of a sci-fi thriller than a horror movie. But due to some terrifying monsters scenes, I’m going to include it. Apparently writer/director Alex Garland wrote the screenplay after reading the first book in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, giving the movie a different overall plot. Garland’s sleek style that made Ex Machina so wonderful is replaced by “The Shimmer,” which gives the film a strange glow. The ending relies too much on digital special effects that looked more gruesome in earlier segments, detracting from its intended impact. Still, a few key scenes, especially the mutated bear, are downright terror-inducing. 4 out of 5 pumpkins. I first found the constant flashbacks unnecessary, but viewed as a refraction on Portman’s mind as well as her body make them more forgiving.

The Babadook - Creepy and nearly a perfect haunted horror movie, except for some final tense moments that too quickly try to switch to sentimental, which leaves their earnestness falling flat. 4 out of 5 pumpkins. Dook. Dook. Dook.

The Babysitter (2017) - One of Netflix’s original movies, this one pays off in gore and borrows heavily from Scott Pilgrim vs. the World-style jokes. 3 out of 5 pumpkins. Meh. It’s cheesy and cliché, but whaddaya gonna do?

Backcountry - Don’t be fooled thinking this is like Jaws “but with a bear,” as I did. Unsympathetic characters and zero tension make this movie a drag to watch. At the start, you think, “Who cares if these assholes get eaten by a bear? They wandered into bear country without a map.” By the end, you’re actively cheering for the bear to eat the boyfriend and only a little sympathetic for the lead character. 1 out of 5 pumpkins. To her credit, Missy Peregrym does a fine job of being a mostly lone protagonist.

Basket Case - Cult director Frank Henenlotter‘s debut starts as a creepy, bloody horror movie, but staggers after showing the monster too soon and then tries to fill time with unnecessary backstory and extended scenes of screams and blood that would have otherwise been eerily good if executed more subtly. Despite not being very good, it’s at least somewhat interesting and kind of impressive considering its low budget. 2 out of 5 pumpkins.

Battle Royal - I’m not convinced this is a horror movie, it’s more just a gory action flick. But hey, oh well. 3 out of 5 pumpkins. Fun, but not as great as many people seem to believe.

The Beyond - Considered one of Lucio Fulci’s greatest films, it might be a bit disappointing to newcomers of his work. Certainly the style and impressive gore are at their highest, but the muddled plot and poor dubbing distract from the overall effect. Fabio Frizzi‘s score is, for the most part, a great addition, however, certain key moments have an almost circus-like tone, which dampens what should be fear-inducing scenes. It’s easy to see why some fans absolutely love this movie while some critics absolutely hate it. In the end, it’ll please hardcore horror fans, but likely bore others. 3 out of 5 pumpkins.

Beyond the Gates - Two estranged brothers are sucked into an all-too-real game of survival after finding a mysterious VHS board game following the disappearance of their father. The plot is fun and original, but the lead actors aren’t all that engaging and the special effects look rather outdated for a 2016 release. Still, it’s an enjoyable watch. 3 out of 5 pumpkins.

Black Christmas - A slasher that starts out with potential, but never gets all that scary or gory, though it’s well made. 2 out of 5 pumpkins. Margot Kidder gets a kid drunk.

Black Sheep (2006) - A hilarious, gory take on zombie sheep. 3 out of 5 pumpkins.

Black Sunday - The Mask of Satan (aka Black Sunday) is totally my new superhero/metal band name. If you're a fan of older horror, this one is not-to-miss. 4 out of 5 pumpkins. Vengeance, vampires, Satan worship, castles, curses, and a buxom heroine, this movie is pretty damn dark for a 1960's black & white film.

The Blackcoat’s Daughter - Scores points for a couple of horrific scenes and a fairly good switcheroo, but mostly too slowly paced to capture the viewer’s attention. 3 out of 5 pumpkins. Emma Roberts continues her path to being the modern Scream Queen.

The Birds - Hithcock’s film was, by no means, the first horror movie. German, Japanese, and UK directors had explored witches, demons, and the classic monsters decades earlier. But, The Birds is a landmark film, like Psycho, for pioneering a new wave of modern horror. It was, perhaps, the first time female sexuality and ecological revenge had been combined to create an unsettling tale with an ambiguous ending. And the rather graphic scenes of found corpses, combined with a minimalist score, are nearly as shocking today as when the film was first released. 5 out of 5 pumpkins.

Braindead - It's Bill Pulman and Bill Paxton in a 1980s B-horror; what more do you need? Most people won't enjoy this campy fart of nonsense, but try pulling your TV outside and getting good and drunk. Anything's good then. 2 out of 5 pumpkins. “The universe is just a wet dream."

The Brood - No where near as polished as Scanners or Videodrome, but still a creepy, well-made film. 4 out of 5 pumpkins.

A Bucket of Blood - This black & white 1959 film from Roger Corman is more dark comedy than horror, but it’s a absurdly fun critique of beatnik culture written by Corman’s partner on Little Shop of Horrors. Dick Miller gives a great performance, and with a run time of about an horror, the pacing feels relatively quick for an older film. 3 out of 5 pumpkins.

Byzantium - The tale of two British vampires who live like wandering gypsies, setting up a low-rent brothel in a seaside town despite being immortal badasses because the all-powerful, all-male secret vampire club is trying to kill them, because . . . no girls allowed? It’s unclear. The vampires are of the more modern type—they go out during the day and receive their curse from a geological location than from one another. Still, overall the movie is better than it has to be. 3 out of 5 pumpkins.

Cabin Fever - Eli Roth’s directorial debut isn’t awful, but it certain could have been better considering Roth credits Carpenter’s The Thing as its inspiration. The homophobic jokes date the movie more than the alt-rock soundtrack and the repetitive scenes reminding viewers of how the mysterious disease spreads (at apparently differing rates depending on the character) during the conclusion end up creating a weird kind of plot hole. To his credit, some of the nods to The Thing are OK. 2 out of 5 pumpkins.

Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever - That Ti West made this pseudo-campy and outright bad movie during the same period that he made The House of the Devil is perplexing. The style, pace, and subtly that make The House of the Devil an enjoyable film are nonexistent in this cash-grab sequel. West apparently hated the final cut and requested his name be removed from the project. That said, I kind of like this movie better than the original. I’ve always found Roth’s praise of his directorial debut to be odd, as it’s not very good. For what it’s worth, this movie isn’t trying to be anything other than what it is: a tasteless, bad horror movie. 2 out of 5 pumpkins. Retcons the plot hole in the first movie, at least.

The Cabin in the Woods - As good of a spoof of the horror genre as one could hope. Stereotypical with an O'Henry twist at every turn, this movie is good for an afternoon viewing, much like Tucker & Dale vs Evil. Without giving much away, if you think about it, The Cabin In the Woods is like a weird PSA about how marijuana will destroy all of mankind. 4 out of 5 pumpkins. Fun and gory with something for everyone.

Candyman - Decades later, it’s not as easy to see why Candyman was such a landmark movie. It’s a bit slow, stumbles in places, and some of the acting is only serviceable. However, the story itself (based on Clive Baker’s original) is—on paper at least—good. Critics at the time were rightfully hesitant to praise a movie simply for having a black villain, especially when his origin is based on racial violence, but Tony Todd’s portrayal is so terrifying it launches the character into one of the all time great horror monsters. Add in Philip Glass’s soundtrack and Candyman reigns among other classics without being a top contender. 3 out of 5 pumpkins.

Carrie - I saw this movie on TV a long time ago, but I had forgotten much of the film, especially the opening scene of slow motion nudity (aren't these girls supposed to be in high school?!). The remake of this movie is likely going to be bad, but the original is so good I'll probably go see it. What can be said? Pig's blood. Fire. Religious indoctrination. Sexual overtones. There's a reason Brain de Palma's version of Steven King's story became so culturally important. 5 out of 5 pumpkins. This movie holds up, even today. 

Carrie (2013) - Though nothing is glaringly bad, and the added back-story decently pulled off by Julian Moore as the mother, almost every scene is a shadow of the original. Which is unfortunate considering that the remake of Let The Right One In managed to find a somewhat more unique tone. 2 out of 5 pumpkins. Largely unnecessary.

The Changeling - George C. Scott does a fine job as a mourning husband haunted by an unfamiliar spirit. Not the most exciting movie, but pretty decent. 3 out of 5 pumpkins. It might’ve ranked higher, but there are no half stars here.


Cheerleader Massacre - This movie looks like someone shot it in their backyard with an earl 90s handheld camcorder . . . in high school. This is just embarrassing, for me too. The actors seem to be exotic dancers or adult film stars, who haven’t been asked back for a shift in a while. Alright, I skipped through this because the quality was so low. At around minute 41 there's a bathtub scene with three naked women, which culminates in one licking chocolate sauce off each other’s breasts. Some people die. Two of the naked women survive, I think. The house they all go to in the beginning of the movie - a ski lodge, I guess - burns down, or doesn't. Whatever. 0 out of 5 pumpkins. Just watch actual porn.

Child’s Play - While only OK, I understand how this became a franchise. Melted Chucky is terrifying. The villain can hop from vessel to vessel, unfortunately through some kind of voodoo racist bullshit. The characters are shallow, but serviceable. For such a big budget movie, it’s weird that it ends so abruptly. 3 out of 5 pumpkins.

Children of the Corn - Damn, this movie is boring. Linda Hamilton does the World's Least Sexy Birthday Striptease. The characters are joking quite a bit having just run over a child, whose dead body is rattling around in the trunk. What was the casting call like for this movie? "Wanted: Ugly children. Must look illiterate." All in all, things turn out pretty good for our protagonists. 2 out of 5 pumpkins. For something that spurred at least five other movies, this was remarkably uninspiring. 

City of the Living Dead - The dialogue is awkward and the plot a bit convoluted, but the special effects hold up and the overall story is good. The first of Lucio Fulci’s Gates of Hell trilogy. Apparently when the movie was screened in L.A., Fulci was booed. 3 of 5 pumpkins. Poor Bob the Simple Pervert.

Climax - Gaspar Noé is known for making viewers feel as uncomfortable possible with his experimental style film making. Which is fine. But that discomfort rarely lands to move me outside the initial shock. Climax is, surprisingly, more like a Suspiria remake than the actual 2018 remake. That, however, doesn’t make it good. The really shocking moments aren’t all that shocking and the cultural commentary isn’t very deep. It’s not a bad movie, it’s just, well, unnecessary. The dance scenes are extraordinary, so at least it’s got that going for it. 2 out of 5 pumpkins.

Color Out of Space - An enjoyable, albiet uneven, film that does a lot with little. A head-trip type of home invasion movie that pulls you in. 4 out of 5 pumpkins.

The Conjuring - It’s easy to see why so many people love this movie. It’s well-acted, it has jump-out-of-your-seat scares, and incorporates several classic fear elements. Considering the mediocre, at best, tiredly worn horror movies that slump to torture porn for shock value coming out recently, The Conjuring stands above its peers. Still, there’s nothing original about the movie. 3 out 5 pumpkins. 

The Conjuring 2 - Billed as more shocking than the original, this sequel likely lands better in theaters with it’s jump-cut scares and action flick sequences. On the home screen, however, the overly dramatic elements are too far flung to seem like a haunting based on true events. 2 out of 5 pumpkins. 

Creep (2014) - Nails the P.O.V. angle without going too far down the overly-used “found footage.” Mark Duplass is terrifying and without his ability to carry the film, the entire concept could have easily fallen flat. 3 out of 5 pumpkins.

Creep 2 - Mark Duplass pleasantly surprises with a sequel that, while not as *ahem* creepy as the first, builds out the world of his serial killer in a manner that is engaging and ends with the potential for more. 3 out of 5 pumpkins.

Crimes of Passion - Technically it’s an “erotic thriller,” but given Ken Russell in the director’s chair and Anthony Perkins as the villain, I’m adding it to this list. Unfortunately, it’s not a great film. Kathleen Turner surpasses over acting in some scenes, and the rest of the cast is pretty forgettable. If the plot revolved around Perkins’s character, it might have been more of a horror flick. Instead revolves around loveless marriage and the fucked up issues of sexuality in America, attempting to say . . . something, but never really making a point. 2 out of 5 pumpkins. Russell has got an obsession with death dildos. I don’t know what to do with that information. Just an observation.

Crimson Peak - Guillermo del Toro is a complicated director. He’s created some truly remarkable films, but has also created some borderline camp. Crimson Peak splits the difference, much in the same way Pacific Rim does. If you’re a deep fan of a particular genre, in this case Victorian-era romance, then the movie can be an enjoyable addition to the category with its own voice. If you’re not, then the movie’s more eye-roll-inducing moments are less a nod to fandom and more of an uninvited addition to what could be a straight forward film. 2 out of 5 pumpkins. Beautiful, but lacking.

Cronos - This del Toro film is a must-see for any fan of his current work. 4 out of 5 pumpkins. Even if you're not usually a fan of foreign films, you'll likely appreciate this modern take on the vampire mythology.

Dagon - To be honest, I feel like I should watch this one again. It’s a bit of a jumbled mess, but there are some wacky, gory moments at the end. Similar in tone and style to Dead and Buried. 2 out of 5 pumpkins. Seriously, like the last 20 minutes cram so much plot it’s just a series of wtf moments until hitting incest and then nothing really matters.

Darling - Well shot in beautiful black and white with an excellence score, Darling really should receive a better score. However, it fails to be more than the sum of its parts. Borrowing liberally from Kubrick’s one-point perspective and Polanski’s Repulsion in nearly every other way, the film is decent, but fumbles in deciding whether to convince the audience of a clear plot, leaving viewers with closure, yet unsatisfied. Still, worth viewing. 3 out of 5 pumpkins.

Daughters of Darkness - A Belgian/French erotic vampire film that isn’t as erotic or vampiric as one might hope. Still, legend Delphine Seyrig shines so brightly, it’s catapults are relatively boring film into near greatness. 3 out of 5 pumpkins.

Dawn of the Dead - The best zombie movie ever made. 5 out of 5 pumpkins.

Day of the Dead - George A. Romero’s end to a near-perfect trilogy isn’t as good as its predecessors, but it’s gorier and somehow more depressing, even with the ending. 4 out of 5 pumpkins.

Dead and Burried - Starts with a bang, but lags in the middle. The ending tries too hard to surprise you, yet, by the time it’s over you kind of don’t care. Surprisingly well acted and good, creepy tale. Might not be everyone’s bag, but if you’re a tried-and-true horror fan, you’ll enjoy the movie. 3 out of 5 pumpkins. Fun fact: The movie was written by Dan O’Bannon, famed for writing Alien. O’Bannon worked with John Carpenter on a short in film school, quit being a computer animator on Star Wars to be a screenwriter, and became broke and homeless after attaching himself to Jodorowsky’s doomed Dune. He later went on to direct The Return of The Living Dead and write Total Recall. 

Dead Snow - A Nazi zombie bites off a dude's dick. Do you really need any other details? 3 out of 5 pumpkins. Germans be crazy.

Dead Snow 2: Red vs Dead - Not as good as its predecessor, but still fun. Plus, more children die. 3 out of 5 pumpkins. Why all the gay jokes, though?

Death Bed: The Bed That Eats - OK, my first nit-pick is that the bed doesn’t eat people so much as it dissolves people. But it still makes chewing sounds? Whatever. A bizarre concept that swings for seriousness and utterly fails due to its lack of plot and extremely low budget. Kinda of weird, but ultimately pretty boring. 1 out of 5 pumpkins.

Death Spa - Hilariously bad. Super 80s. I can’t say this is a good film, but I would recommend watching it for the kitsch value. What if a ghost haunted a gym? Instant money maker. 2 out of 5 pumpkins. Fun fact: the project came about due to shepherding from Walter Shenson, who got rich producing A Hard Day’s Night and Help!, and the lead actor, who plays a gym manager, was an actual gym manager in L.A. at the time.

Deathgasm - Imagine if Scott Pilgrim vs. the World was about a New Zealand metal band and not as good, but still pretty OK. 3 out of 5 pumpkins.

Deep Red (aka Profondo Rosso, aka The Hatchet Murders) - Dario Argento’s 1975 film is more polished than 1977′s Suspiria, which is a bit surprising. However, that doesn’t necessarily make it a better film. Where Suspirira’s fever dream colors and superior soundtrack, also by Goblin, shines, Deep Red doesn’t quite land. The camera work here is better, though, as is much of acting. But there’s a lot of let downs, such as the opening psychic bowing out and never really coming up again, the boorish male lead and oddly timed humor, and the final reveal, which is anti-climatic. Still, an overall great horror movie. 4 out of 5 pumpkins.

Def by Tempation - I really enjoyed this film, despite it not being the most skillful directed or the most incredible script. The plot is compelling, the jokes are pretty funny, and the angles and lighting are really well done despite the limited budget. 4 out of 5 pumpkins. Admittedly, Kadeem Hardison nostalgia helps.

Demons - Multiple people recommended this to me, and I can see why considering the Dario Argento connection. Unfortunately, the premise is more exciting than the execution. Poorly acted and poorly dubbed, the gore doesn’t do enough to hold one’s attention. There’s a scene where a guy rides around on a dirt bike killing demons with a samurai sword. At least that happens. 2 out of 5 pumpkins. Is the ticket-taker in on it? She works in the demon theater, right? So, why is she being hunted? Also, where the fuck did the helicopter come from?

The Descent - Some of Earth’s hottest, most fit women embark on a spelunking adventure with a recently traumatized friend. Aside from a couple of lazy devices that put the team in greater peril than necessary, the movie quickly and cleverly puts the cavers into a horrifying survival scenario that few others in the genre have matched. 4 out of 5 pumpkins. Without giving too much away, be sure you get the original, unrated cut before watching this flick.

The Devil’s Backbone - Though del Toro’s debut, Cronos, is more original and imaginative, this is much more honed. Not necessarily frightening, but tense and dreadful through out, laying open the horror war inflicts on all it touches. 4 out of 5 pumpkins.

The Devil’s Candy - More of a serial killer thriller than a horror, but the supernatural elements raise this movie to better-than-average heights. 3 out of 5 pumpkins. The real lesson is this movie is that cops won’t save you, ONLY METAL CAN SAVE YOU!

Don't Be Afraid of the Dark - The biggest upside to this movie is that it was produced by Guillermo del Toro. The biggest downside is that it's not directed by Guillermo del Toro. Still, the director gets credit for making a child the main character; never an easy task. To the little girl's credit, she's a better actor than Katie Holmes, no surprise, and Guy Pierce. 3 out of 5 pumpkins. With a bit more gore and stylistic pauses, this could have been a 4. This movie proves why killing kids is more fun than kids who kill, and also that every male protagonist in every horror movie is dumb dick.

Don’t Look Now - Well-acted and interesting, Nicolas Roeg’s adaptation is a high-water mark of the 1970s premier horror. The only real complaint is that the ending—while good and obviously ties it all together—is nonsensical. 4 out of 5 pumpkins. Donald Sutherland fucks.

Event Horizon - “This ship is fucked.” “Fuck this ship!” “Where we’re going, we don’t need eyes to see.” These are quotes from, and also the plot of, Event Horizon. 2 out of 5 pumpkins. The most disturbing part of the whole production might be Sam Neil’s attempt to be a sexual icon.

The Evil Dead - Though The Shining is the best horror movie ever made, The Evil Dead is my favorite. Funny, creepy, well-shot on a shoestring budget, it's the foundation for most modern horror flicks, more so than Night of the Living Dead in some fashions. See it immediately, if you haven't. 5 out of 5 pumpkins. Bruce fuckin' Campbell.

Evil Dead (2013) - Not entirely bad, and even takes the original plot in more realistic places, like the character having to detox. But is that what we really need? The fun of the original is its low budget, odd humor, and DIY grit. I guess if you really want a “darker” version, it’s this. 2 out of 5 pumpkins. Better than The Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake, about as good as the Carrie remake, I guess.

Evil Dead II - I have to respect Sam Raimi because it’s like he got more budget and did everything possible to try and make this movie suck just as a fuck you to the studio. All the creepy parts of the original are over-the-top, there’s zero character development—just faces on a stage, and it’s seemingly a crash-grab to set up Army of Darkness more than anything else. That said, it’s kind of boring outside of a couple gory scenes. It’s fun, but not that funny. It’s scary, but more gauche than anything. An exercise in excess, yet a decent one somehow. My biggest complaint is that Evil Dead is great with Bruce Campbell, but would have been good with almost anyone; whereas Evil Dead II is only good because it’s Bruce Campbell. 3 out of 5 pumpkins.

Elvira: Mistress of the Dark - This movie is nothing but puns and tit jokes. But clever ones! Pretty okay with that. Or maybe it's a statement on third-wave feminism in spoof form? Probably not. At one point an old people orgy breaks out at a small town morality picnic, but it's a PG-13 movie so it doesn't get very fun. 4 out of 5 pumpkins. Boooooooooobs.

Elvira's Haunted Hills - A pretty disappointing follow-up to what was a fun, 1980s romp. Instead of poking fun at uptight Protestants, Elvira’s just kind of a dick to her servant. 2 out of 5 pumpkins. Even the boob jokes are flat.

The Endless - More sci-fi than horror, and not the most deftly produced, still an original concept that’s pulled off well. 3 out 5 pumpkins. Maybe this should get a higher ranking. It’s good! Not exactly scary, but good.

Equinox - Decided to give another older Criterion Collection film a try. Though there are some clever tricks in the movie, especially for its time -- like an extended cave scene that's just a black screen -- the poor sound, monsters that look children's toys, and general bad acting drag this movie down to nothing but background noise that's easy to ignore. 1 out of 5 pumpkins. Whatever contributions this movie may have made to the industry, its not worth your time unless studying for a film class.

Excision - Less of an outright horror movie and more of a disturbing tale of a young necrophiliac, the film tries its best to summon the agnst of being a teen, but falls short of better takes, like Teeth. Still, pretty good. Traci Lords is great and John Waters plays a priest. 3 out of 5 pumpkins.

The Exorcist - The slow pace and attention to character backstory is more moving than the shocking scenes you've no doubt heard about, even if you haven't seen the film. The pacing is slow compared to most movies today, but the drawn out scenes, like in Rosemary's Baby, help convey the sense of dread. 5 out of 5 pumpkins. Believe.

Eyes Without a Face - One of the more remarkable things about this French 1960′s near-masterpiece is how carefully it walked the line between gore and taboo topics in order to pass European standards. The villain isn’t exactly sympathetic, but carries at least some humanity, giving the story a more realistic, and therefore more frightening quality. The only, only thing that holds this film back is the carnivalesque soundtrack that could have been foreboding. 4 out of 5 pumpkins. A must watch for any horror fan.

The Fly - Cronenberg's fan-favorite film is delightful, though it’s not as great as Scanners or Videodrome, in my humble opinion. Jeff Goldblum is, of course, terrific. If you haven’t seen it, see it! 4 out of 5 pumpkins. Where’d he get the monkey, though? Seems like it’d be hard to just order a monkey. The 80s were wild, man.

The Fog - A rare miss for John Carpenter’s earlier work. There’s nothing outright wrong or bad about this movie, but it’s not particularly scary and the plot is rather slow. That said, it’s soundly directed. 2 out of 5 pumpkins. If you’re a Carpenter fan, it’s still worth watching.

Forbidden World - Another Roger Corman cult classic, this one made immediately after the much larger budget Galaxy of Terror, mostly because Corman had spent so much on the first set (designed by James Cameron) and thought of a way to make another low-budget flick with a much smaller cast and recycled footage from Battle Beyond the Stars. Even more of a complete rip-off of Alien, with some Star Wars and 2001: A Space Odyssey bit sprinkled in. Perhaps because it’s far less serious and revels in its pulp, it’s somehow better than Galaxy of Terror, which is more ambitious—you know, for a Corman b-movie. 3 out of 5 pumpkins. No worm sex scene, though.

Frankenhooker - Frank Henenlotter‘s 1990 black comedy is over-the-top in almost every way, perhaps best encapsulated by the introduction of Super Crack that makes sex workers, and one hamster, explode. But with a title like Frankenhooker, you get what you expect. Hell, it even manages to sneak in an argument for legalizing prostitution. If you’re a fan of zany, exploitation in the vein of Re-Animator, you’ll enjoy it. 3 out of 5 pumpkins.

Friday the 13th - Terrifically balanced between campy and creepy, with a soundtrack that’s twice as good as it needs to be. 4 out of 5 pumpkins. Worth watching every year.

The Frighteners - Michael J. Fox, everyone! Robert Zemeckis & Peter Jackson - ugh. It didn't even take 20 minutes for the racial stereotypes to kick in. Unlike the trope of youth in most horror movies, everyone in this movie looks old. Holy shit, did anyone else remember Frank Busey was in this movie? Michael J. Fox is a bad driver in this movie. He was also in a car accident that gave him supernatural sense. Jokes. Apparently they tried to make it look like this movie was shot in the Midwestern United States, but it was filmed in New Zealand. It's clearly a coastal or water based mountain town, in like dozens of shots. 3 out of 5 pumpkins. Cheesy without being completely campy, it's also family friendly. If this were any other genre, this would likely be a two.

From Beyond - Stewart Gordon’s follow-up to Re-Animator isn’t as fun, even with some impressively gory special effects. Viewers are throw into a story with little regard for character, which doesn’t really matter, but is still a bit of a left down when you find yourself wondering how a BDSM-inclined psychiatrist builds a bomb from scratch. 2 out of 5 pumpkins. It’ll stimulate your pineal gland!

Funny Games (2007) - A fairly straightforward home invasion horror achieves greatness thanks to Michael Haneke‘s apt directing and powerful performances by Naomi Watts and Michael Pitt. Like with Psycho, some of the most horrifying parts are what comes after. 4 out of 5 pumpkins. The fourth wall breaking is an odd touch, but thankfully and surprisingly doesn’t distract.

The Fury - Brian De Palma’s follow-up to Carrie is a major let down. Despite a fairly charismatic Kirk Douglas and score by John Williams, the two-hour run time drags and drags. Attempting to combine horror and an action-thriller, the film waffles between genres without ever rising above either. 1 out of 5 pumpkins. It’s not explicitly bad; just a bore to watch.

Galaxy of Terror - Roger Corman produced this movie as was to try and capitalize off the success of Alien, but even with that shallow motivation it’s better than it needed to be. Staring Erin Moran of Happy Days fame and celebrated actor Ray Walston, Galaxy of Terror has an uneven cast, made all the more puzzling by Sid Haig. Though “the worm sex scene” is likely the reason it achieved cult status, James Cameron’s production is top-notch and was clearly the foundation for his work on Aliens. The ending even hints at the future of Annihilation. Does all this make it a good movie? Not really, but it’s not terrible either. 2 out of 5 pumpkins.

Get Out - A marvelous debut for Jordan Peele, who—given his comedy background—was able to land some downright chilling moments alongside some mostly well-timed jokes. Unfortunately, not all of them as well timed, especially the drop-in moments with the lead character’s TSA buddy. Peele originally had the film end less optimistically, but wanted audiences to ultimately walk away feeling good. Maybe not the most artistic choice, but certainly the smart one given the film’s acclaim. It’s easy to see why Get Out has cemented itself alongside The Stepford Wives as a smart, “in these times” commentary about society, but it’s also just a really well-paced, well-shot, well-acted film. With two other horror projects immediately set, it’ll be exciting to see just how much Peele will add to the genre. 4 out of 5 pumpkins. America’s worst movie critic, Armond White, said Get Out was “an Obama movie for Tarantino fans” as if that was a bad thing. Idiot.

Ginger Snaps - A delightfully playful but still painful reminder of what it was like being a teenager while still being a gore-fest. A must for anyone who was emo. 4 out of 5 pumpkins. Out by sixteen or dead on the scene.

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night - An almost flawless picture. 5 out of 5 pumpkins. Bonus: nearly everyone in this movie is insanely hot.

Green Room - Surviving a white supremacist rally in the Pacific Northwest is no joke. The region is the unfortunate home to violently racist gangs, clinging to the last shreds of ignorant hate. Though fading, some of the movements mentioned in the movie, like the SHARPs, are grounded in recent history. Mainly a gory survival-flick, the movie sneaks in some surprisingly tone-appropriate humor. 3 out of 5 pumpkins. No one’s island band should be Misfits.

A Ghost Story (2017) - Yes, this isn’t a horror. It’s a drama. Don’t care; including it anyway. It’s unnerving in the way that it makes you consider your own mortality and the lives of the people who you’ve touched, and how all of that won’t last as long as an unfeeling piece of furniture or the wreckage of home soon forgot. 3 out of 5 pumpkins.

Ghostbusters (1984) - “It’s true. This man has no dick.” 4 out of 5 pumpkins.

Halloween (1978) - One of the best openings of any horror film. John Carpenter is a genius. 5 out of 5 pumpkins.

Halloween (2018) - Eh. 3 out of 5 pumpkins.

Hardware - A very unhelpful Marine brings home some post-apocalyptic trash that tries to kill him and his girlfriend, who could absolutely do better than him. Horribly shot and nonsensical, it doesn’t push the boundaries of filth or gore its cult fans adore. 1 out of 5 pumpkins. Do not recommend.

The Haunting (1963) - Not exactly the scariest of movies, but damn well made and just dripping with gay undertones. 4 out of 5 pumpkins. Theo is queen femme daddy and we are all here for it.

Haunting on Fraternity Row - The acting is surprisingly decent, but the supernatural elements don’t even start until halfway into the movie, which begins as a sort of handheld, POV style conceit and then abandons all pretense of that set up. 1 out of 5 pumpkins. Not at all scary, but maybe it will make you nostalgic for frat parties, cocaine, and failed threesomes. So.

The Haunting of Julia - Apparently parents in 1970s Britain didn't receive proper Hymlic maneuver treatment, which perhaps made for an epidemic of dead children. As promising as that premise might be, an hour into this movie and there hasn't been any actual haunting. There's a stylish gay best friend (he owns a furniture store) and a dumb dick of an ex-husband, a scene of library research, mistaken visions, etc. All the standards are here, except for the haunting parts. 2 out of 5 pumpkins. Well shot but absolutely boring, this is more about a woman's struggle with depression than a horror flick.

Head Count - A great premises that falters in key moments, making the sum of its parts less than its promising potential. For example, there’s no reason to show a CGI monster when you’ve already established its a shape-shifter, the scariest part is that they could be anybody! 2 out of 5 pumpkins.

Hellbound: Hellraiser II - I really dislike this movie, not because it’s especially bad, but because it’s a lazy continuation of the first film. Yes, there are a couple of scenes that are squeamishly good, but it spends too much time rehashing the plot of the first and then ending in some grandiose other dimension that has not real impact. Part of the terrifying elements of the first is that the horror is confined to one room in one house. 3 out of 5 pumpkins. It really only gets this many pumpkins because of the mattress scene.

Hellraiser - Truly the stuff nightmares are made of. It’s easy to see why this film became a cult-classic and continues to horrify audiences. That said, the plot is a bit simplistic. Not that the plot is the heart of the film; the objective is for viewers to experience squeamish body mutilation and overall dread, and in that regard it truly delivers. 4 out of 5 pumpkins.

Hereditary - Toni Collette is a treasure in this dramatic horror about family and loss. Though the truly terrifying bits take too long to ramp up, resulting in a jumbled conclusion, the film is engrossing. 4 out of 5 pumpkins.

Hocus Pocus - Admittedly, this movie isn’t very good. But its nostalgic charm and constant virgin jokes earns it a higher ranking that it deserves. 3 out of 5 pumpkins. “Max likes your yabbos. In fact, he loves them.”

Honeymoon - Often described as a modern twist on Rosemary’s Baby, this debut from promising director Leigh Janiak takes its time before getting truly creepy. Though there are some gruesome moments, the tense feeling is bound to the two leads, who are able to keep a lingering sense of dread alive without much else to play off. 3 out of 5 pumpkins.

The Host - I was skeptical of this Korean movie based on the sub-par visual affects, but the script, actors, and cinematography were all much better than expected. A genre-bender, as my friend who recommended it described, you'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll cringe. 4 out of 5 pumpkins. If you're a fan of movies like Slither, you'll love this movie.

Hot Fuzz - Second in Three Flavours Cornetto and probably the worst, but still a great movie that gets better on repeat viewing. 4 out of 5 pumpkins.

House - A part of the Critereon Collection, this 1977 Japanese movie is a trip and a half that follows the untimely demise of some school girls going to visit their friend's aunt, who turns out to be a witch who eats unwed women. One of the girls is named Kung-Fu and spiritually kicks a demon cat painting until blood pours out everywhere. I guess this is kind of a spoiler, but the movie is such a madcap, magna-influenced experiment there's nothing that can really ruin the experience. Like most anime, this movie also ends with an unnecessary song that drags on for far too long. 2 out of 5 pumpkins. I guess this movie influenced a lot of future work, which make sense. Still, most people would consider this a 1 as it's nearly impossible to follow.

The House at the End of the Street - I only decided to watch this movie because Jennifer Lawrence is in it. This isn't even a real horror movie. It's a serial killer movie with a few thriller moments. My standards are low at this point. 2 out of 5 pumpkins. It's a PG-13 movie, so instead of outright showing you some boobs there's just long, awkwardly placed frames of Jennifer Lawrence in a white tank-top. Oh, America.

The House of the Devil - Though an on-the-nose homage to 70s satanic slow-burns, this Ti West feature moves at a decent pace toward the slasher-like ending, making it better than most of movies it pays tribute to. 4 out of 5 pumpkins. 

The House on Sorority Row - A cookie-cutter college slasher that ends abruptly for no real reason considering how long it sets up its premise. Nothing awful, but nothing original. 2 out of 5 pumpkins.

Housebound - A fun, Kiwi flick that nicely balances a bit of horror with humor with a strong performance by Morgana O'Reilly. Though the plot takes a couple unnecessary twits towards the end, the gore kicks up and leaves you with a satisfying ending. 3 out of 5 pumpkins.

The Howling - Released the same year as American Werewolf in London, this movie isn’t very good, but it is entertaining. Apparently audiences and critics thought it was funny. Maybe because it makes fun of that Big Sur lifestyle? I dunno. Dick Miller is the best thing in this movie, outside of the special effects. No idea why it spawned several follow ups. 2 out of 5 pumpkins. Honestly, why not just lean into The Gift and join The Colony—nice surroundings, sultry nympho, regeneration ability. Some people can’t appreciate nice things.

Humanoids from the Deep - A cult favorite from the Roger Corman camp that borrows heavily from Creature from the Black Lagoon and a bit from Jaws. Initially very well done by director Barbara Peeters, but ultimately released much to her distaste. Peeters shot grisly murder scenes of the men, but used off camera and shadows to show the creatures raping the women. Corman and the editor didn’t think there was enough campy nudity. So they tapped Jimmy T. Murakami and second unit director James Sbardellati to reshoot those scenes, unknown to the cast, and then spliced the more exploitative elements back in for the final version, including a shower scene where it’s abundantly clear a new, more busty actress stands in for actual character. It’s unfortunate Peeters’ creation was essentially stolen from her, as it could have been a more respected film. I mean, how many horror flicks could weave in the economic struggle of small town bigots against a young native man trying save salmon populations? That said, the cut we got is pervy romp that’s still a boat-load of b-movie fun. 3 out of 5 pumpkins. James Horner on the score.

The Hunger - First off, David fucking Bowie. Not to be outdone, Susan Sarandon and Catherine Deneuve are absolute knock-outs. Horror stories are often rooted in the erotic, often the unknown or shameful aspects of ingrained morality manifested in the grotesque and deadly. When done positively and well, it can be a powerful device. It’s a shame more recent horror movies don’t move beyond the teen-to-college-year characters for their sexual icons, too often used as sacrificial lambs, because mature sexuality can be far more haunting. As we age our connections to the meaning of love grow deeper and more complex; immorality does not offer the same luster. 4 out of 5 pumpkins. Damn impressive for a first major film. Fun fact: Tony Scott wanted to adapt Interview with the Vampire, but MGM gave him The Hunger instead. It bombed and he went back to making commercials. Then Jerry Bruckheimer got him to direct Top Gun, which made $350M.

Hush - Though the masked stranger, home invasion plot is well-worn, this movies provides just enough shifts to keep things interesting and frightening. 4 out of 5 pumpkins. Watch out, Hot John!

I Am the Pretty Thing that Lives in the House - With only an hour and a half run time, this film still drags. Part of that is deliberate. The foundation of the film is its atmosphere and the lingering uneasiness that it wishes audiences to dwell in. But by the end, you’re left with nothing more than a simple, sad story. It’s similar to the feeling of overpaying for a nice-looking appetizer and never getting a full meal. 2 out of 5 pumpkins.

The Initiation - This movie has every 80s hour cliché necessary: minimalist synth soundtrack, naked co-eds, looming POV shots, hunky Graduate professor, escaped psychiatric patients, prophecy nightmares, and creepy a child. Yes, everything but actual horror. An hour into the horror movie and only one person has died. 2 out of 5 pumpkins. There is no point to this movie, unless you're a huge fan of the princess in Space Balls.

The Innkeepers - The second of Ti West’s two well-received horror originals before he set out for TV and found-footage anthologies, The Innkeepers may not get as much love as The House of the Devil, but should. The dual-leads (Sara Paxton and Pat Healy) are more fun to watch than Jocelin Donahue‘s performance and the tone more even-set throughout the film. 4 out of 5 pumpkins.

The Innocents - Reportedly Martin Scorsese’s favorite horror movie, it’s easy to see how big of an impact it had on the genre (especially The Others) with sweeping camera angles, slow but still haunting pace, and remarkable sound design. Perhaps it’s not as well-received by modern viewers, but it’s no doubt a classic. 4 out of 5 pumpkins.

Intruder (1989) - An enjoyable slasher flick from long-time Sam Raimi collaborator Scott Spiegel that takes places in a grocery store after hours that doesn’t try to do too much or take itself too seriously and features some over-the-top gore. 3 out of 5 pumpkins. “I’m just crazy about this store!”

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) - A terrific example of how to build paranoid fear. That its political allegory can be interpreted on both sides of McCarthyism makes it all the better. 5 out of 5 pumpkins. Original ending, ftw.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) - A rare remake that’s almost as good as the original. Terrific use of San Fransisco as a setting, Goldblum Goldblum’ing it up, solid pacing—great film! 4 out of 5 pumpkins. Plus, nudity!

The Invitation - More of a tense drama until the final moments, this film deserves praise for holding viewers’ attention for so long before the horror tipping point. Further details could spoil the story, but like many tales in the genre the lesson here is always trust your gut. 3 out of 5 pumpkins. Ugh, Californians.

It (2017) - Stephen King’s nearly 1,200 page 1986 national bestseller captures the attention of readers for a number of reason: it’s coming-of-age story is horrific even without supernatural elements, it’s cast of characters resemble classic American archetypes from many of King’s other works, and its adaptation into a four hour mini-series staring Tim Curry as Pennywise in 1990 has haunted the imaginations of children for decades. Unfortunately, like the mini-series, the movie fails to deliver the long, unsettling moments that make the novel so thrilling. King’s story is a cocaine-fueled disaster that throws everything and the kitchen sink at viewers when compressed onto the screen. The truly terrifying elements of the book lose their impact when delivered one after another without time to feel personally connected to each character. The genius of It is the paranormal evil’s ability to hone in on a person’s darkest fears. Without deep empathy for all of The Losers, the individualized psychological torture is muted when reduced to jump-cuts. For what it’s worth, the film does its best with a jumble of sub-plots and the Pennywise origin story, but as the tone bounces from wide shots of small town Maine and the painful trauma of abuse to titled zooms of CGI monsters and an over-the-top soundtrack, something is lost. 3 out of 5 pumpkins. Publishing office, 1985: “So, wait. The kids fuck?” the editor asks, disgusted. King vacuums another white rail into his nasal cavity. “Huh?! Oh. Yeah, sure. I guess. Does that happen? Jesus, I’m so fucked up right now. What day is it? What were you saying? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s like, love is the opposite of fear, bridge to adulthood or something. Do you have any booze around here?”

It Comes At Night - More utterly depressing than terrifying and a reminder that the greatest horror we’ll likely ever face is simply the limits of our own humanity. 3 out of 5 pumpkins.

It Follows - An uncomfortable and honest take on how sexuality is intertwined with the horror myth. One for the ages. 4 out of 5 pumpkins. The real terror is HPV. 

Jaws - A masterpiece that’s too easily remembered for its cultural impact than artist merit. 5 out of 5 pumpkins. R.I.P. Chrissie Watkins, you were a free spirit as wild as the wind.

The Killing of a Sacred Deer - Yorgos Lanthimos‘s follow up to The Lobster isn’t as well done, but the wide shots, odd lines, and increasingly bizzare build-up are all present. The finale is near perfect, but takes a bit too long to reach. I’d really like to give this film a higher score, but alas: 3 out of 5 pumpkins. There’s nothing wrong, yet something is missing.

Kiss of the Damned - There are handful of potential interesting scenes and the internal drama of a vampire family is a potentially the foundation for a good film. Despite this, Xan Cassavetes’s film never manages to actually be all that interesting. 2 out of 5 pumpkins. There’s nothing terrible here, but also nothing remarkable.

Knock Knock - Two hotties do my man Keanu dirty. 2 out of 5 pumpkins. Eli Roth is a better actor than director.

The Lair of the White Worm - A campy demon flick from Altered States director Ken Russell. Staring Hugh Grant, Peter Capaldi, and Amanda Donohoe, the plot is loosely based on Bram Stroker’s last novel, which has a few similarities to H. P. Lovecraft's novella The Shadow Over Innsmouth, which was made into the Spanish film Dagon. Very British all around, a bit like Hot Fuzz meets Clue, this could have been played straight and potentially been scary, but Russell didn’t intend to be serious. A topless snake demon wearing a death strap-on to sacrafice a virgin can’t be taken as *cinema* after all. 3 out of 5 pumpkins. Not great film by any stretch, but pretty fun!

Lake Mungo - Presented as a made-for-TV type of mystery documentary, this could have really turned out poorly. Despite some unnecessary plot additions, this movie really stuck with me. 3 out of 5 pumpkins. Sadder than you might expect.

The Langoliers - Balki Bartokomous is the villain in this made-for-TV special. He is terrible and the rest of the cast is packed with 90s no-name actors and a child actor that might as well be the blind version of a kid Liz Lemon. You know how Stephen King writes himself into every. single. story? In this case it's not even as a plot device, it's just a character to fill space like an obvious oracle. In the book, the character tearing paper is a subtle, unsettling mannerism you assume happens quietly in the background, but because television writers treat their audiences like distracted five year-olds, this action becomes a reoccurring focus with no point or context. One of the best parts about the book was imagining the wide, empty space of the Denver airport. Of course, shutting down an entire airport would be expensive, so most of the interactions take place in a single terminal, which is just as boring as being stuck at the airport yourself. Two 1994-era Windows screen savers eat Balki at the end, then, like, all of reality, maaaaaaaan. The more I think about it, this story might have been the unconscious basis for a strong Salvia freak out I once had. 1 out of 5 pumpkins. Dear male, white writers, we all know that no one actually fucks writers in real life - that's why you're all so angry. Stop creating these protagonists equipped with impossible pussy-magnets. Stop. Staaaaaaaahp.

The Last House of the Left - Wes Craven’s debut isn’t much of a horror, but a revenge tale that contains no build up or sense of dread, but an immediate and unrelenting assault of its characters and the audience. It’s well-made, and the rape revenge tale is older than Titus Andronicus, but that doesn’t mean it’s something worth viewing. There’s no joy; it’s Pink Flamingos without the camp. 4 out of 5 pumpkins. No doubt impactful, but really best viewed as a piece of history with a critical eye and not for entertainment.

The Legend of Hell House - A well made haunted house film that holds up forty years later. Pamela Franklin, playing a medium, carries much of the movie. Her foil, the physicist, is a strange character. He apparently believes people, and even dead bodies, can manifest surreal, electromagnetic energies, but not in “surviving personalities.” Yet, he still orders this giant “reverse energy” machine to “drain” the house of its evil before they even set out to research house. 3 out of 5 pumpkins. Dangerous diner parties, the insatiable Mrs. Barret, mirrored ceilings and kick ass Satan statues everywhere - this house seems pretty great, actually.

The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires - A blast to watch, but not truly great. Unfortunately, I’ve only seen the edited version (The 7 Brothers Meet Dracula) that mixes up the beginning for no real reason and wonder how much better the original cut might be. Still, vampires! Kung Fu! Peter Cushing! 3 out of 5 pumpkins.


Let the Right One In - Beautiful and terribly haunting. 5 out of 5 pumpkins. Likely the best horror movie this generation will get.

Let Me In - Surprising good. Unnecessary, yes. But still good. 4 out of 5 pumpkins. Fun fact: I once watched an *ahem* found copy of Matt Reeves‘s Dawn of the Planet of the Apes without the ape subtitles and thought it was a brave choice to make the audience sympathize with the common humanity among our species. I was also pretty high.

Life After Beth - Jeff Baena‘s horror comedy features a terrific Aubrey Plaza, but Dane DeHaan’s character leaves a lot to be desired. It seems like the film is trying to save something about life, love, and family, but never finds its voice. A fine, funny movie to watch on a rainy afternoon. 2 out of 5 pumpkins.

Lifeforce - Directed by Tobe Hooper (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) and written by Dan O'Bannon (Alien) is a film the suffers from “the disease of more.” The entire concept of space vampires is rad as hell, but a $25 million budget and a 70 mm production couldn’t save what ends up being a boring trod and a jumbled ending that somehow makes major city destruction tiring. Though, to be fair, this was well before Independence Day. Colin Wilson, author of the original source material, said it was the worst movie he has ever seen. I wouldn’t go that far, but during a special 70 mm screening, the theater host chastised the audience in advance to not make fun of the movie during the showing because it was “a great film.” Reader, it is not. But Mathilda May looks real good naked and there are a couple cool, gory shots. So, there’s that. I guess. 2 out of 5 pumpkins. Patrick Stewart is in this for all of like 10 minutes, but is still listed as a main character.

The Lighthouse - From The Witch’s Robert Eggers, this film is objectively a great work of art. Brooding, stark, and compelling performances from Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson—all the elements add up into a unique and disturbing experience. 4 out of 5 pumpkins. All that said, in the same way I consider Death Spa a 2 pumpkin movie you should see, this is a 4 pumpkin movie you could probably skip. It’s not entertaining in the traditional sense, and likely not one you’d want to really ever see again. The Eggers brothers made something weirdly niche and it’s fine if it stays that way.

Little Evil - A serviceable comedy that isn’t all that scary or even gory, which is a disappointment considering Eli Craig’s Tucker & Dale vs. Evil was so good. There are a few nods to famous horror movies that make a handful of scene enjoyable, but otherwise it’s purely background material. 2 out of 5 pumpkins.

Little Monsters - A Hulu original that’s pretty fun, if ultimately standing on the shoulders of giants like George A. Romero and Edgar Wright. 3 out of 5 pumpkins.

A Lizard in a Woman's Skin - Lucio Fulci’s erotic mystery starts out with groovy sex parties and hallucinations, but quickly gets dull in the middle with extended scenes of psychological assessment, only to wind up where we all started. 2 out of 5 pumpkins.

The Lodge - A good exercise in isolation horror that, while a bit slow, ratchets up the tension and horror with each act. 4 out of 5 pumpkins. Damn kids.

The Lost Boys - A fun, campy 80s vampire flick you’ve likely heard of or even seen. I get why it’s cemented in popular culture, but at the end of the day it’s a Joel Schumacher film with a silly plot. 2 out of 5 pumpkins.

The Love Witch - Somewhere between earnest satire and homage, The Love Witch is a well-crafted throwback to 1960s schlock. Weaving in contemporary gender critique, the film is more than just a rehash of its sexual fore-bearers. 4 out of 5 pumpkins.

Mandy (2018) - Like watching a bad trip from afar, Beyond the Black Rainbow director Panos Cosmatos (son of the Tombstone director) pulls off a trippy, dreadful film that starts out with story that follows logic and consequence before giving over to the full weirdness of Nicholas Cage’s uniquely unhinged style of acting. 4 out of 5 pumpkins. Jóhann Jóhannsson’s score is superb.

Midsommar - Though not as good as Aster’s Hereditary, Midsommar sticks with you longer. Eerie throughout and disturbing, but not frightening in the traditional sense, it’s no surprise this film seems to split viewers into devoted fans and downright haters. Florence Pugh’s performance is wonderful and the scenes of drugged-out dread are far better than what was attempted in Climax. Some critics have called the film muddled and shallow, and certainly the “Ugly American” character fits in the later, but I found it to be a remarkably clear vision compared to the jumbled ending of Hereditary. That said, it’s not a scary movie, it’s simply unnerving. Should a male director and writer be the one to tell this tale? Probably not. But it’s not wholly unredemptive. 4 out of 5 pumpkins. I first gave this film 3 pumpkins, but the more I think about it, the more it lingers. That counts for something. One more pumpkin to be exact.

Mimic - Without del Toro’s name attached, perhaps this movie wouldn’t be judged so harshly. Yet, though the shadowy, lingering shots he’s know for give a real sense of darkness to the picture, it’s a chore to sit through and is especially frustrating toward the end. 2 out of 5 pumpkins.

The Mist - Watch the black and white version, which adds an ol’ timey feel to this Lovecraftian tale from Steven King and makes always-outdated CGI a bit more palpable. 4 out of 5 pumpkins.

The Monster (2016) - From The Strangers Bryan Bertino, this monster movie that ties in a trouble mother/daughter relationship doesn’t ever overcome its limitations and poor character decisions that get protagonists in deeper trouble. Zoe Kazan does what she can to carry the role. Not bad, but not much below the surface. 2 out of 5 pumpkins.

Monsters (2010) - A slow-burn that relies on its actors to push the suspense of a road-trip-style plot, leaving the special effects for subtle and beautiful moments. Arguably more of a sci-fi thriller than a true horror flick, it’s still worth viewing if you’re looking for something spooky. 4 out of 5 pumpkins.

mother! - Like many of Aronosky’s films, mother! is difficult to define by genre. Though not a typical haunted house film, the bloody, unsettling aspects make it more than a typical psychological thriller. Haunting in a similar fashion of Black Swan, yet broader in theme like The Fountain, this movie is challenging, disturbing and frustrating in the sense that, as a mere viewer, you’re left feeling like there’s something you’ll never fully understand despite being beaten over the head. An not-so-subtle allegory about love, death, creation, mankind, god, and the brutality women must endure, it’s a hideous reminder that, upon even the briefest reflection, life’s cosmic journey is macabre. 4 out of 5 pumpkins.

Ms. 45 - Ahead of its time, especially considering the unfortunate “rape revenge” sub-genre that seemed to cater to male fantasy than female empowerment. Still, it’s slow build and random scenes toward the finale leave it wanting. 2 out of 5 pumpkins. Oh, the knife is a dick. I get it. 

Murder Party - A bit like Tucker and Dale vs. Evil, but for New York art kids. Even for being a horror comedy, there’s only like 20 minutes of horror, which is too bad as there’s material to mine instead of a prolonged rooftop chase scene. If this was a studio production, it’d probably just get 2 pumpkins, but given it’s $200k budget and at-the-time unknown cast, it’s a solid first feature for Jeremy Saulnier and Macon Blair, who went on to make some truly great films. 3 out of 5 pumpkins.

National Lampoon’s Class Reunion - Flat out awful; neither a comedy nor a horror. Writer John Hughes claims he was fired from production, though that doesn’t hold much water considering he’s credited as “Girl with bag on head” and went on to write several other Lampoon movies. Director Michael Miller didn’t make another feature film for almost thirty years, which wasn’t long enough. 0 out of 5 pumpkins.

Near Dark - Kathryn Bigelow‘s sophomore film is hampered by its ultimate ending, but the story is original and well produced. Even Bill Paxton’s over-the-top performance is enjoyable. 3 out of 5 pumpkins. Worst. Vampire. Ever.

The Neon Demon - A spiritual successor to Suspiria, this film from Drive director Nicolas Winding Refn is beautifully shot, but ultimately empty. While both Jena Malone and Keanu Reeves breathe life into their small roles, the cast of models rarely shine. The horrific ending goes a step too far without lingering long enough to truly shock. Though much better than the extremely similar Starry Eyes, it’s difficult to give this film a higher rating. 3 out of 5 pumpkins. Worth watching for a couple standout scenes. 

Night of the Living Dead - Viewed today the film seems almost tame, but in 1968 it was lambasted for being too gorey and sparked calls for censorship. And to its credit, there wasn’t anything else like it at the time. Romero’s incredibly small budget, Duane Jones‘s great performance, and the film’s unintended symbolism make its success all the more impressive. Kudos to MoMA and The Film Foundation for restoring this important piece of cinema history. 4 out of 5 pumpkins. I argue this is a sci-fi film, if you think about it.

A Night to Dismember (The "Lost" Version) - This version appeared on YouTube in the summer of 2018, decades after it was originally filmed. The version that was released in 1989 on VHS, and later in 2001 on DVD, was entirely re-shot with adult film actress Samantha Fox after a disgruntled processing employee destroyed the original negatives. The re-shoot gave the released version of movie its “sexplotation” vibe that director Doris Wishman was know for producing, but he original version is more of a straight-forward psychotic slasher movie with only a scene of campy nudity and stars Diana Cummings, instead of Fox. Gone is the striptease, sex hallucinations, detective character, and asylum plot that were slapped together in the released version, leaving a still somewhat jumbled story of a young woman who goes on a killing spree after becoming possessed by her dead mother, who died in pregnancy, leaving her an orphan. 2 out of 5 pumpkins. Poor Mary. Poor Vicki.

Nightmare on Elm Street - Why this movie sparked a generations-long series is almost as puzzling as how Children of the Corn pulled it off as well. The movie flat out ignores basic storytelling devices. Recalling the overall plot, you’re not even sure if the main character is better off alive or dead, given the horrifying reality she already exists within. Consider this: Her father is an authoritarian cop leading the world’s worse police force and her mother is a drunk, possessive vigilante arsonist. University doctors are so inept they focus solely on Colonial-era medicine to the point of ignoring a metaphysical phenomenon, believing teenage girls are attention-starved enough to smuggle hats embroidered with a dead child-killer’s name inside their vaginas to a sleep deprivation study. 3 out of 5 pumpkins. So much for the classics. At least this gave us the future gift of inspiring Home Alone-style defense antics.

Not of This Earth (1988) - This film, and I mean that artistically, was made because the director, Jim Wynorskin, bet he could remake the original on the same inflation-adjusted budget and schedule as the 1957 version by Roger Corman. Traci Lords makes her non-adult film debut and is a better actor than the rest of the cast combined. The gem isn’t so bad it’s good, it’s so godawful it’s incredible. 4 out of 5 pumpkins. I was looking for the trashiest horror movie on Netflix, and I believe I have found it.

One Cut of the Dead - Know as little as possible going into this one. 4 out of 5 pumpkins. It’s impossible to not enjoy this film.

One Dark Night - Starts out interesting, but quickly gets forgetable even with the central location of a haunted cemetery. Worth putting on the background. 2 out of 5 pumpkins. Aaaaaadddaaaammmm Weeeeessssst.

The Others - Well-paced, nicely shot, superior acting by Nicole Kidman, ominous tone through out, great ending. 5 out of 5 pumpkins. One of my personal favorites.

Pan's Labyrinth - del Torro’s best work, combining the tinges of war dread and the fantastical elements that would go on to be a key part of his other films. Pale Man is one of the creepiest monsters to ever be captured on screen. Perhaps the biggest horror is that though you’ll cheer for the anarchists, the historical fact is that the Nationalists won and established a dictatorship for nearly forty years. 5 out of 5 pumpkins. No god, no country, no master.

The People Under the Stairs - When the main character of a horror movie would be better placed in a zany after-school sitcom, the entire story is bound to fail. Little did I know how far. Twin Peaks actors aside, the rest of the this movie is so convoluted and poorly explained that it made me hate Panic Room somewhat less. They can't all be winners. 1 out of 5 pumpkins. At the end of this movie, a house explodes and money rains down on poor, mostly black people. Thanks, Wes Craven!

Pet Sematary (2019) - Uninspiring, uneven, and mostly uneventful. 1 out of 5 pumpkins.

Poltergeist - If you haven't seen this Steven Speilberg produced & written, but not directed horror movie, it's worth a modern viewing. Original, yet tinged with all the classic elements of fear, this movie manages to tug on the heartstrings like a family-friendly drama while still being creepy as hell. 4 out of 5 pumpkins. The best, most expensive Holiday Inn commercial ever made.

Pontypool - Good, but not as great as hyped. Characters are introduced haphazardly and the explanation for the horror barely tries to make sense. Still, not bad for a movie with essentially three characters stuck in a single location. 3 out of 5 pumpkins.

Possession (1981) - Described by some die-hard horror fans as a “must see,” I guess I agree. It’s by no means a masterpiece, but it’s bizarre enough to take the time to check out. It’s a sort of Cold War psychological horror as if written by Clive Barker and directed by David Cronenberg. Of course that comparison is necessary for American readers, but Polish director Andrzej Żuławski is an art-house favorite, whose second film was banned by his home government, causing him to move to France. Often panned for “over acting,” Isabelle Adjani actually won best actress at Cannes in 1981. Though, you may find one particular scene as if Shelley Duvall is having a bad acid trip. Part of the appeal of seeing this film is the difficulty in finding a copy. The DVD is out of print, and the new Mondo Blu-ray is limited to 2,000 copies at $70 a piece. Good luck. 3 out of 5 pumpkins. If you’re looking for something weird and very European, seek it out.

Prometheus - Perhaps because Ridley Scott’s return the franchise was expected to be such a welcome refresher after the abysmal failures of others in the series, this one was a pretty big let down. Though there are some cool concepts and frightening scenes, there are anger-inducing plot mistakes and zero sympathetic characters. Michael Fassbender’s performance is terrific, yet not enjoy to be an enjoyable view. 2 out of 5 pumpkins.

Psycho - Not as great at The Birds, but still one of the best. The superb shots, painfully slow clean up of the first kill, it’s no wonder why the film is landmark for horror. Anthony Perkins is tremendous. 5 out of 5 pumpkins. Remember when Gus Van Sant remade this shot-for-shot for literally no reason and lost $30 million? It’s like he has to make one really terrible bomb after each critical hit and then crawl back again.

Pumpkinhead - The production quality of this 80s horror flick is surprisingly high, especially the Henson-like monster. Long story short - asshole dude bro accidentally kills hick kid, hick father calls up demon to seek revenge. All in all, not a bad movie. 3 out of 5 pumpkins. Given the title, the monster's head in this movie is shockingly not very pumpkin-like. Boo.

A Quiet Place - John Krasinski gets a lot of credit for playing a well-intentioned father, which is an easier bridge to his well-known character from The Office, rather than a military member, like in many of his other projects. Emily Blunt is wonderful as is Millicent Simmonds. The creatures are scary, reminiscent of The Demogorgon in Stranger Things, and the plot is decent, even without much of an ending. I’ll be honest, I didn’t really want to enjoy this film as much as I did. It seemed too “mainstream.” And, it is. But it’s also a well-executed, well-acted, well-produced product, which is much more difficult to pull off than it sounds. 4 out of 5 pumpkins. Worth recommending to friends who aren’t even horror fans.

Rabid - No where near the level of Cronenberg’s best or even his subsequent film The Brood, but still very good. Apparently Cronenberg wanted Sissy Spacek to play the lead, but was shot down by the producers. Obviously Marilyn Chambers was selected to play up the porn star angle in the hopes of greater marketing for the indie, horror film out of Canada, but she does a great job in her first mainstream role. If you like any Cronenberg has done, you should watch this one. 3 out of 5 pumpkins.

Raw - A terrific coming-of-age, sexual-awakening, body-horror film that manages to retain its heart even as it pushes the limits. One of the best horror movies of the last decade. 5 out of 5 pumpkins. Nom-nom.

Re-Animator - Creepy actor Jeffrey Combs is also in The Frighteners, which makes it a good nod in that flick. "Say hello to these, Michael!" When you see it, you'll get it. What can be said of this movie? It's crazy. It's great. 4 out of 5 pumpkins. Gory, campy, funny and scary all at once, a definite classic.

Ready or Not - I wouldn’t go so far as to call this movie “clever,” but it’s certainly better than its absurd premise. Samara Weaving’s performance is really the only thing that keeps people watching. 2 out of 5 pumpkins. Killing all the attractive help is played off as a joke, but . . . it’s not? At least rich people die.

Repulsion - After having to listen to her sister being drilled by some limey prick night after night in their shared apartment and a series of unwanted street advances triggers her past trauma, a young woman rightfully kills a stalker turned home intruder and her rapist landlord. 4 out of 5 pumpkins.

The Return of The Living Dead  - This movie doesn’t give a wink and nod to horror tropes, it reaches out of the fourth wall to slap you in the face to create new ones. There’s an entire character that is just naked the whole movie. I understand that just because it’s a joke it doesn’t mean it’s not still sexist. But, also, you know, boobs. 4 out 5 pumpkins. What was created as camp became the foundation for modern zombies.

Return of the Living Dead III - A love story of sorts that takes a more series turn than the original. At first, I didn’t enjoy the uneven balance of camp and earnestness, but it oddly grows on you. 3 out of 5 pumpkins. Worth watching to see what you think.

The Ritual - A Netflix original that is better than it needs to be about regret, trauma, and fear that gets right into the action and wraps fairly satisfying. 3 out of 5 pumpkins.

Rosemary's Baby - If you're looking for a sure party killer this October, put on this number and watch your guests fall asleep! Often forgot, the beginning and end of Rosemary's Baby are terrifying, expertly filmed scenes of dread, but the middle is a two-hour wink to the film's conclusion revolving around an expectant mother. Still, few other films can capture fear the way Polanski's does; all the more impressive that it stands up today. 5 out of 5 pumpkins. If you haven't seen this film, you owe it to yourself to watch it this season.

Scanners - Cronenberg’s 1981 film feels like a much more successful version of what De Palma attempted with The Fury. Dark, paranoid, and ultra-gory in key scenes, Scanners isn’t quite the perfect sci-fi horror, but it’s damn close. 4 out of 5 pumpkins.

Scream - For a movie that birthed an annoying amount of sequels and spoofs, it's sort of sad that Wes Craven's meta-parody ended up creating a culture of the very movies he was trying to rail against. 4 out of 5 pumpkins. Worth watching again, even if you saw it last year.

Sea Fever - A good, but not great, tense thriller on sea. Plus, an important lesson in quarantine. Ultimately, it doesn’t go far enough to present its horror. A well-made, and even well-paced film with a limited cast and sparse special effects, though. There’s nothing explicitly “wrong” as the movie progresses, but a tighter script and bigger ratcheting of the horror could have made it a classic. The ending is kinda cheesy the more I think about it. 3 out of 5 pumpkins. Could’ve used a sex scene with some impending doom is all I’m saying!

The Sentinel - I really wanted to love this one. Downstairs lesbians! Birthday parties for cats! Late 70s New York! Alas, its shaky plot and just baffling lack of appropriate cues make it mostly a jumbled mess only worth watching if that slow-burn 70s horror aesthetic is your thing. 2 out of 5 pumpkins.

The Shallows - Mostly a vehicle for Blake Lively’s launch from TV to the big screen, this movies isn’t particularly good or bad. 3 out of 5 pumpkins. The shark has a powerful vendetta against Lively. What did she do?!

Shaun of the Dead - First in Three Flavours Cornetto, some of the jokes don’t land as well as they did in 2004, but still a great spin on the zombie genre with loads of laughs and a bit of heart. 4 out of 5 pumpkins.

The Shining - The pinnacle of the form. 5 out of 5 pumpkins. "So why don't you start now and get the fuck outta here!" Harsh, but come on, Wendy kinda sucks.

Shivers - Cronenberg’s 1975 shocker flick is . . . fine. You certainly get to see how some of his body horror themes started. Cronenberg himself seems to see it as more of a film to watch to understand what not to do as a young director. If you’re a completist, definitely check it out. Otherwise just skip to 1977′s Rabid, if you’re looking for Cronenberg’s earlier work. 2 out of 5 pumpkins. Not bad considering it was shot in two weeks.

Silent Night, Deadly Night - Whoo, boy. This one’s a ride. A decidedly anti-PC flick that caused calls for boycotts when it was first released, this movie is full of assault and uncomfortable situations. It’s also hilarious, gory, and worth watching in a large group. 3 out of 5 pumpkins. Punish.

Sleepaway Camp - I must be missing something, because like Children of the Corn, I can’t understand why this movie became a cult-classic. A guy who openly talks about wanting to rape children is gruesomely maimed, so there’s that? I guess. A couple of these “kids” are definitely 34, while others are 14. Is this the basis for Wet Hot American Summer? I don’t know or care. 2 out 5 pumpkins. Just watch Friday the 13th.

Slither - Almost on the level of other spoofs, but with a few groan-worthy moments. Definitely one to watch if looking for something fun. 3 out of 5 pumpkins. Not for the bug fearing.

The Slumber Party Massacre - Rita Mae Brown wrote this movie as a parody of the slasher genre that spawned so many Halloween copycats. It’s a bit unfortunate that we didn’t get her version. Author of pioneering lesbian novel Rubyfruit Jungle, Brown’s script was turned into a more straight-forward flick, giving the movie some baffling humor, like when one of the girls decides to eat the pizza from the dead delivery boy, and some untended humor, like the Sylvester Stallone issue of Playgirl. Lesbians undertones still prevail, as do lingering shots of gratuitous nudity, and enough phallic symbolism to write a paper about. All in all, a fun, albeit uneven movie with pretty decent dialogue. 3 out of 5 pumpkins. Fun fact: Director Amy Holden Jones got her start as an assistant on Taxi Driver, passed on editing E.T. after Roger Corman offered to finance early filming for her directorial debut, and later went on to write Mystic Pizza, Beethoven, Indecent Proposal, and The Relic. Bonus fact: Playgirl was able to get nude photos of Stallone based on his first movie The Party at Kitty and Stud’s (aka The Italian Stallion), for which Stallone was reportedly paid $200 to star in during a period in his life when he was desperate and sleeping in a New York bus station.

The Slumber Party Massacre II - If the first movie was a knock-off of Halloween, this is a bizarre rip-off of The Nightmare on Elm Street with a rockabilly twist. It’s hard to tell if this is a parody or a sort of musical vehicle for the Driller Killer, who—to his credit—is somehow almost charismatic enough to it pull off. 1 out of 5 pumpkins. Somehow the weirdest movie I’ve ever watched.

The Slumber Party Massacre III - A return to form, in some respects. All the elements of the original are there: a slumber party, gratuitous nudity, a drill. But the driller killer’s poor-man’s Patrick Bateman character quickly becomes tired. Not terrible for a slasher flick, but not very good either. 2 out of 5 pumpkins. How many lamps to the head can Ken take? 

Species - If I asked you to name a movie staring Sir Benjamin Kingsley, Alfred Molina, Forest Whitaker and Michelle Williams, would you guess Species? No, no you fucking wouldn't. We all know Species, but I, like most, erased it from my memory. This was helpful for two reasons: first because for about the first half of the movie, you think there might be a decent flick happening - baring some obvious flaws of a blockbuster. Second because - holy shit - you get to see a ton of naked breasts in this movie, like way more than I remember. Unfortunately, about halfway through Species someone must have come in and realized having the B-squad Scully & Mulder be one step behind every instinct killing was boring as shit, and flashing tits every 20 mins wasn't going to hack it. Whatever Hollywood dickbag crafted this turd failed to realize the casting of the actor forever known as Bud from Kill Bill is the only white, macho-postering character that morons want to root for. And so we get a squint-faced protagonist getting blow jobs from a coworker scientist and an ending dumber than the boob tentacles he should have been strangled with. 2 out of 5 pumpkins. There are worse horror movies, but there are also much better ones.

Starry Eyes - A thinly-veiled critique on Hollywood’s abusive history with actresses, the movie starts out well, but lags in the third act before a gruesome finale. Sort of a low-rent Mulholland Drive. 3 out of 5 pumpkins. Watch out for that barbell, Ashley. 

The Stuff - Odd, mostly because of its uneven tone. Like if The Blob, The Live, and Canadian Bacon raised a baby and that disappointed its parents, like all babies eventually do. There are some good horror and comedic moments, but none of which make it great. The sound editing is remarkably bad, and the poor cuts make no sense given its scope. Oh well. 3 out of 5 pumpkins.

Suspiria - More of a focus on set, sound, and color than characters, Suspiria is reminiscent of the Japanese classic House, but with a more straightforward story. The Italian director, English language, and German setting make for an interesting, offbeat feel that adds to the overall weirdness of the movie. One cringe worthy scene in particular makes up for its immediate lack of logic, and the soundtrack by Goblin stands up on its own. 5 out of 5 pumpkins. Sexist note: there’s a shocking lack of boobs given the subject matter.

Suspiria (2018) - Another in a long line of unnecessary remakes, though technically more of an homage. Luca Guadagnino’s version was supposedly developed for years alongside Tilda Swinton, who plays three different characters. Truthfully, without any attachment to the original, this could have been a muddled, but remarkable film. Thom Yorke’s score is perfect in certain scenes, yet detracting in others. The plot is similar in this manner. Some scenes are haunting and dense, but others needlessly detailed. The dance scenes are terrific, but weighed down by the larger war themes. The ending’s gore-fest is hampered by too much CGI, but still demonically fun. Fans of the original won’t find the weird, colorful elements to love, but it’s a good movie, albeit thirty minutes too long. 4 out of 5 pumpkins.

The Taking of Deborah Logan - Good premise; found footage in the vein of Blair Witch Project of a demon possession disguised as Alzheimer’s disease. But, the movie can’t decide if it wants to stick to its foundation of a student documentary or veer into the studio-style editing and affects of theatrical release. Which is unfortunate as the former would have made it stand-out among a pack of mediocre ghost stories, while the later distracts from the setting it seeks to establish. 2 out of 5 pumpkins.

Teeth - A movie about the myth of vagina dentata could have been absolutely deplorable, but with the bar so low, Teeth does a pretty good job. Jess Weixler is a functional actress, not necessarily stand-out, but certainly far better than the role requires. Trying to tightrope walk between comedy and horror is never a task a creator should set out upon without a clear vision. Unfortunately, this one seems a bit blurry. One its release, Boston Globe said the movie “runs on a kind of angry distrust toward boys.” Not bad advice. 3 out of 5 pumpkins.

Terrifier - Do you want to see a naked woman hung upside down and sawed from gash to forehead? Then this is the movie for you. That’s it. There’s not much else here. Gino Cafarelli is good as the pizza guy. 2 out of 5 pumpkins. The clown is scary, though.

The Terror - A classic haunted throwback from Roger Corman, but without the nudity and gore his later work is infamous for. A young Jack Nicholson proves he was always kind of a prick. Boris Karloff does his best. The plot is pretty boring, but it’s a decent movie that you might stumble upon on a lazy afternoon on cable TV. 2 out of 5 pumpkins.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre - Tobe Hooper’s 1974 persuasive argument for vegetarianism is just as terrifying today as it was when it was released. Just as Halloween launched a thousand imitators, the hues and low angles in this film set the standard for horror for years and, unfortunately, laid the groundwork for more exploitative movies offered referred to as “torture porn.” Though gory, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s sense of weird dread is established well before the chainsaw rips, and though many have tried to follow in its footsteps, none have captured the lighting that adds to the overall queasy moments of the film. There’s a kind of simplistic beauty to such unexplained brutality, and perhaps because it was first, all others since haven’t seemed as artistically valuable. 4 out of 5 pumpkins. So, umm, what do you think happened to the Black Maria truck driver?

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003) - The only decent carry over from this remake is John Larroquette as the narrator. Over-washed tones, over-the-top gore and unsympathetic characters make this film more than unnecessary, placing among the worst horror remakes of all time. Robert Ebert gave it one of his rare 0 stars, reserved for works he found genuinely appalling such as I Spit On Your Grave, The Human Centipede 2, and most infamously John Waters’s Pink Flamingos. 1 out of 5 pumpkins.

They Live - “I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass… And I'm all out of bubblegum." 4 out of 5 pumpkins.

The Thing - Trying to give this film an honest review is almost impossible. Cast out on its release for being too bizarre and gory, Carpenter’s nihilist tale has since come to be seen as a masterpiece for its special effects, bleak tone, and lasting impact on other creators. Is it perfect? No, but it’s damn close. 5 out of 5 pumpkins. MacReady’s assimilated. Deal with it.

Train to Busan - A bit too predictable, but a solid, well-paced zombie action flick that’s smarter than most American blockbusters from Korean director Yeon Sang-ho, who is better known for his semi-autobiographical animated features. 4 out of 5 pumpkins.

Tucker & Dale vs. Evil - I really didn't expect much out of this movie, but it's actually really, really funny and a really gory spoof. Not quite on the scale of The Cabin in the Woods, but still pretty damn great. 4 out of 5 pumpkins. If you don't think people getting hacked up by a chainsaw in certain contexts can be funny, then this probably ain't your bag.

Twins of Evil - An enjoyable, somewhat smutty vampire movie from the famous British studio Hammer Films, staring Peter Cushing and Playboy Playmates the Collinson twins. Directed by John Hough, who also directed The Legend of Hell House, the film doesn’t break any new ground and is loaded with over-acting, but it’s well-paced, wonderfully set, and generally fun to watch, where the Puritan witchfinders are just as horrible as the vampires. Not as great as Black Sunday, but still worth viewing. 3 out of 5 pumpkins. Let Joachim speak, you racists.

Under the Skin - Mesmerizing and haunting. The less you know going into this film the better. 4 out of 5 pumpkins. Quite possibly Scarlett Johansson’s best work.

Under the Silver Lake - Technically a “comedic neo-noir,” whatever the fuck that means; in any case David Robert Mitchell (It Follows) tries to do too much over too long of a run time. Andrew Garfield gives a decent performance, especially considering he’s in almost every frame of the film. But the edge-of-subtly that made It Follows so modern and terrifying is replaced by a silk, wandering, and heavy-handed stroll through the powerful Los Angeles entertainment Illuminati. Certainly there’s material there, but instead of being a radical stab at the very real institutions of pop-culture that treat young women as nothing more than disposable meat, we drift in and out of a young man’s lust that revels in objectification without the sleazy charm of exploitation flicks or the critical eye of outright satire. Even the eerily presence of the Owl Woman can’t level-up what is an exercise in arrested development for hipsters. 2 out of 5 pumpkins. Despite this negative review, Mitchell still has plenty of potential to make another great film. Whether he deserves that chance is different question.

Us - Jordan Peele’s second film is even better than his great debut. Us isn’t perfect, but hints at what Peele could create in the future. Unnecessary explanation and slightly oddly timed humor are present, like in Get Out, but more restrained. Peele’s talent for making modern horror accessible to the widest audience is laudable. Still, I can’t wait to see what he makes two or three films down the road. I suspect more than one could come close to equaling that of Kubrik’s The Shinning. 4 out of 5 pumpkins. 

Vampire’s Kiss - Is it a horror? Is it a comedy? Is it a parody? Drama? This movie truly defies genre due to the inexplicable acting choices made by Nicholas Cage. His odd affectation doesn’t change from sentence to sentence, but word to word. It’s like he’s trying to play three different characters across three different acts all at once. Is it good? Not really. But, I mean, see it. 2 out of 5 pumpkins.

Vampyros Lesbos - After vigorous encouragement from my academic colleagues, I decided to watch this 1971 Spanish-German film for, umm, science. Shot in Turkey and staring the tragic Soledad Miranda, Jesús Franco’s softcore horror jumps right into full-frontal nudity and attempts a sort of story involving Count Dracula that moves forward through uninteresting monologues and shaky camera work. It’s not awful, but there’s no reason to watch it. If it was playing in the background at a dive bar, it might have a tinge of charm. Other than some close moments of near-unapologetic queer sex, despite being created almost entirely for the male gaze, it’s just another in the pile of European exploitation. Still, it’s fun to daydream about Istanbul being ruled by a dark-haired demonic lesbian; beats the hell out of what we have in our reality. 1 out of 5 pumpkins. Fun fact: The soundtrack found renewed fame in 1990′s Britain, causing it to finally find distribution into America.

The Vault - A serviceable, but ultimately boring horror take on a bank heist that tries to hard to end with a twist. 2 out of 5 pumpkins.

V/H/S - Every review I've seen for this movie is generally positive, but that only reaffirms my belief that most people are easily pleased by unintelligent, unoriginal bullshit. A Blair Witch-style story-within-a-story collection of shorts, I couldn't get past the first borderline date-rape, little-girl, sexually confused, monster story. Fuck this trope. Fuck this movie. The much delayed glorification of grisly murder of the offending male villains is hardly radical and only further supports the stereotypes of patriarchy much as it attempts to subvert a worn genre. 0 out of 5 pumpkins. I hate the world.

Videodrome - Cronenberg’s best film. James Woods’s best role; it’s a shame that he’s total piece of shit in real life. 5 out of 5 pumpkins. Long live the new flesh.

The Wailing - Despite clocking in at over two and half hours, this part zombie/part demon horror movie from Korean director Na Hong-jin isn’t a slow burn, but rather an intriguing maze of twists and turns as the main character (and audience) struggles to find the truth about a mysterious, murderous diseases sweeping through a small village. Actor Do-won Kwak gives an especially captivating performance. Though the ending packs a powerful punch, the overlapping lies and half-truths told over the course of the film makes it a bit difficult to suss out the evil roots. 4 out of 5 pumpkins.

We Are Still Here - What sets out as a slowly paced ghost story turns into something of a gore-fest towards the ends, which doesn’t make it bad so much out of place. 3 out fo 5 pumpkins. Could’ve been a contender.

We Are What We Are - A remake of Jorge Michel Grau’s 2010 film, the American version takes its time getting to the horror before going a step too far at the end. Still, the ever-present knowledge that you’re watching a cannibal film makes some of predictable moments all-the-more horrifying. 3 out of 5 pumpkins.

Wes Craven’s New Nightmare - The novel charm of Craven’s meta Freddy saga has worn with age. Heather Langernkamp is passable, but not enough to carry the film and Robert Englund out of makeup shatters the pure evil illusion of his character. Interesting to see some of the ideas that would later synthesize in Scream, but otherwise kind of a bore. 2 out of 5 pumpkins.

The Witch: A New-England Folktale - A deeply unsettling period-piece that reflects on American religion and its violent fear of feminine power. 5 out of 5 pumpkins. Trust no goat.

The Witches - Roald Dahl’s story is ultimately crushed by a changed ending, however, Nicolas Roeg‘s adaptation up to that point is a fun, creepy movie people of any age can enjoy. 4 out of 5 pumpkins. It’s really a shame the original ending was changed.

Wolfcop - When a movie’s title promises so much, maybe it’s not fair to judge. But there’s so much campy potential in a werewolf cop picture that it’s kind of a bummer to see it executed at level that makes you wonder if it wasn’t made by high school kids whose favorite movie is Super Troopers. 1 out of 5 pumpkins. God, the movie’s horrible.

The World’s End - The final chapter in the Three Flavours Cornetto and the best, showcasing a wealth of talent at the top of their game. 4 out of 5 pumpkins.

XX - Admittedly, I don’t care much for the recent spring of short horror anthologies. Rarely do they have enough time to build the necessary suspense horror movies require. Still, two of the shorts are OK, one is pretty good, and one is bad. So, not a total loss. 2 out of 5 pumpkins.

You’re Next - Home-invasion horror as never been my cup of hippie tea as it feeds into the 2nd Amendment hero fantasy of American males. That said, this dark-comedy take on it isn't bad. Some things don’t really add up. For example: Are you telling me that the deep woods home of a former defense corporation employee doesn’t have a single gun stashed somewhere? Bullshit. Anyway, who doesn’t want to see a rich family’s bickering dinner interrupted by a gang of psycho killers? 3 out of 5 pumpkins. Bonus rating: 6 out of 10 would fuck in front of their dead mother. (Sorry, mom.)

Zombeavers - No one would say this is a good movie, but it also doesn’t take itself too seriously. Not at funny as Tucker & Dale vs. Evil, and certainly more formulaic, this one’s only worth watching if you’re bored. 2 out of 5 pumpkins.

Zombi 2 - Lucio Fulci’s unofficial sequel to Dawn of the Dead is one of his best films. But even though Fulci crafted some of the best zombies to ever appear on screen—filmed in the bright, Caribbean sun, the film suffers, as most of his do, from some unnecessary, borderline confusing plot points and poor dubbing. Still, well worth watching on a lazy day, especially for the final act, when the protaganists fight off a zombie hoard inside a burning church. 3 out of 5 pumpkins. Bonus: topless scuba diving zombie shark fight, which is also my new DJ name.

[setepenre-set]

Code: Safeword (chapter 23)

Pairing: Megamind/Roxanne

Rating: M (for sexual content and language)

Summary: Roxanne calls time-out on Metro Man day before the death ray happens. 

Additional tags: alien genitalia; a rather surprising amount of plot; sex and social justice

AO3 | FFN

tap…tap tap

Minion blinked groggily, frowning as consciousness slowly dawned.

tap tap…tap

What in the world…?

tap tap tap…tap

His bleary eyes focused on the brainbot in front of him—number 98, he thought. It tapped once more on the glass of Minion’s sleeping tank, and then, seeing that he was awake, retracted its arm and bobbed excitedly in the air.

“Bowg,” it said, eyestalk moving rapidly.

The brainbots behind 98—quite a small flock of them, really, echoed the sound.

Minion glanced at the clock on the tankside table—six in the morning, no reason for the bots to be up and agitated this early unless—

Oh no, was Sir working this early again? If so, that meant he wasn’t sleeping properly—but then, that wasn’t really a surprise, Minion thought bitterly. The—fixation on Miss Ritchi, and the way she’d decided to tell him that his feelings didn’t matter, the way she seemed determined to keep stringing Sir along for as long as possible—well.

“Bowg—”

“Yes, yes, all right,” Minion said, calling his suit over to the underside of the tank so he could transfer to it. “I’ll handle it; don’t worry.”

There were more brainbots in the hallway outside his bedroom—what had Sir been doing to get them so excited?

The moment after he wondered this, Minion realized what the bots were so agitated over.

Because a ripple of laughter floated faintly out from the kitchen and into the hall.

Feminine laughter. And then distant sound of Sir’s voice, saying something to—

Miss Ritchi. She was here.

Minion narrowed his eyes, working his jaw from side to side in anger.

What was she doing here? If she didn’t want Sir, then she should at least have the decency to let him be.

Sir had ordered him not to interfere between him and Miss Ritchi, but really, this went beyond the bounds of acceptability. She shouldn’t be here, keeping Sir awake when he should be sleeping; it was hard enough getting Sir to take care of himself without her making things worse.

“Bowg bowg.”

Minion stomped down the hall towards the kitchen.

“Minion!” Miss Ritchi said when he stepped into the kitchen, having the audacity to look pleased to see him.

“Minion!” Sir said, looking happy, too. “You’re awake!”

(of course, he looked happy now; it was later that the misery would hit him, later after Miss Ritchi had blithely gone on her way)

“Yes,” Minion said, “Sir. The brainbots woke me. They seemed agitated.”

Sir and Miss Ritchi were seated at the kitchen counter, both of them in pajamas. Both of them in Sir’s pajamas. More brainbots were hovering around the two of them. Number 228 was hovering especially near to Miss Ritchi.

Miss Ritchi laughed.

“Yeah, I don’t think the brainbots used to having me around, yet,” she said.

(yet?! yet?! ohhh how dare she)

“Yes, I’ve been meaning to update their programming,” Sir said, gazing at her with an expression of adoration that was absolutely painful to look at.

“Sorry they woke you up, Minion,” Miss Ritchi said, and took another bite of toast.

Sir had made the toast, Minion was fairly certain. It had that sad, singed appearance, and the butter was all clumpy from when he’d put it on after the toast had already gone too cold to melt it.

Minion smothered the automatic urge to offer to cook her something a little more edible. She deserved to eat that piece of toast.

“What are you doing awake this early, Sir?” Minion asked, pointedly ignoring Miss Ritchi’s apology.

Sir, who had been staring at Miss Ritchi, jumped.

“What?” he said. “Oh—ah!—Roxanne—has to go to work.”

Miss Ritchi made a noise of agreement and put down her toast, wiping her hands on a napkin.

“I should probably go get dressed, actually,” she said, standing up and taking a quick drink from her coffee cup—probably to wash down the burnt taste of the toast. “Otherwise I’m going to be late.”

Her gaze flicked over to Sir and she raised her eyebrows just slightly, a smile playing around the edges of her mouth.

Sir stood up quickly.

“I’ll come with you!” he said.

Miss Ritchi smiled and led him past Minion and into the hall.

Bot number 98 hovered in place near the elbow of Minon’s suit.

“Bowg-bowg?”

Minion growled under his breath in frustration and went to clear the table with dark thoughts in his mind.

Megamind shut the bedroom door and Roxanne immediately pushed him up against it, kissing him with a force and urgency that made his knees feel weak.

She broke the kiss.

“I really,” she said, “wish I didn’t have to go to work right now.”

“So do I,” Megamind said breathlessly.

Roxanne’s gaze flicked down to his mouth and she made a sound of frustration, almost a growl. (Megamind felt his knees go weak again.) She stepped back and turned away, pulling the sweater she was wearing over her head and dropping it onto the bed, picking her bra up from the floor and slipping it on.

“Help me with this?” she asked, looking over her shoulder at him.

(help her with…?)

“Oh—” Megamind said in pleased surprise, realizing what she must mean.

He took a step forward and reached for the sides of her bra, hooking the clasp for her. She smiled at him over her shoulder and he leaned down to press his lips to her shoulder.

Roxanne made a low humming noise.

“Tease,” she murmured.

Megamind bit his lip, smiling, and stepped back from her to sit on the edge of the bed.

It was—it was very—exciting, watching Roxanne get dressed. Not exciting in the way that watching her get undressed was exciting, but still—it felt—

—it felt sort of like it had felt last night when she’d let him play with her hair, when she’d drawn on his back, or when they’d eaten breakfast together this morning. Like something—

Megamind gave a breathless laugh. Roxanne, slipping on her skirt, looked at him inquiringly.

“—we’re dating,” he said in amazement. “We actually—we—”

Roxanne took a quick breath and then a slow, small smile started to curve her lips.

“Yeah,” she said softly. “Yeah, we are.”

“I get to be your boyfriend,” Megamind said, pressing a hand to his cheek, feeling how wide his own eyes must be. “—oh my god, Roxanne; I am so happy.”

Roxanne took another of those sharp little breaths and swallowed visibly.

“I’m glad,” she said, “because I am—I am so happy that I get to be your girlfriend.”

Megamind made a noise of sheer, overwhelming joy and fell back onto the bed, closing his eyes blissfully.

His sweater, the one that Roxanne had worn, was on the bed, still, half underneath his body. Megamind glanced at it as he sat up.

Roxanne was buttoning her shirt now, still smiling a little to herself. Megamind looked over at the sweater on the bed beside him again and then touched the material, stroking his fingers over it. Roxanne had been wearing this, just a handful of moments ago, and maybe he was imagining things but he could swear that it was still a little warm from the heat of her body. And he definitely wasn’t imagining the way her scent clung to the sweater. (god, that was intoxicating) He wanted—

—and he could, couldn’t he? He could do that; he was allowed—

He unbuttoned his pajama shirt quickly and slipped the sweater on instead.

When he finished pulling the material down over his head, Roxanne was looking at him again, her head tilted questioningly.

Megamind ducked his head, feeling himself blush.

“—it smells like you,” he said shyly.

Roxanne’s lips parted. For a moment, she was very still, just looking at him, and then she crossed the distance between them in a few swift strides and took his face in her hands, tilting it up as she bent down to kiss him firmly. Megamind reaced up and wrapped his hands around her wrists as he kissed her back. After a long moment, she broke the kiss, leaning her forehead against his.

“—I love you so much,” she said. “And you are making it very difficult for me to get to work on time.”

“I love you, too,” Megamind said.

Roxanne kissed him once more, swiftly, then let go of his face and straightened up. She gave him a mock stern glance and Megamind gave her his best look of innocence. She laughed and started to put on her shoes.

“I left your key on the bedside table, by the way,” she said.

Megamind blinked and then moved to lie on the bed again, on his stomach this time, so that he could reach the bedside table. There was a key there; he picked it up and turned it over in his fingers.

“To your apartment?” he said, breathless again as Roxanne made a wordless noise of confirmation.

She had given him a key to her apartment. They really were dating.

“—the Lair is coded to your genetic signature,” he blurted out, realizing he’d never actually told her that. “The entrances—they’re set to let you in, specifically. It’s not a key that you can—hold in your hand, but—”

“I figured it must be something like that,” Roxanne said, finger-combing her hair. “Just—just out of curiosity, when did you re-set those?”

“…uh,” Megamind sat up, folding his fingers around the key, feeling the sharp edges of it, feeling himself blushing. “They…were sort of…always like that? For you?”

Roxanne’s hands went still in her hair.

“Wait, always-always?” she said. “Kidnapping-always?”

“W-well—well it was easier that way!” Megamind said quickly, giving her the excuse that he’d always given Minion. “Not having to—not having to go through any security protocols—when we were bringing you inside the Lair for a kidnapping—”

Evidently Roxanne was harder to fool than Minion, because she gave him an unconvinced look, arching an eyebrow. Megamind winced, dropping his eyes, holding the key tightly in one hand, twisting the fingers of his other hand in the sleeve of the seater.

“—I used to imagine—” he swallowed. “I used to imagine that someday you’d—you’d be—interested enough—t-to find the Lair. And that you’d—that someday I might look up and—and you’d be there…”

He looked up at her, now; Roxanne was looking at him with an expression of such sheer affection that it felt like a bright knife, cutting to the soul of him.

“Is this another one of your fantasies?” she asked, voice gentle.

Megamind made a face.

“Sometimes. Sometimes with the—but sometimes you’d just…just be—” He ducked his head, then looked up at her again, through his lashes, and smiled wryly. “—I just really wanted you to like me, Roxanne.”

She moved to him again, bent down to take hold of his wrist, and then pulled him to his feet.

“I do like you,” she said, and kissed him, chaste and gentle. “I like you—love you—so much. I think—” she kissed his cheek, “—that you are—” she kissed his other cheek, “—amazing.”

She kissed his lips again, the hand that wasn’t holding his wrist going up to cup his face, and then pulled back, rubbing her thumb over his cheekbone.

Megamind took his free hand and placed it over her hand on his cheek, leaning into her touch.

(a key to her apartment was in his other hand; she’d given it to him, and she thought that he was amazing.)

“—I—I believe you,” he said wonderingly.

(she actually thought that about him. she actually loved him.)

Roxanne took an uneven breath, her fingers tightening on his wrist.

“Good,” she said, voice soft.

She leaned their foreheads together, and Megamind felt—

(centered anchored safe she loved him)

“—don't think this means that I’m going to stop telling you, though,” she said after a moment, leaning back to look at him, and he laughed.

Roxanne squeezed his wrist and then let go, and he let her step back from him.

“You,” he said, watching her, “are so incredibly, perfectly fantastic, Roxanne.”

Roxanne, bending over to pick up her purse, paused from a moment before straightening up, a serious, uncertain expression on her face.

“—Megamind—I—you—last night—,” she said, “—what you said last night, about—”

She stopped and Megamind tipped his head and made an inquiring noise.

“—ah, about—” she she looked away for a moment and ran one hand through her hair, “—about—the unions.”

“The unions?”

“Yeah, what you said about—about you helping them strike at Scott Technology,” she said, “I was wondering if anyone at the unions actually knew about you helping.”

“Oh—a—a few of them knew,” Megamind said, “some of the leaders. I had to make sure, you see, that I was able to coordinate my attack with their strike—make sure they didn’t run when it started—”

“And they knew it was you?”

Megamind frowns, blinking.

“Knew it was…? Oh! Oh, yes, they knew, yes; I hadn’t invented the disguise watch yet, so I—had to approach them as myself.”

“Excellent,” Roxanne said. “Could you give me their names? I want to interview them. They’d still be around, right?”

“Most of them are retired, now, but they’re all still alive,” Megamind said. “I have their current addresses on file somewhere; I make it a point to keep tabs on them…”

“That’s perfect,” Roxanne said. “Send those to me after I leave?”

“Of course.”

Minion glared balefully at Sir and Miss Ritchi when they returned to the kitchen. Neither of them noticed, though, as Miss Ritchi put one hand on Sir’s shoulder and leaned in to kiss him, quick and casual, like he belonged to her.

“I’ll see you after work,” she said, smiling at him, and then she stepped away and turned to Minion with a smile. “See you later, Minion!”

Minion didn’t answer, just folded the arms of his suit and watched Sir watching her go.

Sir didn’t even notice Minion’s disapproval, staring after Miss Ritchi as the sound of her footsteps faded. There was the distant sound of her stepping through the holographic entrance and then there was a long silence.

Minion cleared his throat pointedly.

Sir just continued to stare in the direction that Miss Ritchi had gone, looking a bit like he had a concussion.

“Sir. Sir.”

“Mmm,” Sir said absently, still not looking at him.

“Sir,” Minion said sharply, voice loud enough that Sir jumped and finally turned towards him.

“Huh?” he said, still looking dazed.

“I really disapprove of this, Sir,” Minion said, voice stern.

“—this?” Sir said, blinking at him.

Minion made a noise of frustration.

“Miss Ritchi,” he hissed. “She was here. And she was wearing The Sweater.”

(Sir’s favorite sweater, an ugly orange thing that he refused to let Minion throw out, no matter how ragged it got. Sir was terribly attached to that awful sweater, and he’d given it to Miss Ritchi to wear and this was very. very. bad.)

“…sweater?”

“Yes! The Sweater! The sweater that you are now wearing right at this very moment; come on, Sir! I need you to at least try to think about what you’re doing because—”

“Wh—no! No no no!” Sir said, flapping his hands. “No! Minion! Minion, you were right!”

Minion stopped.

“I was right?” he said slowly.

“Yes!” Sir said, “Minion, you were right! I was—less right—” he laughed, suddenly, “—wrong,” he said, “I was—I was wrong, I was so completely wrong!”

He laughed breathlessly.

Minion blinked at him.

“Wrong about…”

“Wrong about Roxanne! She does love me, Minion; she said so!”

Minion’s fins moved in an involuntary flutter of surprise.

Miss Ritchi said—?

“…and did she say why she told you before that she didn’t?” he said cautiously, not wanting to give into false hope.

“She didn’t!” Sir said, face absolutely lit up. “She didn’t say that, that wasn’t what she meant, before; I misunderstood—she misunderstood what I—we were both—we were both confused about—”

Sir cut himself off with a laugh and wrapped his arms around himself.

Minion’s fins fluttered again; he felt his eyes going wide.

“What—really, Sir?”

“Really! She loves me!”

Sir laughed, lifting his arms up and spinning in a quick, blissful circle.

“Sir—Sir that’s wonderful!”

“I know! Ohhh, I have never been so happy to be wrong in my entire life,” Sir said, hugging himself once more. “And she’s coming back! After work! Ah!—brainbots; I need to reprogram the brainbots so that they know she’s—and! And Minion, did you know that there are more than just two genders; did you know that?—oh! I need to tell the brainbots, that, too; I’ll add that to their programming—need to look something up for Roxanne, first, though—”

Sir gave one last laugh—almost an evil cackle, except much, much happier, and bounded out of the kitchen, the brainbots trailing after him in an interested swarm.

Minion closed his eyes for a moment.

Things were—things were going to be all right.

Sir was happy; he was happier than—than Minion had ever seen him. And Minion was—

—well, he felt more than a little guilty now, for letting Ma’am eat that terrible toast Sir had made.

But! But she was coming back; he could make something special for dinner tonight!

“—knew it might be illegal, of course,” Bob Hays said, giving the camera a defiant look. His wrinkled, callused hands tightened into fists on the armrests of his chair. “But we were desperate, and we knew that, every time the union had struck before, the Scotts had broken the strikes—so when he offered to help us—well, we figured we didn’t have anything to lose—”

“—gave some money, to hold the workers over during the strike,” said Harry Welsh, and shook his head. “Figured it was a trick, but they voted me down—glad that they did, way things turned out—”

“—made us agree to hold the strike demonstration that day, insisted that we promise not to abandon the strike no matter what,” said Joe Conner, with a laugh. “We all thought—well, to be honest, I think we all thought we were gonna be a distraction, so that he could be somewhere else, doing something without being noticed.” He laughed again. “Could’ve knocked me down with a feather, when that big robot suit came crashing in.”

“So Megamind specifically planned the battle at Scott Technology around the strike and the demonstration, then?” Roxanne said, and Harry Welsh nodded. “It seems a bit odd, though, after going through all this, that he started off the battle by insulting the striking workers…”

Harry laughed.

“He knew what he was doing. Him saying that is what made Mr. Wayne Scott give that nice speech of his, about what hard workers we were, and how we should be treated fair.” Harry grinned at Roxanne. “Oh, yes, I reckon he knew just what he was doing.”

“Are you okay?” Palak asked, watching Roxanne gratefully attack the iced coffee and doughnuts she’d brought to the table for the whole team. “You seem kind of…”

She trailed of and hesitated, obviously not completely sure what Roxanne seemed.

(Roxanne didn't blame her; Roxanne didn’t even know how she was, really; she—)

Happy. She was happy, damn it; she was. She was happy and she was dating Megamind and she was not at all freaked out about the fact that he apparently thought she was a perfect, impossible-to-live-up-to ideal.

She was—she was being irrational. And surely he couldn’t really mean it the way it sounded, couldn’t—

She’d almost said something to him, that morning in his bedroom, when he’d watched her while she got dressed—when he’d taken of his own pajama top and traded it for the sweater that she had been wearing because it smelled like her. She had tried to make herself say something to him, when he told her again how perfect she was, had tried to make herself say—

(Megamind I’m not perfect not really)

or—

(when you say that I’m perfect it scares me because I know I can’t live up to that)

or—

But she couldn’t do it. The words stuck in her throat and she couldn’t make herself say them, and so she’d ended up just asking him about the union leaders instead.

(Roxanne didn’t want to have to fall off her pedestal, didn’t want to have to face Megamind’s inevitable disappointment and heartbreak and shock.)

Palak was staring at her, Roxanne realized. Actually they were all staring at her, watching her out of the corners of their eyes like they were afraid she was going to shatter into sharp pieces and shrapnel at any moment.

“I’m fine,” Roxanne said, giving them her best and most unconcerned smile. “Just—didn’t get a lot of sleep last night, you know? Probably should have asked you to get me a bigger coffee.”

None of them looked—really convinced by that, but they did let it go, so Roxanne counted it as a win anyway, and half-listened to Lisa describe the really terrible date she’d gone on last night—

“—three drinks in and she’s telling me all about her ex-girlfriend, which, you know, okay,” Lisa said, “I’m just thinking ‘please, god; don’t let her start crying’, but then—but then!—”

Roxanne finished her doughnut as Lisa’s story wound up to the conclusion, “—so it turns out the ex-girlfriend wasn’t quite as ex as this girl thought, and it was all a misunderstanding, but I didn’t get punched in the face and least her girlfriend paid for my drink.”

Everyone laughed; Roxanne wiped her fingers on one of the paper napkins, picked up her coffee, and stood. Lisa, Karen, Palak, Connie, Katie, and Xavier, all of them not even close to finished, looked up at her.

“I think I’m gonna take a walk around the block, the rest of break,” Roxanne said. “If I stay sitting too long I’ll probably end up crashing.”

She raised her coffee to them in lieu of a wave and walked towards the door, avoiding their eyes.

The walk, of course, was just a ruse.

There was a little bookstore, just a couple streets over from the KCMP building; Roxanne strode there rapidly, finishing off her coffee.

She’d thought this through already; had actually thought of it on the drive from the Lair to her apartment, this morning. So she already knew what she wanted, as soon as she walked in; she just had to ask the girl behind the counter to point her in the right direction. The shop even had gift wrap.

The purchase only took about five minutes total, and then she was stepping out of the bookstore and ducking into an alleyway, out of sight of any passersby. She looked around swiftly, checking that she was, in fact, alone, and then pulled her de-gun from her purse and quickly dehydrated the packages. Then she stuffed the cubes and the gun both back in her purse and arranged her compact and her various lipsticks to hide them.

She ducked back out of the alleyway and took off walking in the direction of the station.

The painting in the window of the tiny art gallery a few shops down caught her eye as she was walking past, and she stopped to look at it.

It was—intensely compelling: layers of deep blues—nearly black at the bottom of the painting, brushstrokes in different directions to suggest a frenzy of movement—and then grayish blues slashing down diagonally from the top of the canvas. And on the left side of the canvas, bright against the dark blues, was a small speck of white with a kind of hazy halo around it, like a light seen from a distance.

(and something about it reminded her of—something…)

Roxanne stepped into the art gallery.

There was a girl with pink hair working behind the counter; she smiled at Roxanne when she came over.

“Can I help you, ma’am?”

“Yes,” Roxanne said, “that—that painting in the window, the one with all the blues…”

The girl’s smile went less professional and more genuine.

“Lighthouse in a Storm?” she said.

“—is that what it’s called?” Roxanne asked.

“Yeah,” the girl said, “it’s—one of mine, actually; I did it a few weeks ago.”

(the cheap poster tacked to the wall of Megamind’s bedroom, the one of a lighthouse; that was what the painting had made her think of)

“It’s gorgeous,” Roxanne said, “and if it’s for sale, I’d like to buy it.”

“All right, so what have you got for me?” Roxanne said, leaning against Karen’s desk.

“There’s a couple more people who have called to request interviews,” Karen said, “but—”

She hesitated and Roxanne gave her an inquiring look.

“—but there’s also something that I found,” Karen continued, opening her desk drawer and pulling out a file. “After the interview with Met—Wayne Scott, I did a search for Megamind’s early records. I found juvenile offense records, paperwork for his name change—his name is actually legally Megamind, did you know that?—and I also found—”

Karen put the file on the desk and flipped it open, turning it around so that Roxanne could see the contents.

“—this.”

A newspaper clipping.

“Hometown Boy Makes Bad,” Roxanne read the headline.

And below that, a photograph of—

Roxanne took a sharp, appalled breath.

“Oh my god, but he’s a child,” she said, shocked. “What kind of person publishes something like this about a—he can’t have been more than nine.”

“Yeah,” said Karen, “and there’s more of them, too.”

Roxanne flipped the clipping to the side. There was another beneath it.

Metro City’s Bad Boy Sets School Suspension Record

Megamind was a young teenager in the picture that accompanied this article. He was looking—glaring, really—at something out of the picture, his head turned so that his face was half in shadow.

(Jesus, he looked so young; no facial hair and the soft angles of his jaw and chin.)

Roxanne flipped through the rest of the contents of the file—article after article, all of them detailing incidents from Megamind’s teenage years, all of them written to make him sound as bad—as dangerous—as possible.

“There’s that time gap between the first one and the second one,” Karen said. “I looked up the records; he was listed as homeschooled during that time. The articles start up again after he begins high school. And they’re all sort of—there’s this—they seem—”

Roxanne shut the file and looked up at Karen, whose face was troubled.

“—wrong,” Karen said. “They seem—wrong. Somehow. I don’t—”

“Because you don’t write stuff like this about a child,” Roxanne said, feeling hot and cold at the same time. “He hadn’t even been arrested yet, for most of these. He was a child.”

“There’s another gap in the articles,” Karen said, “from when he was fifteen. And a missing person’s report. And then the articles start up again about two months later. He disappears again when he’s sixteen, and then four months later there’s that first article about him being a supervillain: Battle of the Century. Roxanne, I think there’s—I think there’s something wrong here.”

“Yeah,” Roxanne said. “There is, isn’t there.”

“If this was just one newspaper doing this, I’d wonder if it was somebody with a personal grudge,” Karen said. “But all of these newspapers? I mean, I don’t want to get all conspiracy-theory, but…”

(Metro Man needed a supervillain. I think the Scotts must have known that, too—their newspapers were always very—)

(their newspapers were always very—)

(—when I was expelled from ‘Lil Gifted—)

(—the Scotts—)

“Do me a favor, would you?” Roxanne said, pushing the file back towards Karen. “Look up who owned all of these newspapers, when these articles were being published.”

Karen nodded.

“…yeah,” she said, “yeah, I can do that.”

Roxanne stopped by her apartment on her way back from work, just long enough to pack a change of clothes for tomorrow. She had one more shop to visit; luckily it was on her way to the Lair. Roxanne dehydrated the last of the packages when she got into her car. It would be easier to carry that way, and she really wanted to surprise Megamind.

When she stepped through the holographic entrance and into the Lair, Roxanne could hear the brainbots’ mechanical barking; it sounded like a very large group of them, all in one place. She followed the noise to the workroom and—

—caught her breath.

Megamind was standing in the middle of a swarm of brainbots, still dressed in the orange sweater, his hands upraised and his face upturned. He was smiling and laughing, apparently unaware of Roxanne’s presence. The brainbots were moving in a graceful, swirling cloud around him, the electricity in their braincases flashing, their glowing eyestalks shining as the whole swarm of them spun around Megamind like—

(like a galaxy spinning around its center)

“Bowg.”

Roxanne’s gaze shifted over to the brainbot that had broken from its brethren to fly over to her.

“Hey, 228,” she said, recognizing the shape of its spikes and fins.

“Bowg!”

228 gave an excited little wriggle in midair and Roxanne laughed and reached out to stroke its braincase.

“Yes, I’m happy to see you, too,” she said, petting it.

228 gave another little wriggle beneath her hand, but the move was more controlled this time—it was trying to be careful with its spikes, Roxanne thought.

“—actually, 228, I wanted to ask you to do something for me,” Roxanne said.

“Bowg?”

“Maybe you could ask the other bots, too—Minion said you have an auto-record function,” Roxanne said, “and I was wondering if maybe you could try to find some really nice footage of—of your daddy for me.”

228 moved to hover in front of her, its eyestalk held at an inquisitive angle.

“Nice footage,” Roxanne repeated. “Videos of—of your daddy being nice; could you do that for me?”

228 hovered in front of her for a long moment, its metal jaws working like it was thinking, and then, very clearly, it moved its eyestalk up and down for her—a nod, Roxanne though.

“Thank you,” Roxanne said, and 228 took off, bowging, for the brainbot swarm.

“Roxanne!”

Roxanne’s eyes shifted down to Megamind again; he was looking at her, smiling even brighter than before.

(Roxanne’s heart did a sweet, painful little flip at the sight of his smile)

She laughed and half-ran towards him, the brainbots parting to let her through. He caught her waist as she reached him, laughing too, and then he picked her up and spun her around in a circle.

Roxanne threw her arms around his neck and kissed him.

“Hi,” she said breathlessly when she finally pulled away.

“Yes,” Megamind said, sounding just as breathless.

She laughed.

“I—I mean—! Yes, oll—hel-lo, yes,” Megamind said, laughing with her.

Roxanne give him another quick kiss, both of them still smiling.

The clanking sounds of Minion’s suit made her look over Megamind’s shoulder.

“Hey, Minion,” she said, grinning at him.

“Hello, Ma’am,” Minion said, looking almost as ridiculously happy as Roxanne felt. “Dinner should be ready in about an hour.”

“Ooh, you cooked?” Roxanne said.

Megamind, still holding onto her, turned them so that they both were looking at Minion, now.

“Yes,” Minion said dryly, with a pointed look at Megamind. “I cooked, this time.”

“The toast I made for breakfast was completely edible!” Megamind protested.

Minion rolled his eyes affectionately and ducked back into the hallway.

“Yes,” Roxanne said, patting Megamind on the shoulder indulgently, “you did a good job with the toast.”

Megamind gave her an amused glance, clearly able to tell that she was being overly generous. Roxanne laughed and let him go, stepping back so she could hop up to sit on the nearby lab table.

“So what did you work on today?” she asked. “Did you update the brainbots?”

“Ah! Yes, all updated on their behavioral programming as regards to you,” Megamind said, hopping up to sit beside her on the table, his body half-turned towards hers. “And I also updated the gender section of their informational matrix, based on the discussion that we had last night!”

Roxanne turned towards him, too.

“The—gender section?”

“Oh, yes,” Megamind said, gesturing. “Their previous programming was based on my assumptions about gender; I wanted to make sure they knew the real full range of options—”

Roxanne blinked.

“Do the brainbots…choose their own genders?” she asked.

“Gender and names, yes,” Megamind said, “although even with all of the options, most of them still choose ‘it’. And most of them—you look surprised.”

“Oh!” Roxanne said. “Well—well, I mean—I always just sort of figured that you’d made them all boys, with the one pink one as a girl…”

“Oh, no,” Megamind said, shaking his head. “No, I don’t make them anything; I wouldn’t feel comfortable forcing—that’s why I call them numbers, to start with; they’re meant to pick out their own names.” He made a face. “But most of them just end up picking the numbers I give them anyway; I’m not sure why—”

“Well—you get used to answering to something,” Roxanne said. “Do some of them pick out names?”

“Occasionally, yes,” Megamind said. “Spikeless, Edgar, Teacup, Pinky, Tribble—”

“Pinky is—”

“The pink one, yes,” Megamind said.

“Is Pinky a girl?” Roxanne asked, reaching for Megamind’s hand so she could play with his fingers.

Megamind’s fingers twitched in surprise when she picked up his hand, but he let her do it, spreading his fingers obligingly so that she could toy with each one in turn.

“No, it turns out Pinky is a they,” he said. “They were very excited about the informational matrix update, by the way; thank you for that.”

Roxanne laughed quietly and Megamind gave her a curious look.

“What?”

“Nothing, just—you told the brainbots,” she said.

(he was so sweet it made her heart ache)

“Of course I told the brainbots,” Megamind bemusedly, tipping his head. “I explained it to Minion, too, when he made us lunch. He wasn’t as excited, though; Minion doesn’t really—care so much about gender divisions, you know?”

“Mm," Roxanne said, lacing her fingers with Megamind’s. “What gender is number 228?”

Megamind’s eyelids flickered for only a split second—sorting through all of the bots and their genders, Roxanne realized, and she’d never even questioned that he would know them all.

“228 is a they, too.”

“If Pinky was never meant to be a girl,” Roxanne said, “then why did you make them pink?”

Megamind grinned at her.

“Pinky is the distraction bot,” he said, and then added, at Roxanne’s questioning look, “They’re the fastest bot, the one with the quickest reflexes. And their bright coloring means that everyone is automatically looking—and aiming—at them, which keeps the queen bot safe.”

“Queen bot?” Roxanne said. “Queen as in chess, or queen as in bees?”

Megamind gave her a look of gleeful adoration.

“I love your mind so much,” he said. “Queen as in bees. The brainbots interface with each other constantly, and the connection goes deeper when I need them to do more complex, coordinated tasks. The queen bot is the one who runs the communications network interface, and the additional processing requirements tend to make their reflexes slower. Hence Pinky.”

“The queen is a they, too?”

“Hm? Oh! No, no, they—the brainbots actually take turns being the queen; it’s a position, not a name.”

Roxanne made a noise of understanding, then tipped her head.

“The communications network interface—is it like a hive mind?”

“No, it’s—each bot definitely has its own separate, private thoughts,” Megamind said. “It’s more like—the interface is more like an extra layer of communication, like—like how body language is an extra layer of communication over verbal interaction for humans! Only it’s more—detailed than that, and like I said, when groups of the brainbots are engaged in highly coordinated, complex tasks, the interface layer gets—louder? For them? Pushed to the front of their minds, instead of the back of their minds. Does that make sense…?”

“Less like the Borg and more like a Vulcan mind-meld,” Roxanne said, nodding.

Megamind laughed delightedly.

Roxanne grinned at him. Megamind’s laugh—his real laugh, not his evil one—was so beautiful.

“Only less about sharing emotions,” she added, “and more about exchanging information.”

Megamind nodded, still smiling.

“Exactly.”

Roxanne rubbed her thumb over the back of his hand, enjoying the texture of his skin.

“What do you do,” she said curiously, “when a bot doesn’t want to do its job?”

Megamind looked surprised.

“Oh, I don’t assign them jobs,” he said. “Not—I give them a chance to try different things; some of them like helping Minion around the Lair, some of them enjoy assisting me in assembling machines—the ones that patrol the city and the ones that help me fight Metro Man do it because they think it’s fun. I wouldn’t ever make them fight if they didn’t want to.”

Roxanne raised his hand to her lips and placed a quick kiss on the back of it. Megamind’s fingers twitched in hers and she smiled at him.

“And some of the older bots are sort of—mmm—retired, now,” he continued. “They just—stay around the Lair, mostly, and play a little, nap a lot of the time…”

Older bots…Roxanne took a sharp breath.

(—if I jumped—Zero wouldn’t get fixed.)

“Do you—do you still have—the first one?” she asked.

Megamind went perfectly still for a moment—of course he could probably tell what she was thinking—and then he took a breath.

“Yes,” he said. “Would you—would you like to meet her?”

Roxanne swallowed, feeling tears start in her eyes, pushing them down.

“Yeah,” she said, “yeah, I would.”

Megamind held her hand as he led her through the maze of his inventions, through the oddly shaped shadows cast by giant spikes and gears and oddly-shaped machinery. He stopped in front of something Roxanne thought might be the Lair’s electrical generator.

“Zero,” Megamind called softly. “Zero; would you wake up for a minute? There’s someone here who wants to meet you.”

For several moments, the two of them just stood there, waiting, and then a brainbot emerged from behind the generator and hung in the air, looking down at them, its mechanical eye moving over them slowly.

Zero was a little smaller than the current brainbots, Roxanne saw—her braincase and her mechanical jaws both. The teeth of her mechanical jaws fitted together perfectly, unlike the teeth of the current brainbots, and her four mechanical arms seemed longer and thinner than the arms of the new models. They reminded Roxanne of the tentacles of a jellyfish. She didn’t have any spikes or fins on her braincase, and her mechanical eye was just a bit larger than that of the newer brainbots.

“This is Roxanne Ritchi,” Megamind said, voice gentle, looking up at Zero. “She wanted me to introduce her to you.”

Zero’s mechanical eye focused on Roxanne, looked her up and down slowly. Roxanne had the distinct impression that she was being judged. And then the bot floated down slowly to hang regally in the air before them. The shutter of her mechanical eye closed in a long, slow blink, like the eyes of a pleased cat.

“Zero,” Megamind said, “this is Roxanne Ritchi. Roxanne—this is Zero. Bot Zero-Zero-One, to be exact.”

“Bowg,” Zero said, inclining her eyestalk gracefully.

“She has so much personality,” Roxanne said said. “Ohh, you’re beautiful, aren’t you? Such a pretty lady—”

“Very pretty and very spoiled,” Megamind agreed, reaching out to run his free hand affectionately over Zero’s braincase. “Aren’t you, Zero?”

Zero narrowed the shutter of her mechanical eye and nipped lightly at his fingers. Megamind laughed and stroked over her braincase again. She pushed up into his hand, blinking in that slow, pleased way again.

“Can I pet her?” Roxanne asked.

“She might let you,” Megamind said. “Hold out your hand.”

Roxanne held her hand up, palm up, showing Zero, who looked over at it, and then at Roxanne’s face.

And then she moved her braincase beneath Roxanne’s hand.

Roxanne stroked her hand over the glass, watching the electricity crackle beneath her palm. Zero blinked her shutter slowly and Megamind made a pleased noise.

Tears prickled again at the backs of Roxanne’s eyes.

“Thank you,” she whispered to the brainbot.

“So if you were working on the brainbots’ programming all day,” Roxanne asked casually at dinner, “does that mean that the giant robot for my last kidnapping isn’t finished yet?”

She glanced sidelong at Minion, who, sure enough, was getting ready to answer.

Megamind made a noise of outrage.

“Minion! Do not answer that!”

Roxanne laughed and Megamind turned to her, gesturing threateningly with his croissant.

“You! You are a terrible, devious woman, Miss Ritchi! The evil plot of the final kidnapping is a surprise!”

“Come on, Megamind; not even a hint?” she asked, looking at him and widening her eyes, leaning a little closer to him.

“Temptress!” Megamind said, laughing and trying to glare at the same time. “I already told you about the molecular composition for the new fuel I invented for the machine, and that is all you are getting!”

Roxanne turned appealingly to Minion. He grinned at her.

“Sorry, Ma’am,” he said. “I guess you’ll have to wait.”

Roxanne laughed and took another bite of lasagne. Megamind made a startled noise and she looked over at him; he was staring off into he distance, his fork held loosely in his hand, as if he’d forgotten it.

“What?” she said.

He jumped and looked at her.

“Ah! The—the mechanism for the—I just realized I need to fix—”

He cut himself off, shaking his head and glancing away from her, the fingers of his other hand twitching restlessly against the tabletop.

“Do you need to work on something after dinner?” Roxanne guessed.

He looked at her again with a guilty expression.

“I don’t mind, sweetheart,” she said. “You work on things; I do know this.”

“It—it shouldn’t take long,” Megamind said, still looking uncertain, “it’s something small; it’s just that—” he made a noise of frustration, “—I know if I don’t fix it, then it’s going to drive me crazy all night and I want to be able to concentrate and enjoy being—”

“Hey,” Roxanne said, touching the back of his hand reassuringly, “really, Megamind; it’s okay.”

“I should just let you see it,” Megamind muttered, his mouth twisting. “I’m being stupid.”

“No, you’re not,” Roxanne said firmly, and he looked at her. “It’s nice that you want to surprise me, Megamind. I was just teasing before; I don’t mind waiting.”

“…are you sure?” Megamind asked.

“Very sure,” Roxanne said. She smiled at him, remembering the dehydrated cubes she still had in her purse. “I’ve got something that I need to work on, too—a surprise for you, actually.”

Megamind’s eyes went wide.

“I—I have a surprise?” he asked.

Roxanne bit her lip, smiling.

“Yep,” she said, “but you don’t get to see it until after you’ve finished fixing the mechanism thing.”

She raised her eyebrows teasingly and Megamind’s face lit up.

“Ooh! Ooh, do I get a hint?” he said eagerly.

Roxanne laughed.

“After you wouldn’t give me a hint? I don’t think so, Megamind!”

She turned to Minion as Megamind spluttered indignantly.

“Fair’s fair, right, Minion?” she added sweetly.

Minion grinned at her.

“Minion!” Megamind said.

“I’m afraid I’m gonna have to side with Ma’am, this time,” Minion said.

“Betrayed,” Megamind lamented melodramatically as Roxanne snickered. “Betrayed by my own Minion!”

He sighed pathetically. Roxanne rolled her eyes at him and stole his croissant.

***

Megamind hurried through fixing the regulator mechanism on the final kidnapping battlesuit. He didn’t want to keep Roxanne waiting any longer than necessary, and—and! She said that she had a surprise for him!

(was it—was it a sex kind of surprise? he didn’t think she would have mentioned it in front of Minion, if so, but he really wasn’t sure how this—he wasn’t sure how dating worked.)

Megamind put away the tools, wiped his hands on a work rag, and went to go find Roxanne.

He looked in the kitchen first; that was where he’d left her and Minion both.  Only Roxanne was there now, sitting at the kitchen table. She was typing on her laptop, a cup of tea at her elbow, and Megamind stopped in the doorway, arrested at the sight of her.

Roxanne looked—she looked comfortable; she looked like she belonged here. She—

You are dating Roxanne, Megamind thought again, for about the thousandth time today. The thought wasn’t any less amazing and unbelievably wonderful this time around.

Roxanne looked up at him and her face lit up in a smile.

“Hey,” she said, shutting her laptop and standing.

“Wow,” he breathed, without meaning to. “I—! I mean—um—”

Roxanne laughed, moving towards him.

“You’re such a dork,” she said affectionately, and leaned forward to kiss him.

Megamind kissed her back and then broke the kiss, skipping backwards quickly.

“Sorry! I’m—kind of dirty, with the whole—mechanism—thing; I should—”

“Let me take a shower with you?” Roxanne suggested, smiling slyly. “And then I’ll show you your surprise after.”

Megamind froze.

Roxanne’s smile turned uncomfortable and she stepped back.

“It’s—okay if you don’t want to,” she starts, “I—”

“It’s not that I don’t want to!” Megamind said quickly, hating that look on her face, hating that he’d make her look like that. “It’s—it’s just that—okay, so full disclosure, on my planet, bathing together was kind of a marriage thing so I feel weird doing that without telling you. Sorry.”

Roxanne blinked at him.

“Bathing together was a marriage thing,” she said slowly.

Megamind winced.

“Sort of—I think so—yes,” he said.

“Like a—like something you only did together if you were married?” Roxanne asked.

“Um. Yes, but—also like—also like getting married?” Megamind ran his hands over the top of his head in frustration. “I think, anyway, but like I said, the information I got was—very incomplete—”

“Okay,” Roxanne said, “and so showers together had the same function?”

“I don’t—I don’t know; I’m not sure showers even were a thing, there,” Megamind said miserably, fingers curling around the edges of his sleeves in one of his stupider nervous gestures. “They just seemed—I don’t know; they just seemed too similar for it to be okay for me to—to do it without telling you.”

Roxanne’s eyes flicked down to his hands and Megamind felt himself flush with embarrassment. He dropped his own eyes.

(god, he was so ridiculous, pathetic, didn’t deserve—)

“Thank you,” Roxanne said, “for wanting to make sure I knew, Megamind.”

Megamind looked up again at her. She was looking at him a little uncertainly, biting her lip.

“Is it—is it just that you were worried about me not knowing?” she asked. “Or does—does the idea of showering with me make you uncomfortable? It’s okay if—I’m not—I’m not going to be upset with you if it does make you uncomfortable—”

“It doesn’t,” Megamind said quickly. Roxanne still looked a little unsure, so he added, “I—like I said, it’s not even that—showers weren’t even a thing, I just—I just worry. About doing things—I don’t want to do something without your—without you knowing.”

Roxanne’s expression changed from uncertainty to something soft-edged and filled with love. She stepped forward again and reached for his hands, curling her fingers around his, still twisted in the material of his sleeves.

“I do know, now,” she said, looking at him steadily. “Okay?”

Megamind took a breath, and then another, and then he loosened his grip on his sleeves, sliding his fingers between Roxanne’s instead.

“Okay,” he said, “okay so—would—would you like to take a shower with me, Roxanne?”

She smiled at him.

“Yes, I would.”

...to be continued.

notes: I hope you all enjoyed the new chapter! Thank you all for the lovely reviews on the last chapter; I really appreciate them so much. 

[cupcakeshakesnake]

Watching Knock Knock for the first time

Oh boy... *End of Time flashbacks* yes I am having a lot of flashbacks recently, but let’s hope this episode isn’t related to the infamous four knocks in any way

(Also I kept getting typos and writing “Kock kock” and that sounds so wrong in my opinion)

(The German title is “Klopf Klopf” and that sounds pretty funny too)

SPOILER ALERT!

-Tbh I’d love to live at any of those places

-DON’T TRUST THE GUY, MY MOVIE INSTINCTS ARE TELLING ME TO NOT TRUST THE GUY

-Ah yes, thunderstorms around an old building, totally not a scary movei cliche

-People still listen to LP records?

-That turned into a dubstep remix for a short moment

-Yay, it’s Bill’s theme.

-I love Bill’s theme. It’s relaxing but not slow, and merry, and adventurous...

-SHE’S USING THE TARDIS AS BAGGAGE TRANSPORT

-”Unless we’ve regenerated, or had a big lunch...”  Rose: “Doctor, Doctor, wake up, please, we need you!”  Ten: “mmmmfrrghf I ate too much”

-”Regenerated?”  Twelve: *Vietnam flashbacks*

-The subtitles said ‘draughty’ when I heard ‘drafty’; I looked it up and apparently the latter’s usually the American way of spelling.

I remember him doing that before in another reincarnation, just not sure when.

-”He’s... my... granddad...”  omfg Bill’s embarrased, I feel like Twelve would be offended but why do I find this so funny

-”I don’t look old enough to--”  Well maybe you’re not that old by Time Lord standards but tbh you’re over 2000, you said so yourself

1. That face. 2. That moment when someone doesn’t high-five you back. 3. Apparently Bill’s told everyone about the Doctor, or maybe they’re just all in his class.

-”Oh, come on, father, at least, please.”  “Oh alright, grandfather.”  PFFFFT

-He is so gonna come back here later

-”Mine went greypacking on the Great Wall of China with his boyfriend, but they got arrested for trying to steal a bit.”  That sentence sure is a wild ride.

-”Says it gETs HIM in the zOOOne.”

-”Yeah, I wish. Can’t find a way in.”  Climb up the wall lol

-What kind of accent is this? Scottish? Northern?

IMMA THE FRESHEST FRESHY BOI THE EIGHTIES EVAH GAVE BIRTH TO YA DAWGS

:’D

-”You proud?”  “Thanks.”  D’aaaaaaawwww

-”There’s no living puddles or weird robots, big fish... It’s just a new house. And people you don’t know. Not scary at all.”

-BEWARE OF THE LANDLORD

-I have a bad feeling about what will happen to Bill’s mother’s picture

That makes a lot of sense though.

-I’m not saying bad reception will guarantee a mishap, but when it does happen you won’t be able to contact emergency numbers and call for help. That sounds bad.

-”Landline? What is this, Scotland?”  You sure are lucky the Doctor ain’t here

-ooooOOOOOOHhhHHHHhhH

-”Or maybe a massive, freaky spider.”  I’d prefer that much, much more to a cursed doll.

-And of course they HAVE to mess with the Asian just kidding JUST KIDDING I made fun of my math class friends with a paper cockroach once

-Even my teacher jumped

-But back to the episode.

-WHOP definitely not a mouse

-Why don’t you ALL go and check

-Yay, at least they’re sticking together.

HA  told you he’d come back to investigate

-”Very interesting, lots of wood.”  And the Sonic Screwdriver doesn’t work on wood.

-”For a man such as myself, discretion is second nature.”  If by discretion you mean sneaking up on people and scaring the shit out of everyone

-I’m getting some Dracula vibes here

-Funny, I just looked up the actor and he played Van Helsing in a 2006 BBC adaptation of Dracula.

Thing is, he actually did that, in the past he WAS (and maybe still is) someone’s grandfather. He had to let Susan go.

The subtitles make everything better, 10/10

-I’m wearing headphones and that ASMR certainly was uncalled for

-”How do you get into the tower?”  “You don’t.”  (what he meant: if i ever catch one of your sorry little asses running into that fucking tower i will catch you and i will burn you fucking shitless you little shit nugget)

HARRIET JONES *flashbacking intensifies*

-He doesn’t know who the current Prime Minister is, VAMPIRE (OR SOME SORT OF OUTDATED SUPERNATURAL BEING OR ALIEN ALTHOUGH I’M LEANING TOWARDS ALIEN SINCE IT’S DOCTOR WHO) CONFIRMED

-”I take it back. you’re fine. He’s weird.” Of course the Doctor’s fine I mean he saves people, nothing else, haha

-DON’T GO UPSTAIRS

Yay!

-I’m about as happy as that girl there right now

-BILL TASTE IN MUSIC OMFG

look at the pouting owl

-”You’re not leaving, are you?”  “No.”

-”We need to have a talk about your taste in music.”

-”Oh, this FREAKY SCOOBY DOO HOUSE!”

Boy who cried wolf and all, but I still think you should be concerned

-STOP KNOCKING

-*the Master is triggered from a whole another dimension*

You’ve had quite the crazy life, Doctor...

-I wonder if any of his students are making conspiracy theories, or just theories in general, about all the weird stuff he says, or does everyone pass it off as a joke?

-So did Felicity make it out or

-OH SHIT

-”I’m scared.”  “Don’t be.”  “Why not?”  “It doesn’t help.”

WTF?!?!???

-Kinda reminds me of the ancient pirates stuck inside Davy Jone’s ship in PotC

-Also reminds me of that Steven Universe episode ‘Horror Club’. Although in that case it was a Gem Monster embedded in the building or something similar...

-Lemme guess, the house is alive?

-So was the music sort of Pavel’s connection to life

-”He’s released”

-RELEASED MY ASS  IS YOUR HOUSE MADE UP OF DEAD PEOPLE  YOU’RE FEEDING PEOPLE TO THE HOUSE AREN’T YOU

-PUSH THE BOOKCASE BILL

That was... unexpectedly cute.

Okay, slightly less cute, no offense but from afar you lot do look like cockroaches.

-”It’s not a cupboard!”  When did he figure that out?

-”You’ve gone crazy.”  ”Well I can’t just call them lice, can I?”

Now I’m getting Crimson Horror (Doctor Who series 7) vibes as well

-Y’know, with the crazy woman that blinded and locked up her daughter...

-Nice. Photo evidence.

HIDE!

-”Good.”  Not what I wanted but eh I trust your judgment

Showcasing one of the trick staircases of Hogwarts

hOLY SHIT?? HE’S BEING EATEN ALIVE??!?

I feel like some character advancement has happened in the last couple of seasons, I mean, I’m not the best at figuring out personalities but I feel (again) like, say, Twelve from Series 8 would be getting really mad by now.

-”I haven’t had visitors in such a long time. My name is-”  GROOT  “-Eliza.”  Oh.

I AM GROOT

-Look at me, making Groot jokes when a character just died onscreen.

-”Why would he pick up insects in the garden and bring them in to see his ill daughter?”  Well I know I would.  “Everyone loves insects.”  Thank you.

-Well apart from mosquitoes, I’d still rather keep my blood and not get an itch, thank  you very much.

He ended up calling them lice after all.

WELL I WAS EXPECTING A PLOT TWIST (thanks to some Tumblr posts) BUT NOT LIKE THIS

-THAT’S A FRESH LEHH OF A TWIST

-I MEAN HALL

-I MEAN HELL

-I APPRECIATE IT BUT

-I uh

-*crouches quietly in the corner* what about the bugs

Eliza the Licebender

-Why are there fireworks?

-Oh.

And another trauma to be added to Bill’s collection!

-YAY BILL’S FRIENDS GET TO LIVE!

Take-outs! He got take-outs!

-WHO THE FUCK IS PLAYING FUR ELISE

-WHO THE FUCK’S BEHIND THAT DOOR

-THERE’S GALLIFREYAN INSCRIPTIONS ON THE DOOR

-Ah, Pop Goes The Weasel. *fnaf memories* (yeah I know Scott didn’t make the song)

-It’s not really like the Doctor to keep someone locked up, and I’m seeing parallels between the old man in this episode and him... Too early?

-Soooooooo when are we gonna get to the Doctor’s suspicious basement...  Lemme guess... the season finale?

-SHIT THE NEXT EPISODE LOOKS SCARY TOO

-WHAT IS THIS, A HORROR FEST?

[some-flyleaves]

for “no particular reason” some thoughts on stuff I’ve watched/read lately

spoilers ahead but most of these have been out for a while by now

Beauty and the Beast remake

overall entertaining and well-animated, though I still prefer the original

some of the story tweaks were neat and I especially liked the subplot about the cursed servants becoming less sentient(?) as time went on

others were kinda unnecessary imo, the whole opening scene being a glaring example. also giving the Enchantress a bigger role is neat in theory but kinda definitely raises a few Questions

not fond of the autotuned lead singer which is even more obvious comparing soundtracks

the furniture designs cannot grow on me They Simply Can Not, you can’t get nearly as many lines of action or squash & stretch out of a hyperrealistic CGI teapot

on that note the original’s beast design is still the best design, shout-out to my family for calling the live-action prince a “surfer dude”

at the end of the day idk what to make of the LeFou Discourse(TM) but shout-out to the little bit where Potts was like “you’re too good for him [Gaston]” and all things considered I thought it was a biiit more than what those cynical meme posts suggest. mind I’m not sure what I would’ve thought if I didn’t know about the whole shebang beforehand

it was apparently enough to get the film banned in a few countries, which doesn’t equal Instant Representation Pinnacle obviously but ehhhh that’s another topic for another time

Maleficent is still the best live-action “remake” of the films disney’s been churning out lately imo my onion, but I can’t say any of them have really disappointed me? (unless the first Alice counts; all I remember is that it was weird, which I guess is a given considering the source material but idk live action loses so much charm. definitely haven’t watched the second and have no interest in thereof)

anyway Mulan is one of my favorites so fingers crossed...!

Moana

very predictable but heck if that oscar bait song hasn’t been intermittently stuck in my head since

big earworm shout-outs to “You’re Welcome” and “Shiny” too but this website has ruined the latter sequence to an extent because I’m half convinced someone in production there has a vore fetish

in any case that was way too good a villain song for a one-scene show-stealer wtf the fuck

Moana’s voice & overall expressiveness fuels my soul

also it was GORGEOUS, more than compensates for another ~coming of age~ plot with fantastic colors

I have a lot of questions about the sentience of the ocean

what do you mean the Obligatory Animal Companion was a chicken and not the pig

okay ngl I didn’t quite catch the angry volcano spirit woman also being the green lady? I don’t think...? aw heck it’s been a little while by now but the ending was neat

how fucking old is Maui

Universal Harvester by John Darnielle - if you recognize that name it’s because, as I found out after reading, he’s the guy who leads the band responsible for a song I had on repeat hell for at least a couple months after discovering it via this wonderful, wonderful "lyric.. comic... thing” </ungodly run-on>

if this seems completely out of nowhere it’s because it is. I’ve jacketed and shelved a lot of new books, and while a good handful catch my interest, few compel me to check it out before heading home for the day

off the top of my head the other most recent book this happened with was No One Else Can Have You by Kathleen Hale (heads up for a non-graphic image of hanging on the cover), which was... oh holy shit that was over three years ago I don’t read often enough nowadays x_x

that one started strong but, around if not at the point where the protag was making out with the secondary dude, took a sharp turn towards the cliche & general What Is This Fuckery. but I digress

seriously no image on the internet can do this cover justice, the vaguely vaporwave-lookin part is actually very dark and the whole thing shines like one of those rain puddles mixed with.. gasoline? oil?? whatever makes it rainbow-y at a certain angle

I only skimmed the inside flap description before diving right in the night I took it out, and I realized a good chapter or two in that I’d unintentionally picked up a horror novel.

well. kinda? horror-ish?? despite there being no killer on the loose, no supernatural monster on the prowl, not even an invasion of alien farmers federally paid to invade your small town, basically no imminent looming dagger above the protagonist’s head, it’s VERY unsettling for the most part and I gotta give it major kudos for that

<SPOILER class=“mild”>also huge shout-out to the subtle switch to first-person at a key moment, then scattered throughout from there on.</SPOILER> it was at that point I had to reread the description to see what I’d actually gotten myself into and decided I was gonna read this sucker in one sitting or I wouldn’t be able to sleep

(skip this bullet point if you don’t like vague ending spoilers) despite that it manages to leave off on a somber, even sentimental note. pretty darn satisfying, though upon further thought there are a few big questions left unanswered that probably should’ve been addressed. (/vague end spoilers)

overall I’d recommend it if you’re looking for an interesting little read that might send a few chills from atmosphere alone but also makes you think*. just don’t start reading expecting a chapter or two before bed will do help you fall asleep.

*yeah yeah I know “makes you think” is something of a meme phrase at this point, but screw it I like my media when it actually engages the viewer/reader for more satisfying payoff. I’m not a fan of the “lol intellectualis” thing anyway V: but I digress.

Kubo and the Two Strings

ftr the record I called Beetle being the dad from his debut

my god Laika really likes their bugs and creepy hands (based on this and Coraline at least, I’ve seen ParaNorman but don’t remember much). this is absolutely a compliment.

voice acting didn’t thrill me, with the exceptions of the old lady & spirit sisters, but got dang those facial expressions

magic worldbuilding left a lot to be desired but it took place in fantasy China(/Japan? as with The Last Airbender I think we’re looking at another fictional Asian blend) and I for one am a sucker for that so I can let it slide

climactic fight felt kinda shoehorned, when the moon spirit dude showed up looking like a nice old man I almost thought they were gonna go for a less confrontational ending sequence - which I guess it kinda did but also the obligatory “join me and we can rule forever” stuff came up. I dunno I liked the spirit fish form ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

don’t get me wrong here I did enjoy it, I guess I was just expecting a lot more from all the talk about kids being able to handle mature themes and whatnot? ah well the conflict wasn’t quite Good Versus Evil so that was neat

was the moon spirit just a regular old dude all along though? is the moon going to rise again even with him hanging out among mortals? is he mortal now?? how does the Plot Amnesia work???? can someone tell him who he really was even if it’s not flattering??????

idk for some reason I feel like I’m being harsher here than anything else so far, really did enjoy it though. LOVED the 2d animation in the credits and I absolutely must emphasize how fucking awesome the animation is, being primarily stop-motion and all. they set a very high standard with Coraline and cartwheeled over it with Kubo holy hell

also I have a new desktop background

Wings of Fire Book 1: The Dragonet Prophecy - Iiiii actually haven’t finished reading this one just yet, saving the last part for when I finish at least one mcfucking assignment, but here goes nothin:

if you take a shot for every blatant violation of Show Don’t Tell you’ll be dead three chapters in, not sure if that’s because this is a middle-grade book or what

that said I find the plot & its overall direction intriguing enough to continue and, much as I may internally groan at the repetitive characterization and disney villain dialogue, I thought it was worthwhile and already have the next book checked out ;V

what can I say there are dragons there’s a war and it’s a very interesting take on the whole “because you are the Chosen Ones we will raise you here for hero training” deal

there’s also some intriguing worldbuilding with regards to the “scavengers” and “the Scorching,” not sure how much those are covered in this book but a friend who recommended the series in the first place says it’s some kind of post-apocalyptic thing?? nice.

not really related but shout-out to that one commenter in Script Frenzy who told me it was jarring or weird or something to have my dragon protags straight-up eat a few human researchers. I mean they weren’t wrong and it’s not like the WoF good guys have eaten any people (onscreen, at least) but still. I don’t read dragon stories for the humans >:T

in any case, sorta wondering if that one surviving scavenger will come back in any way later...? chekov’s human.

but seriously we don’t need to be beaten over the head with exactly why each dramatic plot twist is indeed dramatic, I could practically hear the manufactured gasps

despite that there are also descriptive passages of fun events like characters getting their necks snapped or screaming in agony as poison seeps through their scales! and we've barely scraped the surface of the Horrors of War!! >:Dc

conclusion of sorts for this disorganized mishmash of bullet points: why yes I am one of those unrelatable fucks who doesn’t buy the whole “I will defend a shitty shebang of a plot if the characters connect” thing how are you. what can I say, even if I don’t have any particular fandoms right now, I still have Thoughts On Media and no one can stop me from throwing a good ~90 minutes into typing ‘em up despite having other responsibilities ;’V

tune in next time for... well honestly I dunno if this is gonna become a regular thing, but whatever thanks for readin feel free to like reply and follow and see you next time on a-flyleaf dot tungler dot corn~

[aion-rsa]

Star Trek: Lower Decks Episode 5 Review – Cupid’s Errant Arrow

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This Star Trek: Lower Decks review contains spoilers.

Star Trek: Lower Decks Episode 5

Sherlock Holmes once said (while kind of quoting the King James Bible) “there’s nothing new under the sun.” For serious science fiction writers and fans, this tends to be true, too. After all, the website TV Tropes is dominated by sci-fi plot devices for a reason.

What has always made Star Trek unique is that it’s dodged the worst kinds of sci-fi plot devices, or, at the very least, made cheesy sci-fi plot devices seem new and interesting? Or…maybe…Star Trek succeeded because it leaned-into some of those cheesy plot devices and made them even more cheesy? Can both things be true?

In Star Trek: Lower Decks episode 5, “Cupid’s Errant Arrow,” the show has its corny sci-fi trope cake and eats it, too. It’s not the best episode of Lower Decks yet, but it might be Trek’s best “monster in disguise” episode since “The Man Trap.”

The only thing this episode of Star Trek: Lower Decks doesn’t have going for it is a solid B-plot. Just like last week, the USS Cerritos teams-up with another Federation starship, this time, the USS Vancouver. And, just like last week, there’s some low-stakes envy and competition between that ship and our ship. Or rather, Tendi and Rutherford’s love of tech and cool Starfleet stuff makes them excited about this ship. Why Tendi continues to perform engineering-tasks with Rutherford when she, in theory, works in Sick Bay is unclear, but hey, let’s keep in mind this is a comedy and nothing makes sense about the fact that Harry Kim never got promoted, either.

The only issue with the B-plot isn’t that it doesn’t make sense or doesn’t work with Trek; it does. It’s just that relative to the A-plot, it’s simply not as funny. The idea that Rutherford and Tendi are excited about a random scanning gizmo called a T-88 is a joke that feels underdeveloped and never really finds a landing place. As Mariner says, the USS Vancouver seems exactly like the Cerritos, which is really the best joke from this particular line of jokes and is the proof that the B-story here is nearly a C-story.

That said, the A-plot is wonderful. When Boimler reveals he’s dating a successful lieutenant named Barb (Gillian Jacobs), Mariner is suspicious. Barb is too good to be true, which, in the long history of Star Trek means, she’s totally not. After accusing Barb of being everything from an android to a shapeshifter, Mariner eventually has to come to terms with the fact that Barb just likes Boimler for who he really is. Maybe there is no alien plot after all. Maybe some couples in Star Trek can just end up happy.

Well…NOPE.

Turns out Barb didn’t have a parasite, Boimler did. And that alien parasite was making Barb attracted to him, not the other way around. The parasite was using Boimler (and Barb?) for its own purposes. Although this seems like an anti-Trek twist, is actually very in line with the best kinds of Star Trek twists. Instead of Barb being controlled by a known alien or android, she and Boimler were being manipulated by an unknown lifeform. Marnier’s deep knowledge of various Star Trek conspiracies (“I mean she could be a Suliban!”) ends up meaning nothing when faced with the simple fact that this alien parasite was brand new.

While most of the episode relies on this jokey twist to work, that’s kind of okay. So far, we’re learning what to expect from Star Trek: Lower Decks. And, considering this is the first Trek series to feature self-contained stories in over 15 years, and the first of three new Trek series post-2017 to tell standalone stories, its track record so far is pretty good. If you strip away the over-the-top humor, and a few misfires (not sure we needed Boimler moonwalking) the actual Star Trek plots of any given episode of Lower Decks are slightly more clever than most of the first two seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation. If you know the unevenness of early TNG, that might sound like a backhanded compliment, and maybe it is. But, because Lower Decks is daring us not to take it seriously, what’s interesting is when it succeeds at being more than just a comedy.

“Cupid’s Errant Arrow,” comes pretty close to the meta-fictional smarts of “Temporal Edict,” but because it suffers from a slightly dull side plot, the main story feels oddly low stakes, too. And while it might be unfair to criticize an animated sci-fi sitcom for having low stakes, Lower Decks has shown in the most recent two episodes, including “Moist Vessel,” that there is some reason to be concerned about all the actual space danger. With this outing, things seemed a little too comfortable.

Oddly, the best part of the episode might have been Mariner’s flashback to her previous ship. When her shipmate actually gets eaten by a guy who is secretly an alien, you can only help but wonder what would have happened if it hadn’t been played for laughs. It’s funny. But, at the same time, that person really got eaten, right? Having it both ways is what Lower Decks is all about. But sometimes that result is a little messy.

The post Star Trek: Lower Decks Episode 5 Review – Cupid’s Errant Arrow appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[recentanimenews]

Detective Pikachu Is Cool, Cute And Forges Its Own Path

  Creating a Pokémon world that is both A) Satisfying for fans of the series, and B) A good entry point for people that just barely grasp the concept of whatever a "Pikachu" is supposed to be, is a difficult task. Lean too far in the first direction and you'll alienate everyone that didn't grow up with a Game Boy (or Nintendo DS or whatever) attached to their hands. Lean too far in the latter direction and you'll get the same complaint that many people make about some of the later entries in the game franchise: They hold your hand too much. So, rather than lean in any particular direction, Detective Pikachu made the wise choice to get some exposition out of the way and then just Volt Tackle right down the middle.

And I respect that.

Taking place in Ryme City, a location invented for the game that Detectuve Pikachu is loosely based off, we're shown a world where Pokémon and humans exist in harmony. I mean, they've always kind of done that. Or at least I think they've done that. Pokémon haven't led a mass rebellion and eaten their masters yet, so it sure seems like a harmony has been reached. But Ryme City goes a step further because all battling has been outlawed. Now, one could say "UMM, BUT WHY? BATTLING IS HOW POKEMON GROW AND EVOLVE!", but again, Detective Pikachu isn't really concerned with filling you in on the intricacies of the world. Pokémon hang out and some perform light tasks and the streets are probably covered in Dodrio feces (Seriously, there are so many Dodrio in this movie,) and you just have to "get it."

As a fan, I get it. But I could also see how some people would drop out in the first few minutes (which are the clunkiest parts of the movie, by the way. Both the film's energy and its structure get on track as soon as the titular detective gets introduced.) We're treated to an explanation of what a Pokeball is, what a Pokémon trainer sort of is, some Pokémon types, and some examples of a Pokémon's attacks. And then, as if the movie itself shrugs and says "Eh, you don't want to see all of this...," the mystery plotline starts and never slows down. Detective Pikachu doesn't really care about anyone sitting with their arms crossed in their theater seats, pouting about not understanding what's so special about Pokémon. But it also doesn't wink at you constantly with references that only appeal to those that have sunk 100 hours into Pokémon White 2 or whatever.

  Instead, Detective Pikachu is very, very much its own thing. There are no gym leaders or Elite 4 members or visits by Professor Oak. It's not a story about the overall Pokémon world as much as it's just one that takes place in it. Justice Smith plays Tim Goodman, a young man called back to Ryme City after he learns that his detective father has been killed in a mysterious accident. It's there that he meets Lucy Stevens (Kathryn Newton), a reporter who, while just an "unpaid intern" has a suspicion that there's more to this accident than meets the Decidueye. Get it? That's a Pokémon with the word "eye" in it and, okay, sorry. Anyway, Tim soon finds Detective Pikachu (voiced by Ryan Reynolds in a performance that keeps the film afloat even in its most wavering moments) and they all team up to find out the truth about Tim's Dad.

  Along the way, they discover a genetic experiment gone wrong and I'll stop there. But you see what I'm talking about? Those hoping to finally get a plot remniscient of the classic games will have to adjust their expectations, and those that are like "Wait, hold on! The Cubone wears the skull of its mom?" will have to realize that this just aint that kind of movie, bro. It lives and dies based on how fun it is, and luckily, it's fun most of the time. And it makes me realize that I hope all Pokémon movies are like this: exciting, sometimes emotional, and obviously having a blast with how many different Pokémon it can cram onscreen.

    But now I have to talk about sequel potential, or spinoff potential or prequel potential. No matter what anyone tells you, in the age of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, no studio goes ahead with their major franchise blockbuster without at least thinking of how a sequel would work. And if more does come out of this franchise, I hope it sticks to this formula of taking aspects from the Pokémon universe and crafting an original tale out of them. I'm sorry. I just don't think a kid gaining eight badges and defeating an evil team all in the span of a movie or two sounds that interesting. I've played that story about a dozen times now. But a film that took the Team Rocket idea and explored it, or one about travelling through different Pokémon regions or something like that would be great. I don't need Pokémon Red: The Movie. Detective Pikachu taught me that.

  Overall, if you're a Pokémon fan, or if it would be your first introduction to the series, go see Detective Pikachu. With the way the movie works, you'll both be on equal ground and you'll both have a great time. 

    Okay, I can't do a review without at least mentioning this once, but man, does this movie have a lot in common with Tim Burton's 1989 BATMAN. And skip this part if you're worried about spoilers.

  - A loose adaptation of the source material that kind of picks and chooses what it thinks will work best

- A monstrous enemy that is mostly purple

- A blonde news girl as an ally

- A plot structure with a twist about a dead parent that depends heavily on a flashback

- A parade where the balloons are filled with a deadly gas

- Micheal Keaton and Ryan Reynolds both have beautiful eyes

  Thank you. I couldn't go to sleep tonight if I didn't bring that all up at least once. Here's the...

  REVIEW ROUNDUP:

+ Pikachu is so, so cute, y'all. I can't stand it

+ The performances are solid and add weight to the heavy CGI use

+ The amount of Pokémon in the background reveal that this was very much a labor of love

+ TORTERRA

- The first few minutes are fairly clumsy

- No Dragonite. It's my favorite. C'mon, guys

  Will you be seeing Detective Pikachu? What aspects of the Pokémon franchise would you like to see in a movie? Let us know in the comments!

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Daniel Dockery is a writer for Crunchyroll. Be his Pika Pal on Twitter. 

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