And That's It for Our First Scare Series

Boo.

Three weeks are nowhere near enough to get a good look at the vastness of classic horror. During our First Scare series at Nerds of a Feather, we've made our best effort to use the available time to fill some important gaps in our personal horror libraries. I'm going to need even more time to digest what I've learned; I still don't have fully formed thoughts about what makes horror so popular, or how the successive trends in horror have come and gone, or where the line is between the horror I can tolerate and the one I can't force myself to watch. Nevertheless, this brief round of exploration has been fruitful.

I had originally planned to include more monster movies (i.e. Attack of the Giant [Insert Species]), but the bulk of my watching activity ended up centering on the evolution of cinematic Dracula (1931, 1958, 1974 and 1979). Much like the experiment I did years ago with the different versions of Carrie, this repetitive journey through the beats of the same basic story has shown me the shifting worries of their respective societies. Most notably, inasmuch as any adaptation of Dracula allows, I could notice the female roles evolving over the decades from highly prized models of chastity to more autonomous agents in possession of their own desires. This transformation is fully ripe by the time Coppola tries his hand at making a Dracula movie in the '90s.

It's important to be aware of this history, because much of contemporary horror has to do with foregrounding women's fears. There are two parallel consequences of this trend: on one hand, it exposes the uncomfortable fact that daily life for women under patriarchy is a 24/7 horror story; on the other hand, it demands of male moviegoers the development of an added meta level of empathy. In horror there's an important difference between the aesthetic experience of being personally scared and the aesthetic experience of watching someone else be scared, and it all comes down to which character you identify with, an outcome that isn't always open to the viewer's conscious choice. In the standard horror dynamic of the chaser chasing the chased, whose perspective do you automatically adopt?

For these reasons I count myself fortunate to have been joined by two women in reviewing movies for First Scare. I found it interesting to read, in Haley's review of the movie Phantasm, about the mental jump of identifying with a boy protagonist in the '70s while writing as a woman in the 21st century. At the same time, when Ann Michelle writes about Interview with the Vampire, she opts for taking the side of the women that are mistreated all through the movie.

The unsurprising lesson here is that different stories evoke different modes of empathy. Haley finds a sense of recognition in the shared experience of a girls' sleepover in House, while Ann Michelle feels drawn to the deep interiority of the boy protagonist of The Sixth Sense. But the real merit of horror is in forcing us to understand the nonhuman perspective, as in the case of a ghost in Kill, Baby Kill or a carnivorous plant in Little Shop of Horrors.

And then there's just the plainly bonkers.

Keep these ideas in mind when you dress up tonight. Putting on a mask is more than a cosmetic choice. It's another form of empathy, one that brings the Other's perspective not only into your mind, but into your speech and movements, and furthermore invites those watching you to participate in the same game when they interact with you.

If you'll allow me to borrow a trope from another genre for a moment, in many martial arts movies you'll hear the deepity-sounding lesson, "be the sword." Well, dear reader: tonight, when you put on your witch hats and your werewolf fangs and your fairy wings and your hero capes, I invite you to wield that uniquely human superpower of putting yourself in the Other's shoes. When you dress up to be spooky, open yourself to the gift of being spooked. Be the mask.

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

Book Review: He Who Drowned the World, by Shelley Parker-Chan

A masterpiece of politics, people, magic, murder, and war

Cover design and illustration by Lucy Scholes

I almost didn’t read this book. I had enjoyed the first book in this series, She Who Became the Sun (SWBTS), so much, and felt so satisfied by its ending, that I was hesitant to crack open the sequel for fear of a disappointment. But I was not disappointed, my friends! Everything that made SWBTS an outstanding book returned, in spades, in He Who Drowned the World. Twisty turny betrayals? Court politics? Conquest strategy? Tragic character arcs? Explorations of gender presentation? Wang Baoxiang¹? Yes, yes, and yes. Also yes. And, yes, again, yes.

If you have not read SWBTS you need to put down your device right now and go read it. It is superb. It won the British Fantasy Award both for Best Newcomer² (it is Parker-Chan’s debut novel) and for Best Novel overall. It follows the initial rise to power of Zhu Yuanzhang, historically the founder of the Ming Dynasty. However, in this telling, Zhu is not the son of a tenant farmer, but the daughter, so disfavoured that she is not even given a name. In a searing first chapter, relentless drought and famine, combined with a bandit attack, destroy her family, including her brother, who had been given a prophecy of greatness by the village fortune-teller. The girl, whose own fortune was a laconic ‘Nothing’, refuses to accept this future. She takes her dead brother’s name, and with it decides that she will fool the fates and take his fortune of greatness as well; and for the rest of the book she becomes Zhu Chongba, a man whose rise to power you can read about in the history books (or the wikipedia page I linked earlier). SWBTS ends with Zhu’s victory halfway up the ladder to total domination: she has taken the city of Yingtian, changed her name to Zhu Yuanzhang, the Radiant King, and declared that she will lead her people to rout the Mongols from China. 

It is a wildly satisfying ending. I loved it. But it is not the end of the story. The Mongols are not gone yet, and the Ming Dynasty has not yet been founded.

He Who Drowned the World continues that story, from three primary perspectives. All three are familiar from SWBTS, and all three have achieved the first stage of their goals from that first book.

First, we have Zhu Chongba (now Zhu Yuanzhang), who’s doing pretty well! She’s in charge of an army and recognized as the Radiant King of her people in the southern regions of the disputed territory. She further holds the indisputable Mandate of Heaven, which manifests as the ability to generate light and see ghosts. She is also well-supported by her wife, Ma, who has managed to get over a bit of child-murder at the end of the last book. The child in question held a Mandate of Heaven of his own,³ so Zhu had to off him in order to remove a possible rival to her own claim. To be honest, the kid was a bit creepy throughout the book, so his murder didn’t really bother me as much as it probably should have.

Second, we have General Ouyang. Ouyang has also managed to achieve the first step in his life goal. When he was a child, his family was captured and murdered by the Prince of Henan, down to the last man — except him. Him the prince castrated and left alive, and Ouyang has since grown up as a kind of pet eunuch to the family, acquiring enormous skill in murder and warfare, rising to command the entire army of Henan, while nursing in his bosom the desire for revenge. His only goal in life now is to revenge himself upon the Mongols — but he’s not happy about it. He had started building a kind of life for himself, anchored by his deep, agonized, sort-of-but-not-really-but-kind-of sexual-romantic attraction to the Prince’s son,  Esen, who  in turn trusts Ouyang utterly. So Ouyang has been kind of putting off the first step in his revenge, until battlefield losses to Zhu kind of force the issue. By the end of SWBTS he has betrayed and murdered Esen, and feels pretty darn miserable about it. But that’s ok: All that remains for him to do now is to find and murder the Great Khan, and then his life will be complete. He is not in a good head-space, but he’s got his goals and is making progress toward them.

Third we have Wang Baoxiang. Wang was Esen’s brother, and now, after Ouyang’s murder-spree, the Prince of Henan. He is deeply pissed at how everyone has been treating him: they see him as effeminate and unmanly for being bad at stabbing, and refuse to recognize his bureaucratic skills. So he’s decided to use those skills to climb the ranks at court, and become the Great Khan himself. Also, he’s haunted by his brother’s ghost (he may have had something to do with smoothing the way for Ouyang to do the murder), and seems to have some sort of Mandate of Heaven of his own.

What makes He Who Drowned the World just sing is the way each of these characters engages with the same themes from different perspectives. Each has a clear goal which in some way requires taking down the Great Khan. Zhu is the merry warrior, who never doubts the rightness of her path. Ouyang is the tortured warrior, who is fighting the blackness of despair at every step, and regularly doubts the rightness of his path. But — having taken that terrible first step in betraying and murdering Esen — Ouyang cannot allow himself to take any other path. no matter the kinder opportunities that present themselves. Wang, too, is tortured by despair, unable to turn off his cruel, traitorous path to power, despite meeting kindnesses of his own that might, in other circumstances, have made a difference. But for all the similarity between Ouyang and Wang, Wang is not a warrior, so his actions are fundamentally different in strategy from Ouyang's. And all three of them, to one extent or another, must face the question: Is it all worth it? 

Another key theme is the subversion of gender roles. Zhu is the clearest example of this: a woman posing as a man. Or perhaps a non-binary person who takes up whichever gender presentation suits her needs at the moment. She does not envy men their bodies, except inasmuch as their larger size and strength makes them better at fighting; and she does not hate her own, except inasmuch as it poses obstacles to her goals. Honestly, she’s much more inconvenienced by her missing right hand (which Ouyang cut off in SWBTS) than she is by her anatomy.⁴

Not so Ouyang, who is a eunuch, and hates it. He has the manliest of manly roles — the general of an army — and yet everyone describes him as beautiful, woman-like. He is effectively the opposite of Zhu, who approaches gender from a deeply pragmatic perspective: she benefits both from everyone’s acceptance of her as a man as well as her ability to present as a woman when subterfuge is required. She gets the best of both worlds. By contrast, Ouyang, who abhors everything female, is denied maleness as well. Like Zhu, he is mutilated, but unlike Zhu, this obstacle is connected with gender. He gets neither world, and his misery and despair in no small part springs from that.

Wang Baoxiang offers a third perspective on gender roles: he is a man, a cis-het man, with all the relevant anatomy. But he is seen as unmanly (because he does bureaucracy instead of battle), and perceived as being one of those men who sleep with other men. He doesn’t like this perception, which contributes to the general social disrespect that motivates his own actions throughout the book; but he’s not above using it to his advantage, to make alliances and develop relationships that he can exploit and betray when the time comes.

Oh, and speaking of relationships, I’ve got to mention the sexual encounters in this book. Because, dang. There are a lot of them, and not a single one is built on basic kindness or affection. Every single sexual encounter is a power play, a political act, a treachery, a betrayal, manipulation. The degree to which Parker-Chan can construct such a wide variety of unhealthy sexual encounters, all of which are vital to the plot, is astonishing.

Because, yes, they are all vital to the plot. The plot is intricate, subtle, heart-breaking, surprising, inevitable, and deeply, deeply satisfying. The twisty-turny politics, the subtle character studies, the psychology of ambition and regret and sacrifice for a larger goal, are all woven into an astonishing tapestry. It is dark and brutal, with a great deal of dismemberment, but there is just enough hope and goodness that it’s not all awful. Just barely. Maybe. Assuming you don’t need a lot.

1 Wang Baoxiang is the half-brother of the Prince of Henan in SWBTS. He won my heart by being entirely uninterested in battle and manliness, instead turning his considerable brains to the minutiae of administration, supply, and all the other activities that make it possible to feed, outfit, and field an army to do the stabby bits. ‘Moar Wang!’ became my battle cry at my book group meeting. Friends, there is so much Wang in He Who Drowned the World. 

2 Full disclosure: I was on the the panel for that award, and I don’t mind sharing that there was no disagreement at all among panelists that SHBTS was far and away the winner.

3 The Mandate of Heaven hedges its bets. Sometimes as many as three or four people may hold it at one time. It recognizes the potential to be Emperor, but it does not mark inevitability. As demonstrated by the dead kid from SWBTS.

4 Mutilation, in this world, is seen as deeply wrong. Ghosts of mutilated people turn into soul-eating monsters; and even before they are dead such people are shunned and reviled, refused entry into monasteries and other important locations. Actions like, oh, say, sending a jar of pickled hands to your enemy have a very particular resonance in this context.

—

Nerd Coefficient: 10/10, mind-blowing/life-changing/best.book.evar

Highlights:

•     Trenchant psychological character work
•     Betrayal, politics, and manipulation
•     Twisty turny gender stuff

Reference: Parker-Chan, Shelley. He Who Drowned the World [Tor/Mantle, 2023].

CLARA COHEN lives in Scotland in a creaky old building with pipes for gas lighting still lurking under her floorboards. She is an experimental linguist by profession, and calligrapher and Islamic geometric artist by vocation. During figure skating season she does blather on a bit about figure skating. She is on Mastodon at wandering.shop/@ergative.

First Scare: Little Shop of Horrors (1986)

Weird, light, cynical, musical fun

I went all the way back to the ‘80s to find this classic horror musical for my First Scare piece. The idea of “musical” and “horror” normally has me heading in the opposite direction. The closest I’ve come is seeing Phantom of the Opera at the Fox Theater in Atlanta and my obligatory viewings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show in college. But, after decades of skipping this story (including the constant stage productions at all levels), I have finally watched Little Shop of Horrors for the first time.

I was surprised to discover that the story of the murderous, man-eating plant is framed by a trio of singers (Tichina Arnold, Michelle Weeks, Tisha Campbell) who appear in each scene and act as a Greek chorus for the story. In 1960s New York, nerdy, awkward, underdog Seymour Krelborn (Rick Moranis) lives and works in a rundown plant shop in a rundown neighborhood. We know this thanks to the catchy opening song, “Little Shop of Horrors,” and the really well executed follow up song “Downtown / Skid Row.” His beleaguered but awkwardly glamorous co-worker is Audrey (Ellen Greene), who is dating an abusive boyfriend, Orin (Steve Martin). The curmudgeonly but mostly okay store owner, Mr. Mushnik (Vincent Gardenia), becomes frustrated at the lack of business and wants to close the store—to the dismay of Audrey and Seymour. Seymour shows them an unusual little plant he found shortly after a recent solar eclipse and suggests displaying it in the shop window to attract customers. Despite hesitation from the owner, the plan works and the store becomes a success as curious customers stop by to see the weird, Venus flytrap-like plant, and then make other purchases at the store. When the plant begins to wilt, Seymour discovers (after a musical number) that the plant actually wants to be fed human blood.

To keep the store’s success going, Seymour gives the plant his blood. The plant (an eventually giant puppet voiced by R&B singer Levi Stubbs) grows larger and demands more blood. Over time, the store and Seymour become successful, but Seymour begins to suffer from blood loss. The plant convinces Seymour to kill and dismember someone to make food, and it suggests Audrey’s abusive, dentist boyfriend as the victim. As the film progresses, Seymour’s fame grows along with the size of the plant, but it comes at the price of the plant killing people and ultimately seeking world domination. Seymour has to learn to set boundaries and find his strength in order to defeat the plant, save the world, and secure his true love, Audrey.

Little Shop of Horrors was unexpectedly fun to watch for two reasons: 1) the music and 2) the '80s A-list comedy cast. First of all, the music was excellent. It’s weird to say that about a horror comedy, but the songs were fun. Tisha Campbell, Tichina Arnold, and Michelle Weeks do a great Supremes routine, constantly and magically appearing in new costumes and singing through all sorts of shenanigans by the lead actors. Thoughtful songs like “Downtown” bring in some societal commentary on class struggles and allow for emotional solos on the monstrosity of real life. Rick Moranis is the only one who doesn’t belt out his songs, but that fits since he is playing the insecure, awkward young man. If you’ve seen him in Ghostbusters, he is playing the same type of character.

The second thing I enjoyed about the film was the cast. The film has basically an all-star cast of 1980s comedy A-listers, including Steve Martin, Bill Murray, John Candy, Rick Moranis, Christopher Guest, and James Belushi. It's also fun to see super-young Tisha Campbell and Tichina Arnold sliding through the absurdity and violence of the story as background commentators. Steve Martin manages the most unlikeable character in the film, the violent dentist and unrepentant bully, by playing Orin as an Elvis / Fonzie parody. His violence is a serious topic and, at least, the entire cast, including Orin himself, acknowledges that he is a terrible person. Lastly, a little internet research told me that the voice of the plant is Levi Stubbs, the lead singer of The Four Tops. No wonder his voice was so appealing.

There were a few parts I didn’t enjoy as much. I thought Mr. Mushnik deserved better treatment. He takes in Seymour and tries to get Audrey away from Orin, warning her that Orin is a bad guy, so I'm not sure why his character was treated in an ultimately negative way. The puppet plant was, of course, distracting, although the heavy-handed puppetry added to the farcical nature of the story, especially when Audrey II’s true murderous motives are revealed.

Little Shop of Horrors is too weird and quirky to become a favorite for me, but I’m surprised I enjoyed it as much as I did. If you want something creepy but also comedic but also in a musical style (and who doesn't), Little Shop of Horrors will fit the bill.

--

Highlights

• Fun music
• '80s comedy stars
• Weird but entertaining

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

First Scare: Phantasm

While not for everyone, Phantasm is an ode to boyhood, brothers, sci-fi, and not taking any shit.

While I didn't grow up in the 1970s and I was never a boy, it's easy to see how much Phantasm was made to appeal to both those demographics. 

Michael, our young teenage main character, is scrappy, tough, and fearless. (In a dark-and-gritty '70s way, too — at one point he fashions a MacGuyver-eque tool by taping a shotgun shell to a hammer.) He's always biking around looking for adventures, and he idolizes his cool-as-hell older brother. 

Michael discovers that strange things are afoot at the local cemetery. Our main antagonist, the Tall Man, is an alien who's taking dead bodies, turning them into dwarves, and sending them to his own planet to be used as slaves. These dwarves, by the way, look exactly like Jawas from Star Wars. That's not the only sci-fi reference in the movie, though. Phantasm is classified technically as "science fantasy horror," and in addition to the space-themed plot, there are several other overt references that are fun to catch. 

It's Dune heavy from the outset. Early in the film, Michael visits a fortune teller and she has him stick his hand in a small black pain box (no gom jabbar, however). There's a bar literally called Dunes that appears several times throughout the movie, too. When he gets scared, he repeats to himself, "Don't fear." 

I mentioned the Jawas already, but we also see on Michael's nightstand the Roger Zelazny book, My Name Is Legion. He's a nerdy guy, but one that knows how to wield a knife and cock a pistol.

The plot is fairly silly, but to return to it: Michael and his brother team up to defeat the Tall Man, who, I will say, is extremely creepy and scary. I won't say I was ever scared during my watch, but there are several scenes that are inventive and that would definitely be frightening-to-a-kid. The eerie score is reminiscent of that from Halloween, which was released the year before. 

Seeing Phantasm young would definitely be a game-changer, and I appreciate movies like that. My version of Phantasm is 1987's The Gate, a scary movie for kids that has several scenes seared into my memory for life. The best scene belongs to the menacing metal orb that flies at your face and drills into your head, sort of a mobile lobotomy, releasing a comic amount of bright red blood. Scenes like that leaving us wanting more in the vein of overt horror, but unfortunately the movie is inconsistent with its scares — it's more impressionistic, as we get fleeting images every few minutes that are unsettling. But that may be what some of its fans love about it. 

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

First Scare: Poltergeist

A house that hides much worse than skeletons in its closet

My most persistent thought during the runtime of Poltergeist was about how much of this movie's DNA can be recognized in Stranger Things. The tropes of nightmarish suburbia, a childhood immersed in pop culture, electric devices as a conduit to the paranormal, a child trapped within the walls of a house, and a danger too big for parents to protect against are elements that the Netflix show clearly inherits from this '80s classic. I wasn't so much scared as amused by its visual effects, at times reminiscent of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which in my book is not a good sign. When it aims for spooky, it overshoots and lands on goofy. I admit that in my childhood this movie would have terrorized the hell out of me, but watching it now leaves me with an impression similar to live-action Scooby-Doo. I suspect this is a recurring trait in the Spielberg-Lucas axis of storytelling: if it doesn't hook you when you're young, it never will.

Poltergeist feels like a condensation of mystical currents of thought that had gained strength during the hippie era but really date back to the spiritualist fad of the 19th century. Advances in the understanding of electromagnetism coincided with a growing interest in the inner workings of the mind, and it was only natural that a theory eventually formed linking electromagnetism with the paranormal. If you didn't know any better, it made some sort of sense: if you consider radio waves, they're an invisible force that exists all around us and can even pass through us, and have very tangible effects if you have a properly sensitive machine at hand. So it wasn't too much of a stretch to suppose that ghosts worked the same way. Poltergeist is an heir to over a century of superstition that viewed in electrical devices a viable tool for contacting the spiritual realm.

But Poltergeist does more than that. It also takes advantage of the moral panic that was forming around mass media and the way the TV set ended up altering not only the inner dynamics of the American family, but also the rhythm of daily life. People in Poltergeist time their activities by the programming schedule of TV; their day ends when the last broadcast ends. Even before malevolent spirits jump out of the screen, they're already under the spell of TV.

Putting spirits in the TV suggests an unspoken pun, as a riff on Marshall McLuhan's aphorism "the medium is the message." The movie plays with a medium (as in channel of communication) but also with a medium (as in speaker with the dead), and by blurring the difference between the technological and the mystical, it opens space for a new discursive position, one that treats electronic media as another battlefield between good and evil. Instead of a mindless machine, the TV set becomes a subject of moral analysis. And because anything that can make moral choices is effectively a person, the TV set becomes a character in the movie. You can talk to it, and it will answer. It has wants and goals. And it is very angry with you.

The family to whom all this happens in Poltergeist is presented as aspirational: upper-middle class homeowners who genuinely love each other and whose biggest headache at the moment is the construction of their private swimming pool. They don't have problems in their lives. Why make a movie about happy people?

As it turns out, their comfort rests on a pile of hidden cruelty. Their entire suburb was built on a cemetery that the developers didn't bother relocating. And this serves as an indictment of an entire way of life: these are the Reagan years, when the individualistic model of success was being preached as the definitive fulfillment of every human need. Our protagonists certainly look like they have nothing to worry about. But their happiness requires literally sweeping a lot of suffering under the rug. I don't need to recount the centuries of injustice and violence upon which American prosperity was amassed. Nor does Poltergeist pause for a single moment to moralize against our protagonists. The nightmare scenario it proposes speaks for itself: all your comfort created a debt, and that debt will come calling. And it will devour your children.

It's interesting that '80s suburban mythologizing focused so much on the children who were growing up in that space. The quasi-Puritan anxiety that rose against cities as alleged dens of vice and crime led to the creation of those artificial bubbles for raising children. But in those same '80s movies, the children are the first to fall through the cracks on that bubble.

In Poltergeist, the suburban children couldn't be more absurdly privileged. Their bedroom boasts a hodgepodge of product placement that must have sufficed to pay for the movie. They're innocent of the evil awakened by their parents, but they're its chosen targets, with their instruments of everyday joy, their toys, serving as the weapons through which their lives are snatched away. And at the top of those toys sits the ultimate entertainment invention, the provider of hours upon hours of cheap smiles: the TV.

It would seem odd to pair the unacknowledged blood left behind by American growth and the specific concerns that were circulating about the omnipresence of TV. They're two very different sources of fear. But what the TV symbolizes is precisely that prosperity. The medium is the message, and the message is that you now have luxury of spare time to sit and watch. The moral panic warned that guiding your life by the TV schedule was a scourge on society, but in reality, if you even have the time to live by the TV schedule, you're immensely fortunate. In the '80s, the TV is one of the ultimate signifiers of mass-accessible affluence (along with other traditional American life milestones, such as owning a car). So it's fitting that Poltergeist turns the TV into the executioner's weapon that will collect the old debt.

When the veil of mystery is parted and we get to see the otherworldly creatures that threaten this life of comfort, they don't seem all that scary. Of course, I say this now, having survived through The Thing and Gremlins and The Fly and Predator and Hellraiser and Beetlejuice and They Live and Child's Play and plenty of others. It's too late for me to experience those images for the first time. I have no way of confirming how horrifying Poltergeist really was, and, as I said above, the stylistic resemblance to Close Encounters of the Third Kind does its scare factor no favors. I bet many moviegoers in 1982 must have drawn the same connection in their head. Poltergeist remains as a very acute piece of social commentary, but as a horror movie, I find it rather quaint. Almost cute.

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

First Scare: Interview With the Vampire (1994)

A groundbreaking vampire film, tangled with misogyny and old-school monster melodrama

Vampire horror is not my favorite genre, so I generally avoid most of it. My most positive experiences with vampire fiction consist of an ill-advised beach vacation reading of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (which I found surprisingly creepy and enjoyable); Cassandra Clare’s Shadowhunters book series (Magnus, Raphael, and Simon are all very different but likeable vampires); Twilight, which I found reasonably entertaining and, at least, not offensive; and the first season (British version) of Being Human, a slice-of-life story of a ghost, werewolf, and vampire trying to live a normal life in modern-day London. (I will also admit to watching Kate Beckinsale in Underworld more than once.) Beyond those diversions, I generally skip contemporary vampire content since a common premise is often alpha males hedonistically and cruelly murdering innocent people (usually women) to satiate an internal need. So, I unapologetically avoided the original 1994 Interview With the Vampire until this October’s First Scare project.

I remember the arrival of this film in theaters and the resulting rebirth of vampire trendiness. The stars of the film were the then super beautiful Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, and Antonio Banderas (who I forgot was in this story). My college bestie loved the Anne Rice novels and, although I never read them, I understood the movie had several departures from the books. However, despite the traditional appeal of the sexy vampire trope, the film ultimately felt intensely misogynous—primarily violence by men against women, which is ironic since the source material is written by a woman. I know this film is a favorite for many, so I will just say… it’s not for me.

The story begins in the present (1994), with the eternally young vampire, Louis (Brad Pitt) telling the story of his life to a skeptical newspaper reporter (Christian Slater). Then we move to the flashback. Our protagonist Louis is a 1700s slave plantation owner in Louisiana. So, yes, any possible sympathy from me went out the window. His wife and baby have recently died so he’s depressed and making poor choices (nihilistically carousing, etc., because he wants to die due to his grief). Along comes Lestat (Tom Cruise), a blonde, French vampire hanging out in Louisiana. He offers Louis a variation of death: vampirism, to which Louis agrees. Again, no sympathy. After he becomes a vampire, Louis has some buyer’s remorse and is a bit disturbed at having to drink the blood of living creatures / humans (killing them) to live. Lestat has no such concerns and kills (mostly women) indiscriminately. Louis shows his moral outrage by initially mostly drinking rats’ blood, which Lestat eyerolls. However, Louis has no problems killing his Black female slave (Thandie Newton), especially after she says, “you haven’t come by the slave quarters lately.” Ugh. When Louis hands the dead woman back to the rest of his slaves, he laments that he’s a bad person. At this point I was definitely ready to stop watching. Then he randomly tells them to leave (they’re “free”). I mean, it’s the 1700s in the American South. They’re obviously not free. He can’t even be bothered to write an official document for them.

Later, during a plague epidemic in New Orleans, Louis finds a little girl (Kirsten Dunst), with her dead mother, and vampire-kills the child. Presumably, he thinks she has the plague too and is doomed anyway. Unclear. However, Lestat turns the child, Claudia, into a vampire so that she can be a companion for the always brooding / whining Louis. The three become a creepy family until little (one hundred year old) Claudia has had enough of Lestat’s controlling behavior and decides to put an end to him. Then the story shifts gears to true, epic violence.

I was surprised by how dated the actual, physical film looked and how dated the acting was. Lestat and later the European vampire king, Armand (Antonio Banderas), are so melodramatic as the alpha vampires that I struggled to take them seriously, despite the carnage. Louis is angsty, but simultaneously complicit in killing, in a way that becomes annoying. The second half of the film mostly consists of women being murdered while begging for their lives in some sort of sexualized context. Again, not for me.

Kirsten Dunst’s Claudia is the main bright spot in the story. She is wonderfully sharp-tongued, creepy, feral, and intense, and she is the only bit of girl-power in this story. Louis’s big revenge scene is somewhat satisfying, as is an earlier moment when Lestat goes monster-y feral after being set on fire. Other than that, this classic film is not one I’ll be watching on repeat. I can see why AMC thought a remake was needed. Apparently, I prefer my fictional vampires to be more grounded. I also, admittedly, prefer stories with at least one sympathetic protagonist. This film has none. In Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula, there is at least a team of heroes trying to stop the killing. In Shadowhunters, there are vampire heroes and vampire villains, and meaningful discussions of the label of “downworlders.” Those stories are all more to my taste. But I appreciate Interview With the Vampire for its role in reimagining the vampire genre, taking it from monstrously alien to familiarly human, with all its flaws and moral questioning. In doing so, it opened the doors to a range of new interpretations, including many that I quite enjoy.

Highlights

• Another film carried by the child actor
• Problematic misogyny
• A groundbreaking change of pace for the vampire genre

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

First Scare: Dracula (1979)

The one that was color-graded with extreme prejudice

With this being the fourth Dracula adaptation I watch for this series, I start to wonder: is it humanly possible to tell a Dracula story where women actually make choices of their own? Even in this unabashedly horny version, directed by John Badham, Lucy's vehement wish to spent eternity with the Count can be attributed to magical coercion. It's as if there were no such thing as freely desiring your predator; with Dracula there must always be a pinch of deception thrown in the mix, a hidden hand pushing the will that believes itself free. Where human seduction depends on mutual offering and suggesting, vampiric seduction is all about control. The trick is to hide that control under a charming façade, to convince you that your surrender was your own idea. The vampire is one of those predator species that prefer a docile prey. Like an anglerfish, but hot.

The trope of the vampire as a sexual threat has been present since the very earliest vampire fiction: both Polidori's The Vampyre and Le Fanu's Carmilla revolve around serial seducers of unsuspecting maidens. It became a perennial trait in fiction even until the early years of the 21st century to handle the topic of desire with a certain deliberate ambiguity where vampires were involved. Those stories look very different now through the lens of our contemporary notion of consent: for us, upholders of bodily autonomy and personal agency, any degree of coercion is unacceptable, no matter how sugarcoated. And it's a sign of the progress we've made that the authors of classic vampire tales would have found our perspective odd, maybe too reductive. So if you're going to dive into the literary tradition of sexy vampires, you need to keep in mind two conflicting stances: that of today, according to which anything less than free consent is inarguably assault; and that of the authors, whose understanding of seduction was most likely less egalitarian.

Badham casts a handsome Dracula, removing part of the character's mystique. While it makes the movie's romantic storyline more digestible to the audience, I find that it alters the character too much. Dracula is supposed to be a master manipulator; a key component of his scare factor is that, even if he presented himself in public like the stinking, rotten corpse he actually is, his victims would still be incapable of resisting his embrace. Dracula pulls the strings of human desire in the service of his own desire, which is what makes Nosferatu so effective. If Dracula is good-looking, it doesn't strike us as horrifying that someone would desire him—even if he's using his mind control powers. With the air of effortless charm that Frank Langella gives to this character, it's entirely believable that someone would want to be possessed by him—even if he's not using his mind control powers.

Here your mileage may vary. For a segment of the audience, the fact that he's already attractive before he starts controlling you will make him feel more dangerous. In my case, I'm fascinated by the idea of an inhuman monstrosity that can nonetheless reach into your most intimate feelings and twist them against you. And here we need to invoke cultural attitudes around lookism. By making Dracula handsome, this movie joins the long tradition of folk tales that question the idea of a link between external and internal beauty. Think of the Greek siren, or the medieval succubus, or the Japanese jorōgumo: extremely beautiful, equally evil.

For this version of Dracula, the reshuffling of characters goes like this: Jonathan is engaged to Lucy, who is the daughter of Dr. Seward. There's no Arthur, no brides of Dracula, no earlier visit by Renfield, and no ruse from Dracula: he readily admits that he's visiting England as a consumer. Of more consequence is the rewrite that turns Mina into Dr. Van Helsing's daughter. This time, he isn't an established vampire hunter; he learns about vampires along with the audience. This change allows for a scenario I like to see: Dracula infiltrating human society. Langella plays the Count as a worldly hedonist who enraptures people with his vast talent for conversation. Instead of keeping to the formalities of high society, like Lugosi's Count, Langella's is almost scandalous in how openly he seeks and enjoys female attention.

Thick volumes could be written on the Freudian symbolism of the vampire as a dual object of the erotic impulse and the death impulse, on the alarmingly easy way our basic desires can be warped toward our own destruction. Badham's Dracula aims to present a believable scenario of such distorted passions. Much like desire itself, your response to this piece of art will be uniquely yours. Maybe you'll fall under the spell. Maybe you'll remain unmoved. Taste is a mystery, like life and death.

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

First Scare: Dracula (1974)

The one with the excess of close-ups and the perpetually constipated grimace

Ideally, Jack Palance should have been a great choice for the role of Count Dracula. His suitability for the role was so widely acknowledged that Marvel Comics used his likeness for the series Tomb of Dracula years before Dan Curtis cast him in the role. This was the same Dan Curtis who created the TV series Dark Shadows. Add Richard I Am Legend Matheson writing the script, and this movie had the right pedigree to be spectacular. Unfortunately, someone must have given Palance the wrong acting instructions, because from the start to the end of the movie, he only knows how to make one face: that of the unlucky vampire who forgot to add some fiber to his all-blood diet, and is now in urgent need of a laxative.

It's not like Palance is wasted on the role. When he speaks, you believe that he's the right actor. He says his lines in an unnervingly calm, low voice, in the tone of an immortal who has seen everything and can no longer be surprised. His acting choices resemble those of Bela Lugosi in his manner of staring, standing, and carrying himself. However, where Lugosi could own a scene by raising an eyebrow, Palance invariably contorts every muscle on his face, as if the director were pressuring him to choose which emotion to show.

The director himself is no help on this matter, with his strange habit of resorting to a zoom-in to mark every emotional beat. He does make effective use of low angles and the occasional Dutch angle to underline a character's interaction with the realm of the occult, but his overreliance on close-ups becomes a form of self-sabotage against the serious tone he's clearly going for. Matheson's script keeps a tight rein on the pacing of events, an essential skill to have when the audience already knows the plot by heart, and the directing style falls short of what this script deserves.

This time, the reshuffling of characters is less drastic than in previous adaptations, but there's one key detail to pay attention to: the addition of the subplot about the Count's long-dead wife whose likeness he randomly encounters in the present. Coppola would use the same subplot in his 1992 version. This is another way of solving the eternal question about the Count's reason for moving to England: in this case, it's because he's a hopeless romantic. From his dialogues (and bizarrely melodramatic flashbacks) it can be inferred that he'd be happy to remain in his castle if it weren't for the armies that have continuously come to pillage his land and/or murder his wife. If you will just let him keep his wife, he won't have to come to kill you. This version of the Count is no less a seducer than previous ones, but here the story emphasizes his sexual needs instead of Lucy's or Mina's. In fact, the female characters in this version perform the function of hypnotizable MacGuffins rather than people. They're there for the Count to pursue and for Arthur and Van Helsing to chivalrously defend.

It's funny how the space left open by removing Jonathan Harker from the action in London raises Arthur Holmwood to an almost protagonistic position, yet the script keeps him restricted to serving as an appendix of Dr. Van Helsing. They do everything together, go everywhere together, investigate each clue together—you could remove Arthur from this movie and the only change you'd notice would be that Van Helsing would have to recite his infodumps to himself. Even Mina is almost an afterthought: her close friendship with Lucy is more told than shown, and what little autonomy she has in the plot is gone once she's fed Dracula's blood.

Changing Count Dracula from a predator to a heartbroken widower isn't enough to arouse sympathy for this character. There are still good reasons why the common folk who live near his castle shudder at his name. And on a more pragmatic level, the rough, hyperangular features of Jack Palance's face are a bad fit for a romantic lead. But the movie wants to present the Count as a suffering, tragic man who has endured loneliness for too long and just hopes for a second chance at happiness. Again, this is the same angle Coppola would try some years later, but Coppola succeeds at it because his Dracula is legible to us, because his flashback actually does the job of explaining the part of the story we need to understand instead of giving us mere hints as in this movie.

Dracula's manner of death in this version is overacted as all hell. Once the curtains are ripped open to let the sunlight in, the Count staggers and pauses multiple times to make sure you see him pose in pain from all sides. Then he helpfully gets himself in position for Van Helsing to impale him, a process that takes way more camera cuts than it needs. Overall, this movie is not without enjoyable moments, if your idea of enjoyment allows for frequent, abrupt shifts in PoV and a plot structured like a game of cat and mouse.

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

First Scare: Kill, Baby, Kill

Mario Bava's gothic classic is a masterclass in designing and executing absolutely top-shelf spooky vibes

Italian horror is hit or miss with me. I know it's essential to the genre, but the '70s stuff—even Suspiria—just doesn't do it for me. But then in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, Lydia Deetz's daughter, Astrid, states that Kill, Baby, Kill is her favorite horror movie. Of course, this is just Tim Burton spreading the gospel of his favorite filmmakers (which is awesome; the youth need to expand their spooky horizons).

But I took it as a sign to head back to Italy for some frights. Kill, Baby, Kill centers on a small town in the Carpathian mountains that is experiencing a rash of unexplained deaths. A doctor is sent to investigate the goings-on, and accompanied by a local medical student, tries to debunk what he fervently believes is just small-town superstition. The townsfolk, on the other hand, are sure that the spirit of a dead girl named Melissa is spurring people to kill themselves.

The plot isn't exactly groundbreaking, but in 1966 the "evil children" genre wasn't in full force quite yet, so it may have been more exciting back then.

What Kill, Baby, Kill does do well is absolutely immaculate production design and overall feeling. It has the vibe of Hammer horror films combined with the strangely formal feeling of a theatrical play.

Nearly every scene could be a frame-worthy spooky still. If you're looking for long, dark shadows that fall down staircases, grubby gravediggers in fog-laden cemeteries, and cobwebs encircling archaic sconces, this film's got you covered in spades. It could almost be one of the "Spooky Ambience — 10 Hour" channels you find on YouTube and leave on the TV during a Halloween party.

The version I found was dubbed in English, which makes it a little harder to evoke as much as spook, but one thing I really liked was the amount of female characters in this—from the local town witch, Ruth (who, oh my God, would Aubrey Plaza play the hell out of in a modern remake) to the hauntingly white spirit of 7-year-old Melissa, the ghost at the center of it all. It's also cool how Bava turns traditional color symbology on its head, using white for evil and black for the force of good.

Overall, not scary but fun to vibe to on a cool, dark fall night. Bonus points for the haunted dolls scattered throughout.

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

First Scare: House (1977)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Mattresses
• A piano
• A grandfather clock
• Lamps

It's hard to explain just how very weird this movie is. The folks over at Criterion have published an in-depth analysis that goes into why it's a certified classic, but the entire time I watched it, I felt like I was on drugs. Kind of like if Rocky Horror Picture Show was directed by Dario Argento. It's very much a product of its time, I believe—there's some commentary on postwar Japanese life in there, along with growing up. Someone on Letterboxd was like, "this is exactly what a sleepover when you're 12 feels like." And that I totally agree with.

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

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

First Scare: Dracula (1958)

The one sadly afflicted with pink eye

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Film Review: The Wild Robot

The new law of the jungle is survival of the kindest

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

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

Book Review: The Gods Below by Andrea Stewart

The start of a new fantasy series set in a world where a pair of separated sisters are at the core of a story of theocratic conflict and ambition.

We start with a pair of sisters, Hakara and Rasha. They have only each other, eking out life in a bay in a devastated land. The elder, Hakara, dives for pearls for the thin living the sisters are eking out in the wake of their parents' death. This precarious existence ends when the black wall comes. The god Kluehnn is remaking, renewing the tired world - a world devastated, according to accounts, by man’s greed and the horrors of the other gods, gods that must be hunted and destroyed. But that remaking of the world necessarily transforms or kills half of the population as an area is remade is a harsh way to remake a world. As the black wall comes for the Bay area, our sisters are separated. Rasha is transformed, and Hakara, still ever professing to try and find her younger sister, finds employment diving not into the ocean, but rather into the earth itself in search of magical gems that could change the world themselves.

And so we are off and running in Andrea Stewart's The Gods Below, first in a new series for her, following her Bone Shard Daughter trilogy.

The story of the two sisters, as they find lives apart and on opposite sides of the Wall, as it were, is where we get the main backbone of the novel. The separate lives of the two sisters slowly converge (after a ten year time jump), as they find themselves not only on opposite sides of a barrier, but also ideologically and theologically on opposite sides as well. It is a slow burn as they struggle through their own lives, growing and changing, and becoming people who are definitely not the close sisters they once were.

In addition to the two sisters, we get three other points of view as well. One pair are a set of characters who are related but have rather different paths. Mullayne is an inventor, a creator, and an adventurer. He is determined to penetrate the depths of the earth to find the realm of the other, lost Gods, in an effort to find a cure for his terminally ill beloved, Imeah. Love drives Mullayne to follow his research, even when it is a path no one has gone in centuries, and may kill him and his entire team in the process.

And then there is Sheuan. Mull is her cousin, but while Mull and his companions are descending into the depths of the earth like Arne Saknusseum, Sheuan is trying to keep her family with some semblance of power and strength. Her clan is ready to slip and fall from the ranks of the nobles, and that would be a disaster. Her mother has put all of her efforts into trying to put Sheuan into a position to be a savior for the clan. With such pressure, Sheuan soon finds herself borrowing ideas and equipment from her absent cousin in order to try and keep her family afloat. While Mull might want to use his masking technology to delve into the earth, Sheuan has other ideas in mind.

The last point of view, used sparingly, is hundreds of years in the past of all of these otherwise contemporaneous points of view. And it is a god, Nioanen. By the time we get our first point of view for Nioanen, we’ve already had a number of chapters setting up the theological setup of the novel - man despoiled the earth, one god, Kluehnn rose to fight the avaricious fellow deities who were oppressing humanity in the bargain. It is Kluehnn who protects and helps humanity, all other deities are evil and to be opposed and fought. So Nionaen’s point of view, when it first appears, is our first in text direct opposition to this narrative, and gives us concrete information that the story Kluehnn has been putting out may be only one side of the story. Or worse, that he is fact, been lying to humanity for centuries.

In addition to the plotting and characters, we get a rich world to explore and develop here. Using the various points of view immerses into a world where the world broke... and now is slowly being rejuvenated, but at a cost and by methods that are not clear. Although the novel isn’t a mystery per se, there are plenty of questions that are slowly revealed for the reader about the true nature of the world, how and why it broke, and what is happening now. This is a world rich in magic, a world of competing clans, grasping nobles, devotees of the god, and much more.

There is some lovely language, Stewart’s talent for word choice and phrasing I noticed in the Bone Shard Daughter series is in full effect here as well. Her word choice and phrases are evocative, emotive and often pluck at the heart. Even more than the plotting, worldbuilding and strong characters that the novel offers, the way that this novel evokes emotion, and feeling with her word choice, as well as describing and evoking all of the above, really stands out. There are painful choices and hard bargains throughout the novel, and Stewart’s writing puts a light on the difficult choices the characters are faced with, and makes the reader really feel the pressure and consequences of those decisions.

The novel that comes to mind that pairs with The Gods Below is Hannah Kaner’s Godkiller. Like that novel, this novel explores theological frameworks, and internecine politics on a human level that have origins and reflects with the gods and their concerns. There are in fact, Godkillers in The Gods Below, and how those conflicts play out in both novels help distinguish them together in epic fantasy. Godkiller is significantly darker in tone and content, much more in the grimdark mold of fantasy than, ultimately, The Gods Below is.

Overall, this is the first novel in the story, and the stopping point here has some reveals, there really isn’t a resolution for readers who want to get off here. I am invested enough, particularly in the story of Hakara and Rasha, to see where Stewart intends to go with the next novel in the series. I do note, though, that this is a case where the series name, The Hollow Covenant, does in fact constitute as a bit of a spoiler. While it is easy to guess that Kluehnn is not all they're cracked up to be as a protector of humanity and restorer of the world, it does tip the hand even before one opens the book.

--

The Math

Highlights:

• Strong pair of primary characters with a excellent story and characterization
• Excellent and vividly evocative writing
• Interesting and well developed worldbuilding
• Really strong cover art by Lauren Panepinto

Reference: Stewart, Andrea, The Gods Below  [Orbit, 2024].

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

First Scare: Dracula (1931)

The one with the intense stares

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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