Deja Boo: Poltergeist 2

The second entry in the Poltergeist trilogy is classic kid nightmare fuel, no matter how cheesy it may seem in retrospect

The very first Poltergeist came out in 1982 and had some serious chops: It was directed by Tobe Hooper (of Texas Chainsaw Massacre fame) and produced by Steven Spielberg himself. It was a major success, and is universally beloved as a modern take on the haunted house trope.

Needless to say, neither of these two powerhouses returned for the sequel, Poltergeist 2. Does that make it any less enjoyable? No, I proudly say, as someone who loved this movie as a kid and who continues to enjoy it today as an adult.

It does, however, lose a bit of its gravitas. It turns from a quaint, supernatural movie about the horrors of suburban capitalism into a wild, twisty, culturally appropriating spookfest. Once again, I found myself not remembering key plot points in this sequel. Instead, I honed in on specific imagery that sticks with you long after the screen goes black.

The plot

The Freelings, having escaped from their former haunted house (now conveniently disappeared into another dimension), are living at the wife's mother's house. They're far from safe, however, as the main spirit they battled, a 19th-century apocalypse cult leader, continues to target young Carol Ann's life force. A Native American shaman named Taylor comes to their rescue, teaming up with everyone's favorite medium, Tangina Barron (of "This house is clean" fame from the original) to help the Freelings fight off the bad juju. There's not much more to it than that, and the movie consists mainly of scary scenes/monsters/otherworldly forces. They triumph in the end (seemingly). There's a third movie, but only Carol Ann and Tangina return—not even Craig T. Nelson could be bothered to show up.

What scared me then

Look, kids don't always know what's hokey. Sometimes, frightening imagery is enough, as we've learned over the course of this month. The most strikingly scary image in Poltergeist 2 is the main baddie: Reverend Henry Kane, played by Julian Bond. He is truly frightening, in a scary-Flannery O'Connor-preacher sort of way. He's ragged and scary, all rotten teeth and sallow skin.

When he starts singing "God Is In His Holy Temple," you can't help but feel like he's going to crawl out of the screen and kidnap you. He's a worthy villain, and Julian Bond is perfectly cast in this role. He's like biologically created to scare young kids about the terrors of elderly people.

The next scene that scared the living daylights out of me was the son/bathroom scene. The Freelings' teenage son is upstairs alone (yes, in the haunted house that his parents know about), attempting to shave when the dark spirit starts messing with him. The son's spindly orthodontic brace wires start spouting out of his mouth out of control, threatening to consume him as they expand and hold up near the ceiling. His folks come running upstairs to help him, battling the rogue braces wires before they reach the electrical outlet. This scene left a profound impact on me as a young child, and even more so once I reached middle school and got braces myself.

Once again, as I reexamine the past via horror memories, I realize that I was almost continually microdosing body horror. Maybe that's part of growing up: Realizing the gross and almost comical limitations of our corporeal forms.

Finally, I've remembered my entire life the absurdity of tequila worms. In the film, the father (played by Craig T. Nelson), very obviously is fighting alcoholism. At one point, as he's downing a bottle of the hard stuff to battle his demons, he imbibes the dreaded worm—only this time, it's possessed by the evil Reverend Kane, and the father thus becomes possesssed himself. He acts rudely, threatens his wife, and eventually throws up the tainted worm, which then becomes a horrific, tentacled monster.

This monster is a triumph of disfigured, circus sideshow proportions, and thus extremely memorable for children. Or rather, I remembered the worm growing into something monstrous and obscene even if I couldn't recall specific details about it now. But to this day, I've harbored a bit of a fear about mezcal, too.

What scares me now

Watching this as a 43-year-old, I can't say there's very much that scares me. The magical Native American trope bothers me more than any ghostly fright. The special effects are fine, in practicality, but don't particularly evoke much fear. As a fan of haunted house films, the Poltergeist movies are interesting. There's something inherently less scary for me when said spooky domicile is a California ranch. It's just less atmospheric than a broody, sprawling, black-and-white Victorian manse.

The only thing that I can still sort of defend is the depiction of the Reverend Kane. It's unsettling and creepy, no matter one's age. Cult leaders with an interest in little girls transcend time and space, and are always monsters. 

There's one other aspect that was a bit ahead of its time: the idea of a person being haunted and not just a locale. This would be echoed later in movies like Paranormal Activity, but it hardly pioneered the idea. Not being able to escape a haunting is at once harrowing and claustrophobic. Not being able to escape to the safety of a hotel or a family member's is insane. My father, a former Army Ranger and lifelong cop—and who I once thought invincible—once mentioned his greatest fear was a being he couldn't stop. That still holds true for me, I think, as the idea of an escapable spirit remains frightening.

Adults can scoff at the cheesiness of Poltergeist 2, as it's just good fun, but it's very easy to see why many scenes remain with kids who watch it.

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.

Deja Boo: The Birds

Still creepy after all these years

When I was a college freshman, my roommate had a blue parakeet. On occasion, the bird would escape the cage and fly around our tiny dorm room and I would hide under the covers until the bird was safely back in the cage. I realized back then that my fear of free flying animals was likely based on my childhood viewing of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. I didn’t consume a lot of horror as a young child and I actively avoided graphic slasher films. The idea of scaring myself intentionally was limited to intense amusement park rides, not scary movies. As a result, much of what I saw in the horror genre were reruns of old black-and-white film classics that felt more like melodramatic gothic stage theater rather than being actually terrifying. However, one day, while flipping through the channels, I came across an old movie called The Birds, and I couldn’t look away. There are movies that will stay with you for various reasons, and not always because they are particularly well made or well acted. I was riveted by scenes of little children, my age, being attacked and wounded. And I was particularly creeped out by the attacking “monster” being something I walked by, or beneath, every day on my way to school. Without my realizing it, The Birds changed my brain chemistry when it came to the chirps and birdsong of sweet flying creatures with claws and beaks.

The story follows Melanie (Tippi Hedren), an impeccably dressed, pampered socialite whose minor hijinks periodically land her in trouble, but without lasting consequences. At a bird shop in San Francisco, Melanie and a charming young lawyer named Mitch (Rod Taylor) mutually prank each other. Determined to get back at Mitch, Melanie buys a pair of lovebirds and drives up to the seaside town of Bodega Bay to sneak them into the house which Mitch shares with his uptight, widowed mother (Jessica Tandy) and his cheerful, school-aged younger sister, Cathy (Veronica Cartwright). Melanie is helped and reluctantly befriended by Annie (Suzanne Pleshette), a cynical young woman who is Cathy’s teacher and Mitch’s ex-girlfriend. However, a series of isolated, strange bird encounters gradually escalates into swarms of massive, coordinated attacks and lethal carnage in the little town.

The Birds did a great job of creating a fear of the ordinary which, at least for me, can be far more scary than fantastical monsters or creatures. The birds in the story aren’t radioactive, alien, or super-enhanced in any way. They are just ordinary birds, en masse, and very angry at people. This is one of the early films I had seen that used the idea that any small thing, in sufficient numbers and fury, can kill you. This concept has been played out with ants, spiders, piranha, and young children, in other horror stories I saw later in life. I didn’t really worry about sharks or piranha in my home town, but birds were a regular presence in my life. I would see them massed on telephone lines or flying in formation in the sky. After the gory scene where Jessica Tandy finds a friend dead with his eyes gone, I had a new respect for birds.

The Rewatch

As part of our Déjà Boo series, I recently did a rewatch of The Birds to see how it compared to my childhood memories. Despite some dated acting and special effects (that make it sometimes drift a little towards campiness), it’s still creepy after all these years. There were things I noticed on my grownup watch that I didn’t catch or think about when I was a child. First of all, there is no music. Most films, especially from the 1960s, have jaunty background tunes or suspenseful music to set the emotional tone of the scene. In The Birds, music is absent, so there is only the natural sounds of the birds. Even in the most terrifying and violent scenes, there is only the flapping of wings and screeching of the birds and the cries of the victims.

Another thing I noticed is how slow and ordinary the start of the film is. There is no dramatic opening, chase scenes, jump scares or other intensity. Almost the first third of the movie is Melanie figuring out how to prank Mitch with the lovebirds. Even after she gets to Bodega Bay, she is still chatting with and manipulating the locals to complete her prank. I love how polished she is with lying for this small, petty thing, and I was intrigued by the way the small conversations gradually reveal the various characters’ inner demons long before they are hacked at by birds. The slow creep of the story prior to the pivotal action scenes and the lack of dramatic music created a feeling of vague, impending dread while still making the intense physical attacks sneak up on you.

The third thing I noticed on my rewatch was, well, the birds themselves. This may seem obvious, but as a child I was just freaked out by the massive amounts of birds attacking children my age. Watching this as a grownup, my brain was thinking about logistics. How did they get so many birds? How did they get them to swarm? I went down some unverified internet rabbit holes and read that most of the birds were real, but some were mechanical (which on second viewing you can sort of see when a child is pinned to the ground by a persistent bird). I also read that Tippi Hedren was surprised on set by the unexpected use of real, rather than mechanical, birds attacking her in a pivotal scene.

The final element I noticed during my rewatch were the philosophical conversations between the various characters, including several of the side characters. There are multiple times where a victim reports an attack and is disbelieved, not because they are untrustworthy, but because the listener doesn’t want to believe it could be true. There is a great scene in the town’s diner where Melanie reports that there was a bird attack on the school children, and an elderly woman who is a bird expert explains that a coordinated bird attack couldn’t happen, even though it clearly has. Another customer at the diner doesn’t want to hear the information because it will scare her two children. When the birds swarm the area around the diner, the customers stare at Melanie in the aftermath and one says that Melanie must be to blame. It’s an interesting reminder of toxic group conversation dynamics that continue to exist in our current day.

The Birds may seem tame by contemporary standards, but as a child I was riveted by the bird attacks, especially since children were often the targets and they were being attacked by real-life creatures that I regularly encountered. While the gore was mostly kept to a minimum, there were several jump scare scenes with an eyeless corpse or a man engulfed in flames or a child with a bird pecking at her neck. These scenes were enough to leave an indelible imprint on my young thoughts. As a result, The Birds remains a memorable experience as one of my first horror films.

Highlights:

• No music, so many birds
• Jump scares
• Kids always in peril

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

Deja Boo: Child's Play

Child's Play still holds up after 40 years, and is a film that is most likely still scaring children into avoiding their dolls

This movie was the one. The one that caused me to forever fear dolls. Now, is it happenstance that I was also a tomboy in the late 1980s and didn't really like them anyway? We'll never know. But I can say that this movie personally traumatized me, and it's perhaps the scariest Deja Boo I'll personally revisit this month.

Since its release in 1988, Child's Play—or less formally known as "Chucky"—has spawned a franchise of six sequels, a TV show, and a reboot. I think it's easy to forget how chilling the first movie was back when it was just a standalone film. The intervening years have sort of Flanderized the demonic doll into a evil, sardonic toy version of Deadpool. That's okay, there's clearly an audience for this sort of thing.

But when you rewatch this first film that launched everything, it's an incredibly frightening supernatural slasher that sticks with you. Like with Killer Klowns from Outer Space, I don't recall ever sitting down and watching Child's Play from beginning to end when I was a kid. It was whispered about in playgrounds, featured in the lineup in the papery-thin HBO viewing guide that came in the mail, and stacked three deep in the horror section of my local video stores. That was plenty exposure for a young Haley to say absolutely not and bid adieu to even the innocuous Teddy Ruxpin that had previously been living in my room.

There's an easy explanation to why the idea of a haunted doll terrorizes children. They're things of comfort, given to you by a loving adult. They possess an emotional safety that binds you to them. If they suddenly turn on you and at the very least cause trouble—and at the very worst threaten you—you're liable to not be believed. It's only a doll, they'd say. Stop playing, Mom would counter.

Therein lies their fear.

The plot

Chucky is a possessed doll that comes to life in Child's Play, and finds his way via happenstance to the home of young Andy and his single Mom in Chicago. Chucky is the cartoon star of a popular kid's cartoon, and Andy is obsessed—he even has Chucky's trademark blue overalls in the form of pajamas (another terrifying thing to watch given the ubiquity of Chucky in pop culture now). His mom is struggling to stay afloat, but manages to buy a stolen Chucky doll for a song from a back-alley peddler.

Chucky eventually comes to life, and begins tormenting Andy and his family. We find out that Chucky is actually possessed by the soul of a local serial killer who, upon being shot up by a cop played by Christopher Sarandon, utters a magical voodoo incantation and sends his essence into a 2-foot doll.

As a possessed doll, he's not just there for a good time. He has Andy take him via the L train to a sketchy part of town where he can take vengeance on his former accomplice. He then goes and visits his voodoo master, who tells him that he can only come back to corporeal form if he says the incantation again in front of the first human to whom he revealed he was alive. In other words, he now has to kill Andy.

Andy, his mom, and Chris Sarandon eventually figure this all out, and manage to take him out—but not until after he's been kicked, stabbed, shot, and burnt (very Rasputin of him).

What scared me then

Honestly, it was more the idea and image of Chucky that got me more than any specific scene. Seeing a red-headed doll—even if only in brief swatches—was terrifying. I'm sure I'm not alone in this. There's a reason Chucky is up there in the mononym club like Michael, Jason, and Freddie. He's mean-spirited, vulgar, and has zero problem killing men, women, and children.

I think more than the idea of him, though, was his visage. All dolls to me are unsettling, really, but Chucky is beyond the pale. He's creepy when he's the happy, harmless, smiling version of the real-life doll. But when the serial killer's soul wakes up, he contorts the doll's face into an angry, twisted sneer, and the eyes glisten with hate.

It was scary then, and it's scary now.

What scares me now

First, I want to explore what's more disturbing: If Chucky's deranged-supernatural-serial-killer-possession origin was never discussed, or the fact that it is. I think the not knowing would be more disturbing actually, because it would be more like a random act of terror. Him having the backstory somehow makes him more human, I think, so for me it's a little less scary. Now, I still wouldn't want to confront either one, of course, don't get me wrong. But random acts of violence are inherently less upsetting than a situation (no matter how far-fetched) that can be explained at least a little.

The scene where Andy's mom realizes that this stolen doll she bought for her son is truly, evilly alive, is so stark and horrifying. She's looking over the box he came in, and then—the included batteries fall out. This thing has been talking and moving by itself. All of a sudden, all the things Andy's said Chucky's been saying and doing make a lot more sense. It's alive.

Seeing Chucky amble out in the wild, even at a distance, is discomfiting. There's a scene where Andy is watching Chucky run up some outdoor stairs towards him, knowing that Chucky will try to kill him. It's a brief scene, and some may call it a throwaway, but I found it oddly scary. You see this little bright red and blue doll scurrying up steps, moving on its own volition. It's scarier, to me, than any close-up special effect, because it just seems… real. There's an urgency to it that can't be shaken.

Towards the end of the movie, after they've tried repeatedly to kill Chucky, he gets burnt to crisp, all blackened wax and sooty skin. He's alive still, and at this point, at his most physically disgusting. I think this part is especially scary because not only is he a haunted doll, which is frightening because he resembles a real child, but he's also burnt beyond recognition. No one wants to imagine a badly burnt child, but that's exactly what he resembles. It's horrific, and it compounds the fear you've been facing all movie-long to this point.

Child's Play is an upsetting movie, and I feel a little justified in being such a scaredy cat about it in my youth. I dare any parent to let their child even know this movie exists—you'd have the same situation.

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.

Deja Boo: The Brave Little Toaster

Baby's first introduction to the inevitability of death

I will confess to you now that The Brave Little Toaster never made me cry. It’s not the sort of movie that made me fear that there was a monster under the bed, or anything like that. But I do remember, vaguely, being fascinated by the film all the same. I couldn’t really tell you why; I liked talking cars, so that last musical number had an enduring appeal to me. But, as those of us who have actually watched this film could tell you, the actual content of that musical number will in retrospect make people question my upbringing.

This is a movie that I remembered fondly throughout my youth but for the longest time never actually sat down to rewatch. I rediscovered the soundtrack on a Reddit thread (more on that later) and would listen to it during certain tough times. I did not, however, dedicatedly watch the film again. The film is from 1987. I was born in 1996. I watched it in the early 2000s. And in the Year of Our Lord 2026, I watched it again, staring down the gunbarrel of thirty years old.

I must admit: this film is dark for a children’s film, but is dark in a way that is perhaps not obvious to a child. Your basic plot is that five appliances—a toaster, an electric blanket, a vacuum cleaner, a lamp, and a radio—have been left at the country cottage of a city family. The appliances miss the child that they had provided for for so long, whom they call “the Master.” After years and years of being left in the cottage with little sight of the Master, the appliances get together and decide to brave the wilderness to find the Master and resume their lives of faithful service. It turns out, though, that the Master has grown up. He is no longer a child, and in fact he is setting off to go to college, and from there adulthood.

In that premise alone there is a lot to unpack. This is set during high Reaganism, the age of “greed is good,” the age when America assumed what was profitable and what was good were in fact one and the same. What is striking is one of the assumptions made by the film (based off of a 1980 novella by acclaimed science fiction writer Thomas Disch) about its characters: the idea that their fulfillment is found in service. This is an idea that, by itself, sounds very Reagan-era. The film literalizes the concept of a “dream job” by downright stating that these characters are pining for a state of continued servitude. But, if you cock your head a bit in a certain direction, you can see this in a much more liberatory way. Everyone wants to make a living doing what they love, what they’re good at, and you can read the appliances’ quest as a quest for self-actualization. But if this is a metaphor for self-actualization, the metaphor fails a bit; tools are designed to be used for specific purposes. Human beings are simply born.

The appliances march through a dangerous wilderness to the city. This wilderness isn’t particularly dangerous to human beings; indeed Indigenous people had lived in them for millennia (the nature of this film looks vaguely like that of the Mountain West—the radio mentions Utah as being a different place, so I am very tentatively willing to guess that the film is set in Colorado, but really it could be somewhere between there and northern California), though I would suppose that a city-dweller would need some teaching. In any case, these are not humans, but human creations. They have to navigate the wilderness using a vacuum’s wheels and a battery tied to an office chair, and to get out of scrapes, they have to use the vacuum’s cord (they use it to swing across a river once, and another time use it to get the blanket down from a tree). But what they all discover, with emotional force so intense they sing about it, is that this world can be utterly beautiful. Their own sense of purpose has locked them in a house, pining for somebody who isn’t there, and they have denied themselves so much because of it.

They eventually find themselves in the possession of a man who works with appliances like them for a living, a rotund tinkerer-cum-salesman by the name of Elmo St. Peters. He works what is, for our main characters, a grisly trade: he sells appliances, and more disturbingly, he sells appliance parts. Your characters are therefore plunged into an actual horror story for beings of their nature. You get another musical number, led by a hanging lamp with an unnerving resemblance to Peter Lorre. Elmo St. Peters is a man who can be read as the evil doppelganger of the Master: the Master uses his appliances to help himself, thereby actualizing them, while Elmo St. Peters uses his appliances to help himself, thereby dismembering them. You, and they, are confronted with the wildly different meanings of the verb “to use.“

The appliances eventually make it to the Master’s new home, an apartment in the city. They are met by the shiny new appliances, cutting edge for the 1980s and hideously dated by modern standards. That’s where the film shows its age the most; the old vacuum looks very much like a modern vacuum, and the titular toaster is very close to the one I have in my house. The computers and stereos and all the other things in the new apartment, however, look very ‘80s, and this becomes ever more in your face as they sing about how new they are in a tune that is filled to the brim with synthesizers of that era (as well as an obvious Carmen Miranda parody at one point).

And then we get to the junkyard scene. This is the part of the movie that I remembered vividly, even in the twenty-some years I didn’t watch it. This is the song that I found in a Reddit thread that became a talisman for me in times of misery. I listened to it a lot right after I graduated high school, before finding a proper summer job, having been put through the rite of passage that those of us my age, give or take a few years, went through: being driven from store to store by your parents and ordered to ask if they had any job openings, only to be told to apply online (maybe one store let me fill something out there—this was summer 2015). I listened to it a lot during my mental health crash my sophomore year of college (I showed it to at least one therapist). I listened to it, again, in the wake of my suicide attempt, an attempt born out of guilt.

But describing it in words won’t do it justice. Take a few minutes and watch it.

Look into my virtual eyes and tell me this isn’t the darkest shit you’ve ever seen in a children’s film. Occasionally, in college, the swing dance and ballroom dance clubs I was in would share the songs from the movies they loved as children. Most would have some sugary song from the Disney Renaissance. I would show them this, and they would give me weird looks.

Again, I think that I liked this bit as a child because of the talking cars. It’s certainly a catchy tune, with bits of surf rock and a driving beat that would make it easy to swing dance to (I have never had the pleasure, unfortunately), written by the acclaimed Van Dyke Parks. As an adult, this scene encapsulates the themes of the film in a terrifying way. You are literally staring into the jaws of death! How did anyone let this get put in a children’s film? (A big part, by my understanding, was having it made independently rather than financed by Disney). This is a song about feeling left behind, the feeling that you belonged to a different era. Long-time science fiction readers may notice a thematic overlap with George R. R. Martin’s 1983 novel The Armageddon Rag. That is a work dominated by nostalgia and the fear of being left behind. The characters are aging rockers whose heyday was the swinging ‘60s, the age of free love and peace and the antiwar movement. It is a book that is the hypercapitalist, reactionary, money-obsessed ‘80s looking back at the freewheeling, anti-establishment ‘60s, asking where the time had gone.

I’m going to go through that song car by car. I think it deserves it:

The first car we don’t get that good of a look at, but he’s a common person’s car, a means to get from here to there. He’s very much the person who’s thrown too much time into their job and has lost any sense of self. He reminds me of my father.

The second car is more artistically clear in her intent: she’s a car of the optimistic Space Age of the ‘50s, with her sleek design that calls to mind rockets. She is a paean to lost optimism.

The third car is a ‘50s hot rod, with the raspy voice of an aging rock star whose voice has been destroyed by booze and cigarettes. He’s one way of looking at lost youth, tied to a very specific time and place.

The fourth car is a race car of the type common in the interwar years, who realistically couldn’t hold a candle to the cars of the ‘80s. He’s about how skills and senses degrade as you age, and how the highs of youth cannot be recreated afterwards. He’s the car most comparable to an athlete.

The fifth and sixth cars are a limousine and a hearse, respectively. The former sings of a wedding, the latter a funeral, and these are implied to be for the same man. They are clearly the same model of car in different livery to suit different purposes, and sent together into the maw of death. Sex and death are so commonly intertwined in art, and that is the case here. One begets the other.

The sixth car is the reason why, whenever I want to listen to this song, I listen to a version ripped directly from the film rather than the official soundtrack. For on the soundtrack they bowdlerized her lyrics and overlaid a weird-sounding new line that juts out like a nail. I understand why they felt the need to do this, as it is the most openly sexual of any of the verses. This car is reminiscent of the VW vans that the hippies loved, and the surfboard on her roof is self-explanatory. She is the embodiment of the swinging ‘60s, the age of free love, and (as Jack Weinberg put it) never trusting anyone over the age of 30. By the time this film was made, those bright young people would mostly have settled down, reached middle age, taken corporate jobs, and started families—and I suspect that several of them would have watched this film with their children. This segment is another catchy song with talking cars for children, but I can imagine it was a shot across the bow for their parents.

The last car is downright tragic. He is a work truck, left forgotten to rot, deemed superfluous as his owners looked for a better future in the city (here, Santa Fe). Notably, this is specifically stated to be on a reservation, and from the mention of the Hopi later on we can guess this is the Hopi reservation of Arizona (surrounded, incidentally, by the larger Navajo reservation). The time this car was made useful would have been the age of the Red Power movement, when the Indigenous peoples of the continent demanded that the settler state and the settler society remember that they were still living, breathing peoples, not dead ones. This truck is a forgotten tool of a forgotten people, and those layers of forgottenness leave him only one course of action: he is the only car to voluntarily take his place on the conveyor belt to total destruction.

This is a film that is frankly much scarier as an adult than as a child. I am now months away from thirty, the age that society has decided is the end of your fun and the end of your youth, the year you are supposed to be an “adult,” whatever that means. I am autistic, and I have ADHD, which means that I have been “behind” several “adult” milestones. I still live with my parents, because everything in Northern Virginia is hideously expensive. I only got my first job at 25, and I am still there, because the job application process is hell for people like me. I have never had a relationship. I have never even dated anyone. As someone who has spent his entire life chasing an ideal that I simply cannot reach, the themes of obsolescence of this movie resonate with me deeply. Part of me wonders if such great thematic work is wasted on children, but on the other hand, I would never have seen it as an adult had I never seen it as a child. It is a seed that grew into a great and mighty tree that has borne many fruits, and it has done so because the fear it is based on comes for us all.

And, if you're so inclined, it's now on Disney Plus.

POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.

Deja Boo: Babes in Toyland (1986)

#JusticeforTrollog

Yes, yes, I know, I know. That’s how much of a chicken I am. My choice for the Déjà Boo series, where we bravely revisit the movies that left us traumatized as kids, is the Christmas fantasy musical Babes in Toyland from 1986. But don’t let the sugar overload fool you: this movie is seriously scary. It comes with the trivia value that it features extremely early roles for Keanu Reeves and Drew Barrymore before either of them knew how to act, and it drags poor Pat Morita into the role of a generic wise elder who speaks in throwaway platitudes. There are songs, teddy bears, a cute parade, and nonstop smiles. Other things this movie also has: workplace harassment, public endangerment, concussion with possible brain damage, forced marriage under threat of homelessness, abysmal worker safety conditions, chronic and potentially lethal insomnia, chronic and potentially lethal scurvy, human trafficking, animal cruelty, and the creation of artificial life for the sole purpose of serving as slave soldiers.

But sure, enjoy the musical numbers.

Now let me give you some context as to why this movie permanently scarred a young me.

I’ve always had ridiculously high myopia. My first prescription eyeglasses, when I was 9, had −4.5 diopters. If you’ve never needed to deal with such numbers, imagine the eyeglasses of Futurama’s Professor Farnsworth, but on the face of a 5th-grader. My myopia had advanced to −9.5 diopters by the age of 27, when I became able to afford corrective surgery, which couldn’t be done with laser because it would have required removing too much of my corneas; instead I got intraocular lenses, which means they cut open my eyeballs and pushed little discs of bespoke glass inside. I still need to have regular checkups because, while my sight is normal now, the surgery can’t fix the fact that my eyes are just too long, which presents the danger of my retinas stretching so thin they could tear off. The critical importance of caring for my eyes was drilled into me all my life, and that influenced the way one particular scene in this movie affected me.

So back to the movie: We meet Lisa (Drew Barrymore), an 11-year-old child who hates being treated like a child. It’s Christmas Eve, and she’s at home watching TV when the newscast suddenly warns that a big snowstorm is coming for Cincinnati. You see, Lisa lives in Cincinnati. (This movie cares a lot about that fact. This movie does not want you to forget that Lisa is from Cincinnati. This movie wants you to sing the praises of Cincinnati in your nightmares.) The wind is already so strong that it brings down a telephone pole, cutting the lines, so now Lisa can’t warn her older sister, who works at a supermarket and doesn’t know about the snowstorm. Because their mother is busy elsewhere in the city having her car repaired, and cell phones aren’t a thing yet, Lisa decides to brave the weather and walk all the way to the supermarket.

Somehow, maybe thanks to the magic of Christmas, sweet little Lisa doesn’t die of hypothermia and reaches the supermarket just in time to casually prevent the slimy, greedy, creepy manager from committing a #MeToo on her sister. Lisa tells all the customers that they should run home to be safe from the storm, but the manager wants them to stay and keep spending money. Because it’s Christmas Eve, and buying is what that date is for. Fortunately, the people listen to Lisa, so she, her sister, and two of her coworkers decide to give themselves the rest of the evening off. One of those coworkers is Jack (Keanu Reeves), who appears to be dating Lisa’s sister, and speaks in the worst surfer dude accent of the late 20th century. Maybe this was the role that won Reeves his big part in Point Break.

Jack offers to take everybody home in his car, and once they’re on their way, for whatever reason he starts a group rendition of a bizarre song about how awesome Cincinnati is. I don’t know whether this song already existed in real life or was made for the movie, and I don’t care to know. No movie has the right to be so in-your-face about the awesomeness of a place that it never shows you. We don’t get to see any part of Cincinnati in the movie, which is understandable once you realize how cheap this production is, but is still an absurd choice in a plot where Lisa’s Cincinnatianishness will turn out to be the thing that saves the world. Anyway, instead of keeping his eyes on the road, what with a dangerous snowstorm going on, Jack makes everyone sing this ridiculous song and narrowly avoids crashing his car, which hurls Lisa out and sends her straight at a tree.

The rest of the movie makes more sense if you assume that Lisa has died and what follows is hell.

Alas, we’re all draged with her into hell, which looks like a movie set made of half a dozen houses painted in pastel and populated with human-sized plush animals. Welcome to Toyland, a colorful, cheerful town paved in astroturf where people move around in go-karts (driving licenses are printed on cookies), police officers are all big teddy bears, and everyone is named after a fairy tale. Lisa happens to crash-land in Toyland just as the town prepares to host a wedding between a damsel in distress, who looks suspiciously exacly like her sister, and a slimy, greedy, creepy older man who looks suspiciously exactly like her sister’s boss. Now let’s pause for a moment to talk about this villain. Richard Mulligan’s acting style invests this character with a maximalist campy sensibility that makes Creedence Leonore Gielgud look Shakespearean by comparison. His house is a gigantic bowling ball, he has a horrendous overgrown thumbnail that he likes to shove in people’s faces, and his fashion sense, covered in silky rags and black feathers from head to toe, makes him look like Ebenezer Scrooge woke up hungover in Björk’s wardrobe.

This man is about to marry the designated damsel in distress, who is only doing this because otherwise her mother’s big shoe house will be repossessed. So even the utopian candy-colored Toyland has mortgages, which contractually compels me to overthink this story’s worldbulding more than the movie is prepared to give answers for. On what legal basis can the villain kick the mother out if she presumably hasn’t missed any payments? Does Toyland employ public defenders? How was the mother approved for such a big mortgage? Where did she get her dozen adopted children from? Does Toyland even use money? We don’t learn any of the answers. What we do learn about Toyland: it’s surrounded in all directions by a scary cursed forest full of monsters. That makes me wonder how Toyland feeds itself, since we don’t see any cultivated land, yet the biggest business is a cookie factory. It may well be its only business, which raises even more questions, namely about the nutritional health of the locals. We see plush bears, plush rabbits, plush ducks, plush frogs, and the occasional human. The bears will probably do fine, as they can eat everyone else, but with no veggies in sight, I worry about the rabbits. The frogs have even bigger problems, as there are no bodies of water in Toyland, so they have to live in permanent dehydration. As for the humans, an only-cookie diet ought to have already killed them all of scurvy.

Even more disturbingly: in the forest, it’s always nighttime, whereas in Toyland, it’s always daytime. There’s a big plot point involving a deadline by next Wednesday, but how do these people know which day of the week it is, if there’s never a sunrise or a sunset? And don’t tell me they can know by looking at a clock; how do you even calibrate a clock if there’s no daily cycle to refer to? With permanent daylight, one could suppose that the inhabitants of Toyland never sleep. Setting aside for a moment the dangers of prolonged sleeplessness, how do the workers at the cookie factory even know when their shifts end? In fact, let’s talk about that cookie factory for a minute, because holy OSHA violations, Batman, all the workers wear roller skates inside a building that has not only stairs, but massive ovens for baking cookies. You see a fun, whimsical fantasy; I see a class-action lawsuit waiting to happen.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. The first thing Lisa does upon arriving in Toyland is, of course, interrupt the wedding. The damsel in distress loves another guy, who looks suspiciously exactly like Keanu Reeves. Why are these two in love? We never find out; they’re only given enough personality to look alive on screen. It does help, though, that the majority of eligible bachelors in Toyland are plush frogs and plush ducks. If that’s what you’re working with, you could do a lot worse than Keanu Reeves. After the villain’s wedding is ruined, he runs away to brood in his dark spherical house. There we meet the key character that is the whole reason for this post: Trollog. My boy Trollog, who never did anything wrong, is a child-size carnivorous bird with one single, gigantic eye that serves as a crystal ball for the bad guy to spy on Toyland. Trollog is just an animal. He doesn’t speak, doesn’t have an agenda of his own, and doesn’t seem particularly evil. He’s just ugly. Would you consider Simba the villain of his movie because his survival requires him to eat his childhood friends? Then you can’t be mad at Trollog.

To punish Keanu Reeves, and also take control of the cookie factory he’s supposed to inherit, the villain sneaks into the factory and throws away a bunch of cookie boxes. He frames Keanu Reeves for stealing cookies and gets him thrown in teddy bear prison. To help him escape, Lisa distracts the judge by infodumping trivia about Cincinnati sports history. Somehow this works. Keanu Reeves goes back to the factory to search for clues, but he’s captured again. When he finds himself in the villain’s dungeon,  where his friends are soon taken as well, he explains the situation to them with the most awesome line in the whole movie:

“He’s got trolls! Hundreds of ugly trolls! Who ate all the cookies!”

Turns out Toyland has, of course, a Toymaster (Pat Morita), who crafts all the presents that Santa Claus delivers. And for alarmingly unexplained reasons, the Toymaster happens to keep a hidden bottle where he’s been storing all the evil of the world. What do you plan to do with so much evil, Mr. Toymaster? Your sweet face and kind manners don’t fool me. But before we have a chance to uncover whatever the Toymaster has been scheming with the bottle of evil, the villain steals it to use on the creatures of the dark forest so they conquer Toyland for him. He also tries to corrupt our heroes by uncorking the bottle in front of them, and the Evil Green Fart Cloud does appear at first to take over their minds… except Lisa’s. She’s immune because… she’s not a Toylander, I guess? But her guess is that she’s immune because she’s from Cincinnati, so she reasons that thinking about how awesome Cincinnati is will break the spell on her friends. And once again, we have to endure the same song about Cincinnati that we heard before. Considering this was the song she was singing when she was thrown face-first into a tree, she shouldn’t be so happy to remember it, but the magic of the song works, the heroes miraculously know all the lyrics, and they break free of the Evil Green Fart Cloud.

I’m surprised I had forgotten this part. It’s entirely ridiculous, but it matches perfectly with this movie. But to be frank, the only part I actually remembered from this movie happens a bit earlier, when the bad guy breaks into the Toymaster’s workshop to steal the evil bottle. He ties up Lisa and the Toymaster and leaves them to be eaten by Trollog. Poor Trollog! How long has it been since he last ate people? I don’t suppose he can subsist on cookies. But Lisa tricks him into biting her ropes, she helps untie the Toymaster, and then the Toymaster does the absolute most horrifying thing I ever saw in a movie as a kid. Are you ready? Because I certainly wasn’t.

He grabs a paintbrush and covers Trollog’s big eye in paint.

That’s it. That’s what sent me screaming through my parents’ living room. I, who was raised to harbor a persistent dread of blindness, had just witnessed someone paint over an eye, and the movie played it as a moment of heroism. Still not done tormenting this innocent predatory bird, Lisa gets him to walk into a big chest, where she traps him before sitting on the lid. What does she plan to do with my sweet, people-eating boy Trollog? Nobody cares, because it’s time for the third act.

After singing about Cincinnati and saving her friends from becoming evil mindless minions, Lisa leads them back to the Toymaster’s workshop, where she’s told that she needs to embrace her childishness in order to activate the magic of toys. There’s another sappy song, Lisa talks about how much Toyland has taught her to love toys again, and that does the trick: an entire army ot toy soldiers comes alive, just in time to repel the invasion of the forest monsters and kick the bad guy out of Toyland forever. I have to wonder how much this self-imposed autarky will work out for Toyland; remember that it’s surrounded by the dark forest on all sides, so enforcing the bad guy’s exile means keeping Toyland isolated from the world. Since Toyland doesn’t seem to have trade partners or anything resembling foreign relations, I give the teddy bears a week before they get tired of the cookies and proceed to eat the rest of the Toylanders, assuming the rest of the Toylanders haven’t died of malnutrition and/or scurvy before that.

With the villain finally out of the picture, Keanu Reeves marries the damsel in distress, and Lisa is sent back to Cincinnati on a flying sled, which may or may not be driven by the actual Santa Claus, who may or may not be the same person as the Toymaster. It’s not clear. But the next thing that happens is that, precisely â la Wizard of Oz, Lisa wakes up in her house, with everyone standing around and looking worried. She tells them of the weird dream she just had, including the Toymaster (but without mentioning the bottle of evil he was hoarding for still undisclosed reasons):

“He taught me that it was in our hearts that we must stay young and try to be good. And above all, we must believe. And then we’ll always have a merry Christmas and everything, won’t we? Always and always and always.”

Her mother immediately hugs her, I guess to hide the face of concern she’s making as she mentally calculates how much the treatment for brain damage is going to cost. Lisa then looks at the Christmas tree and hallucinates that a toy soldier salutes her.

The end.

But that can’t be the end! Toyland didn’t expel all the creatures of the forest! Poor Trollog is still trapped inside that chest! Are they going to let him starve? Are they just going to forget he’s there, which is basically the same outcome? He’s blind, and alone, and hungry, and has no idea why people were so mean to him. Let him eat a child or two, The damsel’s mother was planning to sell them anyway to settle her finances (yes, really, this is a thing she explicitly said in the movie). Come on, give Trollog a fairy tale child every now and then. It’s a win-win!

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

Film Review: Madoka Magica: Walpurgisnacht Rising

Superheroism is good and all, but who saves the saviors?

When we last visited the Madoka Magica universe in the Rebellion movie, our favorite relentless antivillain Homura rewrote the rules of the universe that her dear friend and savior Madoka had already rewritten. Instead of allowing a system where Madoka is a divine force awaiting all magical girls when they reach the end of their hope reserves, Homura brought Madoka down to Earth, erased her memory, and fulfilled her initial wish that Madoka should never become a magical girl. For the alien Incubators, this state of affairs is uncharted territory. Now it’s Homura who runs the show, and the Incubators don’t have a clue what to do. Where could the story go from there? We were all left wondering, an unbelievable thirteen years ago (gosh, I feel old). Well, Madoka Magica is finally back. The new movie, Walpurgisnacht Rising, once again rewrites all the rules, revealing surprising bits of the setting’s lore and highlighting the questions that have been at the core of this story since the beginning.

The axis around which this whole cosmic epic revolves is the not-entirely-healthy friendship between Homura and Madoka. As you’ll recall, all the way back in the original TV series, Homura made the wish to be the one who would protect Madoka, while Madoka made the wish to save all magical girls from succumbing to hopelessness. This created an unstable dynamic that exposes some of the problems with the very concept of heroism. In order to change a basic law of the universe, Madoka had to renounce her mortal life and become a goddess. But Homura, as Madoka’s magically designated protector, will always have some measure of power over Madoka. Some inevitable questions emerge: Is it fair that Madoka had to sacrifice her humanity? Is protection a form of domination? Is Madoka OK with saving all magical girls except herself? Did Homura have the right to drag Madoka back to life if it meant annulling Madoka’s choice?

Walpurgisnacht Rising presents us with an unexpected extra complication: It’s little use for Homura to crown herself ruler of the universe when there are forces outside of the universe that don’t answer to her. Those forces irrupt into the story since early in the movie, seeking to punish Homura for her Faustian excesses of ambition. Turns out the dead magical girls that Madoka selflessly offered to save had their own opinions on whether they wanted to be saved, which means that the bulk of the movie is spent discovering the multiple competing agendas that threaten to break apart Homura’s utopia. If you thought the ending of Rebellion was a bit too hard to follow, buckle up, because Walpurgisnacht Rising comes with no training wheels. You’re expected to remember how the story was left off thirteen years ago, and to pick up the continuation immediately. So I can’t recommend watching this movie as your first taste of Madoka Magica; you’d end up hopelessly confused. Go back for a couple days. It’s just three prior movies (or a TV season plus a movie, if you prefer). You’ve had all these years to catch up. This movie has massive loads of plot to tell and no time to ease the viewer in.

Among the reforms that Homura has made to the universe, we learn of a new way of fighting evil spirits. She no longer lets the Incubators recruit new magical girls; instead, she grants temporary powers to a random girl, valid for one fight, and afterward erases her memory of it. That way there’s always some heroine available to defend humanity, but without the cost of losing a girl’s soul. The Incubators are understandably not happy with this arrangement, because now they can’t collect the emotional energy they came to Earth for. This new way of doing things goes on nicely until three unknown magical girls show up out of nowhere and start blocking Homura’s attempts to keep distributing powers. Each of these new girls comes with her own plan for how to re-re-reform the magical girl system. From this point on, it gets somewhat dizzying to keep track of who is a villain according to whom, but let me try to summarize.

First, as you may have guessed from the movie’s title, we’re shown the backstory of the super-mega-witch on steroids that Madoka defeated in the TV series: the dreaded Walpurgisnacht. We learn what kind of magical girl she used to be, why she turned into a witch, how she got so inconceivably strong, and what she has to do with the present plot. Since Madoka was the only magical girl with enough power to defeat Walpurgisnacht on her own, there’s someone who reasons that forcing Madoka to become a witch would release immense amounts of energy, helping the Incubators’ mission to delay entropy and keep the universe running. This subplot is rather brief, but it poses interesting questions about what it means to be a self-sacrificing hero. Lastly, we get to the central conundrum of the entire series: Will Homura allow Madoka to fulfill her cosmic role? One of the many revelations of this movie is that, in the same way that neither Homura’s method with temporary powers nor Madoka’s Law of the Cycle is the original way things were, the same is true of witches. Long ago, it used to be the case that magical girls experienced an arguably worse fate than becoming witches. Someone made an altruistic wish to fix that, and the result was that witches came into existence. Such a drastic retcon demands an explanation for how Incubators collected energy under the former rules, but this isn’t too significant for the dramatic effect of the story.

What matters about this retcon is that it goes back to the same theme we’ve seen before with Madoka and Homura, i.e. the idea that coming up with a perfect solution to help others necessarily takes away something from you. The karmic balance in the Madoka Magica series operates by a ruthless transactional logic. To save others, you have to lose yourself. To save you, someone else has to get lost. This unbreakable tradeoff underlies the fundamental tragedy of being a magical girl. It’s a clever bit of dramatic irony that an Incubator isn’t a monkey’s paw; it doesn’t twist your wishes to screw you over a technicality. No, what happens is even more heartbreaking: the Incubator gives you your wish exactly the way you wanted it, and even then it doesn’t suffice to make you happy. In the earlier movies, Madoka’s big gamble to fix everything, followed by Homura’s big gamble to fix everything, only redistributed the weights of the problem instead of getting rid of it. In a universe where emotions follow the math of thermodynamics, some bit of happiness must by necessity be lost in every transaction.

I’m not sure I came out of the theater with a full idea of what exactly happens at the end of Walpurgisnacht Rising. The more we progress along the story, the more surreal the battle becomes, and at least to me it wasn’t clear who managed to save whom. But I don’t mind being confused when the artistry on screen is so absolutely breathtaking. The animation in Madoka Magica has always distinguished itself by a unique aesthetic that combines digital composition with physical collage to produce an incomparable atmosphere of weirdness. This new movie pushes its own style to even higher standards of visual experimentation. Don’t worry too much if you get lost in the plot. Relax in your seat and enjoy the marvelous look of this masterpiece of animation.

(And if you somehow figure out what on Earth that ending was about, please tell me. I still want to know.)

Nerd Coefficient: 10/10.

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

Deja Boo: Event Horizon

An eye-gouging good time!

It’s an odd thing, watching elements of your childhood, particularly ones that you didn’t even know were remarkable, fade into legend. Ask [extremely old guy voice] kids these days, and they will be incredulous at what us ‘90s kids did, and were allowed to do. What do you mean, you just… went out? How did your parents know when to pick you up? How did they know you were safe? How did they even know where you were? (We just did, friends’ parents or a quick collect call message*, they didn’t until we got home, they didn’t). We roamed all over the small, country town I grew up outside of with just bikes and the confidence that none of the (disturbingly high number of) serial killers known to be active in Western Washington were targeting teenage boys. Probably. As far as we knew.

My neighbor growing up either contributed to this vagrancy or helped protect us from it. He was an ideal neighbor, his kids were grown, he had way more money than us, and used it to collect classic cars, for which he build a massive garage/shop, in which he put a home theater—doing so in the ‘90s was no small accomplishment. He was obsessed with movies, buying literally every single movie that came out every single week. His DVD* collection was enormous. Best of all, he allowed us to go in there whenever we wanted, provided we didn't make a mess or steal too much of his beer.

All this is to say, I had unfettered access to a lot of R-rated movies at a young age. Combined with my love of scifi, I was very excited to watch this very grown-up scifi movie called Event Horizon. I’ve written all this without having seen it since that day, because ~12-year-old-me was traumatized. I wanted to do this part of the writeup because I honestly don’t know if it’s a good movie or not, or if it’s scary or not, or if my younger, squeamish self was just too shocked by someone ripping their own eyeballs out. It seems to have enjoyed a resurgence lately, with comics explaining backstory, Sam Neil passing and his brilliance getting the appreciation it has always deserved, and the idea of it being a Warhammer 40k prequel all having brought it back into at least some level of public consciousness.

So now it’s time to face my fears and rewatch it. Hang tight, read a magazine in the lobby or something.

Still here? Good. Before we get to the (literal) gory details, I have to say that, for a mid-‘90s movie, Event Horizon holds up remarkably well. Some of the effects, mostly those related to zero gravity, look somewhat dated, but not terribly so. The opening and closing credits have some very ‘90s electronic music which Trent Reznor would have improved upon, but that’s not present in the film itself.

This movie provided the epiphany that apparently my favorite genre is lost in space** or at sea. I read way too many books about shipwrecks, I love Alien, I will defend Sunshine until my dying breath, so this is right up my adult alley. Did it scare me out of my mind, like when I was a kid? Of course not; I’m old and jaded now. However, it was brilliantly tense and did an amazing job of building suspense all throughout. Despite a brief text intro, it immediately gives us the feeling that something isn’t right. One of the very clever ways this is done is by transitions. They’re never slow fades, or wipes, but smash cuts that seem to occur right as something is about to happen. It creates these mini-jumpscares that create a sense of unease. When the action happens later, and there are really scary things happening, we are primed for not knowing what is around the corner—especially since a key component of the characters’ horror is their deteriorating mental state, as they hallucinate and can’t be sure what is real or not—in a way, neither can we.

At the center of all this uncertainty is Dr. Weir, played brilliantly by Sam Neil. When we meet him, he is ostensibly there to help a rescue crew, as he tries to humbly ingratiate himself to them. The film doesn’t tell us when, exactly, his descent into madness happens (more on this in a sec), but it clearly happens earlier, and more willingly, than his shipmates. His actions become more unnerving as the film progresses, and his motives are more and more in question, and he clearly knows more than he initially let on. Neil plays this part so perfectly, his voice always level and sinister—but somehow disarming.

The recent comics that are a prequel that follows the journey of the Event Horizon spell out his motives—which we do see in the movie, having essentially driven his wife to suicide with his obsession with his work—as well as going into what happened in the seven-year period the ship was missing. While I enjoy this, and it adds to the mythos, one of the strengths of the film is that it doesn’t show us all this. There’s a fair amount of gore (not as much as I remember!), but their trip into the Chaos Realm/hell is only shown in brief flashes. Just like Weir’s embrace of Chaos is not pinpointed, this contributes to the overall unease of the setting, instead of just splashing gore all over the walls (although that does literally happen).

Grounding the whole affair is Lawrence Fishburne’s Captain Miller, who is delightfully hard-assed, and really just wants to do his job and go home—even when that job turns out to be trying to stop a literal portal to hell from opening in Neptune. His stories and interactions with the rest of the crew actually make me think that the “normal,” lived-in part of the Event Horizon universe would make for more interesting story fodder than the prequel/sequel comics that explore, ya know, literal hell. Or maybe all of that is what ultimately leads to humanity as we know it in the Warhammer 40k universe? I stand by that fan theory, because it’s awesome.

In conclusion—if you haven’t seen Event Horizon, I highly recommend it. If you watched it at way too young of an age like me, I recommend it even more.

—DESR

Dean Smith-Richard is the author of 3204AD, and will definitely publish something again one day, probably. He loves to cook, play baseball, and is way too much of a craft beer nerd. He lives in the Pacific Northwest, and likes the rain, thank you very much.

* I have to explain this too, don’t I?

**Ironically, it is apparently impossible to make a decent modern version of Lost in Space.

Deja Boo: The Gate

A surreal '80s horror gem aimed ostensibly at kids is like if Dario Argento directed The Goonies

This is the scary movie for me—the one that has stuck most vividly in my mind since I was a child. Released in 1987, The Gate is a Canadian horror film that features a tiny Stephen Dorff in his pictorial debut. It's my first entry in our new Déjà Boo series, where we'll be revisiting the movies that made us squirm as kids.

The '80s were fertile ground for horror films, but this movie really has nearly every trope you could possibly want: monsters, demons, Satanic panic, body horror, zombies, minions, and rockets. It's jam-packed with spooky action that somehow landed only a PG-13 rating, though we all know that the censors were a bit looser back then.

The plot

Glen (Stephen Dorff) is a typical '80s kid—shy, uncool, but sweet—who wakes one morning to learn that the giant tree in his backyard has been struck by lightning. He and his friend Terry, a young metalhead, dig around in it and find geodes. Slowly, the hole starts getting bigger, and weird things start happening.

Glen's parents go out of town for the weekend, leaving him and his friend with Glen's big sister, who in true '80s fashion throws a house party. Unbeknownst to the kids, they speak the existence of a hellmouth into existence when words appear on a magnetic notepad. This, accompanied by the accidental sacrifice of the family dog into the hole, unleashes ancient gods that begin trying to escape.

The rest of the movie, I'll be honest, doesn't make a ton of logical sense. The kids battle off demons and ghosts that appear in the house, before Glen uses a toy rocket to defeat the final big bad.

I'm still not quite sure who the audience for this one was. Having the parents go away for the weekend is classic '80s kids-in-charge energy, and it's in good company with other movies like The Goonies and The Explorers.

But there are scenes and themes that are way too over the top for young folks, and I don't think it's cool enough for teenagers. Adults then? I'm still not sure. If it was aimed at kids, it's sort of an introduction to horror, in a sense. Nothing becomes repulsive to the extreme, but as a 10-year-old watching this, I was definitely microdosing body horror and Giallo vibes.

What scared me then

There are a few major scenes that have stuck with me over 30+ years, and they are honestly still creepy as hell. One is the scene in which Glen, having demonically grown an eye in the middle of his hand, has to stab it out with a shard of glass. I wouldn't have such a visceral reaction again to body horror until I was 13 and watched Nicholas Cage's character in The Rock stab a syringe straight into his heart as a poison gas antidote. These things stick with you, apparently.

The other scene(s) revolved around the animated/claymation minions from Hell. They gasp and run and claw and grab, all while being about 8 inches tall. Several scenes are gruesomely creepy, and evoke a more macabre Lilliputian from Gulliver's Travels.

Somehow I forgot completely about the scene where Glen, faced with an attacking, demonic version of his best friend, is forced to defend himself with only a Barbie doll. He manages to gouge out Terry's eye with the legs. Wild stuff. Sometimes The Gate is like Evil Dead 2, just absolutely insane but also kind of funny. See also: When Glen's sister straight-up yeets a boombox at a zombie to knock him down.

Another interesting thing I noted on this rewatch is how the film has two modes when it comes to sound: It's either complete silence, or foreboding instrumental dirges. The atmosphere, as a result, is always menacing, and it really serves to underscore the unease throughout the runtime.

What I noticed now

I can totally see why a young me found this movie scary, and I'm not sure any kid today could handle it any better. What struck me most now are the things that were a little quieter in the film. For one, the fact that the family dog dies and they don't even call their parents on their vacation to let them know. I find this near sociopathic-level behavior, and I say this as someone who adores Don't Tell Mom The Babysitter's Dead.

Not only does the dog die, but Glen's sister's wannabe boyfriend is tasked with taking him to animal control(!?!!?!). When he finds out it's closed, he simply returns to the house and dumps it into the hellmouth. Absolutely not.

Anyway, moving on. The subtle background aspects that permeate The Gate are quite spooky—bugs flocking to a windowpane at night, up close chainsaw noises, eerie mists. Even the shadows your own toys cast in the moonlight can be unnerving. I experienced this many times as a kid even with the most benign of playthings. I remember getting a 6-foot tall cardboard cutout of C3PO and being scared to death waking up to him for the first few weeks.

I also found that seeing a kid’s perception of their own house being haunted is especially upsetting. It's supposed to be a place of refuge and love, so when demons start attacking it, you can feel vulnerable. Glen is interesting because he's not a bland and angelic Carol Anne, but he's also not incredibly self-assured. He’s a Final Boy, except everyone else lives—they just don’t contribute to their salvation as a group. Only Glen gets them out of their demonic jam.

The movie ends on a high note, with all evil crises avoided. The house, of course, is utterly wrecked, and as an adult now, I am annoyed by how much I kept wondering what it would cost to completely redo a living room wrecked by Satan.

Highlights:

• A young Stephen Dorff's film debut
• It's basically microdosing body horror for kids
• Great depiction of Satanic panic and heavy metal
• The Goonies if Dario Argento directed it

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.

Film Review: Verity

It’s a bad sign when it doesn’t matter whose truth you will accept

Best-selling author Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway) has suffered a car accident. Her condition is so serious that she can’t finish writing her popular series of murder mystery novels. So her publisher hires a ghostwriter, Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson), to complete the remaining books in the series. Lowen will need to spend some days at Verity’s secluded mansion in rural Vermont to study her copious notes and prepare the plot outlines that will follow. The problem is that one can’t enter Verity’s world without becoming tainted by it. The mind that created those sinister fictions has some real dark corners of its own, and in getting to know it from the inside, Lowen will be dragged into a labyrinth of half-truths and destructive obsession.

The biggest factor that works against the success of the film Verity is that it follows the source material, Colleen Hoover’s 2018 novel, too faithfully. Verity the novel has many chapters that are made of second-hand narration, and Verity the film translates them into extensive voice-over sections where events are told rather than shown. The result is that we spend half the movie hearing Hathaway narrate her character’s manuscript, so the experience is more like sitting for an audiobook than sitting for a movie.

The manuscript in question is a memoir that Verity wrote shortly before her accident. Lowen finds it hidden in a flash drive inside a cigarette pack, and the revelations it contains paint a horrific picture of what kind of person Verity is in private. Lowen came in knowing that Verity’s daughter had accidentally drowned in a lake; Verity’s secret memoir gives an alternate account of events, starting with revulsion at her pregnancy and moving on to contempt for her children. One hallmark of Verity’s novels is that they’re narrated by the villain; this document establishes that Verity was capable of mastering that technique by being herself a villain.

So we follow two parallel timelines: Verity’s backstory and Lowen’s present in Verity’s house. Both have problems, plotwise. As I said above, the parts where we follow Verity’s manuscript consist of voice-over narration, which is the opposite of a cinematic approach. And when we’re in the present, not much actually happens. From the trailers, and from the story itself, it’s a given that Lowen will end up embroiled in an affair with Verity’s husband, Jeremy (Josh Hartnett). But apart from that, Lowen’s role in the movie consists mostly of sitting and reading. Instead of watching a story unfold, we’re learning a story that already happened.

The actors’ wonderful performances do the heavy lifting that the plot can’t. Johnson draws from her prior experience in the Fifty Shades franchise to easily switch between innocent and predatory, while Hathaway, who has had a spectacular 2026 (see for example here, here and here), exudes a mesmerizing malevolence in the scenes set in the past, as well as an ambiguous quietude in the present. Verity’s accident, we’re told, left her immobilized and unresponsive. But this movie is fundamentally built on unreliable narration, so no fact can be taken for certain.

The trick that Verity attempts, but falls well short of accomplishing, is to juggle multiple unreliable narrators and leave the viewer questioning which version is more trustworthy. What (or who) caused Verity’s car accident? What is the extent of her physical impairment? How did her daughter die? Is Verity really the author of that hidden memoir? Is Lowen’s judgment impaired by her abuse of sleeping pills and alcohol? How much of all this might have been orchestrated by Jeremy?

That last part should not be ignored. The movie (as well as the book) introduces a last-minute reveal that is intended to changes how we perceive the character of Verity, but isn’t much of a surprise given that she’s a mystery writer and her memoir sometimes feels hyperbolic. However, this reveal does have massive consequences for how we perceive Jeremy. In the movie (but not the book), Verity’s hidden memoir is discovered in a pack of cigarettes in her office, but Jeremy is the only character we ever see smoking cigarettes. It should also be pointed out, as another clue unique to the movie, that Dakota Johnson looks very much like a younger version of Anne Hathaway. In a story of duplicities and mirrored perspectives, it can’t be coincidence that, when searching for the author that would replace his wife, Jeremy chose one that resembled her so much.

These details make movie Jeremy look a lot less innocent than book Jeremy, while movie Lowen is less a victim of circumstance than book Lowen. I think these changes make for a stronger adaptation, but they’re not enough to save a disappointingly anticlimactic ending. This part is taken straight from the novel, and lands as almost a surrender on the filmmakers’ part. Lowen stumbles upon the final reveal after she’s already made an irreversible choice, so this new information doesn’t have a chance to create the dilemma it’s meant for. Once people have died, it makes little difference whether they were nice or not. Verity feels too satisfied with its own cleverness, but its narrative structure fit the book format better, and its ending robs the resolution of its impact. There are powerful ideas contained here, which neither the novel nor the movie seemed to know how to use.

Nerd Coefficient: 5/10.

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

Film Review: Her Private Hell

Bisexual Lighting: The Movie

Elle is a movie star with a perma-sneer stamped on her face, a taste for luxurious clothes, a golden penthouse the size of an Egyptian temple from which she plays her lonely Rapunzel routine atop a mist-plagued city, and more unresolved daddy issues than the whole cast of Magnolia. She’s currently filming a retro space opera with her once bestie, now evil stepmother Dominique, who brings her own Freudian can of worms. While a serial killer targets lost daughters under the cover of the mist, Elle has visions of Kay, an American soldier in Japan who is pursuing a bloody vendetta against the same threat.

Ambiguities quickly erupt like mushrooms. Is Kay the soldier a symbol of Elle’s unavailable father? Is the killer a symbol of the soldier? Assuming that Dominique’s marriage is an indirect response to Elle’s desire for her, is that response a yes or a no? Which of the two is Elle jealous of? Is Elle’s ingenue coworker Hunter actually a projection of her self-hatred? And what is the limbo of crystalline obelisks where the killer lurks?

Abandon all hope of getting explanations, O ye who enter. Filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn’s newest creation Her Private Hell is built on very specific, meticulously chosen vibes, and would be supremely irritated at the audacity of anyone suggesting that it might need to explain itself. Instead of offering answers, Refn has the movie parade its majestic set designs with mannequin dolls and Greek statues that ooze psychosexual tension; its grandiose orchestral soundtrack; its hypervirile men so rough that they literally light matches by rubbing them against themselves; its two-hued lighting that obscures alternating sides of the characters’ faces; its urban legends about the mist and the dangers it hides.

What comes closest to a statement on what the movie is about is a reference to the story The Little Match Girl by Hans Christian Andersen, a Dane like Refn. In the story, a starving girl freezes to death in the street while waiting for someone to buy matches from her. She is terrified of returning empty-handed to her father, who makes her work. As the night advances, she has delirious visions of the happy family life she wishes she had. She ends up in heaven, although those who see her dead body have no idea of her eternal bliss. Her Private Hell is full of lit matches, their smoke blending with the eerie mist that has enveloped the low levels of the city. Unlike the match girl, Elle is ridiculously wealthy, but her work is also done out of deference to her father, while her mind conjures a fantasy of a man running toward his daughter instead of away from her.

Another meaningful clue is a minor anecdote from the bacsktory of Elle’s father, who once bought an artpiece consisting of a tattooed fetus. To leave a literal mark on our children: that’s the curse of an all-devouring love.

Perhaps to give the viewer sufficient chance to decode these mountains of subtext, Her Private Hell proceeds at a painfully slow pace. But Refn is merciful enough to fill the runtime with compositions to please the eye: in a city where it’s always night, the artificial lighting is calculated to fall on body surfaces to evoke both joy and danger; the camera movements are choreographed with exquisite timing; and the still shots of pensive faces carry entire speeches’ worth of unspoken emotion. The many nebulous zones in the plot are magnificently filled with gorgeous scenery that gets all the spotlight it deserves.

The choice of final battlefield is of crucial importance (remember the Statue of Liberty in X-Men), and this is especially true in a movie as full of symbols as this. The misty limbo of phallic crystals is where Elle goes to resolve her destructive ambivalence toward her father, in a winning move that practically begs to be interpreted as castration. And yet, much remains to mull over. What does it mean that Elle solves the conflict with a weapon that her father gave her? What’s the link between Kay and Elle (that is, K and L), between his military rank of private and the title of the movie? Why are Dominique and her husband never seen together in the same frame? Why does Elle feel like a completely different person once Hunter leaves the story? What is the movie-inside-the-movie trying to say about the movie itself? And what on Earth is that mist?

At the risk of committing the sin of essentialism, we have to keep in mind that Her Private Hell was written and directed by a man, so the reach of the movie’s feminism will be limited. But all those mirrors, and the fixation with cigarettes, and  the killer’s distinct modus operandi, have to mean something, even if the movie refuses to help. It’s obviously for a reason that the victims call the killer “daddy,” that two alleged spirits remark that being pierced is an omen of luck, that Elle’s in-character makeup puts solid teardrops on her face. This movie wants to say a lot, but seems terrified to spell any of it out.

Perhaps the silence is part of the message. Our unconfessed feelings about our parents can be unspeakable. But where words hesitate, light can’t lie.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

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

Film Review: Terminator 2 (35th Anniversary)

The sequel that set the standard for action films holds up perfectly after 35 years

When Terminator 2: Judgment Day came out in 1991, I was 8 years old, and my suburban household had a no-holds-barred approach when it came to R-rated movies. Consequently, I've seen it dozens of times, mostly in the '90s on VHS. This was also, for some reason, back when R-rated films released profitable lines of children's toys. I had all of the action figures, including the plastic-goo-flesh pump that overlaid "skin" on a Terminator metal skeleton.

When I found out there was going to be a 35th anniversary re-release, I knew exactly where I'd be. Terminator 2 is widely regarded as one of the best action movies, best sci-fi movies, and best sequels. It was the highest-grossing movie of 1991, and set the stage for James Cameron's eventual future triumphs in Titanic and Avatar.

But after 35 years, does it hold up?

Absolutely. On this rewatch—it'd been a few years since I'd last seen it from start to finish—I found myself rapt at the effortless storytelling and human beats, and there's a few key things I'd like to review about in lieu of a traditional narrative post-mortem.

Sarah Connor: The opposite of a Mary Sue (and maybe also a Cassandra at the same time)

Has there ever been more character growth between two movies than that of Sarah Connor, mother of the savior of humanity? In the original Terminator, Sarah is a young, naive waitress thrust into a world of violence, destruction, and utter fear. The movie ends with her hitting the road to Mexico, pregnant and filled with a newfound knowledge of the apocalypse that's coming.

When we meet her again, 10 years later, she's almost unrecognizable. Locked up in a mental institution, lean, muscled, and doing perfect chin-ups on an up-turned hospital bed. She has seen some serious, serious shit. Over the course of the movie, we witness her perform extraordinary feats of physical prowess, shoot and reload countless weapons without even looking, and wrestle with killer robots. We also learn that she's been training John for his eventual rise to power in the resistance since he was born—spending time in jungles, flying in helicopters, and stockpiling arms in the Mexican desert. For a female protagonist in the early '90s, this is incredible. It hit me while watching that she is the exact opposite of a Mary Sue, having put in a decade of work to show for skills and talents, learning from outlaws, scumbags, ex-army guys, and countless others. She is deeply competent in many different ways, and competency is hot.

Granted, I know that many folks use the Mary Sue descriptor almost exclusively for (strong) women, so I'm hesitant to even justify it with a response, but I think that's why Sarah Connor is unassailable in the canon: she literally can do it all when it comes to evading Terminators. Compare this to the common criticism of Rey from the Star Wars sequel trilogy; we have no idea how she can fly starships or fight so well.

One other thing that hit me while watching: Sarah Connor is basically Cassandra from Greek myth. Cassandra was a Trojan priestess blessed with the ability to see the future, but cursed to never be believed. Sarah didn't ask to be the mother of John Connor, hero to humanity, but she was fated to become her. And in so doing, learned about the horrors that await humanity and the eventual nuclear war that would devastate the planet. She ends up in a mental hospital because I imagine at some point, her PTSD got the better of her and she leaned into the story of the future in all its gory detail, hoping that someone, anyone, would listen. I don't think folks realize what a burden that knowledge must be, and how horrible it must be for someone to internalize day in and day out.

James Cameron's daddy issues on full display in a Terminator father-figure fan fiction

Maybe it's because I'm older now, but it's impossible to watch Terminator 2 without having your heart break at least a little over the relationship between the T-800 (Arnold) and John Connor. Having never known his real dad (or at least, he won't until he's older and meets him in the future), John has bounced around foster homes and been around Sarah's random boyfriends.

The T-800 is sent back to protect him at all costs, but he also has to obey him. The two bond over the course of the movie in a truly touching way. As Sarah muses, "It would never leave him, and it would never hurt him, never shout at him, or get drunk and hit him, or say it was too busy to spend time with him."

James Cameron has been vocal about his issues with his father, who always disapproved of him becoming a filmmaker. In a podcast I remember learning that even after winning an Oscar, his dad still was cold and distant. Taking this into account, Terminator 2 hits very different. Cameron turned the monster from the first film into the ultimate protector and bastion of unconditional love. Even writing this out, it sounds cliché, but the performances have to be seen to be believed. It works. Another parallel? John only spends a few short days with the Terminator—almost exactly the same amount of time that Jack spends with Rose in Titanic. So, yes, you're right, "My Heart Will Go On" could theoretically be the theme song for this movie, too. Old Jim Cameron is a big fan of love touching one time, but lasting for a lifetime.

This is Arnold's defining role—full stop

One of the reason the aforementioned relationship works so well is because of Arnold's performance. It's some of his best acting, both emotionally and physically. Does it make sense for scientists in the future to program language in a robot with an Austrian accent? No, it does not. But does it help nearly every scene? Yes! And this is partly because Arnold's not the greatest of actors. By portraying a stern robot with a limited emotional capacity, he's already got it made in the shade.

But he's not like he was in the first Terminator. That's a completely different role with a different motive and personality. In that movie, he's playing Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers. In this one, he's got to form a bond with a human boy, and his programming allows him to learn. The scenes with John are truly heartwarming, and Arnold's comedic timing and facial expressions are absolutely perfect. At this point, Arnold was 43, not at the peak of his physical conditioning, but very close to it. He's a presence, and there's a reason why the entire world spouted "Hasta la vista, baby" for years afterward.

Terminator 2 works so well because it's a horror film masquerading as sci-fi

It's sci-fi because of the worldbuilding, of course. And the use of technology, time travel, and robots. The Terminator extended universe is a delight to spend time in, and I've enjoyed every entry into the canon over the decades. But Terminator 2 (and this applies to the original Terminator, too) is truly a horror film in two main ways. First, the aforementioned slashers: The T-800 and the T-1000 are unstoppable, largely silent, and possessed of otherwordly brute strength. When you think they're dead, they're not. When you think you've gotten away, they crash a truck over a bridge and keep heading your way. When you think you've crushed them in a steel mill a decade earlier, they show up again with the same face. This theme of being powerless to stop a methodical monster who will stop at nothing to destroy you is textbook horror.

Second, the movie's structured almost exactly like a horror film, too, with all the attendant tropes. You have the pulsing, loin-girding, percussive score. You have the incredible body horror of the T-1000 getting mangled, his skin peeling off and bullets perforating his back. The scene where he degloves his arm skin to get Miles Dyson to believe him is body horror writ large.

But perhaps the scariest part is the liquid metal Terminator. The T-1000 is shot, stabbed, crunched, frozen, and still gets back up every time they try to destroy him. And still he keeps coming, like every psycho killer you've ever seen. And the scene where he melts through the bars of the hospital is basically straight-up ghost behavior. People gasped in theaters when that happened, and not just because of the CGI.

Final thoughts

After my rewatch, I realized that Terminator 2 is just as good as I remembered it being throughout my entire life. The CGI, while groundbreaking at the time, does exactly what it's supposed to, and it doesn't take you out of the movie (unlike a lot of late '80s/early '90s films). It's meant to look real, and it does. This is better than the hyper-realistic stuff we have today, and also better than the absolute garbage effects of older films (looking at you, Poltergeist 2). The performances are still great, the storytelling is tight, and the emotional heart of it still makes me tear up just a bit—just like it always has.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

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.