Film Review: My Hero Academia: You're Next

Despite a predictable opening, the anime feature film finishes strong in the second half. 

The popular, long-running, manga, My Hero Academia has ended its ten-year print run this year and the accompanying kid-friendly anime series has just confirmed that 2025 will be its final season. In the midst of the excitement and sadness at the impending conclusion of the story, the latest feature film in the franchise opened in U.S. theaters after a run earlier this year in Japan. My Hero Academia: You’re Next is a stand-alone story set between the destruction of Japan / Liberation Front war arc and the final war arc (approximately between Season 6 and Season 7, in case you’re wondering about certain characters). 

My Hero Academia is set in a future version of Earth, where most humans have some variation of special powers (quirks), and children with extraordinary superpowers are sent to academies to be trained as licensed superheroes. The protagonist, pure-hearted Izuku Midoriya (aka Deku), receives a transferable superpower from the most powerful and beloved hero All-Might who can no longer maintain it due to a critical injury. Throughout the series, Deku and two of his friends (loudmouth, explosive Bakugo and brooding, fire and ice powered Shoto) eventually become the top heroes among the students at their hero academy. The current film You’re Next takes place after the villains in the Liberation Front have destroyed much of Japan and decimated the hero system. As a result, the students often find themselves as the first line of defense in the current lawless society. Early in the film, Deku encounters and tries to help a girl, Anna, being chased and eventually recaptured by her kidnappers (later revealed to be the Gollini crime family). A cyborg boy, Guilio, also appears and tries to intercept the kidnappers. He is, confusingly, both kind to Anna but also trying to kill her. Deku, Guilio, Bakugo, Shoto, and the other students are also caught by the Gollini family and trapped in a giant floating fort. The head villain idolizes the former hero, All Might, and, after an angry conversation with the former hero, the villain names himself Dark Might. Dark Might creepily copies All Might’s appearance and clothing and declares himself the successor to All Might’s hero leadership, planning to bring order to the country by force and subjugation of the people. Throughout the film, Guilio and the students struggle to escape from Dark Might’s fort while also trying to free Anna. Anna’s quirk is over-modification which gives strength to some (including the villain) but hurts others and will eventually destroy basically “everything” (a la X-Men’s Jean Grey / Dark Phoenix) if it gets out of control. We later find out that Anna and Guilio have a special symbiotic relationship because of their respective quirks and we find out why Guilio feels he must kill Anna. 

The first half of the film is mostly running and chasing and feels like rehashed storylines and fight choreography from prior seasons. We also get an interesting dream-trap sequence that is reminiscent of the final dream capture arcs of Naruto Shippuden. The lead villain Dark Might is fun visually but he is thin in character and motivation. Interestingly, instead of the usual futuristic hero versus villain scenario, we have retro, steampunk vibes and visuals. The characters, inexplicably, dress in Victorian attire and the backstory feels like we have time traveled to a different setting with Dark Might’s murderous Gollini crime family attacking and massacring Anna’s wealthy Scervino family. The vibe is reminiscent of early prequel seasons of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventures. Fortunately, the second half of the film digs deeper into the characters, particularly Anna and Guilio and their tragic motivations. The final conflicts feel like an homage to the X-Men “Dark Phoenix” story arc. But the best part of My Hero Academia: You’re Next is the stoic, slick, stylish Guilio, whom Bakugo refers to as the “cool side character.” Guilio’s backstory and character design fit all of the great orphan hero tropes and the final scenes, with him as a broken cyborg and Anna as a lethal damsel in distress, are gorgeously drawn.

My Hero Academia: You’re Next works best for existing My Hero Academia fans who will understand the overall setting and character context. However, the new villains and new heroes are unconnected to the main series’ story arcs and, like most My Hero Academia features, the film is not required for the anime continuity. Unfortunately, that likely means we won’t see more of brooding cyborg, Guilio, especially since his character and aesthetic overlap with that of Shoto. Instead, the film works well as an entertaining side quest for those who need a little more of My Hero Academia before we say a final farewell to the teachers and students of UA’s class 1-A. If you can get through the unoriginal opening and the two-dimensional lead villain, the final half delivers a nice payoff in both character study and action.

--

The Math

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10

Highlights:

• Lackluster opening half
• Excellent new side character
• Worth it for the final finish

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

Interview: Oliver Brackenbury and New Edge Magazine

Today at Nerds of a Feather, we talk to editor Oliver Brackenbury of New Edge Magazine about two Mongol themed Sword and Sorcery novellas at the center of a crowdfunding campaign.

1. For those not familiar with you or New Edge, please introduce yourself and the magazine.

My name is Oliver Brackenbury, a Canadian author, podcaster, and screenwriter with a deep love of Sword & Sorcery. Recently I've also become an editor and publisher.

New Edge Sword & Sorcery is an illustrated short fiction and non-fiction magazine featuring original stories, interviews, reviews, and articles all centered on the titular genre. Our motto is "Made with love for the classics, and an inclusive, boundary-pushing approach to storytelling!"

"Made with love for the classics..." means we care deeply about letting readers know what makes classic S&S characters & creators worth exploring. In just two years we've been blessed with the latest Elric story by Michael Moorcock, are on track to publish the first Jirel of Joiry story in 85 years, and have or will soon publish numerous articles introducing new readers to notable figures from the S&S canon like C.L. Moore, Charles Saunders, and Cele Goldsmith Lali.

"...an inclusive, boundary-pushing approach to storytelling!" means we're working hard contributing to there being a broader swath of humanity on the page, behind the keyboard, and in the fandom. We're also hungry to see how we can expand the possibilities of what S&S can do (themes, story structures, prose styles...) while still being clearly recognizable as itself.

Judging by how things have gone so far, people like the results of our efforts!

Barely past our two year anniversary, we have expanded into publishing under the name "Brackenbury Books", and are currently crowdfunding our second book, "Double-Edged Sword & Sorcery", a pair of Mongol-inspired S&S novellas bound in a single paperback akin to the classic Ace Double line.

2) We've seen Mongol-inspired S&S out of New Edge before, but what prompted you to make it the focus of this crowdfunding effort. In short...Why Mongols?

In short, because it's a fascinating culture & period of history, Asian set S&S is almost always rooted in Chinese or Japanese historical inspiration, and because it allowed me to pair two authors I love in one book, writing characters I'd seen people react strongly to in our magazine, each exploring basically the same setting in their own unique way.

In detail, it was an organic product of how the magazine began, and grew into book publishing.

The magazine started with a sweat equity prototype issue #0, available free in digital and priced at cost in soft/hardcover, and the table of contents was drawn almost entirely from a single online community where a bunch of us had strong feelings about how to take Sword & Sorcery into the future.

This included two authors who set their stories in Mongol-rooted settings yet write with totally unique voices: Bryn Hammond writes the nomad Goatskin having adventures in a more fantastic version of our world, while Dariel R.A. Quiogue writes the deposed warlord Orhan the Snow Leopard's adventures in a secondary world heavily rooted in the same setting & time period - that of Genghis Khan.

Bryn is a respected, published scholar of historical non-fiction about that period, while Dariel is an amateur student of the era with over ten years experience writing fiction set in it. Bryn writes in a awe-inspiring, poetic, Weird-with-a-capital-"W" style, while Dariel specializes in pulse-pounding stories that astound with their action. Both can bring the full spectrum of Sword & Sorcery to a tale, but those are some of their specialties.

As part of the crowdfund we actually did a short story panel discussion livestream where we analyzed one Goatskin and one Orhan story, getting deep into what makes them worth reading.

But yes, having organically lucked into working with two knowledgeable, skilled authors - and great people - writing with complementary voices in a similar setting, Mongol S&S made perfect sense to me for this pairing of novellas.

3) I find that interesting, that you have both a fantasy novella, and a historical fantasy novella, and yet both are sword and sorcery. While sword and sorcery goes classically well with fantasy, what do you think the advantages, challenges and opportunities are for sword and sorcery as a genre to tackle more historical fantasy settings and characters?

Brian Murphy's most excellent book, "Flame & Crimson: A History of Sword & Sorcery", cites historical inspiration as one of the seven common aspects of the genre that make up his definition, saying that this lends "a degree of realism". He also rightly points out that S&S was born from Robert E. Howard deciding to add fantastic elements to an historical adventure story he was having trouble selling, thus birthing the genre with "The Shadow Kingdom" in 1929.

I'd agree there's that degree of realism, even when the story is set in a secondary world with giant snakes, sorcery, etc., and since historical adventure was pretty much a co-parent of S&S, it's always worth considering when reading, writing, or reviewing it. But yes, your question!

I think the advantages include inspiration, grounding the story so that the fantastic elements really shine by contrast when they show up, and providing a foundation for your worldbuilding that will help make the setting consistent even if most of that foundation remains below the surface.

The main challenge is, of course, if you really wed your story to historical fact then you may set yourself up for nitpicking; Lovecraft famously advised Fritz Leiber to invent that most influential Fantasy city, Lankhmar, rather then set his Fafhrd & Grey Mouser stories in ancient Alexandria, specifically to avoid getting picked apart by the history nerds. You may also end up being very rigid with yourself, denying your story the ability to go where the narrative would be best suited on account of needing to do something ahistorical to facilitate it.

But I think it's worth it, even if you're fantastic elements are really out there, to consider more historical settings and characters when writing Sword & Sorcery. It gives you the opportunity to justify spending time on all kinds of fun research, to use the fantastic elements to draw in readers who otherwise might not learn the historical details you're including with them, to highlight peoples of historical periods who are often neglected (Bryn Hammond is particularly keen on doing so, which works great in tandem with the subgenre's history of outsider protagonists), make historical subtext brightly legible Fantasy text, and so much more.

4. How do you think Sword and Sorcery reflects the current trends in Fantasy as a whole, today? What place does it occupy in its ecosystem?

I'm wary of defining something I love by what it isn't, however in terms of current Fantasy trends I most often see S&S discussed by fans in terms of how it doesn't follow those trends.

With doorstopper thick, trilogy-or-more high fantasy series the standard right now, Sword & Sorcery can be a refreshing break with its shorter, fast paced, more episodic storytelling. Its more inferred worldbuilding and soft or entirely absent magic systems can provide a breath of fresh air from over-explained settings that so often render the fantastic mundane. Meanwhile, a focus on grounded, outsider heroes just trying to survive a dangerous world can be more relatable than chasing chosen ones around on world-saving quests. And so on.

That said, it may grow in other ways to follow, not buck, publishing trends in the broader SFF sphere. For example, if we get to make our Double-Edge Sword & Sorcery book, the two novellas it contains will become Vol. 1 in what I hope will be only the first of several S&S novella series that we'll publish in the future. In that way S&S will be moving closer to the trend in SFF novellas that Tor has been the main driver behind in recent years.

5) Talking about trends in fantasy, and readership, what ideas do you have for introducing fantasy readers who think S&S is only Conan and bring them to see the potential of reading works such as Bryn and Daniel's?

Oh, lots of things! I'm a very enthusiastic promoter, so I've been working hard getting our authors out there for interviews across blogs, booktube, podcasts and so on. Getting contemporary S&S authors into venues where they can share their own unique take on the genre is a big part.

We also do our own regular short story panel discussion livestreams (here's a playlist) that focus on contemporary Sword & Sorcery tales from a variety of publications, with an eye to showing off the wide range of possibilities. For example we covered "Dara's Tale", by Mark Rigney, to show what S&S can look like with an adolescent protagonist in a story with some overlap with fairy tale tropes.

Naturally there's our magazine, New Edge Sword & Sorcery, which not only features a variety of stories where we aim to show off the full breadth of Sword & Sorcery, there's also non-fiction articles, historical profiles, interviews, and book reviews that help spread fun & interesting knowledge about what S&S can do. My note to our non-fiction authors is always to try and get people excited about the present & future fo the genre, not just the past, when they write pieces like Jon Olfert's article on neurodivergence in S&S, Nathaniel Web's upcoming piece on Heavy Metal's relationship to S&S, or even pieces on past figures because hey if this 20th century author could do X in the genre then what could be done to build on that?

And, honestly, crowdfunds are a great way to get the word out - especially if you make them a kind of community event to take part in, not just a chance to pre-order something. We do our best, mainly through livestreams that have included interviews, panel discussions, TTRPG sessions, and even live music as a way of drawing people in to find out what this S&S thing is all about!

There's always more I could say on this, but that feels like a good answer for now.

6) Is there anything else our readers should know about the campaign, or New Edge, or the two fabulous writers?

Well, the campaign ends at noon EST on Saturday, October 19th so you'll want to back it before then!

Some fun items I haven't mentioned yet include...

• The physical editions are traditionally printed, with the softcover a classic mass-market paperback, and there's a very limited run hardcover of the same dimensions that sports a nice bookmark ribbon. We love the Book As Object and do our best to produce a high quality product.
• There's a crowdfund exclusive bonus short story and, if we hit 300 backers, that will have poetry added to it! Both tie into the novellas, but are not mandatory to enjoy or understand them.
• Other crowdfund exclusives include a bookmark with art from each cover on either side, battle-axe logo stickers, signed author bookplates, and more.
• Our crowdfunds are also the best time to buy New Edge Sword & Sorcery back issues, which we discount only when providing them as Add-Ons for backer pledges.
• We aim to have a Final Friday "Telethon" livestream this Friday at 7pm EST! You can watch it right on the crowdfund page, where the trailer sits at the top. Past crowdfund's Final Friday livestreams have featured TTRPG live play sessions, live music, interviews, and other fun treats; I won't spoil what we have coming for this one!

Our authors can tell you plenty about themselves in the recordings of their recent livestream interviews, so I'll let them speak for themselves.

As for New Edge / Brackenbury Books? As I write this we're a mere $225 from hitting 100% funding on this book and we'd love for you to help take us soaring past that point! We're excited to make the book, naturally, and this crowdfund succeeding will put us in a great place for continuing to produce high quality publications featuring titanic tales paired with awesome art, all coming to you from a diverse array of talented creators.

So go on, check it out!

Thank you so much, Oliver!

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

First Scare: The Sixth Sense

A creepy character study that holds up over time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Highlights:

· Oscar-worthy child acting
· Cerebral plot twists
· Survives the years of spoilers

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

Nonfiction Review: Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment by Jason Schreier

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Film Review: Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

--

The Math

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

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10

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

New Post Series: First Scare

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review: The Runes of Engagement, by Tobias Buckell and Dave Klecha

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Highlights:

• Excellent narrative that speaks to the pervasiveness of modern fantasy in culture.
• Good use of military tropes and feel to give authenticity to the soldiers and their plight.
• How useful is a Panzerfaust against a troll, anyway?

Reference: Buckell, Tobias S and Klecha, Dave. The Runes of Engagement [Tachyon, 2024].

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