2026-06-14 06:29:18
I didn’t have a lot to say about Episode 9 of Widow’s Bay, titled “Emergency Shelter,” because it felt like a filler episode designed to set up the finale. It didn’t feel nearly as eventful as the rest of the season’s episodes, more like a showcase for a few funny scenes, slowing down the pace to build up to the big finish.
Which made the key question: the big finish of what? Widow’s Bay the series, or just season one?
We got the answer to that, at least, with the announcement that the series is getting a second season. Knowing that makes me appreciate the episode a little more. It would’ve felt anticlimactic as part of the end of the entire series, but it works pretty well as a build-up for the story going off in a new direction.
Devoting half of the episode’s run time to Rosemary presenting 300 years of Warren family history via transparencies on an overhead projector seems simultaneously like something Widow’s Bay wouldn’t do, but also exactly like the kind of thing that only Widow’s Bay would do. On the one hand, the series doesn’t usually go so far in making a scene that’s mostly comedic; the pacing is just too tight for that, and they usually prefer to have the comedy running underneath or alongside everything else. But on the other hand: making fun of the idea of treating this as a puzzle box series, by making the big reveal as mundane and excruciatingly drawn out as they possibly can, is extremely funny and on brand.
I’d already gotten the impression that the YouTubers and Redditors were setting themselves up for disappointment by looking through freeze-frames for clues and concocting elaborate theories about the full story of the island and the Warren bloodline. Even in series that do lean into that — I’m thinking of WandaVision in particular — it’s rarely satisfying. Either the references are so obscure, and the theories so wildly off-base, that they’re completely irrelevant; or they figure out everything before the series is halfway done, so getting the reveals at the end feel like a let-down. Very few shows are designed to work like ARGs, but the internet treats everything like one.
So my take on Widow’s Bay is that they’ve been reminding us that it’s supposed to be fun, and that it’s all about the characters, and the story would most likely turn out to be one that normal viewers could process by casually watching the show, without having to turn to internet sleuths. I think that’s turned out to be the case, since the “did you notice…?” paintings weren’t just shown briefly in the background for eagle eyes to catch, but timed out to be emphasized exactly when story developments wanted you to notice them.
And the reveal of Warren’s surviving heir(s) could only have gone in a couple of ways and been satisfying. Evan via his mother was the most obvious one, but I also couldn’t think of a resolution for that which would fit into the tone of the series. (Of course, the series is being helmed by outstanding writers, who have already demonstrated that they’re more clever than I am). It would have to be a character that you’d recognize but hadn’t thought that much about, so Ruth was the right level of flying under the radar.
I realized that the funniest possible choice would’ve been Kathy the waitress. It would’ve made the episode’s final scenes a lot funnier, anyway, to hear the main characters, especially Tom, try to come up with justifications not to just kill her and be done with it.
It does make me wonder whether Widow’s Bay has been hiding an ace up their sleeve the whole season, because K Callan is a very funny actor, and she’s seemed charming but under-utilized the entire time. I just assumed — as I might have been supposed to — that her age required her to be funny but more subdued in this series. Now I’m wondering if maybe Ruth is entirely aware of the curse and her part in the blood line, and she’s been the one keeping the demonic forces at bay for so many years. Maybe she’s got surprises in store for Tom, who’s going to show up expecting a frail old woman.
I’m back to my original thought when I first recognized Callan1: you don’t cast her unless you’ve got plans for her.
Keeping to the idea that the series is character-based that happens to have a horror-mystery plot: after all the developments of the season, it did feel like the episode was returning to the equilibrium established in the beginning of the season. Tom Loftis being perpetually frustrated by an island full of stubborn weirdos who insist on doing things their own way. I liked the shaman being swept away by a tornado because he insisted on bringing his tube socks, and especially that he ran up to Tom yelling, “Wyck!” But my favorite was the return of lighthouse keeper Garrett. Having their roles reversed, and Garrett waving to him from the city hall window, was a fantastic payoff.
I haven’t been going too far into the speculative with Widow’s Bay, but I have been hearing many of the fan theories just by virtue of being on the internet. It is, after all, a little frustrating to be watching a series that seems to be saying “just relax and have fun with it,” but you’re enjoying it so much that you need to be engaging with other fans during the waits for the next episode. Even the less outlandish and complicated fan theories have always seemed a couple of steps ahead of my reading of the series, since they latch onto details that I’d just assumed were meant to be noticed only subconsciously to make more sense later.
(For instance: the painting of a child lost at sea, a comically dark image of the kind that’s everywhere on the island, which others noticed was actually a painting of a child being rescued while lost at sea).
But there’s one aspect of the island’s lore that nobody in the show seems to have considered, and none of the fan theories or podcasts or YouTube videos I’ve heard have mentioned. Everybody’s focused on the Warren family line, with the implied assumption that that was the origin of the curse on the island, and once Warren’s pact is broken, everything will return to some level of normal.
Which might just be a mis-read on my part, since it seems abundantly obvious that whatever evil entity is on the island, speaking to people through mushroom trips, was there before Warren arrived. The pact didn’t summon a demon; it was supposed to appease a demon. So the plan to end Warren’s bloodline and end the pact should make living on Widow’s Bay worse, not better. Not to mention setting up the premise of an indefinitely ongoing series.
Even assuming that the main plot idea of season one is that people born on the island can’t leave, there still seem to be dangling threads that don’t seem to have simple resolutions. The deaths that we’ve heard of happened soon after a person reached the mainline, and seemed to die of natural causes. The ones that we’ve been shown happened immediately on crossing into the “dead zone” around the island. Warren’s children lose their eyesight and develop black spots on their palms and faces. Evan’s mother suddenly realized she couldn’t see, forcing Tom to send the ferry back to the island in a panic.
So what are the “rules” of the pact, and the curse? Is it only Warren’s descendants who are immediately struck by it, not everyone born there who tries to leave, lending credence to the theory that Evan is actually the youngest and last member of Warren’s bloodline? Were the incidents that the reporter asked Tom about in the first episode even verified, or just rumors?
I saw an interview with Hiro Murai, Matthew Rhys, and Katie Dippold that took place around the broadcast of episode 4, but mentioned a few interesting things. One was the foreshadowing that Tom Loftis’s character takes a dark turn at the end of the season, and is changed afterwards. I’m happy to let the series surprise me, since they’ve proven that any direction they take it will be some of the best television, but I’m skeptical that they’ll take it too dark.
My prediction is pretty straightforward, and now that we finally know it’s an ongoing series, it seems heavily-to-the-point-of-obviously suggested throughout the entire season: Tom has been set up to be the next Richard Warren. He’s going to have to make a new pact with whatever entity is on the island, living up to his formerly-honorary title of Lord Protector.
He saw the office of mayor as a figurative curse, not believing in any of the local superstitions and trying to bring the island into the 21st century in order to make life better for people who didn’t like him very much (and vice versa). He was challenged by a local who accused him of being a coward unable to do what needs to be done. He gradually saw enough to convince him that the evils of Widow’s Bay were more than just superstition. He accidentally became one of the few people who have communicated with the evil. He met the first Lord Protector of the island, and he finally took an active role in trying to end the curse while still protecting someone he still didn’t like very much. It sure seems like his character has been set up as the unwilling hero — or at least anti-hero — of the island.
The other interesting quote from that interview was from Dippold, who said that season one of Widow’s Bay felt like a prologue for the rest of the series. It’s exciting to think of everything that could entail, a story that breaks out of a limited-series mindset and can go practically anywhere (as long as it doesn’t leave Widow’s Bay, presumably). And it’ll be difficult to wait patiently and let the brilliant people making this series keep delivering great stuff, without my wanting to second-guess or skip ahead.
2026-06-11 08:53:32
At the beginning of May, I wrote a post about how I was reconsidering my multi-decade-long goal of finding the perfect digital notebook, in favor of switching to good old-fashioned pen and paper. I still had an empty Field Notes memo book that I’d picked up during a trip to Chicago, and I resolved to use that as a test case for a journal.
As you can see from the above picture, things got a little out of hand. Even before I’d filled up the first one, I fell under the thrall of Field Notes’s marketing, and I figured if I’m going to do this, I’d better commit to it. Better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it, right?
I got a couple of larger (A5) books with the idea that I could use them as “master” journals, for anything that needs more long-form writing or a deeper dive. They’re approximately the same size as the iPad mini and the older Moleskine I’d dug up, the only two notebooks that I’ve gotten any traction in as an adult. I have yet to use them, though, and am currently having trouble seeing a good use for them yet. A side effect of having this blog is that any long-form ideas bouncing around in my head usually go directly here without having a notebook as an intermediary.
I also got a couple of the same size with blank pages1, with the goal of using those purely as sketch books to practice drawing. Those I can at least see myself using, even though I haven’t yet. They could ideally be a replacement for how I typically use Procreate — start a drawing, get frustrated that I’m not better at drawing, have it annoy me every time I see it in the Procreate library, delete it so I don’t have to look at it.
But for me, the size that’s “stuck” is the memo book (A6, the size you most likely think of if you’re familiar with Field Notes at all). I’ve been using that Chicago one as a daily tracker for the past month. Not really a diary, since I don’t go into much depth. Not a planner, since I tend to write stuff down after the fact — so far, the trend has been that writing down what I plan to do that day all but guarantees that I’ll end up not doing it. So it’s just a list of what I did each day, even if that turns out to be almost nothing.
There is a whole sub-genre of YouTube videos about the life-changing magic of journaling and bullet journaling and organizing and planning, with tons of people eager to share their perfect system. For me, it hasn’t been “life-changing,” at least not yet, but I’m definitely into it. I’ve filled up my first memo book and already started on a second.
At that rate, I should exhaust my current supply of memo books as early as… 2029. In addition to all the ones visible in the above picture, I might have splurged on a box set of all of the National Parks editions. Who’s to say? What even is money to the unemployed man, when you get right down to it?
You could argue that this is far too many notebooks, especially for a man of my age, who should’ve started doing this 20 years ago if at all. You could point out that Field Notes are a bit overpriced for what they are. The aura comes from effectively marketing to hipsters and collectors. The paper isn’t that great. There are much more cost-effective options from competitors, much less no-name brands you can get anywhere.
To that, I say:
That’s why these hit the sweet spot for me, in ways that were unexpected enough to be counter-intuitive.
My old Moleskine makes the most sense, practically. Plenty of pages with lots of space on each page. A place for everything: I’ve got notes from a decade ago intermingled with stray game ideas from the last couple of weeks. It’s basic black and perfectly utilitarian, so I shouldn’t have any hesitation opening it up and using up the pages. That’s what it’s for.
Meanwhile, the memo books seem like a nightmare for actually finding anything once I’ve written it down. They’re hostile to doing a deep dive on anything, since you quickly run out of space on a page. A book you use daily might only last a month or so. And the covers are so pretty — and they’ve got this aura of “collectibility” around them now — that it seems like wasting one to fill it up with something as mundane as “Wednesday: I had a ham sandwich for lunch.”
In practice, for how I use them at least, all of those turn into positives. The smaller size encourages me to use it for whatever, without being intimidated by a larger blank page. Having several of them means I don’t need to be that precious about each one. Being limited to 48 pages means I’ve got enough space for a month’s worth of stray nonsense, but I also get the sense of completion that comes from finishing one.2
And last month, every day when I opened my journal, I saw the plain cover with the stars from the Chicago flag, and I remembered going on that trip with my fiance. Every day this month, I get a look at that fantastic painting of the Golden Gate Bridge, and invariably remember my time living in San Francisco.
And each of them, I’ll associate with memories of the month I spent using them. It’s a neat and for me unexpected combination of being pretty enough to enjoy using them, but not so precious that I don’t want to sully them. The size becomes a feature, too — instead of being A Big Book of Everything, the limited life span of a memo book means it’ll forever be associated with a very specific time.
Last month, I went to see a production of my friend’s play at CalArts, and I wrote some notes about it on one page, and stapled my copy of the program to the other. That’s now a permanent part of that specific notebook, waiting for whenever I choose to dig back through the completed and archived books.
It gives everything the feeling of semi-permanence, which I like a lot. I already realized that I’ve been drawn to digital ever since I was an adolescent, to the point of feeling low-grade anxiety any time I’m doing something without undo and delete. It always seemed obvious that digital notebooks and, especially, the iPad mini, would be the best of all worlds, since you have infinite space, infinite tools, and the easy ability to correct mistakes.
But in practice, that appeal turns out to be false. As I mentioned with Procreate earlier, I hate having bad drawings around, so I delete them. I hate having dumb ideas lying around, so I erase them. I don’t take advantage of near-infinite storage, because the mistakes disappear. It’s a fixation on perfectionism that doesn’t result in my gradually getting perfect, but just stagnating. Having to start over from scratch each time, essentially, because I’ve gotten rid of all the various imperfect, amateurish, ugly attempts that I should be keeping around so that I can build on them.
It would’ve been a hugely valuable lesson years ago, to realize that it’s not simply that my journals and sketchpads don’t need to be perfect. It’s best when they’re not! You want to hide the process from whoever’s going to be seeing the end result; for myself, the process is the whole point. And it’s silly to be uptight about messing up a page and not being able to undo, since there are several more pages that are chances to get it right.
I was fully aware that getting into notebooks brought with it the danger of getting really into pens. I couldn’t help but dip my toe into it, but at least as of right now, it sure feels like I’ve gotten it out of my system. It’s a whole sub-culture for some people, but I don’t feel that same “oh hang on, this could get dangerous and expensive” pull as I do for other burgeoning hobbies.
I did buy exactly one fountain pen, out of curiosity. It’s a Pilot Metropolitan “Retro Pop,” which I think is mid-range as far as fountain pens go, but is the most I’ve ever spent or plan to spend on a writing implement.3
I’ve never owned one, and the closest I’ve come is having some dip pens with nibs back when I was a teenager. I hated them, hated the mess, hated the feel of the nib on the paper, quickly decided it wasn’t for me. This is entirely different. About as easy to use as a roller ball or gel pen, and using it just feels like it’s naturally improving my handwriting.
They’re not suited to Field Notes paper, though, so I don’t see its becoming a daily-use thing. I did also get a couple of gel pens that have regularly been mentioned by the same type of people who tend to talk about Field Notes — the Uniball Zento pens — and while they’re nice, especially the “Flow” model with its part-metal body, I’m still drawn to the old dependable Pilot G-2. (The Uniballs dry faster and aren’t as prone to smearing, but the Pilot just feels smoother and seems to last longer).
And as long as this is turning into a product round-up, I got a “Mini Field Journal” from Lochby, which is the brand that gets most often recommended on YouTube. I like it so far, and am glad I chose it instead of the alternate smaller version that zips closed instead of using a clasp. It does defeat part of the main purpose of Field Notes, which is that they’re small enough to fit in a pocket. But it can carry multiple at a time, and for me, it’s especially useful for always having a pen handy.
The other journaling-adjacent sub-culture that frightens me is scrapbooking. I’ve accumulated years and years of ephemera — pamphlets, theme park tickets, concert tickets, stickers, brochures, zines — that is currently scattered in various containers all over the house. Not enough sentimental value for me to do something with them, but too much sentimental value for me to just throw away. I liked the idea of just stapling stuff into my daily tracker memo book, but a lot of the stuff is just too big.
Mead is hitting me right in the Gen X nostalgia by re-releasing the Trapper Keeper. Although my much-beloved Empire Strikes Back one from middle school disappeared long, long ago, I kind of like the idea of having a shamelessly garish retro one full of stuff from mostly-forgotten vacations past.
I’ve never felt drawn to washi tape or metallic colored markers, and I honestly don’t see that changing now that I’m in my 50s. But I do have, for instance, a brochure from the tram tour we took in Hong Kong, and it’d be nice to have a place for it that isn’t “crumpled up in a box somewhere.” Watch this space for updates!
I get the impression that anyone who talks about Field Notes as much as I’ve been doing here is obliged to share with you the system they’ve devised for using them. How to set up a new one with numbered pages and an index and post-it notes and customized pockets, or how to arrange each page with the week’s to-do list as well as a habit planner.
Unfortunately, I’m nowhere near that organized, and I suspect that if I’d try to put so much process into the process, I would’ve abandoned it already. But the current version of my non-process:
That journal holds two (or more) pocket-sized notebooks, so I have one as my daily tracker, and one that’s just an unorganized “everything you need to write down in a notebook.”
In the main book, I just use the right page of each two-page spread to make a list of whatever I did that day. Disappointingly often, there’s not even enough to fill a page, so I’ll put two days on the same page. The left page I turn sideways and use for any miscellaneous stuff from the day that didn’t fit into a list. Quotes or memorable details from whatever movie or TV show I’m watching, a health update for my senior cat, more detailed notes on a play, whatever.
I’m not even sure that writing everything down has helped with my memory retention. But I have noticed that it’s nice simply as a slow-down ritual. Purposefully doing something that’s not strictly necessary, and doing it in the slowest and most methodical way possible. I’ve had journaling apps for years, after all, and I could’ve been typing all kinds of rambling paragraphs and lengthy tangents, but I haven’t. Even — especially? — when the subject is my own life, I just want to see a bullet-point list of the key things.
And another advantage of small memo books is that you don’t have to be tied to a system, and you can figure it all out as you go. You can have special-purpose books, unorganized catch-all books, project-specific books, whatever. The initial draw for me had nothing to do with journaling, and was just me looking for a way to brainstorm and think through a game idea. Having a small, 48-page memo book completely devoted to a single game seems like the perfect scheme4, and a perfect document to archive afterwards.
Of course, the key to that is having enough memo books that it never feels like an overwhelming number of blank pages, but also never feels like you’re in danger of running out. So clearly, obviously, there’s only one correct next step for me: to sign up for the quarterly Field Notes subscription boxes.
2026-06-10 01:00:00
One of the things that surprised me the most about The Wicker Man was that it seemed to be almost a musical. There were entire scenes devoted to a song, often pivotal to revealing something about the island or its plot.
My favorite is “Willow’s Song,” which the lovely young innkeeper’s daughter sings to herself to help fall asleep and for no other reason. I love it for many reasons, including how her movements emphasize the pounding of the drum beat. But mostly for the lyrics, which have the quality of the best folk songs — so abstract or metaphorical that it would take a historian to explain how they were unspeakably provocative for the time — until the last couplet, which could hardly be any more direct.1
(I usually try to keep a strict rule that the two-fer should never become a three-some, but I really like a cover of “Willow’s Song” titled “How Do” by Sneaker Pimps. It’s pretty faithful, but fills out the arrangement with the late 90s stuff you’d expect from the Sneaker Pimps, and really drives home the drum beat, which makes it as sinister as it is lovely).
The Wicker Man is so musical, in fact, that at times it felt a bit like a pagan Godspell. The films came out in the same year, and I admit I like the image of the two of them battling it out in the box office for the souls of the youth.
I deeply, deeply love Godspell, and I have ever since I first saw a high school production of it as a teenager. I vaguely remember a mild controversy over the choice to use it in my small home town deep in the Bible Belt, since the costumes, and the whole Hair-meets-the-gospel-of-Matthew concept could be assumed to be mockery. Not to mention setting everything to popular music!
It’s funny to think now, seeing as how the play is so earnest and so reverent. And especially that one of the most wholesome and reverential musicals based on Biblical material was written and performed by so many people who are ethnically Jewish and presumably non-Christian. (Not to mention that several people key to the production are gay or bisexual, which at the time was mostly considered to be completely incompatible with Christianity).
It’s a perfect illustration of how a faith that’s driven by dogma and ritual is a faith unchallenged. Beliefs that can’t tolerate differing interpretations and differing representations are weak and brittle, depending only on tradition and blind acceptance, instead of examining what the words mean and how they have value. Which actually makes it an excellent companion to many of the ideas in The Wicker Man.
My favorite song in Godspell is… well, it’s “Day by Day.” But that’s kind of like choosing “Stairway to Heaven” as your favorite Led Zeppelin song — it’s not wrong, it’s just basic. I think the most powerful song in Godspell is “By My Side”. Even as a cynical middle-aged man, decades removed from having any patience for musical theater that doesn’t deal in ironic detachment, hearing the entire ensemble join in for “I can walk” still gives me goosebumps.
2026-06-09 06:03:04
When a movie has been on my to-watch backlog for as long as The Wicker Man, I go into it with a lot of assumptions based on stuff that’s been outright spoiled, or stuff I knew from general cultural diffusion.
And from watching the inexcusably awful remake. I hadn’t thought it was possible for me to hate that movie even worse, but finally seeing the original transformed my take on the remake from “offensively unnecessary” to “thoroughly offensive.”1
So after watching the original The Wicker Man, I can’t remember ever seeing a movie and so thoroughly wishing I could’ve seen it in its original context. Watching it in 2026, it feels bold and transgressive and completely unique. How much of that is the result of my formative years being in the height of an American conservative movement? My impression of the early 1970s in the UK is mostly formed from Led Zeppelin album covers; maybe pagan imagery wasn’t as immediately shocking.2
In any case, I don’t want to give the impression that The Wicker Man is one of those movies that can only be appreciated in its original context. It does a great job establishing its contrasts right from the start. We see immediately that the protagonist Sergeant Howie, played by Edward Woodward, is kind of a weirdo even by contemporary Scottish standards. His first line is a comically by-the-book “get a haircut” to a younger officer. Immediately after, he sees some graffiti reading “Jesus saves,” and although he agrees with the sentiment, there is a time and place.
While the younger officers are gossiping about how he’s so devout that he’s even saving himself for marriage, we see essential cutaways to Sgt Howie singing hymns with his bride to be, and then taking communion. We hear the entire ritual in voice-over, as the principle of transubstantiation is described from scripture. It’s immediately clear that for the Sergeant, it’s not just a familiar ritual; he believes in it with the true conviction of the faithful.
It’s the key idea that drives most of the movie, and it’s so effectively established from the start. When he goes to the island of Summerisle to investigate an anonymous report of a missing girl, he’s there not just with the authority of the police, but with the even higher authority of acting on behalf of a Christian nation. So when he encounters the obstruction of the older men at the harbor, and then the increasing raunchiness of the locals in and around the pub, you can practically feel his irritation building. They don’t respect the police, they don’t respect the mainland, they don’t respect the Crown, they don’t respect common decency, and they don’t even respect (his) God.
And it was fascinating to see how the movie put such a wholesome spin on heresy and debauchery. Or at least, what our protagonist considered heresy and debauchery. Everyone is perfectly polite and seemingly respectful to Sgt Howie, even as it becomes increasingly clear that they’re obstructing justice.
And I wasn’t prepared for how much of The Wicker Man plays almost like a musical. There always seems to be at least a violinist and guitarist somewhere nearby, waiting to turn the scene into an early 1970s music video. After he meets the innkeeper’s daughter, played by Britt Ekland, everyone in the bar, young and old, male and female, sings a lengthy song about wanting to have sex with the innkeeper’s daughter, to her delight. The song, and even the orgy happening outside, in and around the cemetery, are presented so joyfully that it makes Howie’s disdain and disgust for it seem uptight and rude.
As Howie’s investigation continues, he sees more and more signs that the islanders are lying to him and worse, that they’ve rejected God and are corrupting the children. The thing I love about the first half of The Wicker Man is that it presents all of this as innocuous at worst. Because so much of it is set to music, it often suggests that it’s the residents of Summerisle who are living in happiness and harmony.
It’s easy to imagine a lesser version of this movie, where the idyllic small town gradually reveals increasingly sinister signs of wickedness and blasphemy. Each with a tense musical stinger, instead of a lovely acoustic folk song. Here, it’s all open and in the daylight, and the camera dispassionately treats most of it as it would any quaint old village that has its own traditions. Of course the local pharmacy would have a jar full of foreskins; isn’t that charming?
Because we’ve already seen that Sgt Howie is out of place even on the mainland, and we’ve been reminded of one of the oddest and most symbolic rituals in mainstream Christianity, it adds a powerful subversion on the expected dynamic. Howie often reads not as the “fish out of water” so much as the judgmental invader. Never the villain, since you’re always reminded that he’s on a quest to find a missing child, and it becomes increasingly evident that the residents are hiding something. But the story refuses to give you a protagonist that you can relate to entirely, so for most of the movie, it maintains a sense of your being a dispassionate third party.
Which makes me think that much of the power and the timelessness of The Wicker Man is that your interpretation inevitably brings in so much of yourself and your own experiences and prejudices. I grew up in an environment where until the time I was a teenager, just the suggestion of teaching Christianity as a “comparative religion” would’ve seemed dangerously heretical. How does the tension of the movie play to audiences who grew up in secular households, and how does that differ from audiences who grew up in faithful households with non-Christian religions?
I’ve learned that Christopher Lee not only plays Lord Summerisle, but spearheaded the entire project, acting as more or less an uncredited producer. He also claimed that it was the film and the performance that he was most proud of. The movie isn’t the showcase for him that I’d been expecting, but it absolutely does not work without him. There’s such a strong association with his persona as an intelligent, literate, cultured, and impeccably genteel villain, and that’s crucial to making the core tension of the story work.
We begin to hear mention of him from the moment Sgt Howie arrives at Summerisle, with all of the residents deferring to him as the absolute, unquestioned authority of the island. The connotations of Count Dracula are unavoidable, and the movie takes full advantage of that, foreshadowing a climactic showdown with the blasphemous monster who’s bent an entire town to his will.
So their meeting is a fantastic subversion of that. Summerisle immediately reads as a direct contrast to Sgt Howie: tall, shaggy-haired, jovial, and worldly. He asserts that the community are “deeply religious people,” and that their practices are different from the mainland but equally valid. As Howie insists that they’ve rejected the “true God,” it flips the way paganism is typically presented in Western media. Summerisle is contemporary and enlightened, and Howie is the one who’s clinging to the superstitious old ways. Of course the women are dancing about the fire naked; doing it with clothes on would be far too dangerous!
Watching The Wicker Man in 2026, it’s impossible for me not to see comparisons between Lord Summerisle and a current-day hoodie-wearing tech billionaire. Casually describing a history of social engineering as a grand experiment, where fealty to gods of nature has resulted in greater productivity. His education, wealth, and rank demand a level of deference from a representative of The Crown, even as he’s matter-of-factly describing how they’re not subject to the rules of The Crown. You can imagine a current-day journalist calling it “disruption.”
While the movie’s not a showcase for Christopher Lee, despite his being essential to making it work, it absolutely is a showcase for Edward Woodward. His performance is phenomenal. I kept seeing scene after scene where taking it even a tiny bit too far in any direction would’ve undermined the entire film. As it is, he reads as a man whose self-righteousness is absolute, without ever turning into desperation or defensiveness. The island is constantly and increasingly challenging his baseline understanding of what’s “normal,” but it’s not breaking him, and it’s not making him lose his cool.
Except for the best scene in the entire movie, which is a scene of seduction presented as a musical number.
The innkeeper’s daughter Willow is lying nude on her bed in the next room, slapping her hand against an adjoining wall to the beat of the music, singing to the accompaniment of a guitarist and drum player downstairs. As the song continues, she dances around the room, pressing herself against the furniture, the window, and the walls, like a siren calling out to the Christian policeman next door.
And again, the song is presented as more lovely than sinister. If you’re watching a full edit of the movie3, you saw an earlier scene where a young man from the village was presented to Willow, she called him up to her room, and everyone in the pub sang a song celebrating the two of them having sex upstairs. Here, her dancing is shown as beautiful and natural, her singing as more of a willing invitation than a seduction or temptation.
In the next room, we see Sgt Howie losing control for the first time. He’s sleepless, sweaty, and mad horny, pressing himself against the wall, almost physically restraining himself from running out of the room and into the bed next door. The premise clearly suggests the story of Sir Galahad: a virtuous knight and servant of the King, victorious over wicked temptation and maintaining his chastity. But with the music, and with the way it’s shot — cutting between the brightly-lit dance in Willow’s room, with the dark, shadowy, sweaty desperation in Howie’s — it forces you to consider how much of that torment is purely of Howie’s own making.
We saw so little of Howie’s fiancee that there’s little sense of infidelity; she’s practically a non-character. There’s not even the usual sense of the uneven power dynamic, especially if we saw the earlier “Gently Johnny” scene. It makes you realize that even the notion of a woman having bodily autonomy is considered a threat to a puritanical society. Which of these two characters is really the more “wicked?”
Obviously, I don’t want to suggest that the key takeaway of The Wicker Man is “honestly, there are no bad guys here.” As the story advances towards its conclusion, it becomes increasingly clear what’s going on, even if you hadn’t already been spoiled for the ending. And that, ultimately, is my main criticism of the movie, the thing that keeps it from being unique and perfect.
For all of the interesting and transgressive things it does purely with imagery and music, it still has several scenes of clunky exposition. Most of the initial conversation between Lord Summerisle and Sgt Howie is telling the history of the island outright. As Howie’s focus returns to the police procedural portion of the story, we get several scenes of his thoughts in voice-over, or even saying out loud, his theory on exactly what happened. He finds a book describing the May Day ritual, which lays out step by step what the different roles are, and exactly what happens. And the end of the movie is a character explicitly spelling out exactly what was going on all along.
Of course, what was going on all along is interesting and tragic and horrific, so the movie’s iconic finale still totally works. Especially since Woodward’s portrayal of Sgt Howie remains phenomenal to the end. He’s not simply a fool, and he doesn’t act purely out of self-righteous conviction. His appeal to the people of the island is one of reason, trying to explain the futility of what they’re doing. And the only time in the entire movie that we see a crack in Lord Summerisle’s confidence, a moment of hesitation while considering he hasn’t achieved a flawless victory, is when Howie points out that he’ll be the target the next time the crops inevitably fail. Raising the question of whether Summerisle was ever a true believer, or simply manipulating it for his own benefit.
Even at the end, Howie remains steadfast in his faith, and there’s even a sense that he’s “won” in the sense that’s most meaningful to him. He resisted temptation, and he stayed true to fulfilling his quest, the only person on the entire island who wasn’t being deceitful. Woodward plays him as a man who didn’t succumb to fear or desperation, and stayed true to his beliefs when a more contemporary man wouldn’t have.
The biggest criticism I have of The Wicker Man is that the scenes of explicit exposition are disappointing in a movie that’s so effective at suggestion. And its folk horror/thriller4 resolution does pretty definitively turn it into a story about a Christian martyr remaining steadfast against the evils of paganism. Plus, when you go back and consider it just in terms of plot, a lot of the moments don’t make that much sense as part of a grand scheme.
But those just keep the movie from being perfect. They don’t change the fact that The Wicker Man is a transgressive and timeless examination of belief, ritual, religious imperialism, comparative religion vs dogma, unchallenged cultural assumptions, and the role that faith plays in our natural lives. It’s so much better than the movie I’d expected it to be, and it absolutely deserves its status as a classic.
2026-06-07 09:41:23
I said that I want to go back and rewatch Widow’s Bay from the start and study exactly how it works. It’s hard for me to pin down — not “horror comedy,” just good at both horror and comedy; works like a mystery box series, but also reminds you not to fuss over the details and just have fun; using the “monster of the week” format, but ending each episode feeling like you’d seen one chapter in a continuous story.
After episode 8, my theory is that what makes the show hard to figure out is simply that it’s good at everything. It can do a take on Halloween that doesn’t just feel like reference or parody, and in fact ends up being more effective than just about any Halloween movie I’ve seen. All under 40 minutes, and while advancing two other storylines.
The more I thought about it, the more I suspected that the series is, somehow, even better than I’d given it credit for, even though that’s been “all the credit there is.” Everything that made this version of the Halloween story so intensely satisfying was character driven. It’s the culmination of a character arc for Patricia that was seeded in the first episode.
In case that seems obvious, remember that the first episode was establishing what this show even is. Introducing a town full of quirky characters. Giving us scenes that show how the characters interact with each other. Suggesting a surfeit of island lore that may or may not be explored later, or might just be a one-off joke. All while telling a story that was kind of a mash-up of The Fog and the beginning of Jaws, if the Amity Island local government had been staffed by people from Pawnee, IN.
So in the scene where Patricia is reminding Tom about the night the Boogeyman came to kill her, I thought the whole point was to make a joke introducing their characters. Patricia is a perpetual sad-sack that no one takes seriously. Tom is hapless, dismissive, and not good with people, and is always irritating even when not intentionally. And the character of Widow’s Bay itself: an island that has such a long history of ludicrously prolific horror, that everybody has gotten of numb to it and shrugs it off. It’s a smart, funny, moment; it helps establish what this series is; job done.
And as the series has kept reminding us of the Boogeyman, it’s felt plot driven. This is going to be an event that comes up at some point in the future. As the characters have gotten more established, it’s felt like the show was starting from the premise of an episode, and then showing how the characters would respond to that. “Here’s our Necronomicon/mind-control cult/Wicker Man episode,” and asking “What would it be like to put our character who needs to be liked at the center of that?”
Now, I suspect that I’ve had it flipped the whole time. That the point is showing us the characters, in particular what living on Widow’s Bay has meant for them, and then choosing horror stories that can build up those character arcs.
To put it another way: it’s like if back in the late 1970s, when they were making Halloween, they’d said, “We want to tell the story of a midwestern grandmother named Laurie Strode, who’s become such a paranoid survivalist that it’s estranged her from the rest of her family. How can we do that starting with her as a teenager, while making it look like it’s just a slasher movie where the killer is the most intriguing character?”
So I think what made episode 8 so satisfying for me wasn’t just that it was really well done (although it was), and it wasn’t even that I’ve gotten to like the character of Patricia so much (although I do). It’s that it delivered a hell of a pay-off to the town slasher story that was even funnier than it was scary, and simultaneously resolved all of these lingering story threads making up her story arc.
There didn’t need to be a series-long story excuse to show us Kris getting tasered, but including that whole scene meant that the conclusion of the episode wasn’t just a victorious culmination of the last 30 minutes, or even the last 8 episodes, but of the last 30+ years of Patricia’s story.
And I think it’s even more subtle with the B-story of Evan confronting Tom over the lockbox full of letters from and pictures of his mother. I already realized that the choice to end it with the two of them bonding over good memories of his mother was the best possible way to handle it, so much better than the angry shouting match I’d been expecting. It felt like a mature, best-possible ending for an entire storyline, while also quietly putting to rest a bunch of mystery-box questions like “what really happened to the mother?” and “what did Tom know?”
But I’d also kind of wanted some kind of cathartic resolution, because Evan is one of the only main characters in the series that I’ve grown to actively dislike. (Except Kris, of course. And that awful boy PJ1. And obviously Kathy). Not enough that I wanted to see him get tasered. Necessarily. But enough that I wanted to see him face some kind of actual consequences. Because the entire season has been showing and mentioning his doing whatever he wants and there being no repercussions, culminating with screaming at his dad and only hearing “someday you’re going to feel guilty for saying that” in response.
It was starting to feel like a missed note in a series that otherwise never misses. Most of the stuff has been pranks or relatively normal rebellious teen indiscretions, which were at worst annoying distractions. But we’ve mostly been following the story from Tom’s perspective, and whether you like Tom as a character or not, there’s no doubting that things have been escalating and needing to be taken more seriously. So every time we’ve seen Evan’s BS making things worse, it’s impossible to think, “he doesn’t know about any of the other stuff going on.” You just think about how he’s making everything worse.
And again, thinking back to the first episode made me realize just how well it all fit together. The scenes in episode 8 were a callback to the situation in episode 1, where Tom turned tension with his son into a story about happy memories with his mother. At the time, it seemed like exposition, but it was really showing you how their relationship worked. Tom is (over-)lenient with Evan because he reminds him of his wife. He’s always sad that he lost her, and sad that Evan never got to know his mother. So he’s over-protective, even to the point of being irrational and superstitious.
There’s still another cool layer to it. Just before that scene between Tom and Evan in episode 1, the instigating event was Tom coming home and Evan smoking a joint on the back porch. Evan immediately says something like, “Do you know what this? I found it and think it might be pot.”
At the time, I just thought it’s a good line. This is a show that can have characters who are funny because of the situation as well as characters who are intentionally funny. But even that introduction did more than I realized at the time. It established that the reason Evan keeps getting away with stuff is because he’s charming. He’s not going to cross the “teenage rebellion” line too far — it’s always the kids around him that are goading him into stuff despite his reservations — but he will always reject authority, because he knows he can get away with it.
It’s a reminder that the character hasn’t been mis-handled; everything he’s done has been true to that basic idea. And having him be a basically okay kid who pushes boundaries because he’s already gotten away with it, instead of a maladjusted screw-up, keeps the tension in the right place. He’s not just there to complicate things for Tom for the sake of drama. He’s there to make the sense of threat and dread have character-based stakes. You want Tom and his son to get along and start working together, and you worry about what might happen if he tries to leave the island.
Finally, Wyck has gotten moments that back-fill his character as well. We already learned that his disdain for Tom came from believing that Tom was a coward. Now we realize that no small part of that was projecting, for something he did as a kid and never forgave himself for. He’s been haunted by it ever since, and it’s a big part of why he became an irritable crank and a drunk. It turns the scenes where he’s explaining the revenants to Tom and Patricia, or the Sea Hag to Tom, from being just funny exposition, to being every bit as character based. He takes the island’s curse dead seriously, because he’s convinced he’s seen what it can do first hand. And over the years, it’s created a kind of vicious cycle, where he gets so infuriated when people don’t take it seriously that he over-reacts, which causes people not to take him seriously.
I already loved Widow’s Bay when I was reading it as a bunch of really well-written and executed moments in service of a multi-episode, plot-driven story. Now I’ve got even more appreciation for just how much it puts into every single moment. Even bits that seem like throwaway jokes or one-offs turn out to be based in character. And you can infer years of these characters’ life histories from just a few key moments and perfectly-chosen lines of dialogue.
I still have no idea whether Widow’s Bay is a 10-episode project, or if it’s been left open to become an ongoing series. As much as I want to keep watching it forever, I’ve been leaning towards thinking of it as one season, if only because it’s felt as if it’s one story told very well. Not to mention that they’ve been wrapping up storylines and tearing through island lore and intrigue with the confidence of a team that’s not afraid to “use up” good story ideas.
Now, I’m more on the fence. That confidence feels less and less like a team that’s only written one season’s worth of story, and more like a team that’s confident simply because they know they’ll keep being able to come up with great ideas. After getting rid of the island’s founder and barreling towards a climactic finale, it could seem like everything’s on the path to get definitively wrapped up. But the series is also demonstrating how its plot is revealing more about its characters, not the other way around. I can imagine their saying, “we love these characters, even Kathy, and there’s no shortage of horror stories we can use with a bunch of interesting people on an evil island.”
I don’t think the series needs to “mean” anything, in the sense of having one theme that sums it all up. But the closest it seems that they’ve established so far came right after Wyck came into the bathroom and shot the Sea Hag. Tom asks, “Why is this happening?” Wyck responds, “I don’t know. You just… survive.” Likeable, funny people living on a ludicrously cursed island and just surviving seems to me like the kind of idea that could carry on indefinitely.
2026-06-06 06:49:51
With the mainstream box office success of movies from young directors, like Obsession and Backrooms, we’re now seeing a lot of stories concentrating on a seismic shift in the film industry. We’re finally seeing new voices break into the mainstream! Independent filmmakers are earning huge rewards from committing to their personal and unique vision! The Old Guard is having to learn to keep up, and finally accept that they can’t just keep capitalizing on the nostalgia of 40-50 year olds!
Of course, the reality is that the business is working pretty much the same as it always has. What’s being presented as a “seismic shift” is just a shuffling of the names of people at the top who are making a profit.
From Rob Hatch-Miller on Bluesky, I saw a link to an article in The Hollywood Reporter titled “Meet the Obsession Producers: Tea Shop Productions.” It talks about the two guys who built up an independent production company taking risks and working outside the system. They took a gamble on an up-and-coming young YouTuber, and that (estimated) $750k bet turned into an (estimated) $250 million payout.
Meanwhile, the Instagram account of an Art Director on Obsession has a post describing how much they made from working on the film, and how much work they put into it. It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that it wasn’t a huge payout, even by contract hire standards, and especially not when factoring in the various expenses that get absorbed by small crews. Teams on smaller projects — whether they’re films, which I know next to nothing about, or video games, which I know first-hand — often do work outside their job description, don’t get compensated for travel time or expenses, and generally put a lot of extra time and effort into a project without its being all that remarkable. They usually do it because they believe in the project, and even if they don’t, it’s work that has to get done anyway.
It also shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that any mention of this I’ve seen on social media has immediately had some dipshit responding with the long-familiar and completely expected nonsense. “You agreed to the rate.” “Most movies don’t see anywhere near this kind of success.” “The people who take the biggest risks are always going to get the highest rewards.” “Grow up.”
It’s expected, because it’s the fundamental mantra of capitalism that people have been repeating since long before I was born and will keep repeating long after I’m dead. You have to believe that exceptional wealth is the result of exceptional talent and insight, or else the whole system falls apart, and that’s how you end up with socialism.
That part’s not realistically going to change anytime soon. But the eagerness of assholes to come out swinging with “Suck it up, buttercup!” just shows the degree that people have accepted it as a basic truth without putting any thought into it. The unexamined confidence-turned-into-arrogance of someone insisting, “Well of course you don’t feel well. You drink pasteurized milk!“
Obviously, it offends me as an idealist. But it irritates me even more as a cynic. Because it’s just so dumb, unnecessary, and unrealistic, that it doesn’t even make business sense, much less common sense.
It’s tempting to call those producers the greedy bad guys, or at least a bit hypocritical for being guys in their 40s being credited for young indie upstart success. I don’t have any idea one way or the other; I don’t have any idea what it takes to run their business. I’m just extremely skeptical that such an extraordinarily high return on investment would leave them just breaking even.
It’s also tempting to look at all of the interviews and profiles of Curry Barker, and hear people complimenting him on his next movie and his TV series in development and the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and shake your tiny fist at yet another now-wealthy white guy coasting on other people’s work, and now pulling up the ladder behind him. I don’t have much indication that that’s true, either. And it doesn’t change the basic fact that making something that resonates with people and is financially successful should get you the opportunity to make more stuff.
You don’t have to be sneering at villains and quoting Karl Marx and staging a collective overthrow of the independent film industry to understand that this is just plain bad optics. This movie is an exceptional case. And the handling of the business side of it should be as exceptional as well.
Even if you didn’t believe or didn’t understand how it’s fair, it would be just plain good PR to give everybody who worked on the movie a bonus. And it would likely be ludicrously cheap when compared to all the money that has been spent promoting the movie, and how much money it’s made. A tiny amount in movie-budget terms could be life-changing for the people who worked on it, at least for a while until they get on their next project.
And what makes the disparity even more needlessly stupid is that giving some form of profit-sharing bonus to the crew would obviously be so much more sustainable for the business!
Any time you talk about income or wealth disparity, the chucklehead response always describes it as the investors being the only ones who take all the risk. Even when a person who worked on a film gives them a full account, in detail, with dollar amounts, of all the risks they took to help make it.
The only way you can get low- or even limited-budget projects to happen is if people put in extra time and effort because they believe in the project. (Or even if they simply need the work). I would hope that it’s obvious to even the stupidest person that people won’t have much reason to keep pouring themselves into projects if they’re not entitled to anything should the project become a breakout hit.
And even if that’s not obvious, it should at least be obvious that people can’t afford to keep doing that. If my putting exceptional time and effort into a project has absolutely no chance of compensating me beyond the minimum required up-front payment, then I’m simply going to have to give every project my absolute minimum of time and effort. No matter how much I “believe” in the project.
Ask me how I realized this!
Part of the reason I don’t like paying attention to the financial side of movie and game industry news is that it’s astounding and dispiriting to see how much money is involved. Movies often lose tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars, and yet they rarely bankrupt the studios or end the careers of anyone involved. Even describing the investments as “risk” seems completely absurd, when you can take pretty much any high-profile person in the movie industry and find at least one colossal flop that they’ve been attached to, but they’re still at the top of their field.
One of the things I realized while watching the intellectual, cultural, and cinematic vacuum that was Masters of the Universe was that the people sitting behind me, who sounded like they were enjoying the hell out of it, were so much more invested than anyone involved in the movie’s creation. I never felt like anyone was taking a risk, any more than I felt like He-Man just might lose this fight, you guys!
It’s a (literally) commercial product from a movie-making business, which was careful to include plenty of shots of its toy lines (Mattel) and a crucial shot of its Prime delivery truck (Amazon/MGM). Everyone who stood to make the most money from this movie went through extensive negotiations to make sure that they’d be adequately compensated, either up front, on the back end, or both. And knowing what I know about the current state of the VFX industry, I can all but guarantee that the people on the movie who took the most risk, in terms of time spent vs compensation, were the ones who made the countless effects shots for a set hourly rate.
In other words: the claim that the highest risk yields the highest reward is such a load of bullshit that you can consider it a pure fairy tale.
Independent films (and video games) do often require substantial risk from the people leading them and producing them. Of course they should see the benefits from that, should it end up being a breakout hit. But if you assume that well, obviously, the crew should be satisfied with initial compensation and nothing else, because that’s the deal, but also they should be prepared to take less money and put in extra effort because of Their Love Of The Art, then where’s the incentive?
Doing that is the surest way to budget smaller projects out of existence. If I’m only going to get the minimum compensation, then I’m going to put more effort into making sure the minimum compensation is enough to live comfortably. If I don’t get any career benefit from a hit, like the director does, then I’m going to make sure that I’m only working the minimum number of hours on it. Labor movements come from people feeling like they’re being exploited as labor, instead of respected and included as collaborators who are invested in the project.
Sharing the profits of a success — not to mention offering fair compensation up front, and paying people instead of using volunteers — isn’t some altruistic, benevolent gift. It’s simply the cost of doing business. You have to actually invest in the business for the business to be sustainable. Otherwise it’s not a “risk.” It’s taking advantage of the people who actually are making sacrifices, and then taking the profit that results from their sacrifices for yourself.
This is simple stuff, guys. It’s not naive or idealistic or realistic. It’s business. Grow up.