2026-10-28 15:01:22
The Cycle is a 2026 horror movie running on the Shudder channel, starring Deborah Ann Woll as a forensic scientist with an exceptional skill at deducing what happened to a dead body from a minimum of information. Jeffrey Donovan and Will Hochman play cops who ask for her help investigating a strange case: the body of a dead man was found near the bodies of two other people torn apart by some sort of animal, but all signs say that the man had been dead for much longer.
And get this twist: that man is her biological father, who left the family when she was four years old!
For a lot of the runtime of The Cycle, it plays like a modern police procedural, albeit more of a basic cable than Prestige TV production. Everything is polished and grim and atmospheric, and the performances are genuinely good, but it’s just a little bit off. For instance, every character has a Key Point Of Backstory That Defines Them, and they are all primed to deliver it in a monologue at the drop of a hat. The monologues are all well-performed, but they feel crammed into the wrong context.
I really wasn’t sure what to make of the movie for at least 45 minutes to an hour. I didn’t dislike it; I just felt that it was trying so hard to be a movie that it wasn’t. I wondered why it was taking them so long to get to the place where it was obviously going.
Once it gets there, though, it lets loose. It really transforms, one might say, into the movie it wanted to be all along. And it gets pretty bonkers, with some impressive visual effects that sure seem practical, even if they’re CG-assisted. I got the sense that this stuff was the reason the entire movie existed, and it had been building up the character-based drama not as padding, but an attempt to ground its B-movie soul in something more aspirational.
The other non-spoiler thing I can say is that I think Deborah Ann Woll is great. I always get the sense that she’s thrown herself completely into whatever she’s doing, and she’s going to sell it, dammit. She’s not shy about making it clear what she nerds out about, and what kind of projects she’s interested in, and no matter what it is, you never get the slightest hint of self-awareness or that she’s not invested. I wouldn’t even be surprised if the decision to have her character playing with a vintage GameBoy was her idea.
Even though it’s pretty clear where the movie is going pretty early on, they still treat it as if it were a spoiler, so everything after this point is a big spoiler warning.
So even after The Cycle goes nuts and embraces its identity as a monster movie, I still wasn’t quite sold. It still felt like it was trying to be two different kinds of movie, and that was a shame because it was so clearly better at being an over-the-top monster movie than a drama.
But then there’s a scene with the werewolf doing a retinal scan to get into the locked room where our heroes have hidden themselves. And as soon as the voice said, “Retinal scan confirmed,” that was when I fell in love with The Cycle. Well, that’s overstating it; it’s more that I fell in liked-a-lot-more-than-I-probably-should.
Because like I said, it’s not hard to tell that this is going to be a werewolf movie, and it becomes apparent pretty early on. But I was doing my best to be a good movie watcher and play along, acting like they were building up to a big reveal and ready to act surprised so that nobody’s feelings would get hurt. And when we see the transformation and the attacks, it’s a satisfying payoff even if you saw it coming.
But it wasn’t until the retinal scan that the movie was kind of giving me permission to treat it as the over-the-top horror movie it had wanted to be all along. It doesn’t go so far as to become a comedy, but it does break you out of the “are we supposed to take this seriously?” spell and let you retroactively think about exactly what the premise is.
What could possibly be worse than a werewolf? A zombie werewolf!!!
It is a bit too long, slow to get started and then stretching out the last act for longer than it deserves. This would be a lot more solid at 90 minutes long.
And while everything is clearly set up and knocked down like a Screenwriting 101 assignment — this watch will be important, this character is obviously about to die, etc — there’s one thread that seemed to be building up to something that never arrived. Early on, Woll’s character makes a point of how they can 3D print a skull from even the tiniest fragment of bone, and later she asks her friend to do some kind of “age enhancement” on the corpse she’d autopsied. They show the printers churning away a few times, and we get the barest glimpse of what it prints out, but we never see the end result, and it’s never mentioned again.
I was all ready to have the technician check the print bed and find a full-on werewolf head sitting there. And I was robbed of my chance to make fun of the movie for not having the technician just look at the 3D model, before going through the time-consuming process of printing it out. But instead: nothing!
Also: since the werewolf seems to affect electrical fields around it, I was hoping they were going to go for ghost zombie werewolf! And since it gives characters visions, I was hoping for psychic ghost zombie werewolf! But that was left implied. Maybe the filmmakers were just big fans of Malignant?
In any case, it doesn’t let loose quite as much as I might’ve hoped, but I did appreciate how far it did go. The coroner’s kill was appropriately gruesome (albeit predictable), and the werewolf did dutifully jump through a window at exactly the right moment while watching a creepy video tape. So points for that, even if it, disappointingly, didn’t go so far as having Woll turn around in the last shot and look at the camera with werewolf eyes, like the Thriller video.
You might see The Cycle as a movie that flirts with campy horror but never fully commits, but I prefer to think of it as a movie that says, “Yes, of course we all love campy horror, but you don’t need to be shameless about it.”
2026-10-25 03:20:00
This week’s release of games for Playdate’s Season 3 includes my game Sound Mind, my second finished game for the platform.
It’s a two-player pass-and-play game where you’re one of two siblings locked inside your recently-deceased father’s haunted study, trying to get the most of his cursed fortune for yourself while hiding it from the other. Inside the room, there are various hiding places as well as traps you can set for the other player, to hinder them and slow them down.
Most importantly, the room is filled with things that make noise. When it’s not your turn, you’re listening for the sounds the other player is making, to try and figure out what they’re doing, where they might be hiding, and where they might have hidden the money.
It’s kind of a weird game, on a handheld that doesn’t seem ideally suited to two-player games, so I’m grateful that Panic took a chance on the idea, and then found a place for it as a fun novelty in season three. I hope everybody who does get a chance to play it enjoys it.
Here are some of the ideas that went into the game, and some info about the (long) process of making it.
After finishing the game Sasquatchers, I knew I wanted to make something else for the Playdate, with the overriding philosophy of “not that.” That meant:
People who’ve been following the development of this game will be aware that I completely failed at the last part, but more on that later.
While I was trying to think of game ideas, my husband and I were in the process of planning a move to Los Angeles, which meant a lot of road trips between the Bay Area and LA. On one of these trips, we were at a rest stop charging the car, and he took out his Playdate.
I’d already been curious about how to make a multiplayer game work for the Playdate, but the network APIs weren’t available at that point, and I didn’t have any experience with network programming, anyway. I have noticed from the start, though, that the Playdate has a surprisingly powerful speaker for such a small device.
And as he was using the device, I could figure out what he was doing based on sound cues alone. That’s scrolling through the main screen, that’s opening up a menu, that’s the music from Pick Pack Pup, that’s a game I don’t recognize. It would be near-impossible for two people to share the screen on a Playdate, but you could hear everything.
That reminded me of the remake of an old Parker Brothers board game called Stop Thief! It has players as investigators against one or more players as thieves trying to get as much loot as possible. You use hidden movement to make secret moves around the board, and (in the new edition) put those moves into a smartphone app. The app then plays sound effects — footsteps, glass breaking, etc — to give clues to the investigators about where the thieves might be.
I immediately thought of a scenario of hide and seek or keep-away/capture-the-flag, where you’re holding a giant bag of money and trying to keep it away from the other player(s). And I remembered — or more likely misremembered, since it’s been years since I even watched someone play it — the game Power Stone, which I thought greatly reduced your movement while you were carrying the most powerful item.
Finally, it reminded me of the sound effects records we used to play at Halloween. My favorite was for Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion, which on one side had a story of two kids going through the mansion, and on the other just spooky sound effects. The title screen for Sound Mind has a loop of spooky wind noises and randomly triggered sound effects in honor of that.
And it seemed obvious that the best story involving two people fighting over money inside a haunted house would be that they were forced to spend the night locked inside as a stipulation from a rich relative’s will. The classics become classics for a reason.
It felt like I’d gone from initial spark to fully-formed game idea in under 30 minutes. What could possibly go wrong?
I did a few write-ups on long-simmering game ideas to pitch to Panic, and I included Sound Mind as kind of a dark horse novelty idea that I didn’t honestly expect to go anywhere. It was more the case that I know that they appreciate weird stuff, and it might entertain somebody there who read their pitch docs.
Looking back at the pitch doc now, I’m amazed at a) how naive-to-the-point-of-arrogance I was in expecting this to be simple and straightforward, and b) how much I hate the quick-and-dirty mockup I’d made for it.
Yikes. But some of the core ideas were already there and made it through to the end unchanged. At the time, I was imagining it more like the Spy vs Spy game. Or at least, my vague idea of it, since the ubiquitous ads for it were so evocative of what the game must be like, but I never actually played it.
That first version of the game went like this:
It sure seemed like a solid game mechanic, with an easily understandable win condition. And it seemed to be balanced in an interesting way from the start: you want to push your luck to get as much money as possible, while knowing that the more money you’re carrying, the more vulnerable you are.
And I especially liked the final part of the win condition, in theory. It had a little bit of the prisoner’s dilemma baked in: the optimal way to play the game would be to do nothing at all, since you’d end up with half of a fortune with no risk. It seemed thematically appropriate for a game about greedy siblings, and an awful rich guy trying to punish them one last time from beyond the grave.
It was a rare case of my coming up with an idea where the mechanic and theme seemed perfectly in sync, the mechanic had an inherent push/pull balance, and it would be easy to implement. All the challenge would be in figuring out the “set dressing” to make it more engaging.
I estimated a few months of development, which I knew was overly optimistic for me but would be a healthy challenge for myself, to encourage me to just hunker down and get it done. I figured worst case, it’d take about six months. That pitch doc is dated May of 2022, by the way.
Two things I did correctly on the project: got a working prototype as quickly as possible before going too deep into the artwork, and invested in coming up with a game architecture instead of making it up as I went.
The latter was something I learned during Sasquatchers, since I’d initially assumed that it would be wasted time to over-engineer a project in Lua for a one-bit handheld. Instead, I’d implemented things only as I needed them. What I discovered, though, was that I’d been making things harder for myself by special-casing everything. Later in the project, when I could use a variation on something I’d already made, development went a lot faster, and it was easier to try out variants and alternates. I could implement a new feature in an hour instead of taking a couple of days.
One specific example: to show a health pickup, I made an animated sprite that you could attach to a character, and it would move along with the character and dispose of itself when finished. Once that was in place, I could add all sorts of new status effects, just by changing the art.
The Playdate SDK is interesting because it combines a bunch of lower-level (relatively speaking) systems with some higher-level, very specific one-offs. You have functions to draw a rectangle, for example, or to draw a complete, fully animated “Use the Crank!” indicator. If you want a windowed UI with menus and animated panels and such, you have to implement it yourself, probably using the sophisticated sprite system. It gives you a ton of flexibility, but also means you start out each project with basically a blank page.
I reused some of the systems I’d made for Sasquatchers, with modifications for stuff that I hadn’t used or was poorly designed, and had a reasonably robust UI library in place within a week or two. (The one for Sound Mind still isn’t simple or efficient enough to release as open source or anything, but it worked fine for this project).
I did some experimentation on the art side, trying to come up with something that seemed like a distinctive style. A late addition to Sasquatchers was to add pseudo-achievements and a certificate of completion when you’d finished all of them.1 I tried to make it look like an engraving by using only horizontal lines on the Jackalope to match the shading in the source image. The end result surprised me because it looked like I knew what I was doing.
Based on that, I decided I’d try to see if I could do all of the art for Sound Mind with just black and white as if it were an ink drawing, using only horizontal lines, and occasionally stippling, for shading. For me, a ton of the appeal of the Playdate and its 1-bit display was seeing a return to the dithering patterns of the classic Macintosh; it immediately reminded me of MacPaint and HyperCard. But I’d already done that for Sasquatchers, so I wanted to see how far I could get with just the rule of “no dithering, ever.”
Early attempts were promising, so I was encouraged to experiment a little bit more and do more objects. The characters are (believe it or not) very loosely based on references: William Powell from The Thin Man and various promotional stills of Ava Gardner and Cyd Charisse. Once I had some objects and characters that I was generally happy with, I could start setting up a basic movement prototype:
Which let me focus on making a bunch of new objects:
And then about a month and a half later (based on the file timestamps, at least) have a fully-playable prototype:
With the art style working for me, I could focus on the game mechanics and timing without spending too much time worrying about walk animations and such.
That let me experiment with stuff like object placement, how big the room should be, etc. Some of the basics were already obvious: there should be at least two of everything, so you can’t tell which object your opponent used based on its sound alone. And there should be no area of the room where you can go without triggering some a distinctive noise (the cymbal monkey, the warrior fetish, the theremin, etc) to give a clue as to where you were.
At that point, there were only two small problems remaining: I’d already gone way over my estimated time, and the game wasn’t fun.
A big part of why I’d already gone past my schedule was that I had a day job, and I’ve never understood how game developers manage to finish projects while working a day job. And the job I had at the time was a bit stressful, so even when we weren’t crunching, I’d rarely feel like doing anything in the evenings besides decompress.
The game mechanic was a more significant problem. Honestly, I probably won’t ever do a two-player game again, or at least one that depends so heavily on hidden information, since this one was a beast to test as a solo developer. Especially since it was designed from the start to be pass-and-play, meaning that you can’t really test it online. There’s a reason why solo hide-and-seek never took off.
Even playing it while pretending that I’d had no idea what I’d just done over the last turn, it still turned into a constant back-and-forth that wasn’t satisfying. Part of the problem was dealing with abstract amounts of money, instead of just a single, big, sack full of it. You were having to guess how much you were holding and how much your opponent was holding, and whether you’d stashed some inside this chest or that box felt more arbitrary than strategic.
And the turn count and final turns seemed like an unsolvable problem. There wasn’t much of a sense of progression, but just your taking money from the other player and then their taking it back from you. A lot of that might’ve had simple solutions, but the first turn/last turn advantage seemed unsolvable. The entire game was decided by the last turn, based solely on whether the other player could find you.
I got some feedback on the first playable from Panic, and as always, they’re the best. Encouraging and extraordinarily patient. But I could tell that it was in the state of “this could become a good game at some point,” more than a good game that needed polish, because it simply hadn’t come together like I’d imagined.
After I left my day job, I was fortunate to be in a position where I didn’t need to start looking for work immediately. So I figured I could finally work full-time on finishing this game and be done with it. But then, I heard about an opening for what was literally my dream job, one that seemed as if it couldn’t be more perfectly suited to me. I’d have been a fool not to apply for it, and I ended up getting it. Which meant going back to having only evenings to commit to Sound Mind.
Even so, I was still stuck on finding the hook that would fix the game. I’m super grateful to my friend Seppo Helava, for indulging me in several very long email conversations hashing out various alternatives. There was so much back and forth, and I took up so much of his time, that I’m not even sure which ideas came from where. It is safe to assume that all of the ones that don’t quite work are mine.
And this veers a bit into too-much-information territory, but I think it’s worth calling out: depression. I started taking varenicline (brand name Chantix) to stop smoking, because I’d had some luck with it years earlier, and didn’t think there were any major side effects besides nausea. What I hadn’t realized was that it does have an effect on my mental state, but it happens so gradually that I hadn’t noticed the first time. Others had, but I’d just chalked it up to a bunch of lousy things happening all at once. In any case, it killed my motivation to do anything at all, and destroyed any momentum I’d had on the project. Every issue with it seemed insurmountable.
The version I eventually landed on:
There might still be some simple and elegant tricks that would’ve made the original design more engaging, but I’m happy that this version has such a clear and easily-understandable goal and win condition, since the rest of the game is kind of weird.
Since I was planning on a game that was so heavily dependent on sound, it was a good thing that I’m friends with professional sound designers at Bay Area Sound. When I told my friend Jared Emerson-Johnson the pitch, he described it as “Foley: the Video Game.” I used temp sounds during development, and he and Julian Kwasneski came through with a great combination of ambient noise and sound effects that had to range from realistic to cartoony.
One of the things I knew I wanted in the game was a warrior fetish, like the one in Trilogy of Terror. That was a made-for-TV horror anthology from 1975 with stories about terrible things happening to characters played by Karen Black. The one most memorable to people around my age was the segment called “Amelia,” where she buys a creepy wooden figure that goes nuts and tries to kill her.
Since Jared is such a brilliant composer, it was a drag that the game couldn’t really have any music apart from the occasional stinger, since the sound effects had to always be prominent. I asked for a short bit of music that would play over the conclusion screen, and I wanted it to evoke the opening credits of the Mystery series on PBS, which were animated by Derek Lamb using artwork by Edward Gorey.
The art and setting of Sound Mind had already started to resemble an attempt at Gorey’s style, which became more intentional the longer I worked on it. Reading his Amphigorey collection as an adolescent was a huge influence on me, since his style and sense of humor remain unmatched.2
Jared nailed the ending music, of course. But while we were chatting online and I shared the video from Trilogy of Terror to give an idea of what the warrior fetish sounded like, he called out the background music. This YouTube video has the entire segment, but the relevant part starts at 12:48. I hadn’t even noticed the music, since it was so ubiquitous as “TV horror/suspense” that it just blends into the background. But he wanted to do a couple variations, just for yuks. Within a half hour he’d made three versions that were absolutely pitch perfect.3
A late addition to the game was Doctor Whatsit, the helpful robot. This was entirely because James Moore at Panic had found an adaptation of the Software Automatic Mouth code and ported it to the Playdate. I had SAM on the Commodore 64 and was kind of obsessed with it, and later with Macintalk for the Mac Plus. I wanted it in the game even if there weren’t a good place for it.
If you’re in a game where you’re trying to sneak around and keep quiet, the least helpful thing is a robot announcing everything that you’re looking at. This originally took the form of steampunk AR goggles, which would’ve caused a lot of problems with animation, so I finally settled on a Speak-and-Spell-like toy that would helpfully name everything you’re using.
A few other ideas that didn’t make the cut:
“Mysterio’s Cabinet,” which would magically teleport you to a random hiding place somewhere else in the room. This was replaced with the magic wardrobes, which work like a front-of-the-room counterpart to the secret bookcase passages.
Voodoo dolls of the twins, which you could use to take some damage yourself (you’d move more slowly for the rest of the turn) but would signal you exactly where your sibling was hiding (they’d say “ouch!”)
The Fiji Mermaid, which would be a monkey’s paw-type of device that would either grant you a wish (take me to my sibling, or bring the sack of doubloons to me) or randomly penalize you.
There was also a wall safe behind the father’s portrait above the fireplace. You could find envelopes containing earlier drafts of the will, which could change the rules in your favor. This was to throw some chaos into the game, having the rules change frequently like the card game Fluxx. You had to find a will with a rule that you liked and then sneak it into the wall safe to make it take effect.
That whole mechanic was cut in favor of the “Secret Clause” game mode, which gives each player a secret goal, for instance: Kane can earn two extra doubloons every time Mabel triggers the theremin sound effect.
Sound Mind isn’t particularly sophisticated in terms of what’s going on under the hood, but I usually think it’s interesting to hear what tools and techniques developers use.
Much of the art was first done in Procreate for the iPad, which is the best drawing software I’ve ever used. It was then imported to Pixaki for iPad, which is designed for pixel art and animation. I’d draw over the original sketches and then usually do animation there.
I used Photoshop for combining and exporting most stuff, all the while looking for something that could replace it and free me from Adobe once and for all. The best contender I’ve found so far is Pixelmator Pro, but despite the name, I haven’t been a big fan of how it handles pixel art with a fixed palette and resolution, as required by the Playdate.
For the title screen, and for the revolving walls and bookcases, I used Blender. I did this very late in the process because I thought it would be overkill for a project like this, but it turned out to be one of the easiest parts of the project. Even for simple drawings, trying to get the rotations to look right started to feel like me trying to make Akira by myself.
The title screen is just flats with an animated camera, but the effect looks a lot more impressive than what’s actually happening. The most time-consuming part was having to clean up each frame by hand, because the horizontal-line shading breaks when scaling.
All the code is in Lua, except for James’s port of SAM, which is in C.
The most useful chunks of code:
A couple of the funnest things to work on:
During development of the game, there was the suggestion of making it asynchronous online multiplayer. You’d play your turn, it would upload everything to a server, and then your opponent would hear a playback of every sound you made, and then play their turn.
At the time it seemed if not impossible, then at least more trouble than it’d warrant. For one thing, the game had been conceived from the start as pass-and-play, so I never put any consideration into saving the game state. For another, I’m not a network programmer, and I’ve only done the lightest bit of experimenting with it.
Now, I don’t think it’s as daunting as I’d originally estimated. But I’m not sure it’s necessary, either. I was talking about it with my husband (who’s a huge fan of online multiplayer games, incidentally), and he pointed out that a lot of that initial appeal was something you could play together with someone in person. It does kind of limit the audience for the game, but it’s also what makes it unique. Maybe it’ll make more sense at some point, but for now I’m personally happy thinking of the game being what it is.
Another thing I realized during development is that I’ve inadvertently made like 80% of what would be required for an adventure game on the Playdate. I do have an idea for a game that could use the same characters and the same setting (but more than just the room), and I do have more experience with adventure games than two-player hide-and-seek games.
The issue is that adventure games might be the most resource-intensive type of game there is, something I never really appreciated when I was just firing off ideas and not having to draw, animate, and program them myself. It might be a good opportunity for collaboration with a better artist.
At the moment, I’m happy the game finally found its place, as a novelty embedded in a package of some really excellent games in Playdate’s Season 3. It is, again, a pretty weird game, and it won’t be everybody’s thing. My hope is that it’ll become one of those things where the people who like it enjoy it a lot.
Out of everything I’ve made and worked on, Sound Mind is the closest thing yet to getting a peek inside my brain to see how it works. For better or worse.
And there’s no way it would’ve been possible without Panic. Not just for choosing the game as one that matches their freak, but for the whole Playdate project. Coming up with this whole platform dedicated to enabling creative ideas, and then inviting people to have fun with it. It feels like a little bit of a cop-out when I say “thanks to everyone at Panic” instead of naming individuals, but the issue is that every person I’ve ever dealt with there, without exception, has been just great.
I’m happy that it’s finally done and out there, and that I can be pretty proud of it. (At least until all of the obscure timing-related bugs start to come in. I may have made a game that was difficult to test since it’s two-player only, but at least I made sure that it was heavily dependent on timing. The “double threat,” as they say). But don’t let me scare you off. If you check it out, I hope you have fun!
2026-10-23 01:00:00
I’ve never read the comic from which 30 Days of Night is adapted, but I could still tell pretty quickly that the movie is a strong adaptation. Especially during the first half, so much of it feels like a comic.
Not in the same sense that Darkman feels like a comic book, but in the way that “mature” comics from Dark Horse or Vertigo tell their stories. (The comic was published by IDW, but Dark Horse Entertainment was one of the production companies for the movie, and it’s more about vibe than any specific franchises).
The movie’s full of stationary shots with strong compositions chosen for maximum impact. You can immediately imagine them being panels on a comic book page. Characters are often shot in close-up, delivering short lines of dialogue crammed full of as much weight as possible, and you can practically see the area on the frame where the speech bubble would appear.
And scenes of movement and action are shown in discrete, almost static images — a victim, a close-up of a knife, a shot of blood landing on the ground. (Content warning: dogs are killed, but the action is suggested instead of shown, and we see the aftermath in extreme close-up. Children are killed as well, but off screen).
The story is set in the northernmost town in Alaska, where every winter there’s a 30-day period with no sunlight. We start on the last day of sun, when most of the town’s residents are leaving to catch a plane to Anchorage or elsewhere, not willing to spend a month in the dark. But a stranger (called only “The Stranger”) has also come into town, to cause a lot of trouble, guarantee the town is completely cut off from the rest of the world, and be a harbinger of their impending doom.
It’s really effective at setting the mood and setting the stakes. (So to speak). There is a real sense of building dread. And the movie doesn’t waste too much time having its monsters sneaking around in the dark; things get intense pretty quickly.
But that also means that the movie is more bleak and joyless than I’d expected, since I had heard that the movie is more of an action/horror hybrid than straight horror, and I’d expected the towns people to spend a lot more time fighting back. It quickly becomes a case of the humans being completely overwhelmed by an overpowered force, and they’re just having to figure out how to survive.
Danny Huston plays the chief vampire, and he spends the entire role speaking in some unrecognizable, presumably ancient language full of consonants and opportunities to spit. He’s putting a lot into it, but there’s not really enough of a hook to the character to be that interesting.
Josh Hartnett and Melissa George are playing the estranged married couple who are the leads, and they both do well, George in particular. She’s got more to work with, and she sells the idea of being the strongest-willed and smartest person in the room without overdoing it. Hartnett has to play The Hero, and he doesn’t really have any defining character traits beyond having asthma and sudden outbursts where he cares about family above everything else. Except for his grandmother, who he always calls by her first name and didn’t seem particularly attached to.
My other complaints are that it doesn’t feel like it builds to its conclusion, as much as it uses up all of its good ideas and then just has to settle on a finale that works as a horror action movie. The most clever thing the survivors do happens just after the halfway mark, and it’s not as satisfying as I’d been hoping from the premise. And there was a dramatic finale that I’d been expecting since it was foreshadowed early on, but it also gets used too early, and it doesn’t take out more than one vampire.
But none of my gripes about 30 Days of Night are all that damning; it’s a solid vampire movie with an interesting premise and a really strong first half. I just think it’s a lot stronger when it’s emulating horror comics than when it’s emulating other action movies from the early 2000s.
2026-10-22 01:30:00
There’s one image from The Legend of Hell House that I must’ve seen at an impressionable age, because it’s been seared into my brain as the definitive image of Hammer Horror. Four very 1970s, very British people approach the imposing gates of a gothic mansion shrouded in fog, and look up at it with steely resolve to find out what’s inside.
I figured that I must not be the only one to be so impressed by it, since Edgar Wright referenced it in the beginning of his trailer for Don’t.
One issue is that it’s not a Hammer Horror movie, at all. And for that matter, it turns out that the most British of British people in the cast, Clive Revill, is from New Zealand. And also, I was incorrect in my assumption that it was probably good.
The premise is that a dying man hires a team of experts to investigate “the Mount Everest of haunted houses,” the Belasco House, to get definitive proof of the existence of life after death. One of the experts is a physicist named Lionel Barrett, who attends with his wife. There’s also Florence Tanner, a young “mental medium,” who happens to be a devout Christian and believes it’s her duty to help guide spirits to heaven. And Ben Fischer, a “physical medium,” who was the only survivor of a previous attempt to investigate the house.
The screenplay is by Richard Matheson, who was adapting his own novel. (Relocated from Maine to England, with “Benjamin Franklin Fischer” now only called “Ben”). It feels very much like a product of the wave of horror novels in the 1970s, that tried to give more modern, contemporary, and adult (read: psychosexual) takes on classic horror stories, offering a scientific take on the supernatural, and a combination of psychological horror and old-fashioned scares.
Which all means that this is a movie where one of the characters has sex with a ghost, believing it’s the only way to guide its spirit to rest. Later, Dr. Barrett is examining the damage done to his gigantic EMP machine and says, “Thank God she didn’t know what to smash,” which I thought was ironic, since she clearly did.
Maybe it works better in the book. In the movie, it just seems to have a very strong idea of what it wants to be, but just can’t bring that to the screen. Dr Barrett is supposed to be the skeptic, but it’s a very mushy idea, since he’s there to do “sittings” where the mediums make contact with whatever energy’s in the house, so he can study the ectoplasm and see objects flying around of their own accord. He just doesn’t believe in ghosts, which felt like a very odd place to draw the line.
To its credit, having a team that’s all completely on board with séances and objects moving around is a nice change of pace from the usual haunted house story. When Miss Tanner has a ghost fling a blanket on her, she reacts more with annoyance than with shock or disbelief.
I also get the impression that the book goes into more depth with the characters’ mindsets being influenced by whatever entities are in the house, tapping into their fears or insecurities and making them do things they normally wouldn’t. In the movie, this just gets reduced to some clunky dialogue in circular arguments that get repeated several times, and the physicist’s wife getting super horny.
Maybe the resolution of the movie works better in the book as well, because it sure as heck doesn’t in the movie. I’m still frankly stunned that it was as dumb as it is. If you’re watching The Legend of Hell House for the first time, stop at around the 30-minute mark and try to predict the dumbest resolution for the story you can think of. The real one is even dumber than that, I guarantee.
But I still can’t hate on this movie too much, for a couple of reasons. First is the soundtrack, which was credited to Brian Hodgson and Delia Derbyshire. Derbyshire was a pioneer in electronic music who’s most well known for arranging the theme to Doctor Who. The score of The Legend of Hill House mostly consists of weird electronic gasps, sighs, and moans that break through the silence at opportune moments. It gives the whole thing a creepy, contemporary feel in a way that the images alone wouldn’t. These are very much people from the 1970s inside a very gothic and very haunted mansion.
And the main reason is just vibes and atmosphere. That image of the group approaching the front gate stood out in my mind because the movie is full of some great imagery. The group walking in front of the house in fog, with everything shot from a low angle. The group entering the dark house, shot from the inside with the people silhouetted against the solid gray light of the threshold. Roddy McDowell’s huge eyeglasses. Pamela Franklin’s wardrobe, which especially at the beginning looks like a mash-up of Mod and Puritan.
The Legend of Hell House sure feels like it’s going interesting places, for about half of its runtime. Then the illusion gets shattered, as you realize it’s actually just going around in circles. And then you wish it had kept going around in circles instead of dropping its finale on you. But at least there’s an attack from a black cat puppet, which is a lot of fun.
2026-10-21 01:00:00
Chopping Mall has gotten a reputation as a “cult classic,” enough for its scene with Dick Miller to get a slot in the opening of each Dead Meat podcast, so I definitely wasn’t going into it expecting it to be some sort of art film. It’s definitively 1980s B-movie horror. But I hadn’t expected it to be so self-consciously 1980s B-movie horror.
It felt as if they’d stopped trying to come up with ideas after they’d hit on the title. And honestly, who can blame them, since it’s such a good title. Nothing that I could come up with for a title for this blog post would be able to compete, but I still wanted to share all the alternates.
The movie takes place in an unspecified mall somewhere in Los Angeles — an exterior shot with a street sign suggests it’s Beverly Center, but the credits say it was filmed inside the Sherman Oaks Galleria — that has just installed a new state-of-the-art security system. Huge steel doors automatically seal up all of the entrances and exits at night, and a trio of robots will be patrolling the floors, ready to subdue intruders until the police can be called in the next morning.
Unfortunately, a group of horny young mall workers have decided to stay after hours and have an orgy inside a furniture store. These are men and women in their late 20s who, for some reason, are working in a mall and still have to ask for their parents’ permission to go to a party.
And I say “orgy,” but it really looks like some awkward dancing, a chance for each of the ladies to present their breasts to the camera for exactly one (1) shot, and then sex in the beds which we’re explicitly told does not include oral.
To make matters worse, one of the rainless thunderstorms that Los Angeles is famous for is happening that night, and a few bolts of lightning strike an electrical box on the roof, causing the mall’s sophisticated computer system to go haywire and turn all of the protector robots murderous.
The movie makes its intentions completely clear from the start. The security company’s presentation starts with a film of the robots tasering a jewel thief, and then has a Q&A session to set up the premise to a crowd of people that includes Mary Woronov and Paul Bartel playing their characters from 1982’s Eating Raoul.
I don’t know why that is, and to be honest I don’t care enough to do any research beyond checking to see if the movies had prominent cast or crew in common. As far as I can tell, it’s simply an extended cameo, and an announcement that this movie intends to be black comedy satire in a similar vein to that movie. I’ve never seen Eating Raoul, but if that movie is sophisticated and clever as the commentary and the eye-rolling and mugging for the camera that Woronov and Bartel deliver in Chopping Mall, then I will never be seeing Eating Raoul.
It calms down a bit after that opening sequence, but the same spirit carries on throughout Chopping Mall. It feels as if the filmmakers are desperate for the audience to understand that they’re film buffs, and that this is all an homage to B-movies.
Dick Miller’s character’s name is Walter Paisley, the same as he played in Roger Corman movies. The mall pet store (that sells tarantulas) is named “Little House of Pets.” The sporting goods store where the guys stock up on shotguns, revolvers, and assault weapons is called “Peckinpah’s.” They didn’t feel like sly references so much as making sure to signal that they were in on the joke.
As much as I tried to get into the spirit of the whole experience, I kept being knocked out of it. The only clip that I’d seen from Chopping Mall has proto-Robin Scherbatsky character Linda, after an angry outburst, saying, “I guess I’m just not used to being chased around a mall in the middle of the night by killer robots.” I’d assumed that the movie would be more wryly self-aware, instead of constantly asking the audience, “Get it?!“
The most surprising thing to me in Chopping Mall is that it actually came out before Robocop. I would’ve bet anything that it was a parody made cheaply and quickly to cash in on that movie’s popularity.
And there’s something that feels weirdly mercenary and made-for-TV about the whole thing. All of the scene transitions are, jarringly, preceded by a fade to black, as if the movie was intended from the start to be commercial TV-friendly. For a while, I thought that had to be some kind of weird stylistic flourish, since this movie was clearly R-rated. But then I realized that all of the nudity happens in carefully composed shots that might as well have frame markers at the beginning and end, to make it easier to edit them out for broadcast. The single f-bomb could’ve been easily bleeped out, and the one shot of feature-caliber violence could’ve been cut as well.
A point that’s actually in the movie’s favor: it’s got all of the pop culture signifiers of the 1980s that you’d expect, especially from a movie set in a mall, but it also has reminders of just how long ago the 1980s actually were. It’s not just some blandly nostalgic self-contained world of malls, neon, perms, and leg warmers. There are cigarette machines in this mall, and a character complains about how expensive they are, at $1.50 a pack!
That means I could remember myself in the 1980s, when I would’ve been much more inclined to like a movie like this. Comedy was broader, my tolerance for showy self-awareness was a lot higher, and I probably would’ve gotten a kick out of how self-consciously and intentionally stupid it was.
Plus, it’s easy to forget how much more accessible movies are in 2026, and how much easier it is to get info about them and find like-minded fans. The references probably would’ve seemed less obvious back then. And I would’ve seen Gerrit Graham’s small part in this and thought “oh cool, I like that guy!” instead of “oh man, this is gonna be corny as all hell.”
But as it is, it just felt like it was filmmakers deliberately aiming for the Lowest Common Denominator and convinced that they were better than the material. I would’ve been a lot more into it if they’d just gone for it, and proudly made a B-movie without all of the baggage.
After all, the best scene in the entire thing is when one of the robots shoots a laser at a woman running through the mall in her underwear, and her head just straight-up explodes. When you’ve got something that reaches that kind of heights, why not just commit to it?
2026-10-19 01:00:00
The Devils is almost exactly as old as I am, which is something I had to keep reminding myself as I watched the new restoration of the director’s cut, currently running in major theater chains under an NC-17 rating. The restoration is so clean, and the picture quality is so flawless, that it can be easy to treat it like a new release and forget to put yourself in the mindset of someone watching it fifty years ago.
Ideally, the movie wouldn’t require that kind of translation. It’d be timeless. It’s set in the town of Loudun in France, during the time of the Inquisition, and tells the true-life account of a womanizing priest Father Grandier (Oliver Reed), and Jeanne des Anges (Vanessa Redgrave), mother superior of the town’s convent, who’s sexually obsessed with Grandier and driven by jealousy to falsely accuse him of witchcraft. Because it’s a period movie, there’s little in the costuming or subject matter that feels locked in the 1970s. At least, until Michael Gothard shows up as the Witchfinder Father Barre, looking like he’d wandered in off the set of Tommy. I’m still not sure whether that was intentional.
And the subject matter is as relevant now as it’s ever been. In particular, the themes of sexual repression, ritual and dogma vs genuine righteousness, and the forces of corruption manipulating our institutions for their own gain.
I kept having to remind myself that for as new and fresh as The Devils looks now, it’s still frozen in 1970-71, while the world and the media have matured. I’m not at all suggesting that its imagery feels quaint or old-fashioned now; it’s still very challenging and uncomfortable, even if it’s not as unprecedentedly shocking as it would’ve been on its release. It’s more that its style of filmmaking belies the substance. I could sense that it had more profound intentions than to be merely provocative, but it kept undermining that with moments that were so over-the-top that they seemed to be aiming for little more than to provoke a shocked reaction.
One aspect that is unquestionably and undeniably brilliant is the architecture and set design. The town itself is stark white and brutalist, and we get a fantastic scene of Grandier eulogizing the deceased governor to the townspeople, all dressed in black.
Inside the town walls, we see close-ups of the boils and sores of the plague victims, and their mass graves, and the clean white walls and arches make it clear that this town is fully enclosed and self-contained, a safe enclave against the ravaged wasteland (full of the decaying corpses of Protestants) that surrounds it.
The convent is covered in white tile, separated from the rest of the town by heavy iron bars, driving home the idea that it’s a prison — or a mental institution — instead of a sanctuary. The quote I keep seeing is that Russell wanted it to look like an exorcism taking place in a public lavatory.
Later in the movie, we see the machinations of the Inquisitors, and it looks like a giant bureaucratic nightmare straight out of 1984 or Brazil. There are more iron bars everywhere, reminiscent of Alcatraz, and paired with the multi-story iron doors with a giant red cross emblazoned on them, it clearly suggests institutional Catholicism as a prison.
During Grandier’s trial, the Inquisitors wear white pointed hoods with red crosses on them, and combined with the starkness of the architecture, the scene evokes sci-fi horror more than a period piece.
Another striking location is Grandier’s home/sleeping quarters, at the top of a round tower accessible only by stone spiral stairs. We see him awaiting trial wearing a fur-lined dressing gown with a multicolored paisley pattern that’s almost gaudy, a reminder that for as much as the story has emphasized his earnest righteousness, he never lived an austere life.
Because the movie is relentlessly surreal in all of its imagery, its sequences of dreams or visions don’t stand out quite as much as they do in Russell’s other movies, like Altered States or The Lair of the White Worm. But they’re still striking. In one, Jeanne imagines Grandier walking on water. In another she sees him as Christ after the crucifixion, and she comes to lick the blood from all of his wounds. They’re filmed not as religious rapture, but intense sexual desire, blood and pain and violence combined with lustful passion.
In the moment, they read as little more than “Jeanne is seriously unstable,” and her sexual desire has gone past run-of-the-mill horniness into a willingness to debase herself and do actual self-harm. It’s only later in the movie, after we’ve seen all of the Inquisition-led and sanctioned scenes of depravity, debauchery, and violence that go far beyond even her most intense visions, that you get any sense of sympathy for her.
She was not particularly a woman of faith; when the woman who would become Grandier’s wife tries to be admitted to the convent, Jeanne tells her that none of the women are there because of their religious devotion. They’re in the convent because they’ve been cast off. Jeanne has a physical abnormality that we can assume would’ve made her an outcast during the period, even without the church’s involvement, so she’s left with no outlet for her sexual desire and no recourse except to feel shame for it.
There’s no version of this character that could be said to have a healthy level of horniness, but it’s clear that it was made worse and more intense by a society that had no need for her until her accusations could help their own agenda, and that she was by no means the only person in the town with “impure thoughts.”
And that gets back to my main issue with The Devils, and why it was such a disappointment for me after hearing it talked about for decades as a masterpiece. Its lurid outrageousness, and its eagerness to play everything at max intensity throughout, undermines any depth or complexity we could get out of its characters or the things that happen to them.
The only actors in the movie who play their roles with restraint and conviction are Oliver Reed as Grandier, and Gemma Jones as the devout young woman who would eventually become his wife. But Reed spends most of the movie making speeches instead of engaging in dialogue. And until the end of the movie, it’s never quite clear whether he’s saying things because he genuinely believes them, or if he’s carving out indulgences for himself, justifying the lifestyle he wants while still being in a position of authority in the church. As a viewer, I believe in the things he’s saying — austerity and self-denial aren’t virtues for their own sake — but I spent most of the movie wondering whether he really believed in them, or was a hypocrite.
But there’s no getting around my main complaint about The Devils, which is that apart from Reed and Jones, nobody else seems aware of what type of movie they’re in, and what its tone should be. Many of the performances are just flat-out awful, in my opinion, even taking into account the standards of early 1970s cinema, a huge cast, and someone as over-the-top as Russell in charge.
When they’re showing nuns, Inquisitors, and townspeople in an orgy, defiling all the icons of the church, the blasphemy didn’t offend me nearly as much as all of the people hamming it up. Just because you can find someone willing to get naked except for a dog collar and writhe around on top of a big crucifix, that doesn’t mean they have any screen presence. The movie has a long history of censors labeling it pornography, and I was kind of depressed and disappointed to find myself agreeing. Not because I was shocked by what I was seeing, or because it had no intention beyond titillation or provocation. But because there are very long sequences filled with people on screen who didn’t read at all as “nuns” but as “extras who were willing to get naked.”
I think it would be damning (so to speak) enough if it were just the extras, but it’s several of the speaking characters as well. So many of them seem to be acting in different movies from each other, and they rarely if ever sync up.
And while I do think that there’s a point to all the scenes of torture and trials — the sins of the characters are nothing compared to the depravity of the Inquisitors, who will do unspeakable things for power, not even ideology — I do still think that there are only so many scenes of women getting objects, devices, or liquids shoved up inside of them that any movie needs. The Devils exceeded its quota.
(Spoiler warning: The scene that was cut from most versions until this restoration, where Jeanne gets thrown a charred bone from Grandier’s remains and uses it to pleasure herself, is an exception. Exactly the correct level of outrageousness, in my opinion).
Again, I kept having to try and put myself in the mindset of someone who would’ve been seeing this movie while I was still an infant. My impression of the time is that you’d learn about the events of the period, and you’d even see the occasional drawing or replica version of torture devices, but it was all left comfortably in the abstract. Nothing was showing you how cruel the Inquisition was, or how devastating the Plague was, or even how miserable conditions were for women and how few options they had. And you’d rarely see it put so directly into a political context, showing the hypocrisy and corruption of institutions, and the importance of the division between church and state.
But for me, The Devils seemed unflinching in the depravity, violence, and cruelty it was willing to show, but didn’t add much besides being visually striking.
There is only one thing that was timeless, and that I felt to my core at a visceral level, and that’s how Oliver Reed was preternaturally hot. I didn’t believe anything I saw in The Devils, but I could totally relate to anyone seeing this man and being overcome with impure thoughts to the point of a dark obsession.
