The 13 Coolest Looking Werewolves in Movie History

There are certain rules you need to know to survive a horror movie. Jamie Kennedy’s Randy Meeks codified them for a post-slasher world in the 1990s via Scream. But if you’re a fan of far more classic cinema—or the lore that inspired it in the case of Robert Eggers, director of this Christmas’ Werwulf—then there are even more foundational commandments that should be obeyed: Beware the moon, stick to the road, and whatever you do, don’t go investigate that howling out on the moors.

More than any other mythical creature of legend this side of vampires, the werewolf is the monster we most associate with spooky season and Halloween. The concept goes back to the Ancient Greeks if not further, with the dread of transforming into a beast tapping into something literally primal… and perhaps seductive to a certain point-of-view. In the last century of moviemaking, the canon has been especially crystallized: the silver bullet (or weapon), the fear of wolfsbane, and of course the full moon. And yet, despite that general universality, the look of the werewolf has evolved and changed through the decades, with bipedal and quadruped lycanthropes alike earning their fans and detractors. But which is, purely aesthetically speaking, the coolest looking furry monster?

This Halloween, we’re going to determine exactly that with the below ranking of the fiercest, scariest, or just outright fun werewolf designs to bare their fangs on the big screen…

13. Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)

We start this one with a cheat since, technically, Gary Oldman plays a vampire and not a werewolf in the misleadingly titled Bram Stoker’s Dracula. However, at the same time, Francis Ford Coppola was faithful in acknowledging that Irish author Stoker really did conflate vampirism and werewolfism as one in the same in his book, as did some folklorists before him. On the page, the literary Count Dracula would seem to turn into a literal wolf from time to time. But in this film, Coppola being Coppola, means Oldman’s Count turns into a bestial horndog.

The makeup team of Greg Cannon, Michele Burke, and Matthew W. Mungle won an Oscar for a reason on this movie, and there is something appropriately retro in the modern age of prosthetics and dawning CG that Coppola essentially did a throwback design to Jack Pierce and The Wolf Man, except he covered Gary Oldman head-to-toe in fur since this monster is as much a lothario as he is lethal. Fun fact: he’s also the werewolf design that most haunted modern horror director Eggers, who said “I saw him ravaging Sadie Frost on that bench, and I was way too young to see that, and it was pretty scary.”

12. Van Helsing (2004)

For readers who were an impressionable age in 2004, we suspect this could be the gold standard. There’s no denying that the general design of the Wolfman in Stephen Sommers’ Van Helsing is fun, combining the far more lupine features of modern movie werewolves with the bipedal posture of its namesake.

That blend of old and new earns Van Helsing a place on this list, but honestly the creature is just a little too garish in its CG appearance to be higher up in the ranking. Whether it’s the early Wolfman that Hugh Jackman puts down in the movie or the midnight-hued iteration our heroic Van Helsing in turn becomes at the end, both look more like cartoons than creatures of terror. 

11. Cabin in the Woods (2012)

Here we admit is a deeper cut considering how minor the werewolf is in the absolute monster mash madness of director Drew Goddard’s Cabin in the Woods. Beginning ostensibly as a satire of the “deviltry in the wilderness” branch of horror—think Evil Dead or The Hills Have Eyes—the film, which is co-written by Joss Whedon, turns into a cacophony of every trope and cliché in horror, complete with killer clowns, unicorns, and even an honest to Cthulu merman.

In this context, the werewolf gets both a small but pivotal role, as it and not-Pinhead are the third act creature reveals that let our surviving heroes realize how doomed they are. The werewolf also gets to be the beastie that later seals that fate when it mauls Kristen Connolly’s not-so-nice Final Girl in the movie’s blood-soaked climax. And as realized purely with prosthetics and animatronics, it’s pretty badass. Pity it’s not in the movie more.

10. The Werewolf of London (1935)

If we were ranking purely based on iconic status, Henry Hull’s grandaddy of Hollywood lycanthropes would be closer to the top. There is something, indeed, unforgettable about what Jack Pierce admirer Rick Baker calls “the Elvis of Werewolf Designs” because of the monster’s widow-peak rising back into a quasi-pompadour. This is apparently because actor Hull did not want to sit in makeup artist Pierce’s chair for as long as Boris Karloff did to become the Frankenstein Monster or the Mummy a few years earlier.

Furthermore, the screenplay of Werewolf of London is also a curiosity. Before its far more famous Universal Pictures stablemate redefined the werewolf archetype six years later, this film points to how nebulous the mythology around werewolves still tended to be. So Hull’s lycan can (at times) speak and otherwise strategize when he dons a cap and scarf to conceal his furry intentions. He’s more Jack the Ripper or Mr. Hyde than a bestial id, more man than wolf. But that adds to his charm as being a kind of outlier in the subgenre to this day.

9. Curse of the Werewolf (1961)

Did you know Oliver Reed was a werewolf? Of course you did, but we mean he played a literal one too for Hammer Studios! Curse of the Werewolf is a strange work. It’s loosely adapted from the far better (if still grotesque) novel The Werewolf of Paris by Guy Endore, but its medieval concerns about generational evil and the sins of the father being passed down are turned mostly into misjudged Hammer titillation mingling with stories of rape and incest.

Be that as it may, this was Hammer’s one stab at the werewolf movie, and when it finally gets to the moment where Reed wolfs out, it is indeed a B-movie delight with Roy Ashton’s more barbaric makeup design vaguely evoking Lon Chaney Jr. while adding sharper fangs, heavier fur, and of course brighter red blood, as is Hammer’s wont. It’s an iconic look for the bipedal wolfman that needed to be in this movie more.

8. Dog Soldiers (2002)

What if we did Aliens but with werewolves in Scotland? That very well could have been the elevator pitch for Neil Marshall’s Dog Soldiers, a movie where elite British soldiers attempt to get a little practice done in a remote corner of the Scottish Highlands, and instead find themselves trapped in a house surrounded by lycanthropes. There is just a bare minimum of emphasis on transformation or the tragedy of becoming a monster. Otherwise, this is balls-to-the-wall, guns blazing action-horror.

That remove from typical werewolf movie tropes is perhaps why the monster designs are so joyfully gnarly. With a minimum of fur on the legs, but a maximum amount on prosthetic masks that look as if a horse joined a glam metal rock band, these things are devoid of all humanity or reality. They also look sick as all hell when trying to burst through a window like a full-moon xenomorph.

7. Underworld: Evolution (2006)

If we’re being honest, the Underworld movies haven’t aged great. Definite products of a mid-2000s, post-Matrix and concurrent nu-metal leather aesthetic, they’re a ridiculous product of their time—although one with a bemusing sense of commitment to them, with the casts being littered with Shakespearean thespians spouting pseudo-Shakespearean nonsense. And the early installments at least remembered their first and most important edict: it must all look kewl!

The werewolf designs in the original Underworld by Patrick Tatopoulos are the more original, with these lycans (and henceforth only “lycans” since someone at Screen Gems apparently deemed the term “werewolf” to be goofy) looking closer to hairless cats than canines. But it’s in the sequel film Evolution that we get the best of both worlds. The main lycan in question, a tundra-hued polar bear of a menace named William, is nothing short of fantastic in appearance. In the same era as Van Helsing and Twilight’s all-CGI werewolves, here was a throwback to ‘80s prosthetic mastery; a beast purely defined by wolfish features that can switch between two and four legs depending on the situation. If only the rest of the movie could’ve been just lycan this.

6. The Company of Wolves (1984)

Admittedly this one is another bit of a cheat where we’re ranking for the extended, mid-transformation appearance more than the final shape, which in this Neil Jordan cult classic essentially becomes just a gray wolf. Nevertheless, entire scenes are played out before that moment, particularly near the end with Micha Bergese’s worldly French traveler revealing what big, lustful eyes he really has for Sarah Patterson’s young Rosaleen and her little red-riding hood.

All unsubtle Freudian metaphor for the dangers of dawning desire, particularly for young women raised in a patriarchal society, there’s something simple but psychologically profound about the werwolf in this film being a bare-chested predator with long hair, preternaturally luminous eyes, and very, very big teeth. It might not win an Fangoria award, but it is perhaps the most threatening silhouette on this entire list. 

5. The Wolfman (2010)

Rick Baker might just be the Michelangelo of werewolves. He certainly designed the definitive transformation for one in the unforgettable An American Werwolf in London. He also riffed on his idol Jack Pierce’s “Elvis Werewolf” design when he lightly turned Jack Nicholson into a furry via Wolf (1994). Baker even gave us Michael Jackson’s were-cat in the “Thriller” music video! But it was right before retirement that he returned one more time to the screen for the most pure tribute to Pierce in his career, The Wolfman (2010).

A flawed but, we’d argue, fascinating movie, this troubled production featured an absolute flawless throwback to early and mid-20th century werewolf movies when Baker turned Benicio del Toro into an even hairier monster prowling the streets of Victorian London. It is probably the most sophisticated iteration of the classic movie monster silhouette. The claws are longer, the fangs scarier, and the clothes far more ripped and bloodied. Yet it is perhaps so well-done—and also so clearly a mask near the end when del Toro needs to emote more than pure rage while circling Emily Blunt—that we keep it a little lower than its paterfamilias namesake.

4. Ginger Snaps (2000)

Curiously there are not a lot of female werewolves in fiction. Be it movies, TV shows, or books, even subcultures of lycanthropes are typically depicted by male-dominated demographics. Think Twilight, Underworld, Van Helsing. That makes Ginger Snaps doubly special considering it not only centers on a she-wolf of the Great White, Canadian North, but it uses the concept as a coming-of-age allegory for young women in general and those who might identify as queer or LGBTQ+ in particular.

It is probably for that reason the designs in Ginger Snaps are so outside-the-box. We admit we’re ranking more for the mid-metamorphosis appearance of Ginger Fitzgerald (Katharine Isabelle), who spends most of the film becoming her bloody best self after being mauled by a werewolf that scented out her first menstrual cycle. Midway through the film, Ginger embraces her bad self with a monstrous face and ghostly white-streaked hair cascading in waves down her face. Later on, she is replaced by a full bear-sized quadruped which also is pretty damn nifty as well as it tries to spread the liberation.

3. An American Werewolf in London (1981)

If we were ranking werewolf transformations, this would be number one with a bullet, silver or otherwise. In fact, it is! But if we are ranking purely based on the scientific metric of “what looks coolest,” we suppose we have a bit of a bias for bipedal beasties, as we’ll get to in a moment. Nevertheless, there is no denying that Rick Baker and John Landis’ vision for a four-legged “hound from hell!” is the definitive rendition of a quadruped werewolf.

Entirely the creation of animatronics and creature-shop design in his final form, this culmination of David Kessler’s carnivorous lunar activities is a tour de force in the golden age of horror movie special effects—as well as the first film to win a competitive Oscar for makeup, albeit more so for the aforementioned transformation sequence. Once David (who is played by David Naughton) is fully wolfed out though, his eyes glow with yellow anger, a single fang is big enough to crush an entire jugular, and the way the creature is only teased while stalking down a tube station at midnight is the stuff of nightmares. By the time he is turning Piccadilly Circus into a slaughterhouse, we view the creature in all its glory. And you know what? It still holds up.

2. The Howling (1981)

Here is what I’m sure is a controversial take. While An American Werwolf in London is the winner in terms of transformation sequences and arguably quality between 1981’s two seminal lycanthrope flicks (or three if you count Wolfen), Joe Dante’s The Howling is still a hair-raising triumph. And… if we’re being honest… the werewolves are kinda cooler looking.

That might be sacrilege around some parts, but Rick Baker’s protege Rob Bottin did a phenomenal job in his own right staging the second best transformation sequence in cinema history. Also by nature of Dante going for bipedal werewolves, Dante/Bottin’s have a more classical appearance, even deliberately evoking the Walt Disney design of the Big Bad Wolf from 1933’s “Three Little Pigs” short, which Dante uncomfortably makes explicit by intercutting the cartoon with a sequence of his own Big Bad Wolf brutally murdering the film’s most proactive character. Furthermore, we get two radically different werewolf designs for the price as one when Dee Wallace’s heroine also transforms in the movie’s final scene into the most teary-eyed tragic riff on the famed Jack Pierce Wolf Man design out there. Speaking of which….

1. The Wolf Man (1941)

This will undoubtedly earn ire from some corners, but sometimes it’s a classic for a reason. Jack Pierce’s legendary application of yak hair to Lon Chaney Jr.’s face, hands, and feet is not the scariest werewolf we’ve ever seen, nor the most ferocious. But for the better part of a half century, it was the yardstick they were all measured against. From Oliver Reed to Michael Landon in I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1956), to the entire cottage industry Paul Naschy created in Spanish Wolf Man knockoffs, this was the gold standard.

So when it comes to spooky season, there remains little as charming or seasonally appropriate as the shots of Chaney in his full furry regalia, stomping through fog-choked soundstages and their spray painted trees, looking for a throat to rip. By maintaining Chaney’s physical form, eyes, and even his clothes, we see both the actor’s humanity, as well as the tangible rage only someone familiar with losing himself to demons can conjure. There’s a devilish sense of fun to this werewolf, as well as a crueler energy, both pitiable and perilous. Nearly 90 years later it still shapes how we hear the call of the moon.

The 10 Best ‘80s Action Movies

Everything was bigger in the 1980s. Chalk it up to an economic boom in the U.S., to reactionary turns under the Reagan and Thatcher administrations, to the slick wheeling and dealing of super producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer. Whatever the reasons, moviegoers wanted to see big guns, big muscles, and bigger explosions on the big screen, and action movies were happy to deliver.

Even better, action movies delivered that mayhem at a level of excellence and consistency we have not seen since the end of the decade. Which means that it’s going to be a knock-down, drag-out fight to try to limit ourselves to 10 ten best action movies of the ‘80s. We’re going to include movies that are great by any standard alongside movies that are really great at blowing stuff up. And if we miss a few of your favorites, well, feel free to keep the explosions going in the comment section. Just make sure you drop a stone-cold one-liner when you shoot us down.

Mad Max 2/The Road Warrior (1981)

As this list will show, things get big and bloated as the 1980s go on. But the first movie on this list is lean and mean and all the better for it. The success of 1979’s Mad Max gave director George Miller, working with co-writers Terry Hayes and Brian Hannant, means to certainly expand on the post-apocalyptic world for his sequel. Yet, even as Mad Max 2 takes the characters fully into a wasteland only hinted at in its predecessor, it still retains the restraint that made the first movie so striking.

The Road Warrior (as it was called in the U.S., to avoid confusing viewers who didn’t see its predecessor) finds former cop Max Rockatansky (Mel Gibson) wandering the desert, having lost not just his wife and child, but all of civilization. Along with the odd Gyro Captain (Bruce Spence), Max befriends a group of settlers, and comes to their aid when they are menaced by Lord Humungus (Kjell Nilsson), the Ayatollah of Rock and Rolla. Between its vivid characters, intense setting, and expertly-shot fight sequences, Mad Max 2 more than stands alongside its big-budget counterparts of the era.

Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985)

First Blood is one of Sylvester Stallone‘s best movies. It’s a tense thriller and a sympathetic look at a Vietnam vet who gets hassled by cops on a power trip, who don’t take kindly to a drifter in their midst. It’s a great film, but not for this list. For this list, we turn to the sequel Rambo: First Blood Part II, an inferior movie in every way, except for one: it is an incredible, unbelievable, utterly ridiculous action movie.

Where First Blood showed how war left John Rambo an empty shell of a man, with no place in civil society, First Blood Part II flushes all that away to let him win the Vietnam War for America. Upon learning of POWs still in Vietnam, Rambo suits up and goes back to fight, slaughtering all who stand in the way. Morally reprehensible and narratively implausible though it may be, First Blood manages to entertain, thanks to the tight script, credited to Stallone and James Cameron, and George P. Cosmatos maximalist direction.

Commando (1985)

By no standard is Commando the best action movie of the 1980s. But by every metric, it is the most action movie of the 1980s. The screenplay by master of the excessive form Steven E. de Souza, working on a story by Matthew Weisman and comic book scribe Jeph Loeb, is filled with all sorts of nonsense, that begins—but by no means ends—with naming Arnold Schwarzenegger‘s character John Matrix—and director Mark L. Lester brings it to life in all its absurd glory.

The movie begins with Matrix seemingly left his life of violence behind him, living in tranquility with his daughter Jenny (Alyssa Milano). But when members of his former unit start dying, and especially when Jenny gets kidnapped, Matrix must go back into action. And go into action he does, battling an entire army led by his former compatriot Bennett (Vernon Wells) and by General Arius (Dan Hedaya), the dictator of fictional Latin American country Val Verde, whom Matrix helped depose. Glorious, explosive nonsense follows.

Police Story (1985)

For Americans, no ’80s action movie list would be complete without the names Schwarzenegger and Stallone (it is complete without Norris, as you can see). But when we take the entire world into consideration, then the list must include the name Jackie Chan, easily the most exciting and innovative screen action star of the decade. And in 1985, Chan released perhaps his best movie, Police Story, a film so rich with action that one of its most jaw-dropping sequences involves the main character simply answering phone calls.

Of course, nothing is simple with Chan, a genius of the form who combined Buster Keaton style physical comedy with Bruce Lee’s big-screen prowess. Those skills are fully on display in Police Story, directed by Chan from a script he co-wrote with Edward Tang. The story of Police Story is pretty simple, as it focuses on Sergeant Chan Ka-Kui of the Royal Hong Kong Police Force breaking up the grip that master criminal Chu Tao (Chor Yuen) holds on the city, getting in trouble with his girlfriend (Maggie Cheung) and Chu Tao’s secretary (Brigitte Lin) along the way. But the basic plot leaves plenty of room for the thing we really want to see in a Jackie Chan movie: incredible stunts performed in perfect clarity by the star himself.

Aliens (1986)

In Alien, a group of working-class space-truckers found themselves outmatched by a xenomorph, a perfect organism. In Aliens, humanity fights back, thanks to the bold, brash, and unbelievably-armed space marines. Yes, they mostly die horribly, their guns unable to match the hordes of xenomorphs. But still, they look really cool doing it.

That’s the magic trick of Aliens, a film that manages to feel of a piece with Ridley Scott‘s “haunted house in space” movie while also serving as the paradigmatic action flick. James Cameron gives a masterclass in efficiently introducing colorful characters, making the various Marines who join Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) feel distinctive with just a few seconds of screen time. He then continues to create set pieces that thrill, allowing the xenomorphs to remain terrifying, even as they get chewed up by chain gun fire. Ironically, Aliens manages to increase the threat of the xenomorphs precisely because they’re fighting soldiers in an action flick.

Lethal Weapon (1987)

The buddy cop genre had existed long before the ’80s, with variations like the forerunner buddy cop movie Freebie and the Bean, the buddy criminal flick Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, and the buddy cop/criminal outing 48 Hrs. setting the stage. But Lethal Weapon brought all the pieces together, fully realizing what previous movies only hinted at.

Director Richard Donner and writer Shane Black come together to tell the story of by the book veteran officer Roger Murtaugh (Danny Glover, only 41 at the time, yet already too old for that shit), forced to team with troubled Vietnam vet Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson) to take down a drug smuggling operation based on Riggs’ former paramilitary unit. The combination of street grit and military action gives Lethal Weapon an energy all its own, one carried along by the rat-a-tat banter of the two leads, just as propulsive as any machine gun fire.

Predator (1987)

By now, pairing xenomorphs and Predators has become a tired and obvious trope. But back in 1987, the first Predator movie set the stage by taking the model Cameron set in his film and amping it up to 1000. The first half of Predator takes the introduction of the Space Marines in Aliens and expands it to a glorious symphony of violence, as a special forces team led by musclemen Dutch (Schwarzenegger) and Dillon (Carl Weathers) lays waste to Latin American rebels and an entire jungle.

From there, however, director John McTiernan, working from a script by Jim Thomas and John Thomas, shifts gears, turning toward sci-fi horror. The mighty American military men find themselves under attack by what we now know today as a Yautja, an alien hunter who challenges itself against the strongest opponents. The conceit allows Predator to play like the ultimate action movie, making its big, buff heroes so imposing that they draw challengers from the stars.

Robocop (1987)

Like Aliens and Predator, Robocop mixes science fiction into the action movie mix. But unlike those movies, it has a satirical edge that adds depth to the mayhem, even as it critiques it. The first Hollywood movie from Dutch provocateur Paul Verhoeven, working from a script by Edward Neumeier and Michael Miner, Robocop is both a satisfying action movie about police officer who becomes a literal crime-fighting machine and an indictment of America’s love for retributive violence.

Set in the near future, Robocop stars Peter Weller as Alex Murphy, a good cop and family man who gets transferred from his relatively quiet precinct to the apocalyptic Old Detroit. After being slaughtered by gangster Clarence Boddicker (Kurtwood Smith), Murphy gets repurposed into Robocop, a tool of unethical company OCP masquerading as a powerful force for good. Verhoeven has no use for subtlety, making Robocop’s attacks on corporate America and our lust for violence clear. But Verhoeven also knows how to shoot a memorable action scene, making Robocop an entertaining lecture.

Bloodsport (1988)

With yet another Street Fighter movie failing to live up to expectations, the 1988 Cannon release Bloodsport looks better every year. Bloodsport may star Jean-Claude Van Damme, the most physically adept but dramatically inert of the ’80s action heroes; it may draw inspiration from a totally made-up event concocted by fabulist Frank Dux; and it may be nothing more than a series of one-on-one fight scenes cobbled together – but Bloodsport manages to be pure entertainment, something no other tournament movie seems to get right.

Directed by Newt Arnold and written by Christopher Cosby, Mel Friedman, and Sheldon Lettich, Bloodsport follows Dux (Van Damme) as he participates in the underground fighting tournament Kumite. In between the bouts, Dux encounters reporters and government operatives, and befriends a galoot of an American wrestler (Donald Gibb), all building to a showdown with the deadly Chong Li (Bolo Yeung). Bloodsport isn’t deep or complex, but apparently its clean and entertaining model is almost impossible to emulate.

Die Hard (1988)

Nearly every other movie on this list features a musclebound hero, someone so built and ripped that we immediately clock them as the person who will still be standing at the end. That alone was enough to make Bruce Willis‘ take on New York cop John McClane surprising, even if modern viewers don’t know him mostly as a comedy star, as Die Hard‘s first audiences did. Director John McTiernan, working from a script by Jeb Stuart and Steven E. de Souza, turned Willis’ unlikely status into the movie’s greatest strength, making it an action movie about one normal guy’s very bad day.

As every obnoxious uncle can tell you, Die Hard is a Christmas movie about McClane flying to Nakatomi Plaza in Los Angeles in the hopes of reconciling with his estranged wife (Bonnie Bedelia) over the holidays. His plans run into a snag when a group of baddies, led by the magnetic Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman) lay siege on the plaza, for reasons not initially apparent. From those impossible odds, McClane must battle his way through, stymied by everything from broken glass to cynical federal agents. All the way to the end, we doubt Willis in a way that we’d never doubt Arnold or Sly, making Die Hard among the most thrilling action movies of all time.

Star Trek: Celebrating the Scene-Chewing Genius of William Shatner

At the end of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Admiral James T. Kirk stands before the crew of the USS Enterprise to offer some words of solace on a heartbreaking occasion. Their friend, colleague, and commanding officer Spock has died, sacrificing himself to save them all. Kirk in particular has lost the person who understood him best, and fans of the franchise have lost their favorite character.

“Of all the souls I have encountered in my travels,” begins the Captain. “His was the most… human.” Kirk’s words are fitting, even the fact that he identifies the half-Vulcan as fully human, a designation the living Spock would have rejected. But its not the words that really stand out. It’s the way that William Shatner delivers those words, the preposterous pregnant pause he holds right before spitting the word “human,” the way he twists his face in anguish. 

For years, moments such as these made Shatner’s acting an object of ridicule. But it’s high time that we recognize them as what they are: excellent melodramatic acting.

A Laughed-At Legend

It’s hard to say where Shatner’s reputation went sour. Certainly, people noticed and mimicked his off-beat cadences early on. See, for example, the way John Belushi milked the pauses when playing Kirk on a sketch in a 1976 episode of Saturday Night Live. Even Shatner himself seemed to play it up on various chat show appearances. But all of these seemed like extensions of the show itself, Star Trek’s tendency to prattle on about weird alien names or borrow from Shakespeare for titles such as “Dagger of the Mind.”

Yet, for those who grew up in the era of The Next Generation, Shatner seemed like the old buffoon we had to put up with before we got to the good stuff. Shatner would go on Conan and sing/talk “Common People,” or he’d show up in a spoof of Seven on the MTV Movie Awards. But surely he didn’t deserve to be taken as seriously as Jean-Luc Picard, played by properly serious dramatic actor Patrick Stewart?

Perhaps it was all of those goofy roles that diminished Shatner’s reputation. Perhaps it was his turn as the title cop in the ‘80s series TJ Hooker that did him in. Where Star Trek let Shatner monologue about humanity’s better nature and the joys of discovery, TJ Hooker asks Shatner to deliver diatribes about permissiveness corrupting society, and how the police should be given free reign to crack down on degenerates. On TJ Hooker, Shatner’s speeches felt like the boasts of a blowhard right wing talk show host, hardly engendering the same sympathies as the intrepid captain.

And so, Shatner became a joke, even among Trekkies. That is, until Kirk finally shared the screen with our beloved Captain Picard. And then, the magic of Shatner’s style could no longer be denied.

Generational Talent

Star Trek: Generations is a terrible movie. It somehow botches the lay-up of getting Malcolm McDowell to play a fanatical villain, it turns the explicitly kid-avoidant Picard into someone who longs for a Victorian family, and it lets Kirk die on a rusty bridge. It doesn’t even do justice to the central hook, teaming Kirk and Picard on an adventure.

But Generations does do exactly one thing correct: it gets out of the way and lets Shatner do his stuff.

For those who have forgotten, Star Trek: Generations involves an anomaly called the Nexus, which traps whoever enters it, but fills them with bliss. The Nexus destroys the Enterprise-B, under the command of hapless Captain Harriman (Alan Ruck), and seemingly kills Kirk in the past. But when Picard encounters the Nexus in his present, he finds Kirk apparently living out his dream, on a ranch with horses and an off-screen wife.

The story asks Picard to convince a seemingly contented Kirk to return to action and stop the villain Soran. Picard does so by using what we’ve come to know as his greatest skill, his gift of argument and oration. Yet, in the actual conflict between the two, Picard comes off stiff and uncomfortable, while Kirk seems sprightly and excited, full of life.

Take one of their first exchanges, when Picard enters Kirk’s homestead and tries to explain that he’s the captain of the future Enterprise. Stewart stumbles over his words, talking slowly in the fear that his revelations will startle his predecessor. At the same time, Shatner bounces around the room, with Kirk paying little mind to his visitor and instead taking stock of the items around him. Kirk stops when he finds a clock and realizes it was once a gift to Doctor McCoy. Shatner, of course, pauses as he delivers the line, holding his face stone still to register the shock. When Kirk snaps out of it, Shatner speaks the next lines in a rush, as if he can’t get them out quickly enough.

Were an impressionist on SNL to speak the lines in the same way, they would sound silly and ill-chosen. But in the moment that Shatner says them, they feel perfect. He knows that the occasion calls for pomp and circumstance, and he meets that moment. The meeting of two legends should be a big deal, it deserves awe and playfulness and even sanctimony—not whatever Stewart is doing.

Shatner delivers, over-delivers, the emotion the scene requires, and he does it well, because he’s been answering the call as Kirk for decades.

Boldly Going Where No Actor Has Gone Before

Part of Star Trek’s longevity owes to the fact that it covers so many tones and genres. Yes, it is absolutely an inspiring, utopian show about how humanity gets better over time and improves to explore space. It’s an adventure show that features humans punching aliens in the face, and it’s a philosophical show that sees those same humans sitting down with aliens to talk through their differences. It’s a serious show with pretentious titles, and it’s a silly show that has its doctor chase around a white rabbit to find a pair of girls in bikinis.

In short, Star Trek involves big feelings and big thoughts, and, as such, it calls for big performances. No one has answered that call as deftly and consistently as William Shatner. Laugh if you want, do goofy impressions if you want. But of all the actors in the absurd, far-out world of Star Trek, William Shatner is undoubtedly the most human.

Michael C. Hall Talks Dexter’s Midlife Crisis in Resurrection Season 2

Everyone just wants some acknowledgment for a job well done. Even, it turns out, serial killers.

Since Dexter first premiered on Showtime in 2005, the titular Dexter Morgan (played by Michael C. Hall) has been hard at work making the world a safer place… in his own roundabout fashion. Through eight seasons in Miami (Dexter), one in upstate New York (Dexter: New Blood), and now two in New York City (Dexter: Resurrection), the blood splatter analyst has put his own murderous impulses and his dead father’s moral code to good use by killing other serial killers.

This intractable, if perverted, sense of justice has turned Dexter into a hero for TV-watching utilitarians across the globe (even if the most annoying among us occasionally have to point out that extrajudicial murder is usually bad). But that level of fame and acclaim is not something that Dexter himself often gets to enjoy. With few exceptions, the innocent people who learn of Dexter’s true nature react with horror and must be removed from the plot judiciously to keep the show going. Even though Dexter Morgan doesn’t kill the innocent, Dexter very much does.

Going into the second season of Dexter: Resurrection, the only person who knows the truth about Dexter and still accepts him for it is his son, Harrison (Jack Alcott). According to star Michael C. Hall, that level of isolation is finally starting to get to Dexter and manifest in an unusual, if predictable way: He’s experiencing a good-old fashioned midlife crisis.

“I think Dexter’s midlife crisis has to do with assessing where he’s been and what he’s done and realizing that he’s completely alone in his awareness of it,” Hall tells Den of Geek. “He’s not appreciated besides maybe his son who has his own sort of complicated, complex misgivings about what his father’s up to. The world doesn’t know how many people Dexter’s killed, how many lives he’s residually saved, and I think he craves witnesses and appreciation.”

Though some may balk at what Hall refers to as Dexter’s “spreadsheet sort of justification” for murder, the Bay Harbor Butcher will have plenty of opportunities to add to his moral ledger in Dexter: Resurrection season 2. In addition to returning season 1 killers Rapunzel (Eric Stonestreet) and Lady Vengeance (Krysten Ritter), the season is set to introduce other colorful criminals like the New York Ripper (Brian Cox) and the Five Borough Killer (Dan Stevens) for Dexter to contend with.

Of course, even if Dexter successfully dispatches the Ripper, the 5BK, and any other Big Apple-themed monster, he is still unlikely to get the recognition that he’s always craved. And that frustration only grows more acute as he ages.

“I’ve always imagined that a character like him entertains the idea of being known for what he does,” Hall says. “It’s always been the back of his mind, but it’s kind of knocking him on the head now as he gets older and finds himself on the other side of this new lease on life. He’s like, ‘Okay, now what?’ Is it that he’s a hero and he knows he’s not seen as one? ‘I can’t reveal who I am because I’ll be thought of as the opposite of what I know myself to be.'”

Perhaps one day Dexter Morgan will have his moment in the sun. It’s just going to take many more crises – midlife or otherwise – to get there.

Dexter: Resurrection premieres Friday, October 30 on Paramount+. New episodes debut weekly on Fridays.

Clayface Remembers Comics Are About Monsters and Horror as Much as Superheroes

This article contains the mildest of spoilers about the general character arc for the titular character in Clayface.

Right before Clayface rolls its final credits, we see the titular character in full: a gloopy mass of molten flesh who belts out a thunderous roar. We all know that Matt Hagen would end up this way, and not just because we already saw Clayface in season one of Creature Commandos, which takes place after the events of this movie. It’s also because Clayface is a long-established member of the Batman rogues gallery, and iterations of him have appeared in countless video games, toys, and animated series.

But Clayface doesn’t really feel like a superhero movie, even though it takes place in Gotham City. Instead when Hagan lets out a roar, full of sorrow and rejection, it becomes clear that Clayface is a monster movie. And that’s perfect, because comic book superheroes have always been a bit monstrous.

In the original comics, Matt Hagen became Clayface when he was treasure hunter, an adventurer who got caught swimming in water contaminated by some strange magic. But before Hagen, Batman faced another Clayface, one with more terrifying roots. In 1940’s Detective Comics #40 by Bill Finger and Bob Kane, Clayface was the name given to Basil Karlo, a genre movie actor in the vein of Boris Karloff (obviously) and Basil Rathbone (ditto). There’s also a bit of Lon Chaney Sr., aka the Man of a Thousand Faces!, in the characterization of the shapeshifting actor as well. Alas, when Karlo’s career started to flag, his mind broke and he began acting like the killers he played on the screen, disguising himself as those characters to attack his rivals.

As that origin story shows, superheroes have their roots in horror. Around the same time that Batman first fought Clayface, the Golden Age Green Lantern did battle against Solomon Grundy, a giant zombie with super-strength, while Doctor Fate tangled with the wizard Wotan and Captain Marvel (known today as Shazam!) matched wits with the Monster Society of Evil. Heroes such as the Spectre or Stardust the Super Wizard, the latter a bizarre creation of artist Fletcher Hanks, enacted ironic punishments on their enemies, befitting the tortures of the Jigsaw Killer from Saw.

The connection between superheroes and horror grew more pronounced with the Marvel Age of Comics in the early 1960s. Marvel’s predecessors, Atlas and Timely, spent the period following the superhero boom of World War II publishing sci-fi and horror comics (as well as Westerns, romances, and dramas). When the launch of the Silver Age seemed to make superheroes profitable again for DC, Marvel decided to follow suit, but only timidly.

The Fantastic Four didn’t get costumes or other superhero trappings until several issues into their first series, but the monster tropes were evident every time a woman screamed at the sight of Ben Grimm aka the Thing. The Hulk was a direct rip from Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, mixed with Boris Karloff’s version of the Frankenstein Monster. Meanwhile Ant-Man and the Wasp were derived from The Incredible Shrinking Man. Even Spider-Man, with his gangly poses and general antisocial attitude, could have been called I Was a Teenaged Bug-Man. This was likely in reaction to how during the preceding 1950s decades, comics were as synonymous with horror full-stop, courtesy of publishers like EC Comics, as it was superheroes. Alas, self-censorship in the face of congressional hearing put an end to that, carving a path for Marvel’s new wave of heroes.

Nevertheless, horror roots of superheroes persist today, in concepts like Blade, Ghost Rider, and the Creature Commandos. In fact, James Gunn has dubbed the first era of he and Peter Safran’s DC Studios “Gods and Monsters,” a phrase taken The Bride of Frankenstein.

Clayface follows in that proud tradition. It knows that, fundamentally, superhero stories about someone who gets othered by society, pushed out into the margins. Something strange happens to them, which gives them incredible abilities but makes them unfit to live like a regular person. In the case of Superman, Spider-Man, and Batman, that otherness provides an opportunity for heroism, a chance to change the world for the better. Clayface, however, returns to the roots for the counterpoint, as well as the Gothic horror-obssessed Batman: The Animated Series, which redefined the Clayface origin story with a sense of body horror tragedy befalling show business, a la the this past weekend’s new chiller.

Clayface shows us that the opposite of heroism is also possible. Matt Hagen (Tom Rhys Harries) could have used his shape-shifting abilities for good, but he’s too overcome by bitterness and anger. Once he starts seeking revenge against those who hurt him, he fully gives himself over to rage. Clayface fills us with dread. But because it’s set in a superhero world, it also provides a glimmer of hope. For everyone like Matt Hagen, who becomes monstrous, there’s a hero like Batman and Superman, someone who saves the day. By bringing superheroes back to horror, Clayface reminds us that the good guys have always worked best when contrasted by the dark and terrifying.

Clayface is now playing in theaters.

VisionQuest Finally Introduces One of the Strangest Avengers

This article contains spoilers for VisionQuest season 1 episodes 5 and 6.

For its first four episodes, VisionQuest pit its heroes against a mysterious figure hidden under a cloak. We’ve watched her attack various members of an AI advancement research team led by scientist Katerina Wells (Mary McDonnell). But so far, we’ve only known her by a frightening name chosen by the press: the Butcherbird Killer.

Now with its latest episodes, VisionQuest tells us what anyone who has been paying attention to the casting already knew. The Butcherbird Killer is in fact Jocasta, an android who bears more than a passing resemblance to Ultron. T’Nia Miller was announced as Jocasta long ago. But anyone who knows Marvel Comics knows that whenever Ultron and Vision are around, Jocasta can’t be far behind. And they also know how weird Jocasta’s story is, made stranger by her association with the Avengers.

Jocasta made her debut well after Ultron and Vision, first appearing in 1977’s Avengers #162, by Jim Shooter and George Pérez. Although her name comes from the mother of Oedipus in Greek Myth, the title of Avengers #162, “The Bride of Ultron,” reveals its debt to the Frankenstein story. The mad scientist/Ant-Man Henry Pym (not Tony Stark in the comics) made his monster in Ultron, a creature that emulated his father by making Vision. And now he wants a bride; one befitting the son of Hank Pym.

Ultron builds a female robot body and attempts to copy the brain waves of Hank Pym’s wife at the time, Janet Van Dyne a.k.a. the Wasp, to create Jocasta. But upon realizing that her life will result in the death of the Wasp, Jocasta chooses to sacrifice herself, an act that allows the Avengers to defeat Ultron.

Or so they thought. A year later, in Avengers #170, Ultron uses a remote control to reactivate Jocasta and force him to become his bride. Once again, however, Jocasta rebelled and sided with the Avengers, eventually joining them as an auxiliary member. However, the team refused to allow Jocasta full membership for years, despite her expressed desire to be one of them. It took until 1980’s Avengers #197, by David Michelinie and Carmine Infantino, for Earth’s Mightiest Heroes to recognize Jocasta as an equal.

However, by then, the damage was done. Jocasta left the team only a few years later, and has had a complicated relationship with humanity ever since. Sometimes, she will team with the Avengers or members of the Fantastic Four to stave off larger threats, including serving among a revived Skrull Kill Crew during the Secret Invasion storyline. Other times, Jocasta feels most comfortable with other AIs, forming real connections with the Machine Man or Vision.

That tempestuous relationship still has not settled, even to this day. When Hank Pym merged with Ultron during the 2015 storyline Rage of Ultron, Jocasta saw the combination as a means for making herself human, something she secretly always desired. When Arno Stark, the biological son of Howard and Maria Stark, began his crusade against his adoptive brother Tony (yeah, that’s a whole thing, and we don’t have time to get into it now), Jocasta initially sides with him because he promises to give her a human body.

Since both of those attempts failed, Jocasta has been even more committed to advocating for machines and artificial intelligences. She has participated in multiple robot uprisings, and will consistently choose other androids if forced to pick a side between them and other humans. This doesn’t mean that Jocasta wants to fight the Avengers or any other set of humans. Simply that she has learned that she cannot trust people, not even the good guys.

That development makes Jocasta an interesting reminder of the way that the Avengers operate in the world of the comics. From the very beginning, the Avengers have had members who the general public mistrusted, whether it was the Hulk in the first lineup or career criminals Hawkeye, Scarlet Witch, and Quicksilver in the second incarnation, dubbed Cap’s Kooky Quartet. The Avengers recognize that people make mistakes, and will often extend invitations to bad guys trying to turn over a new leaf.

However, as a group of people, the Avengers themselves sometimes make mistakes. The missed opportunities with Jocasta, and her ongoing skepticism of the Avengers in particular and humanity in general, reminds us of the cost of those mistakes. Every time Jocasta appears in a story, we see that our heroes have feet of clay. And we can only hope that Jocasta has forgiveness in her programming, lest humans find themselves crushed under feet of iron.

VisionQuest streams new episodes every Wednesday on Disney+.

VisionQuest Episode 6 Review: The Marvel Method Strikes Again

This article contains spoilers for VisionQuest season 1 episode 6.

Let’s be 100% clear. I love Marvel. I love Marvel Comics, I love the MCU. I wouldn’t know things about Ravager 2099 or Eternals if I didn’t. But we should also be honest about the fact that, sometimes, Marvel tropes can be annoying, particularly when the MCU seems embarrassed about Marvel Comics. And few instances have been annoying as the moment where Thomas realizes that Paladin has sown a bomb into his arm that will explode if he goes to fast, and shouts, “You’ve made me into Speed.”

The joke is that Thomas is referring to the Keanu Reeves movie, albeit with the premise inverted. The joke is also that Thomas will become a superhero called Speed in the Young Avengers, and that his name is very dumb. Where this bit of elbowing in the side the only time VisionQuest‘s sixth episode, “Deadlock,” does a Marvel bit, then it could be forgiven. But too much of “Deadlock” gets mired in Marvel mechanics, slowing the (forgive me) speed that the series had been building.

As promised in the previous episode, “Firewall,” Vision is going to Madripoor, a third-world country whose corrupt criminal justice system doesn’t enforce the few laws they bother writing. Thomas has been taken by Ultron and given to Paladin, who will use him to finally capture Vision to exchange to an agent for his mysterious client. And who is this agent, you ask? Why, it’s Raza! Remember Raza?

No? Oh… Raza was the leader of the Ten Rings! Remember them? The terrorists who captured Tony Stark in Iron Man and were led by a scary terrorist guy played by Faran Tahir and seemed like he might be the Mandarin, even after it seemed like he was killed by Obadiah Stane? That is, until Iron Man 3, the One-Shot “Hail to the King,” and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings revealed that the Mandarin was a totally different guy with a different set of rings. And even though the Ten Rings logo from Iron Man cameoed in an episode of Ms. Marvel, Raza was never seen again (See? I told you I love the MCU).

Yes, Raza is back to just… shoot at Paladin and Vision a bit. Vincenzo Natali shoots the action cleanly enough, and Todd Stashwick and Paul Bettany remain compelling screen actors. But the return of Raza feels like an unnecessary bit of MCU world-building, more distracting than edifying. The same could be said of the entire Madripoor setting, a place that—despite previously appearing in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier—still works best as a nod to Wolverine comics than it does an actual setting.

Sadly, “Deadlock” doesn’t offer much compelling stuff, even outside of Madripoor. The electric chemistry that James Spader and T’Nia Miller showed previously gets smothered as the episode puts them in a white room to drop exposition, revealing the entirety of Carrington’s backstory. She created the first AI and modeled it on her own mind (or brainwaves, to use the term from Vision’s first appearance in Avengers #57, as a Marvel-lover like me knows). But when Carrington got cancer, her colleagues sold the AI to Stark Industries to become a weapon and, eventually, J.A.R.V.I.S.. But Carrington saved her nanobots in a “nest” buried in her grave, a nest that the Butcherbird Killer has been trying to unlock by gathering keys.

This isn’t to say that the episode lacks anything interesting. When Ultron finally calls the Butcherbird Killer by her comic book name Jocasta, her observation that it is disturbing to invoke Oedipus Rex rings true. And after the two finish dumping exposition, Ultron and Jocasta promise a properly grandiose supervillain team-up with their plan to infect humanity with nanobots to control human beings. Likewise, the client’s arrival in the form of a distorted voice on a television to address Vision moves the plot forward without erasing any of his shadowy intrigue.

Best of all, “Deadlock” gives us a rare glimpse of White Vision turning evil, something largely unexplored in VisionQuest. Amidst his standoff with Paladin, White Vision’s eyes go blank and Bettany flattens his voice to describe the minute details of the assassin’s identity, specifically the name and location of the man’s daughter. In addition to further fleshing out Paladin as a character, the moment reminds us how dangerous Vision and the other AIs truly are. As he’s told us again and again, this Vision is not the hero we knew before, and we see now the capacity for cruelty that he carries. Moreover, when he identifies information about Paladin’s daughter, Vision does what the more likably AIs like F.R.I.D.A.Y. and E.D.I.T.H. have been doing all along, invading privacy and surveilling other people. VisionQuest doesn’t really want to deal with the moral issues of AI and mass surveillance, but the scene raises them nonetheless.

Does this exciting moment make-up for the fact that Diane Morgan seems to be done with the series, with her obsolete AI abandoning Paladin and the show? Absolutely not. Hopefully Morgan got a nice paycheck, but VisionQuest never paid off the promise of Cunk on Marvel. Still, the scene does lead to E.D.I.T.H. becoming an 8-bit sprite to talk with Thomas and Laura, thus confirming that Emily Hampshire has essentially been playing Vanellope von Schweetz from Wreck It Ralph.

Delightful as this bits are, “Deadlock” lives up to its name. VisionQuest has become deadlocked, trapped and spinning its wheels in a plot that isn’t that captivating to begin with, caught in nods to the franchise and the comics, having characters talk about adamantium. As a Marvel fan, I understood that reference. But as a fan of good TV, it’s a bit disappointing to see VisionQuest lose its way.

New episodes of VisionQuest premiere Tuesday nights at 9 p.m. ET on Disney+

VisionQuest Episode 5 Review: The New Age of Ultron

This article contains spoilers for VisionQuest season 1 episode 5.

Throughout Avengers: Age of Ultron, the titular evil super robot sang a creepy version of a Pinocchio song, crooning, “I had strings, but now I’m free.” Ultron repeats that song at the end of VisionQuest‘s fifth episode, “Firewall,” when he convinces Vision to give over control of White Vision’s body. But even before he gets to take White Vision’s body for a drive, Ultron sure seems free of strings.

The AI scenes have been the trickiest part throughout the first half of VisionQuest, as the broad humor and CGI Mindspace fell flat, despite the compelling performances. So while Ultron never felt like a giant homicidal robot when he appeared in the form of a bearded, avuncular James Spader, we weren’t going to complain about the chance to watch a bearded, avuncular James Spader be charming. By taking over Vision’s body, playing mind games with Thomas, and forming alliances with Paladin and the Butcherbird Killer, Ultron reestablishes himself as a proper Marvel villain.

Most of “Firewall” finds Vision and his team trapped within the Mindspace, trying to retrace the steps that Ultron has taken in White Vision’s body. First, Ultron takes Thomas to a pub, where he prods the boy’s feelings about his synthazoid father. Next, he contacts Paladin to give the bounty hunter Thomas’ location. Then, he meets with the Butcherbird Killer to forge an alliance, before finally leaving White Vision’s body on a plane headed to Madripoor, the third-world underbelly of the Marvel Universe.

Once again, we’re in television genre territory, and the success of the episode’s plot mechanics depends entirely one one’s taste for CSI, Bones, and other such forensic shows. Much of Vision’s scenes involve him staring at screens and telling the AIs to zoom and enhance and rewind. The procedural signifiers are, of course, representations of supercomputer functions, not actual real things that real people are doing. But even with that allowance, they feel rote, completely disconnected to anything real. As a result, it’s hard to care that much about the actual plot of “Firewall.”

Now that we know that the Butcherbird Killer is a synthetic copy of Carrington, and that she’s seeking keys for something, in revenge for the life stolen from her. Those “keys” were the faces of the various members of the AI project with whom Carrington worked, faces that she copied as the Butcherbird Killer before offing her former colleagues. But since Ultron made a copy of Katerina Wells’s face and then killed her before Butcherbird could take it, he has a certain amount of control over the synth. Moreover, the information gives Ultron influence over Vision, who reluctantly removes the firewalls that keep Ultron from the internet.

Despite all the familiar tropes and concerned looks that Vision and the AIs exchange with one another, despite the fact that Ultron’s escape angers F.R.I.D.A.Y. so much that she abandons the Mindspace, it’s all a bit blurry. What do the keys unlock? What can Butcherbird do with them? What can Ultron do with them? It’s unclear.

Yet, the pleasures of the episode aren’t in the plot. Rather, they’re in Spader’s performance, now grounded by Ultron’s re-embrace of villainy. For all that the other AIs would shudder at his presence, for his occasional comments about killing all humanity, the Ultron of the first half felt like a wacky neighbor in a sitcom, more Kramer than Lex Luthor. Without tracks to follow, Spader seemed to do whatever popped into his head, which was fun to watch, but not particularly compelling on a dramatic or even comedic level.

“Firewall” doesn’t completely cure the show of that problem. A sequence set inside Ultron’s own Mindscape, in which Spader plays different parts of the synth’s identity, plays at best like Inside Out 3. But for the most part, Ultron has returned to open malevolency, which allows Spader to ground even his most charming line deliveries in menace. Every smile, every understanding wink reveals itself to be a manipulation technique, even if we don’t quite understand Ultron’s end goal.

Nowhere is that more clear than when Ultron romances the Butcherbird Killer (who still doesn’t have her name from the comics yet). Elegant and multifaceted, T’Nia Miller proves herself the perfect match the Spader. She can vamp effectively as Butcherbird and Ultron trade flirtations, and she can make villainous declarations with the best of the bad guys. But because Butcherbird claims to be the actual Josephine Carrington made synthetic, she retains levels of humanity that Spader doesn’t give to Ultron. A description about the taste and texture of brandy, brought up to taunt Ultron’s appreciation for human craft but lack of human taste buds, contains as much sadness as it does threat.

The AIs watching the sequence compare the romance to watching Hannibal Lecter flirt—an apt comparison, given that episode director Vincenzo Natali directed several episodes of the NBC series Hannibal, as well as the great indie horror movies Cube and Splice. In fact, much of VisionQuest has recalled that show, from the connection between charismatic killer and wounded investigator to the bird-themed murderers. Natali brings some of the visual acumen of that show to VisionQuest, making the scenes of Ultron’s interactions interesting to watch.

Each time Vision and the AIs trace Ultron’s location to a new spot, Spader and his scene partner appear on screen in black and white, while the AIs appear as colorized supporting players. The conceit makes the scenes feel like stage productions, complete with Henry Lewis and Jonathan Sayer carrying tables and chairs into frame, and then taking their place behind the bar to play bartenders at the same time that they’re playing D.U.M.-E and U.

With the artificiality even more heightened, one would expect Spader to go even broader and bigger than he had before. But instead, he’s more focused and frightening. The doddering old weirdo who offered a pleasurable distraction in the first half of the series is gone. In his place is an upgraded Ultron, someone who feels more dangerous precisely because he’s not a giant silver robot anymore. He’s now in human form and out in the world, all the scarier because he has no strings on him.

VisionQuest streams new episodes every Wednesday on Disney+.

Dune 3 Final Trailer Reveals a Major Deviation from the Books

Ever since the final moments of Dune: Part Two, we’ve been worried. Not about Paul Atreides, the protagonist of the Dune series, who becomes more of a tyrant with each film. Anyone paying attention to the movie or has read the books knows that author Frank Herbert wrote them as a warning against charismatic leaders. No, we’ve been worried about Paul’s beloved Chani, who stormed away from Muad’Dib at the end of the last movie.

We who have read Herbert’s 1969 novel Dune Messiah, the basis for Dune: Part Three, took comfort in knowing that Chani and Paul would stay together, and their bond would get closer as Princess Irulan and the face dancer Scytale launched a conspiracy against them. But the final trailer for Dune: Part Three steals that comfort away from us, suggesting that in the world of the films, Chani will join the conspiracy against Paul.

A book with more palace intrigue than giant sand battles, Dune Messiah takes place twelve years after Dune, with Paul (Timothée Chalamet) firmly in place as the Emperor. That fact irritates powerful factions, such as the religious Bene Gesserit, the mercantile Spacing Guild, and the science-focused Tleilaxu, who launch a conspiracy against him. Central to that conspiracy is Princess Irulan (Florence Pugh), the daughter of the deposed previous emperor and wife (in law only) to Paul, and Scytale (Robert Pattinson), a shapeshifter.

That conspiracy takes center stage in the final trailer for Dune: Part Three, with Scytale talking with Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam (Charlotte Rampling) of the Bene Gesserit. The trailer features more scenes with Jason Momoa as Hayt, the clone of Duncan Idaho who the conspirators created to distract Paul and his sister Alia (Anya Taylor-Joy) from their advances. And we see Paul confront Irulan about her involvement, showing the level of mistrust he experiences.

The trailer also features interesting deep cuts for those who know the books. We get brief shots of Isaach de Bankolé as Farok, a fighter in Paul’s Freman jihad who betrays his emperor. We may even get our first look at Leto II and Ghanima, Paul and Chani’s twin children, one of whom becomes the main character of the next several Herbert novels.

But even book readers are shocked to see the way Chani (Zendaya) behaves. Throughout the trailer, Chani declares her opposition to Paul, fighting against him and even seemingly joining the conspiracy. Instead of a victim, a bit of collateral damage in the fight against Paul, Chani has become an antagonist.

Strong as this deviation from the source material may be, it does track with the characters set up in the first two movies from director Denis Villeneuve. Even in the first film, where Chani appeared largely in visions, she was separate from Paul, less drawn in. Her fiery exit in Dune: Part Two only solidified the feeling that she would not simply go along with her lover. Now, we see just how far she’s willing to go.

Or do we? Again, Scytale is a face dancer, which allows him to change his form and copy other people. Is that actually Chani we see fighting against Paul? Or is it just one more trick to undermine his leadership? The fact that we can’t tell makes movie fans and book readers equally excited to see how Villeneuve plans to close the trilogy.

Dune: Part Three arrives in theaters on December 18, 2026.

The Debut Review: Julianne Moore Gives a Russian Nesting Doll of a Performance

I never participated in community theater, that peculiar intersection of (sometimes) professional-grade talent and a hobbyist’s after-hours work schedule. But I did get to join a couple of school plays back in my younger days, and it’s easy to remember the sense of kindness and togetherness that emanates from people gathering round in order to create—or in many cases simply to play.

One suspects writer-director Jesse Eisenberg misses that kind of innocence in his craft as well. The longtime Hollywood veteran, and more recently indie director who guided Kieran Culkin to an Oscar win for A Real Pain, also cut his teeth as a child actor along the community and Off-Broadway footlights of New Jersey and New York City. He knows those boards so well that he’s affectionately recreated them in his third feature, and what more than likely will be the feel-good dramedy of this coming holiday season, The Debut.

A love letter to the uncanniness of quasi-professional theatricals, as well as tribute to the actor’s method (both generally and with a capital “M” in the Stanislavski sense), The Debut is a showcase for Eisenberg’s muses, not to mention a powerhouse spotlight for Julianne Moore, who gets some of the best material of her career via the role of Mona. At a glance, the character’s a meek and closed off-housewife, but by this time next year she’ll very likely become every high school theater kid’s go-to Halloween costume when she transforms into Miss Danielle, the Big City super who sings about how NYC might have “Chewed Me Up (But It Hasn’t Spit Me Out!”).

This is getting ahead of ourselves, though. Before Mona becomes a down on her luck Manhattan super, she’s initially a buttoned-up suburbanite living in a beige, if swanky, New Jersey conclave. It’s there she raises her newly autonomous teenage kids with a husband (Patrick Fabian) who seems more inclined to enjoy their neighbor’s company when they get dinner at the same restaurant every week. It is that quiet emptiness which makes the prospect of auditioning for a new community production of an innocuous Broadway musical comedy, Noisy Neighbors, seem so tantalizing. At last this could be a fun distraction for the former choir kid!

That assumption would be her first grievous mistake in the eyes of Jerry, Paul Giamatti’s cantankerous regional theater director who carries himself like Orson Welles at his most imperious. Her second error was not, well, knowing how to really act or apparently sing. But after Jerry’s first choice for the relatively minor character of Miss Danielle bails on the production, leaving a note that she found role too small for her talents, Jerry is in a bind less than three weeks from opening night. So he gives Mona a call that will utterly transform her life.

Much of the joy about The Debut is how unabashedly it places dollops of nostalgia on its visions of behind-the-scenes camaraderie; even “the drama” that permeates most of the gossip one associates with any workplace, never mind those populated by the literally performative, is treated with a fond sweetness. So many showbiz portraits and tableaus yearn for the dirt-beneath-the-fingernails bluntness of Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz, or Alejandro Inarritu’s deliberately self-aware pretensions about the tortured artist in Birdman. Eisenberg goes for something a little less jaded. In fact, it’s quite wholesome at the start with novice Mona being welcomed into the world by leading lady Stef (Halle Bailey), cast in the ingénue part of “Girl in 4F” in the play-within-a-movie.

This could be a writer-director’s own rose-tinted glasses, but I suspect it is also because the movie ultimately wants to celebrate the creative spirit, even while also quite forcefully interrogating those same pretensions and melodramatic tendencies that make mole hills into mountains vaster than Julie Andrews’ Alps. While Noisy Neighbors is a fictional Broadway show that has apparently been in regional repertory rotations for decades by the time The Debut begins, the songs we glimpse, all written by Eisenberg, credibly pass for something tuneful enough to have been staged at one point, but so saccharine few would ever take them seriously. Miss Danielle’s big solo is even sung, notably, over the opening credits with maximum fairy dust by the Bernadette Peters.

All of this sweetness is ultimately an act unto itself, though; a setup to suggest how low the stakes should be for Mona when she joins the ensemble. Nevertheless, it still marks a jumping off point from which Mona, Moore, and the audience will lose themselves into the agonies and ecstasies of artistic innovation. There are no small parts, they say, and thus no excuse to not totally submit your identity and soul beneath the Demands of The Theatre!

… There really is something tragicomic about a woman who is about to ruin her life in order to bring unflinching authenticity to what is ultimately a tertiary role born out of a treacly musical.

Mona’s sheer ineptitude for acting opposite even semi-professional actors is a source of great comedy early in The Debut, with Giamatti’s patented withering stare steadily intensifying as Moore flubs her single line (“the rent is due”) in rehearsals of the opening musical number. When his suspiciously Hollywood-levels of industrious assistant brings him his daily mocha, all Jerry can grumble is “it’s too late for that” while glowering at Moore. But it’s as the pair embark on the typical mentor-mentee arc that Mona/Moore take the movie to marvelous places. The humor is almost diabolical when Mona is finally driven to the point of considering her character’s motivations, being reduced to tears while lamenting that she will be living on the street and forced to eat rats if her tenants don’t pay her the goddamn rent. It’s also the scene that I expect Moore and A24 will use in Moore’s Best Actress nomination clip come Oscar night.

The further down the rabbit hole Mona goes, the more layered and dizzyingly self-reflexive Moore’s performance becomes. It’s a bit like a Russian nesting doll as the thespian must find pathos for an evermore gloomy and “real” Miss Danielle, which in turn quickens Mona with greater life and, finally, mania as she becomes drunk on the thrill of artistic discovery.

It’s a masterclass performance that, along with Giamatti’s own smooth transition from grumpy genius to suave co-conspirator, quite intentionally over-prepares for what is still, on all levels, light comedy. It also grows a little more substantial than the knowingly formulaic structure of Eisenberg’s story might otherwise need. In its heart, The Debut is more comedy than drama, but Moore and Mona lose themselves so completely to the beast that the details The Debut’s screenplay skims feel a little underdeveloped by the end. There are a multitude of threads dangling when opening night’s final bow comes, but the movie is already out the door.

It’s an open question whether Eisenberg leaving so much dramatic meat on the table is by design. This is, after all, a tribute to community theater and the lightest of theatrical entertainments; it is a tad bit masochistic if, like Mona, you keep digging deeper than that. But the ultimate charm of The Debut is even after it ends, it leaves character and audience alike in the trenches with a shovel, still eager to see how much deeper we can excavate this thing they call art.

The Debut played at the New York Film Festival on Oct. 7 and opens in theaters on Dec. 11.

Walter Koenig Set the Path for the Future of Star Trek

Mister Chekov has left the bridge. Walter Koenig, who has played Security Officer Pavel Chekov of the USS Enterprise since Star Trek‘s second season in 1967, has died at the age of 90. He leaves behind a legacy that includes appearances in Babylon 5 and movies such as Moontrap, as well as work in comics. But he will forever be best known for his work on Star Trek, appearing in the Original Series and the movies about that crew, as well as various video games and spinoffs. Koenig even appeared in the final season of Star Trek: Picard as Pavel’s descendent, President Anton Chekov.

Clearly, Star Trek was important for Koenig. What’s less discussed, however, is how important Koenig was for Star Trek. The introduction of Pavel Chekov revealed a strategy on the part of creator Gene Roddenberry, one that not only shaped the show in its own time, but set the forward-thinking path the franchise would continue to follow to this day.

With its bright pastel colors and miniskirts, Star Trek always had a certain hipness to it. But it also had to deal with a certain amount of drabness baked into the premise. The most passionate character was Dr. McCoy, a grizzled frontier physician played by a veteran character actor. The breakout character is a stoic alien, modeled in part on Berkley police chief William H. Parker. Even hero James T. Kirk had too much classical theatricality to be the voice of a new generation.

No, Star Trek didn’t really get hip until its second season when a young mop-top appeared on the bridge. Roddenberry explicitly wanted to add “a young, irreverent, English-accent ‘Beatle’ type” to the show, because of Star Trek’s “teenage audience” and out of awareness “current trends.” Moreover, Chekov was explicitly a Russian, flying in the face of the Cold War fears of the time. Yes, the Klingons and Romulans may have represented elements of the Communist threat that the United States faced. But in the reality of the series, humanity had overcome its divisions and prejudice, and Chekov was the proof.

Which isn’t to say that Chekov didn’t indulge in some nationalism. Throughout the series, Chekov would erroneously claim some antiquated Earth tradition, one very familiar to the viewing audience, as of Russian origin. In season 2’s “The Apple,” for example, Chekov claimed that the Garden of Eden was originally located near Moscow, setting his homeland as the birthplace of humanity. Yet, at the same time, Chekov put his allegiances to his fellow Starfleet officers first, as when he almost punches the Klingon Korax for insulting Kirk in “The Trouble With Tribbles.”

In short, Chekov represented the next generation in the first generation of Star Trek. It was the show’s attempt to show off its hipness and forward-thinking. But it only worked because of Koenig’s performance. He threw himself into being the Davey Jones of the Enterprise, certainly an easy ask of any young man on television at the time. But when Chekov matured and good looks weren’t enough, Koenig kept bringing a sense of humor to the part, most famously with the “nuclear wessels” running gag in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.

However, Chekov’s greatest legacy may be in the way he established a model for the rest of the series. Star Trek has often tried to include a young, hip person intended to appeal to the youth. The ’90s versions weren’t always successful—it’s hard to call Will Crusher, Jake Sisko, or even Tom Paris particularly hip, despite that last one’s love of sci-fi and hot rods. Despite all the grouching around Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, it’s clear that modern Trek was doing what it has always done, showing awareness of modern trends and the desires of its teenage audience.

Regardless of one’s feelings about postmodern gags in Lower Decks or the animated adventure of Prodigy, whatever today’s fans feel about the romantic drama of Starfleet Academy or name-dropping Elon Musk in Discovery, those shows aren’t doing anything new. They’re following in the path that the franchise set out long ago, a path first traveled by Pavel Chekov.

Adam McArthur Talks Jujutsu Kaisen Season 3, Anime Fandom, and New Projects

One of the biggest anime properties in the world is Jujutsu Kaisen, based on the best-selling manga series by Gege Akutami, which launched its third season at the start of the year. Among the fan-favorite actors who bring the English-language dub of the hit supernatural action series to life is Adam McArthur, who voices the show’s protagonist Yuji Itadori. Den of Geek sat down with McArthur for an exclusive interview at New York Comic Con 2026 where he reflected on his recent work with Jujutsu Kaisen season 3 and teased his upcoming starring role in the Netflix original anime series Fool Night.

Jujutsu Kaisen season 3 really dials up the cinematic qualities of the series, especially coming off the intense highs of the preceding season’s Shibuya Incident story arc. The stakes escalate even higher this season, though through it all Yuji maintains sight of the wisdom that his grandfather imparted on him at the start of the series to help others. That advice is something that McArthur takes to heart and helps guide his performance every time he comes back to play the character again even as Yuji gradually understands what his bigger purpose in the story is.

“When he’s getting his butt kicked by Kinji Hakari, he has a whole speech about what his function is,” McArthur observes. “He’s accepting his role in the bigger picture. I think without the path that his grandpa sent him down, we wouldn’t necessarily have that speech and that realization from Yuji that he’s just a cog, that he’s meant to keep killing curses until he rusts away. It allows him to have this viewpoint that he brings up to Hakari but what their function is in all of that.”

Audiences can also see McArthur’s memorable performances in Tokyo Revengers and Kaiju No. 8 but there is something particularly special about his work in Jujutsu Kaisen. For McArthur, a big part of his own appeal in playing Yuji is the character’s resilience and his firm moral compass, something that he’s reminded of whenever he meets fans that have gone through a lot in their own lives but still come out intact and inspired.

“After everything that happened to Yuji in Shibuya, he has every right to be the villain,” McArthur continues. “He could have very well taken all of that stuff and let it turn him bad. What I love about him is that he still tries to make the right decisions despite the adversity and that makes him really special.”

For McArthur, connecting directly with fans is a huge part of the responsibility and joy that comes with the role, estimating that he does around 40 conventions and shows around the country each year. Meeting and interacting with fans, McArthur takes to heart how much the stories and his work in bringing his characters to life resonate with the audience on a personal level. This in turn inspires him every time he gets in the recording booth himself.

“I tell people all the time that the fan-side is just as important as the voiceover actor side,” McArthur explains. “Without the fans, there is no community and without the community there is no show to be had. The shows would go away and, without the show, there’d be nothing to have these conversations about.”

Among the most exciting new projects that McArthur has coming up is the upcoming Netflix anime series Fool Night, based on the manga series by Kasumi Yasuda. With all 12 episodes set to debut on the streaming service on November 26, the show boasts an all-star voice cast led by McArthur and some truly stunning animation to bring this story to life. McArthur plays Toshiro Kamiya, whose hardscrabble existence on a post-apocalyptic world takes a turn when he tries to save his ailing mother. This leads to catastrophic consequences, with McArthur really bringing out how tortured Toshiro becomes through his emotional performance.

“This guy has nothing left to live for; he is the ultimate sad boy,” the actor teases. “It’s a pretty sad story. He comes from nothing. His family takes him for granted and is abusive. He’s trying his best to save his mother, so he makes a very drastic decision and it affects what’s remaining of his life.”

Toshiro Kamiya in Fool Night is very much in line with McArthur’s acclaimed work in playing Yuji Itadori in Jujutsu Kaisen, both young characters forced to grow up quickly and sacrifice tremendously in face of extraordinary circumstances. McArthur leaves everything on the field for his soul-searing performances, noting that he often leaves recording sessions physically and emotionally exhausted to bring those raw qualities out in his work. But for audiences who find their own inspiration in what characters like Yuji endure and persevere through, McArthur settles for nothing less in reflecting that emotional honesty through his performance in the recording booth.

“When I’m in there, I’m breaking my heart for you guys, for the audience,” McArthur reflects. “I have to live those moments as if they’re happening to me and it feels heartwrenching. I’m feeling all of those emotions as I’m acting them.”

All three seasons of Jujutsu Kaisen are available to stream on Crunchyroll. Fool Night premieres November 26 on Netflix.

Perfectly Balanced Infinity Gauntlet Replica Up for Auction

Throughout the Infinity Saga of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thanos had to work really, really hard to get his Infinity Gauntlet. He had to employ various minions, fight Earth’s mightiest heroes, and he had to sacrifice his own beloved daughter, Gamora. He even had to brutalize the elf Eitri of Nidavellir to forge his Gauntlet.

In our world, things are a little more straightforward, thanks to Julien’s Auctions and East Continental Gems. The two have assembled to bring the Infinity Gauntlet off of the screen and into your hands, with a perfect 1-to-1 recreation of the item. The headline offering of the Pop Culture Legends Evening Auction in Abu Dhabi on Dec. 8, 2026, the Infinity Gauntlet will catch the interest of any Marvel lover.

Julien Infinity Gauntlet

Created in cooperation with Marvel Studios, the Infinity Gauntlet features real-world gems modeled on the six Infinity Stones from the MCU. Yet, each of them have their own value beyond mere pop cultural analogues. A release from Julien’s reveals, “The emerald representing the Time Stone was uncovered over a century ago and had been held in the East Continental Gems collection for more than thirty years — a stone the firm had long declined to sell — before being released for this commission.”

The gems weigh more than 170 carats together, resting in a Gauntlet that towers at almost 20 inches tall. Furthermore, each of the six gems come certified and authenticated by the American Gemological Laboratories, with additional documentation from the Gemological Institute of America attesting to the quality of the diamond.

The 1-to-1 Infinity Gauntlet replica may not grant its user the same power over time and reality as seen in Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame, but it will make the wearer the most envied Marvel fan in the universe. It is, as Thanos might say, inevitable.

James Gunn Is Underselling the Appeal of the Superhero Shared Universe

There are many reasons that superhero movies have dropped off from their position atop the cultural landscape in the 2010s. Lackluster projects, market saturation, and simple shifting audience interests have all led to what we call “superhero fatigue.” Undoubtedly, one of the biggest reasons is the feeling that each new superhero entry feels like homework, a phenomenon apparently at work with the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday. To properly enjoy the movie, you can’t just watch the film that hits theaters on December 18; you also have to watch all the Fox X-Men movies, Fantastic Four: First Steps, both seasons of Loki, the re-released Avengers: Endgame, and more.

So when James Gunn took to social media this weekend to push back against people talking about future movies set-up by Clayface, he was right to ask them to focus on the film itself. “I dislike the idea that individual stories aren’t meaningful unless they lead to something else. People not understanding this is strange to me, because Star Wars has essentially been doing this for 50 years across movies, shows, games and books, admittedly without the tonal variety,” he wrote on Threads. Gunn’s approach is correct, and probably healthy in this age of superhero fatigue. But we can’t forget that shared universes are one of the chief appeals of superhero movies.

2013’s Thor: The Dark World was a hit, but even then, it was recognized as a lesser entry. But there was one point when audiences seeing that film in the theater lost their minds: when Loki transforms into Captain America to taunt his brother, giving Chris Evans an opportunity to appear on screen and joke around with his pal from The Avengers.

The scene wasn’t just a cameo by someone audiences recognized and had feelings about, like when Chris Evans showed up as Johnny Storm in Deadpool & Wolverine. Rather, it showed the audience that the world of Marvel had evolved, that events from a previous chapter—The Avengers, in this case—paid off with an event in the current chapter.

Comic book fans have long known the pleasures of an ongoing narrative and a shared universe. All the way back in the Golden Age of comics, fans realized the fun of seeing characters from different stories band together, most obviously with the advent of the first superhero team, the Justice Society of America, in 1940’s All-Star Comics #3.

In the Silver Age, things got even more complicated. The Golden Age stories may have shown us that Flash, Green Lantern, and Hawkman know one another, and that Superman could hang out with Batman and Robin, but the Marvel Age of heroes, with its tighter editing by Stan Lee, showed that events from past stories affected future issues. The Fantastic Four remembered meeting Spider-Man in Amazing Spider-Man #1. Iron Man’s adventures in the pages of Avengers affected his stories in his solo book, Iron Man.

As the fandom grew more devoted and the universe expanded, the connections became more byzantine, resulting in both mistakes by creators and confusion among fans. Publishers tried to corral this in various ways, ranging from Marvel offering a “No-Prize” to anyone who could explain a canonical reason for a mistake on the page to DC rebooting the universe and starting from scratch, most famously with 1984’s Crisis on Infinite Earths.

But every time, fans and creators alike come back to wanting continuity and consistency. If the Flash breaks his leg in his own series, they don’t want to see him racing around with the Justice League of America that same month. If Gambit tried to blow up Captain America’s costume in a crossover event, fans don’t want them to be chummy in the next event, not without a hard conversation.

Of course, comic book fans are an increasingly shrinking and devoted core. And while Disney and Skydance would like the same level of devotion, they don’t want movie audiences to shrink in the same way. So Gunn is showing business savvy when he assures people that they can just go to Clayface and not worry about how it fits in with the character’s previous appearance in Creature Commandos, let alone where he and Batman will show up again in the future. Moreover, he’s right to urge people to just enjoy the movie for itself, instead of doing the all-too familiar superhero movie strategy of apologizing for a lackluster entry by promising it sets up a better one in the future.

But that doesn’t mean we don’t want one chapter of the DCU story to lead into another. And Gunn is aware of this. When discussing the difficulties of Peacemaker season 2 coming after the DC universe rebooted with he and Peter Safran taking over DC Studios, Gunn told Den of Geek, “I’m a balanced canon guy… On the one hand, people take it a little too far. Obviously, these are fictional stories, so we don’t have to pretend that they’re reality. But at the same time, these stories are supposed to be in the same world, and you need to pay attention to the connection between things.”

Hopefully, Gunn still wants us to pay attention to those things, even if he doesn’t want us to have to pay too much attention.

Clayface is now playing in theaters.

The 15 Best Horror Movies of the 2000s

As they were happening, the 2000s seemed like a low point for horror. The slasher revival that launched with Scream in 1996 had waned, remakes cluttered theaters, and torture porn was being talked about like it was the end of civilization. However, with more than 15 years since the end of the decade now passed, it’s clear that the 2000s were in fact a high point for horror—especially if you look beyond Hollywood.

So if you’re ready for a reappraisal. Or if you just want to frost your tips, pull on some low-rise jeans, and blast some nü-metal, then check out these great scary movies from an underrated era.

Ginger Snaps (2000)

Since the earliest variations of the werewolf myth, lycanthropy revealed the horror of the monster still within the modern, civilized man. That last word is used intentionally because, more often than not, werewolves were wolf men, not women.

Director John Fawcett and screenwriter Karen Walton turn that assumption upside down with Ginger Snaps, a coming-of-age horror story. Shortly after a series of dog attacks befall their Canadian suburb, Ginger Fitzgerald (Katharine Isabelle) hits puberty, and begins acting in ways that frighten her sister Brigitte (Emily Perkins). Is Ginger becoming a beast? Or is she becoming a woman? Ginger Snaps answers, “Both.”

The Others (2001)

The success of M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense opened the door for a resurgence of prestige ghost stories. The Others, written and directed by Alejandro Amenábar, is one of the few to match the quality of the originator, precisely because of the way it handles character drama.

Set in 1945 Jersey, The Others follows mother Grace Stewart (Nicole Kidman) as she tries to maintain normalcy for her children Anne and Nicholas (Alakina Mann and James Bentley) while her husband (Christopher Eccleston) is at war. However, when strange phenomena besets the family, Grace must defend her family from an unbelievable truth.

Pulse (2001)

Even by 2001, it became commonplace to observe that the internet connected us, but made us lonelier than ever. But the power of writer/director Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse isn’t in the novelty of its argument. Rather, it’s in the feelings of dread and sorrow it invokes.

Kursosawa’s ambling narrative focuses a group of young people whose friends go missing shortly after they start logging onto the net. Slowly, they discover that cyberspace serves as a conduit between our world and the spiritual, blurring the line between the living and the dead. Heady as that sounds, Pulse works in the sublime, including one of the scariest scenes put to film, in which a ghost slowly ambles toward its victim.

28 Days Later (2002)

Hard to believe today, as The Walking Dead continues to amble on with countless spinoffs, but zombies had long fallen out of fashion before the 2000s. So when Danny Boyle and Alex Garland teamed up for 28 Days Later, the concept seemed like a throwback and reinvention of a forgotten premise.

Boyle and Garland effectively reanimated the genre by giving it a shocking new direction. When courier Jim (Cillian Murphy) wakes up in an empty hospital, he enters an England ravaged by a rage virus, a disease that turns ordinary humans into rabid beasts. Together with a group of survivors, played by Naomie Harris, Brendan Gleeson, and Megan Burns, Jim tries to find something like civilization—if such a thing is even possible anymore.

The Ring (2002)

Given the glut of mediocre foreign language remakes that filled movie theaters and video stores in the 2000s, it’s easy to forget what an incredible job director Gore Verbinski and screenwriter Ehren Kruger did translating the thoroughly Japanese Ringu to American sensibilities with The Ring. The Ring contains all of the horror of the original, but plays in a Western context that invokes a fear of technology not native to this country.

The movie’s success rests in part on a strong central performance by Naomi Watts as journalist Rachel, who begins investigating a cursed video tape after her niece’s grotesque death. As she and her friend Noah (Martin Henderson) dig into the mystery of haunted girl Samara (Daveigh Chase), they put everything at risk, including her young son Aidan (David Dorfman).

A Tale of Two Sisters (2003)

The Ring managed to improve upon its source material, but most American versions failed to capture the tone of the original. Such was certainly the case with A Tale of Two Sisters, whose American take The Uninvited was a sad imitation of the Korean original, written and directed by Kim Jee-woon.

The two sisters in question are teenager Su-mi (Im Soo-jung) and her younger sibling Su-yeon (Moon Geun-young), who cannot accept their father’s new wife Eun-joo (Yum Jung-ah). More than just youthful rebellion, the girls’ mistrust of their step-mother stems from questions about the death of their biological mother, questions that grow more pressing as hauntings begin. Part fairy tale, part ghost story, A Tale of Two Sisters weaves a narrative too unique and complex to be simply transported to another part of the world.

Shaun of the Dead (2004)

In lesser hands, Shaun of the Dead would feel like a series of empty signifiers, like listening to a hyperactive, overly-caffeinated kid list his favorite horror movies. Even with the capable Edgar Wright behind the camera, Shaun of the Dead indulges in its homages, particularly to the zombie films of George R. Romero. But the movie has more on its mind than just touting its genre bonafides.

Simon Pegg, who co-wrote the script with Wright, gives a star-making performance as Shaun, an aimless twenty-something who spends too much time playing video games with his best mate Ed (Nick Frost) to save his relationship with his girlfriend Liz (Kate Ashfield). But when the dead begin to rise around his Crouch End neighborhood, Shaun finally finds his purpose, leading his pals through the apocalypse to get back his girl, rescue his mom, and, of course, have a pint.

The Descent (2005)

To most Americans, few things sound scarier than the foggy marshes of Scotland. Judging by writer/director Neil Marshall’s The Descent, Scots come to the mountains of the U.S. to get their scares, and with good reason. The Descent is one of the few movies that’s so much scarier before the monsters show up, when we’re just watching a group of spelunking women squeeze through suffocatingly tight spaces.

Those women include Sarah (Shauna Macdonald), still traumatized by the death of her husband and child a year earlier. When her best friend Juno (Natalie Mendoza) brings Sarah on a cave exploration in North Carolina, everyone hopes that she can finally heal. However, the opposite happens, as tensions mount between the women and the spaces through which they squeeze grow tighter. All that before they encounter albino monsters from the center of the Earth.

Slither (2006)

These days, of course, James Gunn is best known for running DC Studios alongside Peter Safran and directing huge superhero movies like Superman. But back in the 2000s, Gunn was just transitioning out of his education writing for schlockmeisters Troma Entertainment and working on the live-action Scooby-Doo movies. From that experience came Gunn’s debut feature, the somehow warm-hearted gross-out picture, Slither.

A riff on the standard alien invasion movie, Slither takes place in Wheelsy, South Carolina, where police chief Bill Pardy (Nathan Fillion) still harbors feelings for schoolteacher Starla (Elizabeth Banks), even though she’s married local rich guy Grant Grant (Michael Rooker). When alien worms attack the town and transform citizens into gooey zombies, Grant becomes the leader, but his enduring love for Starla remains, making Slither both sweet and revolting. 

Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)

With its fantasy trappings, Pan’s Labyrinth isn’t as pure horror as, say, Guillermo del Toro’s 2001 ghost story The Devil’s Backbone. But by setting the tale of a girl who finds another strange other world in the middle of the Spanish Civil War, del Toro gives Pan’s Labyrinth an edge that few movies the era could match. 

The horror and wonder of Pan’s Labyrinth comes through little girl Ofelia (Ivana Baquero), whose life changes for the worse when her mother (Ariadna Gil) marries Captain Vidal (Sergi López). In what may be a real adventure or what may be a coping mechanism, Ofelia discovers a doorway to the underworld, where she meets a faun (Doug Jones) who sends her on magical quests that are somehow less frightening than what she experiences in her real life.

The Host (2006)

Most of the movies on this list, even those not from America stick to a single genre. Not so with Bong Joon Ho’s The Host, which operates mostly as a kaiju film, but takes huge tonal swings, from family melodrama to slapstick comedy and everything in between. Instead of feeling discordant, the shifts make The Host a surprisingly nuanced and human look at how people deal with disaster.

Co-writing with Ha Joon-won and Baek Chul-hyun, director Bong turns to his regular star Song Kang-ho to play Park Gang-du, an underachieving snack bar proprietor and doting father of Hyun-seo (Go Ah-sung). When a beast emerges from the Han River and captures Hyun-seo, Gang-du and his family, including Olympic archer Park Nam-joo (Bae Doona), must deal with the fall-out, even as the truth of the monster’s origin comes clear.

Saw III (2006)

Of course, most would argue that the original Saw is the best of the series (if not the most recent entry, Saw X), and with good reason. James Wan and Leigh Whannell pulled off an indie miracle, using resources so limited that they had to use crash zooms of a car being rocked from the outside to create a chase sequence. But here’s the thing: with its minimal plot and mostly off-screen gore, Saw is hardly indicative of what the franchise became.

For a better representative of the Saw series, we turn to Saw III, written by Whannell and directed by Darren Lynn Bousman. In this entry, the Jigsaw Killer John Kramer (Tobin Bell) puts a grieving father (Angus Macfadyen) through an ordeal that includes some of the gnarliest traps of the series. Further, Saw III leans hard into the overwrought police drama that would become the franchise’s true signature.

[REC] (2007)

Found footage movies were all the rage in the 2000s and 2010s, in part because they were extremely cheap to make. But rarely did found footage offerings achieve the level of immediacy the format promised. The Spanish demonic possession movie [REC], co-directed by Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza (who co-write with Luiso Berdejo) stands as a notable outlier.

[REC] has a simple premise, in which reporter Ángela Vidal (Manuela Velasco) visits a Barcelona firehouse to shoot a segment about overnight work. The firefighter get called to an emergency at a downtown apartment, which Ángela initially considers a stroke of good luck, finally providing some excitement in an otherwise dull outing. What they get, however, is a true nightmare, one that’s just as scary for audiences, thanks to Balagueró and Plaza’s deft use of the found-footage format.

Let the Right One In (2008)

Horror movies love to fall back on the old trope that humans are the real monster. But rarely has it been done as well as in Let the Right One In, the Swedish vampire film from Tomas Alfredson and John Ajvide Lindqvist. The acts of cruelty doled out on lonely protagonist Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant) are so upsetting, that you almost forget that his only friend is Eli (Lina Leandersson) a much, much older vampire who presents as a young girl.

This isn’t to say that Let the Right One In doesn’t have its moments of terror involving Eli. From the film’s perfectly-measured climax involving bullies at a pool to every scene involving her familiar Håkan (Per Ragnar), Alfredson never lets the audience forget that Oskar runs the risk of losing his life to a bloodsucker. It’s just that Let the Right One In shows that Oscar’s life is pretty rough even without monsters involved.

The House of the Devil (2009)

With the days of Halloween (originally titled The Babysitter Murders) and When a Stranger Calls far behind us, movies about the perils of watching other people’s kids have fallen out of fashion. Perhaps that’s why writer/director Ti West sets The House of the Devil in the 1980s, when teens and college kids would regularly go to stranger’s houses for money.

That’s what happens to Samantha Hughes (Jocelin Donahue), who takes a babysitting gig and then keeps it even after learning she’s in fact been hired by Mr. Ulman (Tom Noonan) to watch his elderly mother-in-law, not a child. From that moment on, Samantha knows something is wrong, as does the audience. But West keeps the explicit stuff off-screen for much of the movie’s run-time, slowly building tension until a glorious payoff, one that begins with a sad fate for Samantha’s best friend, played by current auteur Greta Gerwig.

Warhound: Genetically Enhanced War Dogs Startup Claims It Could Have Major Applications for Pet Owners

What brave new world is this where genetically engineered military work dogs are not the stuff of science fiction but, soon, the stuff of science fact? That is one of the upshots from news that Forbes first broke Thursday evening about American billionaires Ben Lamm and Palmer Luckey collaborating on a new startup titled Warhound, and already it has in stealth raised $200 million in seed funding. The stated goal is to use some of the same technology of Lamm’s Colossal Biosciences to clone military work dogs that can be genetically altered to serve the U.S. military, a client Luckey’s Anduril Industries is intimately afmiliar with.

While Lamm and Lucky dreamed up the company, and Lamm will sit on its board, Warhound has tapped former U.S. Marine David Spirk as its CEO, and it is positioning itself as fulfilling a very real need for the U.S. military. As of press time, the federal government acquires more than 80 percent of its work dogs for the various military branches from European firms, only about half of which are ever actually deemed fit for service. That is to say for every 100 puppies recruited from European breeders this year, maybe 50 will be deployed in the field in 2029. These are the dogs used to sniff out explosives and narcotics, guard parameters, and track suspects.

There has been a perhaps unsurprising skepticism online to the idea of using some of the same methods as Colossal—the company Lamm co-founded and which made global headlines last year when it announced it had brought back the dire wolf (or a functional version of the dire wolf)—to genetically enhance living breeds of dogs like German Shepherds. It is likely for this reason that Warhound stressed in a press release that it is also working with the American Humane Society, the famed animal welfare organization that has agreed to certify Warhound’s training program and the unification of military working dogs with their former handlers and adoption protocols.

Still, the thing that gave this writer pause is exactly how the science of genetically-manipulated canines would be used to enhance and improve the health of lab-created work dogs—and are there larger, perhaps more benign, applications for this technology beyond military use? In an exchange of text messages with Ben Lamm, the Texas entrepreneur insisted that the north star is expanding the quality of health of these dogs… and potentially making it available one day to the civilian population’s pets as well.

“Our first goal is to extend health span,” Lamm said in a written message, “helping dogs stay healthier and active for longer by reducing harmful genetic variants linked to inherited diseases and muscle degeneration.” While Lamm stops short of directly stating it could be used to also expand a dog’s lifespan, acknowledging it’s “too early” to say if it could add years to a dog’s life, he noted “addressing those conditions could ultimately extend lifespan as well. Some single-gene disorders may be directly targetable while traits such as longevity, scent, temperament, agility, and heat tolerance involve many genes, plus training and environment. We’re studying proven working dogs to understand what is responsibly actionable and what we learn could eventually benefit the dogs in our homes too.”

The last point is curious since much of Colossal’s conservation efforts and technology innovations have become open-sourced and made available to various conservation partners around the world. Lamm declines from saying whether any such advancements from Warhound would become open-sourced. However, he did note, “We will be able to test for mutations and go in and genetically fix things like muscle atrophy and hip dysplasia. Therapeutics and solutions from Warhound that could have health benefits for dogs will be made available to the public.”

I’m not sure this will assuage those concerned with the ethics of genetically altering and breeding the clones of military work dogs, however it does suggest the same technology that certainly captivated the world last year could one day be used to minimize genetic disorders that haunt and despair thousands of pet owners this and every other year. Brave new world, indeed.

Carrie’s Matthew Lillard: The Biggest Lesson from Modern Teachers Is It’s ‘Never the Kid, It’s the Adults’

Matthew Lillard is deeply proud of his children. Obviously aware of the irony that he was once most famous for playing young people discovering their identities or beginning their lives in high school and college, and is now the “elder statesman” on sets like Mike Flanagan’s Carrie, Lillard remains acutely observant of the growing-up experience—especially in his own home with three children between the ages of 18 and 24.

It’s why he suspects so many parents and adults are deluding themselves these days if they think the kids are as happy and as assured in the world around them as he was when he starred in movies like Scream and Hackers.

“I will say my kids suffer from anxiety,” Lillard acknowledges when stopping by the Den of Geek studio. “In any public situation, they’re constantly on look-out. They’ll go to a movie and look for the exits. I think they live in a level of fear that we as adults can never understand.”

They’re worried about an archetype that was once largely relegated to the realm of fantasy when Lillard grew up with VHS tapes of Brian De Palma and Sissy Spacek’s take on Carrie (1976), a classic film about a bullied and isolated child withering beneath an abusive mother until she one day snaps. But in 1976, or when author Stephen King first published the story in 1974, the ‘snap’ involved magical telekinetic powers—not weapons of mass murder.

That last modernly ubiquitous detail is something Lillard and Flanagan’s new and thoroughly reimagined adaptation of Carrie, now streaming on Amazon Prime Video, confronts head on in the first episode when Carrie (an initially warm and bubbly Summer H. Hall) sees for the first time a reality that might shock even many viewers: public school drills where a man holding a fake (but extremely real looking) assault rifle pretends to be a killer walking from classroom to classroom.

“My kids are really bright, they’re really articulate, but that feeling, this level of anxiety, is more prevalent than any adult really understands,” Lillard continues. “Do I think [these drills] are necessary? Unfortunately, I do. Apparently in America we think it’s more important to have assault weapons that are designed to murder human beings than we care about our kids and their safety.”

Such is the provocative new reality explored in Carrie, a series that attempts to reimagine the story of Carrie White, the lonely telekinetic ‘firestarter’ girl, from all angles, including the home lives of her greatest tormentors and those of even her put-upon champions, like Lillard’s Principal Grayle.

“Grayle is the one who is the calm in the storm,” Lillard says. “It’s interesting for me, especially in a genre film, I’m usually out there chewing the scenery and hurling energy around, but Mike had a very clear plan of what he wanted me to do. It’s a real adult role… it’s grounded in strength, in simplicity of performance.”

It is also at the intersection Flanagan wants to explore in Carrie ’26, a TV series as much based on the real-world phenomenon of anonymous social media bullying crippling an entire community in California as it is Stephen King. In this way, we spend nearly as much time studying the troubled home life of Carrie’s chief bully, Chris Hargensen (Alison Thornton), as we do Carrie’s own complicated and toxic relationship with her zealous and militantly religious mother, Margaret (Samantha Sloyan). According to Lillard, this ultimately reflects the greatest lesson he learned from working with real-life educators in the current trenches: it’s never the kid’s fault.

Says the actor, “Personally, I think we are losing the plot in terms of educators and their role in our society and their importance in helping raise kids and educate kids… I did have a great conversation with a teacher who is a dear friend of Mike’s, and we spoke for like an hour. She said a bunch of things that end up in the show, but one of the first things she said, first and foremost, is it’s never the kid; it’s always the adults. Every kid who comes to that school, if they’re a bad egg, it’s because their parent is a bad egg. Kids by nature are just trying their best.”

This is something the modern Carrie attempts to dramatize. While Chris is never excused or exonerated for her actions—she indeed embraces them every time in the series, from creating the “#CarrieRed” Instagram account to filling a fateful bucket with pig’s blood—we do see how she learns her behavior from an aggressive and otherwise negligent father more preoccupied with his dwindling fortunes than his daughter’s health, and a wholly absent and disengaged mother living with another family. While Lillard’s Principal Grayle doesn’t have the full details of that situation, there is a knowing weariness when he sits across the desk from Chris’ litigious father.

“The other thing that [Flanagan’s friend] really tried to highlight for me is that teachers can do anything,” adds Lillard. “They’re all well-educated, they’ve all gone to college, they could all go into the private sector and make more money but they choose, by choice, to raise the next generation of young people. There is an element of love that brings them into that profession in the first place, and I do think Mike tries to capture that. This authentic, empathetic, and loving relationship with these kids, trying to do the best they can given the circumstances they’re working under.” It’s a complexity, and anxiety, we tend to ignore.

Carrie is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video.

Alien Works Because Tom Skerritt Went from Lead to Supporting

Too many of today’s filmgoers may not appreciate the breadth of work that Tom Skerritt left when he passed away this week at the age of 93. Skerritt got his start in war movies and TV shows like 12 O’Clock High and Gunsmoke in the early ’60s, but became a regular in the New Hollywood movement, appearing in M.A.S.H., Harold and Maude, and Fuzz. In the ’80s and ’90s, he started playing authority figures, police and military officers in The Dead Zone, Top Gun, and the Emmy-winning TV drama Picket Fences.

Ironically, it may be one of Skerritt’s best-known roles that illustrates the quality of his acting precisely because we take it for granted today. For decades, everyone has known that Sigourney Weaver‘s character Ellen Ripley is the hero of the Ridley Scott sci-fi horror movie, Alien. But for the film’s first audiences in 1979, Skerritt was the recognizable actor in a traditional heroic part, and the rise of Ripley works, in part, because of his ability to step aside and let her take over. It was a shock when his character died halfway through the movie.

Skerritt plays Captain Dallas in Alien, the even-keeled leader of the truckers aboard the commercial starship Nostromo. Even beyond his higher celebrity status at the time, Dallas immediately projects the confidence of a leader. He checks in with the crew as they wake up from cryosleep and gets information about their early rising from the computer MOTHER, which relays orders from the Company (not yet identified as Weyland-Yutani in this film). When the Xenomorph begins attacking the crew, Dallas comes up with a plan to attack it, leading the charge to hunt it in the air ducts.

At the same time, however, Dallas is not a by-the-book heavy. Early on, we get intimations that there might have been a romantic relationship between him and Ripley in the past, and he speaks familiarly with the rest of the crew. Yes, he’s the one who shuts down talk of increased shares from Parker (Yaphet Kotto) and Brett (Harry Dean Stanton), the two people with the lowest status among this group of laborers. But even then, it’s clear that everyone on the Nostromo admires him personally.

That personal connection comes through in the way that Skerritt plays the character. Dallas remains fairly soft-spoken throughout the film, raising his voice only when necessary when things get emotional. In most cases of disagreement, Dallas falls back on repeating orders from the Company, allowing him to remain aligned with the crew people while still moving the crew forward. Yet Skerritt never lets these tendencies read as passivity. He speeds up his lines deliveries when Dallas gives orders. He holds his body in firm resolution when the crew is deciding on plans.

The complexity of Skerritt’s performance is most evident in Dallas’ most pivotal scene when he argues with Ripley about opening the hatch to allow him and Lambert to bring the infected Kane (John Hurt) back onto the ship. At first Skerritt plays it cool but insistent, ordering Ripley to open the hatch while telling the more emotional Lambert to hold her composure. However, as Ripley refuses to allow entry, citing quarantine procedures that require them to wait for 24 hours, Skerritt allows Dallas to get more bothered, almost yelling his orders and gesticulating with frustration at her response.

Of course director Ridley Scott builds on Skerritt’s performance to emphasize the difference between them. Dallas’ voice is distorted by the microphones, the windstorm outside obscuring him further, all of which stops hard when we cut to Ripley inside the ship, her voice clear and clean. Even as the argument grows more heated, Weaver plays Ripley as fairly calm, holding her tone when citing regulations.

For the movie’s first audiences, Ripley seems cruel and detached, and Dallas appears like the hero, the one willing to cut through the BS for the sake of his crew and friends. Yet as we know today, this conversation is the exact moment that Ripley supersedes Dallas as the hero of the movie. Ash (Ian Holm) and the Company may be more at fault for the death of the Nostromo crew members, as they orchestrate the discovery of the xenomorph and its entrance into the ship, but Dallas would have done what Ash did, making him just as guilty, even though it cost him his life.

Today we know Ellen Ripley as one of the greatest heroes in science fiction. But it never would have happened if Skerritt didn’t commit to his role as Dallas, ignoring his ego to fully embody someone strong, human, and totally unsuited for the job ahead of him. Fortunately for cinema history, Skerritt was more than equal to his task.

Crystal Lake: Exploring the Weird Lack of Nudity in Friday the 13th

This article contains spoilers for all of Peacock and A24’s Crystal Lake.

There’s a bare bum but no boobs as far as the eye can see. For kids of the ‘70s and ‘80s, a slasher movie without tits is like a sky without stars. What’s going on?

Crystal Lake, the Friday the 13th prequel series produced by A24 and streaming now on Peacock is horror that reflects its time, much in the same way that the 1980 original film did. The show is gory as all hell but fairly prudish when it comes to nudity. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Talking to The Wrap, showrunner Brad Caleb Kane said, “I tried. That’s America. You can give the kids the violence, but God forbid they see some breasts. Sometimes you get overruled in these things.” Pointedly, he does not say exactly who overruled him.

The thing is, the implied moral objection to showing boobs isn’t so different to the ostensible point of the boobs in the first film. Friday the 13th (along with Halloween) is one of the most iconic examples of the sex = death models which gave rise to the Final Girl trope. At Camp Crystal Lake, horny camp counsellors are punished for getting jiggy in the most extreme ways during the OG film series, initially by Pamela Voorhees (played magnificently by Linda Cardellini in the TV show) and later by her unstoppable, possibly supernatural, son Jason Voorhees. By Friday the 13th Part III, not-so-little Jason would become the hockey mask-wearing, machete-wielding icon of horror that he is today.

If you transgress, if you are naughty or sexy, if you party hard, show off your body and aren’t a good girl, then Jason (or his mom) will get you. “Be good, kids! [especially girls!!],” the film is saying with a forked tongue. Sean Cunningham’s original isn’t a PSA though; it’s a willful marriage of heightened senses—the titillation of tits and the shock and adrenaline of extreme violence, which nonetheless comes with an old fashioned moral message—the film is very much having its cake and eating it, so to speak.

In 1980 when the original came out, there wasn’t an internet. There was, however, VHS. Back then, if you were a bog-standard young person, your only viable option to look at naked ladies was an old magazine you found down by some railway tracks or horror movies. This was a genre that was deliberately transgressive and not especially tightly regulated, so while many attribute Psycho and the infamous shower scene to being the forerunner of an association between beautiful, naked women and extreme violence, the VHS era leaned into that hard. It was part of the appeal. It was the unspoken deal: pick out a slasher from your video rental shop and you will get to see some boobs.

Now, however, if a person wants to look at breasts, it’s a mere touch of a button away. Caleb Kane saying “that’s America” is only half right. Peacock (or whoever) can be as censorial as it likes, but pornography has never been more accessible, prevalent, and ubiquitous. Not putting nudity in an extremely violent horror TV show doesn’t do anything for the nation’s moral fibre. It literally makes no difference.

Perhaps, though, it allows the franchise to move away from the very male-centric skew it started out with 46 years ago? If there’s no incentive to hook viewers with the nooky, there’s space to make a show that’s able to explore other angles of slasher mythos and iconography outside of “if you shag, you die.”

Crystal Lake has its work cut out in trying to faithfully follow the events of the original while adding its own new back story.

In the show, as in the original films, Pamela’s son Jason apparently drowns because the camp counselors who should have been watching him are having sex. The camp owners decide to reopen the following year in the series though, causing Pamela much distress. When the camp grounds start getting used again, the bodies begin to really pile up.

However, it’s not just Pamela doing the killing this time. Instead we meet Final Girl 2.0 Grace Snell (Gwendolyn Sundstrom), beautiful, kind, innocent, and the one person who always treated Jason with friendship and compassion. Pamela loves her, she is in no way sexualised, and she doesn’t get killed. Perfect Final Girl material. But in Crystal Lake girls, Final or otherwise, can be more than one thing. And Grace, unfortunately, gets in with the wrong crowd (a bunch of hippies), accidentally takes way too much acid and goes on a killing spree. 

Then there’s Pamela herself. A warm, gentle and loving mother, who (we discover in a stand out flashback episode) had been experimented on by her dastardly husband (Midnight Mass star Hamish Linklater), a fiend whose dodgy employers are attempting to genetically engineer humans in order to survive a nuclear attack. That’s why Jason is deformed; that’s why Jason didn’t drown in the lake (or in an earlier scene where Pamela falls asleep while bathing him); and that’s why Jason goes from being a small boy at camp to a hulking great unstoppable killing machine in a matter of years. 

The purity of the original might have been lost along with its flashes of skin, but what has emerged from under the naked corpses is another beast entirely, and one that’s a bit more nuanced when it comes to the women in the show. So if that’s the price of boobs, it’s probably worth it.

Carrie Season 2 Can Finally Do a Stephen King TV Universe Justice

This article contains spoilers for Carrie season 1.

Carrie White does not, it turns out, burn in Hell. Whatever we were told by Sue Snell’s dream sequence at the end of the 1976 Brian De Palma movie, Amazon has different plans for its take on the poor bullied telekinetic. A second season of the Prime Video series has been greenlit, continuing creator Mike Flanagan‘s plans for a three-season series based on the 1974 Stephen King novel.

“For 50 years, audiences have known and gravitated to Carrie White’s story. From the beginning, we imagined a story that goes far beyond the prom, and I’m incredibly grateful for Stephen’s trust and support in exploring what comes next,” Flanagan said in a statement announcing Carrie season 2. If some of the Easter Eggs in season 1 are any indication, Flanagan will need the author’s support in taking Carrie beyond the prom and into a Stephen King shared universe, something that has failed miserably in other adaptations.

Right from the first episode, Carrie made it clear that Flanagan’s take would differ from the novel and previous movies. Sue Snell (Siena Agudong) tells an unseen interviewer that there was so much more to the infamous prom, where Carrie allegedly unleashed her powers and killed almost everyone in attendance. Indeed, as the episodes unfold, we learn that Sue makes this declaration to Adelaide (Kate Siegel), leader of a cult of women with psychic power.

Not only have Adelaide and her people been watching Carrie (Summer H. Howell) and looking for a way to recruit her. But they also send an emissary called Emaline (Thalia Dudek), who acts as Carrie’s close friend when high school becomes too much. In fact, in Flanagan’s telling, the carnage at the prom comes not from Carrie, but from Emaline, who takes possession over her.

The final episodes of Carrie see Adelaide and her cult making themselves known, recording testimony from Sue and other survivors, killing Carrie’s fanatical mother Margaret (Samantha Sloyan), who shows her own powers briefly, and then sending Emaline off to escape with Carrie.

The season ends with Emaline and Carrie on the road, a classic set up for future seasons. But the real interesting part comes in the way that Adelaide describes Carrie’s powers to Margaret. In one of the interviews, she refers to the powers as a “Shine,” speaking not just about Danny Torrance’s abilities in The Shining, but also to the various powers of the True Knot in Doctor Sleep, a book that Flanagan admirably adapted to the screen.

With that line and the set-up of the final episode, it seems that Carrie is planning to explore a larger Stephen King universe. On the one hand, that makes perfect sense. Even from the fact that most of his tales take place in Maine, King’s work has always had a shared quality, one that became explicit in the Dark Tower series. And Flanagan is aware of that quality, recently telling Den of Geek, that King “started [a multiverse] when he was 19 and he doesn’t get enough credit for that. It’s become the engine of so much of our pop culture – the connected universe, the multiverse.”

On the other hand, attempts to make a shared King universe outside of the books have all failed. Even if we discount the terrible 2017 movie The Dark Tower, there’s the lackluster Hulu show Castle Rock, which felt like little more than a series of easter eggs waiting for a narrative to hold them together.

Flanagan certainly is among the more esteemed creators in television today, so he has good will on his side. But his bold deviations from the source material have irritated some fans. Will he be able to win them back with a shared universe show befitting the Master of Horror? We’d like to guess, but we don’t have the Shine to see the future.

Carrie season 1 is now streaming on Prime Video

Werwulf: Exclusive First Look Inside Robert Eggers’ New Movie and a Career in Moonlight

Robert Eggers is in the midst of transformation. When we catch up with the 21st-century maestro of the macabre, he is in a pitch-black room (of course) at his London studio, supervising the final mix of sound and effects for Werwulf. Like other Eggers films that are now staples of modern horror, from The Witch to Nosferatu, Werwulf is a meticulously researched, borderline fanatical period piece, this one set in a 1300s England so authentic every character speaks in Middle English. Stars Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Lily-Rose Depp even practiced each line with a phoneticist.

Yet like Taylor-Johnson’s cursed hero, Eggers is still carefully watching the gory details take shape when we meet. Originally conceiving the film as a black-and-white chiller (better to obscure the bloody bits), he and constant DP Jarin Blaschke ultimately opted for an orthochromatic look that drains light from characters’ faces while maintaining a hellish, flame-lit glow. The makers are still manipulating the film grain, but the goal is to echo the shadowy nihilism of The Lighthouse without sacrificing the color in the viscera. Eggers admits medievalists might wince at a 1300s England where everyone’s covered in darkness, not to mention shit, but, he grins, “That is the world of this movie.”

Below is our conversation, edited for length, about that world, the obscure werewolf lore which informs it, and a career dedicated to reviving the demons we’ve all pretended to forget. (*Editor’s Note: This interview was conducted before Eggers’ Romeo and Juliet was announced.)

You obviously grew up with a fascination with monsters, cinematic and otherwise, so was there a moment where you discovered The Wolf Man at a public library?

Robert Eggers: Nosferatu had this beautiful origin story that was really easy to describe and fold in for press. This doesn’t have quite such a magical moment of discovery, but the movie werewolf that actually affected me the most was Gary Oldman’s wolfman in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. I saw him ravaging Sadie Frost on that bench, and I was way too young to see that, and it was pretty scary. 

Also my younger brother Max, who wrote The Lighthouse with me, when he was quite little he believed he was a werewolf, sincerely, for like six months. And I was also very afraid of werewolves at night when we lived on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere, and I had to drag our garbage cans down the bottom of this long hill to the road. I would always run back up the hill as fast as I could, because of werewolves for whatever reason.

It could have been your brother. 

[Laughs] It could have been. What started this fascination was, similar to vampires, reading Montague Summers’ collection of historical vampire lore when I was in high school.

Unlike vampires with Dracula and Salem with witches, there’s not really a single historical text or event the modern American mind associates with werewolves. You could have gone back to Ancient Greece for this or the Beast of Gévaudan. Why 14th century England? 

If you were trying to be the most archetypally grounded in werewolf lore, 18th century France or early modern Central Europe would probably make more sense. But you’re always trying to raise the bar and after Nosferatu, I was just sitting at my desk, thinking what’s the scariest movie I can write? I’m not saying I succeeded in this, but that was the idea, and I definitely succeeded in darkness, I’ll tell you that! [Laughs]

Werewolves came into my mind because the historical werewolves, who you’ve clearly been reading up about, these Central European stories tend to be humans who are doing things that are so extreme and taboo and frightening, that the community and the magistrates can’t wrap their minds around them being human, so they’re saying you’re a werewolf. 

So a werewolf seems to be like the right monster for this, because that can go very, very dark. And then I live in England, so I thought it’d be great to shoot it here so my son can stay in school, but I quickly discovered there’s not a ton of British werewolf lore because there are no wolves in England. I quickly learned this is because Edward I was trying to protect the wool trade, so he hired this hunter who was a knight to exterminate all the wolves, hunt all the wolves in England. Once he began that, he did a great job and in another 200 years or so there were no wolves, and without wolves there’s no werewolf lore because you don’t have wolves to be afraid of to amplify that in your imagination. 

So if I was gonna make it English, it was going to have to be this early, and making it at the turn of the 14th century also made it exciting to me, because this was also going to enable it to be super dark and super scary because of the so-called primitive nature of of of the of the English culture in that period.

We tend to think of the 14th century as kind of the seeds for the Renaissance, but that’s really elsewhere in Europe. Is it fair to say that England in this period is kind of a backwater? 

I don’t think that’s unfair. [Laughs] Certainly the French historian that we worked with would say so, but he’s French. So Willem Dafoe’s character is based on that knight/hunter, and we don’t see see his life outside of the hunt, but if you got into his psychology and in his worldview, in his strata of society, it would be more complex and along the lines of reaching towards Renaissance thought.

He is a hunter in this, and he was a hunter in Nosferatu. What are the differences between that archetype with someone who is post-Enlightenment and this medieval character Willem’s playing?

[Nosferatu’s] von Franz has mixed feelings about the Enlightenment, but he is an intellectual. He’s not Hugh Jackman, vampire hunter. He doesn’t even know if the fucking stake is gonna work. He just read all of it in books… but this guy uses his hands. He’s a skilled swordsman; he hunted for sport and prestige when he was younger for sure.

Robert Eggers on the Set of Werwulf
Rory Mulvey / Focus Features

The first popular werewolf narrative in England was a German account The Damnable life and Death of Stubbe Peeter. Did you look to that for this movie? 

That’s definitely a great source that I definitely looked at. It’s not Aaron’s character’s story, but it’s certainly among the best.

Peeter was probably a serial killer and admitted to eating children. You’ve made some gruesome movies, but does this material feel gorier or more violent than you’re used to?

The movie is very dark and it is very extreme, and it goes further than some of my other films. The world itself is part of what makes it so frightening… When my cinematographer Jarin read the script, he was like, ‘Does this thing take place in hell?’ And I was like, not literally or metaphorically, but it is hell for Aaron’s character. 

You are going to embark on a very dark journey, but if you know my films, there are a couple jump scares in here, but it’s psychological horror. Even if there’s extreme acts, and even if there is gore, that’s not what’s scary about it. 

And are you drawing any direct inspiration from Stubbe or just the general sense of the era?

There’s some mythology in the [Stubbe] story that also coexists in this but also exists in other accounts that I found, and it is true that a lot of the details are more from the early modern period, just because the medieval English stuff is so scant and most of it is actually written by the like intelligentsia and so isn’t really folklore. So you have to kind of look to the future, rewind it, and then put it through an Anglo lens. So it’s a little funky, but I’ve had to do things like that before.

One of the things I always appreciate about your movies is you remember, the world was very dark before electricity. How are you and Jarin trying to innovate with the setting on this one?

It’s an evolution of the stuff that we’ve been doing. Everything that is flame is flame. Well, actually, there’s one scene with a chicken that for the safety of the chicken, is not lit by flame, but except for that one shot, everything is flame for flame. And we’re using a similar moonlight approach that we started in The Northman, and I think we greatly improved in Nosferatu. Here, I think the biggest challenge in the moonlight was ‘how do we get it to work in these forests and some of these lighting setups?’ The trees were quite large and difficult.

But once upon a time when this movie was conceived, partially because of the the bleakness of the film, and partially because of the violence of the film, I thought it would be good to have it be in black and white, because black and white would express the bleakness but also obscure some of the goriness by way of not having it be in color. But it grew to a point in scope where it became clear black and white wasn’t feasible, so we said, ‘Okay, how do we make that a cool thing?’ And what was it about black and white that we were so attracted to? And part of that was this orthochromatic look which degrades the skin tones and adds the kind of detail that we did in The Lighthouse, and Jarin concocted an idea to do that in color. And furthermore to get the grain structure and microcontrast from black and white negative onto the final image. So it’s definitely a very unique look.

Other returning collaborators are Aaron and Lily. Did you write these roles specifically for them?

I did, yes. I know everyone always says there is no one else who could play the role or whatever, but with Aaron, there is no one else who could have played the role. With his dance background he’s able to do things athletically that I don’t think a lot of actors of his stature could do. And then he is very beautiful in a traditional masculine way, which is really appropriate for the character. He also is good at conveying a haunted quality when this man is cursed—and cannot escape his curse—so that is massive.

Then getting to know Aaron behind the scenes, he is a really, really warm person, an incredible father, a devoted father. Warm in a way that when he meets my son, he’s hanging out with him. He’s not a dark person. He is not into any of the same shit I’m into. So having someone with so much light and warmth trapped in this cursed, dark hellish world, I thought was going to be very exciting.

And Lily’s character is physically extremely different from Lily. Lily’s presence and her physicality is very light, airy, almost ethereal, this character is incredibly earthy, but her personality is incredibly grounded and incredibly centered and incredibly generous. So she is the center of Aaron’s world and her character is kind of like the soul of the movie, and her character is the most courageous and the strongest, and one of the few characters with grace in this totally terrible, hellish, rainy, muddy, shit-infeested world.

Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Lily-Rose Depp in Werwulf
Rory Mulvey / Focus Features

You were comfortable with Early Modern English before The Witch in part because your father was a Shakespearean professor. Did you have a similar familiarity with Middle English before recently?

No, and frankly I can write fluently in Early Modern English if anyone ever needs that! I can do it! Which is great, I suppose. But Middle English was a huge challenge. I am familiar with it, but it is more like approaching a different language.

That’s really cool because you can see here’s Old English, that’s a Germanic language, and here’s the Norman influence of French [in Middle], and you see them getting smashed together and figuring it out in real-time when you read Middle English. But one of the things that also excited me about doing it in this movie and in this period is to be able to play in this world. I thought in making it so dark and super primal and visceral, the less dialogue the better. I try to do this with all my movies, but I think maybe this is the most successful where you can put the movie on mute. You don’t need to hear what anyone’s saying, none of the Middle English matters. The visuals tell the story.

That excited me because unlike The Northman, which I couldn’t do in Old Norse even though I wanted to, I can actually do it in the language of the period, even if it’s challenging… If you read Chaucer or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, there’ll be a sentence where you realize it’s basically modern English, it’s just spelled weird, and then the next sentence you can’t make it out at all. So if I worked hard to keep it in the realm of those understandable sentences, and just kept the vocabulary minimal, I can create a Middle English that a contemporary audience can understand. But I needed help. So unlike with Early Modern English, I had two scholars, Eleanor Baker and Daniel Wakelin from Oxford, which is kind of nuts.

So I wrote this with Sjón, who wrote The Northman with me. So let’s say Sjón originated a line of dialogue in modern English, but with an old timey flair, then I do my damnedest to try to translate it into Middle English. Then I send it to Daniel and Eleanor, who give me notes. I was always 30 percent wrong with everything I ever tried, but they would give me notes, usually it was grammar things, but then early on it would be like, ‘Well, that word’s too French for a lower class person to be using that. They would only know the Germanic word. Willem could say that, but this character couldn’t.’ Really fascinating, and I kind of got the hang of that. 

So then I would rewrite it, send it back to them, get their check, make sure that they thought it was good, then Daniel was like an expert in the pronunciation, so he would then record the line like the way it would have been theoretically pronounced in the period, then William Conacher, the dialect coach who also worked on Nosferatu, we sat down and listened to the whole thing and came up with a watered down version of Middle English that we felt like a modern audience could understand… That was the process for every line in this movie. [Laughs]

What is the hardest skill or subject you found yourself having to master in preparing one of your films?

This language was the most challenging. The transformation was also a challenge. One thing that I was really excited about with doing a werewolf movie, which was something that was a real challenge for me on Nosferatu, is not showing the monster. In Nosferatu, when we meet Orlok, he’s in the shadows; he doesn’t want Hutter to know he’s a rotting corpse, so he’s got a big hat and all this stuff, and then once the coffin reveal happens, it’s kind of done. To make matters even worse with Nosferatu, you have to shine a bright light on it at the end and really expose the makeup. So that was something that was really challenging and frightening for me about Nosferatu. But here I get to, use the Ridley Scott Alien, Jaws rules of keeping the monster hidden as much as possible to keep them exciting in your imagination. But like in Alien, we worked incredibly hard to create a beautiful, practical monster design that is also seen. 

Are you trying to compete a little bit with what Rick Baker did in the transformation or is this something different?

It’s something different. Rick Baker’s transformation sequence is so iconic, and so we did endeavor to do something different.

There’s a school of thought among historians and filmmakers that it’s crucial to draw clear lines between the past and the present to make, whether it’s the Middle Ages or Ancient Rome, the past resemble the debates and concerns of today. As a storyteller, do you consciously resist that? 

Yes. I do. I don’t live in a vacuum, things come out unconsciously, there’s just no way they’re not. If I was making The Witch for a Puritan audience or The Northman for a Viking audience, no one would buy tickets because they’re dead, but obviously I find it more compelling to understand who we are and where we’re going as a society [by looking at] where we came from. I think it’s more interesting to see how people are both incredibly different thinking, but somehow we’re still the same, and isn’t that interesting? 

Is it true that when The Witch was first tested for audiences and other filmmakers, you kept receiving a note to replace the dialogue about “wouldst thou love the taste of butter and a pretty dress?” 

Yeah. [Some] were like, “What the fuck does that have to do with the rest of the movie?” It’s not super thematically cohesive, but I was like “that’s what the Devil offered!” I read it in accounts of young girls saying the Devil offered butter, and I thought it seemed right. Now it’s on T-shirts and tattoos.

Another thing that was tough for people is that they didn’t just drop everything and as a family try to find that baby in the beginning. But it would be more dangerous to the rest of the family to try to do that. Parenting books basically said don’t get too close to your kids until they turn four, just in case. [Laughs]

What lessons did you take from that experience of being told to essentially modernize these aspects of the story, and then it becomes a T-shirt?

I guess the proof happened to be in the pudding in that particular example. So much of this job, like any job, is when do you listen to all the people around you who are more experienced than you, and when do you know this is my time to reinvent the wheel?

Who is a filmmaking hero who became a mentor in the last decade for you?

 It’s no secret that I have a close relationship with Chris Columbus, so I turned to Chris often. 

What is a piece of advice that has really stuck with you from Chris? 

There’s no clever little answer, but I think Chris on Nosferatu was really hard on Jarin and myself in the storyboarding process. I think one of the benefits for me in having Chris as a mentor is he is one of the geniuses of traditional Hollywood dramaturgy, and I’m like such an arthouse, arty-farty fucker that sometimes I need someone to pull my head out of my butt, and certainly with Nosferatu that was designed to be something that would appeal to a broader audience while still being my thing. Chris would always be saying, “Where is this storybeat in the storyboards? It’s in the script and I don’t see it visually. If I don’t see it visually, it’s not gonna be there.’ So I think a lot of what made Nosferatu work had to do with the notes Chris gave along the way.

You previously said about The Witch that while the Puritans did not leave a lot of visual art behind, their whole lives were a kind of work of art. Do you feel that way about most of the periods or eras you’re drawn to as a storyteller?

Yes. Like in the Medieval mind, everything is of significance, you know? In Werwulf, people are living hand to mouth for the most part. It couldn’t be a more brutal world, so it’s hard not to think that it’s completely nihilistic, but it’s not! Everything is of significance and everything is sacred and means something, and that is a way of thinking that appeals to me, even though I don’t subscribe to it in my everyday life. 

I went back and rewatched The Lighthouse. When Robert Pattinson’s character is fantasizing about the mermaid, he’s also reliving a murder. It occurred to me that, with the exception of The Northman, all of your films associate sex with violence. Do you see that as a difference between movies set in a Christian world versus a pagan one?

I think you hit it right on the head. Both Nosferatu and The Lighthouse are Victorian-ish, but that late 19th century world and the Puritan world are very repressed societies. So the more you push that stuff down, the more it comes bubbling up, and as von Franz says—and I’m misquoting my own dialogue—but something to the effect of in order to defeat darkness, you have to understand it. Obviously the revenge cycle and the worship of violence in Old Norse society is not something I admire or aspire to, but in theory, a pagan worldview that is able to embrace the dark side of life could be healthy.

Your family raised you with an interest in the classics and Early Modern English. Do you think that’s partially where your obsession with historical authenticity comes from? 

For sure. And my grandfather also collected antiques and artifacts, and I was very close with him as well. I’m sure that’s part of it.

 What were their notes on The Witch?

I don’t remember. My wife’s my first reader, but I usually send it to my parents at some point early on too.

Could you ever see yourself doing a direct adaptation of Shakespeare? 

I’d be more than happy to if the right one happened. 

Would it be Titus Andronicus? 

I think not. Julie Taymor did such a great job with that movie, it’d be hard to be hard to top it. But I also wouldn’t mind doing a stage production.

Would you like to do more stage productions in general or novels?

I don’t know if I’d be a good novelist. Like I can write dialogue, but my prose isn’t strong enough to be a novelist. I’m just not. But theater directing, I would love to go back to it at some point.

Does it mean more to you when someone like [historians] David D. Hall or Richard Trask praises your work than a film critic? 

Maybe. [Laughs] Look, whether it’s a film critic or a fan or a historian, whenever anyone understands what you’re trying to articulate, it feels good. And obviously the historians are gonna find different little details that only a historian would notice. [And these details] help the random audience member, who doesn’t know about all this stuff, be more invested in the world. That enables them to believe in a werewolf… But does it feel good when a historian notices the button is right? Yeah, it’s nice, but it doesn’t matter in the long run. 

When you made The Witch, you had written screenplays previously but came to the conclusion only a genre movie would get financed. It worked, but you’ve stayed in these waters. What keeps drawing you back?

Everyone has a kind of primal narrative unless you’re Shakespeare or Mark Twain, so you kind of keep telling the same story over and over again, and there ain’t nothing you can do about it. [Laughs] But I think again it comes back to this Dafoe quote, and that’s why I’m interested in horror movies. It’s not for the scare, but what it can tell us about ourselves. So many of my Goth and ex-Goth and metalhead friends and acquaintances, and fans that I’ve met along the way, and horror movie junkies, are the nicest, chillest, most well-adjusted people because they’re cool with the darkness. 

Are you considering any monster movies right now? Maybe a mummy?

This movie’s world is so dark, I was sick to my stomach writing some of this movie. It’s been fairly brutal, so I wouldn’t mind not doing a horror movie next, but you know Hollywood is a mysterious place, so who knows? I might very well be talking to you about the mummy or a haunted house, even though I’m hoping for a nice Edwardian picnic.

Are you still hoping to one day do A Christmas Carol with Willem?

I hope that that does come to light one day. Obviously there’s obstacles on the horizon, but it would be great.

Willem Dafoe in Werwulf
Rory Mulvey / Focus Features

When did you realize on The Lighthouse that Willem was kind of a muse for you? 

Willem was a muse for me before The Lighthouse. I didn’t know that he was gonna be a repeat collaborator in the way he has been, but I remember the first time that I met him, he took me out for lunch—and I felt embarrassed thinking it—but I was like, “I get along with this guy like and we’re kind of like talking the same language like crazy! I’m talking the same language as Willem Dafoe, how weird is that?” 

But I think one of the things that I learned on The Lighthouse, and I think it’s a good lesson for young directors, is when we were doing the rehearsal period, it’s the same thing I was doing like in community theater and children’s theater and in high school. It just happened to be with Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe. Same stuff. It’s like a child’s imagination of let’s make this happen. 

And also Willem is cool, so is Rob, and isn’t trying to be anything other than a performer in service of the piece. So it’s easy to do the work and not have it turn into something else about ego or anything.

I know Nolan has said in the past he looked at Michael Caine as a bit of a good luck charm for his movies. Do you feel similarly superstitious about Willem? 

I don’t know if there’s any superstition per se, but it is just like with all these repeat collaborators, when you have that level of trust and familiarity, you can push each other further because all the other stuff is already out of the way. My and Jarin’s set is slightly unconventional, so if you’ve had experience there, or maybe it’s your first time but you’re there with Willem and Lily, and Ralph Ineson and Kate Dickie, then you’re learning from them too. It’s about the work more than the superstition, but on the other hand, I would feel maybe naked if I ever made a movie without him.

Werwulf is in theaters on Christmas Day, Dec. 25.

Gravity Falls Is the Perfect Gateway to Horror

Halloween is fundamentally a kid’s holiday, a day for youngsters to dress up as their favorite characters and gather candy from their neighbors. But for those older kids and preteens, Halloween can be frustrating too. They’re edging out of the age for trick-or-treating, and want to indulge in some of the more grown-up stuff, even if they aren’t quite ready for the terror and disturbing content of a horror movie.

Those kids may relate the plight of one Dipper Pines, a preteen who wants to spend Summerween—his town’s extra Halloween celebration, made to go trick-or-treating while on vacation—at a party with his older crush Wendy instead of doing a themed costume with his twin sister Mabel. Even better, those kids may get a genuine thrill from watching Mabel and Dipper run from the Summerween Trickster, a spindly ghoul voiced by B-movie legend Jeffrey Combs, who brings all of his scary movie skills to the part. At once frightening, funny, and moving, “Summerween” is a perfect example of how the animated series Gravity Falls prepares the next generation of horror fans.

Welcome to Gravity Falls

Created by Alex Hirsch, Gravity Falls ran for two seasons on the Disney Channel and Disney XD between 2012 and 2016. It stars Jason Ritter and Kristen Schaal as Dipper and Mabel Pines, twins who spend one summer living with their Great Uncle (“Grunkle”) Stanley Pines (one of the many characters voiced by Hirsh), who runs a tourist trap/grift called the Mystery Spot in the Pacific Northwest. With the help of cool girl Wendy (Linda Cardellini) and Mystery Spot handyman Soos (Hirsch), Dipper and Mabel encounter all manner of supernatural happenings, addressing them in ways that are at once heartwarming, absurd, and often surprisingly scary.

The season one episode “Summerween” is a perfect example of this dynamic. Even beyond the central, silly idea of celebrating a second Halloween in the summer, the episode features lots of goofy set-pieces. It begins with the Pines family visiting a Spirit Halloween-style store, and sees Soos irritating everyone by pressing the button on a talking candy dish and guffawing at its lame jokes. A B-plot in the episode involves Grunkle Stan trying to prove that he’s still got it by scaring the kids who come to his door, kids who dismiss his attempts as lame and outdated—until he comes to the door late at night in his muscle shirt and boxer shorts, terrifying them with his hairy body.

Around the shenanigans, “Summerween” finds space for heart and horror. The former arrives in the form of the tension between Dipper and Mabel, as Dipper feels that he and his 12-year-old sister can finally put childish things behind them (especially with the opportunity to spend time with Wendy on the table), but Mabel wants to commemorate one last session before the two of them become official teenagers.

The horror comes with everything else. With his lanky, spider-like limbs and whispering voice, the Summerween Trickster unsettles even seasoned horror fans. Despite his yellow smiling face, the Trickster seethes with menace, and even appears to devour a random child called Gordie. He tells the kids that they must gather a certain amount of candy before the last Summerween candled gets blown out, and we believe that terrible things will happen if they fail.

Of course, it turns out that the Trickster is the embodiment of candy corn, Smarties, and other little-loved candies. So when the kids fail to meet the Trickster’s challenge, Soos simply eats the creature (freeing poor Gordie in the process, he gleefully declares, “I’m traumatized!”). Even better, the Summerween Trickster accepts his fate, relieved that finally, somebody likes his candy. The episode closes by giving the audience a good scare and then a wholesome ending, reminding them that everything is okay in the end… just like a good kid’s scary story should.

Weirdness and Wonder

“Summerween” is a stand-alone episode, one that ends with the Trickster threat thwarted, Dipper and Mabel reunited, and Grunkle Stan pleased that he can still scare a kid. However, the two seasons of Gravity Falls do tell a surprisingly complex larger story, one that rivals other famous shows that involve the Pacific Northwest, namely The X-Files and Twin Peaks. In fact, Hirsch pays homage to the latter show by getting Kyle MacLachlan to do a voice cameo in the final episode and by the David Lynch impression that Hirsch does to voice the show’s big bad, Bill Cipher.

Over the course of the seasons, we learn about the threat of Bill Cypher. A one-eyed, pyramid-shaped creature who speaks in an unsettlingly chipper voice, Bill Cipher comes from another dimension and threatens to unleash a hellscape onto our world via a portal in Gravity Falls. For years, the one defense our world had was Grunkle Stan’s twin brother, Stanford (J. K. Simmons). An intelligent and dutiful child, Stanford devoted himself to science, and after, encountering Bill Cipher during one of his experiments, to defending the world against his threat.

Stanley grew up in Stanford’s shadow, forever jealous of his brother’s success. Yet, when Stanford disappeared, Stanley stood in the gap in his own way, creating the Mystery Shop as a way to monitor strange happenings (and, it must be said, make money).

The entire story comes together in a three-part climax called “Weirdmageddon,” in which Bill Cipher finally invades our world and enslaves the townspeople, leaving Dipper and Mabel as the one last defense—if they can only work together. The “Weirdmageddon” invasions include plenty of unsettling creatures (one of whom was originally voiced by comedian Louis C.K., but has since been overdubbed by Hirsch, who did the same with a character voiced by T.J. Miller) and horrific images. For example, when local rich guy Preston Northwest (Nathan Fillion) tries to appease Bill, he gets his face rearranged into something shocking for a kid’s cartoon. 

Yet, as shocking as it is, “Weirdmageddon” builds to a wholesome climax, one that gets to the show’s basic principles: the world is scary and unknown, but you can get through it with the help of others.

At this point, one might point out that no matter how weird Gravity Falls gets, it is still a Disney cartoon aimed at children. In other words, it prompts more laughs than scares, its pre-adolescents get the most attention, and everything works out alright in the end. And that’s okay, because the scares are real enough, as are the complex emotions that the characters experience.

Which is an important lesson for anyone to learn when they’re getting into horror: as scared as you might feel, as upsetting as the material may be, even the gnarliest horror movie is just a trick, and that itself should be a treat. Gravity Falls understands this just as well as Scream, Friday the 13th, or any other scary classic.

Peter Jackson Partners with Colossal to Bring Giant Moa Egg Back to New Zealand

There are not even 40 confirmed, sufficiently complete moa eggs known about on this planet. Those that survive are a glimpse, a keyhole really, into a past and time when these great, enormous birds dominated the islands of New Zealand (or Aotearoa, as it is known in Māori). Of those less than 40 surviving eggs, only eight are believed to have 90 percent or more of their shells still intact. That number is about to go up to nine.

Indeed, the Giant Moa egg that Peter Jackson and Colossal Biosciences just acquired for Jackson’s native home of New Zealand is a monumental find which has (apparently) been hidden away in a private American collection for more than 60 years. Colossal and the filmmaker were able to hone in and acquire it the moment it was put on an auction listing. Now the Lord of the Rings filmmaker touts it to be among the five best best-preserved examples of moa oology on the world, which in addition to being rescued from private collectors is now being donated to Professor Te Maire Tau, a Māori historian, academic leader, and tribal leader in New Zealand.

“Every New Zealander grows up knowing the moa and feeling its loss,” Jackson said in a statement to the press. “Whenever I’ve been walking deep in the New Zealand bush, I can’t help but keep looking into the thick forest, hoping for a glimpse of the mythic ‘last Moa,’ an amazing bird that sadly no longer exists, no matter how hard you look … and hope. When we learned that this exceptionally rare moa egg was being sold outside of New Zealand, we spoke to Colossal, who not only offered to rescue it at their own considerable expense, but to also fly it privately to New Zealand, so it returns home safely.  After expert restoration, it will very likely become only the ninth known nearly intact moa egg.”

The Giant Moa remains an extinct and legendary creature, a flightless bird that ruled what is modern day New Zealand for tens of thousands of years before going extinct in roughly 1400 CE (so about 600 years ago). Measuring at an average 3.6 meters, or 12 feet, the Giant Moa really did tower over human beings, although not enough to save the bird. It is believed that humans drove all species of moa, giant and otherwise, to extinction over the course of centuries due to both hunting and habitat reduction that followed the clearing of forests.

Nonetheless the myth of the Giant Moa has persisted in Māori tradition and the modern imagination. It also has become a mission statement for Jackson and Colossal Biosciences to bring it back, or at least a variation of the bird.

When we visited Colossal Biosciences headquarters for the first time last year in Dallas, Texas scientists revealed to us that they were using emu and ostrich eggs to prepare the creation of an artificial, “shell-less” egg (which has since been created, albeit for a chicken so far). Still, it is the even more diminutive, pint-sized tinamou whose egg has proven the most promising for gene-editing in the hopes of one day functionally replicating a Giant Moa’s genetic code.

 “When we launched the moa program we made a clear commitment that indigenous leadership would guide the science and every decision surrounding the project,” Colossal CEO and co-founder Ben Lamm said in a statement this week. “Securing and transporting this egg back to its rightful home is just part of that commitment. Regardless of when and how it left the country, we strongly feel all recognizable moa bones and remains as well as any other New Zealand artifacts should be returned to the country and its people. To quote Indiana Jones, ‘It belongs in a museum,’  a museum in Aotearoa, under the care of the people whose ancestors lived alongside these extraordinary birds.”

Clayface Review: A Horror Triumph for DC Studios

It’s been a wild year for the movie industry and the world, which might explain why so many folks were nervous about whether DC Studios’ highly-anticipated, big swing of an R-Rated Clayface would be able to deliver the goods. Walking out of director James Watkins’ shockingly extreme, and enjoyable, entry in the Gunnverse, it felt silly any of us ever doubted Watkins or the incredible team both behind the camera or in front of it, caked in appropriately muddy, runny clay.

Watkins previously burst onto the scene with the hauntingly brutal “Broken Britain” horror entry, Eden Lake, and almost 20 years later brings the same frenetic, terrifying energy to a specifically nightmarish vision to Gotham—albeit with more of an empathetic and mature heart in this superhero offshoot. There’s a sense of fun here that fits the world of DC and the neon-hued streets of Batman‘s hometown. As our gateway into James Gunn and DC Studios’ Gotham, it works splendidly, establishing a lived-in, working class world that is familiar and yet unlike any version of Batman’s old haunts we previously watched. 

Beginning at the precipice of his stardom, Clayface follows a young Gotham actor named Matt Hagen (Tom Rhys Harries), who has crawled his way up from the gutter to the edge of immense fame. Unfortunately, a night out and some bad choices lead him into the bed of a gangster’s moll Mia (Joana Ribeiro). Her beau is less than happy when he finds out and in a scene that will set the stage for just how far Watkins was allowed to go, Matt’s face is gruesomely sliced and diced by some henchies. That along with some false assault allegations from Mia —a plot point that should have stayed in the first draft —destroy his career, leaving him bitter and desperate. It’s here he finds his savior, Dr Caitlyn Corr (Naomi Ackie), an experimental scientist whose research was stolen by a cosmetics company which left her in ruins. 

Once the exceptional Harries and even better Ackie are on screen together, the film finds its pace and purpose as it explores the lengths we’ll go to “be the best version of ourselves,” and the chemistry crackles as they try to use her nanites to fix his once beautiful face. That would be a nice silver lining, but Caitlyn is married to John Borrelli (Max Minghella in a career best performance), the only likable and not corrupt cop in the GCPD, who is investigating a series of murders that seem to be connected to Matt’s horrific attack. This tragic romance element is played as a delightful Gotham set Phantom of the Opera tragedy, as Matt tries to understand who he is on the other side of disaster, loss, and of course mad science experiments. 

To go much deeper into plot would veer into spoilers but as a horror fan who adores comics, it is quite honestly magnificent to see what Watkins has created here. There is an extreme nature to the horror that feels like the sort of thing we’d usually see in torture porn like Matryrs or a Terrifier sequel. But here Watkins wields gore with the precision of a surgeon; he knows just how much to show us and when to give us a little more than we can handle. It’s been a long time since I saw a studio horror that could make me wince and cover my eyes while simultaneously shed a tear for the complicated humans at the heart of it. Clayface made me do both, multiple times. 

For a while many of us have wondered if DC Studios was hoping for an Obsession style word-of-mouth hit with this one and after seeing the atmospheric, bloody, and brilliant concoction that Watkins put together, it feels like they really might have something remarkable on their hands. But what really blew me away was how that was still balanced with a love for the often operatic and over the top elements of the character of Clayface, as well as Gotham itself. There are recognizable landmarks and Gotham-specific nods that feel right out of Batman: The Animated Series, and a clear love for the source material that somehow always makes any extra homework feel unnecessary. This is a movie you can jump right into with only a hunger for a classic monster movie and a lot of blood. And after you fall in love with Matt Hagen, you can dive into the guy and his comic book history—literally in the former’s case.

With no other big horror releases on the slate this spooky season, it feels like DC Studios could be about to make a big impact, because while Marvel has dipped its toes into horror before, Clayface is a big FU to the family-friendly Disney approach. As the newspapers used to say, “This isn’t your father’s superhero movie,” and while I have long complained about the danger of only making grim and gritty yarns, here Watkins—working on a script co-written by Mike Flanagan—has shown you can make comic book movies for adults that shock and push boundaries. Or at least you can at DC. 

Clayface opens on Friday, Oct. 23.