News conan the barbarian

Genndy Tartakovsky Developing Animated Conan the Barbarian Series for Prime Video

What is best in life is apparently lots of barbarians

By Molly Templeton

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Published on June 24, 2026

Image: Cartoon Network Studios/Prime Video

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Image: Cartoon Network Studios/Prime Video

Conan the Barbarian is coming back bigtime, apparently. We’ve already been promised that Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Conan will return in King Conan, from director Christopher McQuarrie. But there’s another barbaric take on the horizon: Polygon has the news that legendary animation creator Genndy Tartakovsky has an animated Conan series in the works at Prime Video.

Tartakovsky is the mind behind a whole lot of extremely good series, from Dexter’s Laboratory to the beautiful and upsetting Primal (don’t hurt the dinosaur!!!!). And apparently he’s been pitching his animated Conan since 2008. 

There’s little detail yet on Tartakovsky’s take on the character, who was created by Robert E. Howard in the 1930s. We do have a poster (below), and a logline, which leaves something to be desired:

As Polygon notes, the pirate queen Bêlit is an established Conan character who first appeared in the 1934 short story “Queen of the Black Coast.” She and Conan go and have pirate funtimes until she becomes obsessed with a cursed necklace and dies; naturally, Conan has to avenge her. Here’s hoping Tartakovsky does something different—and less dated—with this pirate queen.[end-mark]

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News Shaun the Sheep

The Year of the Sheep Continues With Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom Trailer

It’s baaaaad out there

By Molly Templeton

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Published on June 24, 2026

Image: Studio Canal

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Image: Studio Canal

You cannot have too many sheep movies. To be honest, this year really only has two sheep movies—The Sheep Detectives and the latest Shaun the Sheep film—but that is two more sheep movies than most years can boast. 

The Sheep Detectives is now on streaming; Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom is coming along just in time for the Halloween season, and we have a new trailer for it! This one has far fewer references than the previous trailer, but it does have many good shots of animated sheep doing experiments on pumpkins (?) and claymation people freaking out at the sight of a beast that looks like a scarecrow made of dog fur. It is very likely said beast will be revealed to be nothing of the sort, but it is equally likely that the journey to discover the mossy-bottom truth will be absolutely delightful.

This film, of course, hails from Aardman, the animation studio behind Wallace & Gromit and Chicken Run. The synopsis explains:

Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom sees the residents of Mossy Bottom Farm looking forward to Halloween – until the clumsy Farmer trashes the Flock’s beloved pumpkin patch! When Shaun turns MAD SCIENTIST to fix the problem, things rapidly spiral out of control… With The Farmer missing and a wild beast roaming the woods of Mossingham, all the ingredients are in place for a monstrously fun family adventure.

MAD SHAUNENTIST! This trailer also features a pumpkin laser and a disappointed snail. I don’t know what else you could ask for. Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom is in theaters September 18.[end-mark]

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News Forgotten Island

You Won’t Forget the Latest Forgotten Island Trailer

You might even be reminded of Dunkaroos once you meet Raww.

By Vanessa Armstrong

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Published on June 23, 2026

Screenshot: DreamWorks Animation

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Screenshot: DreamWorks Animation

We have a new trailer for DreamWorks Animation’s Forgotten Island, which introduces us to more of the magical world two best friends stumble into and the entity there who steals people’s memories.

We’re also introduced to a weredog named Raww (voiced by Dave Franco) who, for whatever reason, reminds me of the kangaroo mascot for the delicious 1990s snack, Dunkaroos.

Dunkaroo nostalgia aside, the film’s animation looks fantastic, with a compelling story based on Philippine mythology. Here’s the full synopsis:

In addition to Franco and Salonga, the movie features the voices of Jenny Slate (Marcel the Shell with Shoes On), Manny Jacinto (The Good Place, Top Gun: Maverick), Dolly de Leon (Triangle of Sadness), Jo Koy (Haunted Mansion), and Ronny Chieng (M3GAN). It’s written and directed by Joel Crawford and Januel Mercado, who also brought us Puss and Boots: The Last Wish.

Forgotten Island premieres in theaters on September 25, 2026.

Check out the trailer below. [end-mark]

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Excerpts Young Adult

Read an Excerpt From The River She Became by Emily Varga

A relic-hunter searches for an ancient fae object to restore the magic to her world, but must learn to trust her own powers—and her heart.

By Emily Varga

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Published on June 24, 2026

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We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from The River She Became by Emily Varga, a high-stakes, action-packed young adult romantasy out from Wednesday Books on June 30th.

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The River She Became

Emily Varga

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The River She Became

Emily Varga

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The gold key was cold against my chest, alongside my sister’s ring, reminding of what I needed to focus on.

But something about the way the girl had lured the beast away from the zulmi woman stopped me from leaving her. I’d spent too long killing and torturing peris for the Viceroy.

Seeing someone save a life felt novel.

Perhaps helping an incredibly idiotic girl in the woods escape the creature would balance some of my sins.

My hands itched to fight the beast. It had been a long time since I’d been engaged in a fight where I didn’t have one hand tied behind my back or wasn’t enacting the orders of the Court of Salt.

I took a step forward as the girl pushed away from the boulder, at last realizing that the wolf might figure out she wasn’t in the tree anymore. She began walking backward, edging away from the tree she’d climbed, keeping her eye on the direction of the beast. It was a good plan, but she still wouldn’t escape.

She was a few feet from me, not realizing that I was behind her, standing in the shadows of the forest. I waited until she pressed herself against me, feeling the shock flood through her body as I wrapped my arm around her stomach to prevent her from bolting and my hand over her mouth to stifle her scream. She struggled, but if she alerted the wolf to our location now, it would be much more difficult.

She smelled… ​different.

Like mangoes, and dusty parchment, and spilled ink. There was something decidedly un-peri about her. I lifted my hand from her stomach to pull back her hair. I sucked in a breath at the sight of her rounded ear.

Human.

How could that be? A human this far east and outside of the Salt Court? The girl didn’t seem to be enthralled, but it was sometimes difficult to tell.

She’d stiffened when I’d pulled back her hair and made another muffled scream into my hand. Irritation rose up in my chest.

She was going to get us both killed.

“Don’t. Make. A. Sound,” I said, my voice a low rumble as I glanced over at the wolf by the tree.

“Do you understand?”

She nodded against my hand, and I released her, drawing the dagger at my waist in case the beast heard us. At the very least, I wanted to be prepared. The girl turned to face me, and I blinked. I hadn’t seen many humans—the few we had in River had been brought from Salt from before the time of the wall, enthralled by peris who were amused by how malleable they were. They were usually frail, their skin drained of color, hair flat and oily, eyes glazed over.

But this girl’s hair was dark and enormous, a riot of curls the color of deep tree bark, a heavy storm cloud behind her. Her eyes were just as big, and on her nose sat a gold contraption, which she kept nervously pushing up as she looked at me.

They suited her, even if it was impractical to be wearing something over your eyes while running through the forest away from a giant wolf.

She looked… alive.

Vibrant. Warm. Like a golden flower in the middle of a desolate wasteland.

“Who are you?” the girl demanded, her hands planting on her hips, the anger in her voice and blatant disregard for my command that she stay silent causing my own temper to flare up.

It seemed the flower had thorns.

I smiled at her, knowing it was not a reassuring one. I didn’t have to be here; I could let her get torn to shreds by a beast bigger than a tree and not bother myself with any of this.

“I’m the one who’s going to save your life.”

Excerpted from The River She Became, copyright © 2026 by Emily Varga.

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News The Magic School Bus

Elizabeth Banks to Play Ms. Frizzle in The Magic School Bus Live-Action Adaptation

Legendary is looking to make a live-action feature film based on the classic children’s books

By Vanessa Armstrong

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Published on June 23, 2026

Photo credit for Elizabeth Banks: Empire Movies, CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

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Photo credit for Elizabeth Banks: Empire Movies, CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Buckle up! The Magic School Bus will be heading to a theater near you. Today, Legendary Entertainment announced (via Deadline) it’s working on a live-action feature adaptation of the children’s book series written by Joanna Cole and illustrated by Bruce Degen. Elizabeth Banks (director of Cocaine Bear and actor with numerous credits, including playing Effie Trinket in The Hunger Games films) is on board to produce and play teacher and bus driver, Ms. Valerie Frizzle. Rob Letterman (Detective Pikachu) is also attached and tasked with writing the initial treatment and directing.

This isn’t the first adaptation of The Magic School Bus series. In the 1990s, PBS had an animated show based on the books, with Lily Tomlin voicing Ms. Valerie Frizzle and a theme song courtesy of Little Richard. Another animated series, The Magic School Bus Rides Again, released seasons on Netflix from 2017 to 2021. In it, Tomlin once again voiced Valerie Frizzle (who was called Professor Frizzle on the show) and Kate McKinnon voiced Prof. Frizzle’s younger sister, Ms. Fiona Felicity Frizzle.

In the movie realm, Universal has held the rights to adapt the books, and in 2020, Banks, Scholastic, and producer Marc Platt were working on a project there. That effort apparently fizzled out (no pun intended), and Legendary picked up the rights, with Banks, Platt, and Scholastic remaining involved via the new endeavor.

The Magic School Bus books (and television shows) are educational entertainment staples for younger children. Each story sees Ms. Frizzle take her students to places like the inside of the human body, the age of the dinosaurs, the ocean floor, and the center of the Earth (did I mention the bus is magical?). Where the new movie’s Magic School Bus will travel remains unknown, including if/when it will premiere in theaters. [end-mark]

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News The Everlasting

Netflix Is Adapting Alix E. Harrow’s The Everlasting

The fantasy time-loop novel came out in 2025

By Vanessa Armstrong

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Published on June 23, 2026

Alex E. Harrow photo by Elora Overbey

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Alex E. Harrow photo by Elora Overbey

A television adaptation of The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow is in development at Netflix. The fantasy time-travel novel centers on the knight Una Everlasting and the historian Owen Mallory, born in different centuries who find their lives intertwined through time as they loop through it, over and over again.

According to Variety, Daphne Ferraro, who was head writer on the German series Maxton Hall and is set to showrun Lauren Roberts’ Powerless adaptation for Amazon MGM Studios, is on board to write The Everlasting adaptation. Variety also shared the official logline for the project, which hews closely to the book:

The project is still in its early days—Netflix hasn’t picked it up for a series order yet—so no news on casting or if/when we’ll see the adaptation on the streamer. [end-mark]

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Books reading recommendations

Five Books About Futures Worth Fighting For

Speculative fiction can show us the way to a better world, envisioning futures that are both achievable and optimistic.

By Ruthanna Emrys

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Published on June 24, 2026

Infomocracy cover art by Will Staehle

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Infomocracy cover art by Will Staehle

When I was invited to join the crew planning the Protopian Prize, my first question was “What’s protopian?” I’m familiar with all sorts of hopeful SF categories, from solarpunk to policy fiction. But despite my suspicion that I’d probably already written some, the term was new to me.

Protopian stories, so named by Wired co-founder Kevin Kelly, depict futures that are achievable and optimistic—neither flawless nor catastrophic nor static, but workably better than what we have now. (Kind of like A Half-Built Garden (minus the aliens), so it turns out I had indeed written some.)

There are many reasons to read and write protopian fiction, but one of them is that a surprising number of the people working for better futures have trouble imagining them. Democracy 2076 found that democracy activists focused on what they’re trying to prevent, unable to picture plausible futures that they can work toward… They find this frustrating and disempowering—they want these stories.

This fits my own experience too—when I’m depressed about the state of the world, I often want a kickstart from someone else’s brain. I want cool ideas and adventure, but also a sense that we could pull some of those ideas out into real life. I joined the Protopian Prize committee to help bring more of these stories into the world.

Here are five books that I’ve already enjoyed that show futures that are worth working toward—please mention your own recommendations in the comments!

The Wildcraft Drones by T.K. Rex

What if we rebuilt civilization around a very different model of agriculture, slowly replacing monocultured farms with resilient food forests? Rex’s linked short stories cover several centuries of rewilding, automation, and debate and protest over the role of humans in Anthropocene ecosystems. None of the time periods are perfect—the flaws of one often provoke the plot of the next—but all have their advantages and I can imagine living, working, and arguing in any of them. I can also imagine eating, with pleasure, in any of them.

You could start toward this future by visiting your local food forest or community garden, or doing some guerrilla seed planting if you don’t have either.

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In the House of Aryaman, A Lonely Signal Burns by Elizabeth Bear

Aryaman is part of Bear’s larger world centered on the technology of “rightminding.” The terminology is Orwellian, but the tech is actually a collection of tools to give people greater say in their own mental health care. It includes everything from exercise to therapy to measuring your neurotransmitter levels and adjusting your medications as needed.

This murder mystery is the earliest of the stories chronologically, set 50 years from now and featuring such advanced mood-management techniques as a treadmill desk. By the time of Ancestral Night, many thousands of years later, you can set your brain for hyperfocus or crisis readiness on demand—but the central ideas remain the same. People should have agency over their own minds, mental health treatment should be based around consent, and society should encourage us to prioritize each other’s well-being.

You could start toward this future by advocating for better mental health coverage in your local medical system, or by learning conflict mediation techniques.

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Infomocracy by Malka Older

In the near future, Information rules the world. Or, rather, they rule the way the world is ruled—they run the elections through which neighborhoods vote on what government they’ll join for the next decade. They also run the fact-checking that keeps the elections fair, aided by ninja researcher-enforcers. It’s a little bit cyberpunk and a little bit policy wonkery. It passes my test for future-of-politics stories, which is that I come out with really strong political opinions about a world that doesn’t (yet) exist—don’t approve the mantle tunnel! Vote for Policy1st! Elections should be far enough apart to give governments real power! At its core, it’s about finding the right scale for meaningful democratic decisions, and protecting the institutions that are necessary for democracy to work at all.

You could start toward this future by supporting local journalists who investigate and share accurate news, or by protecting the polls at the next election.

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When There Are Wolves Again by E.J. Swift

Hester is a documentary filmmaker who has followed the slow rewilding of England over fifty years, accompanied by beloved wolf-dogs whose ancestor she rescued from the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. Lucy is an activist who learned to care for nature from her grandparents during the COVID-19 outbreak, and has spent the years since fighting to reclaim the commons so that everyone can make those connections. In 2070 the two talk around a campfire, reminiscing about their roles in changing the world but also about their loves and griefs. It feels gentle in parts, but also gut-wrenching. We see the importance of their individual choices, and of the communities in which they’re embedded. I did spot a four-star review complaining that there aren’t enough wolves, and it’s true that it’s more a book about wanting wolves than having them. Or maybe it’s a book about the possibility of wolves, and why you should want them, and the long fight needed to get them.

You could start toward this future by checking out nearby rewilding efforts—in the Netherlands, we have bison in the dunes! Or you could follow Antonia Malchik’s writing about reversing commons privatization.

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Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy

I dithered about including this, because the future sections are framed like a classic utopia. Connie, pulled mentally forward from the misery of a 1970s mental institution, gets a tour of everything that’s great about Mouth-of-Mattapoisett. But tour guide Luciente is clear that it’s a work in progress, and that they are constantly debating changes to their society. It’s also the book that first convinced me that there are alternatives to corporate-defined progress. It exposed me to ideas about queer liberation, about gender non-essentialism, about equity, about ecological care, that I’ve been fighting toward ever since. It was the first place I ever encountered a scene with a man nursing a baby—something that at least one reviewer objected to when I put it in A Half-Built Garden 47 years later, suggesting that we’ve still got some work to do. Maybe a lot of work, but worth doing.

You could start toward this future by protecting trans kids from outdated ideas about gender, or by organizing for better ‘village’-level child care.[end-mark]

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Books Reading the Weird

Dueling Metaphors: Stephen Graham Jones’ The Buffalo Hunter Hunter (Part 10)

After weeks of projected guilt and petty sins, we’re finally through to the real confession…

By Ruthanna Emrys, Anne M. Pillsworth

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Published on June 24, 2026

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Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches. This week, we cover Chapters 19-20 of Stephen Graham Jones’ Nebula- and Stoker-winning The Buffalo Hunter Hunter. The book was first published in 2025. Spoilers ahead!

The Absolution of Three-Persons, May 1, 1912. Good Stab knows who Arthur is, and that Arthur knows he knows, and yet their bizarre Sunday co-confessionals continue. Unable to take any more of “the farce,” Arthur coats his log with sacramental wafers and wine to hide it from the keen-nosed Good Stab, and prepares to get the hell out of Miles City.

What Good Stab doesn’t understand, Arthur thinks, is that Arthur’s a different man from the one who committed the crime for which the Pikuni seeks justice. Meanwhile Arthur still wavers between belief in Good Stab’s supernatural nature and denying that there’s “any tangible proof.” He hopes that Good Stab will take his disappearance as an admission of guilt and not “make [Miles City] pay for [Arthur’s] trespasses.”

Arthur won’t disclose his destination. Suffice it to write he doesn’t expect to return, or even to survive the journey. He’s old and infirm. He must travel on foot, with meager supplies. But God never said absolution would be easy, and that’s “the only repast” he now seeks.

The Absolution of Three-Persons, May 12, 1912. It’s been eleven days since Arthur’s last entry. His parishioners beat on the door of the church, but he doesn’t dare open it lest someone see the state of the chapel. He has barricaded the entryway with pews, and blacked out the windows with an inky paste made from the dampened pages of Bibles. He’s ventured to the rectory only to retrieve his log; God no longer hears him, so it’s his only confidant.

Even Cordelia the cat has abandoned him. She can smell what’s transpired in the church.

Those eleven days ago, Arthur walked “under cover of a starless night,” alone, northward into the open prairie. The next night he crossed the Yellowstone River, then built a fire to dry his clothes and ward off evil prowlers. Waking from a doze, he saw a pale, naked form sitting across the fire. It was the headless wooden body of his church’s formerly crucified Jesus. Good Stab had accompanied the figure, having traced Arthur by his smell. He tilted the statue into the fire. Hollow, it burned quickly. After remarking that they sat almost where his first skinned victims were found, he said he hadn’t finished his confession. No, Three-Persons couldn’t hear him out on the prairie. They must return to his “holy house,” where they started.

He then rushed at Arthur and clamped the flat edges of his teeth around his throat, not to bite but to cut off circulation to his brain. As Arthur’s vision darkened, he saw stars “scratching lines” across the sky and knew he was being born anew.

He woke two days later and found himself suspended above his own chapel, with a Jesus-eye view of the place, for Good Stab had bound him to the vacant crucifix. Good Stab stood below, and for the first time, he addressed the pastor as “Arthur Beaucarne.” He then proceeded to introduce Arthur to his new “congregation”—the variously decomposed corpses carefully propped up in the pews. In attendance were Sheriff Doyle, his star of office pinned through one eye; postmaster Livinius Clarkson, wrapped in his beloved American flag; the four lodging house porch-sitters. Behind them were arrayed the town’s stray dogs, lids skinned to permanently expose their dead eyes. A candle started Clarkson slowly grilling, providing unwelcome illumination of another corpse: the flayed “hump” at whose burial Arthur had presided. Arthur sobbed, pleaded “Why?” For the first time, Good Stab betrayed excitement, and Arthur realized that they were both “mired in up to our souls [in] the culmination of all [Good Stab’s] devious efforts,” his turnip-skin peeling of Arthur down to the “white meat.”

Arthur recognized the “hump” as Benjamin Flowers, the man from San Francisco whom Doyle had identified. Flowers’ three sons were propped up beside him; the youngest and most recently flayed was Arthur Flowers. Cryptically, Good Stab asked if he was named after the pastor. Then he turned the subject to the massacre at Heavy Runner’s camp. Arthur arrived with other soldiers after walking four days in a blizzard; already three of his toes had blackened in his boot. His orders were to “strike them [the Blackfeet] hard.” He obeyed, killing sick elders, women and children. Nor was it the scout Joe Cobell who started the slaughter by shooting Heavy Runner, was it?

Having held in too much, for too long, Arthur screamed, as he should have screamed for the soldiers to stop shooting. Good Stab screamed, too. This was the story of America, Arthur thought, told in a forgotten church to a mute choir of the dead. Voice recovered, Arthur made excuses: He followed orders, he was exhausted, the Blackfeet didn’t even fight back, another regiment would have done the same. Good Stab finally pried out the truth, that Arthur could kill the people “because you were just Indians!”

And the men of the Flowers family were just napikwans, Good Stab countered. But they were more to Arthur. After Heavy Runner’s camp, Arthur consoled himself with a fort woman named Ava. Benjamin was the son Arthur never knew of, Benjamin’s sons Arthur’s grandsons. Good Stab had killed them because all of Arthur’s blood had to be spilled. To Arthur’s anguished “When will it be enough,” he demands, “When will napikwans have enough of our land?”

Still bound to the cross, his heart finally on the ground as Good Stab wants it, Arthur hears his last confession, which includes his confrontation with the finally revived and potent Cat Man, who, it turns out, killed Good Stab’s white buffalo Weasel Plume and the boy Yellow Kidney.

What’s Cyclopean: We’re not going to say the “two corrupt syllables” of Good Stab’s kind’s common name. “Nachzehrer” better “captures the monster they would signify.” Vampire. Vampire. Vampire, vampire, vampire!

The Degenerate Dutch: “Perhaps” all Indians are “monstrous… mind and heart spawned from the most sinful part of the Pit.” In which case, killing them is no “trespass,” right? Right???

Libronomicon: Bibles are used this week to make a sacrilegious paste for blacking out church windows, and as “medicine” to commemorate the killing of a particularly obnoxious missionary.

Seven Deadly Sins and Counting: Arthur’s drinking is finally connected to his older, murderous sins against Heavy Runner’s camp.

Ruthanna’s Commentary

We’ve been waiting, through weeks of confession, for the real confession. It’s been obvious that Arthur is hiding things not only from the world, but from himself. He’s dropped hints, projected his guilt on others, redirected to petty sins, and insisted that he’s been reborn and doesn’t need to think about all those things that other guy did.

This week, Good Stab forces it out into the open: Arthur led the massacre Heavy Runner’s camp. His admission is a mix of self-justification and self-flagellation. He was following orders, they didn’t fight back, manifest destiny made their deaths inevitable, they were just Indians. But also he should have stopped it, he’s felt guilty all this time, he’s a different person, he tried to fuck and then drink and then preach the memories away—doesn’t it matter that contributing to genocide is traumatic?

It does, and it doesn’t. It matters because when we stop caring about the lives and well-beings of others, we stop caring about our own humanity too. And it doesn’t because Arthur’s alcoholism and dissociation don’t bring back the dead. And it does because his self-protective justifications then justify further horrors. And it doesn’t because he shouldn’t get to make the massacre a story about himself.

I’ve just been listening to the If Books Could Kill episode about The Body Keeps the Score. It’s a book about trauma that a lot of people have found helpful, and which apparently has a lot of scientific and moral problems. It offers single-minded sympathy for people traumatized by their own roles in atrocity—a sympathy that’s interested in finding them “peace” but not atonement or justice, to the degree that either are possible. One that’s not at all interested in those whose lives they’ve destroyed, the further traumas that they’ve left in their wakes. This seems very much like what Arthur wants. What he thinks, at least sometimes, that his reinvention as a cleric should earn.

Good Stab is trauma that he’s left in his wake, a body very literally keeping score. (There’s that count he keeps promising.) He in turn—no longer Pikuni—continues atrocity. Justice in the “eye for an eye” sense, but not in the sense that changes anything, or that makes a better world.

Good Stab is a metaphor as well as a real bloody-minded vampire, but Arthur is also a metaphor. Or he wants to be – it’s another way that he justifies himself. He was merely part of the force of America fighting to be born. “You can’t stop a country from happening.” As if there were no other ways for countries to happen. As if the “pioneers” weren’t trying to stop already-existent nations from happening. He was the “different breed of men” needed to “forge a new land, a better country, one that made use of its resources rather than letting them lie fallow.” Manifest Destiny and the Doctrine of Discovery insist that only European extraction counts as a meaningful relationship. They also insist on themselves as forces of nature. You can’t be blamed for implementing the inevitable. Where there’s no alternative, there’s no guilt.

At 70% through the book, we can’t be entirely done with reveals. Good Stab has more to say. And there are the ongoing parallels between the two men—made more parallel by Arthur’s insistence that he, too, has died and become someone new. It’s an odd insistence. It makes sense for Good Stab, who thinks of his original self and soul as collectively supported—there’s a real and consistent definition of “dead” there, even as he walks and talks and feeds. “Reborn in Christ” doesn’t usually imply death, but soul-cleansing. Arthur seems to want to have it both ways. “Who you claim to see inside me is long dead.” At the same time, he yearns for ostensibly-already-experienced absolution.

But no. Jesus may forgive all; Good Stab has other ideas.

Anne’s Commentary

At present, I can’t find that any studio or network has officially signed to make a limited series of The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, but considering the success of the novel and of films like Sinners, I have strong hopes for it. If anything can outdo Game of Throne’s Red Wedding, it would be the Redder, Deader confession scene in this week’s reading. Make-up F/X artists would be drooling to get their hands on the corpses. I don’t know about the dogs, however. Caninophiles might balk at all those dead and lidless pups blasting the screen with “their hungry, childlike gaze.”

If any of us doubted that Good Stab is a Villain whose “mind and heart [were] spawned from the most sinful part of the Pit,” let us put those doubts aside. The guy spared Cordelia’s life because he’s a cat lover! Dogs, with him, are good for nothing but macabre background props.

Killing a beaver for strictly selfish reasons deducts another point from Good Stab’s character profile. On the other hand, he gains a lot of points for adopting Weasel Plume and the other napikwan-orphaned buffalo calves.

Arthur claims that, apart from his never-met French grandfather, his ancestry is primarily German. I say he must have some Egyptian blood, because he is sure in the running for King of Denial. Now, as late as in Chapter 19, he writes that he hasn’t found “any tangible proof other than his [Good Stab’s] attestation” that his tormentor stands apart from the natural world and its divinely ordained order. It’s a thorny question whether believing in a God or gods is not in itself acceptance of the supernatural. Or if God is in effect all of Nature, then everything that exists must be natural, whether you like that particular aspect of the All or not. Such a belief is a tough ask. Who wants to accept that famine, tornadoes, cancer, and Pick-Your-Scariest-Invertebrate are really acts of God? Good is God with an extra O. There’s no E-V-I-L in GOD! Evil must be apart from God, from Nature, therefore SUPERnatural. That’s better. It’s easier to believe that undesirable elements in one’s Umwelt are of the Devil, hence best eliminated if possible. That would include troublesome peoples, like those “just Indians” of whom Arthur Beaucarne oversees the eradication.

But not Pastor Arthur Beaucarne. Previous Arthur’s a “different man, in a different life, and in a different time to boot, with necessities so remote from the contemporary mind as to be practically unretrievable.” While remembering the most visceral details of the massacre, Pastor Arthur can say—can attempt himself to believe—that “I wasn’t really there.”

No wonder Good Stab responds to that assertion “in savage objection.” In so savage an exception, in fact, that Arthur stammers his last and feeblest excuse, “They didn’t even fight.” It’s “the first part of the admission Good Stab had been leading [him] toward for weeks.” Combined with seeing Good Stab’s blood-tears and the way his chin quivers just as Arthur’s does, the self-protective, self-destructive shell between Pastor Arthur and Soldier Arthur shatters.

He screams from the crucifix, reunited with the raw truth of his past, suppressed and roiling for too long. Good Stab screams along with him, fallen to his knees, forehead to the floor, and though their despairs are their own, the pain of both wails harmonizes into what Arthur comes to believe is the “story of America.”

It’s the strongest and most devastating passage in the novel. It’s unbearable, but it must be borne by both actors in the drama of confession and potential absolution. “You tore the heart out of my people,” Good Stab says, still bowed to the floor. “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry,” Arthur says, still on the cross.

The potential absolution doesn’t come yet. Given the psychological and spiritual realism to which Graham Jones adheres, it cannot. Arthur can only answer Good Stab’s demand for why he killed with more excuses. Good Stab has one more death to account for. Arthur spared Yellow Kidney’s life at Heavy Runner’s camp. Given the many children he didn’t spare, he feels the emptiness of this claim is as much as Good Stab does.

Confession must continue—final or otherwise—in the next chapter of the Nachzehrer’s dark gospel.

Next week, prepare for yet another kind of crisis with Matthew McDonald’s “How to Deal With Fallen Gods.”[end-mark]

The post Dueling Metaphors: Stephen Graham Jones’ <i>The Buffalo Hunter Hunter</i> (Part 10) appeared first on Reactor.

News The Last of Us

Peter Sarsgaard Joins The Last of Us Season 3 as Cancellation Rumors Are Debunked

Despite rumors to the contary, The Last of Us’ production has not been shut down

By Matthew Byrd

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Published on June 22, 2026

Photo: HBO

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Photo: HBO

A funny thing happened on the internet recently when a seemingly standard news item about The Last of Us Season 3 going on a filming hiatus prompted rumors that the series has been cancelled.

The whole thing started earlier this month when the British Columbia directory for productions published an update that revealed production on The Last of Us Season 3 would be going on hiatus until June 28. At the time, it wasn’t clear what the reason for this temporary hiatus was.

Without a clear reason, certain parts of the internet began to run wild with bad faith theories. A section of the show’s “fandom” began circulating the rumor that the shutdown was anything but temporary. Essentially, some who wished to see the show cancelled for various reasons largely related to the series’ second season and supposed social agendas alleged that this shutdown was the first part of a larger plan to cancel the show entirely. It’s the kind of thing that normally wouldn’t be worth mentioning, except for the fact that the false rumors proved to have some serious legs. Its momentum was powered by bad faith and attempts to exploit the possibility that something unexpected has occurred.

We soon learned the truth, though, when it was revealed via various sources that The Last of Us Season 3 went on production hiatus due to scheduling conflicts caused by the World Cup. The details are vague, but because The Last of Us Season 3 primarily films around Vancouver (which is one of the host cities for this year’s World Cup), it seems like city officials needed to regulate some of the activities occurring in the area in order to accommodate the logistics of such a massive event. At this time, there is no indication that filming will not resume on the 28th as planned.

In fact, Deadline recently reported that Peter Sarsgaard has joined the show’s cast and will play a new character named Amon who is believed to be one of the leading members of The Seraphites cult. Both the announcement and the timing of the announcement support the speculation that the season’s production delay will not impact the series longer than anticipated.

So while rumors of the show’s death have indeed been greatly exaggerated, there is some potential bad news that goes along with this update.

First off, it seems highly unlikely that The Last of Us Season 3 will debut anytime in 2026 despite some early reports to the contrary. Even without this production delay, that would be an ambitiously quick release schedule for such a large show. An early(ish) 2027 debut date seems far more likely.

Second, The Last of Us Season 3 will still very likely be the last season of the show. HBO boss Casey Bloys previously hinted as much, and the departure of the series’ co-showrunner Craig Mazin also strongly suggested that the show was coming to a natural end. After all, there are only two full The Last of Us games, and despite the liberal use of original stories throughout the series, there are really only so many places to go barring a major creative upheaval.[end-mark]

The post Peter Sarsgaard Joins <i>The Last of Us</i> Season 3 as Cancellation Rumors Are Debunked appeared first on Reactor.

News The Sheep Detectives

The Sheep Detectives Will Soon Be Streaming Near Ewe

The movie starring Hugh Jackman and a bunch of sheep will soon stream on Prime Video

By Vanessa Armstrong

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Published on June 22, 2026

Photo credit: Courtesy of Amazon MGM Studios

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Photo credit: Courtesy of Amazon MGM Studios

The Sheep Detectives, a film starring Hugh Jackman as a human sheep herder and a bunch of A-list actors voicing sheep in his flock, is set to start streaming on Prime Video on June 24, 2026.

The film, if you need a refresher, covers the following:

Those sheep are voiced by Hong Chau, Emma Thompson, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Bryan Cranston, Chris O’Dowd, Regina Hall, Patrick Stewart, Bella Ramsey, and Brett Goldstein. It also stars Nicholas Braun, Nicholas Galitzine, and Molly Gordon, and sees Kyle Balda as director.

And if that cast and the premise, brought to us by Chernobyl and The Last of Us writer Craig Mazin, aren’t enough to get you to give the movie a watch, Amazon MGM Studios also released a new clip that shows George (Jackman) taking care of a sweet wee winter lamb. Give it a watch below, and I DARE YOU not to check out The Sheep Detectives when it starts streaming on Prime Video in two measly days. [end-mark]

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Featured Essays Planet of the Apes

Why a Planet of the Apes Sequel Was Weirdly More Faithful to the Original Book

Developmental woes, money, and studio concerns can make for fascinating changes to a text.

By Don Kaye

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Published on June 24, 2026

Image: 20th Century Fox

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Image: 20th Century Fox

When Pierre Boulle’s 1963 novel La Planète des singes was optioned for film by producer Arthur P. Jacobs, it must have been difficult to imagine that the movie, which finally arrived five years later as Planet of the Apes, would ever reach the screen at all. Science fiction was still largely considered B-movie material, and no studio in Hollywood was willing to accept Jacobs’ pitch about a movie set in a civilization of talking apes. Yet the 1968 film became an enduring sci-fi classic—but not without significant changes that made it possible to bring Boulle’s story to life.

Strangely enough, once Planet of the Apes officially became a multi-film saga and sequels were churned once a year between 1970 and 1973, it was one of those entries—1971’s Escape from the Planet of the Apes—that ended up returning unexpectedly to many aspects of Boulle’s original vision. Escape also became the most acclaimed of the four initial sequels, second only to the original itself, and remains a fan favorite to this day.

Boulle’s novel opens with a husband-and-wife pair of astronauts enjoying an interstellar cruise when they come upon a bottle floating in space. The literal message in a bottle is a manuscript penned by a journalist, Ulysse Mérou, who relates how he undertook a voyage to the star Betelgeuse with two scientists, with time dilation causing just two years to pass on the ship while centuries zoom by outside. Upon landing on a planet that they name Soror, the three men find themselves among a tribe of mute “savages” who appear to be more or less human. The tribe is attacked by gorillas on horseback wielding weapons; one of Mérou’s companions is killed, while Mérou himself is captured and brought to a modern city.

It soon becomes evident that on Soror, apes are the dominant, intelligent species, while humans are considered little more than animals. But when Mérou makes it clear that he is intelligent and can speak, a chimpanzee scientist named Zira takes an intense interest in him. Mérou is eventually accepted by ape society, allowed to live in comfortable surroundings and given clothing, and even speaks before an assembly of apes.

Meanwhile, Zira’s archaeologist fiancé, Cornelius, discovers incontrovertible evidence that there was once a human civilization on Soror that was eventually overthrown by the simians. At the same time, Mérou learns that Nova, the Sororian woman he has mated with, is pregnant—and since the baby will be the first offspring born of an intelligent human in centuries, the new family represents an existential threat to an ape society that now in all likelihood will seek their extermination (Nova was also pregnant in an early draft of the Planet of the Apes script).

While La Planète des singes reads more like a Swiftian satire than the sci-fi action film that it spawned, Planet of the Apes does retain the spine and some of the tone of the book. The French journalist Mérou becomes a misanthropic American astronaut named Taylor (played by Charlton Heston), but Zira, Cornelius, and Dr. Zaius (in both the book and movie, a powerful orangutan official who wants to suppress all knowledge of humanity’s past) all make the transition from page to screen relatively intact (played by Kim Hunter, Roddy McDowall, and Maurice Evans respectively), as does the idea that the ape society was preceded by a human one whose downfall led to the ascendance of its simian cousins.

But one of the biggest changes from the book is the now legendary ending. Confronted with a ruined Statue of Liberty in the wasteland the apes call “the Forbidden Zone,” Taylor realizes he’s back on Earth, 2,000 years after humankind has destroyed itself in a nuclear holocaust. In the book, Mérou, Nova, and their baby son actually make it back to Earth, also millennia later, where—just like on Soror—humanity has fallen and apes are in control (a somewhat muddled version of this turned up in Tim Burton’s 2001 Planet of the Apes remake).

Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling, one of two credited screenwriters (along with Michael G. Wilson) on Planet of the Apes, is largely attributed with conceiving that haunting final image of Lady Liberty. But an almost equally significant change occurred after Serling handed the writing duties off to Wilson. Serling’s original script followed Boulle’s version of a contemporary ape society, with teeming cities, automobiles, fashionable clothing, aircraft, and many modern technological advancements, adjusted for anthropoid use. The apes wear suits, ties, dresses, and other human-like clothing, unlike the more uniform outfits seen in the film.

Serling estimated that shooting the movie that way would cost “a hundred million dollars,” telling Cinefantastique magazine in 1972, “It was an altogether 20^th-century technology, a New York City in which the doors and automobiles were lower and wider… but of course that was much too expensive to do.” Indeed, it would have been no mean feat at a time when the film’s first proposed budget of $7 million got a firm “pass” from Warner Bros. Pictures (20^th Century Fox ultimately bankrolled the movie for $5 million, with the budget going $800K over).

It was Michael G. Wilson who came up with the idea of the apes living in a rural, agrarian society. Advancements like rifles and primitive cameras are present, but the apes’ homes are made out of stone and nestled on hillsides, while transportation is by horseback or carriage. This not only eliminated the budgetary issue of creating a modern society for the monkeys, but also positioned their civilization as somewhat timeless, making it more difficult for Taylor (and the audience) to ascertain where he really was.

Many of the ideas that were excised from the final script for Planet of the Apes—outsiders finding themselves in advanced societies where they are considered barbaric until deemed otherwise, those same outsiders later being perceived as a threat to the current order, a pregnancy as the catalyst—eventually found their way into Escape from the Planet of the Apes three years later, but only after the massive success of the first film spawned a sequel that put the filmmakers in a creative corner.

1970’s Beneath the Planet of the Apes finds Taylor, Nova, and another astronaut named Brent (James Franciscus) caught in a war between the militaristic gorillas who have come to power in the ape society and mutated, telepathic humans who live underground in the nearby ruins of New York City. With Fox insisting that the series end with this film, the climax has Taylor detonate a powerful weapon, worshiped by the mutants, that can and does destroy the entire world. And that was seemingly that—until Beneath became an improbable box office hit and screenwriter Paul Dehn famously received a telegram that read, “Apes exist. Sequel required.”

Dehn’s solution was not only a clever conceit that turned the Apes franchise into a full-blown futuristic saga, but managed to channel some of the original intent and vision of Boulle’s book. Escape from the Planet of the Apes has Cornelius (McDowall), Zira (Hunter) and a third chimp named Dr. Milo (Sal Mineo) salvage, repair, and launch Taylor’s original spacecraft just before the Earth is destroyed. The shockwave sends them hurtling back through time to our present, where the world is initially stunned and aghast to learn that they are intelligent beings from our own future (early drafts had the “ape-o-nauts” actually landing on a different, Earth-like planet with a human civilization like ours, until it was changed to Earth itself).

Milo is killed early on in an accident, but Cornelius and Zira—never more charming and likable than in this film—are soon treated as celebrities, taken shopping for clothes on Rodeo Drive and moved from their initial quarters at the Los Angeles Zoo to a suite at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. Cornelius is treated as an esteemed historian, Zira is invited to speak to feminist organizations, and both become genuinely popular luminaries.

But then it’s revealed that Zira is pregnant, with the president’s paranoid science advisor, Dr. Otto Hasslein (Eric Braeden), also coaxing the knowledge out of her that the Earth will be destroyed in a war between apes and humans. The two chimps become for all intents and purposes enemies of the state, with Hasslein deducing that their intelligent progeny could in fact be the starting point for the evolutionary pivot that has apes ascend over humans. Zira and Cornelius are violently murdered in the movie’s shocking climax, but their baby survives, paving the way for the next two sequels.

Escape from the Planet of the Apes cost $2 million to make—nearly two-thirds less than the original film—thanks to the fact that there were only three actors in ape makeup, and that a number of real locations in Los Angeles were used (even a primitive ape village cost money to build). Yet as a result, Escape gives us a sense of what a live-action Planet of the Apes truer to Pierre Boulle’s setting might have looked like. (The short-lived 1975 animated series Return to the Planet of the Apes was set in a technologically advanced ape society—the format not having the same financial restrictions—but it only lasted for 13 episodes and was hampered by the typically poor animation of many Saturday morning cartoon shows of the time.)

In Escape, the visitors out of space and time do not find themselves in a rural cliffside village, but a modern metropolis in which the humans they once saw as little more than brutes are now running the world. Writer Paul Dehn even consulted Boulle about inserting more satirical elements: The idea of seeing apes dressed in human clothing—one of the reasons why the first movie was stuck in development for so long—is turned on its head here as Cornelius and Zira go out shopping. The initial impulse on seeing them is perhaps to giggle (the fear of studio executives hesitant to greenlight the original film), but Roddy McDowall and Kim Hunter are so endearing, their reactions so amusing, that the sequence works. In another scene, Cornelius—ostensibly an animal to the people around him—is appalled by the violence as he watches a prize fight, while the supposedly “civilized” humans around him cheer and shout.

Charlton Heston’s Taylor is never embraced as a celebrity by the simian society in the Planet of the Apes film, although Mérou is heralded as such in the novel—until he’s perceived as a danger, that is. This is exactly what happens in Escape: Dr. Hasslein decides that the apes and their child must be terminated to save humanity. The notion of how rapidly we can turn on people whom we hold up as equals or cultural figures is mocked here with a few deft strokes. Cornelius and Zira find themselves ousted from the Beverly Wilshire and sent to a military camp; just like Mérou in the original novel, society quickly wants nothing to do with them. Unlike Mérou (and Taylor, at least initially), they are fated to be gunned down in cold blood… although the apes ultimately have the last laugh.

Even with its humor, modern setting, and satirical elements pushed to the fore, Escape from the Planet of the Apes wouldn’t live up to its title unless it had the kind of downbeat ending that the series became known for, and that even Boulle himself managed to convey in his own sardonic way (the astronauts that find Mérou’s manuscript? They’re chimps too, and they dismiss the whole thing as a fantasy story). Yet Escape also offers something else—a funhouse mirror glimpse of how a rigorously faithful live-action adaptation of the source text might have looked.[end-mark]

Sources

• Planet of the Apes Revisited by Joe Russo and Larry Landsman with Edward Gross
• Cinefantastique #6 (Summer 1972)
• Planet of the Apes: The Evolution of the Legend by Joe Fordham and Jeff Bond
• “The Secret Behind Escape” mini-documentary on the Escape Blu-ray

The post Why a Planet of the Apes Sequel Was Weirdly More Faithful to the Original Book appeared first on Reactor.

Movies & TV The Death of Robin Hood

The Death of Robin Hood Brings a Legend Low

It’s not the first time someone has tried to insert realism into a Robin Hood story… but it might be nice if it were the last.

By Emmet Asher-Perrin

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Published on June 22, 2026

Credit: A24

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Credit: A24

I never read Howard Pyle’s The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood when I was a kid, but my partner adored it, and so I’ve leafed through their tattered copy many times. The book is largely considered a cementing point in the status of Robin Hood as a folk hero rather than the morally flexible outlaw who often stole for his own gain, as the early ballads dictated.

The epilogue of the book contains its own version of “Robin Hood his Death,” one of the oldest ballads on record—in it, Robin is betrayed by a prioress, his cousin, who deliberately botches the medieval blood-letting remedies of the time so that he slowly weakens and bleeds out. By the time Little John realizes something has gone wrong, he’s too late to save his friend. Robin asks for his bow and shoots a final arrow, telling Little John to bury him where it lands.

The Death of Robin Hood is an adaptation, of sorts, of this ballad, and the idea of having a whole film dedicated to this story for the first time was an exciting prospect. That it was written and directed by Michael Sarnoski, who made a (deserved) name for himself with 2021’s Pig, was another vote in its favor. A star-studded but thoughtfully assembled cast certainly didn’t hurt either. So it’s a shame that the film paints an utterly morbid picture that reads like nothing so much as “what if Unforgiven and Logan were grafted onto Robin Hood”?

It feels relevant to note that none of the more recent imaginings of the character hold up very well; the MGM series that premiered last year tried to zero in on Norman-Saxon tensions and keeps hoping Sean Bean’s Sheriff of Nottingham will legitimize their attempts; the 2018 film was a pointlessly grimmed up affair with A Knight’s Tale-style anachronisms it never earned; Ridley Scott’s “historically realistic” 2010 version was trying to capture the same vim Scott seized with Russell Crowe on Gladiator to decidedly damp results. It’s fair to say that there hasn’t been a truly great Robin Hood adaptation since Men in Tights. That’s over three decades of hoping and not much to show for it.

The film opens with another attempt on the life of an elderly Robin Hood (Hugh Jackman). While stories have grown over the years, this Robin has no qualms about who he is: a brigand and a thief and a murderer, who only ever acted for this own gain and currently has nothing to show for it, hunted by the kin of the people he’s killed. He’s found by Little John (Bill Skarsgård), who used to run with him many years ago and is now living a completely new life—in a turn of luck, he had the chance to take over the life of a man he killed, and has been living as Edward, a farmer with a good wife and daughter. But some of the men who knew them have found John’s patch of peace and wrestled it from him. He needs Robin to help him get it back.

This goes about as well as you’d expect, and Robin’s injuries from the fight lead John to drop him at the doorstep of an island priory run by Sister Brigid (Jodie Comer), who is so good at healing that she’s rumored to be a witch. Brigid is a young woman who came to the island in the wake of losing her family, and has devoted her life to helping others. The island seems to have a pull all its own, across many generations and faiths. As Brigid helps Robin (who gives the name Randolph), they grow closer, and he also develops a friendship with the leper (Murray Bartlett) who tends the priory orchards after being saved by the sisterhood. But then John’s daughter, Little Margaret (Faith Delaney), shows up on the island without a father, and Robin knows that someone is likely to come after the girl to end the blood feuds once and for all.

I found myself asking “Why does this need to be Robin Hood?” more than once during the film’s runtime, and I don’t think that the movie itself does a very good job at answering the question. This could have easily been a story about any outlaw of the period, and the suggestion that it inspired the ballads of Robin Hood later on might have been more riveting if the character were simply some guy. There was a way to make this connection deeper and get to the heart of key thoughts in the film’s script—namely questions surrounding the meaning of stories and who they serve—that didn’t require something so plain as “Yeah, so Robin Hood was absolutely real, but he was an asshole.”

Half the purpose in making Robin Hood such an awful guy appears to be in service of pointing out how disgusting the past was. The fight sequences are built for dragged-out carnage, blood and bile and mud spilling out in all directions. The acknowledgment that killing before the advent of slick weaponry and sterile surgery rooms would be a nasty affair is a prolonged piece of the film’s worldbuilding. It’s aggressively fine, but also overplayed—once we’re aware that this is the reality we’re occupying, it stops being interesting to watch in a hurry.

One of my greatest annoyances at films like this, the “Violent Man Comes to Terms With His Terrible Past and Either Makes Peace With It or Dies Trying” genre, is that there’s often very little reasoning or background given to who that man used to be. We’re dropped into the end of his story and supposed to care because… well, we’ve been conditioned to think that those sorts of men’s stories are important and that sometimes it even :gasp: takes a toll on him. But does anyone go to a Robin Hood story for that kind of twist?

There are moments when it seems as though the experience might come together, when the script makes a beautiful or cogent point on occasion. One of those points is wrapped around the spirituality of places, the power of the land on this vast and beautiful planet we cling to. (The paganism in the film runs right alongside the Christianity, and I’m not sure how I feel about it mostly because I don’t think the film is doing nearly enough with that aspect. Robin Hood stories are tied up in Green Man mythologies, too, and I dearly wish that would come into play more often if we’re going old school.) And then there’s Murray Bartlett, casually being the MVP of most projects he wanders onto, there to be a friend, but also to let Robin know that we don’t often remember our own stories as accurately as we claim to—which makes tying ourselves too tightly to them a mistake.

I do appreciate that most of the film is a ponderous, slow-moving affair—I just wish it had given itself better questions to ponder. (Honestly, dealing with personal mythologies and who stories are for and the pitfalls of narrative interpretation in a two hour film is a pretty tall order while Interview With the Vampire is tackling that same stable on television with agony, pathos, devastating cleverness, and a better runtime to do it in.) There are simpler complaints I’ve got, too, like the fact that Little Margaret is very much mirroring the relationship Wolverine has with X-23 in Logan, or the fact that there’s an aggravating suggestion of attraction between Robin and Brigid when Jodie Comer is a quarter century younger than her co-star.

There’s a replication of Robin Hood’s final moments in the ballad here, reimagined with a prioress who is not his cousin and a little girl replacing her father at Robin’s side. And all the while, I was wondering why Robin needed to die at all—there doesn’t seem to be a reason other than that he would prefer to. Which is unfortunate because there is a moment further back in the film that suggests the title might be a sort of ruse… that Robin Hood might die, but a man named Randolph could go on living and help to raise the daughter of Edward the farmer in peace.

But then I remember that in this story, Little John is called that because he joined Robin’s gang of brigands when he was a boy—he was literally little. And I realize that the choice to reinterpret such sharp little detail of an age-old tale with something so banal isn’t going to offer up such an interesting premise. We’re here for realism.

For some reason, we often forget that realism is not the antithesis of story.[end-mark]

The post <i>The Death of Robin Hood</i> Brings a Legend Low appeared first on Reactor.

Movies & TV movie reviews

You Got Your Time Loop in My Ghost Ship: Rose of Nevada

There is work, and there is sleep, and there is no escape.

By Leah Schnelbach

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Published on June 24, 2026

Credit: 1-2 Special

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Credit: 1-2 Special

Rose of Nevada is something special. I’m not sure it’ll be for everyone, but I’ve seen it twice now and loved it, even though it makes me queasy.

Probably because it makes me queasy.

I got to see it the first time at the New York Film Festival back in September; I saw it again more recently because the tone of the movie is so bewitching I wasn’t sure I could get it across in a review. To be honest, I’m still not sure I’ve managed it—I could write a whole other review focusing on other aspects of the film and still not capture it. The title up there maybe makes it sound a little silly, but it is both a time loop story, and a ghost ship story, and I think it honors the tropes of those types of stories well. It’s also a tragedy, an exploration of what community means, a working-class nightmare, and I think ultimately a story of sacrifice.

It actually reminded me of All of Us Strangers in a way, with a similarly delicate tone. In the interest of not shattering that tone, I’ll try not to spoil anything here.

Thirty years ago a small fishing boat called the Rose of Nevada went down with all hands. As the film begins, she floats back into the her home harbor—rusted and filthy, but whole. One villager sees her, and goes back into town to tell another, and figure out what to do.

Neither of them seem terribly surprised.

We’re in a present-day fishing village in Cornwall, a Celtic region in the extreme southwest of the UK. And I say fishing village, but really it’s an empty, aching, ghost town. The harbor is empty, the streets are quiet, the pub is deserted except for one girl, a would-be wild child named Jess who doesn’t have anyone to be wild with. The only other young people we meet are Nick and Emily, young parents to a toddler who live next to Richardsons, an elderly couple who lost their boy almost 30 years ago, and never really recovered.

Like almost every other young man in the town, he was a fisherman.

When we first see Nick (George MacKay), he’s going down to the community pantry to collect a ration of groceries. He comes home to find Mrs. Richardson on her stoop, in a nightdress in cold, pouring rain, bewildered and scared. Over one quick-cut, beautiful scene, we see everything we need to know about Nick and Emily: they usher her in, Nick tosses Emily a towel to dry the woman’s hair, the two parents maneuver around each other to give their toddler a granola bar for breakfast, Nick sorts through the now-soaked cardboard box of food to make sure everything survived.

It’s not a large box. It’s really not enough food for a family of three.

Then the roof springs a leak.

Meanwhile across town, a young man named Liam (Callum Turner) literally runs into the story, clearly escaping something. A foil to Nick, he’s the kind of person who careens from bad decision to bad decision, relying on charm and good looks to carry him through. He doesn’t seem like a bad guy, just an opportunistic one—and he doesn’t seem particularly upset to find himself sleeping rough in an abandoned shed for the night.

What follows is an intricate story of desperate choices and exploitation. Mike, the owner of Rose of Nevada, recruits Nick and Liam to crew the boat, along with a grizzled captain named Murgey (Francis Magee) who seems like he walked in out of a seafaring tale from an earlier age. Neither of the young men are solid hands at first—Nick wasn’t even born until three years after the Rose of Nevada tragedy, and he’s only known the village as it sank into obsolescence.

But over a maiden voyage the two learn how to cast and haul the net, how to sort and gut fish, how to tolerate the constant crying of the gulls, how to fling fish innards up and away for the birds. By the time they get back, they’re good at the gig.

But the bustling harbor and thriving village they sail into is nothing like the one they left.

Where a lot of time loop stories spend their screentime on working out the mechanics (or, as in Looper, agreeing that working out the mechanics is a fool’s errand), trying to find past loved ones, trying to figure out how to break the cycle, creating Quantum Leap-style gags about famous historical moments, Rose of Nevada isn’t exactly about its time loop. It’s much more about the idea of a community that was ravaged by tragedy, and then abandoned as the modern world trundled along without it. The village in the early ’90s is the place to be—the pub is hopping, young people are flirting, the grocery store is well-stocked, there’s great music on the radio.

But it’s all being fueled by grueling manual labor. Men spend most of their time out to sea under the sun, wrestling with slippery, reeking fish, slimy knives, crushing winches, clanking chains, endless waves. Even a good trip is dangerous, and you never get to stay home long. Back home, women and elderly people are left to do all the community building, all the teaching and childcare, and also have to be able to welcome the men back into their lives with no friction, and also have to be able to bear it if the men don’t come home.

The success of the village depends on the young men putting themselves at risk. The community feeds on their lives.

But also: the community works together for the greater good. In one vital scene, we see the men of the village gathered on the dock to knit fishing nets together. There’s no chatter, just shared work. Everyone does their part to make sure there’s a good haul, to feed that haul back into the life of the town. Liam joins in; Nick does not.

Because the way that this movie is a horror story is that a time loop that feeds on peoples’ labor doesn’t care about the individual people. It’s a true loop—we are trapped in the endless cycle of hard work and fish guts with Liam and Nick. There is no fun bank robbery, no sexy destination wedding, no meditation on Buddhism and/or Purgatory. There is work, and there is sleep, and there is no escape.

How long has the loop existed? How many times has this happened? Is everyone we meet even still alive? Has some horrific combination of necessity and fate conjured some of these characters?

The film takes all of this seriously. There’s no winking here, beyond a moment that could read as the tiniest reference to the incest fears in Back to the Future—but the film takes that in a different direction that serves the story, and it certainly doesn’t play it for laughs. It ends up adding the idea that life in this village is an unending cycle of life feeding on life. And while the film largely avoids blaring pop culture references, the camera does linger on a television ad about fighting global warming. “It’s not too late yet!” the ad chirps from 1993, as we watch from 2026, and know that nothing was done, it is too late, and the old have devoured the futures of the young.

Mark Jenkin’s previous films are Bait, a realistic drama about the fishing industry, tourism, and gentrification with a very light supernatural element, and Enys Men, a folk horror about a wildlife researcher on a remote island that takes a harder turn for the speculative. I’ll admit that I haven’t seen them yet, but they’ve shot up my list since seeing Rose of Nevada. (Rose of Nevada could be seen as the third in a loose Cornwall Trilogy.) Jenkin is from Cornwall, and has used his work to explore the culture of his home. He often works with his partner, Mary Woodvine, who played the lead in Enys Men and has a pivotal role here. He also shoots on a 16mm Bolex, in the short bursts that camera allows, records dialogue separately, and lays the dialogue, sound effects, and soundtrack over the film in the edit. This results in a film that feels different on the eye than a typical digitally shot movie—kind of like a grittier version of a 1930s and ‘40s Jack Cardiff-shot Technicolor, if that makes sense? (It’s gorgeous, but it genuinely makes me queasy. But clearly I don’t care, given that I’ve watched the film in theaters twice now.) And thanks to Jenkin’s recording style, the sound always feels off in a way that adds to the sense of being unstuck in time. The movie becomes an uncanny experience rather than something to simply watch.

The performances are perfect. Nick is a taciturn young man, but George MacKay puts everything he’s thinking into his eyes—they’re hard to look at by the end. Callum Turner meanwhile uses his body language to bring Liam to life. No matter what he’s actually doing, the man always seems like he’s leaning in a doorway, not committing either way, an inviting grin on his face and eyes that are calculating his next bad decision. Francis Magee is by turns hilarious and frightening as Murgey—what starts off as a slightly ironic performance as a salty old seafarer soon becomes a loop of its own. And all the supporting cast are excellent—both the versions in the present day and those back in the ‘90s. The film only works if all the characters feel like their younger selves, and the cast rises to every occasion.

In the end the film feels to me like it’s lamenting a lost past and shouting a curses at it at the same time. The hard work was exhausting, but also honorable; if the wider world had cared for these workers the village wouldn’t need to feed on its past. In the opening we see Nick collect food for his family from a food co-op—if the larger society cared for the small villages, he wouldn’t need to use that co-op, right? But at the same time, the community provides the food, in the same way that the community came together to mend nets 30 years ago.

But that wasn’t some idyllic past—we see that even 30 years ago the young men of the town lost themselves in booze and Ecstasy when they weren’t at sea. At one point a character asks if the man who owns the Rose of Nevada is going to crew it himself, and his reply is sharp and absolute: “I’m a businessman, not a fisherman.” The town holds to its rigid roles, and anyone unlucky enough to be born poor has to risk their safety on a boat. Jenkin wrote this movie during the COVID lockdown, and he spoke in an interview about watching his community come together; he saw people caring for each other at a time when the larger government and political leaders were worse than useless. But he watched the community come together through his windows, as he and his partner were locked down in their home like almost everyone else. Somehow I think this film has captured that feeling better than almost anything else I’ve seen. Rose of Nevada shows the joy of people caring for each other, but also the ultimate terror and isolation of relying on uncaring nature for your livelihood. The terrifying trap of being forced to give up your own needs and desires, in order to meet the demands of the larger community. It also shows the extent to which people will perform the roles that are expected of them until their lives are deep grooves whose meanings they can’t even remember.

The village that suffered such terrible loss may have healed itself by the end of the film—maybe, the film remains mysterious up to the end. But if healing is only possible by sacrificing the innocent and the vulnerable, while other people in other social classes reap the benefits, can it ever be worth it?[end-mark]

The post You Got Your Time Loop in My Ghost Ship: <em>Rose of Nevada</em> appeared first on Reactor.

News Keanu Reeves

Keanu Reeves in Talks to Star in Lego Live-Action Hybrid Movie

But will Reeves be a minifig?

By Vanessa Armstrong

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Published on June 22, 2026

Screenshot: Lionsgate

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Screenshot: Lionsgate

Keanu Reeves (pictured above as an angel in 2025’s Good Fortune) recently reprised his voice for the character Duke Caboom in Toy Story 5, and the actor is eyeing another movie that will include animation and toys as main characters.

The movie in question is a Lego feature at Universal that will contain a mix of animation and live action. According to Deadline, Reeves is in talks to star in such a film with Josh Cooley, who wrote and directed Toy Story 4, at the helm. The project is the first in a deal Universal signed with The Lego Group to create three live-action films based on the plastic building blocks.

It’s not clear whether Reeves will be lending his voice to a Lego character or if his entire body will be on screen for live-action acting. What we do know, according to Deadline, is that the movie will revolve around Reeves’ character, whatever form that may take, and that the studio is courting him to be the centerpiece of a Lego feature. Reeves is reportedly warming up to the idea.

Other than that, details are slim! That doesn’t mean we can’t conjecture: Will Reeves be playing a John Wick-esque dude with crazy fighting skills? Or will he be more like his Toy Story character, the Canadian daredevil Duke Caboom? Or perhaps (probably) will he play a completely different character? Who knows!

What we do know is that any Lego movie that comes to pass will be the latest installment in a burgeoning franchise that started with 2014’s animated feature, The Lego Movie. Those films came out at Warner Bros., and this live-action/animation movie from Universal appears to be a different iteration on the IP.

Fingers crossed we’ll get more news about the Keanu Reeves Lego film soon, including who Reeves will be playing (assuming, of course, that the deal moves forward).[end-mark]

The post Keanu Reeves in Talks to Star in Lego Live-Action Hybrid Movie appeared first on Reactor.

Column Science Fiction Film Club

Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes: Charmingly Low-Stakes Time Loop Hijinks

A bunch of friends accidentally discover a time paradox-vortex-loop thingy in this goofy, delightful comedy.

By Kali Wallace

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Published on June 24, 2026

Credit: Europe Kikaku / Tollywood

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Credit: Europe Kikaku / Tollywood

Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes (Japanese: ドロステのはてで僕ら, trans. We at the End of the Droste) (2020) Directed by Junta Yamaguchi. Written by Makoto Ueda. Starring members of the Europe Kikaku theater troupe.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve watched a selection of low-budget, high-concept films that make use of minimal productions to place characters in strange and unsettling science fictional situations. It feels fitting to end the month with a film that reminds us we needn’t take everything so seriously all the time—not even accidentally creating a time paradox with your friends in a Kyoto café after hours.

Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes is a mere 70 minutes long, and it spends barely five of those minutes establishing its science fictional premise. Kato (Kazunari Tosa), a café owner in Kyoto, discovers one night after work that the computer in his café is linked to the computer in his apartment upstairs by a two-minute time glitch. When he looks at his home monitor, he can see what is happening exactly two minutes in the future from the perspective of the café’s computer.

This is, of course, completely bewildering to Kato, but he doesn’t get much time to think it over before café worker Aya (Riko Fujitani) and friend Komiya (Gôta Ishida) catch on and begin playfully testing the curious little time loop. Two more friends, Tanabe (Masashi Suwa) and Ozawa (Yoshifumi Sakai), show up to join in. In spite of Kato’s misgivings, the other characters want to figure out what they can do with this ability.

Naturally, their minds go to using the “Time TV” to make money, but they quickly realize the limitations of being able to see only two minutes into the future. Ozawa comes up with a way around that. If they set the two computers facing each other, he reasons, it will create an infinite mirror that will show each subsequent layer two minutes farther into the future. This is where the film’s Japanese title comes from: ドロステのはてで僕ら, or We at the End of the Droste, refers to the Droste effect, which describes when an image occurs recursively inside of itself. The effect is name for an advertisement created by Jan Misset in 1904; his artwork for the Dutch cocoa brand Droste shows a woman holding a cocoa tin that features the same image of her holding a cocoa tin.

Over Kato’s rather feeble objections, the group excitedly follows Ozawa’s suggestion. They place the two computers facing each other and end up with a view several minutes in the future.

(Note: I have no trouble suspending my disbelief for the timey-wimey stuff, but I kept wondering how long the cables are for this computer. Kato must be using the longest extension cord in Japan.)

That’s where things start to get a bit more complicated. Kato sees his future self excitedly announce that the woman next door, Megumi (Aki Asakura), has accepted an invitation to come see his band play. But when he goes over to ask her, she turns him down. Aya convinces him he has to tell his past self that she accepted, because he saw his future self say it, therefore not doing it will create a paradox. This is an assumption all the characters, genre-savvy as they are, bring into the situation. They accept that the future is controlling the present in some way—or they don’t want to find out what will happen if it doesn’t—and that remains true even when things take a turn for the dangerous.

Relatively dangerous, that is, because this is not the kind of movie where the tone ever dips darker than “mildly concerned.” The friends accidentally run afoul of some hapless gangsters who live upstairs, and there is an amusing sequence of events where Kato goes to confront them while carrying one screen (longest extension cord in all of Japan!) so the others can watch the future broadcast below and hurriedly prepare him.

Then the Time Cops show up, and Kato and Megumi finally ask the question that the audience has been asking all along: Why do we have to do what we see our future selves do? Can’t we just… not do that? The future isn’t actually controlling us, is it?

And they’re right, at least from their own perspectives. There is no cataclysm. They don’t accidentally create a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Life just goes on, now with the two of them getting to know each other in the café, and Kato firmly turning off his Time TV monitor.

Just about everybody involved in the making of the film came from the Kyoto-based Europe Kikaku, a theater troupe founded at Doshisha University in 1998. The troupe specializes in comedic performances with sci fi or fantasy elements, so this film is right in their wheelhouse. The setting is a real café where the members of the troupe liked to hang out, and the film was made over the course of seven days for a total cost of about ¥3 million (about $18,000). It premiered in the midst of the COVID-19 lockdowns in a small Tokyo theater to a socially-distanced audience of exactly twelve people—but it was picked up by Toho Cinemas, the theater-owning arm of the Japanese film giant, and would go on to screen at a number of festivals.

According to an interview with director (who was also the cinematographer, camera operator, and editor) Junta Yamaguchi, writer Makoto Ueda first conceived of the basic premise of Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes several years before they found the right time to make it. And when they did, the biggest challenge was getting the one-take, real-time aspect right.

Time for a quick diversion into film trivia! Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes was not actually filmed in a single long take; it was edited to look that way. That’s a tried-and-true approach to filmmaking that’s been around for a long time: Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Birdman (2014) and Sam Mendes’ 1917 (2019) are two modern examples that make use of it.

Prior to the usage of digital cameras and projectors, the length of a single take was limited by the length of a reel of film. That was the problem Alfred Hitchcock ran into when he was making Rope (1948). Film stock at the time could record only seven to ten minutes of action, and two reels could be loaded into a theater film projector for a maximum twenty minutes of continuous runtime. That’s why Rope is made up of a series of seven-minute scenes in which the cuts alternate between hidden cuts (such as close-ups on the same image) and obvious cuts. (I learned from reading about this that apparently Iñárritu hates Rope and was not shy about expressing it during Birdman promotions. It’s an opinion he shares with Hitchcock himself, who considered the film a failed experiment. I quite like Rope. I like audacious experiments in film.)

The advent of video technology extended the length of a single true take considerably; Béla Tarr’s made-for-television Macbeth (1982) clocks in at 62 minutes, with a single five-minute scene followed by one that is 57 minutes long. Digital filmmaking naturally pushed the limit even farther, and now there are several movies from around the world that are true single-take films of over two hours long. These include the Tamil-language Indian horror movie Agadam (2014), filmed in a single 123-minute take; the Iranian experimental film Immortality (2016), which consists of a single 145-minute shot on a train; and the German crime thriller Victoria (2015), for which the full 138 minutes were filmed three times because the director was dissatisfied with the first two takes.

This concludes our detour into film trivia, because that’s not what Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes is doing. This movie takes it cue more directly from the 2017 Japanese zombie movie One Cut of the Dead, which is a film-within-a-film meta satire about the production of a single-cut zombie film that ends up using real zombies. That film was also made for quite a low budget over a handful of days, with Shin’ichirō Ueda both directing and editing. It was also extremely successful, demonstrating that there was at least a little bit of interest in the film world for low-budget, high-concept speculative films with some fun editing trickery.

Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes is not a long film, but making it required intense attention to detail in both filming and editing. To be able to keep moving around the characters—and following them as they haul computers up and down the stairs—Yamaguchi used a tiny, handheld camera fixed to an iPhone that served as its monitor. He said about the process, “We paid particular attention to time management. The two-minute time delay needed to be very accurate, we couldn’t go off even one second. Everything, from the camera movement to the actors, had to be very precise.”

That makes it another film, like Coherence (2014), where the confined setting and short time frame hide just how much preparation and editing go into making a film that convincingly portrays a group of people having an ordinary evening interrupted by science fictional phenomena. Making it look easy on screen is never actually easy at all.

One thing I really liked about Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes is its charming self-awareness in keeping the scale small and the stakes low. The characters even poke fun at the time travel trope of glimpsing the future and seeing a post-apocalyptic hellscape. It never tries to explain the causality or paradox built into the premise; those are not things the characters would be able to work out in an hour. They marvel at the phenomenon, they play around with it, and they only get about as far as using it for scratch tickets and gashapon prizes before getting waylaid.

All of that feels believable for a bunch of friends who accidentally discover a time paradox-vortex-loop-thing in a café one night. Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes is very silly, a bit of slapstick with a romantic comedy at its core, and quite a lot of fun.

Yamaguchi, Ueda, and the Europe Kikaku troupe have revisited the premise of two-minute time travel in River (2023), which is about a group of people at a ryokan getting caught in a two-minute time loop. I haven’t watched it yet, but critics seem to have liked it, so it’s probably worth checking out.

What do you think of Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes? What would you do if your computer showed you exactly two minutes into the future? Maybe it does and you’ve just never looked at the right window…

I have recently reached a milestone here at the Science Fiction Film Club: As of this month, I’ve written about over 100 films. For the first week of July, I’m going to write something about favorites, hidden gems, pleasant surprises, and other things related to what I’ve watched, researched, and learned over the past couple of years.

After that, we’ll get back to the regular weekly schedule with a new theme.[end-mark]

It’s a Really Good Idea to Let Machines Do Our Thinking

I have no idea why this theme is on my mind lately. It just came to me out of nowhere. It’s just such a common sci fi story premise. I can’t explain it. So let’s watch a few cautionary tales about what happens when we let technology we don’t fully understand drive important decisions regarding things like war and peace and life and death and the fate of the entire human race.

July 8 — Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970), directed by Joseph Sargent

It’s a really good idea to give control of nuclear weapons to machines.

Find it online.

View the trailer.

July 15 — Westworld (1973), directed by Michael Crichton

It’s a really good idea to let corporate greed drive decision-making with dangerous technology.

Find it online.

View the trailer.

July 22 — Zardoz (1974), directed by John Boorman

It’s a really good idea to let a machine control human immortality.

Find it online.

View the trailer.

July 29 — The Terminator (1984), directed by James Cameron

It’s a really good idea to… you know what. Never mind. None of this is a good idea.

Find it online.

View the trailer.

The post <i>Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes</i>: Charmingly Low-Stakes Time Loop Hijinks appeared first on Reactor.

News Klara and the Sun

Jenna Ortega Wants to Be Your Artificial Friend in Klara and the Sun Trailer

The movie from Taika Waititi is an adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s book of the same name

By Vanessa Armstrong

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Published on June 22, 2026

Screenshot: Sony Pictures

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Screenshot: Sony Pictures

Taika Waititi’s adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun is actually happening, and Sony Pictures released a trailer today giving us our first glimpse of Jenna Ortega as Klara, as well as the rest of the cast, including Mia Tharia as Josie, the young human who chooses Klara, and Amy Adams as Josie’s concerned mother.

Here’s the official synopsis:

Today’s trailer introduces us to all these characters, as well as Natasha Lyonne as the store manager where Josie buys Klara, and a brief shot of Steve Buscemi as well. Overall, it seems to hew to Ishiguro’s story, though it’s hard to say for sure based on a single trailer and a high-level synopsis.

While story details aren’t clear, we do know that the script comes from Waititi and Dahvi Waller (Mad Men, Halt and Catch Fire), and that the film is set to premiere in theaters on October 23, 2026.

While we wait for more info, check out the first trailer for Klara and the Sun below. [end-mark]

The post Jenna Ortega Wants to Be Your Artificial Friend in <i>Klara and the Sun</i> Trailer appeared first on Reactor.

Books Sword and Sorcery

Bored of the Swords: The Rebirth of Sword & Sorcery and the Death of the Weird

S&S is making a comeback in a very narrow way — we need to restore the genre’s essential weirdness.

By Cynthia Ward

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Published on June 23, 2026

Illustration by H. S. De Lay

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Illustration by H. S. De Lay

Recently, I sent my best friend a text stating “SiriusXM is reminding me how boring I find grunge.”

Do I find grunge boring? No, in fact, I do not.

That wasn’t, per se, my point. My point, which I knew the BFF would understand, is that the grunge sound completely dominates what is now labeled alternative rock. One can spend hours on the SXM app listening to their contemporary alternative channels and never realize that synthesizers were once an important element of modern rock, or that New Wave, punk, ska, goth, jangle pop, neo-swing, EDM, and a couple of dozen other subgenres used to appear regularly on Rock of the ‘80s/’90s radio stations.

The term “alternative rock” was coined for DIY/indie rock music in the ‘90s, when grunge was exploding. In response to the boom, major labels signed grunge acts and put the squeeze on established acts to sound grunge, even as performers inspired by the nascent genre formed or became grunge bands. Of course, the more the grunge sound dominates alternative music, the more alternative fans lose access to other sounds, in a feedback loop which can sometimes turn listening to Lithium and the contemporary altSXM channels into a chore.

So, in a world throttled by algorithmic manipulation and trend simulation, you can imagine this old-school sword & sorcery fan’s pleasure at discovering the 21^st century revival of S&S, which had almost disappeared during the epic fantasy boom of the ‘80s and was now returning from the edges.

I am thrilled to discover there is so much great new sword & sorcery out there. Excellent new work from 21^st-century authors like Milton Davis and Bryn Hammond and Dariel R.A. Quiogue and many others. Excellent new work from Second Wave veterans like Glen Cook and Michael Moorcock and David C. Smith and others. And, as the late skald of speculative fiction, Poul Anderson, hoped in his classic essay “On Thud and Blunder” (Swords Against Darkness III, 1978), the new S&S is “drawing [more] inspiration from other [i.e., non-European] milieus—Oriental, Near Eastern, North and Black African, Amerindian, Polynesian, an entire world.”

I’m pleased to see S&S has gotten more diverse since the mid-twentieth century.

I’m less pleased to see that it’s also gotten less diverse since the mid-twentieth century.

By “less diverse,” I mean that the definition of S&S has considerably narrowed.

I began reading and writing S&S mid-century because, damn, was it weird! S&S prose and comics had barbarians and Amazons and nomads. Sorcerers and witches and priests. Mercenaries and pirates and thieves. Demons and gods and dinosaurs. Peasants and princesses and kings. Elves and dwarves and mer-folk. Bards and spear-women and serial killers. The disabled and the maimed and the accursed. And any of these characters could have a starring role, and many of the stars occupied more than one category (most famously, Elric of Melniboné, the disabled nonhuman prince granted strength by a demonic sword, and Conan of Cimmeria, barbarian, thief, mercenary, pirate, king, and more). The star might even be a cat (Mark E. Rogers’s Samurai Cat) or an aardvark (Dave Sim’s Cerebus the Aardvark).

Visions of a space-faring future might be glimpsed, as in Marvel Comics’ Conan the Barbarian #1 (1970), or a character might pass back and forth between our modern world and a mystic realm—and between different ages of her own body—as DC Comics’ Amethyst, Princess of Gemworld does. An alien might fall to earth, as in Robert E. Howard’s Conan story “The Tower of the Elephant” (1933; adapted by Marvel Comics twice in the 1970s), or in Clark Ashton Smith’s tale “The Beast of Averoigne” (1933). A romance might transcend time, as does that of Conan and 1970s cab driver Danette in What If? issue #13 (1978). Eldritch Lovecraftian horrors might intrude (or worse), as when John Jakes’ Brak the Barbarian faces Yob-Haggoth, or Richard L. Tierney’s gladiator/mage Simon of Gitta (a.k.a. Simon Magus) deals in matters both Mythic and Gnostic. An elf’s quest might meet with another elf hatching from an egg (“Weirdworld,” Marvel Super Action #1, 1976). And the visuals could get distinctly trippy, as evidenced by Eerie Magazine’s recurring adult comic El Cid.

No wonder S&S in the ’70s and early ’80s—like fantasy and science fiction more generally in that era—was read predominantly, if not exclusively, by freaks and geeks.

No wonder I loved it.

And, given that the modern S&S revival is arising from the margins and is still largely an underground scene, I expected a return of that old-school unpredictability.

But it turns out that with S&S, as with alternative rock, things have grown distinctly less loosey-goosey.

Now, I very much doubt the operating logic of the modern S&S reader, viewer, or creator is “let’s be more formulaic!”

But I do have to wonder what’s going on when I encounter increasingly narrow definitions of S&S being increasingly prescribed or enforced.

When I see so many arguing in online fora that “real” S&S just simply cannot have epic scale, or nonhuman sentient races, or a quest, or too much magic, or any element that might suggest science fiction instead of fantasy.

When it seems like almost every new character is a warrior.

Who is almost inevitably whole and able-bodied.

Who is frequently a barbarian.

Who typically wields a sword.

And who usually has a straight white cisgender male identity.

At this point, what is weird?

Nothing.

And I haven’t even touched on the latter-day arguments I’ve seen—rare but there—that S&S is a man’s literature; nor touched on the new-zine editorial which describes S&S in “chest-thumping” warrior terms and tells fans we “follow in the footsteps of great men” (Battleborn #1, ARC, forthcoming May 2026); nor touched on a recent how-to-write-S&S handbook (Arcane Arts and Cold Steel: Writing Sword-and-Sorcery Fiction by David C. Smith, 2025) which explicitly dismisses the entirety of the female-writer-dominated Sword & Sorceress anthology series (34 volumes) as “only ostensibly sword-and-sorcery fiction”…

…Even though women have been writing S&S since 1934, when C.L. (Catherine Lucille) Moore introduced Jirel of Joiry, medieval ruler and woman warrior, in “The Black God’s Kiss” (Weird Tales, 1934). Moore’s Jirel adventures were, according to Wikipedia, “among the first sword and sorcery stories of any kind [and] introduced a female protagonist to the genre.” You can get some information on the series’ and the author’s original reception, often warm, and not only from men, at the critic Bobby Derie’s blog, On an Underwood No. 5.

Women have been involved with S&S ever since—and we did yeoman work to keep it alive, particularly in the droughts between pre-war pulp and the 1960s, and between the 1980s and the modern revival. Discussing every woman involved would require a far longer article (or, more accurately, a book), but I’ll mention four.

In the mid-twentieth century, Cele Goldsmith (later Cele Lalli), editor of Fantastic, took the uncommercial gamble of commissioning Fritz Leiber to resume his Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series and “in so doing she improved the climate and conditions that allowed sword-and-sorcery to reach full flower later in the decade [1960s]” (“The Fantastic S&S contributions of Cele Goldsmith,” The Silver Key, 2021). The writer and editor Jessica Amanda Salmonson not only turned the historical woman samurai Tomoe Gozen into a classic S&S character and trilogy, but edited Amazons! (1979), which received the World Fantasy Award for Best Anthology in 1980, and Amazons II (1982), the first heroic fantasy anthologies to focus on female protagonists, which were also unusual in having a female majority of contributors; one contribution to Amazons!, Elizabeth A. Lynn’s “The Woman Who Loved the Moon,” tied for the World Fantasy Award for Short Fiction in 1980, in the same year that Lynn’s heroic fantasy novel Watchtower won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel.

Reprehensible as she has turned out to be, the late writer/editor Marion Zimmer Bradley wielded enormous influence on S&S in the second half of the twentieth century. She created the once immensely popular Darkover planetary romance series, which influenced many later S&S writers. She also created Lythande, the cross-dressing bladeswoman/magician who originated in the first volume of the first modern shared-world series, Thieves’ World (launched in 1979), and is arguably S&S’s first major lesbian character. In addition, she edited the first twenty books of the female-centric Sword & Sorceress anthology series, with fourteen postmortem volumes appearing from other female editors; as well, she edited Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine, which also published S&S works.

Given that it was mostly women who contributed to MZBfm, Sword & Sorceress, and Amazons; given that the evidence indicates their audiences were female-majority; and given that many women writers were publishing S&S novels and series in the 1970s-1990s, I think it is fair to state that S&S was kept alive through the decades of the millennium-spanning drought predominantly by women and girls.

Yet in the current quest for “true” S&S, we see increasing efforts to exclude this entire population of practitioners and fans.

It’s ironic. When I first encountered S&S, the fan base was so tiny, newcomers were welcomed into the fold that helped us nonconformists survive and even thrive in a dominant culture which bluntly labeled us a deviant subculture…when, that is, the outsiders were being polite (this is not to say that every individual in the S&S world then was welcoming, but the overall vibe was). Now, in some quarters, S&S is quite ready to exclude some of its own in order to police an intensifying conformity.

These days, I find myself speculating about the iconic S&S character Elric of Melniboné, who was created by Michael Moorcock and who made his first appearance in the novella “The Dreaming City” (1961). An inhuman, antiheroic, multiverse-tripping, doomed albino princeling who is weak and effete, Elric is also a druggie, a fuck-up, and a demon-master and demon’s slave. Had he been introduced in the 2020s, I am convinced many would reject him out of hand as sword & sorcery.

From the available evidence, Joanna Russ’ pivotal S&S character, the assassin/thief/time traveler Alyx the Adventurer, was excised from S&S decades ago, despite a dalliance with Fritz Leiber’s beloved barbarian character, Fafhrd, in one of Russ’s stories and one of Leiber’s.

Manifestly, purity is overrated.

The fewer ideas and perceptions and influences you allow into the gene pool, the smaller it gets. And the smaller the gene pool, the weaker the population.

For the arts, homogenization leads not only to stagnation and retrogression, but boredom.

And if you think the pool’s not going to get any smaller, I’ve already witnessed an exclusion from S&S of the preeminent 21^st-century S&S series, the Chronicles of Hanuvar, written by the late and much-lamented Howard Andrew Jones—who, as writer, editor, and critic, was the most important figure in modern S&S until his untimely passing.

To be clear, I’m fine with a definition of S&S that doesn’t want a lot of SF elements or a lot of grand fantasy quests or a lot of world-saving or multiverse-traveling. That’s reasonable. We want people to understand what we mean when we recommend something as S&S.

And I’m fine reading about white cisgender barbarian swordsmen. I’m currently reading Battlepug: The Compugdium, an omnibus graphic novel featuring exactly such a character. It’s a lot of fun—fun that respects and subverts and sends up the trope—and it embeds its lead, the Warrior, in a lot of weirdness.

What I’m not fine with is having one character type or one identity increasingly foreclose other possibilities.

I’m not fine with Jirel of Joiry and Cugel the Clever and Imaro of the Ilyassai and Tomoe Gozen and Corum Jhaelen Irsei and Alyx the Adventurer and Stalker and Jaisel and Tyndall of Klarn and Frostflower and Cutter Kinseeker and Dossouye and Paksenarrion Dorthansdottir and Sorren and Luc de Chaudronnier and Kerowyn and entire identities being excluded from the definition, practice, and history of S&S.

That’s even more boring than song after song grunging up my app feed.

With mass media now the dominant means of introduction to speculative fiction, I suspect many (if not most) S&S fans are introduced to S&S by the Conan and Red Sonja comics, movies, cartoons, and games. These have made Conan an archetype as well-known and influential as Tarzan, James Bond, and Sherlock Holmes. Which is wonderful! But it’s lost to later generations, just how weird a barbarian hero used to be. And it’s no surprise the newcomer to S&S would not only expect, but would in many cases demand, more barbarian swordsmen.

Barbarian swordsmen are a good starting place, to be sure; but they shouldn’t also be the ending place.

Sword & sorcery was, can be, and should be way weirder than that.

In the David Lynch movie Wild at Heart (1990), Lula Fortune observes, “This whole world’s wild at heart and weird on top.”

S&S was, and surely can again be, wilder and weirder yet.

If we restore S&S’s heirloom strangeness to the globally aware 21^st-century S&S renaissance, we’re in for one hell of a time.[end-mark]

The post Bored of the Swords: The Rebirth of Sword & Sorcery and the Death of the Weird appeared first on Reactor.

Column SFF Bestiary

Dat Wascally Wabbit: Bugs Bunny and His Dearest Frenemies

Like all great comic characters, Bugs is more than a set of gags or a laugh line…

By Judith Tarr

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Published on June 22, 2026

Screenshot: Warner Bros.

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Screenshot: Warner Bros.

Warner Brothers on YouTube has performed a great service to the world: It has posted multiple mega-compilations of Looney Tunes cartoons. Bugs Bunny. Daffy Duck. Porky Pig. Sylvester and Tweety Bird. They’re all there, along with Elmer Fudd and Yosemite Sam and a constantly shifting roster of special guests.

Talk about rabbit holes.

The number-one character, the greatest star, especially if you ask him, is a grey-and-white, long-eared rabbit (or hare) with a wisecracking personality and a serious carrot habit. Bugs Bunny first evolved in the 1930s; by 1940 he’d taken the form we all know and love. He was the second cartoon character to get a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, after Mickey Mouse, and like Mickey for Disney, he became the spokesbunny for Warner Brothers. He’s still going in multiple forms, from comic books to feature films to games and, of course, cartoon shorts on television.

Bugs is the epitome of cool. Very little fazes him. With carrot in hand, he’s always ready to deliver his signature line, “What’s up, Doc?”

Late-era Bugs lives in a regular house, but for decades he inhabited a rabbit hole, complete with mailbox with his name on. The hole can crop up anywhere. When he stops for the night in a remote mansion that turns out to belong to a group of gangsters, he drills a hole in the floor and makes himself comfortable.

Bugs’ original and frequent adversary is Elmer Fudd. Elmer takes various forms over the decades, but ur-Elmer is a hunter, and he wants you to be very, very quiet, because he’s hunting rabbits. Hunting is Elmer’s passion. He doesn’t even eat what he hunts. “I’m a vegetarian,” he says. “I hunt for sport.”

Bugs gives him all the sport he’ll ever want or need. So does Bugs’ best frenemy, Daffy Duck, who vies with him to convince Elmer that it’s hunting season for the other’s species. Rabbit season? Duck season? Poor Elmer collapses in confusion.

Confusion is the way of this world, and Bugs is the king of the tricksters. There are no rules that can’t be broken, except one: The rabbit always wins. He’s smarter than anybody else, and there’s no obstacle he can’t find a way around, over, under, or through—or that he can’t talk himself out of.

The only time he’s even close to flummoxed is when the fourth wall comes down and The Artist takes control. The moving finger writes, the pencil draws and then erases, and even Bugs’ ingenuity can’t stop The Artist from taking sometimes violent liberties.

That’s only fair, we learn, when we see who The Artist is: none other than Elmer Fudd. Finally, he says, I got even with that wascally wabbit.

But tomorrow is another day, and another cartoon, and Bugs is back, triumphant as ever. He extends across worlds. He steps in for the Roadrunner as the quarry for Wile E. Coyote, self-proclaimed Genius. He stars in takeoffs on the classics: “The Scarlet Pumpernickel.” “Mutiny on the Bunny.” “A Star Is Bored.” And to my mind the greatest of them all, “What’s Opera, Doc?”

Like all great comic characters, Bugs Bunny is more than a set of gags or a laugh line. He’s an archetype. No matter what you throw at him, he always has a comeback. You can’t beat him. You can’t even damage him—unlike his friend/rival/adversary, Daffy Duck, who all too often catches the flak that’s aimed at Bugs.

The heart of Bugs’ power is incongruity. Rabbits in myth and lore are timid and shy. They’re prey. They don’t hunt; they’re hunted. Nor are they known for their ability to outsmart their hunters. The one thing they really are good at is making more rabbits.

And here’s a rabbit who outsmarts everybody. Hunters can’t catch him. Predators can’t touch him. He’s afraid of nothing. He’s everything a rabbit is not supposed to be—but there he is. Long ears. Big teeth. Crunching his carrot. Cracking wise. Owning the world and everything in it.[end-mark]

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Excerpts Science Fiction

Read an Excerpt From Null Entity by Seth Haddon

Wylla and Sable take their revenge to the very corporation that keeps the galaxy turning.

By Seth Haddon

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Published on June 23, 2026

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We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from Null Entity, the second book in Seth Haddon’s Volatile Memory duology, out from Tordotcom Publishing on July 21st.

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Null Entity

Seth Haddon

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Null Entity

Seth Haddon

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1

She’s back.

Two words on an innocuous thread were enough to announce your arrival. Within seconds, replies bloomed across the message board, and the game began.

“Local hackers are aware of our presence,” I told you. “Probably a minute before station security catches on.”

You grunted, all grit and focus. I stayed silent. You crouched over a terminal in the ribbed underhalls of BSMC-07, a routing station so old its walls sweated rust and the relays never stopped buzzing. Through one of the slats, we spied the concourse below, where a mammoth screen blared an ad for cheap freight. That one would end any second. Our target lay three ads ahead.

We didn’t have much time.

I flicked my focus to your MARK I RABBIT, stashed aboard our vessel in the hangar bay. It monitored station chatter, sniffing for pings or scans—any sign someone had noticed the ship. For now, we were unnoticed.

“Sable. Need you again.”

I split in thirds—one eye on RABBIT, one on the ad playing, the rest with you. You’d hit another tangle, a firewall cinched with hypervigilance. The system’s bones were Corporate Federation’s, ad-stream code that stretched like scaffolding through half the sector. You’d cracked it before, slipping payloads into feeds they swore were untouchable. It was a supposedly neutral system all its member corps depended on. But neutrality was brittle: VisorForge’s fingerprints now ghosted the firewall. Their interests were knotted, paranoia hardened into your problem.

But it wouldn’t stop you. Heat bloomed under your clothes, adrenaline riding you hard. I felt the storm: pulse in your ears, breath catching, thoughts sprinting.

We’re going to get caught. Hurry. Hurry—

I hovered at the edge of your panic, ready to shield. But my agitation was unfounded. You could handle it.

You exhaled steady, fingers flying across the keyboard. “Okay. Project the credentials.”

I fed the authorization tokens into the system for the third time. They were a gift from Pell, a chatty VisorForge tech embedded on Beta sector relays. Those creds gave us access to our mark, now two ads ahead: a sector-wide VisorForge drop hitting thirteen stations and three planets. Our tenth cyberattack in six months. The system opened, your hack landing clean. A cluster of holograms floated in the queue, and you paused on VisorForge’s. Its e-tag listed run time, proof of purchase, and transaction details, a ledger of VisorForge’s spend: a staggering sum. You opened it.

The HoloProp flared to life on the static-choked screen. On the concourse, OrbitDock Realty hawked micro-cubicles for rent—eight cubic meters, eviction protection sold separately. I flicked my attention back to the terminal. Light bled around a white-toothed spokesperson, his grin stretched in uncanny cheer. “The future of performance is here,” he promised. A jovial ad for what it really was. VisorForge’s latest grab.

The small-time mask manufacturer Auntie Donnelly had been absorbed, and now VisorForge was strip-mining their designs into its own catalog. Official statements called it amicable. But scav back channels whispered of a hostile takeover, not with guns but obscure statutes, wielded until the smaller company was absorbed and converted into a VisorForge asset. In the Corporate Federation, every asset meant leverage, every acquisition another seat on the council. Currently on-screen, several low-cost mask models, once Donnelly’s, now spun beneath the VisorForge banner, byronnicum-plated and brand-etched.

Donnelly’s masks had never been animalistic. They were sleek, humanoid, form-fitting steel. The ad claimed all original features were intact: cognitive optimization, task automation via embedded AI, emotional dampening, team integration, real-time metric tracking.

“Cheaper masks, now with the VisorForge guarantee. Maximize productivity—no distractions, just results.”

“No privacy, just profit,” you murmured, smiling when I snorted.

With surgical precision, you sliced into the hologram’s code and embedded our payload.

Our counter-ad carried the contract we’d salvaged from my dead husband’s ship, proof of VisorForge’s pact with the Martial Syndicate. In the months after Fyster’s death, we uncovered the truth: VisorForge had cut the deal without the Corporate Federation’s knowledge. We gambled that exposure would force the board to act against VisorForge—and if not, then public outrage would. We bolstered the ad with months of evidence detailing intra-mask surveillance and the sale of behavioral data to the Syndicate and other Federation branches. As you stitched the last lines in, the hacker message board pinged, replies flooding in.

“Hackers are catching on,” I said. “Your old ID’s been mentioned.”

“Okay, okay. I’m almost—”

Suddenly, you put your hands up.

A symbol eclipsed the terminal screen: a tiny sapling sprouting from a seed, wrapped in roots. It looked innocuous. But it shouldn’t have been in our code, which meant it wasn’t.

Sweat rolled down your temple. You’d seen it before. A variant, and never inside live tech, let alone a VisorForge framework.

“What—?”

RABBIT sent an alert through me. “Ignore it. Encrypted channel just opened between station security and an inbound vessel. Shit.”

“Ass,” you agreed. We both knew who it was.

Subsidiary Four had been on our tail for months, and here it was again, negotiating with BSMC-07 for landing clearance.

You dove back into the feed, ignoring cramping fingers to shove the counterhack aside and claw back control. We had to disrupt the encrypted channel. If the Subsidiary’s credentials got through, station security could lock down every ship in the port.

I had RABBIT spin up the jump drive. When I refocused, you were standing still, a deep frown plowing your brows. The terminal blared warnings. The encrypted channel between Four and station security had dropped.

But it hadn’t been you. You’d had no time to act.

“Sable,” you murmured.

“I know.”

Someone else had infiltrated.

A goading message flickered across the screen:

Sparks spat from the terminal as the treacly stench of burning coolant filled the shaft. You recoiled, and the unit overloaded and burst. From the ruined venting, tufts of green surged outward, slick with sap. Leaves unfurled, and a single bulb swelled, luminous and unfamiliar.

“Biocode,” you breathed. And we both knew who was helping us now.

The Edenic Order.

On the concourse, the billboard flared with the VisorForge ad. A corporate jingle hummed, the crest unfolding like a promise: productivity, unity, control. It lasted six seconds before our splice took hold—you’d made it in time.

The transition was almost elegant. First, a stutter in the voiceover. Then a flicker. The ad split open along the seam we’d left, revealing what we’d buried: the contract stamped by VisorForge and the Martial Syndicate—fine print, pay schedules, telemetry logs, surveillance records indexed by emotional spikes and dissident keywords. Employee faces flickered beside coordinates and IDs. It was raw, clean, and inarguable. VisorForge was watching; VisorForge would happily scrape your brain raw for profit.

In the shaft, you pressed your eye to the slat and peered down at the concourse, waiting for a reaction. At first, nothing. Then people slowed, and stopped.

“Okay,” you whispered, relieved. For this to work, we needed eyes on the feed. And for a moment, we had them. They weren’t angry yet. They weren’t afraid. But they were thinking.

And then the Edenic Order fucked it up.

The screen didn’t glitch this time. It dimmed like a great exhaling. The footage slowed. Green crept in from the edges as something bloomed within the circuitry, as though the machine itself had sprouted.

Those words grew from moss over the screen, part of which fizzled and went black, only to flare again with a kaleidoscope of green-tinged light. Someone screamed. That beautiful pause we’d managed disintegrated as panic swept the concourse below.

RABBIT pinged, sharp and fast.

“Station interference escalating. Comms echoing irregular signatures. Biological growth in secured corridors. Bay lockdowns initiated.”

On the outbound grid, the Subsidiary vessel still held position, flagged as “observing.” Traffic control hadn’t locked us down yet.

“Bastards!” You struck the terminal. “Why did they— It was fucking perfect!”

“Later!” I shouted. Fantasy tugged at me: hours from now, safe, we could lament this great fuckup. But for now—

Snapping out of it, you bolted down the shaft, boots clanging over grated flooring as you ducked beneath entrails of cables spilling from open panels. At the door, you grabbed an oil-stained towel draped over piping and slung it across your shoulder.

The door opened onto a thoroughfare crowded with confused dwellers. You dusted off your hands, nodding to passersby as if they had cause to know you.

We’d infiltrated during the shift change, slipping in with maintenance and cargo vessels. Routine traffic dulled suspicion, but it only shielded so much. The scanners read you as human, but you lacked designations. Erasing your GIRS record had made you a specter, a null entity. That absence was its own alarm. My task was to shape a mask the networks would accept in place of truth—that Wylla Sotain no longer existed. You were maintenance worker Lars P. Olivier to anyone who might look.

Easily, we climbed back onto the ship and requested release from the station lock. rabbit pinged, confirming the Subsidiary vessel was still in place. Security was busy with the Edenic hack, but traffic control hadn’t heard yet—or someone had blocked the command.

We were cleared for takeoff. Hoping to throw off Subsidiary Four, we made two jumps away before pausing at the quieter edges of Beta sector.

You laid your hands on rabbit and slumped back in the seat. I stayed quiet, letting you sit there stroking the mask, waiting for your thoughts to still.

Our hack wasn’t meant to fix anything. It wouldn’t unmake the masks or dismantle the systems that filtered expression through corporate optimization and sold it back as freedom. But it might show someone—just one—that what they wore each day was neither neutral, nor benign, nor theirs.

That was our hope. But the Edenic Order had undermined it. Fury swam through you. They’d made us complicit in their message.

You are not your metrics.

RABBIT chirped as new data flagged across multiple networks. You blinked, pulling yourself together.

A message had appeared—simultaneously—on scavenger forums, hacker boards, and an old mask-parts trade site you hadn’t touched in years. The symbol that had spread across the billboard signed this message now. I felt your breath catch in the quiet between us.

You didn’t speak, but your silence was familiar: recognition, purpose, the old burn under the skin.

The message ended with a signature we knew couldn’t be for anyone else.

And I could feel it, even before you said a word.

You wanted it.

We both did.

2

It’s obviously a trap.”

You’d said that five times now, but it hadn’t stopped you from landing on GTM-11—a backwater mining planet—and agreeing to scout the facility. Desire outweighed the risk for both of us.

You sat nursing a cup of synthetic tea at an AI-manned eatery, staring across at Facility 34X. It wasn’t tucked into some hidden cliffside. It sat squarely in the heart of Nacarat City, bold as anything—which meant we’d need to wait for a lull in foot traffic to avoid attention. On the outside, it looked like a dingy warehouse: corrugated steel, reinforced concrete, windows sealed beneath bolted sheets. Graffiti scrawled across the façade, paint faded under rust. It didn’t scream VisorForge.

It screamed ambush.

Bright strip lighting labored against shadows. A fine rain drifted through the night, blurring flickering LEDs into a smear of color. The planet’s three hours of sunlight were long gone, and I was working double to filter the smog from your air.

I rested beside your wrist on the table, our connection alive only where a strip of bare skin slipped free of your black nylon suit to touch LYREBIRD’s surface. You looked frayed. Hair once clipped sharp now hung ragged, sides shaved only to keep off the heat. Dark crescents bruised your eyes, stamped like thumbprints of exhaustion. Your body bore double the weight, your fatigue and mine pressed into the same skin. At least here you looked like you belonged. Miners carried the same marks from endless shifts.

“I want it,” you whispered, “but what if this is how we end up buried?”

I tried for brevity: Fine. Leave, then. I’ ll do it myself.

Your mouth pulled tight. I imploded with embarrassment.

Outside, a sudden crowd signaled a shift change. Three young people caught your eye. Their masks were makeshift, stitched from mismatched manufacturers. A prism—Parallax’s modular mask, unpopular for its pay-locked AI add-ons, its smooth faceplate cracked and patched with sheet metal; a discontinued VisorForge mark ii moth meant for night vision, seams leaking light as the shell strained from a rebuild used in blackout tunnels; and a Coreform miner’s rig spliced with an obsolete Auntie Donnelly, its sleek steel upper face swelling into a geometric snout for breathing in pits. Pirated overlays tangled inside: AIs whispering scam warnings or flashing market costs to catch price gouges. It wasn’t the first time we’d seen off-grid masks, but it was the first time they were worn so openly. A symptom of our leaks in this sector. Complicated emotion flared in your chest, but ebbed when the moth caught your stare and tossed you a rude gesture.

Your gaze shifted to the holorotator spinning above the plaza: a forced update would be pushed to all VisorForge masks within twenty-four hours.

The warning pulsed in emergency red. Mandatory System Update. Tampering with VisorForge software is prohibited. A slogan followed: A Mask Unkept is a Self Unraveled.

They couldn’t risk anyone else ending up like us.

Below, a nomadic adbot wheeled through the street—cheap, engine sputtering, screen flickering as it flipped through desperate, time-starved pitches. Each brand had seconds to sell salvation. KaroGen Biotechnics—“Heal fast. Keep working.”—hawked dermal graft kits, nerve dullers, and sleep stabilizers. A dime-a-dozen media sub, Flick, promised a daily ten ad-free minutes of escapism. Coreform advertised barebones masks. Built for hazard zones, the ad read, trusted by miners across five systems. A flat voice rasped: “Nothing but what you need.” Corporate code for: the bare minimum to stay alive.

As the bot trundled into range of the VisorForge holorotator, its sputtering ads froze. The screen snapped into a booming counter-ad. A familiar synthetic voice—bright and chipper—rang out. VisorForge’s preferred AI. They used it for everything.

“Your mask. Your mind. Trust the Original—Trust VisorForge.”

You snorted at the use of proximity override on something so petty. But humor didn’t last. VisorForge still ruled the sector, even here on forgotten edges where workers bled for minerals they’d never own and wore masks they couldn’t afford to fix.

“VisorForge cleaned up too well,” you murmured. “We found nothing for months, and now this is handed to us?”

“It’s the Order who want us to see something,” I reminded you.

You thought of the forums they’d used to bait you. Most were battlegrounds, fueled by ego, and over the years you’d ghosted through them under a dozen pseudonyms. The Order had seeded those same spaces with bait, taunting you: Am I better than you, Specter? If you can keep up… They mimicked the ecosystem, counting on pride. You told yourself duty brought you here. But part of you, burning, wanted the fight.

“The Edenic Order,” you repeated, mind snagging on the altered symbol that had overridden your hack. The Order’s mark was a sapling, but this one had been ensnared in thorny roots. You worried it meant these people were different—not the Order you thought you knew.

But that was the issue. You didn’t really know them, just a nurtured idea. You, who once considered giving your flesh to their cause, thought of them as monastic. Meditative. Religious in a way you respected. Not the terrorists the Corporate Federation called them. Yet your fingers tightened on the warm mug, and somewhere in your thoughts I heard: What if I’m wrong?

“Even if it is a trap,” I said, “that isn’t going to stop us.”

Your shoulders drooped because I was right. We couldn’t ignore something this tangible. Six months of running was wearing you down. The first month I’d been ravenous for more about lyrebird. I still had Fyster’s death rattle echoing in my stores. Revenge felt good, but not enough. Everything we found led nowhere. VisorForge wiped their tracks until lyrebird became myth. Even the early HoloProps were removed, buried under reissued brand media. For just the two of us, VisorForge had unleashed a dedicated Subsidiary. Protecting IP demanded nothing less.

Subsidiaries had once been rare, deployed only to erase threats. Now reports placed them everywhere: guarding sites, overseeing byronnicum mines, embedded in offworld factories. While we chased dead ends, VisorForge broke precedent, multiplying what had once been legend and turning them into instruments that coerced, litigated, and enforced absolute control. It was no longer wielding a myth—it was manufacturing them.

We’d decided to change tactics. If they wouldn’t show us LYREBIRD, we’d show everyone VisorForge.

We fought the way you knew: hacking systems, disrupting their message. You were nobody to the system, so you became somebody to anyone paying attention. DDoS attacks. A leaked whistleblower report. An internal audit proving how VisorForge underperformed in safety, ethics, responsibility. We caused a months-long PR disaster.

Now, someone else had taken interest.

I felt conflicted. You were too busy watching the street to notice, but if you’d checked, you’d have seen my uncertainty. Not because I feared a trap, but because I feared what it meant to share this fight.

This was meant to be you and me. Together. The two of us against the world.

What if it became something bigger?

“Why do they care?” you whispered, mirroring my wariness. You weren’t really asking me. “Why deploy biocode into a station just to help us disembark?”

My attentions were split. I imagined what we looked like together, how in another life you might have sat with your fingers tangled in my hair.

I loved you. I hadn’t told you; I was too frightened.

“Sable?” you prompted.

What did it matter if I was nothing but a woman in a mask? You cared about me.

Finish your tea, and let’s go find out.

Excerpted from Null Entity, copyright © 2026 by Seth Haddon.

The post Read an Excerpt From <i>Null Entity</i> by Seth Haddon appeared first on Reactor.

Movies & TV The Vampire Lestat

The Vampire Lestat Breaks Out the Power Ballads in “Toronto”

“Mmm, performative journalism.”

By Molly Templeton

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Published on June 22, 2026

Image: Sophie Giraud/AMC

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Image: Sophie Giraud/AMC

The thing I love—well, one thing I love—about the vampire Lestat is that he is usually trying to be a very good boy. Yes, I do feel this way in part because I just reread Anne Rice’s The Vampire Lestat, in which our hero explicitly rejects a religious definition of goodness and sets out to be good on his own. But this is true of his television counterpart as well. 

The problem is that everyone is constantly projecting their own shit onto him. Dan thinks he’s a monster? Lestat will be a monster. Louis wants him to be how he was in the first season? Now the entire world thinks that’s who he is. Gabriella, Nicki, Magnus—oof, Magnus—Armand: they all have their versions of Lestat. He is wrestling with himself and his demons as much as he is with his “muses” and his mother. 

And then when he finally gets a moment of his own version of bliss, well. You see how they react.

But we’ll get there. 

“Toronto” is an incredible hour of television. It’s a little overwhelming. It had me struggling to explain it. On second viewing it messed me up a bit. It’s smart and biting and densely packed with perfect dialogue, and it has the funniest ’80s parody music video I absolutely never expected to see in this show. And it does a ton of emotional heavy lifting. It is a good thing we are not trying to rank vampire emotional trauma because that would be a lot.

And on the flip side, we have foreshadowed beheadings and alarming bathroom quickies. This is not an episode without any humor. When Daniel (my notes say Dan, since Lestat likes to needle him thusly) claims that Lestat owes him, since he saved Lestat’s life, the good doctor Fareed muses a bit on how long, exactly, a vampire as powerful as Lestat could survive without his head. For some vamps, not so long. 

And amid the hints of beheading, more hints about Daniel’s impending doom. I hate these hints. I think this show needs Eric Bogosian’s prickly New Yorker vibes, his impatience, even his tired tough journalist schtick. But Lestat says “He led a brief, incidental life as a vampire,” and I get very worried about him. There’s a line about Daniel’s hatred for Lestat being “watered in the sunlight later.” Eep. And yet: Lestat has regrets! Lestat probably has regrets about a lot more things than he’s letting on, but he straight-up says this about Daniel.

Perhaps he’s saying this for the benefit of his imagined listener in the future. Or perhaps not.

Either way, he plays Daniel like an electric violin. I’m going to watch this episode another time just to watch Sam Reid move through the twisty, elusive, entirely fake, absolutely convincing emotions he pulls off over the course of the “interview.” (Using scare quotes because the interviewer is at no point in control of the situation.) The return of the stuttering question and his faked upset about it, followed by a genuinely revealing series of answers about the stutter, followed by some less believable answers about how he rid himself of it—amid which are hints and outright revelations about the psyche of the young Mr. de Lioncourt. He pretends outrage and exhaustion and then speaks of watching witches burn with alarming detail. He remembers their names. He implicates Gabriella while she sits there, and then she runs off to fuck his body double. 

And then Lestat talks about Nicki. “Nicolas de Lenfent, my first love.” 

We have met Nicki before, in Armand’s memories, as Daniel points out. But Nicki feels fragile and precarious in Lestat’s telling: obsessed with music yet practical about his skills, squatting instead of paying rent, aware that his father would never send Lestat with kind messages of support. Nicki is troubled even before he’s kidnapped by Armand’s coven and used for snacks. 

Nicki is even more of a mess after he becomes a vampire. But his story is tangled with so many other threads of Lestat’s story: with Armand; with Gabriella; with Magnus, Lestat’s maker, finally seen here in all his disastrous glory. Lestat spins and weaves his history, and it is never entirely clear if the story he’s telling Daniel is exactly the same as the version that we’re seeing on screen. By the time he gets to Magnus lip-syncing “Your Biggest Fan,” we are in truly astonishing territory. Lestat is portraying his maker as a needy, grasping, lovelorn fool, even as he refers to Magnus as his liberator. He hides his feelings about Magnus behind the story of Nicki, offering Daniel something real in one hand while keeping the other behind his back.

“I carried the box because I destroyed him, Dan,” Lestat says of his souvenir of poor doomed Nicki. “I carried the box to remind me what I was capable of.”

What he was capable of was love, if we’re being honest about it. He turned his mother because she was dying, and Nicki because he loved him, and Nicki wanted it. He gave people what they wanted: Gabriella the power to be more like her son, and Nicki his trust. He stopped lying. And it killed Nicki, eventually, yes. But Lestat didn’t do that.

Armand did.

(Here’s what I pause and say: In Lestat’s version, Armand did. In Lestat’s version, which happened after Gabriella went to coffin, so she cannot say otherwise. In Lestat’s version, in which he tells Gabriella that Louis doesn’t know about her, but then says to Daniel that he’s surprised Louis didn’t mention how much he spoke of her. He is trying to keep his dangerous, complicated loves apart, which is probably for the best. Gabriella and Louis is a slightly terrifying idea.)

Armand’s love language is doing truly terrible things. Armand is a gremlin, but also an abused child given eternity. I think there’s a way where, in Armand’s mind, killing Claudia was doing Louis a favor. Setting him free. I’m sure that in Armand’s mind, that’s what he did for Lestat: set him free from a mistake gone awry. You could argue this is most vampires’ love language, maybe, but I think Armand has a notably strong tendency toward it.

At any rate, the tangle of Lestat’s psyche is really on display here, though only for Daniel and—notably—Gabriella. Who is this story really for? Which listener does he really want to understand what happened with Nicki, what role Armand played, how it affected Lestat? It’s not a story for everyone, as his little prank reveals. Lestat plays this off like he was just fucking with Daniel, but this story was never for public consumption. 

And yet before he walks off, he plays one last card, telling Daniel that the band tried to play a bigger venue, that they couldn’t fill it. He knows this perfectly well: “Unlike your last vampire, there are no delusions here.” I am saving all my commentary about Lestat’s rock star career and Lestat’s specific knowledge about music for the end, but this little bit made me sit up straight. Because it’s never been about being a rock star at all. The trappings are fun. The rest of it is feelings. 

Meanwhile, Louis has gone on a little road trip. If ever you needed a reminder that the version of Louis that he presented to Daniel Molloy is not the complete Louis du Pont du Lac, well, here you go: Louis snarkily asking “Hey, you seen Killer?” as he murders his way through an entire coven of vampires singlehandedly. There is just ever so much we haven’t actually seen about this man. And yet, in keeping with the version of himself we do know, he frees the humans and directs them to a waiting car. (Possibly an Uber driver’s most alarming night.)

The show’s decision to twine Louis’ revenge with Lestat’s making is heavy and dark and so very, very fraught, and I think it works. It works as a commentary about bodily autonomy, and consent, and fear, and helplessness. It works because though we never see Claudia, for this whole scene, she is present. For as heavy as all of this is, we don’t have to actually see her go through what she went though. To hear her story in her words is enough. Instead of showing us, while Louis reads those torn-out diary pages, what we have already inferred, we see Lestat’s memories. And we see what happened to him. 

This is not the tidy, “oh he’s my liberator,” flippant-about-Magnus’ suicide version of events. There is no voiceover. There is no filter. There is fear and prayer and horror, and Magnus telling him to “ask for it.” No wonder Lestat’s always on Daniel’s case about his transformational trauma. The show is not shy about an unwilling transformation being an invasion, an assault, a loss of bodily autonomy. “I hope one day he feels this, small and cornered, and crushed like a can,” Claudia wrote about Bruce. But it’s Lestat we see small and cornered.

And yet—this is important—this never takes any of the horror or the import from Claudia’s story, and her telling of it. It is a reminder that one person’s trauma does not lessen another’s. I’m still trying to figure out exactly how the show pulled this off, why this works for me, when in a lesser series or movies I might have felt very differently. There are entirely too many stories about men avenging the terrible things done to women. But Louis sits there, and he channels Claudia, who has been dead for centuries, and it still feels like the moment belongs to her. (You could argue that he’s doing this for himself. But I think his following move suggests otherwise.)

Lestat, in the past, screams, almost dies, and is reborn. None of them are unharmed, and they are all connected. It feels like the right way to tell this story; it doesn’t let you look away from either horror, but doesn’t turn it into something tawdry or gratuitous, either. The performances are fierce, the intensity off the charts. Now we know, too, why it made Lestat so mad, what Louis said about him and Claudia and the train. 

“And he did win, ’cause I want nothing, to be nothing…” Louis reads from Claudia’s diary. Everyone responds to trauma differently. Lestat, you might say, wants everything. 

The entire scene with Lestat and Magnus in the car is bitter and rank and loaded, Magnus speaking of, or for, all the muses, all the ghosts haunting Lestat, and this bit:

This—this!—is what makes Lestat snap and shout and roll the car. “WHEN WE ARE READY” yells Lestat, who was clearly not ready for what Magnus did to him all those years ago. 

He’s ready for the show, though. Lestat’s voiceover doesn’t come back in until he refers to you, the listener, in your gilded bathtub. Then begins my favorite part:

Lestat, on stage, is blissed out. Lestat has dropped musical references, admitted that he can’t sell bigger arenas, spoke of the agreement between artist and audience, and insisted that Daniel is missing the point of the tour: “It is not about asses on seats or streams on Pandora. It is about pure expression!” Lestat does not care if you think rock music is passe or uncool or anything at all. It is a direct expression of his chaotic mind, and it couldn’t be anything else. It had to be this: melodramatic, over the top, performative, loud, ironic-but-also-not, anthemic, sincere, collaborative, and performed live through a haze of (bloody) sweat. If you have never been overwhelmed, blissfully overwhelmed, by the sound at a loud show where the audience has become one big shrieking organism, you might not get it. But I hope you have.

There’s a term for this feeling, which can come from other things, like your basketball team winning a championship after 53 years: “collective effervescence.” In that last concert scene, while Lestat sings “You can’t fuck away the loneliness / it’ll wait ’til you’re done / ’til you come / like a vampire,” his muses watch. They might better be called his ghosts. They are not part of the collective that is effervescing. The ones who’ve been projecting onto him all this time, well, they walk away. Gabriella, seeing her son be exactly who he is, turns away in what looks like disgust. Maybe just boredom. Magnus slinks out the back door; he isn’t the star of this song. Lestat has moved well beyond his maker.

And Nicki stands there in the crowd looking more joyful than he ever has. The band looks joyful. It’s everything.

(A side note: It’s possible that I will come to regret this extremely credulous reading of Lestat. I tend to be a very credulous viewer and reader: I want to believe what I’m being shown, especially when it is as intimate and fascinating and shifty as the way Lestat presents his story. I want to find the truth in it all, even if it’s not there. That tendency toward credulous reading is part of why I love so very much the overtness of this show’s storytelling: that everyone’s version of events is different, every take is subjective, every story spun and respun and told and retold. I believed Louis, and now I believe Lestat. I don’t really believe Armand very often, but we have been shown good reason to be skeptical of Armand’s takes.) 

Meanwhile, Louis has driven all the way back to New York City to visit the waitress Regina again, and of course it’s as Lestat sings “don’t worship that grave / dug on your own / don’t burn alone” that we see him looking at not-Claudia like that, after all this time. Lestat is exorcising his ghosts. Louis is very much haunted by his.

“Toronto” could have ended on Lestat whispering, “Perfection.” But no! We’ve lost track of Alex. Who is at a meeting in a small town, talking about how the band he’s not presently on tour with is blowing up. You’re gonna hear about them soon. If you don’t get EATEN by the wide-eyed VAMPIRE GREMLIN in your midst, anyway.

The long, long pan from that voice saying “I’ll share” to the camera actually landing on Armand—sorry, Arun? That was a vicious tease, and I loved it. I am rather worried about our second guitarist, here, and yes, it has something to do with one detail on that poster that I will leave for you to notice for yourself. 

We have just been reminded, though, that Armand has a habit of doing terrible things out of love. 

LITTLE SIPS

• Lestat’s pajama-pants vibe in the interview!!!!

• The extremely clear way in which Christine hates Gabriella, and the equally clear way in which Gabriella does not care. Bless you, Christine, you are extremely good at your job, even when it involves finding very discreet cleaning crews who are probably paid large amounts of cash. Somebody on this bus has to know what time zone they’re in.

• Interesting that there have been other, offscreen attempts on Lestat’s life. 

• The POSSUM. The reference to one of the vamps getting another possum and then it EATS HIS FACE. Good job, lil buddy.

• “That’s what moms did with kids before Lego and Peppa Pig.” 

• So our boy told Gabriella that he told Louis she was dead, but then he wonders, to Daniel, why Louis never said anything about her, after Lestat had spoken of her at length. I think he’s just trying to keep those two apart. I think he knows that Gabriella and Louis would be terrifying together. 

• The Great Conversion, according to Lestat, is “fucking stupid.” Noted!

• One certainly wonders if Armand saying “I love you, Lestat” is embellishment for the benefit of Armand’s fledgling. 

• I was lightly distracted in the coven basement because I just feel like someone playing 1000 seat venues would not have that many posters available. Why are these dirtbag coven vamps so into Armand, anyway? And what are all those pages? From the book, maybe?

• We have not seen the last of Baby Jenks.

• Louis was most definitely lying about his relationship with Lemuel if the single thing Lemuel asks, after calling his lover, is “Safe?” Phew, those two. 

• I am still thinking about the connection between the three artworks Lestat namechecks: Raphael’s Three Graces, Brancusi’s Bird in Space, and Calvino’s Invisible Cities. Any theories?

[end-mark]

The post <i>The Vampire Lestat</i> Breaks Out the Power Ballads in “Toronto” appeared first on Reactor.

Column 80s Fantasy Film Club

The Black Cauldron: The Dark Fantasy Disney Tried to Bury

Intrepid young adventurers, a bard, some witches, and a bit of necromancy — how did this adaptation go so wrong?

By Tyler Dean

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Published on June 23, 2026

Credit: Walt Disney Studios

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Credit: Walt Disney Studios

In this column, we’re looking back at the 1980s as their own particular age of fantasy movies—a legacy that largely disappeared in the ’90s only to resurface in the 2000s, though in many ways, the fantasy films of the Eighties are far weirder and less polished than what we got in the aughts. In each of these articles, we’ll explore a canonical fantasy movie released between 1980 and 1989 and discuss whatever enduring legacy the film has maintained in the decades since.

For a more in-depth introduction to this series of articles, you can find the first installment here, focusing on 1981’s Dragonslayer. Last time we looked at Terry Gilliam’s beloved flop The Adventures of Baron Munchausen; this time we’re delving into a flop the studio tried to memory-hole out of existence with 1985’s surprisingly dark (at least for Disney) adaptation of The Black Cauldron. 

I first saw The Black Cauldron in my late twenties on a friend’s burned DVD that also contained its fellow Disney lost-media film, Song of the South (1946). Seeing them in a double-feature was a fascinating exploration of the varied reasons Disney might try to erase the existence of one of its movies (more on that later). Despite obvious differences in the time these films were made, the propriety of its content, and the quality of the filmmaking, the pairing made intuitive sense precisely because of Disney’s infamous aversion to acknowledging and distributing either film. We’ll get into some of that minutiae further down in the article as we discuss its legacy, but that first viewing was, for me and likely for many millennials, accompanied by the added thrill of seeing something the world’s most powerful children’s entertainment company didn’t want you to see… 

The film was adapted from the first two of Lloyd Alexander’s beloved Chronicles of Prydain novels (1964’s The Book of Three and 1965’s The Black Cauldron) which follow the adventures of a young swineherd, Taran, in a fantasy kingdom that draws heavily on Welsh mythology. The film begins with the pig-keeper who, despite his desire to become a storied warrior, is saddled with the care of Hen Wen, a pig with the ability to impart visions of the future and secret information to those who beseech her. After learning that the Horned Lord, a vicious despot, seeks Hen Wen in order to discover the location of the Black Cauldron—a lost artifact of terrifying necromantic power—Taran is sent away to find the Cauldron before the Horned Lord can. 

He is almost immediately captured by the Horned Lord but is freed from captivity by the intervention of Princess Eilonwy and the aging bard, Fflewddur Fflam. They search for Hen Wen while the Horned Lord and his comic-relief goblin lieutenant, Creeper, pursue our heroes in the hope that they will lead them to the location of the Cauldron. Along the way, Taran and company befriend Gurgi, a cowardly, thieving were-terrier with a penchant for obvious and amusing lies, and Doli, a grumpy, long-suffering faerie. Hen Wen is found and kept hidden and safe by the Fair Folk while our heroes follow her prophetic advice and confront the three witches who hold the Cauldron in their swampy cottage.

After Taran trades away his magic sword, our heroes obtain the Cauldron but are told by the witches that it cannot be used unless it receives a willing blood sacrifice. The Horned Lord’s men show up and bring the Cauldron back to his castle where they proceed to use it to raise an army of the dead. Gurgi sacrifices himself to stop the Cauldron and the Horned Lord is dragged into the Cauldron and consumed, as his castle collapses around them. Taran bargains with the witches, demanding that Gurgi be returned to life in exchange for the Cauldron and everyone journeys home, happier and wiser.

The film was, as previously stated, a massive flop, grossing $21 million against a budget that the film’s production manager cited as being more than twice that amount. It’s often referred to as “the film that almost killed Disney” and was considered to have permanently marred the reputation of the media empire’s animation department—a legacy only reversed by the storied success of The Little Mermaid four years later, ushering in the Disney Renaissance. It is for this reason that The Black Cauldron gained its reputation as a lost-media phantom (even if that wasn’t really the case). I was shocked to discover that it had, in fact, been released on home video a few different times in Disney’s history. The catch is that it took thirteen years for it to be released the first time—it wasn’t released on VHS in the UK until 1997, and in the US the following year.

But has absence made the heart grow fonder? Is The Black Cauldron a misunderstood masterpiece or does it live up to its reputation as Disney’s worst animated film? The short answer is that it’s neither of those things. It’s pretty bad, but it’s not necessarily worse than other Disney fare from the era—The Fox and the Hound and The Rescuers may be your personal favorites but from an objective standpoint they are equally uneven and, box office take aside, I don’t see much of a difference in overall quality.

What The Black Cauldron is, above all else, is boring. Its scenes are long and often dialogue heavy, committing that cardinal sin of telling rather than showing. Had it been a musical, some of these scenes of exposition might have been replaced by songs (and, in a movie that has a bard as a central character, they had a built-in device for including musical elements). As it stands, Taran spends a lot of time declaring what he wants and relatively little time taking actions that reflect or further those desires. It’s also worth noting that Taran kind of sucks. He’s venal, whiny, and conflicted about his duty in a way that makes him seem profoundly selfish. In my article on Labyrinth, I discussed how great it is that Sarah is allowed to be a snotty teenager, warts and all. That might have been the aim here but the writing and performance really don’t sell it. When Taran gives up his magic sword to obtain the Cauldron and uses his only wish to bring Gurgi back, it should seem like growth but it feels jarringly out of character instead. 

There are better characters. Stalwart British stage actor Nigel Hawthorne is charming and warm as the bumbling bard, Fflewddur Fflam and John Byner’s Gurgi brings some much-needed humor to the otherwise dull proceedings. Towering over this is John Hurt’s performance as the Horned Lord. The design of the character is somewhat darker and more intense than you’d expect from typical Disney fare, but without Hurt’s raspy growl bringing him to life the villain could be dismissed as a slightly more menacing Skeletor. Hurt imbues the character with a sense of real dread and a slightly effete, wry quality that is perfect when he’s called upon to deliver lines like “I presume my boy, that you are the keeper of this oracular pig.” The film works at all because Hurt makes the Horned Lord scary enough to carry most of it. That’s more than can be said for a trio of fairies voiced by children who were so unintelligible that I had to turn on the subtitles to follow the scene. 

The animation remains beautiful as always. There is a gritty depth of detail that makes Prydain feel lived in, impoverished, and frightening in a way that few Disney films manage to achieve. There are no shortcuts taken with its (mostly) hand-drawn animation, and the film is notable for being one of the first Disney features to incorporate computer-generated imagery to create certain effects. When Eilonwy first shows up, she brings her glowing “bauble”—a will-o’-the-wisp-esque glowing sphere that the film never explains—and the complicated shadows it casts around the room are subtle, spectacular, and realistic in a way that speaks to the level of the animators’ artistic talents. 

But, as with Eilonwy’s bauble, a lot of helpful context and basic information seems to have been left out of the film, despite being so diligently animated. Fflewddur Fflam has a magic harp whose strings break whenever he tells a lie, but the film never explains this, and so it just seems like his harp malfunctions often. The titular Cauldron is powered by corpses being brought into the Horned Lord’s castle from the sites of recent battles, but that has to be learned through inference. Much of this might be attributable to then-studio chairman (and future Dreamworks co-founder) Jeffrey Katzenberg personally excising twelve minutes out of the final film. Some of those cut minutes contained scenes from the climax deemed too scary for children, but others were reported to be extended dialogue. I know that I complained about there being too much exposition earlier, but having zero explanation for certain elements makes the film feel unfinished.

Lloyd Alexander stated, in one of the most withering backhanded compliments ever, that “there is no resemblance between the movie and the book. Having said that, the movie in itself, purely as a movie, I found to be very enjoyable. I had fun watching it. What I would hope is that anyone who sees the movie would certainly enjoy it, but I’d also hope that they’d actually read the book. The book is quite different. It’s a very powerful, very moving story, and I think people would find a lot more depth in the book.” Respectfully, however, I disagree. This movie is not very enjoyable.

So did this film leave behind a legacy at all? Given how consciously it was memory-holed for the majority of my childhood it seems unlikely. This brings us back to my experience of the double feature that paired it with Song of the South. Despite being the clearly less palatable (and, obviously, far more racist) of the two films, Song of the South became part of the indelible fabric of the Disney brand. Removed from its original context, “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah” became a beloved tune used across tons of Disney media. Up until 2023, Disneyland’s iconic log flume ride, Splash Mountain, was themed around the adventures of Brer Rabbit and Brer Bear long after the film had been removed from distribution.

By contrast, The Black Cauldron was all but ripped from the Disney brand, root and stem. Tokyo Disney had a Black Cauldron-themed walkthrough attraction that was open from 1986 through 2006, but that was the only direct evidence of its existence in Disney parks or merchandising until its home video release in 1998. But, even if it did not receive the sort of support from the Disney Empire that most of their other films receive, it did continue to influence some of their later movies. I’m fairly certain that some of the animation for Creeper was recycled for Fidget, the similarly unctuous bat sidekick of the villainous Ratigan in The Great Mouse Detective (1986). More notably, the designs of the Horned Lord’s bandits and mercenaries were mined for the far more comical ruffians in Disney’s 2010 retelling of Rapunzel, Tangled. 

Outside of the Disney canon, Andy Serkis’ performance of Sméagol in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films often feels directly inspired by John Byner’s portrayal of Gurgi—both sound like a more intelligible, slyer, and less wrathful take on Donald Duck. Serkis maintains that Sméagol’s voice was based on the sound of his cat coughing up a hairball but it seems impossible that a little bit of Gurgi wasn’t lurking in the back of the mo-cap maestro’s throat. And hey, The Black Cauldron hired John Huston as the narrator for its opening prologue, in what seems like a direct reference to the Rankin/Bass Hobbit film, so it all comes full circle anyway…. 

But what do you think? Did you see The Black Cauldron in theaters? Did you, like me, grow up during through its long penance, locked away in the Disney Vault? Or was this part of your childhood rotation? Let me know your thoughts on this (or anything else about the film) in the comments! And be sure to join us next time when we move from a lackluster take on Welsh mythology to a much more coked-out adaptation of Welsh myth and legend with John Boorman’s glittery, glamorous Excalibur (1981)![end-mark]

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News Spider-Man: Brand New Day

Spider-Man: Brand New Day’s Body-Hopping Villain Could Be One of These Marvel Characters

A few likely candidates for the identity of the unseen threat

By Matthew Byrd

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Published on June 18, 2026

Photo: Marvel Studios

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Photo: Marvel Studios

It’s not just that Spider-Man: Brand New Day is going to feature a ton of villains. The far more interesting thing about the movie is that it’s going to seemingly feature a veritable army of somewhat “lesser” villains who will emphasize the street-level themes the story is reportedly built around. Not since the Spider-Man animated series have we seen Peter Parker battle such an array of antagonists (if only for a scene or two). We actually still don’t even know how many villains will be in the movie.

However, the latest trailer for Brand New Day focused a little less on the quantity of the upcoming villains in order to hone in on an unseen and unnamed threat that can seemingly hop between bodies at will. Who is that mysterious malice? Marvel isn’t saying and, to be honest, nobody is entirely sure.

That being said, there are really only a handful of candidates the unidentified new villain could realistically be. So unless Marvel throws a considerable curveball our way, here are the likely identities of the new threat.

Jean Grey

Buying into this theory requires you to look at the Brand New Day trailer from a slightly different perspective. Maybe the “villain” that we see hopping between bodies isn’t a villain at all. Maybe Damage Control is trying to frame Jean as a villain when they’re really just trying to capture what they consider to be a rogue mutant. This also forces you to consider the possibility that some of the scenes featuring that supposed new villain may have been edited in a specific way to make Jean look more villainous than she actually is.

It’s a bit of a stretch, but it’s certainly the most popular theory. While body (and/or mind) hopping isn’t necessarily one of Jean’s primary powers, it’s certainly well within her considerable capabilities. Perhaps more importantly, it feels like an open secret that Jean Grey is going to appear in the film (and will reportedly be played by Sadie Sink). What has turned out to be a fairly reliable series of rumors and leaks has also long suggested that Jean will initially be somewhat at odds with Spider-Man, as she sees him as a potential threat and asset of Damage Control.

Mister Negative

If Jean Grey isn’t the mysterious new figure hinted at in the Brand New Day trailer (which still certainly seems like the most likely possibility), then determining their identity requires us to dig a bit deeper into Spider-Man’s roster of rogues. So far as that goes, though, Mister Negative is an interesting candidate.

Mister Negative has risen in popularity over the years (thanks partly to his memorable appearance in Insomniac’s Spider-Man games), and he certainly has the ability to corrupt and bend people to his will. As a part-time philanthropist with a Jekyll/Hyde thing going on, it’s easy to imagine that Negative could fit into the street-level story Brand New Day is setting up.

The big problem with this theory is that Mr. Negative’s powers create a distinct visual effect that is notably absent from the trailer. Editing a trailer to obscure certain information is one thing, but completely removing such a distinct visual effect feels like a bit of a stretch. Still, it’s an option.

Shadow King

Like Mr. Negative, the biggest argument for the Shadow King theory is the character’s abilities. As one of the most powerful telepaths in the X-Men universe, Shadow King certainly has the ability to take people over in a manner similar to what we see in the Brand New Day trailer. And yes, those looking for an X-Men connection could argue that a Shadow King appearance would help pave the way for more of those characters to make their MCU debut.

That said, this feels like a significantly less likely possibility. There looks to be a lot going on in Brand New Day, and introducing a character like Shadow King just seems like it would be a plot point too many. Given the X-Men/Jean Grey connection (it’s easy to imagine that Jean could be blamed for Shadow King’s actions), though, you can’t rule out the chance we get a Shadow King appearance.

Krahllak

Right off the bat, it’s fair to say that the biggest argument against Krahllak is the character’s relative obscurity. An ancient demon that has rarely ever crossed paths with Spider-Man would be a strange primary antagonist for the biggest Spider-Man movie yet, to say the least.

However, Krahllak is the driving demonic force behind The Hand: the ninjas we’ve seen prominently featured in the Brand New Day trailers released so far. He’s also had many run-ins with Daredevil and Punisher in the past, which is certainly noteworthy when you consider that at least one of those characters appears in Brand New Day and both have been integral parts of the build up to the movie. Krahllak is also capable of possessing people, though he rarely does so in the same free-wheeling body-hopping style we saw in the latest trailer.

Madelyne Pryor

Right, so this is a bit of a cheat given that Madelyne Pryor is a clone of Jean Grey. She’s also closely associated with some X-Men characters and plotlines that would be incredibly awkward to squeeze into a new Spider-Man movie with little established X-Men MCU presence.

If you allow yourself to believe that the MCU would be willing to rewrite the Pryor origin story, though (which is hardly unheard of), then there’s a strong argument to be made for the possibility of the character’s debut. It’s a little cheap, but an “evil” version of Jean Grey, who is the result of some kind of experiment, would explain some of the things we seem to see in the trailer. If you’re really into the conspiracy of it all, this could also help explain some of Sink’s coy statements regarding her upcoming role.[end-mark]

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News The Ark

The Ark Season 3 Trailer Sees Strife in the Skies and Planetside

Season 3 is set to premiere in July

By Vanessa Armstrong

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Published on June 18, 2026

Screenshot: SYFY

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Screenshot: SYFY

Dean Devlin and Jonathan Glassner’s The Ark is heading our way this summer, and the crew of the generation ship Ark 1 finds itself split up, with some continuing their voyage through the cosmos while others work to build a home at Homebase 1, which is on a planet that—as the trailer SYFY released today shows—has some other inhabitants as well.

The trailer also lays out the challenges the crew will face, both from the outside world and also from other humans. It also has a fun moment where Brice (Richard Fleeshman) tries to convince others (himself) that everything’s totally fine! No monster-like aliens crashing through windows, I promise! Everything’s right as rain! Don’t worry about it!

Things aren’t great for Captain Garnet (Christie Burke) and the others on Ark 1 either; we get hints for intra-human strife, with some not wanting to be peaceful. At all! Shots are fired, and how things all play out remains unclear.

In addition to Burke and Fleeshman, season three stars Reece Ritchie, Pavle Jerinic, Stacey Read, Ryan Adams, and Tiana Upcheva. Additional cast members include Shalini Peiris, Samantha Glassner, and Diana Bermudez. 

Season three of The Ark premieres on SYFY on Wednesday, July 29, 2026, at 10 p.m. ET/PT. 

Check out the trailer below. [end-mark]

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Books Front Lines and Frontiers

Further Adventures in Classic, Quirky Anthologies — Galactic Empires: Volume Two

A second round of stories exploring power, politics, and survival… in space!!!

By Alan Brown

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Published on June 23, 2026

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In this bi-weekly series reviewing classic science fiction and fantasy books, Alan Brown looks at the front lines and frontiers of the field; books about soldiers and spacers, scientists and engineers, explorers and adventurers. Stories full of what Shakespeare used to refer to as “alarums and excursions”: battles, chases, clashes, and the stuff of excitement.

A few weeks ago, I reviewed a themed anthology, Galactic Empires: Volume One, edited by Brian Aldiss. It was a quirky anthology of interesting tales, and I found them so compelling that I immediately looked on the internet, found Volume Two, and ordered it. I acquired a copy in fair condition at a very reasonable price, only to find it lacked a dust jacket, and the copyright page had been torn out. I could live without the dust jacket, but the lack of copyright information means I have no insight into the original publication, which is frustrating. This new volume is very much a companion to the first, featuring a diverse mix of tales that range from fantasy to science fiction, and from thought-provoking to more visceral.

About the Author

Brian Aldiss (1925-2017) was a noted British author of science fiction and fantasy, who was also an editor, critic, and artist. You can find more on his career here, in my review of the first volume of this anthology.

The Rise and Fall of Great Powers

Humanity has long watched the flood and ebb of empires, as rulers have pushed to expand their control over wider territories, only to see those efforts inevitably come to naught as new empires supplanted the old. And as long as they have watched this process, scholars have argued how and why it takes place.

Over three decades ago, while I was doing graduate work in International Relations, I encountered The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, a book by Yale professor Paul Kennedy. Having spent my youth reading science fiction tales that examined the grand sweep of history, and witnessing the static bi-polar stalemate of the Cold War teetering on the brink of change, I found his work fascinating. Before that, my scholarly reference point for the rise and fall of political systems were books like Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History. Kennedy’s work looked at history from a perspective that differed from those earlier scholars, who looked at rulers, treaties, and battles as determining national power. His thesis was that logistics and economic power decided wars, with the coalitions that developed the strongest economies generally prevailing. This showed the importance of nations building and maintaining strong and healthy economies, and also the importance of strong alliances.

Kennedy warned that nations with waning influence were prone to something called “imperial overstretch,” as changes in relative economic strength were generally not the result of their economies shrinking, but the economies of their rivals growing more quickly. Moreover, nations with waning influence had a tendency to ignore the importance of alliances, or take their allies for granted. As the Soviet Union fell, and as the United States has seen its relative strength diminishing after a series of inconclusive clashes in the Middle East, I have thought about Kennedy’s theories from time to time. And lately, the idea that the United States is in a state of imperial overstretch has become nearly impossible to ignore.

While reading fiction, I love tales where bravery and strife change the balance of history, but I have a feeling that the much more mundane world of commerce has greater power to shape our future.

Galactic Empires: Volume Two

I’m not going to give background information on every author in this anthology, but for those who might want more biographical information, where I have reviewed an author in this column before, I have tagged their name with a link to the latest of those reviews.

The “Introduction” to this volume discusses how editor John Campbell’s ideas contrasted with those of other magazine editors, who were often willing to have more fun with concepts like galactic empires. After the “Introduction,” the volume starts with a continuation of a section that carries over from Volume One, “Maturity or Bust.” The four tales that follow come under the heading “You Can’t Impose Civilization by Force,” which Aldiss introduces with an essay looking at the difficulties posed by building a civilization that spans stars.

The first story that follows, “Escape to Chaos,” by John D. MacDonald, is a showstopper, and one of the best in the collection. I had not realized MacDonald had written science fiction, having always associated him with mystery books, such as his series about the detective Travis McGee. This story gives us a battle between a decadent emperor, Shain, and his son, Andro, which reminded me of the biblical tale of King David and his son Absalom (although in this case, we are led to sympathize with the son rather than the father). Andro is headstrong, and starts his rebellion before his forces are fully prepared. He is trapped and dying from numerous wounds when he mysteriously disappears. At this point, the setting turns from fairly stock space opera into something more. It turns out that Andro’s universe is one of twenty-six parallel realities that are tended by Field Teams from a Bureau of Socionetics, an organization based in the City of Transition, which has discovered how to travel between realities, and whose goal is to knit these realities into a single polity.

The rescue of Andro was effected by Calna, a field agent who was expected to use him as a pawn in moving his reality toward other realities, but who has become romantically attached to him. Her boss wants Andro kept in suspended animation, as his resurrection could cause his reality to diverge from the other realities, but Calna rescues him and brings him back to his home. And then MacDonald takes things to yet another level, implying that there might be yet another reality that is manipulating the reality of the Field Teams, and by bringing Calna home in a way that makes her think her time with Andro might have been a dream. MacDonald, after building a fascinating setting and furnishing us with some sympathetic characters, ends the story with a rush of ideas that leave the reader wondering what in the story was real, and invoking the chaos mentioned in the title. I was a bit frustrated by the ideas overwhelming the characters in the end, but had to admire MacDonald’s audacity and vision.

In the next story, “Concealment,” by A.E. van Vogt, an Earth exploration ship finds a mysterious space station staffed by a single man, called the Watcher. They kill him, but the captain of the ship (who, surprisingly for tales in this era, is a woman) has his body reconstitutes in order to question him, to find out who he represents. I often find van Vogt’s work a bit on the strange side, and this story is built around a twist that didn’t quite work for me.

“To Civilize” by Algis Budrys follows colonists from Earth as they are sent home from the planet where they had been living among another culture. There doesn’t seem to be a reason why they were invited, and are now being evicted, but all becomes clear in the end.

In his notes, Aldiss makes it clear that “Beep,” by James Blish, is one of his favorite stories in the collection. The Security Service of an interstellar human civilization strangely expends quite a bit of effort making sure certain people meet and fall in love. The story then flashes back, and shows how the civilization uses something called Dirac transmitters to communicate over interstellar distances, and how the speed of these transmissions gives the Security Service an edge in anticipating threats. But then someone comes along who can predict the future even more accurately, and the Security Service needs to know why. It all comes down to a previously undiscovered aspect of those Dirac transmitters. This is a scientific puzzle story, and once you get past the fact that much of the science is either outdated or implausible, is actually quite clever. Blish presents a strange, new technology, and then looks at what the implications of such a technology might be.

The next three short tales in this section come under the heading “The Other End of the Stick,” looking at those who suffer under imperial rule. The first and best of these is “Down the River,” by Mack Reynolds. Humanity discovers they are part of a vast interstellar empire that has transferred ownership of the planet. They had been treating the planet as a kind of nature preserve, but the new owners will be aggressively exploiting its population and resources. When the humans complain, the ambassador, who has been watching the Earth, gives a litany of the many occasions human empires did the same thing.

“The Bounty Hunter” by Avram Davidson is the story of an old trapper who does his best to hunt ethically and preserve the animals he hunts. There is a quick, and somewhat predicable, twist at the end, but because of the quality of the writing, the story stands out.

Alien slavers find the Earth in “Not Yet the End” by Fredric Brown and humanity is only saved by an improbable and fortunate coincidence.

The next section of the book is entitled “Decline and Free Fall,” where the first two stories come under the heading “All Things are Cyclic.” What follows is my favorite tale in the collection, a swashbuckler, “Tonight the Stars Revolt!” by Gardner F. Fox (an author more widely known for his contributions in the early days of DC Comics than his science fiction stories). It is a lurid tale that wears the vivid colors of purple prose like a badge of honor. If you replaced the veneer of spaceships and technology with magic, it could easily have been a story starring Conan the Barbarian…

Angus the Red is a space pirate, hired by the Heirarch, the leader of a group of imprisoned scientists, to assassinate an evil ruler, the Diktor of Karr. Angus fails and is captured, but a beautiful slave, Moana, whose family he had once helped, frees him and takes him to Stasor, a god-like creature who turns out to be an avatar of an ancient and powerful race. Stasor tasks Angus to travel across the Car Carolan Sea and through the Land of Living Flame to the City of the Ancients, where he will find the Book of Nard, which contains ancient scientific secrets that can help bring down the Diktor. But Angus discovers that the Heirarch is just as corrupt and power-hungry as the Diktor, and builds a rebellion to free the people from both leaders. He is betrayed, but just as his rebellion is on the brink of disaster, he remembers scientific secrets from the Book of Nard, uses them to prevail, and rescues Moana, who falls into his happy embrace. The story is a delight from beginning to end.

In “Final Encounter” by Harry Harrison, after years of searching, humanity finds a beacon that allows them to make contact with an intelligent alien race, only to find they are not so alien after all. And the crew that meets the aliens is quite unique themselves, with the ship’s crew being from the race of Man, an all-male species, while the scientists are from a bisexual human race made up of both males and females.

The final heading of the collection is “Big Ancestors and Descendants,” which starts with “Lord of a Thousand Suns,” by Poul Anderson, the one author to have a story in both volumes of Galactic Empires—a fitting choice since so much of Anderson’s work dealt with empires and star-spanning civilizations. The story takes the form of a tale recounted over drinks in an Explorer’s Club, told by a man who claims he encountered and was possessed by an alien from an ancient race, was captured by enemy forces, and then had to fight for control of his own body. And now he and the alien, who share a body, have big plans to influence the future of humanity. It is a fascinating tale, and well told, a nice example of Anderson at his best.

“Big Ancestor,” by F.L. Wallace, is the story of an expedition made up of people from a wide range of different human species, who are exploring a planet full of ruins. They have taken on an alien “ribboneer” to replace their pilot at the last minute, and his delightfully different personality gives the story a unique perspective. But in the end, there is a twist that is unfortunately a bit too predictable.

Human colonists finally encounter the most powerful alien race in the galaxy in “The Interlopers,” by Roger Dee. They have heard that the race judges all they encounter, and are terrified, but persevere in traveling to the world they want to make their new home. Like many stories in the anthology, this one has a twist at the end, but it is a twist that works well, and ends the volume on a satisfying note.

Final Thoughts

Galactic Empires: Volume Two, like Volume One, contains a loosely connected group of tales, although the stories did seem to be more cohesively related to the topic of the rise and fall of empires. “Tonight the Stars Revolt!” by Gardner F. Fox was my favorite, an excellent tale of rebellion and planetary romance. John D. MacDonald’s “Escape to Chaos” was a close second because of its richly imagined setting, which could easily have supported an entire novel.

And now I turn the floor over to you, so you can share your thoughts on Galactic Empires: Volume Two, (or either volume of the collection, for that matter). And also your impressions on the tales they contain if you’ve read them elsewhere, or your thoughts on compelling stories of galactic empires in general.[end-mark]

The post Further Adventures in Classic, Quirky Anthologies — <i>Galactic Empires: Volume Two</i> appeared first on Reactor.

Movies & TV found footage

Five Sci-Fi and Fantasy Found Footage Movies

The found footage technique is perfect for horror, but also stories about space, time travel, and superpowers…

By Lorna Wallace

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Published on June 23, 2026

Credit: Paramount Pictures

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Credit: Paramount Pictures

I recently went to see Backrooms (2026) and, for me, the scariest parts were the scenes that utilized found footage when exploring the liminal labyrinth. This style is perfectly suited to horror, feeling up-close and personal in a way that can easily be used to ratchet up feelings of dread and tension. Plenty of other horror films have used this technique to put the viewer right at the center of the scares—a few of the most popular being The Blair Witch Project (1999), Paranormal Activity (2007), and REC (2007).

But the found footage style can also be deployed just as effectively in other genres. With that in mind, here are five sci-fi and fantasy movies that make excellent use of the format.

Cloverfield (2008)

Admittedly, Cloverfield is a horror movie, but I’d definitely consider it science fiction too. Set in New York City, Hud (T.J. Miller) has been tasked with filming testimonials at the goodbye party for his best friend, Rob (Michael Stahl-David), who is about to move to Japan. But the celebration goes off the rails when an earthquake causes chaos across the city. Except it turns out that a natural disaster isn’t to blame—aliens are.

With a camera already in his hands, Hud keeps on filming as a small group from the party attempt to flee the city. As they venture through Manhattan, we get increasingly clearer glimpses of the aliens—which are both fascinating and horrifying—as well as witnessing the different human responses to them, from panicking crowds to attacking soldiers. At its core, Cloverfield is an exploration of the fear, confusion, and anxiety that people experience when faced with an unclear threat.

The shaky camera footage might not be to everyone’s taste, but I don’t think many people would have a steady hand when running away from a colossal extraterrestrial, so it feels pretty realistic given the situation.

Trollhunter (2010)

Trollhunter starts with a trio of university students in Norway deciding to investigate and document the illegal bear killings that have been taking place. Once they track down the suspected poacher, Hans (Otto Jespersen), they discover that he’s not actually hunting bears at all—he’s hunting trolls.

It turns out that the legendary creatures aren’t actually the stuff of myth, the government has just been keeping their existence a secret. Hans is an integral part of the cover-up, being tasked with killing any trolls that wander too close to populated areas. But he’s been underpaid and overworked for decades and he’s finally so fed up that he agrees to lift the lid on the secret, taking a starring role in an exposé about his job. The result is a film filled with dry, straight-faced humor, bitingly satiric commentary on government bureaucracy, wildly fun troll designs, and clever bits of lore.

Chronicle (2012)

The protagonist of Chronicle, Andrew Detmer (Dane DeHaan), feels like the antithesis of Peter Parker. Both are bullied teenage boys with difficult personal lives—Andrew is abused by his dad and his mom has cancer, while Spider-Man’s parents died when he was a child—but they have completely different reactions to gaining superpowers. In essence, they’re different sides of the same coin.

The movie begins with Andrew starting a video diary and he soon documents himself, his cousin Matt (Alex Russell), and popular kid Steve (Michael B. Jordan) exploring a cave that contains a glowing blue crystalline object. The three teens then gain telekinetic powers and while it seems like a dream come true at first, things eventually take a nightmarish turn.

Chronicle is at once a deconstruction of the superhero genre as a whole and an in-depth character study of a deeply damaged individual. And thanks to Andrew’s telekinetic powers, all of it is captured using more inventive camera angles than usually appear in found footage movies.

Europa Report (2013)

If you found yourself captivated by footage of the crew of the Artemis II mission back in April, then I recommend giving Europa Report a watch.

Six astronauts have been sent on a mission to explore Europa—one of Jupiter’s moons—in the hope of finding extraterrestrial life. The crew lost contact with Earth six months in, but the footage from the rest of their mission was sent in one final transmission months later. This premise is perfectly suited to the found footage format. There’s no question of “why are they still filming?” in high-pressure moments because documenting their discoveries is the whole point of the mission and their spacecraft and spacesuits are covered with cameras to facilitate that, without the astronauts even needing to personally frame a shot.

The majority of the movie is slow-paced and subtle, going for grounded realism rather than flashy sci-fi thrills. I could have done with the characters being slightly more fleshed out, but I still found myself drawn in by the tension that comes from them being alone in the vastness of space, having to troubleshoot problems without any help from scientists back on Earth.

LOLA (2022)

The vast majority of found footage movies are set in modern times—within the last 30 years or so—because that’s when the technology needed for their in-story creation became far more accessible. But LOLA takes the historical route—it’s set during World War II.

Although video cameras weren’t exactly common household objects during the ’40s, brooding inventor Thom (Emma Appleton) has crafted one for herself and her sister Mars (Stefanie Martini) to use. But a hand-held camera isn’t Thom’s greatest feat: creating a time machine is.

Named LOLA after their long-dead mother, the machine can receive radio and TV transmissions from the future. Thom and Mars decide to use the device to change the course of World War II—with disastrous consequences. Plot-wise, LOLA isn’t doing anything particularly revolutionary within the time travel sphere, but it’s still an intriguing story to follow and the unique combination of the format and time period gives the movie a distinctive charm.

Although horror usually dominates the found footage genre, there are surely more than just these five examples that lean into science fiction and/or fantasy instead—as always, feel free to leave your own favorite examples in the comments below![end-mark]

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News Hot Spot

The System Is Not Stable in the Trailer for Hot Spot

Overstimulation? In a cyber thriller?

By Molly Templeton

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Published on June 18, 2026

Screenshot: Focus Features

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Screenshot: Focus Features

It’s possible I’ve never seen a trailer for a cyber-dystopia in which the protagonist smiles so much. This first look at Agnieszka Smoczyńska’s Hot Spot has a lot of horrors—and a very graphic exploding head—and yes, Djonny (Andrzej Konopka) does seem quite stressed for much of it. (Lapping at puddles?!?!) But he also has a cheeky grin that comes out more than once. Even more than twice. It changes the vibe of this weird, near-future murder mystery.

And there’s Noomi Rapace, face half covered, saying you can call her a witch … but not cyber. Honestly I have no real idea what’s going on here, and the synopsis is not forthcoming:

This trailer is a wildly appealing mix of imagery both familiar (the person on the edge of the building, blood streaks, people glitching) and disconcerting (something about the tiger in the hallway just sets my teeth on edge). This is par for the course for the director of The Lure, who is once again working with writer Robert Bolesto to craft a clearly unnerving world.

Hot Spot arrives in theaters on August 21st.[end-mark]

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Movies & TV House of the Dragon

House of the Dragon Roars Back to Life in Its Season 3 Premiere

A spectacular sea battle and a major character death set the stage for all-out war.

By Tyler Dean

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Published on June 22, 2026

Photograph by Ollie Upton/HBO

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Photograph by Ollie Upton/HBO

It’s been almost two full years since season 2, with months of behind-the-scenes drama and an entire season of a very different Game of Thrones-related series in between, House of the Dragon is finally back. And this first episode is a real doozy…

If you’re new to my coverage of House of the Dragon, these weekly articles are a little bit of everything—part review, part recap, and mostly an exploration of the ways in which the show adapts its source material: Fire & Blood, George R.R. Martin’s 2018 history of the Targaryen dynasty as recounted by a highly unreliable narrator, Archmaester Gyldayn.

(Note: There will be spoilers for the episode from this point on.)

The Title

The title of episode one is “Salt and Sea, Fire and Blood.” While this phrase is clearly an apt description of the events of this episode and the Battle of the Gullet, it’s also an echo of Corlys Velaryon’s struggle with his legacy from last season. He attempts to name Baela his heir after the death of his wife Rhaenys, but she turns him down, insisting that his heir must be “salt and sea” where she is “fire and blood.” “Fire and Blood” are, also, of course, the motto of House Targaryen, as well as the title of the fictional history from which this series draws its source material. 

The episode itself embodies an elemental clash between fire and water, between hasty burning tempers and cooler strategic heads, between the life-giving sea and the destruction promised by fire. And with it, the season is off to an explosive start, filled with contradictions that can only end in violence.

Unraveling the Opening Credits

I will admit that I was a little bit disappointed to see that we are getting the same visual style of credits as last season (given that season 1 and season 2 had radically different opening sequences). That said, I do like the tapestry theme and I will try to rationalize its reuse as indicative of a divide between the season that serves as prologue to the Dance of the Dragons and the seasons that detail the specific events of that conflict. What season 3 does add is a deafening, warlike drumbeat to Ramin Djawadi’s iconic Game of Thrones theme, finally giving House of the Dragon its own remix.

This first episode has, more or less, the same sequence of tapestries as the end of last season, with panels representing historical events—the creation of the dragons, the Doom of Valyria, Aegon I’s conquest, Maegor’s death on the Iron Throne, the reign of Jaehaerys I and good Queen Alysanne, the Great Council 101 AC—and events specific to the Dance of the Dragons—the death of Prince Lucerys, the murder of Prince Jaehaerys, the Battle of Rook’s Rest, and the rise of the Dragonseeds. Instead of showing the Iron Throne at the very end of the titles, the sequence now ends with the Targaryen sigil (and, specifically for our purposes, Rhaenyra’s sigil—the three-headed black dragon) sewn into the end of the tapestry.

Down the Gullet

There was a contingent of House of the Dragon fans last season who hated the end of season 2, claiming that nothing really happened during the finale. I was not among them but I do understand that, in many ways, the second season seemed to be building to the Battle of the Gullet only to leave off just before we reached it. Rumors swirled, in the wake of that decision, that the reduced episode order for season 2 had messed with the original pacing of the scripts and forced the Gullet to be moved to the next season. Whether or not that is the case, I will say that the Battle of the Gullet makes for an incredibly exciting season 3 opener, even if it does feel like it is tying off some loose ends from season 2.

It’s been nearly twenty years since the (excellent) HBO series, Rome, opened its final episode with the aftermath of the Battle of Actium, completely eliding the need to show an expensive naval battle. For those last twenty years, a part of me has been itching to see what an HBO prestige TV budget might do with an epic scene of historical ship-to-ship combat. The Gullet does not disappoint (even if it’s not real-world history). So let’s start with a little Westerosi geographic history:

The Gullet is one of two straits that connect Blackwater Bay (and, thereby, King’s Landing) to the Narrow Sea. It is formed by the islands of Dragonstone (Rhaenyra’s seat and the ancestral home of House Targaryan) and Driftmark (the seat of House Velaryon and their castle, High Tide) on the northern end and Massey’s Hook (which we saw briefly, last season, when Aemond and Vhagar burned the town of Sharp Point) to the South. The Northern pass that Corlys and Lohar move through is discussed in the show as a part of the Gullet but seems to refer to the other strait between Dragonstone and the peninsula that ends in Crackclaw Point. In the books, there is no mentioned narrow route but hey, it makes for an awesome set piece and a chance for the Sea Snake (Steve Toussaint) to live up to his nom de guerre.

We get some fantastic and compelling ship-to-ship combat and chaos but a lot of the best parts happen after Sharako Lohar (Abigail Thorn) boards Corlys’ flagship. Thorn was one of the most engaging elements in the season 2 finale and she doesn’t disappoint here, chewing the scenery and credibly playing Lohar as unhinged and audaciously fun in a way that these Song of Ice and Fire shows sorely need to keep from being too grim. It’s a shame to lose Lohar and Thorn for that reason but what a fun ride it’s been while it lasted, and the last shot of her head sinking beneath the waterline, incredulous that she could be killed, was great. 

Gyldayn’s description of the battle claims that there are five dragons present—Vermax, Sheepstealer, Vermithor, Silverwing, and Seasmoke. The show cuts the latter three and adds Moondancer to the mix, but that works well to highlight the younger generation of the Blacks and their lack of preparedness for war. There is no mention in the original text of Sheepstealer going rogue and indiscriminately attacking friend and foe but it definitely helps to heighten the tension and set up future strife between Baela and Rhaena. Gyldayn also provides a number of scenarios for how Vermax may have been killed. The show chooses to confirm his theory that he was killed with grapnels, though the choice to attach them to an anchor and drown the dragon is absolutely inspired. Every once in a while, a Song of Ice and Fire show comes up with a really cool, slightly anachronistic piece of tech (that giant scythe blade that swings across the Wall?) and this might be my favorite so far… 

And, of course, we end the battle with Jace’s death, accurate to Gyldayn’s description that he clung to driftwood after Vermax’s death but was slain by Triarchy crossbow bolts. Harry Collett always had a bit of a thankless job—portraying Prince Jacaerys as a stereotypical fantasy hero whose job, like Robb Stark before him, was to die in a classic Martin twist and leave Rhaenyra’s future uncertain. But he played the character well and gave us just a hint of that Targaryen madness at the end when he imprisons his mother and convinces Baela to join him.

Uncharted Waters

While I expect the show to continue to follow the plot of Fire & Blood for the most part, there is now such a critical mass of deviations and adumbrations that a lot of this season will likely involve material that is somewhat new to readers of Martin’s books. In this episode, that includes the following elements:

Rhaena, the Fire Witch — As I wrote in my article on the season 2 finale, the show has cut (fan favorite) character, Nettles, and given her plot to Rhaena Targaryen (Phoebe Campbell). There are probably multiple reasons behind that decision. For one, Nettles is involved in an infidelity plot with Daemon later in the book and the show seems to have wrapped up the “Will Daemon betray-Rhaenyra?” question at the end of last season. Secondly, Nettles is the only major character in the Dance of the Dragons portion of Fire & Blood who is, canonically, a person of color. By making the Velaryons (Corlys, Alyn, Addam, Baela, and Rhaena) Black, the show has less of a need to follow Martin’s blueprint when it comes to representation, and Rhaena has very little to do throughout the original narrative. Whatever your thoughts about the Nettles-erasure, the show makes better use of Rhaena—a character that could not be cut from the story.

What we see in this episode is a little nod to the denouement of Nettles’ story in the book. According to Gyldayn, Nettles leaves Daemon and the Targaryen court towards the end of Dance of the Dragons, taking Sheepstealer with her. While her fate is only ever hinted at, Gyldayn suggests that she may have been responsible for rumors of a “fire witch” living in the Mountains of the Moon at the edge of the Vale of Arryn. This episode shows the haggard, starving Rhaena alone in the Mountains of the Moon with only Sheepstealer for comfort. That, combined with the ways in which Sheepstealer nearly kills Baela and Moondancer at the Gullet, points toward an arc that is going to be very different from both Nettles’ and Rhaena’s original ones. 

Aegon II, AWOL — Season 3 is covering a portion of the Fire & Blood in which (the always fantastic) Tom Glynn-Carney’s Aegon II is missing from the historical record. Combined with Archmaester Gyldayn’s musing on the strangeness of Larys Strong’s actions and the unknowability of his motives, the show is choosing to fill in both gaps, starting with an intriguing interlude where the plan to ferry Aegon to the Citadel goes awry, leading to both men being captured by Rhaenyra’s bannermen.

While I know where Aegon has to resurface (a plot point that I assume they will not alter, in part because it’s part of the history that the original Game of Thrones show already spoiled when discussing Targaryen history), how he gets there is going to be a mystery, and there are numerous possibilities for the way in which Aegon might or might not intersect with other concurrent plots. 

Rhaenyra’s Imprisonment — Ending Rhaenyra’s relationship with Jace on such a sour note is also an invention of the show. Seeing as the death of Lucerys ended season 1 and kicked off the Dance of the Dragons in truth, one might wonder how the death of her eldest son and heir will affect her going forward. But the betrayal prior to his death feels like it will significantly alter her trajectory throughout this season.

Gyldayn tells us that Rhaenyra is remembered extremely unkindly by history—something that’s supported by the way she’s been characterized in later ASoIaF novels and shows. Already she has been given the sobriquet “Rhaenyra the Cruel” (the show’s version of Martin’s title, “Maegor with Teats”). And while previous seasons have argued that the title is largely undeserved—the result of Westeros’ sexism—it remains to be seen if the show will have her live up to that title. Changes and additions to her original story—in this case, the circumstances under which she and Jace parted ways—may well be the key to justifying the writers’ arc for her.

DragonWatch

Sheepstealer — We caught a glimpse of him at the very end of last season but this episode has a glut of Sheepstealer glamour shots. He represents one of the show’s best and most unique designs. The Sheepstealer of Fire & Blood is described as being ugly and brown but not much beyond that. He is one of three feral dragons living on Dragonstone; the other two, the Grey Ghost and the Cannibal, are not nearly as important to the story and are probably going to be cut entirely so that leaves Sheepstealer as the only glimpse we are likely to have of what a feral dragon looks like.

They’ve really gone all out with the strange, crocodilian snout, the untrimmed, unruly nails at the end of his wings, mismatched and hoary back scales, and a vitiligo patterning across his body—all of which places the dragon far outside the careful aesthetic that the Targaryens have cultivated with the dragons they’ve controlled and caged for generations. He regurgitates sheep for Rhaena to eat, and has an awkward, loping gait that is singularly unpleasant for his rider. It’s really charming. I’m definitely a Vhagar stan, but Sheepstealer is a close second. 

Vermax — RIP to Vermax, Jace’s dragon whose egg was placed in his crib in infancy. Vermax has always looked to me like the most unadorned and standard issue of dragons—the rock hyrax of the Targaryen brood. It’s sort of a fitting design for his rider, since Jace is also a little generic. But we are really truly in the Dance now, with dragons dying left and right.

Moondancer — We get a little bit of Baela’s Moondancer in this episode. Last season the production team described the creature as a David Bowie-inspired punk rock dragon, which is pretty great. The mohawk-shaped crest flattening out when Moondancer goes into a dive is awesome.

…and the Rest! — We get brief shots of Daemon’s Caraxes, Addam’s Seasmoke, Hugh’s Vermithor, and Ulf’s Silverwing. A nice little close-up of Silverwing shows the silvery scales along her back that presumably inspired her name. We also get a brief shot of Tessarion, the Blue Queen, the dragon ridden by the as-yet-unseen Daeron Targaryen (Alicent’s third son, the younger brother of Aegon, Helaena, and Aemond). She looks stocky and pugnacious, which is fun. Hopefully we’ll see more of her in the weeks to come.

Odds & Ends

• There is a truly terrifying bust of Rhaenys serving as the figurehead on the prow of Corlys’ flagship (renamed, in the show, to The Queen That Never Was). It’s a fun but unsettling detail.

• The aftermath of the Battle of the Red Fork opens with Riverlands soldiers decapitating the regimental mascot lion. I do enjoy the way that the historical ASoIaF shows lean into the lords and ladies of Westeros having ridiculous over-identification with their sigils. It’s much more in-line with how Martin writes them in the books and probably a sign that, after 15 years of Game of Thrones on TV, Ryan Condal and Ira Parker trust audiences to be on board with the more fantastical touches that Benioff and Weiss largely eschewed.

• The head that Stark bannerman and leader of the Winter Wolves, Lord Roderick Dustin (Sons of Anarchy, Braveheart, and Gladiator actor Tommy Flanagan), flings at Daemon’s feet is that of Jason Lannister, current Lord of Casterly Rock and twin brother to Aemond’s Master of Ships, Tyland Lannister (both are played by Jefferson Hall). We last saw Jason at the end of last season, marching towards the Red Fork. RIP to the drunker and less sympathetic of this era’s Lannister twins. Casterly Rock now passes to his son, Loreon. 

• Given the original show’s offensive tendency to wield sexual assault as a kind of narrative cudgel, it’s interesting to note when House of the Dragon mentions it at all. Here, it’s a source of tension between Gwayne Hightower (Freddie Fox) and Criston Cole (Fabien Frankel) where the former feels a rapist soldier in their battalion should be punished while the latter, in his despondent haze, remains apathetic. I’m not a fan of sexual violence being discussed or portrayed in any casual context, but I’m always relieved to see a ASoIaF show reiterate that a healthy kingdom punishes rapists.

• The conversation between Ulf (Tom Bennett), Hugh (Kieran Bew), and Addam (Clinton Liberty) about the distinction between knights and lords mirrors one in Gyldayn’s account where, after the Battle of the Gullet, Hugh remarks “we are knights now, in truth” to which Ulf replies “Fie on that. We should be Lords.”

• Rhaena sings a bit of the High Valyrian lullaby that we hear Daemon singing to Vermithor in the season 1 finale. This show really loves indulging the depths of its dragon lore. (Same!)

• Corlys’ bottle of Ibbenese liquor has a bronze relief of a whaling scene on its body. Ib is an island far north of Essos, famous for its whalers, vaguely Inuit in culture, and populated by this world’s equivalent of evolved Neanderthals.

• We get our first look at Ser Ormund Hightower and Bold Jon Roxton, Alicent and Gwayne’s cousin and his bannerman lieutenant, respectively. Ormund is played by James Norton, who you’ve likely seen in a ton of BBC period pieces but who I know best as the voice of Cole in the Dragon Age games. Roxton is played by Joplin Sibtain who is probably most recognizable as Brasso in Andor. As stated above, we still haven’t seen Daeron Targaryen, Ormund’s ward who is marching with the Hightower host.

• Another fleeting glimpse of the satyr-like Green Man, heralding the arrival of Harrenhal’s resident witch. This time it happens in broad daylight and it’s getting harder to dismiss it as a weirwood paste-inspired hallucination. There was always a ton of room for this show to explore Westeros’ pre-Andal Druidic roots and I hope they continue to do so.

• I’m a huge fan of Alys Rivers and the actor portraying her, Gayle Rankin. Her announcing “I’m a witch” in absolute deadpan is great. She’s this show’s Patricia from Widow’s Bay.

• Lohar’s flagship is called the Bitch Fist. Perfect. No notes.

• If you haven’t yet, go check out the red-carpet events for the season premiere. This is, far and away, the most stylish cast on television.

In Conclusion

This really feels like it’s going to be the war season, and a brutal and bloody one at that. Part of what people seem to have disliked about previous seasons of the show (again, I am not among them) was the way in which it complicated both Rhaenyra and Alicent and made them into less stereotypical villains—ones viewers couldn’t enjoy rooting against. Or, at least, that’s what a bevy of other reviewers have said. Personally, I think that reaction to these characters and their conflict feels steeped in more than a little misogyny. I’m so happy to have my messy, tragic House of the Dragon back, and to see what comes next.

Having reviewed all of (the mostly great) A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms for Reactor earlier this year, I’m glad that ASoIaF shows can be something other than grim and violent—Martin’s world is capacious and allowing room for levity and friendship is important—but House of the Dragon remains what it has always represented to me: a version of Game of Thrones whose creators clearly love the source material and want to recreate the magic of the original series without the more unpleasant, rapey, and exploitatively shocking vibes. A lot of the show’s success in accomplishing this is tied to the number of women it has put in the writers’ room and director’s chair.

This episode, in many ways, did seem like the culmination of season 2: the Gullet, the finale of Jace’s storyline, the result of Rhaena’s season-long search for a dragon. Obviously, it sets up many more plot lines that will likely dominate the season—a new threat to Rhaenyra in Ormund and the Hightower host, a new threat to the Greens in Roderick and the Winter Wolves, the fallout between Alicent and her children for betraying them to the Blacks, the mystery of wherever Otto Hightower is after the end of last season showed him in chains—but it’s a bit of a transition at the halfway mark of the series and, as an episode, you can feel it pulling in both directions. 

At the same time, it also featured one of the most spectacular battles every depicted on any ASoIaF show. And it did so without compromising its characters or emotional through-lines for the sake of cool moments, preserving the classic Martin trope of no one being safe, and managing to both present a spectacle of entertaining violence while also offering a harsh and unyielding critique of war. I loved it! 

But what did you think? Are you as thrilled as I am to be back in House of the Dragon’s warm, bloody embrace? Did you think this premiere episode provided a decent payoff for the lack of fireworks at the end of last season? What are you excited to see more of this season? Let me know in the comments. 

Man, it’s great to be back![end-mark]

The post <i>House of the Dragon</i> Roars Back to Life in Its Season 3 Premiere appeared first on Reactor.

News Spider-Man: Brand New Day

Spider-Man: Brand New Day Trailer Teases Mysterious New Villain

The fourth Spider-Man film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe is set to premiere in theaters in July

By Vanessa Armstrong

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Published on June 17, 2026

Screenshot: Sony Pictures

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Screenshot: Sony Pictures

The latest trailer for Spider-Man: Brand New Day sees Peter (Tom Holland) going through some changes (black eyes… you know what that means!), and having some anger issues since everyone he knows and loves has no memory of who he is. It’s a bummer! But we see him getting help from Frank Castle (Jon Bernthal) and Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo), and also saving MJ (Zendaya) even though she’s not quite sure who he is. There’s also an enemy who jumps from mind to mind that no one can see… except Peter.

Here’s the official synopsis that spells everything out:

The movie comes from director Destin Daniel Cretton, who also worked on Wonder Man and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. The script comes from Chris McKenna & Erik Sommers and Justin Kuritzkes, and you can see it in theaters starting on July 31, 2026.

When you’re deciding where to watch it, keep this fun fact in mind: The movie comes in two native aspect ratios to fit both flat screens and scope screens. What does your local theater have? I don’t know! But Marvel wants you to know that whatever shape your screen takes, the film will look fabulous.

While we wait for July 31, check out the latest trailer below on your flat-screen phone and/or laptop. You can also check out this Spidey Tracker website, which lets you see where in NYC a few of the trailer’s clips are set, get a little more info on some of Brand New Day‘s major characters, and seemingly see where a few upcoming promotional events will occur.[end-mark]

The post <i>Spider-Man: Brand New Day</i> Trailer Teases Mysterious New Villain appeared first on Reactor.

Excerpts fantasy

Read an Excerpt From These Immortal Truths by Rachelle Raeta

A shapeshifting god. A divine peach. And a woman gifted with forever.

By Rachelle Raeta

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Published on June 18, 2026

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We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from These Immortal Truths by Rachelle Raeta, a powerful and romantic historical fantasy that explores not only what it means to live forever, but what it means to live fully. Tor Books will publish a gorgeous new hardcover edition featuring sprayed edges, a case stamp, and designed endpapers on June 30th.

Buy the Book

These Immortal Truths

Rachelle Raeta

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These Immortal Truths

Rachelle Raeta

Buy this book from:

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One

England
1185

The only keepsake Anna has of her childhood home is the memory of being dragged out of it.

The cloying smoke burning her eyes, blackening her lungs, and the bruising pain in her arm as the warrior pulled her from the threshold. She remembers the heat feeling so close that she thought her loose chestnut hair might catch and burn with the rest of it. She was little more than a child, then. A blessing, Fanny used to remind her—if she were any older, she’d be dead.

Anna knows it’s a lie.

Fanny was all rough edges and sharp words, but she was merciful where it mattered. Anna learned early that lies can be kinder than truths, and that some fates are crueler than death. The maidservants had never been as discreet with their gossip around her as Fanny was, though, and Anna grew up overhearing the horror stories of young women being abducted and forced to warm the beds of their captors across the North Sea.

Anna used to believe she was perhaps at least a bit luckier than most, in that regard. Her servitude under her lord was exhausting but bearable, and Fanny was always kind in her own way. The manor was heated by multiple grand fireplaces in the winter and the cut stone kept the interior pleasantly cool even during the hottest of summers. While she never tasted the luxuries delivered to the lord’s table—salted cod, savory venison, roasted swan, bread baked with the finest flour and drizzled with honey—she certainly never went hungry, either. There’s no doubt there were worse houses to serve under.

Then she turned fifteen.

It started on her chest—pale shadows that grew more defined at the edges—before it crept over her shoulders and onto her back. She didn’t know what it was, only that the jagged lines of discoloration scared her the same way she knew they would frighten others. She was able to hide it for a year before a chambermaid spotted it.

Another, before word got to the lord of the house.

It didn’t matter that there was no proof of any type of contamination; didn’t matter that two years went by with no harm to show for it. What mattered was that the harvest that season was weak, and the sickness that spread through the village was terrible.

What mattered, truly mattered, was that Anna existed. Easy to blame. Easy to banish.

Perhaps, she thinks, in some ways she’s still lucky. Her life is a cage, the bars molded from poverty and exile. Ripped from her roots and transplanted onto foreign soil and expected to be grateful for it. There’s a quiet grief in not knowing who she was or where she came from before they raided her home and packed her into a ship like cargo to be sold at the next port. A grief in knowing that she once called another language her own, but losing all traces of it to time. Anna is now twenty-seven summers, and she can’t even be certain if her name was given by her mother or her master.

But she’s alive. She’s healthy.

She knows there are many in her situation who can’t say the same. Many who would have been put to death instead of exiled, who would have found nothing but suffering and starvation past the line of the forest instead of shelter in an abandoned cabin and scraps from the old cook they used to work under. Those meager offerings that Fanny slipped her were the only reason she survived the first few winters. It gave her time to learn the forest—to learn its language well enough to make use of its gifts. The winters are still harsh, her cabin still bitterly cold, and her food supplies almost always teetering on the edge of dangerously low, but she makes it through to spring. And even though she never feels full, she tries to remind herself that a hungry belly is better than an empty one.

Her fingers pluck hawthorn berries from the bush, nimbly dropping them into the folded hollow of her tattered brown dress. She’s yet to prick herself on the thorns this morning, but this grove has seen plenty of her blood over the past decade. She had stumbled on it her first summer in exile; the gnawing hunger in her gut so great she had grabbed the bright berries by the fistful and paid a price in blood. It seems she can’t go a season without giving at least a few drops. Perhaps that’s why the grove yields so well.

Her stomach groans, a familiar sound. Anna appeases it with a few berries and no more. Summer is forgiving, but winter isn’t. She’s learned that surviving the cold months demands saving what gifts she can during the warm ones.

Voices filter through the trees. Anna stills.

This part of the forest isn’t frequented by the villagers—never has been. It’s too far off the road, too long a walk from the town. The only reason Anna can bring food to her table is that the places she gathers are places the townspeople don’t.

The voices grow loud enough for her to recognize them as men shouting. There’s an angry edge to it. A threat.

They’re looking for someone.

If they succeed, Anna knows nothing good will come to the person they find.

A rustle of leaves behind her, the quiet sound of footsteps. Anna starts, holding her yield of berries to her chest, and turns, heart in her throat and ready to run. Dark eyes, framed with dark lashes, stare back at her.

The stranger stands as still as a doe, swathed in richly colored silks as deep as the berries gathered in Anna’s dingy, threadbare dress. Eyes so deep and dark they feel as endless as the night sky, her braided ebony hair long and thick over her sun-kissed shoulder. She’s beautiful in ways that make Anna’s heart ache. Because she knows the men searching for her will be wearing cruelty in their smiles and wielding the threat of death in their hands; knows they wouldn’t have bothered chasing her this far for anything less.

Another shout, closer than the last, and Anna knows time is short.

The hawthorn berries she’s collected all morning fall to the ground as Anna reaches forward and grasps the woman’s smooth palm in her stained, callused hand—eyes wide and begging. She doesn’t know if the woman speaks English, doesn’t know if she’ll follow, but there’s not enough time for questions or doubts. “Hurry!”

She pulls, relieved when the stranger doesn’t resist. Berries burst beneath Anna’s feet, but it doesn’t matter. The woman follows. They run.

There is no place Anna knows better than this patch of forest. She has learned its every landmark, watched the saplings grow into trees over the course of years. Every day she’s gathered logs for her fire, leaves and branches to thatch her roof, and food for her table. They pass her favorite spot for foraging orange-capped mushrooms, wet their skirts running through the stream where she bathes and washes the filth from her clothes.

Anna’s lungs burn with every step, but the pulse drumming in her ears urges her onward. The pain in her chest is no different from the hunger in her belly; there is comfort and there is survival. There is no doubt what fate awaits them both if the men—soldiers, she realizes with a pang—find them.

Seeing the moldy, thatched roof of her cabin through the towering oaks and alders has never brought her so much relief, but she doesn’t allow her steps to pause or her grip on the woman’s hand to weaken. It’s not until they are under her roof, the door shut tight against her back, that Anna allows herself to just breathe.

Legs weak, she slides down the door as she struggles to push back against the black spots crowding her vision. In the middle of her dirt floor, the stranger stares back at her—not a hair out of place. Anna wipes the sweat along her temple, but can do little for the bead rolling between her shoulder blades. She wets her parched lips.

“Do… do you speak English?” she asks between gasping breaths.

The woman’s head tilts, dark eyes curious. Anna wonders how she can be so composed when Anna’s still struggling to find enough air to fill her lungs. “Yes.”

Anna nods, closing her eyes and leaning her head back against the wood as she wills her breathing to slow. “Good,” she rasps. “That’s good.”

“Thank you for helping me.” Her voice is a song: lyrical and sweet. When Anna opens her eyes, she finds the stranger crouched in front of her—tan, slender arms braced against her silk-wrapped knees and chin resting on her knuckles. There are gold rings adorning nearly every finger; patterns inked into her skin there. “What’s your name?”

“Anna,” she breathes, gaze tracing over the unfamiliar designs. Her eyes lift to the woman’s face. “Yours?”

There’s a wicked curl to her lips as she stands, holding out a hand in offering. “I have many names.” Her head tilts, amusement flickering in her eyes. “Which would you choose for me?”

Anna fumbles, baffled by her strange answer—and even stranger request—but takes the offered hand. “You wish me to give you a name?”

“It’s only fitting,” she says, pulling Anna up effortlessly. There’s a strength that seems unusual for her slender frame. “Tell me, who shall I be to you?”

It’s such a bizarre request that Anna simply shakes her head. “I don’t—” She catches the direction of the stranger’s gaze, and her voice catches.

Her chest.

Her marked skin.

Anna flushes, pulling her collar closer to her neck. It must have shifted, the laces loosening, during the mad run home. “It’s not catching,” she assures the stranger, but it sounds weak even to her own ears. “They think it is, but it’s been there since I was a girl and I’ve no pain or lesions.”

Sun-kissed hands cover her own, coaxing them away. Anna is too stunned by her proximity, by the gentleness of the taller woman’s touch, to resist. The woman’s lips twist into a frown. “They believe it to be leprosy.”

Anna nods, throat tight. Her hands tremble, waiting for the look of disgust. For the pulling away. For the abandonment.

The sigh the woman breathes is soft, but weighted with disdain. “Fools.”

It’s so unexpected, it takes Anna a moment to recognize rejection isn’t coming. The relief is nearly enough to make her sick. “You’re not afraid?”

“There are many things worth fearing,” she says, meeting Anna’s eyes. “This is not one of them.”

Anna swallows, trying to find her voice in the tangle of emotion making her chest ache and her eyes burn. “Would  would you like something to eat?” She doesn’t have much, hardly enough to share, but there is a sudden desperation building within her. It has been so, so long since she had anyone to sit with. To talk to. She will sacrifice a meal if it means this unnamed woman will linger even just a little bit longer.

There’s a pity softening the woman’s gaze that makes Anna suspect she knows. “I would like that.”

Tightening the laces on her collar, Anna goes to the corner where she keeps her stores while the stranger takes a seat at her tiny table. The dried fish, painstakingly caught in the creek, is too precious to offer, but she takes some of the dense acorn biscuits and some blackberries she harvested yesterday.

It’s not until she sets them on the table, eyeing the sweet, dark berries, that she remembers the bounty she left behind.

She thinks of the cascade of red hawthorn berries hitting the dirt—the feel of them crushing underneath her foot—and goes pale. There’s no way the soldiers will miss it. They don’t know the forest like she does, but they’d have to be blind not to see a footprint and abandoned food without understanding the implications.

They know enough to know where she lives.

“You need to go,” she whispers, fighting to suppress the tremor in her voice. “Before they come. You need to go.”

The woman plops a blackberry into her mouth, her eyes piercingly intense. “You’re afraid.”

Anna swallows, throat tight and chest aching. “Yes.”

The woman considers her. “Will they kill you for saving me?”

“Yes,” she says, voice shaky. She suspects they may do worse.

Another plump berry disappears past the woman’s full lips, but her stare has yet to falter. “But still, you chose to take me in.”

A statement, not a question. Anna answers it anyway, shaking her head and bracing herself against the wall. “You’ve done nothing to deserve the hell they’d put you through.”

“Neither, I suspect, have you.” The woman’s finger taps, a rhythmic heartbeat against the tabletop. Anna is caught by her stare—entangled by the unspoken decisions shadowing their depths. “Death will not come for you.”

Anna isn’t sure if the words are meant to console her, or if perhaps they’re some kind of prayer, but she knows better than to believe them. Death comes for everyone, and often without mercy. She has no doubts that it’s coming for her now, wearing the faces of the lord’s men.

Anna’s lips part, but she’s unsure of what to say. Then, reaching into the folds of her dress, the woman pulls something from their depths and holds it out in offering.

“For you.”

Hesitantly, Anna takes it from her hand. It’s different from any fruit she’s seen. She turns it around, admires the fuzz of its flesh, and brings it to her nose. It smells sweet—like summer and honey. “What is it called?”

The woman’s eyes shine. “Táozi.”

“Taozi?” Anna tries to match her inflection, but the word feels strange on her tongue.

She shrugs. “Or Persian apple. Depending on who you ask.”

“I am asking you.” Anna still doesn’t understand why the woman speaks in these strange riddles, but she’s learning that it’s easiest to play along. “What do you call it?”

Her smile is enigmatic. “A gift.”

More riddles. Time is only growing shorter; Death is sure to knock on her door within the hour. Anna has spent the last decade fighting to live. Has shivered through the winters and bled for just enough food to usher her from one season into the next. It was inevitable, really, that the time she fought so hard to keep would eventually slip through her fingers. Inevitable, that a day would come when she would be too weak and too tired to resist.

Anna looks down at the strange, foreign fruit cradled in her hands the way the horizon cradles the sun as it sets. Time is something she has very little of now. She will not waste what little she has left—will not rob herself of this last moment of wonder.

Anna brings the fruit to her lips and bites into the flesh, juice filling her mouth with a sweetness bordering on fantastical. She’s never tasted anything like it. She knows she should savor it, but she finds herself taking another bite, and another, and another. When she reaches the center, the flesh pink but hollow, she realizes something must be missing. “There’s no seed.”

“No.”

“But… how?”

The woman’s stare lingers on the remaining morsel, a faraway look clouding her expression. “Priceless are the treasures that cannot be replicated.”

Riddles, it’s all riddles, but Anna’s too hungry to decipher them. She closes her eyes, lets the last bite sit on her tongue—savors what she knows will be her last meal and tries not to let its sweetness be tainted by the saltiness of the tears rolling down her cheeks.

She doesn’t want to die, but she’s far too tired to run from the inevitable. Too weak. There is a whisper, a wordless, threadbare thing, echoing in the hollow of her chest. A numbing warmth. Instinct, perhaps—her mind’s only defense against her fate. Or maybe just her weary heart’s last, whimpering consolation.

A heavy fist meets her door, so much sooner than she expected. Anna’s eyes fly open and her lips part, a warning on her tongue, but it dies before she can speak it. She is the only one in her shack of a home. The woman she saved, the stranger she housed, is gone.

The soldiers break the door open, grabbing her roughly by the shoulders and dragging her away. Anna lets them, her eyes trained on the empty space where a woman of beauty and silk stood only seconds before.

It’s not possible, but there’s no sight or sign of her, only the lingering taste of foreign fruit on Anna’s lips. A numbing horror seeps into her bones as she thinks of the riddles the stranger spoke in, her devastating beauty, and realizes the implications.

She wasn’t human.

Once, before she was exiled, she used to sit in the stiff pews and listen to the reverend’s sermons with the rest of the staff. She remembers the way he had warned them to be wary of the Devil and his tricks. Had warned them of the consequences that come to those who break bread with him. Anna has fallen into the Devil’s snare, tempted by a fruit the way Eve was tempted by the apple. Only, as the soil beneath her feet gives way to coarse sand, as she sees the crude pyre and gathered crowd on the stretch of remote beach, Anna knows the only person she has damned is herself.

Fear floods her. She had resigned herself to death, but not to this—not to torture. A scream rips from her chest, thrashing against the soldiers’ iron grips, but their hold only tightens. She can feel the bite of their fingers bruising her skin. As they bind her hands to the post, the hemp rough against her wrists, the strangled sounds emerging from her lips twist into the shape of words. “Please, please don’t!”

She looks up, tries to find mercy in any of the people’s eyes, and finds none. They look back at her, whispers coiling and twisting like snakes off their tongues as they speak to their neighbors. And Anna knows she’ll find no kindness from any of them. They’re all too happy to see her gone. Too relieved to have an excuse to do it. The leper girl who hid away in the forest and just wouldn’t die. The one they wouldn’t risk killing in the village square because her blood could be cursed.

Anna chokes on a sob as the bindings around her wrists grow tighter. When he’s done securing her, the soldier sneers and spits at her feet. “Witch, Devil’s whore.”

“I’m not,” she cries. The sweetness has faded from her tongue, replaced with bitter salt from the sea air, tears, and snot. “I’m not.”

From the front of the crowd, the town priest’s voice booms over the crashing waves. “Speak no more lies, foul creature.” Anna recognizes him as the same one who screamed she was at fault for the crop’s failures a decade ago—God’s punishment for harboring a foreign heathen touched by the Devil. He turns to the crowd. “How else would a lone woman survive in the woods if not without the help of the Devil? How else would she hide away the villainous whore who brought death to our lordship? How else—”

The blood roaring in her ears, the cold ocean wind stinging her face and tangling in her hair, drowns out the rest. She stares unseeingly at the stretch of beach behind the crowd and remembers the feeling of sifting sand under her bare feet when she first arrived as a small child. It’s almost fitting that she lose her life on the same shore she lost her freedom.

A flutter of movement in the deadened tree across from her catches her attention. Perched on the pale, wind-worn wood is a raven, its intelligent eyes staring into hers. A bad omen, Fanny used to say, a sure sign that death is not far behind. There are a few faces Anna recognizes in the crowd, but the old cook’s isn’t one of them. She wonders if her raven has already flown or if she’s merely the one person who doesn’t wish to watch her burn. She hopes it’s the latter.

A torch is lit, its flames a drop of color in a sea of gray. Beautiful and deadly, not unlike the stranger that sealed her fate. The kindling at the base catches, the flames grow higher, licking the straw at her feet. She screams, the sound muffled only by the swelling in her throat and the cloying smoke in her lungs.

She can’t watch. She can’t let the last thing she sees be the snapping of fire and the blistering of her skin. In her last moments, she wants beauty. She looks past the sneering faces, eyes searching for a glimpse of the raven through the smoke. If she could just focus on those dark, intelligent eyes—lose herself in the glossy plumage of its feathers—maybe she can hold on to it long enough to take her from this world into the next. Only, it isn’t the raven sitting on the same low branch, but the stranger she saved. The woman holds a finger to her lips, eyes full of hope and warnings.

Trust me, they say.

Anna looks down, sees the flames licking at her skin—eating at the hem of her dress and traveling up, up. The pain is horrendous, but her skin doesn’t blister. Doesn’t blacken. A hallucination, she thinks. It must be. Her mind’s desperate attempt at comforting her through the pain. At her back, the rope binding her hands singes and frays until her knees give and the fibers snap. Her scream is swallowed by the roaring in her ears until she’s not sure where one begins and the other ends and her vision blackens—

She opens her eyes to the sky. Above her, ash drifts like dandelion seeds on the wind. She can hear the sound of gulls calling and waves crashing.

Alive.

She’s alive.

She rises and finds herself alone—the townsfolk gone and only their footsteps in the sand to prove they were ever there. Ashes streak her bare skin, clotting in her hair. She stares at her hands, her body, dirty but whole, and feels her breath come faster.

A cloak settles on her naked shoulders, a whisper in her ear. “Did I not tell you, Anna? Death will not come for you.”

Excerpted from These Immortal Truths, copyright © 2026 by Rachelle Raeta.

The post Read an Excerpt From <i>These Immortal Truths</i> by Rachelle Raeta appeared first on Reactor.

Movies & TV Widow’s Bay

What to Watch After Widow’s Bay

A curated watchlist that is the next Martha’s Vineyard and definitely not cursed

By Matthew Byrd

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Published on June 18, 2026

Credit: Apple TV

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Credit: Apple TV

Nobody is happy about Widow’s Bay ending. Yes, the show has been renewed for a second season and will almost certainly be a featured player throughout awards season, but the fact of the matter is that shows this clever, surprising, well-crafted, and simply fun don’t come along often enough. And once you’ve finished Widow’s Bay’s exceptional final episode, you will be left wondering what you could possibly turn to next to help fill the void.

Well, that’s the strange thing about Widow’s Bay. Though it’s often a collection of horror references and concepts, there’s really very little that is quite like it. However, by breaking the series down into pieces, we can construct a reasonable watchlist of movies and shows that at least capture some aspect of the incredible horror comedy series.

Storm of the Century

Pretty much every Stephen King adaptation pairs well with Widow’s Bay (he was kind of a big inspiration, in case you couldn’t tell), but the eternally underrated Storm of the Century is the one Stephen King story you absolutely need to watch and maybe haven’t seen.

As a massive snowstorm descends upon Little Tall Island, the residents of the small Maine town also receive a mysterious and unwelcome new visitor. They soon find out the two occurrences are connected in ways that will force them to make unthinkable decisions. Along with being a direct influence on Widow’s Bay’s final episodes, Storm of the Century is quietly one of Stephen King’s greatest stories (despite being an original TV screenplay rather than an adaptation of one of the author’s many novels). That’s admittedly a big claim, but this three-part miniseries perfectly captures the small town relationships King excels at without succumbing to an underwhelming giant cosmic spider finale. It’s simultaneously a nearly perfect encapsulation of the author’s legacy and one of his finest original works of the last few decades.

Midnight Mass

You do have to occasionally remind yourself that Midnight Mass is not technically based on a Stephen King story. Yes, it comes to us from Stephen King whisperer Mike Flanagan, and yes, it’s something of an unofficial Salem’s Lot story that’s better than the official Salem’s Lot adaptations. And though those qualities make it easy to fall under Midnight Mass’ spell (especially if you’re just coming down from a Widow’s Bay high), it’s the show’s more unique elements that make it arguably Flanagan’s greatest creation.

What begins as the story of a young priest desperate to bring hope to a small island community soon grows into a poignant and genuinely terrifying examination of the allure and easily corrupted power of faith itself. It’s a series about the monsters born from blind hope for a savior as well as the monsters created when we harden our hearts to the idea of something better. It also features a career-best performance from Hamish Linklater, whose standout Widow’s Bay performance felt directly inspired by this series.

Ravenous

Speaking of Hamish Linklater, those who enjoyed the actor’s flashback episode in Widow’s Bay should watch The Witch: Robert Eggers’ beloved slice of New England period piece folk horror. Those who have seen The Witch a few too many times (there are dozens of us!) should instead consider checking out Antonia Bird’s 1999 film, Ravenous.

Set during the Mexican–American War, Ravenous follows a group of soldiers who resort to cannibalism and must confront an ancient curse associated with their unforgivable actions. Ravenous is often described as a horror comedy, and its arguably the funniest cannibal comedy this side of Hannibal and Cannibal! The Musical. However, the comedy of this morbid tale is more in line with the Widow’s Bay-esque absurdity of watching increasingly bad decisions play out in a remarkable situation. This is also an arguable entry in the “Men would rather” subgenre.

Blow the Man Down

While not a horror movie, there are three very good reasons to watch Blow the Man Down after Widow’s Bay:

• It’s an incredibly atmospheric depiction of a fishing village
• It’s an absolutely brilliant murder mystery movie that more people need to see
• It features Margo Martindale giving a career-best performance

What does Margo Martindale have to do with Widow’s Bay? I suppose I could argue for her Americans connection to Matthew Rhys, but the truth of the matter is that there is never a bad time to sing the praises of Margo Martindale.

Speaking of singing, Blow the Man Down actually uses sea shanties as the loose framework for its story involving two sisters who dive into the surprisingly deep underbelly of their small town while trying to conceal a murder. Few movies capture the eternally foggy feel of a small fishing village quite like this one, and fewer still use that feel to paint a compelling story about what we hide from the people we know best.

In The Mouth of Madness

Technically speaking, The Fog is the John Carpenter movie that probably has the most in common with Widow’s Bay thanks to its seaside setting and cursed community. To get even more technical, one never really needs a reason to recommend nearly any John Carpenter movie. Did you like Widow’s Bay? Watch Big Trouble in Little China. Why? Why not?

However, In the Mouth of Madness shares an incredibly specific (and incredibly fascinating) plot element with Widow’s Bay: a fictional small town comprised almost entirely of horror tropes. Granted, the town is really just the embodiment of a popular missing author’s various creations rather than a real place, but our brief trip through it evokes that same feeling of being wrapped in a warm, spooky blanket that Widow’s Bay joyfully delivered week after week. It’s also another piece of media that makes you wonder why Castle Rock was rarely half as good as it should have been.

Tucker and Dale vs Evil

Truth be told, Tucker and Dale vs. Evil doesn’t balance comedy and horror quite as well as Widow’s Bay does. You may find an errant scare in this story of two wholesome fellas who accidentally become the villains in a group of teens’ horror story, but Tucker and Dale hasn’t become a cult classic because of its frights. It is, however, one of the absolute funniest horror movies ever made.

You don’t even need to be that familiar with the “Hicksploitation” subgenre the movie most directly draws from to get the whole thing. Even a vague awareness of the concept of young people in peril in the woods will do. And while there is probably an essay to be written about the ways the movie examines our habit of creating villains out of others, it’s mostly an excuse to watch two of the kindest good ole boys you’ll ever meet become increasingly befuddled as a group of kids keep accidentally killing themselves all around them.

Bodkin

Curses aside, the scariest things about small towns are often the little things. You’re sometimes never quite sure if what you’re witnessing is just a little different or truly… off. Even the next Martha’s Vineyard has its quirks. At its best, Bodkin explores the sometimes thin line between outsider’s suspicion and outsider’s intuition.

The show follows a group of podcasters (I know, I know, hear me out) who descend upon a small Irish town to investigate a murder mystery. They initially suspect they’ve found nothing but the world’s quaintest village, but before you can say “Midsommar,” the group discovers that some of the things they’ve been writing off as quirks are signs of something foul. It’s Bodkin’s comedic undertones and its embrace of the weird that make it a more natural companion to Widow’s Bay than the average cozy murder mystery. If you’re looking for something a little more in that style, definitely check out Prime Video’s Deadloch.

Messiah of Evil

If you have a taste for (or, perhaps more accurately, tolerance of) deeply weird, surreal, dreamlike, lethargic horror movies, then it is my great pleasure to add Messiah of Evil to your watchlist.

Though technically set in a California coastal town, it feels more truthful to say that Messiah of Evil explores a particularly strange corner of an especially bizarre Lovecraftian hellscape. This surrealist painting of a slow burn nightmare takes the idea of a cursed town to often indescribable new levels. It’s not for every Widow’s Bay fan, but I can promise you that it will forever linger on the edges of your mind.

The Devonsville Terror

Yes, yes, yes, you should absolutely watch The Wicker Man if you love Widow’s Bay. That foundational piece of cinematic folk horror is clearly one of the biggest influences on Widow’s Bay’s plot and style. But if you hunger for something a touch more obscure, then allow me to recommend The Devonsville Terror.

Is The Devonsville Terror good? Why ask such things when you can bask in the glory of a possibly half-drunk Donald Pleasance investigating a New England town that is supposedly cursed due to their historical violence against witches? It’s rough around the edges to say the least, but this movie’s village in the fall vibes are simply immaculate. Its acknowledgement that the crusade against witches was really just a power play by the patriarchy is also a surprisingly subtle plot point for a movie that feels like it’s based on some unpublished pulp horror paperback.

Grabbers

Despite having the worst (or best, depending on your taste) name in fairly recent horror movie history, Grabbers really is some kind of masterpiece.

This horror comedy begins with an incredibly familiar premise: residents of a small Irish village find themselves under attack from mysterious creatures and only an unlikely pair of cops can stop them. In an incredible twist, though, we soon learn that the only protection against the monsters is to get, and stay, really, really drunk. Setting of the story aside, Grabbers’ most endearing similarity to Widow’s Bay is its commitment to remaining purely fun at every turn.

Wellington Paranormal

Wellington Paranormal exists on a plane that’s parallel to Widow’s Bay. After all, both shows feature members of a municipality dealing with a series of supernatural events. Whereas Widow’s Bay mixes those adventures with moments of serialized compelling character drama, Wellington Paranormal is a deeply, deeply silly episodic series.

Created by Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement of What We Do in the Shadows fame (it’s actually a soft spin-off of that series), Wellington Paranormal is a version of Cops in which said cops must deal with demons and devils. It’s a show best enjoyed by those who find some indescribable pleasure in watching the least capable (and therefore most hilarious) people in the world try to navigate supernatural cases while maintaining an impossibly bureaucratic disposition about the whole thing.

The Babadook

An essential part of Widow’s Bay lore, The Babadook is the film that inspired series creator Katie Dippold to share one of the greatest tweets of all time. It’s a fantastic movie in its own right and one of the most important horror films of the modern era, but you’re also here for the foundations of a generational meme.

Bonus Patricia Double Feature! Friday the 13th Part 2 and Pearl

As the breakout star of Widow’s Bay, Kate O’Flynn’s Patricia often steals the show. However, the character’s two best moments (aside from the reveal of her book van that the rest of the town clearly doesn’t appreciate enough) occur when she hosts the world’s most chaotic dinner party and when we learn that Patricia has long been something of a final girl hiding in plain sight.

If your tastes veer more towards the final girl territory, give Friday the 13th Part 2 a go. Yes, Patricia’s final girl is much closer to Halloween’s Laurie Strode, and no, I’m probably not going to convince you that any of the Friday the 13th movies are masterpieces (despite my lifelong fondness for them). However, Friday the 13th Part 2 is both one of the best-made entries in the franchise and features one of the greatest final girls in horror history: Ginny Field. Intelligent, resourceful, relentless, and not afraid to live as well as survive, Ginny is both a foundational final girl and a subversion of many of the final girl tropes that would eventually emerge.

If you’re more of a chaos party host Patricia fan, then give Pearl a watch. Not only was it directed by Ti West (who also directed one of Widow’s Bay’s best episodes, “Our History”), but it features Mia Goth giving what I feel comfortable describing as a generational performance. No, Patricia isn’t quite as desperate or murderous as Pearl, but the twinkle of madness in her eyes when she envisions a moment of stardom certainly recalls the look on Patricia’s face when she believes she has become the party princess of the island.[end-mark]

The post What to Watch After <i>Widow’s Bay</i> appeared first on Reactor.