teach me the art of war

Forbidden Fruits 2026: Comedy horror, heavily stylised movie about four young fashion retail workers whose leader, Apple, has them ensnared in a secretive, controlling witches' coven. It was definitely saying something about toxic female friendships, but what exactly that something was, I'm not sure I could tell you. It was very pretty, very vibes-based and not particularly coherent. (Admittedly, I watched it drunk.)

I enjoyed myself anyway, especially because Lili Reinhart is absolutely amazing as Apple. But I was hoping for something more, idk, The Craft meets Mean Girls, which I think is actually what the movie was trying to be, and in the end it just didn't quite get there.

Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022): Also comedy horror. A group of rich, dumb, very dramatic Gen Z friends lock themselves away in a remote mansion for a hurricane party; they are playing what's supposed to be an innocent game of murder in the dark when bodies start turning up for real. This is Glass Onion for morons, in the absolute BEST possible way. I have a lot of affection for Amandla Stenberg from her twin roles in The Acolyte, but she is one of those actors who gives off very strong "knows about TikTok" vibes even when she's running around with a lightsaber, so it was nice to see her sink her teeth into a role where knowing about TikTok was part of the point. She really shone as the troubled, newly sober lesbian protagonist/final girl whose relationships with the group were falling apart even before people started dropping dead.

Us (2019): All horror, no comedy by Jordan Peele starring Lupita Nyong'o. The Wilson family are enjoying a coastal holiday when a family of doppelgängers show up in their driveway hellbent on killing the people whose existence has unwittingly been keeping them enslaved. The doppelgängers, called the Tethered, come from a mysterious underworld and share a soul with their above-world doubles; everything their double does, each of them is forced to perform a twisted simulacrum of, all while trapped in a miserable prison-like space and wearing orange jumpsuits.

I went into this one with extensive spoilers because of the kid characters, and yet I somehow managed not to spoil myself for the final twist, which I'm...not sure if I like or not? I really enjoyed the shock of the reveal, but the longer I've dwelt on it, the more I feel it not just subverts but actually contradicts some of what the movie told us previously. With or without the ending, though, it was a fantastic film and Lupita Nyong'o was breathtakingly good as Adelaide and Red.

Bonus DNF is a thriller, not a horror movie, but I also recently attempted Gravity (2013) - about the sole survivor of an ill-fated mission on the Hubble Space Telescope - and got about halfway through before the stress became too much. Even Sandra Bullock putting in an absolutely amazing performance as a scientist and first time astronaut was not enough to make the sheer cortisol overload worth it for me (and admittedly, my ability to invest in her was hampered by having to fast-forward through her backstory because child death). I love space exploration! I have enjoyed other survival thrillers! But the pacing of this one was just utterly relentless, and the dangers excruciatingly drawn-out, and in the end I couldn't do it.

I've been on a bit of a musical nostalgia kick (rhoda_rants I still need to reply to you about this, you are not forgotten or unwanted I'm just a disaster) revisiting the bands I loved in high school to see how many, if any, I can still appreciate today. My main rule is that I have to be willing to play a whole album all the way through; shitty bands that happened to produce one or two bangers do not count. I've been working my way through my old collection from (loosely) least to most promising, and so far I can report that Behind Crimson Eyes, Pierce the Veil, Aiden, Hawthorne Heights and Hidden in Plain View are all borderline fucking unlistenable, as is Senses Fail's debut album, Let It Enfold You.

Still Searching, though - damn, guys, this is some actually pretty good emo music! It takes the genre's depressive, confessional leanings to the extreme, being basically a concept album about a lightly fictionalised avatar of the lead singer going through a severe mental health crisis. It is angry, angsty, shamelessly self-absorbed, and so honest it almost feels like a privacy violation to listen to. Gets right down into the nitty-gritty of what it's like to have a breakdown. And yes, it is whiny as fuck, but what do you expect? If it's not whiny you're not legally allowed to call it emo, it's just sparkling introspective rock at that point.

My favourite song is the title track, and it pretty much encapsulates the whole album, I think.

Star Wars: Legacy by Madeleine Roux is a brand new Sequels-era novel set during the year between The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker and IT!!! IS!!! FANTASTIC!!!!! Listen, I can't remember the last time I was this excited about a Star Wars novel, and I am going to try and review it as a book and not just as a massive hit of canon Reylo injected straight into my veins, but I probably don't need to disclaim that I am a biased reader here. Still, I know I'm at least capable of receiving canon Reylo content with joy while recognising its artistic shoddiness - I was never exactly kidding myself that TROS was a cinematic masterpiece - and I do think that in addition to being laser-targeted towards my fannish desires this is a genuinely quite good book, certainly on the upper end of the Star Wars tie-in quality spectrum.

So, spoiler-free overview: Rey goes on a quest to try and heal the kyber crystal from the Skywalker lightsaber that broke in two when she and Kylo Ren fought over it. Leia offers to go with her and starts trying to step up as her mentor. There's a wide, silent gulf in their relationship, caused partly by Rey's general wariness after so many bad experiences with would-be mentor figures but mostly by the fact that they're both still struggling in their own ways with the wound of Ben's betrayal. Rey has not confided in Leia or anyone else about the Force bond and is being eaten away by grief and rage over what happened - rage against an older, more confident, better educated man who tricked her into thinking he wanted her as a person rather than for what he could get out of her, and rage against herself for being naive enough to fall for it. Basically she is going through the exact same agony that every girl with a weakness for bad boys goes through at some point in her late teens or early adulthood, only it's about the Force instead of sex. Added to that is the crushing sense that there's no redemption left for her and it's all Kylo's fault: because of him Luke Skywalker is dead, the Jedi are all dead, nearly all memories of them have been obliterated, and she has nowhere else to turn for guidance on how to master her powers and become who the galaxy needs her to be. Leia has barely six months of formal education as a Jedi, and having her around makes it impossible for Rey to put Kylo out of her mind. (I, too, would have qualms about apprenticing myself to the mother of the fuckboy who lured me into a whirlwind fling and then promptly broke both my heart and my most treasured heirloom possession.)

Leia, meanwhile, has no real idea how to be who Rey needs her to be, either. She still loves her son desperately and the only remaining outlet for that love is pain. She feels that she has failed everyone else who relied on her, and her nights are plagued by recurring dreams of an alternate reality in which she never quit Jedi training. She is a powerful, confident warrior with the power to take apart First Order warships with her bare hands; her family and friends are all alive and by her side; an awed Ben, untouched by the dark side, begs her to teach him all her cool Jedi tricks. But in her waking life she has to essentially mother this new, lost girl while waging war against the outcome of her last catastrophic attempt at motherhood.

This is a Star Wars book, and a precursor to TROS, so I don't think it counts as a spoiler to say that things eventually resolve happily in the forging of a deep, inspiring bond between Rey and Leia. But the emotional journey that gets them there is complicated and beautiful and goes deep into their psychology, Rey's in particular. It sets up her temptations to the dark side in a way the movies never did, and makes her arc in TROS so much more satisfying as a result.

( Spoilery discussion )

Honestly, I could keep writing as much again if I let myself. I could regurgitate half the book to you guys and be like "This! This is my favourite part!" every time. I guess it's nice to know that after almost a decade, Star Wars still has the power to stoke me to a fever-pitch of fannish excitement? I was scribbling notes and underlining as I read. I can't remember the last time I did that to a book. I already want to read it again, and maybe also buy it as an audiobook so I can listen to it, too. So much good stuff about my blorbos in here! I'm so happy!

Han Solo - Hunt for the Falcon is a 2025 comic book miniseries following Han's attempts to track down the stolen Millenium Falcon at some point between the time his family imploded and the start of The Force Awakens. Plot-wise, it is a weak and rather unconvincing fetch quest based on the Falcon's chain of custody as described by Rey at the start of TFA: she stole it from Unkar Plutt, who stole it from the Irving Boys, who stole it from Ducain (though in the film this was all new information to Han, so the fact that he now knows it in this comic is a silly little mini-retcon).

But the plot, honestly, doesn't matter all that much. Really this is a character study of Han post-divorce, trying to figure out who to be now that he's no longer either a smuggler or a husband and father. His estrangement from Leia and Ben hangs like a cloud of thick grief over everything. He misses them both, but he also misses the days before they came along when he was free to pursue his own whims and ambitions without thought for how it would affect anyone else. His nostalgia for the glory days causes some major friction with Chewie, who loyally comes along on the Falcon quest but whose own family life is going well and who very much is not interested in returning to that chaotic bachelor lifestyle. We see through a series of flashbacks that Han liked to play the "fun dad" with Ben while making Leia the bad cop; that he and Leia argued a fair bit, including in front of Ben; that he never fully adapted to civilian life and that, even before the family unit collapsed, he was apt to chafe against its paucity of life-or-death thrills. So basically, he was a good-for-nothing smuggler who turned family man without really planning or emotionally preparing for what that would mean, and now has no idea how to pick up the pieces. I love him so much and the silly plot is worth wading through just for that.

Still catching up with my backlog. Theme is, um. *points upwards*

Midsommar (2019): This is one of the most striking horror movies I've watched to date. Grieving the loss of her parents and sister in a horrific murder-suicide, Dani joins her boyfriend (an anthropology PhD whose plans to break up with her were also interrupted by the deaths) on a boys' trip to rural Sweden, to celebrate the summer solstice with the pagan cult in which one of the friends was raised. Everything is sun-drenched and floral, the cultists all clad in serene white and perpetually smiling; the warm welcome they show Dani contrasts starkly with the barely veiled indifference of her boyfriend and the contempt of his friends. It's all so perfectly idyllic - and yet, they're a cult, and this is a horror movie. So naturally the visit goes GREAT. :)))

Florence Pugh is amazing as Dani. The scene at the beginning, when she first receives the news about her family, was such a gut-wrenchingly real, raw depiction of grief that I only barely managed not to nope out. Her shitty boyfriend was finding her too needy even before she lost her whole family; she's under constant pressure to put on the most coping front she can, painfully aware that her "support network" sees her as a burden. ( Spoilers )

Smile (2022): As far as I can tell, this film got made because someone reached the end credits of It Follows and said "Great, now take it from the top, but a bit less good this time." Dr. Rose Cotter, a psychologist working in an emergency mental health unit, contracts a sort of contagious demon from one of her patients. The entity follows you around for a few days, appearing in the form of different people smiling the same creepy smile at you. Then it takes over your body and forces you to commit gruesome suicide in front of a witness, who then becomes the entity's next victim. The supposed irony of Rose's professional background - she treats crazy people, but now everyone thinks she's crazy! Cue Alanis! - is milked for all the heavy-handed messaging about mental health stigma it can possibly yield. There are a shitton of jumpscares. That's about it.

Here's a screencap of the creepy smile. If that image scares you in a way that you'd like to experience more of, then it's by no means a bad use of ~2hrs of your life! I had a pretty good time, to be honest, but it was all empty calories. It's probably not one I'm going to feel moved to rewatch.

Late Night with the Devil (2023): A 1970s late night talk show host, played by David Dastmalchian, gets more than he bargained for when he invites a possessed girl to appear on his Halloween special in the hopes of boosting his flagging ratings. This was good solid fun with great acting and some great campy scares. I wasn't 100% sold on the surreal twist in the final act, but that's more of a "this wasted its chance to end stronger" complaint rather than actively detracting from the film, if that makes sense. I liked it a lot! And I'd like to see more of Dastmalchian, I think. The only other role of his I've seen is when he played Gurathin in Murderbot, and since I hated the adaptation in general and his character specifically, I don't think that appearance did him justice. He acted the HELL out of this.

I'm also very interested to see more of Ingrid Torelli, who played the possessed girl. She's young and very early in her career so there's not exactly much backlog to delve into, but I found her extremely charismatic. And apparently she's Australian! We're such a horror powerhouse. Go us. :')

We Bury the Dead (2024): Speaking of Australian horror... The US accidentally deploys an experimental weapon off the coast of Tasmania, killing literally every single life form on the whole island. Daisy Ridley plays an American woman, Ava, whose husband was staying south of Hobart on a work retreat when it happened, and who has come to join the body retrieval effort to find him. On arrival Ava quickly learns that rumours of some of the dead coming back to life as zombies are true, and also that Hobart is still on fire and the army won't be letting anyone travel south until the flames are out. Unwilling to wait that long once she sees some of the zombies showing signs of what look like self-awareness, hoping desperately to find her husband resurrected and still himself, she and the wildcard fellow retrievalist she has bonded with give their unit the slip and set off alone for the husband's resort.

I watched this mainly for Daisy Ridley and did NOT expect to love it as much as I did. I spent the first few minutes uncharitably annoyed because Ava showed up in an Australia that has literally just lost, like, a full percentage of our population in a tragedy caused by her shithole fucking country (sorry US friends I love youse really) and immediately started trying to play the sympathy card about her bereavement to the visibly exhausted Australian soldier manning the registration desk, thinking she could get a super special exemption to go look for ONLY her husband and not be bothered to pitch in with the rest of the cleanup effort. (Australia is of course in no way the primary or intended victim of the American cultural tendency to view the whole rest of the world as a painted backdrop on which American stories, the stories that matter, play out - but we have taken enough collateral over the years that I have some bad feelings pent up, okay.) But I got past that quickly because 1) grief can make self-absorbed jerks of everyone, not just Americans and 2) her bullshit did actually get called out later in the film. Meanwhile, the meat of the story turned out to be that ( spoilers ) The zombies aren't really the source of much of the horror at all, and the ending left me so fucking happy, in a way that I would never have expected from a zombie flick.

I think We Bury the Dead and Midsommar are tied for my favourites in this post, and are probably up there with my favourites of this year's whole horror binge so far.

This is...a really bad movie? Like, I knew going in that it was controversial and polarising, but I didn't expect it to be so badly made. Tonally it is straight-up incompetent: Gibson seems to want every moment that's drawn from the gospels to be equally weighty, meaning there are no lulls to make the crescendos stand out, so everything kind of just blurs into a sound-wall of emotional bombast. But then at the same time he seems more concerned about preserving the dignity of his characters than connecting us to their humanity, so we end up with all these ridiculously muted reaction scenes, like Mary watching her son get scourged half to death with only a single tasteful tear rolling down her cheek. Satan is depicted as a very pale twink with no eyebrows whose MO is to gently verbally discourage Jesus from going through with the sacrifice while menacingly stroking his pet snake. Judas gets mauled by a werewolf, I think? But then he's fine? (It happens very fast, in the dark, then cuts straight back to Jesus getting tormented. So IDK.)

I will grant that the violence itself is very brutal, and I guess if this was your first exposure to the gruesome historical realities of crucifixion, then the film might blow your socks off on those grounds alone. But the characters are so lifeless and the Satan stuff so cartoonish that I find it hard to take seriously even with my strong religious predisposition to do so.

On a more nitpicky note, I'm also annoyed by the Romans speaking Ecclesiastical instead of Classical Latin. Strictly speaking in that part of the empire at that time they should have been using Greek, but I can forgive the filmmakers preferring Latin for the sake of mainstream audiences; what I can't forgive is them not bothering to look up even the basics of classical pronunciation that any first year student from a half-competent classics department could have helped them with. I was SO ON BOARD for the idea of a script written entirely in ancient languages, but if you're going to make life so much harder for yourself in the first place, why the fuck would you not put in just that little bit of extra effort to do the thing properly? If that's how little thought or care Gibson put into his handling of the very accessible, widely studied Latin language then I shudder to think how bad his reconstructed Aramaic must be.

So, yeah. Unimpressed to say the least. I got about halfway through last night and will probably watch the rest tonight so as not to waste the $2.99 I spent on digital rental, but I did NOT expect to be this bored by the all-time most famously graphic film depiction of the central event of my faith.

There is a story about a minister in Scotland in the eighteenth century who survived in his parish for ten years on a repertoire of four sermons. When some of his congregation asked whether they might have more variety he replied: ‘My friends, my sermons are intended to do you good. When I see that you practise what I have been preaching for so many years, then I will treat you to something different.’
~ Peter Cameron, Necessary Heresies

I’m sharing this quote mostly because it’s hilarious, but also because it makes a good point. I know I, at least, have an awful tendency to collect Christian teachings the way I collect books: greedily, with great self-satisfaction, at far too rapid a pace for me to ever put most of them to their intended use. How much more profitable it would be, and how much less fun, to really lock in and master what I’ve already received before reaching for the next theological ladder-rung!

With that said, here's some recent church-adjacent reading:

( Three books under the cut )

I've been thinking lately about modern vs traditional religious communication, and how prone we are to latching onto the the style and wording of our hymns/prayers/creeds/scriptural translations as somehow integral to the value of the message. Most recently it's reached me in the form of Anglicans wanking about the 1662 BCP vs the modernised Common Worship, but it happens everywhere from KJV purists to the elderly members of my own congregation who take serious offence over our minister referencing popular cinema in his sermons.

In one sense I get it, because I, too, like old things. The aesthetic, the mystique, the sense of continuity, the weight of long consensus and that little bit of extra effort they demand from modern audiences are all very attractive to me; also, a lot of modern Christian cultural products are just genuinely execrable. Non-Christian friends, you would not believe the things I have suffered while tuning into Christian radio! The IQ points I have haemorrhaged just from glancing at the fiction shelf of the local Christian bookshop! How much less embarrassing it is to withdraw into the venerable safety of organ hymns and thee/thou prayer language, and pretend that all the cringey stuff coming out of American megachurches and "hello fellow kids"-style youth ministry has nothing to do with me.

But on the other hand, in Christianity as much as in any other discipline, the writings and works of art we hold up as Culturally Important(TM) today were generally not created with posterity foremost in mind - they were created in the common language of their own day, in the culturally relevant forms of their time, usually (at least in the case of evangelically purposed materials) with the aim of reaching as wide an audience as possible. The gospels and epistles themselves were written in idiomatic Greek to reach an audience full of slaves, women, children, and assorted unwashed masses. So there's a very real sense in which works that strive to convey the Christian essentials in modern, widely accessible formats are truer to the spirit of those older works than the works themselves as preserved in amber today.

(There's also the deeper fact that Christianity is not actually supposed to be cool or glamorous or to confer social status on its adherents, but my understanding of that is still evolving and it also veers into much more theological territory than I'd like to discuss off-filter, so I'll just leave that there.)

All this is to say that I've been watching The Chosen, a TV series that dramatises Jesus' ministry and the lives of his first followers. I. AM. OBSESSED. It is actually good? Like, well-made and interesting? It is an enjoyable, entertaining work of art that stays true to the gospel narratives but fleshes them out into something that really resonates as human and relatable. I get to see Jesus Christ, the God of all creation made flesh, clowning around to amuse little children. Joking with His friends. Enjoying a simple meal. I get to see joy and disbelieving wonder on the faces of the people who experienced His miracles not as Sunday School lessons but as concrete, meaningful changes in their own personal lives. I get to see people being people, as surely in Roman-occupied first century Palestine as they are today. It's not VeggieTales for grownups, I swear to you guys. It is actual telly that actual people would actually, conceivably want to watch for pleasure and not just out of grim Christian duty. It is also an evangelically minded preaching of the gospel, but it's not only that, and it doesn't taste of medicine. It is blowing my tiny mind. I've never till now not had to work to make these stories feel real. Like, I know intellectually that they're true, but they feel so distant. This show brings them right up close in a way that feels...honestly, almost fannish. I'm not sure of the strict theological soundness of engaging with my religion as a fandom but, hey, black-or-white, thinking about Jesus has got to be better than not thinking about Jesus in any given moment, right?

The show also runs laps around the kind of storytelling that thinks it has to be ~twisty and ~shocking and ~unpredictable to keep people engaged. It's so much fun to start each episode knowing, oh, this is Mary Magdalene, she's going to get exorcised! Oh, this is the wedding at Cana, He'll be turning water into wine! and then spending the whole episode looking forward to the payoff with ever-mounting anticipation. I know all these stories. Everyone who's grown up in a culturally Christian community knows half these stories even if they've never in their life been to church. Stories that are actual good stories don't get boring just because you know the ending. If anything, I think knowing the broad outline of the plot can, in a well-handled production, free you to savour the nuances of the retelling, to notice the details, to draw out new messages from old. I know in fannish circles I'm 100% preaching to the choir on that one, but far too few TV showrunners are on the same page as us.

So, yeah. The Lord is my blorbo now, sorry guys. I'll try to keep it off main. At least I'm free from the burden of having to ship Him with everyone like I do with Kylo Ren.

Backrooms (2026): I loved this!!! Admittedly, my reception has been coloured by the sheer delight of getting to go see it in theatre; I was able to book the perfect seat in an otherwise empty row, I treated myself to a big cup of mixed lollies in a fit of childlike exuberance, and all in all a great time was had while my husband generously managed the kids' bedtime alone. Under those circumstances the movie would have had to be very bad indeed before it would have dented my joy, but I do think it was genuinely good - especially for something made by a twenty-year-old youtuber.

Based on an internet creepypasta that I'd never heard of in my life but that is apparently hugely popular with Gen Z, Backrooms is about a struggling furniture store owner who passes through a wall in the back of his shop and finds himself in a liminal space of huge, labyrinthine office rooms that are just Not Quite Right: the architecture is all off-kilter, everything is faded yellow, and the space is completely empty aside from the scattering of random items in unlikely places throughout. His therapist gets roped into it as well, and two of his young employees. The ambience and sound design are key to the horror: not a lot of action happens, but the visual wrongness never lets up, and the awful noises made by the Mysterious Thing that stalks the backrooms had me clutching the armrests. If I get a second chance at an evening out then I am going to spend it on Obsession, but a part of me kind of wishes I could go back and see this one on the big screen again.

As Above, So Below (2014): My trip to see Backrooms was a second attempt at an evening out; the first one fell over, and As Above, So Below was my streamable-at-home consolation prize, plucked from a "You're obsessed with Backrooms, now what's next?" listicle. I can see their point, but the tone could hardly be more different and for me this one scratched a completely different itch. It's about a rogue archaeologist and her thrown-together team of urban explorers who blunder into a haunted hell dimension while searching the Paris catacombs for the Philosopher's Stone. It is ridiculous, corny, historically incompetent, and overall spooky as fuck. Someone clearly said, "Imagine if Indiana Jones was a beautiful twentysomething woman! And imagine if her tomb runs were even scarier and more deadly! No, don't worry about the plot, we're going for Vibes here, it doesn't have to withstand even three seconds of scrutiny! Also, I can get us approval to film in the actual real catacombs!" And then they took that as a mission statement and committed to it with their whole heart and soul. It was so dumb. I had such a good time.

The one misstep that I did actually take issue with was the choice to frame it as found footage. I get the vision, I do! But the script and the acting and the overall story are just way too campy to pass as subject matter for low-lit handcams. Absolutely no one is mistaking these people as real. They are actors reading lines. They are so, so obviously actors reading lines. They are having earnest dialogue about Nicholas fucking Flamel! The found footage conceit kept breaking my ability to immerse myself in the camp, and the camp kept breaking my ability to immerse myself in the found footage, and I think ultimately it would have been a much stronger movie if they'd just scrapped the handcams and accepted that nothing about the project was going to lend itself to realism. It should have been shot like the 80s-action/adventure-inspired brain candy it was.

The Employees by Olga Ravn, trans. Martin Aitken: This Danish novella tells the story of a corporate space expedition gone wrong through a series of transcribed statements from employees aboard the ship. The statements are framed as having been given to a review team sent by the head office; no further context is supplied, except what can be pieced together from the statements themselves. The employees comprise natural born humans and lab-made cybernetic individuals called humanoids. Conditions are dire; both kinds of employee are effectively slaves, and devotion to the company has been deeply embedded in their psyches. Despite this, a rudimentary sort of rebellion is fomenting. The higher-ups have been rolling out a series of cheap, easily scalable technologies designed to paper over the catastrophic emotional wounds they are inflicting on their workforce, the latest of which are a mysterious set of objects from an alien planet that seem to exert some sort of lulling effect on people who get close to them. This ends about as well as anyone who doesn't sit on a board of directors could have told you from the start.

So basically, this story is a critique of late capitalist office culture. The message is not exactly subtle, but the trappings are so enthrallingly weird and creative that it ends up feeling like a lot more than the sum of its parts.

And Then There Were Nuns by Jane Christmas: This is a memoir by an established travel writer and devout Anglican who spends a year trying to become a nun. My first temptation is to scrutinise whether she really meant to be a nun or had just scented another marketable adventure, but I'm intentionally slapping that impulse away, because the book is lovely and deserves to be taken on its merits. And regardless of her initial purity of intention, the experience takes Christmas to some very heavy places. A session of lectio divina near the start of the process stirs up the memories of a rape she's spent decades of her life pretending never happened, so while discerning a possible vocation and grappling with her religious identity, she also ends up having to walk this painful path of trauma healing.

I also suspect that Christmas' obvious unsuitedness to cloistered life is exactly what makes the book work: she makes a good mediator between the kind of woman who is capable of becoming a nun, and the kind of woman (hi) who is not remotely capable of becoming a nun but could stand to profit from learning more about their ways. Christmas' fantasies of a life spent in an aesthetically pleasing state of leisurely communion with God are promptly supplanted by a hefty chore load, a jam-packed worship timetable, and the demand for a total renunciation of self-will. It’s not the big picture stuff she ends up chafing against. It’s the petty deprivations, like the dowdy habits (Christmas considers herself a fashionista) and the annoyance of not being allowed to finish her game when the hour of recreation ends. I get this. I think almost all of us probably get this, regardless of our vocation. I would give my life for my kids without a moment’s hesitation but will I give my morning coffee? Will I close my browser window, right this second, and go do something that benefits them instead? Because that’s what convent life is set up to train nuns to do. And watching an ordinary, self-willed woman fail at it is somehow very inspiring: I couldn’t do it either, not properly, but perhaps I could start doing a little bit more of it here and there! And perhaps that would be better than nothing!

At one point Christmas shared a remark from a priest, that taking confession from nuns is like being stoned to death with popcorn. I think that image will stick with me for a long time to come.

(Yup, still sick and out of commission. Here are three more silver linings.)

Host (2020): As my horror binge has continued, I've already started to notice diminishing returns on the actual fear element - desensitisation, you know? But this one gave me a good hard scare. Set during the COVID pandemic, it's a little under an hour long and confined entirely to a Zoom call between a group of friends who have decided to conduct a virtual seance. The seance works. Aside from being scary as fuck, I really enjoyed how the film made use of the weirdness of life during lockdowns: new relationships forced to turn prematurely cohabitating, established friendships strained by distance, one of the characters reflexively stopping in the middle of a terrifying demonic manifestation to put on her mask before leaving the house. The storytelling is super lo-fi and pared-down, and I think it's a really good example of how a simple idea done cheaply and right can outperform many more lavish productions.

Halloween (1978): I have now watched the first instalments of all the "big three" teen slasher franchises, and this was by far my favourite. Michael Myers is an ontologically evil six-year-old who murders his teenage sister right after she's done having sex. Fifteen years later, he escapes from an insane asylum and goes back home to kill a bunch more teenagers before, during or immediately after sex. Jamie Lee Curtis is such a lovable Final Girl in this, and the music has to be up there with some of the most memorable movie theme songs of all time. I think I disagree very firmly with John Carpenter's conjecture that a pure, inhuman killing machine would be scarier than an actual character with actual motives, but I do admire the total lack of pretence to deeper meaning. Sometimes you want to watch "elevated" horror with Themes and Meaningful Stakes and shit; other times you just want to watch a monster in a mask cut people up for no reason.

White Zombie (1932): Did you guys know that zombies originate from Haitian folklore? Because I did not! In their original form, they are not plague-spreaders or brain-eaters but cheap, mindless labour in thrall to the sorcerers who raised them; early Western use of the lore seems to have revolved around zombies being forced to work on sugar plantations. In White Zombie, the first ever zombie movie, that is exactly what's happening. But one plantation owner takes the exploitation further when he enlists the help of sorcerer Bela Lugosi to zombify Madeleine, the newlywed woman he's obsessed with, and compel her into his romantic servitude. It is a gloriously silly story, shoddily produced by contemporary standards and almost comical by today's; I loved it anyway, not least for the maiden-in-trailing-gown-traipses-sadly-through-massive-gothic-castle vibes it delivered par excellence. And Bela Lugosi is, as always, brilliant. His smug, smirking expressions managed to be simultaneously hilarious and intimidating; I feel like even in intentional comedy-horror, those two emotions usually have to take turns? Good times.