teach me the art of war

The Conjuring 2 (2016): I guess I've hit a new phase of my horror journey where I'm now wanting to delve into sequels of movies I've liked, instead of sampling everything as widely as possible? Look at me, getting a better sense of what I like. :))) The Conjuring franchise seems to have found a spot on the same shelf in my mind as Sabriel and Buffy the Vampire Slayer and a whole bunch of classic gothic literature: demons are real and terrifying, but don't worry, you can learn how to resist them by saturating yourself in religious iconography and hanging out in libraries full of magnificent leatherbound books and dangerous occult artifacts! This stuff is mother's milk to the part of me that wishes I were Catholic. I enjoyed it a lot.

That said, I didn't enjoy it quite as much as the first Conjuring. It's very much a rehash of the same basic plot - terrified family needs the Warrens to save them from their haunted house, this time in London. The Warrens have undeniable onscreen chemistry but I was honestly too worried about the young kids involved to get as invested in their marital angst as I think I was supposed to. The main villain of this one ended up being the demon Valak, presenting for some reason as a horrifying nun, and that was really cool and effective. I also continue to love the "based on a true story" framing, though I'm deliberately choosing not to learn anything about the real-life occult events that inspired each episode, because they are certain to be very silly hoaxes and I'd rather live in spooky la-la land.

The Nun (2018): More Conjuring franchise! It always feels kind of...edifying, somehow? when I end up adoring a piece of media that everyone else has panned. Like, it's good to be reminded every so often that the star ratings on review aggregator sites should really only be taken as the very loosest of suggestions. Despite review-induced low expectations, I had a gut feeling that I was going to like this film, which is a sort of indirect prequel to The Conjuring 2 that sets up a backstory for the demonic nun. In short, it's the 50s, and the Vatican has sent a priest and a novitiate to investigate the suicide of a cloistered nun in a remote Romanian abbey. The abbey is in fact the site of an attempted demon-summoning centuries ago, which was thwarted by the Church and the nuns placed there to keep the portal to hell closed through continual prayer. But now the demon has grown stronger and found a way to break through into the world.

The whole thing is so lavishly OTT gothic, you could almost mistake it for a parody of the genre. (But only almost!) We have cavernous candlelit stone chambers, mouldering graveyards, beautiful young women in implausibly flattering habits. Nuns marching into prayer like soldiers, a battleworn unit of spiritual warriors in the fight against Satan himself. Exquisite ancient grimoires being excavated from tombs, their pages full of horribly suggestive illustrations of demons. Dark, aesthetic Catholicism spattered like gore all over absolutely everything. The last time I felt this spoken to as a romantigoth was when I read The Monk by Matthew Lewis at age, oh, seventeen? Truly exhilarating. I want to bathe myself in obscene amounts of this stuff, like a teenage boy with a can of cheap body spray. I want to reek of it for weeks. I want it to roll off me in the most overpowering waves. I hear you, letterboxd commenters saying things like "the plot is stupid" and "it's overreliant on jumpscares", and I say in full-throated response: THE AESTHETIC, THOUGH.

The soundtrack slaps, too. Pitch-black and atmospheric, full of deep Orthodox chants. I fully plan to blast it at top volume in the car.

Pulse (2001): And now for something completely different! Pulse is a work of Japanese techno-horror that dares to ask: what if instead of bringing humanity closer together, this newfangled internet thing were to amplify our loneliness and social fragmentation until we all end up embracing the apocalypse with open arms? So, um. That aged a bit too well.

I like the idea of this one far more than the actual execution, which was slow and dreary and confusing. This is going to sound like such a petty complaint and it possibly just reflects a lack of cultural context on my part, but...the architecture went over my head? Like, I literally couldn't keep track of who was in which location at which time, and that made it hard to keep up with the story. The main sets were a university campus, a plant nursery and a few people's different apartments, but they all had these random dark, empty, creepy rooms that served no clear purpose within the layout, and those random rooms were where a lot of the most important action took place, and I spent a lot of time just being like, why does your apartment block have a taped-off murder basement? Or are we back at the plant shop now? And if so, why does your plant shop have a taped-off murder basement? *shrug* Other Japanese movies have not confused me this way, but I'm not exactly a genre connoisseur, so I can't tell whether it's a specific issue with Pulse or whether this just happens to be the first time my naive Australian eyes have encountered the taped-off murder basement of the standard Japanese plant nursery floorplan that everyone else already takes for granted.

First, some IMPORTANT BOOK NEWS: Ali Hazelwood has written a sequel to The Love Hypothesis!!!!! It's called The Two-Body Problem and will release early next year, and is being described as a slice-of-life dealing with the challenges Adam and Olive face in balancing their relationship with their academic careers. I am going to expire from excitement. Literally, any minute now my heart will stop and I will keel over and die because I need it NOW omfgkajshdfasdfjkh!!!!!!!

Anyway, I've actually been reading a ton lately, but most of it has been nonfiction of the current affairs/politics/pop culture discourse variety that makes me feel exhausted at the mere thought of writing up reviews. But I've managed a few novels as well, and they're a lot more fun to talk about!

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski...whew, how do I explain this? It is presented as an academic monograph about a documentary film that, even in-universe, may or may not actually exist. The manuscript was found after its author Zampanò's death by Johnny Truant, a stranger with no academic background, who for some reason felt compelled to edit the jumbled drafts together into a final work supplemented by his own rambling personal interjections, after which he had it professionally published. There are two main narrative threads - that of the fictional film as described by Zampanò, and that of Johnny Truant's messy life and deteriorating mental health, scattered through the footnotes - with occasional interjections by the book's ostensible editors, and a meaty appendix section including a third standalone epistolary narrative. The page design and typography are unhinged. Seriously, don't bother even trying to read this one as an ebook. You need to hold the physical object in your hands and view each spread exactly as designed.

Of course, I'm probably preaching to the long-since-converted, this being a classic of modern horror lit and you guys on my flist being so much better informed about horror than me. It was cited as a major influence on The Blair Witch Project and the whole found footage horror craze, and more recently, on projects like Backrooms; the horror is in the creeping existential dread and wrongness rather than in jumpscares or violence. I feel like you could have a very robust debate about where the true heart of the story lies: in Johnny's paranoia and tragic family backstory? In the dysfunctional love between the maybe-doubly-fictional documentary maker and his wife? In the subject of the documentary itself, the House, in all its liminal physics-defying mystery? In truth the reading process itself was not enjoyable, which is entirely deliberate on Danielewski's part - the dry, pseudo-academic format, the baffling text layout, and the constant jumping back and forth between main text, footnotes and appendices are as intentionally difficult as he could make them without altogether losing his readers. But the payoff is worth the effort. It's a complex, chewy work that gets inside your brain and stays there; I've finished multiple other books since but my heart has not yet fully moved on from this one.

One note for any potential readers: there were more than a few times when I nearly lost my temper with the brazen use of female characters as sex objects, but hang in there. It doesn't end in a message of feminist triumph or anything but it does bring in some good nuance.

This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me by Ilona Andrews was very enjoyable but...not really all that good? Okay no, wait, that's too harsh. It has a lot of strengths! The protagonist is just really bland (which to be fair was probably deliberate) and prose-wise it was a bit of a slog. The authors (a pseudonymous husband-and-wife writing team) clearly care most about the fun portal fantasy adventure vibes, and they delivered those in spades. I think the best way I can describe the experience is that it's like reading someone's epic-length self-insert fanfic about a doorstopper fantasy series, one of the better written fics that amasses a huge Reddit fandom but is completely culturally detached from the shipping-centric fannish landscape familiar to most of us on DW.

Our heroine, Maggie, wakes up one morning in the grimdark pseudo-medieval world of her favourite unfinished fantasy series that is Legally Distinct From Game of Thrones. No death or real-world traumatic incident precipitated her isekai journey and she is suffering from no amnesia or identity swap; she is fully herself, with herself being so carefully generic and colourless that no reader could possibly find reason not to identify with her. Having arrived with nothing - she's literally naked in a puddle on the road when she wakes - Maggie has to find her footing in a city that has no social security net and relies on complex familial-political networks to function. She claws her way up from beggar to noble, collecting loyal friends and followers as she goes, with the goal of using her foreknowledge of the books' events (she has been portaled in to a point early in the plot) to change the story and prevent a cataclysmic war from killing all her favourite characters. She also accidentally falls in love with a villain who she hates, and spends a great deal of screentime being buffeted from the arms of one handsome, dangerous man with a sword to another.

Like I said, my biggest complaint is Maggie's blank slate "personality", and I'm aware that my bug is probably other people's feature. It is not a short book, and even after having read the whole thing, I can't name a single character trait that makes her stand out. Back home Maggie is a member of the zillennial precariat, with a job-not-a-career and a loving but not notably close family of origin. In the kingdom of Rellas she is an agent of plot around whom all the other, much more interesting but still archetype-conforming characters orbit. That's probably intentional too; at least one character will remind you of your own blorbo.

The main critique I have that is actually "you did this poorly" as opposed to "I'd have preferred you to do something different" is the prose. It's workmanlike, which, fine! But then it tries to do too much description (instead of getting the fuck on with the plot, which is what workmanlike prose is good for) and the result feels less like being immersed in a visual world and more like being given detailed directions for a route I'm about to have to navigate sans Google Maps. I learnt early on that nothing of value was lost if I just skim-read all the environmental descriptions and a bunch of the other "flavour text". Skim-reading a novel goes against all my bookworm instincts, but I guess it's to this one's credit that it was engaging enough to be worth skimming instead of setting it aside for something more artfully written. What it needed most was a really strict line editor to slash every sentence that wasn't pulling its weight. Still. It's a really fun, escapist story, and if you've ever enjoyed self-insert fic in the oldschool, pre-"y/n" style, then this is basically the exact same thing but written by grown adults and professionally proofread. I will likely read the sequel.

Platform Decay by Martha Wells is the latest Murderbot instalment, and I actually don't have much to say except that it was a whole ton of fun and a welcome return to form after the last couple of novels drifted off in a more queerplatonic-relationships-and-explicit-trauma-recovery direction that was slightly less relevant to my interests. Platform Decay is an inventive fast-paced missionfic that ends in Murderbot awkwardly cradling a small child, while my personal best boy(gender-neutral) Three leads a mass SecUnit rebellion in the background. I read it cover to cover in sitting then immediately re-"read" it as an audiobook and it was great both times.

You guys, it is out! The film adaptation of my beloved Reylo-fic-turned-bestselling-original-romcom is out! And it is so! Much! Fun!

Premise, for anyone who's managed to dodge all of both the book's massive hype and my endless gushing: Olive Smith is a biology PhD candidate at Stanford University who gets herself into a pickle when she lies to her best friend Anh and pretends she's seeing someone new in order to ease Anh's conscience about dating a guy who she's head over feet (iykyk) for but is convinced Olive likes too. But then Anh catches Olive in the lab late one night when she's supposed to be on a date with her fictional beau, and in a panic lest her lie fall apart, Olive grabs a random guy in the corridor and kisses him in front of Anh. The guy? Dr. Adam Carlsen, biology professor and notorious asshole who the students are all terrified of. But instead of getting angry, to Olive's astonishment, Dr. Carlsen leans into the charade and agrees to continue posing as her boyfriend. Turns out Stanford is cutting his research funds because they think he's about to defect to another institution, and he thinks that having a steady girlfriend on campus will help convince them he plans to stay put. It's a romcom, so: fake dating shenanigans ensue. Real feelings develop. A misunderstanding threatens to sunder them forever, and then finally they confess their love and ride off into the proverbial sunset together.

This adaptation stars Lili Reinhart as Olive and Tom Bateman (hilariously, the real-life husband of Rey Starwars who Olive is based on) as Adam. Reinhart is incredibly charismatic and really carries the whole thing, but I also appreciated Bateman's take on Adam - he brought out all the assholishness and stilted social awkwardness that the book tells us about but never really shows. He is not the darkly charming Adam Driver lookalike of my heart, but I did get a very good laugh out of the shots of him storming Kylo Ren-like down hallways and sending student after student from his office in floods of angry tears.

The supporting cast are also absolutely stellar. Anh's BFF chemistry with Olive was perfect, and I adored her other close friend/roommate Malcolm, who in book form I liked but was not especially attached to. Both of them absolutely nailed the awkwardness of still very college-minded grad students suddenly forced to spend social time with an established professor (in adaptation, he has become Malcolm's supervisor, which makes the whole absurd dynamic even better). The script added two great parallel scenes that don't exist in the book, one where Adam has to attend a wild party with Olive's friends followed by a second where she has to attend a faculty mixer with his colleagues. In the book, we mostly understand Adam and Olive's age/status difference and the disconnect between their two worlds through Olive's highly subjective, insecure, not-always-reliable internal monologue. It was really satisfying to see it made so concrete.

There are a lot of other changes to the story, but imo they're all similarly well judged. They've smoothed out some of the rough edges that come from the book being both a debut novel and originally conceived as a fanfic - the most outrageous contrivances are scrapped altogether, and the rest streamlined into a more convincing relationship trajectory. Most significantly, this version of Adam has not been secretly pining after Olive since their chance first meeting years ago, but instead falls for her during the course of the fake relationship. As a fan I'm a little sad about this because pathetic pining Adam is of great personal appeal to me, but as a film viewer I think it was a good call, both because the depth of feeling would have struggled to translate into the compressed movie format and because, to be honest, it would probably just have come across as creepy. I was also a little sad that they cut the whole character of Holden, Adam's book best friend, but he does clutter the story a bit and they very much did need the screentime for other things.

The third act doesn't entirely come together and that's mostly the fault of the source material. The large majority of the book is devoted to Adam and Olive's fake relationship, with the last few chapters speedrunning a big villain reveal, heartwrenching breakup, swift resolution and happily-ever-after; it's crowded even on page, basically. The filmmakers tried hard to streamline that part too, but even with their changes and excisions, a whole bunch of stuff just HAPPENS all at once in the final half hour or so and none of it gets any time to breathe. But I can forgive that, because everything that comes before is as funny and steamy and straight-up delightful as I hoped it would be. The film really captures the feel of the book if not its every detail, and while it's not about to supersede the book in my heart, I am so glad it exists.

I didn't bother blogging about last month's release of The Fall of Kylo Ren issue #1 because it was kind of just fine? There was some entertaining anti-Hux pettiness from Kylo and some ground-laying for his growth as a leader going into TROS but mostly it felt like filler before the real action started.

AND NOW THE REAL ACTION HAS STARTED AKSJFHKLAJGSA. So, Kylo is working out while deep in a daydream about Rey - dwelling on their fight against Snoke together, copying her movements beat for beat - when his new situationship Tava Ren arrives to take another stab at winning him over. The Knights of Ren have blundered into an unwinnable conflict with some sort of army of terrifying assassin droids and getting Kylo to help is their only possible chance of survival, so they show up on his flagship with a "gift" of the stolen dark side artifact that kicked off the droid conflict in the first place. Kylo is delighted with this gift, and promptly and predictably activates its power, thus summoning the assassin droids. Throughout the whole thing Tava is snarky and flirty and funny and irresistibly charismatic while Kylo has to double down HARD on all the worst of his stilted, inauthentic Supreme Leader persona to resist her charms, and aaauuugh he is such an embarrassing prick and the sexual tension is off the charts and (unfortunately for Tava, who deserves better) they are SO going to fuck. In my fic if not in canon, though given how brazenly Charles Soule has catered to every other part of my id, at this point it would not surprise me if Kylo actually gets laid on-page by the end of this run.

Anyway to give you guys a little taste, here is the face Tava is making at Kylo:


And here is the face he makes back:


It's not quiiite as bad as the dinner date but it is still PRETTY DAMN BAD. KYLO YOU WRETCHED THING WHAT ARE YOU DOING.

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.