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I discovered The Gorgon through Jack’s piece last year in A Morbid Scholar’s Treasury of Euro Gothic Cinema, where he enthuses about this Hammer Horror film that replaces the usual vampires and werewolves with a snake-headed gorgon. And while he prepared me for the schlocky thrills, I wasn’t prepared for how absolutely sumptuous this movie looks. Every single frame could be framed and hung on a wall. This might be the most visually gorgeous film I’ve watched all month. Maybe all year.
The bohemian chaos of the Heitz chateau with its cluttered artist’s studio, canvases stacked against walls, paint-splattered furniture, creative disorder that feels both lived-in and romantic. Dr. Namaroff’s laboratory is also a feast for the eyes: walls completely lined with apothecary bottles in amber and green glass, anatomical posters covering every available surface, brass instruments catching the light, a densely layered scientific atmosphere that makes you want to spend hours just examining the background. The ruined castle everyone keeps wandering into any time they step outside for a stroll, with its crumbling stone archways, cobwebs thick as curtains, moonlight streaming through broken windows, atmospheric shadows pooling in corners. Those autumn forests with leaves perpetually blowing through them, carpeting the ground somber pools of shadows.
The color palette alone! Deep burgundies and forest greens, golden lamplight glowing against dark wood paneling, the rich jewel tones of Victorian clothing against all that Gothic architecture. Even the outdoor scenes at dusk have this painterly quality, all purple shadows and orange-pink skies.
In the early 1900s Vandorf, folks keep turning up dead. Turned to stone, specifically. When young artist Bruno Heitz dies under mysterious circumstances, along with his pregnant girlfriend, his father arrives to investigate and also gets petrified (or, “gorgonized,” as one of the characters says later.) Then Bruno’s brother Paul shows up, immediately falls for the beautiful Carla Hoffman in a record time of about twenty seconds, and gets caught up in the mystery himself.
There’s a possessive doctor (Peter Cushing, playing it cold and calculating), a corrupt police inspector (Patrick Troughton, about whom I couldn’t stop thinking he looked like Jason Isaacs even though Isaacs would have only been one year old when this was made), and eventually Christopher Lee shows up as a disheveled professor with overgrown facial hair who barges into the investigation.
The monster is beside the point. You barely see Megaera (not Medusa, but one of her sisters, although the movie gets its mythology muddled, calling her by the name of one of the Furies). When you do glimpse her, it’s in shadows or reflections, and the final reveal of the full creature makeup it’s…not great. But that doesn’t matter because the film isn’t really about the gorgon. It’s about Carla, who suffers memory lapses during full moons and doesn’t know what’s happening to her. It’s about Dr. Namaroff, who clearly knows more than he’s saying and is desperately trying to protect someone. It’s about Paul falling for a woman who may be inhabited by an ancient curse. The romantic tension and the gothic atmosphere are what this movie is.
Barbara Shelley is luminous as Carla, playing her with dignity, confusion, and a mounting sense of doom. It’s tragic watching her realize something is very off and wrong, but not understanding what. Cushing gets to be unsympathetic and lustful and kinda gross, and Lee, arriving late in the film looking completely unkempt (the wig! the mustache!), provides a weird energy, he’s almost comic relief despite playing the Van Helsing role, throwing his physical presence around to intimidate everyone. When he jumps out a window to escape arrest, it’s genuinely amusing to watch his tall, lanky frame squeeze through.
I loved everything about this: the gorgeous autumnal cinematography, the rich color saturation, the way every scene felt like a painting come to life. The methodical, atmospheric pacing. The moody romantic melodrama where the monster is more psychological threat than physical presence. It’s a sumptuous supernatural soap opera of a good time.
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With each new book I read from Cassandra Khaw, I fall more in love with their visceral irreverence. Here, they’ve taken dark academia tropes and soaked them in gore and body horror. The Hellebore Technical Institute for the Gifted is a school for the dangerously gifted, the Anti-Christs and Ragnaroks, the world-eaters and apocalypse-makers. These aren’t students who blithely levitate pencils or conjure a bit of fire. They’re capable of ending civilizations. One can tear reality apart with their voice. Another transforms into something with too many teeth and mouths and eyes and hunger that can’t be satisfied. One might be the son of the literal devil. Also, one of them has something to do with cicadas. It’s a lot!
When Alessa Li gets kidnapped and forcibly enrolled, she’s promised redemption and a normal life after graduation. Instead, on graduation day, the faculty goes on a ravenous rampage and devours the student body. Alessa and a handful of classmates barricade themselves in the library, where they discover they must offer a human sacrifice or the faculty will break down the door and finish what they started.
The narrative jumps between “Before” (Alessa’s time at Hellebore leading up to graduation) and “Days…” (the nightmare of being trapped in the library), which was initially disorienting but that temporal whiplash adds to the nightmarish quality, keeping you off-balance and uncertain about what’s coming. The body horror is relentless and genuinely disturbing; intestines hanging from ceilings, grotesque transformations, unholy, unspeakable violence but actually described in such visceral detail that you feel it all the way down to your toes. Khaw doesn’t flinch away from the gore, and neither should you if you’re going to read this.
The characters are monsters in every sense, literally (they have apocalyptic powers) and figuratively (they’re all varying degrees of morally bankrupt). Alessa herself is an unreliable narrator who presents horrors with this weird mix of disgust and casual coolness that somehow works. None of these people are especially likable, but they’re compelling, and watching them navigate impossible choices while trapped together creates a dreadful trainwreck of claustrophobic intensity that doesn’t let up. I’ve seen reviewers complain about Khaw’s vocabulary—words like “abattoir,” “haruspicy,” “chelicerae,” and “etiolated” — as if having to reach for a dictionary is some kind of personal attack. If encountering unfamiliar words makes you feel stupid, that’s a you problem, not a writing problem. Grow up. Khaw uses language precisely, choosing words that create specific atmospheric effects rather than settling for easier synonyms. The ornate vocabulary isn’t pretentious flourish; it’s deliberate craft that deepens the otherworldly, nightmarish quality of Hellebore itself.
The worldbuilding stays intentionally vague; the magic system has no clear rules, the school’s curriculum barely gets explored, and I think that haziness serves the story perfectly. Not getting bogged down in the mechanics puts the focus on immediacy and urgency. This isn’t about understanding how Hellebore works… it’s about surviving it. The lack of clear rules makes everything more unsettling, more dreamlike, and horrifically unpredictable. After all the butchery and bloodshed, the ending caught me completely off guard, brutal and bold and perfectly fitting for all the chaotic carnage that came before it. This is dark academia cranked to maximum midnight void-darkness and then splattered with heaps of globby entrails (and the impish devilry of those big, hard-to-pronounce words!), and I’m here for every gruesome moment.
ALSO LOOK AT THAT FREAKING GORGEOUS BOOK COVER! I did a bit of digging and I found that the artist for the illustration is Zoë van Dijk. I don’t know about you, but if I see a beautiful book cover, I want to know who created it!
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I watched Companion four hours ago, and I genuinely cannot remember it. Not in a “the details are fuzzy” way, but in a “did I actually watch this or did I just scroll through stills on my phone?” way. I know Sophie Thatcher was in it, and everyone says she’s great, so sure, I’ll take their word for it. There was a house. There were other people. Things happened. A robot gained consciousness and questioned her existence and the nature of love in an unequal power dynamic. I think there was blood? The trailer had already told me she was a companion robot, so there was no surprise there, just watching a story I’d encountered before play out in the most obvious way.
I don’t think Companion is bad, exactly. It seems competently made. But it’s aggressively forgettable, like eating a meal that technically had food on the plate but left no impression whatsoever. I kept thinking “why am I watching this?” while I was watching it, which is never a good sign. It seems like it wants to say something about AI consciousness, about abusive relationships, about what makes us human, but I’m not sure it actually digs into any of those ideas. It gestures at them and then just… moves on. Maybe I missed something. I don’t know.
Here’s what I can tell you: I read Sierra Greer’s Annie Bot early on in 2024 and I still remember that story. If you want to actually feel something about an AI’s growing consciousness, if you want to sit with the uncomfortable reality of a relationship where one person has all the power and the other is learning what autonomy even means, maybe read that instead. Annie is a top-of-the-line robot girlfriend, and as her intelligence evolves, she begins to question her purpose and her relationship with Doug, her owner. Doug’s behavior is upsetting in its gross specificity: choosing Annie’s outfits, controlling her libido settings, expecting perfection (she’s a bedroom bot, but he’s criticizing her kitchen cleaning!) while claiming to love her growing humanity. I found Annie, a robot, more human and more compelling than anyone in Companion, which probably says something about the difference between a story that uses AI as a plot device and one that uses it to examine what it means to become yourself. Or maybe it just says something about what works for me.
I also read Olivia Gatwood’s Whoever You Are, Honey last year. It plays with similar themes of identity and performance, hints at questions of consciousness and reality (one character may be questioning whether she’s even real), but it never makes it obvious. It’s about the personas we adopt, the ways we perform ourselves for others, the strange intimacy and envy that can develop between women. The narrative has a dreamlike quality and the ending doesn’t resolve neatly, but I prefer it that way. It keeps evolving in my imagination. Companion was over the moment it ended.
I can’t recommend a movie I don’t remember. But here are two books for your TBR instead.
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I had fun with this one, what a hoot! A group of municipal employees are herded off to a remote camp for team-building before breaking ground on their new shopping mall. The problem is that the mall is being built on farmland stolen from farmers without compensation. Lina just came back from sick leave and immediately knows something’s not quite right; her signature is on contracts she doesn’t remember signing. Her boss is the type to respond to questions and inquiries with motivational-speak and a manic smile that never reaches her eyes. The project manager, Jonas, is magnificently slimy, the kind of guy who steals your ideas and acts like he’s doing you a favor by letting you work with him.
Kolarsjons Holiday village is one of those budget retreat centers that looks like an abandoned summer camp, with spotty wifi, bare-bones cabins, the kind of place that screams, “We got a good deal on this! HAVE FUN!” They assign everyone to cabins by astrological sign, which feels perfectly on-brand for corporate team-building. Nobody seems concerned that they’re completely isolated by a lake in the middle of nowhere. They do trust exercises, sack races, and zipline nonsense, and then people start disappearing and getting killed….by someone wearing the creepy papier-mache mascot head! Kills are brutal and creative: a frying pan, a chainsaw, a golden shovel. The killer isn’t a supernatural force or an unstoppable slasher movie villain; they just seem to be a person with weapons and intent who keeps coming. They’re clumsy, misjudge their swings, and get their weapon stuck in things. The human awkwardness of it all maybe makes everything more disturbing…?
Watching these people try to survive together is almost as entertaining as the kills. They outnumber the killer by a lot, but workplace dynamics being what they are, they’re too busy protecting themselves, deflecting blame, and covering their own asses to coordinate any meaningful defense. Corporate culture breeds this kind of murky self-preservation instinct, and when actual survival is on the line, already there’s no trust between anyone, so of course it is only going to get worse.
If you work with people, you recognize these guys; they’re the ones you get stuck with at office parties, team meetings, after-work drinks, or just sitting near during regular work hours. Insufferable in normal circumstances. Watching them panic and turn on each other when someone’s trying to decapitate them is grimly cathartic.
If I understand correctly, the movie is based on a novel by Mats Strandberg and I’d like to read it if there’s an English translation. This was already so much fun that I have to imagine the book is even better, and I’m really curious to find out how much of the workplace satire was already in the book?
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At no point at any time in my life did it ever occur to me to see Exorcist III. And yet! Here we are!
Apparently written and directed by William Peter Blatty, based on his novel Legion, this picks up seventeen years after the first Exorcist and completely ignores the second one (which I have not seen, but from all accounts it seems like the right choice). Lieutenant Kinderman (the truly, truly marvelous George C. Scott) is investigating murders that match the methods of the Gemini Killer, who was executed seventeen years ago.
But the real glorious beating heart of this movie is the friendship between Kinderman and Father Dyer. It’s the anniversary of Father Karras’s death, and both of them are pretending they’re fine, but they clearly need each other’s company. They meet up to see It’s a Wonderful Life for the 37th time. They bicker about lemon drops. They talk about everything except what’s really bothering them until Dyer finally gets Kinderman to open up about the case.
It was funnier than I was expecting! Not horror-comedy funny, but the wit and humor in their conversations and in the dialogue in general is what I didn’t expect. Kinderman is constantly making jokes that are too smart for everyone around him. He quotes Macbeth (“And tomorrow, and tomorrow…”) when someone tells him the autopsy results will be ready tomorrow. He tells his colleagues when they don’t follow his train of thought, “I was signaling beings on Mars. Maybe they’re listening.” His humor is dry and literary and completely wasted on his coworkers.
But Dyer gets it. They have this easy rapport. Dyer reads Women’s Wear Daily in his hospital bed and when questioned about it says, “Am I supposed to give spiritual advice in a vacuum?” When Kinderman asks another priest if he has a favorite picture, the guy deadpans, “The Fly.” These priests match Kinderman’s weird energy in a way his cop colleagues never could.
Kinderman has an entire deadpan monologue about his mother-in-law keeping a live carp in his bathtub to keep it fresh before cooking it and he doesn’t want to be there and see that fish. It’s absurd, but what he’s really saying is that he doesn’t want to go home. On this day, of all days, he needs his friend.
Later, when Dyer is in the hospital, Kinderman shows up with a stuffed puffin he claims to have found on the street. You see him in the hallway getting into character for a second before storming in saying, “What’s this nonsense?” It’s one of the sweetest things I’ve seen one man do for another in a horror film. Two older men who clearly love each other.
The movie shifts between this warmth and genuine creepiness. There’s an old woman crawling across the ceiling in the background of one scene while the camera stays focused on a conversation in the foreground. This is the kind of thing that keeps me awake at night, like those scenes in Hereditary. (If I had to name this, I guess I’d call it “human beings not …humaning?”) There’s a hospital hallway sequence that’s one long static shot of mundane night shift work….so long and so mundane that you know something is coming, but when it does, it’s still surprising and effective. Brad Dourif (Grima Wormtongue, woo hooo!) is in an isolation cell as Patient X, delivering theatrical, unsettling monologues with gleeful showmanship.
Except I watched the director’s cut, which is restored from VHS footage, so the quality jumps around—some scenes are beautifully clear, others are grainy and awful. Which meant I didn’t realize until I looked it up afterwards that it wasn’t just Brad Dourif in that cell. Apparently, it switches between him and Jason Miller, two different actors playing the same possessed body. I thought it was just one guy the whole time because the picture quality was so inconsistent, I couldn’t tell.
There’s also a dream sequence where Fabio appears as an angel. Samuel L. Jackson shows up as a blind man. There’s a bizarre moment where a doctor practices a speech alone in his office, reading from notes, before Kinderman walks in, and he has to pretend he’s just casually telling him this information. And near the end, when a possessed nurse is about to decapitate Kinderman’s daughter with garden shears, it’s the grandmother who saves her, yanking Julie back by her ponytail while the two cops in the room, one of whom is her father, just stand there impotently.
The director’s cut is Blatty’s original vision before the studio made him reshoot the ending. It’s restored from VHS footage so the quality shifts occasionally, but it’s worth it to see how he intended it to end—bleaker, more final, just Kinderman making an impossible choice. The theatrical version apparently has a whole exorcism sequence tacked on with a priest who appears out of nowhere, but I didn’t see any of that.
This isn’t The Exorcist. How could it be? It’s slower, talkier, more interested in character and dread than shock. It’s a procedural with supernatural elements and philosophical undertones. But it’s good! It’s strange and genuinely unsettling, and the friendship between Kinderman and Dyer makes the horror more appalling and tragic when it comes. Even though I’ve said a lot already, I feel like I still haven’t said too much, so I am going to stop right there in case you haven’t seen it. And if you haven’t, you should.
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Sheriff Alan Pangborn has seen some shit. I’m quite certain he’s been in several Stephen King stories, though off the top of my head I can only come up with The Dark Half. Anyway, we don’t care about Pangborn. Or anyone else in the town, really. We only have eyes for Nettie Cobb. And her precious crown of braids and her folkloric cardigan and her weird Hummel obsession.
I read Needful Things when I was 14 or 15 years old. I remember almost nothing about it, except for the general premise: mysterious shopkeeper Leeland Gaunt (Max von Sydow, who during his career played Jesus, a priest, AND the devil!) opens a store where everyone can buy the thing they most desire for pocket change and a “favor.” The favors escalate. People turn on each other. The town tears itself apart. Classic King!
What I do remember vividly is Nettie Cobb. Shy, damaged Nettie, who works at a diner and lives alone with her dog Raider. Nettie, who has been through something terrible (the book goes into detail about her abusive past; the movie just suggests it). Nettie, who just wants to be left alone with her little Hummel figurines. Nettie, who has one enemy in the world: turkey farmer Wilma Jerzyck, who hates her for reasons that feel both petty and primal.
Amanda Plummer plays Nettie in the 1993 film adaptation, and she is absolutely perfect. Plummer seems to understand how to play damaged, fragile characters without ever making them pathetic. She doesn’t ask for your pity. She makes you understand Nettie from the inside out, the way she makes herself small, the way she flinches, the way her voice goes soft and uncertain. But there’s also a sharp brittleness underneath. A sense that if you pushed her too far, something would break, and what emerged wouldn’t be gentle or small at all.
Gaunt sells Nettie a Hummel figurine, a little porcelain shepherd boy that she’s wanted for years. The price is almost nothing and whatever small favor he’ll ask later.
But Nettie isn’t the one who pranks Wilma. That’s a kid named Brian Rusk, who smears mud and goose poop on Wilma’s clean sheets hanging on the line. Brian did it as his favor to Gaunt, payment for a Mickey Mantle baseball card. But Wilma doesn’t know that. She blames Nettie.
Meanwhile, someone else (town drunk Hugh Priest, doing his own favor for Gaunt) kills Raider, Nettie’s dog. The only other living thing she loves in the world. But Nettie doesn’t know it was Hugh. She thinks it was Wilma.
The fight between Nettie and Wilma is maybe one of the most brutal scenes in any Stephen King adaptation I’ve seen. It’s ugly and desperate and vicious. They go at each other with a knife and a meat cleaver in Wilma’s kitchen, and the film plays “Ave Maria” over the carnage, which makes it feel both operatic and deeply insane. This beautiful, sacred music swells in the background while two women are absolutely hacking away at each other.
Plummer plays it with wild, feral energy. All that brittleness shattering spectacularly, and what’s underneath isn’t rage exactly…it’s grief and terror and something that’s been coiled up inside her for so long that when it finally breaks free, it’s unstoppable. The fight ends with both of them crashing through a window, still stabbing at each other as they fall.
It’s the emotional vortex of the whole movie. Everything else, Max Von Sydow’s Leland Gaunt being charming and demonic, Ed Harris trying to hold the town together (before Pangborn goes on to guide the town through another crisis, presumably), J.T. Walsh spiraling into paranoid violence, it all feels like setup for this one moment. Nettie and Wilma destroying each other over wrongs neither of them actually committed, manipulated by forces they don’t even understand.
I had no interest in watching this until someone on YouTube last year called it essential autumn viewing. I’m still not sure what makes it specifically seasonal; the leaves are always blowing down the streets, there’s that farmhouse atmosphere, everyone’s wearing coats and sweater, but then again, so many King adaptations seem to exist in perpetual October anyway, don’t they?
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Last week I was having a conversation with a friend about actors we’d love to see in vampire films. I mentioned Christopher Walken, not realizing he had already been in one (and weirdly, I also want to see Jon Hamm as a vampire!) When I discovered that Walken was in Abel Ferrara’s 1995 black-and-white vampire film, The Addiction, it immediately moved to the top of my watch list. Which worked well for me, because I have been wanting to watch this for years anyway!
Lili Taylor is a Kathleen, a philosophy grad student in New York who gets attacked by an elegant woman in an alley one evening after class. The woman drags her into the shadows and bites her neck, whispering, “Tell me to go away,” before disappearing into the evening. Kathleen goes to the hospital, but they find nothing wrong. Except she starts feeling different. Hungry. Specifically hungry for blood.
What follows is Kathleen’s descent into vampirism, which the film treats explicitly as addiction. She doesn’t grow fangs or burst into flames in sunlight. She just needs blood, constantly, and she uses philosophy to justify what she’s doing. Every conversation becomes an intellectual exercise in whether people who do evil things are inherently evil, or if doing evil things makes you evil. She quotes Kierkegaard and Nietzsche while attacking people. She uses her studies to rationalize her violence.
The film is shot in gorgeous black and white. The contrast is severe, deep shadows that swallow entire portions of the frame, harsh light that bleaches faces into stark relief, compositions that feel pulled from German Expressionism. New York streets at night become labyrinths of shadow. Faces emerge from darkness only partially, half-lit, always slightly obscured. It’s beautiful in a way that feels deliberate and considered, every frame composed like a photograph.
The film is also deeply pretentious. It’s all very serious, very intellectual, very self-aware about being serious and intellectual. Every character speaks in philosophy quotes and dense theoretical language. There are images of Holocaust victims interspersed throughout. Christopher Walken shows up for about ten minutes as an older vampire who’s learned to control his urges, and he pontificates beautifully about sin and willpower before disappearing again.
It feels very much like the time it was made. The mid-90s are all over this. Kathleen walks past a storefront with a Smashing Pumpkins shirt in the window, everyone’s dressed in that particular downtown NYC way. There’s Edie Falco (Carmela Soprano!) as one of her philosophy classmates. Michael Imperioli gets prominent billing in the opening credits, but only appears for about thirty seconds as a religious guy handing out flyers. It’s interesting how in this scene, he tells Kathleen to go away, and she does. The “tell me to go away” line that her attacker used on her actually functions with someone who has faith (maybe?)
There’s a line Kathleen utters that immediately struck me: “Essence is revealed through praxis.” What you are is shown through what you do. Not what you think, not what you intend, not what you believe about yourself, but what you actually do. Your actions are the truth of you.
In the context of the movie, Kathleen keeps trying to philosophize her way out of accountability. She’s killing people, turning them into vampires, spreading her addiction. But she frames it as intellectual inquiry. She’s not bad, she’s just exploring the nature of evil. Except her essence—what she actually is—is being revealed through her praxis. Through her actions. She is what she does, and what she does is monstrous.
I think about this outside of vampire movies, too. How easy it is to think of yourself as a certain kind of person while your actual behavior tells a completely different story. You can believe you’re kind while being cruel. You can believe you’re generous while being selfish. Essence is revealed through praxis. You are what you do, not what you wish you were.
The film ends with Kathleen overdosing on her own vampirism at a party where she’s turned the entire philosophy department. That party scene is WILD and probably worth the price of admission (which in this case is a 90-minute slow burn of your time.)
I can’t say I loved it. The philosophical dialogue is dense to the point of being exhausting, it occasionally feels like it’s trying too hard to be profound, and it’s not always clear what Ferrara wants us to take away from it. But I’m glad I finally watched it.
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Here’s a thing about me that you’ll learn pretty quickly if you spend any amount of time with me. I am kind of a ditz. Maybe a complete airhead. Yesterday, I said these exact words, and I was being absolutely sincere: “You mean…it’s called Alien Earth…because the aliens COME TO EARTH??”
It’s a weird thing to be, honestly. I’ve read widely enough that I can make connections between disparate ideas when I’m writing them down. But in actual conversation? All of my salient points fly out of my head the moment I need them. My intelligence lives almost entirely on the page, where I have time to consider my thoughts and arrange them properly. In real time, my head is often somewhere else entirely. I’ll be nodding along while my brain is three topics away, or I’ll start explaining something and halfway through completely lose my train of thought, just gone, no idea where I was going with it or how to finish what I started. I can write thoughtful analyses about complex themes in horror, but then miss entirely an obvious plot point because I wasn’t paying attention. It’s not that I’m not intelligent; it’s that my intelligence needs space to breathe, to wander, to come back around. In the moment, I’m perpetually a little bit lost. People assume I’m being ironic or making a joke when I ask about something that should be completely obvious, but no, I genuinely just didn’t put it together until that exact second. I’m a space cadet.
…which brings me to what I watched last night.
I love the Alien movies. I have seen most of them multiple times. The xenomorphs, the facehuggers, the corporate greed, the slow creeping dread in the void of space! So when I heard there was going to be a series, I was of course intrigued. The trailer looked dark and a little bit weird, which is exactly what I wanted.
The show opens with a spaceship full of alien specimens crashing into Earth. Standard Alien franchise stuff: facehuggers skittering around, a xenomorph stalking through corridors, people dying in brutal ways ways while the corporation prioritizes profit over survival. But what kept circling back in my head all day yesterday wasn’t the monsters. It was the other thing happening in this episode.
In 2120, Earth is divided among five mega-corporations competing in what they call “the race for immortality.” Prodigy, one of these corporations, has figured out how to transfer the consciousness of dying children into synthetic adult bodies. The first one is a twelve-year-old girl named Marcy, who becomes “Wendy” (all very Peter Pan, complete with Lost Boys and a place called Neverland) in her new grown-up form.
And I cannot stop thinking about that. A child’s mind in an adult body, capable of adult things but still fundamentally a kid inside. How disorienting that must be. How strange to suddenly have strength and height and capabilities you don’t understand, when just yesterday you were small and sick and powerless.
I feel like that every single day. How am I trapped in here? How did this happen? I know I’m almost 50, but I need a frikkin’ adult!
I haven’t formed a full opinion on the show yet. But that idea has taken root in my mind, and I want to explore where it leads.
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I read Diane Setterfield’s novel back in 2008 or so, but I don’t remember a single thing about it, so this felt completely new to me. Which is fine! I have a weakness for Gothic stories no matter the era or setting. A crumbling English manor with ivy creeping through shattered windows. Victorian secrets locked in journals and attics. Modern suburbs with something ancient and dark in the basement. It doesn’t matter, they’re all good. The shape of the story stays the same across centuries. Someone isolated. A house that remembers, secrets that won’t stay buried. Blah blah blah. The trappings work on me every time!
Biographer Margaret Lea (Olivia Colman! YAY! We love an Olivia Colman BBC movie! Which is basically like…every BBC movie!) is summoned to the remote estate of dying novelist Vida Winter (Vanessa Redgrave), who, after decades of evasive interviews and elaborate storytelling, is finally ready to tell the truth about her childhood at Angelfield House. Feral twins, mysterious deaths, possible ghosts, family secrets that get darker as the story unfolds.
Angelfield itself is the platonic ideal of a manor house gone to ruin. Empty rooms where wallpaper peels in long curls. Gardens so overgrown they’ve become labyrinths of bramble and wild roses. Vines invading through the front door, flora reclaiming hallways, nature slowly devouring the grand house. The flashbacks of the twins growing up in near-total isolation in this semi-abandoned estate are both eerie and a bit heartbreaking. Two girls who barely speak, moving through rooms like ghosts themselves, inventing their own language because no one bothered to teach them anything else. It’s embarrassing to say that even though I’d read the book, I couldn’t remember where the mystery was going, but the truth finally comes to light, and the explanation feels less compelling than all the creepy atmosphere that came before it.
The film crams a lot of novel into 90 minutes, and it’s pretty obvious. But it’s fine. A gentle British ghost story (despite the murder and incest!) and nothing to get your heart pounding too hard….but when you’ve got a moldering manor full of menace and mystery and that specific Gothic ghostly gloom, what more do you need? A cup of tea and some knitting? I had that too, so despite any flaws, it made for a near-perfect autumn evening.
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I really wanted to like this! I recall being so jazzed about the trailer! A24 doing a horror-comedy about murderous unicorns? Sign me up! But Death of a Unicorn is one of those movies where I kept waiting for it to click into place and it just… never did. One reviewer compared it to the overhypedness of Crumbl cookies, and as someone who always skips right past the Crumbl cookie ASMR videos (I’d rather watch people eat corndogs or sushi, or cheesy noodles and no I am not joking!) I think that was really the perfect analogy.
Paul Rudd and his daughter Jenna Ortega accidentally hit and kill a unicorn on their way to visit Rudd’s dying billionaire boss. The unicorn’s blood has magical healing properties, which the rich family immediately sees as a business opportunity. But the dead baby unicorn has very angry parents who show up for revenge, and they are not the Lisa Frank Trapper Keeper variety.
The problem is, I could never figure out what this movie was trying to be. Camp? Sincere creature feature? Eat-the-rich satire? It kept lunging at all of these, but never quite grasped hold of any of them. It was all over the place; one minute trying to be darkly funny, the next attempting genuine emotion about grief and family dysfunction, then suddenly we’re in full gore mode.
The “eat the rich” angle felt particularly tired. The film gestures vaguely at pharmaceutical greed and commodification, but doesn’t really say anything new, and the billionaire family is just broad-stroke villainous jerks without any real observation behind them. Ortega is playing Yet Another Angsty Teenager and is kinda blah. Rudd gets stuck as a pathetic yes-man who ignores everything his daughter says. The only person having any fun is Will Poulter as the trust-fund douchebag getting high on unicorn blood, and he’s the only one with an actual personality. The CGI unicorns look terrible in daylight, just grotesque cartoon horses. And the whole virgin/purity trope with Ortega feels out of step with a movie supposedly making modern social commentary, right?
There was one moment I loved, though: Rosamund Pike crouched behind a wall, hiding from the unicorns stalking through the mansion. She’s curled into herself and making herself small, trembling and terrified, with her eyes squeezed shut. In the midst of all the absurdity, it felt very human and real. It’s also the exact thing I do when I’m merging onto the highway, so maybe I just related.
But one good moment can’t save a movie. The most frustrating part is that there’s interesting unicorn lore buried in here, the idea that they’re fierce protectors of nature rather than gentle sparkle ponies. The movie could have done something with that. Instead, it just throws in some purple blood, a few gory kills, and calls it a day.
Death of a Unicorn had everything I should have loved, but it needed to pick a lane. Instead, it wandered all over the road, and I’m still not sure where we ended up, but it was a place both dumb and stupid.
What a waste of perfectly good murderous unicorns.
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