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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The Art of Darkness gathers over 200 artworks across twelve chapters, musing on why artists have always been drawn to shadow. Symbolists and Surrealists making visible our inner landscapes, Pre-Raphaelites staging psychological dramas, artists like Goya painting his nightmares, Munch exploring anxiety and fear, Kahlo transforming pain into transcendence.
And the contemporary creators: Marci Washington‘s ghostly figures in rotting wallpaper. Dylan Garrett Smith rendering fauna and flora in ash and chalk. Caitlin McCormack crocheting delicate birds and skeletons. Darla Teagarden building surreal photographic narratives. Becky Munich‘s sly-humored sirens. Susan Jamison‘s luminous egg tempera paintings steeped in ritual. Rachael Bridge capturing twilight in impossible palettes. Stephen Mackey‘s dreamlike twilight worlds. Aron Wiesenfeld’s liminal thresholds. Caitlin McCarthy‘s spectral beauties and sibyls. Alex Eckman-Lawn‘s surreal collage portraits. Ruth Marten’s absurd alligator-laden interventions. Laurie Lee Brom‘s ghost stories. Bill Crisafi‘s woodland ritual. Amy Earles’ autumn daydreams. Nightjar art of Adam Burke‘s misty wilderness. Aleksandra Waliszewska‘s haunting nocturnal visions. Santiago Caruso’s darkly romantic illustrations. Gerald Brom‘s mythic creatures and feral witches.
We all experience the full spectrum of human emotion. The uncomfortable parts don’t vanish when we ignore them. But when we encounter them in art, something shifts. There’s richness in shadows, depth in contrast. These artists give form to feelings we couldn’t name otherwise.
This book is for… October book clubs looking for something visually stunning to discuss ❈ Libraries creating seasonal displays that celebrate the atmospheric and eerie
❈ Bookstagrammers, BookTokers, BookTubers building creepy nonfiction TBRs ❈ Anyone who starts their spooky season decorating in April
❈ Bookish eleven-year-old oddballs and the adults they became
❈ Art lovers discovering contemporary creators alongside historical masters ❈ Gift-givers seeking something thoughtful for the art lover, the goth, the perpetually curious
In The Midnight Shift, Detective Su-Yeon is investigating a series of apparent suicides at Cheolma Rehabilitation Hospital, where elderly patients keep jumping from the sixth floor with handwritten suicide notes but mysteriously drained of blood. When she encounters Violette (a Korean adoptee raised in France who now works as a mysterious vampire hunter) Su-Yeon gets an answer she wasn’t expecting: a vampire is targeting the hospital’s loneliest, most isolated patients, the ones nobody will miss. The novel alternates between Su-Yeon’s present-day investigation, Violette’s backstory in 1980s France (particularly her intense, Carmilla-esque relationship with a vampire named Lily), and the perspective of Nanju, a nurse at the hospital with her own complicated connection to the supernatural events. Cheon builds a marvelously moody atmosphere around the idea that vampires hunt “lonely blood,” that is, people so isolated that they’ve forgotten how to cry, whose abandonment has altered the very chemistry coursing through their veins.
The French flashback sections were fantastic, capturing Violette as a lonely adoptee drawn to Lily in ways that feel both dangerous and beautiful and vital. That gothic, sapphic tension could have sustained an entire novel on its own. The premise about vampires targeting society’s most abandoned people (the elderly patients warehoused in facilities where no one visits) is compelling social commentary wrapped in supernatural trappings, though this leans more melancholy and atmospheric than actually frightening.
But I found myself increasingly confused by things that were referenced but never actually explained or shown. Vampire lore is mentioned constantly (there’s some code between vampires and hunters, as well as specific rules about when Violette can kill them), but I never quite understood how any of it actually worked. How does Violette kill vampires? What exactly are the rules she keeps referencing? Who does she work for and why? Characters kept talking about things like they made sense, but the actual mechanics and logic stayed frustratingly vague. The characters themselves never quite came alive for me either: Su-Yeon drifts through her investigation in this oddly detached way, Nanju hints at interesting backstory but gets so little page time I couldn’t really get invested in her troubles, and even Violette (despite all her flashback chapters) I never fully understood what drove her or how she’d ended up in this life.
The ending left me cold, partly because I was genuinely confused about what had actually happened and why. Things wrapped up quickly with what felt like important revelations, but I couldn’t quite follow the logic or see how the pieces connected. Maybe I missed something, or maybe crucial information just wasn’t on the page; either way, I finished feeling like I’d only gotten half the story. After all that atmospheric buildup, I wanted clarity and emotional payoff, but instead got rushed explanations that raised more questions than they answered. The ambition is clear: blending crime procedural with Gothic horror and exploring queer longing and cultural displacement, but the execution leaves too much unexplained. I kept reading because the mood and premise were enjoyably intriguing, but by the end, I felt like I’d watched a movie with several key scenes missing.
Bonus! Three new cryptid-inspired scents from Poesie (against an eerie Burchfield backdrop)…
Nessie: Tea steeped with blossoms and honey, a thick floral sweetness of highland flowers’ pollen suspended in viscous light. A kind of gold that pools slow, catches afternoon sun slanting through old glass, turns a chipped ceramic mug into a chalice. Wool blankets hung near yesterday’s fires, smoke absorbed into the weave, the ghost of peat clinging to fabric. Rain-grey mornings of soft, tannic ritual matters, steam as prayer, rising toward low clouds.
Mothman: Spiced warmth with its aggressive, bitter edges sanded down, autumn’s recognizable onslaught muzzled by dried leaves’ somber poetry, and tobacco’s civilizing influence. Red musk behaving itself for once, button-popped bodice replaced by a cashmere turtleneck, nutmeg simmering quietly, minding its own business instead of all up in yours. Unruly spices acting right, like their Gran is watching from heaven, turning potential chaos into orderly aromatic gorgeousness. Tea brewed strong enough to stain porcelain, threading through like the dirty bass line in a song you can’t stop humming, even though maybe it’s quite naughty, and who knows, maybe Gran IS listening.
Jersey Devil: Pine resin, cool and sharp, needles sun-baked but chilly, their green gone eerily concentrated and alien. Coastal salt drifts through forest density, ocean air wandering inland, turning shadows crystalline, evergreen ghosting translucent at the edges. Arboreal incense, blood-dark and frost-blessed, threading through branches that claw and clutch. Tea as shadow, as sanctuary, as a centering, grounding the strange marriage of forest meeting shoreline, land suspended between what roots deep and what erodes away, between darkness that grows and salt that preserves.
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After yesterday’s disappointment, I needed something good. Or at least something not terrible! Final Destination: Bloodlines was exactly the combination of not terrible and actually quite good that I was hoping for! Full transparency: I began watching this movie a month ago, but stopped after 20 minutes because I decided it would make good October fodder. And I was right!
The premise is ridiculous, and if you’ve seen even one, you know all you need to know: Death has a design, and if you mess with it, Death will find increasingly elaborate ways to correct the cosmic ledger with outrageously elaborate Rube Goldbergian setups. Is this movie dumb? Absolutely. Does it make any logical sense? Not even a little. Does it try to say something profound about fate, mortality, or the human condition? Well, sort of, a little? But that’s ok! But the big difference between this and yesterday’s crappy waste of time is that Bloodlines knows it’s ridiculous and leans into that with such absolute commitment and affection that it is genuinely joyful to watch.
The setup: In 1968, Iris has a premonition about a Space Needle-esque restaurant disaster and manages to save everyone. Flash forward to the present, and her granddaughter Stefani is having recurring nightmares about that night. Turns out Death’s been working through the original survivors and their descendants, everyone who shouldn’t exist because they were supposed to die that night. (I just visited the Space Needle recently, and I thought about that opening scene A LOT when I was gingerly stepping on the glass floor! As a matter of fact, those are probably the scenes that freaked me out most, which is why that’s mostly the imagery I’ve selected for this post.)
It’s a neat expansion of the franchise’s mythology that seems to respect what came before while giving us something new. The “bloodline” angle makes the stakes feel bigger and the design more convoluted and intricate.
But we’re not here for the plot. We’re here for the deaths! And Bloodlines delivers. An MRI machine. A backyard barbecue. A garbage truck. Everyday situations transformed into elaborate death traps where one wrong move sets off a cascade of carnage. The film understands these sequences work best when you can see all the pieces being set up, when you’re silently screaming at characters to notice the garden hose, the glass shards, the precarious positioning of that lawn mower.
The tone is exactly right. This isn’t torture porn, it’s slapstick with arterial spray. There’s a darkly comic sensibility running through every kill that acknowledges the absurdity without winking so hard it breaks the tension. When someone gets demolished in the most convoluted way possible, you’re allowed to gasp and laugh. The film gives you permission to have fun with the horror.
The practical effects are gory, gorgeous chaos. Bodies don’t just die—they’re eviscerated, impaled, crushed, and dismembered with genuine craftsmanship. Kind of makes you appreciate the artistry while also wanting to look away and maybe puke a little bit.
Tony Todd. Oh, Tony Todd. His final film role is here, playing the series’ mysterious mortician who always seems to know a very weird amount about Death’s design. He was clearly unwell during filming, and watching him deliver his lines with that iconic voice coming from a visibly weakened body is heartbreaking. The film gives him a proper sendoff, finally explaining his character’s connection to everything in a way that’s both satisfying and surprisingly moving. It shredded me, honestly. This absolutely legendary performer, knowing his time was limited, giving us one last performance that’s a goodbye to his character and (whether intentionally or not, but it surely must have been) a meditation on mortality itself in a franchise built around cheating death.
Bloodlines gets it: you don’t need to pretend you’re saying something profound to make an effective horror movie (or an effective movie, period). This is a movie about wacky, sadistic Looney Tunes-esque cartoon deaths, and it never tries to dress it up as something more important.
It’s funny, it’s gross, it’s inventive, and in its own weird way, oddly heartfelt. Exactly what I needed.
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Haunted tiki bar, spectral mai tai floating in the periphery while some scratchy exotica album plays from a speaker you can’t locate, Martin Denny maybe, or Les Baxter’s jungle fantasies, that mid-century escapist thing that was already nostalgic for something that never existed, already haunted by its own appropriations, its own colonial fantasies dressed up as lounge entertainment, which is absolutely not what this fragrance is about but it’s where my nose took me, this tiki bar detour having nothing to do with the brand’s actual abandoned mansion concept.
The fruit here does exactly what I want fruit to do in fragrance, which is be weird about it, ashen and dusty and somber, bruised and semi-preserved like fruit that’s been drinking alongside the patrons, drifting in its own languid dissolution, melting into the upholstery, losing definition under hazy torch light, not trying to be fresh or bright or engaging, just strange and a little sad and smoky.
There’s a mustiness here, old wood and older paper, that particular smell of closed-up places where the air has gone stale and sweet at the same time, resort towns in the off-season where the bars are shuttered and the bamboo decorations gather dust and you can still smell a thousand phantom drinks soaked into the floorboards, lime and orgeat and something vaguely tropical gone sour in the humidity. Beach cottages abandoned after hurricane season, with everything softly deteriorating in the damp air, fruit bowls forgotten on kitchen counters, paperbacks yellowing and swelling and smelling like vanilla and wood pulp slowly decomposing, all of it fading together. This is October in places where October doesn’t mean sweaters, where fall is more conceptual than meteorological, where the season changes because the calendar says so, but the air is still thick and warm.
Something resinous and golden underneath, woody-amber earthiness, not cold-earth but tropical-earth, the smell of wood that’s never known frost, rooms that stay humid year-round, dust that never quite settles because there’s always moisture in the air. The smokiness like the ghost of a bar where fruits lounged and got tipsy, daddy-o, got a little loose, a little wild. The kind of abandoned that’s specific to semi-tropical places, where things don’t freeze and die back, but just slowly molder and transform, go spectral in the heat.
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First things first: Weapons. That’s the title. Just… Weapons.
The film’s concept: a witch is using spellwork to “weaponize” people, turning them into instruments of violence through dark magic. And what do the filmmakers decide to call this? Weapons. Because when you have a potentially interesting supernatural premise about possession, control, and human bodies turned into literal weapons through witchcraft, why bother with nuance or intrigue in your title? Why not just take your core concept and reduce it to the most literal, obvious single word possible? It’s a title for an Idiocracy timeline, the kind of aggressively dumb choice that makes you wonder if anyone in the room raised their hand to suggest, perhaps, something with a shred of mystery or poetry to it.
As for what Weapons is actually about: In the town of Maybrook, Pennsylvania, seventeen children from the same third-grade class wake up at 2:17 a.m., walk out of their homes with their arms outstretched, and vanish into the night. Only one student, a quiet boy named Alex, remains. His teacher, Julia Garner, arrives at school the next morning to find her classroom empty save for this one traumatized child.
The town immediately turns on Justine. Someone spray paints “WITCH” on her car, parents hound her at meetings, and she becomes the focal point of everyone’s rage and grief. Among the devastated parents is Josh Brolin, whose obsessive investigation into his son’s disappearance leads him down increasingly dark paths. The film unfolds through multiple perspectives: the aforementioned two, as well as the school principal Marcus (Benedict Wong, who they did so dirty here), a troubled cop, and a desperate junkie.
Through this fragmented structure, which works …sorta…for about the first two perspective shifts and then becomes exhausting, we eventually discover that Alex’s “great-aunt” Gladys is actually a witch who has moved into the family home. Using bells, talismans, and blood-soaked branches, she can turn people into zombified puppets and siphon their life force to sustain herself. She had Alex bring home personal items from each of his classmates, which she used to activate and summon them to her basement, where they’ve been kept in a trance-like state ever since. Meanwhile, poor Alex has been forced to spoon-feed soup to his catatonic parents and seventeen classmates to keep them alive.
The “horror” of Gladys is almost entirely predicated on the fact that she’s old and sick. Her wrinkled skin, her frail body, her age itself, all presented as inherently monstrous and terrifying. When she puts on makeup and a wig to venture out, the film frames it as grotesque. It’s lazy shortcut horror that substitutes “eccentric old lady is scary!” and “wrinkles are bad!” for actual menace. We never even see her plan working; she looks just as decrepit at the end as the beginning. So what was the point? Why did she think stealing children’s life force would help her? The film has no answers because it hasn’t actually thought any of this through.
The characters make baffling decisions that exist only to keep the plot lurching forward. When Gladys cuts Justine’s hair for a spell, why not just grab something from her car right then? Why keep Alex alive when he becomes a massive liability—the ONLY surviving kid, living in a house with newspaper covering every window?
Yes, the police investigate Alex’s house…once. Gladys does her creaky old lady act, they leave satisfied, and that’s it. In a small town. After the most bizarre mass disappearance imaginable. With the FBI supposedly involved. Okay…? Meanwhile, the entire town has turned on Justine based on nothing, but nobody thinks the weird newspaper-covered house with the sole surviving child warrants a second look? Lordy be with the lazy writing that needs everyone to be stupid for the plot to function.
And then there’s the inexplicably dumb dream sequence where Josh Brolin sees a giant automatic weapon with “2:17” displayed on it, floating above a house. It’s heavy-handed AND ham-fisted imagery (it’s so bad I have to use both) that mistakes obviousness for profundity. A floating gun with a timestamp! Get it? Do you get it?!! The film seems desperate for you to think this means something deep, but it’s just sloppy visual shorthand. Too blunt to be unsettling, too undeveloped to serve as actual commentary. It’s probably there because Cregger thought it would look cool and vaguely Important.
The segmented structure feels like padding. The junkie and cop segments exist purely to deliver exposition and get themselves caught so they can serve as weapons in the climax. Remove them entirely and you lose twenty minutes but virtually nothing of substance.
Speaking of the climax: Alex somehow knows how to use witch magic (how? why? can anyone do this?) and turns his hypnotized classmates against Gladys. They tear her apart in a scene that can’t decide what it wants to be—is this supposed to be horrifying? Darkly funny? Both? The film lurches between treating the violence as genuinely disturbing (children ripping an elderly woman to shreds) and playing it for absurdist laughs (look how over-the-top this is!), but it never earns either response. It needed to commit to one tone or find a way to blend them skillfully, the way something like, say, Evil Dead 2 manages. Instead, you’re left watching something that feels accidentally ridiculous when it’s trying to be serious, or oddly mean-spirited when it’s trying to be fun. The spell breaks, the kids go home (wait, didn’t the opening narration say they were “never seen again”?), though most remain mute and traumatized. Alex’s parents are institutionalized. Roll credits.
I didn’t find it scary, not even remotely. Not that I need my horror to be massively scary! Sometimes, inflicting a mild sense of disquiet works just fine! But this was a few cheap jump scares, zero sustained dread. Julia Garner’s performance is flat and unengaged. Benedict Wong brings genuine warmth to Principal Marcus, and the film thanks him by having his character violently bash his boyfriend’s head in before being killed off unceremoniously in the middle of traffic. Lovely.
Weapons mistakes withholding information for building mystery, conflates visual obviousness with symbolism, and passes off “weird old lady” for a functional villain. It’s mystery-box storytelling at its most hollow. Booo!
Not exactly the auspicious start to the month I was hoping for. At least there are 30 more chances to find something better? Peep at my Notion list to get a gander of what I’d like to watch this month, maybe you’d like to watch along with me!
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