It’s October, which meant I dropped most of the stuff I was watching in September and veered into witchy, creepy, ghostly, spooky material as befits the Halloween season (even though we’re heading into summer in the southern hemisphere).
This included the first season of the rebooted Charmed (which was recently cancelled after the actress playing the eldest sister with telekinetic powers chose to leave the show, necessitating the death of her character in an exasperating repeat of what happened with Shannon Doherty back in the nineties) and a slew of horror films, specifically what I’ve always thought of as the slasher genre’s “big three”: Halloween, Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street. Believe it or not, I had never seen any of these movies before, despite knowing how important they were in the evolution of this particular branch of horror films.
I also delved into some witch-related books from my adolescence: L.J. Smith’s The Secret Circle trilogy and Cate Tiernan’s Sweep series. And truly, it was heaven! There’s just something about nineties (or early noughties) witches that fills me with nostalgic glee. I’m only sorry I didn’t have enough time to squeeze Isobel Bird’s Circle of Three in there as well.
On that note, I’ve also been working through the short-lived adaptation of The Secret Circle (which is profoundly different from the books) and the second season of Sailor Moon, but there was no way either one of those were going to get completed by the end of this month.
Babysitters on Board! by Ann M. Martin
The first of the Super Specials, which were called as such on account of the a. white covers, b. longer page-counts, c. unique subject matter (usually the girls going on vacation) and d. “shared storylines” in which all the babysitters (and occasionally a few others) narrated their own subplots, which wove in and out of each other as the story progressed.
I could tell that this was one of my very favourite books in the series, as my copy is barely hanging in there – a few pages are loose and the spine has nearly collapsed, not to mention the fact that there were passages I remembered vividly, to the point where bits of dialogue had a certain cadence to them, as though they’d been recited in my head countless times.
That said, it’s a rather baffling book in many respects. First of all, there’s no indication whatsoever as to when exactly it takes place. It’s clearly before #13 as Stacey is present and Mallory isn’t a member of the club yet, but if we go by publication dates then it’s a little strange that it’s happening directly after #12 since the summer break just ended and all the girls are back in school.
Then there’s the way in which Ann M. Martin gets all these characters on their super-special vacation, which is the epitome of an Excuse Plot. Turns out that Mr Pike has won a competition at work, the prize for which is an all-expenses paid trip for his family: a cruise through the Bahamas followed by three days at Disney World. Usually a “family trip” is for two parents and two (maybe three) kids, so I can only assume Mr Pike’s company was severely ticked off when they realized he has seven children. On top of that, the Pikes decide to take Stacey and Mary Anne along with them as mother helpers, but God only knows who’s paying for them.
In a move that’s not illegal but definitely pretty dickish, Watson decides he wants in on this vacation, and so books the exact same trip for his extended family: Elizabeth, Kristy, Karen, Andrew, David Michael, Sam and Charlie (though honestly, you’d have no idea those latter two are present as we get absolutely nothing on them whatsoever. Seriously, nothing. They could have stayed at home and nobody would have noticed). And because no members of the Babysitters Club can be left behind, Watson pays for Claudia and Dawn to come along too, something that their parents are apparently just fine with.
It’s a bizarre setup to put it mildly. Is it not slightly unfair that Claudia and Dawn are on a free holiday while Stacey and Mary Anne are working? Isn’t it baffling (even by the standards of the nineties) that Dawn and Claudia would be allowed to wander around the Bahamas by themselves? Or that they’d even want to when they could be hanging out with their friends? But because Martin needs to put everyone in their own separate subplot, hardly anyone ends up sending any time together, which surely defeats the purpose of a family vacation.
And yet for all this, I clearly loved this book as a young reader, and had a great time returning to it. All of the babysitters get their own storylines, as well as Mallory (who will soon join the main series), Karen (who makes the leap into her own spin-off) and Bryon Pike (who... doesn’t get to do either of those things).
Let’s see, Kristy makes friends with a grouchy old man, Stacey bonds with a kid about to undergo major heart surgery, Claudia gets a secret admirer, Mary Anne is impressed by repeat appearances of a glamourous traveller, Mallory tries to emulate Harriet the Spy, Karen gets spooked by the Haunted Mansion, Bryon finds a treasure map, and Dawn... meets a cute boy. There’s also a thing about how she’s a neat-freak and Kristy is a slob and they repeatedly clash while sharing a cabin together, but not only is this stupid, it also makes no sense based on their established personalities (Dawn’s mother is a scatterbrain, so she’s used to living in chaos, and Kristy likes things to be neat and organized).
Obviously some stories are more engaging than others, and many of them start interweaving by the final chapters (Claudia’s secret admirer and Mary Anne’s girl-crush end up being siblings, and Mallory is the one that rumbles the latter’s fibs). There’s also some cute stuff with the narratives of the non-babysitters. I was so taken with Mallory’s idea of spying on people that I’m pretty sure I tried it myself as a kid (even having never read Harriet the Spy) and Byron finding a treasure map made me laugh, as the boys are so excited by it that they start believing it’s not only a potential map of the Bahamas, but also the cruise ship and/or Disneyland. It’s funny because it rings so very, very true. This is how kids think.
In hindsight, I can definitely see why Karen was considered a monstrous brat by the fandom (she goes back to her cabin to get her earplugs, only to get a manicure on the way and charge it to her cabin, is spoiled rotten at Disney World, and lies about her birthday so she can get a whole room of people to sing “Happy Birthday” to her) and Claudia’s secret admirer storyline is full of yikes: by today’s standards there’s absolutely no way this would play out as anything other than a horror show, in which Claudia is stalked and harassed by a complete stranger while she’s trying to enjoy her holiday. Back in the nineties, it’s all treated as totally cute and a fun mystery.
But hey, I enjoyed every word. More than any other book in the series I’ve re-read so far, this is the one that really transported me back to the age I was when I first read them, and I recall being delighted at the fact that the myriad of narratives were all connected (like when the boys run off to laugh at people with funny bathing caps, and Mallory references it in her own chapter). It doesn’t sound like much these days, but it awed me at the time.
Spirit Animals: Books 1 – 6 by Brandon Mull, Maggie Stiefvater, Garth Nix, Sean Williams, Shannon Hale, Tui Sutherland, Eliot Schrefer and Marie Lu
Don’t be too impressed, I didn’t read all six of these books this month; I staggered them over the last three, and finished the final one just a few days ago. I’ve been meaning to read them for ages, as they’ve been floating around the library since their publication and are reasonably popular among our young readers.
The underlying concept of the project is fairly interesting: commissioned as a six-part series, each title is penned by a different author that ties into a tight overarching story – essentially a singular tale divided into six parts written by some of the most recognizable children/young adult writers out there (I was familiar with all of them except Eliot Schrefer and Sean William).
Four young people – Conor (impoverished shepherd), Meilin (cossetted noble), Rollan (streetwise urchin) and Abeke (black sheep of her father’s tribe) – each come from profoundly different backgrounds, but all live in a world known as Erdas, where certain individuals can bound with a spirit animal after partaking of a substance known as the Nectar of Ninani in a coming-of-age ritual.
Erdas is divided into several continents which serve as fairly blatant Fantasy Counterparts to real-world countries: Zhong is Asia, Nilo is Africa, Amaya is South America, and Eura is... well, no prizes for guessing that one. There’s also a frozen continent called Arctica, and you’ll be forgiven for rolling your eyes when the characters visit Glengavin, a place that explicitly has people decked out in kilts and playing the bagpipes.
At the beginning of the story, the world in its entirety is under threat by a warlord known as the Destroyer, who (like many Dark Lords) has returned after a deep hibernation and is now bent on planetary domination. The only ones who can stop him are – you guessed it! – our four protagonists who have summoned the spirit animals known as the Four Fallen: the great wolf, leopard, panda and hawk that were killed in the first uprising against the Destroyer.
Yes, the plot is pretty simplistic, with more than a touch of Avatar: The Last Airbender about it, and the main drawcard seems to be the fairly engaging characters and the talent of the authors who contributed. That said, the whole thing is just a tad too generic for any of the seven writers to put any sort of distinctive stamp on their work. Perhaps Stiefvater’s volume has a bit of typical YA banter, but for the most part this could have easily been written by a single ghostwriter – not even Garth Nix stands out, and he’s one of my favourites!
I’d love to know more about the writing process (how carefully the story was mapped out, how deeply the writers collaborated with each other, etc) as there are two fairly significant twists that are deeply foreshadowed across the course of several books, both of which are set-up and paid-off surprisingly well. An on-line game was also heavily promoted with the release of each book, with various codes and hints to be found on the inside covers, but very little trace of this actually remains on the internet. This was the only webpage I could find, and there seems to be no way to access the actual game.
It would appear that Scholastic put a lot of promotion into this series, and though wasn’t a runaway success, it was popular enough to warrant a sequel series. Time will tell as to whether or not I’ll track that down as well, but they’re still regularly checked out by young readers at the library.
Sweep: Volume 1 by Cate Tiernan
As with the Spirit Animals books, this one requires a bit of context. First published back in the early noughts, the Sweep series (retitled as Wicca in the UK publication) was comprised of a fairly impressive fifteen books, largely focusing on the story of hereditary witch Morgan Rowlands, but also including a Prequel told in diary-form from the POV of Morgan’s ancestress, a spin-off starring a minor supporting character, and a Distant Finale that deals with Morgan’s daughter Moira.
I read them all back in the day, and recently got my hands on the first two reprints that bound together the first six books (three per volume) in the bargain bin of my local bookshop. That was a couple of years ago, and even more recently I was able to purchase the final three volumes that encompassed the rest of the series. And damn, are the covers gorgeous!
Time limitations meant I was only able to churn through the first volume this month, but it was a fun trip down memory lane. Morgan Rowlands is the odd one out in her family: the ugly duckling, the black sheep. She’s a self-conscious, flat-chested wallflower, a mortifying condition that’s made all the worse due to the close proximity of her best friend and little sister, who are both gorgeous.
Honestly, she’s a bit of a drip. As all the stories are told in first-person narrative, we have front-row seats to her internal dialogue, most of which is either self-loathing, self-pity or catty comments directed at other girls. As such, Morgan is not a protagonist I particularly like, though – as strange as it sounds – I enjoy not liking her, and her characterization doesn’t affect my reading pleasure.
Anyway, life for her begins when it always does for a teenage girl in a YA book: once she meets The Boy. Cal Blaire has just started at Morgan’s high school, and she’s immediately attracted to him – along with every other one of her female (or gay) peers. He’s gorgeous, confident and friendly, and soon enough he’s inviting his rather bemused classmates to Wiccan celebrations.
It’s hard to believe any teenager would ever recruit students to their religion in the way this book describes, but Morgan is entranced by the knowledge and power that Cal not only demonstrates, but is willing to share with others. As the circle is whittled down to a committed few, Morgan begins to show a greater gift for witchcraft than her fellows, which catches Cal’s attention.
Soon they’re dating, much to the fury of Morgan’s best friend Bree, who was also nursing a crush on Cal, and the horror of her parents, who distrust anything to do with witchcraft – and not just because they’re Catholic. The reason isn’t difficult to discern: early on Morgan describes herself as a night owl in comparison to the morning-larks that are her parents and sister... but in truth she’s a cuckoo, having been adopted at birth and kept from the truth her entire life.
This explains her aptitude for magick (yes, that’s how the books spell it) as her biological parents were both witches, and real power is something that’s passed down genetically. According to Tiernan, anyone can practice Wicca, but only a select few are “blood witches”, descended from one of the seven great clans, which run the gamut from benevolent to pure evil. Yeah, there’s a reason real Wiccans hated these books.
As with most witch-related books (such as The Secret Circle below) there has to be a certain number of people to make up the numbers in a coven, which leads to literally dozens of characters to keep track of. In this case, most of them also have their own little arcs, though that ends up being one of the more interesting things about the series. One gets the sense that Tiernan had a basic idea of how the core narrative was going to go, but other aspects were clearly made up as she went along, leading to a daytime soap vibe in which certain subplots are raised and then dropped again without resolution (at one point Morgan is tailgated by another car, and I’m pretty sure we never find out who did it or why). I’m going to keep my eye on this trait going forward...
First published in 2001, it was late enough for the inclusion of gay and diverse characters, but still too early for them to be in anything but strict periphery roles. It also wasn’t far enough away from the nineties to avoid a blatant “she’s not like the other girls” mentality, and the sheer number of girls who hate each other over boys is frankly exhausting. And yet, it’s quintessential nineties/noughties witchy fare. Teen angst, coming-of-age drama, blossoming magical abilities, stupid love triangles, seduction by the dark side, etc. I can’t wait to read more.
The Secret Circle trilogy by L.J. Smith
Published about ten years before Sweep, L.J. Smith’s trilogy is also very much part-and-parcel of the witchy pulp YA fiction that made up so much of my adolescence, and was a perfect companion piece to the above series, right down to the somewhat drippy protagonist. In fact, I wonder if Cate Tiernan was familiar with this trilogy, as there are more than a few resemblances between the two, most significantly an I Am Your Father reveal between the teenage heroine and a villainous patriarch.
L.J. Smith’s books hit that sweet-spot between absurd supernatural teen drama (complete with purple prose; expect a lot of eye-colours described as gemstones and sea tones) and stories that have genuinely solid plots and characters. Cassie Blake is holidaying with her mother on Cape Cod when she’s told they’re not returning to California – instead they’re staying at her grandmother’s house on the island of New Salem for the foreseeable future. She’s stunned by this news, as not only has she been denied the opportunity to say goodbye to her friends, but she’s never met her grandmother before – she and her mother have been estranged since before she was born.
Only one thing brings her comfort: the possibility that she might one day cross paths with the super-cute boy she rescued on the beach while he was being pursued by gun-toting hooligans.
But once she starts attending the local high school, she ends up on the wrong side of what’s known as “the Club”, a clique of astounding attractive teenagers that terrorize the other students without consequence. Worst of them is Faye Chamberlain, who is the quintessential Alpha Bitch, who is constantly described in the text as a jungle panther, a barbarian queen, and a dark goddess. She’s seventeen.
Things only pick up when Cassie is befriended by Diana Meade, Faye’s cousin and the ying to her yang. Diana is the good-and-pure school princess who takes Cassie under her wing, though it will come as a surprise to absolutely no one when her boyfriend Adam returns to the island and turns out to be the guy Cassie fell in love with during the holidays. Also not a surprise is that Adam, the cousins, and the eight other members of the Club – Deborah, Suzan, Doug, Chris, Nick, Melanie, Laurel, Sean – are all witches, and on the lookout for a potential twelfth member of their coven.
Slowly but surely, Cassie is initiated into the Circle, unable to resist being part of the in-crowd, but once Faye realizes her history with Adam, she starts blackmailing her into secretly working against Diana, the coven leader. To make matters worse, Adam’s absence over the course of the last few months was due to his attempts in finding what the Club calls the “Master Tools”, and was partially successful when he finds and brings back an ancient crystal skill, which is clearly imbued with some malevolent power.
Diana wants to conceal it, but Faye wants to use it – so she manipulates Cassie into fetching it for her, with predictably deadly results.
It’s a great setup, but the most frustrating thing about this trilogy is that it’s packed full of incredibly fascinating ideas and concepts, most of which are given only the slightest amount of exploration. SPOILERS. For example, it turns out that the owner of the skull, and the original coven leader, was a man called Black John, who is actually Cassie’s father. Yet not only does this have very little impact on the plot itself, but the psychological impact on Cassie herself is virtually non-existent. We discover nothing about how he seduced Cassie’s mother, or what he plans to do with his own daughter, which would have made for some great material.
Likewise, Smith quite elegantly weaves some of the history of the Salem Witch Hunts into the storyline, with several murder victims being killed in the same way the accused “witches” of Salem were executed, and the Club postulating that Black John has done this before as a way of fermenting discord between witches and outsiders, and to force his people to turn to him for protection. It’s a great idea, but it never really goes anywhere, and the effective depiction of John (disguised as the school principal) initiating draconian rules at the high school just dies on the vine.
Heck, in the second-to-last page of the book, Cassie comes to believe that a girl from the past she keeps dreaming about is the original incarnation of not only Diana, but Faye as well – that they were once the same person before being reborn into different bodies. Now that would have been fascinating, but (like I said) the theory is introduced on the second-to-last page of the final book.
Usually I agree with Shakespeare when he said brevity is the soul of wit, but this trilogy could have easily been a five or six-part series. And unfortunately, a lot of the page-count is taken up with the terminal love triangle between Cassie, Adam and Diana (and Nick as another potential option for Cassie). For the second time this month, I was left baffled at the story’s shipping endgame, in which Cassie ends up with Adam having fallen in love with him after a single meeting, which is handwaved away by talk of a “silver cord” that connects them.
According to another character: “there’s nothing anybody can do about it. You and Adam are linked, and that’s it. There isn’t anyone else for either of you, so you’re stuck together for this lifetime. Maybe for a lot of lifetimes.” How... romantic? Adam and Diana have been a couple for years, but he’s willing to throw all that away on a girl he’s just met, and at no point does Cassie consider the fact that a guy who fools around with her behind his girlfriend’s back might not be the Prince Charming she thinks he is.
I hardly ever prefer the bad-boy option, but it seems a no-brainer that Nick was the better match for Cassie: he treats her better, she actually spends time with him, and he definitely comes across as more interesting than the generic Adam.
On that note, this book also contains the single most hilarious example of Character Shilling I’ve ever read in my life, when someone who dislikes Cassie talks about her behind her back, and has this to say: “She looks ordinary at first, maybe, but there are all sorts of colours in her hair; it changes depending on the light. I’m serious. And I’m sure it’s just an act, but she’s the kind that looks all fragile and sweet, the kind guys are just dying to take care of – and then she starts ordering them around. And she gets away with it, probably because she opens those great big eyes and pretends she thinks she’s inadequate... And she’s got eyes to kill for. Not the colour, so much – they’re sort of greyish blue – but they’re so big and sincere it’s disgusting. They always look like they’re full of tears just ready to spill. Drives the guys crazy.”
*deep breath* HAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Who talks like this about someone they hate?? It’s like watching Draco Malfoy from A Very Potter Musical talk about how Hermione Granger is the ugliest girl in school and that he would rank her as an eight. Maybe a nine. But no more than that!
Yet the inherent silliness of this is all part of the charm. In the annuls of YA supernatural fiction, L.J. Smith is certainly better than most when it comes to delivering what we want from this genre – just the right amount of cheesy goodness without being too relentlessly stupid.
The Spook’s Secret by Joseph Delaney
The third book in the series draws upon that staple Stock Character of all speculative fiction: the apprentice that broke bad. In this case, it’s a young man called Morgan Hurst, who worked for the Spook as an apprentice before Tom Ward came along. Now he’s out for revenge against his former master, and isn’t above blackmailing Tom in order to go about it.
There’s a bit of a tangled web at work, in which Tom hears several conflicting stories about Morgan and who exactly he’s related to, and young Alice is thrown in the mix as well, having been once more evicted from the Spook’s household and forced to take up menial work in someone else’s abode. Since it’s obvious the two youngsters are already nurturing feelings for each other, the Spook is clearly trying to nip things in the bud before they form a permanent attachment (but who is he kidding, we already KNOW it’s too late).
As ever, Delaney is great with creating suspenseful set-pieces and ratcheting up the tension. Here, it’s when Tom is forced to break into the Spook’s winter house to fetch something for Morgan, all the while knowing that three witches are roaming the rooms and hall; where every step, every breath, might be what gives him away.
For the third book in a row, Delaney remains coy about the secrets that the Spook and Tom’s mother are hiding in their pasts, but it’s the prerogative of a good writer to sprinkle little hints and clues throughout the text to whet the reader’s appetite. When it came to the Spook’s misogynistic warnings to Tom about the dangers of women in the previous two books, it was obvious we were dealing with a “do as I say, not as I do” situation, which is bourn out with the revelation of certain relationships he discloses here.
And Tom’s mother has innate abilities that put her in a different league altogether when it comes to facing the forces of darkness. Despite her wish to return to her home country, I don’t think it’s the last we’ve seen of her.
Like The Spook’s Curse, this is a decent enough story, but you can tell Delaney is still paddling his feet before he takes the plunge into much deeper waters.
The Red Gloves and Other Stories by Catherine Fisher
I’ll read anything by Catherine Fisher, and in my opinion she stands alongside Alan Garner, Jenny Nimmo, Susan Cooper and even Diana Wynne Jones in her ability to craft a very specific type of fantasy vibe; one that taps into the Celtic legends of ancient Britain.
And if you have a favourite author, then reading their short stories can be fascinating too, as they’re likely to contain the themes and subjects they find most interesting, brought together in distilled form. Short stories not only provide links to the author’s longer fiction, but also each other, and in this case you can tell Fisher loves dealing with old houses, inanimate objects given life, magical transformations, broken friendships, locked chests, Welsh myths, and the uncanny creeping into ordinary life.
She’s also a beautiful writer, with clear, descriptive prose that tells us precisely what we need to know and no more. All but one of the stories have a supernatural tinge, but in many cases it’s kept somewhat ambiguous as to whether the main characters are actually experiencing magical phenomena, or whether it’s an extension of their own psyches. In other words, it was a perfect Halloween read.
The book itself is also gorgeous: the binding, the illustrations, the red-edged pages and matching woven bookmark – a lot of work went into the presentation of a relatively slim book of short stories, which means someone at the publishing house knows Fisher’s worth.
Shadow of Night by Deborah Harkness
In the second book of the All Souls trilogy, Matthew and Diana travel back in time to the Elizabethan era in order to find the alchemical manuscript known as Ashmole 782... and then proceed to do absolutely nothing. They visit Matthew’s father, they get married, they meet the coterie of thinkers known as the School of Night (including the likes of Christopher Marlowe and Sir Walter Raleigh), they find a teacher for Diana and mosey around in various royal courts (including those of Queen Elizabeth and Emperor Rudolf II) and even go sight-seeing whenever it suits them.
As with the first book, Deborah Harkness is content to just potter along with her characters, letting them experience the world they inhabit, with not the slightest bit of tension or suspense or urgency. Occasionally something exciting will happen, but there’s a good chance it will happen off-page, as when Matthew and his friends break into the King of Bohemia’s palace in order to steal the manuscript towards the end of the book. It’s a little exasperating, but as someone who knew what she was getting into when she started this series, it’s not entirely without charm.
Harkness clearly knows her Elizabethan history, and peppers her story with lots of factoids and anecdotes that I can only assume are accurate, and you have to admit that she brings the past to life in a way that fairly depicts both the pros and cons of the era (pro: you can see the stars in London, con: everything stinks). It's a book for readers that like to be immersed rather than entertained, and it’s interesting to compare it with the television adaptation, who obviously had to make several crucial changes just to make it watchable to viewers, while still following the main beats of the book.
The fact that a war between the supernatural creatures of the world – vampires, witches and daemons – is brewing, and that Matthew and Diana are on a crucially important mission to acquire pertinent information for the battle ahead is treated as little more than an afterthought, which is a damn shame considering this is the most interesting component of the whole story (not the turgid love drama between Matthew and Diana, though some of the links Harkness forges between them and alchemical symbolism is pretty neat).
Also, the time-travel element makes no sense. They arrive in London during a period in which Matthew was in another country, and there’s some vague handwaving about how these past versions of yourself cease to exist while you’re time-travelling anyway, but then... once the couple have returned to the present day and past!Matthew is inserted back into the timeline, isn’t he going to be completely baffled over the fact that his closest circle of friends have been interacting with him and his hitherto unheard-of wife during his absence? Harkness never bothers to explain this obvious plot-hole.
Some of the Mary Sue qualities of Diana are sanded down a little bit, what with her need to undergo extensive training in mastering her witchcraft (though she still ends up being the most powerful witch to ever exist, like ever) and Matthew is less of a dick than in the previous book – though still, let it be said, a dick. Having come this far, I may as well read the final book in the trilogy (though there’s a fourth one that tells the story of side-characters) but I’ll try and do it before watching the third season of the show. So far I’ve watched before reading, which I hardly ever do, though considering the show is substantially better than the books in terms of pacing and paring down the extraneous detail, it might actually be the better option.
Halloween (1978)
I made it my business this month to watch the first instalments of the three most successful slasher franchises of all time. Halloween was chronologically first, and fitting considering Jamie Lee Curtis is only just wrapping up her decades-long involvement with the series.
Unfortunately, I had to keep reminding myself that the reason this movie is considered such a classic is because it was the first do to a lot of the things that occur during its runtime, which have since become clichés of the genre. Heck, it pretty much set the template for all the horror/slasher films to come. Don’t run up the stairs. Don’t hide in the closet. Don’t have sex. Scream pointed this all out to us back in the nineties.
In her debut (she was only nineteen years old!) Curtis plays Laurie Strode, a normal teenage girl with a babysitting gig on Halloween. She and her two friends (names are irrelevant) wander around school and the community, mostly oblivious to the strange masked figure that appears to be stalking them. That is, Laurie notices, and everyone else tells her to chill.
The man is Michael Myers, who murdered his sister while he was still just a child and has been incarcerated prison/sanatorium ever since. There he’s been treated by Doctor Samuel Loomis, a man who has long-since diagnosed his patient as “just evil.” The night before Halloween, Loomis visits the facility in order to escort Myers to a hearing, only to watch him escape into the night. Assuming that he’s returned to his childhood home of Haddonfield, Loomis does everything in his power to alert the local police and find out where Myers is hiding.
But on Halloween night, Myers begins his killing spree. His very slow and surprisingly restrained killing spree.
Look, I can’t lie: if it weren’t for the genuinely terrifying score, which tells us the parts of the film in which we should be on edge, this would have been the most boring slasher film of all time. And yes, I am aware that it was essentially the first of its kind, making it the forerunner of all the slashers that are to come, but still – when Laurie looks out of her bedroom window to see Michael staring at her from the neighbour’s yard, only for him to disappear between shots even though she never takes her eyes off him, it's a little silly.
And I spent the entire movie waiting for the sibling reveal to happen, only to realize by the end credits that this was something introduced in the sequels (and that John Carpenter hated it – apparently it’s been retconned in the most recent trilogy of films. Can someone confirm?)
But watching this was like viewing an important historical landmark. It pretty much single-handedly conceived the slasher formula, kicked off a franchise that’s lasted over four decades, and made Jamie Lee Curtis a star. For that, I’m glad I saw it.
Friday the 13th (1980)
If Halloween was the prototype, this is the codifier. Introducing the summer camp as a quintessential venue for mass murder, it also copies or elaborates on some of the tropes found in Halloween: a dwindling group of teenage friends, a killer with inexplicable motives, an array of gruesomely elaborate deaths, and a Final Girl.
In a striking difference from Halloween, this movie hides the killer’s identity, staging it as a mystery that must be solved (even though it’s a Clueless Mystery in that it doesn’t provide any sort of hints or foreshadowing as to who it might be, and when said killer finally shows up on-screen, the reveal takes place mere seconds later. I can think of a thousand ways they could have handled this better, starting with the killer being introduced much, much earlier).
I’m not sure why I’m being coy, the film’s big twist (and only innovative idea, aside from Annie as the Decoy Protagonist) was spoiled years ago in the opening sequence to Scream.
After having been closed for years due to several tragic deaths, Camp Crystal Lake is being reopened for the summer. Two weeks before the children arrive, the teenage counsellors converge on the site to prepare it for the grand opening, only to succumb one-by-one to a shadowy killer.
This was my least favourite of the three films: the characters aren’t well drawn, it’s full of needless padding, and (like I said above) the reveal of the killer is completely mishandled. And what was with Marcie’s precognitive dream? Why did they hint at a relationship between Steve and Alice? What was up with the scene where they kill that snake in the cabin, or of Steve having a drawn-out conversation with a waitress at a diner? What was the point of any of that?
It's a rather bizarre movie in a lot of ways, which largely exists to showcase a range of gruesome murders, but hey – that’s Kevin Bacon!
A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
This was easily the best of the three films: three-dimensional characters, a story that’s more complex than just “bad guy kills teens”, and a final girl who is actually proactive in fighting back. Yes, I know the goal when getting caught up in mass murder is simply to SURVIVE it, but there’s certainly something rousing in watching Nancy research her foe, come up with a plan to defeat him, and booby-trap her house a good decade before Kevin McAllister got left home alone.
In fact, this could have become a movie I genuinely loved… if it wasn’t for that bafflingly awful and bizarre ending! Seriously, what on earth was that about? Is anyone else annoyed with this genre’s absolute insistence on letting the villain disappear into the ether in order to keep the door open for sequels? Please, it’s okay to just let the heroine have a clean win!
Nancy and her three friends (including Johnny Depp in his first movie role, something I might have been more charmed with had I watched this five years ago) have all been suffering strange nightmares, of a horribly burnt man with long metallic claws worn over his fingers. What’s worse, injuries sustained in the dreams cross over into the real world, and soon enough the small community is dealing with a body count. Only Nancy realizes what’s actually going on, desperately trying to warn her parents and the other adults to no avail.
Knowing Wes Craven was behind this film was particularly fascinating, as you can see bits and pieces of Scream strewn throughout, specifically in the use of a dark family secret (the circumstances of Sidney’s mother’s death; the townsfolk forming a mob when Freddy Kreuger gets off on a technicality) and the teenage heroine having to grapple with the fallout of the previous generation’s sins. Both Nancy and Sidney eventually fight back against their assailant, and there’s even a scene in which each one’s boyfriend pays her an unsolicited visit by crawling through her open window. I knew enough about this movie for there to be no real surprises (and even if I hadn’t, the tropes and clichés of the genre are so deeply enmeshed by this point that you can anticipate every beat) but it was still a fun ride – like I said, easily my favourite of the three films.
Except for that infuriating ending! What was that?! Nancy defeats Kreuger by telling him he’s rendered powerless if she demonstrates a lack of fear, deliberately turning her back on him as he melts away. The next day she steps out onto the porch to find the sun shining, her mother giving up the alcohol and her friends still alive, but the moment she gets into the car with them, they’re all trapped inside and forcibly driven away before Freddy’s hand yanks her mother through the window in her front door. So, um… what? Is this another nightmare? Did Freddy really get Nancy? How are her friends still alive? I just don’t get it, and since I’m not particularly interested in following up with any of the sequels there’s a good chance I’ll never know.
The Others (2001)
This is one of my favourite movies ever. I’ve watched it countless times but not for a few years, and so revisiting for our annual Halloween Movie Night at work was a treat. Every frame, every acting choice, every musical cue and sound effect is just riveting – and I honestly think this is Nicole Kidman’s best performance. She plays a highly-strung, rather unsympathetic woman, and not only is she unafraid to lean into the unlikeability of her character, but also make us feel deeply for her as well. Between this and Moulin Rouge, 2001 was quite a year for her.
Grace is a young mother living in a fog-shrouded manor on the isle of Jersey in the years following WWII. Her two children, Anne and Nicolas, are photosensitive, and cannot be exposed to any light brighter than a gas-lamp. Naturally, this requires all sorts of strict household rules: the curtains must be drawn whenever the children enter a room, and each door must be locked before another one opens.
So Grace tells the three servants that appear on her doorstep, responding (or so they say) to the advertisement she has left in the local newspaper. She tells them that her previous servants disappeared in the night, up and leaving without even collecting their wages, a mystery that is soon solved once the audience gets a taste of Grace’s haughty, volatile demeanour.
The servants – twinkly-eyed Ms Mills, stoic Mr Tuttle, and mute Lydia – seem to know what they’re doing, though there’s obviously more to them than meets the eye. Grace discovers that the advertisement she left for the postman was never picked up, and so the call for domestic help never went out – so how exactly did the three of them come to be on Grace’s doorstep right when she needed them? Mrs Mills smoothly offers an explanation, but the seeds of doubt are sown.
And yet Grace herself poses just as much of a mystery to the servants as they do to her. Ms Mills in particular picks up on the reticence of the children, who quietly allude to the day “mummy went mad” before retreating into silence. Daughter Anne is defiant and wilful, pushing back on some of her mother’s Biblical edicts, whereas Nicolas is clingy and nervous, and often the victim of his sister’s pranks.
So when strange things start to happen in the house: footsteps where there should be none, whispers emitting from thin air, objects being moved and found elsewhere, Anne is the one who shoulders the blame. She angrily insists that it’s the work of a boy called Victor, though she’s equally adamant that she’s not seeing ghosts – they wear sheets and carry chains and go “oooh!”
What exactly is going on then? Is Anne playing tricks? Is Grace losing her grip on sanity? Are the servants messing with them for some inexplicable reason? There are clues aplenty strewn throughout the film’s run-time, but none of them seems to add up to a singular explanation.
The success of the film lies in the fact that the mystery does, ultimately, get explained in a way that accounts for the myriad of strange occurrences we’ve just watch unfold. The most rewarding element of The Others is that you can rewatch it countless times and notice all sorts of little details and nuances that point to the story’s solution, from the substantial mist that surrounds the house to the micro-expressions of the actors as they react to bits of information.
SPOILERS
The film suffered a little for having been released so soon on the heels of The Sixth Sense, which featured the same twist ending. Like Bruce Willis, Grace and her children were Dead All Along, and the “others” of the title are actually the new family that’s moved into their house, utilizing the skills of a medium to find out who is causing the paranormal activity throughout the place. In fact, it’s fascinating to look back over the events of the film and try to imagine them from the living family’s point-of-view: clearly they got sick to death of the curtains being constantly pulled back and forth, leading to the climactic scene in which they’re removed entirely.
Not everything is made crystal clear – for instance, a lot of viewers walk away thinking that Grace’s previous servants left after she killed herself, obviously having lost their jobs. But though it’s conveyed subtly, the movie makes it clear they left before the tragedy – that in fact, their departure is what triggered her nervous breakdown. As she says at one point: “they knew I couldn’t leave the house.”
This is interesting when it comes to pondering the film’s timeline. That is, just how long after the murder/suicide is all this happening? It’s easy to assume that Grace waking up from her screaming nightmare in the very first scene is in the immediate aftermath of the killings, and that the trio of new servants appear that same day, seeing the need to gently integrate themselves into the newly dead family (who at this point, don’t even realize what’s happened to them).
But it’s more difficult to believe that the next family have moved in so quickly on the heels of such a gruesome crime, or that they don’t already know what exactly happened to Grace and her children (I mean, surely the bodies would have been discovered by somebody in the interim). In fact, the family’s clothing and model of car suggest that several years have passed, which calls into question how the ghostly inhabitants of the house are experiencing the passage of time. How much do they actually know on a subconscious level about what’s happened to them? (Don’t get me started on the fact that the children are seen eating food throughout the film, though Anne does comment that “it tastes funny”).
Because I like to torture myself with deep questions of an existential nature, I can’t help but ponder some of the unanswered questions regarding the film’s depiction of the afterlife. On the one hand, all the dead characters have maintained the personalities they had in life and possess an awareness of time passing. They still exist in some form, as sentient, self-aware beings. On the other hand, it’s unclear whether any higher power exists in this story, or why exactly the ghosts are apparently doomed to wander the house for eternity, trapped by the perpetual fog that surrounds the property.
A more simplistic ghost story would have the family move on to the next plane of existence (or whatever you want to call it) after realizing they’ve perished, but in this case, Grace’s Catholic faith fails her, and she admits to her children she has no idea what’s going on. Director Alejandro Amenábar tries to infuse the ending with some degree of comfort by having the children cured of their photosensitivity and Mrs Mills gently offer Grace an olive branch, but it still remains that Anne and Nicolas will never grow up, never meet anyone else, and never leave the house.
And what about Grace’s poor husband? He’s also a ghost, and clearly doomed to spend the rest of eternity wandering the battlefield, traumatized and broken. And Lydia clearly isn’t having a great time of the afterlife either. There’s no sign of any benevolent God looking after these lost souls, yet in lieu of that they don’t even get the release of oblivion.
But the ambiguity of the ending is part-and-parcel of the film in its entirety, and I can’t imagine any alternative that would not have betrayed the story’s bleak, unsettling tone.
Let’s leave this review on a lighter note: since the film’s release, two of the minor characters have gone on to greater fame elsewhere, and it’s a hoot to see that the new owners of the house are none other than the Sheriff of Nottingham (Keith Allen) and Caitlyn Stark (Michelle Fairley). It’s always fun to see them in these earlier roles, and they manage to do quite a lot with very limited screentime.
It: Chapter One and It: Chapter Two (2017 – 2019)
Stephen King’s It is one of those stories that everyone knows about, whether or not they’ve read the novel or watched the nineties miniseries. Heck, I casually mentioned it to a little girl who comes into my library’s craft sessions every Friday (not delving into any detail, obviously) and she knew it was about an evil clown called Pennywise who lived in the sewers.
The book is a massive tome that is just as much a treatise on childhood friendship, growing up, and the nature of memories as it is fighting an evil Eldritch Abomination from outer space, but I’d never experienced the story in any meaningful way before these films (I definitely haven’t read the book, and I’m not sure I ever want to). The Losers Club is comprised of Bill, Eddie, Stan, Richie, Mike, Ben and Beverley, all outcasts in the Maine township of Derry to one extent or another. Bill has a stutter, Eddie is a hypochondriac, Stan is Jewish, Richie is a loudmouth, Mike is Black, Ben is overweight, and Beverley is the subject of several vile slut-shaming rumours around town. Also, an evil demonic clown is trying to kill them.
But they have each other, which is very much the crux of the two films and what I suspect is the reason for their success: it’s just as much about the group dynamics as it is a horror story about Pennywise the child-eating clown. The chemistry between the cast, especially the child actors, is just impeccable, and I ended up being more captivated by the complexities of their friendship than I was the whole issue about trying to defeat the monster.
As I understand it, the novel flits back and forth between the characters as children and as late thirty-somethings, which provides an excellent cutting-off point for a duology. The first film deals with the characters’ initial experiences with Pennywise, and ends with them vowing to return to Derry as grownups should ever the threat re-emerge. Naturally it does, and so they converge in their old neighbourhood to pool their adult knowledge and experience to take out the clown once and for all.
It's ingenious in its obviousness, and it was a lot of fun watching the complete story over two nights. (Though imagine if they filmed the first movie, and then actually waited twenty-seven years to do the sequel with the original cast. Haha, that would never happen in a million years... but just imagine it).
There is seriously not a weak link in this entire cast, and every time I thought about saying “such-and-such steals the show” one of the other kids would pull off a scene that made me reassess just who exactly was putting in the best performance. Honestly, it’s all of them, and so it’s not entirely surprising that the older cast have difficulty filling the shoes of their predecessors. There’s something about children going up against the forces of evil (that their parents and other adults refuse to acknowledge) that’s always going to be more powerful than when grownups with resources and experience and common sense do the same.
Based on what I’ve read about the book, director Andrés Muschietti has done a great job of adapting its extensive page-count into a manageable pair of films, with plenty of understandable – or at least interesting – changes from the text (Stan’s suicide is given a different context, Bill and Beverley’s spouses have been practically eliminated, Richie’s secret feelings for another member of the Losers Club is touched upon, Mike’s backstory is changed and he’s more heavily involved in the defeat of It). There’s even a Stephen King cameo that pokes fun at his tendency to deliver unsatisfying endings.
And of course, THAT scene has been eliminated. You know the one I’m talking about. If you don’t... perhaps it’s best to leave it that way.
Sometimes it can get a bit repetitive, what with each of the kids being haunted by their deepest fears, and then each of them as adults having to track down a “totem” to use in the clown-banishing ritual (and once again facing their fears) but it’s worth the length just for the immersion in the township of Derry, its sordid history, and the way in which the characters manage to survive it on a day-to-day basis.
However, two things struck me. The first is that Pennywise’s clown incarnation was probably his least terrifying form. Seriously, the painting of the woman, the headless boy, the creepy old lady – they were much more horrifying than any and all variations of Pennywise. The second is where the chips fell in the romance department.
I don’t get worked up about shipping, and I don’t even mind how things ended up here, but... well. The two films spend so much time setting up Bill/Beverley (their attraction, their rapport, the “what might have been” of it all) that the final pairings (Bill with his single-scene wife and Beverley with Ben) comes across as a bit random. Heck, the first movie actually ends on Bill and Bev’s first kiss, one that’s not only so sweeping and beautiful that there’s no way any real eleven-year-olds are capable of achieving it, but which ends with Bev leaving streaks of her own blood on Bill’s face thanks to the cut on her hand, which ties into all the film’s other uses of blood symbolizing Bev’s coming-of-age, the blood oath they’ve just sworn, and (obviously) life and death itself.
There was even some subliminal stuff, such as a shot of Bev in profile – as both a child and an adult – being woken when water drips on her face matching an earlier scene in which Bill falls asleep next to a picture he’s drawn of her, which also ends up getting drops of water on it.
I mean heck, don’t waste all this epic imagery on the couple that don’t end up together! I don’t care how many cute poems Ben writes her, Bill/Bev were given all the most potent emotional beats together (and I can’t help but feel that a. Ben’s idolization of Bev isn’t going to help either of them in the long run, and b. it’s kind of icky that she only hooks up with him after he’s lost weight and become extremely wealthy. God forbid she date a poor fat guy, amirite?)
It actually ended up reminding me of how Steve Kloves wrote the Harry Potter screenplays and the way you could just tell he would have preferred Harry/Hermione to be the official pairing. The same thing was definitely happening with Muschietti when it came to Bill/Bev.
I can’t believe I just wrote four paragraphs on shipping in a horror movie.
The Banishing (2020)
Watching this the night after The Others only highlighted just how good that movie is. A masterclass of pacing, rising tension and watertight scripting; this in comparison is borderline incoherent. It’s usually difficult to go wrong with period ghost stories; the atmosphere should sustain it if nothing else, but this was a jumble of ideas and set-pieces that never coalesce.
Three years after a brutal murder at Morley Hall, a new vicar moves in with his wife Marianne and daughter Adelaide. There is a strained, unspoken tension between the three of them, and soon enough Adelaide starts behaving strangely: playing with creepy dolls and talking with invisible people. Marianne isn’t far behind her, having nightmares of sinister monks and noticing that the mirrors in the house don’t always reflect what’s right in front of them.
There are two outside forces also trying to exert their influence on the house’s inhabitants: an eccentric occultist who attempts to warn the family of the danger they’re in, and the dour bishop that assigned Marianne’s husband to the hall. These are easily the most interesting characters of the entire film, and played well by Sean Harris (putting his game face to good use) and John Lynch (who I fear is now typecast as grim, hypocritical patriarchs).
The depictions of the hauntings are rather confusing: more often than not a person will notice a doppelganger reacting to something supernatural, making it difficult to discern who exactly are the “real” participants in any unfolding drama. The technique is obviously an attempt to connect the supernatural events to the mirror motif, but it’s also incredibly difficult to understand what exactly is going on at any given moment. Ghost stories can be ambiguous, but there must be a sense of grounded reality to offset the spooky events.
There are also attempts to explore the historical backdrop of rising fascism across Europe and the correlation between religious fanaticism and sexual repression (I’m not saying it ain’t true, but it’s such an old axe to grind) but none of it goes anywhere. In fact, the most interesting scene is the second-to-last sequence, in which John Lynch’s character is seen digging up the graves of the unquiet spirits and taking their remains to Nazi Germany, revealing that he deliberately placed Marianne in the house in the hopes that she would uncover them. But... why? For what purpose?
I feel like if the film had started from that moment, we would have had a much more interesting story on our hands. Ah well, it’s always nice to see Jessica Brown Findlay. It’s a shame her career never really took off after Downton Abbey.
Things Heard & Seen (2021)
I had the idea of watching three period-drama ghost stories over the Halloween weekend, and then got a surprise when Things Heard & Seen ended up being a. closer to present day than I realized, and b. not really a ghost story at all. For whatever reason, all the gif-sets I’d seen of it made it look like it took place in the fifties or sixties, though I suppose these days 1980 is considered pretty long-ago.
Married couple George and Catherine move to Hudson Valley with their young daughter when George gets his dream teaching position at the local university. They each start to settle into their new community: George makes friends at the university. Catherine hires two teenagers to help do up the house. Parties are held, classes are taught, research into the house is done. But their daughter Frannie is unsettled by “a lady” who appears in her room at night, and strange lights and electrical surges lead Catherine to believe the house might be haunted...
Based on the book All Things Cease to Appear by Elizabeth Brundage, many of the reviews I’ve read state that the book was practically unfilmable given the way in which it’s told (largely from George’s point-of-view, who is of the Gone Girl class of Unreliable Narrator). Apparently the whole point of the novel is for the reader to gradually realize what kind of man he is while being up-close-and-personal with his internal dialogue, something that naturally can’t translate to the film, in which the red flags of his behaviour are immediate and obvious.
This movie clocks in at over two hours, which is frankly insane. Things like Catherine’s eating disorder and Natalie Dyers’s entire character could have been cut entirely given their lack of significance to the plot, and heck – you could probably even remove the ghostly elements as well. We never get much solid information on what exactly is going on in the house, and when push comes to shove the ghosts are pretty useless anyway. Though there is supernatural activity, it’s really a film about the state of a marriage and the gradual reveal of George’s true nature.
Admittedly, its pacing and beautiful cinematography makes it compelling, and perhaps some of my unenthusiasm comes from having been blindsided by what it was actually about, but it’s still a deeply strange movie in a lot of respects, with little in the way of explanation or closure. (Seriously, what happens to Frannie?)
Cinderella (2021)
Well of course I was going to see this. Any retold fairy tale, no matter how terrible-looking, is always going to be on my watch-list. But here’s the thing: this is really not that bad. As soon as the trailers hit, people were derisively calling it “woke Cinderella”, and that’s definitely the approach they took with this: the fairy godmother is Billy Porter, Cinderella has ambitions to become a dress designer, and the Prince eventually abdicates the throne in favour of his little sister, who demonstrates throughout the movie that she’s much more suited for the role than he is. (That’s not even getting into the contemporary dialogue or the song choices).
And yes, it’s all a bit cringe. But watching all the usual suspects bellyaching about wokeness and propaganda puts me in the odd position of wanting to defend it, even if it does go a bit overboard at times (the opening number is set to “Rhythm Nation” – oof). But then, who even cares? It’s a fun and colourful musical made for children, and by the sounds of it, it still isn’t anywhere near as bad as Emerald Fennell’s attempt to update the story for the stage. This at least, is still earnest about what it’s doing.
And there are some genuinely good ideas in this, even if it is a bit scattershot. I like that Ella has some career ambitions, and that she sees this as a way of escaping her step-family. There’s a song in which she performs a duet with her own daydream which is nicely staged. Prince Robert gets his own arc, starting as a callow youth that (in a fun gender-flip from the norm) his array of suitors are completely unimpressed by, to someone who can give up his position and title for the sake of his more qualified little sister (you won’t be surprised to hear I LOVED this, given how often I’ve complained about this not happening in stuff like Aquaman and How To Train Your Dragon).
These days, it’s more often than not the case that Cinderella and the Prince will meet before the ball, and here they handle the romance in a fun way: Robert is the one that spots her first, follows her into the village out of curiosity, buys the dress she’s designed, and then convinces her to come to the ball because it’ll give her a chance to present her wares to potential clients (which is what ends up happening). In another nice wrinkle, he gives Cinderella’s dress to his little sister for wear to the occasion.
Here's another good innovation: the fairy godmother ends up emerging from the cocoon that Cinderella rescues and keeps in her basement bedroom, transforming into a butterfly before arriving on the scene to help Cinderella. Butterflies make for pretty obvious metaphors in general, but it’s also a nice way of rewarding Cinderella’s kindness. And it’s not even the first time a Cinderella movie has played around with the idea of a “fairy godmother” – remember the sly wink to Leonardo da Vinci’s orientation when he took the role in Ever After?
I didn’t even mind James Cordon as one of the mice. Camila Cabello is a little cloying, but also completely sincere, Idina Menzel is underutilized, and Charlotte Spencer (from Sanditon and The Living and the Dead) is fantastic as one of the stepsisters. I feel she’s on the brink of her big break – or at least she should be.
All that said, it’s not perfect. Cinderella’s basement hovel is actually a very clean and attractive place. There’s inexplicably no pumpkin carriage (they use a packing crate instead). It packs way too many characters into the run-time, including a subplot that deals with the strained marriage of Prince Robert’s parents (though Minnie Driver looks great, and they take the opportunity to make fun of Pierce Brosnan’s lack of singing ability) which ends up making Cinderella’s entire stepfamily feel utterly superfluous. Her central conflict isn’t trying to endure/escape an abusive home, but finding a way to reconcile her career with her personal life.
Despite some dubious song choices, the dancing is exuberant (the highlight is the princesses at the ball singing “Whatta Man” with choreography that makes them look like they’re in some sort of deranged bird-like mating ritual) and it’s probably the most colourful take on Cinderella since the Brandy version in the nineties. There’s a little girl out there somewhere for whom this recently became their favourite take on the fairy tale, and all things considered, there’s a lot of stuff more worthy of a hatedom than this.
The Northman (2022)
Robert Eggers, director of The Witch and The Lighthouse, is clearly interested in doing one thing in his films above all else: to create that foreign country which is the past. I’m not sure there’s anyone else working in Hollywood at the moment who has such an obvious passion for realism and authenticity when it comes to his period dramas, and though there are still a few anachronisms here and there (the women still have glossy hair and shiny white teeth) I feel completely transported whenever I watch one of his films – which admittedly, is so far only The Witch and this, The Northman.
Loosely based on the Norse legend of Amleth, which in turn inspired Shakespeare’s Hamlet, it’s the saga of a Viking prince whose father was murdered by his uncle, who then went on to usurp the throne and marry the queen. Young Amleth manages to evade assassination, and makes his escape repeating the words of his life-long mantra: “I will avenge you, Father! I will save you, Mother! I will kill you, Fjölnir!”
Years later, and now played by Alexander Skarsgård, Amleth finally gets his chance. He overhears that Fjölnir has been ousted from the hillfort he overthrew, and now resides with what’s left of his retinue in the wilds of Iceland. Encouraged by a seeress he encounters in an abandoned temple, Amleth leaves his band of warriors to fulfil his life’s purpose.
SPOILERS
It seems a fairly straightforward narrative, one that largely serves as an Excuse Plot to showcase Eggers’ interest in depicting the way Vikings lived and the stunning Icelandic countryside, though just past the halfway mark, Nicole Kidman (who played Amleth’s mother Gudrún) drops a scene that changes the entire meaning and structure of the film. Turns out that Gudrún was little more than a slave to her first husband, that she willingly supported Fjölnir’s takeover, and Amleth’s rah-rah quest for vengeance is a misguided act of foolishness. Faced with a new and terrible truth, Amleth has to decide whether to complete his mission to avenge his father, or escape with Olga of the Birch Forest (Anya Taylor Joy) for a life of peace and happiness.
It's not quite that clear-cut, as there’s still plenty of mysticism at work that encourages Amleth to follow the Viking code of honour and kill Fjölnir, though I felt it would have made for a more interesting twist if Amleth’s uncle had been depicted as a decent husband and king to his people. However, since he’s still a murderer and a rapist (and a jerk) the ambiguity of setting up Amleth as the actual villain is a bit lost. Eventually, it’s just two inscrutable characters brawling on an active volcano, which is admittedly pretty cool to watch, but doesn’t leave the audience with anything to root for.
Which is obviously the point. This is a world where a man can drag chained slaves through the halls of his keep before fondly greeting his wife and child; where our “hero” watches impassively as screaming children are ripped from their mothers’ arms and buildings are set alight with prisoners trapped inside them; where a father and son are randomly shot dead on the riverbank for no other reason but that their assailant felt like it.
It's a grim, fascinating, difficult, beautiful film; the sort of thing white supremacists furiously masturbate to while completely missing the point of the entire thing. For there is another wrinkle to the proceedings: when the seeress tells Amleth that he must go to Iceland to fulfil his vow, she makes a reference to the “Maiden-King” and Amleth’s connection to her. By the end of the film, Olga is pregnant with Amleth’s children, and his vision makes it clear that one of the twins she’s carrying will be a daughter.
Could it be that the gods had no interest whatsoever in Amleth’s personal quest? That the entirety of his mission was for him to meet, fall in love with, and impregnant Olga, thereby ensuring that she brought about the existence of Maiden-King, who is destined for greatness? That’s the implication, and once Amleth has fulfilled that role, the gods have no further interest in him.
This is a movie that I will definitely rewatch at some point in the future, just to parse through the multitude of ideas and set-pieces that Eggers presents across its substantial run-time. There’s a lot to absorb, and I probably didn’t do it justice by watching it a. only once, and b. on a small-screen television. I’ll be coming back to this one...
Charmed: Season 1 (2018)
Just as I was getting ready to settle down and enjoy this reboot, the news came out that Madeleine Mantock was leaving the show, just as Shannon Doherty had back in the nineties. My enthusiasm was shot, and certainly not revived by the fact that the show ended after season four.
But knowing the worst, I ended up watching the first season for the Halloween season, and inevitably ended up comparing it to the original show. As it happens, I wasn’t a huge fan of nineties Charmed: I checked out about halfway through the third season, and have never rewatched anything past the first. After season one the stories, continuity and costuming choices became more and more dodgy and I just lost interest.
So the idea of a reboot was actually appealing to me. The showrunners could learn from their predecessor and tell a long-running story about three witch-sisters who vanquish demons and help the innocent, with all the changes in television programming (longer arcs, gradual character development, careful continuity and lore-building) that had been perfected in the two decades between the shows.
And yet despite this, I found myself missing the standalone stories of the original series. That was comprised of episodes you could watch out of order because they were all so self-contained, and usually didn’t have stakes that were much higher than “save an innocent person” or “vanquish this particular demon.” It gave viewers the chance to get to know the characters, their personalities, and their power-sets, not to mention simply enjoy a forty-five minute story with a beginning, middle and end.
This Charmed is not only much more serialized, but has the sisters fighting the apocalypse right off the bat. Concepts such as the Elders and the Source are present from the get-go (I never got as far as these in the nineties show) and the sisters’ whitelighter not only makes his appearance in the pilot, but pretty much explains everything about who they are and what’s expected of them in one big Infodump.
It's hard not to compare the two trios of core characters, especially with creator Constance M. Burge’s original thesis statement for the show in mind: these were three sisters that happened to be witches, not three witches that happened to be sisters (and as I recall, she ended up leaving the show after the network started meddling with that truism). In 2018’s Charmed, the characters are definitely witches before they’re sisters, and the plots are churned through so quickly that it’s nearly impossible for anything to have any sort of meaningful resonance.
Instead of Prue, Piper and Phoebe, we have Macy, Mel and Maggie. Right off the bat, I dislike those names: the Ps are more striking and better suited to the personalities of the characters than the Ms, and given that two of the 2018 actresses are called Madeleine and Melonie, I imagine there must have been a fair amount of confusion on set.
Then there’s the way their powers manifest. Macy has telekinesis, though this failed to learn the lesson was spotted pretty quickly in the nineties: Shannon Doherty originally channelled her power through her eyes, leading to a number of daft scenes in which she would squint at things while the camera zoomed in on her face – they quickly changed to having Prue direct her telekinesis through her hands, which naturally looked much better on screen. This goes straight back to Macy glaring at things, and it looks as silly as it sounds.
Piper’s freezing abilities – or at least the gesture she made when she utilized them – was iconic. She would throw her hands up in the air in a panicked gesture, which matched her somewhat flustered personality perfectly. Here, Mel just raises a hand, pretty much exactly like Eleven does on Stranger Things. As for Maggie, they’ve tweaked her powers a little, making her empathetic rather than prophetic, and then plying her with an expanded power-set when they realize this doesn’t give her much to contribute. (Phoebe’s gift was passive, but at least it initiated stories).
Perhaps it’s unfair to compare the two shows, and the reboot does diverge from its predecessor reasonably quickly. Eldest sister Macy is a geneticist who never knew her family, and begins the show by introducing herself to her two half-sisters, revealing that they share a mother. Mel is a lesbian, social activist and university student, while youngest sister Maggie is a party girl attempting to join the Kappa sorority. It’s actually a pretty good idea to have the show set on a college campus, as it means the girls are in close vicinity on a day-to-day basis, with Macy in the laboratory, Mel in the classroom, and Maggie in the sorority house.
After their mother’s mysterious death, Macy ends up moving in with the other girls, hoping to solve the mystery as to why her mother never contacted her. The various strands of the storyline – Macy’s questions about her family, Mel’s relationship with a cop called Niko, and Maggie’s attempts to join the sorority – eventually merge together in a save-the-world plot that gets pretty convoluted after a while (I kinda gave up trying to understand how it all worked).
They’re helped along the way by their whitelighter, an English chap called Harry who seems to have been conceived as a younger version of Giles from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It would seem the show is gearing up for a witch/whitelighter romance between Macy and Harry (as Piper and Leo had back in the day), while Mel gets the Prue/Andy “how can I have a relationship with a civilian?” storyline, and Maggie gets the Phoebe/Cole “help, my boyfriend is a demon!” arc. The problem is that not enough time is invested in any of these relationships, and since they’re all over by the finale, there’s not a lot of reason to care.
It's never truly bad, but it’s also not that compelling, which is a shame considering the premise is such a solid one. Three sister-witches fight evil. What’s not to like? At least there’s a fun array of familiar faces on display: Sophie from Batgirl! George from Nancy Drew! Dylan from American Vandal! Craig Parker from New Zealand! Always nice to see him.
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