In which Robin’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day (or Week) continues, and Marian kickstarts her own plot at the court of Queen Eleanor. The showrunners promised us something like this for her, and I’m glad it looks like they’re going to try and deliver.
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This second episode of Robin Hood (which aired on the same night as the first, it’s just taken a while for me to write about) isn’t quite as good as the premiere. That was better structured, being bookended either side with scenes of Hugh: opening with him telling stories to his son, and ending with his death.
This episode probably should have ended with Robin and Marian parting in the rain given the emphasis on their relationship throughout this episode, but it decides to carry on for a bit longer and conclude with a cliff-hanger instead.
Don’t worry – this will be a much shorter review than the first.
And so it begins, a new Robin Hood show arriving with very little fanfare, virtually no promotion (I counted a teaser, trailer and a couple of interviews with the cast), on a streaming service that no one’s heard of. Still, it did have one very good poster (below), in which Robin holds the bow and Marian pulls the bowstring, which is hopefully an indicator of teamwork and equity in the episodes ahead.
Is there any point in getting invested, or will this be another one-and-done with an unresolved cliff-hanger finish?
Rebecca de Winter from Rebecca
This is the first time I’ve added an entry without an image of the woman in question, because the whole point of Daphne du Maurier’s famous novel is that we never get a glimpse of Rebecca, just as we never find out the name of the story’s narrator, the second Mrs de Winter.
Rebecca is a posthumous character, yet despite being really, most sincerely dead by the time the story starts, she is the novel’s main character, her presence still looming large over Manderley and all its inhabitants. Heck, it’s right there in the title. She’s the subject of the book, and our actual protagonist is so overshadowed by her that she doesn’t even warrant a name.
SPOILERS
The new Mrs de Winter is at first cowled by tales of her predecessor, the beautiful, glamourous, vivacious Rebecca, and struggles to assert herself – especially when it comes to the housekeeper Mrs Danvers, who was devoted to Rebecca and resents the arrival of her replacement. She’s convinced that Maxim could never possibly love her as much as he did his first wife, but just over halfway through the novel the truth emerges: Rebecca was a cruel and manipulative woman with clear psychopathic tendencies.
Yet once you finally get the whole story, you can’t help but admire her just a tiny bit. As it transpires, Rebecca was terminally ill with cancer, and in order to spare herself prolonged suffering, she goaded her husband into shooting her dead by taunting him with a lie about how she was pregnant with another man’s child. Her plan worked perfectly: she got her relatively painless end, and her husband was left guilt-ridden and paranoid.
Even when the reality of Rebecca’s true nature becomes public, Mrs Danvers ensures Maxim and his young wife will never enjoy her true mistress’s home without her, and burns it to the ground. Rebecca has won, did win, and was always going to win.
The allure of Rebecca is her unknowability – she’s dead before the narrative starts, so all our protagonist ever learns of her is second-hand. There are plenty of Sapphic undertones in her relationship with Mrs Danvers, and it’s made clear she was carrying on a love affair with her first cousin, as well as many others. Her husband says of her: “she was not normal,” and that she had told him things about herself that he would never repeat. To some she was a virtuous and charming woman, to others a pathological liar and narcissist. But the final word on her must simply be: “She did what she liked. She lived as she liked.” And ultimately, she died in the way of her own choosing.
The theme for this year’s October turned out to be Folk Horror. Yes, this was a bit of a surprise to me too, as last year it was vampires, and the year before that, werewolves. Something like witches or ghosts would seem the next obvious choice, but I had a ton of shows and films in the Folk Horror genre that I wanted to revisit, so Folk Horror it turned out to be…
When I think about that particular genre, it’s the atmosphere more than anything that springs to mind. Damp autumn leaves, mist-soaked fields, eerie forests, abandoned graveyards… there are plenty of exceptions of course, though to my mind any self-respecting Folk Horror story has to establish a strong ambiance. From that starting point, you can establish the weird cults, creepy neighbours, ancient beliefs, and highly ambiguous endings.
(In fact, given my excitement over the upcoming Robin Hood series on MGM, and the fact that a substantial amount of that story takes place in a forest, I found myself wondering what a Folk Horror take on Robin Hood would look like…)
Although I didn’t watch what’s referred to as the “unholy trinity” of Folk Horror films, there’s been something of a resurgence of the genre in recent years (The Witch, Midsomer), to the point where something like Starve Acre can just sort of fly under the radar a bit. This also means there’s plenty to choose from if you’re in the mood for something dark and unsettling for the spooky season, though living in Aotearoa means we’re enjoying longer evenings instead of the onset of winter.
I hope you all had an exciting and/or uneventful Halloween (depending on your preferences) and can start looking forward to Christmas with optimism in your heart. All things pass.
Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death
– John Keats
Earlier this year (May, to be precise) I read and watched a number of vampire stories. This month I went with friends to see Dracula performed as a ballet. Across that time, I was continually stunned to notice striking similarities between so many takes on the same subject matter, similarities which were all the more interesting because they weren’t present in the source material upon which these later adaptations were based.
Said source material is comprised of Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (published 1871) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (published 1897). The subsequent adaptations are Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula (1992), NBC’s short-lived Dracula (2013), Emily Harris’s Carmilla (2019) and Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu (2024). What they all have in common is that – contrary to the original texts – their vampire characters are unambiguously portrayed as alluring and inviting and erotic. Well, maybe not Nosferatu exactly, but that didn’t stop a certain segment of fans for finding him so anyway.
But what really caught my attention is that all four stories center on a young woman, one who is caught between the comfort and safety of her every-day existence, and the danger and horror inflicted upon her by the vampire’s intrusion into her life… except that this isn’t how the adaptations frame it.
Instead, each film or show creates a love triangle of sorts, one between a woman who is unsatisfied with her life, the stifling societal norms and patriarchal conventions that surround her (usually represented by her fiancé or husband) and the freedom and modernity that the vampire offers her. To one extent or another, this is the case in all four of the above-mentioned adaptations, and certainly not the case in the two stories upon which they are based.
So, why exactly has there been such a dramatic shift in how vampire-related material is interpreted? One which is apparently so pervasive that it’s appeared in several otherwise unconnected variations of the same story?
Drusilla from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel
As soon as I decided that 2025
would be the Year of the Villainess, I knew that Drusilla would be my choice
for October. A Cockney Victorian psychic vampire who dresses like a Goth
princess and talks to her dolls? That’s a perfect Halloween aesthetic.
On consideration, there were
surprisingly few female villains in a show that was all about strong female
characters. Glory is the standout for being the only female Big Bad, and of
course we had Darla and Drusilla across the seasons… but that’s about it
really. The First could take on feminine form, but was essentially genderless. Amy
Madison eventually broke bad, but in a rather confusing way. There was Harmony as
well, I suppose, though she was never taken particularly seriously as a threat.
The likes of Faith and Dark Willow
always had redemption on the cards, while over on Angel there was
Lilah Morgan and Jasmine. Apart from all that, any other female villains were
just one-shot guest stars: Catherine Madison, Gwendolyn Post, Vanessa Brewer,
Sunday… do you even know who I’m talking about?
But I digress, let’s get back to
Drusilla. I’m happy to say on the record that Drusilla is the show’s most
tragic character, bar none. Born some time in the Victorian Era, she grows up a
pious Catholic girl who believes her psychic abilities are the work of the
devil. This is something her sire Angelus is all too happy to take advantage
of. To quote him: “It was over the moment I saw her. She was my opposite in
every way. Dutiful daughter. Devout Christian. Innocent and unspoiled. I took
one look at her and I knew. She’d be my masterpiece.”
After the murder of her entire
family, Drusilla flees to a convent for safety, though the church ultimately
offers her no safety: Angelus and Darla break in, kill all the nuns, and turn
her into a vampire. Just for good measure, they have sex on the altar in front
of her while she suffers a complete mental collapse.
Yeah, there are no happy endings here.
In a twisted sort of way, turning her into a vampire is almost a kindness after
the torture Angelus inflicted on her, as at least the loss of her soul frees
her from the burden of her religious guilt. Interestingly, her psychic abilities
pass with her into her new existence as a member of the undead, and between her
madness and her precognitive gift, she’s one of the most captivating, terrifying
and (like I said) heartbreaking characters of the entire franchise.
Although most of her history is
presented to the viewer via flashbacks (most notably how she came to sire
Spike), she first appears in Buffy
the Vampire Slayer in quite
a vulnerable state, having been badly injured in Prague. Spike has brought her
to Sunnydale for mystical treatment, and the viewer is initially presented with
a vampire who is certainly eerie, but not a huge physical threat – at first.
Once recovered, she’s a force to
be reckoned with, and as a player in the show’s mythos, is best remembered for
killing Kendra the Vampire Slayer and re-siring Darla over on Angel. Sadly, her last chronological appearance was in
season five of Buffy, trying and failing to bring Spike back into the fold,
after which she just disappears (though I’m led to believe she turns up again
in the comics).
What Juliet Landeau brought to the role is a vibe. She’s a Gothic lady and a Victorian child, a spooky seer and a deadly monster. She’s guileless, deranged, coquettish, driven, unpredictable – truly, a compelling performance from start to finish, and given the impact she had on the show, it’s rather astounding that she appeared in only seventeen Buffy episodes and seven Angel ones (and some of these were entirely in flashback, or as a guise the First took on). She was a force to be reckoned with...
