I am extremely excited for the new "The Colour Out of Space" adaptation featuring Nicolas Cage.

Sad to see the revival of this thread got claimed by the DiFpocalypse, but we must soldier on. Here's some spooky recs for the fall season!

The Cipher by Kathe Koja
Have a moldering old paperback of this one at home—it's long out of print, but the ebook is still available and a new print edition is finally coming out next year. A group of thoroughly unpleasant misanthropes have their lives take a turn for the strange when they discover a seemingly bottomless hole in the floor of their basement. What starts as innocent experimentation turns sinister when they lower a camera down and something inexplicable comes back—and as more people fall into the Funhole's orbit, their lives begin to unravel.

One of the most important examples of the genre's early-90s backlash to the popularity horror attained in the late 70s and throughout the 80s—bleak, nasty, and incredibly strange.

The Drowning Girl by Caitlin R. Kiernan
A schizophrenic woman attempts to claw her way back into sanity by reconciling the two realities she holds simultaneously in her memory and by discovering what a girl named Eva Canning has to do with both of them. Kiernan herself is schizophrenic, and wrote one portion of the book when she was off her meds—the whole thing is laced with a nightmarish, hallucinatory quality, but that section in particular is a stunning piece of writing.

Kiernan's best stuff is her short fiction, but that's harder to find in cheap form as most of her collections are published in limited runs by Subterranean Press. Her story "Interstate Love Song (Murder Ballad No. 8)" might be her masterpiece, and is available in the anthology The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume 8 from Solaris Books.

The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror by Thomas Ligotti
Ligotti is mostly known for his horror short fiction, but this is a book-length work of pessimist philosophy that draws on the cognitive science of Thomas Metzinger to explore all the ways in which being alive is in no way all right—we are, Ligotti argues, nothing more than ghosts in the machine, simulated selves whose consciousness is only an illusion and who would be better off exterminating ourselves en masse to end the perpetuation of suffering. Y'know, some light reading. (For those of you who enjoy evil clowns, his short story "The Last Feast of Harlequin" is excellent.)

Blindsight by Peter Watts
Last time I recommended this before the site fritzed out, Teague ended up reading it and being fascinated and frustrated in equal measure—make of that what you will. Covers a lot of the same philosophical territory as Ligotti—it's a first contact story gone terribly wrong, a riff on Alien that's really an excuse for venturing into the terrifying possibilities of intelligence without sentience and what it would mean if our consciousness really were just a glitch in human evolution.

Ha.

HA

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

SPOILER Show

Seeing Disney get unspinnably shafted just before Disney+ drops has put me in a very good mood.

Two-fer today—new Malick and Greta Gerwig's Little Women adaptation.

These and Episode IX all drop in December, which basically means I'm gonna be on cinema overload for three weeks straight.

For those who hadn't heard, Apocalypse Now is gonna be showing in IMAX in its new 4K restoration later this month. It's already one of the most staggering movies I've ever seen on a home screen, I'm sure in that format it'll melt brains. (This new "final" cut is a compromise between the comparatively lean theatrical cut and the bloated Redux cut—three hours instead of three and a half.)

I am in awe that this movie exists.

Besides the uncanny prescience of the political commentary (the President making the new capital Lynchburg, Virginia, OMG), Carpenter really had the balls to write a slapstick takedown of US imperialism that features

AND IT GOT DISTRIBUTED BY A MAJOR STUDIO?!?!

Not to hold it up as an untouchable paragon of satire or anything—the political instincts are good but sometimes muddled, and the representation isn't without problems, just like in Escape from New York.

Did My Lunches with Orson today—a collection of conversations between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles over lunches that Jaglom recorded. It's a mixed bag whose subjects don't always come off well, but it's at its best when Welles is being deliberately catty about other filmmakers he doesn't like. The most famous quote from it (deservedly) is his long dressing down of Woody Allen, but I also loved this bit about John Landis:

Anyway, if you're a Welles buff it's worth checking to see if your local library system has it—it's a quick read, too, you can get through it in an afternoon.

Klute Krew assemble!

She had quite the career trajectory from 1968–1971; headlining softcore sci-fi porn in Barbarella and then accepting the Oscar for this movie, not sure how many other actresses could say that. Lookin' forward to checking out more of her stuff; They Shoot Horses, Don't They? is next up on that list.

The fact that Trylon is having a summer-long "let's celebrate the moon landing" series means I'm just knocking all these sci-fi DIFs I missed out of the park, huh? In the last month I've done Moon, Silent Running, and The Fifth Element (liked the former two, hated the third), and tonight I just did Sunshine.

Can Alex Garland go back to having other people direct his scripts? (This is coming from someone who gave Ex Machina five stars back in the day and now cringes every time they remember that.) The most valuable thing Boyle brings is recognizing that the script is dumb and compensating with just constant shock and awe, whereas Annihilation has two good (overwhelming) scenes and a whole bunch of cheap plastic-looking footage of actors looking bored reciting bad dialogue. Garland takes his own writing seriously enough to think it'll hold the movie up; Boyle recognizes it's the movie's job to support the dodgy screenplay.

(Tbh, while the third act is certainly a departure I don't think I hate it. The whole movie is a horror movie IMO—it just temporarily shifts focus from the cosmic to the immediate before switching back to the cosmic. And yeah, all the burned-guy mutterings about God and angels are dumb, but, again . . . the whole script is kinda dumb too, on a story/theme level. As you guys point out, they're literally on a mission to the sun on a ship called the Icarus.)

- - - - -

By the bye, Teague asks in this commentary whether there are any movies focusing on the actual apocalypse, not a prevented one or the aftermath of one. In the years since this commentary, there have been two that I'm aware of, one of which there's a decent chance you've heard of and one of which I only found out about because DocSub watches lots of obscure shit and mentioned it on Letterboxd.

How you feel about this one depends on your willingness to tolerate Lars Von Trier's self-indulgence, but I dig it. He knows exactly what his movie is—the sheer fuck-you brazenness of having a slow-motion overture set to Wagner's Tristan und Isolde to foreground the operatic catharsis of a depressed woman gaining solace via another planet smashing into ours is, well, yeah.

Love the hell out of this one. The background magic bean is that, thanks to climate change, an unspecified disaster is going to end the world at exactly 4:44 AM. The movie opens with one night left to go, and from there, we just watch people waiting to meet their ends. The focus is largely on Willem Dafoe (whose performance is magnetic as always) and Shanyn Leigh as a married couple quietly making preparations, but the two of them dip into and out of numerous other people's last hours as the evening goes on. Definitely the more watchable, humanist take compared to Von Trier's overt artsiness.

So, anyway. Check those out, those of you who're interested in end-of-the-world-no-really flicks.

Easily my favorite read of the year so far, fiction or otherwise. Follows a twenty-something trans punk trying and failing to get her shit together and eventually taking off from New York for parts unknown. There's no cutesy hand-holding or attempts to make it an instructional read for cis people—this is a trans book by a trans author with a fucked-up trans heroine and I dug it so hard.

Available for free due to the loveliness that is its Creative Commons license!

Along similar lines, Andrea Lawlor's Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl just got a second edition courtesy of Vintage—magical realism with a genderfluid shapeshifter, that one, and one of my favorite reads from last year.

This is not a cool trailer, but this thread is the best fit for it and there's no "Utterly Bewildering Nightmare Trailers" thread, so.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . we as a species have lived too long.

Depends on what you're asking tbh. If you mean a remake of The Lion King, sure—as long as it's done with the intent of actually telling its own story and having its own meaning rather than being largely the exact same film. If you mean the photorealistic animation . . . nah, I don't think so. It's so completely at odds with the premise of the story. Theoretically, you could do a movie with CG photorealistic lions and have it be great, but you couldn't have them talk or act unlike real lions in any way without the uncanny valley setting in. It's just such a fundamentally misguided notion, and Favreau has admitted as much in interviews and said they tried to cover the lions' mouths as much as possible because the lip-sync was so broken.

That said, you could certainly improve upon the clips we've seen. Intentional framing, more vibrant color grading, anything to make it less listless and drab.