Movie Review: Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma

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The third feature film from celebrated indie filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, (henceforth referred to as At Camp Miasma) is her most mainstream project but even then this is an arthouse feature that is more of a tributary feeding into a mainstream than the usual mass market summer fare.

Reviewing At Camp Miasma is a difficult undertaking both because some of the film’s most interesting and daring takes require ‘spoilers’ for the events of the feature and because the nature of the film is much closer to the dream logic of something like Mulholland Drive than yet another slasher loose in the woods dispatching adult actors attempting to portray teens.

MUBI

On the most surface level the plot is this: indie filmmaker Kris Williams (Hannah Einbinder) is getting the chance to pitch to the mainstream studios about reviving a dormant property, Camp Miasma, a slasher from the 80s with more than a score of sequels but source material that is deeply problematic and transphobic. Kris, a queer filmmaker for whom the original films are a foundational element of her own awakening, is aware that the studio interest in her is to ‘woke-wash’ the property in hopes of avoiding a disastrous online campaign against the movie when they release it. She has traveled deep into snowy mountains to meet with Billie Preston (Gillian Anderson), the star of the original Camp Miasmaand who has become a retired recluse in hopes of bringing her onto the project, but Billie is nothing like what Kris expected and soon over the course of a few days in the isolated and abandoned camp where the first in the franchise had been filmed, reality and fantasy blur for the two women as they untangle what the films mean to them and to each other.

On another level, At Camp Miasma is about the relationship between story and audience: is the audience the master of the story, or does the story in fact create its own audience? When reality blurs for Kris and Billie, that blurring also bleeds into the audience watching the film about the pair of women. The outdoor sets throughout At Camp Miasma have a deeply artificial appearance, one that I found reminiscent of the planet set from the original Star Trek series, something so powerfully artificial, particularly to modern eyes, that the effect in this film must have been intentional.

And on yet another level, At Camp Miasma is about coming into your own sexually, fully accepting yourself, with all of your flaws and limitations, and loving yourself for who you are, and in that process finally being able to accept love from others. In the end, it is a deeply committed love story between Kris and Billie where each woman finally finds the half that they have been desperately missing.

And perhaps the most fun level of At Camp Miasma is the rich and keen-eyed satire of the entire slasher genre. I have said before and will likely say again in the future that slashers are my least loved of all horror films. Far too often I find them dull, repetitive, and populated by bland characterless characters to ever be engaged with the often less than intelligent plots as they unfold. I did not find Scream to be particularly witty, nor did I find X inventive, but even with a limited affection for slashers I found much of the meta-humor in At Camp Miasma quite enjoyable. This would make quite an interesting double feature with The Cabin in the Woods as a pair of films commenting on the genre that their film makers deeply care about.

Is Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma for you? I cannot say; even for people I know well, much less total strangers on the internet, I would have a hard time knowing if this movie will work for them. I can say that I enjoyed it and that I did not consider my time at the theater watching it wasted, but also I know I am unlikely to watch it again. If queerness is something that puts you off, then this film is not for you. If films that blur their own reality is something that you find that breaks your suspension of disbelief, then this is not for you. But if those things do not apply to you and you find yourself engaged with strange and unusual arthouse fare, then give this film a try.

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Of Presidents and Catering Trucks

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July 9th of this year, President Trump returning from an overseas trip secretly switched aircraft due to what the Secret Service believed to be a credible threat against the vehicle. Utilizing a catering truck, the President, after visibly boarding Air Force One, left the most famous aircraft in the world and boarded another military airplane for his return to the United States. While the Secretary of Defense and Trump’s personal assistant flew with him to the military aircraft, Secretary of State Rubio and Secretary of the Treasury Bessent, along with the White House Press Pool remained aboard the identified Airforce One, returning to the United States ignorant that they now rode in an aircraft that the Secret Service believed to be a target of a credible threat.

When the day arrives that Donald J. Trump assumes room temperature, you will see no tears shed by me, in fact, it is quite likely that the corners of my lips will curl upwards in a satisfied smile. Paraphrasing The Manchurian Candidate’s fictitious Senator Jordan Trump “Could not do more damage to this nation if he were a paid communist agent.” Despite my feelings of utter horror and contempt for the man currently holding the awesome office of President of the United States, his assassination would , perhaps at this time, be the worst fate that could befall this nation. Myths are born of such events and this nation does not need more myths but more truth, so if the Secret Service feels that the threat is real enough that a game of Three-Card-Monty with official aircraft are required to keep the President safe, then that game needs to played, and played well.

With that said it was not needed to fly the decoy aircraft with innocent and ignorant people aboard who may have lost their lives had the threat materialized. All that was required was that the world at large, and presumably the actors threatening the presidency, continued to believe that Trump was aboard the official Air Force One until he was safely beyond the scope of the danger. While the President flew to the United Kingdom aboard the other military aircraft the press and the world could have been told that he was business conferring in the meeting space aboard his aircraft and would not depart until the conference had concluded.

Rank and rampant speculation about the ‘meeting’ would erupt; what could it be with the Secretary of State and treasury aboard but not Defense? No word, no further official statements would fuel the theorizing and once the President was safe in the UK the ruse could be revealed with a flourish nodding towards the expertise and skill of America’s Secret service, without endangering any innocent lives.

But, of course, this is not what happened.

Trump, a narcissist incapable of thinking of anyone but himself, not only contemptuously, casually, and with utter indifference endangered the lives of senior officers of the U.S. Government and the reporters aboard the decoy aircraft, but once the deception came to light, insisted that it was himself that remained in the great danger. For Trump, at all times and in all situations everything, everywhere is about him and only him. No other person has any value at all except in their servitude to the mad king.

And what of Secretaries Rubio and Bessent?

They are men so thoroughly broken that they continue to bend the knee, kiss the ring, and lick the boots of the man who so dismissively endangered them. History will remember them as cowards that abandoned their former beliefs for the momentary glare of a spotlight whose edges they shared with an egotist that cared for them not at all.

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Is it the Struggle That Compels Us?

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Recently I have watched the Twitter discourse rise up over the character of Syril Karn from the series Andor with a number of people debating if the show had been disrespectful of the character prompting strong feelings about the man.

Running alongside this discussion is the memory I have of a number of YouTube reactors being quite emotionally torn by both Syril and Dedra Meero, the Imperial Security Bureau (ISB) sector supervisor, as they navigate both enforcing the Empire’s authoritarian government and their own interesting romantic relationship. These were the bad guys, Dedra more clearly than Syril as she employed torture to get what she wanted while Syril remained essentially naive to the Imperial law and order that he strove to maintain. Pluck Syril out of Star Wars and insert his character in 70s New York desperate to catch the killers of two dirty cops and you have a classic anti-hero trapped in a corrupt and decaying culture even as he fights to maintain a ‘true’ sense of justice.

But he isn’t a 70s anti-hero. He is a cog in the fascist machine that is the evil Galactic Empire, and yet there is a pull to root for him as he tries ever so hard to clear his name and bring the hero of the story to ‘justice.’ Dedra is an equally compelling character. Her villainy is more evident, particularly her willingness to not only torture suspects but her disregard for their murder once their usefulness has passed. Yet, here we are again, feeling the pull to care about her. What is going on here?

Let’s look at some other characters from cinema and see if we can’t gain a better understanding in a manner that is more general.

Pulp Fiction gave us Vincent Vega, the street-level thug and murderer working for L.A. crime boss Marsellus Wallace. Our introduction to Vincent was his task of retrieving a briefcase for his boss and calmly murdering the boss’s former partners in the process. Vincent is a violent thug and drug user and yet over the course of his story within the film we are drawn to him and concerned as he falls deeper and deeper into trouble that may end with Marsellus Wallace having him killed as mercilessly as Vincent killed Wallace’s former partners.

Nightcrawler (2014), a neo-noir from Dan Gilroy, who also wrote on Andor, introduced the audience to Louis Bloom, a sociopathic man who rises from street-level thief to celebrated ‘journalist’ as he discovers his talent for finding and creating tragedies he can videotape and sell to local television news. Unlike the other characters mentioned here, I have heard of no one that held any sympathy for Louis, but while the audience kept him at an emotional distance, he remained an object of fascination and of deep interest even as he got his partner killed, murdered his rivals, and blackmailed a woman to satisfy his sexual urges. No one showed sympathy for such a cold, manipulative man, but he remained deeply interesting. Why?

There is a common thread running through all of these characters, criminals, cops, thugs, and bureaucrats; all of them have goals and all of them are fighting against forces that are keeping them from their objectives.

Syril wants justice and the killer of his men caught and punished, but a corrupt system would rather have good reports than truth.

Dedra, a novice ISB Supervisor, wants victory and enforcement of the Empire’s authority, but office infighting and backstabbing stymie her attempts to break a system that rewards staying within the line over creative imagination.

Vincent needs to show his boss’s wife a decent evening out, to make her happy, but their unmistakable chemistry and sensuality provide a temptation that is nearly irresistible to the couple and once she overdoses on his drugs, well then he has to save her life to save his own.

Louis desperately needs to prove to himself and the world that he is worthy, to find that success he is certain that he deserves as rivals and the police forces move in on him from every quarter, threatening to thwart his actions.

There is the key to why the characters are compelling. Each of them is facing off against forces larger than themselves and that struggle to overcome, to win, is that magic sauce that makes us sit forward and care.

Twenty years ago while at a Bay area SF convention and before the events of a convention had started, I caught a fragment of a World War II training video on television. An air crew of a fictional bomber had been captured by the Nazis. In captivity the Germans employed trick after trick, device after device to pry from the airmen the secrets that they kept in their heads. By the end of the video, I found myself on the side of the Germans, anxious to see if they were going to manage to get the information that they so desperately needed. This was a training film to teach our forces all of the many ways that the information might be gained, and yet there I was feeling for the enemy and not our boys.

The Germans were the characters with a clear, active goal. The airmen’s goal was a passive one, keep quiet and say nothing. It is the active character, fighting against the odds to claim some prize that hooks us as an audience and as readers. That is the lesson from the training film and all those movies, your characters need a goal and the odds against them getting it must be great. Syril and Dedra are both fighting to make something of their lives, to prove something to themselves and the doubters who surround them and that is why they become characters we can’t tear our attention away from.

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16 Years of CPAP Therapy

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In 2010 I was diagnosed with severe sleep apnea. The severe part of that diagnosis really surprised me. To treat the condition where you stop breathing due to obstructions in your airway while you sleep, I was prescribed CPAP (Continuous Positive Airway Pressure) therapy, where, by wearing a mask over your nose and sometimes your mouth as well, air is forced into your airways, keeping the flaccid tissues from closing off your breathing. I am told that many people can take weeks to adjust to the therapy, but I took to it from the first night in the sleep lab where I stayed overnight as they monitored and adjusted the machine.

Before CPAP I struggled to be wakeful and fully alert throughout the day with many a Sunday requiring that I retreat to the bedroom for a 60 or 90 minute nap, a situation that vanished literally overnight.

Over the now many years I have been on this treatment I have learned a number of ways to make it more comfortable and successful, using a holder that supports the hose from the machine to my mask allowing an active sleeper like myself to toss and turn and change positions with less trouble, using a full-face mask that covers both my nose and my mouth because I am such a mouth breather at night that not even a chinstrap can stop it. I also learned that any interruption in the therapy is felt instantly the next morning.

Which is why August 31st is going to be a trial for me.

We have been alerted by San Diego Gas and Electric that on that evening from about 10 pm until about 3 am, our entire complex will be without electric power while vital and overloaded equipment is replaced.

This has happened once before and on that night, I decamped from our condo and spent the evening in a local hotel proceeding directly to work from there the next morning but this is not really a great option this time around. WorldCon, the World Science Fiction Convention, will have just ended and it would be best to limit expenses following the hefty ones the convention will incur. On the bright side, I will have September 1st off so there is no need to be at my most alert the following morning.

I think the best that I can hope for is that I can go out to a movie that evening, come back around or just after midnight and hope that the work has been completed earlier than expected, a situation that my sweetie-wife’s co-worker reported happened with them when this same sort of repair took place in their neighborhood. And if not, well, I can put my mask on, go to bed as usual and when the power is restored the machine will detect my breathing and turn itself on.

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An Art Beyond Words

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Spoilers for Obsession

I recently rewatched the entirety of Obsession, my favorite horror film of the last few years and possibly my favorite film of 2026. Dune part 3 and Avengers: Doomsday will have a very tough time beating it out for that top spot in my heart.

Obsession and its cast, in particular Inde Navarrette, have been getting a ton of praise for their work and this blog post is yet another one to add to that pile but I think this morning I want to dive deep and dissect an element of Navarrette’s performance that I have a difficult time articulating.

Navarrette is not a novice to acting, having been a recurring cast member on Superman & Loisand appeared in the Netflix series 13 Reasons Why, but it is unquestionable that her turn as Nikki Freeman, the doomed and tragic object of a young man’s obsession in this year’s breakout and surprising hit, has catapulted her into a very wide and public recognition.

In Obsession, Navarrette performs effectively as two distinct characters: Nikki Freeman, free of the wish’s curse and the ‘Nikki’ that is cursed to love Baron ‘Bear’ Bailey ‘more than anyone in the fucking world.’ I shall refer to these characters as True Nikki and Freaky Nikki to make it clear which is which.

In terms of screen time, the audience has little exposure to True Nikki; she is a voice on a telephone call, a friend chatting happily and teasing Bear at the bar on trivia night, and exposes herself emotionally for a few moments as Bear drives her home, revealing that she is not happy and emotionally keeps her feelings deeply contained saying that when she has a crush on a guy ‘no one knows.’

In contrast, for the majority of the film, Navarrette performs as Freaky Nikki, who is loud, unsubtle, manipulative, and unable to contain her feelings at all, possessing none of the subtlety of the character we were introduced to. So far this might be considered a rather standard Jekyll and Hyde sort of portrayal that has been a fairly standard performance since the 1930s, but there are layers and levels to Navarrette’s approach that I think belie this simplification.

While True Nikki and Freaky Nikki are poles apart in terms of the nature of their characters this is not usually played to exaggeration in the film. Freaky Nikki is a very different character, one the audience is well aware of and possibly would even be aware if there were not instances of True Nikki momentarily and terrifyingly regaining her body. The voices of the two Nikkis are slightly different, using different tonalities in their normal speech. I do not have a particularly well-trained ear, but it sounds to me that True Nikki’s voice is in a very slightly deeper register than Freaky Nikki’s. True Nikki sounds more composed and restrained while Freaky Nikki sounds more ‘girlish,’ perhaps a performance that might be more attractive to a man who lacks the self-confidence to take the emotional risks that courtship and dating require.

Even this, Navarrette’s performance as two different Nikkis, is not the element that astounds me. That moment from the film’s final scene is something I struggle to adequately describe.

Freaky Nikki, certain that Bear doesn’t love her, turns to the same One Wish Willow device that Bear used to enslave, creating a Pseudo-Bear that is obsessed with her as she is with him. This ‘romance’ is short-lived. Bear, seeking an escape from the horrors he birthed into the world, has taken a lethal overdose of pills. (True to Bear’s nature of being unable to commit and face up to unpleasant truths, he had begun to try and make himself vomit up the overdose, but Freaky Nikki’s wish derailed that.)

For a moment the two are ‘happy,’ but then the overdose works its lethal action and Pseudo-Bear dies in Freaky Nikki’s arms. Freaky Nikki wails and cries at the death of her obsession. She nearly ends her own life, but Bear’s death frees her from the wish’s curse suddenly becoming True Nikki again. There is a moment of silence before she throws Bear’s corpse to the floor and sobs.

In a single take, we watch Freaky Nikki transition to True Nikki with both versions warped by the throes of sobbing and wailing, and yet in a manner I cannot quite put my finger on, these are very different wails, very different cries. Freaky Nikki is wailing at the loss of her Bear, and True Nikki is wailing at the horror and torments she has been forced to endure. Both wails are soul-wrenching produced by utter sorrow but are also utterly different, produced by the same actor without a break or a cut to give her time and space to shift emotionally. She wails from two very different reasons, and it is evident in the nature of her cries but in a method so subtle I cannot say precisely why they are different. I can only recognize that they are distinct, that they are two different characters wailing for two different reasons that are easily observed but seemingly impossible to define.

Inde Navarrette has earned every accolade heaped upon her for this performance, and I shall watch her career with great interest.

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And After the Credits?

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Spoilers for Obsession, Longlegs, & Immaculate

When a movie ends, the credits roll, I often find myself wondering about the characters and their lives that follow. For the vast majority of the movies I have watched there is actually little imagining, the story has wrapped up and while life will have its ups and downs, there isn’t a great mystery to what might happen next. But for some, the next phase of the character’s lives seems to hold more trouble than the sequence of events that we had just witnessed.

I recall going to a local art house theater with a friend and watching Blood Simple, a neo-noir from the early Coen brothers’ catalog. It has all the hallmarks of a film noir: love triangle, complicated schemes, betrayals, and of course murder. As we walked out of the theater, we both were amused by the concept of the local sheriff the next day trying to understand and unravel the events from the trail of confusing and inexplicable clues left behind. Beyond the mysteries and noir sub-genres, it is the horror film that more often than not has the most complicated relationship between its resolution and what the characters are likely to face in days following their harrowing experiences.

Neon

Consider Longlegs (2024). At the end of the film, poor FBI Special Agent Lee Harker is at the scene of a mass murder that mimics the scenes blamed on the now deceased serial killer ‘Longlegs’ and with her having been used to murder her superior and her own mother.

 

 

Black Bear Pictures

Another example of the troubles that will follow the survivor of a horror movie is Immaculate(2024) with the physical evidence showing that Sister Cecilia not only murdered at least two of her priests but that she also used a large stone to kill her newborn child, a crime that Italy is unlikely to be compassionate about.

 

 

Focus Features

But it is Obsession’s character of Nikki Freeman that may escape legal jeopardy for the multiple deaths over that terrible night.

After Baron ‘Bear’ Bailey unleashed the enchanted wish-powered date rape magic on poor unsuspecting Nikki Freeman, plummeting the poor woman into unhinged behavior, obsessive need to satisfy Bear’s whims, and a corrosive need for his affection to equal her own towards him, the tale ends with two of their friend group murdered, Bear dead by suicide, and Nikki finally freed of the compulsions but injured, covered in blood, and surrounded by corpses.

What is law enforcement to make of this strange and bewildering scene? A young man, Ian, dead with a gunshot wound to the head, a young woman, Sarah, beaten to death with a brick, and another young man, Bear, dead from a massive overdose of sleeping pills.

The physical evidence will be of actually little help in creating a decent case for the courts. There’s more than enough to put Bear, Sarah, and Nikki together in her car in the park and to establish that the automobile is the place where she was murdered. The blood-splattered trail will clearly show that the pair moved her body but can you build a case that slight, small, Nikki physically overpowered Sarah and pummeled her skull with a brick? A case airtight enough to convince a jury of that?

What of Ian’s murder?

Both Nikki and Bear’s prints are on the pistol that killed him, but only Nikki has the powder residue indicating that she fired the weapon. So, you can establish that she shot the gun, but can you convince a jury of why she murdered her former lover? And why the overdose?

You know what is too terribly common in America today? Murder-suicide.

There’s no need to build a complex and rickety case to try and convict a poor severely mentally disturbed woman like traumatized Nikki if you just put all the blame on the unhinged young man who died by his own hand. Never underestimate the lure of making troublesome issues just go away. The unknown municipality where Obsession takes place is in my opinion far more likely to blame everything on Bear, the ‘quiet’ man who kept to himself, over trying to drag to trial the woman that the physical evidence points to.

It is questions like this that dog me when I finish writing a horror novel or short story. There is rarely a clean answer for how to handle it but I shall never stop trying.

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They Deserve Better

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As I have mentioned from time to time on this space, when I graduated High School I enlisted in the U.S. Navy, a life that I was not particularly well suited for and that I left, at their request, in early 1982. I make no bones about it, the military life was not for me and there are particulars about my services that made the situation worse, but I harbor no ill will towards anyone that serves, quite the opposite. I had friends that remained in the Navy for many years including one who became a ‘lifer’; someone who served for twenty years and retired. I have deep wells of respect for those that serve and understand, a little, some of the hardships and sacrifices that they endure in service to our nation, which fuels the enragement burning inside me at the reports of the living conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln.

During my nearly three years in the United States Navy, I was stationed aboard one ship, the USS Belleau Wood, an amphibious assault ship that carried Marines and a Marine airwing for taking beaches in wartime, and aboard the Burning Wood I spent eight months deployed on a cruise of the Western Pacific, so I know something of life at sea in military service.

Over the course of those eight months, we made no less than 9 port calls, 10 if you include Diego Garcia, a tiny atoll in the center of the Indian Ocean with nothing to do but as one classic SF film put it ‘throw rocks at cans, and we gotta bring our own cans.’ The Belleau Wood made some sort of port call pretty much every month of the deployment and those port calls were more than just a chance for the crew to go ashore for liberty and escape the confines of their metal city; they were places to refuel, resupply, reequip, and do vital maintenance that is difficult or impossible to perform while underway. Ships can be resupplied while cruising at sea. Unrep (Underway Replenishment) is a vital element of a ship’s duty while on station and one that was performed under security conditions because the U.S. Navy had mastered techniques that our adversaries had not and we wanted to keep it that way. That said, there are limitations to what and in what quantities of stores that can be delivered to a ship in this manner. Unrep cannot replace a port call, not for any ship.

The USS Lincoln and her battle group were diverted from their usual patrol in November of 2025 and sent to the Gulf in preparation for this administration’s idiotic war. In that time, much of which the crews served under wartime conditions, the ships had precious few port calls. It is quite difficult to keep such a battle group supplied with just the essentials for their operations, much less the ‘niceties’ of life, such as fresh fruit, things for the crew to buy in the ship’s stores, and so during such a prolonged deployment, but such considerations are beyond the concern of this president and his cabinet of yes-men lackeys. Reports from the Lincoln indicated that morale has crashed with possible suicide attempts among the crew. Mind you, we are getting reports principally from the Carrier herself. I have seen nothing from the smaller ships that comprise her escorts, ships with far less ‘generous’ amenities and with far more cramped living conditions. (Not that a Carrier is a hotel. For everyone aboard this is something that will test your endurance and without a clear and understanding of the mission that endurance begins weakened.)

Trump and his SecDef treat these men and women of the military as game pieces on a board moved about to inflate his ego in a vain and futile attempt to fill the deep void at the heart of his soul. The abuse of our troops, ashore and at sea, is a consequence of the voters, who may not have known better, and the spineless cowards in the government who certainly knew better but placed their own status and riches ahead of the nation’s interest and the troops that they so cavalierly abuse.

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The Book is not Always Better

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It is a commonly held assumption that a movie adaptation is always inferior to the novel from which it was adapted. Setting aside the rather obvious and massively important aspect that these are radically different media with very different needs to serve to be successful, there are still plenty of examples where in a direct comparison the film version is superior to the prose. Now, ‘superior’ this matter is entirely a matter of personal preference and not an objective one, but here are a few examples of adaptation that in my opinion were better on the screen than on the page.

 

 

Warner Brothers

The Prestige – Adapted by Christopher and Jonathan Nolan from the science fiction novel of the same name by Christopher Priest. The Nolans dropped entirely the framing story set decades after the death of the feuding magicians, the concept of ghosts created by strange quantum mechanical devices, and, in perhaps the best move of all, even the inciting incident that ignited the war between the performers. With a cleaner plot line, only one fantastic bit to suspend disbelief, and a much more powerful reason for the two to bitterly hate each other, the Nolans crafted a deeply powerful story about blinding obsession.

 

 

Universal Studios

Jaws – Adapted from the novel by Peter Benchley by a school of screen scribes that included Benchley, the film which birthed the modern blockbuster, is the straightforward tale of a New England seasonal community that becomes the hunting ground for a massive great white shark. The film deleted all of the novel’s melodramatic cliches, the police chief’s unhappy marriage, his wife’s age-driven insecurity and infidelity, Hooper’s own issues being the little brother to an athlete, and even a mafia sub-plot that drives the mayor’s insistence that the lethal beaches remain open. Instead, the film is very simple and direct, subtracting nearly everything that distracts from the story of a dangerous monster shark but adding depth to Quint’s character by gifting him the USS Indianapolis backstory. Perhaps someday, in their quest to keep the franchise alive, Universal will produce a prestige limited series more faithful to the novel and find the results disappointing.

The Hunt for Red October – Adapted from Tom Clancy’s first published novel, the story of a technologically advanced Soviet submarine being stolen and gifted to the Americans by its defecting officers was adapted to the screen principally by Larry Ferguson, and Donald E. Stewart with additional work by John Milius, launching a franchise that encompasses feature films and television series that continue to this day. Clancy’s novel struck me as overly jingoistic with the American forces hardly even capable of putting a foot wrong and even their reservists out flying the Soviet’s lead air combatants. Stripping away the ‘America can do no wrong’ attitude of the book for a more balanced presentation. Removing Ramius’s ‘denied Christianity’ sub-plot from his motivation streamlined the story and left the audience with something more accessible and which required a much lower level of suspension of disbelief.

Novels and movies are very different media with very different challenges, and it is best if when you go to see an adaptation that you set aside the expectations that grew in your mind from the book and let the film be what it is. It may be better, it may be worse, but what it is is its own thing: accept it as that.

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Exposition is Hard; Obsession does it beautifully

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When Obsession played earlier this year it was one of my best times watching a horror film in the theater in quite a while. Oh, there have been enjoyable horror movies this year and in recent years but the simplicity and execution of Obsession places it far above not only other horror films but many other films in general and one of the key elements in that beauty is Curry Barker’s deft exposition.

All stories be they fantasy, horror, science fiction, drama, romance, comedy, whatever require some exposition, that element where things are explained to the audience. More fantastical stories have a different set of expositional goals to meet, to not only help us understand the character, their lives, and their story before the one we are experiencing unfolds before us but also how their entire world works but stories set in the here and now also have to explain the story before the story to us even if they are free from explaining the greater world because the character world is one we can accept as being like our own.

Focus Features

Barker, quite wisely, actually doesn’t spend any exposition at all on the history of the fantastic and magical aspects of the world of Obsession. Where the ‘One Wish Willow’ items come from, who makes them and why are mysteries beyond the scope of the story of Baron ‘Bear’ Bailey and his fixation on Nikki Freeman. What we learn about these cursed items are the same things Bear learns about them as he struggles to fix the disintegrating situation to his own satisfaction. No, the brilliant exposition of this script is in subtle quick asides from the characters and that amazing monolog delivered straight down the barrel of the camera lens at the film opening.

With the exception of only a couple of reaction shots back to the young woman listening to Bear spill out his heart’s secrets we are fixed on Bear’s face as he practices the speech he will reveal to be too timid to actually say to Nikki. This one speech serves so many expositional masters and all while staying firmly within character. At the very surface level this informs the audience, directly and immediately about Bear’s depth of feeling for Nikki, how in his own words ‘she is in every song’ he hears. Secondly, it gives us vital backstory on Bear himself, but framed in relation to his history with Nikki. He moved to this town and Nikki was the only person ‘nice to him.’ Bear says that when his grandmother died Nikki was the only person who called. From these pieces of information, we can understand that Bear was displaced, never fit in, and was somewhat socially isolated. But there is an even deeper level of exposition that is vital to everything that follows for the rest of the film. Bear is confusing fascination and obsession with serious emotional investment.

This lengthy monolog, this spilling of his heart’s desires and secrets, has not one word about Nikki as a person. Bear speaks only about Nikki as the subject of Bear’s fixation. There is nothing about Nikki the writer, something we learn quickly about in the course of the first act, nothing about Nikki’s kindness to strangers, which we see her demonstrate to the unhoused person outside of the bar, nothing about Nikki’s own tough time in school when she was bullied. The entire monolog is about Bear and how Nikki was nice to him and how he sees her without anything about Nikki as a person. It is a subtle, and many people, myself included, missed this red flag that Bear is a terribly selfish person. But the effect is there and the seeds had been planted so that later, when Bear learns much of the truth of what he has called into being and that it isn’t Nikki that is obsessively in love with him, his thought isn’t to correct his deed, to free the real Nikki from her body’s enslavement and her soul’s torment, but to make it still all about him and getting what he wants. Bear is the ‘nice guy’ whose heart is truly black and whose thoughts right up until the end stay centered on himself, all of which was exposited in the film’s opening monolog.

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Further Discussion on The Griffin Incident

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A friend left a lengthy comment on my post about The Griffin Incident over on Twitter. Since over there I am restricted to 280 characters, I will respond here.

First off, I want to say it was not my intention, nor do I think I stated, that science fiction and horror are incompatible genres.  While most people, and I fell into that easy trap myself, call horror a ‘genre,’ it is more like a mood and an intention. Like a romance (lower case R), horror is about what the recipient of the art is intended to feel and experience over the mechanics or rules of the genre. Science fiction can be horror, with A Dance to Strange Music, the short story by renowned hard SF author Gregory Benford, as a perfect example. It is horror and in the author’s note afterwards, Benford explains all of the very detailed science behind the strange events of the tale.

@gunsandrockets wrote, I think what defines science fiction is not rationality, not an explicable story, but instead the presumption that the universe is a material universe, absent of the spiritual, absent of magic. I agree, but I would also point out that a material universe absent spirits and magics is a universe that is explicable and one that can be understood by reason.

So, is Alien science fiction or horror? It is clearly both, though with the somewhat dodgy science we have allowed cinema to get away with. Aliens is not horror; it is action/adventure. With the ‘rules’ of the creature understood by the audience, it is hard to return back to horror; the films following Aliensdid, but mainly by reducing the once terrifying beast into an outer space slasher.

Horror, as a style of cinema, has terribly fuzzy borders that encompass and exclude based almost entirely upon the viewer’s own internal definition. Is Jaws horror? Is The Silence of the Lambs? How about Seven or Manhunter or Mulholland Drive? What is or is not ‘horror’ is a very difficult thing to nail down and even the filmmaker’s intention doesn’t cleanly answer that question. Both the writer and the director of The Exorcist do not consider either the novel or the film to be ‘horror,’ but rather supernatural detective fiction.

I was also asked what about the works of H.P. Lovecraft, science fiction? horror? or both? Clearly both, but I do think many people confuse the nature of the horror at the center of his work, mistaking tentacles and monstrosities for the horror and not that humanity is not only insignificant in the vast universe but that the nature of that universe is beyond our ability to sanely comprehend. Consider the opening paragraph of his novella The Call of Cthulhu.

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

Lovecraft is stating, rather plainly, that the nature of existence is, to the human mind, inexplicable. To try and understand it is to invite either madness or willful ignorance. It is why the recent film Backrooms strikes me as very Lovecraftian. In the end, the nature, the reason, of the backrooms lies beyond our ability to decipher. It simply is and that alone is enough to unship a person’s sanity.  To be fair, this is also a point raised by @gunsandrockets.

That the true nature of the universe is unknowable to lowly mankind. An ignorance which is a mercy, since even getting close to the truth either drives a person insane or turns them into a monster.

To my interpretation, this is saying that the universe is inexplicable. The universe is not rational in any manner that is comprehensible by humanity.

The Griffin Incident promises no explanation at all for the ship and its terrifying manifestations. That puts the story beyond the realm of science fiction. It is not a story that exists in a place without spirits or magic of some kind.

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