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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The Griffin Incident is not Science Fiction

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Star Trek: Strange New Worlds boldly left the confines of its genre of science fiction with the third episode of its fourth season, The Griffin Incident. While some have used the episode’s horror genre as a source of criticism, I instead want to praise the production for slipping free of constraints and having the courage to explore fascinating new realms for its characters.

Paramount+

The Griffin Incident has been, correctly, described as Star Trek meets Event Horizon, the 1997 horror movie that takes place aboard a haunted and terrifying derelict at the outer regions of the solar system. In the Star Trek episode, three characters, Spock, Jim Kirk, and La’An, discover the wreck of a lost Federation starship, the Griffin, and after becoming trapped aboard are visited, much like the characters from Event Horizon, by terrible specters and visions exploiting their unresolved emotional issues. In terms of graphic violence and explicit horror, particularly for television that is not produced for a premium channel, The Griffin Incident pulls no punches and is a quite satisfying bit of horror media, but is it science fiction?

No.

Science Fiction is, at its core, a rationalist genre and all the tales and stories within that genre exit within a rationalist, understandable, and explicable universe. This ranges from the ‘hardest’ of science fiction stories where absolutely no known understanding of the physical universe may be contradicted, no telepathy, no faster-than-light travel, and so on to the stories with the flimsiest of ‘scientific’ justification, often when the strangeness of quantum mechanics are used in place of just flat out magic. Star Trek, from its very inception and earliest pilots, has never resided in the hard science fiction territories and it’s never productive to force ‘real-world’ science on any episode of the series. (It does not bear to consider the thousands and thousands of nuclear bomb’s worth of energy that is released when the rest mass of an entire person to converted is energy for the mere act of transportation.) Even when it is employed as a form of magic to put the characters into an episode that obeys the rules of musicals, some ‘scientific’ explanation is used to justify the strange and wondrous events. That act of justification by way of warped and tortured science is what keeps a story within the pastures of science fiction.

Horror, on the other hand, works best when reason and rationality are lost and the characters, along with the audience, are suddenly thrust into a situation that is inexplicable and perhaps is even beyond comprehension. There is a style of horror where the supernatural is bent out of shape to conform to the universe as we understand it, a style where mass is conserved when werewolves transform from men into wolves and where blood for vampires is simply a nutrient, allowing them to substitute pig’s blood from a butcher for the essence of human life. That is a disservice to the genre, moving it from the uncanny to just a set of rules that can be followed and understood.

The Griffin Incident provides no explanation for why the ship is haunted, such as that the ship’s crew, driven insane by the very nature of space/time in the region, quantumly entangled with the material in the hull, imprinting psychic echoes that appeared as phantoms but were perfectly explicable.

Nope. It’s just a haunted ship and the characters survive but have no understanding of just what transpired in their lives, only that they survived. Science fiction demands that in the end every phenomenon has a cause-and-effect that is understood, but this episode, in the very best tradition of horror, abandoned such comforts leaving the characters and the audience in the terribly uncomfortable space where reason had no purchase.

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Airplane! and Anita Bryant’s Cultural Irrelevancy

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Last night on YouTube I watched a Canadian millennial couple react to the 1980 absurdist comedy film Airplane! As with the many of the reactors who have engaged with this piece of silly cinema, much of the chaotic comedy still worked 46 years later, and some were too fixed to their time and place to have any meaning to people born more than a decade after the movie’s release. It is a strange quirk of comedy that the ‘Jim never has a second cup of coffee at home’ gag is rewarded with laughs because of the strangeness of the spouse’s thoughts, and without any context to the Yuban coffee commercial it is lampooning.

While references to Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan spark some recognition in younger viewers, and the use of serious dramatic actors in farcical skits has little to no impact on those who are watching this movie from the last century, this is not the issue that is sticking with me today. One target of the filmmaker’s sharp critique stirs no reaction and is nothing but a forgotten cultural relic, Anita Bryant.

Anita Jane Bryant, beauty pageant queen, singer with multiple top-ten hits, and ubiquitous citrus spokeswoman for much of her career, was a popular but not stellar figure in the American cultural landscape, often traveling with the legendary Bob Hope on tours to support and entertain the Armed Forces, and finding herself welcome at both the Democratic and Republican national conventions. She hosted parades, performed at half-time shows for the Super Bowl, and even at the funerals of Democratic presidents, and yet today her name, except for whom politics is a passion or who either in or adjacent to the gay community, is almost entirely forgotten.

In 1977, Dade County, Florida, passed the first ordinance in the nation that prohibited discrimination in housing based upon sexual orientation, protecting gay men and women from prejudicial treatment when it came to renting homes, igniting the ire of Bryant, a fire that would consume her career and, in the end, erase her from cultural memory.

Bryant successfully led a campaign that overturned the ordinance, but that victory raised the issue to the wider culture, and while gay rights were not an unknown thing before Bryant’s crusade, (Stonewall was 8 years earlier,) her actions made the cause much more salient to the national conversation. Sponsors dropped her from their advertising campaigns, networks rescinded offers to host weekly television programs, and her career over the next decade functionally ceased to exist. In order to legally allow bigoted people to refuse homes to those whom she despised, Bryant self-immolated to the point that by the time of her death in 2024 she had ceased to be known by the wider public at all.

Both sides waged the political fight in Dade County with ferocity, Bryant deploying the slanderous, vile label that gay men preyed upon children to ‘recruit’ new homosexuals, while some among the fight for rights resorted to political violence. Yes, that violence was shaving cream pies to her face, but it remained political violence, and in my opinion, one only employs violence when no other path remains open and the physical threat from the dominant political actors is very real. While a direct line cannot be drawn from these pie attacks to the January 6th insurrection, the indirect lineage is there.

Anita Bryant’s obscurity is, in the end, the best of all possible victories over her bigoted political warfare.

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Friend-Zoned in the QueryTracker Meat Market

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A common metaphor used in the writing community for those of us on the hunt for representation by a literary agent is that we are ‘in the trenches.’ I can see the appeal of this device and have even used it myself. The trenches of World War I seemed like an impossible-to-win and impossible-to-escape situation for the poor men trapped in that years-long stalemate. Sending out endless queries about your novel to overworked and overwhelmed agents has a distinctly similar vibe to it. An agent can easily get hundreds of queries each month, thousands by the year, and of those they might sign up as new clients less than a dozen. I can see how that feels, from the author’s perspective, like going ‘over the top’ and into ‘no man’s land’ to face mounted machine guns of which very few survive.

But lately, particularly with the passes I have been getting from agents, I wonder if such a violent and combative metaphor is the right one for the process. After all, we authors are not trying to take the ground from the agents, we are not trying to annihilate them as an enemy but hopefully find an artistic partnership that can grow and flower for years and years to come. Perhaps it is more akin to romance than warfare.

Instead of the corpse-littered fields of France and Belgium, this is the crowded discos and singles bars of the 1970s. The agents are like the single attractive women who have high hopes of finding that special person, that match that works on every level. Authors are the swarms of men, dressed as snappily as they are able, deploying their practiced ‘lines’ in hopes of gaining that look, that, as Dolly so eloquently put it in her song, ‘when a glance becomes a stare,’ desperate to find some way, some ‘trick’ that can make them stand out from all the hustlers vying for that woman’s attention.

And if that metaphor works, then we can see its applicability over the death and destruction of the battlefield. Between the firm rejection and the exploration of a relationship there is a netherworld derisively labeled ‘the friend-zone.’ Now, this metaphor should not be pressed too far or adhered to too devoutly. In relationships far, far too often men are seeking a simple sexual ‘conquest’ and are not seeking a partner to share life with. Such men, with their fragile and brittle egos bruised when rejected by a woman who has proclaimed that they see those men as ‘only friends’ or ‘like a brother,’ vanish, never seen again because all that they wanted was the physical and not the emotional. Writers seeking representation are very, very rarely seeking it for just one book and as such this metaphor breaks down in its analogy. Agents are not conquests but partners, and no one is looking for a ‘one-night stand.’

But it is not without some service and, in my opinion, some emotional value.

This has come to me because lately I have been getting a different style of ‘pass’ from some agents. In these emails and responses, the agents are making it clear that while they did not ‘fall in love’ with the submitted project, they know that someone out there will and encourage me to continue querying and submitting.

Oh, how this feels precisely parallel with ‘I like you as a friend, but there’s some girl out there who is perfect for you.’ This is the rejection I have felt many times before I was so fortunate to find the woman who became my sweetie-wife and the way these passes rhyme with those failed dates of yesteryear is powerful. It fits so much better and resonates so much more truthfully than a battlefield strewn with artillery craters flooded with water and bodies that lay nearly half a century before my time.

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Streaming Review: The Day of the Owl

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We were flipping through the thumbnails on the ad-supported streaming service Tubi when my sweetie-wife, a lover of birds, noticed the title The Day of the Owl, and we stopped to investigate.

An Italian/French crime drama from 1968, the film intrigued us enough to start the stream, but on that evening Tubi’s service must have been pushed to its limit because the film stuttered and stopped. We decided to try again another night, and when we did it played perfectly.

les films corona

The Day of the Owl focuses on the new police captain, Bellodi (Franco Nero), recently transferred from Northern Italy to Sicily, and his investigation of an organized crime murder of a local contractor who refused to play along with the region’s rampant corruption. With witnesses who refuse to come forward and informants who work both sides of the conflict, Bellodi soon moves beyond acceptable police work in his attempt to link the murder to the local mafia leader Don Mariano (Lee J. Cobb).

One of the issues one can run into when discovering a film on Tubi is that the service does not always get the most pristine copies to stream, but this was not the case with The Day of the Owl. Image and sound were perfect, though I had the opinion that the sound mix had the foley track too loud; compared to some of the other foreign films we watched on the service, this was like having a Blu-ray in the player. Franco Nero looked fantastic: his intense blue eyes shone brightly, and he cut a fine figure in his uniform. This was also an exception in that the film was presented with its Italian language soundtrack and not dubbed, as is the case with the majority of the films on Tubi. This is not a story for anyone looking for simply good guys and a world where evil is always and easily vanquished, but for those who like more challenging plots, it is worth at least one watch.

The writing is sharp, with a biting sense of humor present throughout most of the film. Sardonic and cynical is the script, and while this movie was released in 1968, it has the tone and resolution of a movie from the deep, dark mid-70s.

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My WorldCon Schedule

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Next month, August 27-31, is the 84th World Science Fiction Convention, in Anaheim, California. As it went down last year, I will be attending but this time with a twist.

A regular smaller convention held in the greater Los Angeles area is LosCon, the Los Angeles Science Fiction Convention which takes place over the long, for most people, Thanksgiving weekend. I have been a regular at LosCon since 1996 and an infrequent participant on panels at that convention as both fan and author. Because the local fan groups that host and organize LosCon are the same people that are hosting the WorldCon this year, I have been invited to participate on a few panels for that much larger convention.

I will be part of two panels on Friday, August 28th:

10:30am, Bring Me the Head of Howard Phillips Lovecraft, exploring the moral dimensions of horror fictions and their creators.

 6:00pm, Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, discussing that adaptation of the classic novel.

Monday, August 31st, I have one panel.

12:00 pm, Trauma vs Entertainment, discussing the line between the trauma that horror can be inspired by and the entertainment it seeks to create.

The rest of the time I plan to be attending panels, workshops, and having a grand old time. If you are attending the convention please do not hesitate to say hello as, due to my inherent shyness, I rarely speak first.

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