mistressofmuses (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
mistressofmuses) wrote2023-01-22 07:54 pm
mistressofmuses) wrote2023-01-22 07:54 pm
Media roundup:
Haven't done any type of media roundup thing in a while. *Definitely* not going back to whenever I last did this many months ago, but here are some thoughts on some stuff I've watched and read recently!
Some things I've watched:
Girl on the Third Floor - rewatch - a pretty good "moved into a haunted house" horror film.
Don, our Man With A Past, has moved into a new home in a small town. He plans to renovate the home for him and his pregnant wife for their Fresh New Start. But of course weird stuff starts happening, and all the locals warn him that the house has a terrible effect on the people who move in... particularly on straight men. He continues his renovations, but discovers more and more weirdness - black sludge pouring from fixtures, and eventually a ceiling collapses, revealing a viewing space in the top floor that appears set up to watch the bedroom. Don allows himself to be seduced by a woman who comes to the house, though he later regrets having cheated on his wife. Don disappears, and his wife, Liz, comes looking for him.
This particular movie actually reminds me more of The Shining than any of the more similar "new start in a new town, oh shit our dream house is super fucking haunted" subgenre. It's a staple of the subgenre to lean in on the "it's the PEOPLE who are fucked up more than the house!" and that's certainly part of the case here... but I actually think this one balances those two sides really well. (Again, similar to how I feel about The Shining.) The house is certainly preying on the worst instincts of the people involved, and Don is not really that great a person. But the things haunting the house - and what happened in the house - are also much more overt than a lot of entries in the subgenre goes for.
The cast is decent - including wrestler Phil Brooks in his first film role as Don.
Also, it's kind of a little and slightly silly thing, but I kind of like that they make an extra point of "hey, this house fucks with straight men. If you're gay you're probably fine though."
Incident in a Ghostland - rewatch - fairly standard home-invasion horror. I didn't enjoy this one as much.
Two teenage girls, Beth and Vera, go with their mother to stay in an old house that belonged to a family member. There's some general family tension - Beth wants very badly to be a horror writer, but Vera is dismissive of her attempts. After they settle into the house, a pair of deranged serial killers break in and attack the family, holding and torturing the girls. The killers - a woman and a mentally impaired man - claim they just want to "play with dolls."
Years later, Beth has a successful writing career, her latest book talking about her experiences when she was attacked and her mother ultimately killed the intruders. Her sister Vera has not handled the trauma so well; she still lives with their mother in the house, completely unable to let go of her paranoia that their attackers will come back, often calling Beth in a panic, begging for her to come back and help her.
PLOT TWIST: the "years later" never happened, and is a fantasy Beth constructed to cope with the torment; Vera's ongoing fear and inability to move on is her still going through the torture and trying to get her sister to wake up and engage. It's basically the "you're in a coma, wake up now" creepypasta.
Beth does wake up, and the serial killers are still assaulting them, treating them like dolls that they abuse and torture. After a failed escape, Beth retreats back into her fantasy of being a successful writer, where she meets HP Lovecraft, who praises her writing. She finds the strength to leave the fantasy and return to the present and what's going on. Ultimately, the two girls are rescued, and she tells the EMT that she likes to write.
This one feels a bit more meh to me. I don't think it does anything wildly unique, though my ambivalence could be largely that home invasion and torture style horror is just not my favorite type as it is. The twist isn't bad; I think it's pretty well done. The movie sets up the "alternate" explanation - that Beth has found success, and is returning to the site of the horror in the hopes of helping her struggling family - pretty well, and in a way that doesn't feel like it's going to be obviously subverted.
The killers are... not terribly memorable or interesting? I could really do without the ~ooh, the man is extra creepy because he's disabled and plays with dolls~ thing. It's definitely played more as a "they're creepy because they like young girls" thing than a "gender deviance is creepy" thing, but it's still a pretty overdone trope.
My biggest problem is maybe weirdly... WHY LOVECRAFT? They lean into it super early, starting the film with a blurb about him, and how he's Beth's favorite writer, and she wants to write like him. She meets him in one of her fantasies about being a writer. But... none of the horror in the film is at ALL "Lovecraftian." There's no otherworldly aspect at all, much less Eldritch or unknowable. The killers are the kind of played-up dramatic serial killers of horror movies, but they're bad people, not monsters, and Beth's retreat into fantasy is also portrayed as an extreme version of mundane (if desperate) escapism. It seems like a weird choice to draw so much attention to, when it doesn't really do anything to further the themes of the film as a whole.
Countdown - another horror movie. This one had just terrible reviews, but I didn't think it was bad!
A group of teens download an app that purports to tell you exactly how long you have to live. Most have long lives ahead of them, except for one girl who has mere hours. She turns down a ride from her drunk boyfriend, only to arrive home and be killed by a mysterious figure at the time she was predicted to die. It's later revealed her drunk boyfriend did get into a car accident that would also have killed her at exactly that time. Now in the hospital, his version of the app tells him that he now has only hours to live... which means he'll die in surgery. He tries to flee the hospital, and is similarly killed.
Our actual main character, Quinn, is a nurse at the hospital. She's dismissive of the app, but when she downloads it she's given only days to live. She tries to track down what the app means, and how and why people are dying on schedule.
Yes, it's basically a Final Destination style movie. Attempting to avoid your death once the app tells you when you'll die goes against the terms of service, which then causes the person to be killed as well. But by the demon inhabiting the app to harvest souls, naturally. It really is a silly premise, but I had fun watching it. There were a few try-hard jokes that fell flat, but other parts that I did find funny. It's not a DEEP movie, but it was entertaining.
What I'm reading:
City of Saints and Madmen - my frustration with the shitty abridged version I had to replace aside...I'm really liking it!
"Dradin, In Love" was a good intro to the city... Dradin is garbage, but in a way that makes him interesting garbage. He's a failed missionary, returning from a stint in the mysterious jungle after a severe illness. He wants to find his old mentor in Ambergris and hopefully be granted a job. On his way into the city, he spots a woman working in the window of a shop, and decides he has fallen in love with her. He becomes obsessed with courting her, spending the last of his money on gifts for her, and fantasizing about who she is, and what their life together will be like... despite never speaking to her. It's pretty clear from the start that things are going to go poorly for him, but when things go wrong, they go VERY WRONG.
"The Hoegbotton Guide to the Early History of the City of Ambergris" is also very very good. This is the one with the delightful academic snark in the footnotes (which are often longer than the pages they accompany.) The author ("Duncan Shriek") has been hired to write this guide for tourists to the city, and he LOVES the history, and has nothing but disdain for his assumed audience, often mocking them in the footnotes he's certain they won't bother to read.
The fictional history itself is really interesting imo. It feels "real" in a sense, despite the fact it's so fantastical - so many conflicting aspects of the history, so many primary documents that have been lost, and other works debated as to whether they're forgeries, or have been edited by the historical figures in question to paint themselves in a better light.
I like that this comes after the other story, because the recontextualizing is more fun in this order. It also leans into the horror of the series (and I would argue that it's definitely horror, despite being most often considered fantasy) in a way that's almost more horrifying for being delivered as a speculative academic history.
"The Cage": This one "shouldn't" have come so soon in the book - it was one of the appendix stories.
But it was very good! This one is a more straightforward horror story, kind of giving me... maybe sort of Edgar Allen Poe type vibes? [Though the move of it to its own "part" of the book also seems to have changed a LOT of context around it, which I'll maybe comment on more when I finish the book entirely.]
Robert Hoegbotton (a member of a merchant family who features prominently and repeatedly in Ambergris) is one of the only importer/exporters in the city willing to visit the estates of families who have been attacked by gray caps. (A humanoid-but-maybe-not-quite-human species that were victims of a genocide on the land the city was built on... and that have taken a very long, slow, brutal sort of revenge on the population of the city.) These households, despite often being wealthy, are generally condemned or burned after the attacks, as the objects inside - and any survivors - are contaminated with fungal spores that rapidly colonize objects and people.
Hoegbotten is drawn to a mysterious covered cage in one such home - though one survivor says it held a bird that vanished when they were attacked, and another says they never had a bird or a cage. He narrowly escapes the fungus that takes over the house, and brings the cage with him. Things go downhill from there.
There's a lot of fun imagery, and excellent slow creeping horror of what the thing is, and whether there's something in the cage after all. I really enjoyed it.
Some things I've watched:
Girl on the Third Floor - rewatch - a pretty good "moved into a haunted house" horror film.
Don, our Man With A Past, has moved into a new home in a small town. He plans to renovate the home for him and his pregnant wife for their Fresh New Start. But of course weird stuff starts happening, and all the locals warn him that the house has a terrible effect on the people who move in... particularly on straight men. He continues his renovations, but discovers more and more weirdness - black sludge pouring from fixtures, and eventually a ceiling collapses, revealing a viewing space in the top floor that appears set up to watch the bedroom. Don allows himself to be seduced by a woman who comes to the house, though he later regrets having cheated on his wife. Don disappears, and his wife, Liz, comes looking for him.
This particular movie actually reminds me more of The Shining than any of the more similar "new start in a new town, oh shit our dream house is super fucking haunted" subgenre. It's a staple of the subgenre to lean in on the "it's the PEOPLE who are fucked up more than the house!" and that's certainly part of the case here... but I actually think this one balances those two sides really well. (Again, similar to how I feel about The Shining.) The house is certainly preying on the worst instincts of the people involved, and Don is not really that great a person. But the things haunting the house - and what happened in the house - are also much more overt than a lot of entries in the subgenre goes for.
The cast is decent - including wrestler Phil Brooks in his first film role as Don.
Also, it's kind of a little and slightly silly thing, but I kind of like that they make an extra point of "hey, this house fucks with straight men. If you're gay you're probably fine though."
Incident in a Ghostland - rewatch - fairly standard home-invasion horror. I didn't enjoy this one as much.
Two teenage girls, Beth and Vera, go with their mother to stay in an old house that belonged to a family member. There's some general family tension - Beth wants very badly to be a horror writer, but Vera is dismissive of her attempts. After they settle into the house, a pair of deranged serial killers break in and attack the family, holding and torturing the girls. The killers - a woman and a mentally impaired man - claim they just want to "play with dolls."
Years later, Beth has a successful writing career, her latest book talking about her experiences when she was attacked and her mother ultimately killed the intruders. Her sister Vera has not handled the trauma so well; she still lives with their mother in the house, completely unable to let go of her paranoia that their attackers will come back, often calling Beth in a panic, begging for her to come back and help her.
PLOT TWIST: the "years later" never happened, and is a fantasy Beth constructed to cope with the torment; Vera's ongoing fear and inability to move on is her still going through the torture and trying to get her sister to wake up and engage. It's basically the "you're in a coma, wake up now" creepypasta.
Beth does wake up, and the serial killers are still assaulting them, treating them like dolls that they abuse and torture. After a failed escape, Beth retreats back into her fantasy of being a successful writer, where she meets HP Lovecraft, who praises her writing. She finds the strength to leave the fantasy and return to the present and what's going on. Ultimately, the two girls are rescued, and she tells the EMT that she likes to write.
This one feels a bit more meh to me. I don't think it does anything wildly unique, though my ambivalence could be largely that home invasion and torture style horror is just not my favorite type as it is. The twist isn't bad; I think it's pretty well done. The movie sets up the "alternate" explanation - that Beth has found success, and is returning to the site of the horror in the hopes of helping her struggling family - pretty well, and in a way that doesn't feel like it's going to be obviously subverted.
The killers are... not terribly memorable or interesting? I could really do without the ~ooh, the man is extra creepy because he's disabled and plays with dolls~ thing. It's definitely played more as a "they're creepy because they like young girls" thing than a "gender deviance is creepy" thing, but it's still a pretty overdone trope.
My biggest problem is maybe weirdly... WHY LOVECRAFT? They lean into it super early, starting the film with a blurb about him, and how he's Beth's favorite writer, and she wants to write like him. She meets him in one of her fantasies about being a writer. But... none of the horror in the film is at ALL "Lovecraftian." There's no otherworldly aspect at all, much less Eldritch or unknowable. The killers are the kind of played-up dramatic serial killers of horror movies, but they're bad people, not monsters, and Beth's retreat into fantasy is also portrayed as an extreme version of mundane (if desperate) escapism. It seems like a weird choice to draw so much attention to, when it doesn't really do anything to further the themes of the film as a whole.
Countdown - another horror movie. This one had just terrible reviews, but I didn't think it was bad!
A group of teens download an app that purports to tell you exactly how long you have to live. Most have long lives ahead of them, except for one girl who has mere hours. She turns down a ride from her drunk boyfriend, only to arrive home and be killed by a mysterious figure at the time she was predicted to die. It's later revealed her drunk boyfriend did get into a car accident that would also have killed her at exactly that time. Now in the hospital, his version of the app tells him that he now has only hours to live... which means he'll die in surgery. He tries to flee the hospital, and is similarly killed.
Our actual main character, Quinn, is a nurse at the hospital. She's dismissive of the app, but when she downloads it she's given only days to live. She tries to track down what the app means, and how and why people are dying on schedule.
Yes, it's basically a Final Destination style movie. Attempting to avoid your death once the app tells you when you'll die goes against the terms of service, which then causes the person to be killed as well. But by the demon inhabiting the app to harvest souls, naturally. It really is a silly premise, but I had fun watching it. There were a few try-hard jokes that fell flat, but other parts that I did find funny. It's not a DEEP movie, but it was entertaining.
What I'm reading:
City of Saints and Madmen - my frustration with the shitty abridged version I had to replace aside...I'm really liking it!
"Dradin, In Love" was a good intro to the city... Dradin is garbage, but in a way that makes him interesting garbage. He's a failed missionary, returning from a stint in the mysterious jungle after a severe illness. He wants to find his old mentor in Ambergris and hopefully be granted a job. On his way into the city, he spots a woman working in the window of a shop, and decides he has fallen in love with her. He becomes obsessed with courting her, spending the last of his money on gifts for her, and fantasizing about who she is, and what their life together will be like... despite never speaking to her. It's pretty clear from the start that things are going to go poorly for him, but when things go wrong, they go VERY WRONG.
"The Hoegbotton Guide to the Early History of the City of Ambergris" is also very very good. This is the one with the delightful academic snark in the footnotes (which are often longer than the pages they accompany.) The author ("Duncan Shriek") has been hired to write this guide for tourists to the city, and he LOVES the history, and has nothing but disdain for his assumed audience, often mocking them in the footnotes he's certain they won't bother to read.
The fictional history itself is really interesting imo. It feels "real" in a sense, despite the fact it's so fantastical - so many conflicting aspects of the history, so many primary documents that have been lost, and other works debated as to whether they're forgeries, or have been edited by the historical figures in question to paint themselves in a better light.
I like that this comes after the other story, because the recontextualizing is more fun in this order. It also leans into the horror of the series (and I would argue that it's definitely horror, despite being most often considered fantasy) in a way that's almost more horrifying for being delivered as a speculative academic history.
"The Cage": This one "shouldn't" have come so soon in the book - it was one of the appendix stories.
But it was very good! This one is a more straightforward horror story, kind of giving me... maybe sort of Edgar Allen Poe type vibes? [Though the move of it to its own "part" of the book also seems to have changed a LOT of context around it, which I'll maybe comment on more when I finish the book entirely.]
Robert Hoegbotton (a member of a merchant family who features prominently and repeatedly in Ambergris) is one of the only importer/exporters in the city willing to visit the estates of families who have been attacked by gray caps. (A humanoid-but-maybe-not-quite-human species that were victims of a genocide on the land the city was built on... and that have taken a very long, slow, brutal sort of revenge on the population of the city.) These households, despite often being wealthy, are generally condemned or burned after the attacks, as the objects inside - and any survivors - are contaminated with fungal spores that rapidly colonize objects and people.
Hoegbotten is drawn to a mysterious covered cage in one such home - though one survivor says it held a bird that vanished when they were attacked, and another says they never had a bird or a cage. He narrowly escapes the fungus that takes over the house, and brings the cage with him. Things go downhill from there.
There's a lot of fun imagery, and excellent slow creeping horror of what the thing is, and whether there's something in the cage after all. I really enjoyed it.