So often big budget dramas dressed in sci-fi dress rise up the box office rankings, you might miss the best films, the ones that don’t need the big budgets or major stars, the refreshing sleepers that surprise you. One of those great surprises was Midnight Special, which I reviewed here at borg back in 2016. The next spectacular science fiction work is even better–The Vast of Night–the brainchild of writer-director-producer-editor Andrew Patterson (who is billed under multiple names), now streaming on Amazon Prime. Could this freshman filmmaker be the next J.J. Abrams, John Carpenter, or Steven Spielberg? Think Super 8, The Fog, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, in a setting like American Graffiti and The Outsiders, with stunning cinematography, superb dialogue in a tightly written script, and a fresh and eerie use of sound. If you missed this Amazon Studios arrival earlier this summer, you’re in for a treat of 1950s teenage sleuths, a radio station, and strange goings about town: An ambitious film that comes pretty close to perfect science fiction in the classic tradition of The Twilight Zone, The War of the Worlds, and the short stories of Philip K. Dick.
There’s something about Mary, a new horror film coming this fall, that screams out John Carpenter. It has that seaside feel of Carpenter’s The Fog, complete with a haunted seafaring vessel and moody cinematography. It also has that trapped-in-an-evil-car vibe of Carpenter’s adaptation of Stephen King’s Christine. It’s about an old boat with a past, found and restored, and haunted–all Christine elements. Who doesn’t want more Carpenter movies, or second best, a Carpenter homage? Mary is a new horror film that boasts its contrast with the average why-not-run-from-the-haunted-house movie by staging its ghost story on a boat: “The thing about boats is there’s nowhere to run.” A nice double feature with The Lighthouse, perhaps? The first trailer for the movie also conjures a little Jaws, The Ring, and Dead Calm.
Academy Award-winning actor Gary Oldman(The Dark Knight Rises, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, RoboCop, The Fifth Element) and Emily Mortimer(Mary Poppins Returns, The Kid, The Ghost and the Darkness) star in the indie film, which is directed by cinematographer Michael Goi(Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, Swamp Thing, American Horror Story), with a cast including Jennifer Esposito, straight off her supporting role in The Boys, plus Manuel Garcia-Rulfo (The Magnificent Seven, Murder on the Orient Express),Natalie Jean (Gotham),Michael Landes (Final Destination 2, Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman), Stefanie Scott (Chuck, Jem and the Holograms), and Owen Teague (IT, Black Mirror).
The solid leading and supporting cast and some nicely creepy cinematography and scares in the trailer make this look like a good Halloween pick. And the eerie music is supplied by frequent horror movie–and Avengers movie series–composers The Newton Brothers. Here’s the trailer for Mary:
This year marks the 120th anniversary of the publication of H.G. Wells’ genre defining science fiction novel, The War of the Worlds. We reviewed the latest incarnation of the story earlier this year here at borg. This Halloween Eve marked the 80th anniversary of the broadcast of War of the Worlds,Orson Welles‘ theater company adaptation of Wells’ The War of the Worlds–the one that sent a minor panic across the U.S. in 1938. Smithsonian Magazine has the best historical retrospective on the event (written in 2015) at its website here. The show was just a quickly cobbled together episode of the radio drama anthology series Mercury Theatre on the Air, broadcast on CBS–the radio network–when an attentive audience took Welles’ performance for reality. Indiana University’s Lilly Library commemorated the anniversary by publicly streaming its newly digitized version of the infamous event derived from Welles’ personal lacquer disc recordings, for free. If you’re continuing your Halloween celebration through the weekend, there’s no better time to turn off the television and take yourself and your family on a time travel trip to sci-fi entertainment, 1930s style. Stream the original radio presentation of Mercury Theatre’s War of the Worlds plus more classic presentations at the library’s website here.
Along with TheWar of the Worlds anniversaries, it’s a good time to celebrate actor and writer John Houseman, who co-founded the Mercury Theatre Players with Welles, and produced and co-wrote the script for the War of the Worlds broadcast. Decades before gaining new fame in his Academy Award-winning role as the scary and iconic Professor Kingsfield in the movie The Paper Chase opposite Bionic Woman Lindsay Wagner, and later starring in the television series version, Houseman served as an uncredited co-writer to Herman J. Mankiewicz on Citizen Kane. Initially collaborators, “Jack” Houseman and Welles would have a falling out soon after that was never mended. Never escaping his early connection with Welles, Houseman died thirty years ago today, the day after the 50th anniversary of the War of the Worlds radio broadcast.
Early photograph of Mercury Theatre co-founders Orson Welles and John Houseman.
If you’re a John Carpenter fan, you may recall Houseman as the narrator at the beginning of Carpenter’s 1980 classic ghost story, The Fog. Born in Romania, as the old coastal chap Mr. Machen (a name referencing 1890s horror writer Arthur Machen), Houseman delivered that same brand of captivating storytelling in his one-of-a-kind voice, storytelling that made the War of the Worlds broadcast so famous.
Chilling Adventures of Sabrina is the rare show that tries to be many things and actually succeeds at them all. If you are looking for the ideal way to spend this Halloween, absent a Buffy the Vampire Slayer marathon, you’re not going to find a better TV pursuit than this new Netflix series. It features a captivating lead in its teenage witch Sabrina, played perfectly by Kiernan Shipka, who shows every frustrating feeling, emotion, and indecision any teenager must go through, reflected in a mythology-rich world with enormous stakes. Sabrina is a kid–a smart kid, but still a kid–so she makes the kind of mistakes teenagers make. Raised in the occult world by a family of witch aunts and a warlock cousin, Sabrina is a half-breed (her mother was human, her father a high priest in the dark arts), but viewers will see she shares some commonality with Hermione Granger from the Harry Potter books–she’s loyal, she’s book smart, she’s street savvy, and conscientious, dabbling in the magical world. She also is trusting and able to be manipulated by the adults around her. She may not be the fully realized, badass, confident heroine everyone wants to see–just yet–but by the end of Season 1 she’s well on her way.
The series protagonist is actually not Sabrina, but a demon who takes over the body of Michelle Gomez‘s Ms. Wardwell, a teacher at Sabrina’s mortal-realm high school, an ever-present mentor steering her out of dilemmas when Sabrina’s aunts fail to give Sabrina the help she wants. Gomez, who played Doctor Who’s #1 nemesis The Master, is even more engaging here, fully inhabiting a character whose motivations are hidden by a fog–a blurred reality paralleled by a clever fuzzy tweak in cinematography throughout each episode. Sabrina’s aunts, played by Miranda Otto, The Lord of the Rings #1 heroine who saved Middle-earth (“I am no man!”) and Lucy Davis, the #2 female lead in the WWI era of the movie Wonder Woman, unite to create a classic duet in the spirit of Arsenic and Old Lace. Otto’s Zelda is strict and a devout believer in her dark religion, Hilda a sweet and doting aunt who gets excommunicated for her support of Sabrina. All three actresses bring their genre star power to the series, providing a jolt of heroine gravatas to support the title character.
Sabrina is approaching her 16th birthday, when she must choose between the world of mortals and the world–and protections–of the witching world. She must decide whether she will relinquish her decision-making from then on to the devil himself or take her chances as a mortal. She is surrounded by those she thinks she can trust and others whose motivations are hidden in a dark world of several levels of good and evil. Making sense of the darkness and evil and placing a pantheon of 56-old comic book characters he rejuvenated in the pages of Archie Horror comics four years ago onto the screen for a new audience is Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, chief creative officer of Archie Comics, and executive producer and writer for the comics and CW’s Riverdale and Netflix’s Sabrina. Quite shrewdly, Sacasa doesn’t comment on the dark religion of the series or any political stance his characters may reflect, instead letter the viewer bring their own value set to the show and making their own analysis. Who do you want to cheer for, the equivalent of Darth Vader or Princess Leia in science fiction, or Sauron or Eowyn in fantasy? Sacasa pulls from age-old classic stories, like Cain and Abel from the Bible, W.W. Jacobs’ The Monkey’s Paw, John Carpenter’s films including The Fog, Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, Robert Eggers’ The Witch, Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, and a classic horror film mirrored in the comics that might be a spoiler for Season 2–so we’ll hold that title back for now.
