Author of adventure/thriller and horror fiction

FROM, Season 1

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In FROM, a community of people live in a town where people enter but can never leave, a place where monsters come out at night and the real world seems a distant memory.

Streaming on Paramount, FROM begins with the sheriff ringing a bell, warning the residents that dark is coming and they need to get inside. Meanwhile, a family discovers a tree blocking the road during a road trip, which forces them to detour to a crumbling town where nothing seems quite right. They soon discover they’re trapped like the residents, who either try to live as best they can in acceptance of their lot, or take a stand to learn more about the mysterious place and how they might escape.

There’s a lot to like here, from the basic TV drama to the themes of resistance/acceptance to the weird horror elements, which include some pretty gory slaughter of people caught outside after dark. There are plenty of riddles and strange elements to keep you engaged in the mystery, very similar to LOST, in fact this show has some of the same producers. Only, because it’s streaming, it’s like watching LOST with bad language and people torn to shreds.

I do have some criticisms. One is the show tips its hand very early on to show what the monsters look like, and they’re far scarier seeing the aftermath than seeing them attack. Another is every breakthrough on a mystery only leads to another mystery, which kept millions hooked on LOST but turned me off during the second season. I feel like shows like that lean so hard on the uncanny (there’s a dog that keeps showing up for some reason, which appears designed to generate internet discussion about what it means) that I start to feel played, and then leans on weird cliffhangers so much it boxes itself into a corner, and you wind up with a finale where it was all some weird plan by God or a collective near-death experience, because nothing else works. That’s a me thing, maybe not a you thing, though, as again, millions loved LOST and watched it to the end, so if you dug that, I think you’d dig this closer-to-R-rated version of it.

Overall, I thought Season 1 was great creepy fun, and I’m already into Season 2, which is rolling at a nice pace. Check it out if you like “Area X” or LOST type stories.

RED ROOMS (2024)

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In the French-Canadian film RED ROOMS (2024), a young woman named Kelly-Anne becomes obsessed with a serial killer, leading her down a dark road to track down a missing video depicting the murder of a teen. This movie is a master class in horror, cultivating a morbid sense of revulsion using sound and description instead of shoving it in your face.

The movie begins with the opening statements at a trial. We have the defendant, believed to have murdered three pretty young teens and posted the videos as “red room” snuff videos for profit on the dark web (a new digital take on the old snuff film urban legend of the 1970s). We have the prosecutor laying out the grisly crime in detail, letting our imaginations do the work. And we have Kelly-Anne sitting in the observation area, watching the trial day after day.

Is she a serial killer groupie, a sicko who likes snuff films, or is something else at work? She’s a fascinating character in how she pursues information about the case and probes the dark web herself to plumb the case’s deepest secrets. We find out what she’s been doing all along in a nice twist at the end, though this comes at the expense of never really knowing what drives her, why she does what she does. We’re kept in the dark for a reason, and while it’s a good reason, again, there’s the tradeoff. That one vital piece of storytelling, which is what haunts a character and makes them believe what they believe and need what they need.

That aside, I loved it. I found the story intensely moody, the cinematography and soundtrack great, and the protagonist engaging. I particularly loved the use of sound, spoken description, and human reactions to the torture and murder of the teens, which made the crimes subject to the imagination and therefore all the more grisly and horrific. Overall, I appreciated how RED ROOMS took the tired trope of the serial killer and turned it into something deeply engaging.

THE KING TIDE (2023)

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In THE KING TIDE (2023), a desperate community of island fishermen discover an infant with a magical power of healing, resulting in the community forming a virtual religion around the girl and becoming willing to do anything to protect and ensure their access to her powers. The filmmakers wring a ton of drama from a simple story and modest budget, with a terrific payoff.

Distraught after his wife Grace suffers another miscarriage, Bobby takes a walk and hears a baby crying near the sea. Discovering a lost infant, he and his wife adopt the girl, though she is no normal child. Named Isla, she has the ability to heal almost any ailment and keep people young. Years later, the island has sealed itself off and has formed a virtual cult around her. But Isla has another power, one that is darker than healing, and when the girl grows confused and appears to lose all her power, the community falls into chaos, turning on each other and outsiders.

It’s a simple premise and story, the kind of thing you might find in a Shirley Jackson short story or a play turned into a film, but the filmmakers mine a huge amount of drama and tragedy out of it. As things go wrong, everyone becomes an antagonist, and what makes these characters so great is every one of them has a powerful motivation for what they want and what they’re willing to do for it. The town’s now useless medic, for example, believes the community is exploiting Isla and wants her to have more choice. Her adoptive parents want to protect her, and their mother, cured of a catatonic form of dementia, is willing to do anything to avoid going back into that horrible fog. And on and on, all of it leading up to tragedy with a terrific ending. The real monster, it seems, is simple human nature.

Otherwise, the setting is notably bleak, an isolated community on an island in Nova Scotia where the houses are barely resisting the erosion of time and the harsh elements. The people who live there are ordinary people similarly turned rugged and hard by their environment. The pacing is solid and the dialogue just fine.

Overall, I was impressed by THE KING TIDE and would happily recommend it as a simple horror story about human nature that is well told.

EXHUMA (2024)

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Korean film has a real knack for horror, offering seriously creepy stories populated by terrific characters you care about. The latest I caught was EXHUMA (2024), about a shaman and a geomancer who team up to relieve a family of a curse, only to discover something far more evil buried beneath the earth. I really enjoyed this one.

In this story, Korean shaman Hwa-rim and her protege are hired by a rich businessman to identify the cause of a strange illness affecting both him and his newborn son, which turns out to be a haunting by a vengeful ancestor. In Korea, they team up with a geomancer (specialist in cosmic energy flowing between people and their environments) and his own partner. Together, they must exhume the grave of an ancestor located in a horrible grave site in an area where the very ground appears to be diseased.

That’s when things of course go very wrong, as they contend not only with the vengeful ancestor but a far larger evil.

This movie is great horror, really folklore or religious horror, deeply steeped in realistically portrayed shamanism, geomancy, and Korean and Japanese mythology. The characters are very likeable, even though we don’t get to know them very well, and the shaman is unfortunately a bit underdeveloped; it’s in the spiritualist procedural aspects where this film really shines. Their cosmic battle against evil forces is compelling and different, with its nearest equivalent on this side of the Pacific maybe being THE EXORCIST. Plenty of twists kept me engaged, though some viewers may find it jarring how the story appears to wrap up halfway through the film, only for the real adversary to reveal itself. In its dark tone evoking dread, the movie reminded me a lot of THE WAILING, which had a similar tone. (That movie also had a very dark ending, distinguishing another great thing about Korean horror cinema, which is you really need to check your expectations at the door.) The ending to EXHUMA surprised me in a great way, and I loved how it came in for a landing.

Overall, I loved EXHUMA and look forward to what Korea comes up with next in horror.

THE SUBSTANCE (2024)

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From its ominous, reverberating house-music score to its crazy logic to it going from partial Cronenberg to full Cronenberg, THE SUBSTANCE (2024) is an an over-the-top ride into obsession with glamor and the price this imposes. Starring Demi Moore giving it her all and then some, with Margaret Qualley killing it as her counterpart, this movie was a lot of fun to watch and a breath of fresh air for moviegoers looking for something new and different in a theater experience.

In this story, Elisabeth Sparkle (Moore) is an aging actress currently hosting an aerobics workout show. The head of the network (Dennis Quaid laying it on thick as a smarmy and piggish Hollywood type) wants someone younger and more attractive to take over the show, and fires her on her fiftieth birthday. This sends Elisabeth into a downward spiral of feeling old, irrelevant, and washed up, but there is hope: A young medical intern tells her about The Substance, a black-market drug that allows you to create a younger version of herself. It works, but of course there’s a rule, which is both women must remember they are the same person and live in balance, and of course if the rule is broken there is a cost.

Thematically, the message is obvious: Hollywood and the glamor industry create an idealized image of beauty with pressure to achieve it at any cost to remain alive and relevant. Otherwise, the film explores the antagonism between those whose youth is fading and the young who want to make their own mark on the world. The way this is told is part sci-fi, part urban fantasy, and part horror, with a heavy lean on the horror, particularly the body horror type. The story is powered by its over-the-top, overstimulating visuals and snappy pace, making Elisabeth for me someone I sympathized with but had a hard time empathizing with, which I guess is the point, as she’s a walking caution sign and blind to the cost of what she’s doing. By the end, as I said, the body horror enters the grotesque and gross-out realm of the Cronenberg with a last act that dragged a little for me but it utterly gonzo, wrapping with a nice horrifying final image. The film has a punchy, angry, raw, unsettling, and unapologetic feel.

Overall, I had a lot of fun with THE SUBSTANCE and would happily recommend it. Whether you wind up liking it or not, I think you’ll find it a pretty wild ride.

FURIOSA (2024)

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In FURIOSA: A MAD MAX SAGA (2024), we get a prequel to the FURY ROAD film that I’d be very surprised if anyone actually demanded but honestly stands out for me as the best in the franchise since THE ROAD WARRIOR. I liked this movie a lot, far better than FURY ROAD, with the biggest downer being that aside from a glimpse or two, Mad Max isn’t in it.

In this film, we get the backstory for Furiosa, one of Immortan Joe’s Praetorians, who played a significant role in FURY ROAD. As a child, she lives in the “Green Place,” but it’s been discovered by raiders, and when she tries to interfere with them leaving to tell others this sanctuary’s location, she winds up captured by the Horde led by the warlord Dementus (played balls to the wall by Chris Hemsworth) and growing up in the wasteland. From there, she becomes increasingly mixed up in the political machinations between three players–Dementus, who captures the sole working oil refinery, Immortan Joe, who controls the Citadel with its food and water supply, and the Bullet Farm, which manufactures ammunition. All she wants to do is escape back to the Green Place, but the wasteland has other plans for her, setting her on a path not of escape but revenge.

Anya Taylor-Joy does a great job in the role that was previously well-played by Charlize Theron in FURY ROAD, embodying the role with a fierce sense of determination and making the action scenes look believable instead of staged. In my view, Hemsworth steals the show as Dementus, though, who is a great character, a product of the wasteland, a man who wishes things could be different and better but knows this can never be–that he in fact must help make it worse. Part charlatan and part emperor with no clothes, he is a pure agent of chaos, undermining and attacking his rivals because it’s all he knows how to do, and he appears to thrive on things falling apart, as if determined to make the world as horrible as his internal landscape.

Anyway, the characters are good, the politics simple and fun, the action scenes the usual riveting ROAD WARRIOR fare. There are a few moments that particularly stretch suspension of disbelief, such as Furiosa freeing herself from a tough situation and getting her robot arm, but whatever, it’s a Mad Max movie. Overall, I found FURIOSA a great addition to the Mad Max world and again one of the best in the franchise, though, I’d love to see something this fun with Mad Max back as the main.