Author of sci-fi/fantasy, horror and adventure/thriller fiction

GWEN (2018)

by Leave a Comment

GWEN (2018) is a British period film appearing to blend psychological and supernatural horror elements, but despite strong performances and a very moody atmosphere and Gothic flavor, its payoff was disappointingly mundane and not very satisfying for me.

Gwen lives with her mother and younger sister on a farm in the UK in the 1800s, and right away, we can see things are not well. The neighbors are dead, apparently from cholera. Dad is off fighting in a war. Mom’s mental health appears to be deteriorating. The owner of the nearby quarry wants to buy their land so they can expand the quarry. Quickly, it becomes apparent than someone or something wants to destroy their livelihood and drive them away.

There’s plenty of Gothic atmosphere, strange goings on, and mom’s spooky descent into madness, but it’s a very, very slow burn, with everything Gwen tries to do to show agency frustrated through design or chance, and any understanding frustrated by mom keeping secrets and otherwise holding back. The result is somewhat repetitive, culminating in a violent encounter that makes sense but wasn’t quite the payoff I was hoping to see. The result feels kind of like an odd period home invasion film where the invasion happens at the end not the beginning.

Still, despite these reservations, GWEN has a lot of strengths, notably its moody atmosphere and the performance of its young lead, Eleanor Worthington Cox. It wasn’t my cup of tea, overall, but I appreciated it for what it was trying to do. Check it out if you’re into moody, atmospheric, Gothic stories.

HERE ALONE (2016)

by Leave a Comment

HERE ALONE (2016) is another low-budget zombie flick, but its solid acting, able direction, and focus on story elevate it from the pack, making it a great watch.

The plot is fairly simple. Ann lives alone in upstate New York wilderness, having fled her home with her husband and baby during a raging epidemic that turns its victims into cannibalistic killers. She has developed the skills she needs to survive, though she’s struggling. When she comes across a man and his stepdaughter, she takes them in. On her own for so long and plagued by guilt, can she learn to live with others again, as she clearly needs to? And will her joining them produce new tensions that could threaten them all?

I got in a lot of trouble for liking WORLD WAR Z. It offered very little in the way of story, but it was the first zombie movie with a big budget and incredible effects, producing amazingly exciting set pieces even if I didn’t particularly care whether most of the characters lived or died. The thing is, most zombie movies at the time were lacking in telling a good story, telling stories about zombies with people instead of the other way around. A few gems were eventually produced that breathed new life into the genre, and HERE ALONE is one of them. The director ably keeps the zombies off screen most of the film, using the character’s terror and sound to produce a real sense of dread. Instead, he focuses on Ann, her slowly revealed backstory explaining her guilt and reluctance to become a part of a pack again, and her growing relationship with two other survivors, who bring their own baggage to the mix. The whole comes across as natural and convincing. While the ending doesn’t quite pay off all these elements, I enjoyed the film as something both familiar and new in zombie world.

FREUD

by Leave a Comment

Streaming on Netflix, FREUD is an Austrian-German series re-imagining the life of a young Sigmund Freud. It’s over the top and has some very engaging elements, but it’s light on ideas, making it more ABRAHAM LINCOLN: VAMPIRE HUNTER than LINCOLN.

Set in Vienna, the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in 1886, the series centers on three characters, Sigmund Freud himself, a young psychiatric doctor who wants to make a name for himself so he can afford to marry his love; Fleur Salomé, a medium who appears to have genuine psychic abilities; and Alfred Kiss, a police inspector haunted by the war with Prussia some years earlier. Kiss is investigating a series of bizarre murders involving people who snap and go wild. Salomé is being used as a tool to entrance people so they can be hypnotized as part of a nefarious plot. And Freud becomes snarled as he seeks to save Salomé and foil the plot.

One thing you can bank on with a European historical drama, they know how to set the time period with fantastic world building. From costumes to sets, everything rings authentic. The story is sensational but engaging, providing an intriguing mystery as to what Salomé’s handlers are up to. Kiss steals the show, tough and unflinching and haunted by his war. It all comes together in a strong climax where all is revealed, and a very well put-together denouement that explores various consequences of what happened and completes Freud’s story. The show doesn’t blink at copious amounts of blood, murder, drug use, and nudity, making it a pretty sensational watch.

There’s something missing, though, which is any gravitas at all. While it’s accomplished in the denouement in the last episode, the rest of the series play it serious without really being such. Freud largely reacts to what happens to him, and he has really has no ideas of his own. These evolve over the course of the series, but it would have been great–seeing as this is a show about the father of modern psychology–if he started the series with any ideas other than believing psychological disorders can manifest as physical symptoms and that hypnosis works. He argues with the doctors who run the asylum where he works, but he never debates them, resulting in a missed opportunity to make the viewer think the way MINDHUNTER did.

The result is titillating if somewhat light fare, a story that fails to capitalize on what might have been accomplished by making Freud a stronger, more influential character. Still, while it’s not faring well with critics, I enjoyed it and found it worth a watch.

LIGHTHOUSE (2019)

by Leave a Comment

Written by Robert and Max Eggers and directed by Robert Eggers, whose earlier work included THE WITCH, THE LIGHTHOUSE (2019) is a psychological historical horror film shot in stark black and white and transplanting old world mythology into a young America.

At the beginning of the film, Thomas Wake (Willem Dafoe) and Ephraim Winslow (Robert Pattinson) arrive at a rugged island near Nova Scotia to operate a lighthouse for four weeks. Quickly, things sour for Winslow as he finds the irritable but senior Wake assigning him all the manual labor while refusing to allow him to enter the upper level of the lighthouse, which houses the lamp. Winslow has strange visions of tentacled creatures, mermaids, Wake’s previous assistant, and other strange elements. When a raging storm strands them long after they’re due to be relieved, the men forge a bond that contains the seeds of confrontation.

When starting the film, I’d prepared myself for an artsy borefest, but it’s anything but. The film is both strange and compelling. Pattinson has come a long way since TWILIGHT and delivers a powerful performance as the haunted Winslow, but Dafoe chews every scene as the irascible Wake who jealously guards the secret of the lamp. Thematically, I’m not sure what the film was trying to be. Originally, it was supposed to be an adaptation of an Edgar Allan Poe story, but it evolved. There are very strong elements of mythology, including Proteus and Prometheus, but it doesn’t come together in a way that makes me think it was really thought out. So while it didn’t quite come together for me, I enjoyed it quite a bit and found it almost unique. Catch it on Amazon Prime.

Cover Reveal for THE CHILDREN OF RED PEAK

by Leave a Comment

Today, horror blog Night Worms published the cover reveal for my cult horror novel THE CHILDREN OF RED PEAK, coming November 2020 from Hachette Book Group.

David Young, Deacon Price, and Beth Harris live with a dark secret. As children, they survived a religious group’s horrific last days at the isolated mountain Red Peak. Years later, the trauma of what they experienced never feels far behind.

When a fellow survivor commits suicide, they finally reunite and share their stories. Long-repressed memories surface, defying understanding and belief. Why did their families go down such a dark road? What really happened on that final night?

The answers lie buried at Red Peak. But truth has a price, and escaping a second time may demand the ultimate sacrifice.

Night Worms invited me to offer some comments about the cover. Here they are:

I worked with Lisa Marie Pompilio on the cover of Orbit’s OUR WAR, a novel about a modern civil war in America, and was absolutely blown away by the final product. When I heard I’d be working with her again on the upcoming release of THE CHILDREN OF RED PEAK, I was very excited. She didn’t disappoint. The cover portrays wilderness, which is on the nose in terms of where a fair portion of the novel takes place but also figurative of mystery, the past, and a spiritual journey from pain to truth. The upside-down world, dead trees, and trailing sliver of blood screams corruption, danger, and tragedy. What is hiding there? What is the price of finding out?

THE CHILDREN OF RED PEAK is about the human search for meaning and the dark side of finding it. In the novel, a group of adults reunite to confront the childhood years they spent in a religious community that degenerated into a violent cult. Tragedy broke them apart and will bring them back together to ask the questions: What really happened that last horrible night in the wilderness at the base of Red Peak? What waits for them on its summit? To find out, they will have to journey across a different kind of wilderness of time and trauma and return to make the same ultimate choice that faced their parents long ago.

Stay tuned!

0.0 MHZ (2019)

by Leave a Comment

0.0MHz is a Korean horror movie about a university supernatural mystery club that explores haunted houses in the hopes of finding ghosts. They do this through a controlled experiment, in which they analyze brain wave frequency in a sleeping subject, on the theory 0.0MHz is the frequency at which a person’s soul meets a ghost. Despite the fun promise of this simple setup, what follows is an uneven, fairly meh story without much tension, though the charm of the characters and overall effect makes for a passable horror watch.

Streaming on Shudder, the film is an adaptation of a popular online comic by Jang Jak, which became popular for its unsettling images. Unfortunately, this doesn’t translate into the film, which aside from a few creepy moments doesn’t deliver much in the way of atmosphere, tension, or scares. The story morphs from a “trapped in a haunted house” story to a possession story to a drama, culminating in a typical gotcha ending. The acting is similarly uneven, with some strong performances but others that are fairly wooden. The characters are charming, though, and there’s a “just go with it” vibe to the film that makes you watch what turns out to be largely meh, which I expected from the trailer, but also passably enjoyable, which was exactly what I was hoping for.