Author of adventure/thriller and horror fiction

LATE NIGHT WITH THE DEVIL (2023)

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In LATE NIGHT WITH THE DEVIL (2023), a talk show host hopes to revive his flagging career and ratings with a Halloween special. The result is a work of found footage horror that boldly distinguishes itself from that genre while keeping things simple.

It’s 1977, and NIGHT OWLS host Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian) has entertained the nation for five years as a late night talk show host, though his ratings never beat Johnny Carson’s, and his career is flagging, particularly after the death of his wife. After a hiatus marked with grief, he decides to stage a comeback. LATE NIGHT WITH THE DEVIL starts with a documentary look at Delroy’s career and then presents footage from the grisly episode, including behind-the-scenes footage.

Delroy is a great character in that he is highly sympathetic and we can root for him, but he has a tragic flaw, which is his drive to beat Johnny Carson in ratings and host the number one show on TV. As the Halloween episode proceeds through its guests, we see both sides of him propelling himself and his show to both potentially realizing his goal and a terrifying confrontation.

The movie does a great job imagining a 1970s late night talk show, complete with stilted on-air banter, constant asides for a quick and easy laugh, fashions, technical dialogue and equipment, and the usual personalities including the band and the show’s hapless sidekick, excellently portrayed by Rhys Auteri. It all proves nicely immersive for the horror element that comes crashing in.

And when it does, there’s quite a payoff. One of those rare horror scenes where I start laughing, not because it’s funny but because it’s awesome. From the beginning of the NIGHT OWLS episode, Delroy tells us we will meet several guests. It all builds up to Lilly (with Ingrid Torelli fantastic in the role), a young girl who grew up in a Satanic cult and is the sole survivor. Her therapist became her guardian, and their sessions formed the basis of the therapist’s book CONVERSATIONS WITH THE DEVIL.

At Delroy’s urging, they do one of their sessions for the studio audience…

Some found the ending ambiguous, though I thought it was clear enough. The story makes sense, but at the end, you may have the feeling that there might have been a bit more to tie things off. I was okay with it, all things said. Though the movie teased aspirations that went beyond found footage, in the end it stayed true to the form.

Overall, I thought LATE NIGHT WITH THE DEVIL was a lot of fun and would recommend it to horror fans looking for something fresh.

CIVIL WAR (2024)

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My overall view of CIVIL WAR (2024) is basically that it’s really good civil war porn. Otherwise, it’s highly YMMV. Let me explain.

In the movie, four journalists are covering a future American civil war that has an unlikely alliance of Texas and California fighting alongside Florida against the U.S. government. The president (Nick Offerman) is described as a “fascist” who disbanded the FBI and bombed civilians. Otherwise, the causes of the war are mysterious. As the Western Forces close in on Washington, DC, the journalists, currently in New York, decide to go to DC to try to interview the president, who notoriously hates the press.

These include exhausted and bitter veteran Lee (Kirsten Dunst), adrenaline junkie Joel (Wagner Moura), old crusty newspaperman Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), and novice reporter Jesse (Cailee Spaeny). Along the way, they travel through various set pieces typical of civil conflict–distrustful locals, unreal inflation for basic necessities like fuel, burning buildings, mass graves, lynchings, militiamen who regard their enemy as inhuman, execution of war prisoners, and ever-present gunfire on the horizon as the front line grows steadily closer.

I was pretty excited about the movie. I’d written a novel about a second American civil war called OUR WAR that freaked out a lot of people, so I’d done a lot of homework on the topic. What would an actual civil war look like? It’s a fascinating if very grim subject. Alex Garland wrote and directed, and I’d enjoyed his 28 DAYS LATER and SUNSHINE.

The result for me was a serious mixed bag.

What I liked: The war set-pieces are fairly realistic, the depiction of the horrors of civil war are chilling, and the depiction of war reporters was pretty spot on, reminiscent of movies like THE YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY and WELCOME TO SARAJEVO. Telling the story through their nominally objective lens was a good approach (though it has a cost, which I’ll get into). The movie takes its time with little weird moments, with possibly the most chilling being a militiaman (Jesse Plemons) responding to Joel telling him he’s an American by asking, “Okay. But what kind of American are you?” In a civil war, that is the big question, and unfortunately there is no right answer that will guarantee you go on living.

What I didn’t like: Garland made a movie about a civil war but left out anything about its causes, probably because he didn’t want to offend anyone. For example, there is a reference to an “Antifa massacre,” but it’s unclear if Antifa massacred people or were massacred. Very clever, but as a result I didn’t feel invested in any of it. Was I supposed to be happy or sad about the war’s outcome? No idea. The reporters offer an objective lens, but an objective lens to what? They have few opinions of their own, and we never get to know any of the combatants or why they’re doing all this.

CIVIL WAR is supposed to be a cautionary tale, but this takes the artistic balls to address the issues of polarization and radicalism head on. The result is less cautionary tale and more civil war porn–mass graves, lynchings, and so on–without exploring the hatred and resulting dehumanization that would cause them. It just feels like it doesn’t have real integrity but instead the writer thinking, “Hey, a mass grave would be cool.” This even extends to the deaths of certain characters. One is dramatically mourned, the other is left on the floor, because that’s what the movie needed at that time.

Those criticisms aside, overall I liked the movie quite a bit and in fact found it riveting. Not as a cautionary tale but for its direction and crazy action. It was a fun watch, but that was a bit of the problem. A movie that wants to take the idea of a second American civil war seriously shouldn’t be all that fun.

THEY/THEM (2022)

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In THEY/THEM (2022), a group of teens sent to a gay conversion camp discover its sinister methods and hypocrisy, while a masked killer invades. It’s an interesting setup with quite a bit of potential, and while I liked it better than I think most people did–it got a 24% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, and critics didn’t like it much better–I found it overall underwhelming.

The film introduces us to the teens, who came to the camp for various reasons. (I’m amazed and horrified camps like this still exist, but they do.) Some of the kids are tired of struggling and want to be “cured,” thinking they will suffer less. Others are being forced by their parents. The amount of nuance and complexity in the framing in the first act is surprisingly good. Even the camp counselors, led by its owner played by the great Kevin Bacon, seem to be overall accepting and offering tools for change instead of harsh pressure and compulsion.

In the second act, things get an abrupt change as we find out the counselors are not what they seem, and the kids begin to take a whole different lesson from their experience at the camp, which is to try to accept themselves for who they are. When the slasher finally shows up, it plays out more like a device about defining oneself than a cause of real horror. I didn’t know one could make the slasher trope so meh, but the film accomplishes it nicely.

The result is a movie that doesn’t seem to really decide what it wants to be. The slasher element is dull and again plays more as a metaphorical device rather than anything driving the plotting, so it doesn’t work as a slasher, and even as a device, it seems tacked on instead of something that is thematically integral. The drama starts off complex and interesting, only to squander this on some campiness and easy resolutions and resistance against cardboard-cutout villains.

Despite all that, I didn’t hate it, and it has a lot going for elements of it if not the whole working together. I have to give the film credit for its sensitive framing of what it likely means to be queer and the queer experience. This seems to be the movie its maker wanted to make, and it might have been far better if it had focused on that, carrying it through as a complex drama without the traditional masked killer element. Anyway, check it out if you’re looking for something different and innovative in a slasher.

Enter Goodreads Giveaway for HOW TO MAKE A HORROR MOVIE AND SURVIVE

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Enter for a chance to win an eARC of HOW TO MAKE A HORROR MOVIE AND SURVIVE, my new horror novel coming out from Hachette Book Group June 18, 2024.

A hundred copies will be given away at Goodreads. U.S. only, 18+ in age. No purchase necessary. Goodreads rules apply. You can enter anytime up until March 18.

About the novel: “A slasher film director wants to make a horror movie using a cursed camera that kills anyone he cares about. The scream queen he loves wants to survive the night.”

Click here to enter the Goodreads Giveaway!

TALK TO ME (2022)

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When I caught the trailer for TALK TO ME (2022), an Australian horror film I caught on Netflix, I wasn’t impressed. It honestly looked like your typical teens do something dumb and then things go wrong movie. It is that in part, though it’s hardly dumb. The excellence of this film is in its weird plausibility and in its intense focus on character.

In this movie, Mia (Sophie Wilde) and her group of friends learn how to conjure spirits using an embalmed hand. The first phase is to see the spirit. After that, you can invite it to possess you. For the possessed, it’s a real drug rush. For the spectators, it’s hilarious and makes great uploads for social media.

There are easy to make allusions to the latest drug kids are into, and dangerous viral sensations like the Tide Pod Challenge. Obviously, they shouldn’t be playing with dead things, but it’s just too much damn fun, and teens are gonna teen because risks and consequences are dumb. When a spirit claims to be Mia’s mother, who died not long before in an apparent suicide, she becomes obsessed with connecting. This of course results in things going too far, putting them all in jeopardy.

The first half of the film is almost perfect, a happy surprise for this jaded horror fan. We get a lot of time seeing the teens being teens, and the characters are all-out charming and genuine via showing instead of telling, without the usual stereotypes. The whole setup is entirely plausible, and Mia, having latched onto a bestie and her family, is both sympathetic and easy to empathize with.

When things go wrong later on, that’s when the movie stumbles a bit, at least for me. I know people make really bad decisions in horror movies, but yikes. It does make sense for the character, though. The story ties off nicely with a solid ending packed with quite a bit of drama and heartbreak.

Overall, I liked TALK TO ME a lot and would happily recommend it to horror fans looking for something familiar in a very fresh package.

Apparently, a sequel is already in the works.

LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND (2023)

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In LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND (2023), based on the novel by Rumaan Alam, a family of New Yorkers vacationing in Long Island find themselves facing increasing isolation and stress as a blackout strikes the region and potentially may be something much bigger. Good acting, a steadily building atmosphere of dread, and the teased-out mystery of what’s happening kept me watching, but its ending fell pretty flat for me.

The movie begins with a New York couple planning a weekend getaway with their teens on nearby Long Island. Amanda (Julia Roberts) is sick of people and wants to escape having to deal with them. Her husband Clay (Ethan Hawke) is a college professor who goes with the flow. Their vacation is increasingly marred by oddities suggesting something is happening, and then a man and his daughter arrive at the house saying there’s a blackout in New York and claiming to be the home’s owners. It very quickly becomes clear that not only is something big happening, the old world they know may be over.

At the heart of this is a moral argument over whether people are essentially bad or good. Nothing shows us what people are really made of like a crisis. As a fan of apoc fiction and film, I came into this already well acquainted with the trope that the second law and order break down, nihilist biker gangs start roaming the countryside raping and killing. As a student of human nature (as most writers are), I never found that believable. People are tribal as a rule, and in a crisis they tribalize even further, usually down to the family level, and yeah they’ll fight over gas and food and toilet paper if there isn’t enough to go around, but if they can pull together, they’ll do it. We may be selfish and self-centered animals, but we didn’t make it to the top of the food chain as a species by being that way, we did it through collaboration. The key is reciprocity. I do good for you, you do good for me. The social contract. That’s how you compete and win in the game of life.

These themes are explored, refreshing to see handled in such a balanced way in an apoc film even if they’re hardly revelatory. What really carried the film for me was how grounded it felt. The isolation, the lack of information, the growing panic and terror of realizing that things may not get better. The characters pull this off, supported in no small part by the solid cast. They feel real, and their reactions feel real, which drew me in and kept me gripped. I cared what happened to them.

Where the movie falls short is in three areas. First is the apparent omnipotence of the antagonist and what GH, the homeowner (Mahershala Ali), speculates is the master plan. It’s way too sophisticated when a simple blackout would be more than enough to cause absolute chaos, as it would sow panic and disrupt access to food, water, and services like healthcare. Second is a lot of weird signs and events are handled for shock instead of realism, including how the characters react to them. As one example, an emergency alert takes over the air waves to basically say “things are bad,” but then offers no information, no instructions or anything, which is what the emergency alert system is actually for. Then you have New Yorkers old enough to have lived through 9/11 (I’m one of them) subsequently go to bed instead of obsessing over trying to figure out what’s going on, just to keep the audience in the dark. Nope. My last criticism would be how it all ended. We see a solid thematic conclusion but otherwise an abrupt and unsatisfying end to the story. Making me wonder if this might have made one hell of a miniseries instead of a movie.

Overall, I liked LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND a lot. It felt grounded enough and had strong enough characters for me to overlook how unrealistic some of the plot points felt, and for an apoc film, it handled its story and themes very well. I may not have fully appreciated where I ended up at the end of it, but I enjoyed the ride. That made it a good watch for me.