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Never Has a Punch to the Gut Been So Satisfying: A Review of Promising Young Woman

*Warning: Contains Spoilers*

I watched this one several months ago, and it took me a while to write this review because processing this movie was like processing a life-changing experience. I won’t say that the movie changed my life, but it FELT that way: exhilarated, horrified, flushed with adrenaline, and oddly at peace. It wasn’t a rollercoaster. It was more like getting buried alive and then rescued. There was a sense of “This is the worst thing that could ever happen. If I can handle this, I can handle anything.”

Promising Young Woman follows Cassandra (played by Carey Mulligan), a former medical student who dropped out after the rape and subsequent suicide of her best friend Nina: a promising young woman who she’d been close to since early childhood. Cassandra copes with the trauma by pretending to be drunk in public places and letting random guys take her home and try to take advantage of her. It’s a clever way to address the issue of consent, and the way she confronts the men once they realize that she’s sober is nothing short of brilliant.

My favorite scene is one I think should be taught in sex ed classes. The guy brings her home, babbling on about himself and his novel and how amazing he is while she’s seemingly semiconscious. He starts to move in for the kill, and she comes awake completely and basically goes, “What the fuck are you doing?”

He freaks out and asks her to leave. She asks why he brought her home, and he says, “I thought we had a connection.” She says, M-hm. What’s my last name?

This is something that needs to be shoved in the face of every man who doesn’t think that getting a girl drunk equals rape. He thought she was drunk, but if he really thought they had a “mental connection,” he should have been delighted that she was actually sober and capable of holding a conversation. Instead he was horrified. We don’t talk enough about the myth of sex as conquest, but this scene cuts past the bullshit and goes in for the kill in a way Mr. Genius Artist could not.

Fun little side note: Cassandra is the name of a character from Greek mythology who spurned Apollo’s advances and as punishment was gifted with foresight but whose predictions would never be believed. Almost nobody listens to this Cassandra either, and it leads to their undoing.

The entire cast is brilliant, but Bo Burnham shines especially bright as Ryan, Cassandra’s love interest and HashtagNiceGuy. He is kind, he is thoughtful, he is charming, and he is an absolute piece of human garbage in the most disturbingly believable way. Cassandra falls hard for him, and she starts to give up her nightly revenge quests. Then she finds out that he was present at the rape of her friend, laughing and joking along with the rest of the witnesses. When she confronts him about this, instead of being contrite and apologetic and, you know, acting like a decent fucking human being, he goes on the defensive and verbally attacks her. Throughout the movie he was supportive and sympathetic about her decision to quit law school and work in a coffee shop, but his last words to her after the confrontation about his own shameful past are, “You fucking failure.”

At that moment, I said out loud, “Ah, there it is.” We all know someone like Ryan. Some of us have dated someone like Ryan. Fortunately most of us will never know how much like Ryan our own exes are, because what he does next is beyond our experiences. If we’re lucky.

Cassandra confronts Nina’s rapist Al (played by Gabriel Oliva), threatens to mark up his body with a razor, and he smothers her to death in a drunken rage. Al and his best friend burn her body and cover up the crime, but her quest for justice isn’t over. It turns out she sent lawyer Jordan Green (played by the brilliant but underutilized Alfred Molina) all the information and evidence needed for the police to find her body and charge the rapist-turned-killer.

And Ryan? That sweet, charming boy who seemed to turn Cassandra’s life around and teach her to love again in the second act? Lied about what he knew to the cops. He knew that she’d gone to confront Al, but when the police questioned him after her disappearance, he implies that she was suicidal after their breakup. He knew she’d been murdered, and he knew who had done it. And he covered for the killer, just like he’d covered for the rapist.

How far does the Bro Code extend? the movie asks. One question among many. How far will the average man go to protect another man from consequences, especially if those consequences might impugn upon his own good name?

I have a lot more to say about this movie, but I’m going to stop here for now for the sake of my readers’ attention span. Tune in next week (or the week after, depending on how my schedule decides to treat me) and we’ll talk about Madison, an old classmate of Cassandra’s and a victim of her unique brand of justice.

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A Study in Pink

I had an epiphany last week.

Depending on how well you know me, you might or might not be surprised by this. But ladies round the Internet, let me know if this realization rings any bells of recognition in your brain.

I was never a tomboy.

I certainly acted like one. I caught frogs and snakes in the woods, disdained dresses and dolls, and looked down my nose at “frivolous” pursuits like makeup and dating and the color pink. I was HEAVY in the NLOG phase (Not Like Other Girls) to the point of being misogynistic. Everyone called me a little tomboy, and I internalized the image for most of my childhood.

But that wasn’t actually me. It was never “girly” stuff that I hated; it was the PR surrounding it.

When I was really little, I hated dresses, but it wasn’t dresses that I hated. It was the scratchy fabric that dug at my neck and arms. It was the lack of freedom, constantly having to keep the hem down, unable to go really high on a swing without showing off my Strawberry Shortcake underpants. Being unable to crawl around on the floor and pretend to be a dog, which was my favorite game. Looking at the soft cotton dresses that little girls wear now, with the leggings and biker shorts they wear underneath… if that had been an option I would have been all over dresses.

I also hated dolls, but it wasn’t dolls that I hated. It was the cheap hard plastic they were made of, the stiff arms and legs that could never stand properly and were impossible to cuddle and sleep with. And they were always babies, which didn’t do anything interesting in my eight year old opinion. My sister had a Cabbage Patch Doll, and I coveted it desperately, because finally there existed a doll that looked like a regular kid that could sleep in bed with me. I never got one, though. I’m not sure if my parents knew how badly I wanted one; I was a pretty quiet kid.

I got a lot of praise for being a tomboy from the adults in my life. (Pretty sure my dad wanted a boy and I was the next best thing.) Girls have always been treated as less-than by society in general, so I was treated like a well-trained dog that could walk around on its hind legs. “Look, she thinks she’s people!” From there I internalized the concept of girly pursuits as inferior, bubble-headed nonsense. That did not help my social life, as you can imagine. Girls treated me like a traitor. Boys treated me like either a mascot or prey.

It took years for me to come around and realize that liking pink doesn’t make you brainless and makeup is actually an artistic skill that takes a lot of work and practice. It was a long, gradual process. And it makes me a little angry to think of how much time I wasted thinking that I hated pink when what I actually hated was the way society treats people who like pink.

I’m still not crazy about putting it on babies, though. Not for any political reasons, but because no color shows dirt and stains faster. Stick with primary colors until your kid is potty trained, at least.

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The Five Stages of Editing

Everyone talks about how hard and lonely a job it is to be a writer. Maybe I’m just a freak of nature, but I don’t get it. How can I be lonely when I’m writing? I’m surrounded by amazing people, and they all have stories to tell that keep me up all night. And it’s fun. In what other job can I create entire universes out of the air, make them move and dance to my whim, and blow them up when I’m having a bad day?

But there’s one part that I do hate with all my heart and soul, and that’s the editing process. That part is both hard and lonely, not to mention exhausting and heartbreaking. It’s an emotional rollercoaster not unlike the five stages of grief. I call it the Five Stages of Editing.

Stage One: Shock. I always let my work marinate for a few weeks before going back to work on it, and I am invariably horror-struck by how badly written it is. Grammatical errors! Adverbs in dialogue attribution! Overuse of the phrase “the fact that”! Oh God, this thing blows like a wind tunnel.

Frequent activities during this stage include drinking, surfing the Net, and picking fights with my husband—fights that usually begin with the question, “Do you still think I’m pretty?”

Stage Two: Depression. I’ll never make this piece of crap readable. I’ve been wasting my time. Maybe I’m wasting my life. How will I ever rub elbows with legends like Stephen King and Brian Keene if I don’t even know the difference between lie and lay? I’ll have to die a horrible booze-soaked death if I ever want to see my name in print.

Frequent activities include drinking heavily, watching way too much TV, and getting maudlin over life insurance commercials. Any mention of the passage of time, getting older, or lifelong regrets is likely to induce an hour’s worth of PMS-like weeping. My children seem to find this stage the most disconcerting, maybe because I have been known to clutch them to my bosom and whimper, “I regret NOTHING!”

Stage Three: Renewed Hope. This stage is one of the most bittersweet. It can usually be induced by reading a chapter or two from an extremely poorly written bestseller. Opinions vary, but I personally recommend Fifty Shades, Flowers in the Attic, or any of the Twilight books. The trick to reaching this stage is to realize that I don’t have to be Ernest Hemingway; anyone has a chance. Anyone.

Now that I’m back in the game, my only activity aside from actually editing the damn novel is posting on various Internet forums about the unfairness of the publishing world. “How can that crap be a bestseller? Why do so many people have the literary taste of a grasshopper?” This sort of post gets great responses on indie author forums.

Stage Four: Determination. I will quit my day job, and I will make a living at this. Bitches better get out of my way, because this bitch is back and taking no prisoners—and hey where’s the coffee? My head is KILLING me.

Frequent activities include editing, drinking coffee by the pot, and swearing on heaven and hell and everything in between that it is going to happen for me this time. Scrapbook full of rejection slips be damned, full speed ahead!

Stage Five: Pride. This is when it’s time to pass around the Xerox copies, email the pdf, and read the work aloud to my writing group. I am one crazy sexy writing mama, and I want the world to know it! I did a bang-up job, hell yes I did, and if the stuffy Establishment chooses to reject me again, that’s their loss. Those dipshits accepted Twilight, so what do they know anyway?

Eventually, emotional equilibrium is reach, and life returns to normal. Then I start submitting my work to publishers, cross my fingers, and the rollercoaster starts all over again.

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Little Dead Girl

Tim drove through the neat Chicago suburb, and the dead girl rode in the back seat.

She was about six years old, chubby and red-haired. Tim never saw her face to face. She only appeared in his rear view mirror. Sometimes in the mirror of a gas station bathroom. Tim would be washing his hands, thinking of nothing at all, and there she would be. That solemn little face, framed by ginger curls. But mostly she rode in his back seat, calm and quiet. A good little girl. Usually she sat still as death, staring straight ahead like a pale statue, but this time she was playing some sort of game with her fingers, twisting them like little pale snakes. She watched her own fingers twist in her lap, as though they moved of their own accord.

Tim turned around in his seat and looked behind him. As usual, there was nothing to see. Just cheap grey interior. He turned back around, looked in his rearview mirror—there she was. It was always the same.

The dealer told me this piece of crap was brand new, he thought for the hundredth time. I bought it new. Lying son of a bitch.

He’d noticed the 173 on the odometer, but the dealer had insisted that it was just from “the guy” driving it from another dealership. Tim should have insisted on a pre-owned-vehicle price rate. He should have walked out of the fucking dealership when that grinning bastard showed him this stupid little cracker box clown car and told him that this was all that the bank had approved. But Tim had been tired, cranky, and nervous about going another week without wheels. He’d accepted the fucking clown car, and to add injury to insult it came with a free dead kid.

“How’s it going back there?” Tim asked, with the fake cheeriness that was the domain of those who have next to no experience talking to children.

The little girl glanced at him and said nothing. She didn’t talk much. “Yes,” “No,” and “Fine” were the sum of her vocabulary. Tim wondered if the kid had been retarded when she was alive. She shouldn’t still be retarded after death. She was all spirit, so she had no brain to be damaged, right?

“Could be worse, I suppose,” Time said aloud, thinking of a road trip he’d once taken with his sister and her brats. “At least you don’t need to stop and pee every two miles.”

The girl still said nothing. Her hair was curly and ginger-orange, and her face was almost porcelain-fair. No freckles. Gingers usually had lots of freckles. Her only signs of nonlife were a single drop of blood below one nostril, and a dark bruise on the upper left side of her face. Her injuries weren’t horrible, not gruesome like in those terrible evil-ghost movies. But they troubled the eye and mind nevertheless. They were so calmly final. Tim couldn’t stop looking at that single drop of dark blood, the blue-black bruise. That’s what death looks like, in the end, he thought. Like nothing much.

“Do you remember how you died?” Tim asked. This wasn’t the first time he’d asked this question, and he wasn’t expecting a response.

“Big white car,” the girl said softly, still playing with her fingers. She watched them intently, like a child watching television. “I saw a big white car, and it got bigger and bigger.”

Her gentle singsong voice sent a chill down Tim’s neck. This was the most he’d ever heard her say, and he wished he hadn’t asked.

Tim wasn’t driving a big car by any stretch, but that meant nothing. To a little girl in the middle of the road, even a SmartCar would look like a Mack Truck.

So what had happened? “The guy” might have hit her while driving it down from that mysterious other dealership. Or… What if the car had been bought once before, and the previous owner had hit the kid shortly after buying it? Couple of days, maybe a week, however long it took to put 170 miles on it. Then he freaked out and brought it back, and the dealer had turned around and re-sold it without thinking twice.

Of course a car that had been involved in a death would have been impounded by the police. But what if it was a hit and run? No witnesses around, so the driver took off. And then returned the car to try to get rid of the evidence. How much damage would a little kid do to a car? Was it something that the dealer would have noticed?

“Did you see the person driving the car?” Tim asked.

“No.”

So much for that. Tim racked his brain for ways to figure out who the girl was and who had killed her. “What town did you live in?” he asked.

“Lake Park,” the girl said. She up looked at him for a moment, studying him, before turning to the window and staring out. Her fingers twisted like white worms in her lap.

Tim was driving through Lake Park right now. His apartment was on the edge of town.

The dealer had lied through his motherfucking teeth. This car hadn’t been driven here from some remote location. Tim’s stomach roiled with anger.

“Do you know your street address?” he asked.

“1112 Hickory Street,” she repeated blandly.

That was about four blocks west of here. Tim considered stopping by the house. But what would he say? “Sorry about your daughter. By the way, she’s been haunting my car for the last month and a half.” They would think he was a lunatic, or some sicko who got off on upsetting bereaved people. At best, they’d slam the door in his face. At worst, he’d have some hard questions to answer at the police station.

Tim kept driving. Unless he could identify the car’s previous owner, there was just no point.

He stopped at a red light, and an idea came. The dealership would have the previous owner’s name on file. Tim could ask for a vehicle history report and get it that way. But the dealer had already lied and said that Tim was the car’s first owner. Tim would have to concoct something to get the guy to tell him the truth.

Or… He could take the car to a mechanic and find out if the car had been involved in an accident. They could figure out all sorts of things by examining the framework of the car, he’d heard. He could also go to the police and find out if there was an unsolved hit and run on their record. It was odd that he hadn’t seen anything like it on the news. Lake Park wasn’t a big town, and a kid getting hit by a car would have made headlines.

He glanced into the rearview mirror. The little girl was staring straight at him, and blood was running out of both nostrils like fresh snot. Tim shivered and looked past her, at the pretty brunette on the crotch-rocket motorcycle behind him. She was wearing a black windbreaker, and her helmet was flame-red, like her motorcycle. Her shirt under the jacket was very loose. She wasn’t wearing a bra. Tim could almost see—

The brunette saw him, smiled, and blipped her horn.

Tim turned around and saw that the light was green. He hit the gas and peeled forward.

The was a little girl crossing the street in front of him.

She had curly red hair and pale, chubby cheeks. Tim didn’t have time to stop. He slammed on his brakes, but it did no good.

She never even looked up. There was a small, terrible thud.

He looked into the rearview mirror. The little girl stared back. Her face was covered with blood, and it was soaking into her dress.

Slowly, she faded away.

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Artist Spotlight: Richard Wall

I plan to start posting interviews and personal spotlights about once a month, so if you’re interested drop me a line at ddtreasures1976@gmail.com or use the contact form on my home page. We’re kicking things off with Richard Wall, a native of England with a fascination for the dark side of American culture. You can find out more at https://richardwall.org/.

Tell us about your latest work. Wow us with it.

My latest work is my second novel, Near Death.

Sing Sing Penitentiary, 1962. Troubled prison chaplain, John Henry Beauregard, gives the last rites to Joseph Hickey, a psychopath sentenced to death for killing a young family in New York State.

After witnessing Hickey’s execution, John Henry quits his job and moves to a cabin in the Appalachian Mountains in South Carolina.

Soon after, another family is murdered in identical circumstances, and John Henry is drawn into a mystery that has devastating consequences and leads to a showdown where his life and soul are at stake.

If the main character were to have a drink with us, what would that be like? What would they order?

The main character is John Henry Beauregard. Former prison chaplain who moved back to his childhood home of South Carolina. John Henry is a deep thinker who struggles with PTSD as a result of the Korean War, he would come across as quiet and reflective – unless the conversation turned to American Muscle Cars. If that were to happen his passion would shine through. He would most likely drink Bourbon.
If he brought along his friend and fellow-character, Vinnie De Matteo it would be a whole different occasion…

What were you most afraid of as a child? Has that changed?

I went through a stage of being bullied at school, there’s no fear like it.

Now I’m not afraid of anyone.

What is your favorite book of all time?

Tough question, the answer to which changes depending on my mood. If I absolutely had to nail one down it would Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry.

Are there any books that you like to read over and over again? What are they?

The ‘Burke’ series of crime novels by Andrew Vachss.

Do you ever get blocked in the middle of a story? How do you get around it?

Full on Writers’ Block hasn’t happened yet, which, considering that I don’t plan my stories, is something of a miracle. Lately I’ve discovered that if I think about my story just before dropping off to sleep, I will wake around 4:30am with an idea to resolve any plot issues.

Do you listen to music while you’re working? What are some of your favorite bands?

Always. I usually put together a playlist that’s connected to the story I’m writing. Currently I’m writing the sequel to Near Death, which is set in the USA in the late ‘60s with links to the Vietnam War, so I downloaded the soundtrack from a documentary about the war. Favourite bands are The Clash, early Rolling Stones, but my first love is scratchy old blues from the 1930s.

Has anyone ever told you something that really stuck with you? What was it?

Find your own voice. You may not write like Stephen King, but he doesn’t write like you.

If you threw a dinner party for your literary heroes or inspirations, who would you invite and what would you serve?

I would invite Burke and his crew from the Andrew Vachss novels, but I doubt they move in dinner party circles. If they accepted I would request that Mama bring food from her Chinese restaurant.

Tell us something awesome that happened to you.

A couple of years ago a musician friend called Half Deaf Clatch posted on Facebook that he’d had an idea to write a supernatural spaghetti western concept album based around an outlaw called Beelzebub Jones. I contacted Clatch and offered to write a short story to go with the album. Clatch said OK and off we went.

Neither of us thought it would be anything more than a vanity project, a one-off. But, a few months later, the album was released and it started getting amazing feedback. So much so that Clatch decided to continue with it and make it a trilogy.

After the release of the 2nd album I received an email from a guy who had stumbled across the Beelzebub Jones albums.

He said:

“My health is pretty up and down and along with it come bouts of depression and that’s usually where the immersion in music comes in to play….From the first track I was hooked… I had to find out more, that’s when I discovered your accompanying literature. What a fantastic idea combining art mediums the way you both have and what an extraordinary job it is too. I love the character, the narrative, the language you use paints the picture perfectly. I can now listen to the albums with my eyes closed and see the story play out like a movie.

It’s led me to discover the works of Half Deaf Clatch which has in turn deepened my appreciation for blues. Playing guitar, I already had an interest but I now look upon it from a slightly new direction. His music is inspiring me and opening up new areas of my playing and which direction I want to head. And your literature has had a huge impact on my own creativity. I’ve a renewed appreciation for language and seeing the two art forms combined has got me spinning with ideas about what else could be possible. And with a little hindsight I realise just how big of an impact has been made in so many areas of my life – creatively, mentally, inspirational, all this seeps into my normal life of being a husband and parent. He’s become such a pivotal part of my life, and it’s for that I’ll always be grateful to you for your contribution – it really has been life changing. Sincerely thank you.”

To receive praise like that has blown me away. It kind of makes it all worthwhile.

Mr. Wall, thank you so much for sharing your thoughts and your stories with us. Best of luck to you!

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Liberals Love Everyone, Until They Don’t: A Review of Knives Out

SPOILER ALERT! SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS!

YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! CLICK AWAY NOW WHILE YOU STILL CAN!

I’m embarrassed by how long it took me to watch this movie; it had been on my to-do list since I saw the first trailer in the movie theater in 2019. Man, remember back when hearing someone cough in a movie theater was an annoyance instead of a reason to panic? Anyway, let’s talk about Knives Out, directed by Rian Johnson, starring Christopher Plummer (RIP), Jamie Lee Curtis, Don Johnson, Chris Evans, Daniel Craig, and Ana de Armas.

Harlan Thrombey (Plummer) shines as the aging patriarch of a rich family who built an empire on a successful string of mystery novels. His death turns out to be the last and greatest mystery of all, as his surviving family and staff are called in for questioning by Lieutenant Elliot (Lakeith Stanfield) and the enigmatic detective Benoit Blanc (Craig). As the threads of the story are slowly unraveled, we get an armchair analysis of a seemingly happy, successful family with all the privilege and power they could ever want. It doesn’t take Blanc long to find out that their happiness and success are a layer of lies covering a tangled skein of rage and betrayal. Shortly before he died, Thrombey went through his entire family, cutting off inheritances and terminating allowances in an attempt to de-program his deeply entitled children. And like entitled children, they freak the fuck out. Literally everyone is a suspect in this smart-mouthed, hair-pulling confection.

It’s a brilliantly woven mystery that turns several tropes of the genre on their ears: it tells you how he died in the very first scene, it tells you who did it about twenty minutes later, and the detective isn’t exceptionally brilliant. Rather than being a miracle of observation and cleverness like Holmes or Poroit, Blanc just lets his subjects talk, watches what they do, and waits for the truth to make itself known. And it does, much to the Thrombey family’s chagrin.

But the real genius of the film is in what it has to say about privileged white society. Harlan’s closest confidante is his in-home nurse, an immigrant named Marta Cabrera. Out of everyone in the family, she is the only one who has no expectations and makes no demands of him, and in the end she is the sole inheritor of his entire estate. The rest of his children and children-in-law are grasping, self-important, and spoiled, and they turn on Marta like a pack of starving dogs when they learn the truth.

Like another successful thriller in which Lakeith Stanfield was a featured character–the incomparable Get Out–Knives Out satirizes white liberal racism. In Get Out, the main baddie tells the hero, “I would have voted for Obama a third time if I could.” And I believe that he was telling the truth there. White people, conservative and liberal alike, are capable of supporting a Black man in theory while victimizing others in their day-to-day lives. And just like in Get Out, the terrible people in Knives Out say all the right things in the beginning and behave kindly toward the immigrant employee, but only when it doesn’t cost them anything to do so. Each member of the Thrombey family is different from the others in ideology, and they each represent a different archetype of the classic American racist. I’ve made a little list of each major player and what I think they symbolize about anti-immigrant racism.

Harlan’s daughter, Linda Drysdale (Curtis), considers herself a self-made success story who built everything herself from the bottom up. She and her husband Richard (Johnson) are solid conservative types who believe in bootstraps and the American dream in the way only someone who was handed millions in seed money can. Linda is friendly toward Marta and apologizes for not inviting her to Harlan’s funeral. “I was outvoted.” In other words, she’s only as kind as she can get away with when it doesn’t cost her the approval of her family. Richard is more outspoken in his conservatism; he supports Trump and believes in immigrants coming to the US “the right way.” (Even though the asylum seekers currently in detention DID in fact try to come here “the right way,” look it up.) He approves of Marta, because he assumes that since she is hardworking, honest, and kind, she must have come here in a way that he would approve of. It’s an interesting assumption from people who never even took the time to learn what country she’s from.

Joni Thrombey (Toni Collette), the wife of Harlan’s deceased son, is a crunchy liberal hippie who fights with Richard about Trump’s child separation policy but turns into a feral cat towards Marta when she finds out who’s the true heir to the Thrombey fortune. Like Linda, her support is conditional. Her daughter Meg (Katherine Langford) is almost worse. Meg verbally defends Marta from a police officer who calls her “the help,” hugs her and treats her like a friend, but when her family pressure on her, she betrays Marta and tries to force her to give up her fortune. Like Joni, her progressive ideals are only skin-deep. But she feels REALLY bad about it, guys.

Walt, Harlan’s youngest son (Michael Shannon), tells Marta early in the movie that the family will always “take care” of her because she took such good care of his father. That avuncular concern dissipates into ugliness when Walt takes it upon himself to visit Marta at her home and threaten her mother with deportation in an attempt to pressure her to give up her inheritance. Marta fends him off verbally, but the encounter leaves her (and the audience) shaken. It makes one wonder what else he’s capable of. His son Jacob (Jaedan Martell) is an interesting character. Through most of the movie he has few lines and barely looks up from his phone. Walt calls him “politically active;” Meg calls him an alt-right troll. The only time he is fully engaged in the goings-on is when his family turns on Marta and start screaming at her. He joins in enthusiastically and accuses Marta of sleeping with his grandfather for money. That feels very symbolic to me. Trolls and online fascists are a minority and have very little power on their own, but when the “normal” people around them grant permission and look the other way, they will raise the ugliness factor exponentially.

Linda and Richard’s son Ransom (Evans) is probably the most honest of the Thrombey clan. He is a creature of pure self-interest with none of the protective coloration of respectability that the others have. When they find out that he’s been cut out of the will, the rest of the clan tries to kill him with kindness.

“This might be the best thing that could happen to you.”

“Maybe now you’ll finally grow up.”

“Nothing good is ever easy.”

The joke is on them ten minutes later though, when they find out that they’re in the exact same boat. They all pretended to be self-made contributors to society, but it doesn’t take long to realize that they depend on and feel entitled to their father’s money. Ransom Drysdale is the only one out of the family who doesn’t fake respectability. He literally only cares about himself, and the only reason he came to the reading of the will was to see the looks on everyone’s faces when they find out they’re no better off than he is.

Knives Out is a smart, fun, entertaining thriller that makes some very good points about how the US treats immigrants. Most of us will defend minorities in the abstract and say all the right things when we’re debating with a Trump supporter. But when our privilege feels threatened, when we think that we might not get what we think we’re “owed” by society, when we are frightened by the implication that we might not be as special as we think we are… the knives come out.

If they had just been nice to Marta, she probably would have shared that money with them.
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Medusa Reborn: Chapter Two

Athena lived in darkness and rage.

She and her sisters were gone from the world, swallowed up by the invaders and their gods. Her people were lost to her, and her family had been broken apart. But still she lived, and she dreamed.

Athena dreamed of bright sun, drifting sands, and powerful mothers. She felt a sense of loss, of life and love taken from her. Her memories faded as she slept on in the darkness of Zeus’s mind. But the loss and the rage survived in her heart. It waited.

After conquering Anatha and destroying her daughters, Zeus had a terrible stomachache. Metis had kicked and fought the whole way down his throat, and though she was quiet now Zeus felt a terrible burning in his guts. He wondered if she wasn’t quite dead. It was hard to kill a god, even an inferior female like Anatha. Zeus was glad that his brother Poseidon had been the one to take care of Medusa. He didn’t like to admit it, even to himself, but his power had limits, and Athena had tested his. He wasn’t sure he could have conquered all three by himself. Now, at least, the she-devils were under control.

But by Hera his guts were killing him.

He tried to distract himself with sex, but that didn’t last for long. Besides, whenever he sired a bastard Hera did her best to murder the babe before it could grow up to challenge his power (or hers), which did not help his mood or his stomach. Over the centuries the pain crept out of his stomach and burned its way his throat and into his head, where it lurked as a throbbing headache. Athena lived and slept in the lascivious membrane of Zeus’s mind, and her dreams were horrible.

Raped a mortal girl in the shape of a swan, raped another as a shower of gold, seduced three maidens one after another, rendering them unfit for marriage and then unfit for life once Hera found out they were with child…

In her sleep, Athena wept. And raged.

Zeus’s headache was unbearable. During the worst of his agonies, he was literally blinded by pain. Any who came too close risked a blow from a flying fist or a thunderbolt. Even Hera, who feared no god or mortal, kept her distance when he was like this. “I don’t want my dresses singed,” she said with a sniff, hiding her worries behind haughty superiority.

Hermes shook his head. “This cannot continue,” he said. “Zeus is the most powerful of us all, and if he cannot control himself then we must control him. The mortal lands are suffering from his temper.”

“Who cares about mortals,” Hera said. “All they do is kill each other and seduce my husband.”

“You know better,” Hermes said. “We derive our power from their sacrifices. Now they are sacrificing bull after bull to Zeus, hoping to appease his temper, but they’re only feeding the power of his pain. He will destroy Olympus if this keeps up.”

“Well, you’re the clever one,” she snapped. “Think of something we can do to ease his pain. Wine only helped for a little while, and now it only makes him sloppy.”

But Hermes had already gotten an idea, and he went straight away to see Hephaestus about it.

Hephaestus lived in the heart of a volcano, where he beat the molten ore into weapons for the gods. Occasionally, a worthy mortal would earn one of his weapons, which could not be defeated or destroyed. Hermes disliked Hephaestus’s home; it was hot and dry and scorched his feathery hair. But no other god had the kind of touch with cutting tools that Hephaestus had. Also, no other god had a chip on his shoulder quite so large. He had been born lame and tossed away to die as an infant, and even immortality had not cooled that grudge. Every argument was a fight to the death, and every fight was a war. Hermes found the lame old god exhausting to be around, but his strong arm and way with an axe could prove useful today.

Sparks flew up from Hephaestus’s forge as he pounded his mighty hammer down onto the anvil. Hermes couldn’t tell what he was making yet; it was still a molten lump. An axe head, perhaps. Hephaestus had a thing for axes. Hermes cleared his throat and swatted away a drifting spark.

The smithy of the gods glanced up and nodded, acknowledging the messenger’s presence. He continued his work until the molten lump had indeed become a magnificent labrys. Hephaestus pulled it out of the steaming water bath with a nod. “This will kill monsters and mortals with equal ease,” he said. “It’s my finest work yet.”

“You say that every time,” Hermes said.

“Because it’s true every time. Now what do you want?”

Hermes explained. The smithy god agreed readily to Hermes’s suggestion. “I want to save Olympus and help the father, of course,” the barrel-chested little man said. He limped over to his wall of weapons and selected the heaviest axe. “But I can’t say this won’t give me a bit of pleasure all by itself.”

They found Zeus in Hera’s garden, moaning among the starflowers. He had sunk to his knees and had his face pressed into a fistful of the pink blossoms. “Lovely scents sometimes help,” his muffled voice said. “But not today. It feels like there’s something inside my head trying to break out.”

“That’s what we’re here to help you with,” Hermes said. He nodded to Hephaestus, who grinned and raised the axe with both hands.

Zeus had time to look up and say, “What—“ before the blade came down square between his bloodshot eyes.

The king of the gods collapsed, blood and brains spreading out in a sickly pool.

Hephaestus gulped. “Now what?” Zeus was stronger than him, and he could not be killed by physical weapons. But it still made him feel sick to see his king’s brains roll out of his skull in that tight, grey bundle.

“Just wait.” Hermes’s tone was confident.

The little grey bundle still moved. And actually, it wasn’t so little. The grey mass was rolling away from Zeus’s body and flexing as it went like a muscle. It seemed much bigger than the space it had fallen from. It was almost as big as Zeus’s entire head. No—it was bigger.

That wasn’t a brain.

Hermes laughed out loud. “I knew it!” His tone was bright and triumphant.

The grey bundle rolled straight up to them and stood up. All the way up. It was taller than Hephaestus. No—it was taller even than Hermes. It wasn’t an it. It was a she.

The grey-eyed woman looked around. “Where am I?” she asked. Her voice was calm, but her eyes were wide as a rabbit’s.

“You are on Mount Olympus.” Hephaestus stepped forward before Hermes had a chance to speak and possibly seduce the girl before anyone else had the chance. “You were borne of the brow of the great god Zeus. You are one of us now.”

She glanced back at the body of her host. “He doesn’t seem so great to me. Where is my mother?”

“You have no mother. Zeus carried you and birthed you. I helped.”

“You lie. All beings have a mother.” The young woman turned away dismissively. “Especially women.”

Hephaestus had been thrown off a cliff by his, so he had no opinion on the subject. “Welcome to Olympus,” he said instead. “Do you have a name?”

“Athena.” She held up one hand, and a sword appeared in it. She flexed the other arm, and a shield formed over it. “I am a warrior. I died fighting.”

“You died? When? What do you mean?” Hermes spoke now, giving Hephaestus a worried look. Was there more to this young woman than they thought?

She shook her head. “I don’t know. I don’t remember.” She looked up at the clear blue sky. A solitary owl circled overhead. As they watched, it dropped lower.

“The owls here are attracted to wisdom,” Hermes said. “It must be looking for you, since none of us has ever made any claim to it.”

“Clearly not.” Athena watched as the owl circled lower and lower. She held up her shield arm, and the owl fluttered to rest on the shield, where an etched owl now spread its wings.

“Come,” Hermes said, offering his arm. “Let me introduce you to the Olympians.”

Athena avoided his proffered arm. “Don’t touch me,” she said coolly. “Never touch me. Ever.”

Hermes withdrew his arm. Never argue with a woman who carries a sword; that was a motto he lived by. If Zeus followed the same rule, Olympus would be a more peaceful place. “Well, let me show you around anyway,” he said. Athena followed him out of the garden, leaving Hephaestus alone with the body of Zeus.

“How do you feel?” he asked.

“Better.” Zeus sat up and pressed his shorn head together. “A maiden with a sword. No wonder I had a headache.”

“She wants to know who her mother is.”

“I have no idea,” Zeus lied.

Zeus stood in the middle of Hera’s bower and tried very hard to project an aura of authority. He was the king of the gods and the master of his wife, and he stood firm as he explained his plan to her. And then asked her kind permission.

Hera glanced around at her gaggle of handmaidens and protégés. Her bower was a quiet, pleasant greenhouse dome filled with flowers and sweetly-scented trees. The open areas were full of cushions and comfortable chairs, so that the women working here could get comfortable. There were a dozen ladies currently inhabiting the bower, all of them busy with some form of weaving or needlework. It was a pleasant, domestic scene full of female comfort and bliss. Zeus was not welcome here, and Hera wanted him to know it.

She put down her embroidery with the long-suffering air of one who has heard it all and doesn’t want to hear it again. “So… you want me to train your newest bastard? To bring her here and made her one of us? You can’t be serious.”

“She isn’t a bastard. She was borne of my skull, not my… manhood. Ask Hephaestus; he was there.”

“She is still your responsibility. Why bring her to me?”

“She was born with a sword in her hand, and she’s full of the fighting spirit. I want her to be well-balanced, to know about the womanly arts as well as the manly ones.”

Hera glanced at her nearest handmaiden, a lithe little mortal named Arachne. “What do you think, my friends,” she asked. “Should we bring this warrior maiden into my peaceful bower and try to break her like a wild horse?”

Arachne shrugged. “She sounds interesting.”

“Interesting? She sounds like a nuisance.”

“But you have to admit, she would liven things up around here.”

Hera looked at the rest of her ladies, silently asking their opinion. Most of them shrugged, and two nodded in agreement with Arachne. “I suppose it’s official,” she said. “The girl will join me and my ladies to learn the womanly arts of weaving and sewing and so forth. At least it will keep her out of trouble.”

“I’m deeply grateful, my queen,” Zeus said.

“That doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten about your latest conquest, by the way,” Hera said casually as he turned away. “I hope the little bastard boy likes snakes.”

Zeus would not give her the satisfaction of hesitating in his step. He walked out of her bower and made a mental note to check in with all of his lovers and find out which one was pregnant this time.

Athena was reluctant at first to take up weaving. Hera did not allow weapons in her bower, and the girl was twitchy and uncomfortable without a sword in her hands. But she settled down as Hera demonstrated the intrinsic art of the craft and the concentration it took to finish a project. “This will make you an even better warrior,” Hera said. “Focus, concentration, an eye for detail. If more warriors took up the finer arts, they would be undefeatable.”

“Hephaestus made it all sound boring and… frilly,” Athena said. She watched the shuttlecock fly back and forth in Hera’s hands as avidly as a spectator at a great battle.

“Hephaestus works in weapons and metal. The hard and heavy side of things. He hasn’t had much exposure to beauty, or he would understand what a powerful weapon it can be all by itself.”

“Beauty as a weapon?” Athena stepped up to take Hera’s place at the loom and tried to imitate what she’d seen the queen goddess do. It was harder than it looked.

“Oh yes. Young girls don’t have much power, you know, so they learn how to use their looks to get what they want. When you’ve been an Olympian as long as I have, you’ll see it, too. Young ladies without much going for them will set out to seduce the rich and powerful and try to earn power that way. I bear them no grudge, though of course when they stray into my territory I am obliged to take action to correct them.”

Athena got the hang of weaving in less than a day, and after that Hera set her to baking, cleaning, and embroidery. The girl took to every task with careful deliberation, making no extraneous moves until she had mastered every step. Hera admired her, though she found her a bit dull. She’d thought a warrior girl would be more passionate and dramatic than this. But Athena seemed determined to make not one wrong move or say one negative word to anyone. It was wise of her, Hera thought, though quite boring.

Athena listened more than she spoke, and as such she made the perfect sounding-board for Hera’s thoughts and ideas. All of her other handmaidens had heard it all before, but Athena was a fresh audience and seemed eager to absorb everything as a scholarly lesson. Hera rarely felt respected by the other Olympians, and she took full advantage of Athena’s pliant nature.

“Men are bigger and stronger, but in the mind and spirit they are as weak as infants,” Hera said over an enormous tapestry that would grace the throne room of a local king. “That’s why it’s important for us women to always maintain control and keep them on the right path.”

“What’s the right path?” Athena asked.

“Loyalty, faithfulness, and good providing. No woman should ever go hungry if she has a good man.”

“Faithfulness?” Athena was aware of the word, but she wasn’t sure what Hera meant in this context.

“Young girls, pretty girls, will sometimes seduce a rich, powerful man in order to steal his seed for a baby of her own. My husband has been plagued by such women for centuries. It’s all I can do to protect him from their predations.”

Athena glanced around the room and wondered why the rest of the handmaidens were suddenly so quiet. She looked back at Hera, whose eyes were bright and cheeks glowed with emotion. “Their predations?”

“Oh they cry and complain when faced with actual consequences, but those little harlots get what’s coming to them every time. Remember, Athena, a good woman is always in control of her own body at all times. If you let a man work his will on you, then you will be as spiritually weak as him. You must always keep control.”

“I must always keep control,” Athena repeated to herself. It was good advice, she decided. Athena vowed just then that she would never let a man make her spiritually weak. She wouldn’t be like those harlots who kept seducing her father.

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Six Degrees to Slasher: Hunchback, Repo!, and Spree

I watched a bunch of movies this weekend; my life has gotten so much more bearable since I discovered Fandango Now. At first I wanted something relatively wholesome, but I started with the darkest Disney movie in 90s history so maybe even then I should have known the direction my mood was about to take.

The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996) is a Disney animated movie that inexplicably got a G rating despite murder, torture, and a thinly veiled rape reference. To be fair, it IS lighter than the original story, but that’s really not saying much. Most funerals are lighter fare than the original Victor Hugo novel.

The hero Quasimodo and his cruel master Frollo have opposite lives and viewpoints throughout the film, and they manifest (in true Disney fashion) in song. Frollo is rich and powerful and privileged, and he sees evil and villainy everywhere he goes. Quasimodo is poor, abused, and confined to a bell tower all his life, but he sees nothing but goodness and beauty in the world that he cannot join. In their opening scene together Frollo sings, “Stay in here,” but as soon as he is gone Quasi is on the ledge, looking down at Paris and singing “If I could live one day out there.” They both become enamored of the same Gypsy woman, and again their opposing visions clash. Quasi is touched that a beautiful woman would show him affection, and he sings, “It must be heaven’s light.” Meanwhile the entitled incel-before-there-was-a-word-for-it Frollo feels ashamed of his feelings and blames Esmeralda. “Like fire, hell fire,” he sings without a trace of irony. This movie was ahead of its time in the message that a woman’s sexuality does not determine her worth. Too often morality is determined by the prejudices of whoever is staring at you. If men think you’re beautiful that’s not your problem, and if they think you’re a witch that’s not your problem either… but they’ll sure as hell try to MAKE it your problem.

That was a fun conversation with my son, by the way. “Why is he so angry at Esmeralda?” “Well son, have a seat, and let me explain a little thing called slutshaming.”

Now let’s talk about Repo! The Genetic Opera. Repo! is a horror rock opera about a dystopian future in which organs and cosmetic surgery can be financed through a predatory company called GeneCo. But if patients don’t keep up with payments, their organs are repossessed… without anesthetic. The Repo Man is a masked killer in a rubber suit, a former doctor now in debt to Rotti Largo of GeneCo after the accidental death of his wife. His daughter suffers from a rare condition and must stay confined inside but dreams of freedom and a cure for her ailment.

It reminded me a lot of Hunchback; Shilo’s father says he wants to protect her from the brutality of the world, and possibly protect her from finding out what he really does for a living. She’s all he has left of her mother, whom she strongly resembles. The subtext suggests that though he claims to be protecting her, his motives in keeping her all to himself might not be so pure. He has even told Mag, Shilo’s godmother, that Shilo died at birth. Aesthetically it reminded me of The Phantom of the Opera, with all the masks and subterfuge and dramatic posturing by the antagonists. When the credits rolled I discovered that the resemblance is no coincidence: Blind Mag, the opera star and an old friend of Shilo’s dead mother, is played by none other than Sarah Brightman.

Repo! The Genetic Opera is crude and stylish at the same time. It beats you in the face with the gore and the violent theme, but the production is as slick as a 90s rock video. The music is compelling and aggressive, and the actors can sing like a motherfucker. Brightman’s beautiful soprano is a chilling counterpoint to the growling metal tones of the other characters. Paris Hilton is effectively cast as the narcissistic, drug-addicted GeneCo daughter, Amber Sweet. It’s a great time for anyone who digs heavy metal, slasher horror, and rock opera that fucks with your head.

Which brings me to Spree, which was the perfect mind-fuck to round out the weekend. Joe Keery stars as Kurt, a sad little man who wants desperately to be Internet famous and thinks he finally knows how to make it happen. He turns his ride-sharing gig into a killing spree, streaming videos of the deaths with the hashtag #TheLesson. His behavior gets more and more violent and erratic, and things come to a wild, violent head when he crosses paths with Black comedy sensation Jessie Adams.

It’s a wild ride (haha), funny as hell in a “Oh God why am I laughing at this” kind of way. It’s a scathing critique of our modern obsession with likes and clicks, and along those lines it doesn’t say anything that we don’t already know. (I’m still waiting for the horror movie that attacks corporations for tying financial success to online success; there’s a lot that could be said about, say, publishers that won’t look at your manuscript if you have less than 2,000 Twitter followers.) But I want to step away from that for a moment and talk about a scene that could go unnoticed if all you’re looking for is the next gruesome death.

Kurt’s first victim is a nasty racist, and watching him choke out after drinking poisoned water is a satisfying way to ease into the killing spree. He’s an asshole, you get the vibe that he’s a white supremacist about to go give some kind of Klan speech, and you’re happy to see him go. But Kurt is no woke individual. When he discovers Jessie Adams online and sees how popular she is, his reaction is not, “Wow good for her” or even “How I can I learn to do that?” It’s, “Those should be MY followers.” He picks apart and critiques her videos, complaining about random stuff that her viewers probably don’t even notice. His first impulse when he encounters someone who is genuinely charismatic and just plain better at this than him is to tear her down and claim that she doesn’t deserve those followers. HE does. Jessie’s life is in danger from that moment on.

So just like Hunchback, and just like Repo!, here we have the entitled white male in his natural habitat, behaving as though he has a legal right to a woman. In this case it’s her body of work rather than her body, but the subtext is clear.

Spree is available to stream on Hulu, and the other two can be rented from Fandango Now for about four bucks a piece. Go watch them right now and then come back here and tell me what you thought.

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The Aftermath of Abuse: A Review of The Invisible Man

***Mild spoilers***

The kids and I watched The Invisible Man shortly before Halloween as part of an ongoing horror movie marathon. It’s not standard Halloween fare: there are no witches, no ghosts (not really), and no evil curses or spells. But the story is as familiar as a fairy tale, especially to women who have experienced domestic abuse.

Cecilia drugs her abusive boyfriend and flees in the middle of the night with the help of her sister Emily. She hides out in the home of a friend and his teenage daughter and is terrified to walk past the mailbox outside. A few weeks later, she gets word that he has killed himself and left his entire fortune to her. And that is when things get scary. Adrian isn’t dead, but Cecilia is the only one who knows. And she’s the only one who can see what he’s doing.

The first step that abusers take is isolating their victims from friends and family. When the victim is completely alone and feels like she has nobody to turn to, she’s less likely to try to escape. Financial dependence is another way. It’s hard to leave when one has no income and no way to get any. Finally, abusers’ favorite method of control is the oldest one in the book: motherhood. Getting the victim pregnant and keeping her bound up in the physical and financial trials of childbearing is a sure fire way to keep her from finding her feet.

Cecilia’s tormentor, Adrian, follows this recipe perfectly. He sends emails and commits acts of violence and sabotage that make everyone think that Cecilia is mentally unstable. His fortune has strings attached that she discovers when she finds out that he had tampered with her birth control. And that’s as much as I want to say with the movie being less than a year old.

I love a horror movie that makes me think, especially one with a lot of symbolism and theme. Good horror taps into societal fears and brings up those dark thoughts that keep us awake at night. Fears about cancer, about societal entropy, about the stranger in the night with a knife–those horror themes are as common as peanuts. Good, but nothing special. I’ve really enjoyed the last couple of years and the more complex stories that deal with fears that fall a bit more outside the mainstream. The Invisible Man is about domestic abuse, obviously, but it’s also about the scariest part: the aftermath.

Abuse doesn’t always leave bruises, and there isn’t a mark on Cecilia at the start of the movie. I thought for sure while watching that there would be an artful bruise on her cheek or possibly a healing shiner, but no–not a scratch. And as I watched sister Emily struggle to believe in Cecilia and believe in her fear, I wondered if the narrative would have gone differently if she HAD been marked up. It’s hard to believe in things we can’t see. The things Cecilia’s family and friends see are Adrian’s good looks, his money, and his death certificate. Cecilia begs them to look past all that to see the truth, but for the most part, they fail. It’s terrifying to not be believed.

I watched this with my sons and daughter and I’m so glad that I did. We talked about so much after it was over. We discussed gaslighting, the signs of emotional abuse, the desire for control, and we talked about trusting our instincts and trusting each other. The Invisible Man is an amazing movie, as smart as it is scary, and I recommend it to anyone.

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Some Thoughts About ADHD and Other Neurodivergences

You don’t outgrow ADHD, but I think I understand why some people think you do.

(For the record, I don’t have a formal diagnosis of ADHD. But the coping mechanisms and tips and tricks recommended for ADHD patients to help them survive as functioning human beings all work on me, so that’s what I’m rolling with until I can afford a therapist.)

Life has gotten so much easier since I’ve been able to control my own schedule and set my own deadlines. I’m very lucky in that I was able to find a job suited to my temperament and energy level. It makes me wonder how I ever survived high school and early adulthood. I’m not being dragged out of bed and thrown onto a bus and being held to someone else’s schedule and someone else’s educational standards. I’m not being made to sit still and learn about math fractions when I need to stare out the window and twirl my hair. If I want to twirl my hair for three hours while thinking about sexy unicorns, then by God that’s how I’m spending my afternoon. And YES, in case you were wondering, my split ends are a hot mess.

And speaking of math, I actually enjoy it now that I have control over what and how I learn. I was a terrible math student in school, not out of any natural ineptitude but just sheer frustrated boredom. And math isn’t boring at all. I just wasn’t suited for the environment and the schedule being forced upon me. It wasn’t math I hated; it was the context. By the way if you’ve got Curiosity Stream (and you need to have Curiosity Stream), there’s a great documentary about algorithms that everyone should watch.

Because I’ve been inside my own brain for so long, I’ve gotten to know its quirks and workarounds. I can check my spoons and decide ahead of time, “Nope, not doing that today. Too peopley.” Or I’ll think about a writing project and go, “I’m not quite ready to start that yet, I have to zone out for *checks clock* twenty more minutes and then I’ll be ready for real world stuff.” I’m not lazy or procrastinating; it’s that I struggle with changing gears. I have to prepare myself for the next thing, and if I don’t have time to prepare my brain gets flustered and locks up. This was a problem when I had to exist in an environment that gave you about four minutes to race from one end of the building to the other and maybe even stop off for a textbook along the way.

Over the years I’ve come to suspect that a lot of neurodivergences are only disabilities in certain contexts. It’s not that a person with ADHD or autism can’t function; it’s that they can’t function in this specific environment under these particular stressors. And most of the time there’s nothing they can do about it. Everyone likes to talk about the land of the free, but we don’t have the freedom we think we do. Most of us can’t even afford to look for a better job; we have to keep the crappy one for the health insurance. If everyone could look for the work that suited them without having to worry about paying for health care, we could probably save a lot of money on health care. Depression, anxiety, and ulcers would all go WAY down. Something to think about, anyway.

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Down the Well–a Stephen King Fanfic

The swing creaked as Abigail Bagley swung back and forth. The rusty chains bit into her hands, but she squeezed them tighter and tighter as she swung. The air was brisk and cool, indicating the onset of evening. Soon her mother would call her in for dinner and bed. Inside the lights would be bright, and she had her Scooby-Doo night light for when Mom shut the door. But Abigail liked it outside, where it was wide open and she could see all around. It helped her not to be afraid of the well.

Mom had picked this house to rent because of the well. They didn’t have a lot of money, and Mom said that having water that couldn’t get shut off would be a great thing. Abigail understood, and in fact she liked the taste of the well water much better than the water in the drinking fountains at school. But she didn’t like the well itself. It was dark and weird down there, and the water made sloshing noises even when nobody was using it.

She didn’t talk to her parents about the noises she heard, the noises that sometimes sounded like voices. Daddy was back in Boston, and it was hard to talk about stuff like this on the phone. Last time she’d tried, he’d started yelling about Mom letting her watch that weird movie with the well girl. But she had only watched a minute or two before Mom caught her and shut it off. When they’d been married, Abigail had always heard Dad tell Mom, “You’re overreacting. Calm down.” But it usually seemed like Dad was the one who should calm down. The yelling had finally gotten to be too much for everyone, and now Abigail and her Mom were renting a raggedy old house on the edge of Bumblefuck, Maine. Mom didn’t know that Abigail knew the word, but Mom had said it a bunch of times, and it sounded funny to Abigail. So she said it too, but only in her head.

Talking to Mom about scary stuff was out of the question. Mom had real world stuff to be scared of, and Abigail didn’t want to make her more scared. So she ignored the well as much as she could, and she stayed out here in the open, where she could keep an eye on it. Over here on the rusty swing set, she couldn’t hear the sloshing of the water. Sometimes the sloshing sounded like voices.

The air was cooler now, and a chilly breeze ruffled her hair. It felt nice. When Abigail thought too hard about scary stuff, sometimes it felt like her head was too hot, and it hurt. The cold air washed out the scary thoughts, and Abigail felt calmer. Soon she would go inside and eat, but not yet.

There was a sloshing, slapping noise from down inside the well. Abigail put her feet down and stopped the swing. For a minute or two all was silent except for the rustle of the wind in the trees. There were no cars driving by. They lived at the end of a long, dirt road, all by themselves.

There was another splash from inside the well. Abigail swallowed. Her throat felt thick and dry.

Then she heard a little girl’s voice. “Help!”

Abigail stood up before she had time to think. The voice was panicky, and her first instinct was to rush to the well and try to see who was down there. But before she’d taken a step Abigail caught herself. She had been out here for hours, watching the well. If anyone had fallen down there, she would have seen.

“You’re not real,” she said aloud, and she sat back down on the swing.

There was silence for a while, and Abigail thought it was over. Then she heard her father’s voice.

“God damn it, Abby! Why won’t you ever listen? Get over here and look at me when I’m talking to you, young lady!”

Abigail cringed. She knew it wasn’t real, but his voice cut into her heart as though he were standing right next to him. She scrunched down into the seat and tried to curl up and make herself small. It was what she had always done when Dad started yelling, and it usually helped.

“Don’t yell at her!” That was Mom’s voice. Abigail’s breath caught in her throat. “Don’t you dare yell at her, it is not her fault!”

Then she heard it: that horrible sound that had ended her parents’ marriage and torn their family in half. That flat, lifeless slap of Dad’s hand across Mom’s face.

Abigail jumped to her feet. “Don’t you dare!” she shrieked. “Don’t you touch her, you big mean bully!” Her heart pounded in her chest, and she felt like she might explode from the rage and fear that flooded her body.

Silence again. Abigail panted hard and tried to calm herself. She was halfway between the swing set and the well, though she did not remember moving at all.

Then she heard a low, horrible chuckle. And the sloshing sound from the well came again. Louder. There was something big and heavy in there.

“You’re a smart one,” whispered the voice from the well. It didn’t sound like Dad or Mom. It sounded low and chuckly, like some awful being telling a joke. “Took me a few tries to find your button. But here we are at last, and here I come.”

All the strength went out of Abigail’s legs, and she fell on the ground. She put her hands out and tried to scoot backwards, but the sloshing sound was getting louder. Now there was a clawing, dragging sound coming from the well. Something was climbing the brick walls, pulling itself out.

“Oh please no,” she whispered.

“Oh please yes,” the chuckling voice responded. The well cover shifted and opened a crack. A small grey hand emerged. Its fingernails were black and filthy. Then the voice changed back to the little girl from before. “It’s so cold down here, Abby. Don’t leave me alone. You’ll like it down here.”

“Oh no please,” Abigail said again. She scooted backwards on her butt, but she still couldn’t find her feet. The thing was coming out of the well, and she didn’t know how to stop it. Soon it would come get her, then it would come get Mommy. Mommy had watched the movie too. Seven days ago.

“You’ll like it down here. There are lots of kids to play with. Kids just like you, who won’t laugh at your old clothes or your Mom who doesn’t have a man. We have so much fun down here. We play, and we float. We all float down here.”

The hand was followed by an arm, then another arm. Then the horrible head, full of stringy black hair that dripped with well water. There were other things in the well girl’s hair. Things that squirmed.

“We… all… FLOAT!”

Abigail screamed. The dead girl lifted her head and grinned, and her mouth was full of thin, jagged teeth. Her face was white and smeared with what looked like white makeup and bright red blood. “We all float,” the dead girl whispered around her mouthful of teeth. “You’ll float too.”

The thing from the well crawled slowly, slowly towards her, and Abigail scooted backwards. She still couldn’t find her feet.

It was getting closer.

This felt like the bad dreams she sometimes had, when she tried to run but her arms and legs were weak and stiff and she couldn’t move. The thing crawled closer.

Then Abigail took a deep breath and screamed, “I didn’t watch the cursed video!”

The thing from the well hesitated. Abigail went on, “I only saw the part at the end where the dad died. My mom told me the rest. I never saw the part that kills you!”

The dead thing from the well went very still. It was almost as though someone had hit the pause button. Abigail scrambled to her feet and ran into the house, panting and sobbing.

Inside, Mom was talking on her phone. She set it down as soon as she saw Abigail come in. “Are you okay?” she asked. “What happened?”

Abigail threw herself into her mother’s arms. “I don’t like the well, Mom,” she whispered. Mom’s hair was warm and smelled nice. Abigail closed her eyes and breathed deeply. She could finally breathe.

“Sweetie, we’re not going to stay here anymore,” Mom said. “I just got done talking to the landlord. The house is way more broken than he said it was—that well is about the only thing that isn’t falling apart—and another kid disappeared last night. I’m done here. We’re done. Your dad says there’s a nice place not far from him and Kristen, and we’re going out there this weekend to check it out.”

Abigail gave a long, shuddering sigh. She felt like she might fall asleep standing up. “Good,” she murmured. “I hate it here.”

She disengaged from her mother and went to the back door to look out. A small, grey hand disappeared into the well, and the cover moved back into place. “You can’t get me,” she whispered.

Then she went into the bathroom to wash her hands for dinner.

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The Future of Vampires: A Review of Daybreakers

Vampires are sexy.

Complain about Twilight all you want, but sexy is their thing. Every movie monster that has multiple successful iterations (and in some cases have been beaten to death, looking at you zombies) represents some society-wide fear and taps into it for the shivers. Vampires represent sexual fears, often the fear of rape or loss of control. You can see it most clearly in older iterations like Dracula, which is a very straightforward psycho-sexual analysis of the human condition. But the world is a little more complicated now than it was in Bram Stoker’s time, so the fears vampires represent are also more complicated, and in my opinion, more interesting.

Daybreakers is a modern dystopian take on vampire mythology. Ten years into the future, a vampire infection has taken over most of humanity, and the straggling survivors are being hunted and farmed for blood. Edward Dalton works for a major corporation as a researcher trying to create a blood substitute that will feed the vampire population without destroying the humans. He never wanted to be a vampire and feels sorry for humans; his motivation is mostly altruistic. Over the course of the film he realizes two things: firstly, that the corporation he works for is anything but altruistic, and also the substitute isn’t necessary. There is a cure for vampirism, and Dalton becomes the mastermind behind perfecting it.

As vampire movies go, it’s more or less flawless. It hits all the important tropes: the vampires burn in sunlight, can’t see themselves in mirrors, and can go from dapper sex symbol to ravening bat-like beast in 0.2 seconds. Fans of traditional vampire lore will find little to complain about. The upper-class vampires dress as though they’re heading to a speakeasy: walking and speaking in a cultured way that completely ignores the disaster looming just out of sight. The starving vampires, called “subsiders,” are captured and bundled out of sight so as not to offend the privileged vampires’ delicate sensibilities. When there are too many subsiders to contain, they’re chained to trucks and dragged into the sunlight to be euthanized. Not TOO subtle of a message there.

The visual aesthetic is stunning. The film has two different looks; the world of the vampires is stark and low-lit, almost black and white. (Fans of Dark City will notice a family resemblance.) The world of the humans, on the other hand, is warm and golden, filled with the colors of an early summer morning. The “sunrise” feel of the human side is deliberate, I suspect, suggesting the dawn of a new era. The cast is flawless. Sam Neill is a human treasure, and Ethan Hawke plays the tortured sexy protagonist to a tee. Even Willem Dafoe is kind of hot in this one.

As far as symbolism goes, there’s a lot of unpack. Because it’s futuristic dystopian, you should expect a lot of commentary about society, and what makes this movie so much fun is the myriad of ways that it can be interpreted. What are the vampires, really? Are they one percenters? Are they the for-profit health care industry, feeding on the sick and driving their customer base into the grave with exorbitant prices? Healthcare is hardly the only social issue plagued with unsustainable practices. Daybreakers is so full of detail and subtlety that one could watch it over and over again and come up with a different answer each time.

This brings us back to my initial point: vampires are sexy. Even Dalton, the reluctant vampire who refuses to drink human blood, dresses as though he’s auditioning for a ZZ Top video and walks like he’s moving in slow motion even when he’s not. Vampires represent sexual fears–and sexual desires. That’s why my favorite hypothesis about the symbolism of the Daybreakers vampires is they represent the traditional concept of sex as a struggle for dominance.

In American society, our language and culture is steeped in the concept of sexual dominance. “Pussy whipped” is what we call a man who lets his lady make decisions for him. “Make them your bitch.” “Grow some balls.” “I got raped in the wallet.” Sex is seen as transactional, usually between unequal power dynamics. The “male” role is dominant; the “female” role is submissive. These are all outdated, archaic concepts that nevertheless many people cling to who fear change and fear the loss of social dominance. The Daybreakers vampires know that there is a blood shortage and that their way of life is unsustainable, but the majority don’t know that there’s an alternative. The few who do want to kill the alternative and drive it underground, because even if it meant a better life for them, it would remove their illusions of superiority. With all their beautiful homes and fancy cars that can seal out light to drive in the daytime, the vampires are clinging to an illusion that will destroy their entire species.

Sex does not have to be a power struggle, and making it one is unsustainable for relationships and personal happiness. Sex should be exchanged between equal individuals, with no assumptions of superiority or ownership. If a sexual exchange is monetary in nature, then that too should take place between equals, freely and with enthusiastic consent. If monogamy is the goal, then that too should be an understanding between equals, without suspicion or control entering into it.

Dalton approaches humans as one approaches an equal, not as a predator approaches prey. By doing so he opens the door to saving both himself and the rest of the dying population. Others can do the same, and they can be free and walk under the sun again.

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Book Review: A Basketful of Heads

I was never a huge fan of traditional superhero comics when I was a kid, because I found the format frustrating. I wanted to finish the whole story in one sitting like I could with a book, and waiting for weeks just to read for half an hour drove me crazy.

I did like horror comics, though, because they were self-contained stories within a single issue. Tales from the Crypt, The Vault of Horror, and The Haunt of Fear are three titles I remember distinctly. They were gruesome and horrifying but oddly moral, like if Tom Savini wrote for The Twilight Zone. I loved them and analyzed them to death for clues to how I could use their lessons follow in the footsteps of my idol Stephen King, who I knew was also a childhood fan.

I’ve started reading comics more often lately, since I discovered graphic novels. Now I can read an entire volume of Harley Quinn’s adventures without having to wait for the next skimpy little issue to come out. So you can imagine my excitement when I found the complete volume of A Basketful of Heads at my local library.

A Basketful of Heads, the graphic novel written by horror’s boy wonder Joe Hill and the first offering from his new DC imprint Hill House, reads a LOT like those long-ago horror comics. There’s blood, intrigue, and a sexy young woman named June who fears for her life from a gang of criminals. She becomes a target because of her connection to a young cop in training named Liam, but finds herself in possession of an unexpected ally in the form of a very old, very special Viking-era battle axe. It reminds me of an eighties-style slasher, but instead of one relentless killer and a collection of pretty girls, it’s one pretty girl working her way through a collection of relentless killers in her search to find and rescue the love of her life.

If you’re familiar with the work of Joe Hill, then you know that in his world (his inscape if you will), NOBODY is safe. There’s no guarantee justice will be served. Things are going to happen the way they’re meant to happen and if you don’t like it that’s too damn bad. (His novella “Loaded” had me breathing into a paper bag at the end.) And as comfortably traditional as the story felt as I was reading it, in the back of my mind I knew that poetic justice and a morally satisfying conclusion were not guaranteed. That knowledge added a little extra zest to my reading experience, and as a result I plowed through the entire volume in a matter of minutes. I’ll have to go back and read it again so I can enjoy the artwork a little more.

Speaking of the artwork, it’s pretty fucking great. The bulk of the story takes place during this godawful storm on an island, so there’s a pervasive feeling of wetness that permeates every page. You can almost feel the little trickle of water sliding down the back of your neck like when it’s raining really hard and your neck isn’t completely covered. The characters are well-drawn as people and not stereotypes and action figures to be pushed around on the page. Even the violent criminals are complex in their own way.

If you like Joe Hill, Stephen King, or traditional-style horror comics, you need to give A Basketful of Heads a try. It’s clever, entertaining, a little scary in places, and overall a good time.

This shit’s pretty metal.
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The Children’s Bones

*CW for child death*

Once upon a time there was a witch, but her house of candy was not in the middle of a deep wood. The little house was in a neat little suburb, and the witch was a cosmetics saleswoman named Jessica Howell.

Jessica was not a witch by choice. She had not been born with evil dwelling in her like dark cancer. She wept every time a child was taken and devoured by the thing living beneath her house. She lived in fear of it. She hated it. She did not revel in death and blood. She was not the monster. She was just the gatekeeper.

She tried to ameliorate her sin by choosing unpleasant, bullying children, the sort that other children hated and feared. But at the bottom of her heart she knew that she was just as wicked as any witch who looked a child over for health and good fat. The children she took were dirty, they were ugly, they stomped on insects and pushed smaller children into the dirt—but they were children. By taking them, Jessica was taking away their ability to grow and change. They were dying in a state of sin, and it was her fault.

And their mothers. Jessica hid in her house and tried not to see the frantic faces of their mothers when they came looking for their children. The police roaming the neighborhood, flashlights swinging. There was never a funeral. The children’s bones were never found.

One child every three years. That was what it cost to keep the beast still and sleeping. Jessica was the witch who guarded it. And she was afraid. Even in the off-years she dreamed of it, of the dark and the claws and its dirty, grubbing teeth. And the smell of blood and the children’s bones.

One cold morning, Jessica awoke at dawn. She put on the coffee and looked out at the misty morning sun. It all looked so peaceful. She wrapped her pink bathrobe tightly around herself and stepped barefoot into the damp grass. The wet cold drove into her feet like knives.

Jessica crept round to the plywood door that covered up her crawl space. She sometimes thought about boarding it up more tightly, with proper wood and padlocks, but what good would that do? When the beast was sated, it slept. And when it was hungry, no power of heaven or earth would keep it in its hole.

Jessica leaned against the siding of the house and closed her eyes. Soon it would be time again. Time to find a child, someone mean and greedy, with neglectful parents who would not be missed right away. Someone easy to bribe with candy and promises.

“My cat is trapped in the crawl space,” she would say. “If you can get in there and bring him out, I’ll give you ten dollars and this whole bag of candy.” And his eyes would light up with avarice, and he would think nothing at all of crawling into the dark and the cold by himself. He might not even notice when Jessica closed the plywood door behind him.

“You old bastard,” Jessica whispered. “How long have you been here? Did you come to the house, or was the house built around you?”

Twenty four years Jessica had lived here. One child every three years. But how many before her? The house had stood for eighty years; had the monster been here all this time? So many questions.

Jessica had bought the house from an old woman who was dying of cancer. She’d never met the woman, a Mrs. Audrey Hillson; the closing had been attended by her grandson. “She’s been in a hospice these last few weeks,” Jim Hillson had explained. “The cancer’s making her lose her mind a little, and she needs to be watched.”

“Was it the cancer that broke her mind, or was it you?” Jessica whispered. “If I have to do this for another fifty years, I’ll go crazy myself.”

A low growl rumbled from behind the plywood door. The beast was stirring. Jessica felt the old anxiety, the old hunger building. She could sense the monster’s need. This summer, no later, it needed to be fed.

Jessica sometimes thought about burning the house. Fill the crawl space with kerosene, light a match, run like hell, burn baby burn. Let the beast have a barbecue this year.

But first she’d have to get close enough. She’d have to open the door and enter the crawlspace to pour or spray the fuel. The crawl was cold and damp, even in dry summer. It would never burn enough to even hurt the monster without accelerant.

And that always brought her to the second solution. Just go inside. Let the beast take her. It would hurt, but only for a minute. And there would be no more dreams. She could sleep, it would be so quiet and peaceful.

She tested her resolve now, putting one hand against the damp plywood. The beast’s growl deepened. She pushed a little, and it snarled. A deep, horrible sound that Jessica felt in her guts and in her soul. Jessica withdrew. She was cowardly and wicked; she couldn’t do it. Not this year. Not yet.

Jessica went into the house. Her coffee was almost ready. She could smell it as she entered the house.

It covered up the other smell. The smell of death, and the children’s bones.

***

Officer Jamieson nodded to his partner. “Are you ready?” he asked.

Basovsky shook his head. “No,” he said. “I still can’t believe it.”

Jamieson walked out to his patrol car, and Basovsky followed. “Female serial killers are unusual, but not nonexistent,” he said. “You took all the same classes I did, and you know she fits the profile.”

“What did the Smith broad see her doing, exactly?”

“Keirsten Smith was out walking her dog last night and saw a woman resembling Jessica Howell climbing out of her crawl space covered in blood, and she had what looked like a baseball cap in one hand. Smith took off and ran home before Howell saw her. She’s lucky to be alive, is what I think. That crazy bitch might have killed her, just like she probably killed the Adams kid.”

“And she’s sure it wasn’t an animal or something?”

“Dude, what kind of animal looks like a skinny woman with glasses and a tank top?”

“I sound like someone’s mother, don’t I?” Basovsky shook his head. “Such a nice, quiet person. House full of cats. So kind to dogs, and good with children.”

“It’s always the nice quiet ones. That’s how they get away with it for so long.”

The Misogyny is Coming from Inside the House: Promising Young Woman Part 2

Promising Young Woman is one of the most thought-provoking horror movies I’ve seen since Get Out. There is so much to unpack here that I didn’t feel comfortable trying to squeeze it into a single post. So here is Part 2 of my review. And I know I said that this was coming “next week” last month, but then Halloween happened and I started a new college class that’s actually somewhat interesting. So anyway, here goes.

By now we should all be familiar with the term “rape culture,” but what does it really mean? Rape is a pervasive issue in society and has been for centuries, but why? Is it the men? It’s the men, right? Men are the ones who usually rape women, so they’re the problem, right? Well yeah, but also not necessarily. Let’s talk about Madison.

Madison is a classmate of Cassie and Nina, and when Cassie begins her final campaign of revenge against the people who wronged her friend, Madison becomes one of the first targets. Cassie meets up with her for lunch and drinks, and the conversation turns back to what happened to Nina. Madison blithely claims that Nina had a history of getting blackout drunk, that it wasn’t really rape, and that she should have known better than to put herself in that situation. Cassie feeds Madison alcohol until she herself is blackout drunk and then pays a strange man to take her to a hotel room. The next day Madison calls Cassie several times, frantic because she doesn’t remember what happened. Cassie ignores her calls.

Later in the movie, Cassie talks to Madison and says that nothing happened; the man put her to bed and that was it. Madison is both relieved and furious, and the viewer hopes that she got the point. This could be a turning point in Madison’s way of thinking, if she accepts it, but we’re not sure if she will.

Then Madison becomes the catalyst for the plot’s hard left turn into Hell, when she gives Cassie a video that was taken of Nina’s rape. She advises Cassie not to watch it, but Cassandra may as well have been named Pandora. She watches the video, and that’s when she finds out that her Mr. Nice Guy Ryan was there, laughing and cheering with the rest of the good old boys.

That’s the meat and potatoes of the narrative, but let’s talk about who Madison is and what she represents. She’s a successful, well-off woman with a husband and a baby. We get to see her house and her car and her clothes, and by all accounts she has it made. Cassie, on the other hand, never recovered from what happened to her friend. She works at a coffee shop and lives with her parents, on the surface a “fucking failure” to use Mr. Nice Guy’s words.

The contrast between these two characters isn’t just economic. Cassie lives every day with what happened to Nina, and she’s haunted by it. She can’t go back to living in a happy bubble where only good things happen to good people and bad things only happen to bad or stupid people. Madison, on the other hand, has consciously cultivated her happy bubble and refuses to step outside of it. When Cassie tries to talk about the rape, Madison blames Nina for what happened to her and said that it was inevitable because of her behavior. Most of us women have heard some variant of this from a trusted female friend, and it hits like a punch to the heart every time. When you’ve experienced trauma, not much hurts worse than finding out that a person you love can’t be trusted to confide in about it.

It helps to understand why Madison acts the way she does. She doesn’t consciously hate women; she doesn’t hate Nina or bear her ill will, but her happiness depends on believing that there is a righteous order to the universe, that “if I do this a certain way that bad thing will never happen to me.” Most women are afraid of rape, and sadly some of us cope with that fear by pretending that it only happens to Certain Women, never to us. If we act a certain way, dress a certain way, and carry our keys between our fingers, it won’t happen to us. We claim that we don’t actually blame those fantastical Other Women for what happens to them; in fact we sympathize with them, but that doesn’t change the fact that repeating this myth, believing this myth, upholds misogynistic views and supports rape culture. When Cassie forces Madison to confront the idea that sometimes bad shit happens for no reason at all, even to people like her, Madison is horrified and furious. My theory is that giving Cassie the video was her revenge for popping her happy bubble and destroying that comforting lie. Cassie was on the road to cultivating her own happy bubble and leaving her trauma behind when she turned on the video and saw the truth.

One would like to believe that Madison did some self-reflecting after the hotel room incident and began the process of adjusting to a new reality before her daughter got old enough to date. But her final statement to Cassie does not offer much hope. “Never fucking contact me again.” Cassie represents a harsh reality, and Madison wants to go back to her happy bubble and never think about it again. Hopefully her daughter will grow up to have better sense.

Rape culture is more than just men raping women (or vice versa, yes I know it happens, please don’t @ me.) It’s the collective mythology that both men and women buy into, that rape is a natural event as unpreventable as a hurricane, and that it only happens under certain circumstances that can always be avoided if one is smart and sexually modest. Both of those things are bullshit. Rape IS preventable; it’s not a natural phenomenon, it’s a thing that humans do to other humans, and we CAN make them stop. But only if, like Cassie and unlike Madison, we face reality and destroy the myth.

Less a Review and More a Highly Articulate Fangirl Squee: Train to Busan

Horror is one of my favorite genres, but sometimes I wonder if I really “identify” as a horror fan. Blood, guts, monsters, and gore are secondary to me; I can take or leave them, and too much is a turn-off. To me, what should always come first and foremost in any movie or book regardless of the genre is the story. Tell me a good story with compelling characters, and it could be vampire space erotica, and I’ll be enthralled. I guess I’m less a horror fan than an escapism fan. And an adrenaline junkie, oh hell yes. Throughout my troubled adolescence I frequently self-medicated my depression with Arnold Schwarzenegger holding a grenade launcher, and I daydreamed about growing up to be Ellen Ripley or Sarah Connor.

Which brings me to the pinnacle of zombie apocalypse films: Train to Busan.

This is my all-time favorite zompoc movie, and in my top three favorite horror movies. (The other two are Dr. Sleep and In the Mouth of Madness, if you must know.) There are plenty of jumps and scares, plenty of face-eating for the gore enthusiasts, and the narrative is a solid, high-quality story full of relatable and mostly sympathetic characters. Even the complete asshole of the group (there’s one in every zombie movie) and his shitty choices make sense in the context of his character.

*Spoilers follow. Click away while you still can*

The movie opens with a “minor leak” at a biochemical plant. (Protip: when an employee at a place called Biotech mentions a “minor leak” in their containment facility, RUN LIKE YOUR ASS IS ON FIRE.) Our main characters are divorced father Seok Woo and his traumatized daughter, Soo-an. He’s overworked and out of touch but still wants to keep custody away from his ex for some reason, and Soo-an has already learned that he can’t be relied on and has begun the self-parenting coping mechanism that many children of divorced and/or toxic parents know too well. She wants to take the train alone to see her mother in Busan on her birthday. You get the feeling that he vetoes this plan more to stick it to his ex than out of any concern for his daughter’s safety, but after he royally fucks up her birthday present he’s stuck escorting her up to mom’s as an apology.

Then the train gets infected with zombies, and shit gets real.

The characters are great. Despite his best efforts to alienate everyone, Dad of the Year manages to form a party of survivors that can work together for their mutual protection, and each party member has a fully-fleshed personality with backstory and motivation. A lot of the film’s tension comes from a place of frustration; there is a LOT of freezing and staring helplessly going on, but that’s not unrealistic. You can imagine all you want, but nobody knows how they’re going to behave when there’s an actual fast zombie charging right at them. Most of us would probably stare helplessly in shock and quickly become worm food. The only characters who never seem to freeze are Obligatory Asshole Yon-Suk, and Sang-hwa, an expectant father with the heart of a mama bear and the biceps of a god.

I don’t care for the endings of a lot of zombie movies, because I don’t care for horror movies with downer endings. (One notable exception being Night of the Living Dead, because the social commentary is too biting not to appreciate.) Not because they’re sad or depressing (although that doesn’t help) but because too frequently it’s an ending that was either inevitable, meaning that nothing the characters did made any difference at all, or worse–that things would have ended better if the characters had just sat on their asses and done nothing. That’s why I hated the ending of The Mist. (Spoiler alert!) I’ve posted before about how if you’re going to kill the kid in a story you need to make it count. Luring the audience into this apocalyptic wasteland and then letting them realize that everything would have been fine if everyone had just STAYED IN THE GODDAM STORE is a punch in the face.

Train to Busan avoids this foolishness by a comfortable margin. Yeah it’s easy to point to where the characters could have made better choices, but all of the choices are either understandable or inevitable. Seok Woo finally redeems himself, and his last dying thoughts as the virus overtakes his brain are images of him holding his daughter for the first time. Maybe his shabby parenting was less a result of carelessness or lack of empathy and more about him feeling completely overwhelmed by the responsibility of raising this precious child by himself. Sometimes when we care too much we try to put space between ourselves and the loved one in an attempt to ward off pain. But pain is part of life, and so is death.

Get you a man who can do both.

Train to Busan is a great fucking movie. End of story.