Earth's Mightiest Heroes

Leviticus (2026). Two queer teen boys in a homophobic Australian backwater are stalked by a demon that appears to each one as the other, driving them apart.

This stars Joe Bird, the little brother in Talk to Me. He was great then and he's great here, and his and co-star Stacy Clausen's chemistry is fantastic. This movie only works because they're so good together as two fumbling kids who don't really understand themselves or each other, who can't trust each other because the other guy might be a demon, but who, it turns out, can't trust anyone else in their lives either. Betrayal is the big theme here: by trusted adults, religion, the person you're into, and yourself.

The conversion therapy metaphor is very obvious, which isn't necessarily bad, but I did feel that the movie wasn't sure what to do with it once it had introduced it. Like yes, now you (or the appearance of you) are dangerous to each other, so now what? I wanted it to give me more. The movie feels like it plateaus in the last act, neither deepening the themes nor escalating the tension but just hitting a lot of the same beats until things finally resolve.

However, the actual character work is good, IMO. Both kids are complicated and make realistically bad choices, but they also both keep trying with one another. There's a really great scene where love interest Ryan uses the word dickhead about five times, and it's honestly really sweet in context. The cinematography was also good; I really felt the kind of down-and-out exhaustion of the industrial small town.

Overall, even though it didn't fire on all cylinders for me, it's definitely a worthwhile watch if teen boys in love in a horror setting sound like your jam.

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Rose of Nevada (2026). Directed by Mark Jenkin, who also made Enys Men, this is about two guys in an impoverished Cornish fishing town who take a job aboard a lost and resurfaced fishing boat, which takes them back in time. The guy who's been sleeping rough suddenly finds he has a wife and kid; the guy who took the job to support his family no longer has one, because they're back in the present day.

This movie is largely an Experience (tm) rather than a story as such. It seems like there is some actual plot/lore underpinning, but Jenkin is not that interested in explaining what it is. We spend a LOT of time on a fishing boat. The captain might be fae, or the boat might stuck in a time loop, or... who can say.

Mostly what Jenkin is interested in is making a movie that feels old, full of fuzziness and tactile impressions of things. I'm told the camera can only store about twelve seconds of footage at a time, so everything is a quick cut, and for whatever reason he didn't mic any of it, so all the sound happened in post and all the spoken dialogue was dubbed in, like an old giallo film or something.

I got out of this and was like well that was an experience I guess, but with time I feel like I might want to watch it again. Maybe I can make sense of more things this time.

There Is No Antimemetics Division (2025) by QNTM. It's hard to research stuff that resists being remembered. Who knows what it might be getting up to that you've forgotten?

This is the pro-published version of what was originally an SCP serial story published online. I could definitely feel the SCP influence, but I didn't mind it, although it's still wild to me that SCP has narrative now. Back in my day it was only the wiki! *shakes cane*

Anyway, this is a series of chapters that build on each other but connect a little more loosely than a conventional novel. Many chapters are about the UK branch of a worldwide organization researching all sorts of Weird Shit (tm) and specifically the woman in charge of the division on stuff that resists remembering, ie the Antimemetics Division. Some chapters are about her husband. Some are about other random people in the organization. The first chapter is one of those and is a great introduction to the universe and the whole concept; if you're on the fence about the novel as a whole, give that first chapter a try. That segment would make a fantastic standalone short film.

Due to the Weird Memory Shit (tm), many of the characters are totally ignorant of the events from one chapter to the next, even if they were involved in all of them, which makes for some great dramatic irony, especially as we get deeper into the novel and the true threat becomes more apparent. ( spoilers )

Overwall, a quick read and a good time. I look forward to rereading it more slowly now that I know what's coming.

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Harvest Home (1973) by Thomas Tryon. A man and his family escape soul-crushing NYC to an idyllic New England hamlet that still keeps to the old ways--which are, it turns out, not so idyllic after all.

Yes, this is folk horror. In fact it might be the folk horror novel. All the basic stuff you think of is here: outsider fleeing the evil city for the wholesome countryside, idealized rural setting, quaint but then toxic cultural traditions, eventual murder. This is not a case where a genre grew and expanded on the kernel of an idea, or if it did, this is the expansion and not the kernel. The classic tropes and themes of the genre are all fully realized here, described in exhaustive detail. The setting is Connecticut, but the traditions are originally Greek by way of Cornwall, so you do get the British element of folk horror. There's also a developmentally disabled child who acts as oracle, and now I wonder if that aspect of Midsommar was referencing this novel specifically, or if it became a thing in folk horror, and I just haven't encountered it in other things yet.

It's fascinating to me that this came out the same year as The Wicker Man and has some of the same themes, and I wonder what was in the water that led to their parallel evolution. It's also really interesting to me that The Wicker Man was very difficult to access for decades and gained cult classic status via illegal copies, but is now acknowledged as an all-time classic, while Harvest Home was a bestseller but has now, I think, sunk into relative obscurity.

(There's an amazing quote from Stephen King on wikipedia from a 1976 review he wrote for the NYT:

It isn't a great book, not a great horror novel, not even a great suspense novel ... Never mind the best seller list. Mind this, instead: Sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, it is a true book; it is an honest book in the sense that it says exactly what Tryon wanted to say. And if what he wanted to say wasn't exactly Miltonian, it does have this going for it: in forty years, when most of us are underground, there will still be a routine rebinding once a year for the library copies of Harvest Home".

Now he's a household name who will blurb pretty much any horror novel under the sun, and meanwhile the only copies of this novel in my library system were ebooks.)

Anyway, I enjoyed this quite a bit. As implied by the King review, this is a leisurely book that takes its sweet time introducing us to the entire village and all its quaint ways, most importantly its seasonal festivals that culminate in Harvest Home, which involves the Harvest Lord (elected every seven years) and the Corn Maiden whom he selects. Along the way we spend time with important figures such as the homespun yet venerable Widow Fortune and Worthy Pettinger, a youth with big ideas about modernizing the local agriculture.

We see all this from the first person perspective of family man and aspiring artist Ned Constantine, who has moved his impressionable wife and severely asthmatic daughter to the village. Ned is the kind of guy who meets his wife by overhearing her talking to her friend in the Louvre and butting in to correct her pronuciation. Beth is, I guess, the kind of woman who falls in love with the kind of guy who does that. The book opens with Ned lustfully appreciating how his wife looks in her nightgown, which is exactly as awkward and offputting as you would expect from a male author writing a male character in the 70s. Ned also continually declines to share any of his growing concerns about the village with Beth out of concern that her delicate sensibilities can't handle them. His and the book's attitude towards women gets even worse when he starts inching towards unfaithfulness with the village ~hussy. Basically Ned is kind of the worst, especially as the book goes on. I frankly can't remember the last time I enjoyed a book this much while growing to loath the main character this much, apparently against the intent of the author.

Ned is also dumb as a bag of hammers. His driving motive through most of the book is to discover what happened thirteen years earlier to unfortunate young suicide Grace Everdeen, and yet he is hilariously incurious about anything else happening in the village that he doesn't see as directly tied to this. Furthermore, confusingly, this mystery is not really part of the main plot except as the reader's way into the village's darker underbelly, and the final reveal of what happened to her is frankly baffling as a narrative choice. (It turns out she ( Read more... )

Anyway, ( big spoilers )

Overall a fascinating piece of horror history that I genuinely enjoyed. Now I want to read more early folk horror.

Themes of the last two months
1. In May, I listened to Kacey Musgraves's new album a lot. Middle of Nowhere is legit my favorite album of hers since her debut. Golden Hour was just okay (I know I'm alone in this), Star-Crossed was so confessional that it felt like an invasion of privacy to listen to and also wasn't any fun, and Deeper Well was just... stale? Also not any fun? Mostly songs of mixed feelings about relationships that I didn't care about?

But Middle of Nowhere takes Musgraves back to her storytelling, classic country roots, and importantly is her first album in years with a sense of humor and irony. Dry Spell I've talked about before and is both clever and very funny. Back on the Wagon is about a woman who's sure that this time her man will stay sober. (I saw a reviewer say that the song is ambiguous on whether this will work out, and no. No it isn't.) Horses and Divorces featuring Miranda Lambert is about old enemies finding common ground over beer (and then fucking about it, IMO). For the moody downbeat vibes, I especially liked Abilene, about a girl getting out town the first chance she gets, and Coyote, about a guy wandering through life lost and missing something he can't identify.

The album lags a bit in the back half, and the first six or so songs are the strongest run of the album, but it's all a good time, and I've already listened to it way more than any of her other recent albums.

2. A lot of Oasis. The thing about Oasis is between the band and the solo projects, there's so much music that I can just switch to a different album or era when I need a change. It's comfort music at this point. This time around it was mostly the Sawmills/Monnow Valley recordings of Definitely Maybe as well as the live tracks from the reunion tour. (Live album when!!!)

3. Lord Huron, mostly Cosmic Selector Vol. 1.

My top artists (by # of streams)
May
1. Oasis
2. Kacey Musgraves
3. Lord Huron

June
1. Oasis
2. Lord Huron

Favorite songs:
1. Becomes the Color by Emily Wells, the end credits music for Stoker (2013), currently my movie of the year. This song is such a great combination of dark and fun and perfectly suits the movie. All of Wells' other stuff that I've tried has been much slower and less lyric-dense. If anyone has recs for other things I should try like this song, ideally with female vocals, I am all ears.

2. The Chain, cover by The Highwomen (live at The Gorge). Perfect song, great performance by some of the greatest artists in country music. Infinitely listenable.

3. Abilene, Coyote, and Horses and Divorces by Kacey Musgraves, linked above.