Tag Archives: horror

And So It Goes

Today is Saturday, October 11, 2025. It’s late here, owing to Elliot and I watching the ending of 2024’s body-horror extravaganza starring Demi Moore in a very courageous role, The Substance, on HBO Max. I believe it was just added to the streaming service and I had always intended to see it on the big screen, but somehow missed it. We started watching it yesterday and paused it after 40 minutes or so.

This film explores many subjects, primarily the exploitation of women in the entertainment industry and how women adapt – or don’t – to the vicissitudes of aging. Moore plays an aging star, Elisabeth Sparkle, who learns that she will be replaced by a far younger star on her workout show. She learns this horrible news from overhearing the TV producer of the show, smarmily portrayed by Dennis Quaid, as Harvey, talking to someone on the phone in the men’s room of the studio where her show is taped.

Sparkle leaves the studio in tears and immediately gets involved in a car accident. It is when she is being examined to see if she has sustained any injuries that she meets someone who leads her to the substance. The plot that proceeds from here takes apart what one may do to cling to stardom, beauty, access, and fame, no matter what the cost might be. The film exposes how dangerous it can be to tie self-worth to star status and/or youth. This is shown physically by having two bodies that must share an alternating schedule with dire consequences if the schedule is not followed religiously.

What one could extrapolate from this is the idea of harming your body for temporary physical gains (unsafe beauty treatments, surgery, drugs, etc.) with no consideration for how it may catch up with you in the future.

Sparkle’s younger version of herself is played by much gusto by Margaret Qualley as Sue. In order to get this newer and better version of herself, in a rather grotesque scene, she bursts out of Elisabeth’s back like a mutant butterfly from a cocoon.

In fact, the film abounds in many grotesque scenes, so I don’t recommend it to the faint hearted. There are many homages in this contemporary horror film, directed by Coralie Fargeat, to other auteurs of gore, people like Brian De Palma, David Cronenberg, and even Stanley Kubrick in long shots of carpets and corridors a la The Shining. Other horror mavens like myself should be able to pick up the references to other filmmakers while watching this tour de force performance by Moore who lets it literally hang out, if you know what I mean.

As outlined by instructions on how to use the substance, the old Demi-Moore-shaped carcass is abandoned in the bathroom when Sue is at large while the two must swap bodies every seven days “without exception.” As you would expect, the much younger version of Moore, Sue, becomes too enamored of her more beautiful self and begins to ignore the explicit instructions to reinvigorate her old self, thus paving the way for disastrous repercussions.

This is when the special effects department really goes to town, as an excessive amount of gore, blood, and other effluvia are discharged onto your screen. I hate to say since I’ve seen so many horror films, this didn’t disturb me like so many of my friends who were disturbed by these scenes. The last third of the film truly delivers in terms of body transformations and the splattering of blood – like tons of it.

There were questions I had about Quaid’s performance who really overdid his raging lusty male executive role too broadly here, and I couldn’t believe that Moore had no friends or relatives with which to interact with when she wasn’t working. She basically holes up in her luxury apartment talking to no one waiting for the seven days to elapse when she must swap her body for Qualley’s. I wondered how lonely she really was. At one point, she desperately calls an acquaintance from her past who accidentally collides with her in the street in order to quell her loneliness. I didn’t find this aspect of the film that convincing.

Overall, I would heartedly recommend this film to more seasoned horror veterans, but not to the occasional horror viewer. The scenes might be too much to take.

In the meantime, a coastal flood warning is in effect here, from what I hear. Today’s rain did not deter me from driving to Williamsburg where I had brunch at Juliette, on North 5th Street. I had the banana stuffed French toast.

I then walked into a longtime bookstore on Bedford Avenue called Spoonbill & Sugartown Books where I spied several books I have already read for my gay men’s reading club. In a few days, I will start reading The Power of the Dog, by Thomas Savage. I hope the book is more satisfying than the Netflix film adapted from the book in 2021. I did see the film when it was first released, and I recall I didn’t like it much. I’m sure the book is much better.

I then browsed the shelves of Mother of Junk, a very cluttered thrift store on Driggs Avenue. I did buy one album, a Petula Clark record. Who is she? you might be asking. She is a British singer, actress, and songwriter and is better known for her catchy tune, “Downtown,” and is called “the First Lady of the British Invasion.” Basically, she’s a pop singer from the 1960s.

From there, I walked to Black Spring Books, another bookstore on Driggs Avenue. Here I purchased a book on the Lower East Side for Elliot whose birthday is October 20.

I rounded up my tour of Williamsburg by having coffee at Blue Bottle on 4th Street. I actually had to use the men’s room so I figured I’d have a cup of their high-priced coffee before using the lavatory.

Well, tomorrow is another day. Let’s hope we don’t have a tsunami then.

Enjoy your Sunday anyway.

And so it went!

And So It Goes

Today is Sunday, October 5, 2025. Yesterday was quite a busy day for Elliot and me, as we sallied forth early in the morning to meet “Seth” at Jax Inn Diner, in Jackson Heights. Originally, I was going to meet Seth alone, but I decided we could both go because I intended to go to Lincoln Center to purchase tickets for the Psycho concert on October 30. We could then drive to the nearest subway station together and park the car there and pick it up later, which is what we did. We then were going to see a new film at the Angelika Theater called The History of Sound, a gay romantic movie punctuated by the inevitable heartache and loss, much in the vein of Brokeback Mountain, made 20 years ago.

After having a very filling breakfast at the diner (I had a bowl of oatmeal and a short stack of pancakes, which is the diner’s specialty) which was so busy when we got there that we had to find parking on the street, Seth made the proclamation that he was going to Lincoln Center also in order to purchase tickets for Ragtime at the Vivian Beaumont Theater. We arranged a time where we would meet each other after everyone bought their tickets.

So we said our goodbyes outside the diner, while we got into our car and drove to 46th Street and Broadway to take the R train downtown. We got off at 57th Street and 7th Avenue and then walked to Lincoln Center. When we neared the David Geffen Hall where I had to buy the tickets, I left Elliot on a bench across the street from the performing hall.

I asked someone inside the cavernous lobby where the ticket booth was, and she pointed across the hall where the ticket station was. The line was nonexistent, so I waited briefly and stepped up to the ticket agent. I asked for two tickets, since I asked my newfound friend “Harvey” if he wanted to go with me, and he said yes. I interacted with a pleasant-looking agent who indulged my blathering on the new Netflix series on the inspiration for Anthony Perkins’ character in Psycho, Ed Gein. He didn’t hear of it and said he would investigate it.

A few moments later, I spotted Seth by the Lincoln Center fountain and I accompanied him into the next theater where he bought tickets for Ragtime. He also had no trouble buying tickets for a performance in November, I believe.

Before going to the Angelika together, Seth and I made one last-ditch attempt to get tickets for Oh, Mary at the Lincoln Center TKTS booth. By the time we got to the ticket booth, only one ticket was available for the 5 p.m. performance, but there weren’t two tickets available for the 7:30 performance. We exited the line and made plans then to see the film at the Angelika.

We took the subway down to Broadway-Lafayette Street on the F train and then purchased our tickets inside since there isn’t an agent outside anymore. We were a little shocked over the price ($17.50 for senior tickets. I was afraid to ask what the general adult price was).

The film, from director Oliver Hermanus and writer Ben Shattuck, concerns itself with the brief but impactful relationship between two musical students at the Boston Conservatory in 1917. They are Lionel Worthing (Paul Mescal) and David White (Josh O’Connor) who not only share an attraction to the same sex but also share a passion for folk music in particular. Lionel is the more withdrawn and shy of the two; he is from poor folk in rural Kentucky and has been endowed with a vivid aural style and natural vocal ability. At a bar in Boston, he is surprised to hear another student playing and singing a familiar tune from his childhood on the piano. The young man, David, is a charming composition major with a passion for “collecting songs.” This means he travels across remote regions to gather and learn people’s local songs. The two instantly bond over this shared interest, and that night they have sex in David’s sparsely decorated apartment. Their emotional bond grows progressively intimate as they continue to meet weekly, only for their affair to end abruptly when David leaves for Europe to fight in World War I. At that time, the U.S.’s entry in the war leads to the indefinite cancellation of classes, so Lionel reluctantly returns to the family farm.

After the war ends, Lionel hears from David who proposes that he accompany him on a song-collecting trip throughout Maine where they will record the songs of Maine’s villages and farms with a wax cylinder phonograph, and where they will spend their nights camping in the woods. The viewer realizes that this time between the two lovers/friends is truly a high mark in their association with one another, but towards the end of their song-collecting venture, it is David who is grows distant towards the end of the trip. It appears that the horrors of war has traumatized David to the point where he’s unable to give voice to what he has experienced. Lionel eventually leaves Kentucky to pursue a career in music which takes him to Rome eventually and to Oxford where he enters into a relationship with a woman.

The film progresses at a very slow pace and it is here where viewers might have a problem with identifying with the events described within. It is very apparent, however, that Lionel and David’s relationship is tender and endearing from the start, but as time progresses and a reunion becomes less plausible, the seismic impact of David on Lionel’s life becomes increasingly clear, and the weight of the loss grows heavier, until Lionel realizes that this brief episode of his youth has bestowed happiness on him that he will never feel again.

The two principals, Mescal and O’Connor, are quite convincing as very different people. Mescal is more reserved and withdrawn than O’Connor who had more of a worldly upbringing. He mentions that he was raised by an uncle in England after his parents both die. As already mentioned, Mescal is the only son of Kentucky farmers. In the film, he uses his pleasant voice to great effect. O’Connor, however, is more outgoing and charismatic, and emanates a low-level nervous energy through employing gestures like constantly fiddling with cigarettes and putting on amiable, yet somehow uncomfortable-seeming, smiles. His natural charm, however, serves to conceal a well of pain over his homosexuality and his experiences in the Great War.

In an epilogue, Lionel is portrayed as a much older man by Chris Cooper, who has achieved much success as a musicologist, lecturer, and writer living in Boston. It is his reaction to finally receiving those long-lost tapes of songs recorded by him and David in Maine’s hinterlands that should bring a tear to the most hardened among us watching in the audience.

After seeing the film, the three of us walked to Veselka Restaurant on 2nd Avenue and 9th Street where we met Seth’s husband, “Jerry.” He came into the city just to meet us for dinner. When we got to the Ukrainian eatery, he was waiting for us on the corner.

We waited on line for a short while before we were escorted to a table inside. The restaurant was quite busy. Everyone was bustling over us, but a waiter did approach our table within minutes and took our orders. The preferred dish at our table appeared to be pirogies, so we all delighted in having them. I also had mushroom and barley soup first.

This was the end of the ride. After dinner, we said our final goodbyes to Seth and Jerry who took an Uber back to Astoria, while we dealt with the subway. We had to remember to get off at 46th Street and Broadway to pick up our car, not to take the E or F back to Forest Hills. And we did!

I have good news concerning our television set: it’s going to be finally returned tomorrow by “Ernest” who has restored it to its former glory. We’ve only been without it for more than two weeks. There’s certainly more worse things than not having a TV for two weeks, that’s for sure.

As a corollary to seeing Hitchcock’s much-sanitized version of the nefarious doings of Ed Gein in Psycho, here renamed Norman Bates, on October 30, I’ve started watching the series on Netflix. It stars Charlie Hunnam as the “monster,” Ed Gein, living in the nondescript town of Plainfield, Wisconsin. Hunnam plays the serial killer as a shy, withdrawn, mother-obsessed, simple man. He speaks in a very low whisper. As his religious fanatic of a mother, Augusta Gein, is Laura Metcalf who harangues poor Ed continuously with the wages of sin and having carnal relations with women. She is possibly the true monster in the whole grisly sequence of events that unfolded in that sleepy town more than 60 years ago.

The episodes veer from the past chronicling Ed’s descent into madness and to the present day (late 1950s through 1960s) when Hitchcock receives word of such a character from meeting with writer Robert Bloch, the creator of Psycho, to depictions of Anthony Perkins who would be cast as the Gein stand-in, Norman Bates. Here Perkins is wrestling with his own debilitating secret, the secret of homosexuality. He is shown in one scene in the bedroom with 1950s heartthrob, Tab Hunter. Alfred Hitchcock is here played by an anorexic Tom Hollander, who I don’t think looks or sounds like the real Hitch.

Anyway, I do intend to watch the series, which is eight episodes long.

Have a good week.

And so it went!

And So It Goes

Today is Friday, August 1, 2025. Yesterday I was absent from this venue because I decided to see a film at the IFC Center in Manhattan at the last moment, even though weather forecasters were predicting flash flooding for most of the day. I waited until about 5:15 to reserve my ticket to see a 25-year-old parody of beach and slasher flicks called Psycho Beach Party starring the inimitable Charles Busch, Lauren Ambrose, and a very young Amy Adams. Last night marked the second night it was being shown and I couldn’t resist seeing a panel of the actor/screenwriter himself and the director of the production, Robert Lee King, after the movie was screened. I bought a senior membership ticket for the 7 o’clock show online at 5:15, so it was time to leave already.

The theater the film was being screened in was the largest auditorium in the venue, so I found an aisle seat a few rows from the stage. A young, perky woman introduced herself as the publicity director of the theater and said that the Q&A would proceed at film’s end.

The plot involves Florence Forrest (Lauren Ambrose), a sixteen-year-old high school senior looking forward to summer vacation on the beach in Malibu, California, who wants to hang out with the boys, and wants to learn how to surf, even though she’s a girl. Before you can say Gidget, Florence becomes involved with the cool boys on the beach. There’s surfer guru Kanaka (Thomas Gibson), surfers Yo-Yo (Nick Cornish), Provolone (Andrew Levitas), and B-movie actress Bettina Barnes (Kimberley Davies) who’s hiding out in a beach house from her studio that’s supposedly haunted.

Soon Ambrose is dubbed “Chicklet” by her on-again, off-again boyfriend Starcat (Nicholas Brendon), who suggests that she’s not even a real chick since she seems not to be interested in sex. She begins to take surfing lessons from Kanaka, and before long, a series of gruesome murders occurs. Florence becomes a suspect in these murders, as she experiences puzzling blackouts where she adopts another personality, that of Ann Bowman, an angry, lewd bondage enthusiast who makes Kanaka her willing submissive slave.

In this film, there are so many send-ups, primarily of 50s and 60s stock types and psycho killer movies, that the viewer gets lost in the mashup. Busch comes in as police captain Monica Stark who is charged with investigating the murders. It soon becomes known that Stark had an affair with Kanaka years ago before making captain.

The cast is extensive here; there’s Florence’s tightly wound mother Ruth (Beth Broderick) who plays her Donna Reed persona to the hilt. Even Amy Adams is a hanger-on among the beach denizens of this Southern California community. This certainly was one of her first film roles, and I had trouble initially identifying her. There’s also a Swedish exchange student named Lars (Matt Keesler) who is living with the Forrests.

The film works as high camp and it’s not necessary to think too much of its exalted aims; it’s just very funny as it pokes fun at these genres with a very light touch.

The interviews after the film were informative. Ben Brantley, originally from The New York Times, interviewed King and Busch. Busch appeared as himself (not in drag) and was dressed all in white. Busch mentioned that the film was adapted from his 1987 off-off Broadway play and that it was determined that more of a plot had to be inserted into the 2000 film adaptation. Busch also stated that the play was formless; there was no serial murder plot which was now added to the King-directed film. The use of Ambrose was mentioned by either King or Busch as they looked at many actresses for the role of Florence Forrest. I wanted to ask a question concerning Adams being in the film, but I lost my chance. However, her casting was addressed by both King and Busch. The director mentioned how she was a good dancer and that in one scene where there was some sort of dance competition among the beach kids, her better dancing skills had to be toned down a bit to suit her character.

The news out of Washington these days is so awful that I don’t know where to begin commenting on every horrible story. The Jeffrey Epstein scandal just gets weirder and weirder every day, what with the bizarre announcement today that convicted sex offender Ghislaine Maxwell, who was serving a 20-year prison sentence in a maximum security facility, was moved to a lower-security federal prison camp in Texas. This move comes a week after Maxwell met in private with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche at the U.S. Attorney’s office in Tallahassee. Details of that meeting have suspiciously not been made public. If this latest action by Dump’s private justice department doesn’t seem a bit suspicious, then we are all morons for not thinking there’s a rotting fish here.

Family members of Virginia Guiffre – one of the women who accused Epstein of sex trafficking and who died by suicide earlier this year – and other accusers of Maxwell and Epstein reacted to the news with “horror and outrage,” saying that it “smacks of a cover-up.” Cover-up indeed. They accused this president of sending a message that “pedophiles deserve preferential treatment and their victims do not matter.” When will Dump’s enablers finally sit down and realize how awful their Supreme Leader is and start putting up some resistance to him? I wonder if that day will ever come.

Have a good weekend, everyone.

And so it went!

Here is former Times critic Ben Brantley and Charles Busch next to him on the right.

Here is Robert Lee King on the left, Brantley in the middle, and Busch on the right.

And So It Goes

Today is Monday, July 21, 2025. It’s late here owing to Elliot and I watching a wonderful film on Netflix, Sinners, from early 2025. We tried to watch it before, but had some trouble understanding the dialogue. We successfully watched the entire film tonight.

Set in rural Mississippi around 1932, the movie stars Michael B. Jordan in dual roles, as twin brothers Smoke and Stack, who return to their southern town to open a juke joint, in their parlance, after trying to make it in Chicago as gangsters. They recruit their cousin Sammie (a breakout role for Miles Caton) who plays a mean guitar and sings the blues. Most of the early scenes reflect the brothers’ setting up a rundown mill and turning it into a money-making endeavor. They buy the property from a bigoted white man by warning him if he ever tries to bring the Ku Klux Klan there, they will shoot dead everyone who attempts to shatter their peace.

it’s not until much later that the film descends into a confrontation between those behind the doors of the juke joint and the vampires who are outside and trying to get in. This culminates in much gore, with plenty of stabbing and shooting and blood gushing.

Before the gore fest enthusiastically begins, the film makes a statement about music and how it connects generations of humans. A prologue tells the story of mythical figures throughout history with the ability to connect their ancestors and descendants – all the world, really – through music. In one of the movie’s best sequences, Sammie’s performance at the club transcends a singular musical moment to become a culmination of all that has come before and all that will be. You see dancers from ancient cultures in Africa, Asia, and elsewhere make their way through the 1930s crowd, while a modern man suddenly appears next to Sammie to bolster his blues with the buzz of an electric guitar. When you see this, you don’t wag your head in bewilderment because you realize the connection the director Ryan Coogler is making of the universality of music here.

Even the vampires appreciate music here as well, which is a rarity seen in any other vampire horror entry. In this film, the leader of the vampires is a white man called Remmick (Jack O’Connell) who galvanizes his growing horde with Irish music and dance, and his interest in Sammie comes from the perceived power of Sammie’s musical ability. He desires to not only take Sammie’s music for his own (“I want your music,” he growls at one point, “I want your stories”) but to use it to reunite with his own heritage, something he has been robbed of because of his vampiric nature.

Some people might think it takes a long time for the horror aspects of the story to break out, but when they do, they are immensely satisfactory to all horror fans. The film works as a melange of genres and it is very worthwhile to see on Netflix.

Today was an entirely ordinary day, given that Elliot and I will be leaving – once more – for Florida on Thursday to help celebrate my son’s imminent 40th birthday by taking him on a Disney cruise over the weekend of July 25th through the 28th, his actual birthday. No, he’s not regressing. The reason for this kind of excursion is that “Joshua’s” close friend and former boss has arranged this trip with me and he’s bringing his wife and two small children on the ship. This marks my first Disney cruise, so I’m sure this particular kind of cruise will have many darling amenities.

My last blog this week will be on Wednesday then.

And so it went!

And So It Goes

Today is Thursday, May 29, 2025. Today will be brief since it’s late here owing to my watching an HBO special starring openly out comedian Jerrod Carmichael whose special was called Don’t Be Gay and it revels in dirty jokes about his relationship with his white boyfriend and his frustration with his parents. All of the jokes emanate from his examination of his attitude toward himself and his acceptance of his gay identity. But he begins the special with expressing his inadequacy toward having a white boyfriend and how he had to enter therapy to deal with this. The show just has Carmichael stand on the stage at New York’s West Side YMCA in front of a gold curtain where he tells well-written, well-performed jokes. At one point, he admits he has an open relationship with his boyfriend and that his boyfriend fucks a guy with a dick that has “a lot of heft to it.” I thought this was quite funny. Then he slams all mothers for being crazy at one point; his mother, he admits, has become very religious. While his father has stopped talking to a large degree. He notices the difference between gay people who openly admit to being horny, while straight men have to do things like call Sydney Sweeney [a relatively new actress] “attractive” without admitting that they would love to bonk her. Carmichael basically revels in this honesty, while admitting he has issues with expressing feelings of inferiority toward white people. In 2024, this up-and-coming comedian starred in his own reality show called Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show on HBO; I watched some episodes from this series sometime ago and enjoyed what I saw. His humor might not be for everyone since it’s quite raw and contains vulgar language. But what comedian isn’t like this these days? Carmichael was born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

After watching this special, I indulged in watching a horror film from 2020: Final Destination which has spawned an entire franchise. This is the film that has as its theme can death be cheated after being tapped to die after a group of young teens bound for Paris exit a jet that eventually blows up in the sky, killing everyone onboard. It is Alex Browning (Devon Sawa) who has a premonition that the plane was going to explode in midair, so he and six other classmates get off the plane and watch it actually explode shortly after takeoff. He and the other survivors have thus cheated death, but will not be able to evade their fate for very long. One by one, the survivors fall prey to ingenious ways of dying. The only actor I recognized in this initial Final Destination film was Tony Todd who was the title character of Candyman some years back. In this movie, he plays a mortician. Of course, Rotten Tomatoes gave this horror entry a very low rating. I thought some of the death scenes were ingenious, but a little too farfetched to be believed.

Anyway, it’s getting late here.

Have a good Friday.

And so it went!

And so It Goes

Today is Saturday, December 28, 2024. For those of you are shivering over the prospect of another Dump presidency, there is a sliver of a silver lining in a new online Raw Story article by Tom Boggioni today entitled ‘Power will start to ooze out of him’: Trump warned he’ll be handcuffed as a ‘lame duck,'” in which longtime political observer Jonathan Alter describes him as a lame-duck president since he cannot run for another term in 2028, even though he might stupidly try. Thus the clock will be ticking on Chump’s hold of power on January 20, 2025.

Speaking with MSNBC host Charles Coleman, Jr. on Saturday morning, Alter said the president-elect stands no chance of running for a third term in 2028, despite speculation that he might attempt it, and lawmakers won’t have to go along with every insane demand he makes.

As Alter explained, “In the short and middle term, I think he’ll be held to account for all sorts of campaign promises. If he is not successful in lowering prices, as he promised he would do, and if his tariffs and other policies contribute to renewed inflation, he will be judged very harshly on that.”

“But remember, he’s not a candidate for reelection,” Alter pointed out. “He becomes a lame duck on January 20th. I know people talk about him getting around the 22nd Amendment and being in office forever – [just like Count Orlok in Robert Eggers’ new reimagining of the age-old vampire story of Dracula, in Nosferatu, which I saw today with Elliot and my friend “Seth”] – that’s not going to happen.” It’d better not, that’s all I can say.

Alter elaborated, saying, “His political power will start to ooze out of him [I’d like something else to ooze out of him, but I can’t say it here], and a lot of the accountability will be reflected first in in the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial elections this coming year and then in the 2026 midterms. But if he ends up governing with a billionaire boys club – [which all early indications seem to point to this grim reality already] – he’s already appointed 12 billionaires – that’s not what he promised. He promised to look out for middle-class working families and if his policies include deep cuts to very popular programs or other things that don’t really seem to resemble the populist promises that he made during the campaign, his popularity is going to suffer.” Let’s pray this does happen, sooner than later.

As I mentioned in the paragraph before, today marked my seeing the latest version of the undying Transylvanian vampire, Dracula, but this time, this remake of F.W. Murnau’s 1922 silent vampire film from writer-director Robert Eggers features a stunning performance by Lily-Rose Depp as Ellen Hutter, the tormented victim of Count Orlok’s (as he’s known in this adaptation) unwanted affection. In the role of the ageless bloodsucker is Bill Skarsgard as the terrifying count who is cast in shadow initially before his image slowly appears before the camera.

The film woos its audience with the beauty of Jarin Blaschke’s atmospheric cinematography and its nuanced performances by Lily-Rose Depp (daughter of Johnny) and Willem Dafoe as Professor Albin Eberhart Von Franz who is a specialist in the occult who is called in by Ellen Hutter’s physician, Dr. Wilhelm Sievers (Ralph Ineson). Dafoe’s Von Franz is the film’s answer to vampire hunter Professor Van Helsing who’s featured in the various Dracula incarnations on screen.

Set in 1838, in the fictional town of Wisborg, Germany, the plot centers on estate agent Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult who was marvelous in The Order and who played Dracula’s trusted servant in 2023’s Renfield) who travels to Transylvania’s Carpathian Mountains to meet the mysterious Count Orlok, an ailing nobleman interested in purchasing a decrepit estate in Wisborg. Thomas is sent by his boss, Herr Knock (Simon McBurney), to seal the deal in exchange for a nice promotion in the firm, and this is what he tells his newly married bride Ellen when he makes the decision to leave for Transylvania.

What follows Thomas’s sojourn to the Count’s decaying estate is predicated on Bram Stoker’s original Dracula in which he is preyed upon by the vampire, escapes the castle, and returns to Germany, while the Count sails for his new home, bringing scores of rats and plague to the city. Thomas attempts to return to Ellen before Orlok arrives.

It is Ellen who experiences night terrors and feverish dreams all throughout her young life and she informs her husband of her premonitions before he embarks on his journey to Transylvania. He vainly tries to soothe her fears, as he rationalizes his trip in light of his getting a solid promotion on his return.

The German Expressionism movement, which spawned Murnau’s classic, is prevalent in Eggers’ adaptation. The monochrome settings, the ghostly carriage arriving to escort Thomas to Orlok’s castle, images of Orlok’s silhouette behind the drapes, and the shadow of the Count’s clawed fingers cast over Wisborg indicate Eggers’ intention to keep the remake as traditional as possible.

Cast as Count Orlok is Swedish actor Bill Skarsgard who dispels the previous images of the immortal demon as personified by Bela Lugosi and countless others in the enduring franchise like Christopher Lee, Frank Langella (who played Dracula on Broadway and on screen in 1979), and others, where here he is more like a walking corpse. He exudes a skeletal look, complete with decaying flesh and a thick mustache, which is very new. Skarsgard speaks in a very low, gravelly voice, which at times, I had difficulty in grasping exactly what he was saying. Skarsgard previously portrayed the devilish clown It in two film adaptations of Stephen King’s immensely popular horror opus, first released in 1986 (which I actually read; it’s over 1,000 pages, as I recall).

As I write this review, I would be remiss to not mention how Elliot and Seth reacted to this new version of Nosferatu. Actually, they weren’t so impressed with the film. Both thought the movie progressed too slowly without much genuine horror. I do take umbrage of an actual film critic’s depiction of this version as very frightening, though. Though I thought the film had some good “jump” moments, I would say it wasn’t all that frightening. But I’m very jaded, you might say, since I’ve been a horror film buff all my life and I’ve seen every kind of horror film there is. Anyway, I would still recommend you go see this film and let me know if you feel the same way as my two companions’ views of it or that you disagree with their critique of it in that it definitely scared the bejesus out of you! And you thoroughly enjoyed the film’s Gothic touches.

And so it went!