This is horror at its finest, perfect foreshadowing, and perfectly relatable. Back then, home-recording on a blank C90 was all the rage. As the story goes on, Roger Kent laments the 'hungry look the adults of the village give to him, building the suspense beautifully with his own innocent introspection.

    "D’you know why gerbils sometimes eat their own babies? It’s because they’re afraid they’re in danger, and think they’ll be safer back inside."

The layers of horror begin to multiply; the village has no other children and hungry-eyed Mrs. Mason then delivers the seminal warning to Roger.

     “Never go out at night, whatever sounds you hear!”

What an absolute chiller. I can still feel the echo of old goose pimples. I don't want to spoil anything as I implore you to read this book, but of course, Roger begins documenting the strange goings-on at night in the village with the aid of his tape recorder. Midnight arrives.

    "Listen! Children! I can hear children laughing. I can hear their voices calling softly ..."

I think what was so memorable about this story was two things; the first being a profound, if subtle sadness that infused it - this desolate, sad village with its terrified adults and the spectral lure of connection for a lonely little boy with only his tape recorder to talk to.

    "Listen ..... It was a girl singing alone this time. I’m sure it was a girl. Her voice was so high and sweet and sad, it made me ache."

    The second is the final line of 'Siren Song’ which is really where the story's power lies. Again, I implore you to read it for yourself. Yes, it's a short, children's story but even now, reading back after so long, it still thrills me and brings back memories of listening again and again, as if trying to decipher meaning or explanation. Alcock, like all masters of storytelling, leaves this with its reader.

Looking at reviews online, much criticism has been levelled against Ghostly Companions - the majority seeming to believe that it's not really for children. Perhaps, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. I feel like a lot of the stories in Ghostly Companions were ahead of their time - they had depth and weren't always resolved in a pleasant manner.  There were no rounded edges; and many of the other stories carry an air of melancholy, as of course all good ghost stories do. I think what 'Siren Song' taught me was not just about playing with format and voice, but about simplicity and mystery; about leaving the reader with an emotional bruise; something that they'll still carry thirty years later. This story, whilst only short, carries a huge amount of power.

Scott King’s podcast investigates the 1995 cold case of a demon possession in a rural Yorkshire village, where a 12-year-old boy was murdered in cold blood by two children. Book six in the chilling, award-winning Six Stories series.

‘A taut and gripping tale that deftly skewers the perfect balance of crime, thriller and horror. Intriguing, disturbing and impeccably crafted – I was riveted from the first page’ Lucie McKnight Hardy
 
‘Matt’s books are fantastic’ Ian Rankin
 
'A stunning new episode of the powerful Six Stories series. A masterful storyteller, Matt Wesolowski is my go-to writer for literary horror' C J Cooke

_______________________

In 1995, the picture-perfect village of Ussalthwaite was the site of one of the most heinous crimes imaginable, in a case that shocked the world.

Twelve-year-old Sidney Parsons was savagely murdered by two boys his own age. No reason was ever given for this terrible crime, and the ‘Demonic Duo’ who killed him were imprisoned until their release in 2002, when they were given new identities and lifetime anonymity.

Elusive online journalist Scott King investigates the lead-up and aftermath of the killing, uncovering dark stories of demonic possession, and encountering a village torn apart by this unspeakable act.

And, as episodes of his Six Stories podcast begin to air, and King himself becomes a target of media scrutiny and the public’s ire, it becomes clear that whatever drove those two boys to kill is still there, lurking, and the campaign of horror has just begun...
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Matt Wesolowski is an author and English tutor for young people in care. His short horror fiction has been published in numerous anthologies such as Midnight Movie Creature, Selfies from the End of the World and Cold Iron. Matt was a winner of the Pitch Perfect competition at Bloody Scotland Crime Writing Festival in 2015. His debut thriller, Six Stories, was an international bestseller, and TV rights were sold to a major Hollywood studio. A prequel, Hydra, was published in 2018 and also became an international bestseller. Changeling (2019), Beast (2020), Deity (2021) and Demon (2022) soon followed suit. He lives in Newcastle. @ConcreteKraken
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Demon is published by Orenda Books and is out now. 

There were a lot of books and movies that left a permanent impression on my young brain. Angel, Barton Fink, Coffy, The Dark Backward, Do the Right Thing, Evil Dead 2, Fight for Your Life, Hour of the Wolf, Motel Hell, and Mystery Train are a few that immediately spring to mind. But it was a low- budget movie from 1986 that made me think I could make a movie or write a book.

I must have been about twelve years old when I discovered it in the Horror section of Castle Video, a small ma-and-pa rental shop that used to occupy the space now leased by a 50% off card store.

My parents had just moved us to Long Island from Queens. I had no friends, hated school, and missed the city. My only lifeline was Castle Video and the schlocky exploitation movies I discovered therein. It was Castle Video where I would meet C.J. Ramone, the replacement bassist for the punk rock group Ramones, who encouraged me to rent the gloriously un-PC teen musical comedy Rock 'N Roll High School.

It was Castle Video where I would meet my first weed dealer. And it was Castle Video where I developed one of my many boyhood crushes on an older woman (the skanky give-no-fucks barfly that temped as video store clerk for the perpetually absent owners).

It was also the place where I unearthed the VHS cover of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer in one of those weird puffy clam shell videotape cases that all the Mondo movies used to come in; Faces of Death, Mondo Cane, Mondo Trasho--they all had those cases that swallowed your thumbs if you held them too tight. But this one was different. It was obvious right away that this was not another tasteless documentary or no-budget Poverty Row flick.

The cover was black-and-white, except for cobalt blue writing beneath the central photograph, a slogan that desperately read, “He's No Freddy, He's No Jason ... He's REAL.”

What jumped out immediately was how the cover's stark image of a man in a wife beater staring grimly into a medicine cabinet mirror contradicted the gimmicky tag line. This was not some movie monster ... but it was the perfect monster for the Eighties. As I would later learn, 'Henry' was based on Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Toole, two American drifters and serial killers who were tried and convicted of at least some of the crimes they confessed to.

The real Henry committed his last crime the year that I was born, which made this all the more fascinating to me, but what really stood out was that cover. In the proverbial depths of dingy horror covers, from the cheesy likes of Blood Diner and Return to Horror High (a picture of a literal skeleton in cheerleader garb) to the adorable menace of Critters and Munchies, this solemn-looking picture stood out like a sausage on an all-vegan breakfast platter.

The film itself proved to be just as unique as its cover, and just as bleak. In it, Henry (Michael Rooker in a performance that can best be described as a whistling kettle) is a quiet nomad who travels from lonely city to lonely city, eating himself a meal or buying himself some cigarettes, before murdering those who serve him.

This isn't the intriguing part, but it is the part that likely kept the interest of audiences weened on a steady diet of slasher films. The interest really begins when we meet Otis (the inimitable Tom Towles, who you might remember as the stoic Norman Stoneface in Showtime's Girls in Prison or the ill-fated deputy in House of 1,000 Corpses), a snaggletoothed hilljack and Henry's friend from prison. The two have been living together in squalor ... until Otis invites his sister Becky (Tracy Arnold) to stay with them.

What follows is a series of tense scenes between Henry and Becky and a number of equally alarming scenes of Henry and Otis. Becky would seem to be a catalyst for the rage both of these men harbor and much of the film's more engrossing material concerns Henry's concerted effort to tamp down his violent desire in the face of the seemingly pure Becky.

Despite its shaggy minimalism, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer contains some narrative threads that make for truly great, if simple, storytelling. But that's not what got me as a kid. If I'm being honest, most of what I just described went completely over my head as a teenager.

What stood out at once was the seediness of its design: 'Henry' was a cheap movie by 1986 standards, costing only $100,000 and being lensed on 16mm film, with all footage shot in a single month. The resulting picture is dark, gritty, ugly, and weird. In short, it is all the things that I look for in a good horror movie.

Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer made me want to make films that captured some semblance of reality while still telling a bold story. The first time I saw Otis ambling around their apartment in his torn and tattered tightie whities, I thought, “Fuck, man! This feels like I'm hanging out with these losers!”

You get a strong sense throughout the film that you've been invited to spy on the lives of actual degenerates as they go about their day-to-day lives, a sense that is only amplified when Henry and Otis videotape one of their attacks on a family.
After raping the husband and wife and forcing them to watch as they murder their son ... who knows? We only get snatches of the scene from what the boys taped on their stolen camcorder. When they subsequently sit down to watch the footage of their attack it's as if they are watching a video store rental of their own.
This sequence curiously predates Michael Haneke's Funny Games by eleven years (twenty-one years if you only count the American remake), but it plays with the exact same family assault scenario and naked portrayal of all-American voyeurism.

Like I said earlier, most of this shit went over my head at the time, but good art is usually filtered through the subconscious anyway, which explains why I can't watch my Troma film, Hemo, without thinking of the urban destitution of 'Henry.' I owe this one a massive debt, for good or ill.

You could say there were two film experiences that changed me forever--Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer and the Dreamland Productions of John Waters.

All of these films share things in common, chief among them the powerful presence of their locations. There are few cliches as tired as the one about how the city is a character in and of itself, but in these films the cliché couldn't be more true--Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer is a Downtown Chicago film and John Waters movies are quintessentially Baltimore.

These were the movies I smuggled out of the video store when my parents were preoccupied. They were the films that I sneaked into my bedroom and played on volume so low it forced me to sit with my face practically resting on the television screen. It was my initiation into Taboo, my introduction to a world that I would revel in for the rest of my life.

Multiple Maniacs was the first John Waters film I'd seen that didn't feature a teen heartthrob or a future daytime talk show host, but it had left little impression compared to what was to come. The first time I threw on Female Trouble, I was convinced that I had somehow seen a demented home movie. The degree of set design ingenuity and overall inventiveness was undeniable, but the thing as a whole looked and felt wrong compared to what I'd grown up thinking of as a motion picture. For that reason alone, its existence pleased me to no end.

Watching Divine in male drag rape divine in female drag was a revelation my little brain wasn't prepared for; this level of creative commitment and technical wizardry convinced me that I, too, could make movies. In fact, I would credit this one even more than 'Henry' or Eraserhead with giving me the confidence needed to make my first film.

There has always been something of the fable about Waters' work, as if they all took place in some bizarro world kingdom (like the Mortville of Desperate Living or the rundown movie house from Cecil B. Demented) and we got to be his captive audience. When I was writing my first script (Of Bitches & Hounds), I modeled it after this fabled world and its residents.

The more I think about it, the more I can remember writing an early draft in which all of the characters had names like Francine Fishpaw or Dawn Davenport. That first draft was awful and unusable, of course, because I'm not John Waters ... but his work has always influenced me and I continue to strive to make things that tickle me as much as his films have always tickled me.

This was when movie covers were done right—the box art for Multiple Maniacs made it look like a snuff film, the cover for Desperate Living suggested some obscure training video for how to open the world's scariest leather bar, and the case for Female Trouble topped them both.

It was a tight shot of a mohawked Divine with facial scars, her large frame bound by chains and handcuffs. In the picture, she is staring, wild-eyed, and snarling at someone we cannot see. To her right, we see an image of an overweight hag with a hook for a hand and to her left a full grown woman in a child's dress screwing her face up at the camera.

“In Crime, She's Beautiful, Sadistic, Gross, Vile ... It's Divine!”

How was I supposed to stay away from this? If crack was marketed like a John Waters movie, every fat weirdo teenager in America would be smoking base.

These odd and unforgettable movies showed me just how much a sense of place can mean in the scheme of things. They taught me that a truly unforgettable work of art should be anchored by the physical space that that story inhabits.

Don't believe it? Watch Pink Flamingos and tell me there's another place on earth where a blue-haired David Lochary could go unnoticed tying sausage links around his flaccid cock and flashing them to young ladies. Show me another city where Henry could dump that bloody suitcase without arousing unwanted attention. And tell me where else in the world Waters would have gotten away with building a literal city of trash for his unsung masterpiece, Desperate Living.
​
This is how I got hooked on regional films and why I continue to seek out obscure examples of shoestring flicks made with all the passion and flare of someone's hometown. In hobbyist terms, this is my Americana.


​

​Some godless horrors are more unforgivable than others, baseless prejudice and willful ignorance chief among them.

In The Proud & the Dumb, a group of white separatists suspect their friend of being a traitor. After a few seemingly innocent remarks call his blind loyalty into question, the group decides to confirm its suspicions in the only way it knows how - by employing insults and threats.

These nasty threats are met with answers the group is unwilling to confront, answers that lead to a series of increasingly absurd and violent acts.

From author/filmmaker Bob Freville (Battering the Stem; The Network People; Pig Lipstick), The Proud & the Dumb reads like a mutant cross between court room testimony and the worst backyard barbecue banter this side of Hell.

Horror, and weird fiction is in a golden period in terms of the amount of fantastic stuff being produced, it is a joyous time to be in. The latest piece of fantastic news for the genre is the announcement of a new a bi-annual zine of British strange fiction CloisterFox, the brainchild of Verity Holloway, this zine is launching later in the year, and it needs our help to get the ball rolling.  

Today we welcome Verity to Ginger Nuts of Horror to talk about what the zine hoopes to achieve and how we can help, as well as some of the perks you can get when you back this project.  

Hello! I’m Verity Holloway, a writer and editor in East Anglia.

I’m launching CloisterFox, a bi-annual zine of British strange fiction. Every six months, I aim to release a zine of six captivating, genre-bending short stories in an A5 perfect bound volume, richly illustrated, ideal for throwing in your bag.

Zines are once again having a moment. The pleasure of having a beautiful book to hold and admire is something every reader can relate to. It's long been a dream of mine to host excellent speculative fiction in a beautiful setting. CloisterFox is a wry creature strolling somewhere he shouldn't, lending vivid colour to dreary train journeys and bus stop ennui.

I want to publish stories that creep uninvited along quiet corridors. Stories missed by shoppers hurrying by. Secrets, miracles, universes behind locked tenement doors. Ghosts and gallows. The dress in the attic as seen through a haze of neon. Tell me things I don’t know. Tell me the dreams you can’t forget. Tell me strange things.

What We Need & What You Get
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I have the contacts, I have the experience, and I have the time. But CloisterFox can’t get off the ground without money. High quality colour printing is expensive, and I intend to pay all contributors and produce a zine to be proud of, to keep, and to return to. I've costed everything: your support means I can confidently launch the first issue and hopefully also the second, which will be considerably cheaper to make as all the initial branding and templates will be done. I also intend to offer an ebook to maximise accessibility.


By backing this campaign you will be helping to pay:

• The six writers in each issue
• The graphic designer
• Printing
• Digitisation
• A guest illustrator
• My fee as editor
• Misc fees like website costs, packaging, online vendor charges etc

If we make more than our target:

• All funds that go over target will be ploughed into the next issues of CloisterFox
• If we do well, I’ll look at the possibility of paid advertising or the services of a publicist for a day.
• Raising a good sum opens up the possibility of little niceties like decorated envelopes, free bookmarks etc in the future.

What do you get? Perks include:

• Zines! Both paper and ebook
• Beautiful enamel pins featuring the words of the CloisterFox patron saint, Montague Summers: “Tell me strange things.”
• Professional story critiques at a bargain price
• Your name enshrined in the back of the first issue
• A character named after you in Verity Holloway's next novel (no-one too evil)

Who is on board?

For graphic design, we have James Powell of Grey Bear Communications. For editing, we have myself. As for the stories, CloisterFox will be hosting these six superb writers in the first issue:
​

1. Dark Matter by Michelle Paver


This might be the quintessential Polar horror story. In 1937, Jack – an impoverished and rather embittered young man – finds himself joining a small group who plan to winter-over in a remote part of Spitzbergen, the ominously named Gruhuken. But something awful might have already laid claim to Gruhuken, and as the Arctic night draws in, Jack is trapped by the elements, the dark, and whatever walks outside… The isolation and creeping dread are palpable in every one of Jack’s unsettling diary entries, and Paver cleverly keeps us guessing whether any apparent supernatural force exists entirely in Jack’s increasingly paranoid mind. A haunted-house story in the freezing darkness, this is an absolutely unforgettable – and very scary – read.


2. Thin Air by Michelle Paver


Paver’s second entry on this list is also set in the 1930s, but takes us instead to the Himalayas and the world of mountaineering. Ambitious Kits and his less confident brother Stephen are part of a small team determined to summit Kanchenjunga in the wake of a controversial and mysterious earlier expedition – and soon find themselves touched by what happened to their predecessors. This is a breathtaking novel, with some set pieces which are arguably even scarier than Dark Matter, and a keen edge of survival horror in the perilous mountain setting.


3. The Terror by Dan Simmons


Taking the known facts about what happened to Sir John Franklin’s doomed 1845 expedition to discover the Northwest Passage as his jumping-off point, Simmons crafts a narrative of both survival horror and supernatural chills. Leaping between two timelines, multiple points of view, diary entries and other storytelling devices (including an extended reverie which takes us to the spiritualist craze of the 1850s), this is immersive fiction at its finest. Anyone wanting to see the flip-side of this concept (rather than hundreds of men and one – albeit incredibly impressive – supernatural monster, how about two men and thousands of angry toad-creatures?) should check out Albert Sànchez Piñol’s often overlooked Cold Skin, set on a remote Antarctic island and exploring big themes of human nature, compassion, and imperial aggression.


4. Ararat by Christopher Golden


Although this book starts with a team climbing Turkey’s Mount Ararat, the story soon turns from survival horror into full-on demonic terror when international investigators into the apparent remains of Noah’s Ark, found high up on the mountain, open a strange black sarcophagus. Friends: never open the sarcophagus. Trust me on this one. Golden’s pacing is relentless, and his characters sharp and relatable (even the less-pleasant ones), which makes for a nail-biting experience in which literally anyone could be next to meet a ghastly end. An absolute page-turner of a novel, and one which leaves me frantic to read Golden’s January 2022 release, The Road of Bones, following a spooky highway in the Siberian tundra…


5. The Dark by Emma Haughton


Although it’s no secret I’m a fan of supernatural horror, The Dark is very much grounded in reality – you’d probably find it in the thriller or crime section, but it shouldn’t be overlooked by horror fans due to its fast pacing, serious claustrophobia, and the slowly unravelling sanity (or is it?) of the protagonist. It’s a locked-room mystery (which might appeal to fans of the paranoia in John Carpenter’s 1982 film The Thing) in which a troubled A&E doctor takes an overwinter position on a remote Antarctic base, and becomes convinced that one of her colleagues is a murderer. While we’re on thriller-type wintery books, February 2022 sees the release of Breathless by Amy McCulloch, where an untested journalist follows a legendary climber on his ascent of a deadly 8000-ft mountain – but there’s a killer in the death zone. Utterly compelling, detailed, and realistic (the author is a keen mountaineer), I found it just impossible to put this one down.


6. The Hunger by Alma Katsu


Just as The Terror took the real-life Franklin expedition and added a supernatural twist, so The Hunger takes the real-life Donner party and adds something supernatural, cannibalistic, and contagious stalking the unfortunate would-be emigrants to California who grind to a halt in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Told through multiple points of view, this is another book to get truly lost in: Katsu has clearly done her research, and the everyday details in this historical novel are vividly brought to life. The threat is creepy and nebulous right until the nightmarish climax, which combines survival horror, psychological horror, and monsters – what could be better? And if you like people-eating monsters in human form combined with a stark, remote snowy setting, I think you’ll also really like the 30 Days of Night graphic novels (vampires descend on a town in the Alaskan winter) and Antonia Bird’s 1999 film Ravenous (cannibal shenanigans in the Sierra Nevada, laced with black humour and a palpable homoeroticism). Turning it on its head for a moment – where the horror takes place in the protagonists’ hometown, and the ideas of deprivation and cannibalism are explored through the perspective of an Anishinaabe community facing the apocalypse – is the brilliant The Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice.


7. The White Road by Sarah Lotz


If there’s something that really creeps me out, it’s cave horror: The White Road cunningly combines both cave horror and Everest horror to create an absolute masterpiece of survival and supernatural suspense. Simon is desperate to attract traffic to his ghoulish website, and in pursuit of content he goes down a little-used cave system in Wales… and gets trapped, in horrible circumstances. Once out – and something of a celebrity – he decides to tackle Everest next. The harsh conditions, perpetual presence of the dead, and skilfully drawn characters combine to provide an extremely vivid and chilling reading experience.


8. At The Mountains of Madness by HP Lovecraft
    
You probably knew this was coming: together with Who Goes There? by John W Campbell – another 1930s novella – At The Mountains of Madness established many of the images we associate with Antarctic horror, particularly the idea of uncovering survivals from ancient alien civilisations. The narrator presents the story as a warning against further meddling in Antarctica, because his expedition discovered proof of an alien race living there that’s not quite dead – just waiting to be found, with catastrophic consequences for humanity. It’s a tense read, with plenty to enjoy about the descriptions of the ancient things and their ruined city. A clear connection can be drawn between this and John Carpenter’s The Thing (although that film is adapted from Who Goes There?) but I’d say, tongue only partially in cheek, that an excellent film which grapples with these ‘ancient aliens’ and ‘cannot be allowed to escape the continent’ themes is Paul WS Anderson’s 2004 film Alien vs Predator. Yes, that one. Did you know it’s set in Antarctica? And it’s much, much better than you’d expect, with some beautiful scenery shots quite reminiscent of Frank Hurley’s photography on the Endurance expedition, and all the ‘underground pyramid as breeding machine for xenomorphs’ action horror you could wish for. To my mind, the perfect popcorn film.


9. The Shining by Stephen King


Baby, it’s cold outside – and we’re trapped in here with ghosts, a malicious building, disturbing visions, and a violent alcoholic who’s about to go roque-mallet-crazy… The weather joins forces with the Overlook Hotel to trap the Torrance family inside this haunted-house on steroids, and the descriptions of the wind and snow are eerie and atmospheric, as are Wendy’s frequent allusions to the cannibalistic fate of the Donner Party. The Shining is a big, intense novel that’s a classic for a reason. Similar themes of violence and domestic abuse feature in Christina Henry’s Near The Bone, a very different book about a woman living under the shadow of her husband in a remote cabin in the snow-covered woods, until one day cryptid-seekers turn up… this is a page-turner which absolutely drips with menace.


10. The North Water by Ian McGuire


I have a real weakness for books set amidst the blood, guts, and privations of the 1800s whaling industry, and while The North Water might be ‘literary fiction’ – whatever that means – it’s also horrific in the extreme. Disgraced ex-army surgeon Sumner takes a position as a doctor on an Arctic whaling ship, where he meets Henry Drax, master harpooner, and one of literature’s most chilling depictions of single-minded ferocity. Sumner’s flashbacks to his participation in the war in India are chilling too, and the two men stalk each other through near-death experiences, starvation, and all kinds of gruesome, stomach-turning moments. The book moves along at a breathtaking pace, plunging the reader directly into its world. Other horrendous stories set in this particular milieu I’d recommend are The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe, which ticks off a litany of terrifying experiences including a quasi-premature burial, shipwreck, survival cannibalism, and capture by an imagined indigenous people of the Antarctic; and Captain of the Polestar by Arthur Conan Doyle, which deftly marries a ghost (or siren?) story with that of a ship trapped in the Arctic ice.

​A vivid ghost story exploring identity, gender and selfhood, set against the backdrop of the golden age of polar exploration. Perfect for fans of Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights and Michelle Paver’s Thin Air.

In the wake of the First World War, Jonathan Morgan stows away on an Antarctic expedition, determined to find his rightful place in the world of men. Aboard the expeditionary ship of his hero, the world-famous explorer James “Australis” Randall, Jonathan may live as his true self―and true gender―and have the adventures he has always been denied. But not all is smooth sailing: the war casts its long shadow over them all, and grief, guilt, and mistrust skulk among the explorers.

When disaster strikes in Antarctica’s frozen Weddell Sea, the men must take to the land and overwinter somewhere which immediately seems both eerie and wrong; a place not marked on any of their part-drawn maps of the vast white continent. Now completely isolated, Randall’s expedition has no ability to contact the outside world. And no one is coming to rescue them.
​
In the freezing darkness of the Polar night, where the aurora creeps across the sky, something terrible has been waiting to lure them out into its deadly landscape…
As the harsh Antarctic winter descends, this supernatural force will prey on their deepest desires and deepest fears to pick them off one by one. It is up to Jonathan to overcome his own ghosts before he and the expedition are utterly destroyed.

This piece contains massive and comprehensive spoilers for Netflix movie Don’t Look Up, and Netflix series Midnight Mass.


I caught Don’t Look Up over the holiday period - I want to say the day before Christmas Eve, just me and the missus, sitting on the couch in a living room full of seasonal decorations.


It made me cry.


If my Twitter feed is any indication, there is, Lord help us, already A Discourse about the film, so let me start by addressing what little of it has leaked on to my timeline, the better to dismiss it and get on with talking about the movie itself; no, you don’t have to like it, that’s obviously an absurd position. If it didn’t work for you, regardless of your politics, it didn’t work. I find it sad-to-depressing-to-disparing that in the year of our Lord 2021 we still have to say shit like this out loud, but okay, sure, consider it said. I’m not writing this with the intention of converting you to being a Don’t Look Up stan. Frankly, I flatter myself that neither of us have that kind of time. I’m writing for the same reason I always do; because I’m feeling something and I want to try and unpick why. That’s the beginning and end of it, for me.


Discourse dismissed, let’s get into it.


And let’s start here; Don’t Look Up is not a comedy. It’s not a satire. It is, in point of fact, one wafer-thin allegory away from being a documentary. And, because it’s a documentary about our shared pathology (as 2021 bleeds into 2022 and the manmade climate armageddon unfolds while we all drive around in our PollutionMobiles and the 100 companies responsible for 71% of the emissions that left at current, essentially unchecked levels will probably kill everyone aged 40 years old or less reading this [and your kids and grandkids] go right on funding governing parties and changing their logos to various shades of green, while privately trying to solve the problem of preventing their personal security staff just killing them and taking all their stuff when the Shit inevitably Goes Down and they retreat to their bunkers), Don’t Look Up is, in point of fact, a fucking horror movie, of biblical proportions.


I’ve long been lamenting the death of satire, and Don’t Look Up is the first movie of the modern era I’ve seen that seems to understand that. Whilst there were moments that made me chuckle (most courtesy of Cate Blanchet, clearly having the time of her life as the monstrous, delightfully amoral “News” anchor Brie Evantee) this ‘comedy’ is nothing of the kind, and I think some of the baffling-to-me descriptions of the film as ‘bad’ stem from this misunderstanding; it’s labeled comedy, it’s not funny, therefore it’s bad. And honestly, it’s yet another one of those moments as a viewer where I feel like an alien; because, for me, that’s such mind bendingly bad film criticism that I kind of don’t know where to start. But okay, let’s start with; I think it’s rarely good criticism to complain about what a film isn’t, rather than what it is. I don’t give a shit what the studio labeled Don’t Look Up; nor, even, what the intentions of the writers and performers were in producing it. I mean, that’s a lie, as a film nerd I’m fascinated by that type of thing; but as a viewer, I give not one solitary shit, and neither, with the greatest possible respect, should you. What we, collectively, should concern ourselves with, IMO, is what’s in front of us.


And Don’t Look Up is a horror movie about the end of the world; worse, about an apocalypse we’re living through, right now.


Because The Comet is real. It’s called Climate Change, and we’ve had decades to do something about it, and generations of our leaders have failed spectacularly to do so, and now, as the first shockwaves of this apocalypse are at our doors, as more and more smartphone footage fills our timelines with floods and wildfires, until one day, the smartphone is in your hand, and you’re livestreaming the end of your world, right fucking now, our leaders still do nothing. And they do nothing for the same reasons the leaders in the movie do nothing; political expediency, and profit.


The key character in this regard is Mark Rylance’s Peter Isherwell, a masterful combination of Mark Zuccerberg, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos; he has Zuc’s Total Information mindset and data access, but his air-headed, emperor’s-clothes lunacy is pure Musk. Whilst I could have done without the implicit linkage of neurodiversity with sociopathology, I can’t deny that the character gave me the willies; there are few things in life scarier than seeing someone with an obviously, transparently insane ideology that is entirely unmoored from reality being taken incredibly seriously by everyone in power.


*looks to camera*


And, like, sure, if you were expecting to laugh, and you didn’t, I guess… but the line between horror and comedy has always been razor thin, right? And the punchine of the movie, over and over again, is We’re All Going To Die Because The Small Number Of People With All The Power Are Insane; so, no, it’s not fucking funny, but that doesn’t mean it’s not good.


For fuck’s sake.


And sticking with Isherwell, it’s worth working through just how excruciatingly on the nose his arc is. President Orlean (Meryl Streep absolutely nailing the vain vacuum at the heart of so many career politicians) initially rejects the end of the world data because she’s facing a tough midterm, then does a swift 180 once she realizes it can be turned into a political win. At a press conference announcement that probably looks over the top to anyone young enough not to remember “Mission Accomplished”, she rolls out The Science, The Plan, and The Hero (yet another brilliant turn in a bit part, this time from my man Ron Pearlman). And the plan is not subtle, and it might not work, but - crucially - operation Blow The Damn Thing Up is launched early enough that, if things do go wrong, there’s time to work on plan B.


That is, until Isherwell starts whispering in the ear of the president. Literally.


And, again, look; if that’s too on-the-nose for you, fine, I get it. But, like… that is basically what’s going on, right now, in every single lobbying firm in Washington (and London, and Beijing, and and and). And for me, the moment the rockets turned around was an absolute express-elevator-down moment; I mean, my stomach lurched. Because while I didn’t know the specifics, the shape of what had just happened felt painfully familiar.


It’s kinda like the moment you find out they locked the doors.


And honestly I do think it’s kinda genius; of course the meteor is made up of rare precious metals and minerals. Of fucking course it is. And of course Elon Zuck-Gates thinks he can design drones that’ll break it apart when it’s close enough to the planet that the treasure will be recoverable when it lands.


And of course, of course, the fucking president goes for it.


(Sidebar: The reason they go for it, which the movie makes explicit at the end is, of course, that the risk calculation is fundamentally different for them; they have [or think they have] a Get Out Of The Apocalypse Free card. The mega rich and uber powerful are not like us. And we are not really real to them.)


The final third of this movie… again, I know there’s detractors out there, but for me, it felt like a super high speed rollercoaster ride through the fucking nightmare ghost train crazy mirror internal psychological landscape that anyone who’s been paying attention to the climate catastrophe has been experiencing for the last two decades and more. The ‘we support the jobs the meteor will bring’, the ‘nobody cares about peer review, look, the corporate sponsored people are clear it’s going to be safe’, the fucking govenrment helpines for those who are feeling anxious about the meteor, where kind operators will explain the benefits we all stand to gain from the riches the rock contains… I swear, I’m choking up again - with sadness, with rage - just recalling it.


Arianna Grande headlining a massive concert in aid of Comet Awareness (in a movie brimming with star turns in small parts, maybe my favorite of all, absolutely glorious, and ballsy) while Streep's mob chant the ‘Don’t Look Up’ slogan… I mean, fucking hell, the planet is melting, burning, and 40% of Americans think the last election was stolen by Joe Biden.


The End isn’t nigh. It’s fucking here.


Were there issues? Sure. Though I think it was Leo’s best performance to date, I’ll never be a huge fan, and there were elements of his character’s arc I wasn’t wild about; his flip/flop seduction by Isherwell and Orleans didn’t really make sense, for me; I understood it mirrored his sexual seduction by Evantee, and it’s not like poachers don’t sometimes turn gatekeeper in the land of Climate Science (money is a powerful thing) but I felt it undermined the character a bit, and Leo simply didn’t sell it, for me; unlike his final reel freak out, which felt painfully real. Similarly, his wife’s forgiveness (however deliciously barbed) was just the wrong side of pat, for me; I get the beat the movie was screaming towards by that point, but I just felt the moment needed a bit more time. That said, the meltdown he has in the studio near the end, as the dam bursts and he realizes the people that are running things really, really don’t have a clue was one I found deeply cathartic, and really spoke to the power of the piece as a whole.


Because, check it out; the only sane response to the current ongoing, still-evolving, still worsening climate crisis is howling bug-eyed fear. It really is. When Leo had his studio meltdown, screaming into the camera about the horror of the moment, I felt it; the rage, the fear, and the wave of despair immediately after the moment as he/I realized that the truth makes you look crazy.


Because the only sane response to our current moment is to scream like a lunatic.  Because, absent a transformation of the global approach to power and material distribution on an order of magnitude we’ve literally never seen, the end of the world is very fucking Nigh indeed, and saying that makes me feel like one of the Time Square crazies with a fucking sandwich board, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s true.


And in that moment, I thought, well, at least someone else gets it; even if that someone else is Leo DiFuckingCaprio of all fucking people.


It’s not just him, of course. This was, as any movie is, a huge team effort, and it’s clear the front of camera team all understood what the writers and director were trying to achieve. And I’m profoundly grateful to them. Because while the movie doesn’t provide hope, it did give me something I hadn’t realized I’d been craving, and in doing so, served to validate my continued instinct towards producing dark fiction that really dives into the viscera of the things that cause me the most fear, and pain, and sadness.


The movie told me, simply, that I wasn’t alone; that there are others out there who understand the depth of the chasm we’re in, the incredibly powerful forces that militate against meaningful change; most of all, that, though you will be sneered at for doing so, bug eyed, screaming terror is, in point of fact, the correct, sane response to our current moment.


So, thanks for that. And welcome to 2022.




KP
16/1/22




For a more detailed, audio-based discussion of this movie, please pop over to YouTube and check out George Daniel Lea and I in conversation.