time machine // database // travel guide
spacetime coordinates: 1980’s Florida
No Man of God is a 2021 American crime mystery film directed by Amber Sealey and written by Kit Lesser. The film stars Elijah Wood, Luke Kirby, Aleksa Palladino and Robert Patrick. It is based on real life transcripts selected from conversations between serial killer Ted Bundy and FBI Special Agent Bill Hagmaier that happened between 1984 and 1989. (wiki)
spacetime coordinates: 2005 small town of Wheelsy in South Carolina
Slither is a 2006 American science-fiction black comedy horror film written and directed by James Gunn in his directorial debut.The film stars Nathan Fillion, Elizabeth Banks, Tania Saulnier, Gregg Henry, and Michael Rooker. (wiki)
The Boys is an American superhero streaming television series developed by Eric Kripke for Amazon Prime Video. Based on the comic book of the same name by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson, which was originally published by DC Comics under their Wildstorm imprint before moving to Dynamite Entertainment; it follows the eponymous team of vigilantes as they combat superpowered individuals who abuse their abilities.
The series stars an ensemble cast that includes Karl Urban, Jack Quaid, Laz Alonso, Tomer Capon and Karen Fukuhara as the titular vigilantes, and Antony Starr, Erin Moriarty, Dominique McElligott, Chace Crawford, Jessie T. Usher and Nathan Mitchell as members of the “Seven”, an official superhero group run by the conglomerate Vought International, who, while maintaining a lofty façade, are shallow celebrity figures prone to do horrendous things in secret. (wiki)
Lovecraft Country is an American horror drama television series developed by Misha Green based on and serving as a continuation of the 2016 novel of the same name by Matt Ruff. Starring Jurnee Smollett and Jonathan Majors, it premiered on August 16, 2020, on HBO.
The series is about a young black man who travels across the segregated 1950s United States in search of his missing father, learning of dark secrets plaguing a town on which famous horror writer H. P. Lovecraft supposedly based the location of many of his fictional tales. (wiki)
I cannot add much the excellent review by Lauren Michele Jackson in the New Yorker. In spite of my own initial enthusiasm for the new takes on Lovecraft’s inheritance – I was dumbfounded by both what she aptly signals (the lack of melodrama, the lack of tension and of bi-dimensional characters), as well as the sensation (sensed by others as well it seems) that everything has to be spelled out, and that we are made an unwitting participant in a prestige piece that takes all historical struggles either as a clear given or that tries to dispel all ambiguity and supply all the answers. All the ideological problems are already marked as finished, explained or to be check-boxed. It is as if Lovecraft’s perverted sense of inchoate slimy materialism, both formless, as well as degenerative and racist, gushes out to over-write, over-describe, literally to suffocate and overload all that could be said or shown about power or class relations. It is as if the desire to actually finally film and remake black history in a more just way, and the urgency of this nowadays, ends up over-labeling and indexing all historical settings and severely limiting all outcomes, circumscribing all relationships of this series, beyond the actual segregation and racial apartheid into some sort of finished, vacuum proof product.
This said, I liked the portrayal of racist occult cop KKK cabal – and how the Lovecraftian monsters were turned against the racist cops, one thing that I badly miss happening in reality. The cabal of rich white immortalist Southerners is a good addition, but then again they all feel incredibly bi-dimensional and out of a right-wing Satanist plot proliferrated today by QAnon. That itself, might be a good lead, yet it remains undeveloped and rudimentary. A much better (comics this time) example I have in Saladin Ahmed’s and Sami Kivelä Abbot by Boom Comics – the villain being much more tangible upper class white old dude academic or even a dark web intellectual (IDW) that uses brutal occult forces to recruit and transformed the black characters into monsters. The battle over Lovecraftian Necronomicon manuscripts and the high seats of academia is much more engaging. I am not sure if flop is a good term, just because season 2 was cancelled in 2021, or because it definitely has somehow closed down some interesting and very important Lovecraftian – systemic-racism venues.
I speak thus with a certain deeper and bitter dissatisfaction, but who am I to say. Although there was so much production effort, good vfx, CGI galore, good action science, and ample classic era pulp exaggerations and body horror ontological excess – it still left a vacuum. Body swapping is an important feature of this series and it really shows the corpo-reality of it, the pain and difficulty of such a metamorphosis which I also found does not get representation in movies. The creature and monster design is just wow, and yet i am still left with the “Sundown” pilot episode as setting the scene, and being actually the best of the entire series (especially the Shoggoth design).
I feel it could well have stayed a long feature movie. There is also an attempt at K- and J-horror “Meet Me in Daegu”, with finally an impartial portrayal of the Communist side during the Korean War that is not being dehumanized or instantly relegated to the enemy side. There is also another intriguing eps with the multiverse branchings (“I am” eps), portal jumping trough a larger multiverse with various highlights of black history from Harlem Renaissance to Afrofuturist imaginings, places and other times where black lives matter. This was finally one funky adventure with a black middle aged woman in the role of inter-dimensional Hippolyta – at its center!
I liked a lot of over the topness of it, the kitsch, the way everything is carnal as well as magical, the way racism is more horrific than the most horrific of Lovecraftian entities, at the same time like Michele in her review, felt actors skills and characters got reduced to just anti-racist Ghostbusters. I like the queering of it and the actors effort, yet I am left craving for something else, maybe miss a touch of that good weird fiction that has resulted in such good literary and aesthetically interesting materials (dunno why the prose of Sofia Samatar Monster Potraits comes to mind).
spacetime coordinates: Set during Korea’s Joseon Dynasty, three years after the Imjin War. (the Japanese invasions of Korea 1592–1598 – three years after the famous “Battle of Unpo Wetland”)
Kingdom (Korean: 킹덤; RR: Kingdeom) is a 2019 South Korean political period horror thriller streaming television series, created and written by Kim Eun-hee and directed by Kim Seong-hun and Park In-je. The series is adapted from the webcomic series The Kingdom of the Gods, which was authored by Kim Eun-hee and drawn by Yang Kyung-il.
Set on a fictional, medieval-inspired Joseon, Kingdom explores the story of a Crown Prince, as he sets to investigate the source of a mysterious plague that begins to ravage his country. It stars Ju Ji-hoon, Ryu Seung-ryong, Bae Doo-na, Kim Sang-ho, Kim Sung-kyu and Kim Hye-jun. // wiki // imdb)
A special feature-length episode of the series, titled
was released on July 23, 2021 and focused on the supporting character Ashin played by Jun Ji-hyun.
The episode acts as a sidequel to the second season of Kingdom and explores the backstory of Ashin, the mysterious heir of the Northern Seongjeoyain tribe village, and the origin of the resurrection plant that triggered an unprecedented cascade of tragic events that swept through the Kingdom of Joseon. // wiki // imdb
spacetime coordinates: 1994 Shadyside / 1978 Camp Nightwing / 1666 Union
The Fear Street Trilogy is an American horror film series, with varying sub-genres of horror. Directed by Leigh Janiak, from scripts and stories she co-wrote with other contributors, the films are based on R. L. Stine‘s book series of the same name.
Fear Street Part One: 1994 is a 2021 American teen slasher film directed by Leigh Janiak. It is the first installment in the Fear Street trilogy and stars Kiana Madeira, Olivia Scott Welch, Benjamin Flores Jr., Julia Rehwald, Fred Hechinger, Ashley Zukerman, Darrell Britt-Gibson and Maya Hawke. The film follows a group of teenagers in Shadyside who are terrorized by an ancient evil responsible for a series of brutal murders that have plagued the town for centuries. imdb
Fear Street Part Two: 1978 is a 2021 American teen slasher film directed by Leigh Janiak. It is the second installment in the Fear Street trilogy, and a sequel to Part One: 1994. Starring Sadie Sink, Emily Rudd, Ryan Simpkins, McCabe Slye, Ted Sutherland, Gillian Jacobs, Kiana Madeira, Benjamin Flores Jr. and Olivia Scott Welch, the film centers on a group of teenagers in Camp Nightwing who must come together to survive a possessed counselor’s murder spree. imdb
Fear Street Part Three: 1666 is a 2021 American supernatural horror film, and the final installment of the Fear Street trilogy after Part One: 1994 and Part Two: 1978. The film follows the origins of Shadyside’s curse in the mid-17th century, Sarah Fier’s witch trial, and the survivors in 1994 who try to put an end to it. imdb
Settlers is a 2021 British-South African mystery & thriller/Sci-fi drama film written and directed by Wyatt Rockefeller starring Sofia Boutella and Ismael Cruz-Córdova.
TimeSpace Warps 