Chuck

Literacy 2025: Book 9: The Midwich Cuckoos

John Wyndham’s classic (and often adapted) story of first contact in a quiet English village

Book
The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham

Synopsis
One September 26th, everyone in the prosaic village of Midwich in the English countryside simultaneously collapses, unconscious. While the area is inaccessible, aerial photography captures an image of an unidentifiable object in the center of town. The phenomenon ends a day later, with the object gone and all of the town’s residents seeming to be completely unaffected apart from losing a day. Then a few weeks later, they learn that every woman of childbearing age who’d been inside the radius of the phenomenon has become pregnant, and they’re all waiting nine months to meet their mysterious visitors.

Notes
This story is obviously familiar, both because it’s been adapted both under its own title and as Village of the Damned, and also from pop cultural references like Grant Morrison’s creation of “the Stepford Cuckoos” in his run on X-Men.¹ But I’m pretty certain that I read it when I was younger, and I wasn’t exactly sure what to make of it.

I’m still not exactly sure. My main take on it after reading it in 2025 is that it is overwhelmingly British. In fact, the first half of the book is so over-the-top in its stiff-upper-lip attitude that I started to wonder if I’d been misinterpreting it all along, and it was intended as a very dry comedy instead of sci-fi horror. The first half of the book almost plays like a comedy of manners, as the residents of this town have to deal with such indelicate topics as unwed mothers. It’s all viewed with a kind of semi-sympathetic detachment as the leaders — the intellectual men of the higher classes — use reason, modern technology, and organization to sort out all of the logistics of the problem.

It reads as comically chauvinistic, as all the women are flighty and impulsive and prone to emotional outbursts, but god love ’em they’re the strongest of us, etc etc.

Mild spoilers: the second half of the book, however, is mostly taken up by lengthy dialogs in which the main male characters discuss the implications of what is happening, and what a proper advanced English civilization should do in response. This is where most of the action of the book takes place, most often relayed second-hand, or in the form of a tense scene described in a circumspect way followed by pages and pages of men talking about it to try and make sense of it.

It was especially telling, to me at least, that the scene that is described as if it were the most shocking and unsettling in the entire story is one in which a man of higher rank is forced to have a kind of mental and physical breakdown by one of the Children. The idea of dozens of women being forced to carry alien babies to term and give birth to them is mostly glossed over with not even a hint of body horror, while the idea of a proper British man losing his shit is described as if it were so invasive and degrading that the narrator can barely even think of it.

That is the overriding tone of the entire book, the idea that British attitudes and culture made them uniquely suited to dealing with this problem and coming up with some kind of long-term solution. But it’s just as interesting that the book makes it clear that it’s the British sensibility and civic/political order that makes them uniquely vulnerable. That, I believe, is intended to be the most unsettling long-term horror of the book: the optimism that civility and rationality can tackle just about anything, confronted with an external threat that simply can’t be defeated by civilization and reason.

Verdict
A short (but somewhat dense) classic that is absolutely a product of its time — in particular the feeling of post-WWII uncertainty — and still resonates not just because of its sci-fi horror premise, but because of the idea of our own vulnerability on a cosmic scale. The various adaptations have put the most vivid images of the book squarely into pop culture, but not the aspects that it seems Wyndham found the most genuinely horrifying.

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Teenage clones of Emma Frost who were all psychically linked!

Opus: Coda

One extra observation about the movie Opus. Spoilers for the movie.

It’s been a couple of days since I saw Opus, and my opinion of it hasn’t significantly changed — I still thought it was fine, and I seem to have liked it a good bit more than the consensus on Rotten Tomatoes.

But there’s just enough weight to it that it’s been bouncing around in the back of my mind. I still don’t believe that the finale hits as hard as it could have. Partly because it’s presented as if it were a haunting, final twist, even though it doesn’t give enough weight to the most interesting questions.

The movie acts as if the most compelling question is “what really happened?” and then gives a lengthy answer to that. The question of “where are all the bodies?” is raised but not given enough time for us to really think about it, and then we see the answer played out in montage, as if that were the key question. And the most important question: “why did you do it?” is answered in a fairly lengthy conversation about evolution through strength vs intellect vs creativity, that doesn’t really answer anything we care about in that moment. The ideas behind the cult should’ve been made explicit earlier in the movie; the thing I cared most about at the end of the movie were the ideas behind the plan.

Another scene that I thought was a missed opportunity was Ariel’s conversation with her friend/crush-haver, the thrust of which was that she’s too mid to be interesting. In retrospect, I feel like this scene was working too hard to establish Ariel’s inherent likability, instead of planting the seed of an idea that would make the finale hit home harder. Ariel’s motivations seemed perfectly reasonable, so her friend’s comments just came across as cruel instead of helpful “real talk.” We all want our work to be noticed and valued, no matter whether we “deserve” it or not.

I think what’s most interesting about the movie ends up being lost, because it lets Ariel’s most significant character flaw get muddled: she was trying to ride the coattails of more famous and accomplished people, instead of trusting in her own voice from the start. But the friend just essentially says, “there’s nothing interesting about your own voice,” which just reinforces what everyone else is saying throughout the movie. I can understand having a character who’s giving bad advice to the protagonist, and I can understand a character being a manifestation of Ariel’s self-doubt, but I think even a less-corny version of “I’ll show him!” would’ve been stronger. Or better yet, some actual self-reflection on Ariel’s part.¹

As it was, there was nothing in the screenplay giving voice to the idea that Ariel was essentially the same as all the other influencers, paparazzi, celebrity interviewers, and writers who’ve become famous for writing about the accomplishments of other, more famous people. And there’s a lot giving voice to the idea that she stands out from the rest because she’s got genuine talent that’s being unfairly overlooked.

Even in the finale, when the specific question of “why was I chosen?” comes up, the answer presented is that Ariel had written something that stood out to Moretti as a memorable turn of phrase. Not that it was her drive, or her ambition, or her willingness to write about other people before she was ready to write for herself. It’s frustrating, since this seems like it would’ve been the perfect opportunity to set up the reveal that was to follow. But the movie was unwilling to let a murderer implicate Ariel for her part in the plan; it had to insist that anyone with any taste at all could recognize Ariel’s unique talent.²

So the last shot has Ariel, on camera, looking haunted as she finally realizes what’s happened. But the movie makes it seem like her haunting realization is that the cult of “Levelists” is still out there, all around us! There’s one in the studio with me, right now! And she’s pointedly calling my non-fiction book a “novel” to discredit it! That makes it seem like she’s Cassandra, telling everyone the truth, but cursed by external forces so that no one will believe her.

But the most interesting idea of Opus, I think, is in how much Ariel had been complicit. It’s the idea that the media cannot comment on itself. Fame isn’t actually about being appreciated or even understood; it’s about being seen.

It’s an idea that’s especially relevant when authors are timing their shocking exposés not for when the truth matters the most, but when book sales would be the highest. Bob Woodward has gotten the most attention (and vitriol) from people looking to him for his President-destroying abilities, seemingly oblivious to the fact that we’re living in a “post-truth society.” And even oblivious to the fact that All the President’s Men has arguably become at least as notable for its place in popular culture as its place in journalism or American politics.

There are two scenes in Opus that communicate this idea really well: first is when Moretti is peeking at Ariel’s notebook, and he only comments on her spelling of “sycaphants.” (i.e. He doesn’t actually care whether she’s writing anything defamatory, just as long as she’s writing about him). Second is when she finally gets her one-on-one time with Moretti, with explicit permission to ask him freely about anything at all, and she chooses to ask whether he really bought Freddie Mercury’s teeth. It was a wild piece of random gossip from earlier in the movie, it’s possibly the least relevant piece of information to everything she’s seen in the compound so far, and yet it’s the one thing that’s stuck in her mind. Because as much as she thinks of herself as a journalist, she’s still captivated by what’s evocative more than what’s necessarily true.

That’s the interesting realization that gets lost at the end of the movie: that her motivation hadn’t been to spread the truth, but to use the truth as the hook to make herself be seen and heard.

Oh, and also one other thing I liked about Opus was the title card. It finally gets sprung on us after several minutes of introduction and setup, and I thought it was excellently timed.

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I admit I should allow for the possibility that this was the movie explicitly telling us that Ariel’s not as brilliant a writer as she thinks she is, and that the reason she’s writing about famous people is because she actually doesn’t have anything interesting to say. But I say that if “Ariel’s not that great a writer, actually” was the point all along, and Opus is on some level a horror movie about self-delusion, then it’s a mistake to cast someone who just seems to be good at everything, like Ayo Edebiri.
2
Second-guessing again: I don’t remember the phrase itself, but I do remember thinking that it was nonsensical, like a teacher had an “unassuming chin” or something. At the time I just took it as a good-faith effort to write something that would sound like the kind of description a young, somewhat pretentious writer might choose. But if the movie is actually playing 4th-dimensional chess and I’m losing, then I suppose it could be an example of how Ariel was chosen not because her writing was good, but because it was memorable.

Kobo Libra Colour: Reader-Centric

An important addendum about e-readers and what we should expect technology to do

I’ve already written about the Kobo Libra Colour e-reader — one could even say I’ve written too much about it¹ — but I keep falling back into the style of aping internet tech reviews. I haven’t called out what might be the best thing about it.

One of my key takeaways is that it just “gets out of the way,” which is underselling it. The entire UX — and the distinction between user interface and user experience is especially significant here — is designed around letting you read (and annotate, if that’s what you’re into) your stuff.

There’s absolutely still a Kobo store selling DRM-protected licenses for books, just like on Kindle devices, but the key difference is that it feels designed around convenience instead of consumerism. It’s never more than a couple of taps away, but the key difference is that it’s always at least a couple of taps away.

On the home screen, the Kobo brings your existing library to the forefront, along with multiple entry points to OverDrive (if you have it connected) to get books from your library. On the “My Books” tab, the search bar defaults to searching through your library, and you have to explicitly choose to look through the Kobo store instead. Even on the “Discover” tab, which is essentially the Kobo storefront, OverDrive is given a prominent position at the top. Half the screen is dedicated to a daily sale offer, to get a recommended book for one or two bucks. And there are algorithmically-generated lists of recommendations to buy higher-margin books, similar to the Kindle. But it also gives prominent placement to your own wishlist, the books you’ve explicitly said you’re interested in, as opposed to the books that are being shoved in front of your face.

That’s in addition to the more “open” feel of the Kobo in general. There are multiple routes to getting your own DRM-free books and documents onto the device, whether it’s Dropbox, Google Drive, or a USB cable. It’s directly integrated with Pocket, if you want to read articles you’ve saved from the web.² Even the books sold through the store and containing DRM are typically in a variant of the standard EPUB format, instead of Amazon’s proprietary AZW variants.

It’s subtle enough that I didn’t think to call it out. And that’s a shame, because it’s a huge part of why I chose the Kobo in the first place.

I don’t want to give the impression that I’ve suddenly become one of the hard-line “no ethical consumption under capitalism!” types. Or for that matter, any of the people who’ve been running around the internet since the early 2000s like Charlton Heston at the end of Soylent Green, screaming “you’re the product! You’re the product!!!“

Partly because it seems false, but also because it’s infantilizing. We’re undeniably influenced to make decisions based on what profit-driven companies decide to present to us, but we’re still adults making decisions. I still would recommend a Kindle to anyone who’s still comfortable buying from Amazon, because they’re well-made devices being sold at a price that’s affordable due to Amazon’s margins. It’s all about each responsible adult choosing the point at which the concessions are more than they’re willing to put up with.

I think it requires consumers to be mindful-if-not-absolutist about the choices we make. And companies to keep the balance in mind, making sure that their responsibility to customers is the most important constraint. I feel like it’s easy for people like me looking at consumer technology, including something as innocuous as an e-reader, to pay too much attention to how sharp and high-contrast the monochrome Kindle renders its shopping cart on every page, instead of asking why there needs to be a shopping cart on every page.

1
And just so there’s no confusion: I’m obviously kidding about getting ad revenue for these posts, since this blog doesn’t have ads. It’s just my latest hyper-fixation, and I think it’s neat.
2
And you don’t mind using a product from Mozilla, since I guess everybody is a bad guy these days.

Literacy 2025: Book 8: Silver Nitrate

Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s novel about the dark magic of film

Book
Silver Nitrate by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Synopsis
Montserrat is a film buff working as a sound editor in the struggling film industry of early 1990s Mexico City. Tristán is her best friend since childhood, a former telenovela star whose fame was ended by a car crash that killed his girlfriend. A chance meeting starts their friendship with a director who’d made several beloved horror movies in the 1960s, before his career ended with an infamous unfinished film titled Beyond the Yellow Door. He reveals that the film had been made in conjunction with a Nazi sorcerer, who’d planned it to be the incantation of a dark, powerful spell….

Notes
I picked this one up for spooky season in 2023, based on how much I enjoyed Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic, and of course Silver Nitrate‘s fantastic cover. I’d assumed that this would be for the horror B-movies of the 50s and 60s what Mexican Gothic had been for gothic horror: a modern take on genre fiction that wasn’t a deconstruction, but an actual recreation with modern sensibilities.

Silver Nitrate is not that. Since it’s got a Nazi warlock casting black magic spells in Mexico City, it’s obviously got some of the trappings of classic horror movies. But its protagonists aren’t just living inside a genre story; they’re aware of the genre and are able to comment on it. But the two books do share an assertion of Mexico as a vibrant culture that defies attempts by Europeans to colonize it and Americans to outshine it.

The other thing it has in common with Mexican Gothic is that I wasn’t crazy about the pacing. My main criticism of the former book is that I felt like the climax came way too early; the last half was just an extended case of reacting to the villains revealing themselves and their entire plot. With Silver Nitrate, I felt the opposite: it spends so much time in the build-up that we don’t really get to enjoy the payoff. The story felt like it really got interesting once magic was revealed and we got to see the manifestations of it, but by that point, it was already rushing towards its conclusion.

A more minor criticism is that a lot of the dialogue felt like recounting the author’s knowledge of film history and Mexican film history in particular, and it didn’t seem natural as a result. I’m well aware that nerds talking about their favorite subjects can go on at length, but it still usually manages to feel more conversational and less like a well-researched article.

Verdict
A fantastic premise, a fun story, and an interesting look at movie history from the viewpoint of Mexican filmmakers, which I almost never see.

Weekly e-Reader

An update on the Kobo Libra Colour after a week and a half

Recently I wrote about buying a Kobo Libra Colour e-reader, and even though I could never seem to decide on how to spell “e-reader” or “e-Ink” consistently, I did decide that I liked it.

But that was a week and a half ago! How has it been holding up now that the initial honeymoon period is over? I figured I should write an update ~~to take advantage of that sweet sweet SEO revenue~~ to give people more information if they were looking for an alternative to the Kindle.

Overall

I still like it a lot!

It is a pretty simple slab of plastic, so it doesn’t have the same I just enjoy holding this allure that weirdos like me find in some gadgets. But it does what it’s designed to do and gets out of the way. It’s already settled into its place as my preferred e-reader, and I’ve used it almost every night since I got it.

The Screen

Below are some more close-ups of the Kobo Libra Colour’s screen than I gave in the last post, showing what it looks like with a little bit more color and also what it looks like with just text.

Clarity: Since I’ve been using it long enough that it’s become my “baseline,” I decided to get out the Kindle Oasis again and do a side-by-side comparison. It’s undeniable that the Libra Colour lacks the clarity of the Oasis; the color filter adds a faint-but-noticeable texture over every screen, whether it happens to be showing color or not.¹

The close-up photos below show the effect, especially when you show the close-up of text on the Kobo Libra Colour vs the Kindle Oasis. It’s that denim-like diagonal texture that appears over everything. The photos are somewhat misleading, though, since I can’t see that texture in person; my eyes simply can’t focus that close to the screen. Instead, it appears as a subtle newsprint-like graininess to the display, which makes the text seem less sharp than on a black-and-white e-Ink display like the Oasis.

No doubt that some readers find it intolerable, and I’d say that they have grounds to complain, since the super-sharp text is one of the main draws of e-Ink. But personally, I think the novelty of color makes up for it, even if you don’t intend to read comics on it. Most of the time I forget the grainy texture is even there, unless I’ve got the devices side by side.

Ghosting: I’d mentioned in the last post that ghosting is more noticeable on the Libra Colour than on previous e-readers I’ve used. It’s a side effect of the technology that makes e-Ink displays possible, and it’s fixed by a full-screen refresh. But it does seem to be more noticeable with a color display, especially in areas of red.

You can see it in the screenshots below in the cover thumbnail of Silver Nitrate, where the text that had appeared on the previous screen is still faintly visible. (You can just make out the words “whole day” and “with Dorotea”). Because the home screen is a scrolling list of color thumbnails, and the scrolling area isn’t updated every frame, it seems to be more noticeable here than anywhere else on the device.

Battery Life: The battery life on the Libra Colour has been good if not spectacular. I’ve never done a stress test to see how long it lasts, and I’ve never needed it and not had a charge available. But I’m so used to these things going days and still reporting nearly-full battery, that it’s just odd to see a battery icon on an e-reader at the 50% mark unless it’s been sitting in a bag for weeks.

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I haven’t seen a Kindle Colorsoft in person, but I suspect it will have the exact same effect since it uses the same screen.

One Thing I Like About Opus

Opus undercuts its own messages about fame by casting a bunch of really talented people

The best thing about Opus is its casting. As soon as I heard “A24 horror movie starring Ayo Edebiri,” I was on board before the trailer even finished.

And it delivers on the promise of “A24 horror movie” just fine. It’s got an overall message that lands well enough, although it lands with a feeling of “okay, I get it,” instead of being as stunning and impactful as it was probably meant to. That’s true of the rest of the movie as well. It all works in context, but nothing punches through as an image or a moment that demands to be vividly remembered.

Now that I’ve got an Apple Watch, it means that I watch everything with a heart monitor attached, and I can tell that Opus was suspenseful because it was buzzing about elevated heart rate every few minutes. It’s a testament to the maturity and confidence of the filmmaking that so many of the horror movie moments are suggested rather than shown.

But the perfect casting throughout is really what stands out. The protagonist is so in line with Ayo Edebiri’s public persona that I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that it was written specifically for her.¹ She has to be grounded enough not to fall for all the trappings of fame, but still enough of a nerd to find famous people fascinating. She’s got to read as driven, ambitious, and under-appreciated, capable of far more than she’s allowed to do. The overall message only works if she’s a superstar in waiting. And she’s got to be movie-star beautiful, but it’s something that she can put on and take off; it’s not her identity.

(Is it too obvious that I’ve got a crush on Ayo Edebiri? Even if she is a nepo baby).

John Malkovich is, obviously, excellent at being a menacing and unsettling cult leader, as well as seeming like the kind of actor who’d love the chance to play an aging glam rocker. Murray Bartlett is great at being unctuous and self-absorbed but mostly sympathetic. Juliette Lewis is Juliette Lewising the hell out of things.

Even with the smaller parts (in terms of overall screen time), it becomes clear by the end that they were played by the perfect person, the only one who could immediately read as exactly the role they’re playing. This guy looks like mostly-silent, creepy henchman but can also read as a basically normal guy who’d become a fanatic. This woman is a bad guy but is somehow still trustworthy. And so on.

I was excited to see Amber Midthunder’s name in the opening credits, because I felt like she’d proven her star power with Prey and was going to get the chance to show her range. So I was initially disappointed that it seemed like Opus had wasted her for a thankless part. But put in context of the rest of the casting, though, I think they needed exactly what she brought to the part. Even without speaking, she gives off a sense of intensity and makes it immediately clear that she could mess you up without breaking a sweat.

In fact, there seemed to be an interesting age divide across the cast. For the most part, the older actors seemed to be capital-A Acting, while the younger ones were more grounded and naturalistic. I interpreted this as subtle reinforcement of the idea that younger generations would be savvy enough to see through the bullshit, while the older characters had been pursuing fame for so long that they’d stopped second-guessing it. They all speak as if they’d seen it all, but they were the most eager to get swept up in it, and even see it as a reward.

Nile Rodgers and The-Dream are credited for the music in Opus and also as executive producers, although I couldn’t tell if that were just the featured songs, or the overall score. The score is excellent, driving home the unsettling feeling of a creepy cult. But for the songs, it feels like another case of choosing exactly the right people. They have to come across as being brilliant enough to inspire rabid fanaticism. While I didn’t fall in love with them as much as the characters seemed to, the moments when the movie turned itself over to showcasing the music seemed the closest to punching through and becoming unforgettable.

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Especially if you noticed that the character’s initials are the same as the actress’s. Like I didn’t notice for two days.

It’s Tough to Be Replaced

A post in praise of one of the best theme park productions Disney’s ever made

Photo of the It’s Tough to Be a Bug attraction sign by Michael Gray from Wantagh NY, USA

This weekend is the end of It’s Tough to Be a Bug, a 4D movie-type attraction that opened with Disney’s Animal Kingdom in 1998. (Before A Bug’s Life came out, memorably). It’s slated to be replaced with a similar show themed to Zootopia.

It would be hypocritical of me to throw too much of a tantrum about the loss of the show, since I haven’t taken the time to re-visit it the last several times I’ve been to Animal Kingdom. There’s a phenomenon on the internet for Disney fans to declare an attraction to be universally beloved and irreplaceable only after it’s been announced that it’s scheduled to be replaced, even if the attraction has lasted years with little interest. Twenty-seven years is a pretty good run for anything.

But it’s still a shame, because It’s Tough to Be a Bug is outstanding. I think it’s the best example of something that satisfies all the constraints of what I dismissively call “Corporate Entertainment Product” — constraints that often seem mutually exclusive with making art — and still manages to feel original, innovative, and even fearless.

As the centerpiece of Animal Kingdom, it had to carry through the overall theme of conservation, but it never feels preachy.¹ It had to promote an upcoming Pixar movie, but it felt more like world-building than opportunistic advertising. It had to be educational without sacrificing any of its entertainment value. It had to push the concept of a 4D movie like Honey I Shrunk the Audience or Muppet-Vision 3D, without making the effects feel like “cheap 3D tricks.” (In the words of Kermit the Frog). And it had to be family-friendly without feeling so watered down as to be forgettable.

That last bit is the part that makes it a real stand-out. The effects in the seats are genuinely surprising and clever — the shock of getting stung in the back by a hornet, and the funnier gag of having thousands of bugs crawling out of the theater underneath you. And I might feel differently if I were an arachnophobe, but being in a dark, “bug-spray”-filled room as giant black widow spiders dropped from the ceiling was exactly the right combination of fun and scary, making good on the overall premise of the movie that feels as exciting as a thrill ride.

Even its placement was ingenious. The exact same show ran for several years at California Adventure, but it was missing the “silent storytelling” of Animal Kingdom’s queue, which felt like you were gradually shrinking down to the size of a bug, to find thousands of insects living underneath the Tree of Life, performing a non-stop revue of Broadway-style edutainment.

Since a lot of us have seen the show countless times, it’s easy to forget how perfect the performances are. Especially Dave Foley as the well-intentioned master of ceremonies balancing insect evangelism with treating the show as a house of horrors. (“That’s right… acid!”)

The 3D effects are perfectly done as well. My favorite is the sequence where the flying insects turn an ad for an exterminator into a movie screen hovering above the audience, onto which is projected scenes from B-movies about giant insects attacking and terrifying humans. The woman’s hand holding a can of bug spray leaving the movie to come off the top of the screen and then spraying the actual theater full of fog: chef’s kiss perfection.

And of course, my favorite line from the entire show, which appeals equally to my love of clever showmanship and my inner 12-year-old boy. It’s during the finale song, when the bugs are all singing about how much humans and insects rely on each other, and the dung beetles sing:

“If it weren’t for the fact that we like the taste, you’d be out there wallowing in shoulder-high waste!”

Shoulder-high waste! In my opinion, that song is easily one of the top 5 Disney attraction songs.

So I want to be sanguine about the replacement. Again, 27 years is a good run by any measure. A new Zootopia movie will likely bring a lot more traffic to the centerpiece of the park, which can be underused.² And it’ll likely be an opportunity to bring in some updated technology, represent a wider range of animal life, and appeal more to guests outside of the US.

But it would be criminal if It’s Tough to Be a Bug were remembered only as a show that had fallen out of interest and become dated, because I think it’s near-timeless, and the perfect example of the kind of thing you can literally only do inside a Disney park.

1
Especially compared to how didactic some of the other attractions felt in the early days.
2
Until I was working at the park (on an unrealized project), I’d never wandered through the paths around the Tree of Life, which are often empty.

One Thing I Like About Black Sunday

An entirely unacademic take on Mario Bava’s classic gothic horror

Black Sunday (originally The Mask of the Demon) has been on my to-watch list for years, partly because of its place in horror movie history as Mario Bava’s official directorial debut, but mostly because of its amazing poster. I finally watched it last night¹, and it’s easy to see why it was so influential.

I’m by no means enough of a movie buff, especially when it comes to classic horror, to be able to put the movie sufficiently in context. Honestly, I’m more of a fan of the overall aesthetic of classic horror than the movies themselves. Often, it feels like trying to dig through the detritus of censorship, dated performances, and special effects that are still in their infancy, just to find a few moments that feel relevant to modern audiences.

(An exception is The Bride of Frankenstein, which I’d always dismissed as another famous-for-being-famous relic of the classic Universal Monsters days, until I actually watched it and realized that it’s a straight-up masterpiece).²

But despite all of the aspects that make Black Sunday feel too dated to be relevant — the melodramatic and often nonsensical plot, the weird dubbing throughout, the makeup that sometimes seems more comical than horrific — there are several shots and scenes that stand out like nothing I’d seen before.

Notably, its gruesome opening sequence, which shows an unrepentant witch cursing her inquisitor brother before having the spike-filled “mask of Satan” nailed onto her face. It suggests far more than it shows, but what it shows is brilliant: the brutal spikes coming straight for the camera, a POV shot of the executioner wielding a massive hammer, and a side shot of the hammer pounding the mask into place. I found a pretty good video from the “History of Horror” channel putting Black Sunday in context with the rest of Mario Bava’s work, in particular pointing out that the more shocking moments were part of Italian cinema reacting to a long period of censorship under Mussolini and after WWII.

To me, it set the tone that anything could happen, especially when I considered that Psycho came out in the same year, and I’ve been hearing for years how shocking and scandalous it was for that movie to even show a toilet.

Not to spoil anything, but the rest of the movie feels much more conventional. We discover that its pseudo-vampires need to be killed via a spike through the left eye, which is never shown explicitly but is still traumatic for those of us especially sensitive to that kind of thing. For the most part, the creatures just seem to have some kind of skin condition. One of our vampires can only be recognized as such because his hair has turned white and he’s got a five o’clock shadow. I’d been expecting it all to be much more lurid, but overall it feels more like a few stand-out images tied together loosely by a traditional classic horror movie plot.

But some of those images are amazing. Princess Katja’s appearance, standing in the ruins of a chapel holding two black dogs, is one of the most famous. There are long sequences that feel like a big swing for a filmmaker in the late 50s, with pervasive darkness punctuated by small areas of light. In particular, there’s a pretty lengthy sequence of a man following a lantern-carrying guide through the dark catacombs underneath a castle, and the shots get darker and darker until we can see nothing but the light coming from the lantern itself.

My favorite shots, though, are just before that. A carriage has arrived to pick up one of our protagonists to take him to the castle. It’s full-on gothic. Solid black, led by two black horses driven by a partially-decomposing man-out-of-time all dressed in black. Black Sunday doesn’t use camera effects anywhere else that I could identify, but the shots of the carriage are done in slow motion. The horses gallop through a dense, pitch-black forest through fog, and it’s strikingly dream-like. Or more accurately, nightmare-like.

Mario Bava is often named as one of the progenitors — if not the creator — of giallo. I’m still not familiar enough with the genre to be making any blanket statements, but it feels as if the roots are here, even without the addition of lurid color.³ Stories that fade into the background to allow strikingly stylistic images take prominence and become unforgettable.

1
As is a common theme lately, as part of my break-up with Amazon, as I try to watch as much as I can on Amazon Prime Video before my subscription expires
2
Not to mention being even more of an influence on Young Frankenstein than the original Frankenstein, like I’d always assumed.
3
Or maybe more accurately, even if the lurid colors here are pure black and bright white.

Paperlike Like

A review of some good iPad screen protectors with some great customer service

A few days ago, I acknowledged that even though I’m pledging to make a break from Amazon, they’re still hard to beat purely in terms of customer service. So when a smaller company with fewer resources meets or beats them in customer service, I think it’s worth calling out.

Last year I wrote a review of Astropad’s Rock Paper Pencil screen protectors, and I gave them an A-. The advantages¹ were that they can be removed and replaced pretty easily, and the included replacements for the Apple Pencil tips have a finer point that feels more like a ball point pen than a rubber stylus.

The more I used it, though, the more I got distracted by how much the Rock Paper Pencil degrades the screen clarity of the iPad. It’s certainly not unusable, but it’s definitely noticeable if you spend most of the day looking at higher-resolution screens. I also fell out of like with the feel of writing with the metal tip on the coarser screen protector. At first, it felt nostalgic like writing on the ruled paper inside my old Trapper Keeper, but over time it felt more like writing on the plastic cover of the Trapper Keeper.²

So I decided to go back to the Paperlike, which I’d used for a long time on previous devices and never had any major problems with. They’re more expensive, but keeping in line with Apple philosophy, it feels like getting the version without compromises for a device that I use a lot. As part of the pledge to break from Amazon, I ordered a couple directly from Paperlike, reasoning that the extra time spent for delivery would be worth it for the feeling of smug superiority for ordering from a smaller business.

The problem is that I’d completely forgotten that I’d already gotten one back when I upgraded my iPad. It had been sitting there unopened and uninstalled the whole time, and I gradually forgot about it as I labored on, drawing with rubber on unprotected glass like some kind of animal.

The company has a satisfaction guarantee, so I sent a note asking if I could return the extra one. I soon got an email offering me a store credit (for 150% of the cost of the item!) instead of returning it. That alone is pretty great customer service. But the downside to being a company that does one thing really well is that I didn’t need anything else from the store. I explained as much in a follow-up email.

And then, they just gave me a refund. They said I could keep the extra to pass along to a friend. I was so pleased by how easy (and non-wasteful) they’d made it that I felt like I had to spread the word.

This kind of thing isn’t exactly unprecedented, if you’ve been dealing with Amazon for a while, but the assumption is that they’re so big that they can write off the losses without a second thought. I’d imagine that it costs them more to do a return than it would just to let customers keep what they’d bought and issue a refund anyway. I don’t want to make it sound like Paperlike is some tiny mom & pop shop, but it’s also a bigger relative hit for them to favor genuinely good customer service, and it deserves a call-out.

As for the screen protectors themselves: they do exactly what they set out to do, which is improve the feel of using an Apple Pencil on the device, with as little degradation to screen quality as possible. And the latest version is all but undetectable once it’s applied; it just gives your screen a matte texture.

I wouldn’t say it’s exactly like writing on paper, but it’s definitely less slippery and more satisfying than writing on glass. And it has less grip than Astropad’s screen protectors, which means that writing or drawing for an extended time isn’t as prone to tiring out your hand.

My biggest criticism — only criticism, really — is that the process of applying it is kind of a pain. They do every thing they can to make it easier. There’s an instructional video that takes you through it step by step. It comes with a microfiber cloth and wet wipes, to clean everything at multiple steps through the process. And there are various stickers to guarantee that everything is lined up perfectly.

When you first open the package and see all of the guides and stickers, it can seem a little anal-retentive for something as simple as putting on a screen protector. But after you try it once, and at least in my case invariably fail, it all seems like a necessity.

Each package includes two screen protectors, ostensibly so you only need to buy one set for the lifetime of your iPad. But in my experience, it’s a necessity because the first one always gets messed up. You practically have to be in a NASA-style clean room to avoid getting nearly-invisible specks of dust or dirt or stray whiskers that’ll get stuck underneath.

I tried applying one to my 11″ iPad, after re-watching the video, cleaning off my desk and everything around it, carefully following every step, cleaning and dusting the screen thoroughly, and I still managed to get a tiny speck of dust trapped under the screen protector. It left the smallest air bubble in the center of the screen, which was barely perceptible but I knew would drive me insane over time. I’d decided to just relax and not stress about it and use the thing anyway, which is when I noticed that I’d applied it upside down. The screen protector was covering the iPad’s camera, and video from it had the Vaseline-smeared look of late-in-life TV footage of Elizabeth Taylor.

So it might be a good thing I have an extra package, since it might actually take me four attempts to get it right. Regardless, I don’t want my general ineptitude and lack of cleanliness to scare anybody away from the brand; they make the application as straightforward as is possible, and once you’ve got it installed, it works great and lasts for years. I’m a fan, and I wish I’d just kept using Paperlike all along.

1
Apart from the obvious advantage that they’re lower-priced than Paperlike
2
That’s the kind of solid analogy you don’t get from product reviews on The Verge.

Falling into Booktube

Rediscovering the intersection of art and commerce and my own overly-romanticized images of being an author

While I was looking all over for reviews of a new ebook reader, I was inadvertently training the algorithms to recognize that I’m totally super into books now. As a result, all of the theme park trip reports, video essays about Star Wars and the MCU, and video game reviews have fallen out of my recommendations, to be replaced with tons and tons of dispatches from Booktube.

A positive example is Good Books Lately, a YouTube channel and podcast hosted by a married couple chatting about what they’ve read and are looking forward to reading. They’ve also got a video giving attention to other people making book-centric videos. It’s exactly the kind of thing I would’ve hoped for, people talking about what interests them and giving recommendations for new stuff to read.

Like with everything else on the internet, there’s another side to “Booktube” and its darker, more-attention-deficient cousin “Booktok.” It blurs the divisions between earnest, low-budget projects from people wanting to share what they’re into; slick projects from influencers trying to sell books and book-adjacent projects; and slick projects trying to pass themselves off as earnest, low-budget projects. And as with so many things on the internet, it blurs the divisions to the point that I’m no longer sure the divisions are even relevant anymore.

But I seem to be more sensitive to crossing the streams of art and commerce when it comes to books than with other media. I don’t usually balk at theme park fans, video gamers, or amateur movie critics pulling in some cash by making unofficial-but-sanctioned advertising. Especially since it’s not always calculated, and it can happen even when you don’t mean it to.

This blog got a slightly higher than normal amount of attention¹ for that post about the Kobo ereader, just because my interests happened to intersect with something people were looking for. But it still hypocritically makes me uncomfortable to see a page full of thumbnails with people all reviewing, say, How to Solve Your Own Murder than it does with people reviewing a new episode of The Mandalorian or the Captain America movie.

I’ve been thinking about it since I re-read my post about How to Solve Your Own Murder and realized it sounds a lot more negative than it should. It’s a really good book! It takes a lot of talent to make something that even flows well and holds together structurally, much less something that’s engrossing enough to make an adult stay up way past his bedtime to finish. My issue was that it was jarring to see a book so fully committed to its protagonist being an aspiring mystery writer anxious about getting responses to her first submitted manuscript, and have it end with setting up the sequel(s) and giving thanks to literary agents and people who’d sold the film rights.

I already acknowledged that there’s a good amount of sexism and hypocrisy there. Not the least of which is the obvious fact that having a literary agent doesn’t mean that you’ve never been in the position of anxiously awaiting feedback on your early material. That’s how you got an agent and a book deal in the first place. All of this and more will be addressed in my upcoming book How to Unpack Your Own Prejudices.

The reason I found this particular instance jarring was because I’m holding onto an overly-romanticized image of authors and the process of getting a book published. It’s hard to shake the image of someone locking themselves in a room alone to pound out a manuscript, bravely letting it loose into the world, and then being rewarded for their brilliance. Even though it should be obvious that a book can’t sell itself any more than any other piece of media can. It’s not just naive to treat the commercial side of book publishing as if it were inexcusably gauche, it perpetuates the harmful idea that commercial success is a reflection of nothing but inherent quality.

But even so, I still think of it as the most direct and intimate form of media. It’s still a solitary author directly addressing a single reader. Even if they’re writing the most plot-driven of genre fiction or purely commercial franchise installment, even if they’re layering on unreliable narrators and unsympathetic protagonists, it’s unavoidable that they’re sharing at least a part of their true self with you.

And I think that’s why I irrationally make a stink-face when confronted with the idea of books meant to sell instead of books meant to communicate. And book recommendations that are chasing whatever is trending and popular, as opposed to reacting to books that you read because they were already trending and popular.

Another side effect of Booktube is it’s a reminder of just how vast the publishing industry is. Every time I get hyper-fixated on reading, I invariably overflow with the unearned confidence of the White American Man and start to think, I should write a novel! And when it’s just a solo reader and a solo writer in a room typing away at a keyboard, it feels attainable, like dipping my toe into a pond. When I see just how much stuff is already out there, from people who actually have something to say, it feels like stripping naked and blindly diving into Lake Michigan.

1
Although still laughably low if I were someone who cared about internet analytics.

Literacy 2025: Book 7: How to Solve Your Own Murder

A solid cozy murder mystery by Kristen Perrin about a paranoid elderly woman who provided all the clues to solve her own murder

Book
How to Solve Your Own Murder by Kristen Perrin

Series
Book 1 in the “Castle Knoll Files” series

Synopsis
When she was a teenager, Frances received a cryptic reading from a fortune teller, predicting her betrayal and murder. Sixty years later, her prediction comes true, and the now-wealthy widow is found murdered in her own home. Now it’s up to her great niece Annie to piece together the decades’ worth of evidence her estranged and increasingly-paranoid relative collected over the years, since Frances’s will stipulates that the first to solve her murder will inherit her entire estate.

Notes
This book makes its ambitions clear in the first chapter: it aspires to be a popular, cozy murder mystery. There’s a fabulous manor house in the English countryside, a close-knit village full of history and secrets, rivals, love interests, and it even forces a scene where everyone is assembled to hear the solution to the mystery. Because of its premise, it’s also got stories taking place across two timelines, and a present in which the protagonist can make self-aware commentary on the story she’s in.

And it also really works. This book is extremely entertaining. The characters are pretty fun, the mysteries are well-paced, there are a few “a-ha!” moments of varying success, and the book makes sure that its readers are operating at the same pace as its characters, with frequent recaps and “did you notice the clue?” type moments. I was pleased with myself for solving part of the murder before the protagonist, and while I didn’t love the rest of the solution, it was fine and didn’t seem to come completely out of nowhere.

The book does veer a little too far into Lifetime Television for Women for my taste, with its love triangles and drama and sexy detective. I’m wondering now whether I should’ve started wearing aftershave when I was younger, since it’s apparently the first and most significant thing anyone notices about a man. And towards the end of the book, it becomes really blatant that it’s being set up for a sequel if not an indefinitely ongoing series. The acknowledgements of my copy include thanks to the people who sold the film rights. It’s entirely possible I’m hopelessly naive about the book business, but this struck me as putting the cart before the horse to a degree that left a bad taste in my mouth.

I don’t mind formula when it’s a single fan trying to recreate something they love, but I’m more suspicious of it when it feels as if it’s been mass-produced in a lab. In retrospect, even my own experience reading it felt as if it had been scientifically tuned to match the desired standard for these books: having fun reading off and on for the first day or two, and then suddenly getting engrossed at the halfway point and staying up way too late to finish it in one night.

There’s undoubtedly some level of sexism to that criticism, since I don’t seem to have as much problem with openly commercial literature when it’s about boy stuff instead of girl stuff. Michael Crichton famously wrote Jurassic Park specifically to be “the most expensive film ever made.” And Anthony Horowitz does this kind of thing all the time; commercial writing is practically the entire basis for my two favorite series of his mysteries.

But with How to Solve Your Own Murder, it made me go back and reconsider all of the affectations that were piled onto its protagonist: all the scenes where she’s biting her lower lip, her repeated insistence that she lacks confidence even as everyone around her just assumes she’s not just competent and qualified but uniquely gifted, her unassuming style that has her in old band T-shirts or sundresses that hide her figure, the way that she seems to be blithely ignorant of her own attractiveness. It seemed sincere — although disingenuously self-deprecating — when I thought that the character was supposed to be a surrogate for the author. But it feels a little false and chemically when I see that the protagonist is supposed to be a surrogate for the target audience. Not a manic pixie dream girl, but a just-as-artificial awkward, self-effacing, and somehow irresistibly attractive archetype that’s made by women, for women.

Verdict
Fun and extremely readable, with a solid mystery, an interesting double-timeline gimmick, and a great hook. I just wish I’d discovered it more organically, and it hadn’t been carefully and specifically constructed to be an “instant bestseller.”

Somehow, irony feels good in a place like this

My favorite thing about the much-parodied AMC ads

Achieving the coveted status of A*Lister — please, no need to bow, I’m really just a regular person like you are — means that I get to see Nicole Kidman’s pre-show ad a lot.

It’s become only semi-ironically “iconic,” with way too many obvious parodies, and an increasingly-less-amusing ritual in the theaters. Back when it was still fresh, I was at a screening of Glass Onion where a couple of guys gave the ad a standing ovation as soon as it started, and that was delightful. Now, at least here in Los Angeles, the ad still always gets a round of applause, which is still cute I guess?

Anyway, there is one part of the ad that is still consistently funny, every time. Kidman describes, “that indescribable feeling we get when the lights go dim, and we go somewhere we’ve never been before.”

And every time, it cuts to a shot of the gate opening in Jurassic World. A movie that is literally, explicitly, about people choosing to go back to a place where we’ve been before.

Last night before Mickey 17, they showed the ad again, and I was a little disappointed to discover that they’ve “fixed” this in the version of the ad that runs currently. When Kidman talks about going somewhere that we’ve never been before, it no longer shows Jurassic World.

Now it shows Pandora, the planet they go back to in Avatar: The Way of Water.