House of Nettles: #nat reviews

Chimes at Midnight (1965) - ★★★★★

2026-02-04T02:02:25Z

Welles's absolute, undeniable stage presence is on full display. He makes himself huge physically, visually, and emotionally, and then spends the entire film toppling himself, playing both roles of Jack and the giant. This is a film about a man full of bluster and bonhomie who, despite being superficially well-liked by all around him, continually pushes their tolerance to the breaking point, needling them, sapping their patience and their wallets even as he makes them laugh uproariously. Falstaff is good friends with all who meet him but never quite truly beloved by any, and when he finally acts upon presumption of that love he is utterly destroyed.

Knowing that Welles identified so personally with Falstaff, went to such great lengths to make this film happen, and even said that this role was his life's work makes its function as self-critique to the point of self-destruction all the more pointed. Fallstaff lies baldly and constantly, and we know from F for Fake that Welles saw his own role as a liar and charlatan; this film suggests that as much as those lies were an intrinsic part of himself, they were also a source of grief. Orson Welles, a man who always presented himself as larger than life, in this film where he is at his largest is also at his most exposed, raw, and vulnerable.

The Shining (1980) - ★★★★½

2025-10-11T12:15:03Z

I came into this viewing kind of prepared to be underwhelmed. My recollection of this was of a visually striking film that was pulling in too many directions at once to really land thematically, kind of a collage of vibes and imagery that just swirls around without landing anywhere. But this watch made me feel like there was actually more there than I was giving it credit for.

I think a lot of the sense of disjointedness i inherited from the book. They clearly wanted to keep the title, which means keeping the concept of "shining" and Tony. But it all feels superfluous in the context of the film's orientation around Jack rather than Danny. It's really only relevant in motivating Danny's interactions with Dick Halloran—a character who himself is done pretty dirty, existing only to explain the titular shining, deliver a warning about room 237, bring a means of escape, and then die instantly upon setting foot in the hotel. I can't help but feel that a story less chained to the novel could have restructured all of this into something more interesting.

I do think Kubrick and Johnson made absolutely the right call in the way they framed Jack. The novel's more sympathetic portrayal (driven, reportedly, by King's own identification with the character) would undercut the ability to use the character to address patriarchy and abuse, and instead center the hotel as an ontologically evil place that corrupts indiscriminately. The darker, unsettlingly suave portrayal by Nicholson immediately raises red flags in his interactions with his wife and kids, and sets up a clear implication that his cruelty isn't just the product of either alcohol or the Overlook.

The film is pointedly full of internal contradictions, and one in particular stood out to me. In the initial interview scene, Jack acts as though he has no knowledge at all of the previous murders. But not only does he identify Grady's ghost by sight, he specifically mentions having seen him *in the newspaper*, suggesting he was following the killings at the time and had known about them for years. We can then read his seeking employment at the Overlook as, in essence, a willing first step towards violence. Perhaps the hotel called to him, but he chose to answer that call.

This then helps clarify the rest of the film. Jack Torrance isn't a flawed-but-fundamentally-innocent man being seduced by pure evil, he's a man who before the film ever began had fully bought into the patriarchal system that told him he must be an effortlessly brilliant writer and any roadblocks must be caused by his useless wife (whom we see not only cooking bountiful meals but doing Jack's actual job of maintaining the boilers) and his needy son. The Overlook doesn't corrupt him, it enables him. It provides the same background radiation white men have always experienced, just amplified: an understanding that he's always right, his actions are always justified, and that anything that pushes back against this worldview is an affront that must be destroyed with violence.

The hotel itself has its own interesting background that's simultaneously undersold and reinforced by the "Indian burial ground" cliché. The whole thing is conspicuously decorated in Diné weaving patterns despite the offhand mention that they "had to repel a few Indian attacks as they were building it". The only person of color we see in its walls is Dick Halloran, who the hotel ghosts refer to later on with a racial slur. It's a place of conquest: an imperial stronghold built on the literal bones and decorated with the cultural spoils of a people dominated and subdued. In its heyday, Stuart Ullman tells us, it hosted the presidents who oversaw this terrible empire and the (implicitly European) royalty from whose fetid stock the project of colonialism was born.

We see this heyday with our own eyes, first in Jack's visit to the ghost bar and then in the famous final shot. In most ghost stories, the previous grisly murder is the seed of trauma that blooms into a full-scale haunting, but the roaring 20s loom too large in the Overlook to make it credible that Grady's massacre was the point of origin. Grady himself is subsumed into the party, the endless ghastly New Years celebration of the rich and powerful, to which he is consigned to the role of a mere waiter. In this way, the film cannily links imperialism and patriarchy: the party, dancing on the bones of a conquered people, flouting Prohibition with glasses held high, too powerful to be touched by the laws they impose on the plebians at their feet, is the bloodthirsty engine that drives the caretakers to their violent fates; and it does so by nurturing in them visions of this conquest in miniature, driving these working men to play out the same murderous and domineering triumph in the only space where they have any real power: the family.

Hollow Knight: Silksong - ★★★★★

2025-09-20T10:27:27Z

This is an impressive follow-up to Hollow Knight not just in that it's another very good game (absolutely not a guarantee from a developer with only one game under their belt, no matter how successful that game was), but in that it understands deeply what makes a game effective specifically as a sequel. It's a checkerboard of expectations met and subverted: the core logic of the combat and feel of movement is essentially the same, but the single most powerful tool in HK1—the downward aerial "pogo" attack—is dramatically harder to use. Even early game bosses often do 2 masks of damage, but Hornet can heal three masks at a time. The familiar spell mechanic is back (renamed "skills" but otherwise identical) but it's augmented with equippable weapons that use a totally new economy.

The result is a game that presents the player, from the moment they first try platforming with the new diagonal aerial attack, with a potent cocktail of familiarity and challenge. This proved too much for players who expected their skill at HK1 to automatically make them excellent at Silksong, but it's excellent design. A new game should challenge old players, and when those challenges subvert the best play patterns in the first game, they increase the challenge more for experienced players than they do for players who (perhaps boldly) pick up Silksong as their first entry in the series. Silksong demands that the player adapt to new styles of movement and resource economies, but at its heart it's still a game about careful positioning and weaponized acrobatics.

So, is it hard? Not really. For all the hullabaloo on release about how difficult Silksong is, the main difference between its main quest bosses and Hollow Knight's are that the early-game bosses are somewhat harder, which is about what one would expect from a sequel. Once you get past the first few intro bosses, you end up at around the level of HK1 bosses in similar positions like Mantis Lords, Soul Master, and of course our very own Hornet. Even the optional bosses are mostly pretty straightforward, with only a couple exceptions. The mandatory platforming is a little more difficult across the board than HK1, in part because of the less forgiving pogo and a larger suite of movement mechanics, but there's no single sequence mandatory or optional that comes close to the sustained difficulty of Path of Pain. If anything, I wish there were a bit more difficulty in the game, and I'm hoping the DLC will provide that.

What people are complaining about, when it comes down to it, is that the game demands they break out of their comfort zone. And it makes some sense! The most diehard Hollow Knight players have been building their mental model of what being good at Hollow Knight entails unhindered for eight years. Every Hollow Knight DLC introduced new challenges that tested the same skills but harder. Silksong asks for more, or at least for a reframing of the way players think about the game.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the removal of the Shade Cloak, and with it the elimination of almost any form of invulnerability-frame evasion in the game. By volume, this wasn't a huge part of the base game—it's an ability you only get in the postgame, so the bulk of the fights you face won't involve it at all. But the postgame fights and many of the DLC fights, which is to say generally the most difficult fights in the game, are built with the expectation that you'll be able to occasionally dodge right through an attack. Silksong has no such expectation, and I think that's tremendously to its credit even as it drives experienced Hollow Knight players mad.

Removing the expectation that players can regularly dodge through the attacks of postgame bosses makes the design and play of those fights vastly more interesting. Dodging attacks through careful positioning brings all the game's movement mechanics to bear in fights, and is what makes the marriage of platforming and action combat so successful. Combined with the substantial wider diversity of directionality in Silksong's attacks relative to the base game, it gives fights the potential to be very deep puzzles about how to most effectively deal damage without taking it. This is all inherent in Hollow Knight as well, but the Shade Cloak offered a safety valve for players to avoid engaging with it in exactly the fights where it was most compelling. Silksong is richer for its absence, and I think this particularly speaks to Team Cherry's maturing understanding of what's effective about their own design.

Donkey Kong Bananza - ★★½

2025-09-04T10:50:26Z

I miss 3D exploration platformers. I grew up on Banjo Kazooie and Donkey Kong 64 captured my childhood imagination like nothing else. These are both deeply flawed games, of course, and I would struggle to bring myself to call either one "good" today. But to my young sensibilities, they held the promise of intricate and captivating spaces full of things to do and goodies to obtain.

The peak of this evocation of the joy of exploration—and this one I will stand by even as an adult—was Super Mario Sunshine. The worlds in that game were vibrant and alive, each completely distinctive and full of personality that was elaborated on as they subtly shifted form from one shine challenge to the next. And then they never made another game like it again. Super Mario Odyssey comes closest, but while kingdoms like New Donk City were just what I wanted, others like Sand Kingdom felt like mere open world content grids. Still, I was excited to see what this team would do to iterate on the concept.

Sadly, Bananza went in just the opposite direction. The core concept, a landscape made of almost totally destructive material, produces a design that is by its nature at odds with the intricate and captivating spaces that I still yearn for. When you can smash through any wall, there's no room for secret passageways or bespoke assets. Even the notion of "rooms" itself is barely relevant for the worlds you actually move through. The designers have can avoid this when they choose with an unbreakable metal material that forms the foundation of every world and is occasionally used for proper walls, but it's clear they resist the urge to do so because they feel (rightly!) that using it more than sparingly would undermine the core principle of the game.

The result is exploration that doesn't feel like moving through an intricate, meticulously designed space. Instead, it feels muddy. The form of a space doesn't matter, because it's made to be unmade. To a large extent (although mercifully less as the game goes on and develops more interesting nouns) you can just blast through terrain at random and find bananas just... there. Not in a location with an interesting design, not through a challenge, just buried under some largely undifferentiated Substance.

To be fair, there are actually six or so materials in each world. But this is part of the muddiness: nearly everything in every world is made out of some combination of rock, dirt, metal, gold, or a couple world-specific materials. Unlike Odyssey's rich worlds full of bespoke assets, every place in Bananza looks more or less the same. This makes it very difficult to navigate, but worse than that it means the different places within a given layer don't feel distinct, and so even layers that have a lot of interesting verticality to them leave me with the same impression as an open world content grid. When movement within a space feels trivial, the space itself feels trivial.

The titular Bananza mechanic reinforces this sense of triviality. This mechanic is harmful to the game even beyond its own bounds, because it provides the player with a dilemma at all times. Most challenges in the game will be absolutely trivialized by activating Bananza. The early layers are full of concrete walls that can't be broken by DK's normal fists. They can instead be broken either by throwing explosive blocks at them, and so they present a lock-and-key mechanism that forms the foundation of a number of cleverly designed challenges and puzzles. But once you've activated Bananza, you can just punch through them like any other material.

But at the same time, there are challenges that absolutely, unavoidably require a Bananza. And the distinction are never clear: some bosses can't be beaten without Bananza, some are only remotely interesting if you avoid using it. Most puzzles are trivialized by gaining a bunch of extra powers, but a few can't be solved without those powers. So if you're staring at a puzzle, wracking your brain for a solution, there's always a chance that the only legitimate answer is "you should cheat" and also always a chance that cheating will totally deprive you of the fun of actually figuring it out.

The fundamentals on which this game is built are flawed. They misunderstand what's fun about the exploratory promise of the genre (although I suppose I have to admit that others may be looking for different things from the genre than I am given the game's average rating). But I will say this: the level design itself speaks to a huge amount of skill from the designers. They took a flawed premise and did the best they could with it, and the result is still pretty impressive considering the raw material. Some of the challenges, like finding the lost Fractone pieces by sculpting the terrain so they have a flat path to walk to their parent, speak to a way of engaging with the terrain that almost makes the premise seem worthwhile. But even that tremendous skill wasn't enough to make me want to reliably pick this up and keep playing.

Elden Ring: Nightreign - ★★★★★

2025-07-17T10:10:23Z

I've played a lot of Nightreign. I'm still playing a lot of Nightreign. In the month and a half it's been out, it quickly became a member of the hundo club, it got me fully back into wiki editing and data mining, and even after beating every nightlord numerous times and completing every character quest I'll still cheerfully hop into a run any time anyone asks. The only reason I'm marking this "completed" now is because I want to get this review out of my head and onto the web.

If you'll permit a digression, I deeply admire Elden Ring's parsimony. It's a huge game made be a relatively small company who had largely made relatively small games up to that point, and it accomplishes that with an economy of design I consider admirable. I know people complain about the re-used bosses, but there are actually very few of the 165 that are true duplicates of one another. Instead, they add little variations here and there, pair them with other bosses for duo encounters, or ramp up the complexity of their abilities over the course of the game. The small dungeons are the same way: they take a limited set of shared components, then mix and match them in different novel ways. These raw materials are a palette of paints that they re-use and recombine over and over to paint the entire game.

Most large games work this way to some extent, but in Elden Ring the quality of the design at each point really shines through in large part because it draws attention to the patterns and repetitions. You know a catacomb is going to have imps or skeletons and some sort of clever trick, you know a watchdog is going to do some kind of elemental damage, you know a hero's grave is going to make you want to claw out your eyes. But you don't know exactly how—it sets up just enough expectations for it to be able to play with them and continue to surprise you throughout its massive length.

If Elden Ring is a painting and its palette, Nightreign is another artist picking up the same palette and painting something entirely different. It stands as much in the tradition of unofficial mods as it does the tradition of classic soulslikes—it's related to Elden Ring in more or less the same way Defense of the Ancients is related to Warcraft III. The nouns and verbs are largely the same, but the context in which they exist is completely different and utterly surprising. After spending more than a decade as industry trendsetters, carving out a new genre and driving other studios insane trying to match their success in it despite going against all conventional wisdom, From Software has now put out a game that is itself reacting to trends in the industry. Not only that, it's integrating two trends—battle royales and roguelikes—whose peak has largely come and gone.

What's truly astounding is how well it works. I had expected a game where you famously die to bosses over and over before you begin to get comfortable with them to fit poorly into a run-based mold, but the ability to be resurrected by allies or even wipe in some circumstances without losing your run makes even difficult bosses doable. The difficulty curve is spot-on, with each nightlord taking just enough runs to feel like the victory is an achievement without being a slog, given that they have a 35-minute runback. The character classes are interesting and varied, and although I have some design quibbles (Executor and Guardian both suffer from the core issue that waiting for an enemy to hit you is a huge opportunity cost when every second counts) I enjoy playing as almost all of them.

The routing shines brightest of all, though. This was always going to be a result of combining roguelike randomness with battle royale spacing considerations, but even after spending so many hours in the game each run still feels unique and compelling largely on the strength of how interesting it is to plot a course through the world. There's so much that's meaningful to react to—Can we take the nearby field boss at our current level? How many stonesword keys do we have? Which locations give us type advantages? When are we leveled enough to do the castle? Does anyone need a smithing stone? How valuable are towers for our team comp?—and all of it is complicated multiplicatively by the circle locations and the time anything takes.

(I will take a moment here to say: I have almost exclusively played this game multiplayer, on a voice call with friends. I'm sure the experience is deeply different if you're playing with two strangers and can't communicate outside of map markers and time-consuming gestures. I've also played a number of solo runs, but I expect my enjoyment of those is also influenced by reaping the benefits of my routing strategy brain trust. Reading through some of the popular negative reviews on here, that's my best guess as to why I'm so much more taken with this game than they are. I recommend playing with friends, and if we're friends, let me know and I'll hook you up with my squad.)

Coming on the heels of Elden Ring and its game-sized DLC, Nightreign is shockingly small. Even given its foundation of asset reuse, it uses only perhaps a third of the base game's bosses and leaves out most of its environments. It smells like a skunkworks project: something created by a small team on the cheap, possibly born out of a single creator's idea, let out into the world to see what the reception would be. We know that DLC is coming; whether it will evolve into something more live-service flavored remains to be seen, and presumably depends to a large degree on us.

For my part, I'm thrilled to see something like this exist. It's small, it's inexpensive, it's weird, and for all that the elevator pitch sounds like chasing trends the result is something that (like every game this studio releases) is wholly and unapologetically its own thing. I want more of that. I'd want more of that even if it didn't unexpectedly charm me. From Software resolutely forged their own strange path long before they hit it big, and with every new game they release I brace myself for the possibility that they've finally attained enough success that they no longer feel they can afford to be so idiosyncratic. But so far, the blow has not come, and for that I'm thankful.

Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour - ★★★★

2025-06-06T08:48:39Z

Let me begin by saying: fuck Nintendo. Their insistence on ruining the lives of people who do anything they disapprove of with the products they sell, regardless of whether that thing is illegal let alone harmful to them, is despicable. It creates a chilling effect on vital efforts towards digital preservation that extends far beyond their own products, on top of just being a heinous thing to do to fans of their games. The regard in which they consistently hold their back catalog as assets on which they could one day collect rent speaks to a deep-rooted capitalistic mindset among the businessmen who run the company that is in no way outweighed by the positive things written below.

All that said... Welcome Tour evinces an attitude somewhere in the company—somewhere widespread enough to get this game made and translated—that I find deeply admirable. Unlike the obvious touchpoint ASTRO's Playroom, this is a tour of the Switch 2 in the most thorough possible sense. It takes the player not just through the most charismatic features like HD Rumble 2 or the mouse control scheme, it shows off every square centimeter of the system in a very literal sense. Players walk across circuit boards and computer chips and learn about exactly what they do. Every meticulous design decision is laid out for the player to see.

The result is a game that's intimately concerned with the physical and design structure of the device it's describing, and that invites the player to share in that concern. It trusts the player to care about the craftsmanship with which the console was created, and it provides tech demos to guide them towards understanding it by directly demonstrating technical concepts like framerate, HDR, and VRR.

And, yes, this is in service of convincing buyers that the $450 or whatever they laid out for this device was worth it by framing it as a meticulously designed luxury product. But it's also taking a stand and saying that thoughtful, humanistic design is what defines quality. In an era when every corporate product is racing to become the worst version of itself that might still be salable, when overhyped prediction engines that can only produce statistically-average slop are hailed as the future of content, this is a dramatically heterodox position for Nintendo to stake out so stridently. I'm impressed and honestly heartened by it—not enough to look past the company's myriad acts of destruction, but enough to say that I'm very glad that Welcome Tour is the way it is.

Silent Hill 2: Enhanced Edition - ★★★★½

2024-10-29T20:23:53Z

Having played only two Silent Hill games, I've already formed my opinion that this is what Silent Hill should be. Although the original marshaled an incredible ambiance, it didn't quite manage to coalesce it into cogent themes. It lives in my memory largely as a collection of horror vignettes which, while strikingly effective given the limited palette of the PS1, are little more than the sum of their parts.

Silent Hill 2 learns that lesson well, and strides forth confidently with a degree of narrative focus and aptitude that's rare to see in games before or since. Everything in this town of Silent Hill curls meticulously around its true function, even long before the player begins to suspect that it has a function at all. Where the first game just asks the player to experience it, the second asks the player to understand it, and is consistent enough to truly reward that understanding. In doing so, it manages to be effective not just as a game or as a mood poem but as a horror story—something I've never seen another game fully succeed at.

The craftsmanship is also outstanding even beyond the purely narrative realm. When I first played Resident Evil (2002) I was shocked by how much mileage it got out of its much-derided "tank controls" as a means of giving the game itself detailed control over the camera angles without bewildering the player's movement. Silent Hill 2 takes this to the next level, allowing the movement of the player itself to guide the camera along paths that echo those of horror cinematography. My breath was stolen when, in the opening sequence as James walks down a long dirt path through the woods, the camera began trailing him with trees interspersed, using filmic techniques to convey a sense of being watched and stalked.

It's just not possible to do that sort of things with the now-standard two-stick full-motion camera controls, and I became even more thoroughly convinced playing this game that we let ourselves throw away a gem of design in tank controls. They do feel awkward, this I won't deny—but must games always feel smooth? What is life without a little variation in the texture? I dearly hope that one day fixed cameras and relative controls are added back to the toolbox of game design, as I long to see what a game could do if it truly iterated on the way Silent Hill 2 wields the camera as a piece of the artistry during the game itself.

The only place this doesn't rise above its predecessor are the combat and resource management mechanics, which still feel by-the-book relative to Resident Evil's brilliance. The combat is perhaps slightly better here, but only by virtue of being easier to avoid. But if the niche this series is carving for itself is tremendous atmosphere, narrative, and visual artistry, you won't hear a single complaint from me.

2024-10-23T05:17:36Z

A lot of my friends don't like star ratings for media, and I get it. It's inherently reductive, boiling down your complex and contextual mental-emotional response to a single linear scale that's often taken to approximate some absolute notion of "quality" that probably doesn't even exist in the first place. That's why I always make sure to write down actual textual thoughts about everything I review—to have a place to capture the nuance and context that's never going to be visible in a star rating.

At the same time, I always enjoy the intellectual exercise of comparing very different things across the same lines. Back in the day I did yearly "Natto Awards" among all the media I'd journaled that year, and I'd always have a lot of fun doing cross-media categories like "best horror" where movies, video games, and novels were all in competition with one another. It's not particularly fair as a way of determining quality, but that hardly matters when quality is fake anyway. What it does do is get you thinking about what it means to successfully inhabit a genre across media, and what each medium brings to its takes on the same ideas. I find star ratings do something similar, pushing me to really think about how much I appreciate a film or video game and to try to articulate why.

By far the biggest reason I use them all the time, though, is just that my memory for these things is awful. My subconscious is particularly liable to just toss out memories it deems "irrelevant" by its own mysterious criteria, and it turns out that what I thought of a given film—or even whether I saw it at all—is roundly considered irrelevant. But not to my conscious mind! I actually care a lot about being able to remember how much I enjoyed something long after the fact, and star ratings are a major way I do that.

To that end, I also try to keep a pretty consistent rubric of what each rating means, so I don't shift too much over time. I do inevitably move somewhat and have to self-correct, of course. This post was itself inspired by me realizing that I've been giving out ★★★½ and to a lesser extent ★★★★ ratings too eagerly. So, as much as a reminder to myself as anything, here's my schema. It's presented as whole-star tiers only; I'll add a half-star if it's particularly enjoyable or well-made relative to its tier.

★ : Corresponds to the "#bad" tag on my old media journal. Actively poorly-made, offensive, and/or otherwise miserable, either with minimal redeeming qualities or simply irredeemably noxious.
★★ : Corresponds to the "#eh" tag on my old media journal. Did not vibe with me. Nothing is egregiously wrong, but nothing is outstandingly right either. Alternatively, there are things I liked about it but somewhat more things I disliked.
★★★ : Corresponds to the "#good" tag on my old media journal. Solidly enjoyable. Not a barn-burner, but definitely a good way to enjoy some art. I'd expect most media to land here, since I usually don't even hear about stuff that's worse than this.
★★★★ : Corresponds to the "#highly recommended" tag on my old media journal. Particularly good to excellent, the sorts of thing I would actively encourage people to seek out. This tier has the most variation—it can be anywhere from "I'd recommend this to people who vibe with the specific thing it's doing" to "everyone should probably experience this at least once".
★★★★★ : Also corresponds to the "#highly recommended" tag on my old media journal, but only the cream of the crop. This is a piece of media that connected with me on a deep level, or something that's manifestly firing on all cylinders and perfectly accomplishing what it set out to do. I don't give out a lot of these.

I think generally when I follow this rubric I tend to rate stuff a little lower than most people who are just vibing their stars, since ★★★ to me is solidly enjoyable and I think in general it's considered a bit of a pan. That's probably part of why I tend to swing away from it over time... but it's also a helpful reminder to take a step back and think about why I'm giving out the ratings that I am!

Lifeforce (1985) - ★★★★

2024-10-18T10:20:37Z

This is a mystifyingly horny film. It's not mystifying why it's horny—I'm the world's biggest defender of the idea that vampires ought to be horny!—but in the way it goes about it. There is of course the almost softcore blatancy with which the camera constantly caresses Mathilda May's massive tits, but that really just serves to set the stage for the pervasive sexuality of the whole thing. The one-two punch of "I can read her mind and she's a masochist" / "well I'm a natural voyeur", in a scene notionally about tracking a monster that's actively killing people, stands out in my mind, as does the sweaty desperation of the prime minister. But really I think there's barely a moment here that's not sexual in one way or another.

The film draws an immediate and firm connection between sex and the theft of lifeforce (General Ripper would be right at home). Even the first time we see it in a human-to-human context, the emaciated guard grasps at the air as though to initiate an embrace and the doctor who becomes his victim approaches out of tenderness. We can then read the fall of London as a sort of self-destructive orgy, a modern Sodom. Our two heroes are defined as heroic by their abstinence: Caine just likes to watch and so always has an objective position and knows what to do, and Carlsen has the astounding ability to choose not to have sex with a beautiful woman—or, at the movie's climax, to stop having sex just before it reaches the point of no return.

This is an approach to sex that sits at the particular crossroads between heteromasculinity and Christianity. It conceptualizes the ultimate horniness as an overpowering urge to overpower, and because overpowering others is wrong it conceptualizes everything about sexualith as immoral. But this totalizing view is in turn undermined by the film itself clearly existing to titillate the (presumedly heteromasculine—note that the only reference to queerness in the film is from the perspective of men wanting to watch lesbian sex) viewer. The film gives itself a gentle cloak of irony, playfully casting the viewer in the role of Caine the voyeur and the reframing the film's Christian bent as more of an erotic roleplay than a genuine expression of values.

It's a fascinating artifact, and one that—despite the intense heteromasculinity that no amount of irony can purge—I'm inclined to appreciate. Because at the end of the day, I think vampire films should be about sex, and I'll be damned if this is not a vampire movie that is well and thoroughly about sex.

Island of Lost Souls (1932) - ★★★★½

2024-10-06T10:07:20Z

This is deceptively compelling. At first glance, the ape men, broken english, and doctrine that all animals converge on the perfect (evidently white) human form feels teleological with a distinct flavor of eugenics. But as the film progresses, it builds out a much more nuanced narrative. "Are we not men?" cry the islanders, taught this mantra by Moreau himself. But Moreau does not truly want them to see themselves as fully human. To him they are at their most compelling, and their most useful, as a sub-human who will do his bidding without ever being his equal.

Although Moreau's work isn't precisely secret, he is coy about it, and when he speaks to the mainland about the other inhabitants of his island he refers to them as "the natives". This gives away the allegory: Moreau is a colonizer and the beast-men his colonized subjects. Whatever he has given them has come with a terrible price: not just subservience but subhumanity. When Bela Lugosi's striking Speaker of the Law accuses Moreau of making them "not men but things", I hear it not as a tired admonishment to avoid meddling in the natural order, but as a claim that it is Moreau himself—despite his vaunted laws—who prevented them from becoming fully human.

It's telling that where H. G. Wells's novel is structured around the tendency of beast-men to revert to their bestial instinct, the film pushes this thread far into the background. The climax of the plot is no longer driven by instinctual violence, but by words: the Speaker of the Law confronts Moreau and declares his laws void because they are built on lies and hypocrisy. In their way, the beast-men are more rational than Moreau himself. The film ends by challenging the core dichotomy between "beast" and "man" at its root and suggesting (surprisingly deftly for a film made within Wells's lifetime) that the concept of "sub-humanity" is itself inhuman.