Featured Essays Daredevil: Born Again Daredevil: Born Again and the Fascism of State Gangsters The show doesn’t shy away from its depiction of Fisk’s authoritarian tactics. By Zack Budryk | Published on May 4, 2026 Credit: Marvel Studios Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Marvel Studios Content Warning: This article involves brief discussions of state-sponsored genocide. The existence of Daredevil: Born Again can feel like a minor miracle. To begin with, there’s the sheer feat of corralling the original cast seven years after the cancellation of the Netflix series where they debuted, to say nothing of sticking the landing after the complete creative retooling the series underwent mid-production. But the actual content of the show, which explicitly depicts it as noble to resist authoritarian government even through extralegal means, was striking in early 2025, an era when the entertainment industry in general and Disney in particular had seemingly resigned itself to behaving as though reactionary politics had won the culture (a wildly premature conclusion, as it would turn out). And yet, two months into Donald Trump’s second term, here was a mainstream TV show in which the cops and political leaders are the bad guys.  Much of this feels like an easier sell in the show’s second season, when real-life jackbooted thugs beating and shooting Americans in the street have drawn fierce backlash, and indeed, people involved with the show have subtly conceded the similarities between mob boss-turned-Mayor Wilson Fisk’s anti-vigilante shock troops and ICE aren’t a mere coincidence. But the show’s depiction of Fisk’s specific authoritarian tactics are also a genuinely enlightening depiction of how fascism works in practice, with this literal gangster illustrating how authoritarian governance functions as a combination of gangster tactics and the state’s monopoly on violence. Authoritarianism has historically had a deceptively complex relationship with organized crime. More traditional criminal organizations are often the subject of purges–when he took power in the 1920s, Benito Mussolini cracked down on the Mafia, largely because their regional influence in southern Italy threatened his agenda of centralized national control (they gave as good as they got—Lucky Luciano, the man often credited with inventing the structure of the American mob, allegedly provided crucial intelligence to the Allies during World War II).  The Nazi party likewise targeted the urban crime syndicates known as Ringvereine. But gangsters have also been major assets for authoritarian governments in need of someone who knows their way around targeted violence. Henri Lafont, who ran the French auxiliary of the Gestapo, was a local gangster authorized by the Nazis to recruit his old partners in crime from prison. Decades later, the Indonesian genocide that killed up to a million communists (real or accused), union organizers, ethnic Chinese and other minorities, was largely carried out by organized crime elements, including Anwar Congo, who re-enacted his own crimes for filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer in his harrowing 2012 documentary The Act of Killing. “We need gangsters to get things done. Free, private men who get things done,” then-Indonesian Vice President Jusuf Kalla tells a cheering crowd in Oppenheimer’s film. On a more philosophical level, though, fascism and the mob go hand in hand because fascism runs on mob tactics. The most obvious is the use of brutal, swift and disproportionate violence, both from agents of the state like ICE or the SS and from state-affiliated paramilitaries. But there’s also the constant, ambient cloud of scams and heists and rackets, from the Nazis’ looting of Jewish valuables to Donald Trump’s longstanding fixation on “taking the oil” from uncooperative nations. Born Again teases out the extent to which Fisk’s mayoralty reflects this. The brutal Praetorian guard of cops who will become his Anti-Vigilante Task Force are introduced relatively early, but they’re not that out of place in a superhero story. It’s only later in the first season that we see his broader agenda, to profit personally from a zoning loophole that allows him to use a marine terminal as a free-trade zone. Despite a few little throwaway hints to the contrary, not only is Fisk still a gangster, he’s using the machinery of the state to both personally enrich himself and, like Mussolini, eliminate the non-state competition. That’s also what makes his task force, and their real-world equivalents, a unique threat: it’s not just that they’re violent and heavy-handed, it’s that they’re a private army in the guise of public employees.  There’s something particularly dread-inducing about the depiction of authoritarianism at the municipal level; particularly in a country the size of the United States, one can know an illiberal, authoritarian national government is in place but rarely see its effects in person unless you live in a city targeted by its security forces or, like I do, go to work amid National Guard patrols and ostentatious banners outside staid federal agency headquarters. Fisk’s tyranny, however, manifests as skin-crawlingly intimate even in the vastness of New York, in contrast to uneasy allies like Matthew Lillard’s affable CIA emissary. It’s no easy feat to flee an authoritarian country, but there’s something particularly claustrophobic about being trapped on an island with a dictator. In real life, we’ve seen local and state leaders stand against federal overreach, but when your mayor is the one having people dragged out of restaurants and bodegas, no one in government is coming to save you. That dearth of “legitimate” allies makes the season’s ongoing philosophical debate between Matt Murdock and Karen Page over the morality and practicality of revolutionary violence particularly immediate. Batman may be committed to never taking a life, but Batman is also friends with the police commissioner; these principles can be a far heavier lift when the cops, the nominal legitimate keepers of the peace, are prepared to shoot you on sight. Fisk’s use of the police to brutalize dissidents feels especially resonant, precisely because even in the negotiable reality of superhero media they feel so much like real-life cops. Fisk and the task force’s brutish leader Powell, much like their real-world counterparts, assert a mandate to bring down their fist on the worst of the worst but their violence is overwhelmingly concentrated simply on people who piss them off. In real life, big city mayors and New York mayors in particular are often strong-armed by their police forces (during the 2020 Black Lives Matter uprisings, the NYPD notoriously doxxed then-Mayor Bill de Blasio’s daughter) but the brutality Fisk’s cops inflict is with his enthusiastic blessing and support. When Fisk gruesomely murders his uncooperative police commissioner, Gallo, in the first season finale, he’s not just settling a personal score, he’s making an offering to cops like Powell by killing the kind of man they perceive as tying their hands. With Fisk’s backing, Powell and his thugs deal out violence in deeply realistic way, from Powell’s assault of a journalist in the first season to his cold-blooded murder of one of his own as an excuse to turn the police response to a protest into a riot (In an amusing bit of meta-irony, Fisk’s cops are depicted as huge fans of the iconography of the Punisher, just like their real-world counterparts, but with the added cognitive dissonance that they are actively seeking to kill one another).  Like any other mob boss, or aspiring mob boss, Fisk as mayor has people who understand when he needs someone killed, to the point that he doesn’t need to directly order it. Part of what makes his murder of Gallo so shocking is that it’s the first time he’s personally killed someone in the series after doing it left and right in the Netflix era. It’s a further point on the board on Karen’s argument for a more proactively ruthless approach when, as Fisk makes explicitly clear during his brawl with Matt, he holds all the cards as the only player willing to kill.  By the second season, all of this coincides with Fisk instituting martial law as part of his purge of vigilantes, with not just active vigilantes like Matt Murdock driven underground but anyone who either supports them or is a political dissident in general. Authoritarianism and fascism thrive on contradictions, on the idea of a world gone mad. If nothing means anything, state officials can corruptly benefit from their offices while also fearmongering about a different, scarier kind of criminal, one who will have free reign if the regime itself is constrained by the law. If a cop can’t shoot or shake down whoever he wants, both Fisk and his real-world analogs warn, we’ll be at the mercy of the thugs.  It’s easy to see all this stuff and wonder what the hell any of us are supposed to do about it once we understand it. Daredevil: Born Again understands how paralytic this can be, and even as Daredevil and his allies undertake individual missions to push back against the Fisk regime, much of their downtime is tactical debates between Matt and Karen that wouldn’t be out of place in Andor. Ultimately, Matt and Karen and the show itself eschew easy answers, because we know this real-world moment doesn’t have easy answers, or at least, it has answers that require patience, community organizing and a willingness to accept the idea that you might not see the seeds you plant bloom. But ultimately, it can be an odd comfort to understand how much of the fearsome force of an out-of-control state is simply cheap thugs who can’t work to their full capacity if we deny them our fear. That’s why their natural enemy, in both the show and real life, is a man (or a person) without fear.[end-mark] The post <em>Daredevil: Born Again</em> and the Fascism of State Gangsters appeared first on Reactor.

Books SFF Bestiary Fox at the Pinnacle: Rita Mae Brown’s Hierarchy of Creation The Sister Jane novels involve several intelligent species in a highly interconnected world, all centered around a complex sport. By Judith Tarr | Published on May 4, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share While I was reading Rita Mae Brown’s Mrs. Murphy mysteries, I had Questions about the role of horses as compared to cats and dogs. It seemed in the volumes I read that equines got shortchanged, even when they were nominally the center of the book. In the interest of further research, I dipped into another of her series, the Sister Jane novels. Sister Jane is a form of Virginia royalty: Master of Foxhounds, managing and overseeing the multitude of people and animals that participate in a fox hunt. Brown is writing what she knows. According to her bio, she holds that august office herself. In sixteen volumes and counting, Brown dives deep into the complexities of the sport. It’s an obsession and a passion, and as Brown writes it, it’s great entertainment. It’s also good worldbuilding. Brown’s setting is very much a part of the real world, but it touches on myth and magic. There are ghosts at the top of Hangman’s Hill, and the Grim Reaper might be seen up there with his scythe. Signs and omens come and go, and animals, and occasionally humans, take note of them. In this universe, animals talk to each other. They try to talk to humans, though not with much success. Humans, in animal terms, are functionally illiterate. Even when they seem to understand what’s being said, it may just be a coincidence. The main players are foxes, hounds, and horses. Sister has a house dog or two as well, and a calico cat who considers herself above it all, often literally, high on a shelf in the house or up a tree outside. Athena the great horned owl is a regular visitor, usually with wisdom to offer; later in the series, Bitsy the screech owl moves into the barn. Here, finally, I got my wish about horses. The horses in these books have distinct personalities and clear opinions. They’re willing partners in the hunt. Not every human rides well, and sometimes human ego or cluelessness causes problems, but Sister and her staff are strong and courageous riders. The horses appreciate that. They have their own take on what happens at home or on the hunt. They have a wicked sense of humor, and they take pleasure in pricking the bubble of human arrogance. The hounds are numerous, far more so than the horses, but Sister knows every one by name, and we meet many of them. We learn about their bloodlines, what they’re bred for, what kind of country they’re best for hunting in, who they are individually. Hounds are counted in couples and hunted in packs; they’re profoundly communal, but one, especially if they’re young or egotistical, may go off on their own, and get into various forms and levels of trouble. Sometimes they deepen a mystery. Sometimes they solve one. Singly and collectively, hounds are highly intelligent. They have a distinct hierarchy of age and position. When they hunt, they follow the instructions of the huntsman, supported by their own leaders and elders, but the huntsman respects their superior senses. It’s very much a cooperative venture. The pinnacle of all this creation, the reason for the hunt, the most intelligent of all creatures, is the fox. There are two subspecies in Brown’s Virginia, the red and the grey. They live and breed separately, but they share territory, and they may cooperate in a hunt if it suits their purposes. In the first volume, Outfoxed, the foxes collaborate in a grand strategy to avenge a slain fox and oppose an enemy, St. Just the Crow, who has a vendetta against one of the red foxes. It’s a complex plan with many parts, and one of those parts is set up and orchestrated by Sister Jane. She, being human, never knows how extensive the plan actually is, but she plays her part; she gets it done. She has better hound sense than most humans, and she understands foxes remarkably well within her limited capacity. She has tremendous respect for their intelligence. In this corner of the world, it’s a bad thing if a hunt harms a fox. Part of a master’s job is to look after the foxes in their territory, to recognize individuals, to be aware of the locations of their dens and runs. If conditions are difficult, they’ll make sure the foxes are fed and have access to shelter and clean water.  Brown’s foxes understand this and take it as their due. They have an interesting relationship with the hounds. They’re not enemies; they’re opposing teams. It’s all about the game. A hunt is a chase, a quest, with the hounds seeking a fox or foxes, and the fox setting out to outsmart the hounds. Some of them even have friends on the other team. Inky the black fox has a special relationship with the hound Diana, for example, and they share knowledge and information. On the hunt, each will support her team, but when they’re at home they have a surprising amount in common. This is a highly interconnected world. Everyone has a role to play, and while they may be on opposite sides of a game or a hunt, real and active enmity is rare. St. Just the crow hates the fox because killed his mate. He does dastardly things, but he has a reason for it. That’s true of the humans, too, though humans are far more cruel and egotistical than animals. There’s always a reason, or least an excuse. The best of them serve and protect each other and the animals with whom they share the world. They may not understand what the animals are saying, or that they’re talking at all, but they try. Sometimes they even succeed.[end-mark] The post Fox at the Pinnacle: Rita Mae Brown’s Hierarchy of Creation appeared first on Reactor.

Books classic science fiction What Was the First Book You Bought From Each SF Publisher? Let’s take a trip down the book-lined pathways of Memory Lane… By James Davis Nicoll | Published on May 4, 2026 Photo by Vrînceanu Iulia [via Unsplash] Comment 0 Share New Share Photo by Vrînceanu Iulia [via Unsplash] I don’t just follow authors whose work I like—I also follow editors who buy the sort of book I enjoy, and the publishers who make those books available. Often, I have very specific memories about when and where and from whom1 I bought my books, which I am sure is a great comfort to friends whose names I clearly have misplaced. In some cases, I can even tell you which was the very first book from a given publisher that I bought. Not the older publishers—or at least, not always. But the dewy-cheeked infants of publishing, lines founded after I started buying books? Those I remember. Here are five (well, maybe six) such books from my shelves. DAW Books DAW Books was founded in 1971 by Donald A. Wollheim and Elsie B. Wollheim, Early DAW had two characteristics that brought it to my attention: DAW specialized in science fiction and fantasy and DAW paperbacks had bright yellow spines that were visible from across a store2. There are whole shelves of yellow spines in my library. My first DAW was the June 1972 mass market edition of Gordon R. Dickson’s 1971 Tactics of Mistake. Tactics, part of Dickson’s unfinished Childe Cycle, details the adventures of military genius Cletus Grahame in the early days of interstellar colonization. It’s not my favourite book in the series—Cletus doesn’t show much genius, it’s just that his enemies are dolts—but it was my first DAW purchase. Orbit Books To quote Wikipedia: “Orbit Books was founded in 1974 as part of the Macdonald Futura publishing company.” I don’t know anything about the personalities involved. Oddly, despite Orbit being very much British3, the first Orbit-published book I owned was by American author Poul Anderson. Specifically, the September 1975 paperback of Anderson’s 1974 novel A Midsummer Tempest. Tempest details efforts to ensure Charles I’s victory, thus saving the Fair Folk. If “GO STUARTS FOR GREAT JUSTICE” wasn’t unusual enough4, Tempest is set in a world in which Shakespeare was the Great Historian, a world in which Shakespeare’s anachronisms (and presumably, his geographic liberties) are simple historical fact. Del Rey Books Ballantine imprint Del Rey Books was founded in 1977 and named for Judy-Lynn del Rey. It happened that her tastes and those of her rather curmudgeonly husband, Lester, lined up with mine. Each month, I’d look for the Del Rey ad in the SF magazines I read, then pester long-suffering booksellers about whether the featured books, whose release dates were unambiguously months away, had arrived yet. My first Del Rey was the March 1977 paperback of James White’s 1977 Monsters and Medics. Monsters and Medics is a collection rather than a novel. Contents include an author’s introduction, a short novel, three novelettes, and three short stories, all of which I enjoyed enough to become a James White fan. Tor Books Founded by Tom Doherty in 1980, Tor is the inspiration for this article. Or rather, @purblind.bsky.social’s question (wondering what the oldest Tor we have on our shelves are….) was the impetus. There are two books that were my first book from Tor. Which one was actually first depends on whether you count Tor as a continuation of Tor / Pinnacle Books or as two different, if closely connected, companies. If Tor / Pinnacle is just an early phase of Tor, then my first Tor was the June 1981 paperback original of Poul Anderson’s The Psycho-Technic League. The collection gathers stories from an early future history Anderson had discarded. I gather that Anderson had second thoughts about the setting’s political views, but I’d liked the individual stories and was happy to have them in one place. Also, the book had that JIM BAEN PRESENTS banner. I followed Baen from Galaxy to Ace to Tor and—but more on that later. If Tor / Pinnacle is distinct from Tor, then my first Tor was the 1982 paperback original of David Drake’s Time Safari. The Time Safari stories, which I recall as having been inspired by de Camp’s 1956 novelette “A Gun for Dinosaur,” detail the experiences of Henry Vickers as he guides would-be hunters in the age of dinosaurs. Baen Books Jim Baen5 founded Baen Books in 1983, following a somewhat convoluted sequence of events beginning with the collapse of Pocketbooks’ Timescape imprint6. Having followed Baen from Galaxy to Ace to Tor, of course I followed him to Baen. My first Baen was the August 1984 paperback of Lewis Shiner’s proto-cyberpunk novel Frontera—which tells what happened to the Martian colony after governments collapsed on Earth. So, those are my firsts with those particular publishers. Do you remember your first books from various publishers? If not, you can probably work out what they must have been using the ISFDB. It is a game everyone can play.[end-mark] I gather booksellers don’t expect customers to thank them for their excellent service half a century after the store in question went out of business. ︎It may surprise people to learn that I am much more adept at spotting books and book-related items than anything else. I once failed to notice the schoolmates I was looking for because my attention was distracted by an unfamiliar-to-me Book Nook two blocks behind them. Don’t worry! I did manage to slip away from the field trip to buy a couple of bags of books. ︎The US Orbit came along much, much later. ︎The only reason Charles I is not the worst king ever is because “worst king ever” is an exceedingly competitive field. Looking at you, Emperor Huizong! ︎With Tom Doherty’s assistance. It apparently still comes as a surprise to some fans to learn that Doherty has always been and still remains a silent partner in Baen Books. ︎For reasons of word count, I am limiting myself to publishing lines that are still around. That said, my first Timescape book was Syd Logsdon’s 1981 A Fond Farewell to Dying. (I’ve written in more detail about the Timescape line here, if you’re interested.) ︎The post What Was the First Book You Bought From Each SF Publisher? appeared first on Reactor.

News What to Watch What to Watch and Read This Weekend: All Along the Binge-Watch Tower—Battlestar Galactica Returns to Streaming Plus: All the animated animal films you could be watching instead of Animal Farm By Molly Templeton | Published on May 1, 2026 Photo: Universal Content Productions Comment 0 Share New Share Photo: Universal Content Productions Happy May Day, folks! If, like me, you only learned about May Day in terms of maypoles and general springiness as a child, there is much more to this particular date, which is also known as International Workers’ Day. If you are out there taking part in May Day events and rallies, please look out for yourself and your fellow humans. I hope the skies are clear and the future is … at least visible. It’d be nice for the future to be visible rather than cloudy and murky and mostly alarming. Hug your friends, give skritches to your favorite animals, call your reps, and get some sun, yeah? So Say We All: Battlestar Galactica is Back on Streaming Yes, Vanessa already told you about this, but it’s worth mentioning twice. At least twice. As of today, you can watch all of Battlestar Galactica and its assorted spinoff shows and movies on Paramount+, and most of it on Pluto TV, which also has an all-BSG, all-the-time channel, if you’d like to return to that cable-TV era feeling of just watching whatever happens to be on. (Unless it’s “Black Market.” I speak as a completist when I say: Do not waste your time on “Black Market.”) I suspect you’ll still have to dig up some DVDs if you want to watch my favorite episode in its extended form (that’d be “Unfinished Business,” aka “Everyone boxes out their feelings and it gets super awkward”). You can, though, watch Caprica, a show I started rewatching recently and then simply forgot to continue. But I meant to, at the very least for Magda Apanowicz as a teen struggling with literally everything including, maybe, the fate of the world. (There are maybe too many things out there to watch?) Anyway. BSG universe. On Paramount+. I’m so happy about this. You Should Watch Literally Any Animated Animal Movie Except Andy Serkis’s Animal Farm Watch Chicken Run. Watch Flow. Watch fricking Bambi. The Land Before Time? An American Tail? Ratatouille! That’s a good one. Just don’t watch the new Animal Farm. Yes, this is an anti-recommendation. It’s a warning. At first, it was just that the trailers looked dubious. But then Andy Serkis went and gave Animal Farm a happy ending. An entire new third act, according to a USA Today piece. The world is just too bleak for George Orwell’s story as written. “So we wanted the next generation, the kids who we hopefully are going to be watching this film, to at least have the ability to question what they should do next time around. History will inevitably repeat itself,” Serkis said. It appears not to have occurred to him that if he wanted to tell a hopeful story, he should have picked another dang story. But it’s okay! There are so many other animated animal movies to watch. If you’d like something hopeful, how about Paddington 2? Paddington 2 is perfect. Time to Get Back in Bed With The Vampire Lestat It’s just over a month until rock-god Lestat has his say about things in the rebranded Interview with the Vampire—now, in its third season, called The Vampire Lestat. This is, of course, the name of the second volume in Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles. And now is a very good time to read it. Or reread it. Or re-re-read it. You know. If it’s been a while. I really need to get my hands on a nice mass market paperback with the iconic red ’80s cover. But any cover will do. If you would prefer to go into the show without knowing anything, I respect that. But as someone who spent high school rather immersed in this world—quietly, secretly immersed, though in crushed velvet leggings sometimes—I feel I owe it to Book Lestat to revisit his version of things before TV Lestat (Sam Reid) takes over everyone’s imagination.  The first page of the book is basically Lestat telling you how awesome and hot he is: “Right now I am what America calls a Rock Superstar.” He’s on MTV! Bless. On the second page he explains, “But in spite of my French accent, I talk like a cross between a flatboatman and detective Sam Spade, actually.” God, I cannot wait to hang out with this ridiculous man again. A Treasure Trove of Wondrous Randomness In the process of writing these weekly posts, I have developed a small obsession with Wikipedia’s wonderful, absolutely baffling selection of speculative fiction anniversaries. Sometimes you find things that kind of make sense, and/or are very strange bedfellows, like the fact that May 3 is the 20th anniversary of the publication of Rick Riordan’s The Sea of Monsters, but the 30th anniversary of the Pamela Anderson movie Barb Wire. May 4 isn’t just Star Wars day; it’s the 25th anniversary of The Mummy Returns! But then there are other things. Other TV shows and books and authors and dates in speculative fiction history that just seem … random. The esoteric loves and foibles of those editors who keep this list really show, and it’s beautiful. Somehow May 1 is the publication date of both a two-part Deep Space Nine tie-in novel and a Michael Chabon essay collection. May 2 is the date that both The Magician’s Nephew and X2 came into the world. Also, there are so many more strange SF TV shows than I ever knew existed. May 1, 1991: “My Secret Identity, a Canadian science fiction television series, finishes airing on CTV.” You know how long you can go down rabbit holes thanks to this one Wiki portal? Actually, let’s not talk about it. But also: have fun. And Featuring David Bowie: The Prestige One last note: Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige is now streaming on Hulu. Is this movie perfect? Absolutely not. Did I go see it a second time the very day after I saw it the first time, because I wanted to figure out how it worked? Absolutely yes. And frankly I will never get David Bowie as Nikola Tesla out of my head. If you would like to complete your set of 2006 magician movies, you can also watch Edward Norton in The Illusionist on Prime and Netflix. It’s just not quite as good, though. Maybe just not as … magical. I’ll see myself out.[end-mark] The post What to Watch and Read This Weekend: All Along the Binge-Watch Tower—<i>Battlestar Galactica</i> Returns to Streaming appeared first on Reactor.

Movies & TV Hokum Hokum Is Much More Than a Haunted Hotel Movie And yes, there are creepy bunnies. By Leah Schnelbach | Published on May 1, 2026 Credit: Neon Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Neon You can tell the horror movie’s really kicked into another gear when the audience starts whimpering. I’ve seen Hokum twice now, both times in packed theaters, and both times there was whimpering. I recommend you see it in as full a theater as you safely can, knowing as little as you can. Here, in these opening paragraphs, I’m going to sketch in an incredibly faint chalk outline of facts, and then, after a spoiler line, a slightly more in-depth discussion of the film’s themes. But I really don’t want to give anything important away here. By way of a logline: Adam Scott plays Ohm Bauman, a bestselling author who’s stuck on the ending to his hit trilogy. He embraces the way of the writer—procrastination and alcohol—and travels to the Bilberry Woods Hotel in Ireland, where his parents spent their honeymoon. He can get away from his book, drink at the bar, and spread his folks’ ashes in a place they loved. This part of the plot is set up and dispensed with in about the first 8 minutes of the movie, leaving Ohm free to fall into the real plot: the hotel has a dark secret. This is Damian McCarthy’s third feature, following Caveat and Oddity, which were each fantastic in their own ways, and if you know those movies and love them like I do, you’ll most likely also love Hokum—but this will also make for an excellent introduction to McCarthy’s work if you’re new to it. I love that he seems to be creating his own world through tone and theme, rather than trying to do overworked, airless tie-ins like some cinematic universes I could mention. Fans of those prior films will see themes and objects recur (more on that in the very light spoiler section below) but all of it’s used in a way that serves this story, not as a cheap callback. While Hokum has a Hollywood star in Adam Scott, and wider distribution through Neon, the soul of the film feels very much of a piece with his earlier work. Adam Scott is so good as Ohm. Obviously, Adam Scott is always good—but Ohm allows him to show new facets of himself, and gives him an arc that really feels like a journey. Without giving anything away I’ll say that McCarthy made a really cool choice for the character, and Scott inhabits it perfectly. Courtesy of Neon The cast of characters is small and insular, but all feel like three-dimensional people. There’s gruff, goat-hating handyman Fergal (Michael Patric); nervous desk clerk, Mal (Peter Coonan) who’s also the son-in-law of the ancient owner of the Bilberry Woods, Mr. Cobb (Brendan Conroy)—which accounts for some of Mal’s nervousness; a rather hapless bellhop named Alby (Will O’Connell) and a bartender, Fiona (Florence Ordesh), round out the staff. And then there’s Jerry (David Wilmot) a reclusive local man who lives in a van in the forest. They each get a few moments to shine, but for the most part this is Ohm’s story. Hokum’s atmosphere is folk horror perfection. We’re in West Cork, Ireland, near where the the last bit of Ireland’s temperate rainforest stands. (It’s a similar setting to The Watchers, which, despite the always-welcome presence of Olwen Fouéré, couldn’t quite pull its folk horror off. Luckily, Hokum succeeds beautifully.) Production Designer Til Frohlich has given us an excellent horror hotel—if you look at it from the outside it’s a rambling building tucked into the woods, and once you’re inside it seems just a little too worn to still be fancy. But the longer you stay the more it feels like there are things watching from the shadows. The film’s Director of Photography, Colm Hogan, does incredible things with light—his shadows fucking seethe, single lamps and torches flare in and out and create tiny pockets of light that are almost worse than darkness. When the sun sets it’s pitch black. The forest is thick, and there are no other houses or signs of civilization within site of the hotel itself—so if you spend a night alone there, you are, truly, alone. Hopefully. I also want to shout out Hokum’s editor Brian Philip Davis—this is a short, compact film with a lot of well-times jump scares, and those scares, and the breathing room around them, are calibrated beautifully. The jump scares work toward a purpose, they’re not just a poke between the ribs. And composer Joseph Bishara creates an atmosphere of dread that will probably become my own go-to writing soundtrack. Here’s where we draw a chalk circle around some very light spoilers! Click here to skip past them. Credit: Neon If you’ve seen and loved Caveat and/or Oddity (I love both in different ways) you’ll be pleased to hear that McCarthy has returned to his resonant objects. A desk bell is heavily featured, as is a crossbow, ropes and chains, upsetting bunnies , chalk, and the See/Hear/Speak No Evil motif. The most exciting for me was a book whose author seems to be, if I read it correctly, a certain “D. Odello.” I’m guessing there are more that I missed. As in the last two films, these objects gradually gain heft and meaning as the story creeps along. He has also revisited one of his biggest themes in a new and horrifying way, but again, to say anything more is to say too much. And that’s it for anything remotely spoiler-y. As for outside influences, the film relies on shadows, creaks, and atmosphere more than gore or violence, and the Bilberry feels like an homage to The Haunting of Hill House, The Innocents, and fellow Irish horror writer Dorothy McArdle’s The Uninvited. And you can’t really heck a writer into a hotel with a secret without invoking The Shining and 1408. The fact that Ohm Bauman is a hugely successful, famous author of a book series that feels a lot like The Dark Tower series only adds to the Stephen King riff. But again, Hokum is in a side conversation with all of those things—the slight allusions never overpower the story McCarthy tells. Credit: Neon There are a lot of exquisite details in this film, but there are two in particular that would have made me shriek with happiness if I hadn’t been in a room with other people. If I write about this film once it’s been out for a bit, as I suspect I will, I’ll get into them later. I also love that McCarthy isn’t offering up Irish kitsch. The hotel does that, with its blaring Halloween party and carved grimacing turnips glimmering in every corner for the amusement of the (presumably non-Irish) guests. But the movie just drops Adam Scott into this world, and doesn’t give him any explanation beyond the fact that “craic” means “fun” …kind of. He butts up against local customs, folklore, and even the liquor, and no one gives him an inch. There’s a very brief use of ogham script in the movie that made my tattoo prickle, and a celebration of poitín that makes me regret my decision not to buy more at the Duty Free shop when I left Dublin. Next time, Dublin Airport Duty Free shop. Next time. As in his earlier work, there are a lot of churning ideas about guilt, forgiveness, and purgatorial in-between spaces here—in this case an extremely claustrophobic space. Once you know the shape of the main hotel suite (just as with 1408), you know exactly how impossible it is to escape. And then there’s the title. Another throughline in McCarthy’s work is the skeptical outsider who scoffs at folklore, superstition, belief in general. Here McCarthy ups the ante by making that character a visitor from the U.S., and someone who makes his money from horror novels, so not only is he treating Irish culture as a thing he can watch from outside (even after he’s very much trapped inside), he also sees himself as someone who knows the tricks of a spooky story. But they’re only tricks if the story is fictional. Credit: Neon I’ve talked elsewhere about Irish horror, and there are plenty of psychoanalysis-type reasons that Ireland is particularly good at the genre—its history is riddled with trauma, its people have had to fight for everything—and they’re still fighting—and the cultures of storytelling, song, and writing all mine deep veins of ghosts, witches, and curses both supernatural and banal. I don’t think it’s an accident that Damian McCarthy’s previous films feature a landlord and an English dude as antagonists, that Aislinn Clarke’s films The Devil’s Doorway and Fréwaka revolve around Magdalene Laundries and inter-generational trauma, that Paul Duane’s All You Need Is Death is about desperate immigrant youths scrambling to sell “authenticity” on the black market because it’s the only way to stay above water. But what I love about a lot of these films is that none of them ever boil all the way down to “the villain became a murderer because of his shitty father” or “the real monster is SOCIETY’S HATRED OF WOMEN”—sure that’s usually part of it, but these films allow room for nuance, mystery, the uncanny. Sometimes monsters just ARE. Sometimes things that seem like monsters to our human eyes are actually beautiful. Maybe the supernatural elements are “real” and maybe they aren’t—it doesn’t matter when the the story’s good enough. And that’s what Hokum is doing. You can treat it like a math problem, you can get annoyed when certain questions aren’t answered (or give you several different answers to choose from) but I think if you do that, you deny yourself the story McCarthy and his team are offering you—a story that ends up being the best horror of the year so far.[end-mark] The post <em>Hokum</em> Is Much More Than a Haunted Hotel Movie appeared first on Reactor.