Column Science Fiction Film Club The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari: An Allegory of Anxiety and Terror in the Aftermath of War Unpacking the murky origins and warring interpretations of a legendary silent film. By Kali Wallace | Published on May 20, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (German: Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari) (1920) Directed by Robert Wiene. Written by Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer. Starring Conrad Veidt, Werner Krauss, and Friedrich Feher. In the summer of 1918, a few months before the November 11 armistice that ended the First World War, two young German writers were introduced by mutual friends. Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer had served in the German military during the war, and the experience had turned both of them into staunch pacifists and left them deeply disillusioned with their nation. They were also penniless and in need of work, so when somebody suggested they try their hand writing a screenplay, they decided to give it a shot. This was just over twenty years after brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière had held the first public screening of a motion picture in Paris in March of 1895. Since that fateful presentation, which consisted of ten brief films showcasing ordinary events like workers leaving a factory and swimmers jumping into the sea, filmmaking had become tremendously popular entertainment, increasingly serious art, and a wildly lucrative industry. It was also, from the start, a multinational phenomenon, with films being exported and imported across borders frequently. That changed with the start of World War I. The nations now actively fighting each other were no longer importing each other’s films; in particular, Germany was no longer trading films with the Allied countries. But the German people still loved movies, and there were already theaters all across the country, so the government had partially nationalized the film industry to keep it alive—and, of course, to contribute to wartime propaganda. It worked, and the German film industry survived WWI. Times were hard, but people kept making and watching movies, and the film industry grew and evolved. German film studios, like their counterparts in Europe and the United States, were making as many films as they could, as quickly as they could, to appeal to as broad an audience as possible. According to Hans Janowitz, it was silent film actor Gilda Langer who suggested that he and Mayer write a screenplay. They were young, angry, and desperately in need of money, so they thought: Why not? They looked around for inspiration. There was the recently ended war, of course, and their bitter experiences in it, but there were also inspirations of a smaller scale: a circus sideshow, a woman’s murder. That is how The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was born. Their screenplay, although fairly mundane in conception, would evolve into a highly stylized, artistically unique film allegory about the absolute power of a hateful authority inflicting fear and violence on young people who are helpless to resist. Or so the story goes. We have to be a bit careful here. Janowitz wrote about the inception of Caligari in 1941, more than twenty years after the film came out. In that narrative, he said a few things that have turned out to be not quite accurate, possibly because he misremembered, or because he was embellishing, or because his own views on his younger self and the film had changed over time. This makes identifying absolute facts regarding the production of Caligari somewhat difficult. The film is over a hundred years old. Janowitz and Mayer have been dead for more than 70 years, director Robert Wiene for even longer, so some details are simply unverifiable.   That’s common for old movies, but in the case of Caligari the inevitable questions have invited rather more than the usual amount of academic interest. There is the popular story of how the film was made, then there is a small but lively academic subculture dedicated to dissecting and verifying that story. In the words of film scholar Mike Budd, who edited The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari: Texts, Contexts, Histories (Rutgers University Press, 1990), “The myth is entertaining and memorable, and some of it is probably true, but it resembles too much all those other stories coming out of Hollywood, [German production studio] UFA, and other commercial film industries.” In other words, it’s not easy to tease out what actually happened from what has been repeated and embellished over more than a century, because people have liked stories about the making of movies for as long as movies have been around. Janowitz and Mayer wrote the screenplay for Caligari over a few months in 1918 and 1919. Contrary to popular belief, they did not actually set out to make a pointed political allegory. They wrote a story about hypnosis and murder, and only later did they recognize how heavily their experiences in the war and the German political climate had weighed on them. This comes straight from Janowitz’s own writing. In his 1941 monograph “Caligari —The Story of a Famous Story,” which is reprinted in excepts in Budd’s book, he wrote, “It was years after the completion of our screenplay that we realized our subconscious intention… the corresponding connection between our Doctor Caligari, and the great authoritative power of a government that we hated, which had subdued us into an oath, forcing conscription on those in opposition of its official war aims, compelling us to murder and be murdered….” I’ve come across a few critics and film scholars who think that sounds too convenient, suggesting that maybe Janowitz was seizing on a weightier interpretation decades later simply because it was popular. And, sure, that’s possible; that’s something we’ll never know. But I don’t think Janowitz’s experience is unbelievable. In fact, I think it’s a pretty normal experience for writers to look back on something we wrote when we were young, with the help of time and life experience and outside perspectives, and think, “Oh dear. I really was working through some shit when I wrote this, wasn’t I?” Screenplay in hand, Janowitz and Mayer went looking for somebody to make the movie. The German film industry at the time was partially nationalized, but in many ways it still functioned similar to the Hollywood studio system. Erich Pommer, co-founder and production head of the studio Decla-Film, purchased the script. Pommer and producer Rudolf Meinert were interested in the film for the most mundane of reasons: they thought it would be fast and cheap to make, and audiences would like a melodramatic thriller. Their first choice for director was our old buddy Fritz Lang, but he was busy with the two-part adventure film The Spiders (1919 and 1920), so they had to find somebody else. They brought on Robert Wiene, a prolific director and screenwriter at the time, although only a fraction of his movies survive today. This is where the story of the film’s production starts to get into a bit of a muddle. The conflicting stories arise from two key areas: the script and the visual design. We’ll start with the latter. Just about everybody involved with the film—particularly Janowitz, Pommer, and Wiene—would later claim the film’s striking visual style was mostly their idea. We have no real way of knowing how much of any of those claims are true. What we do know is that the look of the film was the work of three artists: Hermann Warm, Walter Reimann, and Walter Röhrig. All three were part of Germany’s avant-garde art scene and had worked in set design for Expressionist plays and films, so it seems likely that in hiring them the filmmakers knew what to expect. From what I’ve read, there was no point at which any of the artists considered giving the film a naturalistic look. Even from the very earliest planning stages, they decided the film was going to be weird, stylized, and nightmarish, and it did not take much to convince Wiene and the producers to go along with the idea. Expressionism was fairly common in German at the time, but not in cinema, and everybody agreed the Expressionist style would make the film stand out. I’m writing this with the assumption that if you’re reading this, you’ve seen The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. But if you haven’t, and you have somehow also missed ever seeing stills from the movie over the past century, I need you to pause now and go have a look at some images from the film. There really is nothing quite like it. Caligari is a stunning movie. It’s weird, disorienting, and captivating. There are almost no right angles. Rooms are not shaped like rooms; doorways and windows are slanted into outrageous trapezoids. We see close interior settings and broad exterior settings, but all they have in common is that the sense of perspective is all wrong. Shadows are in the wrong place—because they were painted onto the sets—and some sets are entirely the wrong size for the actors. The scale is completely mismatched to how the characters move through the environment. The characters (with two exceptions) move through the film in a fairly ordinary way, dressed and made-up in fairly ordinary style, acting as they would in any other setting. The normalcy of their actions only emphasizes how very abnormal their world is. It looks like drawings come to life, like a dreamscape stuck somewhere between two and three dimensions, like what might happen if somebody dropped a normal film on the ground and had trouble putting the pieces together. It’s incredible to look at. I absolutely love it. In a 2005 conversation for the CUNY film series City Cinematheque, professors Jerry Carlson and Gilberto Perez briefly discuss how none of this is a mistake. Stage set designers, even those working with limited budgets and time frames, or those more used to German Expressionist stage production, knew how to create naturalistic environments with two-dimensional backdrops. Nobody made Caligari look the way it does because they didn’t know better. And then there is the color. If you haven’t seen this movie in a few decades, you might have only seen a black-and-white version, although it greatly depends on which restoration you saw and when. For much of the film’s history, people watched the grayscale version and didn’t know anything was wrong, because that is what we expect movies from 1920 to look like. But in fact, shades of gray weren’t what theatergoers in 1920 would have seen. The original exhibition nitrate reels of film were hand-tinted in a variety of colors: entire scenes washed with murky yellow, sickly green, burnished orange, giving every segment another layer of unreality. Unfortunately, most of the subsequent copies of the film were preserved without the tinting. The original colors were restored in stages over the years, with the most recent restoration being completed in 2014. Film restorationist Barbara Flueckiger goes into detail on both the film’s long restoration history and the work to restore its original colors in a 2015 article in The Moving Image. They used six differently tinted copies of the film from around the world, all dating from the 1920s, to piece together what the original color might have looked like and create a restored digital version. Everything about Caligari’s visual style was unusual in 1920, and it’s still unusual today. The mode of most cinema, then and now, is to aim for either natural realism or convincing illusion. The filmmakers of Caligari believed that releasing a movie that looked so different would garner a lot of attention, whether positive or negative, and they were right. Everybody noticed, and almost immediately other filmmakers began borrowing. The impact of the film’s visual style is obvious throughout film history: in contemporaries such as Yakov Protazanov’s Aelita (1924) and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927); in the Hollywood monster flicks of the ’30s and the noir films of the ’40s and ’50s that so loved shadowy, off-kilter visuals; and in films made by later generations riffing on those genres and styles, such as the highly stylized films of Tim Burton and Guillermo del Toro. Caligari is one of those rare films that is so well-known and looks so unique that nobody can manage to rip if off exactly, but just about every film era since the ’20s has paid homage to it in various ways. That brings us to the other component of the Caligari muddle, which is the story. Or, more specifically, the script. The film’s plot is not particularly complex: A mad doctor, Caligari (Werner Krauss), is hypnotizing a sleepwalker, Cesare (Conrad Veidt), to kill people, and a trio of young friends (Friedrich Feher as Francis, Lil Dagover as Jane, and Hans Heinrich von Twardowski as Alan) find themselves on the receiving end of this senseless violence. Alan is killed, Jane is abducted, and Francis is determined to reveal Caligari’s evil nature. The main action of the movie is enclosed in a narrative frame. It begins with Francis telling the story to an attentive listener, and it ends with the twist that Francis himself is a patient in a mental institution, Jane and Cesare are his fellow patients, and Caligari is the doctor treating them. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is often referred to as the first true horror movie, and it’s easy to see why. So much of its story feels familiar to anybody who has seen a horror movie at any point in the intervening century. The killer stalking the night, the violent deaths we can all see coming, the beautiful young woman in peril. There’s even a bit of a love triangle. The film’s characters aren’t well-developed; they are primarily archetypes portrayed in broad strokes. It’s not a problem for the film, because every part of it feels so unhinged from reality that we accept the characters having a detached, dreamlike feel as well. The most striking of them is the somnambulist Cesare, who is both frightening and pitiable. Veidt is truly fantastic in the role, making the most of the exaggerated shadows of his eyes in those close-up keyhole views and the uncanny way he moves through the streets. (You’ve seen Veidt before in a very different movie: he plays the Nazi officer Major Strasser in Casablanca. Veidt was Jewish and fled Germany in 1933, but he spent a lot of his American career getting cast as Nazis. He was, understandably, not terribly happy about that.) The it’s-all-in-his-head twist ending is another element that feels familiar today, and I doubt it was that shocking to audiences even when the film was new, not in the era of Gothic melodrama and detective fiction. Even so, Caligari’s twist ending has been the subject of very niche but very serious academic debate for decades. I’ve done a lot of research while writing this column over the past two years. Most of it has been very focused on the films we watch, but some of it has been into more general film history, and just about every book and documentary that mentions The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari has told the same story. I’m going to quote Mark Cousins’ The Story of Film (Pavilion, 2004) as just one example: “The film’s writers, Carl Mayer and Hans Janowitz, had considered their story in political terms. Caligari represented the malign and controlling German state, Cesare represented ordinary people manipulated by it. The thirty-eight-year-old Wiene and his producer, Erich Pommer, removed the film’s political edge by adding not only an opening sequence, but a coda….” This is the story about Caligari: angry and disillusioned Janowitz and Mayer, fresh out of fighting in WWI, wrote an allegory of German politics and the callousness of systems of power that send young people to kill and die. But Wiene and Pommer, without the knowledge or blessing of the screenwriters, added the coda, which reverses the film’s entire theme and political message. This interpretation of the film was popularized by Siegfried Kracauer in his book From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (Princeton University Press, 1947). Kracauer drew his information from Janowitz’s account written circa 1941, the same one I quoted from above, which is partially reprinted in Budd’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari: Texts, Contexts, Histories. (In those excepts, Janowitz places the blame for the mental hospital frame firmly on Wiene, calling him a “cowardly” director, and not on Pommer.) Kracauer’s argument is that the framing scenes were added to the movie specifically to defang its political message, which he links to broader trends in German cinema leading to the beginning of the Nazi Germany. The central story is a critique of absolute authority, but the frame story inverts that critique by making Caligari, the authority, benign and helpful rather than malevolent. In Kracauer’s argument, that change is emblematic of Germany’s cultural evolution toward totalitarianism. “While the original story exposed the madness inherent in authority,” he wrote, “Wiene’s Caligari glorified authority and convicted its antagonist of madness. A revolutionary film was thus turned into a conformist one…” That’s the story that Budd refers to as an “entertaining and memorable” myth. Indeed, it has so many things we love in a cinematic story: meddling filmmakers ruining an artistic vision, cultural trends prophesying a horrific future, a One True Interpretation that can be discovered if we just know how to look at it. There’s just a little bit of a problem: It’s not clear who added the narrative framing device or why, nor that the addition of the frame necessarily has the effect that Kracauer describes. It’s also not clear that Janowitz and Mayer meant to write a revolutionary film, even if they did later acknowledge it as such. One curious thing to note, one that’s obvious to anybody watching the movie, is that it’s not remotely apparent that the film’s narrative frame is intended to provide a clear dividing line between delusion and reality. The frame scenes look like the rest of the movie, particularly the coda. That scene in the mental hospital courtyard bears all the same visual hallmarks of the uncomfortable perspective, the unnatural shadows, the distorted architecture. Maybe that’s because the production wasn’t going to spend money on another set. Maybe it’s because the filmmakers wanted both the frame and the core story to be nightmarishly unreal. Maybe it was meant to portray madness inside madness. We don’t know and we’ll likely never know, but I do think it’s interesting that the so-called “real” world doesn’t look very real at all. Another curious footnote is that Fritz Lang claimed that when he was in discussions to direct the film, he suggested adding a more normal, less stylized opening scene to let the audience ease into the film. Now, as we already discussed when we watched Metropolis, Lang is another man whose personal recollections don’t always match historical evidence, so there’s no way of knowing how those conversations actually went. If we take his word for it, it does sound like it was a purely commercial suggestion, not a political or ideological strategy. Everybody involved knew The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was an oddball film that might not appeal to audiences expecting more commonplace mystery and melodrama, and the filmmakers may have been looking for a way to ground it. The disputed origins of the narrative frame were, for a long time, impossible to fact-check. Kracauer had access to Janowitz’s personal narrative, but he did not have a copy of the script, because as far as he knew there were no surviving copies. It would turn out there was one—just one!—in the hands of actor Werner Krauss, who played Caligari. Krauss refused to show it to anybody while he lived. (I don’t know if Kracauer asked. Kracauer was Jewish and living in the U.S. during and after WWII, while Krauss was a fervent anti-Semite who collaborated with the Nazis during the war and was undergoing mandatory “denazification” afterward, so it seems unlikely there would have been friendly correspondence between the two.) After Krauss’ death in 1959, however, his estate sold the script the Museum of Film and Television in Berlin, and film scholars were finally able to read it. New interpretations began to appear over the next couple of decades. Alas, the script didn’t clear anything up, because the copy Krauss held onto for all those years was neither the frame-free version Janowitz described as the original nor the final shooting script that matches the film. It is instead a surprise third thing: a version of the script in which the movie begins with Francis telling the story at a bourgeois garden party, and there is no twist coda at the end to indicate it is a delusion. Which, yes, sounds like it might have come from Lang’s suggestion of a grounding opening scene, but that’s pure speculation. That version of the script doesn’t prove anything one way or another, except that at some point there was a version of the film considered in which Francis’ story is presented as actual, not a delusion. (The film’s Expressionist visual style is not described or dictated in the script. That, presumably, all developed off-page.) After the script was made public, some film scholars decided its existence disproved Janowitz’s account and Kracauer’s interpretation. Others think it changes nothing. Most fall somewhere in the middle. It remains unclear when or how one existing script evolved into what was filmed, who wrote and added that frame, and what they intended. It’s a question that vexes film historians largely because of the impact of Kracauer’s interpretation, and I understand that all too well. I think it’s natural to want to be able to trace decisions in popular art and entertainment that can predict the rise of Nazism and the outbreak of WWII, to be able to pinpoint moments in which the quashing of critical political themes to soothe popular tastes added another building block on a path toward totalitarianism. We very desperately want the interplay between art and politics to be that direct, because that would mean we can extrapolate the latter from the former. The fact that we don’t know why the frame story was added is frustrating, because the reason could mean so many things. It could have been an ideological decision. It could have been a commercial decision. It could have been both, as Kracauer posits that the decision was made because “films, at least commercial films, are forced to answer to mass desires;” it is in those mass desires he sees the warning signs of rising conformism and totalitarianism. It could also have been the same decision that countless storytellers have made, the one that has them thinking, “Man, wouldn’t it be fucked up if it was all in his head?” without considering all the thematic implications. (That’s a decision that countless thriller writers have made and continue to make and will probably continue to make, even when I very much wish they would give it a rest and try something new.) Which brings us to the obvious question: Does it matter? Does it matter if we’ll likely never know exactly why the film has a frame story that the screenwriters did not want? Does it matter if Wiene intended to change the meaning to make it more palatable and less revolutionary? Does it matter if film school textbooks repeat somewhat mythologized and not entirely accurate versions of events? Does it matter if Janowitz revised his own history when he was writing about the film twenty years after its release? I think it does, but not because I think we are going to uncover clear answers. I think it matters because people have been talking about this film for over a hundred years, and what they have said offers fascinating insight into both the art and politics. Film is the artistic medium of the 20th century. It was born as the century was dawning and spread worldwide almost immediately, but what films mean and how we view them is constantly evolving. There was never a point at which filmmaking was insulated from tumultuous politics and horrors of the 20th century. It is true that the film Janowitz and Mayer wrote in 1918 is not the same film that Wiene directed. But it’s also true that the people who watched the movie in 1920, when WWI was so newly ended their ears were still ringing from the bombs, were not watching it in the same context as those who watched after WWII, or in the ’70s, or today. All art is political, whether artists intend it to be or not, and artists have no control over how people will interpret their work after ten or twenty or a hundred years. This is especially true in an artistic medium that, by its history and its nature, records and reflects the world back to the people living in it. For all the debate about the narrative frame in the movie, that’s not what people remember, because that’s not the part that resonates most strongly. What resonates is the nightmarish imagery, the disorienting visuals, the terrifying villain who incites others to violence so easily and the crushing helplessness of the man forced to be his weapon. Nobody thinks of Caligari as a movie about a friendly psychiatrist just trying to help an unwell young man. The frame is almost irrelevant when we watch the film today, because the story that Janowitz and Mayer intended shines through so much stronger. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is a movie with remarkable staying power. It’s an unsettling, weird, and beautiful film. There may not be a singular true interpretation that we can uncover if we dig deep enough, but the themes of authority and control, madness and reality, violence and fear, have remained uncomfortably relevant, while the movie itself, in all its distorted glory, remains entirely unique. What do you think of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari? What do you think of that notorious narrative frame? What are your favorite later films obviously impacted by Caligari’s style? Next week: We’ve gone into dreams, we’ve gone into drugs, we’ve gone into hypnosis, so now it’s time to go into the sinister mind control exerted over an entire popular with Alex Proyas’ Dark City. Find it online.[end-mark] The post <i>The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari</i>: An Allegory of Anxiety and Terror in the Aftermath of War appeared first on Reactor.

Books reading recommendations Seven Works of Suburban Folk Horror When something sinister’s lurking in every sunny backyard or seemingly innocent sub-basement… By Sam Reader | Published on May 20, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share Nestled within the suburban gothic genre like a sub-basement filled with dark secrets beneath a house with a white picket fence lies the land of suburban folk horror. It’s an unsettling genre where manicured lawns and picket fences border ancient evils, forbidding woods, and ruins, and hide all manner of cults and strange rituals. Suburban folk horror distinguishes itself within the gothic with a focus more on folkloric roots, interplay between nature and developed lands, focus more on the middle and working classes (as opposed to gothic’s upper classes) and a clash between ancient evils and modern traditions. Its influence is clear in movies like Poltergeist and Weapons and shows like Widow’s Bay, among many others. If you’re looking to dip into some sinister, shadowy summer reading, here are seven standout works of suburban horror to consider. The Blade Between by Sam J. Miller Returning to one’s hometown can be a trying experience, especially when one left that town under traumatic circumstances and now finds oneself returning to a rapidly gentrifying hellhole. Ronan Szpessy is urged by a dead friend to do just that; he finds himself heading home to Hudson, NY to photograph the former whaling town and reconnect with his father and former best friends. As he does, he’s drawn into a chaotic whirl of plans including a blackmail scheme, ghosts, communion with a whale god, and sudden violent confrontations between a growing whale cult and the capitalist hipsters gentrifying Hudson. Miller keeps a knife-edge balance between showing Hudson’s descent into chaos (helped by numerous people along the way) and following Ronan as he attempts to navigate pressures both normal and supernatural as things build toward a climactic conflagration. The Blade Between is a stormy and strange story about the soul of a town and the trauma and resentments that can hide and fester in the places we’re forced to live. Needful Things by Stephen King King’s unusual mix of suburban drama, eerie folk legend, Ray Bradbury worship, and gothic horror reached its peak with Needful Things, a novel that was originally intended to send his Castle Rock location off in style. After the local curiosity shop burns down, the space is taken by Needful Things, a store owned by Leland Gaunt. Within Gaunt’s shop, the people of Castle Rock find their heart’s desire at a surprisingly affordable price—and all Gaunt asks in return is for them to play a little prank on their fellow townsfolk. Before long, neighbors are knife fighting on streetcorners and there’s a holy war going on between the Protestant and Catholic churches in town. Gaunt’s presence as a trickster/Satanic figure playing on the town’s insecurities (and the depiction of the uselessness of modern faith in Castle Rock) present a classic American folk horror scenario, like Hawthorne with a more violent, slapstick sense of humor. Ghost Story by Peter Straub Straub’s another author who plays with the line between gothic horror and folk horror (it’s easy to see why he and King were friends), especially in Ghost Story. The novel’s twisted narrative follows the Chowder Society, a group of old men who spend their time telling ghost stories to keep from talking about the horrible thing they did when they were younger. This structure—the slow-burn reveal of what the Chowder Society did, their telling of ghost stories, and the spirit that exercises its influence over Milburn, NY—lets Straub weave together a dense network of folktales and ghost stories, a horrifying creature of legend, and more modern horror sensibilities. It’s the story of something old, ancient, and horrifying descending on a small town and the sins of the past being unearthed and unleashed in the present. It’s hard to get much more folk horror than that. Invasive Species by Ellery Adams In the town of Cold Harbor lives Mrs. Smith, a reptilian sea creature of a woman who, to preserve her youth and keep herself alive over the centuries, descends from her house every hundred years to mingle with the townsfolk and eat nine children (as one does). What Mrs. Smith hasn’t counted on is that the times have moved on since she last preyed upon Cold Harbor, and as the witch known as the Mother of Eels makes her moves, moves are also being made around her: by a savvy housekeeper who knows the town’s secrets, by an ambitious woman looking to take the real estate world by storm, and by a twelve-year-old girl who isn’t falling for Mrs. Smith’s act. They all collide in a sharp, funny, and at times deeply unnerving story set at the height of the upwardly mobile Eighties, a gruesome homage to ’80s movies, classic ’80s horror, and folk horror. HEX by Thomas Olde Heuvelt (translated by Nancy Forest-Flier) The Black Rock Witch haunts the town of Black Spring and has since she was first put to death in 1664. Those who live in Black Spring live under the terrible curse of the Witch and must follow strict rules: No one from the outside world can ever know of the Witch, and no one is to undo the revenant’s horrible black stitches. When a group of teenagers decide to make a viral video messing with the Witch, the town erupts into chaos and violence as the rules are quickly broken. HEX is unique in that the threat comes more from what the townsfolk do to each other and the consequences of messing with the Witch (as well as misunderstanding her curse), leading to some bleak but ultimately human-driven scenes and rituals…a dark story of what happens when safeguards go too far. Direwood by Catherine Yu The day Aja’s sister Fiona goes missing, blood rains from the sky and weird parasitic caterpillars are eating the trees, but the teenaged Aja is more worried about getting through Fiona’s birthday party and once again playing second fiddle to the favorite daughter of the suburb of Glen Hills. Then that night her sister goes missing, and suddenly a hole is ripped in the world. Her parents are shattered by grief, other teenagers are disappearing, and those horrible caterpillars and the blood rain are moving closer—as is the beautiful, horrible man who wants Aja to let him in. While Direwood might be playing with the familiar trappings of the vampire romance, the idea of an ancient evil lurking in the woods in a decaying chapel, the environment itself playing a factor in the vampirism, and the visual references to earlier suburban folk horror/gothic novel ’Salem’s Lot all mean the novel channels folk horror as much as gothic. Hollow Tongue by Eden Royce Blending body horror, gothic horror, and a touch of folk horror into one unnerving novella, Royce invites readers to come home with Maxine, a woman who comes back to her suburban childhood home after an accident and a series of personal misfortunes. Between the twisted garden that seems to have a mind of its own, her casually racist neighbors, the disappearance of her parents, and the utter wrongness of her childhood home, there’s plenty for her to contend with, but the ultimate horror lies in the secret lurking behind all these things… Royce’s novella is a nightmare of nature and nurture, leading to an utterly grotesque climax that has to be read to be believed.  Of course, this is far from an exhaustive list, especially with only seven entries (Negative Space from my previous article would have fit, but I try to avoid recommending a book twice in a row), so now that you have a sense of the vibes we’re going for, feel free to recommend your own favorite examples of suburban folk horror below…[end-mark] The post Seven Works of Suburban Folk Horror appeared first on Reactor.

News The X-Files Mysterious Director’s Cut of The X-Files: I Want to Believe Coming to Disney+ Director Chris Carter claims this is the version of the movie he always “intended” to make By Matthew Byrd | Published on May 19, 2026 Screenshot: 20th Century Fox Comment 0 Share New Share Screenshot: 20th Century Fox In a surprise press release, Disney has confirmed that they will be adding Chris Carter’s director’s cut of The X-Files: I Want to Believe to Disney+ on June 11. The specifics of this version of the movie are somewhat mysterious. It has long been reported that Carter wasn’t entirely satisfied with the version of 2008’s I Want to Believe that was released in theaters. He apparently battled the studio and censors over the film’s graphic content, which led to numerous scenes being cut or altered. “I made it too scary, basically, and I was told so by the brass at Fox, and they wanted a PG-13 movie,” Carter said during a 2025 interview on the Fail Better with David Duchovny podcast. “So we cut it back to be a PG-13 movie, and we thought, ‘Okay, we’ve satisfied their demands.’ The critics, the people who rate the movies, said ‘No, it’s not a PG-13 yet, you’ve got to cut it back even farther.’ I can tell you that you can do more on network television, [the censors] are more permissive than they are for the movies.” Interestingly, the I Want to Believe DVD did include an “Extended Cut” of the movie. However, that version of the movie only included a few minutes of new footage which likely wouldn’t have affected the original movie’s rating much. Besides, to hear Carter tell it, this is a version of the movie that he only started working on recently. “Now I have a chance to go back and make the scary movie that I always intended,” Carter explained during that podcast interview. “It’s not just doing a director’s cut to do a director’s cut. It’s really kind of bringing to life something that for me was on the page and never got to the screen.” We don’t know the extent of the changes Carter intends to make to the film in this cut, but the prospect of a “rescued” version of the movie is certainly intriguing. Unlike the generally acclaimed 1998 X-Files movie, I Want to Believe is a largely standalone story that essentially functions as an extended Monster of the Week episode. The format was an advantage in some ways, though the final product sharply divided most fans, with many siding with the more negative critiques that called the movie disjointed, unnecessary, and underdeveloped. However, the film has always had fans who praised its standalone nature and Se7en/The Silence of the Lambs-like tone. It’s not clear if Carter would be able to seriously address some of the film’s more substantial structural issues. It seems much more likely that he’d be able to expand upon the grim nature of the original movie, though, which was certainly hindered by the film’s numerous cuts and eventual PG-13 rating. The good news is that we won’t have to wait long to see if this version of the film puts the sometimes-forgotten second X-Files movie back in the conversation.[end-mark] The post Mysterious Director’s Cut of <i>The X-Files: I Want to Believe</i> Coming to Disney+ appeared first on Reactor.

Excerpts Epic Fantasy Read an Excerpt From The Heart of the Nhaga by Lee Young-do A tale of castles built on the backs of flying mantas, giant birdmen, and heartless immortals. By Lee Young-do | Published on May 19, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from The Heart of the Nhaga by Lee Young-do, a Korean epic fantasy novel translated by Anton Hur—publishing with Harper Voyager on June 2nd. Three handles one.The world is divided by the Line of Limit. To the north are the Tokkebi—fire people able to manipulate flames as both weapons and illusions; Rekon—giant birdmen with immense strength and warrior acumen; and the humans—as divided as the other races are unified. To the south are the Nhaga—a reptilian people who relinquish their hearts for immortality. For centuries, the races didn’t cross that line, but change is in the air. A Nhaga is being sent North… and a trio is being dispatched to make sure this agent from the South makes it out alive—one from each race.But the illusion of a simple journey is quickly dispelled by the fact that the Tokkebi is merely a scholar, not an adventurer; the Rekon is deathly afraid of water; and the human hunts and eats Nhaga. And when the Nhaga they’re supposed to be escorting out of the Kiboren forest is murdered, the one sent in his place turns out to very much have a heart—meaning he’s quite vulnerable to the dangerous exodus.The four must quickly forge an alliance and shed the distrust and prejudice that plagues them if they are to survive. And just as crucial, they must figure out what this mission is actually about, because unbeknownst to them, the very fate of the world might rest on this one Nhaga making it to the North intact. 1 Rescue Mission When the humans brought a bit of the day into the darkness of the night with their torches and lamps, a fragment of the night lost its place and cowered at the edges of the light. A Tokkebi grabbed that fragment of night and pulled it into the artificial day. By gaining that fragment, he gained the five daughters of the night: Chaos, Seduction, Imprisonment, Concealment, and Dreams. With their help, the Tokkebi built a castle. There was a reason they did this, a very Tokkebi-like reason. They thought it would amuse them. Chaos decided the interior of the castle while Seduction decided the exterior. Imprisonment installed various dead ends, mazes, and traps, while Concealment created secret tunnels, hidden doors, and passwords. It was unknown how the fifth daughter contributed to this fortress. Dreams was very different from her sisters. The night wanted to hide and conceal and cover up, but Dreams wanted to uncover, discover, and open, which made her somewhat similar to the day. But she couldn’t be seen during the day and was visible only at night, like the stars. Even without the prospect of Dreams’s mystery contribution, the fortification of Jumunuri was strange enough. Only the lord of the castle knew precisely how many floors, rooms, corridors, and stairs Jumunuri had. There were, of course, a few facts known to those who visited the castle often. For example, the fourth floor could be reached only by going up to the seventh first, or turning three corners at any point of the castle would always lead you into the great hall, or if you stood at the top of the eastern tower and turned leftward twice, you’d land on your behind at the lord of the castle’s library. Depending on the taste of whoever was the current lord, they would put a cushion in the landing spot of the library or a bed of iron nails or place a lit candle or two. The candles were a very Tokkebi touch, as a singed posterior would be just the right amount of expected playfulness, but could the nail bed be more than mere rumor? It seemed a touch too harsh for a Tokkebi. But no one was sure of the truth. But the Jumunuri’s head of the sentries, Sabin Hasu’un, didn’t stare out at the black sky in melancholy because he was afraid of some prickly nails. He did so because he had witnessed the lord of the castle walk by carrying a pail full of beetle feces just now. The falling-on-one’s-posterior-in-the-library bit was usually undertaken by the lord of the castle’s valet, Byong. But the head of the sentries had a letter he had to hand over himself. He sighed and resigned himself to a stinky fate as he turned twice. His surroundings changed into something else entirely, and he fell on his behind. What’s this? There was nothing on the landing spot! Sabin dusted off his unharmed posterior as he got up and turned toward the letter-writing table of the lord of the castle. Buy the Book The Heart of the Nhaga Lee Young-do Buy Book The Heart of the Nhaga Lee Young-do Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget Bao Moridol, the eleventh lord of Jumunuri, held a spade in his hand as he stared at Sabin. Only when Sabin saw the pail by his feet and the pots by the window did he feel a sense of relief. “You must’ve had a good dream, my lord. Is what’s in the pail manure?” “What?” “I had assumed, my lord, that you wanted to sprinkle it on the floor…” Sabin stopped. The lord of the castle’s eyes had flashed with inspiration. “Hmm…!” Sabin silently apologized to whoever had the lord’s audience after him and at the same time gleefully created a list of people in his head to tell that the lord of the castle wanted to see them at once. Who would be the best Tokkebi for this delightful honor? As he got lost in this daydream, Bao Moridol, slightly nervous, said, “What is your business?” “Well, my lord, don’t you think it’s more of a matter of how much sun those plants get, rather than manure? Because Jumunuri is so dim.” “Your business!” Sabin grinned. The lord of the castle no doubt wanted to throw him out of the room as quickly as possible to test out this new idea. He decided to cooperate with the lord. From the corner, he dragged a chair closer and sat down. “A beetle, from those Kims who shave their own heads, brought a message for you.” “The Kims called monks? But why did you come with it? What is Byong doing?” Sabin shrugged. “This is what the Kims wanted. You know how they are. How they take care of any business having to do with people they deem important.” “Remind me how they take care of them again?” “They want the fewest possible people to know their business.” “Do they, now?” “This is only what I think, but the Kims seem to believe that the more important a business, the fewer people who should know of it. A most convoluted way of thinking, is it not? One needs many people to know if they want help.” “They’re weary of meddlers, I imagine.” “If it’s truly important business, who would dare meddle?” “The Kims fill their minds with useless thoughts. But if this is what they want, we can play along for now. It’s just between you and me, then. What is the message?” “The Kims have asked us to dispatch a Tokkebi.” “For what?” “They are assembling a rescue mission to go below the Line of Limit. They want a Tokkebi to be a part of the mission.” The lord of the castle looked intrigued. He was also aware that his head of the sentries, who respected the lord of the castle very much, liked to prank his lord and spent most of the hours of the day thinking of ways to do it. These pranks were a source of much mirth for Bao. Sabin Hasu’un detected scores of opportunities to prank his lord over the course of a day, barely executing a tenth of them. Which was why the lord enjoyed baiting his head of the sentries, provoking him to act. However, Sabin seemed serious this time. Bao said, “The Kims want to bring a Nhaga up north past the Line of Limit? For what?” “That’s the mystery. They refuse to say. Their tendency toward secrecy, I assume.” “As are the other members of the mission?” “Ah, they disclosed that part. The Kims seem to follow an old saying, how ‘Three handles one.’ There’s a Kim and a Rekon in the company as well.” “How amusing! What are they offering?” “Two hundred in gold.” “Astonishing. It makes me want to go myself. What? Why are you making that face?” “There’s no special reason. Just the expression of a head of the sentries pondering over whom to throw his support behind as the next lord of the castle.” Bao chuckled enough to satisfy his head of the sentries and said, in a more serious tone, “Then whom shall we send?” This was surprising. “You want to send someone? That ‘three handles one’ business is just old nonsense. No ragtag band of a rescue mission can withstand the murderous forces of the Kiboren jungle. They’ll be massacred in no time. I do not think there is any hope for them, my lord.” “Why not?” “Because of ignorance, mostly. Who knows anything about Kiboren or the Nhaga?” “That Kim would know.” “Pardon?” “That Kim—the one they’re sending on this mission. I’ve a feeling I know who it is. There’s only one who knows enough about Kiboren and the Nhaga to lead such a mission.” “There is such a Kim?” “Kagan Draca.” Sabin knew who this was. A wrestler who had scored a legendary win against a phalanx of Tokkebi champions. “He’s still alive?” “Alive and well. He hunts Nhaga for breakfast at the Line of Limit.” Sabin tried to smile. Surely this was a joke the lord of the castle was making, albeit a cryptic one. But Bao did not look expectant of a smile. “Hunts them for breakfast?” “Exactly that. He hunts them. And then eats them.” Sabin mimed cutting a piece of meat with utensils and eating. The lord of the castle nodded. Sabin’s face turned blue. “Is he… insane?” “Well, they say he’s an excellent cook.” “Oh… I see.” The lord of the castle entwined his fingers and placed them on his knee as his face took on a pensive look. “Kagan despises the Nhaga. Enough to hunt them down. That’s why he does what he does. Ambushes them near the Line of Limit. Chops them up. And eats them.” Sabin gulped. “I think hating someone enough to hunt them down and eat them is less of an example of staying true to one’s principles and more of a symptom of mind sickness.” “Well. He does have a good reason for doing it. You know very well that Nhaga are diffcult to kill, as they have no hearts.” “Is that why he, ah, chops them up? So they do not regenerate? But still. Isn’t the eating part somewhat… excessive?” “It’s a waste of perfectly good meat otherwise.” Now Sabin wondered if it was his lord of the castle who was indeed insane. Bao waved his hands at him. “No, no, that’s what Kagan would say. I’ve asked him the same question, and that was his answer. But there are other reasons. Hmm. One moment.” He opened a drawer, rummaged through it, and took out an old parchment scroll. “A letter Kagan sent me about six years ago. Read it.” Carefully taking it from him, Sabin started to read. Peace be unto you, this is Kagan.We haven’t spoken in a while. As you can imagine, weapons are easier to come across in this wasteland near the Line of Limit than paper would be. A peddler I came across yesterday happened to have some pages of parchment, which is how I am writing to you now.I thought about what you bade me to do in your last letter. But I’ve concluded that I cannot stop what I am doing now. Yes, I am still eating Nhaga. There’s no need to put terrible words onto paper, but I also find no need to talk around it.Have you heard of the tiger hunters of Kitaljer? When a tiger hunter in Kitaljer is eaten by a tiger, the dead hunter’s son becomes the son of all the other hunters. They teach that son everything they know. When the son is ready, he goes out to hunt tigers with the other hunters. And when they catch one, they cut it open and feed its liver to the son.I am the son that survived, my lord.The Nhaga have swallowed everything that was precious and meaningful to me aside from this worthless body of mine. So I eat them. Maybe someday, I shall be the one eaten by them. I try not to cross the Line of Limit, but in pursuit of another stumbling Nhaga, I sometimes find myself inside their jungle forest. When I realize I’ve given up my one advantage over the Nhaga, it makes me feel the cold of the jungle forest just like them, even as the winds of the jungle sizzle on my skin. I hastily make my way back up north, but just a few days later, I find myself under the line again.And then, one day, when I can no longer swing my Baragi against my enemies, I shall die. I do not care if you see it as the death of a madman and forget me accordingly.I do not think there is any other destination for me than insanity. Beneath these words was not a signature but a strange symbol. When Sabin lifted his head, the lord of the castle said, “It’s the insignia of the Kitaljer hunters. The black lion and the dragon.” “The black lion and the dragon?” “‘Kagan’ and ‘draca,’ respectively, in Kitaljer hunter language. Both were killed off by the Nhaga. That’s where he gets his name.” “Ah. So that’s not his real name?” “No. But I can’t tell you his real name without his consent.” Bao took back the letter and returned it to his drawer before he faced his head of the sentries once more. “So. What do you think?” “So this… wrestler exacts revenge on the Nhaga using the methods of Kitaljer hunters who disappeared hundreds of years ago? Which is to murder and eat their enemies?” “Rather succinct, but yes.” “What did they do to that Kim to drive him to such mad revenge?” “A terrible thing.” Sabin waited, but the lord of the castle did not elaborate. The lower-ranked Tokkebi was about to nod in unspoken understanding when he happened to glimpse a change in his lord’s face. Bao looked stricken. “A most terrible thing indeed.” Sabin couldn’t help but ask. “What deed, my lord?” Bao sighed and shook his head. “It’s the same as his real name. I cannot tell you without his consent. In any case, you see how this friend would understand the Nhaga and Kiboren better than anyone else? A predator naturally knows much about their prey.” “That may be true,” said Sabin uneasily, “but I would much prefer to enter such a place with companions who have their wits about them. What if this Kim gets tired of his regular meals of Nhaga and decides to add some Tokkebi to his diet for variety?” This was not a joke, but Bao laughed heartily. “Don’t you worry about that. Kagan’s rage is directed exclusively at the Nhaga. He is capable of no other rage at this point.” “How could you be sure of that?” “Look at what he’s written. He’s got nothing to lose now. The Nhaga took everything. This may sound like nonsense, but for anyone who isn’t a Nhaga, Kagan may be the safest person to be with in the world. Because he can’t get angry at anyone or anything else.” “What a sad state that is.” “Truly. A sad state. And it’s the truth. I can guarantee Kagan is safe for everyone else.” Sabin found it difficult to agree. But he also couldn’t find it in him to disagree out loud. There were many things one didn’t need to do to the lord of the castle at Jumunuri and one of them was to argue the logic of the lord. Sabin changed the subject back to the matter at hand. “If the champion Kagan is indeed safe, and at the same time eats Nhaga for breakfast, he is indeed the perfect someone to send someone with into Kiboren. Will you send someone?” “‘Three handles one.’ And they need a Tokkebi to make three. So I shall send someone.” “Who?” He thought on it. “No one has the qualifications for this sort of thing. There isn’t a single Tokkebi who knows anything about the Nhaga or Kiboren. Which means all Tokkebi are equally eligible. There’s no need to think too much about it, then. I shall send whichever Tokkebi enters this room next.” “…. The very next Tokkebi?” “Precisely.” If they’d been outside Jumunuri’s walls, Sabin Hasu’un would’ve gently ignored the lord of the castle’s words just because the lord of the castle had uttered them, and it wouldn’t have passed for disobedience. Sabin also knew that the lord of the castle wasn’t very wise. Both he and Bao knew this didn’t affect his great respect for his lord. But here, inside these walls, he had to obey the words of the lord of the castle. Sabin didn’t bother to ask any more questions. He did manage a short complaint, though. “May I wait with you for that? If I leave here, I’m afraid I may inadvertently become that very Tokkebi.” The lord of the castle chuckled. And so, the two of them began their wait. They didn’t have long. Shortly, a very angry Tokkebi appeared in the middle of the room and fell on his behind. At the sight of the head of the sentries, he shouted, “You! Are you trying to steal my work from me? Then from this day forth, I shall be the head of the sentries, by the name of the God That Kills Himself! Do you yield?” The lord of the castle’s valet Byong Srabble loved his work. Sabin considered it his downfall in this case and shook his head. Bao grinned. “That won’t do. Because you, Byong, are to be dispatched on a rescue mission.” Byong blinked as he considered Bao’s words. “A rescue mission?” “Yes. You have to go into a place no one has gone into for several hundred years. And rescue someone.” Excerpted from The Heart of the Nhaga, copyright © 2026 by Lee Young-do. The post Read an Excerpt From <i>The Heart of the Nhaga</i> by Lee Young-do appeared first on Reactor.

Books book reviews Murderous Intent and Muses: Vile Lady Villains by Danai Christopoulou With sumptuous language and dramatic descriptions, Danai Christopoulou has crafted something lovely. By Alex Brown | Published on May 19, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share “What’s done cannot be undone.” In Danai Christopoulou’s Vile Lady Villains, two queens get the chance to rewrite their narratives. We meet Lady Macbeth and Klytemnestra after they commit the heinous crimes audiences have condemned them for for generations: Lady Macbeth for conspiring with her second husband to kill her first; Klytemnestra for murdering her husband as revenge for him killing their daughter. The women are yanked from their tragic worlds into a strange new one inhabited by wraiths and terrors. They are tasked by the Fates—the Moirai to Klytemnestra, the Three Witches to Lady Macbeth—to undertake a journey they will not comprehend until it is done. In their descent into yet another land of nightmares, they find their guide, William Shakespeare, and collect objects and magics that both help and hurt them along the way. He introduces them to Shepherd, the queen of the world where fictional characters live (or are trapped, depending on your point of view). She sees the two queens, now calling themselves Claret and Anassa, as her latest subjects, but they want more for themselves than to exist at the whim of yet another ruler. As they forge new paths, they cannot help but be drawn to each other, their love growing from pools of blood. Are they vile villains, maligned mothers, femme fatales, or women who refuse to be defined by others? Before reading this book, I did a little research on the main characters and re-read William Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Aeschylus’ Oresteia. In their author’s note, Christopoulou mentioned that readers don’t have to know anything about either going in, but that they reference things from Shakespeare and the Oresteia; I am enough of a completist that I wanted to pick up on as many references as I could. I was pleased to discover quite a bit has been written on the overlap of these two women. In particular, this quote (J. Churton Collins, Studies in Shakespeare) was rattling around in my brain the entire time: “Klytemnestra in the Agamemnon might well be the archetype of Lady Macbeth. Both possessed by one idea are, till its achievement, the incarnations of a murderous purpose. In both, the motive impulses are from the sexual affections. Both, without pity and without scruple, have nerves of steel and wills of iron before which their husband and paramour cower in admiring awe, and yet in both beats the women’s heart.” Buy the Book Vile Lady Villains Danai Christopoulou Buy Book Vile Lady Villains Danai Christopoulou Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget The debate over whether or not Shakespeare knew about the Oresteia is addressed in the novel, opening the door to a deeper conversation about stories. In Vile Lady Villains, Shepherd allows one living writer in each generation entry into her pocket world of characters. Those writers get access to endless muses to inspire their work in the real world. The writer we meet in this generation is Shakespeare. It’s about 1606, or toward the end of his career (he died in 1616). Klytemnestra never appears in a Shakespeare play, but Agamemnon, the husband she murders, appears in The Tragedy of Troilus and Cressida (1602). Lady Macbeth, the character in his play, was based on Gruoch, wife of MacBethad mac Findlaích, as described in the British history book we know he mined for inspiration, Holinshed’s Chronicles (1587).  When we first encounter these women, they come off as rather one-note. Klytemnestra can only think in terms of murder and vengeance; Lady Macbeth is weak-willed and guilt-ridden. Once they shed those names for names they choose for themselves, they also begin to shed the personalities their storytellers gave them. At one point, Anassa comes face to face with the real Gruoch and sees first hand just how much Willy Shakes rewrote her role for his own purposes and how far she’s come in rebuking that image. When Claret has her own moment of self-reflection, she comes to a similar conclusion. The real question is what comes next? Do they go back to their old, ill-fitting roles, do they let someone else write a new ending, or do they write a whole new story for themselves?  The novel has some structural weaknesses that hold it back from greatness. Sometimes the beautiful writing style was marred by anachronistic and clunky narrative choices. I would have liked more development of the other sapphic romance; it appears out of nowhere and is gone from the story just as quickly. The deus ex machina felt too pat an explanation for how Lady Macbeth and Klytemnestra ended up in the crosshairs of the Moirai. The chapters are short and tend to end just as things get exciting. Their journey often loops back around to places they’ve already been, to have conversations or revelations they’ve already had. For readers expecting something more in the romantasy vein, it likely has the effect of feeling like the story dilly-dallies. I largely enjoyed the slow progression, even if sometimes even I felt things were taking too long to get going. Vile Lady Villains is ultimately a story about stories. It is a story about storytellers; about how history is, in a way, just a collection of sometimes contradictory stories we piece together into a flimsy narrative; about how a story is changed by whatever context both the writer and the reader bring to it. It is a feminist attack on the patriarchy and a sapphic rallying cry about living your truth. Claret and Anassa’s story is an odyssey and a tempest, a katabasis and a dream. With sumptuous language and dramatic descriptions, Danai Christopoulou has crafted something lovely. [end-mark] Vile Lady Villains is published by Union Square & Co. The post Murderous Intent and Muses: <i>Vile Lady Villains</i> by Danai Christopoulou appeared first on Reactor.