News The Brothers Lionheart Astrid Lindgren’s The Brothers Lionheart Is Coming to Apple TV From an Unlikely Pair of Co-Creators Can we get Ronia, the Robber’s Daughter next? By Molly Templeton | Published on December 9, 2025 Photo: Penguin Random House Comment 0 Share New Share Photo: Penguin Random House Americans most likely know Swedish author Astrid Lindgren as the creator of Pippi Longstocking, but Lindgren also wrote half a dozen other children’s book series as well as a handful of standalone novels (and plays!). And now one of those novels is headed to Apple TV: Deadline has the news that the streamer has picked up The Brothers Lionheart, a melancholy and rich story about two brothers growing up poor in Sweden. Intriguingly, the series is co-created by Thomas Vinterberg (the director of Another Round) and playwright Simon Stephens (who adapted Mark Haddon’s Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time for the stage). Both have experience with adaptations (Vinterberg also made 2015’s Far From the Madding Crowd), but it is a bit of a tone shift, especially for a director whose arguably best-known film is about four high school teachers trying to maintain a certain blood alcohol level. But it’s not like there isn’t precedent for a similar tonal shift. Jonathan E. Steinberg went from Black Sails to Percy Jackson, for example. When Vinterberg signed on to the project last year, he said in a statement, “The Brothers Lionheart is possibly the most important cultural legacy from my parents’ generation … It stands as a milestone from my childhood, shining vividly in my memory. The project is a great responsibility and, at the same time, a significant dream-come-true to create the series based on this immense and moving tale – and in that way, help pass it on to my children’s generation.” Vinterberg will direct all episodes of the limited series, which he will co-write with Stephens. According to Deadline, “The Brothers Lionheart follows two brothers who share an unconditional love that transcends life itself. Jonathan and Karl Lion journey through the magical realm of Nangijala, where whispered prophecies, terrifying dragons, and a tyrannical emperor force them to become the heroes their bond demands.” One can only assume that this synopsis is intentionally vague; it will be interesting to see how many details about the story Apple TV lets slip before it airs. The Brothers Lionheart has previously been adapted into a Swedish film and two musicals; an English-language film was in the works in the 2010s but appears to have fallen apart. This new version seems unlikely to meet a similar fate.[end-mark] The post Astrid Lindgren’s <i>The Brothers Lionheart</i> Is Coming to Apple TV From an Unlikely Pair of Co-Creators appeared first on Reactor.

Books book reviews Journeys and Destinations: On Mark Z. Danielewski’s Tom’s Crossing Danielewski takes the skeleton of a pulp Western plot and turns it into an epic meditation on friendship, horses, and the nature of mythology itself. By Tobias Carroll | Published on December 9, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share What, exactly, is Mark Z. Danielewski’s novel Tom’s Crossing about?  One way to answer that question is to ask the marketing department. Something you might notice if you have a copy of Tom’s Crossing in front of you, as I do, is that its copy is surprisingly minimal. The back cover has a blurb from Stephen King and the ominous line “NO ONE TALKS TO THE DEAD FOR FREE.” The jacket has a little more information: that the book is about “two friends determined to rescue a pair of horses set for slaughter.” This is accurate enough, but it’s also a little like saying that Moby-Dick is about a fishing trip. There’s a character in this book named Melville; I cannot imagine any writer, much less one as aware of narrative history as Danielewski, doing that as anything other than a way to acknowledge the white whale in the room. There’s another answer that comes to mind that reflects a wholly unrelated creative work: the influential Western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Specifically, an oft-misquoted piece of dialogue from near the end of that film: “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” Tom’s Crossing, set largely in Utah, is a novel that’s very concerned with all of those things: the West, facts, legends, and the way facts and legends can become one another. It would be accurate to say that Danielewski’s novel is also about the way legends begin and how they grow. Tom’s Crossing is also about horses. More accurately, it’s about the peculiar way that horses and humans can bond; simply by virtue of existing, it has already become part of a bizarre equine Transcendentalist canon, situated somewhere near Mike Oldfield’s song “On Horseback.” It’s a Western, and it’s a quest novel, and it’s a ghost story. And while it’s arguable that it can be read as a deconstruction of any or all of these things, what stands out for me about Tom’s Crossing is its lack of anything remotely resembling ironic distance. From the outside, this looks like a monolithic postmodern work of experimental literature. What you have inside is, in fact, a completely sincere and often sentimental adventure story. There is nothing cool about this book. I enjoyed it tremendously. It’s been years since I first read the work of Mark Z. Danielewski. That came, predictably, through his novel House of Leaves, a novel that one could convincingly argue is one of the most influential works of fiction of the last 25 years. Nestled narratives, ambiguous storytelling, and typographic experimentation are just some of the things found within. It’s a work steeped in horror with enough formal inventiveness to chart its own literary path. I have not read much of Danielewski since, in part because despite my warm feelings about House of Leaves, it also terrified me in a way nothing else has done since then. Details: at one point reading it, in a room in my apartment with the door closed, I realized that I was no longer sure that the rest of the apartment was on the other side of the door. The best writing can change the way you see the world; this left me feeling like my brain had been hacked, that I was now seeing the world in a manner similar to the perspective of Danielewski’s most existentially fraught, horrifyingly paranoid character. The tricky thing is that that same skill at using prose to rewire a reader’s brain comes in handy here. Right about here I need to tip my hat to Alexander Sorondo’s massive exploration of Danielewski’s life and art, which includes a detailed look at Danielewski’s five-volume The Familiar and its efforts to echo certain Prestige TV narrative beats within the context of an expansive novel. There’s a similar approach used to very different ends in Tom’s Crossing. It is not remotely hard to imagine a version of this novel that’s one-sixth the size, and yet Danielewski opts for a maximalist approach. He uses devices here to make quotidian moments seem heroic and heroic moments seem truly epic. In other words, this is a novel that needs to get you on its wavelength. Here’s a brief summary of what readers can expect from this book: Tom’s Crossing begins by telling the story of two high school-aged friends, Kalin and Tom. It’s 1982 and the two boys are living in the town of Orvop, Utah. They have grown fond of a pair of horses, Navidad and Mouse, who live on the property of a local business owner nicknamed “Old Porch” and who are at perpetual risk of being slaughtered. Tom dies, and on his deathbed asks Kalin to free the two horses. Kalin embarks on a quest to lead them through the wilderness to an area where they can run wild. He’s joined by Tom’s ghost and, eventually, Tom’s younger sister Landry. Old Porch and his sons pursue them, weapons in tow and ill will in their hearts. People die along the way.  There’s something unexpected about the way Danielewski approaches this most archetypal of stories. The title page declares that the author is “E.L.M.,” and that it was transcribed by an unknown party. It also clarifies something in an especially bold font: “A Western.” The opening paragraph of Tom’s Crossing does not name any of the major characters mentioned; by its third paragraph, Danielewski introduces Rayleen Roundy, a woman trying her best to paint a scene that’s become familiar to her. Danielewski names several more characters in rapid succession. If you’re expecting Rayleen to become a significant character going forward, you would be incorrect. From the outset, he’s making something very clear: This isn’t just a novel about the events it describes; instead, it’s about how those events will resonate over the years that followed. Alternately: Kalin’s mother Allison works at a movie theater, and there’s one scene set there where two films are alluded to but not named. One is E.T.; the other is Rambo: First Blood. Both have, since the time of their release, become borderline myths of their own. It’s telling that Danielewski mentions both films here; one could argue that, if those two books are a spectrum of sorts, this novel is situated equally from both poles. Danielewski can also be very specific when he wants to be. He does include some proper names of musicians and movies at various points over the course of this story. A handful of writers also come up in Tom’s Crossing, and it’s interesting that one of the ones named in the book is Ben Okri. Arguably Okri’s most famous novel is The Famished Road, whose protagonist is a boy with one foot in the world of the living and another in the world of the spirits. That description could also apply to Tom’s Crossing’s Kalin, who spends much of the novel talking to his dead friend, who only he can perceive. Tom isn’t the only ghost to show up here, however. At one crucial point in the journey, the spirit of a deceased Indigenous woman named Pia Isan joins the traveling party—but only Tom is able to perceive her. This sets up a parallel structure, where communication between all of the members of this traveling quartet is impossible, and Tom and Kalin must each act as go-betweens. That the party consists of two white men and two women of color also seems significant: This is, after all, a novel where Mormonism is omnipresent, set just four years after the Mormon Church broke with its existing policies and allowed Black men equal standing in the religion. There is an entire afterlife cosmology alluded to in pieces here. Despite being a ghost, Tom himself is unsure of what all of the properties of ghostdom are. Some of the most jarring moments within the novel come from Tom shifting between a familiar friend to Kalin and a being that appears to have lost some essential qualities, including large chunks of his memory. There’s a sentimental component to this journey, two dear friends on one last adventure — but Danielewski never lets us forget that there’s something else happening as well. That right there is the darkness of a ghost’s mind. That there is Tom, darkness and distance incarnate, beholden to forces beyond the reach of calculation, not to mention speculation, the ne plus ultra past which all returns are rendered impossible. Or, to put it more simply: to dare close enuf to know Tom’s thoughts would be to lose irrevocably our own. There are a few more uncanny elements of Tom’s Crossing. There’s a recurring motif that involves Kalin’s mother warning him to avoid using a gun, except that this is less a warning and more of a curse. To reveal how exactly this element plays out over the course of the novel would be to spoil too much, but it wouldn’t go too far to indicate that this is foreshadowing: not just Chekhov’s gun, but Chekhov’s gun with accompanying curse. This is, after all, a Western.  Buy the Book Tom’s Crossing Mark Z. Danielewski Buy Book Tom's Crossing Mark Z. Danielewski Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget One of the other recurring devices in Danielewski’s novel are the points where the narrative pauses and Danielewski briefly introduces characters who, years after these events, find themselves inspired by them to debate their veracity or create art depicting their interpretations of certain scenes. The years in which these events take place stretch on past 2025; they also often reveal the fates of these minor characters, mortality and all. There is at least one very science fictional demise found in this text; this may be a Western, but it also has space to mention death by robot. This is a review of Tom’s Crossing, and as such it’s worth addressing the sheer scope of this novel. And here I’m at a disadvantage: Like many books of this size—especially Alan Moore’s Jerusalem, which this book is very similar to in some ways and radically different from in others—many of the risks it takes pay off as long as you’re willing to accept that the narrative approach justifies the scope. In Moore’s case, that was giving the city of Northampton an epic all its own; here, it’s the way Danielewski takes the skeleton of a pulp Western plot and turns it into an epic meditation on friendship, horses, and the nature of mythology itself. But Tom’s Crossing is an understandably daunting read. This is a big, dense, ambitious book that does a few structural things that have no business working—including one cliffhanger moment late in the novel which is followed by a seemingly random interlude about what appears to be a wholly unrelated character. Danielewski is juggling a lot of narrative balls here, and while they do pay off, readers will need to sign on for the long haul. Essentially, it’s a perpetual motion machine: The payoff comes from the anticipation building and building. This all does go somewhere eventually; even one subplot that seemed to be completely unrelated turned out to have a very good reason for existing. Readers will find many references to The Iliad in Tom’s Crossing. (Also characters named Melville and Bilbo; Danielewski is not shy about some of the terrain he’s crossing here.) And maybe that, in the end, is what Mark Z. Danielewski’s novel Tom’s Crossing is about: showing us how a story that’s become the stuff of myth got its start, and where to find the human connection at the heart of it.[end-mark] Tom’s Crossing is published by Pantheon. The post Journeys and Destinations: On Mark Z. Danielewski’s <i>Tom’s Crossing</i> appeared first on Reactor.

News Tomb Raider Sigourney Weaver in Talks to Join the Cast of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Tomb Raider Series The live-action series is set to start production in January 2026. By Vanessa Armstrong | Published on December 9, 2025 Screenshot: Lucasfilms Comment 0 Share New Share Screenshot: Lucasfilms The Prime Video Tomb Raider series from Phoebe Waller-Bridge that is set to star Sophie Turner as Lara Croft is slowly moving forward, with an A-list actor eyeing the production. According to Deadline, Sigourney Weaver is in talks to join the show. We don’t have any news on what role she’d play, but having Weaver on board in any capacity is intriguing. (She’s gotta be playing a villain, right?) Weaver, of course, is no stranger to taking on parts in big franchises. There’s Alien, of course, and also her part playing a young Na’vi (after playing a human character who died in the first movie) in James Cameron’s Avatar films. She’s also playing a delightfully sociopathic character in Bryan Fuller’s recently released movie, Dust Bunny, and is in the upcoming Lucasfilm feature, The Mandalorian & Grogu (pictured above). Waller-Bridge’s live-action television adaptation of the popular video game franchise has long been in development, with the Fleabag creator working on it since at least 2023. Amazon MGM Studios officially greenlit the show in May 2024 and in September of this year, we saw Turner confirmed as Lara and Chad Hodge also on board to serve as co-showrunner with Waller-Bridge. The series is reported to start production on January 19, 2026, so—if things remain on that schedule—that would see filming start in mere weeks. Here’s to hoping we’ll get more information on Weaver’s character (assuming the deal goes through!) in the new year. [end-mark] The post Sigourney Weaver in Talks to Join the Cast of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s <i>Tomb Raider</i> Series appeared first on Reactor.

Excerpts dark academia Read an Excerpt From We Who Have No Gods by Liza Anderson In a world of witches, a human woman must hunt or be hunted… By Liza Anderson | Published on December 9, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from We Who Have No Gods, a new dark academia fantasy by Liza Anderson, out from Ballantine Books on January 27, 2026. Vic Wood has her priorities: scrape by on her restaurant wages, take care of her younger brother Henry, and forget their mother ever existed. But Vic’s careful life crumbles when she discovers that their long-missing mother belonged to the Acheron Order—a secret society of witches tasked with keeping the dead at bay. What’s worse, Henry inherited their mother’s magical abilities while Vic did not, and he has been chosen as the Order’s newest recruit.Determined to keep him safe, Vic accompanies Henry to the isolated woods in upstate New York that host the sprawling and eerie Avalon Castle. When she joins the academy despite lacking powers of her own, she risks not only the Order’s wrath, but also her brother’s. And then there is the imposing, ruthless, and frustrating Xan, the head Sentinel in charge of protecting Avalon. He makes no secret of wanting Vic to leave.As she makes both enemies and allies in this mysterious realm, Vic becomes caught between the dark forces at play, with her mother at the heart of it all. What’s stranger is that Vic is beginning to be affected by the academy—and Xan—in ways she can’t quite understand. But with war between witches threatening the fabric of reality, Vic must decide whether to risk her heart and life for a world where power is everything. I The Acheron Order maintains the boundary between the world of the living and the world of the dead. Behaviors and individuals that threaten this balance are to be eliminated. —William Ruskin, A History of the Acheron Order (New York, 1935) That man, there, was looking at her funny. Having worked in this restaurant for the better part of a decade, Vic Wood knew the weight of men’s eyes on her back well. Most of the time she hardly noticed the touch of a curious glance between her shoulder blades. This was something else. A mousy man of about sixty sat alone at the bar. To the untrained eye, he looked profoundly normal. Dashes of gray streaked his brown hair, and he wore a crisp button-down under a suit the color of drab carpeting. But pallid tweed spoke as loudly as any other clothing. He was rich. The outfit—dull and perfectly tailored—was the kind of plain pricey the wealthy deployed to avoid undue attention from the masses. Where the nouveau had not yet learned the dangers of flaunting their luck, old money hid itself well. Best to fit in and keep your head attached to your shoulders. Vic clocked him on sight. A useful skill, when tips paid the rent. Isolating the haves from the have-nots. When her mother died eight years ago, Vic had taken the first job she found that would hire a sixteen-year-old lying about her age. She spent two years waiting tables in a shitty restaurant for half-decent pay. Hands up her skirt and dirty jokes were part of the game, and Vic learned to play along. She got tough and hoped that one day her and her brother’s survival wouldn’t depend on her ability to smile when she wanted to scream. Once they moved to Austin, she upgraded to Le Curieux Gastropub, an upscale fusion joint that sold lifestyle as much as food. The restaurant hired for hot, young, and cooler-than-you, so Vic looked the part. She left her curly black hair loose around her face and learned to ignore it when it fell in her eyes. When a new makeup style came into vogue, Vic practiced in front of a mirror until she could apply it without thinking. She amassed an all-black wardrobe fit for the uniform requirements but interesting enough to push the envelope a little. Vic rose through the ranks quickly. It didn’t hurt that most of the staff worked on a temporary basis. College kids crammed service jobs into the gaps between semesters. Vic enjoyed the descriptions of campus life they brought with them, even if she felt a twinge of jealousy at their adventures. In all her years of waiting tables, hundreds of men had sat at that bar, and hundreds of eyes had watched her from across it. None of them had felt quite like this. Henry would have called her paranoid. That was a favorite word of his to describe her. Suspicious, cynical, always looking for the worst and usually finding it. The man at the bar was just a man at the bar, her brother would have said. As if Vic didn’t have good reason to be wary of strangers. This man was too clean, too pressed, too pale. Muted, like a photo printed without enough ink. His eyes, as nondescript as the rest of him, followed Vic with too sharp a precision—as though she were a specimen ripe for dissection. Buy the Book We Who Have No Gods Liza Anderson Buy Book We Who Have No Gods Liza Anderson Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget The familiar warning sounded in the back of her brain. She approached him, her spine pin-straight, and slid a rag across the bar to give her hands something to do. “Can I get you something to eat?” Vic spread her service smile wide, and an expression flashed across the stranger’s face as fast as an animal darting in front of a headlight. Recognition, she would have sworn, if it had appeared on any other face. Was this the man she’d been waiting for? Had the time finally come? “I am not staying.” He had an odd voice, Vic thought. Accented in a way that avoided accent, as if he had taken great pains to excise any hint of identity from his speech. “You let me know if you change your mind,” Vic replied. The hair on her neck stood on end, and she turned to leave. A clammy hand slipped around her wrist and gripped tight. Vic tamped down the urge to wrench her arm from his grip. Eyeing the damp cloth hanging in Vic’s hand, he pulled away, his lip turned up in disgust. Her skin echoed the wet pressure of his palm. She shivered. His eyes clung to hers, and Vic couldn’t look away. “On second thought…” He slapped the counter like he meant to kill an insect. “Is there anything you recommend?” Vic couldn’t move. Why couldn’t she move? “Everything’s good here,” Vic heard her voice answer. “I’m partial to the ragout.” The stranger hummed a noncommittal note and kept his snakelike gaze on hers. “Have you worked here for a long time?” “Since I was eighteen.” The words fell from her tongue without hesitation. “Will you stay here?” Vic tried to break eye contact. She didn’t like the questions, the artificial calm in his voice. She didn’t like that she couldn’t stop her words from spilling out. “Will you continue to work in this restaurant?” the stranger repeated, an edge to his tone. “I don’t have any reason to leave.” A bead of sweat swelled on the stranger’s forehead. Glistening in the amber light of the bar, it rolled into his eyebrow and hung there, a dewdrop on the end of a rotten leaf. “You did not go to university, did you?” he asked. “No.” “Why not?” Vic tried to shake her head, but her muscles were locked. She wanted to tell the stranger to go to hell and take his prying questions with him. She wanted to scream in his face to leave her alone. But memories floated to the surface, and Vic could not send them away. “I couldn’t go to college,” she said, her voice weak and quiet. “I had to take care of my brother.” “Why?” “I’m the only person who can.” It had been eight years since Vic last saw her mother. Eight years, ten months, sixteen days, and about half an hour, to be precise. Meredith Wood had thrown a rushed “remember to feed your brother!” over her shoulder and slipped out the front door of their apartment for the last time. She worked the late shift at a nearby hospital, and her lifelong disinterest in punctuality left her practiced at hasty goodbyes. After three days of watching the door, Vic called the hospital. Fifteen minutes later, she hung up on an increasingly concerned hospital administrator, who explained in a deep Southern drawl that they had no record of a Meredith Wood. She was very sorry, dear, but she couldn’t find that name anywhere. Not a full day had passed before Henry, only ten years old and small for his age, sidled into the living room, chewing on his lip. He’d spilled their mother’s secret, and Vic’s life had fallen apart. Men were coming for Henry, people he said could do things Vic couldn’t. Witches, he’d said. Mom called them witches. “But surely you want more than this?” The stranger gestured to the space around them, though his eyes remained locked on hers. No, Vic wanted to say. She was happy, she’d swear. For the last eight years, Vic had done just as her mother had asked. Henry is special, her mother had told her again and again. Take care of him. Vic had been taking care of Henry even before their mother vanished. When Meredith dragged them across the country, lying about working long hours at whatever hospital needed the staffing that month, Vic had made him dinner and helped with his homework and made sure his clothes were clean. She’d stayed up with him when he was sick and walked him home from school every afternoon. Vic had done well. Henry would graduate high school in a few months. He was safe and happy and no strange men had come to take him away from her. And that was enough for Vic. The stranger’s lip twisted, his skin sallow in the light. “You’re nothing like your mother, are you?” No, Vic thought instantly. She was not. Where Meredith beamed bright and lively, Vic was combative and cold. Where Meredith had taken up as much space as possible, Vic had folded herself to fit in the cracks her mother left behind. But he shouldn’t know that. He shouldn’t know any of that. “How do you know my—” He cut off eye contact, and Vic dropped against the bar like a puppet with its strings cut. A nearby couple looked at her in alarm, but Vic righted herself quickly, backing away in confusion. “Are you okay?” one of her co-workers whispered as Vic passed. “It looked like you fell.” Vic couldn’t get her bearings. She’d been wrung out, hung to dry, and left behind. “Nothing happened.” Vic wiped sweat from her neck. Something had passed between her and the stranger who knew her mother. Looking at him had twisted her up inside. Only seconds later, and the memories were already drifting away. Vic couldn’t recall exactly what he’d said or how she’d felt, but she retained the slimy feeling in her gut. All her planning. Hiding, avoiding new people, keeping her life as small as possible. All of it had worked for a time. But it was over now. Vic could see that clear as day. Just as Henry had warned when he had been a frightened child, looking up at her like she could fix it. They had come at last. She cast a glance backward. The stranger rose from his seat. Reaching into his coat pocket, he extracted a thin leather wallet and removed a single bill. He folded it with care, running a blunt fingernail along the crease as if he had all the time in the world. He leaned forward to ease the bill under his half-empty wineglass, and Vic caught sight of a carmine stain against his crisp white sleeve. His cuff had come undone, revealing a thin strip of skin and markings more intricate and alien than any writing Vic knew. A circle, letters in an alphabet she didn’t recognize. Bloodied marks only just beginning to scab. They were carved into his skin. Vic bolted. Excerpted from We Who Have No Gods  by Liza Anderson. Copyright © 2026 by Liza Anderson. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. The post Read an Excerpt From <i>We Who Have No Gods</i> by Liza Anderson appeared first on Reactor.

Column 80s Fantasy Film Club Krull Deserves a Bigger Cult Following — Who’s With Me? Is this a good movie? Debatable. Is it an *awesome* movie? Hell yeah it is. By Tyler Dean | Published on December 9, 2025 Credit: Columbia Pictures Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Columbia Pictures In this column, we’re looking back at the 1980s as their own particular age of fantasy movies—a legacy that largely disappeared in the ’90s only to resurface in the 2000s, though in many ways, the fantasy films of the ’80s are far weirder and less polished than what we got in the aughts. In each of these articles, we’ll explore a canonical fantasy movie released between 1980 and 1989 and discuss whatever enduring legacy the film has maintained in the decades since. For a more in-depth introduction to the series, you can find the first installment here, focusing on 1981’s Dragonslayer. Last time, we looked at a singularly dark interpretation of L. Frank Baum’s Oz books with 1985’s Return to Oz. This time we are delving into the sui generis fantasia that is 1983’s Krull. I didn’t see Krull until about seven or eight years ago, but it instantly became one of my favorite films. The film and I are almost exactly the same age (it’s about two months younger than I) which helps me justify the fact that, in 2021, I celebrated my 38th birthday with a socially distanced outdoor screening of this movie. So let’s dive in! Krull is a strange one. Standing boldly astride the Fantasy/Sci Fi divide, the story is set on the titular planet, a world of magic that has been subjugated by an alien warlord called the Beast. Prince Colwyn (Ken Marshall, of Deep Space 9 fame) and his fiancée, Princess Lyssa (Lysette Anthony—redubbed by Lindsay Crouse) are attacked on their wedding day. Lyssa is stolen away by the Beast and his Slayers, prompting Colwyn to embark on a quest to win her back and topple the Beast’s rule. He is joined by the sage Ynyr (The Elephant Man’s Freddie Jones), the shapeshifting wizard Ergo, a blind seer, along with his young apprentice, Titch, as well as an oracular cyclops and a band of thieves led by the lovable rogue, Torquil (played by Alun Armstrong—RSC member, Penny Dreadful luminary, and star of more than a few BBC adaptations of Dickens novels). Fun fact: Torquil’s merry men include Liam Neeson and Robbie Coltrane, both relatively early in their respective film careers. Colwyn and company conquer crystalline spiders, changeling assassins, and the Beast’s laser-toting, armored Slayers on their way to the forbidding Black Fortress, where Lyssa has been imprisoned. Along the way, Colwyn fulfills a prophecy by retrieving the mythical “Glaive,” a weapon that resembles a vaguely sentient, bladed starfish. He finally comes into his full powers after marrying Lyssa, thereby fulfilling another prophecy, and destroys the Beast, liberating Krull and giving the survivors a happy ending.  So, how does Krull hold up? I already tipped my hand in the intro, but Krull is fucking great! It strikes the perfect balance of engaging and stupid. It takes itself just seriously enough as it’s pushing its absolutely gonzo vision of its fantasy world to be thoroughly enjoyable, even if the viewer doesn’t take it quite as seriously… If I had to point to a single quality that makes Krull so delightful, it would be a fearlessness with regards to its worldbuilding. Released the same year as Return of the Jedi, Krull clearly takes the Star Wars approach of confidently launching its original story in the kind of lived-in world whose history feels much deeper than what is actually explained on screen. Unlike Star Wars, however, it basically eschews all exposition, to both its credit and its detriment.  Take, for example, a third act plot point where Ynyr must visit a character who has rated only the briefest mention up to this point in the film: The Widow of the Web, an ancient sorceress (Francesca Annis) who lives in a crystal at the center of a huge web guarded by the aforementioned crystalline spider. We learn, in very short order, that the Widow has some sort of control over the flow of time, that Ynyr and the Widow once had a son which the Widow killed shortly after his birth, that the Widow is also named Lyssa, and that she is willing to sacrifice herself to save the other Lyssa by providing Ynar with just enough time to deliver vital information to Colwyn. That’s a lot of plot, and there is almost no other context for any of it. In most movies, that sort of dense plotting would require an entire act of a film to set up and explore and Krull burns through it in a scene that lasts, at most, five minutes. Imagine if Obi-Wan just shouted out a laundry list of all his past entanglements with Darth Vader in the two minutes before their duel and none of it was ever mentioned anywhere else in the film.  That’s definitely not to Krull’s credit (and there is a reason taking the same approach as Star Wars doesn’t necessarily lead to Star Wars-esque success) but at the same time, there is something so matter-of-fact and unforced about the whole of Ynar and the Widow’s backstory that one finds oneself intrigued rather than impatient. Krull, despite being an original property (producer Ron Silverman claims the original prompt for the film was inspired by Dungeons & Dragons), feels like it is using remarkable economy of storytelling to cram in details from much more complex and capacious source material. It’s a movie that feels designed to make viewers question if there wasn’t a trilogy of forgotten fantasy novels on which it was based. Everything about the story—from its magical wedding rites and its ancient rivalries between noble houses to the Glaive itself—somehow manages to feel deeper and more engaging than it is. To this end, Krull boasts a production design that leans, tantalizingly, into its blending of sci-fi and fantasy. Knights wear tunics straight out of a 1960s BBC Shakespeare adaptation alongside smooth, ceramic-looking armor that suggests either that the peoples of Krull have adopted fabrication techniques from the Beast or else were a more technologically advanced society before he came to the planet (Torquil’s spiked collar and chainmail mantle are particular highlights). Likewise, there is a charming faux-Medieval brutalist quality to some of the castle sets that feels inspired by Cedric Gibbons’ in-world sets for Kiss Me Kate (1953) or Mary Blair’s design for the exterior of “It’s a Small World.”  Some of that geometric, minimalist brutalism also gets repurposed to far more intimidating effect for Lyssa’s scenes in the Beast’s Black Fortress which, from the outside, looks like a glacier-carved rock formation along the lines of Devils Postpile or the Giant’s Causeway. From the inside, the fortress is vaguely implied to be the body of the Beast itself, with apertures shaped like eyes, huge curling bridges studded with teeth, and claw-like spirals through which Lyssa meanders. The film never explains whether the twenty-foot-tall reptilian baboon that manifests as the Beast late in the film is the true body of the creature or if Lyssa has been wandering around its bones and organs the entire time. Similarly, there is no explanation given for the humanoid, glass-helmeted spacesuits of the Beast’s Slayers which release grotesque slug-like creatures, reminiscent of John Carpenter’s The Thing, that burrow into the earth when their shell is damaged. It is implied the slugs are the Slayers themselves and the humanoid suits are mecha they pilot, but any real explanation feels tantalizingly beyond the grasp of the film, not out of laziness, but because the humans and Cyclopes of Krull would have no way to unravel those extraterrestrial mysteries.  This is not to say the Krull doesn’t have its low points. Neither Colwyn nor Lyssa is particularly engaging as a lead (and, in the latter case, Lyssa is done no favors by the mismatch between her body acting and her dubbed lines), and for every fascinating choice or odd plot point, there is a plodding scene of our adventurers trudging through the grim ocher swamps of Pinewood Studios. Even some of the costume design falls flat: Robbie Coltrane appears to just be wearing a sturdy pair of builder’s coveralls. The presence of two different wise old mentor figures also feels quite unnecessary. Still, there are cast highlights as well. David Battley, who seems to be channeling Eric Idle (with whom he’d worked a few years earlier), manages to mine some charming comic relief from his role as the initially selfish and self-important wizard, Ergo the Magnificent, and gives one of the best line deliveries in B-movie history when, after pestering the seer’s young apprentice for sweets, he introduces himself and lists his many (self-bestowed) titles. The boy responds that it’s all very impressive and introduces himself as simply Titch…a name to which Ergo responds cheerfully, “That’s not impressive, but it is adequate! Adequate.” All in all, Krull is wildly stylish with only the barest hint of real substance that never actually manifests, but I would argue that still puts it ahead of many other fantasy films of the day.  Krull was a box office flop and, even if it’s been more fondly remembered in the 42 years since it was released, it has never achieved as extensive a cult status as, say Fire and Ice, or even the far less interesting Beastmaster. So let’s talk about what impact it has had in the decades since. Most of its pop cultural afterlife has been centered around its magical weapon: the Glaive. I want to start out with the obvious. A glaive (sometimes called a glaive-guisarmes) is a real weapon—a polearm culminating in a sword-like blade, similar to a naginata. You will note that the Glaive in Krull is nothing like that. It’s a psychically controlled shuriken that mostly works like a bandsaw. In addition to causing an endless amount of confusion among nerds about what a glaive actually is, the boomeranging throwing star/chakram has been a popular archetype in fantasy games ever since: Blizzard Entertainment’s Warcraft games prominently feature a “glaive thrower,” a sort of Krull-style glaive-launching ballista; Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon has a “killstar” that functions the same way; a personal favorite—2001’s Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magicka Obscura—calls its glaive-type weapon “Azram’s Star;” and so many of the chakram and bladed boomerang-type weapons seen in Xena: Warrior Princess to Secret of Mana to the Smart Discs of the Predator franchise may be directly inspired by, or at least owe some of their raison d’etre to, fond memories of Krull.  While far from the first piece of media to blend science fiction and fantasy (Anne McCaffrey and Frank Herbert were doing it back in the ’60s and, obviously, Star Wars was the ascendant speculative fiction of the day when Krull was released) there is a particular subgenre of medieval-ish fantasy worlds invaded by sci-fi forces that feel like they owe much to Krull. The Dungeons & Dragons space fantasy setting Spelljammer certainly seems to have taken aesthetic notes from Krull, as do the foundational Japanese RPG series Super Hydlide and Phantasy Star. While Krull was released a couple years after C.J. Cherryh’s Pride of Chanur, you can see the influence of both in early ’90s fantasy like C.S. Friedman’s Coldfire Trilogy, or in the way that Games Workshop kept elements of period-specific fantasy when it launched Warhammer 40000, its space opera counterpart to its established Lovecraftian-Horror-in-the-Holy-Roman-Empire-but-make-it-anti-Thatcherite setting. As a final note, Krull is also likely to have had a lasting impact on the twelve couples who were married on a version of the Krull set as part of one of the weirdest promotions in the history of cinema. I’m not saying that I would want to have a Krull-themed wedding—who am I kidding, I would adore that—but I am saying that getting married as a promotion for a film (particularly one that wouldn’t be released for another month or so and wasn’t based on any sort of known franchise) is the kind of thing that we should do more often. Think of the Rebel Moon weddings we missed out on!  But what do you think? Is Krull an accidentally brilliant piece of ’80s fantasy or is it yet another, plodding dud saddled with an underbaked plot? Do we stan Rell the Cyclops, and his unbelievably drawn-out death sequence? Is baby Liam Neeson’s facial hair worse in Krull or Excalibur? What do you think a glaive is? Please share your thoughts in the comments, and be sure to join us next time when we go from a film that somehow gives the impression that it’s drawing from a deep (if nonexistent) well of lore and source material to one whose source material is a plotless treatise on dragon physiology with Rankin/Bass’ 1982 animated classic The Flight of Dragons![end-mark] The post <i>Krull</i> Deserves a Bigger Cult Following — Who’s With Me? appeared first on Reactor.