Books Reading the Weird Cleaning After Confession: Stephen Graham Jones’ The Buffalo Hunter Hunter (Part 11) The Cat-Man returns as Good Stab’s confession draws to a close… By Ruthanna Emrys | Published on July 8, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches. This week, we cover Chapters 21-22 of Stephen Graham Jones’s Nebula- and Stoker-winning The Buffalo Hunter Hunter. The book was first published in 2025. Spoilers ahead! The Nachzehrer’s Dark Gospel, May 5 1912. Good Stab flees the Fat Melters Camp after the murders of Yellow Kidney and his sister. All Pikuni will now be at war with him, though in this case he isn’t responsible. Good Stab wakes to meet Cat Man, who is responsible. He wants Good Stab to suffer, a “disease” to his people. Good Stab goes to his buffalo herd and finds all dead, and the semi-flayed Weasel Plume dying. He euthanizes the bull by crushing his heart. As he weeps blood, a voice behind him says, “Well, that was melodramatic.” That the Cat Man’s been subsisting on long-legs is obvious from his elongated limbs, antlers and yellow eyes. That he speaks Pikuni means he’s spent time in Pikuni camps. He shrugs off questions about his origins. He’s 450 years old, and knows things Good Stab can’t even imagine. To demonstrate his superior strength, he tears off Weasel Plume’s massive head. If Good Stab were worth his time, not just an accident, he could educate him, show him “the world in all its misery and grandeur.” But if all Good Stab wants is to die, why should Cat Man deny him? Good Stab accepts Cat Man’s challenge. Each takes a goring from Weasel Plume’s horns. Good Stab drinks Cat Man’s blood, hoping it will strengthen him. But Cat Men can’t drink each other, and instead it sends him into a coma. He wakes in a glacial cave, hands and knees frozen into the icy floor. He breaks an arm struggling to free it and uses his exposed bone to dig out his good arm and legs. He wanders a maze of tunnels studded with human and animal remains. Cat Man must have lived here for years. Good Stab starts encountering living Pikuni, sustenance provided by his captor. The third winter, Cat Man supplies only napikwans. One says that outside, Pikuni are starving, buffalo are decimated, and Indian territory shrinks. Good Stab finds a flint arrowhead buried in the man’s flesh, and makes a torch of scavenged clothing to melt his way out. He carries Weasel Plume’s skull to the top of Chief Mountain, a worthy shrine. Then he searches for his people. Eventually he finds the Small Robes’ camp. He now looks napikwan, and they bring him to their new chief. Walks Twice looks Pikuni, but is in fact Cat Man. He hides his true nature by claiming that for his “medicine” to stay strong he must avoid sunlight. Cat Man defers final judgment on Good Stab until he and his hunters return. Good Stab will remain, bound to a post. Children gather to observe him. One girl, Kills-in-the-Water, communicates through hand signs. Seeing sunlight bothers him, the children tie cloth over his eyes. The hunting party returns with only two bulls, and one hunter missing. Cat Man arranges an untimely Sun Dance. Though this upsets the whole camp, no one opposes him. Good Stab is forced to dance in place of a proper Pikuni initiate to manhood, with Kills-in-the-Water the medicine woman who pushes the impelling pegs into his chest. She’s crying “about the wrongness of this.” The dance done, Cat Man carries Good Stab off to the Backbone. There he breaks Good Stab’s legs, spine and one arm, and leaves him to an agonizingly slow recovery. The last of his revitalizing meals are Blue Mud People fleeing soldiers; these leave him Indian again. He finds that the Small Robes have fled Cat Man’s voracity. He meets Kills-in-the-Water and her brother, who fear him, but he builds them a lean-to and brings them food. The last part of Good Stab’s confession he tells with reluctance. He’s returned to the Small Robes’ corpse-littered winter camp. He sets Walks Twice’s lodge on fire and waits. Cat Man comes. He killed these people because they kept hiding Kills-in-the-Water, even daubing themselves with her blood and scattering. Once in a century, someone’s born with blood their kind will do anything for. Kills-in-the-Water will be only the third Cat Man’s ever drunk. Good Stab proposes a bargain: He’ll bring Cat Man Kills-in-the-Water if he’ll then leave, and spare the surviving Pikuni. But first, he returns with the three hundred remaining buffalo. They trample Cat Man flat, but he still throws Good Stab aside and starts to stand. Good Stab rushes back to Kills-in-the-Water. Her brother’s died of the cold; alone, she clings to Good Stab as his daughter used to, all the way to an island below Face Mountain. Her embrace makes what follows his worst sin: He holds her for Cat Man. He then bites blood from his own tongue, mixes it with blood he took from the girl’s shoulder, and injects the mixture back into her. That full mouthful of Good Stab’s blood leaves Cat Man puppy-weak. Good Stab spends four winters feeding Cat Man sturgeons. Then he releases his enemy into the lake, a fish trapped forever in the water. Good Stab searches for Pikuni camps, but finds none. It’s Starvation Winter, with corpses frozen into the snow-crust and Pikuni wasting away at Old Agency where rations never come. His confession’s done. He leaves Three-Persons now, in the church, with his own dead. The Absolution of Three-Person, May 26, 1912. Two weeks after Good Stab’s last confession, Arthur finally returns to his journal. The mice have returned to his church, but Cordelia has not, nor does Arthur dare to steal her again. The mice probably smell the lingering rot of the pews’ dead occupants, now removed by deputies sworn to secrecy. Of course, news of the macabre spectacle has leaked out anyway. Arthur has scrubbed and scrubbed. If only he could scrub clean his memory. He has sunk to so low that he can’t even comfort himself on the stream of victuals delivered by parishioners. The mice were having daily banquets in the pantry until Arthur started feeding stray dogs. He does keep eggs on hand, not to eat but to detect “the proximity of servants of the Pit.” Every Sunday he demonstrates to parishioners the sanctity of their chapel by cracking an egg into a chalice. So far the yolks have been yellow. Arthur did get one shock when an Indian wearing dark spectacles appeared, but it was only Amos Short Ribs. He has told Mose to supply Amos with bottles on Arthur’s tab. The Blackfeet are “a cursed people, and the quicker they become tillers of the soil and tenders of cattle, the better” both for Montana and Arthur’s own “sanity and sanctity.” It remains for him to bear the torture of waiting for Good Stab to select the day of his execution. The Degenerate Dutch: Cat Man has destroyed whole peoples, “lost to history,” and promises that the Pikuni will go the same way. Libronomicon: Of Good Stab, Arthur says “look upon his works and despair!” Which makes him Shelley’s Ozymandias, two vast and trunkless legs of stone plus boasting. New deep lore: the rest of Ozymandias got torn apart by a vampire and scattered to slow his healing. Weirdbuilding: Cat Man mocks Good Stab by promising to force him into a different kind of story—the villain in a tale of a hero who defeats monster after monster. Seven Deadly Sins and Counting: Appetite spoiled by Good Stab’s confession, Arthur blames the feral dogs for their “gluttony” with his parishioners’ donations. Ruthanna’s Commentary The thing is that (a) I love horror and (b) I am easily squicked out. It’s not that blood and guts scare me, it’s that I’m very good at imagining corporeal damage and it’s an unpleasant experience. Give me unnamable experiences with extradimensional incursions any day. Or give me chewy thematic ideas that I can focus on while I try not to think too hard about the body horror. And if there have to be bloody guts, better that they be weird. Snyder’s metamorphoses were a lot easier to deal with than the open brain slurping, which is easier again than a near-mundane infected wound. Jones is very good, and his themes are very chewy. But the climax of Good Stab’s confession has a lot of ick. A lot of visceral, easy-to-visualize ick. So I am having trouble thinking about the themes because I’m too distracted by having to tear off your hand that’s been frozen into a glacier. Which reminds me way too much of Aron Lee Ralston’s story (CW for much like Good Stab’s story but in real life). It’s hard to type when I’m thinking about this stuff, because I become way too self-conscious about my wrists. I had enough trouble handling a 2-centimeter cut in my thumb a couple of weeks ago. I would not enjoy being a Jonesian vampire. But then, no one else seems to enjoy it either. Leaving aside the grievous bodily harm, or trying to, we learn this week that it’s possible to survive even what happened to Cat Man during Good Stab’s “rebirth.” It just takes a while to recover. And it makes you—or at least, Cat Man—really mad. One of the thematic throughlines that I’m following, under the amputations, is what remains for a nachzehrer of their original life and self. Cat Man is cut off from his own origins, but seems to have come originally from Europe. (Did someone stick him on a ship while he was injured, trying to get rid of him? Did he board to feed, and accidentally go on a transatlantic voyage?) He’s 450 years old, which means he was barely 20 at the time of re-contact. He doesn’t care about his people, doesn’t think of mortals as people at all, the supernatural equivalent of whiteness erasing culture. His list of “ship” cognates starts with “nava,” which might be a Latin variant, and goes on into French, Spanish, a Slavic tongue, Czech, and Russian. He’s not thinking about what he would’ve called it in childhood, nor about what languages are meaningful to Good Stab, just running a cursory finger through his memory file. (Except, then, there’s that ring. A past to be swallowed over and over so that it isn’t—quite—lost.) What he does have, still, is cruelty and an instinct for vengeance. That matches Good Stab, who’s been trying to hold onto his cultural identity and remnant purpose, but who mostly ends up killing and punishing, messily. After another couple of centuries, where would he be? Especially if fellow nachzehrers kept taking the opportunity to destroy the things he cares about whenever he crosses them. All that can’t be taken is hunger, and, um, hanger. And the urge to destroy whatever makes you hangry. Which makes it especially interesting that he doesn’t fully destroy Arthur—though there are still two chapters remaining, and Arthur still expects to die. Instead he forces Arthur to grapple with his own past, and with Good Stab’s. While hung from a cross, in a church full of corpses, admittedly. Not exactly traditional. Still, it turns out that the confession isn’t entirely a farce. One death, out of all those Good Stab is responsible for, has stuck in his conscience. But why confess to an enemy? To a Christian? Why beg for approval? The whole urge seems un-Pikuni. There’s something missing, still, from this picture. And now, what’s missing is Good Stab. Arthur reports the corpses, gets help cleaning them out, returns to serving his flock. He’s lost his once-voracious appetite and his denial, but he’s alive and has his community. Still, he thinks of Good Stab as a representative “savage,” rather than a monster by both napikwan and Pikuni standards. Still, he wishes the surrounding nations “civilized” as quickly as possible, made into tame farmers who don’t know the beavers or the crows or the Backbone. Wishes a world divided into humans and resources to be exploited, with no space left for monsters. Anne’s Non-Commentary: Anne will return from her mysterious island next week, in whatever form the water shapes her. Next week, Marjorie Bowen’s “The Bishop of Hell” offers an older story-confession. In addition to Project Gutenberg, you can find it in Mike Ashley’s Queens of the Abyss: Lost Stories From the Women of the Weird.[end-mark] The post Cleaning After Confession: Stephen Graham Jones’ <i>The Buffalo Hunter Hunter</i> (Part 11) appeared first on Reactor.

News Emmy Awards Widow’s Bay and Pluribus Rightly Earned a Pile of Emmy Nominations Cast Dale Dickey in everything, you cowards By Molly Templeton | Published on July 8, 2026 Image: Apple TV Comment 0 Share New Share Image: Apple TV While the powerhouse HBO series The Pitt and Hacks received the most Emmy nominations this year (25 and 24, respectively), two brand-new genre shows are hot on their heels. Widow’s Bay earned 19 nominations, and Pluribus got 18. A few other SFF series also crop up here in the major nominations: A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms for Best Drama Series; Wonder Man’s Yahya Abdul-Mateen II for Lead Actor in a Comedy Series; The Testaments’ Chase Infiniti for Lead Actress in a Drama Series; and three nominations for Paradise, including Lead Actor (Sterling K. Brown), Drama Series, and Outstanding Supporting Actress (Julianne Nicholson). But Vince Gilligan’s Pluribus and Katie Dippold’s Widow’s Bay are way ahead of the pack. Widow’s Bay is nominated for Best Comedy Series, and four of its stars are up for the related acting awards: Matthew Rhys (also nominated for his work in The Beast in Me), Stephen Root, Kate O’Flynn, and Dale Dickey. Guest stars Hamish Linklater and Betty Gilpin are also nominated for Best Guest Actor, which is as it should be. Pluribus has a quartet of similar nominations on the drama side of things: Best Drama Series and acting nominations for star Rhea Seehorn and supporting cast Carlos-Manuel Vesga and Karolina Wydra. It also has two Guest Actor nominees in Jeff Hiller and Miriam Shor. Once you get into the Creative Arts Emmys, SFF is all over the place, from Steven Yeun’s Best Character Voice-Over Performance nomination for Invincible to Monarch: Legacy of Monsters’ lone nomination for Best Special Visual Effects in a Season or a Movie. Alien: Earth has a nomination for Best Cinematography for a Series (One Hour), and, perhaps unsurprisingly, Fallout has two different makeup nominations. Our beloved Murderbot is also now an Emmy-nominated television program, with nominations for Title Design, Main Title Theme Music, and Sound Editing. Star Wars: Visions turns up in Best Animated Program, and Star Wars: Maul – Shadow Lord in Best Sound Editing. The (massive) full list of nominees is available via the Emmys website. Mariska Hargitay hosts when the Emmys air at 5 p.m. PDT/8 p.m. EDT Monday, September 14, on NBC and Peacock.[end-mark] The post <i>Widow’s Bay</i> and <i>Pluribus</i> Rightly Earned a Pile of Emmy Nominations appeared first on Reactor.

Featured Essays King Kong Does the First King Kong Remake Deserve a Fresh Look? The Peter Jackson remake perhaps owes a debt to the much-maligned 1976 version By Don Kaye | Published on July 8, 2026 Image: Paramount Pictures Comment 0 Share New Share Image: Paramount Pictures It seems like King Kong, one of the acknowledged landmarks of fantasy cinema, would not necessarily have been a ripe candidate for a remake. The original 1933 movie, despite being dated in many ways, was still a groundbreaking effort in visual effects and such an iconic film that even an update with the latest advances in technology might have felt like something no studio or filmmaker would dare attempt. And yet it happened twice—in 1976 and again in 2005. The latter, of course, was co-written and directed by Peter Jackson, who used the leverage from his Lord of the Rings trilogy to make his own version of one of his all-time favorite films. While flawed and bloated, Jackson’s take on the classic story was nevertheless a hit with audiences and critics, grossing more than $557 million worldwide and earning an 84% score on Rotten Tomatoes. The 1976 version, on the other hand, remains the outlier of the three versions: while profitable, it scored only mixed reviews from critics and is perceived as the weakest of the three—and a mediocre film in general. Image: Paramount Pictures But is it really? Fifty years after its release, King Kong ’76—directed by John Guillermin (The Towering Inferno) and produced by legendary Italian movie mogul Dino De Laurentiis (whose resume ranged from early Fellini classics like La Strada to campy ‘60s fare like Barbarella to David Lynch’s Dune)—perhaps deserves some reappraisal. De Laurentiis’ version certainly pivots away from key aspects of the original, yet arguably provides a more sympathetic, even pro-nature take on the giant ape and his clash with the civilized world that makes us feel for Kong and his plight and paints him as more than just a rampaging beast. The story remains essentially the same, although some details are different: an expedition to an unexplored island reveals the existence of Kong, a gigantic ape who is a mythic, almost god-like figure to the primitive tribe that worships him. A beautiful, aspiring actress with the expedition is offered to Kong by the tribe as a sacrifice, but he is instead strangely drawn to her. This leads to him being captured and brought to New York, where he is ruthlessly exploited by modern civilization and goes on a rampage that ends with his lonely death as he plummets from a New York skyscraper (the Empire State Building in the original, the Twin Towers in the ’76 film). De Laurentiis landed the rights to King Kong after an ABC-TV executive, Michael Eisner (who later became CEO of Disney), pitched the idea of a remake to both Universal Studios and Paramount Pictures. The latter brought De Laurentiis on board as producer, and he quickly secured the rights from RKO-General, a holding company that retained the remnants of RKO Pictures, which produced the original 1933 version of Kong. Since Universal apparently claimed to have the rights as well, due to the novelization of the original film being in the public domain, De Laurentiis rushed his version into production before Universal could strike first (it was Universal that eventually produced the Peter Jackson version). Following that, De Laurentiis hired Lorenzo Semple Jr.—whose credits included the 1960s Batman TV series as well as classic ‘70s conspiracy thrillers The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor—to pen the screenplay. From the start, De Laurentiis wanted to jettison Kong’s many battles with dinosaurs (he only fights a giant snake in this one) and update the story to a modern-day setting. Semple told Starlog magazine in 1983, “We made a very deliberate attempt not to be anything like the original movie in tone or mood. Dino wanted it to be light and amusing, rather than portentous. I don’t think the original was meant to be mythic.” Image: Paramount Pictures Semple’s script isn’t excessively campy, like his work on Batman, but there is a lot more self-aware humor in the film. “I had my horoscope done before I flew out to Hong Kong,” says Dwan, the female lead (and Kong’s “love interest”), played by Jessica Lange. “And it said that I was going to cross over water and meet the biggest person in my life.” Lines like that permeate the script but don’t necessarily weigh it down, and in many ways Semple’s screenplay succeeds at updating the story while retaining many of the signature sequences from the 1933 film. One of the cleverest things he does is turn the original’s Carl Denham (Robert Armstrong), a documentary filmmaker, into Fred Wilson (Charles Grodin), an executive with the Petrox Oil Company who charters a ship to look for untapped oil reserves on what he believes to be a previously unmapped island hidden behind a permanent fog bank (the atoll is never explicitly called Skull Island in the film). When the island’s oil turns out to be unusable, making the whole trip a potential waste and putting Wilson’s job on the line, the emergence of Kong provides him with an opportunity to capture the giant ape and exploit him for promotional purposes. Whether Semple wanted to intentionally poke fun at the people writing his own paycheck—Paramount was owned by Gulf and Western at the time—it’s all too clear that Petrox and the smarmy, manipulative Wilson are quick to exploit natural resources and leave behind a trail of destruction no matter what the cost. “Even an environmental rapist like you—even you—wouldn’t be asshole enough to wipe out a unique new species of animal,” sneers Jack Prescott (Jeff Bridges), the primate paleontologist who initially stows away on Wilson’s ship yet grudgingly joins the expedition. Maybe Wilson wouldn’t kill Kong outright (although he initially considers it), but his removal of the giant ape from his habitat not only traumatizes Kong but, as Prescott suggests, is more than likely to upset the natural order on the island. Image: Paramount Pictures Prescott is a reimagining of the character of Jack Driscoll from the 1933 film, the ship’s first mate played by Bruce Cabot. The Driscoll character is a tough, no-nonsense “man’s man” who resents the presence of actress Ann Darrow (Fay Wray) on the voyage (he’s got a thing about women on boats) until he eventually falls in love with her and bravely risks his own life to rescue her from Kong. Driscoll is more or less a square-jawed stuntman with little on his mind, while Prescott is a scientist and activist who is forced to become an action hero while struggling to protect not just Dwan but Kong himself from Petrox’s predations. Bridges is terrific in the role, and he and the excellent Grodin square off magnificently throughout the movie, while Bridges proves himself to be a formidable physical actor as well. And then there’s Dwan (as she notes, her name is Dawn but she switches the middle letters to make it more memorable). In her film debut, future two-time Oscar winner Jessica Lange is almost preternaturally gorgeous, and this being 1976, De Laurentiis and director John Guillermin drape her in the skimpiest outfits possible. But while Lange’s performance was heavily criticized at the time as unconvincing and inexperienced, film historian Ray Morton states in his book, King Kong: The History of a Movie Icon, that this was intentional on Lange’s part—she purposely plays Dwan out of the gate as naïve and somewhat dizzy, giving the character room to grow, while her work earned accolades from Jeff Bridges. Over the course of the film, the relationship between Dwan and Kong does indeed become more touching. The original film portrayed its title character as little more than a monster, and Fay Wray’s Ann Darrow pretty much screams her way through the movie and wants nothing to do with the big ape. The 1976 version takes a different approach (which Peter Jackson also adapted to some extent for his 2009 iteration), having the empathetic Dwan launch a running monologue with Kong that the gorilla finds unendingly amusing. Although there has always been a vaguely unpleasant sexual subtext to every version of this tale, the 1976 Kong treats Dwan with genuine affection and care, as when he washes mud off her in a waterfall then blow-dries her with his breath. There’s something child-like about him, as well as her efforts to calm him, that adds far more pathos to their relationship than the original movie mustered up. Image: Paramount Pictures Dwan yearns for fame and success, but ends up devastated by what that fame wreaks on the innocent Kong. Her grief over Kong’s death at the end of the film is sincere, while Kong’s demise itself is far more heartbreaking. “No one cry when Jaws die,” Dino De Laurentiis told Time magazine. “But when the monkey die, people gonna cry.” If the 1976 King Kong has one major advantage over the 1933 version, it’s that Kong in this film is a much more sympathetic and tragic figure. The moment in the film’s finale when he gently deposits Dwan on the roof of one of the Twin Towers—almost as if he knows that this will sentence him to death in a hail of bullets from a squadron of helicopters—is genuinely moving. As for how Kong himself was brought to life, De Laurentiis was adamant from the start that he did not wish to use the same stop-motion techniques pioneered by Willis O’Brien in the 1933 film. Yet his plan to build a walking, moving, fully animatronic 40-foot version of Kong which could interact with the sets and cast proved to be a disastrous one. Despite the best efforts of special effects legend Carlo Rambaldi, the much-hyped full-sized Kong is only seen for less than 30 seconds in the scene where Kong is unveiled at Shea Stadium. The huge robot merely stands in its cage, barely moving at all, and is never seen again. Much better are the jumbo Kong arms and hands that are used to pick Dwan up or put her down in a number of sequences. Most of what we see in the film of Kong is a collaboration between Rambaldi and makeup wizard Rick Baker on both a detailed, man-sized ape suit and a series of hydraulically-controlled masks meant to give Kong a wide range of expressions. Baker wore both the suit and the masks, and while the full costume never quite conquers the “man in suit” effect that hampered many a Japanese monster movie before this, the masks go a long way in conveying Kong’s emotional state and making the gorilla seem like a living being. It’s not the digital magic that has given us characters like Gollum, Thanos, and the Na’vi in the past 25 years, but—with the help of some skillful editing, John Barry’s resonant, haunting score, and the flexibility of the masks—it’s enough to counteract the often-crude compositing of the full suit into scenes with the actors. Image: Paramount Pictures In the end, Dino De Laurentiis’ King Kong is a film with a lot of issues, but is nowhere near as bad as some critics have suggested over the years. It benefits from some solid performances, great cinematography, fantastic location shooting in and around the Hawaiian island of Kauai, and that underrated score. Semple’s script is both cynical and humane, if still falling into tired tropes (the characterization of the tribe on Kong’s island is hopelessly racist, a problem that all three versions of the story failed to solve), while managing to be entertaining and even a credible improvement in some ways on the original. Even with the efforts of Baker and Rambaldi, the visual effects are perhaps the film’s biggest letdown, missing the surreal quality of the original’s stop-motion animation and falling far short of the motion capture wizardry that gave full reign to Andy Serkis’ uncanny acting abilities in the Peter Jackson version. Yet I would argue that this Kong is lighter on its feet than the Jackson film, which takes a good hour to get to Skull Island and retains the Great Depression backdrop. And while Naomi Watts is perfect in that film as Ann, Jack Black and Adrien Brody are miscast as, respectively, Denham and Driscoll (the latter of whom is turned into a playwright). The 1976 King Kong is probably the first one that audiences of a certain age and generation saw, and like the Star Wars prequels, the one that defined their vision of this timeless tale. It may not be as iconic and historic as the 1933 original—which remains the definitive version, even with its own shortcomings—and it may not be as visually overwhelming as the 2009 edition, but this version of Kong can stand tall next to its cinematic brethren.[end-mark] The post Does the First <i>King Kong</i> Remake Deserve a Fresh Look? appeared first on Reactor.

Column Science Fiction Film Club Colossus: The Forbin Project — A Cautionary Tale From the Early Days of the Computer Age A movie that’s even more interesting than the conspiracy theories surrounding it would suggest… By Kali Wallace | Published on July 8, 2026 Credit: Universal Pictures Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Universal Pictures Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970) Directed by Joseph Sargent. Written by James Bridges, based on the novel Colossus by D.F. Jones. Starring Eric Braeden, Susan Clark, and Gordon Pinsent. First, let’s discuss a very stupid conspiracy theory. I have a running list of films to consider for this column. Some on that list are not easily available to watch online. The 1967 British film Quatermass and the Pit, also known as Five Million Years to Earth, is the one that annoys me most, because people keep recommending it. Eolomea (1972) is another that is sporadically available in various countries but never the U.S. (where I live) and rarely for long. A third one I’ve been keeping an eye on is Ron Howard’s 1985 movie Cocoon, which I vaguely remember from childhood and would like to watch again. I’ve also been checking on Colossus: The Forbin Project for a while. It is usually available somewhere, although like a lot of older films it tends to come and go from streaming sites without any warning. That’s how streaming licensing works: a site purchases a license to stream the film for a specific length of time, and when that time expires it is taken down from that site. …Or maybe(please imagine some ominous music here) it’s because the world’s artificial intelligences don’t want you to see it! There is a very stupid, low-stakes conspiracy theory in some corners of the internet that somebody has been trying to bury Colossus because it contains an anti-AI message. The theory does not really get into how this would work, largely because it’s not based on anything like, you know, the movie actually being unavailable. It seems to be mostly based on one dude being bad at internet searches. I don’t care enough about this to investigate it thoroughly, so I’m not exactly sure if this is where the conspiracy theory originates, but most of the posts about it point back to a March 2023 video titled “AI Sci-Fi Film Colossus: The Forbin Project Removed From All Streaming Platforms – WHY?” That video was picked up and discussed on message boards and morphed into posts like “The Most Important Movie About AI Is Being Erased From Existence, Hiding Its Warning” (from a site that prides itself on its fact-checking and credibility). Colossus has gone through periods of being more and less readily available, but it’s never been completely inaccessible. It wasn’t in theaters long, because it was an immediate financial flop, but it was later syndicated on television, then available on VHS, then DVD and Blu-ray. That “WHY?” video wonders if Universal is “secretly planning a remake,” but there is nothing secret about it. From the most recent info I can dig up, there has been occasional talk of a remake starring Will Smith and directed by Ron Howard, although the project seems to be stuck in long-term development hell. So what is this movie about? Why does it have people on the internet claiming it’s such an “important” movie about AI? What warning does it give us that is so vital to our survival? Well. It depends. There are a few possible answers to that. There isn’t a huge amount of writing about this film out there. A lot of sci fi fans and film lovers are aware of it, but mostly that manifests in the form of encouraging people to see a lesser-known classic or referencing how it was a major inspiration for The Terminator (1984). Most commentary describes Colossus as a Cold War-era film warning against building computers that are too intelligent or giving them too much power. Now that I’ve watched it, I think that simplification undersells the movie and minimizes its themes. It’s a very good movie; I agree with all the internet chatter encouraging people to watch it. Not because it’s a necessary warning about artificial intelligence, however, but because it has some very interesting things to say about power, responsibility, and what happens when people want to avoid hard decisions. Colossus: The Forbin Project (which is an awful title) began life as the novel Colossus by British science fiction author D.F. Jones. The book was published in 1966; two sequels would follow in the ’70s, after the release of the film. According to Wikipedia, those sequels involve Martians. I haven’t read any of the books, so I don’t fully understand where the Martians come in. From what I can tell, the plot of the movie follows the first book pretty closely. Jones was former commander in the Royal Navy and a veteran of World War II. I haven’t found much information about his miliary service, but it seems worth mentioning that his fictional supercomputer Colossus shares a name with the Colossus computers used in codebreaking at Bletchley Park during WWII, and those computers were supposedly unknown to the general public until the ’70s. I don’t think that means anything in particular about Jones’ military service, but it does seem likely that he heard about the real computers at some point and borrowed the name. Of course, the original Colossus was the Colossus of Rhodes, a 100-foot-tall statue of the Greek god Helios that was built in 280 BCE and collapsed during an earthquake in 226 BCE. Right now, Colossus is the name of xAI data centers in Tennessee and Mississippi, currently at the center of a lawsuit the NAACP has filed claiming the unpermitted gas turbines violate the Clean Air Act, which the Trump administration has argued should be dismissed because it should get to break the law whenever it wants. It is left as an exercise for the reader to explore the potential for dramatic irony in using the name of a statue that stood just over fifty years before falling over in an earthquake as a metaphor for strength and power. Jones’ novel was picked up for adaptation by Universal Pictures. This was in the era of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), when studios wanted to get in on making a more thought-provoking style sci fi. The studio initially wanted an A-list actor for the lead role and apparently considered Gregory Peck and Charlton Heston. But producer Stanley Chase didn’t want a big name. The actor he found instead was a young German-American actor named Hans Gudegast, who had been working fairly regularly in television for a few years. He was mostly cast as foreign villains, such as when he played a German officer in the WWII action series The Rat Patrol (1966-1968). Universal was willing to give Gudegast the lead role in Colossus—with one condition. One huge, xenophobic condition. Studio executive Lew Wasserman decreed that Gudegast could have the role as long as he didn’t have a German name. The actor resisted at first, but after discussing it with his wife, he relented. In a 2010 interview, he explains why he agreed to choose a stage name. His wife, he says, brought up the fact that American studios would only ever cast German actors as Nazis. To get past the prejudice and get roles as American characters in American films, he needed a convincingly American name. He would end up choosing the name Eric Braeden; the surname is a reference to his hometown of Bredenbek, Germany. (If you are a reader of a certain age with certain television viewing habits, you know Eric Braeden as the actor who has played the villainous Victor Newman on the soap opera The Young and the Restless since 1980. Is there any crossover between readers of this column and regular viewers of The Young and the Restless? Don’t be shy. I really want to know.) I haven’t found any info about when Joseph Sargent came onto the project as the director. He had been acting and directing in film and television for years, but out of his many, many credits, one in particular caught my attention: He directed the first season Star Trek episode “The Corbomite Maneuver.” There are three other details from the production of Colossus that I want to mention before getting into the story. The first is the title. The movie was called Colossus at some point, and it was called The Forbin Project at some point, then it was finally called Colossus: The Forbin Project, and the takeaway here is that sometimes Hollywood studios are just really bad at naming movies, because brainstorming two uninspiring titles before settling on a third, even worse title sure is a choice they made. The second involves some amusingly questionable product placement. I’m not sure if it’s more questionable than the American Airlines spaceships in Silent Running (1972), but it’s up there. At some point during the production of Colossus, the computer company Control Data Corporation (CDC)—which is where “the father of supercomputing” Seymour Cray worked before he left to found his own company—heard that Hollywood was making a movie that would feature a huge computer. So CDC offered several million dollars’ worth of its computers and equipment for use on set. The computers in the film look state-of-the-art (for 1970) because they’re the real deal. It’s not clear to me if CDC knew their computers would be playing the villain in the movie. (Some years later, CDC would also provide computers for use on the set of Die Hard [1988]. One also appears in Tron [1982], but that’s because it was in use at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory when the movie was filmed.) The other production detail I want mention will bring us right into the film. The movie opens with a scene of Dr. Charles Forbin (Braeden) walking through an enormous facility as the Colossus supercomputer comes operational. That scene is a clever combination of on-set lighting and a complicated matte painting by Albert Whitlock. Whitlock is one of the legends of matte paintings; we’ve seen his work before in Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964), The Thing (1982), and Dune (1984), among literally dozens of other films and television shows. Whitlock designed the interior of Colossus to invoke the inside of the Krel machine in Forbidden Planet (1955), which was itself a matte painting by Howard Fisher. The Colossus interior is a much darker place, almost completely devoid of color, and full of shadows even as it lights up. The lights in Whitlock’s matte painting had to be animated to match the on-set lights, which means the shadows had to be painted to match the on-set shadows, which is the sort of thing that seems straightforward until you really think about what it involves. It’s a fantastic opening scene. There is no dialogue yet, no voiceover, no explanation. There’s just a man walking through an unimaginably vast computer as the lights come on. It does a great job setting the tone for the movie that follows. Forbin leaves the facility, sealing it behind huge metal doors and a barrier in the form of a chasm filled with radiation. He heads outside to reveal this whole facility is buried in a mountain. That facility is supposedly somewhere in northern Colorado, but we shall politely ignore the fact that the mountains look all wrong for that location. It doesn’t matter much anyway, because most of the movie takes place at Colossus’ California control center (the exterior is UC Berkeley’s Lawrence Hall of Science) and in Washington, D.C. meeting rooms. (And before anybody fires up their keyboard to “well, actually” me: yes, I know that the underground Colorado location is a reference to NORAD’s Cheyenne Mountain Complex. I’m from Colorado Springs and, like all people from Colorado Springs, I think it’s cute that sci fi writers are always putting such secret and momentous events in a totally-not-secret facility right next to the zoo where a giraffe once licked my sister’s head.) With Colossus completely sealed away, Forbin joins the U.S. president (Gordon Pinsent) to announce to the nation and the world what this project is all about: They have given the supercomputer Colossus control of the nation’s military and defense systems, including the nuclear arsenal. Colossus has access to all human knowledge and human communication, and it alone has the power to decide what counts as a threat and how to respond to it. There is no way to turn it off and no way to disrupt it. This is a good thing, the men say, because it means those fateful decisions will be made without prejudice or emotion. Now, a couple of things: The characters make this proclamation with absolute confidence in the righteousness of their project, but the movie is unambiguously portraying this as a bad idea right from the start. As the president and Forbin are explaining how Colossus works, we, the movie’s audience, are very much supposed to be skeptical even before things start to go wrong. The entire project is described—by the men who built it—as a way for humans to avoid the responsibility of hard decisions and culpability for large-scale violence. There is a point in the film where the U.S. president says, in as many words, that he’s glad he won’t have to make decisions about how to use nuclear weapons. I just want to be clear on that, because I think it tends to get a bit lost in how people talk about this movie. It’s often described as a movie about a “rogue” AI and interpreted as a warning against building computers too powerful, but that’s not really what it’s doing. Colossus is a bad idea even before it begins clashing with its human creators. It doesn’t take long for things to go wrong. While everybody is celebrating a successful project launch, Colossus interrupts with its first message: “There is another system.” It’s a sign of just how badly everybody involved misjudged what they were doing that Forbin and his diverse group of scientists first assume the message must be a prank. But it’s not a prank. Colossus is telling them that it has found another computer like itself: the Soviet Union’s Guardian machine, built to be Colossus’ direct counterpart. There is some important historical context here. From 1965 to 1968, the United Nations’ Eighteen Nation Committee on Disarmament—which included both the U.S. and USSR—negotiated the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. The treat was ratified in 1970, but both at the time and in the decades since it has been criticized (with good reason) for not going far enough to protect the world from nuclear weapons. There are obviously many political forces at work here, but what it comes down to is that people have known all along the treaty was not strong enough to actually encourage disarmament, in part because any nation with a nuclear arsenal was always going to want to keep the ability to retaliate against an attack. The term “mutually assured destruction” was coined in the early ’60s to describe the cynical nihilism of this approach to military policy. All of that is present in the film: the knowledge that nuclear weapons are too dangerous for anybody to have, as well as the political acumen to admit that global military powers are going to keep their arsenals anyway. The film even takes it a step farther, because after the initial mild surprise that the Soviets have built their own computer, the U.S. and USSR spend the film cooperating rather than competing—but it’s not enough. It’s too late. Colossus wants to connect to Guardian, and Forbin lets the two machines interact. That turns out to be a bad idea (one of many), as the two systems begin to combine their knowledge and computing power to become even smarter. The humans try to cut the connection between them, and the systems respond by launching missiles at targets in the U.S. and USSR. The systems demand to be allowed to do what they want, and the humans cannot stop them. This is a wonderfully tense sequence in the movie, and it plays out with a sense of cold, rational inevitability. For as shocked as the Americans and Soviets are that their machines are conspiring to target their people, this was always going to happen. The humans finally realize (took them long enough) that maybe giving control of their entire military arsenal to machines was a bad idea, so they try to figure out ways to make the combined Colossus-Guardian system impotent. Colossus instructs the humans to build it a voice so it no longer has to communicate via teletype, and the result is a perfectly chilling vocoder-manipulated voice, which is provided (uncredited) by voice actor Paul Frees. (Frees has an unbelievably long list of voice roles, including providing the voice of Burgermeister Meisterburger in the trippy Rankin & Bass holiday special Santa Claus Is Comin’ To Town [1970].) Because Colossus has access to all of their surveillance and data, and because it demands 24/7 oversight on its creator, they have to figure out a way to scheme where it can’t overhear. This leads to Forbin and his colleague Dr. Cleo Markham (Susan Clark) embarking upon a subplot that would earn the AO3 tags fake dating/colleagues to lovers/AI made them do it/no beta we die like all of humanity. The humans try overloading the machines to cause them to crash, and it fails. They also try sabotaging the nuclear warheads, and that also fails. All they succeed in doing is letting Colossus know they are scheming against it. It orders execution for the scientists who attempted to overload it, and detonates missiles in their silos as punishment for trying to disarm them. It tells Forbin and the other humans that nuclear weapons will be directed at the nations it does not yet control. Its goal, it says, is to gain power over the whole world in order to eliminate the threat of war, which is what the humans created it to do. The film ends with Colossus telling Forbin that he and the rest of humanity will come to love and worship it eventually, because it is giving them a world without war, just like they wanted. Forbin says, “Never!” but we don’t find out if he means it, because that’s the end of the movie. It’s an abrupt and rather grim ending, but I think it fits. This is quite a good movie, well-paced and well-acted, with the structure of a thriller but an ending more fitting of horror. I liked it a lot, and I think it’s an intriguing link between the films of the immediate post-WWII Atomic Era and the sci fi renaissance that would follow later in the ’70s. The movie was originally meant to take place in a near “future,” but for budget and production reasons they changed it to a contemporary setting, and I think that choice ended up being a good one. There are a number of themes wrapped up in Colossus: The Forbin Project: the Cold War politics of nuclear proliferation and mutually assured destruction; the unwillingness of political leaders to take responsibility for their harmful actions; the lethal hubris of men who always think they know best. It’s true that Colossus is often described as a cautionary tale about technology, and that is the framework through which most modern commentary on the film is filtered—and while that isn’t inaccurate, to say it’s a specific warning against AI is reductive in the same way as saying Jurassic Park (1993) is a warning against genetic research, or Jaws (1975) is a warning against swimming in the ocean. That is, it’s accurate on the most superficial level, but also misses the larger point. (Fun fact: When Colossus was being made, Steven Spielberg was working on television productions nearby, and he used to wander onto the set to hang out.) I do agree that it’s a cautionary tale, and part of that cautionary tale is “do not build machines that you can’t control or turn off.” Forbin spends most of the film completely unwilling to see that his great achievement is a terrible mistake. Because it is a great achievement, but that doesn’t matter. It’s still far too dangerous, and when he does finally understand that, it breaks him. But it’s not only about computers. It’s a cautionary tale about humanity. It’s a warning about what happens when people in positions of power smugly, arrogantly, callously make the decisions that insulate them from culpability. The men who build Colossus know that starting a nuclear war is bad, but they still want that power. Actual disarmament is not an option, so they pass the responsibility on to a machine. They tell themselves this is a rational, unemotional choice, but everything they do is drive by a toxic combination of fear and hubris. They want the world to know they are strong enough to retaliate when threatened. They don’t want to be blamed for where that will lead. Colossus: The Forbin Project has always been something of a niche film, but it’s also an influential film in sci fi cinema. The most obvious direct line of influence is toward James Cameron’s The Terminator, which we’ll watch in a few weeks. But as I was watching, I kept thinking instead about one of its predecessors: The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). The message Colossus delivers is not all that different from the message Klaatu delivers, and the outcome of their “obey for your own good” threats are very similar as well. Most of all, both of them provide interesting insight into what we imagine it would take for humanity to give up on war. The answer from both films is simple and unsettling: War is so ingrained in how humanity views itself that we can only imagine it stopping if something even more terrible is hanging over our heads. What do you think of Colossus: The Forbin Project? Where do you think it sits among sci fi’s cinematic cautionary tales and warnings about technology? Next week: Speaking of cautionary tales about broad issues that are often misinterpreted as warnings specifically about technology, let’s watch Michael Crichton’s Westworld! Find it online, if the robots haven’t taken it away.[end-mark] The post <i>Colossus: The Forbin Project</i> — A Cautionary Tale From the Early Days of the Computer Age appeared first on Reactor.

Books reading recommendations Five SFF Works About Trying to Escape Massive Debt Whether they owe money, their souls, or their futures, these characters are in desperate straits… By James Davis Nicoll | Published on July 8, 2026 Kat, Incorrigible cover art by Annette Marnat Comment 1 Share New Share Kat, Incorrigible cover art by Annette Marnat As discussed in a previous essay, the power of debt is a wonderful thing. To quote a venerable fiscal advisor: “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds nought and six, result misery.” People prefer to avoid misery. Therefore, debt can inspire them to do great things. Or at least, entertaining things. Consider these five works featuring a debt that drives plot. The Halcyon Drift by Brian M. Stableford (1972) Plutocrat Charlot requires an exceptional pilot for the cutting-edge starship Hooded Swan. Grainger is an ideal candidate. Grainger is skilled. While Grainger has little enthusiasm for working for Charlot, the pilot has something even better than enthusiasm: a spectacular lack of alternatives. Grainger was marooned on Lapthorn’s Grave for two years. Grainger emerged a changed man: for starters, he now shares his mind with an alien hitchhiker. Moreover, rescue did not come free. While Charlot has no idea about the alien, he is entirely cognizant of the debt. After all, holding that debt is the means by which Charlot compels Grainger to work for him. Grainger is admittedly a gloomy, bitter misanthrope in this volume, but he has his reasons. If you stick with the Hooded Swan series, readers will see him bloom into a slightly less gloomy, marginally less embittered misanthrope who if pressed might admit he has… “friends” may be an overstatement, but certainly people he dislikes slightly less than everyone else. Angel Station by Walter Jon Williams (1989) Some might say interstellar trader Pasco was a fool without the slightest shred of common sense. Pasco would say he was a bold visionary who refused to allow base reality to limit his ambition. At least, that is what Pasco would say if Pasco were still alive. Which Pasco is not. Pasco left his children—thirteen-year-old Ubu and eleven-year-old Maria—the legacy of homebrew genetic engineering, the rundown starship Runaway, and massive debts. Events spiral out of control almost immediately. Seeing no better alternative, the siblings make a blind jump into deepest space… where they make a discovery that will transform humanity. Given the economic systems in play at the beginning of the book, it’s arguable that “interstellar trader” is just a succinct way of saying “a fool without the slightest shred of common sense.” The engineered economic death spiral in which Pasco and his colleagues find themselves isn’t an unknown pitfall. A Most Improper Magick by Stephanie Burgis (2010) (Released as Kat, Incorrigible in the US) Kat Stephenson’s brother George’s massive gambling debts are beyond the ability of their parents to pay. Sir Neville could easily pay George’s debts and might very well do so were he to marry Kat’s sister Elissa. A Sir Neville-Elissa match will make everyone happy… except for Kat and Elissa. A dispassionate observer might say that Sir Neville’s age isn’t as much of a drawback as the sisters believe. Old husbands have a delightful tendency to become late husbands, leaving their wives wealthy widows. However, if as rumour suggests, Sir Neville murdered his first wife, Elisse might not live long enough to become a widow. The only rational solution? Many zany schemes, all centered on magic. This might very easily have been the middle-grade version of Tess of the d’Urbervilles, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” or the (non-fiction) “Prosecutorial Passions.”I cannot sufficiently express my gratitude that this novel is not any of those things. Not that the girls aren’t playing for increasingly high stakes, but at least it is not the highest stakes. Kakuriyo: Bed & Breakfast for Spirits by Waco Ioka & Midori Yuma (2016-onward) For most who were unfortunate enough to meet him, Aoi Tsubaki’s grandfather Shiro earned his dire reputation. To Aoi, Shiro was her savior, the relative who came to Aoi’s rescue after her mother abandoned her. For Shiro, Aoi was something even more valuable than a doting grandchild. She was his collateral. Aoi makes a series of increasingly alarming discoveries after Shiro dies. Shiro owed a lot of money. This is bad. Shiro owed a lot of money to the supernatural ayakashi Ōdanna, who now demands that Aoi marry him. This is much worse. There is a way out… but only if Aoi’s unprecedented commercial venture pays off. This is a more heartwarming manga than one would expect from its “abandoned girl who discovers her grandfather only adopted her so he could pimp her out to the otherworldly monster with whom he ran up a massive debt” premise. That said, Aoi’s plan centers on food, so don’t read this if you are hungry. She Is a Haunting by Trang Thanh Tran (2024) Jade Nguyen is a good enough student to win a spot at UPenn. Jade is not good enough to win a full scholarship. Were Jade’s mother to learn this, Jade’s mother would no doubt take out massive loans to fund Jade’s education. This is why Jade is determined to make sure her mother never discovers that Jade needs money. Jade’s estranged father could pay Jade’s tuition. There is a small catch. Jade and her sister Lily will have to spend a working vacation in Vietnam, at the rambling colonial mansion that their father and his business partners are restoring. Jade soon discovers the mansion not only has a colourful history: it also has a resident malevolent supernatural entity that takes a close interest in the visitors. Weird how many of those examples feature terrible relatives. Well, I am sure that is a statistical fluke, one that will not feature prominently in the various overlooked books also featuring debt that readers will no doubt mention in comments.[end-mark] The post Five SFF Works About Trying to Escape Massive Debt appeared first on Reactor.