Column Science Fiction Film Club The Terminator: The Future Comes to 1980s Los Angeles James Cameron, time travel, slasher films, parent traps, and the making of a sci fi classic… By Kali Wallace | Published on July 29, 2026 Credit: Orion Pictures Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Orion Pictures The Terminator (1984) Directed by James Cameron. Written by James Cameron and Gale Anne Hurd. Starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Linda Hamilton, and Michael Biehn. I don’t remember exactly how old I was when I first watched The Terminator. It came out on VHS in 1985, but we didn’t own a VCR until 1989 or 1990, so it was sometime after that, but before Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) came out. I do remember that watching The Terminator with my family taught me a valuable lesson about foreshadowing in storytelling. What I remember is my dad explaining why it was so obvious that Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) would be the father of Sarah Connor’s (Linda Hamilton) future son. He was the only other character in the movie, my dad said, and it was all set up to make him important before he died. When I was eleven or twelve years old, this ability to predict where a story was going blew my mind. Due to the unavoidable circumstance of being a tween girl in 1991, I was always more of a T2 fan, so I haven’t rewatched The Terminator as many times over the years. I am happy (but unsurprised) to come away from this viewing reminded once again that it really, really holds up. It’s just as great now as it was in 1984. There has been so much written about The Terminator over the years that it’s impossible to cover it all. It’s one of the most beloved action films ever made, starring one of the most famous men in the world, conceived and directed by one of the most successful directors of all time. It’s legendary, now. But that’s not what anybody expected back in the early ’80s when James Cameron wasn’t, you know, James Cameron yet. He was just a young, new director who wanted to start making his own movies. Cameron, who was born in Canada but moved to California as a teenager, fell in love with movies during the ’60s and ’70s. He got his start in Hollywood working at the studio of legendary B-movie director and producer Roger Corman. Corman’s studio served as a training ground for a number of actors and filmmakers (including Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Jack Nicholson, Ron Howard, and so many more); he was also the man responsible for bringing foreign-language films by the likes of Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, and Federico Fellini to the United States. So having Corman as a mentor was a good beginning for a would-be filmmaker in the ’70s. Cameron started as a model maker and artist at Corman’s studio and on other productions. (Remember that he did the skyline matte paintings in John Carpenter’s Escape From New York [1981].) But he wanted to direct, and he got his chance at the start of the ’80s. Following the wild success of Jaws (1975), Corman produced the monster film Piranha (1978), which was written by John Sayles (who would go on to write and direct The Brother From Another Planet [1984]) and directed by Joe Dante (who would go on to direct Gremlins [1984]). Everybody up to and including Steven Spielberg knew Piranha was a cheap Jaws rip-off timed to capitalize on the marketing for Jaws 2 (1978), but that didn’t stop it from making a tremendous pile of money. Corman, as the head of New World Pictures, was surprised by the film’s success but had only a single-picture deal, so the sequel rights were in the hands of producers Jeff Schechtman and Chako van Leeuwen. They went looking for funding elsewhere, and they found executive producer and film financier Ovidio Assonitis. Assonitis was no stranger to putting out movies that were thinly-disguised rip-offs of successful films. Warner Bros. had sued him for his film Beyond the Door (1974), an Italian imitation of The Exorcist (1973), and he had already made his own Jaws ripoff with Tentacles (1977). Assonitis wanted to fund the Piranha sequel as an executive producer—but he had no intention of letting the film’s director have any say in the movie. He fired the first director, Miller Drake, before filming began. That’s where James Cameron came in. He was initially hired to work on special effects, but when Assonitis fired Drake, Cameron was promoted to director. According to Cameron, a lot of people warned him against taking the job, but he wasn’t going to turn it down. His first chance at directing didn’t last long. Assonitis still insisted on maintaining full control over the film, so Cameron lasted just over two weeks on set before Assonitis fired him and finished Piranha II: The Spawning (1982) himself. It’s always difficult to tease out the truth in the Hollywood “Who was the bigger asshole?” blame game, especially when one of the players is James Cameron, who is notoriously difficult to work with. But according to most of the cast and crew, Cameron was doing his best with the minimal resources available, while Assonitis was a fussy and controlling nightmare on set. Assonitis did bring Cameron back to work on editing the film during post-production in Rome, and the unconfirmed Hollywood legend is that Cameron would go back and re-edit scenes at night, while Assonitis wasn’t around to interfere. So here was Cameron, not yet thirty years old, already broke and bitter after being fired from his first directing job, possibly guilty of breaking and entering in hopes of either salvaging an incredibly stupid movie about flying piranhas or getting his name removed from the credits, and he gets sick as a dog in his Rome hotel room. In his feverish misery, he had a vivid nightmare about a metal endoskeleton clutching a pair of knives as it crawled out of a fire. He thought, rightfully, that this was a pretty badass image, so he wrote it down and made some sketches. (As somebody who also collects notes on my own and other people’s nightmares to draw or paint, I am charmed by this habit. It’s one of exactly two things I have in common with James Cameron.) When Cameron returned to the U.S., he worked with screenwriter Bill Wisher to develop that image into a proper story. He brought that story to Gale Anne Hurd, who was working as an assistant producer for Corman at the time. Hurd worked with Cameron on further developing screenplay. In order to get the production moving with Cameron as director, he sold the rights to her for $1. That’s part of why the Terminator franchise moved around between companies so much over the years as the rights have been sold and auctioned off. (Under U.S. law, the original authors can regain the rights after thirty-five years. That happened in 2019, and while it was big news at the time I’m having trouble finding details on the current situation. I think Cameron and Skydance have some form of joint control over the Terminator franchise.) Even though The Terminator is unquestionably a sci fi classic, and Cameron was an avowed fan of big, flashy sci fi from an early age, he didn’t set out to make his own 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) or his own Star Wars (1977), or even his own Alien (1979) (which would obviously come about a few years later). He had something else in mind. He was going to make his own Halloween (1978). Camera said as much in a 2024 interview with Empire: “To me, Terminator was just a science-fiction version of Halloween.” He idolized John Carpenter (that’s the second thing I have in common with James Cameron) and imagined making a hugely influential slasher-style movie in the quick-and-dirty, low-budget manner he’d learned from Roger Corman. When Cameron and Hurd went looking for a studio to make The Terminator, they found the new-but-already-struggling Orion Pictures. Orion seems to have taken a fairly hands-off approach to the film, but they did insist on casting a major star to anchor the picture. Cameron and Hurd discussed this in a detailed 2014 roundtable interview with EW: they originally wanted Lance Henriksen to play the Terminator, but Orion president Mike Medavoy told them he wanted O.J. Simpson as the Terminator and Arnold Schwarzenegger as “the good guy, whatever his name is.” This is where we separate readers of this column by age, because some of us are old enough to remember when that was a terrible idea because O.J. Simpson’s public and screen persona was that of a beloved football star turned affable actor. He was too nice. As Cameron described it, “This was when everybody loved him, and ironically that was part of the problem—he was this likable, goofy, kind of innocent guy.” So Cameron and Hurd objected, but they didn’t have a high-profile replacement in mind. Cameron also hated the idea of casting Schwarzenegger as Kyle Reese. Conan the Barbarian had just come out, and he was certain nobody would believe Schwarzenegger as the protective good guy in the film. Cameron went into their meeting determined to find a way to refuse to hire Schwarzenegger. But they found themselves talking in depth about the Terminator character, and Cameron wanted Schwarzenegger for that role. Schwarzenegger was hesitant; the whole point of growing beyond his Conan fame was to take roles that weren’t just about being a strong guy perpetrating violence everywhere he goes. But Cameron talked him around to it, and the rest is Hollywood history. (By the time T2 came out and Schwarzenegger did play the protective good guy, he was well-known for his lighter side in acting thanks to films like Twins [1988] and Kindergarten Cop [1990]. But that was in the future.) Amusingly, both Michael Biehn and Linda Hamilton have said that Schwarzenegger’s name being attached to the film gave them pause when they were offered their roles. Like everybody else, they were still thinking about Conan the Barbarian and didn’t know if the film—relatively low-budget, from an unknown director—would go anywhere. Rewatching this movie after many years, I find that Hamilton is still perfect, but Biehn is sort of the weak link in the cast. That surprised me, because he’s great in Aliens (1986) and The Abyss (1989). But he’s really kind of flat in The Terminator. I don’t think the script is doing him any favors, as Reese is the character saddled with all of the exposition, which means he’s got to earnestly try to explain time travel to some unimpressed cops (played by Paul Winfield and Lance Henriksen) when we all know it won’t make a difference if they believe him or not. But it also doesn’t matter, because Sarah Connor’s doomed baby daddy is not what’s important in the film’s climax. What’s important is that sick-ass metal skeleton that rises from an inferno in the most delightfully frightening way. For the film’s visual effects, Cameron brought on our old buddy Stan Winston, who had recently worked alongside Rob Bottin on The Thing (1982). This would be the first collaboration between Cameron and Winston; they would become close friends and go on to work together on both Aliens and T2. This was the early ’80s, so everything is practical. The machines we see in the future apocalyptic wasteland are miniatures, which do a brilliant job of establishing, with pretty efficient visual shorthand, a future in which humanity is near extinction. All of the explosions are pyrotechnics, all the crashes and smashes are stunts, and every unsettling scene where the Terminator is losing part of his face or cutting away his skin is makeup. But the real star of the show is the Terminator skeleton. Winston has since passed away, but other members of his team talk about their process in that 2014 EW oral history, and there are some videos online (such as this one) that show clips of the process, which is all quite fascinating. According to John Rosengrant, Cameron and Winston started with Cameron’s initial drawings of the Terminator—the ones he developed out of that original fever dream he had in Italy in 1981—then the two of them went to junkyards to get some ideas for how a mechanical cyborg might look underneath its human skin. Winston and his artists had to make a full-body cast of Schwarzenegger, including his head, and Shane Mahan then sculpted the head to be a mechanical approximation of Schwarzenegger’s rather striking features. The skeleton was made from silicone and given its shiny chrome look using a process called vacuum metalizing, where an extremely thin layer of metal is deposited on a plastic surface in a vacuum. Tom Woodruff Jr. talks about sculpting the spine and pelvis so he could use those pieces to maneuver the Terminator’s torso as a puppet; he notes that when Biehn was whaling on the Terminator with a metal pipe, he was also whaling on Woodruff’s hand. Any time we see only the torso and head of the Terminator, it’s a puppet with glowing electronic eyes mounted on a crew member, moving around a Kern Foods fruit packing plant. It’s an incredibly clever mechanical and artistic creation, and it’s used to marvelous effect to make that machine feel like a real threat. The vast majority of effects were done in-camera—that is, what we see on the screen is what was actually happening, with puppeteers and strings and such cleverly hidden. The notable exceptions are, of course, the scenes in which the full-body skeletal Terminator is shown walking. Those clips are obviously stop-motion animation, with that slightly jerky, unnatural movement, but even that works in the film’s favor. The Terminator is a machine that has been battered and blown up and set on fire by this point, and that’s how it moves, and it’s terrifying. It all works together so beautifully. The Terminator is quite dark movie, and the action is often very chaotic and overwhelming, but we can always follow what’s going on. More than that, it comes together into what I would argue are some of the best action sequences ever put to film. The final third of the film in particular is phenomenal. There are clunky parts leading up to that, but once we get to that final stretch everything is phenomenal. The breakneck pacing, the unrelenting danger, the ruthless violence—I’ve seen this movie several times, and every time I’m still on the edge of my seat by the end. It’s that good. I keep thinking about Cameron’s stated goal of making a sci fi version of Halloween. For all the action and explosions and machines, for all the lore that has come up in the sequels, for all the iterations of the story that have followed, that’s exactly what he did, and that’s what makes it brilliant. It is, after all, a very simple story: A young woman has to survive an unstoppable monster. Like Halloween, it has relatively little dialogue beyond what is needed for exposition; whole stretches of the movie pass with little to no conversation. Also like Halloween, it’s filmed and takes place almost entirely at night; Cameron and Hurd specifically sought out locations in Los Angeles with mercury-vapor streetlights so they could film without having to build and light sets. The villain has unmatched presence but no personality or humanity. The tension ratchets up throughout the entire film with no relief. And, in the end, the final girl makes it out alive, but her survival is bittersweet. Sure, there’s timey-wimey stuff about the apocalyptic future and artificial intelligence and robots taking over the world, and it all hinges on the world’s weirdest Parent Trap plot in which humanity’s future savior has to get his subordinate to fall in love with his mom so he can send him back in time to effect his own conception. (The more you think about that, the weirder it gets.) Although T2 digs into it much more deeply, The Terminator only briefly touches on how the nuclear apocalypse comes about; we learn that humans built a defense system, and that system somehow came alive and tried to exterminate us, but the details are left vague. I love all of the sci fi elements—including that iconically grimdark vision of humanity’s future with the machines rolling over piles of human skulls—but the heart of The Terminator is a classic slasher flick with guns instead of knives and a cyborg assassin instead of a masked lunatic. And like a classic slasher, it is driven by fear. Fear of the strange man on the street. Fear of being in danger and nobody coming to help. Fear of enemies that can’t be reasoned with. Fear of humanity’s capacity for destroying itself. Fear of monsters made in our own image. Fear of what the future looks like when we value human life so little. It’s all in there, and it’s every bit as compelling now as it was when it became a surprise smash hit four decades ago. What do you think of The Terminator? How does it hold up compared to the whole franchise that followed? I’ve seen T2 and most of the third one, but I’ve never watched the television show (shows? are there two now?) or any of the other movies.[end-mark] The Dino Days of Summer Let’s make like it’s the Mesozoic and watch some dinosaur movies. Why? Because I want to watch dinosaur movies. August 5 — The Lost World (1925), directed by Harry O. Hoyt An early adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel, with dinosaurs made by stop-motion pioneer Willis O’Brien. Find it online. View the trailer. August 12 — Journey to the Beginning of Time (1955), directed by Karel Zeman Classic Czechoslovak film about some boys who find a trilobite and go on a river journey through time. Find it online. (Check the usual unofficial places too.) View the trailer. August 19 — The Land Before Time (1988), directed by Don Bluth Would you believe that I’ve never seen this movie? I feel like that can’t possibly be true, as I was an American child of the appropriate age when it came out, but I have no memory of ever watching it. Find it online. View the trailer. August 26 — Jurassic Park (1993), directed by Steven Spielberg This one I have seen. It’s great. Let’s watch it again. Find it online. View the trailer. The post <i>The Terminator</i>: The Future Comes to 1980s Los Angeles appeared first on Reactor.

Books reading recommendations Seven Horror Books Featuring Freaky, Frightening Forests Sure, why not head up to the creepy cabin in the woods — what could possibly go wrong? By Sam Reader | Published on July 29, 2026 Morsel cover art by Emerald Barkley (Nightfire, 2026) Comment 0 Share New Share Morsel cover art by Emerald Barkley (Nightfire, 2026) Every summer, as many of us in the Northern Hemisphere go camping, spend time hiking, or just live close enough to woodlands to be serenaded nightly by a symphony of insects and animals, our thoughts turn to the darker and more mysterious stories about the woods. They’re a place of strange magic and even stranger creatures, places mostly untouched by humans where things so old we don’t have names for them might live. Horror has had a tradition of books and stories warning us “don’t go in the woods” since time immemorial, and with many of us heading out into nature to enjoy the weather (or just to find someplace shady in the midst of various heat waves), we thought it was good time for a refresher. Presented for your approval, here are some books about why it’s never a good idea to head into the woods unprepared, featuring some of the endlessly inventive ways in which authors manage to imagine the existential threats and primal horrors that might lurk within a shadowy woodland setting… Slasher Summer by E.L. Chen The oppressive woods play an important role in Chen’s cruel little thriller, as they so often do in any horror story where old friends head out to a relaxing weekend at a cabin deep in the woods. The forest and lake surrounding the remote cabin doesn’t just cut off the college students from civilization and any help as the killer mercilessly knocks them off—it also further isolates them from the rest of their lives: the people they are outside their individual roles in the suburban psychodrama that caused the killings in the first place. The victims in Slasher Summer are unable to escape the forest (sometimes literally…there’s a really gnarly kill with a tree branch) any more than they are able to escape their past selves, creating a brutally effective metaphor for people who can’t seem to break free from the small town where they grew up. It might be a little on the nose, but what part of a slasher movie isn’t? The Ritual by Adam Nevill The woods of The Ritual are oppressive even before the four friends on an ill-advised hiking trip through the Swedish mountains run into the gigantic deer effigy and the pagan chapel among the towering trees. They’re unnervingly quiet, isolating, and injuries start as if to warn the four that things are going to get worse from there. How much worse involves sinister effigies, pagan churches, sacrifices, teenage moonshiners, and monsters even Arthur Machen and William Hope Hodgson would hesitate to describe. It says something of Nevill’s craft and the horrors of the forest that despite what’s become of the four hikers by the end of the book and the brutality of The Ritual’s climax, the overwhelming sensation as the woods finally give way to countryside is guarded but qualified relief. Moonflow by Bitter Karella Karella’s debut novel exists in a strange intersection between subcultural noir, 1970s horror-fantasy, and Carlton Mellick III novels, one that sucks you in deeper the further the heroine travels into the feral Pamogo forest. Described as a spirit-inhabited sprawl that hates tourists, where the most reliable method of navigation involves literally knowing where bodies are buried, the Pamogo is a lightless expanse of thick growth and perpetual rain that perfectly matches the spiraling narrative in which things only get weirder the deeper everyone goes. The mushrooms that writhe like animals when humans touch them, the TERF separatist eco-murder cult, and elements too strange to give away here all succeed in making the Pamogo the bizarre, transfixing star of Karella’s equally bizarre and transfixing novel. Sarafina by Philip Fracassi Fracassi’s American folk horror tale of three Civil War deserters is set in another feral forest, this one much further south. Fleeing the Battle of Shiloh (one of two Fracassi books set around that brutal Civil War clash), three brothers find themselves lost in the woods and fleeing the Home Guard, who will kill them as deserters. Fracassi uses the forest to ramp up the tension marvelous to effect, with the woods closing in around the brothers as their options dwindle, with Sarafina and her son Titus seemingly offering them a relatively pleasant and bucolic sanctuary…or perhaps only a brief respite before the horrors begin anew. Little Wild by Laura Evans Little Wild is a book that plays with boundaries—romantic idyll against harsh reality, wild against tamed, madness against magic, queer love against keeping up appearances in society—so it makes sense that the area around The Lodge where Margaret’s father lives is both beautiful to behold and also incredibly foreboding, set against the repressive and aggressively English Snare House where the affluent Winthers live with their tamed “Wilderness.” The woods around The Lodge, where Margaret finds herself banished, are also unique in that there’s nothing particularly menacing about them in and of themselves—it’s more that it’s the site of deep family trauma, memories, and painful history buried beneath the surface. It’s also notable that the woods themselves are relatively benign but have a psychological effect on Margaret the longer she stays in the forest, the isolation and strangeness of her own situation (as well as the trauma of her father’s mental state and her mother’s death in the woods) causing her to see them in a different light. Morsel by Carter Keane Morsel takes the Appalachian Mountains of Ohio to a new level of unnerving. The strangeness of this version of Appalachia is characterized by the stillness of Keane’s forests and the utter wrongness that starts up after Lou arrives to check out a property as a pro bono assignment for her job and immediately finds stick effigies straight out of Karl Edward Wagner waiting for her. The situation’s worse than she imagined, as she quickly runs into coyotes, a corrupt and murderous sheriff, a multilevel marketing cult, and some kind of horrifying alien monster that bleeds black goo and feasts on anything living within range. All of this is disturbing, especially as Keane’s depictions of the clashes between Lou and the various evils of the woods are bone-grindingly visceral, but worse is how the violence unfolds in absolute stillness, the animal noises suddenly cutting out as if they’re willing spectators in Lou’s struggle for survival. How To Survive Camping: The Man With No Shadow by Bonnie Quinn Quinn’s dark, sharply funny horror stories are set in a world where the woods are full of bizarre dangers, though not presented in such a visceral, horrifying light. Kate, the manager of Goat Valley Campground, deals with the various supernatural entities the same way someone would an annoying coworker, bantering with entities like The Man With The Skull Cup on her morning rounds through the camp. It lends Goat Valley a witty, wry, naturalistic tone to its supernatural folklore—there are horrifying dangers all over the place, sure, but as long as the campers and camp staff are careful and follow the safety guidelines, they’re no more a threat than wild animals or bad weather. This only increases the horror once the entity known as The Man With No Shadow starts taking a direct interest in campers, resulting in what was naturalistic becoming deeply unnatural as more and more dangers are revealed…. These are, of course, only a small sample of books that explore the horrors of the deep dark woods. What are your personal favorites? Which ones might we have thought were too well-known to mention? Sound off in the comments![end-mark] The post Seven Horror Books Featuring Freaky, Frightening Forests appeared first on Reactor.

Excerpts Horror Read an Excerpt From The Unheld by Luke Larkin A girl journeys across the haunted Montana Territory to rescue her father from an otherworldly creature. By Luke Larkin | Published on July 28, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from The Unheld by Luke Larkin, a horror western out from Hyperion Avenue on August 25th. Charlie’s life is a lonely one. While other twelve-year-olds are in school, she spends her days skinning the animals her mercurial father hunts in the woods just outside their cabin. And the woods and its twisted creatures—an owl with four wings, a boar with two heads, a fox with gills—are becoming stranger by the day.One night, a nightmarish beast appears and drags Charlie’s father into the wilderness. To find him, she enlists the aid of two unlikely allies also in search of the beast: an Englishman with a connection to a mysterious occult society and a Northern Cheyenne policeman exiled for a crime he didn’t commit. Yet as the trio prepare for the confrontation with the beast, Charlie must decide if her father, a brusque man who has always withheld his affection, is ultimately worth saving. Buy the Book The Unheld Luke Larkin Buy Book The Unheld Luke Larkin Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget Charlie followed her father along the dusty road and did her best not to look at the hog. It lay heavy in the back of the cart, jerking awkwardly this way and that with every rut and stone the splin­tered wheels met, and with every jostle Charlie’s father cursed the thing under his breath. He cursed its ugly, gnarled hooves and its ugly, rib-lean belly, and its ugly, ugly heads. The hog paid him no mind. It just lay in the cart, dead and watching Charlie from its two sets of vacant eyes as she followed behind, grinning with its two twisted mouths, both held open in silent squeals. It was a staring contest, two against one, and Charlie was an unwilling opponent. She wished the thing were gone and hoped her father would sell it quickly. “What’re you up to back there?” her father said in his gruff voice. “Sure as hell don’t feel like you’re pushing. That’s the deal. I pull, you push. Unless you’re fixing to pull, but I can’t say you’re much good in front.” Charlie didn’t want to push. She didn’t want to come any closer to the grotesque animal her father had shot and killed in the forest. He’d hunted plenty of strange creatures in the past few months, none fit to sell: a mink as long in the body as a snake; a pheasant with the wings of a sparrow; a fox that, for as far as her father could figure, had gills on either side of its throat. Once, her father brought home a mountain lion, and Charlie watched, squirming, as he split it down the stomach with his knife and found nothing at all on the inside, as though the animal had been only a walking pelt, empty save for the stale and putrid air that rushed out of the cavity and licked Charlie’s face. The hog was her father’s first quarry in weeks that was nor­mal enough to sell, and he was hoping to get a good price at the butcher. It was the same for every hunter in the territory—mostly twisted-up animals that nobody dared eat. A hog halfway normal was bound to fetch a halfway fair sum. Or so they hoped. This all began with the disappearance of the deer last fall. Charlie’s father, being a hunter and so often wandering in the forest, was among the first to notice. He ventured out from their cabin into the trees and came home empty-handed for a week straight, and this set his temper simmering. For days, he trudged through the door and stamped the muck from his boots and grum­bled: “Ain’t a damned one out there. Not a single goddamned one.” He’d say this more to himself than to Charlie, and he’d mutter it all through the evening. A fruitless week became a fruitless month became a barren season with not a single buck or doe or fawn in sight, like they’d lit straight out for another country, perhaps one with better graz­ing, or fewer wolves, or somewhere without hunters to shoot them dead. That’s what Charlie figured, at least. But then the wolves disappeared too, and the bears next, and even the small fish in the streams, so that for a long while the only things to be found in the woods were the squirrels, chittering away as though nothing were amiss. Charlie’s father trapped and skinned and butchered these, and for a while the two survived on nothing but squirrel, and when they became desperate, they’d make the trip into Plainsend to retrieve scant milk and eggs and flour, paid for with credit from the grocer, though who knew how long until Charlie’s father could pay the grocer back. Then the beasts. That’s what her father called them. They weren’t animals, or they were almost animals, but with some other thing mixed in as well. Too many eyes, or too few. Mismatched tails and missing limbs or too many heads, like the hog before Charlie now. The very first her father ever shot was a headless coyote. He brought it home to the cabin and Charlie helped him butcher it, holding its hind legs splayed as he took to it with the knife. Where the coyote’s head should have been, its neck simply ended in a mound of fur. They couldn’t bring themselves to eat it. The meat was tough and scant, but there was also something foul about the animal itself, something that eluded Charlie and her father, and that they didn’t care to think on. Her father burned the coyote, and he burned the next two animals—a goose with fur rather than feathers and a rabbit with the legs of a fawn. They were wicked, he said. But he couldn’t afford to burn them for long. They had to eat. Eventually, Charlie’s father shot whatever he saw—wickedness be damned—and brought the animals to the butcher. The butcher turned up his nose and waved him away and the people crowded around outside to see what new and terrible thing the hunter and his daughter had bagged now. Sometimes Charlie’s father could sell his catch to a passerby. More often, he and Charlie wheeled it back out of town and nearly blackened it over a fire. It was easier to swallow that way. “Meat’s meat,” her father said over his bowl. And true, Charlie thought, even the wicked and malformed animals looked harmless when diced and smothered in a stew. Or at least then you couldn’t tell them from the normal ones. They ate what they could stom­ach, save for the fish, which returned to the streams as strangers long in the body or else with too many spiny bones or their gills bleeding black bile, and always they tasted rancid and contami­nated every stew they entered. At any rate, the animals weren’t right, and that was just the start of it. Excerpted from The Unheld, copyright © 2026 by Luke Larkin. The post Read an Excerpt From <i>The Unheld</i> by Luke Larkin appeared first on Reactor.

News Pan’s Labyrinth James Cameron to Guillermo del Toro on Pan’s Labyrinth 3D: “If You Take Less Than 300 Days, I’ll Kill You” The director’s “by hand’ approach to the restoration included forbidding the use of AI By Matthew Byrd | Published on July 28, 2026 Photo Credit: Warner Bros. Studios Comment 0 Share New Share Photo Credit: Warner Bros. Studios Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth is not only returning to theaters later this year but is being converted to 3D for special limited screenings. A 3D conversion of such a film for a re-release requires a tremendous amount of effort, but Del Toro has been adamant that the process not be rushed in order to ensure that the conversion meets his standards and the standards set by the original film. Del Toro also mentioned that another legendary director had some choice words for him about the benefits of not rushing that process. “When you convert to 3D, there are two ways: quick or good. I chose good,” Del Toro told Gold Derby as part of a retrospective on Pan’s Labyrinth. “Specifically, when I talked to Jim Cameron about conversion, he said, ‘If you take less than 300 days, I’ll kill you.’ Because you have to put in the time — you go to every element by hand. A human made a decision. We’re redoing some sound elements, remixing it in Atmos, and doing a new color pass.” The “by hand” line is apparently more than a saying. At SDCC, Del Toro mentioned that he was adamant that nobody use AI software in any way to restore and convert the film. “I said, ‘Absolutely no goddamn AI,'” Del Toro told a cheering SDCC crowd. “What we’re protecting is the beauty and the redeeming power of art. It’s not about who gets the job. We are protecting a lineage of art. If we cut a generation of people from learning their craft, you’re cutting the rest of the history of that medium away from them for what?” Elsewhere in the retrospective interview, Del Toro emphasizes how much he had to fight for his vision of Pan’s Labyrinth, which, when coupled with the director’s previous statements about the use of AI in filmmaking, certainly helps to explain the director’s no-shortcuts approach. You’ll be able to see the results of his team’s efforts when Pan’s Labyrinth is released in various formats across theaters on October 9.[end-mark] The post James Cameron to Guillermo del Toro on <i>Pan’s Labyrinth</i> 3D: “If You Take Less Than 300 Days, I’ll Kill You” appeared first on Reactor.

Books Seeds of Story Reversing Rivers, Raising Louisiana, and Revamping Reefs: Elizabeth Kolbert’s Under a White Sky How science is trying to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems. By Ruthanna Emrys | Published on July 28, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share Welcome to Seeds of Story, where I explore the non-fiction that inspires—or should inspire—speculative fiction. Every couple weeks, we’ll dive into a book, article, or other source of ideas that are sparking current stories, or that have untapped potential to do so. Each article will include an overview of the source(s), a review of its readability and plausibility, and highlights of the best two or three “seeds” found there. This week, I cover Elizabeth Kolbert’s Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future. It covers how humans have tried to engineer nature, how that’s gone badly, and how we’re now trying to engineer fixes to our world-breaking failures. It’s both unsympathetic to the hubris with which we’ve claimed dominance—old boasts that “man every day is surpassing nature” earn example-ful criticism—and tentatively hopeful about our problem-solving abilities. It also reminds us that we should be careful, given how previous innovations have seeded the central problems of the Anthropocene. What It’s About Towards the end of Under a White Sky, Kolbert summarizes: “This has been a book about people trying to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems.” Case in point: the 19th-century engineering marvel that reversed the Chicago River, connecting it to the Mississippi watershed. This addressed a problem that was itself deeply Anthropocene: the excrement and stockyard viscera that clogged the river and flowed into the city’s drinking water. Success led to a pointedly blunt headline: WATER IN CHICAGO RIVER NOW RESEMBLES LIQUID. Combine that with another solution: DDT was first used as a military insecticide, then an agricultural one. It was a key part of WHO’s 1950s efforts to eradicate malaria. It also pushed bird populations to the brink of extinction. Rachel Carson’s 1962 Silent Spring founded the modern environmental movement and inspired a campaign to ban DDT. Carson suggested alternatives to chemical pesticides—such as using one biological agent, a targeted predator or parasite, to keep another in check. Following this advice, the US Fish and Wildlife Service imported Asian Carp to keep aquatic weeds in check. They also became part of wastewater treatment. Now they fill the Mississippi and threaten the Great Lakes through the inter-watershed connection created a century and a half ago. Enter new spider-to-catch-the-fly solutions, from electrified underwater fences to carp-bashing tournaments. Similar patterns abound. Kolbert covers sinking ground in Louisiana, where efforts to keep the Mississippi from jumping course have interrupted the natural restoration of silt to the banks, and where efforts to maintain existing land worsen the problem long-term. Then there’s the human-driven Sixth Extinction (on which Kolbert’s written a whole separate book), and our efforts to curtail it. On the edge of Death Valley, a cave harbors pupfish whose entire habitat is confined to a 60×8 foot lightless pool. A mile away, a replica pool breeds supplementary pups, and may replace the original (threatened by pumping and radioactive waste). Around the world, some species thrive around humans (crows, cockroaches), while others are entirely shaped by our decisions (dogs, wheat), but many suffer from our activities. Some do fine after a boost, while others, like the pupfish, become “conservation-reliant.” It’s not clear yet where reefs will fall on the extinction-to-reliance-to-recovery spectrum. Overheating bleaches many coral species, forcing them to expel algal symbionts gone haywire. If this goes on for too long, they starve. Kolbert visits a research aquarium in Australia, where coral and algae are bred for heat-tolerance, and tested against the projected conditions of 2050. Potentially, CRISPR gene drives could spread heat-resistance DNA through wild populations. Or robots might shade vulnerable ecosystems during heat events, or colder water could be drawn up from the deeper ocean. All options are risky, but something must be done unless we’re willing to lose a major ocean habitat. Gene drives don’t only spread beneficial characteristics. They are also being tested for reducing populations of invasive cane toads and rodents. The term “mice-nine” appears. From specific ecosystems and species, Kolbert moves to the atmosphere as a whole, and proposed engineering fixes to the boss-level Anthropocene problem of CO2 emissions. These range from injecting carbonized water into deep ground where it will mineralize, to planting trees (and then burying the mature ones rather than allowing them to fall and rot), to stratospheric aerosol injection. The first two directly address the problem—and in combination with reduced emissions could potentially get us into the realm of negative emissions, necessary for many of the most optimistic future climate models. Stratospheric aerosols could reduce immediate harm while we work on direct solutions—but could also lead to dramatic whiplash if paused before atmospheric carbon is successfully drawn down. It would also produce the white sky of the book’s title. All of these solutions involve engineering a system larger and more complex than the Mississippi River. What remains to be seen is whether we’ve finally learned enough to create interventions that do more good than harm. Buy the Book Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future Elizabeth Kolbert Buy Book Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future Elizabeth Kolbert Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget Kolbert’s first book, on Anthropocene mass extinction, is from all reports extremely good. It’s also a depressing enough topic that it has sat on my shelf for years, unread. It therefore wasn’t until this week, reading Under a White Sky as a companion to What the Wild Sea Can Be, that I discovered that Kolbert’s funny. She’s absolutely rigorous, offering detailed interviews and in-person experiences in places most deeply affected by the issues she’s discussing. But she also relishes warnings about getting face-slapped by carp, quotes researchers’ frustrations as they wait for coral to spawn in captivity, and describes a rodent biocontrol group as “Dr. Moreau joins Friends of the Earth.” She’s clear-eyed about the dangers of climate change and healthily skeptical about geoengineering, but her curiosity and humor are good companions for exploring both. As I mentioned last time, my current work-in-progress involves high seas adventure during a time of severe geoengineering tradeoffs. Kolbert provides rich fodder. Stratospheric aerosol injections remain the idea that scares me the most. It’s easy to screw up, likely to mess with weather and crops in the most vulnerable places on earth, can be carried out unilaterally by a single powerful nation-state or amoral billionaire, requires the sort of consistent maintenance that we currently suck at, and is incredibly appealing to people still enamored of fossil fuels. It also—and this is the issue I haven’t seen anyone talk about, including Kolbert—seems likely to kick off an epidemic of permanent Seasonal Affective Disorder. White skies everywhere, year-round? Moon and stars blurred into a vague haze? This sounds literally miserable. Most interventions aren’t quite that horrifying, but carry the same sort of “whoops, didn’t see that coming” risks as imported carp. Rewilding takes care and caution for just that reason. The right species can restore a whole ecosystem; the wrong one can destroy it. Outside Amsterdam, newly-introduced bison thrive in our dunelands, and the dunelands thrive from their presence. Beavers can fix whole watersheds and are sometimes better engineers than humans. But cane toads, deliberately introduced to Australia, are a toxic menace to everything that tries to eat them. If we try to control them with gene-drives, what further side effects might arise? Much geoengineering falls into the realm of desperation: the status quo is too a poor an option to accept. Examining Greenland’s ice cores, Kolbert notes something alarming. For some time, the near-simultaneous emergence of fully-agricultural societies around the world has been a mystery—why 6000 years ago, and not 50,000 years earlier? Homo sapiens has been neurologically modern for much longer. You are not smarter than a Stone Age hunter-gatherer. Graeber and Scott lean toward agriculture as a hierarchy-promoting mistake, but that still doesn’t explain the synchronicity. The ice cores show the relatively stable climate of recent millennia to be an exception. “…in the midst of the last ice age, the climate of Greenland was so variable it could hardly be called a climate.” Average temperatures leapt 8 degrees C in 50 years, for example, then dropped back again. We see the same pattern in evidence from the Middle East, China and Europe. In such conditions, settling in one place long-term, let alone growing crops, simply doesn’t work. Nomadic hunting and gathering is the most adaptive choice. Then, post-Ice-Age, everything calms down: “All of civilization falls within this period of relative tranquility and so this sort of calm is what we take to be the norm.” Push the system out of that narrow balance, and it might not return any time soon. The Best Seeds for Speculative Stories Racing Against Carbon. Some of the most interesting, promising, and difficult climate mitigation options involve removing carbon from the atmosphere and ocean. Immediately pre-Anthropocene, animal exhalation and volcanic emissions were approximately balanced with plant-based and sedimentary drawdown, resulting in approximately 280 parts per million (ppm) of CO2. Now we’re above 400ppm and rising. We can plant more trees and algae, but that only goes so far, and unless we bury them carefully, the carbon is re-emitted when they rot. But if we inject enough CO2 underground, it will calcify and remain there. There are several different methods being tested, none currently scalable—but success would change our calculus dramatically. There’s ample room here for stories about both the technical race itself and the political wrangling required to combine it with real emissions reduction. Rewilding the Spider to Catch the Fly. Both direct rewilding efforts, and the complications of invasive population management, make for great stories. We have to move beyond the myth of untouched wilderness—and speculative fiction in particular needs to think about what the future of nature looks like. How many ecosystems, and species, will require ongoing intervention? Can we return to an understanding—and a relationship—in which the human role in ecology is treated as natural? What conflicts will emerge between different approaches to that role? Groups training cane toad avoidance among predators may get along poorly with those developing gene drives for population reduction. (Or might learn to work together—geoengineering meet-cute, anyone?) New Growth: What Else to Read Kolbert regularly cites John McPhee’s The Control of Nature, a classic collection of essays on hubristic environmental engineering. His piece on the Mississippi’s imprisonment led to a plot point in A Half-Built Garden, and remains an ongoing obsession. Elizabeth Rush’s Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore reports from communities in Louisiana and beyond dealing with disappearing land. Project Drawdown collects an encyclopedia’s worth of climate solutions, calculating their potential carbon impact and offering guidance for implementation; in addition to the website they also offer their most central ideas in book form. Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future has become a core novel of climate mitigation. Don’t read it in the middle of a heat wave, or maybe do (but be prepared to obsessively check your local wet bulb temperature afterward). E.J. Swift’s When There Are Wolves Again is a slow burn tale of rewilding both places and hearts. Monica Byrne’s The Actual Star is one of the few stories I’ve read that imagines a post-agricultural world based on anything other than apocalyptic disaster. Sam Miller’s Blackfish City goes in a very different direction, with a new surge of hubristic engineering to create habitat for climate refugees in the Arctic. Share your favorite tales of wild engineering in the comments![end-mark] The post Reversing Rivers, Raising Louisiana, and Revamping Reefs: Elizabeth Kolbert’s <i>Under a White Sky</i> appeared first on Reactor.