News Amazon Prime Anime Studios Claim Amazon Added AI-Generated Dubs Without Their Permission The No Game, No Life: Zero distributors deny giving Amazon their permission to upload the controversial AI-generated dubs. By Matthew Byrd | Published on December 3, 2025 Photo: Kadokawa Animation Comment 0 Share New Share Photo: Kadokawa Animation In what is rapidly becoming one of the stranger and potentially consequential entertainment stories of the year, some anime studios have confirmed that they did not approve (and were not aware of) Amazon’s efforts to add AI-generated dubs to their works via the Amazon Prime service. This whole thing started last week when Amazon quietly added AI-generated dubbing options to various anime projects such as Banana Fish, No Game, No Life: Zero, Pet, Journal of the Mysterious Creatures, and Vinland Saga. Some of those anime works received AI-generated English and Spanish dubs, while others (such as Vinland Saga) only received Spanish dub audio options. The decision was made with essentially no fanfare and wasn’t really noticed until fans spotted the new audio options and decided to give them a shot. The results were, perhaps predictably, disastrous. The decision to add an AI-generated audio option to these works understandably drew the ire of various voice actors who spoke against the decision to incorporate such an audio option and deny them, audio engineers, and associated studio personnel work in the process. While there has been some confusion regarding whether or not there were ever any plans to give these works more traditionally produced dubs (more on that in a bit), the very idea that you could unleash such an option in the effective dead of night and declare it a viable alternative did not sit well with various professionals and fans in the anime community. More to the point, some of the AI-generated dubs in question are quite bad. You’re probably not going to be surprised to learn that AI-generated voiceovers lack the nuance and audio quality that you’d get from professional actors working in a studio. However, you may not entirely be prepared for the ways those poor quality AI-generated “performances” fail to even vaguely match the timing of what’s occurring on-screen. No familiarity with the show Banana Fish is required to appreciate how poor this dub is: Amazon has started using AI to add English Dubs to anime like BANANA FISH. It’s really quite terrible and shows how important real actors are. pic.twitter.com/POgy4oIq1p— DansGaming (@Dansgaming) November 29, 2025 Since those AI-generated audio options were added late last week (the exact timing is unknown, though it was believed to have occurred late last Thursday or Friday) Amazon has quietly removed the English dubs for Banana Fish and No Game, No Life: Zero from Prime Video. However, the Spanish AI dubs for works such as Dororo, Karakuri Circus, Banana Fish, and Vinland Saga and the English AI dub for Pet have not been removed as of the time of this writing. The ethics and results of these dubs will undoubtedly continue to be discussed, but the biggest question at the moment may be “What really happened here?” Were these dubs created with any consent or input from the various anime studios involved, or was this purely an Amazon initiative? Who knew what about this project when, and what kind of approval process was involved? Were these works selected because there had been no official indication that they would otherwise receive an official English dub, or were other arrangements considered for their “participation” in this program? Recently, we got at least a few answers to this whole thing, though they arguably make the whole situation even more bizarre. Anime News Network reached out to some of the studios and distributors behind these works and received some troubling replies. No Game, No Life: Zero distributor Kadokawa Animation said they did not approve “any form” of an AI dub, while sources at North American distributor Sentai Filmworks reportedly stated that the studio was not made aware of this decision “in advance.” Banana Fish distributor Aniplex did not respond to Anime News Network with a comment at this time, but we have reached out to them, Amazon, and several of the other studios involved with this recent batch of AI-generated dubbing options for more information. For now, the situation remains volatile and ongoing. Anime studios and distributors like Crunchyroll have already had to address controversies regarding the use of generative AI in their works, and Crunchyroll representatives have since stated that they are “not considering” the use of AI in their creative processes, including voice acting, as a result of that reaction. We certainly know that there is backlash against the idea of using such technology in ways that not only impact the quality of that work but potentially cost performers, artists, and engineers their jobs. So while the idea of more studios choosing to go that route despite the pleas not to is troubling, it’s more disturbing to consider that these decisions were made without explicit permission. It should also be noted that Amazon previously added AI-generated audio dubbing options to international works such as El Cid: La Leyenda and, at the time, argued that the decision to do so was based on their belief that such works would otherwise not receive professional dubbing options. It’s unclear whether Amazon considered using their own considerable resources to produce said dubs as an alternative. What happens next is worth keeping an eye on. The timing of this situation makes it likely that the dubs were removed due to the reactions to them (and their seemingly obvious issues) rather than formal disputes from the creators (which would seemingly take time, if such permission was even technically required in the first place). But how long will that last? Is the argument that such techniques should be used for series that would otherwise not receive official dubs really strong enough to stand on? Will these dubs go up with “fixes” in the near future, or is the blowback greater than that at this point? Will potential disputes hinder Amazon’s attempts to reupload these dubs in any form? Perhaps most importantly, will this entire situation eventually set some kind of precedent not just for anime dubs but the rights of creators and distributors regarding similar modifications? It’s that last question that will perhaps generate the most interest in this situation regardless of your familiarity with and interest in the specific works that this technology has been used on so far. [end-mark] The post Anime Studios Claim Amazon Added AI-Generated Dubs Without Their Permission appeared first on Reactor.

Books book reviews All That We See or Seem by Ken Liu Is an Imaginative High-Tech Thriller Ken Liu’s latest examines the “complexities of artistry…” By Vanessa Armstrong | Published on December 3, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share Julia Z is a hacker in the not-so-distant future who, after a childhood of ignominy, is trying to stay under the radar in a quiet town outside of Boston. One day, however, a man named Piers shows up on her doorstep. His wife Elli has disappeared, and an unabashedly evil man named the Prince says he’s kidnapped her and will kill her unless Piers gives back something Elli stole from him.  Piers, a corporate lawyer who really loves his wife but is a self-professed luddite, believes he hasn’t been followed to Julia’s home. Piers is wrong, and Julia finds herself now entwined and on the run with him, trying to find Elli and save them all from the Prince’s wrath. Ken Liu’s All That We See or Seem is marketed as a sci-fi thriller, and there’s certainly elements of that, but I’d argue that other aspects of the book give it a solid foot outside that subgenre as well, including into hard sci-fi. Let’s start with the technology. It’s clear that Liu has done intensive research into how AI could develop and become integrated into society. Almost everyone, for example, has a personal artificial intelligence that has grown up with them (Julia’s is named Talos), which has turned their AI into de facto extensions of people. There are benefits to this—no one’s organic brain can crunch numbers like their AI one can—but it comes with a loss. Later on in the book, for example, we get this illustration of humanity’s new dependency: In the same way that few contemporary writers could compose even a five-hundred-word essay with the help of AI as research assistant, fact-checker, dictionary, thesaurus, grammarian, and, in extreme cases, amanuensis, very few contemporary programmers could create a functioning nontrivial application without the help of codedaemons, bug-genies, patchsprites, scriptpixies, and a whole fairyland of similar artificial intelligences. In half a page, Liu has painted a future that feels depressingly plausible: It seems more likely than not, the way things are going, that this will be the world when my five-year-old is Julia’s age.  But What We See or Seem explores other potentialities as well. Take Elli’s profession as a dream guide, a person of some celebrity who guides thousands of people through a shared vivid-dream experience that is created by the hopes, fears, and thoughts of those involved. How vivid dreaming works, specifically how the technology interacts with people’s brains and how Elli constructs the shared experience, is intricately explained and developed. Julia Z’s various hacking abilities (Is there a seemingly insurmountable problem? Julia knows the AI for that!) also reveal the level of detail Liu has thought through.  Buy the Book All That We See or Seem Ken Liu Buy Book All That We See or Seem Ken Liu Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget Liu also has imagined how this technology would work in a capitalist world, including how the companies that create these products can use them to alter what their human consumers may perceive: Does some Saudi prince, for example, not want their photo taken? The camera you use will automatically black them out of any images. Through this and other, more horrible means, the elite can alter the shape of the internet and, as a result, what is perceived as reality.  Through Elli, Liu also examines the complexities of artistry, and how creative desire, for many, cannot be completely divorced from external validation and perceived success. “There is so little certainty in art, so few ways to concretely judge where you are, that the hunger for approval, for the magic that comes from having sold, from being desired by many, becomes the polestar by which all steer,” Liu writes about halfway through the book. Here, he’s talking about Elli, but it’s clear that we see that tug everywhere today, and that behind the personas people put out in their quest for creative success, there’s a complex person (Bo Burnham’s songs, “White Woman on Instagram” and “The Internet”, also tackle this, and makes for an unexpected but delightful pairing with All That We See or Seem.)  These are meaty questions, and Liu weaves these larger themes over the course of the story. Doing so slows the story down a smidge, especially when considering that “Thriller” label, but things still move along at a decent pace. And without getting into spoilers, the book also takes a major turn a little over halfway through, plunging the reader into a story that’s different from what they might have been expecting. (Whether that turn works or not will likely vary from reader to reader.) One thing I would have loved to see more of is the development of certain characters. Julia as the protagonist (and as the main character in what will reportedly become a series), is fairly fleshed out: We get her backstory, which not only explains how she got her hacking skills, but reveals why she’s afraid to put her trust in or even connect with others. Piers, however, is disappointingly less developed, although we’re given more of Elli’s motivations to understand her better. There are also a slew of characters from Julia’s past and present whose primary purpose, like NPCs in a video game, seems to be to move the plot forward. Their introductions and subsequent exits from the story felt abrupt and wedged in—mainly there because Julia needed some kind of assistance or a sounding board. In the same vein, the Prince as the villain of the story, along with his main henchman Victor, are also one-dimensionally evil. Are there people like them in the real world? Sadly, yes (I can even think of some candidates). But for fiction, it would have been interesting to explore how people can break bad so completely.  Thrillers, however, usually do spend more time on plot than character development, and sci-fi thrillers usually do get into the details about the technology in the (usually) dystopian future that they paint. All That We See or Seem also gave me some Caprica vibes at certain points, which I appreciated. And so when the next Julia Z novel comes out, I’ll happily add it to my TBR list. [end-mark] All That We See or Seem is published by Saga Press. The post <i>All That We See or Seem</i> by Ken Liu Is an Imaginative High-Tech Thriller appeared first on Reactor.

News 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple Trailer Has Ralph Fiennes Wielding a Potential Cure His test subject? None other than everyone’s favorite infected, Samson By Vanessa Armstrong | Published on December 3, 2025 Screenshot: Sony Pictures Comment 0 Share New Share Screenshot: Sony Pictures When the infected attack, what do they see? That’s a question Ralph Fiennes’ Dr. Kelson raises in the latest trailer for 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, the sequel from director Nia DaCosta that follows up on the story Danny Boyle and Alex Garland established in the first film in their planned 28 Years Later trilogy. The trailer also reveals what Kelson is up to and what’s in store for Spike, something that the synopsis hints at as well: In a continuation of the epic story, Dr. Kelson (Fiennes) finds himself in a shocking new relationship—with consequences that could change the world as they know it—and Spike’s (Alfie Williams) encounter with Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell) becomes a nightmare he can’t escape. In the world of The Bone Temple, the infected are no longer the greatest threat to survival—the inhumanity of the survivors can be stranger and more terrifying. Dr. Kelson’s shocking new relationship is with Samson, an infected who, as we see in this trailer, the good doctor thinks he can cure of the zombie-like disease. Will Dr. Kelson be successful? Will young Spike survive his time with the blond-haired Jimmy, who, as we also get hints at in this trailer, remains mentally unwell (as does Dr. Kelson, for that matter, with his titular Bone Temple, which he explains is a memorial for the dead)? Whatever else the film has in store for us, one thing is clear from this trailer: Dr. Kelson is taking a leap into the unknown with his potential cure. We’ll be able to go with him when 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple premieres in theaters on January 16, 2026. Check out the trailer below. [end-mark] The post <i>28 Years Later: The Bone Temple</i> Trailer Has Ralph Fiennes Wielding a Potential Cure appeared first on Reactor.

Books Reading the Weird Old-School Scream Queens: Sam J. Miller’s “Courtney Lovecraft’s Book of the Dead” By Ruthanna Emrys, Anne M. Pillsworth | Published on December 3, 2025 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 Sam J. Miller’s “Courtney Lovecraft’s Book of the Dead”, first published in Nightmare Magazine in October 2025. Spoilers ahead! Evan Brabbick is the creator of the wildly popular podcast, Night Logic, which “peeks behind the curtain of the sunlit world of what we believe to be reality, to see the dark side that most of us only ever catch glimpses of. I’m determined to document that dark side—and the people who work along its borders.” In his current episode, the borderline worker is Courtney Lovecraft, an “old-school, old-ass drag queen [who does] old-school drag” in trowelled-on makeup that makes her look like “the evil queen from a Disney cartoon.” She claims to be named after her drag mother Darlene Lovecraft, nothing to do with Courtney Love or H. P. Lovecraft. Her performances feature “abundant shade,” lip-synched torch songs, and psychically retrieved postmortem messages for specific audience members. Many messages are nasty, because the talking dead are “deeply disappointed.” Other spirits send “love and kisses instead of promises of bloody revenge.” Like the spirit who wants someone to know “he’s sorry he had to leave you.” At which point Courtney renders “Our Love” by Donna Summer, a performance sure to make at least one “old queen” go “verklempt.” Courtney Lovecraft claims complete ignorance of social media. She’s never auditioned for a TV drag competition. She’s performed her entire career at Shenanigan’s Ballroom, a former movie theater in Poughkeepsie, New York, where “the drinks are cheap, the paint is peeling, and it smells like it’s still the seventies inside.” As an “underground icon,” she doesn’t need to travel: The fans come en masse to pack her chosen venue. She refuses interview requests. So why’s she doing Night Logic? Her publicist thinks she may be broke, hoping to expand her audience. Brabbick’s podcast includes his narration, performance excerpts, and a backstage interview. When Brabbick asks about the show’s supernatural aspects, Courtney describes early memories of three aunts who’d share family scandals. Her mother demanded the source of one particularly scurrilous story, then broke down when Courtney named the aunts. Mom’s sisters, it turned out, had died before Courtney was born. So, yeah, the dead have always talked to her. She tried to pass on their messages, which only got her bullied and didn’t stop the dead’s whispers. Brabbick asks if the dead ever want more than message delivery. Courtney scoffs that the dead only want one thing: to be rid of their pain, to pass it on to someone else. The podcast cuts back to Courtney’s performance. She knows people want to hear the standard diva hits, but next up’s a real deep cut. Before she starts, the speakers emit a strange mix of “feedback and shrieking and whale song and wolf song and a churning bass line.” (They’ll emit similar blasts twice more during the show.) But it’s the “deep cut” that makes Brabbick feel he’s finally approaching the dark side. A “shriek of terror from [his] lizard brain” urges him to flee. He stays put. When asked about her song choice, Courtney changes the subject. Here Brabbick inserts a drag scholar, who semi-jokes Courtney is a vampire. Giving her audience the sense that “Something isn’t right here” is “fundamental to her mystique.” She doesn’t want drag to be universally loved. The world is scary for queer and trans folk, and she wants to spread the scariness around, “making the straights sweat a little,” while making the unsafe feel safer. Next interview clip, Brabbick asks Courtney about Alger Sinani, a local gay superfan who after a show murdered his best friend’s stepfather. A local gay trans fan, Courtney corrects, a detail Brabbick purposefully left out. And yes, he killed the man who was abusing his best friend. Their interplay grows more intense. Courtney opens out of her stage persona, gradually shedding her makeup. She says that gender “transgressors” are “public enemy number one these days,” the “scapegoats” straight white cis people use to distract from their planet-killing messes. Brabbick’s cashing in on this “manufactured dread” by spotlighting “drag’s biggest creep.” He retorts he’s not the enemy. Courtney talks over him. His only concern is getting more listeners, more attention. Ophelia told her so. Brabbick doesn’t remember who Ophelia is at first. He inserts a post-performance clip of a fan sounding wild, unhinged. A local barkeeper claims people are coming out of her performances vomiting, with nosebleeds. Wearily, she says that the spirits’ pain is increasing. She can’t satisfy them. They’re out of control. Can’t Brabbick see, smell, the black sea of hate rising to drown everyone? He’s here to help her soothe the spirits. And to atone for his sin against Ophelia, the sister whom only he and (now) Courtney know about. Brabbick acknowledges he had a brother named Trevor, who killed himself at sixteen. The night before, Trevor confided in Brabbick: she was living a lie, and her name was Ophelia. Though Brabbick didn’t verbally express his horror and anger, he knows “Trevor” read the emotions on his face. Through ignorance and fear, Courtney says, Brabbick failed Ophelia, but he can help her and others by working with Courtney. He must promote this episode hard, get at least his eleven million followers to listen; otherwise, the raging spirits will kill him. Remember those three weird speaker blasts during recording? They’re “the chime at midnight” that causes the veil obscuring the “other side” to drop. Afterwards, listeners will hear the dead as Courtney (and now the chime-struck Brabbick) do. She fervently hopes the chime-struck will do what the dead ask, which is this: Be good to each other. Live and act with love in everything you do. Too saccharine a sentiment to save the world? Courtney believes in it. So does Brabbick, amid spasms of regret over broadcasting the “chime.” The Courtney Lovecraft episode ends with Courtney’s last admonition from the stage: “Is that too fucking hard? To be decent to each other? Pity the poor fuck who fails to clear that very low bar. Life doesn’t have to be hell, any more than death does.” The Degenerate Dutch: Courtney warns, accurately, that “Gender transgressors are public enemy number one these days.” It makes for all too many unquiet dead. Libronomicon: You can learn more about Courtney Lovecraft in Tommy Kinkaid’s Camp Concentration: The Drag Queens Who Are Resisting the Mainstream and Reserving the Right to be Revolting. Madness Takes Its Toll: Evan mocks his own claims about the will of the dead: “Woooooo spooooky, it’s like some The Ring bullshit where you hear this podcast episode and go insane.” Ruthanna’s Commentary In his author spotlight, Sam Miller talks about “the glorious queer-specific emotion that combines anger and pain and grief and joy and community and love and lust and defiance,” and the long history of drag that embodies that emotion. I’ve loved me some fabulous big-wig lip-synching in my day, especially on days when the world outside was dark and bigoted. Drag transgresses boundaries, of gender but also anything else it can get its manicured hands on. That makes it a terrific match for horror. Why peek through the veil when you can tear it apart completely? “Courtney Lovecraft” has everything that I wanted, and didn’t get, from Beyond Black. As in Black’s novel, we have a real medium with all the trappings of a con, surrounded by the resentful dead. But there are no multi-chapter doldrums of the living and dead who can’t move on. There’s body shaming—over-the-top Courtney-style, for an audience expecting it—but no fat-shaming. Instead there’s “a little bit of too much truth”: the truth you get in performance, and the truth you get when the makeup comes off, and the truth you get when you don’t need an intermediary any more at all. And there’s a touch of hope, even amid Courtney’s cynicism. Hope in this case is not so much a discipline as a mandatory assignment: we can make life better than it is. And in doing so, we can make death better too. “Is that so fucking hard? To be decent to each other?” Often, yeah, it seems to be ridiculously fucking hard. But it’s possible. Podcaster Evan is “the poor fuck who fails to clear that very low bar,” and the story does make us pity him. And everyone else, all of us listeners, who will soon be in good company smelling the dead. Stinking intestines make a gross sort of sense, but why burnt popcorn? The dead want to give away their pain. Justice, closure, revenge, maybe even run of the mill resentful sniping. But they can also grow: Courtney passes on a message from a father who has learned, post-mortem, to believe his child’s truth. And Evan’s sister, who never lived her truth, goes by her own name in death.  There’s a theme in the sort of dead who frequent Courtney’s shows. Not surprising: there are presumably other mediums for those who’ve neither perpetrated nor suffered from anti-queer oppression and violence. What will they think about her sharing the secret? Are some of them being pushed to do the same thing? It makes me wonder about Courtney Lovecraft’s unacknowledged namesake—H.P., not the living punk singer who got stuck at the worst table in the house. He was certainly a guy with a lot of negative emotions. He had feelings about gender, some of them unpleasant. He might have been gay, or bi, or ace. He was a hellish bigot. He hated New York City, but Poughkeepsie is a safe distance away. Does he hang around Shenanigan’s? And if so, has he learned anything? If he can, maybe there’s hope for the rest of us. Otherwise, if we can’t manage our assignment, we’d better pray that the dead are merciful.   Anne’s Commentary Finally we meet a fictional medium who rivals Hilary Mantel’s Alison in Beyond Black. The two won’t ever meet, since Alison’s circuit lies in the London hinterlands, while Courtney performs exclusively in Poughkeepsie, New York. Both ladies have been psychically sensitive from early childhood. Both are mobbed by spirits stuck between what Brabbick calls “the sunlit world of what we believe to be reality” and “the dark side” humans rarely glimpse. Courtney had three familiar spirits in her dead aunts, whose shady gossip delighted the future queen. Alison’s less lucky. Her familiar spirits are a petty criminal who tormented her while he was alive, and his pack of equally dead, equally loathsome mates. Courtney and Alison share a facility with makeup, too. I can see them bonding over this, despite the former’s flamboyance and the latter’s relatively subdued style. Courtney denies any connection between her stage name and Courtney Love or H. P. Lovecraft. She claims the moniker was bestowed by her drag mother, Darlene Lovecraft, “one of the supreme queens of the Niskayuna drag scene.” Unsurprisingly, the Night Logic team can’t find evidence that there was ever a drag scene in Niskayuna. I suspect, with Brabbick, that Courtney protests her strictly upstate roots too much. Bette Bathory from San Francisco had a look much like Courtney’s, and their stage shows sound identical, with a review describing Bette’s as a mix of “torch songs and obscene comedy and communion with the Great Beyond.” Like Courtney, Bette delivered spirit messages to specific audience members, who were often deeply affected. Countess Elizabeth Bathory (1560-1604) was convicted of serial murders, mostly of young girls. Rumor said she drank and bathed in the blood of her victims to retain her own youth, making her at least a wannabe vampire. Historians dispute the accusations of murder, some claiming Bathory was persecuted for political reasons. Tommy Kincaid, drag scholar, accuses Courtney of being a vampire, with coffins in her basement and no mirrors in her dressing room. He adds he’s only joking; yet that she might be a vampire is “exactly the kind of thing she wants you to think.” She wants to scare her audience out of their complacency. To regain for drag culture its power to disturb and provoke, sadly eroded by the safe entertainment of TV drag competitions. Despite the career perks offered by shows like RuPaul’s Drag Race, Courtney disdains auditioning for them. Riches and broad-based fame aren’t her goal. She reigns over a niche market and makes Poughkeepsie a site-of-passage for fledgling queens. Maybe this satisfies her, but it’s not enough for her ever-growing following of uneasy spirits. The pissed-off ones don’t just want to say hey to their loved ones. Their messages are often threats of violent revenge. So what do the dead want, Brabbick asks, beyond a living voice to speak for them? Provoked when Courtney counter-asks what he, “Mr. Leading Authority on the Paranormal,” thinks the dead want, Brabbick sullenly says they want “lots of things, in [his] experience.” Wrong, lamb chop, Courtney snipes. The one thing the interstitially trapped dead want is to be “rid of their pain. To pass it on to someone else.” Kincaid thinks it’s not a question of what the dead want at all, but of what Courtney wants, which is “to build a massive fan base of people who are just as scared—and just as angry—as she is.” Why? Because “when you attract an audience of people in extreme states of mind, extreme things can happen.” Tommy’s partly right. Courtney does want what the dead want, which is to escape the pain inflicted by the black tide of hatred rising in the world. Their shared demand of the living is simple but profoundly difficult: Be good to each other. Live and act with love in everything you do. That’s an extreme ask, all right, and Courtney’s followers are too few to work the magic. That’s why she needs Brabbick, even though she senses his only concern is to gain listeners. To garner attention. To make people like him Needing to be liked, alike and hence acceptable, may be why Brabbick couldn’t hide his horror when Ophelia revealed she was a transgender woman. He’s tried to catch Courtney out with his questions about Bette Bathory and Alger Sinani, but she nails him with what his suicide-dead sibling has told her. Critically, to gain the ears of his 11 million listeners, she doesn’t threaten to expose Brabbick; instead she offers a way to atone for his gravest sin. Thus Courtney proves she’s not just a heartless shady bitch. The bitch does have a heart, much enlarged by the strenuous exercise given it by the spirits. That’s another thing she and Alison have in common. Brabbick broadcasting the “chime at midnight” to a much vaster audience than Alison’s presumably creates millions of sensitives. Will the revelation of an afterlife and the all-healing power of love save the world? Brabbick doesn’t know. Neither does Courtney. The extreme happening it sparks could easily be destructive instead of redeeming. Tune in to the next episode of Night Logic to find out! Next week, we’re ready to find out what’s going on with Her in Chapters 21-23 of Lucy Snyder’s Sister, Maiden, Monster.[end-mark] The post Old-School Scream Queens: Sam J. Miller’s “Courtney Lovecraft’s Book of the Dead” appeared first on Reactor.

News Ready or Not: Here I Come Absolutely Everyone Is Trying to Kill Samara Weaving in the Ready or Not 2: Here I Come Trailer Doubling the stakes isn’t enough. Let’s do a quadruple. By Molly Templeton | Published on December 3, 2025 Screenshot: Searchlight Pictures Comment 0 Share New Share Screenshot: Searchlight Pictures Alas, poor Grace (Samara Weaving), who thought her ordeal was over. She survived the bonkers murder-game shenanigans of the Le Domas family. She’s alive! She’s free! Just kidding. Ready or Not 2: Here I Come, the sequel to the 2019 horror comedy Ready or Not, is a matter of raising the stakes exponentially. Sure, Grace survived one family. Now she has to survive four families, all of whom are basically vying to rule the world. By killing her—and her sister, Faith (Kathryn Newman). The plot description borders on the John Wick-ish: “Grace has one chance to survive, keep her sister alive, and claim the High Seat of the Council that controls the world. Four rival families are hunting her for the throne, and whoever wins rules it all.” But the real point here is the cast. Absolutely everyone is trying to kill Grace and Faith—or, in the case of Elijah Wood, directing the proceedings. The cheery cast of murderers include Sarah Michelle Gellar, Sean Hatosy, Néstor Carbonell, Kevin Durand, Olivia Cheng, and David Cronenberg. It is delicious to see Gellar playing a sort of anti-Buffy; it is always delightful to see Carbonell, and here he seems to be having quite a good time. It’s clearly way more fun to hunt than be hunted. As for new prey Newton, it turns out this role was basically made for her. According to People, directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett (who direct under the name Radio Silence) “wrote her character specifically with her in mind after they worked together on 2024’s vampire movie Abigail.” (The screenplay is credited to Guy Busick and R. Christopher Murphy, who also wrote the first film.) In the same article, Weaver says Here I Come is “so unhinged, absolutely cooked—you’re gonna love it.” Ready or Not 2: Here I Come is in theaters April 10, 2026.[end-mark] The post Absolutely Everyone Is Trying to Kill Samara Weaving in the <i>Ready or Not 2: Here I Come</i> Trailer appeared first on Reactor.