Books Reading the Weird An Inordinate Fondness for Beetles: Donald A. Wollheim’s “Mimic” Could non-human creatures walk among us, hidden in plain view? By Ruthanna Emrys, Anne M. Pillsworth | Published on June 3, 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 Donald A. Wollheim’s “Mimic,” first published in Astonishing Stories in December 1942. You can find it more easily in column-favorite anthology The Weird, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer. Spoilers ahead! This week’s story opens with a classic preamble about human hubris. We think we know a lot, but half the planet remained undiscovered less than five hundred years ago. Science and technology remain in their infancies—why, the discipline of atomics has barely been born! Many truths lurk unimagined, and “when they are discovered, they may shock us to the bone.” Our unnamed narrator works as a museum curator’s assistant, “mounting beetles and classifying exhibits of stuffed animals and preserved plants, and hundreds and hundreds of insects from all over.” He soon learns that “Nature is a strange thing.” Look at its fondness for camouflage and mimicry. Soft-bodied moths masquerade as armored wasps. Beetles imitate army ants and march undetected in their all-devouring columns. In all animal groups, there are the killers, the survivors. Lesser species are wise to ape them. And since man is “the greatest hunter of them all,” the “irresistible master” of the world, why wouldn’t inferior creatures walk among us, hidden in plain view? When narrator was young, a neighbor rented rooms in a grimy tenement at the end of the street. He appeared twice a day, early morning to head for the elevated train, after nightfall to return home. He always wore a black ankle-length cloak, and a wide-brimmed black hat pulled low over his face. Though he looked like a creature from “some weird story out of the old lands,” he harmed nobody; indeed, he paid attention to nobody. Except, maybe, women. If a woman crossed his path, he’d close his wide, watery blue eyes until she passed. Then he’d march on as if there’d been no such encounter. At Antonio’s grocery he never spoke, only pointing to what he wanted. The kids jeered until they grew bored with his unresponsiveness; then, like their parents, they ignored him. Only one incident of note occurred during Black-Cloak’s long residence. He dragged sheets of metal into his room, banged on them for several days, then stopped. That was all anyone ever knew until years later, when narrator was grown. Sheer luck found him nearby when the janitor of Black-Cloak’s building ran out shouting for help. Narrator and a policeman followed him to Black-Cloak’s rooms, where he’d heard thuds and screaming. Silence greeted them. Knocking received no answer. At last the policeman and narrator broke in the door. Beyond lay a room littered with torn papers and garbage. Oddly, it was unfurnished except for a metal box four feet square, screwed and roped shut, its lid sealed with a waxy substance. Black-Cloak lay on the floor, still cloaked though his hat was cast aside. He was dead. Inside the box, something rustled. The would-be rescuers examined the body, “gradually—horribly” becoming aware of its wrongness. Black-Cloak’s eyes remained open, staring. The eyebrows were mere lines in the flesh of a face with no nose—mottled skin only presented as a nose if unscrutinized. It had no teeth. The “coat” was “a huge black wing sheath, like a beetle”. The thorax underneath had six insectile legs and a hole oozing watery liquid, while the abdomen below was crumpled, reminding narrator of a wasp after egg-laying. The janitor fled, “gibbering.” The policeman began to pray, but at narrator’s instigation he helped break the seal on the box. Together they lifted the lid. “Noxious vapor” poured out, along with things two or three inches long, dozens flying on gauzy beetle wings. They looked like little men in black suits, with expressionless faces and watery blue eyes. Out the open window they streamed. Narrator ran to watch their exodus. How could people have known about army ant imitators without ever suspecting some creature might disguise itself to look like “the supreme animal himself—man.” They found bones at the bottom of the box, maybe human—they didn’t try too hard to identify them. In retrospect, narrator supposes that Black-Cloak was female, the box her nest, the flying throng her offspring. He speculates that Black-Cloak was wary of women because they observe men more closely and could suspect her inhumanity. Or maybe Black-Cloak had an “instinctive feminine jealousy” of potential competitors. But what shakes narrator most is the thing only he saw, staring after the fliers in the dawn sky. On the roof of a lower building, what looked like a red brick chimney opened two white eyes, unfurled great bat-wings, and peeled away from the real chimney to pursue Black-Cloak’s young. What’s Cyclopean: Gibbering! The Degenerate Dutch: “It is less than five hundred years since an entire half of the world was discovered.” Does that mean that First Nations folks already knew about cape-men as well? Weirdbuilding: Vampires get close by passing as human. But there are a lot of opportunities for monstrous urban camouflage—just ask Fritz Leiber’s smoke ghost. And if you want really terrifying insects (with bonus human mimicry), there’s T. Kingfisher’s new Wolf Worm. Ruthanna’s Commentary Humans may be top predators—the army ants of the larger world. But we are also awfully anxious. Evolve without predators, like the dodo, and you’ll be without fear (or protection). But evolve as a predator—or an adaptable scavenger, which is humanity’s actual niche—and you’re forever aware that something bigger or sharper or smarter might come along any minute. Thus our endless, ant-like stream of b-movie giant insects/tomatoes/amorphous blobs. And thus the fear of predators passing as our own. It’s interesting that this latter fear barely arises in “Mimic.” Amid the variety of insect-kind, there are species that look like other species so they can eat their young, or lay cuckoo eggs, or just free-ride on the work of busier ants. But Wolheim’s examples involve vulnerable beetles passing as dangerous wasps, or finding safety amid army ant columns. The man in the black cloak walks among humans, even buys our food, but fears us more than we do her. There’s that bone in the nestbox, of course. But corpses are pretty easy to find in 40s New York, and grave-robbing is probably safer than killing for yourself. A single escaped victim would be a lot more dangerous than a random perceptive woman. I’m side-eyeing the explanation for the mimic’s femmephobia, by the way. Sure, women are on average socialized to pick up indications that a man might be dangerously… off. But freezing every time one goes by is A Lot, and not a good way to avoid scrutiny. Nor does it seem likely that insectile femininity should find conflict with the mammalian version. Birds get jealous, sure, but they also pick out human “mates” about whom to get territorial. Maybe the mimic is actually an insect-looking bird? It would explain a certain amount, not least the violation of the inverse square law. But we only rarely fear birds, while insects can raise an instinctive flinch. Like snakes, they’re often-enough venomous that we have our own adaptations—many but not all humans are predisposed to develop phobias. Narrator, oddly, isn’t. He works with insects in the museum, finding more interest than terror in their strangeness. His fear, perhaps, comes more from that knowledge than from uncanny valley reflex, from inferring a whole mimetic ecology from one individual. Or two: there’s that chimney flyer. And where harmless beetles pass themselves off as army ants, there are probably predators and scavengers as well. There are parasitic breeders with faster and more vicious reproductive cycles than the mimic. It scares our narrator. But it’s not what scares me. This is New York only a little after Lovecraft’s time there—and no less prone to xenophobia. There may be cape-man beetles every few blocks, but more often there are visitors terrified of unfamiliar languages, human predators taking advantage of immigrants, and white supremacists eager to prove their egos on othered bodies. All of whom would leverage “some supposed people are actually insects” for their own purposes. Not that we need excuses, but any new impetus for dehumanization is terrifying. Wollheim presumably knew this—it was 1942, and it would be hard to miss. Earlier that same year, the U.S. had entered World War II and sent Japanese-Americans to internment camps. So is the story infavor of identifying the “real” inhuman threats, or is the reader expected to infer the dangers of looking for them? My head-canon: we never do figure out where cape-man gets her money. I think those “bills” are the most dangerous mimetic predators in the story. They have a symbiotic relationship with the cape-men, helping them scrounge human food in exchange for insertion into the economy. Hapless bodega-owners pass them to landlords or bankers; eventually they’ll fasten onto the richest and most greedy humans. They’ll send feelers, cordyceps-like, into the brains of CEOs, encouraging them to focus on profit alone until the bills reach their final instars in the form of crypto. What happens then, we are only just starting to learn. Anne’s Commentary Wollheim’s “Mimic” kicks off with the cautionary reflections of a narrator who has Come to Know Too Much and Seen That Which He Cannot Unsee. After graduating from college (with a degree in biology would be my guess), he may justifiably think he knows a lot, or at least something, about his subject. His studies earn him a museum job, where he assists in curating exhibits and organizing collections, with an apparent emphasis on class Insecta and order Coleoptera. The beetles alone would be humbling, comprising as they do almost 40% of all arthropods. As the story goes, evolutionary biologist J.B.S. Haldane quipped to a group of theologians that God must have “an inordinate fondness for beetles,” but the junior curator assigned to sort through endless drawers of them could be excused for not always sharing that fondness. And for concluding, like “Mimic’s” narrator, that Nature is a strange thing. The strangeness specific to his story is that Nature revels in camouflage and mimicry. My favorite example of the two combined is Pseudocerastes urarachnoides, the Spider-tailed Horned Viper. Its mottled pattern of creams and browns allow it to hide in plain sight on the arid substrate of the west Iranian mountains. That’s not surprising — camouflage is a common feature of ambush predators. Less common but far from singular is its use of a caudal lure, usually a tail-tip that squirms in imitation of a wormy treat. This snake’s lure, however, sports a bulbous “abdomen” and scales elongated into spidery “legs,” irresistible to its largely avian prey. This is a form of Peckhamian or aggressive mimicry. The Black-Cloak Man primarily practices another form, though we can’t rule out him keeping some kind of lure under his cloak or wing-protective “suitcoat” elytra. If those bones in his metal box are human, after all…. The stereotypical images of candy-offering pedophiles and alley-lurking flashers come too forcibly for me to speculate further about Black-Cloak lures. I brake my current train of thought to mention that my appreciation of “Mimic” was several times sidetracked by credulity-stretchers. Also, narrator annoyed me right off with his Anglo-European-centric remark that the Americas were discovered less than five hundred years ago, his time frame. Hello, peoples inhabiting North and South America long before 1492 might have said. If establishing even freaking empires doesn’t count as discovery with you guys, we don’t know what would. I wasn’t inordinately fond, either, of his analysis of why Black-Cloak particularly avoided women. First off, how women may notice men more closely than men do, thus having a greater chance of detecting Black-Cloak’s inhumanity. Men, of course, only notice women. Unless they’re gay men, who didn’t exist in 1940s America, at least not in narrator’s neighborhood. Second off, Black-Cloak turns out to be a she, not a he, which given that males of some inhuman species can tend to their young is not a necessary conclusion. But allowing Black-Cloak is female, she might experience “some touch of instinctive feminine jealousy” toward women. I can’t. I’m restarting my previous train of thought. So. Assuming that Black-Cloak is some sort of giant arthropod that has survived to the Age of Superior Humanity and has had time to evolve alongside said Superior Humanity long enough to mimic it, not that really Superior Humanity has been around long, evolutionarily speaking, what advantage does Black-Cloak gain by the deception? They go regularly to the grocery store, and there have been no disappearances of neighborhood kids or pets since their arrival. So, let’s assume they’re not large-scale carnivores needing mimicry to go as “wolves in the fold” among their prey. We could ask Antonio whether it’s the meat case or the produce section to which Black-Cloak points when they visit his grocery. Moving on, hypothesis-wise. Narrator mentions army ants and their beetle-mimics among his examples of Nature’s strangeness. Army ants will devour everything in their “marching” path, but the beetles that resemble the ants (probably by tactile and chemical imitation as well as visual) can be engulfed by a column while escaping predation. This is protective mimicry. But if Black-Cloaks need to escape human aggression, do they need to blend in with humans? It would be “cheaper” for them to avoid humans altogether by living in unpeopled areas. Certainly not in big cities. This suggests that Black-Cloaks gain some advantage exactly by living in much-populated areas, the very strongholds of their models. We’re back to the ants, and creatures that don’t want to beat ants but to join them. Myrmecophiles, “ant-lovers,” are broadly defined as “any organism that is dependent on ants at least during part of its life cycle.” Many myrmecophiles make their homes within ant colonies, or even in the midst of army ant columns, drawing advantages from the protection, resources, and stability these communities provide. Ant guests (inquilines) have relationships with their hosts ranging from the parasitic through the commensal and mutualistic. If Black-Cloaks are live-in myrmecophiles, or rather anthropophiles of a sort, where would they fall on the relationship spectrum? Lacking textual evidence that humans benefit from Black-Cloaks, I’ll go with a commensal one, with Black-Cloaks benefiting from humans and neither hurting nor harming humans (with the possible exception of harvesting the odd human for larva fodder.) It’s possible that Black-Cloaks aren’t human mimics in the evolutionary sense Wollheim’s going after, which I continue to have problems buying. Maybe they’re aliens with the ability to semi-shapeshift in short order and pass on the shift to offspring. Maybe over time they could perfect their human mimicry. Maybe that bat-winged thing that peeled off the chimney is another alien with cephalopod-level camouflaging ability—it seems unlikely it would have evolved only to imitate brickwork. And maybe Brick-Bat was what put the hole in Black-Cloak’s thorax, preparatory to devouring their succulent hatchlings. Not that I think the narrator would take greater comfort in finding out that extraterrestrial or interdimensional shapeshifters are real, rather than terrestrially evolved megaroaches and chameleon-bats. Whatever he’s seen, he still Can’t Unsee It. Next week, Arthur clings to civilization in Chapters 17-18 of The Buffalo Hunter Hunter.[end-mark] The post An Inordinate Fondness for Beetles: Donald A. Wollheim’s “Mimic” appeared first on Reactor.

News Hollow Sydney Sweeney Will Face Off With the Headless Horseman and a Love Triangle in Hollow Is this Ichabod Crane Is the Villain, the book/movie? By Molly Templeton | Published on June 3, 2026 Image: Neon Comment 0 Share New Share Image: Neon We’ve had Sleepy Hollow (Tim Burton version) and Sleepy Hollow (did-Abbie-dirty TV version). We’ve had a lot of takes on Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” honestly. Here’s the latest: In screenwriter, director, and novelist Lindsay Anderson Beer’s novel Hollow, Katrina Van Tassel is the protagonist. And she’ll be played by Sydney Sweeney (Immaculate, pictured above). Hollow is about to be both a movie and a book. As Deadline reports, Anderson Beer’s novel was picked up by Putnam, which will publish next year. Anderson Beer (Pet Sematary: Bloodlines) is also writing and directing the movie adaptation of her own book. If any of this sounds lightly familiar, it might be because Anderson Beer’s take on “Sleepy Hollow” was announced in 2022. Back then, it was just a movie adaptation. Why, how, and when did Anderson Beer change it into a novel-first story? That backstory remains to be told. According to Deadline, “the novel positions Van Tassel not as a romantic prize, but as the central figure in a dangerous mystery and seductive supernatural love triangle. The story blends gothic atmosphere, psychological intrigue, and erotic thriller elements into a contemporary, high-concept reinvention of the classic tale.” The book is scheduled to be released in the fall of 2027, which Deadline says is “timed to align with development of a feature film adaptation.” This is a little unclear, but the long and short of it is that Hollow will be available for your enjoyment next year—in one form or two.[end-mark] The post Sydney Sweeney Will Face Off With the Headless Horseman and a Love Triangle in <i>Hollow</i> appeared first on Reactor.

News Stargate Martin Gero’s Stargate Series Is Canceled at Amazon Stargate may yet live on in some other form By Molly Templeton | Published on June 3, 2026 Photo: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Comment 0 Share New Share Photo: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer The new Stargate series didn’t make it out of the resurrection sarcophagus. In November, Amazon MGM Studios announced a new addition to the franchise: a “next phase” from Martin Gero, who worked on Stargate SG-1, Stargate Atlantis, and Stargate Universe. But just seven months later, Variety has the news that the show has been canceled. “According to an individual with knowledge of the situation,” Variety notes, “Amazon execs were concerned that Gero’s take on the series would not have broad appeal beyond the franchise’s already dedicated fanbase.” No plot or character details were ever announced about the Gero show, which was supposed to be a “bold new chapter” for the franchise that has been running since the 1994 James Spader/Kurt Russell film. The series Stargate SG-1 followed, for ten seasons; Stargate Atlantis ran for five seasons; several other series and two direct-to-video movies exist, and they are not all in continuity with one another. But they all, presumably, have Stargates, alien-built doorways that allow for instantaneous travel across the universe (provided there is another Stargate where one is trying to go). Amazon had been considering developing new Stargate projects for years; the massive corporation’s purchase of MGM Studios brought with it the rights to a lot of franchises. Variety notes that the studio “is still exploring new ways to further the franchise.”[end-mark] The post Martin Gero’s <i>Stargate</i> Series Is Canceled at Amazon appeared first on Reactor.

Column Science Fiction Film Club Coherence: Dinner at My Place Tonight, Just Bring Yourself Schrödinger’s cat, astronomical anomalies, and parallel realities collide with an ill-fated dinner party. By Kali Wallace | Published on June 3, 2026 Credit: Bellanova Films / Ugly Duckling Films Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Bellanova Films / Ugly Duckling Films Coherence (2014) Written and directed by James Ward Byrkit. Starring Emily Foxler, Maury Sterling, Nicholas Brendon, Elizabeth Gracen, Lauren Maher, Alex Manugian, Lorene Scafaria, and Hugo Armstrong. Back in the early 1930s, Albert Einstein wrote a letter to fellow physicist Erwin Schrödinger as part of their ongoing correspondence trying to make sense of the more confounding aspects of quantum mechanics. Einstein was troubled by some of the interpretation put forth by their colleagues Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. Einstein was particularly disgruntled by the idea that quantum systems exist simultaneously in a superposition of different states until they are observed, at which point the system collapses into a single state. In his letter to Schrödinger, Einstein said this idea was as ridiculous as a keg of gunpowder being both exploded and unexploded. It might work in the math, but it did not fit with the observable world. Schrödinger agreed and offered a more developed thought experiment: Imagine a cat in an enclosed box. Also within the box is a device that may or may not release a deadly poison, depending on a random quantum trigger, such as the radioactive decay of a single atom. According to Heisenberg and Bohr’s mathematical formulation, the state of that single atom—and therefore the release of the poison and fate of the cat—exists in a state where it is both decayed and not decayed until it is observed. That would mean the cat is both alive and dead until something is present to measure whether the atom controlling the poison’s release has decayed or not. This is obviously absurd in the real world, as we all know that any cat in a box is loafing adorably while you take twenty pictures of him because he’s the cutest little thing you’ve ever seen. But it wasn’t until physicists in the ’80s began finding experimental proof of some of the wilder ideas in quantum physics, such as particles being able to exist in a state of superposition, that Schrödinger’s cat began to shift from a fairly niche thought experiment meant to illustrate a key weakness of quantum mechanics to a simple metaphor meant to explain the model’s fundamental weirdness. That’s the version of the idea that grew into a pop cultural meme over the past few decades. Before that, sure, philosophers read about it and considered the implications, and sci fi writers were of course interested in the implications, with Ursula K. Le Guin often being credited as the first to bring the quantum cat into fiction… but definitely not the last. There are a lot of interpretations of quantum mechanics, because it has the dubious prestige of being the most rigorously tested and proven scientific theory humanity has yet devised, yet nobody can agree on what it means. Physicists love that, because it means there are always more bizarre mysteries for them to dig into, but they aren’t the only ones. Sci fi writers also love it, especially the “many worlds interpretation,” which was proposed by physicist Hugh Everett in the 1950s. In this interpretation, in that box with the cat, the radioactive atom set to release the poison both does and does not decay, meaning the cat both lives and dies in two different realities, because every quantum outcome exists in an infinite and infinitely multiplying number of possible worlds. There were stories about parallel universes or alternate timelines before the idea became a serious scientific concept, but not nearly as many as there have been in the decades since. It has become such a commonplace trope in mainstream fiction that it feels silly to even name examples, but I’m going to anyway because they include everything from the DC comics multiverses of the 1960s to Star Trek’s goateed Mirror universe to the ’90s show Sliders to the many Spider-verses of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) to the universe-hopping existentialism of Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022). When James Ward Byrkit and Alex Manugian (who also plays Amir in the film) started brainstorming the treatment that would become Coherence back in about 2013, the idea of multiple universes was definitely present in mainstream pop culture, even if it hadn’t yet become the focal point of multiple blockbuster Hollywood films. But the origin of the film didn’t come from science fictional ideas or themes. That would come later, when Byrkit was refining the idea and dug into the works of Stephen Hawking and other physicists to learn more. The origin of the film came from the unique way in which it was made. Or, to put it another way, it’s what happens when you invite eight actor friends over to your house and scare the daylights out of them for fun and profit. Byrkit was no stranger to Hollywood and filmmaking when he started thinking about making his own movie. He had worked as a storyboard and concept artist on Gore Verbinski’s three Pirates of the Caribbean films and had co-written the animated film Rango (2011)—all of which were huge productions with massive budgets, big-name stars, and major studio backing. Those experiences made him want to try something completely different: a film that wasn’t controlled by executive decisions and corporate demands down to the last detail. “I missed the days where it was just me, some actors, and a story. I wondered what it would look like to strip it down to the bare minimum of elements—to get rid of the crew, the script, and to just have the camera and actors,” he said in a 2014 interview. That didn’t mean he would jump right in without preparation. There was, in fact, a huge amount of preparation behind Coherence. He and Manugian sat down to brainstorm what kind of story they could tell in a film with a bare-bones production, and the cultural touchstone they landed on was Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone (1959-1964). As a weekly, half-hour anthology television series, each episode of The Twilight Zone combined basic settings with unknown characters to explore heady and bizarre scenarios. It’s a show that does a lot with a little, in other words, which makes it an appealing model for somebody who wants to make a movie without using many resources. So Byrkit decided the setting would be his living room, and the premise would be “a Twilight Zone-like fractured reality.” Then he spent about a year figure out exactly how that would work. He cites the episode “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” as the primary influence; that’s the episode about a neighborhood descending into paranoia and violence when a meteor passes overhead and they lose contact with the rest of the world. Another inspiration was Roman Polanski’s film Carnage (2011), which is about two couples losing their shit when they have a dinner party to discuss a childish fight between their sons. When Coherence was making the festival rounds, just about every single interviewer also asked Byrkit about Primer (2007), because Primer is the film everybody goes to when they think “high-concept micro-budget sci fi filmed in somebody’s house.” Byrkit acknowledges that he saw Primer and took its success as a sign that there was an audience for that sort of film. I agree with him that they are very different stories that approach their ideas in different ways, even though both fall into the category of “ordinary people in weird sci fi scenarios.” In Coherence, the characters don’t start out thinking they are in a weird sci fi scenario. Lee (Lorene Scafaria) and Mike (Nicholas Brendon) are hosting a dinner party for their friends, who are all the most stereotypical white middle-aged Californians you’ve ever seen in your life. There’s Em (Emily Foxler) and Kevin (Maury Sterling), who are going through a rough patch. There’s Hugh (Hugo Armstrong) and Beth (Elizabeth Gracen), who has brought the all-natural organic ketamine-spiked tincture. And there’s Amir (Manugian), who has brought along Laurie (Lauren Maher), who nobody seems to like because she’s Kevin’s ex. There’s a comet passing overhead, but it is otherwise a very normal night. They are drinking wine and eating dinner when strange things start to happen. First, their phones aren’t working; a few of the screens randomly shatter. Then the power goes out everywhere except at one other house nearby. Hugh and Amir head out to see if they can use the phone at that house, but they return injured and rattled and insisting that they witnessed something impossible: the other house is this house, filled with their doppelgangers. It spirals outward from there. As soon as somebody brings up Schrödinger’s cat and the 1998 film Sliding Doors, we know exactly what kind of movie we’re in, even if we don’t know where it will go. That’s intentional, because we’re supposed to gain this genre awareness as the characters gain it. They want to believe they’re all hallucinating, but they keep running into versions of themselves, which makes denial a bit difficult. To preserve the feeling of weirdness inflicted upon an evening of normalcy, Byrkit didn’t write a script. What he did instead was pick actors he knew to be willing and able to handle improvisation. He gave them each some guiding notes, but nobody knew the whole story except Manugian, who helped write the treatment and knew the major twists and turns. For five nights, they filmed at Byrkit’s house, letting the actors improvise wildly as the tiny crew threw curveballs into the mix. (There seems to have been some preparation in the form of a short trial run, so they weren’t going into the process completely blind.) The actors all agreed to this and, after an initial adjustment period, it seems like they enjoyed themselves. (Even Scafaria, who actually had to cook for the others as part of playing the dinner party host, but also actually got to take a nap in the middle of it.) There are so many stories out there about directors subjecting actors to unpleasantness to get genuine reactions, but this was more like giving some seasoned professionals a specific scenario and letting them play out a nerdy sci fi RPG for a few nights. In one interview Byrkit specifically said, “We set out to make a B-movie. We didn’t set out to make a talky, indie high-art film.” He specifically picked chatty extroverts so there wouldn’t be awkward lulls, and when they got hung up in places or the story needed to move along, he would step in and give them a nudge. (One example: When Hugh and Amir first return to the house, the other actors were so wound up they refused to let them inside. Which is, well, a little ironic. Considering.) The actors had personal details and any information their characters would know, such as Em’s story about missing out on a major career opportunity or the book belonging to Hugo’s physicist brother. But they weren’t told how or when to share that information, and nobody had guidance about what to do with it. They also didn’t know when external events would intrude upon their dinner party; their startled reactions to the first knock at the door are genuine, as they were all getting so into the scenario they didn’t expect a change. There were, naturally, some problems with making a film this way. Directors of photography Arlene Muller and Nic Sadler had to deal with the obvious technical challenge of following eight people around a house for several hours. They had to suffuse the main areas with light, except for when the lights go out and the characters are using candles or glowsticks, but they also had to keep the few exterior shots completely dark. They had to somehow keep everybody in focus, even when everybody was moving around unpredictably. They didn’t quite manage that, as there are several places where the lack of focus gives a sort of pseudo-cinéma vérité look, which is not exactly what they were going for. The editing is also quite jumpy, in part because editor Lance Pereira was piecing together five nights of improv and in part because the movie as a whole is piecing together an unspecified number of realities joined together by a cosmic “roulette wheel” that shunts the characters unexpectedly into different worlds. I think the film is edited together quite well overall, and I think the movie works overall, but I fully admit I have no interest in going through the movie and tracing every single character or thread to see if it all fits. Not only does that sound very tedious, but I also think it’s pretty much beside the point. The movie is filmed so that we’re in the scenario with the characters. When they start trying to figure out what’s going on, we want them to make some progress toward a solution, but we also understand how freaked out and curious they are. When they realize the physics book and the comet knowledge won’t help them, we’re as lost as they are. (The comet story from 1920s Finland was made up, which makes me a little sad. I was prepared to go down a rabbit hole learning about weird historical comet happenings.) When they start to piece together the fact that people have swapped worlds without knowing, we get to feel those jolts of surprise and discomfort. Overall, I found this to be an enjoyable movie to watch, and I’ll probably watch it again to pick up more details next time. It plays out at a nice pace, with a good number of surprises and twists, and we really do want the characters to get through it. It all builds together to make Em’s search for a world that hasn’t noticed what’s going on, and the violence she resorts to in order to stay there, all the more haunting. Part of my enjoyment comes from knowing that it was an experiment in creative filmmaking, an artistic passion project, and it worked. I love the idea of stripping away everything we associate with modern sci fi films—the huge productions, the special effects, the big stakes—and exploring what’s left. I love the idea of figuring out what kind of weird, twisty, surprising stories can be told in a limited setting with a lot of careful planning, some clever guidelines, and a willing cast. I am always delighted by people finding more ways to tell the stories they want to tell. What do you think of Coherence? Have you ever been to a California dinner party that ended up like that? You can share in comments. We want to know. If you’re wondering how much the movie cost: Most reports put the budget at $50,000. Those reports do not include information about whether Lorene Scafaria had to buy the garlic chicken she cooked for the dinner party. Next week: I do love a story about a cult, so we’re watching Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead’s The Endless (2017). Find it online. I’ll probably also talk a bit about their 2012 debut film Resolution, which is a prequel of sorts to The Endless but it is not at all necessary to watch beforehand. (I swear that makes sense, but it’s a huge spoiler to explain how or why.)[end-mark] The post <i>Coherence</i>: Dinner at My Place Tonight, Just Bring Yourself appeared first on Reactor.

Movies & TV Widow’s Bay Widow’s Bay: Kate O’Flynn on Patricia’s Final Girl Moment Reactor interviewed O’Flynn about Patricia’s journey against The Boogeyman, and what the latest episode means for the rest of the season. By Vanessa Armstrong | Published on June 3, 2026 Credit: Apple TV Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Apple TV Warning: This post contains spoilers for the season one, episode eight of Widow’s Bay, “Your Baggage.” Kate O’Flynn, who plays the peculiarly indomitable Patricia on Apple TV’s Widow’s Bay, didn’t even know what a Final Girl was before doing press rounds for the show. That didn’t stop her, however, from channeling big slasher movie energy while staying true to Patricia’s demure demeanor as she timidly shrieks along the darkened streets of the island while The Boogeyman plods after her, intent on her murder. “My memory of that episode of filming that episode is just running and screaming,” she jokingly told me in an interview, though she also praised her character’s “amazingly innovative problem-solving” with the gasoline and the lighter, and that “doing that Final Girl trot and action hero thing as Patricia… just felt really fun.” The entire sequence between Patricia and The Boogeyman is when I laughed the hardest during the show’s first season. Not only because of O’Flynn’s riff on the slasher movie as Patricia, but also because we get a dose of Mean Girls when she crashes book club and ends a face-off with her former classmate in a definitively violent way. “She’s over it at that point, she is over that whole dynamic,” O’Flynn said about her high school bully. “There’s something bigger and she’s able to let it go… by tasering it.” Credit: Apple TV Tasering gags aside, the latest episode of Widow’s Bay is also an emotional turning point for O’Flynn’s character. “I love the fact that Patricia gets that payoff… this is where she finds her strength and her courage, and she’s able to deliver the goods when it comes to The Boogeyman,” she told me. “Those goods” involve not only shooting The Boogeyman, but keeping a shotgun on his corpse until his remains are properly burned to ash. Patricia is done with his supernatural serial killer nonsense, thank you very much, and this episode, O’Flynn explained, tees Patricia up for the season’s last two episodes. “She breaks through that neurosis she has about caring what other people think, and she finds agency that carries her through to the end,” she said. “There’s less flapping from her… it’s a bit more serious in those last two episodes.” The last two episodes of Widow’s Bay premiere on Apple TV on June 10, 2026, and June 17, 2026.[end-mark] The post <i>Widow’s Bay</i>: Kate O’Flynn on Patricia’s Final Girl Moment appeared first on Reactor.