Featured Essays Anne Rice Immortal Universe The Anne Rice TV Universe Needs to Get Gayer  AMC didn’t balk at making subtext text in Interview With the Vampire. So why the shyness with their other shows? By Lacy Baugher Milas | Published on January 7, 2026 Image: AMC Comment 0 Share New Share Image: AMC AMC’s Interview with the Vampire is incredible television. In fact, it’s the sort of Anne Rice adaptation most of us who grew up loving her expansive fictional world of supernatural monsters and lavish excess likely thought we’d never get: Thematically rich, gorgeously rendered, and gay AF. The series fully embraces the homoeroticism that has always been simmering under the surface of Rice’s Vampire Chronicles novels, making the queer subtext fully text in glorious, screaming color. And while it is not always particularly true to the letter of its source material, the show gets its spirit exactly right, shifting details, character dynamics, and narrative truths in ways that still manage to say something new about both the original novel and the world we live in now. Perhaps most importantly, Interview remembers that it is, at its heart, a gay love story, deliberately drawing complex and compelling parallels between vampirism—specifically the otherness and isolation inherent in being an immortal—and queerness, through a twisted central romance that spans both decades and continents. The relationship between vampire Louis de Pont du Lac (Jacob Anderson) and his maker Lestat de Lioncourt (Sam Reid) is frequently toxic, often violent, and straight-up abusive at times. But it’s also thoroughly fascinating. Full of steamy sex and emotional betrayal, their relationship is the narrative engine that powers the rest of the story, and is clearly the series’s most important element (even when the two aren’t together onscreen).  Image: AMC With its combustible central characters, campy sensibilities, and lavish, over-the-top feel that drips with New Orleans-infused history, Interview makes for wildly addictive TV, building a rich and layered supernatural world that goes well beyond vampires and raising questions about how they all manage to co-exist alongside a humanity that’s largely unaware of their presence. And it’s found genuine success, posting fairly modest linear ratings, but racking up critical acclaim, streaming views, and an extremely vocal and loyal fanbase that seems eager for as much Rice-related content as they can get. And, thankfully, AMC appears to want to give it to them.  Thus far, the network has launched two other series in the larger “Immortal Universe” that’s based on Rice’s works: 2023’s Mayfair Witches and Talamasca: The Secret Order, which aired in the Fall of 2025. It’s unfortunately true that neither of these series quite manages to reach the dramatic, campy heights of their predecessor, but each still adds some intriguing new layers to the larger fictional world they all share. But both (along with any further spin-offs that may be in the franchise pipeline) could really stand to take some important lessons from the breakout series that initially started it all.  Image: AMC Both Mayfair Witches and Talamasca lack the romantic (in every sense of the word) sweep and scope of Interview, and—somewhat surprisingly—are also missing the overt queer overtones that help make Interview so much fun. Rice’s works are so popular precisely because of their larger-than-life characters, complex emotional stakes, and audacious, utterly fearless spirit. (Find me another author that has her main character become a global rock icon, meet Jesus, and have visions of the fall of Atlantis, I dare you.) Her books are beyond extra, and so are the characters at their centers. Or at least, they should be.  But where Interview finds the joy in updating Rice’s world for a new medium and a new generation, AMC’s adaptation of Mayfair Witches goes in the complete opposite direction. Flattening its source material’s frankly bonkers premise into the dullest possible version of itself, the show eschews the weirdest, freakiest elements of Rice’s original in favor of playing it painfully safe. Considering this is a story whose main character canonically sleeps with the demon who has been haunting her family for generations before she gives birth to him as her biological child (just go with it, it’s a long story), Mayfair Witches should feel free to try almost anything with its characters and their relationship dynamics. That it repeatedly chooses to do less than nothing is deeply frustrating and a real let-down for the fans who’ve waited so long to see this story onscreen. Image: AMC To be fair, the Lives of the Mayfair Witches trilogy is notoriously unwieldy, a series of positive doorstopper novels whose story spans generations and crosses continents. Featuring over a dozen central characters, a demon curse, ghosts, and god-like immortal ancients, it’s full of dark themes that include (but are not limited to) rape, assault, forced pregnancy, possession, suicide, and murder, alongside a heaping dose of violence and copious sex. The Mayfairs, as a whole, are deeply messed up, boasting a family dynamic that comes complete with plenty of incest, manipulation, and monstrousness built right into its core. Given all of this, it’s almost shocking how unsexy the show that bears its name is. The characters have little chemistry, the various lovers lack sizzle, and the story doesn’t lean nearly hard enough into the most outlandish elements of its plot. Even the demon Lasher (Jack Huston), a being who is basically supposed to exude sex and temptation, tends to come off more as a guy who makes you want to cover your drink on sight. There’s no lush melodrama here. There’s barely even any fun. These choices feel doubly strange given that the Mayfair novels depict plenty of queerness and transgressive sexuality throughout the family’s history, from Katherine Mayfair’s occasional cross-dressing and Julien Mayfair’s open bisexuality to the inter-family incest that sits at the heart of Lasher’s quest to be reborn. Julien had multiple male lovers, was the only male Mayfair to wield significant supernatural power, and for whom Lasher called a storm to mark his death. (This is a whole thing, and only happens when the witch that Lasher has chosen passes.)  But the Julien that appears in the TV series bears no real resemblance to his book counterpart, and his relationships with men are not mentioned.  Image: AMC To its credit, Mayfair Witches does introduce the new character Josephine “Jojo” Mayfair (Jen Richards), Cortland Mayfair’s (Harry Hamlin) trans daughter, who is certainly intriguing in her own right. But the show doesn’t go nearly far enough when it comes to exploring the experience of a transwoman in a family where literal power is passed down through the matrilineal line. And these choices feel like nothing so much as severe missed opportunities: To tell more engrossing stories, to show us more complicated characters, to expand the kind of stories this fictional world is capable of telling. To be brash and bold and yes, gay AF, in the same way that Interview has been. The big shifts the series appears to be planning for its forthcoming third season—which will relocate to Salem, lack Lasher, and feature a bevy of new characters—means it has a chance for a fresh start, should it choose to claim it.  As for the third Immortal Universe series, Talamasca sits somewhere in the middle of the pack. The most straightforward installment of the franchise, the series isn’t based on a specific novel, but instead attempts to tell the story of the mysterious organization of scholars and spies that is heavily present throughout Rice’s works. As such, it has a certain narrative freedom its sister series do not, but it also hasn’t quite figured out what to do with it just yet. And, as a result, its first season, which follows the story of a young telepath (Nicholas Denton) recruited by the Talamasca to help track down a mysterious object, is overstuffed and uneven.  Image: AMC It isn’t until Guy becomes involved with the vampire Jasper (William Fichtner)—also searching for the same McGuffin-esque item—that the story seems to find something approaching a beating heart. Denton and Fichtner have the spiky, immediately sparky sort of chemistry that launches endless TikTok edits and a trauma-bonded, pseudo-frenemies vibe that sees them circling and betraying one another throughout the show’s first season. The Talamasca, as an organization, is sketchy enough to make Jasper’s cause (destroying them) fairly sympathetic, and Guy’s desire to find the truth the group has denied him helps their unexpected partnership feel almost desperately genuine, even as the show never quite settles on how much either of them truly trusts the other.  It’s fairly apparent that this particular onscreen pairing is as much an accident of chemistry as anything else, since the folks making the series seem as surprised as anyone else by the audience reaction to their dynamic (or the fan edits that seem to be drawing folks to the show based on that one scene of them rolling around on the floor of a parking garage). But, it’s obvious that the show’s simply more interesting when these characters are onscreen together, and no matter how you choose to read the interactions between them—in this fictional universe violent threats practically can be flirting if you want them to be—they make for substantially more entertaining television than the series’ traditional police procedural elements or Talamasca head Helen’s (Elizabeth McGovern) search for her long-lost sibling. The series may have stumbled into its best element almost completely by chance, but it’s almost certainly the one it needs to lean into the hardest if and when it comes back for a second season. Image: AMC Talamasca is probably never going to be the sort of show that’s willing to get quite as gay as the franchise’s flagship series. It’s got a completely different vibe and tone. And honestly, that’s okay. The point of a shared universe, after all, is that it allows a franchise the space to tell different kinds of stories in different ways. But it’s also not an accident that Talamasca’s at its most compelling when it’s doing the same things Interview does, namely poking at themes of trust, loneliness, memory, and loss. That it can, at least occasionally, find a way to do that while staying true to its grittier spy roots, means it’s already leaps and bounds ahead of Mayfair. But as we all gear up for the third season of Interview (now going by The Vampire Lestat) to premiere next year, here’s hoping the folks in charge of the rest of this universe are taking some copious notes. They’ve still got a lot to learn.[end-mark] The post The Anne Rice TV Universe Needs to Get Gayer  appeared first on Reactor.

Column Science Fiction Film Club Mad Max: An Australian Road Fable for an Ultraviolent World How George Miller changed the way we imagine the future… By Kali Wallace | Published on January 7, 2026 Credit: Kennedy Miller Productions Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Kennedy Miller Productions Max Mad (1979). Directed by George Miller. Written by James McCausland and George Miller. Starring Mel Gibson, Joanne Samuel, Steve Bisley, and Hugh Keays-Byrne. Sometime in 1977, a notice went up in motorcycle shops around Melbourne, looking for bikers to appear as extras in a film. A few local “bikie” gangs answered the call: the Vigilantes, the Four Owners Club, the Barbarian Motorcycle Club. The guys who showed up were soon put to work revving their engines on camera and doing a series of impressive and rather dangerous stunts. They were probably not, as rumors often claim, paid in beer; they were likely paid like any other film extras or stuntmen. Nor did anybody die during the filming. From what the cast have said, the bikers generally had a grand, adrenaline-pumping time working on what nobody expected to become the first film in one of the most unique and iconic film series in cinema history. The Mad Max films have so powerfully influenced cinema’s collective vision of the dystopian near future that it’s hard to speculate how we might imagine the future without them. Even stories that don’t explicitly show a Mad Max-style future, with the lawless wastelands filled with violent roving gangs and so on, will often contain a hint that those elements are out there somewhere, or have existed in the past as a necessary step between tearing down an old world and building a new one. Sure, plenty of other films, both before and after, have contained the same elements: extreme violence driving reasonable men over the edge, the charismatic psychopathy of amoral sadists, the fine line between civilization and barbarism, the suffocating paranoia of impending societal collapse. But the Mad Max films combined those elements with a striking aesthetic and tone that have never stopped guiding how we conceive of a bleak near future. That’s why I find it fascinating that Mad Max, the first of the films, didn’t start out that way. It was not originally imagined as a snapshot of a grim future, and it was certainly not intended to launch a series that would develop into changeable modern fable about human survival. So let’s go back to the beginning. That’s pretty easy to do, because director George Miller and many others have spoken extensively about the origin and development of the Mad Max films. In particular, I’ve taken a lot of information directly from interviews with Miller, especially this extensive interview with Australian Screen, which is part of the Australian National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA), and this more recent interview with The New Yorker. The beginning is in a town called Chinchilla, a rural farming community in the Western Downs of Queensland. The internet tells me that Chinchilla currently has a population of about 7,000 people. It is known as the “Melon Capital of Australia” because it produces a quarter of Australia’s total watermelon crop. It has a very large statue of a watermelon. It is also where George Miller was born in 1945. Miller describes his home town vividly: “Completely flat roads. Loamy soil. Heat haze. Burnt land. And with a very intense car culture.” Intense car culture in rural Australia in the 1960s meant no speed limits, optional seat belts, and a lot of reckless young people. Miller notes that by the time he graduated high school, he knew several people who had died or been injured in serious car crashes. Miller went to study medicine in Sydney, but even while he was working on becoming a doctor he was already interested in filmmaking. In 1971 he and his younger brother Chris entered a student film competition at the University of New South Wales; their one-minute-long St. Vincent’s Revue Film won first place, and the prize was a chance to attend a film workshop in Melbourne. Miller didn’t plan to go. He was finishing medical school and fully intended to become a doctor; it was a much more sensible career path than trying to make it as a filmmaker. But while he was working a construction job for extra money before his medical residency began, he had a close call with an on-site accident (falling brick, no hard hat) that made him think maybe life was too precarious to pass up a chance to do something he really wanted to do. He didn’t quit medicine right away, but he did go to Melbourne to take part in the film workshop. The workshop was auspicious in two ways. It’s where Miller made his short film Violence in the Cinema, Part 1 (1971), and it’s where he met Byron Kennedy, who would later produce the first two Mad Max films. Kennedy died in a helicopter crash in 1983, but the production company Kennedy Miller Mitchell still bears his name. (This is, coincidentally, the first of two tragic helicopter crashes I will be mentioning in this column.) As far as I can tell, we can’t watch Violence in the Cinema, Part 1 online. I’ve looked, and if it’s out there it’s beyond the reach of my internet search skills. It seems to be only available to watch if you catch it at a film festival or visit the NFSA in person. There are, however, plenty of descriptions of it available. The film features a “clinical psychologist and media critic” (played by Arthur Dignam) sitting in an armchair and giving a talk about cinema’s preoccupation with violence. While he speaks, a man bursts into the room and shoots the psychologist in the face. The psychologist responds by holding up and bandaging the ruined remains of his face, then continuing his talk while committing acts of extreme violence himself, before finally being run over by a car and set on fire. The monologue in Violence in the Cinema, Part 1 is taken from a keynote speech given by Australian “public intellectual” Phillip Adams at a psychology conference. Adams saw Miller’s film, as well as Mad Max when it came out, and wrote about them in that condescending way common to many public intellectuals. I haven’t seen Violence in the Cinema, Part 1, I don’t know what impact it has on the viewer, so I will only share what Miller himself says about it: “Violence in the Cinema, Part 1 (1971) was simply trying to make the point that whatever we think—in terms of intellectually, the way we basically cerebrate something—is quite different than the way we experience it viscerally.” Miller didn’t immediately quit working as a doctor after making Violence in the Cinema, Part 1. He went back to his residency, which included working in the emergency room, where he got to see in agonizing detail what violence and road accidents did to human bodies. Meanwhile, he and Kennedy were developing the idea that would one day become Mad Max. The story is a mixture of all the things that were stewing in English-language cinema in the ’70s: extreme physical and sexual violence, the failure of trusted systems and exposure of societal rot, and of course a whole lot of driving around in cars or on motorbikes. The American New Wave had started a decade earlier with films like Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Easy Rider (1969), and in the ’70s the world would be introduced to movies like Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs (1971), Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1972), Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974), and Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976). Australian filmmakers were playing along as well; Mad Max owes a lot, including a chunk of the cast, to Sandy Harbutt’s biker film Stone (1974). The decision to set Mad Max in the near future seems to have come fairly early in the development, but it was largely one of practicality. According to Miller, because the story was “very, very intense in its incidents,” he thought it might be more palatable to shift the setting into the speculative. He doesn’t reference A Clockwork Orange specifically—although he does mention that film elsewhere, so he was aware of it—but the approach seems similar, wherein the story is set in a near future to allow for a very particular vision to develop without running into the audience’s kneejerk skepticism or defensiveness. But, as Miller explains, they didn’t have the budget to set the film very far in the future. That’s how it ends up with the iconic opening words on the screen: “A few years from now…” In fact, they didn’t have the budget for much of anything. Kennedy, as the film’s producer, hustled to scrape together about $350,000, which seems like a healthy amount until you realize how many cars they had to smash up. It wasn’t until after Mad Max’s surprise success that Miller was able to afford a bigger production, which was Mad Max 2, or The Road Warrior (1981). And the enduring success of that movie and the third, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1983), as well as his production company’s eventual financial boost from a friendly sheep-herding pig and some dancing penguins, meant that decades later Miller could finally revisit the story with an ample budget, and that’s how we got Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), which is one of the greatest movies ever made. (Fun fact: Mad Max would be so successful upon release that it would hold the world record for the most profitable film relative to its budget until 1999, when The Blair Witch Project supplanted it.) But that was all in the future. Back in the mid-’70s, Miller and Kennedy had to figure out how to create a near-future dystopian microcosm on the backroads outside of Melbourne. Neither Miller nor Kennedy knew much about screenwriting, and they didn’t know any screenwriters either, so they hired finance journalist James McCausland to co-write the script. A finance journalist might seem a strange choice for a screenwriter—and Mad Max is McCausland’s only film—but some very obvious economic reality was woven into the fiber of Mad Max from the start. In a 2006 article, McCausland explained how the 1973 oil crisis influenced the Mad Max vision of the future, with particular focus on the extremely violent lengths people will go to keep the oil-fueled machinery of the modern world running, even when the social structures around that machinery are failing. (There’s nothing I can say to comment on how that particular theme remains just as relevant today as it was in the ’70s. I’m tired. Call your members of Congress.) That $350,000 budget did not stretch toward hiring a known actor, even though Miller had initially wanted an American lead to draw some attention to the film. The film’s casting agent suggested he check out recent graduates of Australia’s National Institute of Dramatic Arts (NIDA). That’s where he met a fresh-out-of-acting-school Mel Gibson, who at the time had exactly one film credit to his name. (The story that Gibson showed up to the audition with a beat-up face is another Mad Max urban legend. There are a lot of them.) Steve Bisley was one of Gibson’s classmates, so that how Miller found Max and Goose, the film’s lead Main Force Patrol officers. The budget also had no room for getting the primary members of Toecutter’s gang and their motorcycles from Sydney to Melbourne, so Hugh Keays-Byrne (who plays Toecutter), Tim Burns (who plays Johnny the Boy), and several others rode their bikes down to get some real-world practice at being a bikie gang. In costume. I’m no film accountant, but I suppose most of the rest of the budget was used for smashing up cars on roads around Melbourne. Which is what they did. They didn’t have filming permits—Miller claims none were required at the time—so they would just go out and sort of block off the road and crash whatever needed to be crashed, then sweep it all up afterward. Eventually the local police noticed what was going on and offered to help, probably because they realized it would be safer for everybody if somebody was at least trying to direct traffic around the filming. Mad Max is mostly thought of as a car movie, thanks to the souped-up Ford Falcon XB that stars as Max’s Pursuit Special, but most of the stunt work involved the motorcycles. It helped that both Miller and cinematographer David Eggby were motorcyclists themselves—although that also led to things like Eggby thinking it was a good idea to get some shots while physically strapped, without a helmet, to the back of a bike ridden by one of the Vigilante club members racing along at over 100 mph. Filmmakers mostly aren’t supposed to do things like that anymore. There are now much more rigid guidelines regarding on-set safety during stunts, although how effective they are and the extent to which the industry adheres to them is a matter of much debate. It’s a grim but important sidenote in cinema history that some of those changes came about because of another film that Miller was involved with, which was Steven Spielberg and John Landis’ Twilight Zone: The Movie. Miller directed a remake of the episode “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”—you know, the one where William Shatner sees gremlins on the wings of a plane—and his portion of the production seems to have gone off without a hitch. But another portion of the production, the part Landis himself directed, infamously resulted in a horrific and completely preventable helicopter crash that killed lead actor Vic Morrow and child actors Myca Dinh Le and Renee Shin-Yi Chen. Reading about that incident will make your blood boil, because none of it ever should have happened and nobody was ever held accountable. Back on those Australian roads, there were no accidents during the filming of Mad Max, and the story that a stuntman died is an urban legend. After filming was complete, Miller and Kennedy spent an entire year editing the film; Miller admits that a lot of it had to do with his inexperience as a filmmaker, as well as the fact that he was figuring out what kind of movie he wanted it to be as he edited. He wasn’t happy with the end result, but it ended up being successful in Australia and amazingly successful worldwide, especially in Japan and Europe. It wasn’t a huge hit in the U.S., although it did well enough; it didn’t help that American International Pictures, the U.S. distributors, dubbed the entire film to replace the Australian accents and slang with American voices. (You might remember AIP from the previous column about Mario Bava’s Planet of the Vampires [1965].) Confession: I did not actually know that before doing research for this article, and I definitely watched Mad Max long before the dubbing was rectified with the 2000 DVD release. I guess I never noticed that it was dubbed. In my defense, it’s not a dialogue kind of film. I’m pretty sure a hefty majority of the spoken words in Mad Max are in Nightrider’s (Vincent Gil) ravings at the start of the film. That is, in fact, one of its defining characteristics. If you’re familiar with Miller or the Mad Max films, you might already know that Miller has described the films as silent movies with sound, wherein the action itself is the primary tool of storytelling. It was during the editing process that he decided he wanted Mad Max to capture the feel of the old silent “kinetic action montage movies,” such as the films of Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd. There isn’t much plot either, but it doesn’t need much of one. A highway patrol officer for a failing and ineffectual police force runs afoul of a motorcycle gang, which leads to the deaths of first his partner, then his wife (played by Joanne Samuel) and child, after which he goes on a rampage to kill those responsible. It briefly touches on the things we might expect from such a story: the desire for heroes amidst hopelessness, the nonexistent distinction between state violence and criminal violence, the enduring fantasy of a man finally having a reason to go apeshit on the world. The film is starting from a place where all of those conversations have already been had, all those arguments have already been lost. In a scene with fellow MFP officer “Fifi” (Roger Ward), Max acknowledges the cops have always known they aren’t any different from the gangs. They are just pretending for as long as they can. Pretending that their badges mean something, pretending that their crumbling Hall of Justice has any impact, pretending that they are upholding something for a society that has long since given up. The film is straightforward in its barrage of brutality, but it’s also amazingly weird. The juxtaposition between Max and Jessie’s warm domesticity and whatever the fuck Toecutter’s gang has going on at any given moment is disorienting, and the wild swings between mundane moments and explosive action keep us off-kilter. It gives the entire film a sense of existing in a sort of cinematic uncanny valley, where just enough looks familiar to draw us into this world, but everything is a bit twisted once we get there. Miller describes this as a “fable-type quality,” and I think that’s as good a description for it as any. He was aiming for something just slightly offset from reality, but he ended up with something a lot more interesting—and, luckily for himself and for us, he embraced that when he went to work on Mad Max 2. Mad Max is an origin story that wasn’t meant to be an origin story, but it works as one. It was made in exactly the right time and place to take advantage of the violence of ’70s English-language cinema as well as the weirdness that was to come in the ’80s. Post-apocalyptic stories often carry a tinge of fantasy wish-fulfillment to them; a great deal of how we imagine societal cataclysm is influenced by the clean slate made possible by tearing everything down and beginning anew. Mad Max doesn’t allow that, because it isn’t a post-apocalyptic story. It’s a story set in the middle of a slow, ongoing apocalypse that feels like ordinary life for most of its characters. Max and Jessie try to live as though nothing is wrong. Raise a child, go on vacation, adopt a dog. It ends in tragedy, because the protective shell around ordinary life is already cracked. On the other hand, when Toecutter’s gang shriek and holler about living freely, it’s not even clear what they think they need to be free from. Everybody in this world is spinning without any real direction, grasping for strings in a way that defies our usual concept of society and civilization as something that marches forward or backward in straight lines. Mad Max offers up a brutally familiar world without any escape from a very tired, careworn flavor of nihilism, while at the same time capturing the mythic feel of a story that might as well begin, “Once upon a time, there was a man.” We’re watching a personal tragedy play out in this film, with all the cacophonous noise and relentless action and visceral violence, all the crunching and smashing and shrieking with rage, but it already has the feel of something that can be reshaped into a myth. That’s what gives this movie and its sequels such enduring power. What do you think of Mad Max and its legacy? Has your opinion on it changed over the years? Do you still think “The Toecutter” is the best gang-leader nickname ever? We are absolutely going to watch The Road Warrior at some point. I know the second movie is a brilliant film; I know it provides so much more to talk about. You don’t need to convince me! And probably Beyond Thunderdome too, because I am always happy to talk about Tina Turner. Maybe I’ll figure out a month for watching great sequels to great films. Sci fi cinema has a few true gems in that category. Next week: We get a psychic glimpse of a very different kind of near future in Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report. Find streaming sources.[end-mark] The post <i>Mad Max</i>: An Australian Road Fable for an Ultraviolent World appeared first on Reactor.

News Magic: the Gathering Jim Henson Company Unleashes a Wild Music Video for Magic: The Gathering‘s Next Expansion Enjoy this wonderfully unhinged music video By Vanessa Armstrong | Published on January 6, 2026 Screenshot: Magic: The Gathering Comment 0 Share New Share Screenshot: Magic: The Gathering Wizards of the Coast’s Magic: The Gathering has come out with a new expansion called Lorwyn Eclipsed: Return to the Land of Light and Shadow. To celebrate the news (and encourage people to buy it), Wizards partnered with Jim Henson Company to create a bombastic and inspiring music video, which includes characters created by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop. The clip is a fun watch, even if you’ve never played Magic: The Gathering. It features one creature from sunny Lorwyn named Squen who’s a little bit dark, and a vibrant monster named Cragg from always-dark Shadowmoor. Their lands are divided by a purple sparkly fog, and they each look longingly at each other’s half of a single plane of existence. Cragg wants to see Lorwyn and sniff all the flowers to death, while Squen wants to find Shadowmoor’s darkest depths, where anarchy will set him free. (Fun!) There are more delightful lines in the video that I won’t spoil here, but the song also hints that the divide between their two worlds may come undone. Will the two become whole (perhaps literally) when it does so? Perhaps, if they play their cards right. Lorwyn Eclipsed is now available for preorder and is set to come out on January 23, 2026. Check out the impeccable music video/trailer below. [end-mark] The post Jim Henson Company Unleashes a Wild Music Video for <i>Magic: The Gathering</i>‘s Next Expansion appeared first on Reactor.

News The Batman: Part II Sebastian Stan in Talks to Join The Batman Part II Cast in Unknown Role The long-awaited sequel is set to start filming this spring By Vanessa Armstrong | Published on January 6, 2026 Photo Credit: Chuck Zlotnick/Marvel Studios Comment 0 Share New Share Photo Credit: Chuck Zlotnick/Marvel Studios Sebastian Stan, of course, is no stranger to comic book movies; he’s starred in several Marvel Cinematic Universe films as Bucky Barnes/The Winter Soldier/a halfhearted member of Congress (pictured as the latter, above). It looks like he’s now considering joining another comic book franchise: According to Deadline, Stan is in talks to play a part in Matt Reeves’ upcoming feature, The Batman Part II, the Robert Pattinson-starring sequel to Reeves’ 2022 film, The Batman. What role Stan will be taking on is unknown. He could be Batman’s pal, he could be a villain, he could, for all we know, just be some dude on the street who gets mad when Batman double parks in front of his car (probably not the last one). Stan also isn’t the first MCU star to join the film. Back in December, reports came out that Scarlett Johansson was also joining the film in some capacity, though the details on her character are also completely under wraps. My guess for her role, with nothing to back me up, is that she’s playing Poison Ivy. Because why not? Here’s what we do know about The Batman Part II. Pattinson is back as an emo Bruce Wayne, along with Colin Farrell as Oz Cobb/The Penguin, Jeffrey Wright as Commissioner James Gordon, Andy Serkis as Alfred Pennyworth, and Barry Keoghan as the Joker. The script comes from Reeves and Mattson Tomlin and is set to start production this spring, with a release date of October 1, 2027. [end-mark] The post Sebastian Stan in Talks to Join <i>The Batman Part II</i> Cast in Unknown Role appeared first on Reactor.

Movies & TV Watchlist Here Are All the Genre Movies Premiering in January! This month’s releases feature a variety of zombies, an alien time loop, and a super-powered dog… By Petrana Radulovic | Published on January 6, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share There is a lot of entertainment out there these days, and a lot of fantasy, sci-fi, and horror titles to parse through.  So we’re rounding up the genre movies coming out each month.  January is apparently a great month for bloody horror and post-apocalyptic sci-fi. The sequel to 28 Years Later hits theaters, along with movies about vampire cops, murderous chimpanzees, and haunted nursing homes. There are also two horror video game adaptations: Return to Silent Hill and Iron Lung.  The Home — in theaters January 1 Pete Davidson stars in this psychological horror film, playing Max, a troubled graffiti artist who works at a retirement home as part of court-ordered community service. Max is cautioned not to go to the fourth floor of the home. But he soon starts to notice disturbing things happening to the residents and begins to investigate.  We Bury the Dead — in theaters January 2 A grieving woman searches for her husband in a military disaster zone. She joins a body retrieval unit, still hoping to find him alive. But things begin to take a terrifying turn when some of the corpses she’s retrieved start to stir. They become more and more violent as the mission goes on.  Greenland 2: Migration— in theaters January 9 Five years ago (in 2020’s Greenland) a comet destroyed most of Earth. Now the survivors, including the Garrity family, must leave the safety of their shelter in Greenland and trek across the wastelands of what was once Europe in order to find a new home.  Primate — in theaters January 9 After being bitten by a rabid animal, a pet chimpanzee named Ben goes on a violent rampage, turning a tropical vacation into a bloody fight for survival. Ben is smarter than the average chimp and can use his tablet to communicate, which leads to some chilling moments in the trailer with the repeating robotic voice. Starbright — in theaters January 9   During an eclipse, a star crashes to earth and a young woman becomes its guardian. The trailer shows the star as a small fairylike creature and the footage starts off like a typical fantasy, with the young woman twirling around in a fancy dress and dancing with a handsome stranger. But things take an action-packed turn with various shoot-outs and explosions. Apparently guarding a star isn’t for the fainthearted.  28 Years Later: The Bone Temple — in theaters January 16 Like the rest of the movies in the post-apocalyptic horror 28 Days series, The Bone Temple takes place in a world where a virus induces homicidal rage and eventually causes the collapse of society. Characters from the previous installments return—including Cillian Murphy’s Jim from the 2002 original movie. Killer Whale — on VOD January 16 While on a tropical vacation, two young women take a getaway to a secluded lagoon. But their blissful retreat takes a bloody turn when a vengeful orca finds them and decides that it wants revenge for years in captivity. Orcas aren’t usually violent towards humans in the wild, but this one has an agenda.  All You Need Is Kill — in select theaters January 16 In this surreal animated sci-fi action flick, adapted from a Japanese light novel of the same name, a young woman is caught in a time loop. Every morning she wakes up and battles monstrous alien creatures, dying in the process. And then she wakes up again and again. She’s not sure how to escape till she crosses paths with a young man also trapped in the same time loop. If this sounds familiar, All You Need Is Kill was previously adapted in the 2014 live action movie Edge of Tomorrow. The Confession — in theaters January 16 A musician returns to her childhood home only to find a taped murder confession from her late father. Dead animals start showing up around her home and her son starts acting erratically. What links them might be a strange town folktale about a man who lured children like the Pied Piper.  Charlie the Wonderdog — in theaters January 16 Owen Wilson voices a dog who gets abducted by aliens and then gains superpowers. His human family is understandably surprised—but also concerned about his safety. But Wonderdog just wants to save the day. And when an evil cat starts plotting for world domination, he’ll need to step up his hero game.  Night Patrol — in theaters January 16 An LAPD officer learns that one squad of officers is hiding a dark supernatural secret: they’re vampires who prey on unsuspecting victims in poor neighborhoods. He must team up with some of the street gangs from his childhood neighborhood in order to fight the vampire cops.  Cosmic Princess Kaguya! — on Netflix January 22 Cosmic Princess Kaguya! is a modern musical reimagining of The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter. In this version, the mysterious (and very hyperactive) princess crashlands from the moon into a regular high school student’s apartment. The two bond over music in a virtual world, where they’re able to pursue their dreams away from the stress of day-to-day life. Mercy  — in theaters January 23 In the near future (the scary year of 2029), a detective must prove to an AI judge that he did not murder his wife. Chris Pratt stars as the wrongfully convicted detective, with Rebecca Ferguson as the advanced artificial intelligence overseeing the trial.  Return to Silent Hill  — in theaters January 23 Return to Silent Hill specifically adapts the second Silent Hill game. It will be the third movie based on the popular horror video game franchise. In this one, a widower named James receives a letter from his deceased wife which urges him to go to the mysterious town of Silent Hill. While there, he learns the town has been clouded in a strange supernatural fog, with monsters lurking within.  Mother of Flies — on Shudder January 23 After being diagnosed with a terminal illness, a young woman seeks out a strange witch in the woods of the Catskills, who claims she can trick death. But the price of her cure is high—will it be worth the supernatural costs? Mother of Flies comes from the Adams family, a family of indie horror directors who also star as the main characters in the movie. Iron Lung — in select theaters January 30 The feature film debut of popular YouTuber Markiplier (real name Mark Fischbach), Iron Lung is based on a sci-fi horror game of the same name. In a distant post-apocalyptic future, a convict (played by Markiplier) is sent to explore an ocean of blood on a distant moon in a tiny, poorly constructed submarine.[end-mark] The post Here Are All the Genre Movies Premiering in January! appeared first on Reactor.