Seth Harris

Book Update – March/April 2024

A Touch of Jen by Beth Morgan

What a strange book. Remy and Alicia are an odd couple. One of their favorite pastimes is to scroll through Jen’s social media profiles and make fun of her. Jen’s a former co-worker of Remy’s from when he was a waiter. Alicia clearly has insecurities because Remy has the hots for Jen but pretends he thinks she’s a pretentious basic bitch. Things have evolved into a weird sexual roleplay where Alicia will pretend to be Jen while Remy pretends he doesn’t like it. That’s not where the strangeness ends. Alicia insists strange noises are coming from the kitchen in their apartment at night. Remy says it’s probably just their roommate.

Patron Pick – Late Night With the Devil

This special reward is available to Patreon patrons who pledge at the $10 or $20 monthly levels. Each month, those patrons will pick a film for me to review. If they choose, they also get to include some of their thoughts about the movie. This Pick comes from Matt Harris.

Late Night With the Devil (2024)
Written and directed by Colin Cairnes and Cameron Cairnes

Horror changes with the times. One of those changes is centered around technology. Before television or film, horror was spread to the masses through radio broadcasts. Before the radio, horror was printed; even before that, it was part of the oral tradition. As technology changed, it didn’t just alter the medium through which people experienced horror but expanded what kind of horror could exist. Ghosts and demons were now able to use modern technology as a means to invade people’s lives. Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds worked as a horror artifact – a horror story told as if it was a piece of media. The found footage genre is a continuation of this, an ask of the audience to suspend their disbelief and fully invest in the reality of the horror. But it doesn’t often work, at least for me.

Movie Review – Collateral

Collateral (2004)
Written by Stuart Beattie
Directed by Michael Mann

We end our brief survey of neo-noir films with this crime flick from Michael Mann. I wouldn’t say I adore all of Mann’s work, but I would never question how gorgeous his movies look. He invented an aesthetic we mainly associate with the 1980s yet kept with it for the next few decades. Whether the scripts work or not, Mann will deliver a moody, atmospheric experience, and that is half of what most noir stories are. You need to feel the seediness and grime for the story to work its magic. Mann accomplishes something even more impressive here, he got Tom Cruise to play the villain.

Solo Tabletop RPG Actual Play – Heinrich’s Call of Cthulhu Guide to Carcosa Part Five

Heinrich’s Call of Cthulhu Guide to Character Creation
Written & Designed by Heinrich D. Moore
You can purchase it here

Heinrich’s Call of Cthulhu Guide to Carcosa
Written & Designed by Heinrich D. Moore
You can purchase it here

Read the first part of Vivian’s journey through Carcosa here

[Explore – The Hospital]

Like an answer to a prayer, Vivian saw the glowing green cross and the words “Hospital” in the distance. She kept to the shadows on the street, though she never saw anyone. Once inside, everything appeared normal initially, but Vivian began having flashing images of barbed wire and stainless steel metal cells rush through her mind. This resembled the real hospitals she had been in, but another reality emerged from the dream world, overtaking this one.

PopCult Podcast – The Sweet East/The American Society of Magical Negroes

This was a week of films that were not great. One is a Alice in Wonderland picaresque following a hipster down the East Coast. The second is a wildly misguided attempt at racial satire that is woefully hollow.

TV Review – Neon Genesis Evangelion Episodes 13 thru 18

Neon Genesis Evangelion – Episodes 13 thru 18
Written by Hideaki Anno, Mitsuo Iso, Akio Satsukawa, Hiroshi Yamaguchi, Shinji Higuchi
Directed by Tensai Okamura, Masahiko Ōtsuka, Ken Andō, Naoyasu Habu, Kazuya Tsurumaki, Minoru Ōhara

Neon Genesis Evangelion is finally unfolding its mystery with this batch of episodes. Of everything I have watched so far, these were the ones that grabbed me the most. I won’t say I understand every detail of what is going on, but the ideas presented here are both about how the Angels are evolving and what NERV’s true end goal is with the development of Evas. Some very anime-trope-y things are still going on, but they feel toned down in this section of the series. I think that was the right idea because now we’re starting to see who the real villain of this story is, and I don’t think it’s the Angels.

Solo Tabletop RPG Actual Play – Heinrich’s Call of Cthulhu Guide to Carcosa Part Four

Heinrich’s Call of Cthulhu Guide to Character Creation
Written & Designed by Heinrich D. Moore
You can purchase it here

Heinrich’s Call of Cthulhu Guide to Carcosa
Written & Designed by Heinrich D. Moore
You can purchase it here

Read our introduction to Vivian Endicott here.

Vivian will be wearing the Mask of the Guilty. I based this on the fact that she’s literally haunted by her mother, Claire, who died in alone, in poverty of an overdose.

Vivian followed the map she’d found stuffed into the stacks of Ballingrud’s Occult Books. It happened while she was thumbing through a facsimile reprint of Codex Maleficus, the slip of paper fell out.

Comic Book Review – Palestine

Palestine (Fantagraphics)
Written and illustrated by Joe Sacco

Journalist/cartoonist Joe Sacco visited the Palestinian territory during the First Intifada (1987-1993). You may have seen the word, Intifada lately, and, depending on how you had explained it to you, you very possibly got the wrong definition. The Intifada was a period of sustained protest and civil disobedience by Palestinians against the Israeli occupation. 1987 was the twentieth anniversary of the Arab-Israeli War, which saw the occupation seizing even more territory, pushing the indigenous Palestinians into smaller & smaller walled-off spaces. Sacco spent a lot of time visiting the West Bank and Gaza Strip, having conversations with Palestinians of all ages who had all experienced brutality at the hands of the Western occupying force. He recreates these moments in this incredibly moving graphic novel.

TV Review – Northern Exposure Season One

Northern Exposure Season One (CBS)
Written by Joshua Brand, John Falsey, Stuart Stevens, Karen Hall, Jerry Stahl, Sean Clark, David Assael, Steve Wasserman, Jessica Klein, and Charles Rosin
Directed by Joshua Brand, Peter O’Fallon, Steve Cragg, Dan Lerner, David Carson, Sandy Smolan, Max Tash

I was a weird kid, if you haven’t picked up on it. I read TV Guide every week when I had access to it. It was through reading that magazine that I came to learn about the show Northern Exposure and the comparisons to Twin Peaks. I watched that program as a kid, and on rare occasions, I caught an episode of Northern Exposure. What I liked about Twin Peaks was the horror of it, and this show about a small town in Alaska didn’t have any of it. Many decades later, I still hear very positive things about Northern Exposure and decided I should sit down and watch it with more mature eyes.

Movie Review – Mulholland Drive

Mulholland Drive (2001)
Written and directed by David Lynch

I’ve mentioned on the blog before how I discovered David Lynch as an eight-year-old who was somehow allowed to watch Twin Peaks. For a long time, I knew him as “the guy who made Twin Peaks.” Even in college, as I began to explore his greater body of work, I was like most people; I just didn’t understand the abstractness of it all. What shifted my understanding was reading Lynch on Lynch, a book of interviews with the director focusing on his work in chronological order up to Mulholland Drive. Through this text, I came to understand the source of Lynch’s creativity – from deep inside his subconscious and expressed through images without any implied context – and how intuitive his work is. This happened around the same time I was taking Literary Theory & Criticism, which was probably the most influential academic experience I’ve ever had.