Tabla de contenidos para September 2018 en SFX

RICHARD EDWARDS EDITOR RAVES → Incredibles 2 might just be better than the original. I look forward to a third instalment in, er, 2032. → Lando’s back in Episode IX! The Clone Wars is returning! Good times in a galaxy far, far away… → Frances McDormand as God? I’m struggling to think of a TV show with a better cast than Good Omens. IAN BERRIMAN REVIEWS EDITOR RAVES → Delighted that Altered Carbon has got a second season – the first was sensational. → ’50s serial Quatermass And The Pit is now on iPlayer! If you haven’t seen it, you must. RANTS → The irrational howling about a new Buffy series had me eye-rolling. It could be great! Worst-case scenario: bad Buffy you don’t need to watch. JONATHAN COATES ART…

America’s motorways, says Tim Powers, can be spooky places. “On the freeways, ordinary time and space are warped, stretched or condensed, and you only re-enter the real world when you exit,” he says. Welcome to the world imagined by Powers in his new novel, Alternate Routes. It’s a tale that takes in not just the idea of freeways as mystical and eldritch places that “facilitate the appearance of ghosts”, but the legend of the Minotaur and the notion that Theseus may have needed “a string abacus” to find his way out of the Labyrinth. “I like to find mythological or folklorical roots for the supernatural elements in my books,” says Powers, “to convey to the reader, ‘See? I’m not making this stuff up. It’s been going on for centuries –…

Celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, Planet Of The Apes would have been a very different film if it had been made from Rod Serling’s original screenplay. Now Boom! Studios has turned The Twilight Zone creator’s first draft – which originally envisaged Ape City as a thriving metropolis populated by simian academics rather than the film’s more primitive society – into a graphic novel, written by Dana Gould and drawn by Chad Lewis. “It was down to budgetary concerns but it changed the tone of the movie drastically, keeping it more of a science fiction adventure and less of a political thriller,” Gould tells Red Alert. “It’s very cloak and dagger, with a lot of political skulduggery.” Significantly, the main character in this version is an astronaut called Thomas, who…

FILM & COMIC CON EXETER 15-16 September Guests include Roy Scammell (that’s Mr Original Xenomorph to you), while there’ll be autograph sessions, photo shoots and memorabilia galore. showmastersevents.com/exeter COMIC-CON SCOTLAND 22-23 September Peruse the comic village, watch talks, mess about in the kid zone or prance around in your fancy new cosplay. mcmcomiccon.com/scotland SCALA CINEMA BOOK LAUNCH 26 September To celebrate the launch of the filmtastic new tome, there will be music, dancing, special guests and “film highlights”. bit.ly/SFXscala FRACTURED VISIONS 29-30 September Cardiff’s Tramshed Cinema hosts the inaugural Fractured Visions festival, with experts offering feedback and prizes on films submitted by emerging talent. Got a film? Submit it now! http://bit.ly/SFXvisions DESTINATION STAR TREK 19-21 October It’s been 25 years since Deep Space Nine premiered. What better way to commemorate…

Cullen Bunn knew he was onto a good thing when he came up with the name Asgardians Of The Galaxy in 2015. Now that idea is set to become a reality in September as he and artist Matteo Lolli join forces to chronicle the intergalactic adventures of a new band of Norse-related heroes. “I came up with a general mission statement, team line-up and initial story arc,” he recalls. “It was something that Marvel wanted to do, but we had to wait until the right moment to strike. That moment presented itself when the recent Infinity Wars crossover came together.” Led by Angela, the Asgardians consist of Skurge the Executioner, Thunderstrike, Throg the Destroyer and Annabelle Riggs’s Valkyrie, although one of the most obvious candidates, alien Thor Beta Ray Bill,…

→ Disney removes James Gunn from Guardians Of The Galaxy after bad-taste Twitter jokes resurface. → Anne Charnock’s Dreams Before The Start Of Time wins this year’s Arthur C Clarke Award for best SF novel. → Robin Hobb’s Assassin’s Fate wins Best Novel at the David Gemmell Awards for Fantasy. → Former SFX contributor Rob Williams scripting pilot episode of Dredd TV show. → Star Trek 4’s JD Payne and Patrick McKay to run Amazon’s Lord Of The Rings show. → All but one Game Of Thrones prequel (the one by George RR Martin and Jane Goldman) axed. → Grant Morrison to write Green Lantern and Willow Wilson Wonder Woman. → Black Panther’s Shuri to get her own comic series. → The Walking Dead’s Greg Nicotero working on TV version…

#NEW STAR TREK TV SHOWS → Brian Stabler, GamesRadar+ I wouldn’t mind seeing more Picard, but only if it’s a series set in the Mirror Universe. Who wouldn’t want to see Picard rocking a goatee? → Gavin Alex Harris, Facebook A Picard series, where every episode involves Q dropping Picard into a new unpredictable and embarrassing scenario. → Wendy Brydge, Twitter I personally think Picard was the greatest captain of the entire Star Trek franchise, and wild Tribbles couldn’t keep me away from a new series featuring Jean-Luc – just as long as it’s Sir Patrick Stewart and not a recasting! → Dave1884, Twitter How about a Data and Tasha Yar show where Data shows Tasha how “fully functional” he is? SFX There are websites where you can watch this…

Japanese author Dempow Torishima’s biopunk novella collection Sisyphean offers a Kafkaesque and titillating vision of genetic engineering and post-humanism. Translated into English by Daniel Huddleston, this work stands out for big ideas, amazingly immersive world-building, and grotesque body horror. It may or may not be destined to be a classic, but it has the elements of a cult classic. Sisyphean imagines a future far beyond our raw beginnings, resulting in extreme diversity in humanity as well as customised life forms harvested for labour, food, furniture, tools, housing and even space colonisation. In this universe, life is both technology and economy, and humanity is literally what you make of it. Torishima’s imagination gives us controlled evolution without end, producing a future humanity we’d find repulsively alien today, though one we might…

WHAT WAS YOUR EXPERIENCE LIKE ON PREDATOR? This story is really complicated – because some of it was good and some of it was really, really bad. I worked on Predator for quite a long time – and I was working on the suit for Van Damme before Stan Winston and Arnold were involved. Van Damme was the original Predator but as everyone knows he got let go and it might have been because of my suit and the fact it gave him very limited mobility [laughs]. I have a new book called Rubberhead Volume II and I have a whole chapter on this because it obviously did not end how I wanted… YOU MEAN, NOT GETTING A CREDIT ON IT? I thought I did get a credit on it!…

HAVING DRAWN 1989’S inaugural miniseries, Chris Warner knows just what it is that makes Predators so scary and formidable. Now Dark Horse’s senior editor is penning a sequel to 2017’s five-parter Hunters for artists Agustin Padilla and Neeraj Menon. “The Predator is just flat out cool as all hell!” he laughs. “It’s one of the greatest monster designs ever. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned to appreciate Predator as metaphor. In a real sense, we are the Predators as we hunt for sport without giving it a lot of thought to what our target species think about it or what the repercussions are. Let’s not forget that humans almost wiped out the American bison in less than a century. To be honest, I kind of root for the Predators!” Mostly…

What’s the secret to playing a nun? After researching what the life of a nun entails, Taissa Farmiga realised that her performance had to be incredibly controlled. “It’s a struggle for self-perception,” she explains, “Not just a daily struggle, or a minute-by-minute struggle – a second-by-second struggle. You always have to be consciously watching your thoughts, watching your body language, Some of the rules are as simple as: don’t saunter around, walk with purpose; hide your hands, unless it’s for work. All these little things you don’t think about on a daily basis – in my life, I’m not consciously thinking about my physicality. That struggle on the inside, the minute-by-minute ‘How’s my tone? How am I portraying myself to the outside world?’ is something I really wanted to incorporate.”…

Located slap-bang next to the Sydney Cricket Ground, Fox Studios Australia has become the biggest film-making facility in the southern hemisphere. Although its reputation is built on the Matrix movies and the Star Wars prequels, it was Dark City that first demonstrated what the place was capable of. With Alex Proyas committed to building as much of his demented world as possible, the sound stages didn’t so much resemble sets as living, breathing locales. As Kiefer Sutherland remembers, “I walked on the sets daily and gasped. It was like old Hollywood where, if you made a film about ancient Egypt, you had to build your own pyramids first.”…

NEW SHOW! SEASON 1 US BROADCAST The CW, 14 October UK BROADCAST TBC COUNTRY OF ORIGIN US IT’S BEEN 12 YEARS since the Halliwell sisters worked their contemporary magic on San Francisco in the Constance M Burge-created series Charmed. But as with most genre shows, unto a new generation a reboot shall come. And the time for a new Charmed comes this October. Helmed by showrunner Jennie Snyder Urman, the new series will feature three Latina sisters navigating our current reality who happen to discover their “Power of Three”. While the existing Charmed fandom has pushed back online about the need for a reboot, Snyder Urman tells SFX, “I was really mindful of not messing with anything from the original as it was eight years of stories. The way I…

What appealed to you more – the love story or the fantasy? • It was the emotional side. Once I did my first audition I got a taste for it, and a hunger for it. I loved the world, I loved what they were going for and just wanted to be a part of it. Is Harry there to ground the fantastical stuff • Absolutely. And that was the hardest part of the journey – how can you find the truth within the shape-shifting powers? This is a story about family and love. It’s two teenagers on this journey of coming of age, trying to find out who they are. We’re using shape-shifting as a device to get that point across. You’re in your 20s. What’s the trick to playing…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 100 minutes | 12A ▸ Director Jennifer Yuh Nelson ▸ Cast Amandla Stenberg, Harris Dickinson, Gwendoline Christie, Skylan Brooks There are obvious echoes of the X-Men – and many other Young Adult stories – in The Darkest Minds, Jennifer Yuh Nelson’s film about a disease that has wiped out 90% of America’s children, leaving the remaining 10% with a range of feared special abilities. (Not to mention its striking visual parallels with the Trump administration’s immigration policy, with the survivors being separated from their parents and caged in camps). The film’s strengths lie not in originality, but in a refreshingly sensitive execution. Adapted from Alexandra Bracken’s 2012 YA novel by Wayward Pines’ Chad Hodge (with input by the author), the story follows the tragic life of Ruby…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 15 | 97 minutes ▸ Director Gerard McMurray ▸ Cast Y’lan Noel, Lex Scott Davis, Joivan Wade, Mugga Let’s face it: a Purge prequel is a fundamentally bad idea. Compelling though the concept of the lawless 12-hour free-for-all is, it’s impossible to conceive how such an institution might plausibly come about. The First Purge tries its best, staging a small-scale experiment and paying locals to stay put, but never really convinces. For one thing, the New Founding Fathers Of America’s “hidden agenda” is anything but. “We’re required to cheer on criminals” Racial issues have always bubbled just beneath the surface of the Purge franchise, so it makes good sense that this fourth outing takes place around the housing projects of Staten Island, and featutes an overwhelmingly…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 2018 | 15 | Blu-ray (4K/standard)/DVD/download ▸ Director John Krasinski ▸ Cast Emily Blunt, John Krasinski, Millicent Simmonds, Noah Jupe, Cade Woodward Watching A Quiet Place in cinemas was a remarkable experience, for this is a film that demanded – and generally earned – attentive silence from the usual array of popcorn rustlers, coughers and amateur commentators. At home, it’s also best watched in rapt silence, so that you can fully appreciate the sound design. It’s masterful, with every breath of wind through the trees, creaking floorboard or thumping heartbeat assuming critical importance. That’s because this indie chiller has a beautifully simple high concept: blind monsters who hunt by sound. It’s an idea whose implications the screenplay (initially penned by Bryan Woods and Scott Beck, then…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 1980 | 15 | Blu-ray ▸ Director Peter Medak ▸ Cast George C Scott, Trish Van Devere, Melvyn Douglas, John Colicos BLU-RAY DEBUT “It’s not a horror movie,” insists director Peter Medak. Well, it is, but one which sits at the subtler end of the spectrum, along with the likes of The Haunting and The Innocents. Based on a (supposedly) true story, The Changeling sees recently bereaved composer John Russell (George C Scott) moving into a rambling mansion, where he’s disturbed by mysterious bangs and taps turning themselves on. Could his dead daughter be trying to communicate with him? Martin Scorsese is an evangelist for this classy, melancholy ghost story, which works its effects via gliding camerawork and suggestion rather than jump scares. A sequence which…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 2018 | 15 | Blu-ray/DVD It’s impossible to watch this British indie (also titled Twenty Twenty-Four) without thinking of Moon. Like Duncan Jones’s masterpiece, it follows the sole occupant of a remote base (this time underground) with only a computer for company. Unfortunately, the AI here, Arthur, doesn’t speak; this means that a vast amount of the film is made up of static shots of text on a computer monitor. Andrew Kinsler does his best as Roy, a man tasked with preparing for the apocalypse, but boy is it dull. + Extras None.…

▸ RELEASED 20 AUGUST (Download out now) 2018 | 12 | Blu-ray (4K/standard)/DVD/download ▸ Director Brad Peyton ▸ Cast Dwayne Johnson, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Naomie Harris For all those people who found last year’s Kong: Skull Island too intellectually demanding comes this savagely stupid giant-animals-on-the-loose actioner that’s an unwelcome throwback to the kind of dunderheaded summer blockbuster we assumed Marvel had all but crushed. Dwayne Johnson plays an unfeasibly muscled primatologist called Davis Okoye, who, after a DNA-altering drug tumbles to Earth from a malfunctioning space station, is forced to do battle with an albino gorilla, a flying wolf and a mutated crocodile. With a synopsis as dizzyingly loopy as that, you’d expect Rampage to be as arch as India Gate, but Brad Peyton’s film plays for cool and serious…

An unhappy nine-year-old living in the wilds of Texas with her junkie dad creates an elaborate fantasy world in Terry Gilliam’s 2005 feature TIDELAND (out now, Blu-ray). The new extras on this HD debut include a commentary by the director and his co-writer. We said: “Gilliam’s attempt to craft a demented gothic fairy tale about childhood innocence rapidly falls to pieces… a non-stop cavalcade of overplayed strangeness that’s painful to watch.” Dreamlike strangeness is the order of the day in 1967 Czechoslovakian New Wave film THE MIRACULOUS VIRGIN (20 August, Blu-ray/DVD), which comments on the Slovak surrealist movement of the ’40s as various male artists and poets become infatuated with a female student. The non-sequitur structure is baffling, but it’s beautifully photographed, with no shortage of striking imagery: a painter…

▸ RELEASED 23 AUGUST 448 pages | Hardback/ebook ▸ Author Drew Williams ▸ Publisher Simon & Schuster There’s a moment of spaceship-piloting derring-do in The Stars Now Unclaimed where you can practically hear John Williams’s asteroid field chase music from The Empire Strikes Back ringing in your ears. This is a glorious romp of a space opera to quieten people who grumble, “They don’t write them like that anymore.” It’s Star Wars meets Firefly meets Lensman meets The Stainless Steel Rat, and it doesn’t care who rumbles the fact. Set in a universe where an apparently freak radiation incident has robbed many – but not all – worlds of advanced technology, plunging them back into pre-industrial societies, it follows an unnamed agent scouring worlds for children with special abilities. But…

One bona fide classic and four subsequent movies of varying quality isn’t the greatest track record for one of cinema’s most memorable monsters, yet it has done little to diminish the Predator’s appeal. Everything from Stan Winston’s memorable design (those jaws!) to its brutal, trophy-driven approach to hunting made the creature such an instant icon that it’s a shame it has never had a top-rate follow-up to truly show what it can do. That may be about to change, with Shane Black – who appeared in the original – returning to put his own spin on cinema’s ultimate killer. We caught up with him at San Diego Comic-Con to find out how he’s making Predator scary again (p38). Speaking of San Diego, we were there to gather the hottest movie…

To call Steve Ditko one of comics’ greatest creators is an understatement. If all (all!) he had achieved in his career was co-creating Spider-Man, then he would have made an indelible mark on pop culture, but he left us so much more. Born in Pennsylvania, the young Ditko fell in love with comics and art at an early age, eventually going on to study under Joker co-creator Jerry Robinson. He began work at Atlas Comics in 1956. As the company evolved into Marvel, Ditko was already a consistent favourite with readers and when Stan Lee needed an artist to design a hero called Spider-Man in 1962, Ditko drew a thrillingly weird costume. While Spidey is his most famous work, Doctor Strange is arguably Ditko’s most fascinating. From his Bleecker Street…

In February, SFX joined forces with Foyles bookshop on London’s Charing Cross Road to bring together some of the best science fiction and fantasy authors in the UK for an afternoon of panels and signings. Our panels united Richard Morgan, Claire North, Vic James, Adam Roberts and Anna Smith Spark to talk about adaptations of novels, and Peter F Hamilton, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Gareth L Powell, Adam Christopher and Una McCormack to ponder whether space-set SF is better when it’s utopian or dystopian. We know you enjoyed it as much as we did, so we’re doing it again – and SFX Book Con 2 will be bigger and longer, with more authors and more panels. Taking place on Saturday 10 November – meaning it’s the ideal time to pick up some…

Tell us about your protagonists. → Liba is connected to her home, religion and family. She discovers she can turn into a bear like her father. Laya is flighty and unsure what she believes – she turns into a swan, like their mother. When strange men come to town, the girls need to save themselves. What folklore does the book draw on? → It’s a retelling of Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” poem. I drew upon Jewish/Hassidic and Russian/Ukrainian folklore about bear-men and swan maidens, and looked to the Jewish tale of the Shpoler Zaydie, who danced in a bear skin to save other Jews. What did you find out during your research? → I discovered the town of Dubossary on the border of Moldova and Ukraine, where my great-grandfather came…

The first time I saw anything of Harlan’s was the “Shatterday” episode of the 1980s Twilight Zone. I instantly made it my mission to track down everything else he wrote. Luckily, he wrote a lot, with a blistering ferocity and childlike optimism, sometimes in the same sentence. Later, I met him and we became friends, which was as wonderful and surreal as you’d imagine. He was warm and incredibly generous, full of enthusiasm for the world, with an incredibly tender side – and a not-so tender side, if you wronged him or his friends. He was a champion for writers getting paid, particularly with unscrupulous producers. He also loved giving stick to his friends, and getting it back – when he lost a dollar bet with me, I phoned him…

While Chris Wooding admits that Grimdark has been “a much-needed shot in the arm,” the Tales Of The Ketty Jay author believes the genre is getting too gloomy with all its various anti-heroes. His answer is The Ember Blade, which boasts “the feel of the epic fantasies of yesterday but not their black and white approach to morality”. Indeed there’s a touch of Tolkien about The Ember Blade, as the relationship between Cade and Aren brings to mind the bond between two certain Hobbits. “Cade starts out as the Sam to Aren’s Frodo,” reasons Wooding. “But once out in the wide world, Cade is no longer sure he wants to play second fiddle, so learning to negotiate their friendship is a challenge Aren has to overcome if they’re going to…

ARE YOU TALKIN’ TO ME? JOKER → Joaquin Phoenix has plenty to smile about. He’s now a lock for the role of the Joker in this standalone movie exploring the rictus-faced rise of Batman’s arch nemesis. “It feels unique,” Phoenix tells Collider. “It is its own world in some ways and maybe, mostly, it scares the fucking shit out of me…” Helmed by Todd Phillips, it’s set to be a hard-edged, modestly budgeted character piece, taking inspiration from such lowlife scuzz-fests as Taxi Driver. Intriguingly, Robert De Niro – Travis Bickle himself – is in negotiations to play a talk show host who proves pivotal to the Joker’s origin story. Also orbiting the project are Deadpool 2’s Zazie Beetz, frontrunner to play a single mother who catches the Joker’s eye,…

FIVE IN THE EYES → It’s that time again. Five joyful days in a dark cinema over the August bank holiday weekend bingeing on some of the horror films that’ll define the year ahead. As ever, FrightFest is going to be packed with surprises, but here are a handful of titles I’m most looking forward to shivering over. 1. Terrified – an Argentinian supernatural chiller about a haunting, and which I’m reliably informed is genuinely scary. 2. Anna And The Apocalypse – zombie musical comedy Christmas film, need I say more? 3. Summer Of ’84 – nostalgic Stranger Things-style romp from the guys who made Turbo Kid 4. Possum – weird-sounding two hander from Garth Marenghi creator Matt Holness about a puppeteer and his uncle. 5. The Dark – sweet-sounding…

HOW WOULD YOU SUM UP CASEY BRACKET? She loves her job, she loves her dogs and those are her passions in life. She’s the top of her field and she studies how Predators evolve and change – she’s brought in by the government to figure out why this Predator is so much more advanced than the Predators they’ve seen in the past. WOULD YOU SAY THE CHARACTERS ARE MORE NUANCED THAN IN THE ORIGINAL MOVIE? Instead of being these badass military guys, they are like a dirtier dirty dozen. They’re a bunch of misfits who are not the first people you’d call to save the world. We band together and become a unit, really for survival. YOU DID X-MEN: APOCALYPSE A COUPLE OF YEARS BACK. ARE YOU NOW SEEKING OUT…

FROM SWORD-WIELDING SKELETONS TO SNAKE-HAIRED Gorgons, the films of Ray Harryhausen traded in pure cinematic spectacle. The posters promoting his work raced to match the magic and imagination on the screen. Harryhausen: The Movie Posters raids the archive of private collectors and the Ray and Diana Harryhausen Foundation to present the best of the promo art that sold these movies to international audiences. Lurid, colourful and bursting with wow, they’re as much about old-school showmanship as the films themselves… Harryhausen: The Movie Posters is out 4 September from Titan Books.…

THE BLACK NUN + Armchair Thriller’s “Quiet As A Nun” (1978) concerns a convent where a sister once starved herself; her spectre appears when death is imminent. Episode three’s chilling climax sees the faceless Black Nun rising from a rocking chair… SISTER GERTRUDE + Anita Ekberg plays a nun working at a geriatric hospital in 1979 nasty The Killer Nun. After a brain tumour operation, she gets addicted to morphine, starts a lesbian affair with another sister, and stamps on an old lady’s false teeth! MOTHER VINCENZA + In 1981 nunsploitation flick The Other Hell, a priest investigating killings at a convent discovers (spoilers!) that the Mother Superior went mad after having a baby, which her predecessor tossed into boiling water! Crikey. SISTER MARY EUNICE + Set in an asylum…

Different writers have different ways of approaching their books, but for Jasper Fforde the idea of a “narrative dare” is key. What if you were, for example, to set a thriller “in a world in which humans have always hibernated”? Fforde’s answer to this question is contained within Early Riser, a thriller set in the dead of a winter through which most of the population is slumbering. “It’s like writing a book in a reverse order where the world happens, the detail of the world happens, the dramatic possibilities of the detail in that world happen, and the plot gets tacked on the back of that,” Fforde says. If that sounds like an arse-about-tit way of doing things, Fforde probably wouldn’t entirely disagree, but in the case of Early Riser,…

“Dark City is a great visionary achievement, a film so original and exciting, it stirred my imagination like Metropolis and 2001.” So wrote the esteemed critic Roger Ebert. Gene Siskel’s other half might have added that Alex Proyas’s picture borrows extensively from Fritz Lang’s urban nightmare while the look of the Strangers is clearly influenced by Peter Lorre’s pursuers in Lang’s serial killer masterpiece M. In fact, watch Dark City closely and you’ll find references to Citizen Kane, Nosferatu, The Narrow Margin, Vertigo and John Boorman’s Zardoz. It all ought to reek of pastiche but as Kiefer Sutherland remarks, “There are lots of references but Alex develops them in a highly original manner. It’s his movie, 100%.”…

RETURNING SHOW SEASON 7 US BROADCAST The CW, 15 October UK BROADCAST Sky One, TBC COUNTRY OF ORIGIN US IT MAY BE YEAR SEVEN FOR the Emerald Archer’s hit show, but that doesn’t mean life in Star City is remotely settled. Former writer turned showrunner Beth Schwartz is taking the reins of the series and deciding the fate of Oliver Queen (Stephen Amell), incarcerated in the season six finale. Schwartz says that as the new season picks up, “Star City is not doing well. Diaz (Kirk Acevedo) corrupted the whole city and without the Green Arrow, there’s a lot of crime. It’s not a good place to be without our hero.” And that also goes for Oliver’s wife, Felicity (Emily Bett Rickards). “They’re going to struggle,” she says of the…

ON RECREATING OXFORD’S BODLEIAN LIBRARY • “We were allowed to film in there on a Sunday, but we were only allowed 30 people in there at any one time, we weren’t allowed to have fires and wire rigs and throw people around and stuff obviously, and we’re not allowed to touch any of the books. So the more time we spent investigating it, and the more time we spent there, it soon became quite apparent that the actual filming process was going to be a bit of a ball ache and never going to happen. “It took eight weeks to construct the set. We fabricated all of it in the end. There’s something ridiculous like 600 metres of book spines. You ended up with 150 metres of real books and…

RETURNING SHOW SEASON 3 US BROADCAST Amazon Prime, 5 October UK BROADCAST Amazon Prime, 5 October COUNTRY OF ORIGIN US THERE HASN’T BEEN A new episode of The Man In The High Castle for more than a year and a half, but executive producer Isa Dick Hackett (daughter of Philip K Dick) says the show will be more relevant than ever when it returns for its third season this autumn. “It feels like we are living in one of his novels, more so every day,” she says of today’s global political landscape. “I think he would be apoplectic. High Castle is an anti-fascist tale and he had such deep fears and anxieties about fascism.” But the biggest news is that the spine of the upcoming season comes from a surprising…

RETURNING SHOW SEASON 2 US BROADCAST CBS All Access, 2019 UK BROADCAST Netflix, 2019 COUNTRY OF ORIGIN US IN A UNIVERSE WHERE INFORMATION ABOUT upcoming movies and TV is usually trapped behind an impregnable forcefield, Star Trek: Discovery really is going where no show has gone before – season two isn’t due until early 2019 and we already have a good idea of what it’s about. To boldly know, and all that… For starters, we’ll be edging closer to the established Trek canon that sometimes felt galaxies away in Discovery’s wonderfully adventurous first year. “We’ve never been tempted to say, ‘Screw it, we’re doing our own thing,’” explains co-creator and new showrunner Alex Kurtzman. “However, we are constantly challenging ourselves in the writer’s room with, ‘How can we push really…

STAR TREK In 1966 episode “Miri”, Kirk and the gang visit a planet where a man-made virus has killed off anyone who’s reached puberty. Silver lining: the surviving children only age a month for every century that passes. WILD CARDS In this shared world anthology series, the alien-made wild card virus kills 90%, turning another 9% into freakish monsters. A lucky 1%, however, become “Aces”, gifted with powers such as enhanced strength, shapeshifting and flight. RED DWARF In season five’s “Quarantine”, Rimmer contracts a deadly holovirus that drives holograms insane. On the plus side, it gives victims telepathy, telekinesis and the ability to shoot death rays from their eyes… Still, we’d rather catch the sexual magnetism virus. PLANET OF THE APES In the modern-day franchise, the Simian Flu wipes out…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! PG | 88 minutes ▸ Directors Aaron Horvath, Peter Rida Michail ▸ Cast Scott Menville, Hynden Walch, Khary Payton, Tara Strong It’s a sad state of affairs when the best DC movie of the past decade is a kids’ cartoon that cost a mere $10 million compared to Justice League’s $300 million. But hey, it just goes to prove, yet again, that a film’s only as good as its script – and the script for this charming animated adventure is mighty fine. Pacy, whip-smart and hysterical, it’s Deadpool level meta: the musical numbers subvert so many genres it’s almost dizzying, and there’s even a guest cameo from Stan Lee (remember, this is a DC film!). Plus you can’t fault a film that slyly casts Nicolas Cage…

What appealed to you about the premise of A Quiet Place? → The biggest reason is we had just had our second daughter weeks before I read this, so emotionally I was an open nerve, and in the terrifying stage of early parenting, just making sure that our child was safe and alive and that we were being good parents. I was really the perfect candidate to read this at that time! And I realised that instead of making it just a scary movie the concept of it could actually become this giant metaphor for parenting. This is your first horror movie. Did it feel like a left turn for you? → It’s weird. I would have thought of it as a left turn, but I didn’t really look at…

▸ RELEASED 27 AUGUST (Download out 20 August) 2018 | 15 | Blu-ray/DVD/download ▸ Directors Jeremy Dyson, Andy Nyman ▸ Cast Andy Nyman, Martin Freeman, Paul Whitehouse, Alex Lawther Something which forcefully comes across while you’re watching Andy Nyman and Jeremy Dyson’s adaptation of their long-running stage play is that these are filmmakers steeped in the British horror tradition. A nod to Whistle And I’ll Come To You here; a line pinched from 1944’s The Uninvited there… they clearly known their onions. They’re working in the tradition of the horror anthologies made by Amicus in the late ’60s and early ’70s – the likes of Dr Terror’s House Of Horrors and Tales From The Crypt. But whereas with those, the connective framework was often the weakest link (generally some spin on…

▸ RELEASED 27 AUGUST 2018 | 15 | DVD This French zombie film is virtually a one-man showcase for its star. Trapped alone in a Paris tenement, Sam (Anders Danielsen Lie) masterfully clears out the dead from the apartments, while veering from stoicism to shrieking mania. His loneliness is echoed in Denis Lavant’s silently expressive turn as a zombie companion. Beautifully shot, surprisingly funny, this is a thoughtful and gruesome feature debut from director Dominique Rocher. + Extras None.…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 1988 | 18 | Blu-ray & DVD (dual format) With its burnt-faced baddy and dream-like visions, this mental institution horror faintly recalls A Nightmare On Elm Street. After a dead cult leader’s acolyte wakes from a 13-year coma, a series of suicides ensues. One can’t help wondering how real-life burns victim Richard Lynch felt, plastered in gooey make-up. Sadly, the deaths are neither imaginative nor particularly gruesome, and the final-act twist is just dumb. + Extras Commentary; three interviews; trailer; booklet.…

▸ RELEASED 27 AUGUST 2017 | 15 | DVD ▸ Director Takashi Miike ▸ Cast Kento Yamazaki, Ryunosuke Kamiki, Yusuke Iseya, Jun Kunimura Takashi Miike is Japan’s maddest director, infamous for Ichi The Killer and Audition. JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure is manga’s maddest saga, about a dynasty of huge-haired supermen. It’s a pity, then, that a film bringing them together feels so unexceptional. Based on one of the manga’s mid-period storylines, the film’s set in a picturesque Japanese town where paranormal heavies turn a killer into a JoJo-style superman. Standing against them are a truculent teen scion of the JoJo family, an older JoJo who mentors him a bit, and a shrimpy schoolboy who stumbles into things. The fighters often manipulate elements like water, or objects like a toy-sized army. The…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 1977/1978 | 15 | DVD ▸ Directors Geoffrey Arthurs, Alvin Rakoff ▸ Cast Jack Woolgar, Barry Stokes, Glynis Johns, John Phillips Two frightfully obscure supernatural dramas are exhumed in this double-header from the archives of lost TV hunters Kaleidoscope. “The Shadow Of Death” is the pilot for never-made horror anthology show The Fearmakers. It’s an endearingly creaky piece of old-school creepitude, introduced by its star, Jack Woolgar. “Science, with all its sophisticated technology, has still not proved or disproved the existence of the supernatural,” he asserts, his splendid squadron leader’s moustache looming by candlelight. Woolgar plays a shifty old coot returning to a decrepit hunting lodge to reclaim treasure buried beneath its floor. Full of owl hoots, wind-tossed trees and atmosphere, it’s a straightforward chiller that…

▸ RELEASED 23 AUGUST 560 pages | Hardback/ebook ▸ Author Sam Hawke ▸ Publisher Bantam Press How do you solve a murder while trying to survive in a city under siege? For Jovan and Kalina: not easily. With the country in open rebellion, they must struggle against the odds to defend their home and people, all the while searching to find who among those trapped within the walls of Silasta killed their uncle. Both point-of-view characters are extremely relatable and nuanced, and this is very much driven by their personal challenges. Jovan is a highly skilled proofer, with the ability to detect any known poison; he lives to protect the Chancellor, but struggles with feelings of anxiety and obsessive-compulsive traits. His sister, Kalina, meanwhile, suffers from an illness that keeps…

As a fan of both science fiction and fantasy, Jaine Fenn enjoys the best of both worlds. The first instalment in the Hidden Empire author’s Broken Shadow duology, the new novel Hidden Sun takes place in the post-apocalyptic society of Shen where the population is forced to hide away from the deadly sunlight in isolated shadowlands. “As a fan of odd juxtapositions, I’m all for blurred edges and genre mash-ups, and Hidden Sun does have elements of both fantasy and sci-fi,” Fenn explains. “The human societies of the shadowlands are, for cultural and practical reasons, low-tech, making them recognisably fantasy, but out in the skyland, you’re on an alien planet.” Able to explore an interest in science that is unbecoming of her gender, main character Rhia’s noble status allows her…

To mark the 50th anniversary of Stanley Kubrick’s epic 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) Gary Lockwood, who played astronaut Frank Poole alongside co-star Keir Dullea, has embarked on a global tour to celebrate the milestone with fans. It will finish in Australia, “One of my favourite places in the world,” he tells Red Alert. Having retired from acting 26 years ago, Lockwood has spent the past two years penning his autobiography. He confesses he intended to be a novelist: “I was kind of a smart kid, I read a lot and was a good athlete. I kind of had a lot of skills and could have gone in any direction, but I kind of got waylaid by the easy money and beautiful girls of the movie business!” Would you like…

Hang on to your hairnets – the year’s best horror festival is back! “Our audience knows that over five joyous days, they will be jolted, saddened, terrified, transported and even transformed,” says co-director Alan Jones. That couldn’t be more true this year, as the festival – spread between the Cineworld Leicester Square and the Prince Charles Cinema – presents a fiendishly seductive line-up of premieres and exclusive screenings. Opening the event is Jenn Wexler’s The Ranger (above), a slasher ode to punk, while Gaspar Noé’s intoxicating Climax will close the fest. Also aim to catch Leigh Whannell’s Upgrade (see p9), Darren Lynn Bousman’s St Agatha, and a plethora of zombie comedies and horror musicals. Tickets are on sale now. Visit frightfest.co.uk for info. DATE 23-27 August LOCATION Leicester Square, London…

→ Buffy The Vampire Slayer to return, with black woman in lead role, and Joss Whedon on board. It looks like it won’t be a reboot: “It could be time to meet a new Slayer,” teased showrunner Monica Owusu-Breen. → Whedon’s also working on The Nevers for HBO, a sci-fi show about Victorian women who gain unusual abilities. → Star Wars: The Clone Wars to make unexpected comeback with new season. → Altered Carbon gets second season with Anthony Mackie in the lead. → Batwoman to get own show after debuting in this year’s Arrowverse crossover. → Syfy orders fourth season of Wynnona Earp, cancels Colony. → Fear The Walking Dead bags fifth season. → Frances McDormand to voice God in Good Omens. → Apple developing Time Bandits TV show,…

There’s so much to do at San Diego Comic-Con that you could create approximately 34 clones of yourself and still not see it all. But one of the highlights is always the Hall H panels, where Hollywood comes to show its wares, so we took advantage of the most savage air conditioning in the city to check out the big-screen highlights of this year’s Con… DC MOVIES With Marvel absent, it was left to DC to deliver the superhero goods, and it didn’t disappoint. The biggest surprise came in the form of Wonder Woman 1984, with Patty Jenkins, Gal Gadot and Chris Pine bringing fresh footage from next year’s sequel exclusively to Hall H after just three-and-a-half weeks of filming. The brief glimpse featured Wonders using her lasso of truth…

→ Jeremy Renner joining Spawn… Emma Thompson back for Men In Black… Duncan Jones teasing an adap of 2000 AD’s Rogue Trooper… Black Panther’s Danai Gurira orbiting both Star Trek 4 and Godzilla Vs Kong… MGM remaking Child’s Play… William Brent Bell to write and direct an adaptation of Stephen King’s From A Buick 8… Bill Murray, Adam Driver and Tilda Swinton starring in Jim Jarmusch’s indie zombie movie The Dead Don’t Die… Cate Shortland to direct The Black Widow for Marvel… Keri Russell teaming with producer Guillermo del Toro on horror thriller Antlers… Studio 8 has bagged screen rights to Rob Liefeld’s supersoldier comic book Prophet… Indiana Jones 5 now targeting a 9 July 2021 release… JB Smoove joining Spider-Man: Far From Home… Ralph Fiennes starring in Terry Gilliam’s…

“WAR HAS A COMPLEXITY THAT’S SELDOM IN MODERN FICTION” If you know me, or read my books, it may seem odd that I’m writing a rant about the role of violence in speculative fiction. I love to write about many aspects of violence; I like to read about military campaigns; I reenact; and I teach various forms of martial arts, including fighting in medieval armour. I personally find violence fascinating. I spent years in the military, and I have some hands on experience of the whole thing, from logistics and politics to dropping bombs to clandestine operations. In our modern world, most speculative fiction readers would probably agree that violence is not the only way to solve complex issues, perhaps even agree that it is the very worst way. And…

WHAT CAN YOU TELL US ABOUT QUINN MCKENNA? McKenna is a contract gun-for-hire. He’s estranged from his family, which is a fairly large, significant part of the narrative: becoming a father to this kid who he’s not so much a father to, and then leading this group of men who are in need of direction, a gang of misfits. McKenna falls in with them, but he’s really the anchor of the story. FROM WHAT WE’VE SEEN, THE LOONIES ARE VERY DIFFERENT FROM THE SOLDIERS OF THE ORIGINAL MOVIE… Oh, yeah. With all due respect to the original, there’s a lot of cosmetic things going on in that film: the Native American guy has a bandana on; Jesse Ventura, the cowboy, chews tobacco. But Shane has really put so much of…

NOT OFTEN CAN IT be claimed, with any degree of conviction, that the fifth in a horror franchise is bringing something new to the table. But that genuinely does seem to be the case as The Conjuring returns not with a bang but, ahem, with a wimple. Fans of this horror universe have already met The Nun’s titular nasty, introduced in 2016’s The Conjuring 2. In the 1977-set film, paranormal investigator Ed Warren was inspired to paint a sinister nun from his nightmares. He and wife Lorraine realised that this demon, named Valak, was orchestrating the events of the infamous Enfield Haunting. At that time, Lorraine Warren speculated that the demon had “taken a blasphemous form to attack my faith”. But there’s clearly more to it than that, as this…

RETURNING SHOW SEASON 11 UK BROADCAST BBC One, autumn US BROADCAST BBC America, autumn COUNTRY OF ORIGIN UK 1 Doctor Who’s always thrived on its ability to reinvent itself, so it’s no surprise that the creative forces behind series 11 see Jodie Whittaker’s arrival as an entry point for newcomers. “The first episode of a new Doctor is always a great place to start, and this year I think even more so,” new showrunner Chris Chibnall tells SFX at San Diego Comic-Con. “I hope it’s as inclusive, accessible, mainstream and entertaining a version of Doctor Who as we could possibly make. I feel like our job is to convince people who’ve never seen it that it is the greatest idea that television has ever had.” 2 Chibnall reckons that the…

RETURNING SHOW SEASON 9 US BROADCAST AMC, 7 October UK BROADCAST Fox, 8 October COUNTRY OF ORIGIN US WITH THE SHOW’S arch-antagonist Negan safely locked up, there are big changes afoot on The Walking Dead – the biggest being the impending departure of the show’s leading man, Andrew Lincoln. “This will be my last season playing the part of Rick Grimes,” the star confirmed to the Hall H faithful at Comic-Con. “My relationship with Mr Grimes is far from over, and a large part of me will always be a machete-wielding, stetson-wearing sheriff’s deputy from… London, England. “This has always been an ensemble and it will continue to be an ensemble. No one is bigger than the story – and the story this year is unbelievable.” That includes the introduction…

NEW SHOW! SEASON 1 US BROADCAST The CW 25, October UK BROADCAST TBC COUNTRY OF ORIGIN US JULIE PLEC, THE PROLIFIC co-creator of The Vampire Diaries universe on TV, is back with a new series based around The Originals character Hope Mikaelson. Played again by Danielle Rose Russell, now 17-year-old Hope is sent to boarding school at The Salvatore School for the Young and Gifted in Mystic Falls. Giving context for the spin-off, Plec tells SFX, “The Originals was a show about a family dynasty over millennia. To be able to say this is the next generation of that family is so cool. And Mystic Falls has had centuries of vampire history, and now it’s a new generation coming back into this town that’s basically had its history re-written. “Hope,…

▸ RELEASED 31 AUGUST 15 | 100 minutes ▸Director Leigh Whannell ▸Cast Logan Marshall-Green, Simon Maiden, Rosco Campbell, Betty Gabriel With its body-mod technology and grunge-tastic aesthetic, the second film from Leigh Whannell (writer of Saw, director of Insidious 3) excels as a no-holds-barred blast of B-movie sci-fi that draws from the very best of John Carpenter and David Cronenberg while making its own bloodspattered mark on the genre. In the wake of a gang attack, beardy mechanic Grey Trace (Logan Marshall-Green) is paralysed from the neck down. Hope arrives in the form of STEM, a microchip implanted into Trace’s spine that restores his motor functions, and gives him a chance at revenge. Oh, and STEM (voiced with velvety charm by Simon Maiden) is also able to turn Trace into…

▸RELEASED OUT NOW! U | 97 minutes ▸ Director Genndy Tartakovsky ▸ Cast Adam Sandler, Kathryn Hahn, Selena Gomez, Jim Gaffigan The Hotel Transylvania films don’t have a high critical reputation, but this third in the series is great fun, and perfectly watchable if you missed the earlier instalments. The titular hotel is owned by a benign Dracula, voiced by Adam Sandler, but this film bundles him onto a monster-friendly luxury cruise liner. The Count is enticed into this holiday by his ever-loving daughter (Selena Gomez), with his friends and family coming along too. Then Drac falls for the female captain, who’s secretly one of a dynasty of vampire hunters… It sounds like a soporific sitcom spinoff of the ’70s, but it buzzes with cartoon energy, not far from Minions.…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! (HMV exclusive) 1984 | 15 | Blu-ray/DVD/download ▸ Director Michael Radford ▸ Cast John Hurt, Richard Burton, Suzanna Hamilton, Cyril Cusack BLU-RAY DEBUT John Hurt did wounded very, very well. His greatest screen turns – Quentin Crisp, John Merrick – were all about vulnerability and damage. It’s a quality that made him the perfect choice for Winston Smith. Milk-pale, insect-thin and bronchial, it’s a performance that haunts this movie like a ghost, the walking “dead man” of George Orwell’s nightmarish future fable. For all that the fascist pomp of the opening scene recalls Queen’s video for “Radio Ga Ga” – released the same year – this isn’t the shiny ’80s take on the book you may imagine (ironically, the film’s best remembered for its Eurythmics tie-in…

▸ RELEASED 20 AUGUST 2017 | PG | Blu-ray & DVD (dual format) ▸ Director Tatsuya Yoshihara ▸ Cast Gakuto Kajiwara, Nobunaga Shimazaki, Kana Yuki, Miyu Kubota This kids’ adventure anime is purposefully pitched at fans of Naruto. In a medieval-style world, everyone is born with some level of magic power, except, apparently, a lad called Asta. Yet Asta turns out to have inexplicable abilities to fight magic, and sets out from his village to find glory in his nation’s army. He ends up with a troop of misfits; naturally, they’ll face foes that will bring out their inner strengths. Asta is the Gilbert Gottfried of anime. His rasping cry will have many viewers switching over to the less extreme English dub or just switching off altogether. If you can…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 2017 | 12 | DVD Set in the aftermath of the Christchurch earthquake, this YA horror adapts New Zealand author Margaret Mahy’s acclaimed 1984 novel. It’s not bad, either, with a sinister feel and a splendid performance from Erana James as Laura, who must save her little brother from a spell. Timothy Spall is truly disturbing as the creature who wants to eat his soul, and while Laura’s brooding love interest seems to have wandered in from a Twilight movie, the rest of the cast are stellar. Creepy and satisfying. + Extras None.…

▸ RELEASED 3 SEPTEMBER 1971 | 15 | Blu-ray ▸ Director Mel Welles ▸ Cast Rosalba Neri, Joseph Cotten, Paul Muller, Peter Whiteman By the early ’70s, Hammer were ramping up the sex and violence in their gothic horrors, but they could never go this far! Lady Frankenstein sidelines both the Baron (Joseph Cotten) and the creature, with his daughter centre-stage as she transplants the brain of dad’s assistant into a hunky stablehand to (as a poster put it) “satisfy her strange desires”. With its mittel-European setting and torch-wielding villagers, it’s firmly in the Hammer tradition, but with no holds barred: a scene where the creature hurls not a child but a naked woman into the river sums up the approach. The location work and sets impress, as do the…

▸ RELEASED 27 AUGUST 1972 | 18 | Blu-ray ▸ Director Gary Sherman ▸ Cast Donald Pleasence, Hugh Armstrong, Sharon Gurney, Christopher Lee BLU-RAY DEBUT It looks wrong. It looks amazing, but it looks wrong. Cannibal chiller Death Line always seemed to exist behind a patina of scuzz. All those late-night screenings from tattered old prints only enhanced the film’s vibe of grot and grotesquerie, filthy as an ashtray crammed with Silk Cut in some decaying ’70s boozer. Now it’s been given a hi-def scrub for Blu-ray. And it’s a remarkable makeover, allowing you to marvel at the sheer artistry of the decrepitude on display, from an abandoned Tube station, caked in Dickensian grime, to every toxic pustule on the skin of The Man (sympathetically played by Hugh Armstrong), part…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 372 pages | Hardback/ebook ▸ Author Kate Mascarenhas ▸ Publisher Head Of Zeus Time travel is a concept brimming with fictional potential, from the paradoxes of the past to the wondrous possibilities of the future. It’s also ripe for more personal stories – how would you approach the opportunity of once again talking with long-deceased parents? Kate Mascarenhas’s compelling, confident debut focuses on one question: when you can visit anyone in the recent past again and again, how would that affect your emotions around death? And how would that change you as a person? In 1967, four women work together to create the world’s first time machine – with devastating consequences for one of them. Fifty years later, time travel is a booming business, with the…