Table of contents for November 2020 in SFX

Daimon Hellstrom made his first appearance in issue one of Ghost Rider from 1973. THERE’S SOMETHING STRANGE, even downright unnatural, about Daimon and Ana Helstrom. Daimon is an ethics professor. Ana runs an auction house. Both possess otherworldly abilities that allow them to hunt down the worst of humanity. The estranged children of an enigmatic serial killer, the pair are at the heart of upcoming TV series Helstrom, inspired by the Marvel comic Son Of Satan. The source material originally depicted Daimon shirtless, showcasing a pentagram birthmark on his chest, and wearing a red cape and wielding a pitchfork. The wardrobe of his sister Ana (or Satana, as she’s referred to in the comics), meanwhile, consisted of a snug, revealing purple costume. Showrunner Paul Zbyszewski (formerly a writer on Lost and executive…

John Franklin, who played 12-year-old cult leader Isaac in the 1984 film, was actually 24 – as a boy, he had a growth-hormone deficiency. FONDLY REMEMBERED BY MANY as a blood-curding shocker, the original 1984 big-screen adaptation of Stephen King’s novella “Children Of The Corn” featured a memorably chilling opening, where children unleash a murderous kinder surprise upon unsuspecting adult customers in a café. Despite the remainder of the film largely leaving critics lukewarm, this anti-adult horror tale was financially successful enough to spawn a staggering, if increasingly dull, eight-sequel series (plus the obligatory remake). Now a new film is on the way. Don’t worry if you haven’t seen the previous entries though – they had little narrative continuity anyway. “This adaptation runs from the wellspring, the river that Stephen…

Is all Star Trek news good Star Trek news for those who’ve been on the journey longer? When we did Next Gen we were so blessed that the show was such a big hit, that I think that Paramount, who owned it at the time, said, “Oh, this will be great. We’ll do another one.” I felt that, frankly, they went to the well one too many times. I feel here, with Alex and CBS All Access and Amazon and Netflix and all the people who are holding these shows, that we’ve got Discovery up and running, and it’s fantastic, and it’s found its legs. I think there’s plenty of room in the world, and clearly the audience loves the overall vision and the people who have the reins now. Particularly Alex Kurtzman, who…

THE LATEST INSTALMENT IN what’s recently been christened The Walking Dead Universe is set a decade after the world turned. The pilot episode of the two-series limited event, The Walking Dead: World Beyond, briefly takes us behind the fortified walls of the Campus Colony of Omaha. It’s one of three cities that forms part of a network – with mysterious organisation the Civic Republic Military playing an as yet undisclosed part in the running of a new order. As SFX caught up with showrunner Matthew Negrete in an old-world phone call, he was wrapping up post-production on season one while wrapping his head around how season two is going to play out. Which means we have to go right back to the beginning… “The kernel of what actually became this…

I’m not sure what I think about the phrase ‘elevated horror’ – I think it sounds a bit snobby,” muses Rose Glass, whose directorial debut Saint Maud is “elevated horror” concentrated. “But I quite like it, I don’t know…” She shouldn’t be so modest. Her intense character study of a religious zealot nursing a glamorous older woman through her dying days is certainly not for kids. By which we mean it’s sophisticated, intelligent and thought-provoking – and ultimately all the more terrifying for it. It’s one part odd-couple black comedy (notes abound of the gothic melodrama of Whatever Happened To Baby Jane?), one part nerveshredding psychological thriller, and all parts gross-out horror thrill ride. The film stars a wry, charismatic Jennifer Ehle as former dancer Amanda, and an unrelenting Morfydd…

BIODATA From Los Angeles, California Greatest Hits Gallagher’s first major role was as a quadruplet in Nickelodeon comedy show Nicky, Ricky, Dicky & Dawn. Random Fact He says that if he could have any superpower, it would be the ability to create music straight from his mind. At the tender age of 16, Aidan Gallagher has already accrued a dizzying array of titles: actor, musician and environmental activist (in 2018 he was named a UN Goodwill Ambassador). He’s practically the definition of an old soul. So it’s not surprising that as Five in The Umbrella Academy – essentially a 58-year-old in the body of a 13-year-old – he leaves no doubt that he’s always the adult in the room. Netflix’s TV adaptation of Gerard Way and artist Gabriel Bá’s comic features…

IN THE LIST OF TERRY NATION’S artistic triumphs, Survivors has always tended to come a poor third, after creating the Daleks and writing Blake’s 7. Yet recently, for obvious reasons, Survivors is back on everybody’s lips “You know, I’ve been thinking about it a lot,” says Lucy Fleming, who played Jenny Richards in the series all those years ago. “And people have been mentioning it to me a lot, saying ‘Does this ring a bell?’” It was on 16 April 1975 that BBC One viewers witnessed the end of the world as they knew it. In Survivors’ first episode, ‘The Fourth Horseman’, we see Home Counties England ravaged by a deadly plague, one lethal enough to even wipe out Peter Bowles. By the time the end credits rolled, 95% of…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 15 | 94 minutes Director Josh Boone Cast Anya Taylor-Joy, Maisie Williams, Charlie Heaton, Blu Hunt Circumstances, it’s fair to say, have not been kind to The New Mutants. In truth circumstances have smashed it in the teeth, rolled it into the gutter and administered a merciless booting while live-tweeting it all and cackling. Shot in 2017, when the world was young, the thirteenth instalment of the X-franchise originally targeted an April 2018 release slot. Endlessly rescheduled, dogged by rumours of exec-level disapproval of its tone and major surgery reshoots (dismissed by director Josh Boone), it seemed destined to stew in the can forever, victim of Disney’s devouring of 20th Century Fox. Now it’s been marched to the front as part of cinema’s strike back against Covid-19.…

RELEASED 30 OCTOBER TBC | 107 minutes Director Josephine Decker Cast Elisabeth Moss, Michael Stuhlbarg, Odessa Young, Logan Lerman In her acclaimed horror stories, Shirley Jackson explored how everything struggles to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality. So it’s fitting, then, that this unconventional biopic presents an ambiguous version of her. Based on the novel of the same name by Susan Scarf Merrell, Shirley tells the fictionalised tale of how a young married couple are drawn into the turbulent world of Jackson and husband Stanley Edgar Hyman, and broken by her creative process. Viewers familiar with Jackson’s work will recognise her trademark themes of paranoia and lunacy, but the film does a good job of clueing in newcomers. Where Shirley falls short is its in pacing and conclusion. Dramatic…

EXTRAS RELEASED 12 OCTOBER (download out now) 2020 | 18 | Blu-ray/DVD/download Director David Koepp Cast Kevin Bacon, Amanda Seyfried, Avery Essex, Colin Blumenau What’s the point of a thriller without the thrills? You Should Have Left signals its intentions right from its title screen: it’s a backward-looking angst-fest about regret, guilt, and things left undone. As a result, there’s very little urgency to any of it. Theo (Kevin Bacon) is a haunted man, battling both the spectre of his first wife’s suspicious watery death and the looming shadow of his much younger, hotter new wife’s (Amanda Seyfried) infidelity. To escape his darkness, he whisks his family off to an improbably massive house in the Welsh countryside. Unfortunately – cue woefully generic dramatic music – it’s full of ghosts, and…

RELEASED 12 OCTOBER 1990 | PG | Blu-ray BLU-RAY DEBUT With a Hollywood remake due next year, it’s no surprise that Nicolas Roeg’s version of The Witches is finally hitting Blu-ray, but it’s a shame to see the release’s spare pennies spent on the packaging rather than commentaries or featurettes. Oh well. While the performances are hit-and-miss, the movie is terrifying in the way twisted Roald Dahl tales tend to be, with Anjelica Huston’s witch-face being particularly disturbing. Extras Four art cards; poster; booklet.…

RELEASED 12 OCTOBER 1956 | PG | Blu-ray Director Kôji Shima Cast Keizô Kawasaki, Toyomi Karita, Shôzô Nanbu BLU-RAY DEBUT This quirky oddity represents a landmark in Japanese cinema: their first sci-fi movie made in colour. Though released a year after Godzilla, its key influences are Western, with pinches from both When Worlds Collide (celestial body on a collision course with Earth) and The Day The Earth Stood Still (aliens come to warn humanity). Given the film’s faint Ed Wood vibes, it’s mindboggling that regular Akira Kurosawa collaborator Hideo Oguni wrote the script. It often seems like plot beats – nightclub mambo routine, kids’ communal singing, kidnapping, tsunami – were pulled out of a bag. Director Kôji Shima has an eye for attractive compositions, though. The alien Pairans – star-shaped,…

THE DRIVER (19 October/12 October, DVD/download) is a postzombie apocalypse flick from the director of Ballistic: Ecks Vs Sever. Mark Dacascos plays a former hitman who, after his compound is destroyed, zooms off in a BMW with his daughter in search of a safe haven. Given that Dacascos is a martial artist there’s surprisingly little face-kicking action, with a lot of time spent in the car or on father/daughter bonding as he trains her up. Expect cheesy dialogue and painfully obvious greenscreen. 2008 home-invasion horror THE STRANGERS (out now, Blu-ray) centres on a couple terrorised by three masked strangers at a remote holiday home. It’s as basic as that premise, but director Bryan Bertino makes good use of stillness and silence to build suspense. Second Sight’s new limited edition is…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 464 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook Author Django Wexler Publisher Head Of Zeus Django Wexler’s new fantasy series is built around two siblings on opposite sides of the law. Maya belongs to the militaristic Twilight Order, forcibly recruited as a child and trained to use deiat (magic), while her brother Gyre grows up to become an outlaw determined to destroy the Order for stealing his sister. Maya is the more sympathetic of the pair, her powerful abilities balanced by compassion and a belief in justice that’s sorely tested by the political struggles within the Order. Gyre is much less likeable, willing to sacrifice friends and foes alike in his dogged pursuit of vengeance. It doesn’t help that his partner in crime is Kit, a libidinous psychopath with neither morals…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 569 pages | Paperback/ebook/audiobook Author JS Barnes Publisher Titan Books A sequel to Dracula is a great idea on paper, but it’s been written on too many pages here. Dracula’s Child has drained Bram Stoker’s poetry, and replaced it with plot. Lots of plot. Continuing the Crew of Light’s story a decade after the events of Stoker’s original, the central mystery revolves around a pre-coma utterance from Van Helsing. No wait, it’s about a conspiracy at the heart of government. Hang on, there’s something here about a gay couple who encounter dark forces on holiday. No, it’s about a potentially evil child. And another potentially evil child. And oh, there’s Renfield’s diary! That’s barely breaking the skin of plot beats that stop and start with the rhythm…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 391 pages | Hardback/ebook Author Graham Masterton Publisher Head Of Zeus Britain has a great tradition of haunted house stories, and veteran Graham Masterton’s latest book attempts to slot into that subgenre, with the Dartmoor-set tale of a fractured family returning to their moors mansion after the death of the patriarch. The House Of A Hundred Whispers aims for gothic chills but plays instead as incredibly outdated, in terms of not only its characters and its style but most of all its attitude to women. After the murder of their father, the family – Rob, Martin and Grace, with partners in tow – return to Allhallows Hall for the reading of the will. But there’s clearly something off about this place, and when Rob’s five-year-old son Timmy…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 560 pages | Hardback/ebook Author VE Schwab Publisher Titan Books This story weaves together a number of tropes – a deal with the Devil (or in this case the darkness), the damned soul condemned to wander for all eternity – and yet creates a gentle and tender story. In 1714, French village girl Adeline agrees to trade her soul for freedom, and is condemned to an unageing existence in which no one remembers her. She wanders through the world ghostlike, leaving barely a ripple, until three centuries later in New York she meets a young man who for some reason doesn’t forget her. Because this is Addie’s story, not the world’s, wars and the like barely feature – there’s a glimpse of the French Revolution and WWII;…

RELEASED OUT NOW! Publisher DC Comics Writer/artists Various SPECIAL ISSUE Pushing the whole “1000th issue celebration” concept about as far as it will go, the latest bumper DC anthology arrives only a year after the most recent Detective Comics-related special – and in this case, it’s marking 1000 issues since Batman’s 1939 debut in Detective Comics issue 27. There’s been no shortage of special Batman anthologies over the last few years, and the creative roster assembled here is undeniably strong, but while these celebratory issues are always a mixed bag, Detective Comics #1027 only occasionally pushes the needle above average. Of the 12 tales in this collection, only four fully succeed as memorable and satisfying reads. Greg Rucka provides a typically characterful and gritty look at the Gotham police in…

RELEASED OUT NOW! Reviewed on PlayStation 4 Also available on PC, Xbox One Publisher Deep Silver VIDEOGAME If you grew up on 2000 AD’s satirical view of the future then this tactical RPG will be right up your, er, block. As one of the remaining Arizona Rangers, your mission is to help The Patriarch, the owner of Colorado, get his wayward heirs under control. Best laid plans tumble, as every action you take alters the world. It shifts and moves around you to help or hinder the many factions of the game’s absurdist vision of the future. There’s little functionally original about the game – perks and character upgrades affect dialogue and combat choices, which in turn alter the outcome of the story – but it’s done with such imagination that…

Mary Laws first worked with Greg Nicotero on Preacher. His company KNB EFX Group did special effects and prosthetics work for the series. IN 2013, AUTHOR NATHAN BALLINGRUD’S collection of short stories North American Lake Monsters caused quite a stir in horror circles for its haunting tales of very flawed humans traversing very human and sometimes supernatural horrors. It earned him the Shirley Jackson Award, and a few years later the deep admiration of TV writer Mary Laws (The Neon Demon, Preacher). “I read the first story, and I immediately called my agent and said, ‘This is what I have to do,’” Laws tells Red Alert, explaining how she came to adapt the book into the eight-episode Hulu series Monsterland. “I hadn’t read anything like it in a very, very long…

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THE GLAMOUR OF TELEVISION production is in full effect today. On a gloomy October afternoon in 2019, SFX is standing in a Nabisco factory which closed back in 2012. Standing outside in the long weeds, the ghost of a giant Shredded Wheat logo is still faintly discernible on the wall. Inside, traversing the space requires taking detours around giant puddles, and we’re pretty sure the graffiti shouting “so-and-so sucks cock” isn’t the production designer’s handiwork. Standing by the director’s monitors, we wonder why an open umbrella has been rigged up above them, until flapping heralds the arrival of a pigeon through a broken window, which perches on a pipe overhead. Suddenly clocking the layer of bird shit underfoot, we take a precautionary step sideways… We’re on location for Nick Frost…

“REDRUM” In an empty classroom, wonkily-drawn art adorns the walls, the imagined sound of children’s laughter hangs in the air, and the smell of chalk and paint takes us back to our childhood. We’re leafing through a copy of Mary Norton’s The Borrowers when we see them: six Scrabble tiles spread across a teacher’s desk, spelling out the above. We’re used to seeing Easter eggs on screen. But discovering one in real life – or, at least, on the Vancouver set of The Haunting Of Bly Manor – sends chills down the spine. For all we know, the Scrabble pieces could be an irrelevance. A crew member messing around. Perhaps they bear no connection to Bly’s story, loosely based on Henry James’s 1898 horror novella “The Turn Of The Screw”,…

NO SELF-RESPECTING SLASHER FILM buff would argue that John Carpenter’s original Halloween (1978) is not deserving of a prime place in any horror movie hall of fame. The sequels, however, are a very different matter, with the Carpenter-produced Halloween II (1981) meeting with mixed reviews and introducing a twist whose effects endured for decades: that Myers and his perennial victim Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) are in fact brother and sister. The iconic masked murderer temporarily halted his killing spree for Halloween III: Season Of The Witch (1982), while Halloween 4 (1988), Halloween 5 (1989) and Halloween: The Curse Of Michael Myers (1995) pushed the character further into the realms of the supernatural. In the conclusion of the latter, which was a box office disaster, Myers is even revealed to…

IN JULY 1993, AN UNSEASONAL holiday film magicked its way onto screens. Although it featured a stellar cast – with an antagonistic trio of Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker and Kathy Najimy leading the way – Hocus Pocus met with a lukewarm critical reception and did not set the box office alight. But now it’s a firm fan favourite, both in the oeuvre of Halloween films and the Disney backcatalogue, with a nostalgic audience eager to return to Salem again and again. Doug Jones, renowned for his versatile creature characters, played clumsy zombie Billy Butcherson, a jilted lover killed and subsequently resurrected. He thinks the film’s endurance is warranted. “I feel like the movie is timeless,” he tells SFX. “As we were filming it, I felt like we were creating…

How did the Survivors range come about, and what did you want to do with it? Survivors was a series that we all loved at Big Finish, and wanted to make on audio when the time was right. Thankfully the time came, and we got to make nine box sets that I’m hugely proud of. My intention was to revisit the ’70s series and tell stories that ran in tandem with it – we were part of Terry Nation’s original continuity. That’s why our first episode told the outbreak with new characters, and they then went on to intersect and join up with the leads from the TV show. So when Jenny Richards wanders into the second episode, she’s actually between scenes of episode two on TV. The big challenge at the…

RELEASED 30 OCTOBER (also VOD) TBC | 89 minutes Director Natalie Erika James Cast Emily Mortimer, Robyn Nevin, Bella Heathcote Plausibly grounded in a scenario many families go through at some point, this Australian chiller knows there are few things more genuinely terrifying than seeing a loved one mentally deteriorate. It’s a demonic horror where the demon is dementia. After elderly Edna (Robyn Nevin) disappears, daughter Kay (Emily Mortimer) and granddaughter Sam (Bella Heathcote) move into her home. Edna returns three days later, unable to explain where she’s been. But soon her family will find out for themselves… A gloomy, slow-burn tale, featuring moments of almost unbearable tension, it has great success making the quotidian seem sinister – rendering the clutter around the house oppressive, for example. It also excels…

RELEASED 23 OCTOBER PG | 98 minutes Director Sean Olson Cast Chad Michael Murray, Marina Sirtis, Sydne Mykelle, Tyler Christopher If you remade Charlie AndThe Chocolate Factory in the style of Stranger Things, but skimped on the former’s charm and the latter’s horror, you’d end up with Max Winslow And The House Of Secrets. A billionaire with the ridiculous-but-we-don’t-care name of Atticus Virtue (Chad Michael Murray) gives five schoolkids the chance to inherit his megabucks, supertechnological mansion – all they have to do is go inside for a night and play the games it sets for them. Cue some faux Hunger Games set-pieces, a sinister AI voiced by Marina “Deanna Troi” Sirtis, and a reasonably entertaining romp. The kids are okay, though they’re the standard, off-therack selection: the bitchy Instagram…

Season One UK Sky One/Now TV, Fridays/all episodes streaming now US Streaming on Peacock Showrunner David Wiener Cast Alden Ehrenreich, Jessica Brown Findlay, Harry Lloyd, Kylie Bunbury EPISODES 1.01-1.09 Adapting Aldous Huxley’s 1932 dystopia presents a challenge. It’s not inherently that dramatic, opening with a lengthy tour of its future World State and closing with a conversational defence of its components: a genetically-engineered caste system (Alpha Plus to Epsilon); a lack of ties (“mother” is a dirty word and monogamy’s considered deviant); lives of vacuous leisure, with every emotional disturbance fixed by popping a Soma pill. Its depiction of a reservation in New Mexico where “savages” live amid garbage and stink would also provoke outrage today. This version, partly scripted by comics maverick Grant Morrison, fixes that by turning the…

RELEASED 19 OCTOBER 1977 | 15 | Blu-ray Director David Lynch Cast Jack Nance, Charlotte Stewart, Judith Anna Roberts, Jack Fisk David Lynch’s “most spiritual” film is a one-off, even in his singular filmography. Made over four years while the director was studying at the American Film Institute, it’s every bit as unnerving as his later work, with an added layer of body horror that’ll make you squirm. Henry (Jack Nance) wanders around a city and discovers that he has a new baby with girlfriend Mary (Charlotte Stewart) – a surprise, given that they’d only recently slept together! But “baby” doesn’t quite describe the deeply cursed-looking being he finds waiting at home… It’s a film that feels handcrafted, and follows its own nightmare logic, every scene either disturbing in its…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 1902 | U | Blu-ray Director Georges Méliès Cast Georges Méliès, Bleuette Bernon, François Lallement, Henri Delannoy BLU-RAY DEBUT We bang on about the magic of cinema, but director Georges Méliès was a genuine magician: a stage illusionist whose pioneering use of camera effects bridged fin de siècle theatre with the first days of the screen. In pop culture, the once epic ambition of A Trip To The Moon has been crushed down to a single image: the bullet-shell body of a rocketship smashing into the eye of the Man on the Moon. This new deluxe edition rectifies that, presenting the 13-minute film in both black and white and a reconstruction of its original hand-painted colour, which adds an extra layer of unreality. The Big Bang of…

EXTRAS RELEASED OUT NOW! 2019 | 12 | Blu-ray/DVD Director Makoto Shinkai Cast Kotaro Daigo, Nana Mori, Shun Oguri, Tsubasa Honda Makoto Shinkai’s follow-up to the phenomenally successful Your Name has one main problem: it’s the follow-up to Your Name. It’s another fantasy romance. A teenage runaway in a raindrenched near-future Tokyo encounters a girl who can successfully pray for sun. It’s a witty, sumptuously animated film with real heart that captures Tokyo with a vivid intensity. But it’s also too similar in style, structure and storytelling tricks to its body-swapping predecessor, not so much inviting as demanding comparisons. Ultimately, it falls just short: it’s less tightly plotted, the characters less clearly defined, the ideas less focussed. But “not quite as good as Your Name” is still pretty damned good.…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 1990 | 15 | Blu-ray Director Adam Simon Cast Bill Pullman, Bill Paxton, Bud Cort, Patricia Charbonneau BLU-RAY DEBUT It’s enough to make a zombie salivate. Brain Dead is crammed with grey matter: mental patients with brains exposed; brains in jars, smashing on the floor. But it didn’t start that way. The original script was penned in the ’60s by Twilight Zone regular Charles Beaumont. Director Adam Simon’s rewrite switched the focus from psychotherapy to neurosurgery. Unsurprisingly, it has a Twilight Zone feel, especially in scenes like one where our hero sees the same hitchhiker again and again. Bill Pullman plays a neurosurgeon tasked by a corporation with curing Halsey (a brilliantly twitchy Bud Cort), a mathematician in an asylum. But are Dr Martin and Halsey actually…

RELEASED 8 OCTOBER 576 pages | Hardback/ebook Author Kim Stanley Robinson Publisher Orbit The imminent future looks dangerous. As climate change bites, global instability will likely grow. If humankind gets things too badly wrong, civilisation itself may collapse. In part, as the horrific opening to Kim Stanley Robinson’s latest novel hints, this is because swathes of the planet will become increasingly uninhabitable. In these pages, Robinson offers an account of a “wet-bulb” event in India that takes place in the middle of the 2020s, where the combination of heat and humidity grows too much for the human body to bear, and millions die as a result. Among those present is Frank May, a man left with post-traumatic stress disorder because of what he witnesses – and whose searing testimony lays…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 336 pages | Hardback/ebook Author Cixin Liu Publisher Head Of Zeus The English translations of 2015 Hugo winner Cixin Liu’s back catalogue continue to come thick and fast. This volume collects 11 short stories from various points in his career, with a foreword from the man himself. “The Village Teacher” opens the book with the story of a dying man teaching Newton’s laws to a group of impoverished children in rural China. Hard-cut to the edge of the solar system, where a vast alien fleet has arrived with the intention of annihilating it unless they find evidence of intelligent life… It’s a perfect example of a theme that continues throughout the collection and Liu’s writing as a whole: the relationship between the smallest moments of everyday life…

RELEASED 15 OCTOBER 416 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook Author Yoon Ha Lee Publisher Solaris Where do you go when your debut space opera has been a success that surely wildly exceeded your expectations? In the case of American-Korean Yoon Ha Lee, author of the Hugowinning Machineries Of Empire sequence, you look to your Asian heritage to craft a story rooted in the Japanese occupation of Korea, and conjure up a gloriously imaginative silkpunk fantasy. The main character is Gyen Jebi, a struggling artist who’s made a big mistake. Having gambled on getting a cushy job, they (Jebi is non-binary) find themselves instead working for the Ministry of Armor, an agency of the hated Razanei government. Here, their job is to paint sigils that animate and control military automatons. While Jebi has…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 336 pages | Hardback/ebook Author Naomi Novik Publisher Del Rey As Naomi Novik points out in our interview this issue (see page 68), the idea of a magical school raises many questions. Leaving aside for a moment the traumas induced in many by everything from comprehensives to the British public school system, parents don’t usually set out to send their children to places that are lethal. Yet Novik’s Scholomance is as scary as schools get: a place where monsters stalk the corridors and classrooms, waiting to pounce on unwary students. Survive and you graduate. Make a mistake and you drop out, because you’ll be dead. Then there are the kinds of difficulties we more often associate with school fiction. This is a book filled with cliques, mean…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 880 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook Author Christopher Paolini Publisher Tor Never an author to let a good cliché go to waste, Christopher Paolini, the author behind epic fantasy Eragon (famously written before he’d started shaving) and its doorstop-sized sequel, delivers exactly what every reviewer expected him to deliver with his first SF novel: a fantasy novel in sci-fi clothing. Sure, there are hard SF ideas here, but they’re window dressing. To Sleep In A Sea Of Stars is a thinly disguised quest saga complete with weapons of great power, magic (science), “Old Ones”, dreams, maps and a glossary. The “Space Opera’s Greatest Hits” plot (part Dune, part Firefly, part Battle Beyond The Stars, part you name it) starts with an Earth xenobiologist, Kira, making first contact on a…

RELEASED 7 OCTOBER Publisher Image Comics Writer Alex de Campi Artist Erica Henderson GRAPHIC NOVEL He was born out of the Victorian Gothic, but Dracula has always been the most malleable of nightmares, shapeshifting across actors, genres and time periods. This entertainingly lurid graphic novel – a “neo-noir”, its creators claim – places him in Los Angeles, 1974. Welcome to the scuzzy underside of Tinseltown, where ageing stars trade their souls for more than just screen immortality and shutterbug Quincy Harker makes a living photographing the city’s corpses rather than its shining stars. At one point we view the Hollywood sign from behind, its legendary letters reversed, and the image packs all the talismanic power of an inverted cross. Crucially, this take on Dracula strips away the Lee, the Lugosi…

RELEASED OUT NOW! Publisher Image Comics Writer Sean Lewis Artist Caitlin Yarsky ISSUES 1-3 How far would you go for your family? Benton has a wife and an ailing son, Perry. When he seeks help to save Perry’s life, however, Benton winds up making a very bad deal with the “gods” who rule Feral City. These amphibian monsters are running a new drug called Bliss to the population, and they want him to act as their enforcer and hitman. He takes the gig and embarks on a killing spree that puts his family directly in the firing line… This eight-issue maxi-series hinges on a moral dilemma, but that aspect never quite convinces. The framing device sees an older Perry defending his father’s intentions in a metaphysical court, but – three…

HOLM TRUTHS Owen Carpenter, email I was sad to hear of the death of the veteran actor Ian Holm. He brought so much class to the many genre productions he featured in, everything from Robin And Marian to Alien to The Fifth Element to The Lord Of The Rings. I will miss him very much. I was even sadder when SFX failed to pay a proper tribute to him, or even notify their readers of his passing. You do realise that many of us are now over 50 and have fond recollections of when Ian played Bilbo Baggins on BBC radio in the ‘80s? SFX Sadly, as ever it’s a question of available space, Owen. Hopefully your words can stand as a tribute to this great actor, though. NOUGHT OUT OF…

Of the 30 stories in the six volumes of Books Of Blood, eight had already been adapted for film or TV. BACK WHEN WRITER/filmmaker Brannon Braga (Star Trek, Threshold, The Orville) was in his early twenties, he read all six volumes of Clive Barker’s Books Of Blood, and his creative world was rocked. “Clive’s work was groundbreaking in its originality and its transgressive subject matter,” Braga tells Red Alert, recalling Barker’s impact on him. “This was not horror that had any traditional recognisable elements like vampires or werewolves or ghosts as we normally imagine them. Every story was just so original and had a huge impact on me.” A lifelong fan of the author going forward, Braga made a name for himself in the genre space, where he often thought about…

WHEN SFX BEAMED DOWN TO Vancouver in January to speak with the cast and crew of Star Trek: Discovery – all spoilers, sadly, embargoed! – we were blissfully unaware as to what 2020 had in store. Fitting, then, that what became the delayed third season catapults the crew of the USS Discovery into the great unknown. Catching up with showrunner Alex Kurtzman several months later – following announcements, virtual convention appearances, Star Trek Day and so on – just where does a global pandemic leave the Star Trek Universe? “Things are just starting to shoot again,” he explains. “We would have been in production already on Picard, but we couldn’t be because of Covid. It’s pushed our Discovery and Strange New Worlds dates just a little bit, but I think…

Untangling the Halloween series takes some doing, because the entire shebang completely fails to fit together, with Halloween and Halloween 2 leading into two different mythologies. The more popular is the journey of Laurie Strode, whose timeline picks up with H20 and ends with Resurrection in 2002 (which also kills her brother Michael, in a sense, given that it’s the final film of the original franchise). Alternatively, audiences can follow Myers and his obsession with his niece Jamie Lloyd (originally played by Danielle Harris) and psychiatrist (Donald Pleasence), central to Halloween 4 and the next two increasingly clumsy sequels. Rob Zombie’s woeful 2007 reboot Halloween and its follow-up Halloween II (2009) keep the brother/sister connection and are self-contained, while 1982’s Halloween III: Season Of The Witch is a standalone, Myers-free…

RELEASED 9 OCTOBER 15 | 84 minutes Director Rose Glass Cast Morfydd Clark, Jennifer Ehle, Lily Knight, Lily Frazer Mind, body and soul are in conflict in Saint Maud, the haunting first feature from Rose Glass, which mixes religious, psychological and corporeal horror in a film that flits between transcendently beautiful and deeply horrific in a heartbeat. Morfydd Clark plays palliative care nurse Maud, whose patient Amanda (Jennifer Elhe), a former dancer and minor celebrity, is dying of cancer. The recently converted Maud becomes obsessed with the idea of saving Amanda’s soul as a mission from a God she believes she speaks to. Shot against the backdrop of a flashy, trashy Scarborough seafront, Saint Maud is a mix of social realism and infernal paranoia, spattered with nightmarish imagery. It’s a…

RELEASED 23 OCTOBER (DVD/download 26 October) TBC | 94 minutes Directors David Amito, Michael Laicini Cast Nicole Tompkins, Rowan Smyth, Dan Istrate, Shu Sakimoto Any movie that dubs itself The Deadliest Film Ever Made (the subtitle here) is setting itself up for a humbling fall. The conceit of this pocket-money horror is a film that has evil burned deep into its celluloid. A documentary-style introduction grimly informs us of the various people who have screened it in the past, only to die in mysterious circumstances shortly after. It was believed that all copies of the movie had been destroyed – but no, one print survived, so we’re told. After this eight-minute opening, we’re launched into the film itself, prefaced by a caption telling us that “by continuing to watch you agree…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 1978-1980 | 12 | Blu-ray UK adaptation David Wier Cast Masaaki Sakai, Masako Natsume, Shiro Kishibe, Toshiyuki Nishida, Tonpei Hidari, Shunji Fujimura BLU-RAY DEBUT The nature of Monkey is irrepressible, the series’ iconic opening narration tells us. And so it would seem. The screwball Japanese series with the irreverent UK dub that blasted onto our screens in the late ’70s has a crazed energy that bubbles virtually intact from this new, crisply candy-hued Blu-ray release featuring all 52 episodes. Following the adventures of a bunch of misfit creatures as they battle demons in search of sacred scriptures, Monkey was loosely based on a 16th century Chinese novel, Journey To The West. Very loosely. You could equally say it was based on The Monkees series. It certainly has…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 2019 | 18 | Blu-ray Director John Adams Cast Toby Poser, John Adams, Zelda Adams, Izzy Figueredo, Joan Poser This brooding horror is very much a family affair. Director John Adams and writer Toby Poser both star, as does their daughter Zelda – but it doesn’t pull any punches with its themes of familial loss and all-consuming grief. Ivy (Poser) and Echo (Zelda) live in an isolated house in the Catskill Mountains. When drunk driver Kurt (Adams) accidentally kills Echo and hides the body, Ivy turns to the occult and Echo’s spirit returns to torment her killer… The excellent location work and direction make for a stylish and moody film and all three leads are strong, with Poser finding an edge of mania in Ivy and Adams…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 2020 | PG | Blu-ray/DVD/download The mystery-solving canine and his meddling human pals face off against Dick Dastardly (Jason Isaacs, having the time of his life) in an animated adventure that adds nothing new to the franchise but still offers enough pun-tastic humour to raise the odd smile. Will Forte tries his best as Shaggy (he’s no Matthew Lillard), but Frank Welker’s Scooby is thankfully present and correct. The postmodern quips will age fast, though. Extras Three featurettes.…

RELEASED 12 OCTOBER 1960 | 15 | Blu-ray/DVD/download Director Sidney Hayers Cast Anton Diffring, Erika Remberg, Yvonne Monlaur, Donald Pleasence BLU-RAY DEBUT Roll up, roll up for all the fun of the circus. Acid burns to the face! A lion-tamer mauled! A knife-thrower’s assistant getting it in the neck! Seventies horror critic David Pirie bracketed this lurid British horror with two other films from production company Anglo-Amalgamated (Horrors Of The Black Museum and Peeping Tom) as a “Sadian trilogy”, and you can see why. It’s sleazy stuff, which does as much as the censors would then allow to situate titillation (a young woman unclipping her bra, say) alongside grisly death. The ludicrous plot sees Anton Diffring’s disgraced plastic surgeon deciding, after a chance encounter, to use a circus as a…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 286 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook Author Garth Nix Publisher Gollancz There seem to be a lot of magical secret societies in Young Adult fiction, and a lot of unsuspecting youngsters who stumble onto them. But few of these societies are as much fun as the supernatural beings who keep an eye on things from two weird London bookshops, and few of the youngsters as easy to empathise with as Susan, the lead in Garth Nix’s heartily enjoyable new adventure. Set in 1983 – though it’s a slightly different version of the world we know (for example, The Professionals’ Bodie and Doyle are women) – the tale opens with Susan moving to the capital to hunt for her long-missing father. Before she can say “daddy issues” she’s running for…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 448 pages | Paperback/ebook/audiobook Author John Marrs Publisher Del Rey John Marrs’s latest near future, high-concept techno-thriller isn’t so much a sequel to The One (DNA dating app has dark secret) and Passengers (autonomous cars hacked by terrorists), but it exists in the same shared universe, with events from those earlier books still causing ripples. It also has a similar structure, with multiple characters in parallel plotlines propelling the action in bite-sized chapters that keep you hungry for more. The central shtick this time has the UK government storing top-secret information in the DNA of “minders” – volunteers who give up their old lives to live under the radar for five years, in an attempt to foil potential hackers. Of course it all goes wrong because… well,…

RELEASED OUT NOW! (collection out 17 November) Publisher Titan Comics Writer Jody Houser Artist Robert Ingranata ISSUES 1-2 Multi-platform event Time Lord Victorious is playing out across books, audio, an animated series and even live events. First out of the gate is this two-issue comic, in which the Tenth Doctor is pulled into an alternate reality where the Time War didn’t happen, then recruited to help defend the Daleks against an apparently even worse enemy. If you were put off by the incredibly dense “roadmap” that accompanies the event, don’t worry – this is a simple adventure that anyone can pick up. It’s just not a very interesting one and, with no characters outside of the Doctor and the two warring races, there’s little sense of jeopardy or excitement. Instead,…

RELEASED OCTOBER 75 minutes | CD/download Publisher Big Finish AUDIO DRAMA Big Finish’s first contribution to the sprawling Time Lord Victorious event is a sprightly sci-fi Western that introduces Paul McGann’s Eighth Doctor to a memorable new foe. The Doctor arrives on the ocean planet Atharna, but it’s not quite how he remembers it: something has turned it into an arid wilderness with a second sun. What’s more, he immediately encounters a most curious pair: an injured woman named Felicity (Misha Malcolm) and Brian, an Ood (Silas Carson, reprising his TV role as the voice of the species). Brian’s the star here, and the main link to the larger story (he also shows up in novel The Knight, The Fool And The Dead). Behind the polite Ood exterior, he’s secretly…

RELEASED Weekly from 1 OCTOBER 10x10-minute episodes | Podcast Publisher Anderson Entertainment AUDIO DRAMA It’s a good time to be a Gerry Anderson fan. Most of his biggest shows are available to stream on BritBox, while over the past few years Big Finish has been busy raiding Anderson’s back catalogue, giving fresh audio life to Space: 1999, Terrahawks, Space Precinct and Captain Scarlet – all with the help of the late puppetmaster’s son Jamie, who’s been a gatekeeper of the Gerry Anderson brand since his father died in 2012. Set in 2068, First Action Bureau (initials: FAB, of course) is Jamie Anderson’s first self-created show to emerge and, while there are a few light nods to his father’s work, this podcast drama feels very much its own thing. The First…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 246 minutes | Vinyl Publisher Demon Records RADIO DRAMA This’ll make a fine present for recordcollecting Gaiman obsessives. Inside a stylish black slipcase (along with a signed print) are three Radio 4 dramatisations of some of the author’s lesserknown works, all pressed to 140g gold vinyl. In Dirk Maggs’s adaptation of Stardust, young Tristran Thorn (Matthew Beard) vows to bring back a fallen star as a present for a local beauty, little realising that the star is alive and desired by various factions of witches and faerie. Sitting somewhere between the darker tone of the novel and the frothier Matthew Vaughn film, this is a decent romantic adventure, with plenty of intrigue – even if the hammedup rural accents do become a little wearisome. In Norse Mythology,…

DOM CARTER, FREELANCE WRITER When is a Roman spacecraft not a Roman spacecraft? When it’s a liferaft from a Yrrillian battle cruiser. Confused? So were schoolboys Tom and Geoff when they discovered Aquila in a cave next to a long-dead centurion. Named after the Latin word for eagle, Aquila was a puzzling car-sized spacecraft that could turn invisible, fire a deadly laser and temporarily give your arm superhuman strength if you shoved it in the glove compartment. Being characters in a late-’90s CBBC show, however, Tom and Geoff mainly used Aquila to get to school on time and collect rocks. Although when the boys hit puberty between series, it wasn’t long before they were using Aquila to impress dates and thinking of flying to the Canary Islands to spy on…