Tag: horror

carmilla and the girlhood horror of being chosen

Carmilla, a gothic novella by J. S. Le Fanu, explores themes of loneliness and dangerous friendships through the eyes of naive teenager Laura. Her intense bond with the seductive and predatory Carmilla reveals a compelling, intimate depiction of vampirism. This dynamic evokes broader comparisons to contemporary vampire narratives and relationships.

Carmilla, the 1872 gothic novella by J. S. Le Fanu, understands that when you are lonely enough, a dangerous friend can feel like a miracle. It can feel like a blessing from God, even if they are really jealous amphibians who soak in blood like a tampon.

Laura is nineteen. Pause. Listen to Hayley Williams’ cover of the Tegan and Sara song Nineteen right now. Come back. Now you’re in the brain of a 19-year-old girl.

Laura lives in a very rural world with her aging dad, no mom, next to no social life, and very little experience. Life is boring, anything new that happens feels so big and exciting.

When Laura meets Carmilla, she isn’t entering the world of someone living a full life, she is meeting someone with a big gaping lonely hole of a life who dreams about making a friend her age. She is very naive, which makes Carmilla (beautiful, intense, new) look like The Apple to Eve.

Carmilla is seductive in every sense. She has the pull of an intense new friendship: fast closeness, emotional whiplash, obsession, secrets, quick codependence, and the feeling that someone fascinating has chosen you. When you’re a teenage girl, you throw yourself into people like this. You want to feel special, you want to be chosen. Laura knows absolutely nothing about Carmilla, and points out multiple times that Carmilla won’t share details about her life.

I like the sapphic take, and that is a different lens to view the book in. My personal read comes from knowing how it feels to be absorbed by a friendship before you know whether that person is safe.

Carmilla is a predator. She’s your best friend who only wants you to spend time with her. She has mood swings, strange expressions, possessiveness, manipulation, and this constant sense that she knows more than she is saying. She is plotting, but she is also driven by appetite. That’s why this version of the vampire is so compelling and can be seen going strong today in pretty much everything. She is manipulative, but she also may not fully have self control.

Thinking about how this type of vampire that J. S. Le Fanu has crafted shows up in other famous works, Dracula feels like a male vampire story about purity, possession, and men rallying around Mina. We must save the purest woman. The purest woman will inspire us all, as Men.

Carmilla is more intimate. Laura isn’t perfect, she’s very naive because she has no experience. The vampire takes advantage of her loneliness. The vampire gets into the home, the bedroom, the friendship, the nervous system. She does not only attack Laura, she makes Laura love her.

And Carmilla is an amphibian! Picture her naked and perfectly preserved, pickling herself in a coffin filled with blood. She is a tampon of monstrosity. That was my favorite depiction of a vampire. She is beautiful, weak, ancient, deadly, and dependent all at once.

I have been going back to the “sources” of some of my favorite creatures like vampires, fairies, werewolves, witches, etc. and reading the original works and comparing to the modern versions. This version of the vampire feels very familiar, and very cool to have held up this long.

Is Carmilla… Edward Cullen? Is Bella Swan, Laura? I can’t get into this right now.

the solution for a claustrophobic astronaut is to give him more space

Alien: Romulus is the ninth film in the Alien series, and it’s a mixed bag. The plot lacks depth, but David Jonsson’s performance as Andy the Android was a highlight. Rain, the main character, and her gang get into trouble with aliens while trying to escape their grim mining colony. Overall, I give it a 7/10.

Review for Alien: Romulus (2024) – 7/10 – SPOILERS AHEAD!

Alien: Romulus is the ninth movie in the Alien franchise, set right between Alien and Aliens. If you need the lore, I’d recommend checking out Alien and Prometheus before seeing this movie, solely because those are my favorites.

I have to give this movie a solid 7/10, and it would be a 6/10 except for the performance of David Jonsson, who plays Andy the Android. In general, the plot was lacking substance, but I was excited to see a sci-fi with body horror and suspense elements. I think the ending could’ve been taken even further, and I’ll explain what I wish happened.

The main character is Rain (Cailee Spaeny), a girl who lives with her “brother” Andy, an android (aka synthetic human) in a sad mining colony on an unhealthy planet. Her friends, who all seem like kind of awful people with big problems due to the living situation sucking so much, convince her to break into a ship that is floating around their planet’s rings to steal cryostasis pods that they can use to ship themselves to a better planet. Plot twist, aliens are on the ship and want to kill them, and do. That’s pretty much the whole plot.

The cast of characters includes:

  • Tyler, the only semi-rational character other than Rain, played by Archie Renaux. I really loved him in Shadow and Bone so was excited to see him in this film. I love him as a love interest, though I thought his character was a little boring.
  • Tyler’s sister Kay is a mostly ineffective character who reveals she is pregnant and that the father is “some jerk.” Her actress is Isabela Merced, who was also Dora the Explorer (iconic!!!) in the live-action films. Though she’s very popular online (she has 4M Instagram followers), I’ve never seen her act before. I kind of hated this character because pregnant Hispanic woman in space was meh. As a Hispanic woman myself, I wish she was just mentally a stronger character or more capable generally.
  • Bjorn, aka “some jerk”. He’s British, unintelligible, has anger issues, and hates Andy because his parents were killed in one of the mines when an android made the decision to sacrifice some people to let more live. I wish there were subtitles when he spoke because I did not pick up on all the lines he delivered. The actor, Spike Fearn, was great at portraying the angry guy who makes poor decisions. Side note, I think this guy should play Sid Vicious if they make another biopic.
  • Navarro is either also romantically linked to Bjorn or just a friend of the squad, and she had the earliest death and probably the least amount of screen time. For those reasons, I feel neutral about her actress, Aileen Wu. She dies a true facehugger-to-chestburster death, and that’s the last of her.
  • Rook is the last character, a synthetic human engineer who works for The Company. This character is kind of Andy’s spirit guide, while also leading to the subplot of the Black Goo of Life. Alien: Romulus used AI to bring back the late great Sir Ian Holm’s likeness for this android, and although I don’t think it was necessary, I didn’t find that it distracted me or hurt the film. It was more of a huh, okay, moment.
  • The Thing that Kay gave birth to was really creepy, and cool, and this is where I wish things had been taken so much further. It goes to its mother and I wish it had done something truly awful like breastfed or started crying for her to hold it. The best part of the movie was this sickening creature, and instead, we wasted time on things like introducing and killing Navarro for 0 reasons.

There were some great suspenseful moments in this film, like when Rain and Andy find themselves in a scary, aliens-are-all-around-us-and-could-come-kill-us-at-any-moment passage and Andy is having the equivalent of an android seizure. You want him to be okay, and you’re worried about the aliens who seem to be able to just fly down from these really tall corridors at any moment.

I didn’t find that I cared that much about any of the characters’ deaths because they chopped through them so quickly. The only character I was rooting for was Rain, because you kind of just knew everyone else was meant to die.

I give it a 7/10 because it was cool and thrilling and set in space, and for Andy.