A Certain Slant of Light

[REC] (2007): This is Spanish found footage horror about a zombie virus outbreak in an apartment complex, filmed by a TV reporting duo who get trapped in there while accompanying first responders for a workplace documentary feature. On the whole I thought it was well executed. The lead reporter went off the deep end and into "We have to film every second of this!!! We have to show them what's really happening!!!!!" territory faster than I thought was entirely convincing, but I was happy to write it off in-universe as her way of coping so that I could kick back and enjoy the grisly terror that ensued.

There are elements of the film that I have to imagine would have been more shocking pre-COVID. Locked inside your apartment building, you say? Prevented by police from seeking basic medical care and supplies, you say? Hazmat-suited biosafety officials roaming outside the window, you say? Well, we've all been there! But the zombies themselves were very scary, and the end scene with ( spoilers ) had me breathless.

Warm Bodies (2013): A zombie on the hunt for brains meets a girl out scavenging for medical supplies to take back to her walled city, and instead of falling to it, falls in love. The zombie (known only as R, since he can't remember his name or anything about his past life) saves her life (though only after eating her boyfriend) and decides he's going to help her: first by taking her home with him to shelter in the abandoned airport where he and the rest of the horde eke out their shuffling, groaning, flesh-hungry existence; then by escorting her back to the human settlement in safety. But connecting with her has set off some mysterious process inside him, and suddenly he and the other zombies all start to show signs of humanity again.

This was SO CUTE. I loved everything about R's point of view: his shrugging awkwardness, the warm-hearty-meal pleasure of eating brains, his craving for anything that made him feel alive, the things he was self-conscious about (don't stare, she'll think you're a weirdo!) vs the things he wasn't (being a horrific animated corpse - that's just his normal). There's nothing deep or complex going on in this movie at all, but it delivered exactly what I hoped for: the aesthetic trappings of a horror flick, the fluffy joy of a romcom, and the winking sense of humour of a genre-savvy story with no ambition to be anything other than fun.

Two Can Play by Ali Hazelwood: Now this is the Ali Hazelwood story (singular) I’m here for! Our love interest is a very tall, hung, professionally successful STEM genius (a video game designer, this time) and a staunch feminist ally; so staunch, in fact, that he has spent years marinating miserably in his secret love for the heroine rather than run even the faintest trace of a risk that she might, if she were to squint at his actions in the worst possible faith, feel sexually harassed by his approach. Thanks to the fastidious avoidance by which he has overcompensated for his attraction, the heroine has been convinced he hates her - right up until a forced proximity scenario (a mandatory work retreat, this time) exposes our love interest’s true feelings for the heroine and causes her to fall in love with him, too. Delicious.

I wish I could take this as a sign that Ali is returning to my preferred form after the great big bundle of Not My Thing that was her last full length novel, Problematic Summer Romance. Alas, this novella actually predates that; it has only just hit shelves in print, but it was released as an Audible exclusive back in 2024, and I ignored its existence until now because fuck Audible exclusives. So while I’m always holding out hope for more rehashes of this exact story, I dare not hope too highly. Ali’s next release could still end up being another "hot for big brother's friend" age gap kinkathon. Or another omegaverse. Maybe it’ll be age gap big brother's friend omegaverse! To whatever god/s or higher powers you acknowledge, please pray for me that it not be so.

Me when I catch my kids' cold: 🙁🤧
Me when my husband doesn't catch our kids' cold, meaning I get to spend like half the weekend watching horror movies in bed while he takes over the heavy-duty parenting: 😈😈😈😈😈

Get Out (2017): HOLY SHIT WOW OKAY. WOW. I confess to being surprised back in 2017 when the whole world suddenly started saying that Jordan Peele, who I knew only as one of the two guys who made silly skits about hats, was actually a huge horror genius. I get it now. This was absolutely terrifying, but in a way that feels very different from any of the other horror I've been binging over this last couple of months. It has all the cleverness and humour you'd expect from a career comedian turned wunderkind of elevated horror, coupled with villains who are straight-up bloodcurdling in their fetishistic admiration of Blackness and cold disregard for real Black lives.

Chris is a young Black photographer on a trip out of town to meet his white girlfriend's family for the first time. They present as stereotypical white Liberals: wealthy but self-effacing, welcoming but awkward, proud of their self-avowed colourblindness but incapable of meeting an actual Black person without being deeply weird about race. And of course, all those smiles and good intentions turn out to be a deliberate front: the Armitage family has a secret, incredibly sinister plot to acquire and exploit Black bodies, and Chris finds himself ensnared in it before he has time to realise his unease is a gut response to something much darker than a few fumbling microaggressions. This film blew my mind. It was scary, it was funny, it was FUN, and underneath all that it was an extremely clear-sighted callout of a kind of covert racism that almost a full decade later still often seems to get a pass.

The Conjuring (2013): I loved this! It's a straightforward haunted house/demonic possession type story - family moves into creaky old country house, bad supernatural things happen, demonologists come to the rescue with a terrifying climactic exorcism scene - but every part of it is executed to spooky perfection. It's aesthetically beautiful (of the several posters/covers, this one best captures the ~vibe imo), has a cast of likeable characters I was cheering for the whole time, and manages to sustain an immaculate atmosphere of paranormal suspense livened up with just a small handful of well-timed jumpscares. No complaints. Prime material for a semi-regular Halloween rewatch.

I've always found stories involving professional exorcists, paranormal investigators etc. oddly comforting, no matter how scary they try to be. I know I should be alarmed by the idea that the supernatural not only exists but is sufficiently widespread to have spawned a viable career path, but it's just so nice to think that if you're ever in a situation where traditional law enforcement fails you, there's some stake-wielding hero or beautiful clairvoyant or quietly powerful magic shop owner out there who will put their own life on the line to help you. It's even nicer in stories where the rules of Christian folklore apply, and you can cling to a crucifix or a bottle of holy water for protection during your hero's brief but unavoidable offscreen time. The Christians do very much have to be Catholic, though. This is theologically disappointing but aesthetically essential. Imagine if you were in one of these movies, cowering in some dark, haunted corner as you wait for your exorcist to arrive, and then in walks some Protestant fresh from his drab conference-hall worship centre wearing his clerical collar with jeans. Dude doesn't even know Latin, probably. He and the demon are going to have to communicate through Google Translate.

Paranormal Activity (2007): Katie has been experiencing terrors in the dead of night since she was eight years old. Her shitty boyfriend Micah, finding out about them after they move in together, decides to "help" her by treating the whole thing as a sleuthing game and antagonising the demon attached to her while filming the whole thing. This is some seriously stripped back horror: something like half the runtime is just footage of the couple sleeping, while the other half is an increasingly weary Katie begging Micah not to film her, all happening inside the same few rooms of a neat, modern, unremarkable suburban American house. And it is SCARY. It had me on tenterhooks the whole time, heart leaping into my throat with every footstep noise or flicker of shadow. The final shot almost had me out of my seat.

Unlike The Conjuring, there are no comforting demonologists to save the day here; they exist, but they're, like, super busy and can't help you. I think that part might actually have been even scarier than the demon.

A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984): A group of teens start having vivid nightmares about the same disfigured man with knives on his fingers; if he kills them in their dreams, they die in real life. Now, this one I definitely did watch back in high school! Almost none of it actually jogged my memory, though, besides the Freddy costume itself and the scene where he slits his abdomen to reveal all those maggots. Man, though, what a fun slasher. I'd forgotten how funny Freddy is, the way he does his murders like they're playful capers - and then how scary it is at the end, when he loses his temper at being bested by Nancy and that playfulness turns to unbridled rage.

(Behold! A cute new ghost librarian icon for spooky reading specifically. I've uploaded some new horror movie themed icons, too. Gotta get the most out of my paid account.)

Seventeen-year-old Jade Daniels is a half-Blackfeet girl living with her abusive father in a small lakeside town in Idaho. Alienated and lonely, she retreats into slasher movies, fantasising vividly about a real-life slasher villain someday appearing to tear up the town she hates. But then a community of uberwealthy developers and media moguls move into a new luxury settlement in the national park across the lake, bringing with them a daughter Jade's age who turns out to be the perfect embodiment of the slasher genre's Final Girl archetype; bodies start washing up, killed in mysterious ways, and Jade becomes convinced that her fantasy is at last coming true.

This is - oh, man. I LOVED this book. Jones does not for one second allow the fact that he is a middle-aged man to interfere with the overwhelmingly authentic troubled-teenage-girlness of Jade as a protagonist. I know this girl. I'm friends with this girl. I literally went to school with this girl, or at least, a few different girls who add up to her. Her viewpoint is blinkered by all the petty adolescent foibles you'd expect as well as the much darker stuff, and it's a big source of poignancy that we as adult readers can see the very different version of events being experienced by the few adults who care about Jade and are trying to help her, but she cannot see it at all. She remains fervently committed to the world she has constructed for herself in a way only kids of this almost-worldly, I-know-it-all-now age can be - which makes it all the more impactful when she and the adults both turn out to be completely right, in ways that should be fundamentally incompatible but somehow aren't.

So, yeah. The character work and overall handling of narrative themes in this novel are among the best I've read in ages. I am therefore all the more inclined to nitpick its structural flaws, because (to reduce things to a simplified Goodreads rating system) I really badly wanted this to be a five-star book but could only in good faith award it four. Which still puts it well inside my "heartily recommend" bracket by any measure! If you haven't read it but think you might like to, please add my name to the list of people who've recced it to you and stop reading here. What follows will be both spoiler-riddled and comparatively far less important than the book's strengths.

( Major spoilers under the cut )

On the other hand, I don't know it's just because I acclimated myself to Jones' prose last year with The Only Good Indians, but I found this an easier, more aesthetically pleasing read. And the cover design is gorgeous in this very simple, distilled way that breezily outperforms many more elaborate confections. If I ever spot a copy of this book secondhand, I'm snapping it up because it will look lovely on my shelf, and also because I know it's one I'm going to want to read again down the line. I just love Jade so much.