Deja Boo: The Birds

Still creepy after all these years

When I was a college freshman, my roommate had a blue parakeet. On occasion, the bird would escape the cage and fly around our tiny dorm room and I would hide under the covers until the bird was safely back in the cage. I realized back then that my fear of free flying animals was likely based on my childhood viewing of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. I didn’t consume a lot of horror as a young child and I actively avoided graphic slasher films. The idea of scaring myself intentionally was limited to intense amusement park rides, not scary movies. As a result, much of what I saw in the horror genre were reruns of old black-and-white film classics that felt more like melodramatic gothic stage theater rather than being actually terrifying. However, one day, while flipping through the channels, I came across an old movie called The Birds, and I couldn’t look away. There are movies that will stay with you for various reasons, and not always because they are particularly well made or well acted. I was riveted by scenes of little children, my age, being attacked and wounded. And I was particularly creeped out by the attacking “monster” being something I walked by, or beneath, every day on my way to school. Without my realizing it, The Birds changed my brain chemistry when it came to the chirps and birdsong of sweet flying creatures with claws and beaks.

The story follows Melanie (Tippi Hedren), an impeccably dressed, pampered socialite whose minor hijinks periodically land her in trouble, but without lasting consequences. At a bird shop in San Francisco, Melanie and a charming young lawyer named Mitch (Rod Taylor) mutually prank each other. Determined to get back at Mitch, Melanie buys a pair of lovebirds and drives up to the seaside town of Bodega Bay to sneak them into the house which Mitch shares with his uptight, widowed mother (Jessica Tandy) and his cheerful, school-aged younger sister, Cathy (Veronica Cartwright). Melanie is helped and reluctantly befriended by Annie (Suzanne Pleshette), a cynical young woman who is Cathy’s teacher and Mitch’s ex-girlfriend. However, a series of isolated, strange bird encounters gradually escalates into swarms of massive, coordinated attacks and lethal carnage in the little town.

The Birds did a great job of creating a fear of the ordinary which, at least for me, can be far more scary than fantastical monsters or creatures. The birds in the story aren’t radioactive, alien, or super-enhanced in any way. They are just ordinary birds, en masse, and very angry at people. This is one of the early films I had seen that used the idea that any small thing, in sufficient numbers and fury, can kill you. This concept has been played out with ants, spiders, piranha, and young children, in other horror stories I saw later in life. I didn’t really worry about sharks or piranha in my home town, but birds were a regular presence in my life. I would see them massed on telephone lines or flying in formation in the sky. After the gory scene where Jessica Tandy finds a friend dead with his eyes gone, I had a new respect for birds.

The Rewatch

As part of our Déjà Boo series, I recently did a rewatch of The Birds to see how it compared to my childhood memories. Despite some dated acting and special effects (that make it sometimes drift a little towards campiness), it’s still creepy after all these years. There were things I noticed on my grownup watch that I didn’t catch or think about when I was a child. First of all, there is no music. Most films, especially from the 1960s, have jaunty background tunes or suspenseful music to set the emotional tone of the scene. In The Birds, music is absent, so there is only the natural sounds of the birds. Even in the most terrifying and violent scenes, there is only the flapping of wings and screeching of the birds and the cries of the victims.

Another thing I noticed is how slow and ordinary the start of the film is. There is no dramatic opening, chase scenes, jump scares or other intensity. Almost the first third of the movie is Melanie figuring out how to prank Mitch with the lovebirds. Even after she gets to Bodega Bay, she is still chatting with and manipulating the locals to complete her prank. I love how polished she is with lying for this small, petty thing, and I was intrigued by the way the small conversations gradually reveal the various characters’ inner demons long before they are hacked at by birds. The slow creep of the story prior to the pivotal action scenes and the lack of dramatic music created a feeling of vague, impending dread while still making the intense physical attacks sneak up on you.

The third thing I noticed on my rewatch was, well, the birds themselves. This may seem obvious, but as a child I was just freaked out by the massive amounts of birds attacking children my age. Watching this as a grownup, my brain was thinking about logistics. How did they get so many birds? How did they get them to swarm? I went down some unverified internet rabbit holes and read that most of the birds were real, but some were mechanical (which on second viewing you can sort of see when a child is pinned to the ground by a persistent bird). I also read that Tippi Hedren was surprised on set by the unexpected use of real, rather than mechanical, birds attacking her in a pivotal scene.

The final element I noticed during my rewatch were the philosophical conversations between the various characters, including several of the side characters. There are multiple times where a victim reports an attack and is disbelieved, not because they are untrustworthy, but because the listener doesn’t want to believe it could be true. There is a great scene in the town’s diner where Melanie reports that there was a bird attack on the school children, and an elderly woman who is a bird expert explains that a coordinated bird attack couldn’t happen, even though it clearly has. Another customer at the diner doesn’t want to hear the information because it will scare her two children. When the birds swarm the area around the diner, the customers stare at Melanie in the aftermath and one says that Melanie must be to blame. It’s an interesting reminder of toxic group conversation dynamics that continue to exist in our current day.

The Birds may seem tame by contemporary standards, but as a child I was riveted by the bird attacks, especially since children were often the targets and they were being attacked by real-life creatures that I regularly encountered. While the gore was mostly kept to a minimum, there were several jump scare scenes with an eyeless corpse or a man engulfed in flames or a child with a bird pecking at her neck. These scenes were enough to leave an indelible imprint on my young thoughts. As a result, The Birds remains a memorable experience as one of my first horror films.

Highlights:

• No music, so many birds
• Jump scares
• Kids always in peril

POSTED BY: Ann Michelle Harris – Multitasking, fiction writing Trekkie currently dreaming of her next beach vacation.

Anime Review: Kaiju Girl Caramelise

A cynical, thoughtful, funny twist on the usual coming-of-age rom-com anime

As the world around us feels more stressful, the proliferation of anime rom-coms offer a sweet retreat, and an alternative to the (often equally cathartic) intense or violent adventure stories. With charming characters, poignant moments, the overcoming of insecurities or childhood traumas, and slice-of-life coziness, all of these tropes can be a perfect balm to a stressful day. When you’re in the mood for that kind of vibe, I highly recommend a few of my favorites: The Fragrant Flower Blooms With Dignity, You and I are Polar Opposites, the very underrated and funny Tamon’s B-Side, and the ultimate evening chill show Smoking Behind the Supermarket With You. However, my latest guilty pleasure is a bit of a departure from the general sweetness of the romance anime genre. Kaiju Girl Caramelise offers a different kind of rom-com, in the form of a gender-swapped, building-crushing, monster love story that’s wild, funny, and unexpectedly meaningful about external appearances and the pressure to fit in.

Kuroe Akaishi is a high school loner who dresses in dark clothing and avoids socializing due to her unusual “skin condition.” But this is more than an inconvenient allergic reaction. When she gets overstimulated, her hands turn into thick claws, she grows a monstrous tail, and eventually she begins to turn into a giant (skyscraper-sized) Godzilla-like monster. As the new school year begins, a popular and beautiful boy, Arata Minami, becomes attracted to her, despite her outcast status and her intentionally goth appearance. This newfound and very genuine attention leads to dangerous overstimulation in the worst way as Akaishi finds herself reluctantly attracted to the boy despite her grumpy, self-conscious attempts to avoid him. But as their relationship grows, she loses control of herself more frequently and begins to fully transform into her enormous fearful kaiju form, which the locals nickname “Harugon.” Although afraid of the creature, Minami feels an unexpected connection to it and treats it with empathy. Minami struggles to manage the constant social pressure he feels at school, but he soon finds himself at the center of national media attention when the rampaging Harugon publicly shows kindness and restraint with him. Meanwhile, Akaishi is both horrified by her nightly transformation and property damage and stressed out about figuring out what kind of creature she really is, while also angsting about her unintentionally toxic affection for Minami. Fortunately, Akaishi is supported by several women in her life, including her single mother, a scientist, who has a major secret related to Akaishi’s transformations. Akaishi is also supported at school by unexpected new friendships from Manata, a wealthy, kaiju-obsessed classmate, and Reiru, a cosmetics expert and fashionista who has her own unexpected physical appearance secret.

For a show with such a funny and light premise, Kaiju Girl Caramelise has surprisingly solid commentary on society’s focus on physical appearances versus true emotional connections. All of the lead characters have an unexpected side that fits this theme. Akaishi is a shapeshifting teen girl and destructive Godzilla monster. Despite this secret, her new friends support her, and her dreamy boyfriend loves her even though something seems off. On the other hand, Minami is popular because of his good looks, but his childhood was one where he was overweight and bullied, making him now overcompensate by starving himself to stay “beautiful” and by being automatically social and warm with everyone. The cycle of hyper-popularity due to his physical appearance is exhausting and toxic for him, and it gets even worse for him when he becomes the focus of national attention. Rich and pretty Manata is obsessed only with the monstrous Harugon creature, to the point of jealousy of Minami’s public connection to it. And Reiru channels her physical insecurities into a thriving social media presence about creating your own beauty, since beauty is essentially superficial. Later in the series, a boy, Daichi Yoneyama, appears to be a rival to Minami, but he is also not what he appears to be.

Interestingly, when Akaishi transforms into Harugon, she is not only physically monstrous, but she also changes emotionally, becoming more volatile, impatient, and frustrated. Akaishi will often acknowledge her escalating temper during her transformation. This is a change from shows like Kaiju No. 8, in which the transformed protagonist (Kafka Hibino) remains sweet-natured and tries to moderate his monster form while retaining his sense of humor. On the contrary, although Akaishi usually tries to calm herself down to stop her initial transformation, once it is complete, she relishes her monstrous side and finds it exhilaratingly cathartic. In one very funny scene, she thinks (incorrectly) that Minami wants to make out with her, and she knows that will trigger her potentially deadly kaiju transformation. Instead of leaving him or trying to calm down, she instead says, “Sorry, Tokyo, you’re all doing to die tonight.”

While Minami is the ultimate green flag, cinnamon roll character, the show has fun with gender-swapping the traditional monster and damsel-in-distress roles. In Kaiju Girl Caramelise, the giant, bridge-stomping monster is a girl, while the beautiful, kind-hearted, person in peril is a boy. When Minami first encounters a rampaging Harugon, he feels a familiarity with it after looking into the eyes of the monster, and he, at least subconsciously, realizes he has a connection to the creature. We soon have several moments of the kaiju catching or saving Minami, while the news cameras are rolling, which in turn causes Minami to become a national sensation, nicknamed the “Kaiju Prince.” But it is always clear that the real strength of the show is Akaishi. She remains a realistic combination of boldness, insecurity, humor, strength, cynicism, and thoughtfulness.

In its short run of episodes, Kaiju Girl Caramelise succeeds in being sharp, cynical, funny, and surprisingly thoughtful about the societal pressure for a “beautiful” appearance and the value of struggling to push past the superficial expectations. It also has a great deal of feminism and positive girl power energy as Akaishi, Reiru, and Manata all support each other and even find unexpected support among their female classmates. The show will periodically venture towards traditional mean-girl territory and then subvert the usual tropes with something that is actually and surprisingly positive. Despite the funny rom-com set up and completely enjoyable story arc, Kaiju Girl Caramelise has enough heart to be more than the deliciously guilty pleasure that it seems to be.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

Highlights:

• Gender-swapped monster romance
• Surprisingly positive messaging
• Funny, enjoyable guilty pleasure adventure

POSTED BY: Ann Michelle Harris – Multitasking, fiction writing Trekkie currently dreaming of her next beach vacation.

Deja Boo: Child's Play

Child's Play still holds up after 40 years, and is a film that is most likely still scaring children into avoiding their dolls

This movie was the one. The one that caused me to forever fear dolls. Now, is it happenstance that I was also a tomboy in the late 1980s and didn't really like them anyway? We'll never know. But I can say that this movie personally traumatized me, and it's perhaps the scariest Deja Boo I'll personally revisit this month.

Since its release in 1988, Child's Play—or less formally known as "Chucky"—has spawned a franchise of six sequels, a TV show, and a reboot. I think it's easy to forget how chilling the first movie was back when it was just a standalone film. The intervening years have sort of Flanderized the demonic doll into a evil, sardonic toy version of Deadpool. That's okay, there's clearly an audience for this sort of thing.

But when you rewatch this first film that launched everything, it's an incredibly frightening supernatural slasher that sticks with you. Like with Killer Klowns from Outer Space, I don't recall ever sitting down and watching Child's Play from beginning to end when I was a kid. It was whispered about in playgrounds, featured in the lineup in the papery-thin HBO viewing guide that came in the mail, and stacked three deep in the horror section of my local video stores. That was plenty exposure for a young Haley to say absolutely not and bid adieu to even the innocuous Teddy Ruxpin that had previously been living in my room.

There's an easy explanation to why the idea of a haunted doll terrorizes children. They're things of comfort, given to you by a loving adult. They possess an emotional safety that binds you to them. If they suddenly turn on you and at the very least cause trouble—and at the very worst threaten you—you're liable to not be believed. It's only a doll, they'd say. Stop playing, Mom would counter.

Therein lies their fear.

The plot

Chucky is a possessed doll that comes to life in Child's Play, and finds his way via happenstance to the home of young Andy and his single Mom in Chicago. Chucky is the cartoon star of a popular kid's cartoon, and Andy is obsessed—he even has Chucky's trademark blue overalls in the form of pajamas (another terrifying thing to watch given the ubiquity of Chucky in pop culture now). His mom is struggling to stay afloat, but manages to buy a stolen Chucky doll for a song from a back-alley peddler.

Chucky eventually comes to life, and begins tormenting Andy and his family. We find out that Chucky is actually possessed by the soul of a local serial killer who, upon being shot up by a cop played by Christopher Sarandon, utters a magical voodoo incantation and sends his essence into a 2-foot doll.

As a possessed doll, he's not just there for a good time. He has Andy take him via the L train to a sketchy part of town where he can take vengeance on his former accomplice. He then goes and visits his voodoo master, who tells him that he can only come back to corporeal form if he says the incantation again in front of the first human to whom he revealed he was alive. In other words, he now has to kill Andy.

Andy, his mom, and Chris Sarandon eventually figure this all out, and manage to take him out—but not until after he's been kicked, stabbed, shot, and burnt (very Rasputin of him).

What scared me then

Honestly, it was more the idea and image of Chucky that got me more than any specific scene. Seeing a red-headed doll—even if only in brief swatches—was terrifying. I'm sure I'm not alone in this. There's a reason Chucky is up there in the mononym club like Michael, Jason, and Freddie. He's mean-spirited, vulgar, and has zero problem killing men, women, and children.

I think more than the idea of him, though, was his visage. All dolls to me are unsettling, really, but Chucky is beyond the pale. He's creepy when he's the happy, harmless, smiling version of the real-life doll. But when the serial killer's soul wakes up, he contorts the doll's face into an angry, twisted sneer, and the eyes glisten with hate.

It was scary then, and it's scary now.

What scares me now

First, I want to explore what's more disturbing: If Chucky's deranged-supernatural-serial-killer-possession origin was never discussed, or the fact that it is. I think the not knowing would be more disturbing actually, because it would be more like a random act of terror. Him having the backstory somehow makes him more human, I think, so for me it's a little less scary. Now, I still wouldn't want to confront either one, of course, don't get me wrong. But random acts of violence are inherently less upsetting than a situation (no matter how far-fetched) that can be explained at least a little.

The scene where Andy's mom realizes that this stolen doll she bought for her son is truly, evilly alive, is so stark and horrifying. She's looking over the box he came in, and then—the included batteries fall out. This thing has been talking and moving by itself. All of a sudden, all the things Andy's said Chucky's been saying and doing make a lot more sense. It's alive.

Seeing Chucky amble out in the wild, even at a distance, is discomfiting. There's a scene where Andy is watching Chucky run up some outdoor stairs towards him, knowing that Chucky will try to kill him. It's a brief scene, and some may call it a throwaway, but I found it oddly scary. You see this little bright red and blue doll scurrying up steps, moving on its own volition. It's scarier, to me, than any close-up special effect, because it just seems… real. There's an urgency to it that can't be shaken.

Towards the end of the movie, after they've tried repeatedly to kill Chucky, he gets burnt to crisp, all blackened wax and sooty skin. He's alive still, and at this point, at his most physically disgusting. I think this part is especially scary because not only is he a haunted doll, which is frightening because he resembles a real child, but he's also burnt beyond recognition. No one wants to imagine a badly burnt child, but that's exactly what he resembles. It's horrific, and it compounds the fear you've been facing all movie-long to this point.

Child's Play is an upsetting movie, and I feel a little justified in being such a scaredy cat about it in my youth. I dare any parent to let their child even know this movie exists—you'd have the same situation.

POSTED BY: Haley Zapal, NoaF contributor and lawyer-turned-copywriter living in Atlanta, Georgia. A co-host of Hugo Award-winning podcast Hugo, Girl!, she posts on Instagram as @cestlahaley. She loves nautical fiction, growing corn and giving them pun names like Timothee Chalamaize, and thinking about fried chicken.

Deja Boo: The Brave Little Toaster

Baby's first introduction to the inevitability of death

I will confess to you now that The Brave Little Toaster never made me cry. It’s not the sort of movie that made me fear that there was a monster under the bed, or anything like that. But I do remember, vaguely, being fascinated by the film all the same. I couldn’t really tell you why; I liked talking cars, so that last musical number had an enduring appeal to me. But, as those of us who have actually watched this film could tell you, the actual content of that musical number will in retrospect make people question my upbringing.

This is a movie that I remembered fondly throughout my youth but for the longest time never actually sat down to rewatch. I rediscovered the soundtrack on a Reddit thread (more on that later) and would listen to it during certain tough times. I did not, however, dedicatedly watch the film again. The film is from 1987. I was born in 1996. I watched it in the early 2000s. And in the Year of Our Lord 2026, I watched it again, staring down the gunbarrel of thirty years old.

I must admit: this film is dark for a children’s film, but is dark in a way that is perhaps not obvious to a child. Your basic plot is that five appliances—a toaster, an electric blanket, a vacuum cleaner, a lamp, and a radio—have been left at the country cottage of a city family. The appliances miss the child that they had provided for for so long, whom they call “the Master.” After years and years of being left in the cottage with little sight of the Master, the appliances get together and decide to brave the wilderness to find the Master and resume their lives of faithful service. It turns out, though, that the Master has grown up. He is no longer a child, and in fact he is setting off to go to college, and from there adulthood.

In that premise alone there is a lot to unpack. This is set during high Reaganism, the age of “greed is good,” the age when America assumed what was profitable and what was good were in fact one and the same. What is striking is one of the assumptions made by the film (based off of a 1980 novella by acclaimed science fiction writer Thomas Disch) about its characters: the idea that their fulfillment is found in service. This is an idea that, by itself, sounds very Reagan-era. The film literalizes the concept of a “dream job” by downright stating that these characters are pining for a state of continued servitude. But, if you cock your head a bit in a certain direction, you can see this in a much more liberatory way. Everyone wants to make a living doing what they love, what they’re good at, and you can read the appliances’ quest as a quest for self-actualization. But if this is a metaphor for self-actualization, the metaphor fails a bit; tools are designed to be used for specific purposes. Human beings are simply born.

The appliances march through a dangerous wilderness to the city. This wilderness isn’t particularly dangerous to human beings; indeed Indigenous people had lived in them for millennia (the nature of this film looks vaguely like that of the Mountain West—the radio mentions Utah as being a different place, so I am very tentatively willing to guess that the film is set in Colorado, but really it could be somewhere between there and northern California), though I would suppose that a city-dweller would need some teaching. In any case, these are not humans, but human creations. They have to navigate the wilderness using a vacuum’s wheels and a battery tied to an office chair, and to get out of scrapes, they have to use the vacuum’s cord (they use it to swing across a river once, and another time use it to get the blanket down from a tree). But what they all discover, with emotional force so intense they sing about it, is that this world can be utterly beautiful. Their own sense of purpose has locked them in a house, pining for somebody who isn’t there, and they have denied themselves so much because of it.

They eventually find themselves in the possession of a man who works with appliances like them for a living, a rotund tinkerer-cum-salesman by the name of Elmo St. Peters. He works what is, for our main characters, a grisly trade: he sells appliances, and more disturbingly, he sells appliance parts. Your characters are therefore plunged into an actual horror story for beings of their nature. You get another musical number, led by a hanging lamp with an unnerving resemblance to Peter Lorre. Elmo St. Peters is a man who can be read as the evil doppelganger of the Master: the Master uses his appliances to help himself, thereby actualizing them, while Elmo St. Peters uses his appliances to help himself, thereby dismembering them. You, and they, are confronted with the wildly different meanings of the verb “to use.“

The appliances eventually make it to the Master’s new home, an apartment in the city. They are met by the shiny new appliances, cutting edge for the 1980s and hideously dated by modern standards. That’s where the film shows its age the most; the old vacuum looks very much like a modern vacuum, and the titular toaster is very close to the one I have in my house. The computers and stereos and all the other things in the new apartment, however, look very ‘80s, and this becomes ever more in your face as they sing about how new they are in a tune that is filled to the brim with synthesizers of that era (as well as an obvious Carmen Miranda parody at one point).

And then we get to the junkyard scene. This is the part of the movie that I remembered vividly, even in the twenty-some years I didn’t watch it. This is the song that I found in a Reddit thread that became a talisman for me in times of misery. I listened to it a lot right after I graduated high school, before finding a proper summer job, having been put through the rite of passage that those of us my age, give or take a few years, went through: being driven from store to store by your parents and ordered to ask if they had any job openings, only to be told to apply online (maybe one store let me fill something out there—this was summer 2015). I listened to it a lot during my mental health crash my sophomore year of college (I showed it to at least one therapist). I listened to it, again, in the wake of my suicide attempt, an attempt born out of guilt.

But describing it in words won’t do it justice. Take a few minutes and watch it.

Look into my virtual eyes and tell me this isn’t the darkest shit you’ve ever seen in a children’s film. Occasionally, in college, the swing dance and ballroom dance clubs I was in would share the songs from the movies they loved as children. Most would have some sugary song from the Disney Renaissance. I would show them this, and they would give me weird looks.

Again, I think that I liked this bit as a child because of the talking cars. It’s certainly a catchy tune, with bits of surf rock and a driving beat that would make it easy to swing dance to (I have never had the pleasure, unfortunately), written by the acclaimed Van Dyke Parks. As an adult, this scene encapsulates the themes of the film in a terrifying way. You are literally staring into the jaws of death! How did anyone let this get put in a children’s film? (A big part, by my understanding, was having it made independently rather than financed by Disney). This is a song about feeling left behind, the feeling that you belonged to a different era. Long-time science fiction readers may notice a thematic overlap with George R. R. Martin’s 1983 novel The Armageddon Rag. That is a work dominated by nostalgia and the fear of being left behind. The characters are aging rockers whose heyday was the swinging ‘60s, the age of free love and peace and the antiwar movement. It is a book that is the hypercapitalist, reactionary, money-obsessed ‘80s looking back at the freewheeling, anti-establishment ‘60s, asking where the time had gone.

I’m going to go through that song car by car. I think it deserves it:

The first car we don’t get that good of a look at, but he’s a common person’s car, a means to get from here to there. He’s very much the person who’s thrown too much time into their job and has lost any sense of self. He reminds me of my father.

The second car is more artistically clear in her intent: she’s a car of the optimistic Space Age of the ‘50s, with her sleek design that calls to mind rockets. She is a paean to lost optimism.

The third car is a ‘50s hot rod, with the raspy voice of an aging rock star whose voice has been destroyed by booze and cigarettes. He’s one way of looking at lost youth, tied to a very specific time and place.

The fourth car is a race car of the type common in the interwar years, who realistically couldn’t hold a candle to the cars of the ‘80s. He’s about how skills and senses degrade as you age, and how the highs of youth cannot be recreated afterwards. He’s the car most comparable to an athlete.

The fifth and sixth cars are a limousine and a hearse, respectively. The former sings of a wedding, the latter a funeral, and these are implied to be for the same man. They are clearly the same model of car in different livery to suit different purposes, and sent together into the maw of death. Sex and death are so commonly intertwined in art, and that is the case here. One begets the other.

The sixth car is the reason why, whenever I want to listen to this song, I listen to a version ripped directly from the film rather than the official soundtrack. For on the soundtrack they bowdlerized her lyrics and overlaid a weird-sounding new line that juts out like a nail. I understand why they felt the need to do this, as it is the most openly sexual of any of the verses. This car is reminiscent of the VW vans that the hippies loved, and the surfboard on her roof is self-explanatory. She is the embodiment of the swinging ‘60s, the age of free love, and (as Jack Weinberg put it) never trusting anyone over the age of 30. By the time this film was made, those bright young people would mostly have settled down, reached middle age, taken corporate jobs, and started families—and I suspect that several of them would have watched this film with their children. This segment is another catchy song with talking cars for children, but I can imagine it was a shot across the bow for their parents.

The last car is downright tragic. He is a work truck, left forgotten to rot, deemed superfluous as his owners looked for a better future in the city (here, Santa Fe). Notably, this is specifically stated to be on a reservation, and from the mention of the Hopi later on we can guess this is the Hopi reservation of Arizona (surrounded, incidentally, by the larger Navajo reservation). The time this car was made useful would have been the age of the Red Power movement, when the Indigenous peoples of the continent demanded that the settler state and the settler society remember that they were still living, breathing peoples, not dead ones. This truck is a forgotten tool of a forgotten people, and those layers of forgottenness leave him only one course of action: he is the only car to voluntarily take his place on the conveyor belt to total destruction.

This is a film that is frankly much scarier as an adult than as a child. I am now months away from thirty, the age that society has decided is the end of your fun and the end of your youth, the year you are supposed to be an “adult,” whatever that means. I am autistic, and I have ADHD, which means that I have been “behind” several “adult” milestones. I still live with my parents, because everything in Northern Virginia is hideously expensive. I only got my first job at 25, and I am still there, because the job application process is hell for people like me. I have never had a relationship. I have never even dated anyone. As someone who has spent his entire life chasing an ideal that I simply cannot reach, the themes of obsolescence of this movie resonate with me deeply. Part of me wonders if such great thematic work is wasted on children, but on the other hand, I would never have seen it as an adult had I never seen it as a child. It is a seed that grew into a great and mighty tree that has borne many fruits, and it has done so because the fear it is based on comes for us all.

And, if you're so inclined, it's now on Disney Plus.

POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.

Book Review: The Rise and Fall of the Galactic Empire, by Chris Kempshall

A very specific type of Star Wars fan gets what they always wanted

There’s a segment of fandom communities, and I can vouch that this is particularly strong in alternate history communities, that likes taking a look at a fantastic setting and seeing how it could be made to make some degree of sense. Of course, many of these settings violate the laws of physics, but you can look at them and impose logical consistency. Being a Star Wars fan, I have often thought of how you could make that universe make sense—and, of course, the Expanded Universe, both before and after the Disney buyout, did this in spades. But now, Disney has done something the franchise, to my knowledge, has never done: released a history book about the Star Wars setting: The Rise and Fall of the Galactic Empire, by Chris Kempshall.

Reading this book I could not help but feel that us Star Wars fans were given a great gift in that the universe conspired to get Mr. Kempshall to write a book like this; he himself admits that he had been wanting to write this book for most of his life. He is also a professional historian, specializing in World War I, and having done a lot of work on the representation of history in video games. What you get, then, is a book that feels like it was written by a fan, in the sense that sheer enthusiasm drips off of every page, and by a professional, in that there is a structural rigor undergirding the project that gives it greater depth than simple fan works might.

One of the things that really helps the verisimilitude of the book is that Kempshall knows how history as a discipline works. I am familiar with this type of faux-history book style of writing, as I have been involved with online alternate history communities for the better part of twenty years (and that makes me feel very old to say), and one of the things that become very obvious after a certain point of learning history on your own is that many of them have only gotten facts from Wikipedia and other easily accessible sources that nevertheless lack depth. They write in vagaries and treat facts as bits of trivia and not as pieces of information in a much larger panorama. The works are, as my dear friend and colleague Colin Salt once said while interpreting me, trinketized. As I wrote many years ago:

“How can the neophyte alternate historian improve their questions? I think it’s ultimately a matter of mindset. A mistake many newcomers make (and this is a notion encouraged by many online historical discussion fora, not just alternate historical spaces) is assuming that history is simply the aggregation of bits of trivia, whose own complex interrelationships are neglected. This reduces the study of history to a collection of trinkets rather than the system of the world that many academics spend entire lives studying but a tiny portion. This is not something that newcomers should feel overly guilty over; this is how history is taught as in many school systems before the university level.”

What Kempshall’s book reminded me of very strongly was Robert Sobel’s 1971 work of alternate history, For Want of a Nail, a book about the American Revolution failing, much of what in our world became the eastern United States remaining British and thereby becoming a super-Canada of sorts, and the patriots and their descendants moving into what we would call Texas (they call it the state of Jefferson), intervening in a Mexican civil war, and merging their country and that larger country into the United States of Mexico. Sobel’s book discusses the long-standing rivalry between these two countries over a period of centuries. It is a book that goes to great care to not only detail history, but historiography. He has a whole section of totally fictitious sources at the end, and it is as long as the sources in a real history book would be. There are footnotes throughout the text. More crucially, he frames his work within a longstanding historian’s fight between North American and Mexican historians about the intertwined genesis of their two nations, and complies with an in-universe historiographical convention to have a historian from the other country (in respect to the background of the in-universe author) write the conclusion to a book written about the interaction between both. Looking back on Sobel, I see a commitment not just to emulating history, but emulating how people think about their own history.

Kempshall has done both of these in his book. He has a plethora of footnotes, although no lengthy bibliography at the end. Notably, a large chunk of these sources are audio logs, as well as primary source military records and postwar memoirs. This feels different from an actual history book in setting, but not in aim, as this is a universe that does not have a large production of paper books (befitting a space opera). The in-universe author of this book, a clear stand-in for Kempshall, nevertheless is not simply a pastiche. He took up arms to fight the First Order, and that experience colors his entire view of the events of the previous wars (he argues that it may make more sense to view the Clone Wars, the Galactic Civil War, and the war against the First Order as one single decades-long war, not unlike the European Civil War thesis, for example).

Your narrator is, likewise, a politically inclined being. There is a point where he is contemplating the racial capitalism that the Galactic Empire practiced, with humans as a dominant caste and nonhumans as a subordinate caste consigned to second-class citizenship and degrading grunt work (the Wookiees, for example, are exported to various worlds to be used as slave labor. Similarly, Geonosians were used as slaves to build the Death Star), and he ruminates on how there is a blind spot in having a human like himself writing the history of the Galactic Empire, a state built on vicious human supremacy. He has great empathy for the victims of the Empire, demanding that the galaxy respect the decision of a species, for whom a refusal to acknowledge someone is the worst insult imaginable, to refuse to mention the Empire at all. Furthermore, he has seen the cost of warfare, and the cost of totalitarianism, within his own life. He has come to the conclusion that an injury to one is an injury to all, that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere, that none of us are free until all of us are free; and that is a lesson he is intent on imparting to us. It is a lesson, not unlike that in Andor, that is quite relevant to us in our own galaxy.

Kempshall, and his in-universe counterpart, are very good at getting the vastness of the Star Wars setting across. I remember once realizing that the part of me that loved reading many Expanded Universe books, and how they interwove little references to each other, was the same part of me that loved reading different history books on broadly the same period and seeing how they interconnected, and Kempshall realizes that too. An alternate historian friend once talked of how online alternate history has an “accent” of sorts, an unspoken assumption that any historical figure or event that is unfamiliar to the reader can simply be googled by said reader, allowing the actual story to not be bogged down in too much detail (I phrased it, in that same conversation, as an assumption that the reader has Wikipedia open in the next tab over). That is how Kempshall treats a variety of Expanded Universe happenings, several of which I recognized, but also a lot that I didn’t. For those wanting a deep dive into the Star Wars universe, you will be pleased, and you will have more to read (he has reminded me that I really need to get around to reading Chuck Wendig’s Aftermath trilogy at some point).

But Kempshall is also very good at discussing the individual. He frames the Galactic Empire as a personalist dictatorship under the malevolent rule of Sheev Palpatine, and as such the psychology of the dictator played a massive role in determining how the Empire actually ruled. It is here where I think Kemphall makes his best interpretations of the Star Wars lore, and particularly one tension that has always existed within it: the conflict between the mystical aspect of the setting and the critique of imperialism within the setting. Tony Gilroy, the man who wrote Rogue One and Andor, wrote that he found Darth Vader to be very difficult to write for in the former, and ultimately decided not to include him in the latter as the mystical feeling of the man who used to be Anakin Skywalker clashed with the very on-the-ground, view-from-the-bottom nature of the latter show.

Kempshall resolves this tension well by being very cognizant of what the average denizen of the galaxy far, far away would actually know about the nature of the Jedi, the Sith, and the Force. His in-universe avatar talks of the journey he underwent in the research for this book, which ultimately convinced him that the Force was real. He considers Palpatine not only as a politician, but as a religious extremist following a creed that is shrouded in secrecy. He, like most of the Galaxy, had only a vague idea of who the Jedi actually were before they were destroyed. He takes the fact that both Jedi and Sith believed in their religions seriously and examines how their creeds affected their behavior. He has only the briefest idea of what the Bendu was, and how he affected the Battle of Atollon (this is in the Rebels show). He believes what transpired when Mace Windu confronted Palpatine to be lost in the mists of history. But he is quite correct in realizing that what Darth Sidious and Darth Vader wanted was not necessarily what the Republic and the Empire wanted.

This judicious evaluation of what the average citizen of the galaxy actually knows, or could potentially know, extends to the workings of the Empire at large. Like a real history book, there are insets in the text that are filled with images. Notably, he says that two pictures of the conference room scene in A New Hope, infamous for Darth Vader nearly choking Admiral Conan Antonio Motti to death, are only allegedly from the Death Star and that their actual provenance cannot be demonstrated with certainty as the battle station was nearly destroyed. Likewise, there are major gaps in what can be understood in regards to Imperial doctrine as well as the lives of Sheev Palpatine among others. This, I found, did a lot of work in persuading me for a moment that this was a real, actual history book.

Kempshall, in his own way, is deconstructing the “cool” image that the Galactic Empire has had for the past few decades in popular culture. This state is not a ruthlessly efficient engine of war that made the railspeeders run on time. This state was an incoherent morass of infighting, egos, and pettiness, all bound together by the megalomania of Sheev Palpatine. He was a man who was so arrogant to believe that he would live forever, and was paranoid to a fault. Even in death the man loved to punish for its own sake, most obviously in Operation Cinder as portrayed in the first Alphabet Squadron book and the new Battlefront II (a move that reminds me very much of Sanji Iwabuchi’s order to his IJA troops, upon seeing that Manila would fall to the Americans any day now, to destroy as many buildings as possible and to rape as many women as possible, to give the Americans and the Filipinos nothing worth liberating). This was a man who, for decades, used a younger image of himself to avoid looking feeble, calling to mind Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s discussion of how strongmen think (Palpatine's depiction here reminds me of John Ganz's conception of a “creep loser” form of fascism). Much as Andor showed the coldness and the misery of the Empire on a personal level, Kempshall shows the dysfunction and immaturity underlying the Empire on a political level. The Death Stars are cast as impractical Nazi-like Wunderwaffen, intended to win any civil war through fear, neglecting that you also need doctrine. One bit near the end is telling: Kempshall talks of how, during the New Republic, Imperial reenactment groups proliferated while most of the rest of the galaxy, especially nonhumans, found the very idea offensive. I cannot help but read this as a critique of the real-world 501st Legion, the legion of fans who dress up in stormtrooper costumes and parade around, who on the one hand probably don’t know that the word “stormtrooper” came from World War I German shock troops, but have also gotten love from canon by becoming the namesake of Darth Vader’s personal formation of stormtroopers.

(Incidentally—this book solidified my belief that the closest real-world analogue to Darth Vader is Yevgeny Prigozhin.)

The book is very good in how it handles the fact that the Empire committed myriad atrocities, up to and including genocide. He treats Alderaan as not merely a spectacular explosion on screen, but as the calculated destruction of an entire way of life. He is very clearly horrified that his book cannot capture the wholeness of the death that the Empire meted out, and you can tell, as a veteran of the war against those who wanted to bring it all back, that it haunts him. He makes an interesting case that Order 66 should be considered the first Imperial genocide, which feels odd until you remember that he is treating the Jedi Order as a religious group, a group that was targeted because it stood for hope.

Kempshall succeeds in doing something I would have thought difficult: building out the universe in the sequel era. I have conflicted feelings about the sequel trilogy; I think, ultimately, that they are entertaining films when viewed by themselves, but it is clear that there was no thematic spine uniting them in the way that there was, for all its flaws, in the prequel trilogy. More damningly, in my mind, they failed to really build out the universe in an interesting way. Kempshall finds the thematic core that the sequels should have had, and runs with it: that era is about the consequences of winning the fight against tyranny, and how to build a better society on its ruins. The age of the First Order, he contends, is the age of the fight for the value of democracy, and how it must be fought again and again, inside every heart.

I finished this book wanting more like it, and not just for Star Wars; there’s a part of me that wants this for StarCraft, and Transformers, and Sonic the Hedgehog, and Command & Conquer. While I was reading this book on the Indigenous People’s Day holiday, I went to the local Barnes & Noble and bought Kempshall’s newest Star Wars book, on the history of space combat (which, I promise you, dear reader, I shall review for this blog in due course). This is the sort of book a very specific type of nerd has dreamed of for years, and now we are so lucky to have it. It is the type of book that takes worldbuilding seriously as an aspect of storytelling, while never letting worldbuilding overtake storytelling. It is a reminder to us that rebellions are built on hope, a lesson we, in this galaxy, need more than ever.

Reference: Kempshall, Chris. The Rise and Fall of the Galactic Empire [Dorling Kindersley, 2024].

POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.

Deja Boo: Babes in Toyland (1986)

#JusticeforTrollog

Yes, yes, I know, I know. That’s how much of a chicken I am. My choice for the Déjà Boo series, where we bravely revisit the movies that left us traumatized as kids, is the Christmas fantasy musical Babes in Toyland from 1986. But don’t let the sugar overload fool you: this movie is seriously scary. It comes with the trivia value that it features extremely early roles for Keanu Reeves and Drew Barrymore before either of them knew how to act, and it drags poor Pat Morita into the role of a generic wise elder who speaks in throwaway platitudes. There are songs, teddy bears, a cute parade, and nonstop smiles. Other things this movie also has: workplace harassment, public endangerment, concussion with possible brain damage, forced marriage under threat of homelessness, abysmal worker safety conditions, chronic and potentially lethal insomnia, chronic and potentially lethal scurvy, human trafficking, animal cruelty, and the creation of artificial life for the sole purpose of serving as slave soldiers.

But sure, enjoy the musical numbers.

Now let me give you some context as to why this movie permanently scarred a young me.

I’ve always had ridiculously high myopia. My first prescription eyeglasses, when I was 9, had −4.5 diopters. If you’ve never needed to deal with such numbers, imagine the eyeglasses of Futurama’s Professor Farnsworth, but on the face of a 5th-grader. My myopia had advanced to −9.5 diopters by the age of 27, when I became able to afford corrective surgery, which couldn’t be done with laser because it would have required removing too much of my corneas; instead I got intraocular lenses, which means they cut open my eyeballs and pushed little discs of bespoke glass inside. I still need to have regular checkups because, while my sight is normal now, the surgery can’t fix the fact that my eyes are just too long, which presents the danger of my retinas stretching so thin they could tear off. The critical importance of caring for my eyes was drilled into me all my life, and that influenced the way one particular scene in this movie affected me.

So back to the movie: We meet Lisa (Drew Barrymore), an 11-year-old child who hates being treated like a child. It’s Christmas Eve, and she’s at home watching TV when the newscast suddenly warns that a big snowstorm is coming for Cincinnati. You see, Lisa lives in Cincinnati. (This movie cares a lot about that fact. This movie does not want you to forget that Lisa is from Cincinnati. This movie wants you to sing the praises of Cincinnati in your nightmares.) The wind is already so strong that it brings down a telephone pole, cutting the lines, so now Lisa can’t warn her older sister, who works at a supermarket and doesn’t know about the snowstorm. Because their mother is busy elsewhere in the city having her car repaired, and cell phones aren’t a thing yet, Lisa decides to brave the weather and walk all the way to the supermarket.

Somehow, maybe thanks to the magic of Christmas, sweet little Lisa doesn’t die of hypothermia and reaches the supermarket just in time to casually prevent the slimy, greedy, creepy manager from committing a #MeToo on her sister. Lisa tells all the customers that they should run home to be safe from the storm, but the manager wants them to stay and keep spending money. Because it’s Christmas Eve, and buying is what that date is for. Fortunately, the people listen to Lisa, so she, her sister, and two of her coworkers decide to give themselves the rest of the evening off. One of those coworkers is Jack (Keanu Reeves), who appears to be dating Lisa’s sister, and speaks in the worst surfer dude accent of the late 20th century. Maybe this was the role that won Reeves his big part in Point Break.

Jack offers to take everybody home in his car, and once they’re on their way, for whatever reason he starts a group rendition of a bizarre song about how awesome Cincinnati is. I don’t know whether this song already existed in real life or was made for the movie, and I don’t care to know. No movie has the right to be so in-your-face about the awesomeness of a place that it never shows you. We don’t get to see any part of Cincinnati in the movie, which is understandable once you realize how cheap this production is, but is still an absurd choice in a plot where Lisa’s Cincinnatianishness will turn out to be the thing that saves the world. Anyway, instead of keeping his eyes on the road, what with a dangerous snowstorm going on, Jack makes everyone sing this ridiculous song and narrowly avoids crashing his car, which hurls Lisa out and sends her straight at a tree.

The rest of the movie makes more sense if you assume that Lisa has died and what follows is hell.

Alas, we’re all draged with her into hell, which looks like a movie set made of half a dozen houses painted in pastel and populated with human-sized plush animals. Welcome to Toyland, a colorful, cheerful town paved in astroturf where people move around in go-karts (driving licenses are printed on cookies), police officers are all big teddy bears, and everyone is named after a fairy tale. Lisa happens to crash-land in Toyland just as the town prepares to host a wedding between a damsel in distress, who looks suspiciously exacly like her sister, and a slimy, greedy, creepy older man who looks suspiciously exactly like her sister’s boss. Now let’s pause for a moment to talk about this villain. Richard Mulligan’s acting style invests this character with a maximalist campy sensibility that makes Creedence Leonore Gielgud look Shakespearean by comparison. His house is a gigantic bowling ball, he has a horrendous overgrown thumbnail that he likes to shove in people’s faces, and his fashion sense, covered in silky rags and black feathers from head to toe, makes him look like Ebenezer Scrooge woke up hungover in Björk’s wardrobe.

This man is about to marry the designated damsel in distress, who is only doing this because otherwise her mother’s big shoe house will be repossessed. So even the utopian candy-colored Toyland has mortgages, which contractually compels me to overthink this story’s worldbulding more than the movie is prepared to give answers for. On what legal basis can the villain kick the mother out if she presumably hasn’t missed any payments? Does Toyland employ public defenders? How was the mother approved for such a big mortgage? Where did she get her dozen adopted children from? Does Toyland even use money? We don’t learn any of the answers. What we do learn about Toyland: it’s surrounded in all directions by a scary cursed forest full of monsters. That makes me wonder how Toyland feeds itself, since we don’t see any cultivated land, yet the biggest business is a cookie factory. It may well be its only business, which raises even more questions, namely about the nutritional health of the locals. We see plush bears, plush rabbits, plush ducks, plush frogs, and the occasional human. The bears will probably do fine, as they can eat everyone else, but with no veggies in sight, I worry about the rabbits. The frogs have even bigger problems, as there are no bodies of water in Toyland, so they have to live in permanent dehydration. As for the humans, an only-cookie diet ought to have already killed them all of scurvy.

Even more disturbingly: in the forest, it’s always nighttime, whereas in Toyland, it’s always daytime. There’s a big plot point involving a deadline by next Wednesday, but how do these people know which day of the week it is, if there’s never a sunrise or a sunset? And don’t tell me they can know by looking at a clock; how do you even calibrate a clock if there’s no daily cycle to refer to? With permanent daylight, one could suppose that the inhabitants of Toyland never sleep. Setting aside for a moment the dangers of prolonged sleeplessness, how do the workers at the cookie factory even know when their shifts end? In fact, let’s talk about that cookie factory for a minute, because holy OSHA violations, Batman, all the workers wear roller skates inside a building that has not only stairs, but massive ovens for baking cookies. You see a fun, whimsical fantasy; I see a class-action lawsuit waiting to happen.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. The first thing Lisa does upon arriving in Toyland is, of course, interrupt the wedding. The damsel in distress loves another guy, who looks suspiciously exactly like Keanu Reeves. Why are these two in love? We never find out; they’re only given enough personality to look alive on screen. It does help, though, that the majority of eligible bachelors in Toyland are plush frogs and plush ducks. If that’s what you’re working with, you could do a lot worse than Keanu Reeves. After the villain’s wedding is ruined, he runs away to brood in his dark spherical house. There we meet the key character that is the whole reason for this post: Trollog. My boy Trollog, who never did anything wrong, is a child-size carnivorous bird with one single, gigantic eye that serves as a crystal ball for the bad guy to spy on Toyland. Trollog is just an animal. He doesn’t speak, doesn’t have an agenda of his own, and doesn’t seem particularly evil. He’s just ugly. Would you consider Simba the villain of his movie because his survival requires him to eat his childhood friends? Then you can’t be mad at Trollog.

To punish Keanu Reeves, and also take control of the cookie factory he’s supposed to inherit, the villain sneaks into the factory and throws away a bunch of cookie boxes. He frames Keanu Reeves for stealing cookies and gets him thrown in teddy bear prison. To help him escape, Lisa distracts the judge by infodumping trivia about Cincinnati sports history. Somehow this works. Keanu Reeves goes back to the factory to search for clues, but he’s captured again. When he finds himself in the villain’s dungeon,  where his friends are soon taken as well, he explains the situation to them with the most awesome line in the whole movie:

“He’s got trolls! Hundreds of ugly trolls! Who ate all the cookies!”

Turns out Toyland has, of course, a Toymaster (Pat Morita), who crafts all the presents that Santa Claus delivers. And for alarmingly unexplained reasons, the Toymaster happens to keep a hidden bottle where he’s been storing all the evil of the world. What do you plan to do with so much evil, Mr. Toymaster? Your sweet face and kind manners don’t fool me. But before we have a chance to uncover whatever the Toymaster has been scheming with the bottle of evil, the villain steals it to use on the creatures of the dark forest so they conquer Toyland for him. He also tries to corrupt our heroes by uncorking the bottle in front of them, and the Evil Green Fart Cloud does appear at first to take over their minds… except Lisa’s. She’s immune because… she’s not a Toylander, I guess? But her guess is that she’s immune because she’s from Cincinnati, so she reasons that thinking about how awesome Cincinnati is will break the spell on her friends. And once again, we have to endure the same song about Cincinnati that we heard before. Considering this was the song she was singing when she was thrown face-first into a tree, she shouldn’t be so happy to remember it, but the magic of the song works, the heroes miraculously know all the lyrics, and they break free of the Evil Green Fart Cloud.

I’m surprised I had forgotten this part. It’s entirely ridiculous, but it matches perfectly with this movie. But to be frank, the only part I actually remembered from this movie happens a bit earlier, when the bad guy breaks into the Toymaster’s workshop to steal the evil bottle. He ties up Lisa and the Toymaster and leaves them to be eaten by Trollog. Poor Trollog! How long has it been since he last ate people? I don’t suppose he can subsist on cookies. But Lisa tricks him into biting her ropes, she helps untie the Toymaster, and then the Toymaster does the absolute most horrifying thing I ever saw in a movie as a kid. Are you ready? Because I certainly wasn’t.

He grabs a paintbrush and covers Trollog’s big eye in paint.

That’s it. That’s what sent me screaming through my parents’ living room. I, who was raised to harbor a persistent dread of blindness, had just witnessed someone paint over an eye, and the movie played it as a moment of heroism. Still not done tormenting this innocent predatory bird, Lisa gets him to walk into a big chest, where she traps him before sitting on the lid. What does she plan to do with my sweet, people-eating boy Trollog? Nobody cares, because it’s time for the third act.

After singing about Cincinnati and saving her friends from becoming evil mindless minions, Lisa leads them back to the Toymaster’s workshop, where she’s told that she needs to embrace her childishness in order to activate the magic of toys. There’s another sappy song, Lisa talks about how much Toyland has taught her to love toys again, and that does the trick: an entire army ot toy soldiers comes alive, just in time to repel the invasion of the forest monsters and kick the bad guy out of Toyland forever. I have to wonder how much this self-imposed autarky will work out for Toyland; remember that it’s surrounded by the dark forest on all sides, so enforcing the bad guy’s exile means keeping Toyland isolated from the world. Since Toyland doesn’t seem to have trade partners or anything resembling foreign relations, I give the teddy bears a week before they get tired of the cookies and proceed to eat the rest of the Toylanders, assuming the rest of the Toylanders haven’t died of malnutrition and/or scurvy before that.

With the villain finally out of the picture, Keanu Reeves marries the damsel in distress, and Lisa is sent back to Cincinnati on a flying sled, which may or may not be driven by the actual Santa Claus, who may or may not be the same person as the Toymaster. It’s not clear. But the next thing that happens is that, precisely â la Wizard of Oz, Lisa wakes up in her house, with everyone standing around and looking worried. She tells them of the weird dream she just had, including the Toymaster (but without mentioning the bottle of evil he was hoarding for still undisclosed reasons):

“He taught me that it was in our hearts that we must stay young and try to be good. And above all, we must believe. And then we’ll always have a merry Christmas and everything, won’t we? Always and always and always.”

Her mother immediately hugs her, I guess to hide the face of concern she’s making as she mentally calculates how much the treatment for brain damage is going to cost. Lisa then looks at the Christmas tree and hallucinates that a toy soldier salutes her.

The end.

But that can’t be the end! Toyland didn’t expel all the creatures of the forest! Poor Trollog is still trapped inside that chest! Are they going to let him starve? Are they just going to forget he’s there, which is basically the same outcome? He’s blind, and alone, and hungry, and has no idea why people were so mean to him. Let him eat a child or two, The damsel’s mother was planning to sell them anyway to settle her finances (yes, really, this is a thing she explicitly said in the movie). Come on, give Trollog a fairy tale child every now and then. It’s a win-win!

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Deja Boo: Killer Klowns from Outer Space

Killer clowns are objectively scary, we'd all say. But somehow as a kid I couldn't realize what a joke this movie was.

Remember back in 2016 when creepy clowns started appearing all over the globe? It was easy for would-be scarers to do, because it seems like clowns are near universally frightening to many people. I was definitely scared of them as a kid, and Killer Klowns from Outer Space served no small part in this gigantic fear. 

I was fortunate enough to never be exposed to Pennywise from It, though I knew he was in the pop culture ether. No, my first exposure came from two things: an Emmet Kelley clown poster my own mother decided for some reason to hang above my bed, and a clown lamp that also appeared around the same time. They didn't last very long, and I definitely remember a dramatic scene when they had to be quickly removed. 

What scared me then

I didn't carry too much clown trauma going into the late '80s, but Killer Klowns from Outer Space became an HBO fixture, and therein lies my clown fright re-imagining. I do not remember watching it from start to finish ever, strangely enough, but I saw previews and clips while my parents were watching it on TV. I knew my parents enjoyed it, but they were in their late 20s and prone to enjoying dark comedies.

What I do remember, I remember in brief, impressionistic swatches, like some sort of modernist author from the 1920s. The absolutely horrific clowns (only later would I appreciate the extraordinary practical effects it took to bring them to life) are running amok in an unnamed city after their circus bigtop space ship crash lands on Earth. I remember the bright pink, cotton candy cocoons that enswathed their victims, and found myself feeling claustrophobic at the prospect.

Normal, everyday clowns are creepy enough, but these guys are grotesque, distorted, malevolent beings that kill and maim. No thank you.

There is also a slightly unhinged, rock and roll theme song titled the same as the film that is also somehow very disconcerting. It's slightly menacing, but also very, very catching.

This is all I really remember, honestly, about the movie, besides harboring a strangely antagonistic feeling towards it for 35 years. I haven't watched it since, but remember it being unsettling. As an adult, when I clicked past it while searching for movies on streaming platforms, I'd chuckle and say, "Oh, I'm not watching that ever again." And so it remained in the outskirts of my mind for a lifetime.

What scares me now

Reader, there is nothing scary about this movie. Yes, the clowns are gruesome, but if anything, I was in awe of the production value and how well-done they were. 

You may notice that I left out a plot subsection in this review, but I did this purposefully because there's not really one to speak of. The clown aliens crash land on earth, then start killing people. End of plot. It was so bad that I actually found myself watching it in 5-10 minute increments because it was just so boring. This is a win, I suppose, for my adult self and my lack of fear. It's nice to know that some things are just unable to be reconciled when you're young.

I honestly can't believe I didn't revisit this film for a lifetime because of a few poorly sketched clown memories. I approached it with an open heart, though. I found myself thinking about the premise itself — alien clown beings that have traveled the universe and are violent. Perhaps it's like the classic chestnut of a million monkeys with a million typewriters somehow managing to type out Hamlet. Maybe, in a million galaxies, a sentient, traveling species emerged as circus clowns, with popcorn guns and a penchant for balloon animals. Sure.

But after I mused poetically at this for a few moments, I began to just be annoyed. Even at 88 minutes, it dragged and dragged. The movie is mainly visual bits that relate to circus activities: at one point, a killer clown is entertaining passersby on the street with a shadow puppet show. As the grand finale, he makes a scary monster that leaps from the shadow and devours the watchers. To kill a killer clown, you need only take aim at his big red honking nose. 

I could go on and on, but it would only bore us both. Of all the movies I plan on watching for this Deja Boo series, I am most embarrassed by this one. There's no accounting for taste, I guess, and also no accounting for fear as a young, impressionable child. Clowns have firmly occupied a space in society as things of terror, and when you couple that with alien, murdering clowns, it's perfect fodder for an anxious child to latch on to. And latch I did!

Nuance is missing from a youthful perspective, as kids can't separate comedy from horror, and that's exactly what this movie is about: the hilarious results of killer alien clowns wreaking havoc on a small community. It worked with Halloween and Friday the 13th, and it worked (to some small, niche extent) with Killer Klowns from Outer Space. 

--

Highlights:

• Not every movie has its own rock and roll theme song
• The commitment to the circus bits is admirable
• Great practical effects
• Not scary one bit

POSTED BY: Haley Zapal, NoaF contributor and lawyer-turned-copywriter living in Atlanta, Georgia. A co-host of Hugo Award-winning podcast Hugo, Girl!, she posts on Instagram as @cestlahaley. She loves nautical fiction, growing corn and giving them pun names like Timothee Chalamaize, and thinking about fried chicken.