There's No Such Thing As Wasted Words

I have a couple of Big Posts Of Stuff that I still update regularly. They're linked in the sidebar, but IDK if people look there, so I figure I'll point them out in case people are interested.

Ongoing horror watch (and reading) list. A giant post of all the horror I consume, sorted into Loved It, Like Some of It, Disliked It, DNFed. I use this list all the time when looking for recs for people. I put an * for stuff that has explicitly queer themes or major characters.

(Obviously some of these are judgment calls, like is Mindy Meeks-Martin in Scream 5 significant enough to get an asterisk? I decided not.)

The Epic Mpreg Recs List. I made the main list six years ago, sorted lovingly into my own idiosyncratic categories, but I do occasionally add new stuff at the bottom.

The Shining (1980). I honestly can't find much to say about this. It's beautiful; the sets are amazing, there's a lot of gorgeous shots. It felt very ~cinematic. It's too bad about the Jack Nicholson of it all! I could have done with at least 80% less Jack Nicholson. Every time he was on screen I was like, we could doing literally anything else.

The kid actor was good, and after all the shit I'd vaguely osmosed about Wendy Torrance (or just about the actress), I was extremely impressed with how effectively she protected herself and her kid, even when she was scared out of her mind.

Honestly I mainly watched this so I could finally watch Doctor Sleep. Mission accomplished, I guess. I also want to reread the novel now.

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Until Dawn (2025). On a road trip to find closure over a friend who went missing, a group of five twenty-somethings stumble into a house that traps them and kills them over and over.

This movie tried to do too many things and half-assed most of them. The characters got at most half a personality characteristic each. The monsters were boring. The plot/explanation got increasingly convoluted, with more and more stuff stuck onto it. The main sets around the house all felt weirdly artificial. There were a handful of great horror reveals (the bulletin board, the guest book), but the movie didn't really know how to capitalize on them.

I did like ( spoilers )

There were some okay kills, if that's your thing. There's one particular kill that I was not expecting at all, and the movie made a lot of hay out of it. It's like they found One Cool Trick and kept hitting that button, for better or for worse.

In conclusion: big meh.

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Clown in a Cornfield (2025). In a tiny midwestern town, sometimes a clown murders one or more people in a cornfield. Enter Quinn, a high schooler who's just moved to town with her father while they both grieve her mother's death.

This was completely delightful. The novel this was adapted from was written by a high school teacher, and I think that really shows in the affection for the teen characters. The fraught father/daughter relationship is good too, though! I also really enjoyed the romance, which I thought was very sweet.

There's also themes! A late stage reveal that made me think of a completely different movie that I will not spoil you for! Lots of fun kills!

This is far and away my favorite of these three movies, but it's hard to articulate why except that it's a lot of fun and the characters feel like real people with real relationships, which is saying something in a movie about a killer clown. The clown gets the marquee, but the characters make the movie. If this sounds like your jam at all, I highly recommend you check it out.