Witchcraft Wednesday: Coven 13, Issue #3

We are back with my October exploration of Coven 13. The first issue established Arthur H. Landis' vision of a modern successor to Weird Tales and Unknown Worlds, while the second made his editorial philosophy even clearer. The supernatural should not simply be dropped into a story because the author needs a monster. It should be part of the world around it, with its own history, rules, and consequences.

Now we get to Issue #3, dated January 1970, and are now into the decade that would see the 70's Occult Revival, "The Exorcist" and "The Wicker Man", not to mention "Kolchak: The Night Stalker" and Dungeons & Dragons, and all the other material I return to in these pages.

Coven 13, Issue #3, January 1970

The contents page actually labels this "Vol. 1, No. 2," even though the November issue was already #2 and the following March issue is #4. I am going to chalk that up to a simple production error. More importantly, this issue gives us Alan Caillou, Ron Goulart, Robert E. Howard, Dennis Quinn, Pauline Smith, James Benton Carr, and Part Three of James R. Keaveny's "Let There Be Magick!" We also get another installment of Bell, Book and Tarot, two poems by Wade Wellman (son of Manly Wade Wellman), and an essay on Henry James' The Turn of the Screw.

Landis' editorial is once again worth reading because he continues to define what he thinks Coven 13 should be. This time he complains about the number of manuscripts arriving that simply recycle vampires, werewolves, pacts with the Devil, and familiar monsters. He isn't rejecting those subjects. What he wants is originality. He again insists that writers should look at the world around them rather than simply copying the "mouldering pages" of earlier writers, pointing specifically to Rosemary's Baby, Bell, Book and Candle, and Psycho as examples of stories that combine the strange with contemporary life.  

The rest of the editorial concerns the less glamorous problem of magazine distribution. Landis explains how printing tens of thousands of copies means little if large numbers never make it onto newsstands, and how long publishers can wait before actually getting paid. His declaration that "COVEN 13 WILL MAKE IT!" reads a little sadly in hindsight. There is only one more issue of Coven 13 in this form before the magazine changes hands and eventually becomes Witchcraft & Sorcery.

It is a supply-and-demand issue we still see today in the RPG publishing industry. 

Let's get to the stories that did make his cut.

The lead novelette is "Leona!" by Alan Caillou, again illustrated by William Stout. Christian Althing has lost his daughter Leona and refuses to accept her death. He has an old magical book, an altar, ritual tools, sacrifices, a cauldron, and a growing belief that he can use all of this to bring her back. His grief gradually consumes every other moral consideration.  

This one gets at something I have been thinking about quite a bit in my own games. Death should matter. Witches can speak with ghosts, summon spirits, learn secrets from the dead, and get into all sorts of trouble with necromancy, but actually restoring the dead to life is another matter entirely. "Leona!" is essentially about what happens when someone refuses to accept that boundary. Christian does not want to understand death. He wants to force death to return something it has taken from him, and the results are appropriately (and predictably) horrific.

In my Advanced Witches & Warlocks book, I specifically keep spells like Raise Dead and Resurrection out of witches' hands. It violates their moral and ethical systems. If a witch gets to the point where she wants to bring someone back from the dead like that, she either needs to get a cleric or be satisfied with necromancy.

We also get two poems, "Song of the Undead" and "Nightmare," by Wade Wellman. An important distinction here is that this is Wade Wellman, the son of Appendix N author Manly Wade Wellman. The poems themselves fit comfortably into Coven 13: graves, undead things, banshees, haunted houses, moonlight, and the dead walking where they shouldn't.    

The latest "Bell, Book and Tarot" by Jean Cirrito turns to the Evil Eye, and this is probably my favorite nonfiction installment so far. We get the Italian mal'occhio, protective gestures, amulets, serpents, horns, crescent moons, horseshoes, rue, animal charms, and other ways people have tried to protect themselves against an envious or dangerous gaze. The piece ranges from classical mythology to European folk practice and customs still familiar to the writer in the twentieth century.

This is exactly the kind of material I want for Sunny Valley. Folk magic works best for me when it consists of small things people have always done: a sprig of rue, a hand gesture, a charm over a doorway, something your grandmother insists you carry even though she also insists she does not believe in such nonsense. That feels much more convincing than everybody knowing elaborate ceremonial magic.

"The Strawhouse Pavilion" by Ron Goulart brings us back to Landis' idea of the contemporary supernatural. A modern couple is being haunted by Wendy's dead father, but he does not simply appear as a transparent ghost. He was a bandleader, so he brings an entire 1940s dance pavilion with him, complete with music, cars, dancers, and the atmosphere of another era. Eventually Wendy realizes that her father has essentially brought back the whole ballroom because merely appearing as a ghost would not have been impressive enough.   

I love this idea! It feels like something that could happen in Jackson without changing the setting at all. A haunting does not have to be a figure walking down a hallway. Maybe an entire building comes back. Maybe music plays from a ballroom demolished thirty years ago. Maybe a street looks exactly as it did in 1947 for ten minutes and then snaps back to normal. That is a much more interesting supernatural event than another chain-rattling ghost.

In fact. Jacksonville has a rather famous band stand/gazebo. It was supposed to have been dismantled and shipped to the Smithsonian Institution. I can't recall if it was or not. BUT I have very distinct memories of it, especially sitting on it and reading "The Best of Dragon vol 2." Also, when the infamous "I attack the Gazebo" rumor was floating around in the early days of the internet, that was the image I had. So thank you, Ron Goulart. Jackson now has a ghost gazebo. 

Next comes the biggest literary name in the issue, Robert E. Howard, with "The Little People." Howard died in 1936, making this a very posthumous publication, and this January 1970 appearance was the story's first publication. The story explicitly invokes Arthur Machen's "The Shining Pyramid" and plays with the idea that stories of elves, trolls, fairies, and other "little people" might preserve distorted memories of an older population driven into caves and remote places by later peoples.     

There is plenty here that has not aged well, particularly Howard's racial and pseudo-anthropological assumptions, and I have no interest in importing those into my games. But there are some very solid ideas as well. What does interest me is the underlying weird-fiction idea that folklore may remember something real without remembering it correctly. That comes close to ideas I have been developing for Jackson and Sunny Valley, where an old legend might describe something genuine while completely misunderstanding what that thing actually was.

That does not make Howard's Little People my Ur-humans, nor do I want to collapse either of them into Faerie or the Sidhe or even the Sr. Wellman's Shonokins. What interests me is the older literary tradition of asking what might exist behind the folklore. Howard also gives us the direct Appendix N connection in this issue. I am still not suggesting that Coven 13 influenced D&D, but once again we can see these literary circles overlapping just a few years before D&D appears. It would have certainly influenced me had I been in Gygax's shoes. In January 1970, at just six months of age, I am not even sure I owned shoes yet. ETA: Asked my mom, I had a little pair I wore in an "Olan Mills" photo portrait. I was a chunky monkey back then, and my little fat fingers weren't well suited for typing.

This issue does solidify the connection to the earlier pulps that Landis loved so much. Securing the first run rights to this tale must have been a wonderful feeling for him. 

There is a reader's letters column that is a fun read. 

The issue also includes Arthur Jean Cox's essay on Henry James' "The Turn of the Screw." Cox digs into the famous question of whether the ghosts are actually present or whether everything is being generated by the governess herself. The essay is valuable less because I need another interpretation of James and more because it demonstrates what Coven 13 wanted to be. This was not simply a magazine printing spooky stories. It wanted readers to think and argue about supernatural fiction as well.

Then we get "Witch Fish" by Dennis Quinn, which may be my favorite story in this issue. Abat is a witch who transforms himself into an enormous brook trout as part of a revenge scheme against the warlock Marag. That is strange enough, but the real fun for me is the background Quinn casually establishes.

The New England countryside has places known by one set of names to ordinary people and another set known only to witches and warlocks. There is a Federation, a Grand Council, magical territories, familiars, regulations on the use of magic, and punishments for breaking those rules. Abat has only recently finished serving a twenty-year ban on practicing witchcraft.      

That immediately gives me ideas for Jackson and West Haven. There is the map everyone sees, and then there is the map witches know. Same roads, same rivers, same cemetery, but with completely different meanings and boundaries. The mundane map tells you where a place is. The witches' map tells you what happened there and why you should not cross a particular boundary after dark.

"Last Rites" by Pauline Smith is another very 1969/1970 occult story. It even comments on witchcraft, necromancy, divination, parapsychology, and "Cosmic Consciousness" entering colleges and universities. From there we get young people experimenting with the Key of Solomon, the Atharva Veda, ritual circles, lunar timing, a photograph, and a cat. Really captures what I feel was going on in the early 1970s.  

One little detail really captures the entire Coven 13 approach. The old magical texts recommend isolated crossroads, forests, caves, abandoned houses, and other secluded places for ritual work. The characters note that in the age of automobiles and subdivisions, finding such places has become increasingly difficult.

Ancient magic has to deal with modern zoning.

That may be the most Coven 13 idea in the entire issue! 

"Don't Open 'til Xmas!" by James Benton Carr takes us into contemporary urban occult horror. Paul Benton is planning to spend Christmas with his younger girlfriend when a mysterious package arrives. He initially thinks it is from her, but it actually comes from his estranged wife Helen, who has recently been to Haiti. Inside is a doll, and Paul eventually realizes that Helen has used magic to transfer him into it.    

Some of the treatment of Haiti as shorthand for sinister magic is very much of its period, but the basic concept fits perfectly with Landis' editorial philosophy. The occult doesn't require a ruined castle. It can arrive by special delivery at a modern apartment. Sometimes the witch just needs your mailing address.

It also fits well with the themes I have been exploring all month of "Horror comes Home."

Finally, we return to Part Three of "Let There Be Magick!" by James R. Keaveny. By now the story has become increasingly recognizable as the sort of fantasy environment an RPG player could enter without much explanation. We have knights, sorcerers, strange animals, magical wards, hostile creatures, reanimated dead, castles, wilderness travel, and a wizard's stronghold.

What continues to interest me is how the protagonist approaches magic. He sees something everyone else accepts as supernatural folklore and immediately starts asking how it actually works. The "dead-alives," for example, are terrifying to the inhabitants of Camelot, but he begins testing assumptions about them, separating what they actually do from what people believe they do. That is exactly the sort of thing players do in an RPG.

Again, this is not evidence that Coven 13 influenced D&D. What it shows is how many of the ingredients were already circulating together before 1974. Sword & Sorcery, Science Fantasy, occultism, weird fiction, ghosts, witches, monsters, magical societies, necromancy, and ancient forgotten peoples were all part of the same imaginative landscape.

Final Thoughts

Of the three issues I have covered so far, I think this one brings the various pieces together the best. We have a warlock trying to defeat death, a ghost who brings an entire ballroom with him, folk protections against the Evil Eye, a hidden society of witches, young people experimenting with grimoires, Robert E. Howard reaching back into the older Weird tradition, and a Science Fantasy serial becoming increasingly recognizable as the sort of world fantasy gamers will soon inhabit.

Coven 13 still doesn't seem particularly concerned about whether something belongs to horror, fantasy, Sword & Sorcery, folk horror, occult fiction, or Science Fantasy. It is all part of the same supernatural landscape. And frankly, that is fine with me. 

In fact, that is probably what I like most about it.

Sadly, only one more issue to go.

October Movie Challenge: Eternal Evil / The Blue Man (1985)

 I would be remiss if I didn't watch some more psychic-phenomena movies. And Eternal Evil, aka The Blue Man, lets me dip into some Astral Projection and Reincarnation. I just wish it had been a little better. 

Eternal Evil / The Blue Man (1985)

Paul Sharpe is a successful director of television commercials living in Montreal with his wife and son. He has a nice house, a good job, and what appears to be a comfortable life. He is also deeply dissatisfied with all of it. He is married and has a kid.

Paul becomes involved with a mysterious woman named Janus, played by Karen Black, who teaches him how to leave his body through astral projection. At first, the experience seems liberating. Paul can travel outside himself, move invisibly through the world, and escape the ordinary life he finds so frustrating.

Then people around him begin dying.

There is a lot happening here, and it looks like Paul is doing the killing, but instead, it is our psychic vampires who are preying on others to take over their bodies. 

I like some of these ideas, and Karen Black is always fun, but it just wasn't put together in an interesting way. I wanted psychics and astral projection, and I got all that, including some psychic vampires. I should have been happier, but mostly I was a little bored. 

October Horror Movie Challenge 2026
Viewed: 29
First Time Views: 19

October Horror Movie Challenge: Hold the Dark (2018)

Tonight I am stepping outside my usual range for this year’s challenge. This one was my wife's choice because she likes werewolves and Alexander Skarsgård. 

Most of what I have been watching has been from 1984 to 1987, but as I was watching, I began to think about something specifically for my Valhalla, Alaska, setting. It has wolves, isolation, strange local beliefs, and the tournaq, or tornrak, wolf-demon.

Hold the Dark seemed like a good choice for all of this.

Hold the Dark (2018)

Medora Slone (Riley Keough), a young mother from the Alaskan backwater of Keelut, puts in a call to wolf expert and naturalist Russell Core (Jeffrey Wright), with an urgent request. Her six-year-old Bailey is gone, and with two other children having vanished in much the same way, she believes wolves are to blame. She wants him to come up north and put down the animal before her husband Vernon (Alexander Skarsgård) comes home from his tour in Iraq.

Core makes the trip thinking it will be a hard but straightforward job. He is relieved of that notion rather quickly. What he uncovers about Bailey is far worse than Medora let on, and when Vernon does return, he sets off on a course of violence all his own. In time, the film sheds its missing-child premise for something stranger and harder to pin down.

You could almost, but not quite, call it a werewolf movie or even a supernatural horror in the conventional sense, yet for most of its running time it leaves you in doubt as to whether it might be one. I find that uncertainty to be its best quality.

Take the wolves themselves. They are present from the start, though the film is cagey in how it presents them. Core will study them and insist they are animals, not moral agents; he can make sense of a pack culling its own young as a matter of nature, which is violent but not evil. The villagers of Keelut have a different take. Once Core gets to the bottom of what happened to Bailey, some are quick to say Medora is under the influence of a wolf-demon, or tournaq as the movie puts it.

You will not get a tidy resolution on that here. There is no scene of Medora breaking out in fur, nor does Vernon undergo a full-moon metamorphosis. No one is on hand with an old tome to lay out the rules. The wolf imagery is there in the hunting and predation, in parents turning on their children, and in people acting on instincts others cannot fathom. Whether you see it as supernatural or merely human is left open, and that is more to my liking than a run-of-the-mill creature feature.

Then there is the village of Keelut, perhaps the most effective horror element of all. It feels cut off from the world, not by some contrived fantasy setting but because the distance imposes its own order. An outsider like Core will notice right away: the people know each other, and they know things they are not sharing with him. The landscape is vast, cold, and indifferent. It is exactly what I was looking for in this movie. Alaska is a character in and of itself, it was one of the reasons I began Valhalla, AK.

Director Jeremy Saulnier and writer Macon Blair seem to have an eye for dark fantasy rather than for Alaskan realism. As someone considering an Alaska setting for inspiration, I can put that aside. Hold the Dark is not a documentary, but it is invaluable for atmosphere. The silence and the sense that the modern world thins out once you are far enough from the centers of population are very well done. There is something about the cold, the dark, and the isolation that keeps ideas like Valhalla, AK alive for me.

The masks in the film do this well. Vernon and Medora both wear them, and the movie leaves us wondering what they mean. Ritual, identity, a change in the person beneath without any physical alteration. That could serve Valhalla nicely. A wolf-demon need not make a man into a werewolf; the mask is transformation enough. Wear it and your thinking changes. You stop feeling the cold; you smell blood and recognize fear. There comes a point where you can no longer fathom why the rest of the world is so put off by your actions. That's a different sort of creature.

Violence Without Explanation

What makes Hold the Dark violent is its suddenness and brutality. You have an extended gun battle at one point that could be mistaken for something from another film, yet it serves to make a point: here, violence is hard to put a lid on once it starts. Saulnier has a way of rendering it ugly instead of heroic, and this story requires that. Vernon is as dangerous as they come but never an action hero; he is unsettling because his conduct follows a logic that eludes everyone else. Medora is no different. They are both driven by something older and more instinctive than what we would call morality. Whether one wants to call it supernatural is beside the point. For Core, it might as well be. My wife kept thinking they were werewolves. I don't think she was wrong.

Valhalla, AK and the Tournaq

My Valhalla is quirkier than Keelut, somewhere nearer Northern Exposure and Resident Alien, where the oddities and monsters are local complications rather than an unending tragedy. But humor only goes so far. You need places where the jokes end. Put some miles between you and town, lose the road and the radio, and you will hear wolves. Then you are in another place entirely.

I went to see the movie for the wolf-demon. The film refers to its possible wolf-spirit as a tournaq, but I would not put much stock in that as a mythological artifact. Inuit lore has its share of helping spirits for the shaman or the hunter, but "wolf-demon" is the film’s own construct.

If I were to put Valhalla on paper, I would fictionalize it. Let us say the locals use the term tornrak for it, though no one can tell you where the word originates. An anthropologist will say the name is incorrect, and an old-timer will reply, "Yeah. So is the thing." That is the sort of place Valhalla is.

The beast is not a werewolf in the sense of a man becoming a wolf. A tornrak is what gets people to become wolves in every way but the physical. It latches on to someone who is already isolated or angry. At first it is just a presence at the periphery of vision, a wolf at the window with no tracks in the snow to account for it. Then there are the dreams of hunting and running with blood in the mouth and snow on bare feet. When the person wakes, he feels better than he has in years. One should not overlook that. A proper supernatural corruption gives you something before it takes anything: strength, a release from guilt or fear, the means to endure the cold. Before long the victim is thinking in pack terms. Family is pack, outsiders are to be put down, and instinct has done away with moral choices.

And then the tornrak wants something. Hunger does not require words.

Final Thoughts

There is a strangeness to Hold the Dark. It sets out as a mystery over children being killed by wolves and devolves into a crime thriller of the most violent kind, all while skirting the edge of the supernatural without fully committing. You could be left frustrated by the ambiguity and the questions the film has no intention of answering. Even the director and writer seem content to let the atmosphere be dark and mythic rather than literal. To my mind, that is precisely what makes it such good material to draw from.

I don't want the tornrak explained. I do not want somebody to find a nineteenth-century book saying it has 8 Hit Dice and can only be killed by silver. At least not at first. I want people in Valhalla to disagree about whether it even exists. I want the old locals to tell contradictory stories. I want the rational explanation to remain possible long after the players have stopped believing it.

And I want the wolves to remain wolves. 

Because the most disturbing possibility in "Hold the Dark" is not that human beings can turn into animals. It is that maybe there is not as much difference between humans and animals as we would like to believe.

October Horror Movie Challenge 2026
Viewed: 28
First Time Views: 18

Mirror Monday: Why Witches?

 I have been writing about witches for a very long time. Anyone who has followed this blog for more than a few weeks probably knows that. Between Advanced Witches & Warlocks, NIGHT SHIFT, and my Jackson, Illinois, setting, witches occupy a considerable amount of my creative time. They have been part of my gaming life for nearly forty years, and I don't expect that to change anytime soon.

But why witches?

It is a fair question, and one I have asked myself (and have been asked) more than once over the years. Why have I devoted so much time to creating a Witch class for *D&D? Why do witches feature so prominently in my horror games? And why, when I decided to return to the Illinois of my teenage years and create a fictional town filled with supernatural mysteries, did I place a teenage witch named Larina Nichols at its center?

I think the answer goes back further than my games.

The Witch in the Library

My local public library was a second home of sorts when I was younger. I would make my way from one shelf to the next, book in hand, driven by a fascination with the supernatural: mythology, folklore, monsters, vampires, and ghosts. I read anything that put itself in front of me if it held out the promise of some kind of mystery.

Witches in particular held my attention. They had a way of occupying several worlds at once. You had the ones from folklore who were objects of fear and persecution; you had the literary variety, ranging from fairy tale villains to the great sorceresses of myth. And then there were those who actually made witchcraft part of their spiritual practice. Not to mention the ones I wanted to portray in a game of Dungeons & Dragons.

I found myself trying to reconcile these disparate notions. Some were at odds with one another or with my own beliefs, while others appeared to be different takes on the same fundamental ideas of power, nature, and knowledge. Reading and making sense of all this was how I came to think about witches. The notion arose in me that would later give birth to an in-game quote:

Morgan: There are things man was not meant to know, Nichols.
Larina: That's ok. I'm a girl. 

Larina, in my Jackson setting, is fond of the same reading material, poring over works on religion and magic to better understand her Wiccan faith and her own gifts. We put that knowledge to different uses. I was putting together an AD&D character and a magic system; she was forming an idea of where she stood in the world. Yet for all that, our methods were much the same. You will see why I have dubbed these Mirror Mondays.

The Witch Is Not the Wizard

I have long been of the opinion that a D&D witch should not be a distaff Magic-User or a cleric with better eyeliner. The Magic-User is concerned with the arcane; the Cleric has his divine power. But the Witch, as I have come to see her, is engaged in something else entirely. Her's is an occult art, one that is tied to spirits and hidden things and the relationships between them.

A Magic-User may know the right formula for an effect, and a Cleric can make his petitions to a higher authority. A Witch has to know what she is up against and what might be required of her in return. It is a more complicated business, and it has to be if she is to stand apart from the rest of the established classes in AD&D. Those distinctions are what allow for good storytelling. After all, magic ought to have its consequences. It is not merely a set of convenient skills on a character sheet. The risk is not always in a failed spell. Sometimes the problem is that something answers you.

The Witches of Jackson

With the development of Jackson, Illinois, and a return to Larina Nichols, I put the Witch in a new light.

In *Advanced Witches & Warlocks*, the questions were of an AD&D nature: what are her abilities, how does she advance? In Jackson, I was after the meaning of being a witch. What is it like to be sixteen in 1986 in a small Midwestern town and find out the supernatural is real? To see what others cannot? To have the monsters at your school or down the street rather than in some dungeon or a haunted castle in the Carpathians? Or to be the object of fear for being different?

Larina, Stephanie, and Faye are all witches, but they are not cut from the same cloth. Larina wants to understand. Stephanie is ambitious and confident in her power. Faye has older, stranger ties to the occult. I find their differences far more compelling than any common ground.

The same holds for the older set in Jackson. Sylvia, Kiera, and Natasha may have the power and knowledge to spare, but it has not made them happy or wise, nor has it made them particularly adept at getting along. You will find a past between them that is littered with unchangeable decisions.

Then there is Nida, and she has no desire to have anything to do with magic. And Vera who has been forbidden by her family to practice it.

In these characters, I can get at things a class description on its own never could. To say one has power is not to say what they will make of it. It does not indicate whether they will be kind or cruel, brave or frightened, generous or selfish. That is a question of character, not of the class they belong to.

Witches, Women, and Power

Witches have an aspect to them that has long held my interest. In fiction and in folklore, they are an odd mix of power, independence, knowledge, and femininity. They can be villains or heroes. Or they can be frightening for the simple reason that they will not behave as others expect of them.

I have never been one to think a woman of power has to shed her femininity to be taken seriously, nor do I see femininity as a synonym for weakness or passivity. Larina might be romantic and compassionate, or stubborn and terrifying. Stephanie is quite happy to be the center of attention in fine clothes and still be a formidable witch. Faye can be dangerous and vulnerable at once. None of them are, by any definition, "weak."

They can be wrong too, which is something I consider vital. I am not interested in characters who are put there to show how admirable or just how powerful they are. I want ones with flaws, who disagree and occasionally make a mess of things. The men in my stories are no different; a strong female doesn’t need a weak male counterpart any more than he needs the women around him to be helpless. There is room for all of them in fantasy and horror. Rowan, for example, is quite powerful in her own right, and she adores Andy. He is her rock, her bit of reality.  Valentino is also very capable. In one of his first adventures, he body-slams a zombie, and he also loves and protects Ami, even though she is every bit as capable as he is. These two complement each other.  Masculinity and femininity aren't competing resources.

One of the things I enjoy most about writing witches is that I don't have to limit them to any single definition of femininity. My witches can be beautiful, glamorous, romantic, sexual, maternal, ambitious, independent, or frightening. Often they are several of those things at once. They can wear elegant dresses and high heels, carry swords, summon demons, fall in love, raise families, and occasionally make decisions that shake the foundations of reality.

I have never understood why any of those qualities should be mutually exclusive. A woman doesn't become less feminine because she is powerful, nor does she become less powerful because she enjoys traditionally feminine things. Larina, Stephanie, and Faye are very different women, and I wouldn't want them any other way. They have their own personalities, interests, ambitions, and faults. Most importantly, they have their own choices to make.

Of course, not all my witches are good people, and even the good ones can do terrible things. Natasha Wilcox is one of the most intelligent and accomplished witches in Jackson, but that doesn't make her compassionate. Sylvia has paid dearly for some of her choices. Larina herself is perfectly capable of allowing her convictions to get in the way of understanding someone else's suffering. I don't need these women to be perfect, and I certainly don't need them all to agree with one another. Their disagreements, failures, and contradictions are part of what makes them interesting. Being a witch grants them access to power, not a monopoly on wisdom.

To me, that is what makes a character interesting. Not whether she conforms to someone else's expectations of what a woman should be, but whether she feels like a person who exists beyond the pages of the character sheet.

The Witch and the Monster

Horror has always had an interesting relationship with witches, often casting them as monsters. The charge of witchcraft was historically ruinous. In our stories, they have been cast as evil’s servants or wise healers, embodying generations of fear of the forbidden and of those who don’t fit in.

But being a witch doesn’t make my characters into monsters of their own accord. They might become so by what they do, by making a bad bargain or seeking power at too high a price. Or they may come across something in themselves they don’t like. But that is about action, not nature.

For Jackson, the distinction is key. The town has its share of the supernatural, but also plenty of human prejudice and anxiety. Those ordinary failings can be just as harmful as the monsters, and the witches have to deal with both.

There is also something wonderfully transgressive about the witch as a character. Witches are frequently associated with forbidden knowledge, dangerous bargains, ancient powers, and things that polite society would prefer not to acknowledge. Their stories can be bloody, violent, grotesque, sexually charged, and deeply disturbing. I don't shy away from any of that in my games. These elements are part of the long traditions of fantasy and horror that I love.

And I don't believe the presence of blood, gore, sex, or monsters automatically makes a story better. Those things are tools, and like any tools, their effectiveness depends on how they are used. A witch bargaining with a demon can be frightening because of the demon's appearance, but the real horror might lie in what she has promised in return. A monster can tear someone apart, but sometimes the more interesting question is why it chose that particular victim.

I don't see these darker elements as belonging to men or women. They belong to horror. And horror, like fantasy, has always benefited from writers and characters who bring different experiences and perspectives to it.

Tabletop Witches Don't Have to Be One Thing

Another thing I love about tabletop roleplaying games is the extraordinary freedom they give us to create. There is room for dark fantasy, heroic adventure, Gothic horror, cosmic terror, sword-and-sorcery, and just about anything else we can imagine. Not every game needs to appeal to everyone, and I certainly don't expect everyone to share my particular fascination with witches. But if you do, I'd love to hear from you!

I have always been fascinated by the assumption that fantasy gaming belongs to a particular kind of person or that there is only one proper way to approach it. I came to D&D through a lot of the same books, rules, and traditions that inspired so many other gamers of my generation. I loved the combat, the monsters, the dangerous dungeons, and the strange worlds waiting to be explored. But I was just as fascinated by the magic, mythology, folklore, and characters who didn't fit neatly into the traditional heroic mold. The old wizard, the wise cleric, the heroic paladin, and the mysterious witch were all on equal footing to me.

For me, none of these things were contradictory. They were all part of the same wonderful hobby. I didn't have to choose between Conan and Circe, between fighting monsters and studying magic, or between writing about powerful warriors and powerful sorceresses. Those interests complemented one another, and they still do. 

My love of witches didn't take me away from old-school gaming. It took me deeper into it.

But I have never believed that someone else's enjoyment of the hobby diminishes my own. There is nothing preventing me from playing AD&D the way I played it in the 1980s, or from creating something new that draws upon those same traditions. The fact that other people might prefer different characters, stories, or playstyles doesn't make my games any less meaningful.

I want more people to discover these old games and the literature that inspired them. I want them to read Appendix N, explore the old rules, and find something that excites their imaginations. They might discover the same things I did, or they might see possibilities I never considered. Either way, the hobby is richer for their participation.

I've spent far too many years exploring fantastic worlds to believe there is only one correct way to enjoy them.

The Two Sides of the Mirror

Working on Advanced Witches & Warlocks and on Jackson, I have come to see how much the two feed off each other. A rule I put down for AW&W clarifies what Larina and the rest are up to. An adventure from Jackson makes me re-examine what an ability means to the one who has it. A character will point out a flaw in the rules, or a new rule will introduce a role-playing element I hadn’t considered.

I will be the first to admit that, even after forty years, I can look at one of my own creations and learn something new from her that I didn’t know before. And I don’t see that ending soon.

I don't write about witches because I want to change what fantasy gaming is supposed to be. I write about witches because they have always been part of the fantasy, horror, and folklore I love. I don't see them as alternatives to the warriors, wizards, clerics, and rogues who have populated my games for decades. I see them as part of the same rich tradition. There is room in my games for Conan and Circe, for Bram Stoker and Mary Shelley, for ancient sorceresses and teenage witches trying to survive high school. 

There always has been.

There are mysteries out there beyond the familiar world, and more to be said about what people do when they find them. I suppose that is why I am drawn back to witches' time and again. They let me get at the unknown, the very things that pulled me into gaming and mythology in the first place.

In some ways, I am still that boy in the library hunting for a book on witches. Only now am I the one writing the books, and I am still finding new ones.

October Movie Challenge: Frankenstein (2025) and The Bride (2026)

Another double header tonight. With the disappointment of Dracula 2025 still on my mind (damn, that movie got on my nerves!) I wanted to see something Christoph Waltz was good in.

There have been many versions of Frankenstein on the silver screen, including one of the very first films ever made. This movie did not come out in time for me to review it last year, so I saved it for this year. Now, while this is the first time I have reviewed this, I did watch it back in November. So I really can't count tonight's re-watch as a first-time view.

Frankenstein suffers the same issues as Dracula, in that the novel is rarely portrayed with fidelity on the silver screen, and what most people think of as the story has a lot more to do with the Universal Studios versions from the 1930s and 1940s. That's fine; those movies are classics for a reason, but they are not the story on the page.

Frankenstein (2025)

Guillermo del Toro’s 2025 take is not 100% faithful to the novel, but it comes very, very close. I am inclined to rank this and Kenneth Branagh’s 1994 Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as the two best efforts to put Shelley's story on screen. It has occurred to me that a Frankenstein marathon is in order at some point.

Oscar Isaac stars as Victor Frankenstein here, with Jacob Elordi as the Creature. Mia Goth plays both Elizabeth and Victor’s mother, Claire, and Christoph Waltz plays Heinrich Harlander, the arms maker who puts up the money for Victor’s experiments. Harlander is one of del Toro’s more substantial inclusions; he is a wealthy man with his own reasons for wanting to make inroads on death. He is not part of the novel, but that is fine, really.

Waltz is good, as you would expect. He does not have to resort to rants or chewing scenery to make his mark. In Harlander, he has a chance to be charming and intelligent while also being deeply unsettling and vaguely amusing. One gets the sense right away that he is not bankrolling Victor out of any particular faith in the progress of science.

Where del Toro makes his biggest change is with Victor. The original is obsessive and irresponsible enough, but del Toro takes his arrogance and cruelty a step further. Isaac’s version is brilliant and driven, yet damaged by his father and the loss of his mother, and he seems to think that gives him license for all he does. There is an ego to the project as much as a desire to vanquish death.

Which leaves Jacob Elordi’s Creature as the film’s emotional core. Elordi is excellent in the part. What you see at first is something almost childlike, taking in the world through imitation and sensation. But he grows into a creation that is articulate and self-aware, as Shelley intended. Film versions have a habit of losing that; they make the monster out to be stupid when he should be reasoning, reading, and fully comprehending what Victor has made of him.

Del Toro seems to grasp that the real tragedy is not the accidental making of a monster, but rather that Victor has made a person and then shirks his responsibility for him. That is the heart of the novel and why the adaptation works for me.

You will find the Arctic framing device intact, with the narrative set against Captain Anderson’s expedition in the frozen north. It is not exactly as Shelley wrote it, but it has more of the structure and spirit than the typical fare of lightning and torch-wielding villagers.

Then there are the visuals. From the laboratories and machinery to the costumes and bodies, it is all gorgeous, with the kind of beauty mixed with decay that del Toro excels at. Victor’s work is impressive but grotesque.

It is a horror story, to be sure, but not the Creature who is the monster. Victor is. Or at least he creates the conditions for disaster and acts as if it were done to him. The Creature is capable of terrible things, but there is more to it than that.

I was fond of the movie when I saw it in November and even more so the second time around. Being aware of where del Toro has departed from Shelley allows one to see the purpose behind it. It is not a perfect adaptation; perhaps we never will get one. But this one knows the novel, and that is worth something.

The Bride! (2026)

 Ok. I want to start out by saying I really loved what this movie was trying to do. I am not 100% sure it always succeeded in doing what it wanted. No worries; the best bits overwhelmed the weaker parts.

This one doesn't fit my theme either, but like last night it was my wife's choice. She sits through these with me, and I have to sit through things like Hot Frosty around Christmas. ETA: I have been informed I will be watching "Christmas at the Zoo" sometime next month.

This movie opens with narration by Mary Shelley. That is quite appropriate, really, and a nice callback to the very original Bride of Frankenstein, and even a little bit of Young Frankenstein. Much like Elsa Lanchester, Jessie Buckley plays both Mary Shelley and the Bride. She also plays Ida, the woman who is reanimated into the Bride. Christian Bale, in his usual chameleon-like display, plays Frankenstein's monster. It was directed and written by Maggie Gyllenhaal. 

Mary Shelley provides the opening narration for The Bride! which is a fitting touch, and in its own way a nice nod to the original Bride of Frankenstein where we were treated to Mary, Percy and Lord Byron talking shop over her story. Jessie Buckley is on hand as both Mary Shelley and the Bride. In fact, she appears as three related people: Shelley, Ida, and the resurrected woman who will be the Bride. Christian Bale is in fine chameleon form as Frank, or what you would now call the monster, while Maggie Gyllenhaal has put her stamp on the project as writer and director.

The premise is simple enough. Take the old mythology of Bride of Frankenstein and put it in 1930s Chicago. Frank is in need of company, and he goes to Dr. Euphronious (Annette Bening) to have a creature created for him. They happen upon Ida, a young woman who was murdered by a mobster, brought back to life. 

Gyllenhaal poses the obvious question with this: what if the Bride had a movie of her own? What if she were allowed to determine her own identity? In so doing, she makes this less of a straight adaptation and more of a rejoinder to the whole Frankenstein tradition.

Buckley is outstanding. She is not grateful to be put back together, nor will she take it for granted that Frank is her soulmate by virtue of having made her. Her Bride is damaged and sexual, funny and angry, unpredictable and very much alive in spite of herself. She has strong opinions on the matter.

As for Bale’s Frank, you can see the line of descent from Boris Karloff’s Monster far more clearly than in Jacob Elordi’s Creature. He is a lonely, scarred man, weary of being hunted, and the film is well aware that he is carrying decades of cinematic history on his shoulders.

Then there is the setting. 1930s Chicago brings with it a host of gangsters, the press, radical politics, and a city in flux for these two outsiders. The synopsis touts a combustible romance and a cultural movement, and in a way the film is as excessive as that description implies. It can be a weakness at times, but also a strength.

There are scenes where The Bride! seems to be straining to be a Gothic horror, a gangster film, a screwball romance, and a feminist take on Frankenstein all at once. Not every bit of it lands. But I would prefer to see Gyllenhaal go after something with such ambition rather than another serviceable retelling of the monster making for a windmill.

Buckley is what keeps it all in order. She gives the part an identity of its own, quite unlike Lanchester’s character, and that is the point. James Whale gave the Creature a companion when he asked for one; Gyllenhaal wants to know what that companion has to say about it. As it happens, quite a lot.

I like the notion of Buckley playing Mary Shelley too, alongside Ida and the Bride. It draws a line between the author and the women made and remade by others. After Hollywood has been at it for two centuries with their versions of Frankenstein, it is only right the Bride should push back. A clever idea.

Hollywood has "dug up" and remade Mary Shelley so many times. 

Don’t get me wrong, not everything in the movie works. The tonal changes are sudden, and at points the characters have to make room for the film’s arguments. I would have liked to have seen it let Frank and the Bride just be for a while. 

But when it does work, it is very good. And it is not trying to usurp the original Bride of Frankenstein, which would be a fool’s errand. It is having an argument with it. Far more compelling.

A case of two Frankensteins

It was a happy accident to put these on one after the other; in doing so, you see how they handle the same mythology from opposite ends.

Then there is Guillermo del Toro, who has no trouble going backward. He makes a point of returning to Mary Shelley and the Arctic setting, giving the Creature the intelligence and emotional depth he is due. It is a reminder that the tragedy is Victor's for not owning up to the life he has made.

Maggie Gyllenhaal moves in the other direction. She is concerned with a movie invention, not something from Shelley, and wants to know what transpires once the laboratory is left behind. What if the Bride is not done for? What if she has her own wants and is under no compulsion to love the one who put her together?

One film is about what Frankenstein was, the other about its potential. I have an appreciation for both. Coming off Dracula 2025, it is a relief to be with filmmakers who actually care why these old monsters are worth our time. Gyllenhaal and del Toro, even in their different takes, respect their source material much more than Luc Besson. 

Mary Shelly, Feminism and Horror

Of course, before there was Boris Karloff, before there was the Universal monster, and long before Hollywood decided that every Frankenstein story needed a castle full of electrical equipment, there was Mary Shelley. In the summer of 1816, an eighteen-year-old Mary Godwin joined Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Polidori in Lake Geneva, Switzerland, where a challenge to write ghost stories ultimately gave us Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. Published in 1818, the novel has never really left us.

What I find remarkable is not simply that Shelley was a young woman writing horror in the early nineteenth century, though that is remarkable enough. It is that she understood something about horror that we are still exploring today. The frightening part of Frankenstein isn't merely the reanimated flesh or the unnatural creation of life. It is what happens when someone creates a living being and refuses to take responsibility for it. Victor Frankenstein's greatest sin is not necessarily that he creates a monster or even his hubris, but that he abandons his creation and then refuses to face the consequences.

It is also worth remembering that some of the foundational works of horror were written by women. Mary Shelley helped establish the traditions of both Gothic horror and science fiction, long before those genres acquired their modern names. She wrote about death, obsession, murder, unnatural creation, and the destruction of families, and she did so without sacrificing the emotional and philosophical questions that make the story endure. More than two hundred years later, we are still finding new ways to tell her story. That is a legacy few writers, regardless of genre, can claim.

The Bride of Mary Shelley

There is another connection between Shelley's original novel and both versions of The Bride of Frankenstein that I find especially interesting. In the novel, Victor begins creating a female companion for his Creature but ultimately destroys her before she can come to life. He fears what she might do, whether she would accept the Creature, and what might happen if the two could reproduce. In James Whale's 1935 film, the Bride comes to life, but things don't work out as her creators intended. She takes one look at the Creature and wants nothing to do with him.

There is something wonderfully tragic about that moment. Both Victor and the Creature imagine a female companion who will fulfill their expectations, but neither has considered that she might have expectations of her own. The film gives her very little screen time and even less opportunity to express herself, but her rejection of the Creature becomes the emotional climax of the story. A woman created to be someone's companion chooses otherwise, and everything falls apart.

Now jump ahead ninety-one years to Maggie Gyllenhaal's The Bride! (2026). Here, the Bride is no longer simply a companion created for the Creature. She was a woman named Ida before her death, and when Dr. Euphronius brings her back to life at Frank's request, she becomes something neither of them could have anticipated. She is angry, confused, passionate, violent, and determined to discover who she is. Frank wants someone to love him, and as the two develop a relationship, the Bride is not particularly interested in being defined by his desires. She has her own identity to discover, her own desires, and a whole lot of rage.

What I find fascinating is how the three versions build upon one another. In Shelley's novel, the female Creature is denied existence because Victor fears what she might become. In Whale's film, she appears only briefly, but she is allowed to reject the role assigned to her. In Gyllenhaal's film, she finally becomes the central character, and she is every bit as monstrous, complicated, and unpredictable as the men around her. She isn't a perfect heroine, nor does the film ask us to excuse everything she does. She is a monster, after all. But she is also a person, and that is an important distinction. She is a monster of her own choosing.

I also love the casting connections. Elsa Lanchester plays both Mary Shelley in the opening of the 1935 film and the Bride herself. Gyllenhaal takes that idea even further by having Jessie Buckley play Mary Shelley, Ida, and the Bride, with Shelley's restless spirit becoming part of the story itself. Whether you like Gyllenhaal's interpretation or not (and I do), that is a clever way to connect the author to her creation. The woman who wrote the original story is quite literally demanding to be heard through the woman the story has so often left silent.

And perhaps that is what I find most interesting about these films. The horror isn't simply that someone has brought the dead back to life. It is that these creations have their own thoughts, feelings, desires, and wills. The people responsible for creating them seem genuinely surprised when they don't behave as expected.

Mary Shelley was exploring these questions in 1818, and here we are in 2026, still finding new things to say about them. I think that speaks rather well of her original idea.

All from a teenage girl who was challenged to write about monsters.  

Or as Mary says in the 1935 Bride of Frankenstein. "Why shouldn't I write of monsters?"

NIGHT SHIFT and Jackson Connections

I am not sure where the kind of mad science we see in Frankenstein would find a home in Jackson. The Mauvaiseterre has more than its share of witches, psychics, demons, and ghosts without anyone building from spare parts.

The premise, however, is right at home there. All it takes is a death and someone who will not let it stand. In Jackson, any effort to reverse it would be of a magical order: a parent stumbles upon an antiquated rite, a witch makes an exception to the rules for raising the dead, or a psychic is certain the lost one is within reach.

Perhaps it succeeds. That is when the horror sets in. Not from any malice in the returned, but because death has altered them in ways no one comprehends. You could make that work anywhere. The spectacle is in the making of life; the story is in having to answer for it.

I mean. That is what I have done with Elowen Hale, but chronologically speaking, she isn't born until 2005 or so. So that is still 20 years in the future as far as my Jackson is concerned. 

October Horror Movie Challenge 2026
Viewed: 27
First Time Views: 17

October Movie Challenge: Monster Marathon

It's the weekend, and that means double feature time. Though I am likely to hit more double features snce I still have a lot of movies I want to watch. I wanted to get some movies that could have some monsters I could use in Jackson, Sunny Valley, or even Valhalla and I wanted to stay within my time period. So tonight I decided on a mini monster marathon with two movies I have tried to watch before and never managed to finish.

That probably should have been a warning. Still, I am nothing if not stubborn or a glutton for punishment.

Tonight’s movies are Blood Tide (1982) and Boggy Creek II: And the Legend Continues (1985). Both feature monsters lurking in isolated places. Both have some potentially interesting ideas. Both are also fairly terrible.

But I finished them this time. That has to count for something at least.

Blood Tide (1982)

I will start with the better of the two, though that is not exactly a ringing endorsement.

Blood Tide (and sometimes "Bloodtide" in the same credits) follows Neil (Martin Kove, "Karate Kid" and "Cobra Kai") and Sherry Grice (Mary Louise Weller, "Animal House"), an American couple who travel to a remote Greek island searching for Neil’s missing sister Madeline (Deborah Shelton). They eventually find her living there with Frye, an American treasure hunter played by James Earl Jones. Frye has been exploring underwater ruins around the island and, because treasure hunters in horror movies apparently have no sense of self-preservation, uses explosives to open a sealed underwater chamber.

Something had been sealed inside. The local villagers knew this, because of course they did.

Soon young women are disappearing, an ancient sea creature is loose again, and the villagers return to traditions involving human sacrifice in an effort to appease it.

There is a decent monster movie buried somewhere in here, but hell if I can find it. 

The cast alone should have helped. James Earl Jones, José Ferrer, Martin Kove, Lydia Cornell, and Mary Louise Weller. It's a surprising cast, and they really should have produced something better.

James Earl Jones does what he can with Frye, and José Ferrer could probably make a grocery list sound important, but there is definitely a sense that everyone showed up, collected a paycheck, and enjoyed the Greek scenery. To be fair, the scenery is gorgeous.

The movie itself has the right elements. We have a remote Greek island, an old convent, pre-Christian artwork, underwater ruins, a sealed chamber, a monster that once required human sacrifices, and villagers who remember more than they are willing to say. This should be fantastic material for an old-school monster story.

Instead, the movie is slow, the creature is barely developed (both in plot and in makeup effects), and much of the suspense never really goes anywhere.

I do like the central idea. Frye discovers that some things were sealed away for a reason. The image of an underwater chamber marked with an ancient symbol is exactly the kind of thing I want from this sort of movie. Madeline’s strange connection to the island also suggests something older and more interesting than the movie ultimately develops.

There is also something almost charmingly old-fashioned about *Blood Tide*. This feels much more like a 1970s horror movie than something from the early 1980s. The Americans travel to an isolated Old World location, ignore local warnings, disturb an ancient evil, and discover that the locals have preserved traditions for reasons outsiders do not understand.

In the end, the scariest thing about this movie is the full-on kiss that brother and sister Neil and Madeline share. 

Boggy Creek II: And the Legend Continues (1985)

Then there is Boggy Creek II, which I feel I should point out is the third Boggy Creek movie.

Charles B. Pierce wrote, produced, directed, and stars in this sequel to his much better 1972 film The Legend of Boggy Creek. Pierce plays Dr. Brian Lockhart, an anthropology professor at the University of Arkansas who takes several students into the Arkansas wilderness to investigate reports of a Bigfoot-like creature living around Boggy Creek.

I mean, there are a lot of reasons why this movie should tick all the boxes.  Cryptozoology professor. College students. Remote Arkansas swamps. A local monster legend. Early 1980s technology (loved the computer!), colorful (yeah, that's word I am going with) locals. 

You could build a perfectly good NIGHT SHIFT adventure out of that setup in about five minutes.

And somehow this movie is remarkably dull. Sometimes painfully so. 

Lockhart and his students head into the woods with camping equipment and a sonar-based detection system while Lockhart narrates previous encounters with the creature. These stories appear as flashbacks and involve farmers, fishermen, stranded motorists, and one unfortunate man in an outhouse. Eventually the group meets Old Man Crenshaw, who knows considerably more about the creature than he initially admits.

It turns out Crenshaw has captured a young creature, which explains why the adult has become more aggressive. Lockhart eventually realizes that the monster is not some rampaging beast. It is a parent trying to recover its child.

That is actually a decent idea. The monster is not evil. The humans caused the problem.

Unfortunately, getting to that realization takes much longer than the movie’s 91-minute runtime.

Maybe it because it goes from dull flashback to dull flashback. Or maybe because we get Professor Lockhart confidently explaining everything while his students follow him around. The professor is also astonishingly self-assured for a man whose research methodology seems to consist primarily of driving into the woods and waiting for Bigfoot to appear. I suppose tenure was easier to get in the 1980s.

And will someone PLEASE get Chuck Pierce (yes, his son) a goddamn shirt?

Monsters Where They Are

My intended theme for this October was 1980s horror. But the theme I found has been "Horror Comes Home."  I picked these movies because they matched my intended theme and completely failed on my found theme. These movies are more akin to the 1970s style of horror, going where the monsters are. Often in some remote location, be that the Arkansas backwaters or Greek islands. 

I have likely given these movies far more thought than they deserve.

October Horror Movie Challenge 2026
Viewed: 25
First Time Views: 16

October Movie Challenge: The Initiation (1984)

Tonight’s movie is The Initiation, a 1984 slasher featuring college students, sorority pledges, buried family secrets, recurring nightmares, and a late-night trip to a department store that goes very badly.

This one has been on my list for a bit now. Despite the title, there really is not all that much initiation going on here.

The Initiation (1984)

Kelly Fairchild, played by Daphne Zuniga in her first major role, is in the midst of pledging a sorority but is also haunted by a recurring dream in which her parents and a stranger are being set on fire at her old home. With large holes in her memory of the event, she enlists the help of Peter (a pre-Charmed James Read), a psychology graduate student, in the hope a sleep study will jog things loose.

On the other hand, Kelly and the rest of the pledges have their work cut out for them in preparation for the big night. They are to make off with the night watchman’s uniform from the department store her family owns. It is a convenient way to get a bunch of students locked up in a sizeable commercial building after hours, which I do not mind. When the killer shows up, the matter of the initiation becomes secondary.

Larry Stewart has directed this from a Charles Pratt Jr. script. Along with Zuniga, you will see Vera Miles, Clu Gulager, James Read, and Marilyn Kagan in it. Some of the campus footage was done at Southern Methodist University, and the Dallas Market Center was used for the Fairchild store. Ignore the fact that the sign out front is just a banner draped over the real mall's sign. 

Zuniga is very good in what was her first major part. She has to be the anchor of the film as Kelly and, later, as the murderous twin, Terry Randall. The whole evil-twin business is straight melodrama, but she makes the difference between the two convincing enough for me to accept it. 

Then there is James Read as Peter. He is fine in the role, though these days I am more accustomed to him as Victor Bennett, the father on Charmed. There is something oddly fitting about the future dad of Prue and the girls delving into psychic dreams in an eighties horror.

College Horror 

I have to say the college atmosphere is what I enjoy most, even if the film could have made better use of it. There is a different dynamic to college horror than to high school horror. In high school, you are still tied to your family and the identity you have had since you were young. College is meant to be a chance to put that behind you, to leave home and figure out who you are going to be as an adult. I have brought this up with both college and boarding school movies this month and it is a fertile ground for a game.

So Kelly can't recall anything from her life before the age of 9. Which is convenient since there are plenty of red herrings here that make you believe she might be our killer. 

As Kelly is put through the motions of a ritual to induct her into a new social family, she is also starting to realize that her own flesh and blood are not what they seem. One could make the case for a better film that would have done more with such a parallel, but what is on offer here is sufficient to draw an audience to the multiplex.

The Mall After Dark

This is where The Initiation becomes a far more compelling affair. Even if it doesn't differ much from Chopping Mall in some respects. 

For the sorority challenge, Kelly and the rest of the pledges are tasked with going into the Fairchild department store after it closes. Some students slip in to put the frights on them, and before long all of them are trapped. The well-lit world of commerce is transformed into a slasher’s maze.

Using the Dallas Market Center as a stand-in gives the movie a scale you do not get from an average house or dorm setting. Malls and the like are fine horror territory precisely because an empty one is an entirely different place. I have already argued that malls are the second-best place for 80s horror, next to schools.

In the day, they are designed to put you at ease so you will part with your money; there is music, displays to catch the eye, and people about. But when the doors are locked, the mannequins, mirrors, and furniture are still there, and the people are not. The film makes good use of it. It is something I see in a lot of 1980s horror this month: the modern commercial world can be as haunted a castle as any isolated Gothic spot. You head to the mall, and the monster is already there. Or, more to the point, it follows you there.

Jackson finds this useful for Lincoln Square Mall. By day it is all very ordinary. Teenagers are shopping, parents are grumbling about the cost, kids are congregating at the food court, and Stephanie likely knows half the staff. Put out the lights and bar the doors and it is another matter altogether.

Family Secrets

Kelly’s nightmares turn out to be repressed memories. The man she recalls being burned is Jason Randall, her biological father, which means the tale her family has been telling is mostly lies.

But the real twist is yet to come.

There is a twin sister. If you want to say that in your best "Return of the Jedi" Darth Vader voice that is up to you. 

Terry Randall has been put away in an institution since she was a child and expunged from the family record. Daphne Zuniga is on hand to play both parts for us, delivering the kind of amnesia and secret parentage you would expect from a mix of soap opera and horror. She would later go on to "Melrose Place" so yeah, this is a good turn for her.

It is preposterous. Yet it works, perhaps better than it ought to. It's the 1980s. 

An evil twin is a straightforward notion for horror because it is an assault on identity, not just the body. A killer in a mask is concealing himself; an evil twin can take your place. Your friends will swear they were talking to you; your family will spot you in a place you have never been. You may have an alibi, but witnesses will vouch for having seen your face. That is a more interesting proposition than someone simply running after you with a blade.

The rest of the movie is fairly predictable, though. Terry kills all of Kelly's friends and decides to kill Kelly and take her place. Not sure if she really thought this one out well, but hey, she was crazy.

Jackson, IL Connections

I mentioned already I am a touch disappointed I didn't make Stephanie and Grant Vale twins. In truth, it does work better for Steph to have an older brother she thinks is great, but is also away at UIUC, so he doesn't pop in all the time except when I need him.

But near the end of this movie, I had an idea.

Why not make Stephanie into a forgotten twin? 

I would put this down as a Stephanie adventure. But as always, you sub in your Characters here.

Picture someone with the exact features of Stephanie Wren Vale making an appearance in Jackson. In the beginning, there is no violence to point to a monster, just oddities. A teacher is adamant he had words with her after school; one of the cheerleaders will tell you Stephanie called and was deliberately cruel. Then someone spots her coming out of Lincoln Square Mall, even though she was elsewhere.

Stephanie dismisses it as a joke until someone is actually hurt. The witness has no doubt that Stephanie is responsible, and suddenly she has a very personal problem.

Her first thought is likely to be something quite ordinary. She has a sister. Or at least that is what she comes to believe: that her parents have been keeping the existence of another daughter from her. So she starts to probe. She pokes around in the family records, puts questions to her parents, and reads their every hesitation as proof they are up to something.

"Do I have a sister?"

They say no, but are really cagey about it. Stephanie does not buy it. For a Vale, a family scandal is far more credible than a supernatural duplicate. It is only Larina who will eventually put forward the answer Stephanie is not looking for. What if the girl is not her sister? What if she is a doppelgänger?

That is where the story gets frightening. The copy is not content to simply resemble Stephanie; it is studying her. At first there are errors. A wrong nickname is used, or she is wearing something Stephanie would not touch. It knows the facts but not their significance. An associate of Stephanie’s might notice the smile is right on time but not in the right moment. With each meeting, the copy improves.

The doppelgänger is not so much trying to frame Stephanie as it is practicing. Its aim is to take her place. That is the true danger. Stephanie is adept at managing social spaces and how others view her; the creature turns that identity into a weapon.

For the climax, you want to be inside Lincoln Square Mall after hours. There are mirrors and mannequins and dressing rooms aplenty for the thing to vanish and come back a little more like Stephanie. By the end, Faye and Larina may find themselves confronted by two Stephanies, both claiming the other is the monster. Faye (you characters in your) is the one to sort it out. Not with some spell, but because she knows Stephanie.

In my game this would work because Faye would be a good choice to spot an evil twin. 

Final Thoughts

I would not call The Initiation a great slasher of the decade. It's not even really a great slasher for 1984. The title sets you up for sorority stuff the film doesn't really deliver; the initiation is little more than a way to get everyone into the department store.

Still, there are merits, and I did enjoy the second half. The college environment allows Kelly the freedom to question what her family has told her, and the psychological side means her nightmares are not just foreshadowing for its own sake. Daphne Zuniga handles the double duty well in her first major outing, and James Read makes Peter likable enough to make the investigation bearable.

But my favorite part is the mall. There is nothing like a deserted one at night for 1980s horror. It strips the safety from a familiar place. And then you realize the one on your trail has your face. 

In Jackson’s case, I prefer the doppelgänger to the evil twin trope. One character goes through half the ordeal fearing her parents have kept a sister from her. Then the good news: there is no secret sister. Too bad something else is wearing her face. 

I am going to need more "Evil Twin" movies.

October Horror Movie Challenge 2026
Viewed: 23
First Time Views: 14