Tales of Jackson: Edge of Seventeen

 It might be fairly obvious now, but I am not doing any adventure here in order. Some are playtests; others are fully thought-out ideas...in my head, if not on paper. And some start out as one thing and then become something very, very different at some point.

Such is the case with Larina's birthday on October 25, 1986. 

Aaron and Larina share chips in her VW Bug.

The Edge of Seventeen

"Sometimes the ghost doesn't want to haunt you or scare you. Sometimes it just wants to share a bag of chips or for you to hold your hand before they move on."

One of the things I have been working on for my Jackson, Illinois setting is making sure that not every adventure follows the same formula. Yes, Jackson is a town filled with witches, ghosts, demons, monsters, and all sorts of supernatural trouble. And yes, the teenagers living there seem to have an uncanny ability to find themselves in the middle of it. But not every encounter with the supernatural needs to end in a fight. Not every ghost needs to be busted, every demon defeated, or every mystery solved.

Sometimes the supernatural is simply part of life in Jackson. Sometimes it can even give someone something wonderful, if only for a little while.

That is the idea behind my Season 2 adventure, "Edge of Seventeen."

Honestly, I was always going to do this adventure.

A Birthday Near Halloween

The adventure takes place between October 19 and November 1, 1986, during the 1986–87 school year. Larina Nichols, our resident teenage witch, is about to turn seventeen. Her birthday falls on Saturday, October 25, just six days before Halloween. 

Of course, she is just a stand-in for your characters, but it works well if their birthday is near Halloween.

For most teenagers, having a birthday that close to Halloween might mean a costume party, some scary movies, and plenty of candy. For a witch living in Jackson, Illinois, it means something else entirely.

The Veil between the worlds of the living and the dead is exceptionally thin around Halloween. Spirits can cross over more easily, strange things happen in places that are normally quite ordinary, and the dead sometimes walk among the living.

Naturally, a character would like to have a birthday party without anything supernatural getting involved.

Naturally, that isn't going to happen.

In my game, Larina is a 16-year-old senior at Jackson Public High School who has been advanced academically, and she also attends advanced Greek classes at St. Michael's Catholic School. One afternoon, while eating lunch alone in her purple Volkswagen Beetle, she is approached by a handsome young man wearing a St. Michael's school uniform.

His name is Aaron Michaels. He's seventeen, with blond hair, green eyes, and a friendly smile. He sees Larina sitting alone and asks if she would like some company. Soon they are sitting in her Beetle, sharing a bag of potato chips and talking.  It's a perfectly ordinary meeting between two teenagers.

My players immediately distrusted him, calling him "Witch Bait."

And for Larina, who spends an extraordinary amount of her time dealing with extraordinary things, that's rather nice.

The Boy Who Wasn't There

Aaron and Larina hit it off almost immediately. He's intelligent, funny, thoughtful, and genuinely interested in her. They start spending time together, going on dates, listening to music, and doing all the things teenagers do when they discover they really like each other.

For once, Larina has a boyfriend who isn't intimidated by her intelligence, doesn't expect her to solve some supernatural crisis, and doesn't seem to have any ulterior motives.

So yeah.  Aaron has a secret. Aaron Michaels is dead.

He was the son of Professor Michaels, a chemistry teacher at MacAlister College and attended St. Michael's Catholic School. He died in a chemistry laboratory accident while saving two children who snuck in from exposure to chlorine gas. Aaron wasn't a criminal, a villain, or someone whose death was the consequence of some terrible supernatural bargain. He was a good kid who saw two children in danger and did what he could to save them.

Now, with Jackson's already thin Veil growing thinner as Halloween approaches, Aaron has somehow returned.

And this is where I want the adventure to depart from the usual ghost story.

Aaron isn't trying to haunt anybody. He isn't seeking revenge. He isn't possessing someone or attempting to drain the life out of Larina. For approximately two weeks, he is, for all practical purposes, alive again. He can eat, laugh, feel the autumn cold, hold Larina's hand, and experience the ordinary pleasures of life.

When he's with Larina, he even sometimes forgets that he's dead.

Is that because of Larina's magic? Is it because the Veil is particularly thin? Or is it because the two of them have formed a genuine emotional connection?

I don't know.

More importantly, I don't think I want to know. Some mysteries are better left unanswered.  Besides, all the other characters spend their time trying to figure it out. That is when they are not trying to plan a birthday party.

That is my design hook here. I have split the party. I have one character away (the Birthday girl) and the others planning the party and noticing this new guy who is taking all her time. Which is convenient since they use the distraction to get the party planning done.

Happy Seventeenth Birthday, Larina

Larina doesn't discover Aaron's secret until her seventeenth birthday party on October 25.

By this point, she has been dating him for almost a week and has developed genuine feelings for him. Aaron has become someone important to her, and suddenly she discovers that the boy she's falling for has been dead for years.

Naturally, Larina didn't take the news particularly well.  Though better than I expected.

She is hurt that Aaron kept the truth from her, confused about what is happening, and more than a little frustrated that the first decent boyfriend she's found in a while turns out to be a ghost.

Her friends, of course, have opinions. But here is the important part of the adventure. Larina doesn't reject Aaron because he's a ghost.

After they talk about it, she decides she still wants to be with him. She likes Aaron for who he is, not whether his name appears on a list of the living.

For the next week, they continue dating. Aaron even gets to give Larina a birthday present, a silver pentagram necklace that shows how much he respects her beliefs, despite his Catholic school upbringing.

They spend time together knowing that the approaching end of the Halloween season will separate them.

And that knowledge changes their relationship. They no longer need to pretend that everything is normal, but they also don't need to spend every moment worrying about what comes next.

Sometimes they just want to sit in her car, listen to the radio, and share another bag of chips.

Happy Birthday Larina!

The Ghost Who Doesn't Need Busting

Originally, Aaron wasn't supposed to be the main story of Edge of Seventeen.

My first idea involved a ghost girl who had died before her seventeenth birthday. With Larina's birthday approaching, the girl's spirit would return, threatening to steal the life or future she had been denied. That would provide the supernatural mystery and danger, while Aaron would serve as the romantic B-plot.

It was a perfectly serviceable supernatural horror adventure. There would be a mystery to investigate, a dangerous spirit to confront, and some sort of climax at Larina's birthday party.

But the more I developed Aaron, the more interesting his plot became. The more I had him show up, the more the players wanted to know more about him. 

I found myself spending more time thinking about the boy who had died saving two children than the ghost girl who was supposed to be the antagonist. Aaron didn't have an evil agenda or a sinister secret beyond the fact that he was dead. He was just a good kid who had been given an unexpected opportunity to experience some of the life he had lost.

And Larina was giving him that opportunity without even realizing it.

Eventually, I decided to drop the ghost girl entirely.

Aaron was promoted from the "B plot" to the "main plot", and Edge of Seventeen became a very different adventure.

There is no evil ghost to defeat. No demonic mastermind is manipulating events. No sinister ritual is required to send Aaron back to the grave.

Instead, the adventure is about two teenagers who find each other under impossible circumstances and decide to make the most of the time they have.

That doesn't mean there isn't a mystery. The characters can investigate Aaron's death, explore the circumstances of his return, and try to understand what happens when Halloween ends. There are opportunities for the other characters to become involved, particularly when Larina learns the truth.

But solving the mystery isn't the point.

The point is just two teens getting to be regular teens for a little bit. It doesn't matter that one is a ghost and the other is a witch. It is the type of adventure you can have in Jackson and nowhere else.  

Everyone Needs a Hand to Hold On To

On November 1, the Veil begins returning to normal, and Aaron can no longer remain in the world of the living.

Larina cannot prevent this. Despite her considerable magical abilities, she cannot simply make Aaron alive again. Nor should she have to. There is no mystery to solve here, but I don't need the players to know that right away.

One of the lessons I want Edge of Seventeen to explore is that magic cannot, and perhaps should not, solve every problem.

Aaron isn't asking Larina to resurrect him (she couldn't anyway). He isn't demanding that she find some way to keep him in Jackson forever. He just wants to spend what time he has with her.

And when that time ends, he wants someone to hold his hand. Neither wants to say goodbye, but they both know they have to.

And then Aaron is gone.

No explosion of supernatural energy. No terrible curse. No triumphant spellcasting.

Just a girl standing alone on an autumn evening, missing a boy she loved for a little while.

I don't plan to bring Aaron back in a future adventure. His story has an ending, and I think it should remain that way. Not every character needs to return, and not every loss needs to be reversed.

Sometimes that is simply how life works.

Aaron says goodbye

What I Want from Edge of Seventeen

I want this adventure to demonstrate something important about Jackson and about the kinds of stories I want to tell with NIGHT SHIFT. 

This likely reads more like a Monsterhearts game than an OSR-adjacent NIGHT SHIFT game, but that is the point. 

Not every supernatural encounter needs to be a combat encounter. Not every ghost is evil. Not every mystery must be solved, and not every adventure needs a villain.

There are plenty of monsters in Jackson. The teenagers will have more than enough opportunities to fight vampires, confront demons, break curses, and save the town from terrible things.

But sometimes the supernatural gives us an opportunity to tell a different kind of story.

A story about kindness, first love, friendship, loss, and growing up.

For Aaron Michaels, the extraordinary event isn't coming back from the dead. It's getting to experience things he thought were gone forever. A first date. A birthday party. A girl who really likes him. The simple pleasure of being seventeen.

For Larina, the adventure is about learning that something doesn't have to last forever to matter, and that loving someone sometimes means accepting that you cannot keep them.

And for the players, I hope it becomes a reminder that the characters in Jackson are teenagers first and supernatural investigators second. Their friendships, romances, heartbreaks, and ordinary lives deserve just as much attention as the monsters lurking beyond the Veil.

Because sometimes the ghost doesn't need to be busted.

Sometimes it just needs someone to share a bag of chips with, and a hand to hold before moving on.

October Movie Challenge: Poltergeist II & III (1986, 1988)

 I wanted to do these two movies back-to-back since they are more connected to each other than they are to the first movie. The original Poltergeist is not just a great horror movie; it is a great movie, full stop. Spielberg shows the promise here that will earn him the accolades he gets with ET and Shindler's list. 

Sadly, Poltergeist directors Brian Gibson (II) and Gary Sherman (III) don't quite live up to the bar Spielberg set, but then again, who can? But if you ignore the first movie and take these two on their own merits...well, they still don't live up, but there is a perfectly serviceable horror movie here.

Niether of these re first time views.

Poltergeist II: The Other Side (1986)

"They're baaack."

I can't say with 100% certainty that the title of this movie didn't have a roundabout way of influencing the name of this blog. The name of my blog comes from an older website of mine, which in turn came from a newspaper column about weirdness I used to write for my high school newspaper. Though I am pretty sure I started that in 1985. In any case, the movie and the blog both take their name from the same sources.

In another bizarre connection. I guess I connection I used to talk to my dead grandmother on my play telephone too. But in my defense, I was only 2 at the time. 

The Freeling family has moved from their haunted house, now a hole in the ground, to live with Diane's mother. Missing and unexplained is older daughter Dana. The script for the movie has her at college, but that sequence was cut from the final shooting script due to the murder of Dominique Dunne, the actress who had played Dana. I have to admit that bothered me a lot at the time.

A dig at the former site of their home reveals a burial pit under the graveyard already there. Yes, it is an extra graveyard! BUT this becomes the key feature of this and the next film, introducing Rev. Henry Kane (played by Julian Beck), one of the creepiest horror movie villains in a long time. So the movie is redeemed by this alone.

We get a Magical Native American, Taylor (Will Sampson), to help the Freelings against Kane. This would be the last film roles for both Sampson and Beck.

What follows is fairly predictable, but not unenjoyable. This film has an uphill battle afterall. There are some great special effects. The "Worm" stands out, but the "Spielberginess" of the movie is gone.

Poltergeist III (1988)

In some ways, I enjoyed this one more. This movie only has Carlo Anne (a sadly very sick Heather O'Rourke) and Zelda Rubinstein as Tangina Barrons, as in the previous two movies. Henry Kane is back, played by Nathan Davis, with voice-overs by Corey Burton. The setting switches to Chicago, a place I was already in love with, so there was that.

Craig T. Nelson and JoBeth Williams are out as the Freeling parents as Carold Anne is sent to live with her aunt Patricia (Nancy Allen) and her new husband, Bruce (Tom Skerritt). I like both Nancy Allen and Tom Skerritt, so I was fine with this, and if the plot contrivance was to send Carol Anne to a special school, well that is fine, though I did have concerns about parents sending their child away after two traumatic experiences.  

We do learn from Tangina that there have been no incidents since the last movie and they only start now because Carol Anne's psychiatrist, Dr. Seaton (Richard Fire) dredges it all up again via hypnosis. 

This movie also features an early outing for Lara Flynn Boyle as Bruce's teenage daughter Donna Gardner. 

This moves the action from haunted houses built over graveyards to the modern John Hancock Center in Chicago. A good example of my "Horror Comes Home" theme. 

The Poltergeist Tragedies

I do at least want to acknowledge the various deaths that took place. Dominique Dunne was just 22 when she was murdered by her ex-boyfriend in 1982. Her death really bothered me at the time. Later on, both Will Sampson and Julian Beck would die soon after the second movie, and of course the most famous was Heather O'Rourke, age 12, who died in February of 1988 after filming, but before the movie was released in June.

Poltergeist 2015

I wanted to watch the 2015 Poltergeist with Sam Rockwell, but honestly I am a bit tired now. This was a lot easier to do 15 years ago.

NIGHT SHIFT and Jackson Connections

Both NIGHT SHIFT and Jackson, IL can draw on ideas from both Poltergeist II and III, though for different things. And honestly this is why I picked these two for tonight even though I have already seen them both.

With Poltergeist II it is the notion that one can get away from the supernatural and not have escaped it for good. The Freelings in Cuesta Verde have left town to put their lives back together, doing as much as anyone would in their position to leave it all behind. It does not keep Reverend Kane from putting in an appearance. I think of this with Jackson. Put down a haunting, and you are not guaranteed a clean ending. Some things have a memory of those who hurt them, some places hold on to former residents, and a family can be tied to something that will follow them anywhere.

I want room in NIGHT SHIFT for such stories. A bunch of characters can put an end to an artifact or a terrible encounter and go home to finish school and grow up. But come five or ten years, and something happens that makes them realize the experience has left its mark. They thought the matter was settled years ago, but then they have to consider they may never have understood what went on. In Poltergeist II at least, getting out alive and leaving something in your past are not the same.

Poltergeist III is in some respects more interesting to work with. The move to Chicago alters the whole mood. Carol Anne is older and with relatives in a high-rise. The supernatural is to be found in the elevators and mirrors and parking garages rather than another suburban house. That is along the lines of what I have in mind for my Chicago 1992 campaign.

By 1992, the Jackson kids have put some distance between themselves and their former home. They are at college or at work, sharing an apartment, having relationships, and paying bills. They have obligations and have let some of their old friends go. This is significant because in Jackson they had a support system. If something odd happened, there were people around who knew what it was, and even if the adults didn’t believe them, they had each other.

In Chicago, none of that applies. Old friends are hundreds of miles off, and no one at work or in college has any idea what transpired in Jackson. It is hard to tell someone who has never seen anything supernatural why you are afraid of a certain sound or reflection. The characters are more capable, but their support system is gone.

The city also puts the horror in a different light. In Jackson, I see it in the woods or an abandoned house outside of town. Chicago has its share of forgotten spots, but there is something about having the supernatural in the heart of a crowded city. An apartment building can have hundreds of people who don’t know one another. You might hear screaming through the wall and be told to mind your own business. The elevator could stop on a floor where a tenant is not remembered. There is a reflection in an empty hallway. You can be in the company of others all day and find nobody to put stock in what is happening to you.

That is the horror I am after in Chicago 1992.

There is a contrast too between the supernatural and the demands of being an adult. As a teen, a haunting might mean missing school or lying to your parents. At twenty-two, you still have to be at work in the morning, and the landlord wants his rent. Your classes do not stand down because you saw a dead woman in the lift, and your partner may well think you are losing it for not looking in the bathroom mirror. Those pressures put a different spin on the story. The characters have more freedom but also responsibilities they cannot shirk.

And that is how Jackson and Chicago differ. In Jackson, the kids are coming to realize that the world is stranger and more perilous than the adults say. They are young enough to hope an older head has the answers. By the time we get to Chicago 1992, they are the adults. They have to make the calls and make sure everyone is alright when things go sideways. There is no parent or teacher standing by with the solution.

Poltergeist III stays with me for that reason. I have no desire to rework Reverend Kane, the film’s mirror tricks, or Carol Anne’s tale. I want to see what happens when the supernatural tags along from childhood into adulthood.

The Jackson kids have made their way and put down new roots. But the trouble they ran into back home may have done the same.

Now I am in the mood to do a Chicago-based horror movie marathon. I bet there are enough movies. According to IMDb, there are 152 movies tagged "Horror" and "Chicago, Illinois." I might have next year's theme! Though I do want to do psychic movies sometime as well.

October Horror Movie Challenge 2026
Viewed: 31
First Time Views: 19

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
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