Makes watts durable | The Powerhouse 555 from Anker has 1000 watts and represents the middle class from the manufacturer's range. Our hands-on shows whether the Powerstation is the golden mean or whether it lacks something.
Let’s face it, buying a gift for someone who loves gaming is tough. Almost every day brings with it a handful of new releases, and everyone has different tastes. Plus, if they’re a fan of a particular style or genre of game, there’s a good chance they’re already bought the new hotness. To save you that trouble, here are some gifts that are a bit different but should be appreciated all the same. You may also find something that will pique your interest.
Blood, Sweat, and Pixels
Engadget
Blood, Sweat, and Pixelsis a must-read for anyone with even a passing interest in video games. Across 268 captivating pages, Bloomberg journalist Jason Schreier shares how some of the most influential games of the past decade were made. Featuring interviews with the people who were there – including The Last of Us director Neil Druckmann and Eric Barone, the creator of Stardew Valley – the stories that populate Blood, Sweat, and Pixels shed a light on just how fraught the process of creating a game can be during even the best of times. It’s riveting reading for anyone who wants a more informed perspective on the craft.
Don’t let the Logitech G305’s affordable $40 price fool you, it’s a gaming mouse almost any gamer would happily add to their collection. At 99 grams, it’s one of the lighter mice in Logitech’s stable, and you can program all six buttons to your liking. It also includes the company’s fast and responsive Hero optical sensor and Lightspeed wireless technology for “wired-like” performance. A single AA battery provides the G305 with up to 250 hours of life, and you can get as much as nine months of use with some tweaking. Best of all, the G305 is available in a few different colors, including a handful of cheerful pastels. There’s even a K/DA version for fans of Riot’s virtual K-pop group. That versatility makes a perfect gift for a PC gamer.
If you’re buying a gift for someone who primarily plays games on their phone, consider treating them to the best mobile gamepad on the market. At $100, the Backbone One is pricey, but it easily surpasses competitors like the Razer Kishi in build quality. It also comes with a surprisingly robust companion app that makes capturing screenshots and clips from your play sessions a breeze. Each new Backbone One controller also comes with complimentary access to services like Xbox Game Pass, giving owners a few different ways to add to their game library.
As Supergiant’s staff composer, Darren Korb has written some of the most memorable video game soundtracks in recent memory, but his work on Hades may be his best yet. From start to finish, the Hades Original Soundtrack is filled with tunes like ”Out of Tartarus” and “The Unseen Ones” that will make you stand up and shred an air guitar. It’s the perfect gift for fans of Hades (and there are many of those), but you can also give it to someone who hasn’t experienced the game yet. It might just convince them to play one of the best indies of the last few years.
With the popularity of multiplayer games, you may want to consider gifting your friend or family member a gaming headset. For an affordable option that features a clean sound signature that’s tuned for first-person shooters, it’s hard to go wrong with the Drop and Epos PC38X.
You may not be familiar with Epos, but you’ve definitely heard of Sennheiser. The historic audio brand founded Sennheiser Communications as a joint venture in 2003. In 2020, the subsidiary rebranded to Epos and went on to take over Sennheiser’s gaming portfolio. That history should tell you what to expect from the PC38X. It’s a headset that has more in common with classic headphones like the HD600 than its gaming peers. An open-back design helps the PC38X produce an immersive sound stage that can give you an edge in games like Valorant and Modern Warfare II. The built-in microphone is one of the best ones you’ll find on a gaming headset at this price, producing warm and natural tones when you speak into it. It’s a wired headset too, meaning you don’t have to worry about battery life and compatibility. Best of all, Drop frequently discounts the PC38X below its usual $169 price.
Okay, I lied. We do have one straightforward recommendation: Hollow Knight. Team Cherry’s debut title is one of the best games made in the past five years. It combines the exploration of a 2D Metroid-like title with a challenging combat system that is reminiscent of FromSoftware’s Dark Souls series. Add to that a beautiful soundtrack, art style and story, and it’s easy to see why so many people are eagerly waiting for Hollow Knight’s upcoming sequel, Silksong. While we’re here, go the extra mile and gift your friend or loved one a physical copy of the game. It comes with a beautiful map of Hollow Knight’s world.
It’s not creative, but if you want a safe option, it’s hard to go wrong with a gift card. We’re highlighting Steam here, but all the major gaming platforms offer their own take on the format, including Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo, and do so in amounts that should fit any budget. Some of those same companies offer digital versions of their gift cards, making it easy to ensure your friend or family member can enjoy them, even if you can’t see them in person.
Another option if you’re buying for someone with an Xbox or PC is a one- or three-month Game Pass gift card. Microsoft’s subscription service is widely considered one of the best deals in gaming and is a great way to discover new titles to check out.
This gift will only appeal to fans of FromSoftware’s Dark Souls series, but let me tell you, if the person you’re buying for falls in that group, they will love you for it. Laudate Luna is a beautiful 12- by 36-inch print of Lordran, the setting where the first game takes place. Anyone who has fond memories of Dark Souls will be able to retrace their journey to Anor Lando and find all the places where they died repeatedly trying to conquer the game’s punishing combat.
If buying a gift for someone who enjoys gaming on their Nintendo Switch, there’s a good chance they’ll appreciate it if you get them more storage. The beauty of microSD cards is that they’re affordable. A company like SanDisk offers 512GB models for less than $100. That’s enough to install about 20 to 30 games. SanDisk sells Switch-specific models, but any UHS-1 compatible microSD card that offers transfer speeds of at least 60 MB/s will do.
After more than two decades of iteration, it’s hard to find a fault with Microsoft’s Xbox controllers. The latest Series X/S version refines a design that was already excellent with the Xbox One, but what it lacks is customization. That’s something you can get with Microsoft’s Elite Wireless controller. The Series 2 model comes with six different thumbsticks, four separate paddles and a set of two d-pads. With all those components included, even the most discerning players should be able to tune the controller to their liking.
With the recent release of DXVK 2.0, the Direct3D 9 / 10 / 11 to Vulkan translation layer, it pulled in DXVK-Native for Native Linux builds and so Valve has upgraded Half-Life 2, Portal, Portal 2, Left 4 Dead 2.
There are few movies as divisive amongst genre fans as "The Mist," which celebrates its 15th anniversary today, November 21, 2022. The film was the third of three Stephen King adaptations from acclaimed writer/director Frank Darabont and a massive departure from the classical, more serious stories like "The Shawshank Redemption" and "The Green Mile."
"The Mist" is a story about humanity under pressure and the choices you make when all the chips are down. It also happens to have a lot of creepy-crawly monsters waiting to jump out of an ethereal mist and eat people alive.
The movie follows David Drayton, an average family man who is both tough and empathetic. He's modeled after movie poster artist Drew Struzan and it's through his eyes that we see what happens when monsters are unleashed upon the folks taking shelter in a small convenience store in rural Maine. David and a small group of clear-headed good guys must try to survive both the monsters outside and the horrific cult developing inside.
To this day, "The Mist" remains a fascinating horror film with a gut-punch ending that will either make you a fan for life or cause you to curse Darabont's name to the high heavens.
I was lucky enough to have spent a week on this set back in 2007 and saw first-hand the creativity, innovation, and care that went into this production. So as the movie celebrates its 15th anniversary, I wanted the cast and crew that brought "The Mist" to life to talk about the entire process, from concept to screenplay to filming, editing, the premiere, and its lingering legacy, in their own words.
Here is the complete story of how "The Mist" was made, told by those who were there.
How Frank Darabont Came To The Mist
Frank Darabont (writer/director): "The Mist" called out to me for a number of reasons. One of which is I just thought it was such a potent comment on not just our society, but all societies. We've got this very, very complex technological society and we're becoming more and more dependent on that, by the way. And the more and more we do, the more and more there is this backlash of mistrusting science.
The more we progress into the future, the more there's going to be a part of society that wants to go back to a very primitive, very superstitious [time]. And "The Mist" really spoke to that. It really spoke to the thin veil between how we feel when the lights are on and everything's working fine, and when suddenly we're back in the Dark Ages.
What's scary to me is all it takes is one massive solar flare that comes directly at us instead of off into some other direction of space, and totally knocks out our technology and puts us back into the Dark Ages. If that happens, we're not going to be having a conversation like this on [the internet]. We're going to be out there shooting deer for our dinner and trying to grow turnips in the backyard.
It's such a thin barrier between cooperation and savagery and I just thought it was such a brilliant callback to things like Rod Serling's great "Twilight Zone" episode, "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street," or "Lord of the Flies."
The whole theme of the movie is in this scene where Tom says, "Yeah, when the machines are running and everything's fine, okay." Although even that's getting a little sketchy these days. But turn off the lights, and no lights, no machines, no rules, you'll see how savage people get, and that really struck as true to me. I love when an unpretentious genre movie will actually present a significant theme like that. It's under the donuts and candy, there's actually a very nutritious meal and I love when that happens.
When I was reading it, somehow I just pictured one of those low-budget movies that we grew up all watching. In my case, pre-video, late at night usually on some creature feature. It just reminded me of that sort of '50s, early '60s, low-budget, usually black and white, grainy kind of horror movie. It just felt like one of those things. And that appealed to me greatly as well. So it's a fascinating balance to me between very high-brow and very low-brow elements. And nobody does that better than Stephen King.
So, Darabont reached out to the prolific author about getting the rights to bring "The Mist" to the big screen. Having already impressed King with his adaptations of "The Shawshank Redemption" and "The Green Mile," King agreed.
Darabont: We did the typical dollar deal, and if it gets made, [King] gets more dollars of course.
Darabont is no stranger to King's "Dollar Baby" program, in which he'll allow aspiring filmmakers and good friends to option his short stories for a single dollar. The writer/director's first project was an adaptation of "The Woman in the Room," which ended up putting Darabont on the map in Hollywood and kicked off the whole "Dollar Baby" idea.
Darabont: It was, I think, the first time that Steve had ever done that. It was one of the very first, if not the first. His "Dollar Baby" policy is that it's not to be released commercially. I wanted to make a short film, and try to release it commercially, so the dollar thing turned into an actual option. And it was actually a lot of money for me at the time, but I didn't want to insult the man, so we offered him $5,000 for that. If I'd offered him $2, I'm sure he would've said yes anyway, but I didn't know him that well at the time.
Then years later, years later when I actually had a pretty thriving career, I get something in the mail from him, and I open it. It's that check, that $5,000 check. He never cashed it. I never realized he didn't cash it. And he had it framed and he signed it, "Just in case you ever need bail money." I just thought, I mean, that's just such a great example of the man's generosity and his heart. I can't say enough about him.
I don't believe that the writing [of the script] was a huge job. I think it was more of a pleasure than hauling a sack of bricks on my back, which some writing is. It never particularly came easy to me. My trick, my secret superpower is I could sit in my chair from dawn till dusk. I could write 12, 15 hours a day. I can't do that anymore. Even my knees won't take it, let alone my brain, and I have a life now! [laughs]
Back then, the secret to writing is sit your ass in the chair and do it every day and don't leave unless you have to pee or eat. If you have to eat, do it at home. Don't go out to lunch with friends. Eat and then sit back in the chair again. There's a tremendous amount of work ethic and discipline involved, for me anyway.
I always say to people who've asked in the past, if it doesn't come out perfect the first time, don't feel bad because it doesn't for me either. In fact, my first draft always sucks. My first draft of any page of any script, I look at it and it's a mess. As I go along, breaking new ground, I always start every day with revising the previous set of pages. That gets me warmed up. It makes those pages nicer. So as I start to read them, they don't suck so much. They actually start to look pretty good. Just don't feel like you're failing if it's not the end result right off the bat.
I always had to hack at it for draft after draft. By the time I handed in a first draft of anything, I was ready to shoot the movie because I'd probably revised that page, any given page, 20, 30 times. Sometimes in big ways, sometimes in small ways. For me it was always the discipline. To capture the theme or capture characters or some nuance in the story, that just comes, honestly, as a result of sitting there.
My advice to writers, people who want to be writers and who really want to do good work, is don't think that you get to wait until this inspiration shows up, because it's not going to.
Stephen King has described his muse as a guy with a buzz cut, wearing overalls, smoking a cigar and saying, "Get to work, a**hole. You got stuff to do today. Get to it." And I have to agree with him. If I waited for the airy fairy muse to drop magic fairy dust on me until I'm like, "Oh boy, I'm going to write something great today," I never would've written anything.
The inspiration does not come first. It actually comes during. When you're hacking through the underbrush of the story you're trying to write, that's when it shows up. That's when it happens; sometimes in little drips and drabs and sometimes in a big way, but that's when it happens. You don't get inspiration without it. The inspiration follows perspiration.
Writing The Script
Darabont wrote his adaptation of "The Mist" on spec, meaning he didn't have a studio involved when he got the rights. His plan was to write it his way and then shop it around to prospective buyers at the studio level, which was a trajectory that had worked for him in the past.
Darabont: In that sense, it was like "Shawshank," which was purely a spec thing. And thank God I found Castle Rock [Entertainment] at that time in their history. [They had] an absolutely wonderful open door there to filmmakers who had a vision. "The Green Mile" was also for them because there was this tremendous comfort zone with them by then.
By the time "The Mist" came around, they weren't really in a position to greenlight movies anymore. I gather they've recently been funded again as a production company. I sent Rob Reiner a congratulations because I think nobody deserves it more. They were just such a friend to the filmmaker. But no, "The Mist" was definitely on spec. I had the script. We shopped it around.
The difference between a studio budget and an independent budget can be huge. I think I had some kind of overall deal at Paramount at the time, so we had their accounting department budget this thing. They came back with a $60 million budget. I'm like, "Okay, that's not going to work."
I do remember we had one producer who was a very famous producer, and I don't want to embarrass him, so I'm not going to say who it was, but he had a big production fund and he had me into his office and he had a checkbook in front of him. He said, "I'll give you $40 million to make this movie, but you've got to change the ending."
And I said, "What would you like the ending to be? I've been thinking about this movie for 20 years, and there's only one ending I've ever had for the thing. So suggest a happier ending that works. I'll consider it because that's a pretty generous budget."
And he said, "Well, that's for you to figure out." I said, "I'm sorry, sir, but again, I'll think about it overnight, but I'm telling you, I've been thinking about this for a long time and I want that gut punch, that kick in the balls that you got at the end of 'Night of the Living Dead' where the hero is accidentally shot." They think he's a zombie, so they kill him. I'm still reeling from that ending from when I was a teenager.
I sent [the script] to Steve King. I said, "Listen, here's the script. It takes a bit of a left turn at the end." It's inspired, actually, by a line from his book, "But it's not the ending at all that you wrote, Steve. And if you don't want me to make this movie, I won't make this movie. You tell me." I put it in his hands.
And he wrote back and he said, "I read it. I love your ending. I'm sorry I didn't think of it, because I would've written that instead." Right. Okay, great. I take that as a great compliment and an endorsement.
It's a very Rod Serling ending. It's that O. Henry, "screw you, you wanted a happy ending, but you're not getting one but you're surprised, right?" kind of ending.
Again, there's a lot of s*** going on in our country that I was not happy about at the time. Steve King and I share very similar opinions about society, culture, politics, et cetera, so he loved the ending because he got it.
I knew going in that half the audience would hate it. I knew that. But I thought it's art. Not every painting is a happy one. It's an artform of self-expression at its best and you have to run the risk of maybe some people won't like what you did. And that's okay by me.
So anyway, I walked away from the $40 million budget, and the only person who stepped up and had the cojones to greenlight it was Bob [Weinstein]. I got a call from Bob and he said, "I love your script, totally fine with the ending, but you gotta make it for this price," which was a bit less than half of what the other guy was offering.
So I had that night of the soul where I'm going, "Instead of paying myself my directing fee, I'll take scale. Instead of having some luxury of time to shoot, I'll have to shoot on half the schedule." I've never, ever done a movie like that before.
I went to Steve again, because I wanted him to be part of the decision-making process here. I never wanted to make a movie that was going to embarrass him or let him down. I said, "Steve, so here's the situation. The movie that Paramount thought would cost $60 million and this other guy was willing to pay $40 million, I have to make for $18 million. What do you think?" $18 million is not a big budget. Not anymore. Even 15 years ago, it was pretty small. I'm sure that somebody who just made a movie for $800,000 is cursing me out right now and laughing at me, but for the movie we were making, that was pretty tight.
And Steve, bless his heart, he's the eternal optimist. I just love this guy. He responded by saying, "Okay, so take the pay cut. Work for scale. Why not? It's the movie that you want to make. And by the way, there is a great tradition in our genre of working with lower budgets and restrained resources. Go make your low-budget movie." And I thought, "Okay, by God, I will."
I remember when Bob first said, "You can make your movie," and I said, "This is very nice of you, Bob, but we got to have an understanding right off the bat. I'm not some kid out of film school. You guys, no offense, but you have a reputation for taking over cuts and recutting people's work. And I'm not that guy, so if we say yes and we shake hands, then you've got to understand. Of course, you'll be invited into the editing room to watch the cuts, and I will listen to everything you have to say. I may address one note or a hundred notes, or no notes. You've got to understand it's going to be my movie. And if you're okay with that, then let's do it. Otherwise, let's shake hands and part friends and maybe someday work on something else."
And he said, "No, let's do it and you got a deal." That's a promise he made to me. And you know what? I got to say, he lived up to that.
Darabont Wrote David Drayton With Thomas Jane In Mind
With the movie now set up at Dimension Films with a budget somewhere between $17 million and $18 million, the next challenge was locking the ensemble cast.
Denis Huth (producer): I feel like the casting on this came together pretty quickly, as I recall. Deb Aquila was the casting director on this, who Frank had worked with before and absolutely loves. And she knows him really, really well. So there are always those roles in a Frank [Darabont] movie, we call them the Darabont Traveling Players, who pop up in all of his projects, so we knew Jeff DeMunn, we knew Bill Sadler. There were definitely going to be people who he had kind of earmarked for certain roles in his mind. Laurie Holden was certainly one of them. Even down to Susie Watkins who was his script supervisor for many, many years, but she played, I think the character's name was Hattie. So there's a lot of little roles like that.
For [the role of] David, he really did have Thomas Jane in mind from the very beginning. I'm sure we talked about other people, but Thomas Jane was sort of his goal. He really felt he was perfect for the role, and I think he was.
Darabont: He came to mind while I was writing, simply because I'd always loved his work. He's got a very grounded quality on screen, even when playing that marvelously amped-up extreme character in "Boogie Nights." A lesser actor would have gone over the top in a not believable way, but Tom kept it feeling real.
Tom's got a great working-class everyman quality that I felt fit perfectly with Steve King's world, and with that character. And, boy, did Tom deliver. I loved his performance. The man is a tireless pro, a pleasure on the set, and he really nailed it.
Thomas Jane (David Drayton): Somehow, probably through some dinner, I met Darabont and we sort of bonded on our mutual love for classic comic book art, so we stayed in touch. I don't remember that we were actually actively working on looking for something to work on, but one day a manila envelope was dropped off at my front door. It was a script for "The Mist" with a little note: "Check this out, let me know what you think."
Of course, being a Stephen King fan, I read it right away. And the script was brilliant, in my mind it was definitely up there with the best of Stephen King adaptations. So I guess that's how the project came to me. it was one of those rare occasions where something shows up on your front door that's actually, really special.
It was a very simple conversation. Sometimes these things are, I got to tell you it's rare, but it does happen. Frank is a consummate writer. He is excellent at his job, and of course, he's a wonderful director, very sensitive, very in tune with his version of the human condition. So it's one of those things where I got nothing to say, except for, "Yeah, let's, let's do it."
Darabont: When I was writing the script, I thought, this guy is making every right decision for every right reason, and every decision he makes turns into a disastrous choice and I thought, this is really interesting. This is really provocative because it runs counter to what we expect from a movie.
In most movies. You see your hero, even if he's encountering obstacles or barriers or things kind of go bad, but ultimately they keep making the right decisions and it winds up with the right choices. This is the opposite. And I thought this is a radical departure from how most movies work and how most movie heroes work. In a sense, it is a mirror to reality because sometimes with our best intentions and our best actions, we get screwed anyway because the world is such a messed up place.
If you look at the year I made that movie, look at the world that we were in, the political situation here in the U.S., the cultural situation, the divide that has now become a chasm, was very much in evidence. I was hoping that that wouldn't widen, but it has. So what you had actually was an older filmmaker who was just a little more pissed off than the younger filmmaker who was so full of optimism and hope that he made "Shawshank Redemption." Now I'm just kind of a pissed-off older guy, and that's what I wanted to express.
I think most of us are in the middle of things. Most of us are in this reasonable mass middle of things, but at the edges on both sides, you have this incredibly radicalized, extremist element that is driving the conversation, and it's no longer even a conversation. Now it's a shouting match. Now it's a duel to the death. The extremists are driving the bus and the rest of us have no choice but to ride along and scream in horror as things get more and more crazy and extreme and that was my everyman in that movie. That was David Drayton. That was the character Tom Jane played.
He's the average guy with his heart in the right place making the best decisions he can with the information he has, who gets flattened. And that happens sometimes. Sometimes cultures get to a point where we're rounding up people and shoveling them into ovens. Insanity does prevail sometimes, which is a very, very scary thought. Will it get to that point here? Who knows? I wouldn't have thought we'd get to this point in my lifetime. So is it going to get more extreme from here? Could it? It could, I suppose. I hope not, but the movie worked as a warning shot, as a flare sent up from a concerned storyteller. And I love movies that do that. I love movies that can shake us up a little bit. So that dynamic of [David Drayton] making all the right decisions, but it's going to go in the sh***er was a very conscious thought in my head. As I was examining Steve's story and actually writing my version of it as a screenplay, as I was adapting that, that dynamic became very much at the forefront of my thinking.
Jane: He's making the best choice that he can given the situation and they all turn out to be bad ones, wrong ones.
That was unique. I was like, "Wow, you got the hero of the story and every single decision he makes turns out to be the wrong one in hindsight." I loved that, I loved that.
That's the beauty of it. It's all the choices that he makes the audience would've made, too. In other words, we buy all of his decisions as being the best option, the "right" thing to do. He does all the "right" things to do, which will turn out to be wrong. And I think that's a wonderful statement. And I think it's a large reason why the movie, even if it's just on a subconscious level, that's why the movie's successful.
The Trickiest Role Was In The Most Capable Hands
Huth: I think there were a lot of names discussed for Mrs. Carmody because that is probably the trickiest role in the whole movie. She very easily could have been way over the top. It could have just been a caricature and it was very important to Frank, and to all of us, that character be as grounded as possible.
She obviously gets very extreme very quickly. And even when you first meet her, you feel like, "Oh, maybe this woman isn't quite all there." But to her, it was very real. To her, this is what she truly believed. It's not just that she's a lunatic, it's that this is her faith and this is what she truly believes. This is not somebody who's trying to be the bad guy for the sake of being the bad guy.
And when Marcia Gay Harden came up, I think it was such a great idea. It was probably [casting director] Deb [Aquila]'s idea because most great ideas when it comes to casting come from Deb. She brought that humanity to it. She brought that vulnerability to it. She's just not this evil witch of a woman. She's scared. You see her in that scene where she's praying in the bathroom and she's crying and she's scared. And that really is the cornerstone, I think, of the whole story, which is what do people do when they're terrified, and how do they react? And everybody's going to react differently. She clung to her faith, and that became the thing that was going to carry her through.
I think she's so fascinating to me, and the whole fact that so many people, including the Bill Sadler character who completely switches sides from starting out, like, "You're a nut, shut up," to being one of her true believers.
And with the mist, it's so unknowable, but she's giving them something to cling to. She's giving them a reason. She's giving them someone to blame. And that I think makes people feel like they're more in control of an uncontrollable situation.
She committed to it 100%, which is huge. I don't know that Marcia Gay Harden was necessarily an actress at that time going, "Oh, you know what? I want to do a monster movie." But she really understood it. She understood the story Frank was trying to tell and really saw who Mrs. Carmody was and embraced that.
Darabont: There was no great search for Mrs. Carmody, or for Brent Norton. It was as simple as their agents calling and asking if I'd be interested in working with Marcia Gay Harden and Andre Braugher. My response? Are you kidding me? Yes, please, and thank you.
What a pleasure it was to work with her, and let me say the same about my entire cast. Andre Braugher! Toby Jones! Sam Witwer! They were all new to me as colleagues. Every time I think of those people and the great experience I had with them, I get a warm glow. And of course, that also goes for the cast members I'd worked with before: Jeff DeMunn, Laurie Holden, Bill Sadler, on and on. I'd hang a medal on each and every one of them.
Assembling The Key Players
Darabont: Laurie [Holden] is another marvelous talent, a pro who brings so much texture and heart to whatever role she plays. I adore fearless actors, and she's one of them. I loved working with her on "The Majestic," so I wrote the part in "The Mist" for her. Ditto her role in "The Walking Dead." Those roles were hers, I never auditioned anybody else. That same goes for any time I ever cast Jeff DeMunn, or Bill Sadler, or others I worked with multiple times. When you know you have the right actor for a given role, you count your blessings and go with it.
By the way, Laurie's role in "The Walking Dead" was intended by me to have a substantial character arc that never transpired. She would go from being a mentally jangled, super self-absorbed, badly traumatized and angry girl to the opposite end of the spectrum: their most reliable soldier, an ace sniper, and a grown-ass woman who becomes all about self-sacrifice and protecting the group. And her relationship with Dale would blossom into a very deep May-December situation, a real marriage based in deep abiding feelings and respect. I aim for characters and situations based in messy and complicated feelings, as happens in life. And no, she was never intended to be a love interest for Rick, as I read somewhere.
She was never meant to be thrown away as zombie food. Nor was Dale, for that matter. Nor was Glen.
Nathan Gamble (Billy Drayton): We had to record [my audition] on a tape, an actual tape, and we had to send it off and it would take three days to get there. It took a long time before we knew anything. I never actually had an in-person audition with Frank or any producers or whatever.
The tape that I did must have been good enough where they didn't need to because I was in Seattle and I did most of my auditions that way. I remember even as a kid, most of the stuff where you would audition through tape, they watched it and they'd go, "Okay, let's fly him down to L.A. so they can meet in person and see his look in person and yada, yada, yada." But no, this was a pretty straightforward process. It was bada bing, bada boom, there you go, you got it. Now you're in a Stephen King movie.
Andre Braugher was approached to play David Drayton's neighbor, the uptight and petty lawyer Brent Norton who ends up joining David Drayton and his son on their fateful trip to the grocery store. He didn't remember the process of being cast, but did remember the impact the script had on him.
Andre Braugher (Brent Norton): It's a good script. It's a very humane script, as horrible as it is. These are all people who react in a very understandable way to shocking events that really upend the way that they think about the world.
It also reveals what people turn into in extreme situations, like Marcia Gay Harden's character, or what Thomas Jane is ultimately forced to do at the end of the film. You know what I mean? These are ordinary people under extreme stress. I found that to be a fascinating part of the film and the character that I played.
Stephen King has done a wonderful job writing this story, and Darabont has done a wonderful adaptation that shows, essentially, ordinary people trapped in the grocery store by the mist, and how fascinating that is.
Darabont: Alexa [Davalos] is a fiercely talented actor who projects such intelligence in her work. By the way, I've known Alexa since she was a toddler. Literally. I attended Hollywood High with her mom, Elyssa; we were in the drama department together.
I first cast Alexa in the pilot episode of "Raines" that I directed for its creator, the wonderful Graham Yost. She played opposite Jeff Goldblum, another actor I loved working with. I adore that guy. He's freakin' brilliant and a total blast on the set.
Later on I wrote the role in "The Mist" for Alexa. After that I wrote the female lead in "Mob City" for her opposite my man Jon Bernthal, and man did she shine. Her work in that actually awed me; talk about nailing the perfect period noir vibe. She was like Gene Tierney or Jean Simmons reincarnated.
Sam Witwer Was On His Way To Another Audition
Sam Witwer (Private Jessup): The way that I walked into "The Mist" was, well, steeped in ignorance because not only had I not read the short story, but I wasn't even supposed to audition. It was all completely an accident.
I was walking down the street in Hollywood and this woman is on the crosswalk, carrying bags of stuff and she dropped everything she was carrying.
No one was going out to help her. I remember some guy walking next to me actually snickered, which really made me angry, so I ran out into the street, said, "Hey, can I help you?" And she goes, "Oh, please," because there were cars coming and stuff like that. So, I helped her pick her stuff up and I said, "Okay, where are we going?" And she goes, "Right over there." "Okay, cool."
And we got into the elevator with her stuff and I guess I had my headshot with me because I believe I was going to her office anyway for an audition that I remember utterly not being excited about. She saw my headshot and she goes, "Are you an actor?" I'm like, "Yeah."
So then, we go up in the elevator, and we go to this casting office. I'm like, "Oh, I guess this person works at the casting office that I was heading to anyway. Well, isn't this convenient?" So, this woman says, "Hey, everyone. This is Sam. He's an actor. Oh, Sam is so nice. He helped me pick up the stuff in the middle of the street. Let's buy him lunch."
And I was like, "Whoa, my lucky day. This is great." I'm a young actor, right? Free food is awesome. That's the best. And then, she goes, "Actually, instead of lunch..." And then, I'm like, "Oh, I guess I lost the lunch before it even happened." She goes, "Would you like to read for something?" And I said, "Sure."
And so, she handed me these scenes. One was the romantic scene between Jessup and Alexa Davalos's character and one was an argument scene which would eventually be the scene with me arguing with Tom Jane. And then, one was this freaking out crying scene where I'm accused of all this awful stuff. I had no idea what it was. And I had about 15 minutes to sit down and look at all this material, including the freaking out crying scene.
And I looked it over and I was like, "Okay, I think I got the gist of it." And then, I went in front of the camera and performed it. And I remember Deb getting very excited and her saying, "Oh, my God, Sam. You might really have saved me on this and Frank is going to love this." And I'm like, "Great. What is this? Is this a TV show?" She goes, "No, it's a movie." I'm like, "Okay. Well, thanks, Deb. Thank you. Bye."
So, I went down to my car. Got into my car, called my manager and I said, "Listen, I just met someone named Deb in the middle of the street. I auditioned for something. Apparently, it's a movie. And apparently, someone named Frank is going to love this. Do you have any idea what the hell just happened?"
And my manager goes, "Okay, I'm looking this up. Well, that casting director, that's Deb Aquila. She's a big casting director." I'm like, "Oh, well, that's good." "So, that movie, that would be 'The Mist' probably." And I'm like, "'The Mist' like Stephen King's 'The Mist?'" He's like, "Yeah, and the Frank ... looks like that's Frank Darabont." I'm like, "Wait a second, 'The Shawshank Redemption,' 'The Green Mile' Frank Darabont? 'Dream Warriors' Frank Darabont? Come on, 'The Blob' Frank Darabont? 'Young Indy?'"
So, I started having a freak out at that point. I was so glad that I didn't know that when I actually did the audition. And then I got a call the next Monday saying, "Frank Darabont would like you to be in 'The Mist.'" So, that was it.
But the story is even a little bit cooler than that. I think it was a week or two before I auditioned for them, this guy named David Scow handed Frank Darabont DVDs for a television show called "Battlestar Galactica", which Frank was like, "I'm not watching 'Battlestar Galactica.' Come on. The rehash of 'Star Wars?'" And David Scow goes, "That's not what this is, man. You got to check this out."
So, Frank did check it out, lost his mind for it. The story Frank tells, he knew nothing about bumping into Deb on the street, none of that. None of that story got to Frank.
The story Frank told me back was, "Oh, well, here's my version. I was on the treadmill. I popped in the casting tape, got on the treadmill. And it started playing, and your audition came up. And I said, 'Oh, my God, it's Crashdown from 'Battlestar Galactica.' Cool. Oh, wow. He's really good. Oh, he's really right for this.'"
And then he said, "I got right off the treadmill, hit stop on the tape, called up Deb, and said, 'Hire that guy.'" And so, I'm like, "That happened that fast?" He's like, "Yeah, it's happened that fast. I literally got on and off the treadmill."
So, that is the story of how I got "The Mist," the multifaceted, multi-viewpoint story.
Melissa McBride Stunned Everyone On Set
Melissa McBride (Woman with Children At Home): I was working behind the camera in casting at the time, and I'd gotten a call about the Darabont project from the casting director that I worked with quite a bit. I had been in casting for a while already then. There was some concern that I wouldn't be able to do it because the role that they wanted me to audition for was in the store for the entire run of the production and had one word of dialogue, but I had a full-time job.
I remember at the audition seeing the sides for that other part, and I read them and I was like, "Well, what's going on here?" I thought, "Well, she goes out of the store, maybe she gets killed." So that's a quick part and that's a really juicy little monologue.
Darabont: She was one of the helpers there in the casting office. They threw her on just to have one extra choice for one role that had one line of dialogue. It was something along the lines of, "Oh my God, you killed her," or, "you murdered her." I think it was one of Mrs. Carmody's ladies. And she literally did this one line of dialogue on the tape. And I remember we were still prepping, but I was there on-site. We were in Shreveport by then and I saw her say this one line and I went, "There's something really special about this actor." So I immediately called the casting office and I said, "Could you please have her read for the bigger role for the lady with the kids at home?"
McBride: I got a callback and was asked to read for that part, coincidentally enough. I did and that was the role that I ended up getting.
Darabont: It was just a home run audition. I was so surprised that she hadn't been put forward as a leading contender, a leading possibility. I was so thrilled to find her because I knew that we needed an actress who could really deliver that scene. And boy, did she.
So when "The Walking Dead" came around, I just said, "Okay, I'm casting Melissa McBride." And I didn't even talk to her about it. "I'm casting Melissa McBride." Carol is her role. And everybody said, "Yeah, okay."
And the next thing she knew, she's what, in a decade-plus of this hit show? I'm just so proud of her. She's such a naturally gifted powerhouse of an actor and I'm just so pleased for her.
She said to me she'd pretty much given up even trying to be an actor at that point. They just put her on as an afterthought just to have one extra choice. And it can turn like that.
There's No Place Like Shreveport, Louisiana
While the production team was casting their ensemble, they also had to suss out a location to build their supermarket that could feasibly double as rural Maine. The location they settled on didn't exactly wow the cast and crew.
Huth: I would think we probably looked at a few different cities, a few different states. Story-wise, it takes place on the East Coast, but my guess is it was pretty much driven by where can we go where we can own a stage for that long, and that has a good film crew base.
That was a time when Louisiana was a big Mecca for filming. Moreso New Orleans than Shreveport, but Shreveport had stuff going on and the stage was available, so I think that was the majority of what went into it.
There was crew. That's a key part of it. You can't just go anywhere on location if you have to bring an entire crew with you. If they already live there, that goes a long way. It's part of why Georgia is so big right now. There's a huge, huge, huge film base there. And that's why so many movies can be filming there at once.
Rohn Schmidt (cinematographer): I'm glad we were shooting six-day weeks because it just got us out of there a week faster.
And not just me, but many other filmmakers have spent a film there and it's sort of like doing your time. It's like, "Oh, you've worked on the frontline if you've shot in Shreveport." So anyway, there were nice enough folk and I certainly don't want to call it a s***hole, even though I've never had any desire to go back.
I don't know if Frank remembers this, they wanted to shoot the film in Toronto. They were almost ready to start construction on the set up there. The show is set in Maine, so it probably would've been a slightly closer match than Shreveport, Louisiana, but the union in Toronto would not let both [camera] operators come.
Frank was not going to give in on that. I guess they didn't believe their bluff would be called. I don't know the politics of all of that, but Frank said, "Okay, we'll just go down to Louisiana and use their tax breaks."
It became a running joke because Shreveport's fine, but it's not a very big city, certainly not on the world-class scale that a city like Toronto is. Each Sunday night when we went out to dinner, we'd go, "Okay, well we could be going to a fancy restaurant in Toronto, but we're going to head on down to the Applebee's and get some dinner tonight."
Jane: There was nothing around. It was pretty lonely out there. It wasn't even really a town, it wasn't a decent place to eat. At one point about halfway through the shoot ... I don't know if you were there for this, but I'm a big fan of crawfish and I found this place in Nacogdoches, Texas, right over the border, and I bought a couple hundred pounds of crawfish and had them shipped in for the crew one day for lunch. They showed up and we put them in a big canoe, God knows why.
Anyway, we had this whole canoe and it was full to the brim of crawfish and I treated the crew and myself to really excellent, succulent crawfish one day. I'll never forget that, that was a really fine crawfish. If you're ever in Nacogdoches, look up the crawfish there.
Huth: I do remember he brought crawfish. Shreveport is not New Orleans, for sure. I also remember we were very close to a dog food factory and so it smelled like dog food 24 hours a day. Nothing against Shreveport, I'm sure there's lovely things in Shreveport, but just where we were, it was not a place you just want to go for kicks, I guess.
'Jazz Improvisation' And Working The The Crew From The Shield
Darabont and his producers had their location (with the all-important tax breaks and good crews) and their big cast, but one problem was evident: they were still attempting to shoot a script originally budgeted at $60 million for around $18 million. This forced Darabont to scrutinize his usual slow and steady production technique.
Darabont: I couldn't be the Kubrick wannabe, like the painterly director on "The Green Mile" or on "Shawshank." I had to really shoot from the hip for once.
Thank God for Shawn Ryan and "The Shield." He found out I was a big fan of the show, which starred Michael Chiklis and an amazing ensemble cast. It's one of the best TV series ever.
He found out I was a big fan of the show because my friend and casting director, Deb Aquila, had cast "The Shield," so she mentioned I was a big fan. He said, "Does he want to direct an episode?" I said, "Oh yeah, why not? I'd love it."
Most hour television shows don't actually have an hour. It's 42 minutes, for crying out loud. Commercials take up a third of the running time for commercial television shows. You [typically] have eight days to shoot [an episode]. "The Shield" had seven.
Schmidt: "The Shield" was originally intended to go to Canada and to do it on the budget that they had set aside for a Canadian production. We had to cut one day from the production, so rather than the normal eight days for an hour episodic, we had to do it in seven. That was part of the deal going in. Everything had to be 12% faster to achieve that.
One of the ways we came about that was with zoom lenses, not spending time on lens changes. Robert Rodriguez's "El Mariachi" had come out and he had a rather ingenious idea where he would start out a scene wide and then would zoom in about a third or halfway through, knowing he was not going to go back, editorially, to that wide shot. So we were doing the same thing. We would roll for a little while, and then when someone wasn't speaking, we would zoom in to the next lens size.
I think I lost half of my hair in my head when I saw the first edit of the pilot, because they had used those zooms. They were never intended to be used on camera by me. I don't mind admitting this. We were just trying to be efficient and I'm like, "Stop. You got to cut all those out. They're terrible. They're rough and they go in and then they adjust again a second time and the focus is there and the person's not even speaking."
And Scott Brazil and Clark Johnson both went, "No, that's what's great about it." And what they discovered is because they were on someone not speaking they were emphasizing what someone was hearing. It was about the actor's reaction there. And it made it much more powerful to hear the words and then emphasize that actor's reaction by zooming in on it and it became really iconic to the show.
Darabont: I went, and I directed this thing, which was the easiest directing I've ever done, because that crew and that cast were so dialed in. It was such a smoothly running machine that it was ... I wouldn't say it was quite like directing traffic, but it wasn't much harder than that because those folks were such pros.
I hired the two camera operators and the cinematographer. They had a hiatus coming up and I said, "You want to come do a movie with me in Shreveport?" And they said, "Sure." And Rohn Schmidt, who was the DP, I mean, this guy could light a scene in 10 minutes. It's unbelievable.
This is a movie where the lighting didn't need to be pretty. If you were harkening back to the tradition of "Night of the Living Dead" and movies like that, the lighting wasn't pretty. It was very documentary-like and Rohn was brilliant at that.
What was truly amazing were the two camera operators, Billy Gierhart and Richie Cantu. These guys had years of experience on "The Shield." And all their coverage on "The Shield" was improvised. They'd get in there, Billy with his steadicam and Richie sitting on a skateboard with a camera on his shoulder and just, from take to take, they'd do whatever interested them. Wherever the lens took them, that's how they shot. So every take was different.
Schmidt: [Frank] calls it jazz improvisation and I think that's a very perceptive way that Frank has described it. You have the baseline, you have the melody that you're referring to, that everyone knows the story there, but then they just go and react to what the actors are doing, react to what the other camera's doing. The two operators would often have their [other] eye open, looking to see what the other person was doing just to make sure they weren't shooting the same thing.
Witwer: The camera crew were characters in the movie. They were participating in those scenes, so there was never a moment where you could slack off and feel relaxed because you weren't going to be on camera, because maybe it was going to be your close up. You had no idea.
Jeffrey DeMunn (Dan Miller): That was really neat. Initially I went, "Huh?" And then I realized how superb it is because you don't have to play to anything. You just do the scene. Those two guys were like a pair of ballet dancers. Oh my God, they were the most elegant dancers together moving those cameras around and you just talked. You just said what you had to say to the other person and they would make the shot up. It was really delightful. I don't understand why I haven't encountered that more often.
Braugher: That whole thing started with "Homicide," so I was very familiar with it. The role itself had challenges. You know what I mean? Being cooped up in that supermarket was tough in and of itself, but in terms of the shooting style, I felt very comfortable with it, because I'd spent six years on "Homicide" doing that in particular. It was like going home.
Jane: Me, I was a fan of "Shawshank" and "The Green Mile," and I was disappointed that Frank had decided that he was going a different way with "The Mist" and shoot it in this much more kinetic style of filmmaking. I'm a big fan of that classicism that he used with "Shawshank" and "The Green Mile."
So I was disappointed. I was like, "God, I wanted to be in one of those kind of movies," and I told him as much. He said he'd done a couple of episodes of "The Shield" and he really enjoyed the speed and the quality of the filmmaking that the style of "The Shield" had.
The B-Camera operator had a stool. He had a handheld camera and he had one of those office stools that you can kind of roll around using your feet, with very smooth wheels. And he sat on that f***ing thing and scooted himself all over that grocery store, getting different shots.
And I thought, "Oh, great. This is going to look like an episode of television," but it didn't of course. I thought that kinetic energy worked very well for that contained story. I thought it was a good choice.
We worked financially constricted because Bob Weinstein wouldn't give us more cash because he was terrified of that ending, but the decision to use the crew from "The Shield" still served a version of the story that works for the story. He was able to make it work, and yeah, I was disappointed, but in the end I thought the artistic choice was sound.
The Original Opening Didn't Make The Cut
Another victim of the tight budget wasthe original scripted opening, which took us inside the Arrowhead Project and gave us a concrete explanation on where the mist came from.
Darabont: It was basically a scene where they're trying to open a portal into another dimension and suddenly the chamber, that I pictured as an old diving bell with portholes and stuff, suddenly the glass blows out and this mist comes pouring out and this chaos and screaming and then boom, we cut to the opening title and then the rest of the story goes on as you see it in the movie.
Schmidt: I loved the location. I was looking forward to shooting that because he found this cool [place]. I think they used to defuse and grind up Nike missiles or something like that, this absolutely absurd '50s actual place out on that military base. I still have some of the stills from there and I just jaw drop every time it comes up. So it would've been a really great sequence, but yeah, I think it over-explained it.
Braugher: I remember Frank was talking about, "We're behind schedule. I got to film this thing with the army." I suggested to him, I said, "You don't have to film that thing. It would be best not to film it." He was intrigued. He said, "Why?" I said, "Well, if you know that the army did it, then that means that everyone in the storefront who's speculating about its cause, we already know that they're wrong. So we're ahead of them, as the audience." So I said, "You can actually gain a day, and I think make a better movie, by not filming that rather than filming."
Darabont: I remember when Andre got to Shreveport, we got together just because I'd never met the man. I was so thrilled he was coming to do this movie because God, I admire him and his work. So we sat down together over coffee or lunch or something and I love to pick my actor's brains. What do you think? And he says, "Well I love the script, but do you think you need that opening?" And I went, "Ding!"
It was at this point that I gently reminded Darabont that when I was visiting the set he also asked my opinion on whether or not they should cut the opening scene. My response to the question was that King's story didn't need the explanation and ultimately it'd be scarier not to know where it came from.
Darabont: By all means, take credit because now that you mention it, I vividly remember that. I hadn't thought about that in years, but yes, I do remember that. And when you said that if you don't know where it came from, isn't it a little creepier? I thought, "Oh, that's right. That's pretty good." As you said, Stephen King's story didn't need it, so where did the mist come from? Who knows? And we actually get a pretty good explanation from Sam Witwer, another actor who I loved working with, or did back when I was working. You get that explanation from that character.
Witwer: I didn't feel like we needed it, but I was afraid to bring it up because A, I was this young actor, didn't have any right to be making suggestions like that, and B, I was also keenly aware that it might be self-serving. Because I looked at that and I said, "Well, if you had this opening thing in the movie, do you really need Jessup?"
One of his functions is to give a piece of an explanation as to what's happened here and to do it at a really interesting point in the movie. If you get that full-throated explanation of where the mist comes from in the very beginning of the film, doesn't that make Jessup a little bit redundant? I'm trying to not get cut from the movie. You know what I mean?
Braugher: [Without the opening] we have to ask ourselves, is this the Lord at work? Is this retribution for crimes and sins? Is this that experimentation that they were doing over there like the soldiers were suggesting? We never know.
Darabont: I loved that opening and I loved the sort of low-tech, high-tech production design that I had in mind. In this last season of "Stranger Things," when we're in the underground facility and there's these crazy machines that all look like they're pounded together out of cast iron and rivets and stuff, it's exactly the kind of production design I had in mind for the opening of "The Mist."
I just really wanted to shoot that sequence and wanted to do that low-tech '80s sci-fi vibe that The Duffers have now perfected, clearly, but the truth is, I didn't have the money to do it. I didn't have the three days to shoot. I had $18 million to shoot and about, gosh, what was it? 34 days to shoot. "Shawshank" was a 71-day shoot. "Green Mile" was 105-day shoot. This was a 30-something-day shoot.
To shoot that, I mean, and really actually do it right, would've taken certainly at least two days to shoot. It just wasn't in the budget. We didn't have the resources. We didn't have the money to build that set. We didn't have the money to hire those actors. When you're dealing with that tight number of resources, you have to pick your battles.
Starting On The Loading Dock
The first scene to be filmed was the loading dock sequence in which our heroes explore the back room behind the store, a scene that would culminate with poor Norm the Bag Boy (Chris Owen) getting dragged out into the mist by tentacles. It was something of a rocky start.
Schmidt: Our first day of shooting was in there and I had made a big promise to myself to go for it on this film, to not be afraid, to just hang it all out, be on the edge and not be safe at any point.
[Thomas Jane]'s walking around lighting the scene with just the glow from the cell phone, which was very new at that point that you could do that. We worked with the props department to rig out a slightly brighter LED on the cell phone to make that all work and it looked beautiful. It was right on the edge in terms of exposure or not, but it was very cool looking.
This is [shot on] film, so the negative went off to Los Angeles to be processed and transferred. I talked to the color timer later the next day, midday, "Oh, it's absolutely beautiful, spectacular. I can't believe how cool looking this is." I'm like, "Okay, great."
And that night we were going to watch the first day's dailies and they had set up a little video projector in one of the conference rooms at the hotel we were staying at and everybody's there and they've got beers and little pieces of pizza and they're all ready to watch the first day's dailies.
It turns on and all you can see is just the white square of the cell phone. Absolute black except for this tiny little white square of a flip phone and it never gets brighter.
And we're becoming aware that slowly everyone in the room has snuck out one by one. So it's just me and Frank and Randi [Richmond], the producer. We turned on the lights and looked at each other.
I said, "Well, Frank, I guess you need to replace me because that's not acceptable." And I said, "There's another cinematographer I know that's very competent." He was finishing up in New Orleans. I think they're finishing that week. I said, "I'll call [him] and he can come finish up for me, or if you want me to hang out and try to do my best for the next day or two until we can get someone in from out of town, that's fine. Whatever you want to do."
And they said, "Okay, well, we'll just reshoot and we'll figure it out," and we went to bed. I had a long talk with my daughter in the parking lot, "Well, I think I'm going to be home a lot sooner than I thought I would be."
And about 11:00 P.M. that night, I'm very much in bed because we're shooting again at 7:00 am the next morning. And then there's knocking on my hotel room door, "Rohn, Rohn, get up," and it's Billy, the camera operator, who's a techno-geek. He sleeps about four hours a day anyway and says, "Come down, come down."
Apparently, the digital projector that we were viewing these dailies on was not set up. No one had ever calibrated the projector. We sat and watched and it was beautiful. It was all there. It was spectacular.
We did reshoot that day's dailies there, although I think the original footage is what's in the film because I was so gun-shy that it was way overlit when we went back in there. I was going to make sure we could see what we needed to see there.
The Practical Problems With Practical Effects
That scene also presented an interesting challenge for the practical effects crew.
Huth: Greg Nicotero was one of the first people Frank called when we found out we were actually making the movie. Greg and his team at KNB EFX designed so much of the creature work and actually built models of a lot of it; of the tentacles, of the bugs, certainly the spiders. There were a lot of the creatures that they had, practical things built to scale for us, which we could use in some shots.
I remember the tentacles being one of the hardest things just because of the way they move, and the interaction with the actors and the physical world, with the loading dock door and all of that. I remember we had some practical, but most of that I think ended up being visual effects. [That's] just the nature of how the effects work.
We didn't have the time that practical effects always take. Everybody prefers seeing something real as opposed to something digital and there are some moments in the show with real spiders that Greg made and the real bugs. It is also hugely helpful for the actors to see, just to really understand what they're looking at and what's going to be animated in front of them when right now they're kind of staring at a blank space for the spiders. I remember the special effects guys had a mop and they were just backing away from camera with it and it would be replaced by the bug. In a perfect world, you do everything as practically as you possibly can. But we don't live in a perfect world, we live in a filmmaker world and you gotta make it work.
So I think the visual effects turned out pretty amazing, all things considered. And they work well together. And I think that's the best kind of effect is when you can match a practical effect to a visual effect and make it pretty seamless.
Gamble: My mom and my dad, trying to preserve the innocence of a child as much as they could, they only allowed me to read the stuff that I was in. There's some pretty graphic stuff in that movie and pretty gory stuff. This one time I was on set, oh my gosh, I was a fish out of water. I was walking towards lunch because they just called lunch and I forgot what his name is in the movie, his character, but he is set on fire and his whole body is just maimed with crazy third-degree burns. He had all this incredible makeup on that I, at the time as a stupid 8- or 9-year-old didn't know it was makeup. So I see this burn victim walking at me and my heart just dropped into my britches, man. I could not fathom what I was looking at. My mom had to calm me down. It was probably comical looking back on it now, but pretty traumatizing as a kid.
I think it needs to be recorded how much of a standup guy [Greg Nicotero] was to [me] on that set. He thought I was a cool dude as a 9-year-old. I remember him showing me these various things, bringing us to the various prop tables and he just made it seem like it was all fun and games and you did not take it very seriously, because that was a very serious heavy set.
But yeah, Greg, especially, he was a rock star. He was cool.
The special effects crew knew they wanted to keep as much of the mist itself as practical as possible, so they devised a way to exert control over the actual mist itself.
Schmidt: Special effects person, Darrell [Pritchett], had worked that out, tested it out with just positive air pressure and chilling the mist. He just walked around the set with the little remote control and he could literally just bring the mist in or push it back out just from standing there right on the set. It was really pretty remarkable.
Huth: I remember that stage was freezing. It was freezing, freezing, freezing cold. And it had to do with the temperature of the room and the temperature of the mist, and that's how they could manipulate it like that. I believe that was all practical in the final movie. I don't think they augmented that at all. That's one of those things that you can do practically and make it look amazing.
[...] I think that it was augmented a little bit when we were outside. When we were filming in the grocery store, basically half of the stage was the store and the other half was the parking lot. And the parking lot side of it, anytime we rolled was completely filled up with mist if we were shooting out those windows. And that was just part of the set.
Controlling the movement of the mist was one challenge, but actually shooting usable footage within it was another.
Schmidt: What was discovered is that it really had a lot to do with how it was not only lit in photography but also how the final finish, the final color correction, coloring of the show was there. It's almost like night vision, you can see into the mist if you drive too much contrast into there. That was the style there to have lots of contrast in photography, but really what the secret was was to reduce the contrast and that gave it that milkiness that was always there and obscured. It's so dramatic to see people walk off and disappear into that mist. It's pretty creepy.
We were very careful about it. We'd be very still and [ensure] that there weren't puffs or clouds for the most part. If you think about it, it's just there. It didn't feel like it was moving around. Normally, I would prefer that you feel the atmosphere dancing, but that was really neat just to see it just hanging there. "Okay, this is just a weight hanging over us all the time." If there's clouds, a breeze, it would almost imply that it was going to clear at some point, but nope, not going to happen.
There were times they had it pumped in there so thick that you couldn't see your feet and it was weird. It's vertigo at that point.
Melissa McBride's Monologue
One moment that nearly every person I spoke to brought up was the moment where Melissa McBride wowed everyone on set with her monologue, where she begs for someone to help her get to her children who are alone at home. This happened early on in the filming schedule and took everybody by surprise.
Huth: I remember when she came on set and did the scene, everyone was just so blown away. It's such a tiny little moment, but Melissa's a unicorn, she can do anything. And she still is, after having worked with her for 12 years on "The Walking Dead," she's just so incredibly talented and so tapped into emotion. And it plays so real. She's one of the most natural actors I've ever seen. It's just incredible what she can do. And nobody knew who she was. She had certainly worked before that, but it was all tiny little roles similar to this one.
Jane: Yeah, I remember her murdering it. The hardest job for an actor is to be a smaller character who basically flies in during the middle of some shoot and you've got a day, maybe two days, maybe half a day, and then you fly out. So you're jumping onto a moving train and then you're jumping off of a moving train. That is the hardest job for actors. It's very difficult to find competent character actors who come in for parts like that. When you do find them, it's that much more impressive, to watch somebody jump into something, come in, knock it out of the park and then leave. It's f***ing great.
Schmidt: We were all in tears, and I'm not just saying that like, "Ooh, it was a moment." We literally were choking back tears because it was such a perfectly impassioned speech. I'm not sure she even has children, not that I'm aware of. Maybe she does now. At least at that time, I don't know if she did. And yet, you just felt that absolute care. And again, it's just one of those monologues that was written that could have been quite sappy, but it was just so genuine. And that look she gives them before she heads out that she gives everyone there is like, "I can't believe you people." It just touches on the humanity of all of that.
Witwer: I think she did it maybe three times or something like that. But to deliver it and have it be perfect each time and have the camera crew also doing their jobs each time, it was just an incredibly unpredictable ballet that you watched in front of you. And it was very intimidating to watch because it was so well pulled off.
Darabont: What a courageous actor because you have to do this wrenching emotional thing and there's literally over 100 people watching you. There's 80 extras, there's all this crew. She just totally dialed in, totally nailed it. And people were blown away by what she did. And yes, burst into spontaneous applause, that does actually happen.
And I remember about halfway through the coverage, Jeff DeMunn kind of sidled up to me and said, "Who is she? Where did she come from? Did you fly her in from L.A. or New York?" I said, "No, she's local." And he said, "She's astonishing." He was absolutely blown away by what she was doing.
Gamble: We all clapped afterwards. At the time no one really knew who she was. She wasn't this huge action star in "The Walking Dead." So she knocked our socks off.
I remember Frank being at the monitor. He couldn't believe what he was getting because it's an important scene. She's probably one of the best actresses that I've ever had to work around. I didn't really have any close interactions with her. I mean, we talked and she was very friendly and nice, but it was definitely one of those scenes where it was like, "Dang, this lady is a legit one-take wonder." We don't need to ever do that again, ever. Everything you needed was in that one take and the whole crew and cast clapped for her afterwards.
Time is money and the director usually comes up and says, "Hey, great job. We're going to move on," but everyone stopped for a good five, 10 minutes and just showered her in praise.
McBride: I have stage fright. I get the irony of that. I guess the intimacy of film makes it somehow different, but I learned early that I had stage fright from school and public speaking, all of that stuff. Obviously, it felt good to know that people liked the performance. It was also strange because I've been on several shoots and have never experienced anything like that. It was unusual. I thought it was unusual and it was a little out-of-body feeling for something like that to happen.
'They'll Come Tonight'
One of the most challenging sequences to film in the entire production was the nighttime attack where all hell breaks loose. Poisonous bugs break in and are chased by big pterodactyl-like creatures that then turn on the humans hiding in the store. There are practical fire effects, digital effects, gunfire, and child endangerment, and all at night.Scene 35, as it was dubbed in the script, was so notorious that Constantine Nasr built a whole DVD featurette around it.
When there's chaos on screen, that usually means every element behind the scenes was perfectly engineered and planned to the smallest detail to get all the right pieces. But the tight shooting schedule and kinetic style forced Darabont and his crew to shoot from the hip.
Darabont: We were shooting very specific things because there were special effects that were coming into it and I needed the scene to cut together. Instead of looking at the storyboards, I was just making it up as I went along. I was going, "Okay, now we're going to shoot this. And then we're going to shoot that. And then here's how it'll cut together."
That was a week of this madness. It was a runaway horse, but we held on and we got the scene in the can. And I was very, very proud of that, and really pleased with that. Man, I had fun. As much as it was incredibly exhausting and stressful, because you're shooting a movie in half the schedule you've ever shot a movie on.
Gamble: There's that one dinosaur-ass-looking thing that is stomping its way towards me and then Tom's character pulls me aside at the last second and then it gets blasted away by Ollie.
Well, when Tom picked me up, he tripped on the edge of an aisle and me and him fell. I fell head first in his arms, right on the ground. I banged off of the sections of the aisle, and then I banged my head on the ground. I remember I didn't cry or anything, but I had a bruise on my head. I remember that.
I had worked with the same producers of that movie actually on another TV show and I had a similar thing happen, too. I remember they were like, "What is with you? Why do you do this kind of stuff?" I go, "I swear, I'm not doing it intentionally. I promise."
My mom, God bless her heart, she's not a helicopter mom, I remember she was in the trailer away for the majority of it. She doesn't want to ever feel like she's getting in the way and she's never wanted to ever tell me how to do what I need to do. She's like, "You do your thing. I'll be here watching 'Gilligan's Island' in the trailer." My whole childhood was her watching "Gilligan's Island" in the trailer while she was painting, but she is constantly worried about my physical safety, so heads would've rolled if it would've been a worse thing. If there would've been blood, heads would've rolled, for sure. It would've been a genuine horror film on that set.
Despite that little accident, young Nathan Gamble and Thomas Jane had a bond on set, something that is crucial for the audience to buy, or else the brutal ending loses its impact.
Jane: They talk about chemistry between actors, either have it or you don't, and sometimes you gotta fake it. I don't think it can be truly faked, but me and Nathan just kind of hit it off. He was a good kid, we enjoyed each other's company. He wasn't an annoying kid. He was very open and very curious, very unpretentious, not a child actor guy at all. His dad was really laid back and cool. And we had a good relationship. It just came naturally.
Gamble: It's so funny because I think a lot of people see [Thomas Jane] as this serious guy. He takes his job very seriously and rightfully so. He's a respectful person, he's a professional. I tossed the ball with him between takes, I remember that. I remember him talking about eating crawfish with me a lot. And I remember him just laughing with me.
Like I said, as a nine-year-old, I don't know how much of what I retained is necessarily 100% and conclusive, but I just remember that those big takeaways is that he wasn't really like a father figure. He was more just like a fun, big brother in a sense. He wasn't like, "All right, now I'm going to tell you a life lesson on how to act." It was more of just like, "Hey, look at that, isn't that funny?" Or just goofing off and tossing a baseball. We tossed the baseball a lot.
I haven't really spoken to him much since, and I just remember that he was like the big brother on set to me.
One of the most important moments in the movie is a quiet scene between David Drayton and his son, where the boy makes his father promise not to let the monsters get him.
Jane: That's the key moment in the script and in the story. We duly paid attention to that scene and took the time to get exactly what Frank wanted out of it. [Billy]'s speaking for himself, but he's also speaking for all the characters, from the crazy lady who starts her cult to everybody in the movie is basically saying "don't let the monsters get me."
I mean, if you wanted to break it down, that's part of what the story's about. What are the decisions we make based on fear versus the decisions we make based on love? Those are kind of the two main drivers of the human condition.
A Quick Trip To The Pharmacy
Another stand-out scene is when David Drayton leads a small group on a journey to the neighboring King's Pharmacy. They encounter some truly nightmarish spiders in this space, which presented cinematographer Rohn Schmidt with some unique lighting challenges.
Schmidt: One of the hardest sequences that kept me up really from when I read the first script was the journey to the pharmacy, which is scripted as a day scene. It had lots of creatures jumping out at you. In a night scene, it'd be easy to create a little shadow that they'd pop out of, and here I was in this white cloud trying to hide creatures that could jump out and scare you. So that kept me up a lot.
I did a lot of testing. I think probably every day off I would go ask the effects people to smoke up the set and I'd take a still camera down and experiment with different combinations of fill light and flashlight and levels of smoke and finally got the recipe down for that, on how thick to make the smoke, which wasn't the thickest smoke and how much contrast to put into the final color correcting.
That was lit entirely with flashlights. By that time I had gained the trust of the cast where, in the midst of acting, they would be able to put the flashlight down, "I need you to put it here on this spot and aim it at that box there," but they were all in. They loved it. They were very accommodating to the plan there and it worked out really great. It's scary.
The pharmacy scene also hides a very geeky easter egg.
Witwer: "The Force Unleashed" was going to come out a year later or something like that. I think I'd shot "The Force Unleashed," and then went directly to "The Mist." I wasn't feeling particularly macho, so when someone gives me the knife, I hold the knife in the reverse grip because I wanted to subconsciously remind the audience that I can indeed beat up Darth Vader. Don't mess with me. It's my reverse lightsaber grip. I think that was my way of making myself feel better that I was a space tough guy.
The Murder Of Private Jessup
The scariest scene in the movie, however, doesn't have any creatures in it. Throughout the story, the fanatical Mrs. Carmody gains more and more power as a cult leader of sorts. She and her followers believe they can stave off the monsters outside by performing human sacrifices, and their first target is Sam Witwer's Private Jessup.
Huth: I really think it's the scariest scene in the whole movie. This isn't the monsters, this is the people and people are always scarier than the worst monster you can imagine. When Mrs. Carmody has directed them at this person and said, "This is who we blame. This is the person whose fault it is." All of the rage and all of the terror, because it all comes from fear, is released onto this one poor guy who really had nothing to do with anything. Yes, he was in the military, probably didn't even know what was going on with these experiments, had nothing to do with it, but she's given them someone to blame.
And he goes from being sort of this tall, cute, handsome soldier guy to being a helpless individual who is at the mercy of people who have lost their minds, people who are so afraid that they will do anything, will do things they never would've imagined they could have done.
They stab this man repeatedly and then throw him out to the creatures. And in their minds, it's the right thing to do. In their minds, it's completely justifiable and that is the most terrifying thing in the entire movie.
Witwer: What's funny is when you're a young actor you have instincts, but you can't actually describe to people why you're doing it. And as a young actor, I remember I had this instinct of doing all these weird things with my hands when I had been stabbed and when I was carried out of the grocery store.
And only now do I realize, if you watch newborn babies, their hands contort in ways that, if you've had hands for a while, you don't use your hands like that. But babies use their hands in strange ways. And I was doing that. I was, on some subconscious level, acting like [Jessup]'s being born into the real world essentially. We're going out of the womb of a fun Hollywood movie into the real world of people who can be awful. And he's being birthed into the world of the mist. So, my hands, if you watch when I'm being carried out, I'm doing baby hands. I'm doing baby fingers.
I felt like having any kind of aggressive reaction [...] was wrong. Do you know what I mean?
I think that when faced with certain horrors, I think we all regress. That was definitely my instinct. The character's body language throughout the movie is not very aggressive and the least so when he starts getting murdered by the mob.
Schmidt: It's kind of a passion of the cross there. I think he even has his arms out or they're holding his arms out. And that was very much on purpose.
What a great place to do that in. It's like going through an ancient narrow cobblestone street as they wind the way through the aisles of the supermarket there. It was hard to get high enough (to capture that shot). It seems like it's a big tall roof, but I think the first couple takes we kept trying to get wider and wider because it was so powerful and dramatic.
Even though we had our widest lens on we ended up knocking some of the lights off of the ceiling with the crane, raining them down onto the extras down below. We had to stop and get out a bunch of big ladders to take down those lights just so that we didn't injure somebody.
Everybody brought it to that scene. Frank whipped them up into a frenzy and it was a little terrifying. You just looked at each other and went, "Okay, this is a little creepy and scary," just a little too real sometimes.
We had a fantastic set of recurring extras. It was the same people. It wasn't just random people showing up each day, so we had gotten to know them. We'd been in there for weeks on end, all day every day in the supermarket, and then to see them just become so sinister as a group was creepy. You hope you're capturing that. You hope that your camera is in the right place because you've now created a situation, a scenario where you can get and really communicate that terror there.
A Key Contribution To The Script
Jessup's murder was not only a big scene for Witwer to perform, but it also marks a moment where he had a big impact on the actual script.
Witwer: I want to point out before I say this that I was coming up with a lot of harebrained ideas that really had no value whatsoever.
Frank was so patient with me as he would hear me pitch something and be like, "Yeah. Okay. Well, we're not going to do that." But he was such a cool guy. I mean, I really shouldn't have been pitching out all those stupid ideas, but he, at the very least, acted like he wanted to hear what I had to say or at the very most, genuinely wanted to hear what I had to say.
Anyway, so one day, like a clueless, young, stupid actor, I walk out and he's having a break. He's taking five minutes to himself outside because this guy is literally under siege. Directors are under siege every moment of every day. So, there he was taking five minutes to himself and I walked up to him. "Hey, Frank. Can I ask you a question?" And he snapped out of whatever private indulgence of having a moment of rest he was having and said, "Yeah, sure thing. What's on your mind?," which is an incredibly kind thing that he just took it with a smile, right?
And so, I said to him, "Listen, tomorrow or the next day, we're going to shoot my death. Norm, the bag boy got killed in a wonderfully grotesque way and we've had flying birds and people burning, and all kinds of just spiders and all kinds of crazy stuff. We've had our fun horror film. I think what we need when I get killed is a murder. A very personal, unpleasant murder."
And he is like, "Okay. Where are you going with this?" And I said, "Well, in the script, it says that I get stabbed and all that stuff happens. "Expiation!" I get thrown out into the mist and then I go back to the window. I'm bleeding and I start screaming, "Let me in. Let me in." And then, when I hear something, I turn around and I see that creature."
The script says I get yanked into the creature and blood and gore and body parts get sprayed across the whole window of the front of the grocery store.
I'm like, "That's really cool, but I think we've had that in this movie. I think we've done the fun horror movie thing. I think we need to make this a personal murder. So, what if instead of all that, I'm bleeding, I turn, I see the monster and then, I turn very, very deliberately to Sadler, place my hand, which has been– I've been trying to hold my guts together. I place my hand on the window and I just say "please." And then, I get pulled out into the mist by the monster and the handprint is all this left of me, the bloody handprint. What if we do that instead?"
And Frank just sat there and went, "Yeah, you know what, we're going to do that." And I'm like, "Wait, what?" And he's like, "Yeah. No, that's what we'll do. Absolutely. That's much more uncomfortable. And then, for the rest of the movie, that handprint is there as the reminder that a murder took place." And then, he starts spinning off on the idea of what it means. He's like, "Yeah, because it's so much scarier. The monsters are now firmly inside the hearts and minds of the people inside the grocery store. So, yeah, we're going to do that. And also, that's going to be a lot cheaper." And I was like, "Yeah, yeah. Cool."
Mrs. Carmody Dialed Up To 11
This scene also marks Marcia Gay Harden going full throttle with Mrs. Carmody. I wanted to know what the actors in this scene felt watching Harden turn the extremism up to 11.
Jane: All actors have sort of two eyes. One eye is always looking inward and the other eye is always looking outward and you're using whatever you can get from the outside world to fuel what's going on on the inside. So there's that feedback loop. The better Marcia did, the more I was able to connect with the scene, and that's true with any actor that you're working with. The better they can do it, the better it is for you.
In that respect, she was real easy to work with because she was firing on all cylinders most of the time. When the cameras are pointing at Marcia, our job is to support her in every way that we could so that she could get the best out of herself. When the camera's pointed at your fellow actor, you want to deliver anything that they need to get the best out of what they're doing. And it's really fun to watch somebody really good at their job.
Even though Mrs. Carmody is desperately trying to sacrifice little Nathan Gamble to the tentacle gods outside, the young actor has nothing but pleasant memories of Harden as an actor.
Gamble: I remember feeling like a genius in front of Marcia Gay Harden, only because her and [Toby Jones] used to play Scrabble off set between takes. They had a little section in the grocery store, but it was down an aisle. They set up a table and they would play Scrabble.
Being a kid, I would wander around in the set. This is my playground, in a sense. I saw that they were playing Scrabble and I walked over to the table and she's like, "I have no idea. I feel like I'm stuck." And as a nine-year-old, I saw that she had the ability to put down "gorilla," which is a pretty long word for Scrabble. And she looked me right in the eyes and said, "You are such a little genius."
Setting Up The Final Act
Jessup's death sets the final act in motion, which sees our surviving protagonists escape the store, hurtling towards the now infamous ending. We all know what happens at the end of the movie, but at the time it was a closely guarded secret, so much so that the ending was not included in the scripts of almost all the cast and crew.
Witwer: I was not trusted. I did not have clearance. I remember I didn't even try to find out what the ending was. They were like, "Do you know what the ending is?" I'm like, "I don't." "Do you want to know?" I'm like, "Actually, I don't."
Darabont: I didn't bother writing a fake ending, I just didn't include the last scene in the script that was circulated. With so many people on a set — extras, day players, crew, caterers, visitors, etc. — I knew that some jerk would jump online and give the ending away. Hell, the actual pages would have appeared before we'd even started shooting.
It's understandable why Darabont took such precautions. He had sacrificed half of the potential budget and had to utilize a whole new filming style in order to preserve his gut-punch ending. There was a big moment on the road to that ending that almost didn't make the cut, though, and it ended up being one of the most striking images of the entire movie.
Jane: One of the things I remember that Frank had initially cut from the original script was when they hear the rumbling and the Jeep starts shaking and they look up and they see this enormous brontosaurus creature. It had the little birds flying around it to give you this sense of scale.
That was the moment where it was like, "Oh f***, this world is never coming back. This is a world of monsters and we are some of, if not the only humans left. This isn't our world anymore."
Frank had initially cut that and said, "The budget ... it's just one more of those creatures. We got lots of creatures."
And I remember saying, "Frank, if we're going to pull this ending off, you've got to have that gigantic brontosaurus stomping through frame, because that really shows us that this is no longer the same planet that we were used to." We needed that moment. Thankfully, it didn't take much convincing. He's like, "Yeah, we need that."
But that's sort of part of the actor's job. "Okay, if I'm going to pull this off, what do I need?" I needed to protect that moment. That was one of the things that I felt we really needed. Plus it's just a f***ing awesome image. You thought those creatures in the supermarket were bad. Welcome to the real world.
And Jane needed all the help he could get to pull off that ending. The movie is structured to deliver that moment, and it would live or die based on Jane's performance.
Jane: That was one day that I spent by myself. That was a day where I told the first AD that if he needed to find me, I'd be out in the woods and I spent the entire day by myself sitting on a log, waiting in-between takes.
A Cruel Twist Of Fate
The big scene was split between two setups on different days toward the end of the shoot. One was on stage where they filmed the interior of the Jeep as David Drayton makes his horrific decision and the other was on location when he steps outside to give himself over to the mist, only to find something far worse.
The interior shoot included Frances Sternhagen, Laurie Holden, Jeffrey DeMunn, Nathan Gamble, and Thomas Jane, which was actually easier for Jane as an actor.
Jane: Because we had three other actors and the pressure wasn't all on me and I had other people to feed off of.
DeMunn: Yeah, that was a dark one. We all were just focused and I was glad to be with the people I was with.
Gamble: I remember when we were rehearsing it, it was such a skeleton crew. Compared to the giant, vast crew that we usually had, it was such a bare-bones crew for this. Obviously everyone in the car, Frank, the camera guy, maybe one or two other people there when we were rehearsing it.
I remember when we were rehearsing this particular thing, when Frank asked me to wake up, "Slowly wake up and look at your dad and look scared, look shocked." Tom would be holding the gun at me on the other side of the camera.
Schmidt: We shot a couple of takes with Billy waking up and the gun wasn't there, just as a practice and a warm-up. I think this was Frank's idea and then we gave the gun to Thomas. So that reaction that you get with the gun right there aiming at him, you could never have acted that. That really is surprise on his part there.
I'm not sure he knew that was going to be there. I'm sure his parents did and I know they were on board with that idea, but it's the most absolutely true and pure reaction to that, the surprise that he sees when the gun goes there. I feel like his eyes dilate uncontrollably.
Gamble: When they yelled "cut," Tom laughed afterwards because he couldn't believe how ridiculous his life was at the moment, "I'm holding a fake gun on a child right now." I remember him just thinking, "This is my life. I signed up for this." I can see his brain working. It was just like, "Wow, in all my years, I would've never guessed that this scene I would ever shoot."
They had me off-set for the screaming and crying, but I could hear it through the walls because I had the school room where I did school on the other side, and I could hear the screaming from him and it was pretty sad.
I mean, it was really sad to just focus on two plus two is four when there's a man just screaming for his life on the other side of the wall.
Huth: [Jane]'s phenomenal in those moments. I remember it being very difficult to watch just even as we filmed it. And I don't think we did very many takes because it was just so torturous, but there's something about the visual of seeing him with the gun in his mouth and he just keeps pulling the trigger and praying for a bullet that's not there. It's crushing. It's the lowest moment. And he really committed to it. I remember him going off by himself and doing whatever it was he had to do internally to get to a place to be that open and that raw.
But it was awful. I hated watching it. Anything that feels that real is very, very, very uncomfortable and very painful. And it was.
You think, "Okay, now he's going to get out of the car and the creatures are going to get him." That's where you think this is going. Particularly because his performance was so strong. He absolutely broke down. He was that man who had been completely destroyed by the events of the last couple of days that there was no salvation. Nothing was going to put him back together.
It actually would've been a better ending for David if the creatures had killed him. But again, the twist of fate, you never know what's coming next.
Working With The Elements
For this "twist of fate" moment, the crew moved to an exterior location where they could shoot the reveal of the army trucks and tanks pushing back the mist.
Schmidt: Sometimes, you just have to have faith that it's going to work. To get that much smoke, Darrell Pritchett had an army of these giant foggers out there. It's down in the south, so the wind's changing regularly.
When we got to the tank, that was exterior. We needed to shoot it in the early morning before the sun came out so that we could match [what we shot on stage]. And it just all worked.
It was a little scary. After the first take, the tank driver said, "Well, I can't see where I'm driving." He's driving 25 miles an hour in a tank at us and the camera crew and the actor and everything else. So I think what we ended up doing was lining him up where it was safe and then him driving straight back and not touching the steering at all was how that was achieved. He just had to travel forward on faith. It was blinding fog. It really was.
Jane: You've literally got tanks running through frame, you've got fog, all that stuff is in effect. So it was not just a big day for me, it was a big day for everybody. Everybody had to be on their game. Not only that, you have all these moving parts that are not minor moving parts, we're talking about a giant train of army trucks and extras and cast and the mist rolling through. You got Darabont who threw in this f****** crane shot, right? And that is one of the most difficult shots, when you start really close on somebod...
When I first started writing books, my "recipe" for how to present the information followed the same structure I saw in other books at the time. While I was writing books to provide content along the lines of what I wanted to see, essentially filling in the gaps I saw in books on DFIR for Windows systems, I was following the same formula other books had used to that point. At the time, it made sense to do this, in order to spur adoption.
Later, when I sat down to write Investigating Windows Systems, I made a concerted effort to take a different approach. What I did this time was present a walk-through of various investigations using images available for download on the Internet (over time, some of them were no longer available). I started with the goals (where all investigations must start), and shared the process, including analysis decisions and pivot points, throughout the entire process.
Okay, what does this have to do with teaching? Well, a friend recently reached out and asked me to review a course that had been put together, and what I immediately noticed was that the course structure followed the same formula we've seen in the industry for years...a one-dimensional presentation of single artifacts, one after another, without tying them all together. In fact, it seems that many materials simply leave it to the analyst to figure out how to extrapolate a process out of the "building blocks" they're provided. IMHO, this is why we see a great many analysts manually constructing timelines in Excel, after an investigation is "complete", rather than building one from the very beginning to facilitate and expedite analysis, validation, etc.
Something else I've seen is that some courses and presentations address data sources and artifacts one-dimensionally. We see this not only in courses, but also in other presented material, because this is how many analysts learn, from the beginning. Ultimately, this approach leads to misinterpretation of data sources (ShimCache, anyone??) and misuse of artifact categories. Joe Slowik (Twitter, LinkedIn) hit the nail squarely on the head when he referred to IoCs as "composite objects" (the PDF should be required reading).
How something is taught also helps address misconceptions; for example, I've been saying for sometime now that we're doing ourselves and the community a disservice when we refer to Windows Event Log records solely by their event ID; I'm not the only one to say this, Joachim Metzhas said it, as well. The point is that event IDs, even within a single Windows Event Log, are NOT unique. However, it's this reductionist approach that also leads to misinterpretation of data sources; we don't feel that we can remember all of the nuances of different data sources, and rather than looking to additional data sources on which to build artifact constellations and verification, we reduce the data source to the point where it's easiest to understand.
So, we need a new approach to teaching this topic. Okay, great...so what would this approach look like? First, it would start off with core concepts of validation (through artifact constellations), and case notes. These would be consistent throughout, and the grade for the final project would be heavily based on the existence of case notes.
This approach is similar to the Dynamics mechanical engineering course I took during my undergraduate studies. I was in the EE program, and we all had to "cross-pollinate" with both mechanical and civil engineering. The professor for the Dynamics course would give points for following the correct process, even if one variable was left out. What I learned from this was that trying to memorize discrete facts didn't work as well as following a process; it was more correct to follow the process, even if one angular momentum variable was left out of the equation.
The progression of this "new" course would include addressing, for example, artifact categories; you might start with "process execution" because it's a popular one. You might build on something that persists via a Run key value...the reason for this will become apparent shortly. Start with Prefetch files, and be sure to include outlier topics like those discussed by Dr Ali Hadi. Be sure to populate and maintain case notes, and create a timeline from the file system and Prefetch file metadata (embedded time stamps)...do this from the very beginning.
Next, go to Windows Event Logs. If the system has Sysmon installed, or if Process Tracking is enabled (along with the Registry mod that enables full command lines) in the Security Event Log, add those records to the timeline. As the executable is being launched from a Run key (remember, we chose such an entry for a reason, from above), be sure to add pertinent records from the Microsoft-Windows-Shell-Core%4Operational.evtx Event Log. Also look for WER or "Application Popup" (or other errors) that may be available from the Application Event Log. Also look for indications of malware detections in logs associated with AV and other monitoring tools (i.e., SentinelOne, Windows Defender, Sophos, WebRoot, etc.). Add these to the timeline.
Moving on to the Registry, we clearly have some significant opportunities here, as well. For example, looking at the ShimCache and AmCache.hve entries for the EXE If available), we have an opportunity clearly demonstrate the true nature and value of these artifacts, correcting the misinterpretations we so often see when artifacts are treated in isolation. We also need to bring in additional resources and Registry keys, such as the StartupApproved subkeys, etc.
We can then include additional artifacts like the user's ActivitiesCache.db, SRUM.db, etc., artifacts, but the overall concept here is to change the way we're teaching, and ultimately doing DF work. Start with a foundation that requires case notes and artifact constellations, along with an understanding of how this approach leads and applies to validation. Change the approach by emphasizing first principles from the very beginning, and keeping them part of the education process throughout, so that it becomes part of the DFIR culture.
It’s easy to forget about our microwave when we’re not using it—especially since many models are compact, tucked into the corners of counters, or mounted above the stove. But, like other kitchen appliances, our microwaves need basic maintenance in order to keep running smoothly.
Presenting a task as impossible as hiding a futuristic country for centuries in Sub-Saharan Africa. Imagine having to follow up the phenomenon of Marvel's Black Panther (2018) which, like most explosive zeitgeist events, had ultra precise perfectly timed ingredients and arrived at the exact moment in culture when all of them would be most appreciated. Now imagine having to follow that up without its charismatic leading man, lost to cancer at the young peak of an already impressive career. Director Ryan Coogler was in an unenviable position. It's no surprise, then, that the sequel to Marvel's most popular solo adventure is a bit wobbly on arrival. Never mind that the sequel must bear the weight of all the absurd expectations and make sense of T'Challa's absence while trying to find new legs on both land AND at sea. Thank god for the latter. Whatever the movie's faults, it's not from attempting a simplistic retread...
Through 2020 America's professional lives "had taken on the overtones of a secular religion," argues a writer in the Washington Post, with jobs forming "a primary way to find meaning in the world and a crucial part of our identity.... Even precarious, low-paying gigs were valorized as 'hustle culture,' representing freedom to perform labor on our terms."
But then...
Fast-forward to fall 2022. The number of people quitting, while down from the peak, remains at the highest level since the 1970s. White-collar workers don't want to give up working remotely. Low-paying sectors such as the hospitality industry can't find enough people willing to work for the wages on offer. Union organizing and strikes have been on an upswing.... [W]hat's increasingly clear is that the March 2020 decision to partially close down the American economy shattered Americans' dysfunctional, profoundly unequal relationship with work like nothing in decades. And even if there was great discomfort in a shutdown that severed almost every one of us from assumptions about how we earn a living, we also found an unexpected opportunity: to remake our relationship with the labor that fills our days....
All of it — the lockdowns, the disease, the sudden change in household functioning and how or whether we worked at all — amounted to a massive psychological shock, leading many to ask why labor looms so large in our psyches. "It really was an opportunity — an unwelcome opportunity — to take a look at the mad scramble that many of us have just assumed was normal," said Kate Shindle, who as president of the Actors' Equity Association represents a particularly hard-hit industry. Then, when the economy unexpectedly boomed back, Americans were poised to pivot. As many had recognized, it was one thing to seek meaning in work but another to see our lives subsumed by it — and for what? A less-than-adequate paycheck? A job that could literally kill you? "Maybe the poor safety net really kept people from analyzing the role of work in their lives," David Blustein, author of "The Importance of Work in an Age of Uncertainty" and a professor at Boston College's Lynch School of Education and Human Development, told me. "Maybe the American work ethic was a form of survival...."
Over and over, when people spoke to journalists, including me, about why they made changes in their professional lives since March 2020, they told us they liked receiving better wages when they switched employers. But even more, they wanted greater control over the terms of their labor.... An increased level of remote work, likely in a hybrid format, is almost certainly here to stay, says Nick Bloom, a professor of economics at Stanford University, who has studied the topic for decades. Employees want it, technological advances continue to make it easier, and companies that forbid it completely are likely to find themselves at a disadvantage....
The past two and a half years brought immense upheaval, and we'll be struggling to process the resulting changes for years. But it's undeniable that some of these shifts were long overdue. Workers are highly unlikely to forget what we learned: namely, that our jobs are much more flexible than we thought.
Not long after "Batman: The Animated Series" star Kevin Conroy passed away, another icon of the '90s has left us far too soon. Jason David Frank, the actor and martial artist best known for playing Tommy Oliver, the Green Ranger and White Ranger in the "Mighty Morphin Power Rangers" franchise, has passed away. Rumors began circulating on the web Sunday morning after Frank's agent and trainer posted the tragic news, and now the death has been confirmed by his manager, Justine Hunt, according to TMZ. The report also states that "sources with direct knowledge" say Frank died by suicide, though this remains unconfirmed for now.
Jason David Frank became one of the most popular heroes of the 1990s in his role as Tommy Oliver, who began his turn as the villainous Green Ranger. Eventually, the character became a hero, after turning his back on the show's villains, giving children of the '90s one of their favorite characters on television. What began as a 14-episode stint on the popular "Mighty Morphin Power Rangers" series turned into something bigger.
It's Morphin Time
Originally, Frank was meant to depart "Power Rangers" and lead "Cybertron," another live-action sci-fi series trying to capitalize on the popularity of the Japanese import, which would eventually be retitled "VR Troopers." The actor even shot a pilot for the series. But when Tommy Oliver proved to be incredibly popular, "Power Rangers" kept Frank in the cast and turned him into the White Ranger, a new leader for the original "Mighty Morphin Power Rangers" line-up. After starring in the first "Power Rangers" movie, Frank stuck around when the "Power Rangers" became Zeo Rangers, playing the Red Zeo Ranger, as well as the Red Turbo Ranger in "Power Rangers Turbo."
Though the glory days of the Green Ranger and White Ranger had passed by the late '90s, with Frank leaving the show in 1997, he returned for an anniversary special in 2002, and he became the Black Dino Ranger in "Power Rangers Dino Thunder" in 2004. But Frank's true return to "Power Rangers" glory came when he put on the Green Ranger suit in a cameo appearance in "Power Rangers Super Megaforce" in 2014.
In addition to his work on "Power Rangers," Frank appeared on other '90s shows like "Sweet Valley High" and "Family Matters," as well as MTV's "Undressed" in 2000. In recent years, he also lent his voice to the animated productions "Transformers: Titans Return" and "We Bare Bears." But Frank's most beloved role was always as Tommy Oliver, and he was always happy to meet fans at yearly pop culture conventions.
Rest In Peace
More recently, Jason David Frank reprised the role of Tommy Oliver in quite a cool fashion. A live-action trailer was created for the comic book event series "Power Rangers: Shattered Grid." In the comic series, the character of Tommy Oliver turned back into a villain known as Lord Drakkon, who hailed from an alternate reality where he reigned over a technologically-advanced, dystopian Angel Grove as an oppressive ruler with and army of his own Ranger Sentries. It's a shame we never got to see that turned into a live-action series, but the trailer was certainly a treat for longtime "Power Rangers" fans.
Frank's on-screen career may have been mostly limited to his work in the "Power Rangers" franchise, but there's a reason he kept returning to the role, and it wasn't just a paychek. Fans never lost their love for Tommy Oliver, no matter what "Power Rangers" suit he had on. Frank was an integral part of the franchise, and his role as an outcast who became a hero resonated with a lot of kids going through tough times in the '90s. Plus, he simply looked cool in the green suit with the gold shield. Was there any Zord that was better than the Dragonzord? Combine his fan favorite TV role with his discipline in martial arts, and it's clear that Jason David Frank was truly a hero to a lot of people. He will be missed.
"Falling Down" is the story of a man who gets pushed over the edge. That man, played by Michael Douglas, feels alienated and impotent in his place in society, and after suffering a mental breakdown, he goes on a violent (and often racist) rampage through Los Angeles.
The movie's themes feel perhaps even more prescient today than they did when it was released, with Douglas' character serving as a sort of avatar for the "white male rage" of the Internet era, when people are more isolated than ever. People long for a world of the past, a world that makes sense to them, and when they look around and don't see that, they lash out.
Watching the film today, some people may feel that the film doesn't do quite enough to condemn the actions and worldview of Douglas' character, especially in situations like his racist tirade against a Korean convenience store owner. The director himself, Joel Schumacher, addressed these criticisms in an interview back in 1993 when the film was released, saying that while the character was meant to be relatable on some level, to make the audience feel conflicted, he isn't supposed to be emulated.
Regardless of how you feel the movie's politics have aged, Michael Douglas puts in a compelling performance as William Foster, a man who can no longer handle the mundanity and fruitlessness of his life. And according to Douglas in his own 1993 interview, a lot of his understanding of the character originated from a suggestion by the hairdresser on the movie's set.
The William Foster character in "Falling Down" is no exception. Going into filming, they had most of Foster's appearance down. He'd wear tight, repressive clothing, wear glasses, and carry a briefcase. But they didn't know what they were doing with his hair until the hairdresser on set made a suggestion, which, as Douglas explained, really finally gave him a sense of the character:
"It's amazing sometimes how the haircut can make the man, and the haircut came and all of a sudden the whole character came together. I had a sense of somebody of this military background, maybe he'd been in the service at one time. Somebody who worked in the defense industry ... I also had a sense for the guy, that he gave me a feeling of like the late 50's and the early 60's, and somehow my character, you kind of had the feeling that he came from another time, or he wished for another time when things made sense. When somebody's job was worthwhile [and] you had a purpose in life."
Things like hair and wardrobe and makeup can sometimes be overlooked in filmmaking, but examples like this show how those aesthetic choices play an important part in the symphony that is a film. No contribution is too small, and when someone like Michael Douglas takes suggestions from the hairdresser, fascinating things can happen.
It's been a while since Hollywood's star factory cranked out a genuine, organic sensation quite like Timothée Chalamet. He's the rare marquee name who can command attention off the screen with his vivacious personality as well as hold it on-screen with his acting talents. It's possible to point to previous celebrities and thespians he recalls, but what's most remarkable about the rise of Timothée Chalamet is that he feels like something entirely new and unexpected to behold. He's at the forefront of a new generation of leading men who are out to deconstruct and demolish traditional ideas of what on-screen masculinity can and should be.
In under a decade since his big-screen debut, he's already forged a formidable path through the industry that is breaking new ground for those to follow behind him. Though he charged onto the scene for most with 2017's "Call Me by Your Name," the role for which he received an Oscar nomination, Chalamet had already worked with established names like Jason Reitman and Christopher Nolan — not to mention turned in an attention-grabbing performance in "Miss Stevens."
Since rising to the vanguard of young Hollywood, he's opened a huge tentpole in "Dune," joined an inestimable Wes Anderson ensemble, collaborated closely with Greta Gerwig on her first two features, and become something of a muse for Luca Guadagnino. One senses, too, that the best is still yet to come. On the occasion of Chalamet's latest big-screen turn in "Bones and All," we take a look at a dozen of his most memorable movie roles.
Interstellar (2014)
Perhaps you didn't clock it at the time, but yes, that's a pre-fame Timothée Chalamet in Christopher Nolan's "Interstellar." While he's not the main child that Matthew McConaughey's Cooper pines for across dimensions and the universe, his 15-year-old Tom is still a crucial part of the fabric of the film. There's more to the performance than just seeing the actor before he became self-conscious of his own star image. As the younger version of a character who will later come to be played in the film by Casey Affleck, he has a somewhat tricky task of feeling at home in his own skin while also laying the groundwork for the acclaimed actor to come in and inherit the character. It never feels in doubt that there's a straight line between Chalamet and Affleck, with the teen actor's mercurial moodiness calcifying into the adult's embittered pessimism.
Nolan often gets a bad and inaccurate reputation for making films that are cold and unemotional. "Interstellar" feels like the most direct rebuttal of this common line of criticism, and not only because the video of McConaughey's prolonged crying has become something of a meme. A journey to the end of the world to save the world has the paradoxical effect of driving Cooper deeper into himself to discover the forces that transcend meaning and understanding. "Love powers the universe" sounds like the kind of corny conclusion that could double as parody, but Nolan's epic space odyssey earns it and more.
Casting performers like Chalamet who play into this naked, vulnerable emotionality help lay the groundwork for this heartfelt conclusion. Even though it gets a bad reputation as one of the lesser Nolan works, it's still a riveting watch. It also deserves inclusion in any survey of Chalamet's career, albeit as somewhat of a footnote given his limited participation.
Hostiles (2017)
Timothée Chalamet has but a brief role in Scott Cooper's "Hostiles," a 2017 Western film that far too few saw thanks to its odd distribution by Byron Allen's fledgling unit Entertainment Studios. Chalamet plays a supporting role as Pvt. Philippe DeJardin, trading nicely on his French descent. In 1892, he's part of a group of soldiers tasked with transit for Cheyenne war chief Yellow Hawk (Wes Studi) from New Mexico back to his tribal lands in Montana. DeJardin's youth plays a large role in what little we see of his character, but Chalamet makes the most of his scenes. He plays up the put-on toughness of DeJardin, so it's clear how he comes across to the rest of the army detail: a boy amongst men.
The film cannot rank particularly high in Chalamet's filmography because he's simply in it so seldom. But if tempted to turn off the film after Chalamet's early exit, stick around because "Hostiles" has a lot to offer even without his presence. Every Christian Bale performance is at least somewhat interesting, and he's doing some sturdy work here as Capt. Joseph Blocker, a weary soldier who resists his final assignment until threatened with a court martial. Cooper avoids the lazy tropes of transforming a grizzled bigot by virtue of compassionate exposure to a group he dislikes, weaving a more complicated moral and physical journey for Blocker and the characters. The film also features a standout performance by Rosamund Pike, who loses her family in an attack by Comanches and must navigate her way through the trauma alongside the detail once they find her on their quest.
Hot Summer Nights (2018)
Even Timothée Chalamet's most classic matinee idol movie is not so straightforward. Shot before the sudden "Call Me by Your Name"-mania but released into it, "Hot Summer Nights" features the actor in a last bit of self-containment as Daniel, a bookish teenager who finds his coming-of-age story through dealing drugs. It starts off simply, as these things often do, by simply hiding a friend's weed to avoid detection by the cops. But once he gets a peek into the underground world, Daniel sees something somewhat unexpected: an opportunity for windfalls of profit. He spots the opportunities for distribution innovation and process improvement, juicing his customers for every penny their worth alongside rebellious bud Hunter (Alex Roe). His clientele has plenty to spare, too, given the film's setting amongst the rich kids in 1991 Cape Cod.
Elijah Bynum's directorial debut has slickness and style to spare as it pulls the audience into Daniel's world while it grows in promise and peril alike. He gains the level of notoriety in a new place that he so desperately craves as a slightly shy guy, and catches the eye of Maika Monroe's beguiling McKayla. But the more he gains in stature, the more his exploits catch the attention of his suppliers, who want in on the cut as Daniel looks to expand his preppy pot empire into cocaine. Through it all, Chalamet projects a cool that is knowingly effortful, which allows anyone to project their own adolescent insecurities onto the character. It's all the more impactful because he lets us see the performance within the performance. "Hot Summer Nights" is nothing groundbreaking (it certainly feels like a first feature) but makes for a fun hour and change to spend with an electric Chalamet.
2019's "The King" was Timothée Chalamet's first film that belonged to him and him alone. Save for Robert Pattinson's brief but uproarious turn as the Dauphin of France, campy accent work and all, he commands the frame from start to finish. It's not hard to see what attracted Chalamet to take the role as his star blew up in the industry — the story of his character Hal echoes his own evolution from a teen to a man.
Don't let the modest name fool you. Hal is the pet name for the boy who would soon become England's King Henry V during the Middle Ages. He begins "The King" as a lad of modest aims and intentions entirely uninterested in assuming the throne. But after the death of his father and brother, he's forced with no choice but to take the crown.
What follows is nothing of the grandiloquent sort of drama you might expect of the Shakespearean plays from which David Michôd and Joel Edgerton adapt the film. This is a gritty, grounded tale that's more interested in Hal's mumblings as he struggles to articulate his authority both to others and himself, perhaps to the film's ultimate detriment. This gray, grimy war flick is as murky as the mud on which Hal must fight for his country. Chalamet disappears inside the twisted, tortured psychology of his character in "The King." It's an unusually muted performance from the normally extroverted and physical performer, but the turn works because he commits to the brooding.
Beautiful Boy (2018)
There's a particular trap for young actors to do movies about addiction. As a literal challenge, it allows them to demonstrate the extent of their limber and adaptable physicality as they portray someone in the thrall of a controlling substance. As a metaphorical challenge, it's a convenient plot device through which to play out larger meta-narratives about indulging in the temptations of youthful indiscretion. So perhaps it's no surprise that Timothée Chalamet gravitated toward "Beautiful Boy," playing the real-life recovering meth addict Nic Sheff.
Chalamet is a raw nerve and live wire in the film, a bundle of tics and anxieties splayed out on the screen as he torturously plunges into the depths of addiction. If he's a tad overwrought, it's only because the movie itself is. Chalamet feels entirely combustible, like at any given moment in "Beautiful Boy" Nic might simply explode before our eyes. Through his lithe, lanky physicality and his weepy, woebegone emotionality, Chalamet helps us understand what it really means to be an addict. This is a necessary component for the larger aim of Felix van Groeningen's film, which is to explore the very nature of addiction itself.
Nic is but a supporting character in "Beautiful Boy" with an outsized impact on the story compared to his screen time. The film documents the wider ripple effects within the Sheff family, particularly on the wounded soul of his heartbroken father David (Steve Carell). Though Nic's behavior tests the limits of their compassion, David's quest for solutions and salvation for his son is the ultimate testament to the power of a father's love. Their bond is all the more moving because Chalamet never leaves a bit of doubt as to just how much Nic needs that compassionate care.
Timothée Chalamet has primarily followed the Leonardo DiCaprio trajectory to avoid being pigeonholed as a teen idol. That is to say, he's tread an almost exclusively solemn and serious path in the five years after breaking out. But no one can resist taking a role in a Wes Anderson movie, now can they? Chalamet showed some serious comedic chops leading one of the vignettes within "The French Dispatch" (and held his own as scene and romantic partner Frances McDormand, to boot). Should he ever want to go all-in on doing lighter fare, he could easily shift genres.
Anderson wisely leans on someone with Chalamet's pre-existing iconography to play Zeffirelli, the student leader of a French student revolution in the model of the May '68 protests. He's possessed with the kind of contagious zeal that defies logic or explanation; it simply must be felt. Chalamet instantly lights up the screen with his charismatic energy, a remarkable feat given the gnarly pencil-thin trash 'stache adorning his upper lip. He's deft with the delivery of Anderson's droll dialogue and committed to the off-beat sexual energy he shares with McDormand's Lucinda Krementz, a reporter from the titular newspaper assigned to report on his would-be revolution.
Chalamet avoids the worst tendencies of actors in a Wes Anderson film, who often resort to a rote recitation of the lines with a pronounced affection that renders them into cinematic paper dolls. His Zeffirelli is flesh and blood, at turns smug and sincere. It's too bad there's not a whole movie about this character rather than just one chapter of him.
Lady Bird (2017)
In most people's adolescence, there's a character like Timothée Chalamet's Kyle Scheible from "Lady Bird." He's a rebel who thinks he has a cause after reading a few pages of Howard Zinn, strutting about projecting an invulnerable sense of removal from the world. That unbothered cool can prove alluring, as it does to Saoirse Ronan's Christine "Lady Bird" MacPherson, but such an affect masks the pretentiousness and callousness to his self-involvement.
Kyle doesn't really enter the picture in "Lady Bird" until the protagonist has already tried on a new identity or two as she seeks to escape from what she views as her humdrum Sacramento existence. He serves an important purpose in the narrative, illustrating the draw of winning an elusive love interest and the disillusionment of actually pinning one down and dealing with all of them as a person rather than a concept. Chalamet oozes the smarm and charm of the "bad boy" archetype, nailing Kyle in everything from the chilly demeanor to his soft-spoken faux-philosophical dialogue.
"Lady Bird" draws heavily from Greta Gerwig's own adolescent experiences, and it speaks to her tremendous grace and wisdom that she does not turn the character of Kyle into a mere caricature. He's more than just an instructional lesson for Lady Bird to have a sense of self-worth, and Chalamet helps anchor Kyle in the hidden pain of watching a family member slip away to cancer. Just like everyone in the film, he's struggling to expand his point of view beyond one where he's the main character. This may be the best overall movie Chalamet has ever done, although he's far from the main reason it's a coming-of-age classic.
Miss Stevens (2016)
If actors were commodities purchasable on a stock market, anyone who bought into Timothée Chalamet after seeing "Miss Stevens" would be filthy rich now. This is the real breakthrough performance for the actor. It's the first real showcase of his full talents from impulsive physicality to tender vulnerability. Like many a Chalamet performance, there's an exquisite tension between the character's lack of certainty and the performer's undeniable confidence in portraying such confusion.
Chalamet gives a preternaturally assured turn in Julia Hart's film as misunderstood teen Billy Mitman. He's a troubled but talented student who finds expression for his angst through art; specifically, drama. At his school, however, that program's funding is so on ice that Lily Rabe's titular English teacher must accompany a group of three students to their monologue competition. Billy and Miss Stevens, still coming of age herself at 29, strike up an odd companionship as each navigates their own hang-ups and doubts in the open. She sees past the fears of his peers, who view his temperamental relationship with newly prescribed behavioral medications as reason to regard him as some kind of ticking time bomb.
It's to the great credit of director Julia Hart, who co-wrote the script with husband and producer Jordan Horowitz, that they simply lean back to let Chalamet and Rabe make magic. She's fond of the loose, Richard Linklater-style "walk-and-talk" where the camera hangs back to observe a casual conversation between characters. The film does not force Chalamet to shove Billy into some kind of easily recognizable box nor map his relationship with Miss Stevens into a familiar formulation. It's just humanity in all its messy majesty, laid out before us with authenticity and accuracy.
Dune (2021)
It's easy to get swept up in the sight, sound, and spectacle of Denis Villeneuve's epic space opera "Dune." But the film would be absolutely nothing without the quiet strength it draws from Timothée Chalamet's performance as protagonist Paul Atreides. This is very much an archetypal monomyth, a hero's journey that would do writer Joseph Campbell proud, yet Chalamet roots the character in deep, complex characterization. Anchoring a movie like this is a major accomplishment in its own right, but there's real emotional stakes to this character's success and failure that the actor layers in flawlessly among the film's other technical elements.
Chalamet intrinsically understands that it's difficult for the average viewer to connect with Paul as a messianic figure, so he plays up the humanity first and foremost. Within the film's science-fiction future, this son of a duke comes to learn he might have the breeding and the power to become the fabled Kwisatz Haderach. The ground around him shifts as people come to realize he might be their hope for deliverance through dire geopolitical straits. Chalamet shows the weight of this responsibility as reality sets in for Paul, choosing to pierce his armor of stoicism with brief bouts of self-doubt that prove revealing and relatable for the character.
There's a tendency for leading men to just smolder their way through a tough guy role like this, but Chalamet elevates "Dune" by bringing his trademark emotional directness to the character. He's a performer changing the way a generation approaches their construction of masculinity because he does not downplay feelings of weakness — he deals with them openly.
Bones And All (2022)
In Luca Guadagnino's "Bones and All," Timothée Chalamet delivers the type of performance that's clearly the result of a collaboration between an actor and a director who knows them well enough to push them out of their comfort zone. In many ways, the itinerant cannibal Lee shares much in common with his sentimental and sensuous turn as Elio from "Call Me by Your Name." Both young men seek love and connection in a world where they do not feel they can be accepted as themselves.
But Guadagnino goes a step further here, asking Chalamet to start by playing the character as confident only to have those defenses slowly chipped away as he falls for fellow flesh-eater Maren (Taylor Russell). When Lee first struts across the screen in "Bones and All," he exudes an unflappable cool that cannot help but lure people into his orbit. He knows the pull he has on other people, too, and justifies weaponizing it to draw in the people he desires to devour. His roguish charms are his strength, a potent defense mechanism against a world that has no place for his kind. They're also his weakness, as they preclude him from experiencing intimacy even with someone who might understand his struggles.
Ultimately, Guadagnino is far less interested in the blood going down Lee and Maren's gullets and far more captivated by the blood rushing into their hearts. Their love on the run is fast, frenzied, and utterly infatuating because Chalamet — alongside Russell — methodically strips back all his character's posturing and performativity until we see the scars on his very spirit.
Little Women (2019)
After working with Timothée Chalamet in 2017, Greta Gerwig observed that the actor was "a young Christian Bale crossed with a young Daniel Day-Lewis with a sprinkle of young Leonardo DiCaprio." She perfected this hybridization in their next collaboration on 2019's "Little Women," and not only because his role as Laurie was once played by Christian Bale himself. Gerwig sees the danger and the daring in his persona that captivates audiences, but she also knows there's a sweetness underlining it all that makes them swoon.
In the world of "Little Women," the character of Theodore "Laurie" Laurence can often represent something as a prize put on a pedestal for the March sisters to fight for, specifically the headstrong Jo (Saoirse Ronan) and her impetuous younger sister Amy (Florence Pugh). But Gerwig's adaptation, which oftentimes feels like a graduate-level seminar deconstructing Louisa May Alcott's novel, finally unlocks Laurie as a character in his own right. He's not some gullible gent willing to entertain any sister like a lousy lothario. He's a boy craving the love of a big family, which he sees abounding within the March house but lacking in his own. Chalamet's Laurie desperately craves acceptance into their home, and the actor isn't afraid to show the depths of his desperation to gain the March's approval.
Gerwig understands Chalamet's unique appeal across gender lines at the very moment that those distinctions are blurring in the real world. He doesn't want to court a March sister so much as he wants to become one of them. Underneath the swagger is the sincerity of a puppy dog who just wants to give and receive love. Chalamet does not shy away from the more feminine coded aspects of the character, such as Laurie's maudlin emotionality, as he creates the definitive cinematic Laurie.
Call Me By Your Name (2017)
The performance that made Timothée Chalamet the youngest Best Actor nominee in 80 years still retains all its power. As Elio in "Call Me by Your Name," Chalamet delivers a masterclass in coming-of-age before the camera. His jaded teenager gets jolted out of his aloof apathy by the arrival of the American student Oliver (Armie Hammer) to study with his father (Michael Stuhlbarg) at their villa in Italy. The two feel a quick kindling of attraction that neither is quite ready to act upon, especially because both are performing the heteronormative masculinity of their '80s-era setting. And Elio, for all his wiles and wits, maintains all the insecurities and immaturities of an inexperienced teenage boy.
Chalamet stays attuned to the physical impulses of Elio to a frightening degree, abandoning studied mannerisms in his approach to the character and letting all his contradictory impulses run free. It's a case study of the confusions of adolescence, where one's body acts in ways the mind cannot understand and must catch up with.
With great sincerity and sensuality alike, director Luca Guadagnino surveys this burgeoning summer romance in "Call Me by Your Name." He captures the beauty and the tragedy of two people who fumble their way towards an expression of the desire and affection they feel for one another yet cannot figure out how to sustain it outside the throes of one passionate season. Chalamet's soul and self are entirely out in the open in the film, with his heart beating out of his chest as it's made and broken before our eyes. As Elio experiences all the emotions of first love as a character, so does the audience experience that first bit of identification and affection for Chalamet as a performer.
Zombies have a long history in film, and just like the rest of the horror genre, the evolution of the zombie movie is a topographical study of political and sociological change. From the early appearance of zombies as anti-war symbols in 1919's "J'accuse!" through the Vodou zombies of 1932's "White Zombie," and from the shambling flesh-eaters of George A. Romero's seminal 1968 film "Night of the Living Dead" through the fast-moving rage zombies of Danny Boyle's 2002 epidemiological horror "28 Days Later," zombie movies are a constant but ever-changing staple of cinema.
While those classics of the subgenre make for excellent year-round horror viewing, there are so many underrated and/or underseen zombie movies that deserve your attention. This list highlights 15 of those films: stories about the undead that breathe new life into horror and raise new questions about politics, culture, and art, all while making you scared to walk past a cemetery.
Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things (1972)
"What a perfect place for a mass murder!" Alan (portrayed by co-writer Alan Ormsby) is the director of a theatre troupe who decides to bring his cast and crew to an island cemetery for a night of jokes, witchcraft, and necromancy. Predictably, playing pranks in a graveyard and trying to raise the dead don't go well, and they find themselves besieged by real zombies after Alan's fake spell actually works. Filled with wry, morbid humor and a terrifying finale, "Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things" proves that theatre kids are the real villains.
Many elements of the film come back in later zombie cinema. At one point, Alan abandons his actress Anya (Anya Ormsby, Alan's real-life wife at the time) to be eaten by zombies in a scene that bears more than a passing resemblance to the opening sequence of "28 Weeks Later." The film ends (spoiler alert!) with the zombies getting on boats to get to the mainland, recalling the finale of Lucio Fulci's "Zombie." The ending is horrific, with the undead rushing the camera in an uncomfortably visceral recreation of a zombie attack. With the film's sardonic humor, this odd horror-comedy makes for a fascinating watch.
Dance Of The Dead (2008)
When corpses start returning to life in the graveyard next to a nuclear power plant, a group of misfit teens band together to save their high school prom. Director Gregg Bishop and writer Joe Ballarini take more than a few cues from "Return of the Living Dead" for their charming low-budget horror comedy. The punk band providing the soundtrack, the unlikely group of teens running from zombies, and the nuclear runoff (or military waste as in writer-director Dan O'Bannon's 1985 film) that creates ravenous hordes of zombies — these elements combine with a goofy sense of humor and a delightfully earnest approach to make a must-see zombie movie.
Though "Dance of the Dead" sets itself apart with its low-budget ingenuity and offbeat humor, it still has quite a few nods to earlier horror films: the aforementioned tips of the hat to "Return of the Living Dead," along with a jump scare straight out of "The Descent," a death scene similar to an iconic kill from "Day of the Dead," and the cathartic demise of an overly aggressive teen boy à la 1988's "The Blob." These references don't diminish the film's uniqueness, though. Rather, they bolster its regional charms. This is a movie that loves horror, and the cast of young, relative unknowns gives it a verve that is often missing from established studio films. Hilarious, sweet, and featuring a palpable joy for filmmaking, "Dance of the Dead" is a light-hearted zombie crowd-pleaser.
Wild Zero (1999)
Part '50s creature feature, part "Return of the Living Dead" homage, director Tetsuro Takeuchi and writer Satoshi Takagi's "Wild Zero" is the least predictable and most progressive film on this list. Anarchic and gloriously silly, "Wild Zero" has all the ingredients for a perfect midnight movie: hilariously cartoony gags; fist-pumping, "can you believe that just happened?" moments; and rock 'n' roll blood brothers fighting the undead.
Ace (Masashi Endō) is a huge Guitar Wolf fan, and when he helps the band during a skirmish, the guitarist (also named Guitar Wolf) makes him a blood brother. Ace meets a young woman named Tobio (Kwancharu Shitichai), and when they are attacked by zombies, Ace calls Guitar Wolf for help. Meanwhile, the band's vengeful former manager, The Captain (Makoto Inamiya), is hunting them down. He's fond of pageboy wigs, impossibly short shorts, and over-the-top violence. Between his wild performance and his equally wild wardrobe, he serves as a sentient visual gag.
There's sweetness at the core of all the humor. Ace and Guitar Wolf's blood bond is a sincere reminder of the healing power of rock 'n' roll, and Ace and Tobio's love story has its beautiful slogan. Tobio is trans, and as Guitar Wolf reminds Ace, "Love has no borders, nationalities, or genders!" That "Wild Zero" has a trans love interest who is treated with respect and sensitivity puts it head and shoulders among quite a few films as does its zany, punk rock zombie story.
One Cut Of The Dead (2017)
Not only is writer-director Shin'ichirô Ueda's "One Cut of the Dead" one of the best zombie movies in recent memory. It's also a brilliant movie about movies. It's best to go in knowing as little as possible about this indie horror comedy, but the premise is that a small filmmaking crew makes a zombie movie at a site once used for military experiments involving the reanimation of corpses. The fake zombies become real zombies, and the cast and crew must fight off the bloodthirsty undead. Wildly original and utterly surprising, "One Cut of the Dead" belongs on any list of the best zombie movies.
"One Cut of the Dead" was so well-received that a French-language remake premiered at Cannes in 2022 (though /Film's verdict was, "Just go watch the original"). If it was so highly regarded, why is it on a list of underrated zombie movies? One of the criteria for this list is that a movie is underseen. It can be praised by everyone who watches it, but if enough people still haven't seen it — even if it's been remade by a studio at a much higher budget — then it qualifies for this list. While the film broke box office records relative to its budget, it still hasn't reached as wide an audience as it deserves. Inventive, hilarious, and completely in love with the art of making movies, "One Cut of the Dead" is a zombie movie that everyone needs to see.
The Living Dead At The Manchester Morgue (1974)
Director Jorge Grau's eerie ecological zombie movie is moody '70s Euro-horror that feels as prescient as all the best zombie films. A small English village starts using radiation as a form of pest control. That radiation makes its way to the Manchester Morgue, and the corpses start coming back to life. Many post-Romero zombie films follow the same basic formula: humans interfere with nature — whether by nuclear power, radiation, or biological experimentation — and disaster ensues. But "The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue" stands out from the crowd due to its unnerving score and sound design, its terrifying zombies, and the sheer number of subplots that feel ahead of their time.
The focus on environmentalism combines with other themes to make "The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue" one of the most intriguing movies on this list. There's a Satanic panic, as ignorant law enforcement officers suspect the zombies' victims of desecrating a graveyard themselves due to their supposed anti-Christian beliefs, tying into the film's decidedly anti-cop bent. When protagonists Edna (Cristina Galbó) and George (Ray Lovelock) discuss the investigation of the reanimated corpses, Edna asks, "Do you think the police are right?" George's response about a particularly truculent cop is "Never. Especially not him." Environmental fears, concerns over police misconduct, and the violent scapegoating of Satanic panics are all relevant issues today, making "The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue" both a stylish '70s artifact and a relentlessly modern horror story.
Blue Sunshine (1978)
Written and directed by cult favorite Jeff Lieberman, "Blue Sunshine" takes a novel approach to zombies. A crooked politician named Ed Flemming (Mark Goddard) sold an exotic variant of LSD called Blue Sunshine to his college classmates several years ago. Now those same classmates are suddenly going bald and flying into homicidal rages. Jerry Zipkin (Zalman King) is falsely accused of committing the murders, and he goes on the run to find out what's really happening and clear his name. With morbid humor, bizarre visuals, and a healthy dose of paranoia, "Blue Sunshine" is a fascinating zombie film that perfectly captures the unease of post-Nixon American life.
Once again, a '70s zombie film feels eerily prescient. A bank of televisions plays Flemming's campaign ads, including a slogan that bleats, "It's time to make America good again!" The post-Watergate political conspiracy gives the film a creepy, mysterious feel, as paranoia seeps in through every frame. Lieberman adds a dash of surrealism to the proceedings: A puppet show at one of Flemming's campaign rallies fills the screen, increasing the sense of unreality and utter absurdity of the United States in the late '70s. A card at the end of the film tells the viewer that there are still 255 doses of Blue Sunshine unaccounted for, implying that there are at least 255 more latent killers on the loose, leaving the viewer unmoored and helpless against the corrupt ticking time bomb at the heart of America.
Sugar Hill (1974)
"Sugar" Hill (Marki Bey) is in love with Langston (Larry D. Johnson), the owner of popular nightspot Club Haiti. When mob boss Morgan (Robert Quarry) orders Langston's murder after he refuses to sell the club to him, Sugar takes her revenge on Morgan and his men with the help of Haitian Vodou practitioner Mama Maîtresse (Zara Cully). Mama calls on Baron Samedi (Don Pedro Colley), a deity who commands the dead. Baron Samedi's zombies dispatch Morgan and his men as Sugar revels in her righteous quest for vengeance.
Some of the earliest cinematic zombie stories focused on Vodou, but they were rarely told from the point of view of Black protagonists. As a Blaxploitation zombie movie, "Sugar Hill" shifts the story of zombies from mindless, voiceless Black characters to a story of Black heroes with agency who seek retribution against white villains who have wronged them. The film features some of the eeriest zombies on this list, with their bulging, glowing eyes and earthy, rotted frames.
While the zombies are frightening, they're also unique on this list as being agents of justice rather than frightening monsters. The zombies attack on Baron Samedi's commands, and he only directs them to devour the men responsible for Langston's death. With strong direction from Paul Maslansky, two unforgettable performances from Bey and Colley, and top-notch creature design, "Sugar Hill" is a pulse-pounding, cathartic combination of horror and revenge thriller, and a sterling example of Blaxploitation horror.
Little Monsters (2019)
This Australian film from writer-director Abe Forsythe is a cautionary tale. When a U.S. Army testing facility loses control of biological test subjects, zombies make their way to Pleasant Valley Farm. A group of young children is on a field trip to the farm, accompanied by their teacher Miss Caroline (Lupita Nyong'o) and Dave (Alexander England), the uncle of one of the students. Dave is a screw-up, and he initially spends more time insulting the children and hitting on Miss Caroline than helping the situation. When the zombie threat becomes obvious, though, Dave steps up and helps Miss Caroline convince the children that it's all just a game as they conga their way through fields of zombies and pass snarling corpses disguised as scarecrows.
"Little Monsters" is uproarious and surprisingly sweet. It features a tried-and-true (but still hilarious) comedy trope in Teddy McGiggle (Josh Gad), a saccharine children's entertainer who turns out to be selfish, lecherous, and the absolute last person you want in your bunker when the zombie apocalypse hits. It's a smart narrative choice, as it throws a live grenade into the already tense situation and manages to set up Dave, who initially seems irredeemable, as Miss Caroline's Prince Charming. Still, the true hero of "Little Monsters" is Miss Caroline, proving once and for all that teachers are undervalued and that when things take a turn for the worse, men can't be trusted.
Pontypool (2008)
Grimly funny, with dynamic direction from Bruce McDonald, "Pontypool" is a fascinating look at the virality of language. Tony Burgess' script, based on his novel "Pontypool Changes Everything," takes an avant-garde approach to zombies. They aren't infected by radiation or nuclear waste, nor are they resurrected by Vodou. In "Pontypool," certain words are infected, and hearing the wrong thing can turn people into mindless monsters. That's a problem for radio host Grant Mazzy (Stephen McHattie), who reports on the town's descent into chaos while trying to figure out how not to spread the contagion further.
McHattie gives a tour de force performance. Mazzy is a grizzled warrior poet stuck doing traffic and school closure announcements, frequently going off script to rant about the state of the world or speculate on the cause of the zombie outbreak. McHattie turns Burgess's lyrical dialogue into thunder and lightning. The film primarily takes place in Mazzy's claustrophobic recording booth, but between McDonald's direction and McHattie's performance, "Pontypool" rarely loses its crackling energy. The idea of "infected words" is fascinating, especially since English seems to be the only language affected, suggesting several routes of interpretation regarding the poisonous effects of cultural hegemony and the loss of nuance in a world that wants instantaneous answers. Mazzy's poetry stands in stark contrast to this loss of meaning. He does battle with the forces of meaninglessness, both in his daily life and his crusade to fight the zombies at his doors.
Juan Of The Dead (2010)
Juan (Alexis Díaz de Villegas) is a survivor. A Cuban native, he survived fighting in Angola and the turmoil of the Special Period, and now he faces a new challenge that seems like business as usual: zombies. Juan is used to finding ways to thrive within chaos, so when he discovers that he and his friends are expert zombie killers, he sets up a business. He dispatches customers' zombified relatives, once again doing other people's dirty work for them.
Writer-director Alejandro Brugués packs a lot of political meaning into his horror comedy. The Cuban government identifies the zombies as "antisocial people in collusion with the U.S. empire," and the military attempts to force Juan and his friends to fight the threat for them. Though the story lags a bit in places, Brugués does a good job of balancing the competing tones. Juan alternates between action star, comedian, and unlikely hero, and Díaz de Villegas — who died in June of 2022 — handles each aspect of Juan's personality with grace and humor. The film holds an interesting combination of ideas and approaches to the zombie subgenre, and "Juan of the Dead" is a vital entry from an underrepresented country in horror cinema.
Dead & Buried (1981)
Potters Bluff is an odd town. It seems friendly on the surface, but visitors keep getting murdered. Townspeople surround them, photograph them, and kill them in gruesome ways. Sheriff Dan Gillis (James Farentino) can't figure out a possible motive or the identity of any of the killers. He enlists the local coroner, William Dobbs (Jack Albertson), to help him investigate. The investigation takes a turn for the even more bizarre when the murdered visitors turn up later, seemingly alive and happy as new residents.
"Dead & Buried" by director Gary Sherman and writers Ronald Shusett and Dan O'Bannon, is an odd and deliriously unsettling video nasty that still manages to shock and disturb over 40 years later. Shusett and O'Bannon wrote the original story for "Alien," and the visceral mixture of issues related to sex, death, class, and gender are just as present in "Dead & Buried" as they are in director Ridley Scott's 1979 classic. The death scenes are grisly and realistic, and the killers' use of photography contributes to the feeling that you're watching a snuff film. The film's finale only heightens that sense, as unforgettable images cascade across the screen as the characters — and the viewers — reel in disbelief. Shocking and timeless, "Dead & Buried" may not be as famous as O'Bannon's other work, but it deserves a spot in the zombie cinema canon.
Blood Quantum (2019)
Filmmaker Jeff Barnaby died in October of 2022, but he leaves behind a body of work that includes the essential zombie film "Blood Quantum." Simultaneously gruesome and gorgeous, the film shows a talented filmmaker in total control of narrative and visuals. The story follows a First Nations community in the middle of a zombie outbreak. The Indigenous characters discover that they are immune to the zombie virus, while white people are highly susceptible to it. The film is clear about its historical and political messages. The white colonizers are a horde of mindless monsters bent only on consumption and destruction, and true to their pattern of past behavior, they keep trying to sneak their sick and infected into the Indigenous stronghold that is (far too charitably for some characters) taking in refugees.
No one knows why the virus appeared, though Moon (Gary Farmer) has a theory: The Earth "turned these stupid f***ing white men into something she can use again. Fertilizer." The dialogue exemplifies the film's combination of brutality and poetry. There's an aching sense of humanity in the film. "Blood Quantum" does not revel in its zombie kills, focusing instead on the pain and the waste of human life. Yet, there's hope in the film as well, especially with the white characters — who are largely selfish and useless — being burned off like an infection ravaging the Earth, giving the Indigenous characters room to breathe and space to begin anew.
Get The Hell Out (2020)
"A wrong movie makes you suffer for only 90 minutes. A wrong government makes you suffer for four years." So begins the frenetic and hilarious "Get the Hell Out," a tongue-in-cheek satire of Taiwan's raucous parliament. Terrifyingly fast and ravenous zombies take over the parliament floor, and disgraced MP Hsiung (Megan Lai) must team up with Wang (Bruce Ho), the security guard who won her open seat and is secretly in love with her, to fight the bloodthirsty monsters. Hsiung is pretty much the only member of parliament who isn't corrupt. Her main reason for entering politics is to oppose the building of a chemical plant in her hometown — the very chemical plant that is now creating all these zombies by dumping its toxic waste illegally.
Like most of the films on this list, "Get the Hell Out" has sharp political messages. Unlike some of the more serious and frightening movies, though, its satire comes in a rapid-fire mélange of cartoon, video game, and game show aesthetics, complete with winking product placements and over-the-top visual effects. The tone and pacing can be overwhelming at times, but "Get the Hell Out" is a wild, fun ride that skewers modern politics with more than its fair share of blood, guts, and laughs. It's a hard movie to track down, but hopefully, it will soon see the physical media release it deserves.
I Walked With A Zombie (1943)
"I Walked with a Zombie" is one of the legendary collaborations between director Jacques Tourneur and producer Val Lewton for RKO Pictures. Betsy (Frances Dee) is a nurse hired to look after Jessica (Christine Gordon), the ill wife of Paul Holland (Tom Conway), a sugar plantation owner on the island of Saint Sebastian. The locals tell Betsy that Jessica mysteriously became a zombie shortly after Paul found out that she was having an affair. Most of the white characters look down their noses at the "superstitions" of Haitian Vodou, ascribing Jessica's zombie-like state to an unnamed fever, but the film makes it clear that it's the white colonizers who are ignorant about the ways that the world really works.
Betsy in particular is naïve and insensitive to the plight of the island's Black residents, whose ancestors were enslaved and who continue to work as servants for the white characters. Betsy is repeatedly depicted as ignorant and out of touch with reality. The Vodou rituals are not fetishized or exoticized. Rather, they seem more grounded than the privileged world the white characters inhabit. For a film made by white creators in 1943, "I Walked with a Zombie" has aged surprisingly well due in no small part to the talent and vision of Lewton and Tourneur as well as screenwriters Curt Siodmak and Ardel Wray, a woman who also frequently collaborated with Lewton.
Cemetery Man (1994)
The most bizarrely sexy film on this list, director Michele Soavi and writer Gianni Romoli's "Cemetery Man" is a true cult classic. Starring Rupert Everett as Francesco Dellamorte, the caretaker of a cemetery in a small Italian village, "Cemetery Man" is a dreamy reflection on life after death. Dellamorte's cemetery is prone to resurrecting the dead, and he spends his nights dispatching corpses. The mayor refuses to help, so Dellamorte goes about his lonely duty until he falls in love with a beautiful young widow (Anna Falchi). When she dies after being attacked by her late husband, Dellamorte begins to unravel, losing touch with reality and seeing the widow's face everywhere he goes.
Soavi's work with Italian horror master Dario Argento (Soavi was the assistant director on Argento's "Tenebrae," "Phenomena," and "Opera") shines through in "Cemetery Man." The film's unique framing and beautiful visuals contribute heavily to its cult status. It's an odd film, swooning over death rather than running from it. Dreamy shots of fabric blowing in the wind or reflections undulating in a rippling pool sometimes make it seem more like a Gothic romance than a zombie horror movie. Death is seen as a natural force. The zombies have roots growing out of them, and when the widow is reanimated, she's just as beautiful in death as in life. "Cemetery Man" can be an acquired taste, but it is a visually stunning film with an intriguing mix of ideas swirling at its center.
After a long-delayed release, we said goodbye last year to Daniel Craig's James Bond in "No Time to Die," and we still haven't recovered. After spending nearly 18 years playing the iconic character, Craig transitioned out of the role and he's shown no signs of slowing down just yet. Recently, he's been channeling his inner southern gentleman again, reprising the role of detective Benoit Blanc in Rian Johnson's "Glass Onion," the follow-up to the murder mystery hit "Knives Out."
While promoting the upcoming theatrical release of "Glass Onion," Craig shared with the LA Times (via Entertainment Weekly) the two reasons why his James Bond had to die -- and, to be quite frank, his reasoning shouldn't come as too much of a surprise:
"One, for the franchise, was that resets start again, which [the franchise] did with me. And I was like, 'Well, you need to reset again.' So let's kill my character off and go find another Bond and go find another story. Start at [age] 23, start at 25, start at 30."
The idea of finding someone younger for the role makes sense, especially given the stunts involved in the Bond films. That said, it is highly unlikely that we'll see a truly young 007. Bond screenwriter Michael G. Wilson is on record having said that casting younger doesn't mesh with the overall visualization of the character as a "veteran" who has "been through the wars, so to speak" and has "probably been in the SAS or something" before becoming a secret agent. As for Craig's second reason for Bond's demise ... it's personal.
'No Greater Sacrifice'
Craig's second reason for why it was James Bond's time to die is pretty simple. "The other [reason] was so that I could move on. I don't want to go back," Craig shared. "I suppose I should be so lucky if they were to ask me back, but the fact is I need to move on from it. The sacrifice that he makes in the movie was for love and there's no greater sacrifice. So it seemed like a good thing to end on."
If you're fuzzy about the details, towards the end of "No Time to Die," Bond becomes infected with a nanobot virus that is programmed to kill Léa Seydoux's Dr. Madeleine Swann and their daughter, Mathilde. Knowing that he poses a threat to the ones he loves, Bond decides to stay on the island that houses the nanobot factory and accept his fate. He is presumably killed when missiles strike the island to ensure the destruction of the nanobot technology. A fitting end, considering the trajectory of the character's arc across the series.
While Craig's Bond dying was originally planned out between him and producer Barbara Broccoli when he signed on, that doesn't soften the blow entirely. But the exit has freed him up to pursue other projects that allow him to explore. If his work with Rian Johnson is anything to go by, there's plenty more the actor has to offer outside of what we've seen from him as James Bond.
In 1999, Slashdot editor Hemos said Greg Bear was "rightly recognized as a master of hard science fiction" (introducing a review of Bear's then-new book, Nebula-winning book Darwin's Radio). In 2011 Bear began writing the Forerunner Saga , a trilogy of books set 100,000 years before the events in the game Halo.
Today theGamer.com writes that Bear has passed away at age 71:
Bear's family and fans are paying tribute to the legendary author, who had more than 50 sci-fi novels to his name. Many share fond memories of reading Bear's work and meeting him at conventions, describing him as generous, welcoming, and brilliant. Fans are also sharing their favourite books from Bear in tribute, encouraging others to explore his works to celebrate his legacy.
Bear's wife, Astrid Bear, confirmed the news of his passing in the early hours of Sunday. This was after she revealed that her husband has been placed on life support, with no chance of making a full recovery after the stroke.
More from File770.com:
Bear's novels won Nebulas for Moving Mars (1995) and Darwin's Radio. Three other works of short fiction won Nebulas, and two of those — "Blood Music" (1984) and "Tangents" (1987) — also won the Hugo....
Bear sold his first short story, "Destroyers", to Famous Science Fiction at age 15, and along with high-school friends helped found San Diego Comic-Con.
He also published work as an artist at the beginning of his career, including illustrations for an early version of theÂStar Trek Concordance,Âand covers forÂGalaxyÂandÂF&SF. He was a founding member of the Association of Science Fiction Artists. He even created the cover for his novel, Psychlone...
"Drought conditions are worsening in the U.S.," reports CNBC, "and that is having an outsized impact on the real estate that houses the internet."
Water is the cheapest and most common method used to cool the centers. In just one day, the average data center could use 300,000 gallons of water to cool itself — the same water consumption as 100,000 homes, according to researchers at Virginia Tech who also estimated that one in five data centers draws water from stressed watersheds mostly in the west. "There is, without a doubt, risk if you're dependent on water," said Kyle Myers, vice president of environmental health, safety & sustainability at CyrusOne, which owns and operates over 40 data centers in North America, Europe, and South America. "These data centers are set up to operate 20 years, so what is it going to look like in 2040 here, right...?"
Realizing the water risk in New Mexico, Meta, formerly known as Facebook, ran a pilot program on its Los Lunas data center to reduce relative humidity from 20% to 13%, lowering water consumption. It has since implemented this in all of its center. But Meta's overall water consumption is still rising steadily, with one fifth of that water last year coming from areas deemed to have "water stress," according to its website. It does actively restore water and set a goal last year to restore more water than it consumes by 2030, starting in the west.
Microsoft has also set a goal to be "water positive" by 2030. Â"The good news is we've been investing for years in ongoing innovation in this space so that fundamentally we can recycle almost all of the water we use in our data centers," said Brad Smith, president of Microsoft. "In places where it rains, like the Pacific Northwest where we're headquartered in Seattle, we collect rain from the roof. In places where it doesn't rain like Arizona, we develop condensation techniques."
For some reason this week, we went a little ham on movies we've seen recently, including Smile and the Menu, but we come back around to games eventually - games like Somerville, Darktide, final thoughts on God of War: Ragnarok, Goat Simulator 3, and more. This week's music: Tei Shi - Bassically
Christopher Walken always disagreed with the mostly negative critical response to 1980's "Heaven's Gate." He plays a supporting role in the legendary flop of a Western, giving one of his most subdued and haunting performances as the morally-conflicted cattle baron enforcer Nate Champion. Walken had only just won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in director Michael Cimino's previous film, "The Deer Hunter," when the pair reunited for "Heaven's Gate." He couldn't have known what he was getting into.
He stands by it, however. As he told IndieWire in 2012, Walken "always thought it was good" and that the hate it received was undeserved. To critics like Vincent Canby of the New York Times, the film was "an unqualified disaster," one with flimsy themes and shoddy craftsmanship unbecoming of a filmmaker with such strong ambition as Cimino. Stories of the movie's troubled production and massive budget had been public knowledge since its first week of filming.
The poettry of Cimino's controversial 1978 Vietnam film "The Deer Hunter" was suddenly perceived as a fluke after "Heaven's Gate." Canby was just one of many critics who called the movie shallow, pretentious, and overlong. It was a disaster, with disastrous consequences for the film industry.
Still, Walken told IndieWire he felt that "Heaven's Gate" was "disproportionately beat up at the time, including by people in the business. I never understood that." To watch the movie now in its restored four-hour director's cut, it's easier to see the intention and majesty of Cimino's vision -- one that was obscured by industry gossip in 1980.
The Johnson County War
Like many epics (misunderstood or not) of its era, "Heaven's Gate" uses its milieu –- rendered lovingly in specific, eccentric detail –- as a means of exploring larger questions about America. In particular, it deals with the circumstances of European immigrants in the West, zeroing in on the punishing struggles and minimal rewards of their new lives.
The movie dramatizes the real-life Johnson County War (the film's original title according to Peter Biskind), taking many liberties. The poor men and women at its fringes are trying to make any kind of life for themselves in America, stealing cattle from the wealthy just to survive. To hear men like capitalist Canton (Sam Waterson) talk about them, they're a cancer on his booming frontier civilization. He wants them dead.
Marshal Averil (Kris Kristofferson) becomes involved with the conflict. A former Harvard graduate whose commencement takes up much of the movie's first half hour, his heroic involvement in the frontier conflicts is mysterious. He seems to be putting on the role of adventurer. By the time of the movie's epilogue, he will be hanging out with New England WASPs again.
In the middle of Canton and Averil is Champion (Walken), who does the dirty work of keeping the county's immigrants in line, mostly through violence. If Walken's primary concern while acting is keeping himself amused, there's little that's funny in "Heaven's Gate."
The film's story is thoughtful and grim, even in scenes like the protracted roller skating sequence (one scene that's iconic for the wrong reasons, looking out-of-touch and silly in a 19th-century Western). Difficult scenes of sexual assault and brutal slayings ensure the movie is appropriately depressing and uncommercial.
Making An Epic
Being difficult and uncommercial would not have been the kiss of death for "Heaven's Gate" if it had won critical praise or awards. But it got nothing.
For some time, the movie was synonymous with a particular kind of Hollywood disaster: The overambitious, expensive, self-indulgent flop that was capable of practically killing a famous studio, United Artists. Peter Biskind, author of "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls," called the movie a "sorry end to New Hollywood," a cinematic movement throughout the 1970s that saw serious filmmakers taking advantage of the fractured studio system to make personal art. After "Heaven's Gate," those studios refused to let a "Heaven's Gate" happen. Never again would they pour that kind of money (a hefty $44 million in 1980 dollars) into a destined turkey.
Cimino was accused of dictatorial tendencies. Stories of his micromanaging perfectionism and wild expenses have been repeated since the movie's first week of production. Per Biskind, the director was shooting 30-plus takes per scene and going through $1 million a week. Speaking to Rolling Stone in 2016, Walken claimed "everyone was optimistic" during filming. He probably wasn't talking to the movie's producers, who saw the production spinning wildly out of control and sought in vain to steer it towards completion.
When the movie was finally released in November 1980, the New York premiere screening was so disastrous that Cimino and United Artists had to cut over an hour of its runtime before releasing it wide in April 1981. Walken, ever the movie's champion, told The Hollywood Reporter in 2020 that he walked out of that screening thinking he had "watched a good movie."
Reappraisals
Walken would only find his opinions vindicated over 30 years after the movie's release in 2012, when Michael Cimino was given the chance to recut "Heaven's Gate," bringing it closer to the version that screened at the catastrophic 1980 screening. It is, indeed, a "good movie."
"Heaven's Gate" is bold, muddy, and broken-hearted, a loose and rambling epic retelling of an obscure skirmish in late 19th-century U.S. frontier history. It deals with the unromantic details of human living that often get skipped over in history books, and it uses every second of its nearly four-hour runtime to help construct and deepen its sprawling drama.
The wealth of period detail in its production design is worth seeing as well. Walken, infamous for his tendency to steal something here or there from the sets on which he worked, would have had a field day. Walken told IndieWire that it "was always a beautiful movie to look at," impeccably designed and shot on location in Glacier Park, Wyoming, with enormous care by the great cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond.
As time passed, others who worked on the movie also admitted to having affection for it, showing that even if the film was designated a "disaster," it's worthy of admiration. In a conversation with the Financial Times promoting the movie's 2012 cut, Zsigmond called Cimino a "master painter." In that same article, Isabelle Huppert, who plays a madame named Ella in the movie, claimed to "love the film" as well. Walken is in good company.
Wherein we discuss getting old, World of Warcraft: Dragonflight, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (and Castlevania generally), Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (mild spoiler warning!), Kevin Conroy, and Marvel Snap. Starring Ryan Scott and Ryan Higgins.
Chainsaw Man Season 1 episode 7 is arriving soon, and here’s everything you should know about the release schedule of the episode.
The anime has entered the Eternity Devil arc, and our devil hunters are trapped in the stomach of the powerful devil. No one can find a way out; the devil is not ready to let them go before he can have Chainsaw Man’s heart. Now, the seventh episode of the anime might show us how the brave Chainsaw Man defeats the devil and protect his colleagues.
Chainsaw Man episode 7 will release on Crunchyroll on Tuesday, November 22, 2022, while in Japan, the episode will come out on Wednesday, November 23, 2022. Fans must follow the below time schedule to track the episode in their time zones:
Pacific Time – 9:00 AM (November 22nd)
Central Time – 11:00 AM (November 22nd)
Eastern Time – 12:00 PM (November 22nd)
British Time – 5:00 PM (November 22nd)
European Time – 7:00 PM (November 22nd)
India Time – 10:30 PM (November 22nd)
Philippine Time – 1:00 AM (November 23rd)
Japan Time – 2:00 AM (November 23rd)
Australian Time – 3:30 AM (November 23rd)
What happened in Chainsaw Man Episode 6?
The devil hunters looked for ways to get out of the hotel, but they couldn’t succeed. While the entire team was thinking about what could be done to break the trap, Denji enjoyed the soft bed in the hotel room. After some time, the Eternity Devil showed up, and he told everyone about his desire to kill Chainsaw Man. After that, he said that if the rest of the devil hunters would let him take what he wanted, he’ll let them leave peacefully.
Except for Aki and Himeno, everyone was ready to let him take Denji’s life. Later, Himeno came out clear as she revealed her true colors by stopping Aki from saving Denji. However, Aki came in between when the team was about to stab Denji with a knife. Seeing Aki’s condition, Denji goes to fight the Eternity devil.
Spider-Man: Miles Morales is out now for PC as well, and the first comparison video compares the new PC port to the PS5 version.
As could be read in our PC impressions article, Sony again did some great work on this PC port and going by this new comparison video of ‘ElAnalistaDeBits’, the PC version also benefits from better ambient occlusion and better ray-traced shadows. Interestingly, however, is that the PS5 version currently offers a slightly higher drawing distance compared to the PC version and the overall vegetation quality is also better on Sony’s console. Whether this is caused by a bug that can be fixed via a post-launch patch, remains to be seen, but it’s interesting to see nonetheless. Also interesting are the game’s loading times, which are vastly better on PlayStation 5 compared to the PC port. Check out the Spider-Man Miles Morales PC vs PS5 comparison video down below:
Spider-Man: Miles Morales is available globally now for PlayStation 5 and PC. Here’s what our very own Alessio Palumbo had to say about Sony's latest PC port:
With Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales PC, Sony confirms its commitment to the platform. It's the latest in a series of great ports that deliver the definitive version of a great game, providing enhanced visuals (including Ultrawide support), amazing granularity for tweaking all kinds of settings, and even full support for the DualSense controller's haptic feedback and adaptive triggers.
In that sense, they could push Microsoft to do better, as they've been a bit lacking in the area despite being in the PC market for much longer. On the other hand, Sony's ports remain long staggered from the console releases. PlayStation president Hermen Hulst recently said it would be at least a year before a PS5 game gets to PC (live service titles notwithstanding).
If you like free PC games, look no further! Check out our updated list of all the best AAA and indie free games this week, starting with Evil Dead: The Game on Epic, Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell on Ubisoft Connect and much more freebies!
What's the best "Star Trek" movie? Is it "The Wrath of Khan"? "The Voyage Home"? "First Contact"? Many a Trekkie have said, half or fully seriously, that the answer is the loving parody film, "Galaxy Quest." "High concept" doesn't even begin to cover the film: aliens (the Thermians) who believe that a short-lived sci-fi series was a documentary recruit the cast to help them battle a galactic tyrant.
The sci-fi show in question is a "Trek" parody, a program that was cut short but kept alive decades later by an obsessive fandom. Jason Nesmith (Tim Allen) is William Shatner, the egomaniac who soaks up public adoration so much he doesn't notice how his co-stars loathe him. Alexander Dane (Alan Rickman) isn't a one-to-one for Leonard Nimoy, but his resentment of playing the alien "Dr. Lazarus" is in line with Nimoy's autobiography, "I Am Not Spock" (his gradual acceptance of Lazarus mirrors the sequel, "I Am Spock"). Sigourney Weaver, a silver screen sci-fi icon in her own right, plays the series' female lead Gwen DeMarco/"Tawny Madison". Far from the hardened Ellen Ripley, Tawny was the show's eye-candy, and Gwen isn't too pleased about her legacy.
The lampooning doesn't end with the actors. "Galaxy Quest" cracks jokes about all the "Trek" hallmarks: technobabble, red shirts, and of course the fans who obsess over the "canon" of an imaginary world. According to writer Robert Gordon and director Dean Parisot, the challenge of the movie was striking the right balance of parody and sincerity.
Captain Starshine
MTV published an oral history of "Galaxy Quest" in 2014. The premise was there from the beginning, but the original script, by David Howard, was titled "Captain Starshine." Producer Mark Johnson liked the pitch but felt the script needed a touch-up, so he recruited Gordon.
Gordon didn't read "Captain Starshine" and worked only off a logline. He was reluctant to take the job, feeling, "[the story] could be a great idea or it could be a terrible idea. Gordon added some of the scene's funniest moments along the way, such as the crew scratching the ship when they take it out of drydock. However, he felt he only "got it" when he wrote the film's most emotional scene: where Nesmith and co. have to admit the truth to the Thermians.
Parisot agreed, saying: "The movie needed to begin as a mockery and end as a celebration. That's a hard thing to do. Part of the mission for me was to make a great 'Star Trek' episode."
The evolution is most apparent in Alexander's character development. His antipathy burns brightest for Lazarus' catchphrase, "By Grabthar's hammer, by the suns of Worvan, you shall be avenged." In the third act, to comfort the dying Thermian Quellek (Patrick Breen), Alexander recites the line in earnest. Then there's Jason's gambit to defeat Sarris, where he reverses time by 13 seconds to undo their loss. This could easily work as the ending to a real "Star Trek" movie and, indeed, is reminiscent of "Next Generation" episode "Cause and Effect."
Trek Alumni's Reactions
"Galaxy Quest" parodies both the fans of "Star Trek" and its makers, yet both parties loved the movie. Some "TOS" cast members gave tongue-in-cheek reactions. George Takei called the movie, "a chillingly realistic documentary." William Shatner said the picture was, "very funny," though joked, "I don't know what Tim Allen was doing. He seemed to be the head of a group of actors and for the life of me I was trying to understand who he was imitating."
It wasn't just actors from "The Original Series" either. Patrick Stewart, Captain Jean-Luc Picard himself, told the BBC how he initially didn't want to see the movie because he thought it was simply, "making fun of 'Star Trek.'" Who convinced Stewart to give it a chance? Jonathan Frakes, who played Commander William Riker and directed "Star Trek: First Contact," "Star Trek: Insurrection," and plenty "Star Trek" episodes. If any of the "Next Generation" cast could give a verdict on how to make a good "Star Trek" movie, it was Frakes. Stewart recalled seeing "Galaxy Quest" in a theater Saturday night:
"I found it was brilliant... No one laughed louder or longer in the cinema than I did, but the idea that the ship was saved and all of our heroes in that movie were saved simply by the fact that there were fans who did understand the scientific principles on which the ship worked was absolutely wonderful. And it was both funny and also touching in that it paid tribute to the dedication of these fans."
It's easy to make fun of something, but harder to do so from a place of love. The reactions from Trekkies and "Trek" alumni show that Gordon and Parisot pulled it off.
Making its debut on History back in 2013, "Vikings" delivered a visceral, bone-crunching journey to the eighth-century Scandinavia and the age of the Vikings. The gritty, violent saga told the story of Ragnar Lothbrok (Travis Fimmel), a farmer who became a warrior and, ultimately, a king. Another part of the series' ongoing storylines involved his first wife, the shieldmaiden Lagertha (Katheryn Winnick), their son Bjorn (Alexander Ludwig), and various other characters who were introduced over the course of the show's six seasons.
As "Vikings" creator Michael Hirst explained to Looper, the writer enlisted a Viking historian to explore some of the most notable figures from that era. He wound up honing in on Ragnar because he was "the first great Viking leader to emerge from the myth and legend, and that was perfect in many ways because it was the beginning of the Viking age." While the series concluded in 2021, fans looking for similar shows to binge have no shortage of options; here are 15 shows like "Vikings" that you really need to see.
Vikings: Valhalla
Before "Vikings" completed its run, Michael Hirst teamed up with Netflix for a spinoff series, "Vikings: Valhalla." The new series was set a century after "Vikings," telling the origin stories of legendary historical figures like Leif Erikson (Sam Corlett), Freydis Eriksdottor (Frida Gustavsson), Harald Sigurdsson (Leo Suter), and others. "I am beyond excited that we are announcing the continuation of our 'Vikings' saga," said Hirst in a statement, promising that showrunner Jeb Stuart "will bring new storylines and a powerful visceral vision to stories about some of the most famous Vikings known to history."
At the very heart of the show is the relationship between Leif and Harald, who share a warriors' bond that Suter compared to that of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. "I think there's a yin and yang element to these two characters," he explained in an interview with The Wrap. "They complement each other quite well. They come from two different ends of the Viking world. And Leif brings like a stillness and a composure that complements Harald's brazen brashness." Meanwhile, it's no surprise that Suter's character has become a fan favorite, given Harald's "berserker" style of combat and the mark he left on history. "Someone described him ... as 'The Thunderbolt of the North' — a chronicler at the time," added Suter. "So yeah, he was a big deal."
Barbarians
Making its debut in 2020 on Netflix, German television drama "Barbarians" filled the void for fans of "Vikings" when that show ended its run. Treading similar ground, "Barbarians" is set in the year 9 CE during the Roman occupation of Germania, leading to the Germanic uprising led by Roman soldier Arminius (Laurence Rupp), who was ripped from his Germanic tribe as a child and given to the Romans, who raised him to be a warrior. As a review in Entertainment Weekly pointed out, "Barbarians" follows the "Vikings" model of melding history with fiction, adding plenty of creative license and brutal, bloody battle sequences. While Arminius is clearly the protagonist, another key character is Thusnelda (Jeanne Goursand), princess of her tribe and a formidable warrior in her own right.
The first season concluded with the Battle of Teutoburg Forest, a decisive conflict that ended Rome's occupation of what would eventually become Germany. Interestingly, the show's depiction of this 2,000-year-old battle dragged "Barbarians" into controversy. As the New York Times explained, the battle was seen as an "ideological rallying point" for the Third Reich, and continues to fufill that function today for German nationalists and neo-Nazis. However, "Barbarians" showrunner told the Times that his intention was to reclaim that historic battle from the far right. "We didn't want to be scared away and leave the subject to those forces we detest," he declared.
Norsemen
Being a Viking was about more than berserker battles. The Norwegian series "Norsemen," for example, delves into comedic aspects left unexplored by "Vikings." Set in the eighth century, "Norseman" follows the lives of the residents of a Viking village as they grapple with highly relatable 21st-century issues like power struggles, sibling rivalries, and gender equality. Taking a page from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," both the show's characters and its humor boast a modern sensibility, while the historical setting is portrayed in all its gritty, grimy, ultra-realistic glory.
As series creator Iver Helgaker revealed during an interview with What's on Netflix, he got the idea for "Norsemen" after watching Taika Waititi's brilliant horror satire "What We Do in the Shadows." "And that made us think about the History Channel's 'Vikings' and 'Game of Thrones,' where everything is about the big historical and life-changing events. We thought it would be funny to focus on what happens in between all of that and just take on the everyday stuff," he explained.
The Last Kingdom
The story told in "The Last Kingdom" is similar to the one in "Vikings," but with an added twist. Set in the ninth century, the series is based on the historical novels of Bernard Cornwell. Its protagonist is Norse warrior Uhtred (Alexander Draymond), who was born a Saxon but raised by Vikings, as he leads his people against the Saxons while striving to reclaim his birthright. In an interview with The Carousel, Draymond admitted that he was flattered by comparisons between "The Last Kingdom" and "Game of Thrones," but hastened to explain why the two shows are fundamentally dissimilar. "I think 'The Last Kingdom' is a bit grittier and dirtier, and then it's based in history — I think it's a very different show," he said.
While "The Last Kingdom" ended its run after five seasons, Variety reported that the series finale wasn't the end of the tale, and that the show would be followed by a feature film, "Seven Kings Must Die," to wrap up the storyline. "It's been such a privilege to tell Uhtred's story for five seasons," Dreymond said in a statement regarding the film, which will stream on Netflix at some point in 2023. "It's going to be an epic end to a wonderful journey."
Knightfall
While there are no Vikings in "Knightfall," the battles are no less bloody and barbaric than the ones in Michael Hirst's historical epic. Although it also hails from History, "Knightfall" is set in the early 1300s, and recounts the rise and fall of the Knights Templar. The series' protagonist is the fictional Templar leader Landry du Lauzon (Tom Cullen), who leads his knights on a quest to retrieve the legendary Holy Grail. The series received a big shot in the arm in its second season when "Star Wars" icon Mark Hamill joined the cast as Master Talus, a veteran Templar charged with training initiates.
While the series only lasted two seasons, there's no denying that the show was developed with an eye towards capturing the same audience who grew to love "Vikings." In an interview with Fansided, Cullen shared his excitement about being part of such a vibrant historical drama. "The show, in terms of the epic scale, is something that really, really thrilled me," he said. "It's something that I've dreamt of being in since I was a kid. I used to run around Wales with a wooden sword and shield with my mates, and I've always been really influenced by films like 'Gladiator' — I think I saw 'Gladiator' seven times in the cinema — and 'Prince of Thieves' and 'Braveheart,' so that was a real dream, to be part of something as big as that."
Black Sails
"Black Sails" offers up all the action and adventure that "Vikings" does, but substitutes Vikings with pirates on the high seas. Produced by action-movie maestro Michael Bay, the series is set in the world created by author Robert Louis Stevenson in his literary classic "Treasure Island," but takes place 20 years before the events of the book. It centers on Captain Flint (Toby Stephens) and his crew of buccaneers, who seek treasure and protect their home base of New Providence Island in what is now the Bahamas.
Asked how "Black Sails" compares to Disney's "Pirates of the Caribbean" movies, Stephens delivered a definitive response. "It is an epic TV series about piracy in the 18th century, the golden age, but it's character driven so it's very satisfying from that point of view," he told Digital Spy. "You get sucked into these characters you really enjoy ... They're complex, but at the same time you get all this amazing adventure stuff like battles, sequences when we're raiding ships and all that stuff." Stephens added, "For me, the texture of it is really good, it feels more like a really gritty western than your 'yo ho ho and a bottle of rum' stuff."
Rome
Making its debut in 2005, HBO's "Rome" was as lush and lavish a historical drama as one would expect from a show that was, at the time, the most expensive in television history, with the first season budgeted at $100 million. As a review in the New York Times put it, "Rome" offered viewers "the television equivalent of Cecil B. DeMille extravagance" in telling the story of two humble Roman soldiers (Ray Stevenson and Kevin McKidd) whose lives intersect with iconic historical figures (including Julis Caesar, played by Ciarán Hinds) during the historical events that transformed Rome from republic to empire.
While the show became popular with fans and received rave reviews, the high costs of making "Rome" proved to be its undoing. HBO pulled the plug after season 2 when its accountants apparently figured out there was no possible way for such an expensive show to turn a profit. However, as series creator Bruno Heller told Den of Geek, no series in history, before or since, managed to recreate that historical era with the same degree of historical detail. "Walking out there at dawn into the Forum and seeing this world created, it was just magical," Heller said. "It gives me goosebumps now thinking about it, seeing a hundred [Gaul] tribesmen on horseback with great furry helmets charging down a hillside yelling, that sort of thing. No one makes things like that anymore."
Spartacus: Blood And Sand
Loosely based on Stanley Kubrick's classic "Spartacus," which dramatized the tale of a slave-turned-gladiator who led his fellow slaves to revolt against their Roman masters, the Starz series "Spartacus: Blood and Sand" starred Andy Whitfield in the title role. As a review in The Guardian confirmed, the series became instantly renowned (or, depending on one's viewpoint, notorious) for its frequent and copious bloodshed. While reviewer Phelim O'Neill wasn't incorrect when he described "Spartacus" as "clearly the goriest thing ever on TV," he readily admitted that he "wasn't expecting what came next: 'Spartacus: Blood and Sand' is a terrific show — compelling, smart, intentionally funny."
After the first season, Whitfield was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma; in order to give him time to deal with his illness, the show went on an extended hiatus while producers instead created a whole other show: "Spartacus: Gods of the Arena," a six-episode prequel that focused on the gladiatorial adventures of other characters. Sadly, Whitfield died at age 39 just 18 months after being diagnosed. After Whitfield's death, Liam McIntyre stepped into the lead part for the subsequent two seasons.
The Spanish Princess
A follow-up to the earlier Starz series "The White Queen" and "The White Princess," "The Spanish Princess" presents a dramatic recreation of the life of Catherine of Aragon (played by Charlotte Hope), first wife of King Henry VIII. While Britain's Tudor era took place hundreds of years after the events of "Vikings," the themes of conquest and power are timeless, as seen here.
In order to present a rousing and exciting series that would attract the type of viewer who enjoys "Vikings" and similar dramas, "The Spanish Princess" took plenty of dramatic license when it came to historical accuracy. "This show is ultimately a fiction," Hope told Town & Country. "Catherine didn't go to war in armor, but she did give a really rousing speech. And I think that it was really important in our story for us to have the visualization of that power on the battlefield."
Reign
Tudor family history continued unfolding in The CW's "Reign." Premiering in 2013 and continuing for four seasons, "Reign" dramatized the formative years of Mary, Queen of Scots (Adelaide Kane) as she rose to power as queen of France following her wedding to Prince Francis. Megan Follows also starred in the series as Mary's scheming mother, Catherine de' Medici.
While "Reign" takes a far soapier approach to historical drama than "Vikings" does, it should appeal to fans of the genre. "The CW series does a fairly effortless-looking job of combining a 16th-century setting with a fluid, modern dynamic," The Wrap declared, while also listing several reasons why "Reign" is worth watching. "Those reasons include sumptuous production values, a fast pace, and a modern spin on the story of Mary, Queen of Scots," the review noted. However, it's the lead performance that really ties everything together. "The best reason to watch is Mary herself, played by star-in-the-making Adelaide Kane," The Wrap said.
Marco Polo
"Marco Polo" arrived on Netflix in 2014, following the adventures of the titular Venetian explorer (Lorenzo Richelmy), who finds himself enmeshed in the court of legendary Mongol leader Kublai Khan (the Marvel Cinematic Universe's own Benedict Wong). Kahn is attempting to go head-to-head with the Chinese army, placing Marco smack-dab in the midst of the conflict.
Ultimately, "Marco Polo" — which ran for just two seasons — had its pros and cons. On the positive side, notes The Review Geek's Greg Wheeler, are the show's "gorgeous cinematography and keen eye for visuals," which do much of the heavy lifting when it comes to transporting viewers to 13th-century Mongolia. On the flip side, a review in Vulture found "Marco Polo" to be "vacant and uninspiring," a sentiment echoed in Time's write-up, which described the show as a "gorgeous but ludicrous saga."
Given the series' massive budget (it reportedly cost about $90 million per season), no expense was spared in recreating those historic battles. "My best moment was when we were in the middle of this set with 300 extras fighting each other, and I was on my horse, riding as fast as I could down the valley, where I would shoot three arrows and enter into the war," Richelmy recalled in an interview with Collider.
Rise Of Empires: Ottoman
A Turkish production, "Rise of Empires: Ottoman" chronicles the saga of Sultan Mehmed (Cem Yiğit Üzümoğlu) as he leads his army on a mission to capture the Roman-occupied city of Constantinople, ultimately leading to the establishment of the Ottoman Empire. What makes the series stand out from other historical dramas is its depiction of warfare in the 15th century. The series takes viewers on a deep dive into the brilliant military strategies employed by the ruler who would come to be known as Mehmed the Conqueror.
While "Rise of Empires: Ottoman" may appear to be just another historical drama to the casual viewer, it's also part documentary, with historians chiming in to share their insights about the dramatic re-enactments. The show's secret weapon, however, is its narration; that comes courtesy of British actor Charles Dance, who's known to fans of "Game of Thrones" as the scheming Tywin Lannister.
The Real Vikings
Conceived as a companion series to "Vikings," "Real Vikings" takes fans of the flagship series on a journey into the actual history behind the show, providing a healthy dose of context for the show's characterization of Ragnar Lothbrok and his exploits. Featuring commentary from top Viking historians and archeologists, the series combines documentary filmmaking with footage from the show. In addition, actors from the series, like Clive Standen, Maude Hirst, Alyssa Sutherland, and Katheryn Winnick, appear to help guide viewers through the surprisingly complex history behind their characters' quasi-fictionalized stories.
Given that the original "Vikings" has a tendency to play "fast and loose with recorded events," as The Guardian so succinctly put it, this informative and fascinating addendum offers fans the opportunity to become better versed in real Viking history and lore, which definitely results in a deeper appreciation of the main show.
Vinland Saga
"Vikings" viewers who are partial to animation are in for a treat. Based on a Japanese manga, "Vinland Saga" follows the journey of a boy named Thorfinn. When his beloved father is murdered by a vicious mercenary named Askeladd, Thorfinn joins Askeladd's crew — without revealing his true identity, of course — in order to take out his father's killer and get some revenge. However, the plot takes a number of unexpected twists and turns, and winds up being much more than just another revenge story.
According to CBR's review, "Vinland Saga" is "a must-watch anime series" that will undoubtedly appeal to fans of "Vikings." In fact, Polygon goes a step further by describing the anime series as "a violent and bloody good time with exquisite action scenes, fleshed-out characters and an intriguing story about coming of age in a cruel world that takes enough from real life to satisfy history buffs."
Game Of Thrones
Over the course of its run, "Vikings" was continually compared to "Game of Thrones" — an understandable connection, since they were both on the air at the same time. Obviously, there are some key differences between the two shows. The biggest and most obvious is that, while "Vikings" is a scripted drama, it's rooted in actual Nordic history. "Game of Thrones," meanwhile, is set in a make-believe world created by author George R.R. Martin that features fire-breathing dragons, ice zombies, and other fantasy elements.
While it was inevitable that the two shows would go head-to-heda in the media, "Vikings" star Clive Standen felt that it was "a bit unfair" to compare them. "['Game of Thrones'] all comes from the imagination of one man's mind. Whereas 'Vikings' is a historical drama," Standen told Fox News. "It's documented in history. It's a very, very broad spectrum of history. But ... these are all real characters that lived and breathed and walked the earth. They're all worthy of the history books."
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VirtualBox v7.0.4 is released. VirtualBox is a general-purpose full virtualizer for x86/x64 hardware. Targeted at server, desktop and embedded use, it is now the only professional-quality virtualization solution that is also Open Source Software....More