When it comes to novel adaptations, most readers I know fall into one of two camps: they either refuse to watch them, or they can hardly wait. The first group wishes to preserve the written form of the story in their minds, uncorrupted by anyone else’s vision, while the second is more open. Like parents of multiple children, their hearts simply expand to include the completely new but related work of art.

Personally, I teeter on the fence between these camps. I usually end up watching the screen adaptations of books I read because I just can’t resist—even though I’m not a relaxed, open-minded viewer, but an uptight and wary one, unable to watch without keeping a running tally of the differences between the adaptation and the book. Sure, I understand that the adaptation will necessarily diverge from the book in ways that I might not like. It might even diverge in ways that I truly love. And yet, I can’t help hoping it won’t, at all.

The new Apple TV+ adaptation of Lessons in Chemistry was no exception to the rule. I’m one of the many readers who loved Bonnie Garmus’s novel and its heroine, Elizabeth Zott, a brilliant research chemist and the reluctant, revolutionary star of Supper at Six, the most popular cooking show in Garmus’s mid-century America.

If you’re wondering if Lessons in Chemistry is “just like” the book, I’m sorry to tell you, it’s not. Not entirely.

But I loved what they did with it. Mostly. Maybe you will, too.

In some ways, the series is even more enjoyable than the book—like the setting, for example. As with Mad Men, Lessons in Chemistry captures America as it was in the 1950s and 60s. The clothes! The hair! The billboards! The cars! The furniture! I could watch it all again with the sound turned off and be completely entertained.

The casting and acting is also superb, in my humble opinion. Most of the actors faithfully represent the characters created by Garmus, complete with their mannerisms, personalities, and motivations. Brie Larson, as Elizabeth, is just as beautiful, brilliant, and matter-of-fact as she is on the page. Her daughter, Madeline (Alice Halsey), is as adorable and precocious. Calvin Evans (Lewis Pullman) is perhaps a little more handsome than his print counterpart (not that I’m complaining). Kevin Sussman is pitch-perfect as Elizabeth’s producer, the diffident, hapless, and goodhearted Walter. And Rainn Wilson as the vile TV studio executive, Phil Lebensmal? Inspired.

The screenwriters also did an admirable job of capturing the complexity of the plot without sacrificing clarity or pacing. I’m not surprised that they found it necessary to simplify some of the storylines and conflate some of the characters; Elizabeth’s storyline is only one of many intersecting narrative arcs in the novel, and all of the book’s supporting characters are well-developed with complex backstories and perspectives. I was generally pleased with how much they managed to pack in.

Without spoiling too much for my fellow readers and viewers, I’ll say the love story between Elizabeth and Calvin—their progression from enemies to lab partners to soulmates—is just as emotionally satisfying as it is in the novel, and as well informed by their individually traumatic histories. Madeline’s search for the truth about her father makes it on to the screen, and her findings line up exactly with those in the novel. Calvin’s friendship with the Reverend Wakely, and a slightly less provocative version of his spiritual journey, makes the cut, too. And I absolutely loved how they chose to represent the storyline of Six-Thirty, the Goldendoodle voiced by BJ Novak.

Really, there were only two characters, and storylines, that I had mixed feelings about.

I’ll begin with the one that was simply a disappointment: Fran Frask. In the novel, she is a “too cheerful, wide-bottomed secretary,” who later gets fired by her (young, idiotic, male) supervisor for gaining weight. She also gets dumped by her boyfriend for a younger, thinner, less sexually experienced woman. At the ripe old age of 33 in the 1960s, she’s basically destined for spinsterhood. We can’t blame her for bitterly resenting Elizabeth, who has the relationship and the professional success she so desires for herself, though we can (and do) judge her for openly sabotaging Elizabeth’s career. We expect the pair to be lifelong enemies, but instead, they bond over a shared trauma and become allies.

I loved this character, and this friendship, and I was so looking forward to seeing a fat actress in a leading role that at least wasn’t entirely about her weight. But as so often happens, Hollywood had other plans: the role of Fran Frask was given to the wonderfully talented—and very thin—Stephanie Koenig. Moreover, her friendship with Elizabeth doesn’t come out of a meaningful shared experience but a casual conversation in the grocery store. Fran doesn’t grow as a person beyond (gasp!) learning to ask a man out rather than waiting for him to ask her. I wish they had fleshed out this character a bit more (pardon the pun).

The other, completely transformed character is Harriet Sloane, and my feelings on this are much more complicated.

On screen, Harriet (Aja Naomi King) is the mother of two young, adorable children. She is raising them solo while her husband, a surgeon, serves his country overseas. Harriet is an engaged and loving mother, always ready to gleefully chase her children around the lawn. She also manages to keep her lovely home looking perfect at all times, even though she works full-time, has a robust social life, and is deeply committed to her community. She loves her life and is grateful for it—but she is also secretly unhappy because she is capable of so much more. She has always wanted to become a lawyer but has dutifully put herself last, a distant second to her husband and children.

Essentially, this Harriet Sloane is the sort of woman we’re all supposed to want to be. She’s the yardstick against which we’re meant to measure ourselves and then rap our own knuckles with when we inevitably fall short. Frankly, I would feel nothing but annoyed by this “new and improved” version of Harriet Sloane if her story didn’t also diverge from the original text. But it does, in a deeply meaningful and moving way.

On screen, the fictional Californian suburb where Elizabeth lives, just across the street from Harriet, becomes the historic black community of Sugar Hill, and Harriet gains a storyline drawn directly from history. She wages a campaign against the Santa Monica Freeway, which is—spoiler alert—doomed from the start. In print, the cast of characters is entirely white, which seems like an oversight given the themes of the book. After all, Elizabeth is a chemist who wants to discover abiogenesis (the singular origin of all life on earth) and thereby prove the inherent equality of all human beings. She wants to end discrimination on the basis of sex, race, or any other congenital characteristic simply by proving that there is no scientific basis for it. Adding the grim, historical context of racism to Elizabeth’s quest strengthens the entire story, in that it complicates it, or tempers it, in a way that I find interesting.

For someone so attuned to sex discrimination, Elizabeth is painfully oblivious to her own privilege—as were, and are, so many white feminists—so, on screen, Harriet helps her see it. She also helps Elizabeth reframe some of the things she sees as disadvantages (her beauty, her gender, the cooking show she has been forced to host in lieu of a chemistry career) as huge opportunities, levers she should pull on if she truly wants to fight for gender and racial equity. This Harriet makes Elizabeth a better, more self-aware person, and a stronger ally. I love all of this.

And yet, my heart breaks, more than a little, for the original Harriet Sloane.

In the novel, Harriet is not an ideal woman but an invisible one. She is precisely the sort of woman we’re told to avoid becoming, by any means necessary, for as long as we can: a “large gray-haired woman in a rayon dress and thick brown socks.” Trapped in a lonely marriage and virtually abandoned by her four adult children, this Harriet has never worked outside the home or ever daydreamed about furthering her education—her favorite publication is Reader’s Digest because it cuts “big boring books down to a chewable size like St. Joseph aspirin.”

When Elizabeth is told to target her cooking show to the “average housewife,” she’s outraged. She takes the phrase as an insult to her viewership, which it is. The word “average” is essentially a pejorative in our toxic achievement culture, while the term “housewife” is a rudely dismissive term that reflects the dismally low value placed on domestic labor. But the thing is, the Harriet Sloane we meet on the page is an average housewife, in the best, most literal sense of the word “average.” She’s “midway between extremes”—neither old nor young, pretty or ugly, wealthy or poor. She’s not “out of the ordinary”; rather, she is deeply ordinary. She’s so unremarkable from the outside that her own family barely notices her. Even Elizabeth, who later becomes her best friend, fails to really see her for years, despite living across the street from her.

After just a few minutes in Harriet’s presence, though, Elizabeth respects the older woman, and recognizes her as someone from whom she can learn, not despite her age but because of it. Harriet, Elizabeth muses, is someone she can turn to for “actual wisdom. How to get on with the business at hand. How to survive.”

The meaning of their friendship in the novel, as I understood it, is that the invisible woman—the average, middle-aged housewife—is worth seeing. Not because she’s secretly extraordinary, but because ordinary women are just as worthy of appreciation as extraordinary ones. We shouldn’t depreciate as we age, like cars. Our value should be stable because, as Elizabeth herself insists, we are all ultimately equal in value, all made of the same stuff. We’re all just a bunch of atoms, arranged in different ways.

I was really looking forward to seeing an everywoman share the limelight with a superwoman, not just stand in her shadow, as is usually the case. So, you can imagine my disappointment when the older, average woman, the Harriet I knew and loved, was instead completely written off, replaced with a younger, more attractive, more accomplished woman. I guess, as Phil Lebensmal puts it in the book, most “people don’t want to see themselves on TV. They want to see the people they’ll never be.”

Even so, I’m glad to have known both Harriets. I feel all the richer for having spent time thinking about, feeling my way through, and learning from both the book and the movie.

And I think I’m almost ready to get off the fence. The next time one of my favorite reads is adapted, I’ll be on the couch with a big bowl of popcorn and a more open mind.

The night I saw Killers of the Flower Moon I dreamed wildly, fitfully. Until I went to bed, I spent my waking hours thinking about the film, and then I suppose I continued to think about it as I slept. I have many questions about it. There are so many details I’d like to discuss. I wish I had seen it with friends, rather than (as is customary for my job) by myself with only my notebook to aid in exegesis. Killers of the Flower Moon, which was directed by Martin Scorsese, screen-written by Scorsese and Eric Roth, and based on the monumental nonfiction book of the same name by David Grann, is a tremendous feat of filmmaking, but it’s not a simple one, not an easy one.

Killers of the Flower Moon unfolds on a heretofore obscure event in the history of 20th-century America: the regional genocide of the Osage people during the 1920s. David Grann’s book, published in 2017, is responsible for bringing this history to a wide national audience. In the 1870s, the United States had removed the Osage Nation from their lands in Kansas, relocating them to a reservation in an undesirable, inhospitable patch of land in Northeast Oklahoma. But that land turned out to be rich with oil, and the Osage people quickly became wealthy. In the 1920s, Grann notes, the Osage were the wealthiest people (per capita) in the whole world.

In this region, the usual socioeconomic dynamics of America had been upended—the long-oppressed Native people had access to a kind of life that had exclusively been designed and intended for white people. And because of this, the Osage people found themselves in terrible danger. The white men in the town began to kill the Osage for their money—but not simply that, as if that isn’t terrible enough. The Osage people were courted, cornered, cajoled, conspired against, and legally captured by the greedy, jealous white people in the region—swearing friendship and loyalty, ingratiating themselves into their families, marrying into the Nation, taking control of their finances, and milking them every way they could. Killing them was only the final step in the systematic destruction, dilution, dehumanization, and devastation of an entire people, culture, and history. It is an act of such profound evil that it seems both impossible to comprehend and all-too-possible to believe happening in America.

Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon begins with the story of the Osage Nation’s windfall, but quickly shifts perspective, filtering it through the eyes of a white outsider, Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio). A World War I veteran, Ernest travels to Oklahoma to live in the home of his uncle, William K. Hale (Robert De Niro), an affluent cattle rancher who prides himself on his friendship with the Osage. He has positioned himself as both a benefactor and steward of the Osage people, using his influence to provide them access to fine goods and vanguard healthcare, centralizing himself in their proceedings and culture. He speaks the Osage language, he lightly arranges marriages between some white men and Osage women, he becomes a trusted force in the Osage County way of life. That he likes to be called King suggests that his deference is a ploy, that he has disguised self-interest as benevolence. It’s not long before Ernest—plain-spoken, dim, impressionable, giggly, and acquisitive—notices Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone), a beautiful, pensive, no-nonsense Osage woman. Working as a cab driver in the town, he flirts with her, tries to get to know her. Hale approves of their mingling, informing Ernest that Mollie’s full-blooded Osage status means that she has full headrights to her family’s wealth. Ernest is attracted to Mollie’s lifestyle as much as (if not more than) he is attracted to her. When they marry, countless Osage men and women have already been reported dead (of causes ranging from health issues to gunshots), but the film is not ambiguous about the connectedness of the murders to each other, as well as acts of swindling and robbery of the Osage people that have been taking place in the background—acts that Ernest is already involved in.

Grann’s book is a little more openended about who exactly committed many of these uninvestigated, unprosecuted, and unsolved murders—he puts forth compelling theories, but ultimately is unable to state conclusively given how much time has passed and how little hard evidence there is. But it does tie a conspiracy together under Hale’s aegis (one of many masterminds of numerous plots against the Osage). The book’s main frame is Mollie finding herself at the center of the mass death of her people and family. A secondary, later frame is the work of a man named Tom White, an agent with the nascent Federal Bureau of Investigation who is eventually sent to figure out why so many Osage are dying (he’s played in the film by Jesse Plemons, but it’s a rather small role). Then, Grann’s book unfolds a story about the birth of the FBI. Scorsese’s film is less interested in the investigation than the machinations of Hale, Ernest, and other white men—as well as Ernest and Hale’s ability to justify killing of a group of people who are not only their Osage neighbors and friends but also literally their own family. These murders are myriad and slow, part of an overall poisoning of Osage culture, heritage, and lifestyles. Most of these murders unfold as creative acts of nutritional and psychological torture; the white men have gotten the Osage addicted to alcohol and to sugar, encouraging their spirals into depression and despair.

The film counts down the deaths of Mollie’s family—her two sisters, Minnie (Jillian Dion), Anna (Cara Jade Myers), and her cousin Reta (JaNae Collins)—as well as Hale’s close friend Henry Roan (William Belleau). Mollie knows that she is next. She doesn’t know that Hale and Ernest are poisoning her, too. Ernest seems genuinely fond of her but has (as a white supremacist, as all of these white people fundamentally are) accepted the idea that helping to kill his wife’s family is just something he has to do.

Scorsese’s film, which is 3 hours and 26 minutes, is a gut-wrenching story told with ample thought and care—it is clearly invested in doing right by the Osage people of then and now. The Osage’s participation in the making of the film has been well-publicized, but it’s clear, when viewing the film, that Scorsese not only wants to get the historical details right without exploiting the Osage or their suffering but that he also wants to tell the story in the most respectful, collaborative way possible. In one scene in particular, Scorsese acknowledges a kind of lurid true-crime reportage that (he wants to make clear) this film is not. At the same time, in order to be its most respectful and compassionate version, the film might have focused less on Ernest. Scorsese likes an antihero, and a man who experiences such absurd self-denial that he can’t fully understand the impact of his being a serial killer annihilating his wife’s family for personal gain, is certainly that kind of protagonist. Scorsese is perhaps too curious about fleshing out Ernest’s feelings and conflicts instead of accepting that he is a walking contradiction, made into such by white supremacy. It seems very easy to understand that a man like Ernest Burkhart, an idiot fashioned into his true self by cultures of racism and misogyny, might believe he loves his Osage wife and yet find it justified to kill her entire family, because he subconsciously he regards them all as things to possess, property to be claimed, resources to be mined.

Most of the performances in the film, from Lily Gladstone’s almost-cipher-like Mollie to Jesse Plemons’s awkwardly-dogged detective White, are excellent. Gladstone, in particular, is the film’s glowing center, and whenever she is not onscreen, her absence is not only palpable but painful. Killers of the Flower Moon also boasts a fantastic ensemble of character actors, including John Lithgow, Louis Cancelmi, Ty Mitchell, Gene Jones, and the great Tantoo Cardinal as Mollie’s mother, Lizzie Q.

Scorsese has referred to both DiCaprio and De Niro as his muses, and frankly, I wish he’d get some new ones. As Ernest, DiCaprio delivers a solid performance, but it’s the kind of frowny-faced, Southern-drawly one we’ve seen a lot of from him—I found his performance cartoonish and lacking any of the particularized pathos he tries hard to summon. De Niro, while obviously a more than capable actor, delivers a serviceable performance, but it feels wrong for the film. Maybe it’s hard to see De Niro as a small-town guy. His Hale is almost distractingly recognizable, out of place (and occasionally slipping into his New York accent). No one’s better than De Niro at playing dangerous when it takes the form of creepily calm, but this isn’t Hale’s vibe. Hale—a charismatic bureaucrat—should seem more unassuming. I’d want a Michael Stuhlbarg, a Tracy Letts, maybe a Henry Czerny. I’d want a Burl Ives type—someone who could entwine paternalism with paternity. John Goodman? Then again, I find myself wondering if Jack Nicholson from a decade ago could have pulled it off—he’s maybe a little too palpably sinister, but even that feels more in line with the film’s thematic trajectory.

Anyway. The film’s long runtime promises immersion in this time and place, but I still found myself at times feeling like a stranger there; I’d forget who some side characters were rather than recognize them as if they were my fellow townsfolk. In a way, the sprawl of the film is too great—and again, I think this is because the film spends so much time mapping out Ernest’s emotional states. But technically, the film is extraordinary—as a gallery of shots, it’s mesmerizing. Scorsese loves to play with cameras (inside and outside the frame) and ask questions about media, and this reliably innovative approach also breaks up the narrative when it starts to sag.

The emotional weight of what Scorsese has achieved with Killers of the Flower Moon is significant; the night I saw the film, I dreamed about some of the film’s most dramatic scenes from the perspective of a tormented spectator, the same tormented spectator I was when literally watching the film. In my dreams, I’d be running towards imminent, heartbreaking disasters, yelling at characters to run away, to turn around, and I could never arrive in time, never save anyone. Despite some of its pitfalls, Scorsese’s film swells with humanity and heart, leaving a tremendous impression of the real-life horrors that took place in Osage County in the 1920s. He removes the distance between our moment and this one, a century before, making us feel the horrors that happened to the Osage people—people who, after centuries of persecution and belittlement, were finally given a share of American prosperity and were forced to pay a price for it.

It would appear that Martin Scorsese, Leo DiCaprio, and David Grann’s recent creative ménage à trois was so damn satisfying for all involved that the trio have decided to go for another roll in the hay.

Yes, just as Killers of the Flower Moon opens to rapturous reviews worldwide, everyone’s favorite diminutive octogenarian auteur has confirmed that his next big project will be a DiCaprio-starring film adaptation of New Yorker staff writer/literary adaptation Midas David Grann’s 2023 nonfiction bestseller, The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder. 

In an interview with the Times of London earlier this week, Scorsese confirmed he will be filming The Wager as his next project, which means that his planned biopics of Teddy Roosevelt and Jerry Garcia, as well as his hinted-at adaptation of Marilynne Robinson’s Home, will have to wait for now.

This will be the seventh feature film collaboration between Scorsese and DiCaprio (Marty and Robert DeNiro have worked on 10 movies together), and the sixth big screen adaptation of one of David Grann’s New Yorker articles or books.

This year’s New York Film Festival showcased a tightly curated lineup, including several fictional and nonfictional works based on books. Some were closely hewn adaptations, others more freewheeling, and almost all have already been secured for distribution, ensuring their imminent availability to audiences. Here’s a look at what to look out for this fall and beyond.

Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures

Poor Things (December 8)
Based on Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things

Buoyant and bawdy, Yorgos Lanthimos’s latest film—a steampunk Frankenstein update based on Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel—is his most easily digestible and least provocative film. Upholding what one would presume to be commonly held convictions, Poor Things is a sexual bildungsroman, a broadly feminist tale about a woman discovering her place in the libidinous desire and what she deems “furious jumping.”

The film’s unequivocal highlight is Emma Stone’s leading performance as Bella Baxter, who appears to be an adult but acts incontrovertibly like a toddler. She’s all infantile babble and incontinence, breaking plates with gleeful abandon to the chagrin of her father, the monstrously deformed, cutting edge surgeon Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe). Suffice it to say that the rapid aging of Bella’s brain brings a most merciful end to the overblown juvenilia that comprises the film’s first act. Bella is soon betrothed to Godwin’s assistant Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef) but elopes on the whim of sexual desires with a rakish lawyer (a hammy Mark Ruffalo) on a globe-trotting trip, where she becomes privy to the brokenness of the world and its unfair constraints on women.

As the film shifts from London to Lisbon, the black-and-white gives way to an oversaturation of color and further lavish sets, Wizard of Oz-style. Lanthimos, long recognized for employing a purposely affectless dialogue and puttered sentences that defy the primacy of language, broke that trademark with The Favourite (2018), a period piece fueled by eloquent and long-winded British-speak. As in that film, he gets his kicks in Poor Things by juxtaposing expletive-laden flourishes with refined propriety of Victorian language. Many incredulous WTFs (expertly executed by Youssef and Ruffalo) add a contemporary comedic element and anachronistic flair, much like Bella’s wardrobe and makeup, which spans ludicrously puffed shoulders, ruffled corsets, and go-go boots. The maximalist ride is mostly a confection, lacking the full political bearing of the novel.

Courtesy of New York Film Festival

The Beast (TBA 2024)
Based on Henry James’s The Beast in the Jungle

Henry James’s novella The Beast in the Jungle becomes a spark plug for French filmmaker Betrand Bonello’s unparalleled and engrossing technophobia vision. The unbearable premonition that haunted John Marcher in James’s story now burdens Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux) in 1910 Paris. At a party, she happens upon Louis (George MacKay), whom she crossed paths with years ago and confided in, sharing her belief that a dreadful fate awaits her.

Bonello maintains much of the dialogue and wistful airs of the first chapter, but thereafter, everything else is subject to change. The Beast is a love story that spans time and space and takes place over three separate storylines: In 2044, artificial intelligence has taken over the workforce. In order to compete, Gabrielle reluctantly undergoes DNA purification to purge herself of pesky emotions, a now standard process that involves going back into her past lives. The Belle Epoque narrative, as it turns out, is one of her former incarnations. Another is her life as an aspiring actress in 2014 Los Angeles, stalked by an incel YouTuber modeled on mass-murderer Elliot Roger. The strongest of the three segments, this section has the distinct flair of David Lynch’s Southern California-set films, suffused with dread and longing, occasionally jolted by sportive scares, or downright eerie ones.

Caroming between the three narrative strands, the film is chaotic but not necessarily incoherent. Its ambiguities are purposeful and productive. The sophisticated execution—this is Bonello’s tenth feature—safeguards The Beast from ever straying into the domain of cliched sentimentality. Bonello wrings from James’s tale of fate and loneliness something suitably grotesque, oblique, and at times even trollish—wholly resonant with our times.

Courtesy of New York Film Festival

Foe (October 19)
Based on Iain Reid’s Foe

This mildly dystopian romantic drama starring Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal falls egregiously short as an entry into the New York Film Festival, but when considered as part of standard mainstream cinema, it’s not as egregiously disappointing as one might think. Based on Ian Reid’s self-proclaimed “philosophical suspense story” of the same name, Garth Davis’s film adaptation is neither philosophical nor suspenseful. Gesticulating wildly at profundity, Foe remains ponderously empty. Any suspense is virtually nonexistent, any stray thrills muted into one single prolonged note of exasperation.

Henrietta (Ronan) and Junior (Mescal) reside in seclusion on a remote farm. Their tranquil existence is disrupted when a government worker named Terrance (played by Aaron Pierre) pays them a visit and announces that Junior has been selected, or rather conscripted, to live on a satellite as part of a pilot program to colonize space. To ensure Henrietta’s companionship, an AI replicant of Junior will be fashioned with Terrance’s help. He’ll interview her to get a detailed impression of their marriage, and eventually moves in with the couple for his research.

The film is meant as an uncanny probing into our changing nature of identities and shifting selfhoods during marriage. Reid is credited as a screenwriter, but it’s apparent that something crucial has been grossly misplaced in the adaptation process, especially when the most impassioned scene is Junior’s arbitrary and discomfiting tirade against a coworker’s masticating. It’s all too possible that Reid’s book simply got the better of Davis. Eagerly constructing a picturesque pink-dustbowl of a wasteland, he’s more fixated on striking a Terrence Malick-style sense of wonder than properly mining the book’s psychological tensions.

Courtesy of New York Film Festival

Orlando: My Political Biography (November 10)
Inspired by Virginia Woolf’s Orlando

How does one make a transbiography in a heteronormative world? That’s the question posed by theorist, writer, and curator Paul B. Preciado in his debut film Orlando: My Political Biography. Reflecting on and refracting Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel about a nobleman who changes gender and lives for centuries, Preciado skillfully fashions a collective portrait of transness that refuses easy categorization into the binaries of documentary and fiction, biography and poetry, and more.

A poignant melange of textures, the film alternates scenes of political history (archival footage of trans pioneers, like Christine Jorgensen) with ones of inspired originality (music sequences about the difficulties of procuring hormone therapy drugs), and blends personal anecdotes with literary text. A cast of 26 trans and nonbinary people perform light reenactments of Woolf’s novel—pie collars or white-painted eyebrows serve as visual synecdoche for the period costuming—reading aloud passages before seamlessly segueing into voicing their own formative experiences. Undoubtedly the strengths and joys of the film are its display of transgender individuals, spanning race and age, who are frequently denied the recognition and representation they deserve.

The Pigeon Tunnel (October 20)
Based on John le Carré’s The Pigeon Tunnel

The Pigeon Tunnel, Errol Morris’s documentary about spy novelist John le Carré, is best seen as a supplementary B-sides or bonus accompaniment to the author’s works. Enthusiasts will no doubt be enthralled at the opportunity to spend time with the author of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, but will not uncover much new information, while the uninitiated will find even less amusement. Similarly, fans of the filmmaker will find this modest work a slighter entry to the Morris canon.

The documentary is largely a filmed conversation between Cornwell and Morris that loosely tracks his life from boyhood to spy to novelist. As the two banter, what emerges from seemingly discursive interrogation is how the events of his childhood—namely his relationship with his beguiling con-man father—came to have an outsized influence, unwittingly preparing him for a life of subterfuge. The footage is interpolated with scenes from film adaptations of le Carré’s novels and Morris’s customary reenactments, the low-fi computer-generated quality of which undercuts any supposed seriousness of the subject.

Similarly, the content of le Carré and Morris’s conversation fails to achieve a tension that matches the haunting and layered score composed by Philip Glass and Paul Leonard-Morgan. The film, much like the memoir of the same name from which it takes its title, feels incomplete, with these recollections and dialogue forming the skeleton of a larger, more detailed story that has yet to be told.

Janet Planet (TBA by A24)
Directorial debut of Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Annie Baker

In her directorial debut, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Annie Baker nimbly evokes the specificities of setting—early 90s Western Mass, awash in gentle hippiedom with transcendentalist puppeteers and earnest contra dances—but stumbles to coax out the intricate particulars of her vision onto the screen. Julianne Nicholson and newcomer Zoe Ziegler log fine performances as mother Janet and her curious, introverted 11-year-old daughter Lacey. The film, based on Baker’s original script, is composed of three acts, each showcasing the arrival of a different adult—current boyfriend, old friend, new boyfriend—into Janet and Lacey’s life, leading to a subtle upheaval. The disruptions are barely perceived, registering only by dint of Ziegler’s facial expression, like a miniscule wince or widening of the eyes.

“Scholars have written dissertations on Baker’s silences, trying to understand the way they shift her theatre toward both greater naturalism…and greater mystery,” Helen Shaw writes for The New Yorker. These magnanimous pregnant pauses of the stage lose some of their impact in the film, where in order to carry their weight, they must be augmented or anchored by something of visual import. And while Baker preserves her innate sense of comedic timing in this transition from stage to screen, some of the dialogue, particularly in the second section, feels unmoored and ever so slightly stale.

It’s time: the adaptation of Ottessa Moshfegh’s first novel, Eileen—which she once described as her attempt at “a mainstream book a normal person could read”—is coming to theaters on December 1. Directed by William Oldroyd (who also directed the excellent Lady Macbeth), and written by Moshfegh along with her partner Luke Goebel, the film stars Thomasin McKenzie as Eileen and Anne Hathaway as Rebecca; it also stars Shea Whigham, Marin Ireland and Owen Teague. Watch the trailer below—and if you’re so inclined, refresh your memory of the book by reading an excerpt here.

The author, teacher, and scholar John Williams wrote four novels during his career, but he habitually refused to claim credit for the first, written while he was in his twenties and serving in the US Army Air Corps during World War II. The three books that met his standards are carefully crafted—one critic called Stoner, published in 1965, “a perfect novel”—and each subverts a different genre.

Butcher’s Crossing, published in 1960, is shaped like a Western: it follows a young, wealthy white man from the East Coast as he seeks adventure, and himself, on the frontier. When Will Andrews arrives in the frontier outpost of Butcher’s Crossing, he is quickly persuaded to underwrite a buffalo-hunting expedition headed by a veteran hide hunter named Miller. Miller leads Andrews and their two companions to an isolated mountain valley in Colorado, where they encounter an enormous herd of buffalo—and descend into a hell of their own making. The Western genre demands that its heroes be bettered by their trials; Williams had other ideas.

Butcher’s Crossing broke trail for other revisionist Westerns such as Thomas Savage’s The Power of the Dog (1967) and Cormac McCarthy’s operatically violent Blood Meridian (1985). Though Butcher’s Crossing is ostensibly more traditional than Blood Meridian, there is something of Andrews in McCarthy’s nameless “kid,” and something of Miller in McCarthy’s fearsome Judge Holden. And Blood Meridian, like Butcher’s Crossing, lays waste to the notion that the frontier rewarded those who tested it: “Your heart’s desire is to be told some mystery,” says Holden. “The mystery is that there is no mystery.”

Anti-Westerns are inherently anti-Hollywood—their characters aren’t transformed, and their audiences aren’t absolved—and none of these novels translates easily to film. The Power of the Dog waited more than half a century for its compelling if imperfect 2021 adaptation, and Blood Meridian, which has resisted directors including Martin Scorsese and Ridley Scott, is currently in the hands of director John Hillcoat. Sixty-three years after its publication, Butcher’s Crossing now has its adaptation, directed by Gabe Polsky and co-starting Fred Hechinger as Andrews and Nicolas Cage as Miller. Unfortunately, the film does no justice to its source.

Butcher’s Crossing is a quiet novel, but its characters are incessantly menaced by the elements, by one another, and by what they find—and don’t find—within. The film is about as menacing as Little House on the Prairie. The town of Butcher’s Crossing is too neat, and its people are too attractive; Miller, Andrews, and their companions are suspiciously clean and well-fed, even in the depths of their suffering. Cage, who seems to be trying to deliver his lines without moving his mouth, is less than convincing as the impassive, uncannily skilled Miller, and Hechinger is literally and metaphorically just along for the ride. (Jeremy Bobb and Xander Berkeley play their supporting roles with more verve.) Though the film adds two murders to the novel’s plot, no one ever seems to be in much danger—except, of course, the bison, whose pointless slaughter is effectively portrayed.

The production makes much of the fact that it was filmed primarily on land belonging to the Blackfeet Nation, and features bison loaned from Blackfeet herds. A postscript rightly acknowledges the Blackfeet’s role in Indigenous-led efforts to restore bison to the North American plains. But the references to Native Americans in the script, none of which are drawn from the book, range from ham-handed to corrosively stereotypical. There is an awkward, out-of-character tribute to the Native American practice of using buffalo bones for “just about everything, everything from needles to war clubs”; a grisly corpse supposedly mutilated by Native people who “don’t like [white] hunters”; and even a stage-whispered reference to the horror-movie trope of “Indian burial grounds.” If these are attempts at inclusion, they’re not only inept but unnecessary: the central figures in Butcher’s Crossing are profoundly self-absorbed men, and to pretend that they spared even an insulting thought for others dilutes the bleak power of the novel.

The mutilated corpse and the burial-ground reference help to turn Butcher’s Crossing into a film about frontier brutality and its just desserts. But that lets the audience off the hook, allowing us to see Butcher’s Crossing as a tragic story long since resolved. The novel that Williams constructed with such care is far more complicated and far less comforting.

Scholar and novelist Michelle Latiolais, who studied with Williams at the University of Denver, points out that he wrote Butcher’s Crossing during the prelude to the Vietnam War, and published it as the first few hundred US troops arrived in Vietnam. Millions of civilians and hundreds of thousands of soldiers died on that Cold War frontier, another place advertised as an opportunity to fortify the American character. The lies that drive the tragedy of Butcher’s Crossing were retold then, and are still told today.

Blood Memory: The Tragic Decline and Improbable Resurrection of the American Buffalo by Dayton Duncan and Ken Burns is the companion book to the upcoming two-part 4-hour PBS documentary titled The American Buffalo, premiering October 16 and 17. In making the documentary eighteen extended on-camera interviews were conducted, totaling in more than thirty hours, only portions of which could be fit into the four-hour film. This book draws extensively from the fuller transcripts of what was said in those interviews.

“We saw the first train of cars that any of us had seen. We looked at it from a high ridge. Far off it was very small, but it kept coming and growing larger all the time, puffing out smoke and steam; and as it came on, we said to each other that it looked like a white man’s pipe when he was smoking.”
– Porcupine, Cheyenne

“In the ripeness of time, the hope of humanity is realized.  This continental railway will bind the two seaboards to this one continental union like ears to the human head; [and plant] the foundation of the Union so broad and deep that no possible force or stratagem can shake its permanence.”
– William Gilpin, governor of Colorado Territory

*

The cataclysm of the Civil War tore the nation apart, causing the death of 750,000 men, more than 2 percent of the population. But when the war was over, and the North and South were reunited, Americans set out with renewed energy to unite the nation, East and West. To do it, they began extending railroads to span the continent—opening up vast areas beyond the Missouri River for homesteaders, creating easier access to distant metropolitan markets for crops and cattle, and servicing the demands of boomtowns that had sprung up after gold discoveries in the mountains of Colorado and Montana. In the Great Plains, the pace of change quickened as never before, and on a scale that made the spread of the horse culture in the 1700s and the arrival of steamboats in the 1830s pale by comparison. Native people called this newest agent of transformation the “Iron Horse.”

“What we see happening in the Great Plains, in the years after the Civil War, is different from what had been going on earlier,” said the historian Andrew Isenberg. “In the beginning of the nineteenth century, there’s trade between Native people and Euro-American fur traders. They’re consuming beaver pelts and they’re consuming bison robes. That’s very different from this industrial society in the post–Civil War period that encounters the Great Plains—an industrial society that is much more interested in consuming resources.”

As the Union Pacific pushed west across Nebraska, heading toward California, the Kansas Pacific aimed for Denver from Kansas City, piercing into the heart of the buffalo range of the central Plains. To feed the hungry crews laying track, the railroad company hired an ambitious and flamboyant twenty-one-year-old Union veteran, paying him $500 a month to keep them supplied with the meat from twelve buffalo a day. His name was William F. Cody. By his own account, he killed 4,280 bison during a year and a half to fulfill his contract. Within a few years—thanks in part to his talent for self-promotion and his incorrigible habit of embellishing his actual exploits—he would become one of the nation’s most famous westerners, but under a different name: “Buffalo Bill” Cody.

Homesteaders along newly completed sections of the railroad lines also discovered that bison could be useful for getting ahead in life. Some hunted buffalo to feed their families or to supplement their meager incomes by hauling buffalo meat to railroad depots for passengers to feast on. Nearly all of them gathered the ubiquitous dried manure piles (called “buffalo pies” or “buffalo chips”) to burn in their stoves and fireplaces for cooking their meals and keeping their sod houses warm.

Railroad passengers often amused themselves by firing at the herds that sometimes slowed a train’s movement. “[It] was the greatest wonder that more people were not killed, as the wild rush for the windows, and the reckless discharge of rifles and pistols, put every passenger’s life in jeopardy,” wrote Elizabeth Custer, traveling to join her husband, an Army officer stationed in Kansas. To publicize its progress across the Plains, the Kansas Pacific even promoted excursion trips for passengers eager to see—and shoot at—the buffalo they were sure to encounter. “In estimating the number,” a satisfied customer reported, “the only fitting word was ‘innumerable;’ one hundred thousand was too small a number, a million would be more correct.”

A church group from Lawrence organized a special two-day outing to raise money for the congregation. Three hundred people signed up—and brought along a cornet band. On the second day, they came upon a herd, according to an account by E. N. Andrews:

“[The buffalo] kept pace with the train for at least a quarter of a mile, while the boys blazed away at them without effect. Shots enough were fired to rout a regiment of men.

Ah! See that bull in advance there; he has stopped a second; he turns a kind of reproachful look toward the train; he starts again to lope a step or two; he hesitates; . . . a pail-full of blood gushes warm from his nostrils; he falls upon the right side, dead.

The train stopped, and such a scrambling and screeching was never before heard on the Plains, except among the red men, as we rushed forth to see our first game lying in his gore.

[I] had the pleasure of first putting hands on the dark locks of the noble monster who had fallen so bravely  Then came the ladies; a ring was formed; the cornet band gathered around, and . . . played “Yankee Doodle.” I thought that “Hail to the Chief ” would have done more honor to the departed.”

Such excursion trips made good copy for newspapers and may have helped the railroads advertise their progress across the Plains, but they did not reduce the bison population appreciably, Elliott West said: “There are these images of people shooting bison from railroad cars, and, as you hear with the overlanders, that’s sometimes given as a reason for the decline of the bison. Well, of course not. I mean, were you really going to kill that many animals shooting at a moving target from a train?” More significant was the way the railroads accelerated the encroaching settlement of eastern Kansas and Nebraska, which were no longer reserved as part of Indian Territory. Cattle drives had begun, trailing thousands of cows (some carrying a disease called Texas tick fever) from Texas north to reach the railroads, for shipment to eastern stockyards and slaughterhouses. The buffalo range contracted some more.

In only one way did the bison seem to welcome the arrival of the Iron Horse. Along the new tracks, telegraph lines were strung from wooden poles. The buffalo—always looking for a rough surface to rub up against on the treeless Plains—found them to be perfect scratching posts. They toppled so many poles, the company decided to attach bradawls, a metal tool with sharp points, to dissuade them. It didn’t work. “[The buffalo] would go 15 miles to find a bradawl,” The Leavenworth Daily Commercial reported. “They fought huge battles around the poles containing them, and the victor would  scratch himself into bliss until the bradawl broke, or the pole came down. There has been no demand for bradawls from the Kansas region since the first invoice.”

When the white man wanted to build railroads, or when they wanted to farm or raise cattle, the buffalo protected the Kiowas. They tore up the railroad tracks and the gardens. They chased the cattle off the ranges.

The buffalo loved their people as much as the Kiowas loved them.

There was a war between the buffalo and the white men. The white men built forts in Kiowa country . . . but the buffalo kept coming on, coming on.  Soldiers were not enough to hold them back.

Even before the Civil War’s end, Native tribes had successfully resisted the relentless incursions onto their homelands, and the Army had built forts in response. Now, more forts were established, and more troops were dispatched to man them. Buffalo Bill Cody signed up to act as an Army scout and to help supply the posts with buffalo meat. Officers and enlisted men spent some of their idle time firing at bison for pleasure. At one fort in Kansas, the captain issued an order: “Item No. 1. Members of the command will, when shooting at buffaloes on the parade ground, be careful not to fire in the direction of the Commanding Officer’s quarters.”

George Armstrong Custer had been a celebrated cavalry hero during the Civil War. His impulsive bravery in a series of battles made him, at the age of twenty-two, the Union’s youngest general. Eleven horses had been shot out from under him. Posted now at Fort Riley, Kansas, with the newly formed Seventh Cavalry, he rode out one day to kill his first buffalo. Galloping up next to a bull, he aimed his revolver—and somehow managed instead to shoot his horse through the head. On foot, bruised, and totally lost, he had to be rescued by his own men. Adding to the humiliation, the dead horse was one he had taken from Confederates at Appomattox, named Custis Lee, and given to his wife. He had to explain to Elizabeth that he had killed her favorite mount.

The soldiers were there to deal with what was called “the Indian problem,” not to hunt buffalo for sport. For Custer and all the other Army officers, vanquishing the western tribes was proving frustratingly difficult. Native American warriors attacked railroad survey crews and road gangs, occasionally even derailed trains. The Army’s retaliations proved ineffective—and sometimes disastrous for both sides. The Plains seemed aflame with skirmishes, raids, and occasional massacres. In 1867, Congress decided to try a different approach. Delegations were dispatched to pursue “the hitherto untried policy of conquering with kindness.”

That October, more than five thousand Kiowas, Comanches, Arapahoes, and Southern Cheyennes gathered at Medicine Lodge Creek in Kansas to hear a proposal from U.S. officials to end the violence on the southern Plains. The treaty council nearly ended before it began. The Indians learned that on the way, and despite explicit orders from their officers, some soldiers had killed buffalo for their tongues and left the carcasses to rot. “Has the white man become a child, that he should recklessly kill and not eat?” a Kiowa chief asked. The offending soldiers were placed under arrest, and the negotiations commenced.

The government proposed that the United States be allowed to build railroads to the Colorado gold mines and encourage settlement north of the Arkansas River. The Native tribes would move onto reservations in what is now southwestern Oklahoma, where they would be supervised by agents drawn from Christian denominations like the Quakers. They would receive food and supplies for thirty years, be provided schools for their children, and be taught how to farm. The Kiowa chief Satanta objected:

“I love the land and the buffalo and will not part with it. I want you to understand what I say. Write it on paper. I don’t want to settle. I love to roam over the prairies. There I feel free and happy, but when we settle down we grow pale and die. A long time ago this land belonged to our fathers; but when I go up the river I see camps of soldiers on its banks. These soldiers cut down my timber; they kill my buffalo; and when I see that, my heart feels like bursting. I have spoken.”

“Do not ask us to give up the buffalo for the sheep,” Ten Bears of the Comanche added. “Do not speak of it more: I was born upon the prairie, where the wind blew free, and there was nothing to break the light of the sun. I was born where there were no enclosures, and where everything drew a free breath. I want to die there, and not within walls. I have hunted and lived over that country. I lived like my fathers before me, and like them, I lived happily. So why do you ask us to leave the rivers, and the sun, and the wind, and live in houses?”

The peace commissioners promised that, south of the Arkansas River, non-Indians would be prohibited from settlement, and the tribes could exclusively continue hunting there “so long as the buffalo may range thereon in such numbers as justify the chase.” Though not every band of each tribe was represented, the treaty was signed and sent to Congress. The Kiowa calendar for that year showed an Indian and a white man shaking hands near a grove of trees.

A year later, farther north at Fort Laramie on the Platte, a similar treaty was signed by some of the Lakota Sioux. In exchange for the government’s abandoning its Army forts in Wyoming’s Powder River country, an expansive Great Sioux reservation was created, encompassing half of present-day South Dakota, including the sacred Black Hills. The treaty also contained a clause stating that the Lakotas were free to hunt outside the reservation—so long as there were buffalo.

General William Tecumseh Sherman, now in command of the Army in the West, reluctantly agreed to the hunting concession. “This may lead to collisions,” Sherman wrote his brother, “but it will not be long before all the buffaloes are extinct near and between the railroads.”

General Sheridan,
As long as buffalo are up on the Republican [River], the Indians will go there. I think it would be wise to invite all the sportsmen of England and America . . . for a Grand Buffalo hunt, and make one grand sweep of them all.Until the buffalo and consequent[ly] Indians are out [from between] the roads, we will have . . . trouble.
General William T. Sherman

Early on the morning of January 13, 1872, a train pulled up to the Union Pacific railroad platform at North Platte, Nebraska, flying the flags of the United States and Russia, and carrying a special passenger. Grand Duke Alexis Alexandrovich, the fourth son of Czar Alexander II, was in the midst of a goodwill tour of America that had already created a media sensation with massive parades and elegant receptions in cities up and down the East Coast. He had come west to hunt buffalo.

His host, Lieutenant General Philip Sheridan, was overseeing the elaborate details for the outing. Troops of soldiers, even a cavalry band, had already set up “Camp Alexis” a day’s ride south, with a walled tent, floored and carpeted for the guest of honor, and wagon-loads of provisions that included plenty of champagne. Buffalo Bill Cody was on hand, having selected a campsite he was sure would be near a buffalo herd. Cody had recently guided a number of newspaper owners and wealthy businessmen on what was dubbed in the press as the “millionaire’s hunt” in the same area. To accompany Russia’s young aristocrat, Sheridan selected George Armstrong Custer, now a lieutenant colonel. Despite his disastrous first encounter with a buffalo, Custer had developed a love for chasing game across the Plains and had also hosted hunts for English nobility, journalists, and influential easterners. “Buffalo hunting,” he said, is “the most exciting of all American sports.”

The hunt began on January 14—the Grand Duke’s twenty-second birthday—and Alexis was accorded the privilege of the first kill. Equipped with a pearl-handled revolver, made especially for him by Smith & Wesson, and after some coaching from Custer, he rode up alongside a bull and fired several shots. But the bull was only wounded. In his own embroidered account of the moment, Buffalo Bill placed himself at the center of the action, claiming that Alexis was riding his horse, Buckskin Joe:

I rode up to him, gave him my old reliable [rifle] “Lucretia” and told him  I would give him the word when to shoot.

At the same time I gave old Buckskin Joe a blow with my whip, and with a few jumps the horse carried the Grand Duke within about ten feet of a big buffalo bull.

“Now is your time,” said I. He fired and down went the buffalo.

Alexis jumped down, cut off the buffalo’s tail as a souvenir, and “let go a series of howls and gurgles like the death song of all the foghorns and calliopes ever born.” In celebration, bottles of champagne were distributed to everyone. Later, when the Grand Duke shot a second bison, out came a second round of champagne. “I was in hopes that he would kill five or six more before we reached camp,” Buffalo Bill recalled, “especially if a basket of champagne was to be opened every time he dropped one.”

That night, Sheridan presented his guest with another gift. With the promise of thousands of rations of flour, sugar, coffee, and tobacco, he had lured Chief Spotted Tail and nearly six hundred members of his Lakota tribe to join them. The next day, nine of the Lakotas took part in the hunt. One of them, named Two Lance, demonstrated how Indians could bring down a buffalo with a single arrow. Two Lance’s passed clear through the animal’s chest. He then presented the arrow to the Grand Duke as a parting remembrance of his adventure.

“I think I may safely say,” Sheridan proudly reported to Washington, that the hunt “gave more pleasure to the Grand Duke than any other event which has occurred to him since he has been in our country.” Alexis took the train to Denver for a grand ball, then for another hunt with Custer in eastern Colorado Territory. On their way through Kansas, he shot a bull from the window of his passenger car. Later, the Grand Duke and Custer posed for portraits together. Not to be forgotten, Cody had copies of the photograph reproduced—with an image of himself superimposed to make them a trio.

As Alexis headed home to Russia, Buffalo Bill left the Plains for New York City. A dime novel about him had been turned into a play—and the breathless newspaper accounts of his time with the Grand Duke had made him even more of a celebrity. Once he saw the gaudy melodrama, he decided to join the cast. If money was to be made playing Buffalo Bill onstage, he might as well get some of it himself.

 __________________________________

From Blood Memory: The Tragic Decline and Improbable Resurrection of the American Buffalo. Reprinted with permission from Knopf. Copyright © 2023 by Dayton Duncan & Ken Burns.

In 1978, a young man escaped from the psychiatric institution where he had been held for fifteen years, ever since he murdered his older sister as a six year old boy. After his escape, he began a brutal killing spree that left at least four people (and one dog) dead. Anyone looking for a rational explanation for his actions came up short-handed; his own doctor once said, “I spent eight years trying to reach him, and then another seven trying to keep him locked up, because I realized that what was living behind that boy’s eyes was purely and simply… evil.” The massacre that night was the very definition of a senseless crime.

Or was it? Maybe he was actually tracking down his long-lost sister, and killing anyone who got in his way. Or maybe he had been marked since birth, destined to become an avatar of violence by a sinister cult. Or maybe he was the real victim, a product of childhood abuse and neglect, which left him no other choice but to take bloody revenge on a cruel world. Maybe it didn’t matter at all, who he was or what he wanted or what dark forces drove him. Maybe it depended entirely on the perspective of whoever was telling the story.

John Carpenter’s Halloween, which came out on October 27th, 1978 and turns 45 this year, is one of the most totemic and influential films in American history. It wasn’t necessarily the first slasher—a topic that inspires much debate, but at the very least, Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Bob Clark’s Black Christmas had both been released four years earlier, and Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho had come out another fourteen years before either of them, not to mention the dozens of Italian giallo films that are a key strand in the DNA of the slasher. But it undoubtedly set the template for the wave of horror movies, particularly the ones that feature iconic masked killers, that followed in its wake.

It was at the time of its release, and still remains, one of the most profitable independent films of all time, grossing $70 million on a budget of a little more than $300,000. It made a star out of its young lead, Jamie Lee Curtis in her feature film debut—but it also made a star out of her co-lead, the aforementioned psychopathic killer, the inimitable Michael Myers. Like many of its imitators, Halloween birthed a long-running, ever-evolving franchise, comprising thirteen movies that span five decades—a host of sequels, remakes, reboots, and no less than five separate continuities, and apart from a brief foray into alternate mask-related horror in 1982, Michael Myers has been the one constant of them all.

Loving a horror franchise is a little like loving a person over a long period of time. We are, all of us, different people—sometimes wildly different—over the course of our lives, and true love means accepting and embracing all those different people. And while most, if not all, of the major horror franchises live in the shadows of their original installments, regardless of their overall consistency of quality, the true aficionado knows that there are hidden gems to be found in the unlikeliest of places, that each franchise is greater than the sum of its parts. No Halloween movie holds a candle to the original, but each of them is interesting in its own way. Michael Myers has been all those things previously mentioned—killer, brother, uncle, supernatural entity, misunderstood anti-hero, each identity abandoned once a new creative direction proves more fruitful. He’s worn a lot of different masks over the years, both figuratively and literally (for some reason, they cannot seem to get the mask exactly right since the first entry, and an entire piece could be written ranking the various masks across the series).

But all those different versions of the Michael Myers story represent more than a jumbled, contradictory chronology, a series in constant, chaotic need of reinvention, continuity be damned. Each retcon and new development in the Halloween franchise functions as a different method of ascribing order and rationality to the senselessness and randomness of the original film; their attempts to explain its events serve to enhance its horror and prove why it has remained an enduring classic of the genre.

(Note: spoilers abound for the original Halloween and all of its sequels, as well as other pertinent slashers.)

Revisiting the original Halloween on its 45th anniversary, with the full knowledge of everything that has come after, is a fascinating exercise. The film’s relative simplicity stands in stark contrast to the more elaborate plotting and pyrotechnics of the later installments of the series. While the revolutionary camerawork is prurient and voyeuristic at times, in terms of its narrative, Halloween is almost Hemingway-esque in its austerity. Michael Myers (played by Nick Castle while masked and Tony Moran unmasked) escapes from Smith’s Grove Sanitarium on the night before Halloween, and returns to his hometown of Haddonfield, Illinois, at some point along the way acquiring a rubber mask.

His psychiatrist, Dr. Samuel Loomis (Donald Pleasence, one of the other franchise stalwarts, appearing in nearly as many installments as Curtis), is convinced that Michael is going to kill again, and resolves to track him down and stop him. Along the way, we meet high-schooler Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), and her friends, Annie Brackett (Nancy Loomis) and Lynda Van Der Klok (P.J. Soles). Most of the film is spent watching Laurie and her friends go about their day, dealing with classes, boys, and babysitting, all while Michael skulks around in the background and Loomis fails to locate him; Michael doesn’t kill anyone on screen until nearly an hour into the movie. Once night falls, however, he kills Annie, Lynda, Lynda’s boyfriend Bob (John Michael Graham), and then sets his sights on Laurie and the two children in her charge: Tommy Doyle (Brian Andrews) and Lindsey Wallace (Kyle Richards). He nearly succeeds before he is shot six times by Loomis and falls out a second-story window—but when Loomis looks out to check on him, he’s nowhere to be found.

And… that’s pretty much it. Carpenter, a devotee of classic Hollywood director Howard Hawks, emulates his economical and minimal style here, to an almost ruthless degree; his script, which he co-wrote with producer Debra Hill, is spare and light on incident, depicting only the bare essentials of the narrative without delving deep into the backstories or home lives of its cast. The characters don’t particularly grow or change over the course of the movie; they either survive, or they don’t. As an antagonist, Michael is mostly a cipher (in the credits, he is identified as “The Shape”). It would be disingenuous to say that he is completely without discernible motivation—he does choose to return home in the first place, and despite Loomis characterizing him as some unknowable, unreachable evil, he demonstrates a certain kind of pathology.

On some sort of abstract level, he seems to be ritualistically recreating his sister’s murder, even going so far as to steal her headstone from the cemetery where she was buried. He seems to take pleasure in his kills, from donning a makeshift ghost costume and Bob’s glasses in order to toy with Lynda before killing her, to the infamous head tilt moment, in which Michael cocks his head from side to side after pinning Bob to the wall with his knife as if in silent admiration for his own handiwork. But in terms of why he’s chosen these people… they are simply unlucky enough to cross paths with him. Carpenter famously drew inspiration from a college psychology class visit to a psychiatric institution in Kentucky where he encountered a young boy whose blank, unsettling stare stayed with Carpenter; Dr. Loomis’ description of a young Michael, quoted at the beginning of this piece, is based on this incident. Michael has been a killer ever since he was six years old; the film is uninterested in why he is the way he is, save for the simple explanation that he is Bad.

A kind of conservative social ideology has often been read into the slasher genre by critics and scholars—namely, that the teenage characters who drink, party, and have sex are the ones who typically die and the more virginal characters are the ones who survive, suggesting a kind of Puritanical morality, a bloody Sunday School lesson for any young viewer thinking of engaging in any sort of risqué behavior. Films like Wes Craven’s meta-slasher Scream (1996) helped codify the rules of surviving a horror movie, with Jamie Kennedy’s Randy Meeks exclaiming, “number one: you can never have sex,” and “number two: you can never drink or do drugs.” While some cultural commentators confine their interpretations to the social effects of the slasher, rather than attempting to ascribe intent to the various filmmakers who made the genre what it is, it frequently gets conflated, and thus the slasher’s reputation as a reactionary genre persists. It is always a tricky proposition to assume intent in any work of art, but especially in the slasher, which as a genre has a specific demographic (young people) and a specific goal (to scare them).

What do teenagers and young adults, at least a decent percentage of them, love to do? Have sex, drink, and do drugs—all activities which lower one’s defenses and make one vulnerable. What is scarier than being attacked when one is most vulnerable? It’s almost a corollary of the old precept, “correlation does not imply causation”—these movies are not necessarily cautionary tales of moral instruction; they are designed to scare people (whether one wants to ascribe inherent conservatism to the desire to scare young people is a deeper, more abstract philosophical question, and one that is largely irrelevant here).

All this is to say: the dynamic of the virginal being prioritized over those who are sexually active has always been flawed, and there are countless examples of movies that subvert or undermine that notion, but possibly none more so than Halloween—and, furthermore, any attempt to interpret Halloween along those lines undermines its essential horror. While later slashers would play up their characters’ sexual desires to almost cartoonish levels, with some unlucky victims scampering off to do the deed despite obvious signs of danger, Halloween feels comparatively subdued. Annie and Lynda are normal teenagers; their sexual activity isn’t wildly irresponsible (save for Annie abdicating her babysitting duty to hook up with her boyfriend, though logistically speaking it doesn’t seem as though continuing to watch little Lindsey would have saved her life). Laurie is a normal teenager too, for that matter. While it is often assumed that Laurie is a virgin, she does express desire for her classmate Ben Tramer. What’s more, she smokes pot with her friends, just before a babysitting job.

The conventional, rule-oriented moral framework of the slasher would dictate that she die too, and yet she doesn’t. Michael simply gets to her last on his rampage from house to house, giving her enough time to notice that something is amiss on her previously peaceful suburban street and prepare her defenses (and giving Loomis enough time to get there with his gun). The slasher rules are at their core an effort to make sense out of senseless acts of killing, to force a random and violent universe to obey a strict internal logic. If you do X, you’ll die, but if you don’t, you’ll live. But Halloween doesn’t neatly adhere to that system.

Furthermore, compared to the rest of the pantheon of iconic horror movie villains, Michael Myers in the first Halloween is uniquely anarchic. Many killers have a set of rules—narrative rules, not inherent moral codes—by which they operate. Some have a specific territory in which they dwell, and they kill those who are unlucky enough to wind up there. For example, Leatherface and the rest of the cannibalistic Sawyer family in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre kill the main characters because they wander onto the Sawyer property. Jason Voorhees in the Friday the 13th series functions almost like an apex predator, hunting anyone who trespasses in his domain of Crystal Lake. Other killers are driven by revenge. Freddy Krueger in the Nightmare on Elm Street series targets the children of the parents who murdered him, before he became a supernatural dream demon. In some respects, Jason (and his mother Pamela, the villain of the first Friday the 13th) also follow this logic, killing camp counselors after the original Camp Crystal Lake employees failed to come to Jason’s aid as a drowning child. Michael Myers, however, has no idea who these teenagers are. They mean nothing to him. He comes to their territory, not the other way around.

He also doesn’t have as clear-cut a pattern as others—in addition to teenagers (both male and female), he kills an adult man, a mechanic, early in the movie, acquiring his iconic coveralls in the process. This flouting of clear narrative logic both makes Michael scarier and also places him in a more true-to-life mold. The late 1960s and 1970s saw a proliferation of spree and serial killers, including the Zodiac Killer, Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, among others. They killed people who were strangers to them, for the most part. Their crimes made people realize that danger could come to them in their homes—it could seek them out, even if they did nothing to invite it. Michael evokes these killers with his methodology. You can’t take proactive steps to avoid him; you can only hope for the best.

Halloween’s pared-down approach to narrative and character almost gives it the feeling of reportage. One could almost imagine Sergeant Joe Friday saying, “Just the facts, ma’am,” and getting some version of this story. Apart from the haunting ending in which Michael seemingly survives being shot multiple times and falling from a great height, it is brutally realistic and eminently believable. It has all the potency of a small-town folk legend. While the characters are not generic, they are very simply and directly drawn, which makes it easier to imagine oneself in their position. That is the terrible power of Halloween—this could happen to anyone. Even you.

And then came Halloween II.

A film does not reach the level of success that Halloween did without Hollywood taking notice and demanding more, but with that impulse comes a fundamental problem: how do you follow up on something that, while technically open-ended (where did Michael Myers go?), feels fairly complete, even limited, as a narrative? Michael Myers came back home, killed Laurie Strode’s friends and nearly killed Laurie, and that’s it. There’s not much left to explore. As Carpenter himself later said in an interview with Vulture, “I didn’t want to direct sequels. I didn’t think there was story left.” What do you do? Do you just essentially remake the first movie and watch Michael Myers kill different people? It’s certainly a valid option, and one that other slasher franchises have resorted to. Or maybe you take the series in a different direction entirely—abandon the characters and use the title, the holiday itself, as your guiding principle.

Carpenter and Debra Hill’s original vision for the franchise was to turn it into an anthology of different horror stories all set on Halloween, having nothing to do with Michael Myers, and indeed, 1982’s Halloween III: Season of the Witch, directed by Tommy Lee Wallace (the art director and production designer on the first Halloween), is exactly that. (Unfortunately, Halloween III, which is about a Druidic cult implanting slivers of Stonehenge in mass-produced children’s masks that will kill the wearers and release swarms of bugs and snakes when exposed to a certain television commercial, is not incredibly relevant to a piece about the legacy of Michael Myers and the original film.)

But after Halloween, Michael Myers was a star, and for the first sequel (and the ten subsequent sequels after Halloween III), it seemed unthinkable not to feature him, as well as the other characters made indelible by the 1978 film, like Laurie and Dr. Loomis. But why would Michael, who was defined by the first movie as an unfeeling killing machine, continue to be in the orbit of other returning characters? And so a decision was made that would radically alter the original’s story and shape the trajectory of the franchise going forward for nearly forty years.

Halloween II, which came out in 1981 and was directed by Rick Rosenthal, but was written by Carpenter and Debra Hill, takes place in the immediate aftermath of Halloween, continuing on that same Halloween night. Laurie has been taken to the hospital after her injuries and trauma, and Loomis continues to search for the escaped Michael. Over the course of the film, Laurie, who spends a solid stretch of time confined to a hospital bed, dreams about childhood memories of learning that she was adopted, and visiting a young man in a hospital. Meanwhile, Loomis learns a terrible secret that was hidden, even from him. This is the bedrock that provides the narrative thrust of this second movie: Laurie Strode is Michael Myers’ younger sister, put up for adoption after the death of Michael’s parents while he was in the sanitarium and she was still very young.

Therefore, the random attack from the original film was not random at all. It was extremely targeted; as Loomis himself exclaims when he discovers the truth, “He killed one sister fifteen years ago, now he’s trying to kill the other!” On a scene to scene level, Halloween II is fairly similar to Halloween, except with the action transposed from a quiet suburban street to a hospital and the victims now hospital employees rather than babysitters, but Michael’s movements are now suddenly purposeful: he is reuniting with his long-lost sister, and mowing down anyone who stands in his way.

What this does is turn the story of Halloween into a bizarre funhouse mirror version of the Chosen One trope, with Laurie Strode functioning as its Luke Skywalker or Harry Potter, except instead of unimaginable power and heroic destiny, Laurie has been cursed with a dark family legacy and a perpetual boogeyman on her heels. And just like Chosen One myths can have the unintended side effect of reducing a universal “anyone can be a hero” message into “people who have the right parents and/or backgrounds can be heroes,” this alteration to the Halloween canon takes what was a horrifying senseless crime that could have happened to anyone, and recontextualizes it as something that was always going to happen to one person (albeit with some collateral damage of unconnected bystanders along the way). It defangs the original’s bite, grabbing hold of its swirling forces of chaos and randomness and shoving them into a neat and tidy box of narrative and character-based logic (psychopathic, murderous logic, but undeniably something more rational than what existed before). It was the first attempt to explain away the incomprehensible horror that is Michael Myers. It would not, however, be the last.

After Halloween III’s lackluster performance (it grossed $14.4 million at the domestic box office against a budget of $4.6 million, which made it the least successful Halloween film so far), the decision was made to bring back the franchise’s star, in a film called Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers. Directed in 1988 by Dwight H. Little, it would begin an era of the Halloween franchise that fans dub “The Thorn Trilogy” (for reasons that will become apparent), which also includes 1989’s Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers, directed by Dominique Othenin-Girard, and 1995’s Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, directed by Joe Chappelle. The Thorn Trilogy centers on Michael, Loomis, and a new character: seven-year-old Jamie Lloyd, played by Danielle Harris, who is the daughter of Laurie Strode (Laurie is revealed to have died in a car accident in between Halloween II and Halloween 4, thus resulting in Jamie’s adoption by the Carruthers family). After Michael, who has been comatose for a decade since the events of Halloween II, learns of his niece’s existence from a careless attendant, he springs to life in search of her, with Loomis once again hot on his trail.

It is at this point that things begin to get… weird. It is a common stage in the life-cycle of a slasher franchise that has always been terrestrial in nature to at least flirt with the supernatural—at a certain point, it simply strains credulity that the villain in question would be able to withstand so much damage in one movie only to return in the next, ready for more. For example, Jason Voorhees is a mortal man, albeit an extremely durable one, up until 1986’s Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives, in which Jason’s corpse, after having been unquestionably killed in the retroactively hilariously-titled Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter only two years prior, is struck by lightning, thus re-animating him into an even more durable zombie. The Thorn Trilogy marks Halloween’s supernatural era. The signs start small—Jamie seems to share a link with Michael that could be instinctual, could be outright psychic. At the end of Halloween 4, Jamie seemingly attacks her adoptive mother out of nowhere—an indication that Michael’s evil has taken hold of her, forcing her to emulate his own history of familicide. (An initial pitch for Halloween 5 involved a fully evil Jamie as co-antagonists with Michael, but this was rejected and Jamie’s apparent heel turn softened so that The Revenge of Michael Myers reveals she only wounded her mother, and she is now living in a children’s hospital with her family’s full support.)

But Revenge (and its follow-up, Curse of Michael Myers) has an even wilder plot twist up its sleeve. Throughout the film, we see a mysterious man (credited as The Man in Black) stalking around Haddonfield, searching for Michael. This man has a strange runic symbol tattooed on his wrist—a symbol, coincidentally, that Halloween 5 reveals is also tattooed on Michael’s wrist (in the original opening for the film, we see a hermit resurrect Michael in an occult ritual after his death in Halloween 4, tattooing him with this rune in the process; reshoots removed this opening but left the tattoo without its origin, thus leaving audiences with no explanation other than he secretly had this the whole time). At the end of The Revenge of Michael Myers, The Man in Black detonates a bomb at the Haddonfield police station to free Michael Myers in an enigmatic cliffhanger that would not be unraveled until The Curse of Michael Myers. To sort through these developments is a challenge—at the time of Halloween 5’s filming, director Othenin-Girard and producers were unsure of who The Man in Black was, having added him solely as a tease for future installments, and The Curse of Michael Myers had a notoriously troubled production, with at least two extant widely-differing cuts of the film in circulation (the hastily re-edited theatrical version which confused audiences at the time of its release and the more coherent Producer’s Cut).

It would take too much time to unpack all of the variations in the canon between the two versions, but broadly-speaking, Curse reveals that a nefarious Druidic organization (though not the one from Halloween III), the Cult of Thorn, is manipulating Michael and his blood relatives as pawns in their evil agenda. Through the investigations of an adult Tommy Doyle, Laurie Strode’s young charge in the first film (interestingly enough, now played by Paul Rudd in his first starring role, coming out the same year as his feature film debut in Clueless), we learn that Michael is not just a psychopathic killer—he is the victim of the Curse of Thorn, which surfaces throughout generations and compels its host to slaughter their family members. The cult is attempting to harness his power through various methods, including cloning his DNA and, in a particularly disturbing turn of events, using it to impregnate a now-older Jamie.

This is a particularly convoluted stretch of the narrative, more reminiscent of a soap opera than the original Halloween. But ultimately, what this amounts to is a further recontextualization of the events of 1978, going even beyond the revelation that Laurie and Michael are sister and brother. In this version of the story, all those innocent people (and the dozens since then) died because their killer was driven by a supernatural pre-ordained directive. Michael Myers is not just a faceless boogeyman, and he’s also not just a brother in search of a family reunion—he is damned by destiny. The simple potency of the first film is now truly a distant memory, replaced by grandiose myth-making—once again retconned to be something that could not happen to just anyone.

The next major phase of the Halloween saga ignores the events of the previous three films: 1998’s Halloween H20: 20 Years Later, directed by Steve Miner, and 2002’s Halloween: Resurrection, directed by Rick Rosenthal (returning to the franchise after Halloween II), reveal that Laurie (with Jamie Lee Curtis herself returning to the franchise for the first time since 1981) faked her death and relocated to California where she’s now working as a boarding school instructor, along with her son John (played by Josh Hartnett). While interesting films in their own right, they do not meaningfully advance the recontextualization of the Michael Myers mythos—they strip out the supernatural elements and return to what now constitutes a baseline for the franchise, with Laurie as Michael’s sister and Michael killing his way to get to her.

And so, for the purposes of this piece, we will skip forward to a controversial period: the Rob Zombie era, named after the heavy metal provocateur who helmed the first outright remake of the original film, 2007’s Halloween, as well as its direct sequel two years later, Halloween II (which, despite the title, is not a remake of 1981’s Halloween II). After various failed attempts at following up on Halloween: Resurrection (including a fascinating what-if scenario proposed after the release of 2003’s Freddy vs. Jason, in which Halloween would crossover with the Hellraiser series), the reins were handed over to Zombie for a hard reboot of the franchise. The result is for the most part a scene-for-scene recreation of the original movie, except infused with Zombie’s more grindhouse sensibilities and a modern, gorier flair. The key difference, however, is an extended prologue featuring Michael as a ten-year-old boy. While the 1978 film limits this period of Michael’s life to just the cold open where he murders his sister, Zombie’s film expands on it, showing the sordid details of Michael’s childhood as a whole, including dire socioeconomic circumstances, his mother’s crass, abusive boyfriend and his intense bullying at school. In general, the Zombie movies engender a kind of sympathy for Michael (played as an adult by Tyler Mane). They retain the canon that Laurie (played by Scout Taylor-Compton) is his sister, except now Michael seems more interested in an actual emotional reunion rather than a murderous one, pulling out a childhood photo of them together in the climax to show her instead of trying to kill her.

Halloween II reveals that Dr. Loomis (played by Malcolm McDowell) is more of a craven opportunist who doesn’t really care about his patient. He publishes a book about Michael’s case and cashes in on the resulting fifteen minutes of fame; in many ways, more of the film’s ire is directed at Loomis than at Michael, who kills Loomis at the end in a semi-triumphant moment of vengeance.

Many fans at the time were upset at the demystification of Michael Myers, their faceless, mysterious avatar of evil now redefined as a mere mentally-troubled young man. Zombie explicitly wanted to inject new life into the old myth and bring more psychological realism to Michael Myers’ story; in an interview with Bloody-Disgusting.com in 2007, Zombie explained, “First thing I wanted to start with is: ‘What is the reality of someone like Michael Myers?’ And the reality is he would be a true psychopath, he has no concept of what he’s doing.” While this framework does not excuse Michael’s actions, it does help explain them. No longer the victim of a magic curse, he is now the victim of a broken home life and a system which failed him. “It was the Boogeyman,” exclaims Laurie at the end of the 1978 film, but one would be hard-pressed to describe this version of Michael Myers in such black-and-white terms.

We see all of the circumstances that led him to this point in painstaking detail. He is an all-too-human figure, not a mythical monster. This added childhood context, an attempt to really understand evil in a way that the series had yet to do up until that point, represents just one more aspect of the multi-faceted project of the Halloween franchise to rationalize what happened that fateful night. One can make sense of what was previously senseless if one has all the facts—this doesn’t necessarily remove all the horror, but what one can’t comprehend is always scarier than what one can comprehend.

This brings us to the final era of the Halloween franchise (at least for now): the David Gordon Green era, so named for the director who shepherded the last three installments, 2018’s Halloween, 2021’s Halloween Kills, and 2022’s Halloween Ends. This era also arguably marks the end of the recontextualization project. After decades of sequels and reboots, the 2018 Halloween represents the fifth distinct timeline—this time, ignoring everything except the 1978 film. Yes, that includes the detail that Laurie and Michael are siblings. As Allyson, Laurie’s granddaughter (played by Andi Matichak), explains to a friend who asks if Michael was Laurie’s brother, “No. That’s just a bit that some people made up to make them feel better, I think.” In this timeline, Michael’s massacre was indeed what it appeared to be in the original film—a random act of brutal violence, with no easy explanations as to why it took place.

Instead, the focus of this sub-trilogy is the survivors of Michael Myers, including a now older Laurie Strode (a returning Jamie Lee Curtis), having to draw their own conclusions and interpretations from something that is so hauntingly unresolvable. Meaning cannot be found in learning more about what makes Michael tick—instead, meaning can only be found in trying to live alongside and move through one’s trauma. In fact, the characters who attempt to understand Michael on a deeper level, including a pair of true-crime podcasters (Jefferson Hall and Rhian Rees), Michael’s current attending doctor (Haluk Bilginer), and Halloween Ends’ tormented young protagonist Corey Cunningham (Rohan Campbell), are all doomed in varying ways by their efforts to get closer to the heart of evil. The true hero of the trilogy, Laurie, rejects all attempts to analyze Michael—she tells the podcasters, “There’s nothing to learn. There are no new insights or discoveries…. Michael Myers murdered five people. And he’s a human being we need to understand?” In Laurie’s perspective, the only recourse when confronted with an evil like Michael’s is not to explain, but simply to vanquish, and then move on with your life.

In a 2014 career retrospective with Deadline, John Carpenter said, “Michael Myers was an absence of character. And yet all the sequels are trying to explain that. That’s silliness—it just misses the whole point of the first movie, to me. He’s part person, part supernatural force. The sequels rooted around in motivation. I thought that was a mistake.” While that motivation was first supplied by Carpenter himself in his co-written script for Halloween II, the point remains. Explaining that essential unknowable question does take away from the inherent mystique of the character and what he represents. It takes what was once a shot to the heart of random terror and turns it into a saga: one of complicated family dynamics, supernatural curses, and a decades-spanning murderous mission. In many ways, it is less scary. But is it fair to characterize this decision as a mistake?

The Halloween franchise as a whole stands as a monument to the human capacity for rationalization, our need to explain the terrifying things that happen to us. To borrow Allyson’s words, it’s a way to make us feel better. The same impulse can be found in how we respond in the real world to real-life tragedies and horrors, always looking for that fundamental why. But the totality of the series, at the end of the day, only serves to strengthen the legacy of Carpenter’s indelible original, and makes it more timeless and impactful, even now, forty-five years later. For only 1978’s Halloween, the first, the best, has the awful and powerful wisdom to know that sometimes, there is no why. No reason, no order. Sometimes, bad things just happen. What could be scarier than that?

The story goes something like this.

William Friedkin needed to find the right little girl for his film. She had to be strong and stable, good humored and intelligent, someone who could say lines like “Let Jesus fuck you” and not be left irreparably damaged. Friedkin didn’t want any responsibility for setting some innocent little girl off on the wrong path for life. The filmmaker was entering uncharted cinematic territory, and he must have paused, or at least we hope, to consider an important question: What will playing the devil incarnate do to a young child? As he started his search, Friedkin knew at least this much: the little girl had to be a good actress, and of course, she had to be pretty.

In the book version of The Exorcist, Regan has freckles, red hair, and braces, just like I did when I turned 12. Friedkin would take certain artistic liberties when casting his Regan, preferring tall, snub-nosed brunettes. He spent months searching, flipping through stack after stack of sunny young actresses, all white, shiny, and smiling. He’d bring the ones he liked into his office for an audition, but none of them were quite right. Some seemed too immature to handle the intensity of the role; others were promising, but their parents balked at the image of their sweet daughter transforming into a monster. Even the most fame-hungry stage parent thought such a role would hurt, not elevate, their child’s burgeoning career.

Mike Nichols had passed on the project because he didn’t want the success of the film to depend on the performance of an untrained child. Friedkin was starting to think Nichols was right. But then round-faced Linda Blair walked into his office. Friedkin was a big name around Hollywood in those days, and working with an Academy Award–winning director could open serious doors for an aspiring actress, even one who up to that point had only landed a few child modeling gigs and a small role in the short-lived soap opera Hidden Faces. Linda Blair, born just a few months before my mother in 1959, was a sweet-natured, horse-loving child actress living in Connecticut with dreams of staring in movies about princesses, about little girls and their dogs. If she hadn’t made it as an actress, Blair would have been perfectly content growing up to be a jockey or a veterinarian. Getting cast by someone as illustrious as William Friedkin, with his tinted aviator glasses and gargantuan ego, was certainly a long shot, but Linda’s mother took her daughter to the audition anyway. The Blair’s old address in St. Louis must have seemed like an omen: 123 Hollywood Lane. Friedkin had auditioned countless girls and liked none of them, so maybe, just maybe, Linda had a chance.

When Linda and her mother arrived at Friedkin’s Manhattan office, William asked a few basic questions and then went over the script, discussing in detail some of the things Linda would be required to do if she were cast. When they approached the scene where Regan masturbates with the crucifix, William paused and prepared to ask what he had asked stacks of other girls before her. He took a deep breath.

“Linda,” he said. “Do you understand what Regan is doing here?”

“Yeah,” Linda responded eagerly, as if she were in class and knew she had the answer the teacher wanted. “She’s masturbating.”

William nodded.

“And do you know what masturbating is, Linda?” “It’s like jerking off,” Linda replied.

“And have you ever masturbated before?” William asked, shooting Linda’s mother a tentative, apologetic glance.

“Sure, of course I have,” Linda said. “Hasn’t everyone?”

With that, Friedkin smiled and leaned back in his chair. His search, at last, could end.

Pauline Kael mentioned this story in her 1974 review of The Exorcist. She describes Linda Blair as a “sparkling, snub-nosed, happy-looking little girl, who matches up perfectly with Ellen Burstyn.” Kael adds, “I wonder about those four hundred and ninety-nine mothers of the rejected little girls. . . . They must have read the novel; they must have known what they were having their beautiful little daughters tested for. When they see The Exorcist and watch Linda Blair urinating on the fancy carpet and screaming and jabbing at herself with the crucifix, are they envious? Do they feel, ‘That might have been my little Susie—famous forever?’”

*

In the notorious scene, vinyl records swirl through the room in a manic cyclone. Curtains slap wildly against the window-pane. The girl’s mother rushes in and finds her daughter sitting upright in bed on her knees, stabbing herself repeatedly with a crucifix until she spurts bright red blood. It makes a horrible sound, like a dull knife goring through ripe fruit. You can just imagine the foley artists in postproduction going at a grapefruit like mad. The motion, and the slight thrust of the little girl’s hips as she does it, is violent, greedy, wrong. As she stabs herself, the little girl growls “Let Jesus fuck you” again and again, her eyes frantic and wide.

Chris rushes over to Regan and tries to grab the crucifix from her hand. Instead, the girl yanks her mother’s head into her bloody crotch and holds it there. “Eat me! Eat me!” she barks. When Chris surfaces, her frightened face is stained with her daughter’s blood. Regan then punches her mother with a strength well beyond that of a 12-year-old girl. Chris’s body hits the back wall with a loud thud. A dresser barrels inexplicably toward where she cowers in the corner, presumably propelled by the demonic force thrashing inside Regan. Chris gasps and dashes away just in time. For all the cultural fervor around the crucifix-masturbation scene, few people ever bother to point out that Regan also comes frighteningly close to committing matricide.

Before she leaves the room, Chris takes one last look and sees her daughter’s head spin slowly around, a full 360 degrees. The camera zooms up on the girl’s face—teeth jagged, skin pale, eyes not quite human—as she growls, “Do you know what she did? Your cunting daughter?”

William Peter Blatty considered this scene a necessary solution to a nagging plot problem: What is so horrible that it would drive an atheist to a priest? He had already done so much work establishing Chris as a logical and devoted nonbeliever that any sudden and dramatic conversion would seem entirely out of character. To make the plot progress in a logical way, Blatty needed a moment so appalling and unexpected that Chris would finally accept that something supernatural was at work. It had to shock her conscience into belief. And what is worse to imagine, in a country simultaneously puritanical and perverse, than a violently masturbating little girl?

The scene would not only solve a thorny narrative issue, it would also prove commercially viable: The crucifix-masturbation scene was an undeniable audience draw. Many people paid to see The Exorcist solely because, thanks to the dissoluion of the Motion Picture Production Code five years before, they could now watch something so graphic and shocking play out on an American screen.

A little girl, they must have whispered, masturbating with a crucifix.

*

Despite Friedkin’s colorful story about Linda Blair’s audition for The Exorcist, Blair has maintained that she did not know what masturbation was when she was cast, nor did she understand what was happening in this scene when it was filmed. In the documentary The Fear of God: 25 Years of The Exorcist, Blair says, “A child does not know what those words mean. … A child does not understand what masturbation is.” Blair describes shooting the scene as “very mechanical,” with Friedkin carefully directing her every move.

To counter the media storm claiming that Blair was psychologically disturbed by the intensity of her role, Friedkin and Blatty have always maintained that production was a fun and lighthearted affair for their young star. You can find photographs and footage online of Linda Blair laughing and smiling on the set, drinking milkshakes in her hospital gown and goofing off for the camera while bound to the bed. Friedkin even says he became a “surrogate father” to Blair, tickling her playfully before shooting particularly gruesome scenes and taking the time to explain things like lens types and lighting to her during moments of downtime. By most accounts, Blair was an incredibly bright and well-adjusted young girl, a “jewel,” according to Blatty, who never once complained about anything.

Blair, once again, counters this narrative. “I don’t think anyone has ever understood how hard it was on my end,” she has said of filming The Exorcist. From Blair’s perspective, it wasn’t that she never complained. It was that she did complain, but no one heard or understood.

Most famously, Blair was injured while filming a scene where her out-of-control body flails and thrashes on the bed, jerking up and down like a jackknife. To shoot the scene, Marcel Vercoutere, the notorious French special effects coordinator, strapped Blair into a remote-controlled harness that he operated with relish from the sidelines. In 1983 Vercoutere told Fangoria magazine,

I was the devil! … I had her strapped in there, and I was throwing her back and forth.   When does the acting start and the realism begin? To say she is being possessed and thrown and picked up, jiggled and bumped, and to get that horror and not going too far, not to hurt her, or bruise her. Up to a certain point, it’s for fun, then it starts to get more violent. And she starts to say, “Okay I’ve had enough.” Now that’s when you start!

Blair had no control over when the contraption stopped or started, or how fast her own body was made to move. Not surprisingly, she ended up injuring her back when a piece of the equipment came loose while filming.

“I’m supposed to be yelling, ‘Make it stop!’” Blair told Mark Kermode. “And that’s what I was yelling. But nobody realized I meant it.”

The crew brought in doctors and a masseuse to treat her injury.

“A child’s body will heal,” Blair said. “And I was very strong. But it was tough work.”

To produce the vomit that Regan must spew over the priests, master makeup artist Dick Smith devised a plastic mouth harness, not unlike a horse’s bit, which would pump pea soup into Blair’s mouth through a nozzle. Blair describes spending hours on set with her mouth wide open.

Though Blair’s body double, Eileen Dietz, has since claimed that she was actually the one forced to wear the bit, Blair nonetheless endured a string of equal discomforts at the hands of Smith and the production crew. The contacts she wore to turn her eyeballs white reportedly stung, and the glue used to secure prosthetic scars to her face burned and irritated her skin. For the possession scenes, when Friedkin kept the set at frigid temperatures, the crew wore old ski suits to keep warm. Blair, on the other hand, spent most of the day in a thin nightgown and long underwear, shivering and blue lipped, even as snow reportedly fell around her.

Actresses often describe the hours they spend in the makeup chair as a kind of excruciating and mind-numbing endurance test. Blair is no different, except that she did her time staring not only at her own transformation but also at the reflection of the grotesque Regan dummy used in the scene where her head does a 360, which Dick Smith insisted on keeping in her dressing room.

Of being forced to stare at her shadow-demon self for hours on end, Blair has said, “I didn’t enjoy the experience of being in its presence.”

*

Though Friedkin has stated over the years that Blair had no stand-in or substitute, it has since been officially acknowledged that snippets of the more graphic scenes were actually performed by a body double, Eileen Dietz. In the case of the crucifix masturbation, it is Dietz’s hands we see driving the blood-splattered crucifix into her crotch, not Blair’s. Dietz appears on and off again throughout the rest of the film, for a total of 28 and a half seconds. Warner Bros. was forced to do the calculation when Dietz, along with Mercedes McCambridge, sued for credit. Unlike McCambridge, who simply wanted credit for voicing Pazuzu, Dietz falsely claimed to have performed all of the possession sequences in the film. 

The ensuing public battle between Dietz and Blair was nicknamed “the Great Pea Soup War.”

Though the knowledge that young Blair was not in fact miming masturbation did little to stem rumors that she was psychologically deranged by the role (the world, it seemed, really did want her to be broken by it), some believe it did hurt her chances of winning Best Supporting Actress at the 1974 Academy Awards. The Oscar instead went to another child actress, the plucky 11-year-old Tatum O’Neal, who starred alongside her real-life father in Peter Bogdanovich’s black-and-white period piece, Paper Moon.

Blair didn’t win the Academy Award, but she did announce the award for Best Short Subject alongside actor Billy Dee Williams, who had recently won praise for his performance in the Billie Holiday biopic, Lady Sings the Blues. On stage, Williams asked Blair if she’d gotten around to watching her much-talked-about performance in The Exorcist. Blair cocked her head and smiled, preparing for one of those inescapable Oscars one-liners.

“Well,” she replied sagely, “I don’t like standing in lines.”

Though O’Neal made history that year as the youngest person ever to win an Academy Award, perhaps Blair deserves credit for a different Hollywood first. Hedy Lamarr may have performed the first on-screen orgasm in the film Ekstase, but Linda Blair will forever be marked by cinematic masturbation’s opening salvo, the sound of something sacred and sharp tearing through young female flesh.

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 Adapted from Night Mother: A Personal and Cultural History of The Exorcist by Marlena Williams, published by permission of Mad Creek Books. 

My new poetry book, The Shining, attempts to tackle many feelings characteristic of our current moment. The fear and isolation that we’ve all undoubtedly felt as we’ve battled the coronavirus pandemic over the past few years is merely one.

I remember early moments of our 2020 lockdown feeling as if I were trapped in The Shining movie, and that my old life of going outside was a distant memory. It wasn’t snowing outside my window, but the invisible forces of the deadly virus created a kind of storm that was unsafe to venture out into. As Bernadette Mayer’s poem “The Way to Keep Going in Antarctica” states: “Nothing outside can cure you, but everything’s outside.” I felt that longing for what was beyond my walls, and yet I couldn’t help but feel that everything was forever gone.

When Stanley Kubrick made The Shining (1980), he excised at least two scenes from the film before most people could see them. In one, Jack Torrance finds a magical scrapbook that explains some of the atrocities of the hotel. Another is a hospital scene where we see Wendy recuperating from the ordeal of her husband’s death (and murderousness), as well as her run-ins with ghosts.

The hotel manager, who we haven’t seen since he interviewed Jack for the job of hotel caretaker, now appears to console Wendy. He lets her know that her fears of the supernatural forces in the hotel were unjustified and that the authorities found no evidence of them. He also hands her a bouquet of bright red flowers. As he leaves the hospital wing where she is stationed, he sees Danny Torrance, Jack and Wendy’s son, and hands him a small ball. It is the same ball rolled to Danny by an unseen force from the open door of Room 237. We are meant to understand that the hotel’s devilish spirits live on—and that maybe they even live on within Danny and his mother.

From what I understand the hospital scene made it into the first showings of the film in LA and New York, but shortly after, Kubrick ordered his assistants to go into these theaters, splice the hospital scene out, and destroy the clips. All we have left are the screenplay and a few photographs, and the two scenes that bookend this empty space: Jack’s death in the frozen maze and the wall of photographs in the ballroom that place Jack at the hotel in 1921.

The Shining’s ending often confounds. Perhaps the deleted hospital scene would have given us more answers. In the pictures of the scene, Wendy’s hospital room looks plain, no frills at all. Her stare looks plain, too, and deathly blank, almost otherworldly as she attempts to find her way back to real life, after existing in the portal of the Overlook Hotel.

A hospital room is like a hotel room. Both are transitory, liminal spaces. You aren’t meant to stay in either and yet they are designed to make you feel “at home.” They provide all of the domestic trappings: a blanket, a pillow, a TV, a water cup. But these things are not necessarily objects that you would have chosen. They have no meaning to you. You are meant to not soil the sheets too much. For those same white sheets have to be bleached again and again for the next passenger on a trip to their own very specific hell.

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Lately, I’ve heard people that say that horror is having a “moment.” I certainly hope that’s true. In the last few years, I have been a superfan of horror gods like Jordan Peele, Ari Aster, Carmen Maria Machado, Victor LaValle, and Ottessa Moshfegh. I cannot wait to read McSweeney’s new horror issue, edited by the amazing Brian Evenson. I hope to see more horror everywhere. I hope that the future of art will be drenched in red.

Horror has always been a sort of friend to me. I grew up in the 80s, which is known as a golden age of the genre. I remember first learning about the power of horror at my local bookstore, seeing a VHS cover of the movie Carrie placed next to some paperbacks. (Like The Shining, Carrie is also based on a Stephen King book.) I couldn’t have been more than five or six, and the cover terrified me. It portrayed that apex scene, when Carrie’s school bullies dump blood on her at the school dance, just as she’s anointed prom queen. In a split second she goes from glory to humiliation, her pale pink dress drenched in red.

Her vengeful eyes seemed to look down on me with disgust. I felt somehow like her sadness and fear were all my fault. Maybe that was how I was supposed to feel. After all, I was witnessing her pain, so wasn’t I complicit in it? And yet, looking up at her on high, like a bloody goddess, I felt a kinship. Just like Carrie, I was often bullied as a child for being strange. I felt a sisterhood in the look in her eyes, too. I couldn’t place it then, but 40 years later—and millions of hours spent steeped in her genre—maybe now I can begin to.

There is a feeling to this moment in time that seems particularly bleak. Maybe every era feels this way. Maybe it’s the lens of my middle age and my own preoccupations with nihilism that make it seem so. But as we live in such a hateful, violent world barreling toward its own destruction, what else has the capacity to speak to us but horror? As the climate crisis, war, poverty, book banning, and mass shootings are in the daily news alongside the latest celebrity breakups, the very genre of horror isn’t a fantasy anymore. We can imagine a world that is as unforgiving as the cold monster running at us with an ax because that’s how the world feels now.

Or maybe that’s how it’s always felt, and now we are waking up to that. We are all in the haunted hotel. Now all we can do is save ourselves by climbing out a tiny window and rolling down a snowy hill.

Or maybe caring for each other is the only way to heal. I still believe in that. Maybe all we are is a witness to our joy and pain. And maybe a good horror story—a space where everything completely terrible is simply acknowledged—is a human embrace after all.

Working on The Shining, I certainly felt that way. Everything felt so awful when I started writing it one day in a frenetic rush. I had even turned away from poetry itself. And yet the ekphrastic dream of my good friends at the Overlook Hotel, a space in my imagination for 20 years or more—they beckoned me. Or no, they welcomed me. They embraced me as I entered their space. They witnessed everything I was and forgave me anyway. They gave me poetry back to myself.

Maybe horror itself is a space to heal. Where we can exist in the excised hospital room of our dreams. Maybe if we turn to the art that frightens us still, we can make it all make sense.

*

I’ve always loved Sylvia Plath’s poem “Tulips.” It’s a terrifying poem, and one that gives its own horrible answers. The persona is in a hospital room that somehow presents itself as a healing space, where all of the past—with its ferocious, passionate hurts—can be forgotten.

Instead, the persona is haunted by tulips given to them as a gift. Their redness is an omen for all that is outside of the room that they cannot get to. The tulips are “too red.” They are a “dozen red lead sinkers” who “eat my oxygen.” They are a “loud noise” that cannot be stopped, for they remind the persona that life outside still goes on.

When I look at the images from the deleted hospital scene of The Shining, I cannot stop thinking of Plath’s poem. Plath’s persona feels like Wendy. They are both subject to who enters, to who brings them the red flowers they didn’t ask for. To who heals them, not on their own terms but on terms that represent a larger system and structure within which they are merely pawns.

In the end of Plath’s poem, the persona feels the beat of their heart again. They have for a moment forgotten the low hum of pre-death and instead enter a space where seawater can come in and bring back mementoes from a “country” as “far away as health.”

In the end of “Tulips,” “the bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me.”

I hope so much that Wendy felt that way. That the bouquet of red flowers she was given bloomed with love. It’s hard to believe she ever came back from what happened to her. But I do hope that I am wrong. I hope someone eventually came along and loved her. Loved her with blooming, sheer love.

In the end of Mayer’s “The Way to Keep Going in Antarctica,” she writes: “If I suffered what else could I do.”

It’s true. What else can we do.

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Dorothea Lasky’s poetry collection, The Shining, is available from Wave Books.