Den of Geek New York Comic Con 2024 Special Edition

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▼WEBTOON

Webcomics are bigger than ever before and WEBTOON is leading the charge. This is how the South Korean born digital comics platform became an international phenomenon. PG. 56

▲HORROR PREVIEW

From original chillers to book adaptations and highly-anticipated sequels, there’s a lot of great horror coming to our screens in the next few months. PG. 36

BATMAN: RESURRECTION

1989’s Batman may have ended with the Joker’s death, but the Clown Prince of Crime still haunts the Dark Knight from the grave in the sequel novel Batman: Resurrection Writer John Jackson Miller tells us all about it. PG. 24

▲NOSFERATU

Cinema’s most grotesque bloodsucker returns in A24’s remake of the silent horror classic. Director Robert Eggers and stars Bill Skarsgård, Lily-Rose Depp, and Nicholas Hoult take us into their new nightmare. PG. 30

PIECE BY PIECE

Pharrell Williams has built an illustrious career in music as one of the industry’s foremost producers, writers, and performers. Now he’s ready to tell his story on the big screen, but this is no ordinary biopic. Director Morgan Neville tells us how he built the new LEGO animated documentary brickby-brick. PG. 12

PETER CAPALDI

Time can’t get enough of former Doctor Who lead Peter Capaldi. But in The Devil’s Hour, he plays a very different kind of time traveler. In our new chat with the actor, he reveals what fans should expect from the second season of the Prime Video hit. PG. 22

▼SPOOKY READS

If you prefer your scares on the page, we’ve got you covered. A classic summer camp slasher setup with an online twist, a father tries to solve his son’s grisly murder by writing fiction, a family reckons with the horrors of climate change, and more recommendations await you in our spooky book preview. PG. 18

◄GLADIATOR II

Ridley Scott returns to Ancient Rome for this unexpected sequel to the 2000 mega-hit. The director and stars break down the battles, decadence, and pure debauchery awaiting moviegoers this November. PG. 52

▲BLUMHOUSE GAMES

The house that horror movies built is making the jump to video games with indie titles for every kind of fan. We talked to the team making it all happen. PG. 48

ON THE COVER

Greetings and welcome to the spooky season edition and our favorite time of year. Keep your tinsel and bright-colored lights, or your splendid summer sun. Give us the shadows of Transylvania every time. It is there we find our exclusive cover story on Robert Eggers’ bold new Nosferatu, a movie about a young woman drawn to dark, unsettling things. We can relate, while discussing the undead with Eggers, LilyRose Depp, Nicholas Hoult, and Bill Skarsgård.

On the flipside of that Danse Macabre is a trip down memory lane with What We Do in the Shadows showrunner Paul Simms, complete with unseen behind the scenes photos, ahead of the final season. This issue also features a preview of horrors yet to come, including a Smile 2 chat with Parker Finn and Naomi Scott. We even find ourselves back in Ancient Rome with Ridley Scott, Connie Nielsen, and Fred Hechinger for Gladiator II! And what’s scarier than entering the Colosseum?

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Support Your Local Comic Shop!

The magazine you’re holding in your hands right now is available at these fine comic book stores nationwide.

CALIFORNIA (2) House of Cards and Comics, (3) Isotope Comics, (4) Crush Comics, (5) Fantasy Books and Games, (6) Comics Conspiracy, (7) Illusive Comics and Games, (8) SpaceCat, (9)

Atlantis Fantasyworld, (10) Comicopolis, (11) House of Secrets, (12) Hi De Ho Comics & Books, (13) Galaxy of Comics, (14) Golden Apple Comics, (15) Mega City One, (16) Secret Headquarters, (17) The Comic Bug, (18) Now or Never Comics

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Comics and Gaming

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HALLOWEEN ALL YEAR ROUND

A New Orleans comic shop that doesn’t need to wait for Halloween for a costume party.

BY JIM DANDENEAU

COMICS CULTURE is obsessed with cosplay, and as such, one would think Halloween would be a banger of a time for comic shops and fans to celebrate. That’s not necessarily true for More Fun Comics in New Orleans. “We don’t have to throw a costume party,” says DC Harbold, owner of More Fun Comics. “New Orleans does it for us.”

More Fun is in its 33rd year of operation and is one of the last two comic shops left standing in New Orleans proper. The shop was opened in 1991 by a couple of guys who got together “because they had a

nice collection,” Harbold tells us. “They were big Golden Age fans, hence the name More Fun Comics.”

The shop was a reasonably successful early Modern Era comics shop—a strong back issue selection, adding in the hot new format of the time, graphic novels, and building a loyal customer base to the point where they had enough business to spawn an offshoot that became the other remaining New Orleans shop, Crescent City Comics, until Hurricane Katrina decimated the city. “We survived that storm in 2005, [and] I came back reasonably soon

after the evacuation, really after only about a month,” says Harbold. “Lo and behold, I got back to the city, and the shop had electricity and was basically mostly functional.”

Harbold hustled to get the shop back to something vaguely resembling normal and did it despite not having a home of his own, which had been demolished by the storm. He worked with Diamond, the lone major comics distributor at the time, to schedule deliveries, managed shipping logistics to an isolated and brutally damaged city, and had the shop ready as residents started returning and looking for an island of normalcy. More Fun ended up picking up a bunch of customers from shops that couldn’t make it back, and developed their secondary identity in the process. “I think we were one of the first comic book stores to reopen on the Gulf Coast,” he says. “[And] literally just a little while after Katrina, I leaned into the vintage toy thing.”

Every shop in the greater New Orleans area has its own identity. They all carry the big books and have pull lists with weekly pickups. But one, by the college campus, specializes in gaming, while one in the suburbs has high-end graded

PHOTO CREDIT: DC HARBOLD

DC Harbold, owner of the store More Fun Comics.

comics; another is more familyoriented with drawing classes and book clubs, while More Fun is the spot for classic, hard-to-find toys. Post- Katrina, Harbold tells us, “...it started with [customers saying], ‘Hey, my parents have to knock down the shed. That’s where all my old toys are. You want me to bring them in here?’”

That profile has developed into an anchor product. More Fun has not only classic toys but a whole section of books about collecting old action figures. “I ordered a case full of that Rad Plastic book, about all the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles toys, and I have the He-Man hardcover and books about Star Wars collecting and G.I. Joe, those kinds of things” Harbold tells us.

WE DON’T HAVE TO THROW A COSTUME PARTY.

NEW ORLEANS DOES THAT FOR US. REALLY, ALL WE HAVE TO DO IS BE HERE.”

So More Fun is in good shape and thrilled to benefit from New Orleans’ party culture. “Once a month, there’s some sort of parade that goes down Oak Street, the street that we’re on, which is always a costume event,” he says. “We’ve got the Krewe of Chewbacchus, a Mardi Gras crew that’s sci-fi and comic book based that do all kinds of costume building and cosplay events and things… [and] the 501st [Legion, a group that cosplays very high end Imperial troops from the Star Wars movies], they’ll organize a thing for the kids… [but] really all we have to do is be here.” With any luck, they’ll be there for another 30 years.

More Fun Comics is located at 8200 Oak Street, New Orleans, LA 70118. If your shop does something unique or interesting, let us know @denofgeekus.

A LIFE IN LEGO

Pharrell Williams’ life story is told in LEGO in the unusual animated documentary, Piece by Piece. Director Morgan Neville builds the picture.

BY ROSIE FLETCHER

PHARRELL WILLIAMS is a legend. He’s one of the most influential artists of his generation, has had countless hits either as a performer or as a producer, has worked with an incredible roster of top music talent, won armfuls of awards, launched a fashion brand, and has even been nominated for two Oscars. And now he’s a LEGO figure.

Director Morgan Neville has also won a boatload of awards, including an Oscar for the documentary 20 Feet from Stardom. He has a rich history with documentaries, often focusing on tales from the music industry, and now he, too, is a LEGO figure.

“I did not know Pharrell and it was his idea,” Neville laughs from the back of a car on the way to the airport

when we ask about whose brainchild the LEGO angle was. He’s surprisingly sprightly given it’s 5 a.m. for him, so you can see why that energy might have appealed to Pharrell.

“The first meeting I had with him is not that dissimilar from what’s in the film,” Neville recalls. “I didn’t record our first conversation, but we reenacted it for the film. He explained it to me the first time, saying, ‘People wanted to make a documentary about me for a long time, and I’ve never been interested.’” It was only when Pharrell’s agent told him he could do it any way he wanted that it occurred to him to do it in LEGO.

And so, Piece by Piece was born. It’s a strange and wonderful beast: an animated biopic charting Pharrell’s

life; a colorful journey packed with music and flights of fancy. Starting with his upbringing in Virginia Beach, the film follows his gravitation toward music, his meeting and partnership with Chad Hugo and, later, Shay Haley, and his rise to stardom via production duo The Neptunes and band N.E.R.D.

“I’ve made a lot of music documentaries, and I think they work best when songs help drive the story,” says Neville. “So, a song like ‘God Bless Us All,’ which is the scene in the church, was a song Pharrell had written on an album about a friend of his. There was something gospel in the song, and I feel like this is the message that Pharrell got from his pastor growing up. So, I got Charlie Wilson

from the Gap Band to re-sing it. The track is Pharrell’s track, but then we added a choir and Charlie Wilson singing it, and then it becomes this whole other thing. Pharrell wrote songs for the movie, too. It was a great opportunity to really let the songs help drive the narrative.”

Because of the nature of the film, there were a lot of moving parts.

“I don’t know if anybody’s ever done a film like this,” Neville says. “We essentially made the film twice.” First, Neville shot a live-action documentary version of the film, complete with interviews. The talking heads in the movie are unsurprisingly stellar, with an eye-watering list that includes Kendrick Lamar, Gwen Stefani, Timbaland, Snoop Dog, Daft Punk, Jay-Z, Busta Rhymes, and more. But there’s also archival footage, clips from other movies, and moments of music history that were screened, edited, fine-tuned, and then sent over to the animation company.

Neville says he thinks of it in terms of three “gears.” “One was a kind of direct documentary gear where we had handheld footage or archive footage,

A young Pharrell in LEGO figure form in the colorful music doc, Piece by Piece.

The concept of telling Pharrell’s story via LEGO was the “Happy” singer’s own idea.

PHARRELL WILLIAMS

MORGAN NEVILLE

something that I just wanted to replicate one for one,” he explains. “Then, when people were telling stories, remembering things, it felt like people’s memories existed in a cinematic space. It’s an idealized version of how something happened. It’s like a movie scene. So I said, ‘Well, let those play cinematically.’ Later, when the music comes in, it plays fantastically, and anything can happen. So we go into outer space or underwater, whatever else.”

It frees up the documentary to really play within its visuals, with Pharrell swimming with giant fishes and communing with an enormous apparition of Neptune.

Fun fact: anything that’s animated in a LEGO movie also has to be buildable. It’s a cute detail that actually

I DON’T KNOW IF ANYBODY’S EVER DONE A FILM LIKE THIS.”

MORGAN NEVILLE

proved to be a bit of a challenge for Piece by Piece. It was important to Pharrell and Neville to be able to represent a lot of different skin tones, characters, and hair styles.

“I remember lengthy conversations about dreadlocks where we said, ‘Look, the dreadlocks on Pusha T should be thinner.’ They said, the problem is the dreadlock could break off, and a child could choke on it. And we said, ‘Yeah, but this is animated.’

They said, ‘It doesn’t matter.’ We found a compromise but it was interesting.”

The biggest challenge of all though? Dancing. “Bricks aren’t flexible,” says Neville. “How much can a head wiggle on a non-existent neck? And how much can you suggest motion where there isn’t motion? That was one of the things we realized early.”

In a movie full of dancing, they were fortunate to find a good workaround. During the section of the film that explores the phenomenon that was the song “Happy,” for example, where the video is packed with real people dancing to the song, the team were replicating real shots.

“We had a guide of what we were going for, and then it was just, how far can we push it.”

There are elements of musical, drama, comedy, and fantasy within the bricks of Piece by Piece, but Neville was keen not to lose the things that make documentaries special.

“Typically, in a LEGO movie, your main character wears one or two outfits the entire movie—Pharrell has something like 62 outfits in the movie,” he explains. “In animation, you control the world. In documentary, the world controls you.”

Piece by Piece is currently in theaters.

From top: Pharrell with collaborator Gwen Stefani; a young Pharrell gets his break.

SAM REID

The Vampire Lestat is ready to take

center stage.

BY LOUISA MELLOR | PHOTOGRAPH BY

1

Sam Reid was born in New South Wales, Australia, in 1987 and grew up on his family’s cattle farm. Instead of taking up farming, he went into the other family business and followed in the footsteps of his actor brother Rupert, whose career began on the 1990s soap Heartbreak High. Their sister Kali is also a TV and film producer.

3

Speaking of accents, it was Reid’s voice that got him cast as Lestat in AMC’s with the Vampire. Creator Rolin Jones told the show’s official podcast that his first response to seeing Reid’s chiseled face and “dreamy eyes” on the audition tape was: “No, no fucking way that guy.” Then Reid began to speak. “It was in his voice,” said Jones. “This guy feels like an alien and he feels other than us.”

4 Reid really did his homework to play Lestat. He re-read the entirety of Anne Rice’s book series; took French, Italian, and piano lessons; and by the end of season one, had grown his hair long instead of wearing extensions (he had to wear a wig to play Dale Jennings in seasons two and three of 1980s-set Australian drama The Newsreader).

5

Interview with the Vampire season three will adapt Rice’s 1985 novel

The Vampire Lestat, in which Reid’s character is a world-famous rock star. Luckily, Reid’s a talented singer who appeared in the West End production of acclaimed Bob Dylan stage musical Girl from the North Country Who sings Lestat’s songs? He does.

PAGE TO SCREAM!

Folk horror, twisted slashers, and a nightmare road trip in the best chillers of 2024

so far.

BY N ATA LIE ZUT TER

HEADS WILL ROLL

JOSH WINNING (G.P. PUTNAM’S SONS)

Summer camp slashers usually star teenagers, but here, Camp Castaway collects famous adults who have been canceled, including sitcom star Willow. After a viral tweet alienates her fans and fiancé, she relishes the opportunity to go electronics-free in the woods… until one of the campers winds up dead and beheaded. Now Willow and her fellow Hollywood rejects must unmask the killer if they have any hope of being welcomed back into the limelight.

I WAS A TEENAGE SLASHER

STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES (SAGA PRESS)

Stephen Graham Jones gets inside the heads of serial killers with impressive empathy, but his latest foray into the slasher subconscious is more of a darkly funny riff on horror movie tropes. Awkward social outcast Tolly Driver gets possessed by the zombie version of a kid who died from a prank gone wrong. An unwitting vessel, Tolly gets revenge on the cool kids, narrating the killing spree with the wry hindsight of middle age.

MODEL HOME RIVERS SOLOMON (MCD)

Speculative author Rivers Solomon recontextualizes the haunted house story through the lens of race and class: despite supernatural occurrences besieging the Maxwell family in their childhood home, they stubbornly cling to their uppermiddle-class lives as the only Black family in a gated Dallas enclave. But when the Maxwell parents die in an apparent murder-suicide, their estranged adult children return to confront the ghosts of their past and the bloody costs of upward mobility.

SMOTHERMOSS

ALISA ALERING (TIN HOUSE BOOKS)

In 1980s Appalachia, polar opposite half-sisters Sheila and Angie find common ground when two female hikers are murdered on the Appalachian Trail. While the teenage girls are accustomed to the dark magic of the mountain on which they live, this transgression provokes a ferocity from the land. Meanwhile the sisters must evade a more human danger and avoid becoming the killer’s next victims.

HORROR FOR WEENIES:

EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE FILMS YOU’RE TOO SCARED TO WATCH

EMILY C. HUGHES (QUIRK BOOKS)

Not everyone who likes horror is looking to be terrified; these self-proclaimed “weenies” want to know the twists, just without the jump scares. This horror guide breaks down 25 iconic films and crafts a cultural map of the social impact of these stories.

KILL YOUR DARLING

CLAY MCLEOD CHAPMAN (BAD HAND BOOKS)

Glenn’s 15-year-old son Billy was brutally murdered 40 years ago, and the killer was never found. But Glenn can’t move on, creating a scrapbook about the life Billy could have led. Hoping to find closure, he enrolls in a writing class to make sense of his son’s awful fate through fiction. But Glenn’s mix of memory and grisly imagining instead exhumes dark secrets from the past; solving the mystery might be worse than letting it be.

REST STOP NAT CASSIDY (SHORTWAVE PUBLISHING)

Even on the best of days, you wouldn’t want to get stuck in a gas station bathroom. But in this novella, this road trip rest stop threatens to become a prison for metal bassist Abe Neer. Locked inside in an effort to flee a googly-eyed attacker, Abe regrets his decision to pull over to the Trumbull Farms Snake and Spider House as he begins to hear something skittering and slithering through the vents.

THE UNMOTHERS

LESLIE J. ANDERSON (QUIRK BOOKS)

This debut’s eerie premise elevates well-worn tropes of folk horror: an insular small town that won’t divulge its dark secrets to the journalist writing a story about the inexplicable birth of a human child to a horse. The specifics are even more unsettling: the journalist is grieving her late husband and recent miscarriage, the town of Raeford survives on the equine industry, and this isn’t the first pregnancy to involve a horse (god).

THE NIGHT GUEST HILDUR KNÚTSDÓTTIR

TRANSLATED BY MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL (TOR

NIGHTFIRE)

Translated from Icelandic, this disturbing tale explores the psychological horror of sleepwalking. Physically fatigued from restless nights and mentally fatigued from dismissive doctors, Iðunn wears a pedometer to bed, only to discover that she walks 40,000 steps per night and wakes up smelling like the ocean. When she decides to investigate further using her phone camera, Iðunn discovers the deep-seated cause of her nocturnal wanderings.

A BETTER WORLD SARAH LANGAN (ATRIA BOOKS)

This social horror dystopian thriller speaks to our current moment as a family contemplates their escape from mounting climate change and political unrest. Plymouth Valley, an enclosed company town, promises brighter futures but demands gruesome costs from its residents, including bizarre rituals and the menacing mystery behind the upcoming Winter Festival.

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IN THE LOOP

Peter Capaldi’s time-traveling vigilante returns for the second season of The Devil’s Hour. BY

CHRIS FARNELL

THE DEVIL’S HOUR started out shrouded in secrecy. During the season one press tour, Peter Capaldi couldn’t give away more than that he played a serial-killing vigilante with “some degree of clairvoyance.”

The finale showed that Capaldi’s character, Gideon Shepherd, was living his life in a time loop. He used his foreknowledge to right wrongs, to violent effect if necessary. His superpower was revision, the ability to memorize a lifetime of grisly crimes in order to prevent them happening the next time around.

“It’s not very glamorous, is it?” Capaldi laughs. “A superhero with a uniform made of notepads.”

Season one presented Capaldi with a new kind of acting challenge.

“I was basically chained to a table for two weeks,” he says, remembering the interrogation room set in which he spent most of the first season. “Usually, one of the things I do when I’m acting is to try to find movement, energizing scenes, finding things to do, walking in and out, sitting down. When you couldn’t do any of that at all, that was very interesting.”

CAPALDI UNCHAINED

When we speak to Capaldi, he’s just read an “enormous” email from Amazon dictating what he can’t talk about. But he can confirm that in season two he’s no longer chained to that table. Gideon Shepherd is out and about.

“It was all a bit action-y,” Capaldi says. “If the first [season] was a kind of dark, unsettling, cosmic, supernatural story, this is slightly more thrilleresque. The characters are out in the world trying to stop things happening.”

In season one, Capaldi played the only character fully aware of the time loop, but he didn’t let that knowledge weigh him down.

“It sounds contrary because of the nature of this character, but I like to try to be in the moment and alive to what’s happening in that scene and making it feel real,” he explains. “That means, to some extent, removing foreknowledge. [Gideon] has knowledge of how things are going to fall, rather than what will happen moment to moment.”

In season two, Gideon will have an ally in the form of social worker/ detective (depending on the timeline) Lucy Chambers (Jessica Raine). Lucy will help Gideon hunt a new threat, and while she’s more aware of the time loop this time around, she still has a lot to learn.

“She doesn’t understand the way that [Gideon] understands, and his own understanding of what’s going on is challenged also,” Capaldi says. “He’s

Q&A Jessica Raine is Lucy Chambers

⊲ How did you keep Lucy Chambers’ different timelines straight?

There’s a system on the script with an asterisk for a certain timeline, a circle for another, and a hashtag for another. I just read it and read it and read it and had to read it in complete silence.

⊲ What was it like shifting from a ghost story in season one to a thriller in season two?

Gideon Shepherd (Peter Capaldi) with the giant mind map he uses to keep track of the time loops.

been pursuing this target for a long time, or many, many loops. He’s surprised to find his idea of what it all means changing. He’s not quite as smart as he thought he was. The universe and the cosmos are smarter and darker.”

A TALE OF TWO TIME TRAVELERS

We can only talk about The

Devil’s Hour’s meddling time traveler for so long before invoking that other time traveler. How does Gideon differ from Doctor Who’s Twelfth Doctor?

“It’s not for me to judge that it is different! Many years ago, a wise old actor said to me, ‘You don’t become the part; the part becomes you.’

All the characters I play are essentially versions of myself, for good or for bad.

“The Doctor understands almost everything, which is why he’s so

I’ve got a secret desire to play an action hero, which was fulfilled in season two and especially in season three. It was a real shift from being very reactive to the so-called hauntings and questioning her sanity, to this season where she has full knowledge of what’s happening.

⊲ What was it like working with child actor

Benjamin Chivers as Lucy’s son Isaac?

Benji just turned up like a gift. We could not believe our luck. We shot bits of season two, scenes that needed Benji, during the filming of season one

difficult to play,” Capaldi explains. “Gideon’s not like that. He’s human. He only has his human capacity to draw upon.”

Despite keeping it close to his chest, Capaldi also understands everything—at least everything that will happen in The Devil’s Hour. He’s already filmed the third and final season.

THE DOCTOR UNDERSTANDS ALMOST EVERYTHING, WHICH IS WHY HE'S SO HARD TO PLAY. GIDEON'S NOT LIKE THAT. HE'S HUMAN.”

PETER CAPALDI

“Some months ago, we wrapped on season three. It goes onto another level then, but it definitely concludes,” Capaldi says.

Of course, with a TV series about time loops, even the most definite ending may not be all that definite.

“If you’re sharp enough, you’ll see that everything that goes on now in season two is pointing to what happens in season three,” Capaldi concludes. “Which in itself reaches back to season one….”

All episodes of The Devil’s Hour season two drop Oct. 18 on Prime Video.

because kids grow so fast!

There were isolated scenes that Tom [Moran, creator] knew he would need for season two, which we fitted in while filming season one, when we didn’t even know if we would get renewed!

⊲ Do you really believe that Gideon Shepherd has never eaten a pain au chocolat despite having lived for 1,000 lifetimes?

You hear that and you’re like “What?!” I’m the same, to be honest.

— CHRIS FARNELL

PARTY LIKE IT’S 1989

Writer John Jackson Miller returns to Tim Burton’s Gotham with the novel Batman: Resurrection, showing how Joker changed the city after the 1989 blockbuster film. BY JOE GEORGE

JOHN JACKSON MILLER watched 1989’s Batman 12 times in the theater. As a reviewer for his college paper, Miller went into the film with low expectations, burned by the poor adaptations of the past, but was thrilled to find a movie that reflected the richness of the comics he loved.

And yet, there was one nagging issue he couldn’t get over, one moment that just didn’t make sense, no matter how many times he revisited Batman

“Hey, bat-brain, I was a kid when I killed your parents!” Joker says during his final confrontation with Batman, implying he knows Batman is the son of Thomas and Martha Wayne. Sure, Batman had just told Joker, “You made me first,” but nothing in the film suggests that Jack Napier would have any idea that Bruce Wayne is Batman.

“I wanted to explore that moment,” Miller tells Den of Geek. “I don’t know if it’s a blown line or just a stub left over from one of the rewrites, but I’m going to take the line as it is and see where I can go with it.”

Such niggling questions helped Miller write Batman: Resurrection, a novel that explores the aftermath of Batman. Miller takes readers through a city still reeling from the Joker’s attack, now vulnerable to a new threat.

“I decided to deal with the question and come up with something where we have more than one meaning to

the word ‘resurrection.’ I looked at the model for the Burton movies and borrowed the “Re” from Batman Returns for Batman: Resurrection,” he explains. “Exactly what or whom is being resurrected, we won’t say yet.”

However, Miller will reveal one person caught in the wake of Joker’s destruction: a frustrated actor who takes the name Basil Karlo and, after

an encounter with Smylex-tainted make-up, transforms into Clayface, a grotesque shape-shifting monster from the comics.

“I wanted a protagonist/antagonist who fits the Tim Burton aesthetic,” Miller says of Clayface. “All of his characters are broken in some way, shape, or form. I took the Golden Age Clayface Basil Karlo and made him

Michael Keaton’s Batman, flanked by TVs showing Jack

1989 movie.

more sympathetic and tragic. I wanted to tie his tragedy to something from the first movie.”

Miller cites a line from legendary critic Gene Siskel’s review of Batman Returns as a guiding principle when making his version of Clayface. “He called it ‘an opera about loneliness.’ I thought that was wonderful because the movies are about lonely people versus people who have someone. They’re all on paths and colliding with one another, hoping to get to some position where they can be whole.”

Those collisions take readers into contact with characters who show up in later films and even with Batman ’89, the DC Comics series from Sam

I WANTED A PROTAGONIST/ ANTAGONIST WHO FITS THE TIM BURTON AESTHETIC. ALL OF HIS CHARACTERS ARE BROKEN.”

JOHN JACKSON MILLER

Hamm, screenwriter of the original Batman, and artist Joe Quinones.

“We can see how the Joker impacted everybody. We see what Max Shreck thought of the Joker; we see what Selina Kyle thought of the

Joker. We can see the wreckage of what this guy did to the world.

“I wanted the book to show how Commissioner Gordon’s approach to police work has changed with this vigilante running around, how Harvey Dent has to charge criminals brought in by Batman, how business leaders like Shreck deal with Batman and the Joker. And I wanted to show what happened with Joker’s crew.”

Indeed, a surprising amount of Batman: Resurrection features Lawrence, the shades-wearing, boombox-carrying goon in the Joker’s entourage, as well as the wisecracking reporter Alexander Knox.

But, as much as the novel checks in with these other Gothamites, including a mastermind who reveals themselves late in the narrative, Miller assures readers that Batman: Resurrection is still a story about the Dark Knight.

“This is a mystery novel because Batman is the world’s greatest detective,” Miller explains, teasing that the book also turns the focus on Bruce’s psychology. Where villains fall into madness because of their loneliness, “Bruce is saved largely because he has Alfred there as a good mentor who guides him.”

Thanks to this focus, Miller doesn’t worry as much about the incredible expectations that greet Batman: Resurrection in 2024, a year in which even casual audiences know the minutiae of lore. While the book is a sequel to the film, it exists in its own pocket universe.

“I hope that people will come to this as an Elseworlds story inspired by these films, but nothing we do here will constrain anyone from doing something else down the line.”

So if a Batman: Resurrection reader doesn’t understand how a line from the novel fits, they shouldn’t worry about it. Or, they could think about the line for decades and use it to launch their own amazing story, just like Miller did.

Batman: Resurrection is available in bookstores now.

Nicholson’s Joker in Tim Burton’s

SAY WHAT?

Quotes of the month from Den of Geek exclusive

interviews

.

“WE GO BOWLING. WE EAT A LOT OF ICE CREAM. WE DO STICKER PLAY.”

“We could have 1999 over and over, and over again. You can have The Matrix and Magnolia, and American Beauty, and Blair Witch, and Sixth Sense all in that one year.”

— M. Night Shyamalan on lack of industry risk-taking.

“I think she would have killed him.”

—

Jenna Ortega on what Wednesday Addams would make of Beetlejuice.

“They’re hon est, I don’t thi nk they’re r ight.”

— Singer-songwriter Sean McVerry on covering SpongeBob’s “Ripped Pants” on the debut episode of

— Jeffrey Dean Morgan on the innocence of children.

COMIC-CON CARNIVAL

Den of Geek returned to San Diego Comic-Con with an unprecedented slate of parties, interviews, and activations.

PORTRAIT STUDIO

Bruce Campbell Hysteria!

Cailee Spaeny Alien: Romulus

Sara Martins Those About to Die

Assad Zaman Interview with the Vampire

Daveed Diggs Snowpiercer

Karen Fukuhara The Boys

WOMEN IN ENTERTAINMENT

SPONGEBOB 25TH ANNIVERSARY PARTY

GOLIATH POWER SABER PARTY

(Above L-R) Carolyn Lawrence, Clancy Brown, Vincent Waller, Marc Ceccarelli, Tom Kenny, Rodger Bumpass, and Bill Fagerbakke during the SpongeBob 25th Anniversary shindig with Nickelodeon and Den of Geek (Left) Our special edition magazine next to a plate of Krabby Patties.

Den of Geek and Goliath celebrated the launch of the Power Saber with a special party at the historic Horton Grand Hotel in the Gaslamp Quarter. The first 250 attendees received the first-ever saber that fully auto-extends and retracts.

Den of Geek was proud to host the Wonder Women in Entertainment and Media Happy Hour, where fellow badass ladies breaking glass ceilings in the industry gathered to talk about their experiences working in media, while enjoying a complimentary Den of Geek x Mission Brewing exclusive beer.

Lily-Rose Depp stars as Ellen Hutter, a young woman with a mysterious connection to the film’s dark forces.

Robert

Eggers, Bill Skarsgård, Lily-Rose Depp, and Nicholas Hoult offer an unsettling first look

at Nosferatu’s resurrection.

BY DAVID CROW

athed in light and shadow, past and present, the castle looming over Robert Eggers and his companions is haunted by its history. It was here, at Pernštejn Castle, that Werner Herzog filmed his reimagining of the German Expressionist classic Nosferatu (1922), and it is here again, more than a hundred years after the original F.W. Murnau masterpiece, that Eggers is attempting to make the most famous vampire story his own.

In a location that actor Nicholas Hoult describes as “cold in terms of a feeling and isolation,” the darkness has been penetrated, by upwards of a hundred candles. These rushlights are not intended to be seen in the film, but cinematographer Jarin Blaschke has agreed with Eggers to shoot all the Transylvanian-set scenes exclusively by candlelight—an ambitious task for any vampire movie, much less one captured on celluloid. The bold choice means on another such night, in a dark and shrouded set-build, the first time Hoult and most of the crew will even see Eggers’ vampire—the moldering Count Orlok (an unrecognizable Bill Skarsgård)—will be in this dance between light and dark. And every dance has its quirks. “I had all the prosthetics pieces and the big fur coat,” Skarsgård recalls with a smirk. “And Jarin would have hundreds of candles, and the way he would light a face would just be like, ‘Light more candles; kill these four

candles; light those up.’ I remember being very hot and sweaty.”

It’s not necessarily the effect one expects in the presence of a vampire, but it was satisfying all the same to Eggers and Skarsgård. After all, the pair have chased the demon for nearly a decade.

Years and years before castle sets, there was a moment when Eggers looked poised to make Nosferatu his second feature following The Witch. The vampire remake was announced in the trades back in 2015, and Eggers fielded immediate interest from many actors, including Skarsgård, who auditioned for several roles before being cast as Thomas Hutter (Hoult’s character in the eventual film). Plans obviously changed, and Eggers went on to make The Lighthouse and The Northman instead, but his vision of a vampire never faltered or shifted. According to Skarsgård, “I don’t think it changed all that much in terms of the

Nicholas Hoult as Thomas Hutter and Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Friedrich Harding.

dialogue and the structure and the payoff, and how weird and twisted it is, how it’s occult and demonic.”

What did evolve was Eggers’ confidence. Nowadays, the research-intensive filmmaker appears quite comfortable stepping into the shadow of Murnau and Herzog and unearthing something unique in the gloom.

“I don’t know that my intentions were all that different,” Eggers explains, “but I wouldn’t have had the experience and skills to have made it as well as I made it now.”

At last he has found the right moment to unleash an image which has given him no peace: an image of a vampire stripped free from a century’s worth of cinema and fantasy, humor and irony. With a wry smile and small nod to his Lighthouse star Robert Pattinson, Eggers even muses: “We need to find where the fear is in this archetype and bring it out again, and put to bed my friend Rob’s sparkling vampire.”

RAISING THE DEAD

When we catch up with Eggers and his troupe, the singular auteur is in a strange place. The movie he’s dreamed about for so long is finished, with the edit locked back in April, yet closure remains elusive. Not until Orlok is out in the world spreading love and pestilence will the experience be complete, and unlike every other Eggers film that was tinkered with until the last minute, the director is getting a chance to catch his breath ahead of Nosferatu’s Christmas Day release. (It’s a date he insists makes total sense: “There’s a Christmas tree in the movie, so what else do you want?”)

At the moment, the director seems content, having fulfilled his goal of going way back with Nosferatu, including before Murnau and German Expressionism came along. While like the 1922 original, Eggers’ Nosferatu is based on Bram Stoker’s immortal novel Dracula from 1897, the new film is set even earlier than Stoker’s prose, with the film taking place in 1830s Germany. In this context, Eggers seized on an opportunity to immerse himself in “the learned occult knowledge” of the early 19th century, as well as the older vampire folklore that inspired it.

“Why were people digging up corpses, staking them, cutting their heads off, and burning them?” Eggers posits. “Because they really believed in vampires. Where does that come from? How is that potent?” The filmmaker’s extensive search for an answer took him well into the obsessions of Albin Grau, the producer and production designer on the original Nosferatu who was also a practicing occultist. Eggers went so far as to rename the Van Helsing-like character in

the new movie, Albin Eberhart Von Franz (played by Willem Dafoe), after Grau and Jungian psychologist MarieLouise von Franz. The director’s quest for authenticity likewise led him to retain certain elements of Murnau and Grau’s iconic Orlok design (the talons are still there) while reinterpreting others.

“My main goal was to ask, ‘What would a dead Transylvanian nobleman look like?’” Eggers says. “The hairstyle and all of the clothing, and all the trappings come down to that, and then creating a scary, imposing, masculine vampire rather than a sad vampire, although Bill still adds some needed pathos in a few moments.”

Skarsgård indeed brings a wounded ferocity to the character while vanishing in Orlok’s design. The Swedish actor reveals he would sit for six hours in the makeup chair for full-body prosthetics, which was only the beginning. Since Eggers’ Orlok is supposed to have once been a 1500s

Director Robert Eggers on the set.

sorcerer who survived the grave, Skarsgård felt liberated in other areas.

“There’s no historically accurate accent of what that would sound like anymore,” Skarsgård explains. “He could possibly be Hungarian or he could be Romanian. So I just took little things, idiosyncrasies that they possibly would have, like rolling Rs, without going too Bela Lugosi. It was just finding these little things to anchor it in.”

A TALE AS OLD AS TIME

Skarsgård might intentionally avoid Lugosi, but as a lifelong Dracula fan, he notes that Nosferatu follows “one of the greatest horror stories ever told.” It’s a myth Eggers recreates with the care of accursed scripture.

Set in 1838 in the fictional Baltic port city of Wisburg, Nosferatu finds two young lovers, Thomas Hutter (Hoult) and his wife Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp), separated when Thomas gets the offer of a lifetime to sell real estate to an eccentric nobleman in the Carpathians. Viewers might guess where this is headed, but what will be unnervingly new is the psychic, nigh perverse connection that Depp’s Ellen has had with Orlok since childhood. He is a presence that’s always walked beside her, and now he is coming to be with her in the flesh. Unfortunately, he brings with him all the plagues and pestilence of antiquity.

Says Eggers: “One of the things that I like about the Murnau version taking place earlier [than Dracula] is… Dracula is moving to London because it’s one of the hubs of the Western world and he’s eventually hoping for world

NOSFERATU’S TRUE BELIEVER

THE GENIUS BEHIND Nosferatu’s undying magic is credited to director F.W. Murnau, but the inspiration to make a vampire film— one illegally adapted from Dracula, no less —belongs to the film’s production designer and producer, Albin Grau.

Born in the 19th century and molded by it, Grau was an artist, an architect, and a practicing occultist who believed in alchemy. In his lifetime, the filmmaker was acquainted with the infamous Aleister Crowley (an alleged Satanist, though he refuted such descriptions), and was a member of several occult societies, including the Order of the Oriental Templars. Grau also co-founded Prana Film, the studio that produced Nosferatu, under a name that in Sanskrit roughly means “the life-giving breath.”

Ahead of Nosferatu’s release, Grau told a newspaper that he was inspired to make the movie while serving in the First World War, where he met a Serbian farmer who said his father rose from the dead to feed on the blood of the living.

Robert Eggers says of Grau: “He had some salacious stories when he was doing press that were a little bit cartoony, but I think Albin Grau probably did believe in the existence of vampires or psychic vampires.”

Eggers regular Willem Dafoe plays vampire hunter Albin Eberhart Von Franz.

domination. Whereas Orlok just seems to want Ellen. It therefore becomes a little bit more of a simple fairy tale.”

Simplicity can deceive, though, and one of the most intriguing new complexities of Nosferatu (2024) is that it fully becomes Ellen’s story.

“She’s somebody who’s been plagued with this darkness that’s always been around her,” Depp tells us. “She’s felt this pull since she was a little girl. So I think she felt a lot of shame for it and a lot of loneliness… and she was really calling out for some kind of companionship, and she found it in this demonic force. In Orlok.”

It’s a take on the material that a Dracula aficionado like Depp instantly fell in love with when she read the script, and which she fought to realize on the big screen. In fact, more than a few folks who saw the movie asked Eggers if, during the scenes of Ellen’s “convulsions,” when she appears to be communing mentally and physically with the vampire, her contortions were achieved with CGI. Nope. Depp worked with movement choreographer Marie-Gabrielle Rotie to develop each of those scenes during months of prep, finding inspiration in Japanese butoh dance. And even before getting the part, she floored Eggers and his casting director by auditioning, unprompted and over Zoom, with her early interpretation of Ellen’s possession.

“I kind of did something totally wild and weird,” she says. “I threw stuff, I threw myself on the ground, I just went nuts.” The director offered her the role the same day.

BUILDING WISBURG ANEW

One of the advantages of Nosferatu being the director’s fourth movie is the freedom to finally go big. Larger than

WE NEED TO FIND WHERE THE FEAR IS IN THIS ARCHETYPE AND BRING IT OUT AGAIN, AND PUT TO BED MY FRIEND [ROBERT PATTINSON’S] SPARKLING VAMPIRE.

— ROBERT EGGERS

any of his previous undertakings, Nosferatu saw the construction of around 60 sets in Prague: massive all-encompassing spaces that recreated a Germany with still one foot in the early-modern era, and a Transylvania that is positively medieval. (The filmmakers also traveled to the real Transylvania for some wide exteriors at Hunedoara Castle.) Eggers says it is “like if Merchant Ivory did a Hammer horror movie.”

The bigger scope similarly frees Eggers to indulge in longer single takes, evocative of 1940s Hollywood, as well as a more heightened way of speaking among the characters. The writer-director points out this is due to the protagonists’ well-to-do standing versus Puritan farmers or Viking warlords. “In the English language, we’re sort of in late Jane Austen, early Charles Dickens, and that gives a different formality to the speech.” As with his previous movies, Nosferatu perennially comes back to the research.

“He’s very good at distilling [history] into the script,” Hoult explains. “That was one of the things I noticed and loved about it. How descriptive it is in terms of era-specific

language and moments. It almost feels like you’re reading a novel with dialogue interspersed in.”

Also like other Eggers movies, a commitment to authenticity can lead to adversity. For his part, Hoult remembers filming one sequence in wintertime Prague where, to make the rain visible on candlelit film, he was asked to lie in the mud and beneath a rain machine set to “heavy” in the dead of night. After a few takes of being drenched in ice-cold water, “Rob was very nice and said, ‘You need to warm up,’ because I was shaking violently.”

Depp similarly has a convulsions scene where Ellen falls under a spell while sitting by the sea. Despair over Thomas’ absence transforms into bestial mania. “We started shooting

in February, so it was pretty frisky in Prague,” Depp chuckles. “And the water was absolutely freezing… but it’s putting me even more in the circumstance. I don’t have to pretend I’m cold and freaking out. I’m actually cold and freaking out.”

Yet Eggers is quick to note that Nosferatu is less about the physical conditions than the “high stakes” of the emotions endured by the story’s three leads.

DEATH AND THE MAIDEN

More than German Expressionism, it is the aesthetics of great Romantic painters like Johan Christian Dahl and Caspar David Friedrich that inspired Eggers and Blaschke’s visual palette on Nosferatu. The film is a lush mix of wintry hues. Even so, the central underlying fear stems from something much older. From Nosferatu’s first scene, the way Orlok stalks Ellen intentionally evokes medieval and early Renaissance motifs: the Danse Macabre, Death and the Maiden, the Daemon Lover. They’re images of death consuming youth. At its base foundational level, it links eroticism and death.

“I just think they’re linked in humanity,” Eggers considers. “Like I don’t think it would take Freud to tell a caveman that when a spear penetrates an animal it is similar to a phallus penetrating a vagina. You pull the spear out. What does it look like? I think that it is just linked, however frightening the idea may be to certain mores, and I think that’s kind of interesting in the horror world.”

In this vein, Depp sees Ellen’s draw toward Orlok as tragic since she is so deeply in love with Thomas. He is genuinely good for her, but there’s something inviting about darkness.

“I think that it touches a lot on taboo and being drawn to something that scares you,” the actress says. “A lot of people live with a true fear of death, understandably so, but we’re kind of drawn to it and intrigued by it… because it’s the most terrifying thing, it’s the most titillating thing.”

Perhaps it is the actor who plays Death himself who can best make sense of Orlok’s thrall. In Skarsgård’s mind, the vampire represents anything humans are drawn to despite knowing better. “It could be an addiction, it could be an abusive relationship, it could be all of those things,” Skarsgård says.

“He’s the embodiment and allure of attraction to destruction.

Sometimes you want to be destroyed or you want to be corrupted, and that’s Ellen’s inner struggle. Then sometimes, from Orlok’s perspective, it’s the craving to destroy that which you find so beautiful.”

The terror of Nosferatu is we are naturally, and forever, drawn toward it.

Nosferatu opens in theaters on Dec. 25.

Willem Dafoe’s Professor Von Franz is loosely based on Dracula’s Van Helsing.

Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp) on a stroll with her friend, Anna Harding (Emma Corrin).

BY ROSIE FLETCHER | ILLUSTRATIONS BY CHLOE LEWIS

Smi le 2

IN THEATERS ON OCT. 18.

Director

Parker Finn and star Naomi Scott bring a sequel to make horror fans grin.

THERE ARE FEW THINGS more friendly and welcoming than a smile. Or so you might have thought before the release of the hit horror of the same name in 2022.

Now, two years after the wild success of Smile, director Parker Finn is back with a follow-up.

“We wanted to make sure that we were coming back to do a sequel that felt really worthwhile,” Finn tells Den of Geek. “We wanted to have something that felt unique and really its own thing.” Smile follows a therapist who witnesses a patient take their own life and finds herself cursed by a strange entity that manifests as strangers displaying a menacing grimace, who predict her own imminent death. It’s a neat premise, but Finn is keen not to make Smile 2 a rerun of the original.

“The challenge became an opportunity,” he says. “In the first movie, there’s a lot of mystery, and the audience is learning about it as the character is. In the second movie, they’re coming in with more knowledge than where the character is. With the audience potentially being ahead of the character, I wanted to lean into that and see if I could use that against the audience and invite them in. And I love this idea of partway through the movie if the audience might start to feel like, ‘Oh, wow, wait. Am I the evil? Am I doing this to the character?’”

The film picks up where Smile left off, but this time, our protagonist is Skye Riley (Naomi Scott), a pop sensation about to embark on a big tour when she witnesses a suicide.

“[Naomi] sings all of the songs in the film and she does all of the choreography. She is a force of nature, a quintuple threat,” Finn says. “The most important thing for me, though, was the harrowing, dramatic journey that the character goes on.”

Scott, who is best known for playing Princess Jasmine in Disney’s live-action Aladdin, says she felt like she really understood the character of Skye when she read the script —the trauma of her past, and her fractious relationship with her mother (Rosemarie DeWitt). “It really does feel like a character piece where I get to run the gamut of emotion, and it is rooted in something that requires a

grounded performance,” she says. “But then I get to go to all these just flipping unhinged places and really go for it.”

Then there are the big song-anddance numbers that Scott performed, working with choreographer Celia Rowlson-Hall. “It feels like the role that I probably needed the most prep for but got the least because of how quickly this movie came together,” Scott says. “There are pros and cons to that. Honestly, there’s something to be said for just being dropped into

something and just being like, right? Go for it. Don’t overthink it.”

Check out the film’s trailers, and you’ll see Scott decked in elaborate costumes and owning the stage in between being stalked by strangers sporting disquieting grimaces. Expressions, Finn explains, that were not enhanced with any CGI.

“There are certain things that we do with head positioning and how we have them disconnect the smile itself from the top half of their face so that they almost have this dead-eyed stare,” he explains. “Then that’s mismatched with this too-wide smile.” We exchange “Smile” faces with Finn via Zoom. Finn’s is better.

The past few years have been quite the ride for Finn, whose short Laura

Hasn’t Slept (which was the genesis of Smile) played SXSW in 2020. Then, after Smile 2, he will be working on a remake of Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession, which he promises will “honor the original.”

A die-hard horror fan himself, Finn is excited for audiences to see a sequel he says is “bigger, scarier, weirder, crazier.” And that’s got to bring a smile to your face.

GENER ATION Z

PREMIERES ON CHANNEL 4 IN OCTOBER.

Horror maven Ben Wheatley takes on the state of the nation and zombies.

TWO THINGS TO KNOW about Ben Wheatley’s zombie horror TV show: they’re not zombies and they’re not actually dead. The six-part series from Channel 4 charts a zombie-esque outbreak in a small, rural, British town, sparking generational conflicts in the quarantined residents.

“It’s a biological weapon that has changed their biology. So it’s in the ballpark, but it’s easier to talk about it in sound bites of zombies,” says Wheatley. The director of horror hits including Kill List, High-Rise, Sightseers and, most recently, Jason Stathamstarring giant shark movie Meg 2: The Trench, had been planning Generation Z for some years, with the first announcements for the show released in 2019. But then Covid hit, and that changed everything. Sort of.

“I reread it, and I thought, well, it’s weird because the original drafts of it were predictive science fiction, but now it’s happened,” says Wheatley of reanimating the show post-pandemic. “Everybody’s got the experience of it. So, in a way, with that kind of context, I went into writing the rest of it, finishing up, and I think it was for the best. It gave a much more rounded view to all the characters having been through Covid.” In Generation Z, a spillage of some sort of chemical agent is the catalyst for the outbreak, and residents of a retirement home become the first affected. But, as Wheatley says—not zombies, not dead. In fact, these retirees are energized and ignited by the infection. They are hungry for flesh, but they are also hungry for freedom,

empowerment, and independence.

As much as it’s a gruesome horror (and it is; there is plenty of gore here) and a black comedy, Generation Z is a state-of-the-nation show, with a huge cast which reflects on generational disconnects, politics, the military, class, gender, and family. Wheatley says he took inspiration from postnuclear holocaust movie Threads (though this is nowhere near as bleak) and George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (“it’s political without banging it over your head”). And yes, it’s prescient and current, with conspiracy theories about the vaccine having caused the outbreak, youngsters being radicalized online, and the cost of living crisis being very real concerns.

Wheatley has rounded up a massive multi-generational cast, including

several bona fide British national treasures—Sue Johnston and Anita Dobson are among them—who get to play against type.

“I think they got to do stuff that they wouldn’t normally do on British telly. It was a stretch of the legs for them to get into all this,” says Wheatley. Without spoilers, this involves an orgy and plenty of ultra-violence.

Then, at the other end of the age spectrum, there’s the young cast. Wheatley says they saw loads of people and got their pick: “It was not really a discussion, we went, ‘Oh God, we’ve got to have them, because they’re terrific.’” This includes (among many others) Half Bad: The Bastard Son & the Devil Himself’s Jay Lycurgo, Somewhere Boy’s Lewis Gribben, and Viola Prettejohn from The Nevers. “We got to look under the hood of the next generation of British performers. I think I’ll be dipping back into Gen Z for casting for quite some time,” says Wheatley.

Though the show tackles a whole range of issues, the extended scope of TV (compared to film) was a big part of the appeal for Wheatley. “Being able to do a longform horror piece on Channel 4—that’s a big canvas,” he says. “You can actually get the advantage of television, which is to hear the characters and see them and see the challenges to them, without having to rush through. I wanted to show that kind of development, how they’re dealing with the world.”

Shot almost entirely on location over 14 weeks (the same amount of time it took to shoot Meg 2, he tells us), Wheatley promises a show that intensifies and escalates as it progresses. And could there even be scope for a second series?

“It’s all in the hands of the reviews and the audience,” says Wheatley. “I see it as changing genre each season. The zombieness of it, or whatever that is, will go away, and something else will happen. But we’ll be following these characters as they grow up.” Generation Alpha—not aliens? Only time will tell. — RF

Her et ic

The Monkey

FEB. 21, 2025 | Osgood Perkins writes and directs this cursed-toy chiller based on a 1980 short story by Stephen King. Theo James (The White Lotus) stars as estranged twins Hal and Bill who were tormented by the titular plaything as kids and who reunite as adults when the mysterious deaths start racking up again. She-Hulk’s Tatiana Maslany and Frodo himself, Elijah Wood, co-star, while the horror heritage is strong, too: Perkins, the son of horror legend and Psycho star Anthony, has had a recent hit with occult thriller Longlegs, while genre maestro James Wan (Saw, The Conjuring) takes on producer duties.

— RICHARD

JORDAN

▲NOV. 8, 2024 | Hugh Grant seems to be in a particularly carefree—and kind of brilliant—phase of his career. The one-time rom-com regular has thrown typecasting to the wind in recent times, gamely chewing the scenery in Paddington 2, geezer-ing it up in a couple of Guy Ritchie flicks, and even stealing the show as an Oompa Loompa in last year’s Wonka. So it may come as no surprise that the horror genre is next on his reinvention hit list. In Heretic, Grant plays a seemingly affable chap who invites in a pair of Mormon missionaries (The Fabelmans’ Chloe East and The Boogeyman’s Sophie Thatcher) for a chat about their religion. But what starts out as a cozy theological discussion soon descends into something much more menacing…. A Quiet Place story creators Scott Beck and Bryan Woods are on writing/directing duties, promising a gripping—and irreverent—chamber thriller with a standout turn from their leading man. — RJ

Nightbitch

DEC. 6, 2024 | Sometimes, a title is so good it can single-handedly sell a movie. But as intriguing and provocative as Nightbitch’s moniker is, there’s much more going for this surreal horror-comedy, based on the 2021 novel of the same name. Director Marielle Heller steered Melissa McCarthy and Tom Hanks to Oscar nominations in Can You Ever Forgive Me? and A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood respectively, so her collaboration with Amy Adams—

here playing an artist-turned-stayat-home mom whose maternal instincts start to manifest in canine form—is definitely one to watch out for. Scoot McNairy co-stars in a film that sounds barking. — RJ

Wolf Man

JAN. 17, 2025 | Horror hitmaker

Blumhouse continues its reimagining of the classic Universal Monsters with this modern-day remake of the 1941 creature feature. Coming off the back of his successful reboot of The Invisible Man, Leigh Whannell returns to helm this tale of Blake (Poor Things’ Christopher

Abbott)—a man who is attacked on a visit to his remote childhood home and begins a monstrous transformation. Trouble is, he’s brought his wife (soon-to-be Silver Surfer Julia Garner) and daughter along for a country retreat, putting them both in mortal danger. The original birthed the werewolf archetype as we know it, so this one has some big paws to fill…. — RJ

Pre sence

▲JAN. 17, 2025 | Steven Soderbergh has never been one to play things safe. The indie cinema pioneer burst onto the scene with 1989’s Sex, Lies, and Videotape, and, even after pivoting to more mainstream fare (Erin Brockovich, Magic Mike, the Ocean’s franchise), he’s never lost his experimental edge. That’s evident in full force in this supernatural chiller—a Sundance favorite that sets out to upend the haunted house movie. Lucy Liu stars in a spooky story of a family that moves to a new home in suburbia, soon realizing that they may not be alone. Not a hugely original premise, you might think, but the difference here is that Soderbergh and veteran screenwriter David Koepp (Jurassic Park, Spider-Man) present things from a ghost’s-eye view, allowing the adventurous auteur to mess with the medium. Sundance festival director Eugene Hernandez called it “as fresh and inventive as anything [Soderbergh has] made in his career.” — RJ

AND T HE RE S T…

There are plenty more horrors waiting to spook us in 2025.

⊲ Unlike Wolf Man, the Maggie Gyllenhaal-directed The Bride! (Sep. 26) is simply inspired by 1935’s Bride of Frankenstein, rather than fitting in directly with the Universal/Blumhouse monsters franchise. It looks set to impress nonetheless, with a big-name cast including Jessie Buckley, Christian Bale, and Penélope Cruz.

⊲ Meanwhile, you can expect a raft of sequels to major horror franchises. Some long-running series are getting new installments, starting with zombie threequel 28 Years Later (Jun. 20), with original director, writer, and star Danny Boyle, Alex Garland, and Cillian Murphy, respectively, returning.

Saw XI (Sep. 26) is set to continue the story of trapsetter Jigsaw after the wellreceived 10th chapter, while The Conjuring: Last Rites (Sep. 5) sees paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga) take on one last terrifying case.

⊲ Some of the biggest horror hits of recent times are getting second outings in 2025, too.

Ethan Hawke’s terrifying killer The Grabber is due for a resurrection in Scott Derrickson’s The Black Phone 2 (Oct. 17); the evil bears are causing more murderous mayhem in Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 (Dec. 5), and M3GAN 2.0 (Jun. 27) sees Jenna Davis’ eponymous AI back to slay another day. — RJ

M e mo r ie s Fangs f o r t he

WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS SHOWRUNNER PAUL SIMMS GUIDES US THROUGH SIX SEASONS OF BEHINDTHE-SCENES PHOTOS.

BY ALEC BOJALAD

S ince it first premiered in 2019, FX’s vampire mockumentary What We Do in the Shadows has been one of television’s most gleefully silly comedies. Through its five—soon to be six—seasons, the series, based on Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi’s 2014 film of the same name, has invited its central vamps to embrace all manner of absurdity.

Nandor the Relentless (Kayvan Novak) went from a fierce Ottoman warlord to a lazy superfan of the 1992 U.S. men’s Olympic basketball dream team. Nadja of Antipaxos (Natasia Demetriou) elevated herself from peasant girl beginnings to vampire nightclub owner (though she eventually burned the club down to claim an insurance policy she forgot to purchase). Laszlo Cravensworth (Matt Berry) stayed a British dandy with a penchant for particular enunciation throughout, while familiar Guillermo de la Cruz (Harvey Guillén) found his

1

Van Helsing heritage, and Colin Robinson (Mark Proksch) kept looking for energy to drain.

In addition to presenting the story of the Staten Island vampires, their neighbors, rivals, familiars, and friends, What We Do in the Shadows is also a testament to what good old-fashioned hard work can achieve. The show has always put its modest TV budget to good use, crafting lugubrious horror imagery that would make Bela Lugosi proud and Bram Stoker scream.

“We really worked hard to make it dumb,” says executive producer and showrunner Paul Simms.

On the eve of the show’s sixth and final season, Den of Geek was granted access to a collection of behind-thescenes photos, several of which have never been seen. These images chart the show’s rise from horror-comedy underdog to fandom favorite. Paul Simms provides his perspective on all the beautiful, bloody memories.

1. SEASON 6 EPISODE 3

That there is obviously Dr. Leslie Cravensworth, who we know as Laszlo. He’s in his underground scientific laboratory, which we hadn’t seen before until this new season. He’s selecting some eyes because he is going to finally return to his great experiment of using dead human tissue to create a New Man, which is one of the stories this season.

The other interesting thing about this is that, just on an emotional level, Matt is so funny, but he’s also a shy, reserved person. As the series went on, in a really positive way, I saw him become much more open. The last day of shooting was his 50th birthday, and so we brought him a birthday cake on set. He gave this great off-the-cuff speech. It was a thank you to everyone for his birthday, but it was also him talking about the show, what it meant to him, and how our whole Canadian crew had helped make it. It was very moving for me.

When you’re all stuck up in Toronto together for four months, and you’re away from home, you better be having fun at work, because that’s the main place you’re going to have fun.

2. SEASON 1 EPISODE 3 “WEREWOLF FEUD”

So much of this show is figuring out how to do things. Like how to have Nandor hold Guillermo over his head here. I think he’s showing Guillermo what it feels like to fly. To the right is our stunt coordinator Tig [Fong], who was such an integral part of the show. He just has this super “can-do” attitude. When we’re thinking of something, he always has a suggestion about how to make it better. We eventually promoted him to directing episodes.

When we first went to Toronto, the very first stunt we did was Laszlo getting his cape caught in a taxi door and dragged down the street. As we were preparing to do it, I said, “We’re going to be here for five hours. Stunts like these take forever.” And bam, on the very first take, it worked perfectly.

3. SEASON 4 EPISODE 1 “REUNITED”

The Nadja doll was supposed to be a one-time joke. And our costume designer Laura Montgomery just loved making the costumes that would always be miniature versions of Nadja’s costume. The fun is also in the details. If you look at the pattern on the doll’s dress, the cloth is a shrunk-down version of the pattern on Nadja’s.

There are three actual Nadja dolls in existence. There’s the main Nadja doll that we used on set there. There’s a stunt doll without any electronics inside that we used when she needed to be thrown around. And then there’s a Nadja doll that [prosthetics designer] Paul Jones made for Natasia for her birthday.

4. SEASON 5 EPISODE 3 “PRIDE PARADE”

There’s Paul Jones, our prosthetics person and creature creator, working with the Nadja doll. This is another one of those old-fashioned showbiz Hollywood moments like you imagine when you’re a kid. I’ve worked on shows where it’s just people sitting in a restaurant or people sitting in their living room, and here you come into work one day and there are three guys in skin-tight bodysuits that have to be green so they can be digitally removed later, operating puppets.

I think it says something about the whole show. It is incredibly silly and at times even stupid in a funny way. But we really worked hard to make it dumb. And it’s just fun looking at the silliest thing, which is this weird doll with a ghost inside of it, but everyone who’s working on it is very serious about making sure it gets done exactly right.

5. SEASON 2 EPISODE 9 “WITCHES”

This is a fairly accurate summary of what it’s like to shoot in Toronto during the winter. Production design-wise, it looks great because they’re in real snow. Lifestyle-wise, it’s just miserable. Everyone is freezing cold. In later seasons, we got better at figuring out ways to shoot more inside or have exterior scenes that were at least enclosed. But at the very beginning, we didn’t anticipate the stress it puts on everyone to do that.

In fact, in the very first week of shooting, one of the scenes we shot was Laszlo, Nandor, and Nadja levitating up to the third floor of a window. The weather was like this, except with more sleet, and they were hanging from cables by a crane. It wasn’t until much later that Matt Berry confided in us that he’s terribly afraid of heights, and he was not having an easy time.

6. SEASON 3 BEHIND THE SCENES

It’s fun seeing Kayvan laughing like that and out of character. Each actor prepares differently. The show seems very loose and improvisational, and there is a lot of improv, but Kayvan’s approach was to really study his script and work on how he was going to say something.

With The Guide, it was a combo of how much we love the character and how much we love Kristen Schaal that made us bring her back. You can see from the picture how much fun she is to be around.

It’s the same thing with Anthony [Atamanuik]. He was supposed to be a one-time joke as Sean the neighbor. Even Colin Robinson was not originally supposed to be as big a part of the show. He was a guy that we thought would pop in every three or four episodes, but he was so funny that he became as integral as all the other characters.

7. SEASON 2 EPISODE 1 “RESURRECTION”

This is an interesting one to talk about because there’s blue screen. I think people watching the show assume there’s tons of blue screen, but there isn’t. I will say though that we have great VFX people and they are true artists. There’s VFX in everything! When people see something and go,

“I love this; there was no VFX in it,” that just means the VFX was so good you didn’t notice it.

When the vampires are outside, their breath makes a mist. Well, vampires don’t have that body temperature so their breath shouldn’t [be visible]. Of course, they [can’t appear] in mirrors because vampires can’t reflect. But that also includes accidental reflections off of windows, framed pictures, or anything like that. This really does make me want to talk about how great the visual effects artists are, and how misunderstood it is as an art form.

HORROR GAMES COME HOME

Blumhouse Games creative lead Louise Blain and the team behind the label’s first title, Fear the Spotlight, walk us through the horror studio’s big jump into gaming.

BY JOHN SAAVEDRA

WHEN BLUMHOUSE GAMES announced that it would bring its first project to last June’s Summer Game Fest showcase, no one was quite sure what to expect from the new publisher. Certainly not the ambitious slate of six indie games developed by a group of small (and scrappy) teams from around the world, covering multiple subgenres, and none based on existing Blumhouse properties—no Paranormal Activity Simulator or Insidious: The Game Yet, that first presentation in front of a live audience at the jam-packed YouTube

Theater in Inglewood, CA, perfectly communicated the new label’s mission: to champion original passion projects from creators who are exploring the horror genre in new and unexpected ways.

Founded by horror film magnate Jason Blum in February 2023, Blumhouse Games takes the same entrepreneurial approach to the small-budget indie projects it chooses to fund as Blum’s well-known film and television production arms. By betting big on the little guys, starting with viral found footage mega-hit Paranormal Activity, Blumhouse soon became a household name in the

projects with low budgets. That’s the way we’re going as well. It means we can take risks because they’re smaller games, and it means that we can work on multiple projects.”

BHG’s current plan is to release three games per year for the next three years. While there are other publishers doing great work in the indie space—Devolver Digital and Team17, to name just two—the costs of game development and publishing and the sheer amount of new games fighting for customers’ attention on a monthly basis mean it’s increasingly rare to see big-name labels invest in new IP rather than mining established franchises. Blumhouse has a wealth of the latter to choose from, so why not adapt any of them for a new medium?

“That might sound easy, but actually doing that right is very hard,” Blain says. “It’s not to say we’re never going to work on Blumhouse IP, but it needs to be the absolutely right

horror sphere. Chatting at a mixer after the showcase and then again over Zoom in August, BHG creative lead Louise Blain is quick to emphasize just how excited she is to bring Blumhouse’s indie horror know-how to the games industry.

“Horror grows under restraint,” Blain says of the studio’s philosophy. “If you limit things, you can get really exciting horror. That’s how Blumhouse itself grew. It made risky decisions on interesting, creative

projects at the right time. You want it to feel authentic and genuine, and everything that someone wants from that.”

Currently, BHG is in the lab cooking up titles like Sleep Awake, described as “a first-person psychedelic horror set in the far future,” where people disappear when they allow themselves to fall asleep; The Simulation, a true crime-inspired mystery about video game design; Crisol: Theater of Idols, a first-person shooter where “the player

must sacrifice their own blood to use as ammunition”; and Grave Seasons, the eye-catching pixelated farmingsim murder mystery set in a town stalked by a supernatural serial killer.

But first on the release schedule is Fear the Spotlight, a third-person horror adventure about best friends Vivian and Amy, who sneak into their high school after dark to perform a seance. Naturally, things go terribly wrong, leaving the teen girls trapped inside a nightmare version of the school haunted by sinister forces.

“Fear the Spotlight kind of epitomizes everything we want to say as Blumhouse Games,” Blain says of the three-to-five-hour experience. “It’s got an incredible narrative, great characters, and really amazing-feeling mechanics. It’s genuinely scary, it’s intense. It’s a complete package of everything we want people to know about Blumhouse Games. It ticks every box.”

The short hands-on demo we played at Summer Game Fest was indeed a spooky time that slowly built up the tension. You take control of Viv and follow Amy through the dimly lit corridors of the school, avoiding security cameras on your way to the library for the seance. As you explore, you encounter clues that reveal more about the school’s tragic past and foreshadow what awaits the girls when they’re inevitably transported to a terrifying new realm of reality.

If that synopsis sounds like a blast from the past, the game is, indeed, designed to look and feel like a PlayStation 1 game that’s been locked away in a Blumhouse crypt for decades, biding its time before clawing its way to the surface in 2024. With its polygonal 3D graphics, an atmosphere thick with fog and shadows and heavy film grain, and an emphasis on puzzle solving and environmental storytelling, Fear the Spotlight is heavily influenced by the popular horror games of the late ’90s, particularly Silent Hill and Resident Evil

“Horror games started for us when we were playing PlayStation games of that era, so we knew we wanted to recreate that look—or, moreso, be

Crisol: Theater of Idols

inspired by it,” says Bryan Singh, one half of the husband-and-wife team that make up indie studio Cozy Game Pals, the creators of Fear the Spotlight “It’s us remembering what our favorite games looked like rather than being a very accurate depiction,” adds Crista Castro, the other half of the team.

The decision to harken back to the muddier visuals of the PS1 era when devs used fog as a way to obscure the graphical shortcomings of the day was about more than nostalgia. The visual design fits the psychological horror story Singh and Castro are telling. As the supernatural seeps into familiar surroundings, Viv’s reality becomes harder to pin down.

“The PS1 aesthetic works so well with our game because it makes things ambiguous,” Singh says.

“Everything’s a little fuzzy and shimmery. So when you start to see something not quite right, you’re not quite sure you saw it correctly or not.”

Just don’t expect Fear the Spotlight to play exactly like the PS1 titles of yore, as the controls and gameplay of that era feel a bit dated today. The way you interact with the environment and solve puzzles in Fear the Spotlight feels a bit more immersive than the classic games that inspired it.

“All of the puzzles in Fear the Spotlight are very tactile,” Blain says. “They thought about the kind of

puzzles that you would find in early Silent Hill but modernized them. It’s like, ‘This is what was so exciting about it. So what different way can we look at that?’”

Everything leads to the seance itself, which is chilling. As you hold down the planchette with Amy, who is sitting across from you, it begins to move across the spirit board on its own. Then, there’s a crack of thunder, a menacing silhouette appears behind your best friend, and Amy disappears into the darkness. You’re left to fumble with the controls as you nervously relight the candles one by one while calling out to Amy in the dark. But

EVERYTHING’S A LITTLE FUZZY AND SHIMMERY. SO WHEN YOU START TO SEE SOMETHING NOT QUITE RIGHT, YOU’RE NOT QUITE SURE YOU SAW IT CORRECTLY OR NOT.

you already know she isn’t going to answer you.

It’s an effectively creepy moment, but Blain thinks new players will find a bit of comfort in Fear the Spotlight’s familiar “seance gone wrong” scenario, a way to hook people who have watched The Craft or Goosebumps or Are You Afraid of the Dark? without scaring them off if it’s their first time with a horror game.

“With Fear the Spotlight, we really like to think of it as kind of a gateway horror game,” she says. “You know the setup, you know that things have to go wrong. I love the idea that someone who maybe goes to see M3GAN but didn’t think they were brave enough for a horror game—well, look at Fear the Spotlight, Grave Seasons, and The Simulation.”

The idea, as she pitches it, is that there’s a horror game out there for everybody, and Blumhouse Games wants to bring gamers as many

Grave Seasons

Sleep Awake

different kinds as it can. In a lightning round toward the end of our chat, Blain briefly touches on some of the other projects in the pipeline.

Blain says of Grave Seasons: “The devs, Perfect Garbage, love farming and cozy games, but they’re also very passionate about horror. This is just the most perfect mashup of those. It’s almost scary how well these two genres go together.”

On The Simulation: “It will really reward your gaming knowledge as you go through these different sorts of digital worlds. I don’t think people have seen anything quite like The Simulation before. It’s really juicy!”

Then there’s the mysterious Project C, which teams filmmaker Brandon Cronenberg with one of the best experimental game developers in the business, Sam Barlow, who’s wowed gamers for years with interactive narrative experiences such as Her Story and Immortality. Blain calls the

pairing “a match made in nightmares, just the two perfect brains” but won’t get into any specifics about the title beyond teasing that “it’s going to be dark and scary.”

While the current focus is on making the first six games in the lineup the best they can be, BHG is also keeping an eye out for other exciting opportunities in the space.

“The lovely thing is that there is really no shortage of brilliant development teams working on indie horror projects,” Blain says. “We’re getting really interesting pitches approaching us.”

From the development side, Singh and Castro of Cozy Game Pals, who initially self-funded a smaller version of Fear the Spotlight that released on Steam last year before Blumhouse invested in the project to make it even better, certainly see the value of the studio entering the industry. “We’re so excited for what this means for indie

developers, that there’s a new studio that people can go to, especially for horror games,” Castro says.

As for what types of projects Blain would like to see come through Blumhouse Games’ door next, she doesn’t have a specific wishlist as much as an expectation of the unexpected.

“I just want all the horror. I love folk horror, found footage horror. What I’m completely aware of is that someone somewhere will pitch one of those, but it won’t be in the way that I expect, and it’ll be all the better for that. Chances are I think I know what I want, and someone’s going to go, ‘We did this but then we did this to it,’ and I’ll be like, ‘We’ll that’s the perfect horror game!’”

Fear the Spotlight releases on PlayStation and Xbox consoles, Nintendo Switch, and Steam on Oct. 22. You can play a demo on Steam now.

Ridley Scott’s Gladiator II offers up more battles, more swords, more Roman decadence, and two very debauched emperors.

BY

DON KAYE

HISTORY TELLS US that for a brief period circa 209-211 A.D., twin brothers named Caracalla and Geta ruled the Roman Empire as co-emperors at the behest of their late father (and previous emperor) Septimius Severus. The brothers’ shared stewardship of their kingdom did not end well, nor was it a particularly illustrious time for the empire itself. But it has, more than 18 centuries later, provided us with one positive aftermath: it forms much of the basis of Gladiator II, the long-awaited sequel to director Ridley Scott’s Oscar-winning 2000 film Gladiator, in which Russell Crowe was indelible as a Roman general seeking vengeance after he is betrayed and left for dead by the cruel, unstable

Emperor Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix). Scott’s old-fashioned period spectacle earned $465 million at the box office and took home five Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Actor, while cementing Scott’s reputation as a master of the historical epic.

Although Crowe’s Maximus departed this life at the end of Gladiator, along with his nemesis Commodus, discussions about a sequel began way back in 2001, shortly after the first film ended its run. While various pitches were thrown around (including one idea in which Maximus comes back from the Roman conception of the afterlife), development of a follow-up stalled until around 2017. That’s when Paramount Pictures, which had obtained the rights, decided it was time to return to the arena.

According to Ridley Scott, work on the sequel’s script began four years ago, and part of the premise for the sequel revolved around Caracalla and Geta. “After [Commodus’] death, there was a scramble for

Clockwise, from top left: Joseph Quinn as Emperor Geta; Lucius (Paul Mescal) in the middle of a fray in the arena; Denzel Washington as the scheming Macrinus.

the chair, and out of that eventually came a man who became the father of the two princes,” Scott explains. “He, as emperors go, was semi-decent—sometimes weak, sometimes lax, but not terrible. But when he died of, I think, natural causes at 70, which was old for the Roman Empire, the two brothers took over.

One of them was just this side of being dysfunctional, a lunatic. The other one tried to control his brother.

So that state of constant disagreement and fluctuating personalities was where we began.”

brothers in harm

THE TWO BROTHERS are played by Fred Hechinger (Kraven the Hunter) and Joseph Quinn (The Fantastic Four: First Steps), respectively, with Hechinger telling us that finding information on the real Caracalla was relatively easy. “There’s a treasure trove of historical material,” Hechinger says. “But I must say, Ridley is an empire to himself, and his energy and excitement about the spectacle and

intensity of the story means, in my experience, that his influences hold no bounds. So our influences are as wide-ranging as Romulus and Remus to Beavis and Butt-Head. There is a vast expanse of things that we picked from, some of which are true to the time, and others which are completely anachronistic, crazy, and freewheeling.”

Hechinger hints that Caracalla and Geta are essentially two sides of the same (Roman) coin, siblings for whom a love-hate relationship can mean death or enslavement for dozens or thousands on a whim. “There’s a codependency to the two of them,” he says. “There’s also a raging competition. There’s this two-mindedness where they really have, by the design of their immense power, and also by the way that they speak to one another and engage with each other, created a very private world…. There’s a comedy and a tragedy to how these two interact, and, I also think, a real desperation.”

With the movie’s antagonists shaping up early on, Scott and screenwriters Peter Craig and David Scarpa next needed a hero. They found one in Lucius (Paul Mescal), the now-grown son of Commodus’ sister Lucilla (Connie Nielsen, encoring from the first film). Sent to live in Africa by his mother after the events of Gladiator, Lucius is captured by Roman invaders and brought back to Rome as a slave who is trained to fight in the arena by the scheming, power-hungry Macrinus (Denzel Washington).

“She has lost Lucius,” says Nielsen about returning to her character 20 years later. “She’s had to make a heartbreaking decision in order to save his life, and she has had to find a way to live with just hope that maybe one day she might find him again. She has also lived as a prisoner and has been used as a political pawn by subsequent rulers of the Roman Empire, who trot her out as the remaining member of her very famous dynasty. So she understands that she is alive because she has status, and that status is further heightened by the person that she is also married to.”

That person is General Marcus Acacius (Pedro Pascal), who leads the campaign that ends up capturing Lucius, and who eventually faces the younger man on the floor of the Colosseum itself. While both Lucilla and Lucius are based on real people, Marcus Acacius is a fictional creation, as is his confrontation with Lucius in the gladiatorial arena. “If you stick rigidly to history that long ago, it frankly may be boring,” says Scott. “So liberties are necessary with such massive tales… we’re in the second century, so you’re talking a long time ago. I think you can take some liberties. But it’s nice to start with a sequel where there was Lucilla, there was Septimius Severus, and there were his damaged sons.”

a cautionary tale

AS FRED HECHINGER noted earlier, the liberties that the story takes with history extend to the kind of performances he and Joseph Quinn delivered. “Ridley and I talked about Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten, but we also talked about the specific practices of Roman times,” he says. “I think it was always about drawing visceral parallels between now and then and making sure that the past feels fully alive because that’s the experience of filming something like this.”

Hechinger adds that Scott’s style of creating the production—building dozens and dozens of physical

Clockwise from top: Ridley Scott directs Pedro Pascal who plays Marcus Acacius and Mescal on set; Lucilla (Connie Nielsen) returns. Emperor Caracalla (Fred Hechinger) addresses his subjects.

liberties are necessary with such massive tales… we’re in the second century, so you’re talking a long time ago.

sets instead of just relying solely on digital backdrops or volume screens—was an almost immeasurable gift to the actors in terms of providing verisimilitude.

“You walk onto that set, and Rome is there around you,” he notes. “Horses are running by, mobs are

screaming…. You get into the thick of the feeling of the past right now. It’s everything. [Ridley] operates with an enormous number of cameras running at the same time, so as an actor, you’re convincingly living in an environment that is, in some ways, functioning like a one-time documentary of an event. It’s wild. Everywhere you look is the real thing.”

“It’s very strange because it didn’t feel like any time had passed at all,” agrees Nielsen about stepping back into Scott’s vision of second-century Rome. “It was the same people on the set and the same space, and at the same time, it really also was very moving, because going back to that story and having that opportunity to revisit one of these great, giant movies that hardly anyone makes anymore… to be back there, and do that again, and film that almost classical epic film was amazing.”

Thanks to all its grandeur, sensory overload (just look at that trailer!), and random anachronisms, the one thing that its cast members and director say Gladiator II won’t be is a museum piece, frozen in time. With its jockeying for power, palace intrigues, mentally crumbling leaders, and circus of human cruelty, Gladiator II isn’t just meant to shine a spotlight on an empire that failed nearly two millennia ago, but one that is potentially on the precipice of the abyss right now.

“The things that kind of lay at the core of the destruction of the Roman Empire are present in our world today,” says Nielsen. “So the things that we are alluding to in the film are really these same age-old questions. What type of society are we? What kind of community do we want to live in—and what will people do to get there?”

“For any historical piece to work, it has to speak to now,” concurs Fred Hechinger. “It’s not only boring but slightly dangerous to make a movie that exists in a kind of vacuum of history, that looks at it with this distance—as if it’s [supposed to be] this kind of another thing that’s so far away from everything we know. I think that one of Ridley’s strengths as a filmmaker throughout his entire career is taking historical narrative and bringing it to visceral, present-day life so that you can’t look away from the parallels.”

While Ridley Scott’s goal is always to provide the kind of massive cinematic entertainment that very few filmmakers deliver these days, he also notes cautiously that for all his love of period pieces, Gladiator II could just as well be set in the present. “There’s no difference,” he says. “It’s the same, except I think now it’s much worse. The weapons are much mightier than a sword, and one hopes deeply that they don’t get into some stupid exchange…. One hopes common sense prevails, but I’m not sure it does.”

Gladiator II is out in theaters Nov. 22.

T HE SOUTH KOREAN BORN PL ATF ORM IS BR ING ING WEBCO MICS C RE AT ORS

E XP LOSIVE AUDIE NCE NUMBERS

BY SAM STONE

IN

EARLY

2015, the webcomics platform Inkblazers shut down, leaving young comic book creator uru-chan looking for a new digital platform to host her stories. Based out of Massachusetts, uru-chan was a lifelong fan of manga and anime, with a lot of these storytelling aesthetics informing her own stories, from the character designs to adding magical realism and quirky humor to memorable characters trying to find their way.

Uru-chan chose to start publishing her work on the South Korean webcomics platform WEBTOON, beginning with her series OFR - Ice in June 2015. In deciding to publish through WEBTOON, uru-chan’s life and career were forever changed.

THE WEBTOON ADVANTAGE

Fans were drawn to her fantasy tale of a misfit thief finding love, and her expressive characters, and uru-chan’s readership and exposure to global audiences exploded exponentially, with OFR - Ice being read by over 1.4 million unique user impressions and tens of thousands of WEBTOON users subscribing to the series.

Her follow-up WEBTOON series, the ongoing title unOrdinary, which launched in 2022, has seen even greater success on the platform, clocking in impressively with over 1.3 billion unique user impressions and over 6 million subscribers.

“When I started with WEBTOON, they gave each new title a shoutout,” uru-chan tells Den of Geek. “They already had a pretty decent audience, around 500k, at the time when I joined in 2016. When I first launched, they would send a push-button notification or email to any subscriber. Immediately, my audience shot from a couple thousand subscribers to around 50k. You’re not going to get an audience like that anywhere else.”

A DIGITAL PLATFORM TO TELL STORIES WORLDWIDE

For the uninitiated, WEBTOON is a digital comics platform founded by Junkoo Kim in 2004. Kim continues to serve as the digital platform’s CEO as it expands its international reach and branches into other forms of mass media. Since then, the term “webtoon” has become synonymous with South Korean digital comics, particularly webcomics formatted to be more intuitively read on mobile devices through a vertical scroll presentation. WEBTOON has spread into other readership markets

around the world, growing to have a user base numbering well over 85 million worldwide and becoming the biggest webcomics platform in the United States.

Under Kim’s leadership, WEBTOON steadily began to grow its overseas and foreign-language presence with the launch of its international platform in July 2014, allowing overseas artists to upload their works to the site. Studio interest increased in its properties, the publisher created WEBTOON Studios in November 2020, playing an even more active role as WEBTOON titles were adapted into both live-action and animated film and television projects. If you’ve watched the live-action horror series Sweet Home and the gritty K-drama Itaewon Class on Netflix, or popular anime shows like Tower of God and Noblesse on Crunchyroll, then you’re familiar with WEBTOON stories.

For Kim, WEBTOON is built on the underlying principle that people around the world each have their own stories to tell and that WEBTOON gives them the opportunity to share their stories with audiences globally. “Everyone in the world has their own stories; it all started from that belief. I thought they had that need to share their stories and that they wanted to share them,” Kim explains. “Individual creators not only feed into the volume of the content, but I believe that it will be high quality. In that process, I thought that we could attain a strong diversity of content. I believe that a diversity of content is very critical.”

ADAPTING WEBTOON TITLES FOR THE SCREEN

WEBTOON titles have steadily been optioned by television and film studios around the world, including Ron

Howard’s Imagine Entertainment, Netflix, and Skybound Entertainment; 50% of Netflix Korea’s original projects produced in 2023 were based on various WEBTOON properties. These aren’t confined to a single genre, either. From the feudal zombie-horror series Kingdom to the hard-hitting crime show Bloodhounds or even the coming-of-age romantic drama Love Alarm, some of Netflix’s biggest shows in the past few years have been based on WEBTOON stories. Whether you’re into zombies or period-piece romance stories, WEBTOON’s extensive library of titles includes all kinds of genres. Still, Kim and WEBTOON are very careful about entrusting adaptations to the right multimedia partners.

“It’s not just simply a business for us. This is a content business. Because of that, if you’re just looking at how to make money, that doesn’t work. You need to be really good at adapting that IP,” Kim observes. This distinction carries far beyond licensing titles to Netflix and Crunchyroll—it also extends to creative partnerships with American comic book companies like Marvel Entertainment and video game studios such as Ubisoft. WEBTOON publishes the official Assassin’s Creed tie-in comic, Assassin’s Creed: Forgotten Temple. Even the mega-popular K-pop band BTS has partnered with WEBTOON, releasing original comics on the platform that blend urban pop fantasy with classic Korean mythology.

NOT JUST GLOBAL PLAYERS

With this attention to quality and reader data in mind, Kim notes that the WEBTOON platform sends a message to storytellers and readers about its long reach and accessibility. The extensive audience and scope have consistently proved to creators that WEBTOON is unmatchable in its readership scale. This symbiotic dynamic has propelled the platform to its strong market position.

“It’s not simply that we want to show ourselves as global players,” Kim explains. “I think the message is clear to our readers: Through us, you can reach global audiences and, through

Freaking Romance

Lore Olympus

real-time transactions, we can distribute it globally. This really showed the creators that it’s possible and really reinforced our No. 1 market position.”

This axiom has since proved especially true for uru-chan, a young comic book creator on the other side of the world from Kim, who started out telling her own stories through webcomics online. What she discovered in publishing her work on WEBTOON, with its steadily expanding international reach, would change her life and career.

THE ENDLESS CREATIVE POSSIBILITIES OF WEBTOON

One of the factors of WEBTOON’s success is its overall presentation: not only is it optimized for reading through desktop and laptop computers, but it’s also presented in a vertical scroll that makes it easy to follow along and read on mobile devices. After years of reading traditional comics and manga, along with publishing on other webcomics platforms prior to WEBTOON, uru-chan was quickly surprised by how WEBTOON’s presentation could expand her digital canvas. This expansion led to a greater sense of creative freedom, as uru-chan could let her imagination and visuals grow significantly on this platform.

“It wasn’t until I was working with WEBTOON that I realized how limitless the layout is because it’s an endless scroll. You can draw pictures as big as you want them,” uru-chan notes. “That’s not a jab at manga, but manga is a bit more restrictive when it comes to page layouts and stuff like that. You have to plan a lot more ahead of time whereas, with WEBTOON, you have a lot more freedom.”

While the rapid growth in her readership can certainly be overwhelming, uru-chan is careful to stay focused on her work and not allow the pressure of having a large global audience actively affect her creative process. Instead, uru-chan sees the high level of fan support she has received as motivation to continue

honing and improving her storytelling talents.

“I think the big thing that I’ve learned in the past eight years is to continue to focus on my craft and continue to write the best stories that I can,” uru-chan reflects. “It’s about staying grounded and grateful for having such a big audience as you’re continuing to write stories —and doing the best that you can with stories so that the audience can enjoy it.”

A LANDMARK YEAR FOR THE PLATFORM

As uru-chan continues to tell stories and reach readers globally through WEBTOON, the company—and Kim—have achieved an enormous milestone in the organization’s history. On June 27, 2024, WEBTOON officially began its listing on the NASDAQ, marking its full Wall Street stock market debut.

This multi-billion dollar launch is the successful culmination of much of Kim’s vision for WEBTOON, but the industrious founder and CEO is not looking to slow down his growth plans any time soon.

“With the power of diversity and the power of content, I was able to gather creators and go viral. Hopefully, after going public, I’ll be able to accelerate this. In five years, or maybe further ahead into the future, I want all of the world’s creators to be able to share their storytelling content on WEBTOON. I want them to pick WEBTOON as their No. 1 preference,” Kim declares. “As a platform business, this is the North Star for us, being the first pick for creators. I think the business result of that is that all entertainment players throughout the world ask WEBTOON for IP to develop into films. I want all entertainment players to contact WEBTOON for their IP for their entertainment business. I want us to be their first pick. That is our North Star!”

WEBTOON has two booths at NYCC and many of its creators, including uru-chan, will be appearing on panels and doing author signings.

Ordeal

A H OR R O R CO M I C S

B U YING G UIDE

Spooky season is upon us! And the right horror comics are worth big bucks.

BY JIM DANDENEAU

This story is part of an editorial series presented by eBay.

FIFTY YEARS AGO, there was a line of comics so terrifying that it changed the comic book industry… forever. EC Comics, like many of its best known subjects, has died and been resurrected multiple times in the last five decades. EC, originally Educational Comics, was founded in the mid-1940s as the home for wholesome, educational yarns, often comic book adaptations of Bible stories, before pivoting away from those at the start of the ’50s and becoming the premier home for gruesome, shocking horror books.

In fact, these titles (and their often brilliantly illustrated covers) were so shocking and gruesome that they played a role in the moral panic around comics inspired by Fredric Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent, a book that blamed

violent imagery for contributing to juvenile delinquency— that kids would read these books and become violent maniacs. This book and Wertham’s testimony before a congressional hearing about “public morals” eventually led to the adoption of the Comics Code Authority, a comics industry organization dedicated to self-censorship so the feds wouldn’t do it for them. The first major impact the CCA had on comics was to effectively end EC’s run as the best horror publisher of the Golden Age.

But the enduring appeal of EC’s horror line has kept the company popping back up from time to time—first with periodic reprints of the original material, and then with a new relaunch every few years, most recently in February 2024 as an imprint of Oni Press. EC earned that affection because it employed some of the best creators to ever work in comics—greats like Frank Frazetta, Otto Binder, Al Williamson, Wally Wood, and John Severin. And because these books are 70 years old, there are exceedingly few copies left in circulation, which, if you’re a collector, means you should prepare to shell out some serious dough— especially for high-grade copies. Prepare to shiver in terror as we walk through the best horror comics to add to your collection.

M A D # 1-4

We start with the most expensive comics on the list: the first four issues of MAD Magazine. Yes, that MAD Magazine MAD started out as one of EC’s standard books a pair of stories from Harvey Kurtzman (who would eventually turn MAD Magazine into what we all know and love) and Marie Severin (legendary longtime Marvel colorist). You see in these books Kurtzman’s cartooning and storytelling style: these are horror-ish, but with a sharp undercurrent of social commentary and satire that would develop into the off-the-wall humor that exemplified his future work.

Like all books from the Golden Age, most remaining copies of these issues are in awful condition, so finding something with a 7.5 from CGC is huge.

$12,000

THE VAULT OF HORROR #12

The first issue of The Vault of Horror (issues 1-11 shipped under the title War Against Crime and then changed with issue 12, a common occurrence with Golden and Silver Age books) hit with what EC became known for: shocking covers that often told most of the story right at the start of the book. This issue had several stories, but the first, by Johnny Craig, was the tale of a wax museum that wasn’t quite all wax.

This is a key issue in EC’s shift to horror comics, and finding one in great condition certainly justifies a five-figure price tag. $30,000

$6,600

WEIRD FANTASY #13

The “Brain in a Jar” trope took off with Lovecraft in the ’30s, but comics is a special medium. The marriage of illustration and narration takes a trope and elevates it into something eerie, as you see here with the classic Al Feldstein cover. Weird Fantasy was a book heavily influenced by the popular science fiction stories of the time, full of aliens and nuclear fears and thinly veiled “cover versions” of popular literature, sometimes so close to the original that EC would get sued by Ray Bradbury for plagiarism. But even if the subject matter was trite (or largely copied from better work), there was a wit and a sharpness here that made these stories endure. Copies for under $7,500 are, believe it or not, a bargain, so $6,600 is very reasonable.

C RIME SUSPEN ST O RIES #22

Yet another classic cover, this issue of Crime SuspenStories features a decapitated head and a bloody axe, probably causing thousands of parents to rifle through their kids’ comics and throw them away in disgust. Covers like this are precisely why the Comics Code came for horror books in particular— this is gruesome stuff, incredibly well drawn, but shocking for any era of comics. Hence the huge cost! At $10,500 for a CGC 5.5 copy, this is probably a little on the pricey side, but like other Golden Age comic investments, this should continue to grow in value within a couple of years.

$10,500

$2,900

T H E H AU N T OF F E A R #15

The numbering here is confusing, because The Haunt of Fear started out as Gunslinger and was renumbered after four issues, but the numbering doesn’t really matter—this is the first issue of the retitled Gunslinger and is widely considered one of the scarcest, most valuable horror comics of all time, which is why the price is still pretty high for a book in not-great shape.

TAL E S F R O M TH E C RY P T #46

Tales from the Crypt originated not as an HBO show in the mid-’90s but as an EC comic in the ’50s—Crypt-Keeper and all. Just like the show, the Crypt-Keeper was the framing device, and just like all the best EC comics, this had a horror cover from Feldstein, but with interior art from Joe Orlando, Feldstein, and others. The show is due a revival sooner or later, so a cheap, high-grade copy like this is almost certainly a solid investment.

$3,800

$3,199

SHOC K SUS P EN S T OR I E S #1

The shocking part of this book is that such a key issue is selling for such a low price. The first issue of the series that launched as a “sampler” of EC’s offerings, according to publisher Bill Gaines, is yet another example of the lurid covers EC was famous for—this one showing a death by electric chair. This is a classic cover on a high grade first issue and there’s really no reason why this shouldn’t be selling for $7500. Jump on it if you can afford it.

T HE HAU N T O F F EA R #8

The numbering here is ESPECIALLY confusing, because after The Haunt of Fear ran for a few issues, apparently the postal service asked EC to renumber, so after #17 the next issue to come out was #8. But the numbering doesn’t really matter. The shrunken head cover is the important part—this is a classic EC image that you’ve likely seen reprinted multiple times, and a 9.2 graded copy is an incredible find.

$4,800

$14,200

COLLECTOR’S

DIGEST

STREAM. SHOP. CONNECT LIVE.

Catch epic exclusives, curated auctions and more from top sellers and guests including head of DC Comics Jim Lee and the King of Collectibles Ken Goldin. Tune in daily during the con and beyond, all on the eBay app or live at Booth #3001.

L E S O F T ERRO R

N N UA L #1

Back in the day, comics used to be returnable—any books that didn’t sell would be returned to the publisher, limiting the risk on the newsstands. Every year, EC would take the comics sent back to them, strip the covers off, bind four of them up with new trade dress and sell them as “annuals.” We don’t know what stories are in this issue, because it could be any four comics that Al Feldstein had lying around in 1952. That’s why these are so collectible—there are many permutations of Tales of Terror Annual #1, so even one in fairly poor condition will cost a lot.

POWER OF QUIZ COMPELS YOU!

Will you survive Den of Geek’s horror-themed pop culture quiz? BY

LOUISA MELLOR

1

▼ New York Comic Con was first held in 2006. What was that year’s worldwide highest-grossing horror movie?

Silent Hill (2006) Wolf Creek (2006) Saw III (2006) The Hills Have Eyes (2006)

2

Which famous horror author’s work has Mike Flanagan NOT (yet) adapted into a Netflix show?

Edgar Allan Poe

H.P. Lovecraft

Henry James

Shirley Jackson

3

▲ Which of these is NOT the subtitle of a sequel to A Nightmare on Elm Street?

Dream Warriors

The Dream Master Requiem for a Dream

The Dream Child

4

“Be afraid. Be very afraid” is the tagline on which movie’s poster?

Jaws (1975) Alien (1979) The Fly (1986) The Exorcist (1973)

5

What’s the name of the famous British horror film production company founded in 1934?

Hammer Morning Evening All Over This Land

6 Bill Skarsgård plays Count Orlok in Nosferatu (2024). Which other villainous horror movie icon did he play in 2017 and 2019?

Jigsaw Chucky

Freddy Krueger Pennywise

7

The Crow celebrates its 30th anniversary this year. Which of the following is true about crows?

They can solve puzzles on a similar level to six-year-old human children.

They hold funerals for their dead. They “caw” in regional accents. All of the above.

8

▲ About which 2024 horror film did Stephen King write on X: “Not sure why WB is holding it back; not like it’s embarrassing, or anything. Who knows. I just write the f***ing things.”?

The First Omen Winne-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey 2 Nosferatu Salem’s Lot

9

What is the name of the titular monster in Jennifer Kent’s cult 2014 Australian horror movie? Jabberwock

Babadook

Agadoo

Skibidi Toilet

Want more quizzes?

Scan the QR code to access Den of Geek’s interactive brain teasers.

10

What did the cast of The Blair Witch Project (1999) successfully sue Artisan Entertainment for in 2000?

Using their footage without permission in Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2.

Using their real names in the original film.

Psychological trauma sustained during the shoot.

Banning them from the Cannes premiere.

11

What is the core ingredient of most fake blood used on movie sets?

Molasses

Tomato ketchup

Corn syrup

Dr Pepper

12

▲ The original mask worn by Michael Myers in Halloween (1978) was based on the face of which sci-fi acting legend?

Tom Baker

William Shatner

Scott Bakula

Sir Patrick Stewart

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