Den of Geek Quarterly Magazine Issue 3 - Featuring Dune by Den of Geek

I NSIDE: HALLOWE E N HORROR SPECIAL!

REBECCA FERGUSON, TIMOTHÉE CHALAMET, AND DENIS VILLENEUVE SHARE THE SECRETS OF THE SCI-FI EPIC

EDGAR WRIGHT THE AUTEUR DIRECTOR STEPS BACK DEN OFIN GEEK TIME FOR LAST NIGHT IN SOHO

G H O ST B UST E RS : A F T E RL IFE JASON REITMAN ON CONTINUING HIS FATHER’S LEGACY

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DOUBLE FEATURE

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INSIDE THIS ISSUE

BY EXPERTS. FOR FANS.

HORROR COMICS

DC Comics has launched it’s new horror imprint including Soul Plumber, from the guys behind The Last Podcast on the Left. PG. 66

The moment we saw the artwork for this issue’s cover we fell in love. There’s something about the feel of the golden hieroglyphics and the way stars Rebecca Ferguson and Timothée Chalamet peer out that evokes all the mystery and wonder of sci-fi classic Dune. Which is just how we feel about the movie. After talking with both stars and director Denis Villeneuve we’re even more excited for what’s to come. This is our biggest issue yet, so as well as our in-depth Dune cover feature you’ll find a horror special, more access and interviews with directors and stars than we’ve ever had before, and the latest on all the upcoming movies, games, comics and TV shows! COVER PHOTO CREDIT: © 2021 LEGENDARY AND WARNER BROS. ENT. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

ISSUE 3 | FALL 2021

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COWBOY BEBOP

The beloved anime is getting a live-action show for Netflix. We catch up with showrunner André Nemec to learn all about his plans for Spike Spiegel (John Cho), Faye Valentine (Daniella Pineda), and Jet Black (Mustafa Shakir). PG 24.

ETERNALS

Comics writer Kieron Gillen guides us through the extremely complicated world of the Eternals, as seen in the latest Marvel Comics series. PG 36.

IMAGE CREDITS: STEVE WILKIE/SYFY/ GEOFFREY SHORT/NETFLIX/ MARVEL/DC COMICS

ON THE COVER

GHOSTBUSTERS: AFTERLIFE

Director Jason Reitman talks to Den of Geek about how this sequel to the original Ghostbusters movie is really a family story at heart. PG. 44

CHUCKY

The pint-sized menace has his own new show. Chucky heads up our massive Halloween horror section, which includes Halloween Kills, American Horror Story, and more. PG. 60

MICHELLE GOMEZ

Doctor Who’s Missy and Chilling Adventures of Sabrina’s Madame Satan on her new role as the mysterious Madame Rouge in Doom Patrol. PG. 26

EDGAR WRIGHT

We sit down with the auteur director of Shaun of the Dead and Baby Driver for an in-depth chat about his latest movie Last Night in Soho. PG. 48

TOP GUN: MAVERICK

Director Joseph Kosinski on making the sequel to the beloved action movie. Tom Cruise is back but this time he has new recruits in tow. PG. 28

MARVEL’S GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY The creators of the game take us into the cosmos with Star-Lord and the gang. PG. 40 DEN OF GEEK

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

ECHOES OF ARRAKIS

We’re paying tribute to the massive adaptation of one of the most sprawling, epic works of science fiction with our biggest issue ever!

up paperback copy of Dune at a garage sale as a 10-year-old, a printing of the book that certainly pre-dated the David Lynch film version by at least a decade, if not more. All I knew was that this was an impressive, grown-up looking book, perhaps the biggest book, in terms of page count, I had ever encountered. The 1984 movie, then in heavy rotation on cable, was weirdly beloved by kids my age—or at least by me—and this seemed like a good way for me to explore that universe further while also impressing teachers and parents by carrying

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around what I was certain was the longest book ever written. Needless to say, I was too young to fully appreciate the themes of Frank Herbert’s work, and the dense prose meant I never got around to actually finishing (let alone understanding) Dune until high school. But like any great work of literature, the novel has rewarded repeat readings through the years, always managing to feel timely and prescient regardless of what point in history I revisit it. When we had the opportunity to put Denis Villeneuve’s Dune movie on our cover, perhaps the first adaptation

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I REMEMBER SCORING A BEAT

1) Gurney Halleck (Josh Brolin) pulls Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) out of danger on the desert planet Arrakis. Read our cover story on PG 30. 2) Director Denis Villeneuve guides Timothée Chalamet in the ways of combat.

MAG AZ I N E Editor-in-Chief Mike Cecchini Editorial Director Chris Longo Print Editor Rosie Fletcher Creative Director Lucy Quintanilla Art Director Jessica Koynock Copy Editor Sarah Litt Production Manager Kyle Christine Darnell

DENOFGEEK.COM Editor-in-Chief Mike Cecchini

Director of Editorial and Partnerships Chris Longo Managing Editor John Saavedra 1

of the novel that has a chance to do the source material justice, I knew we had to do it. A proper adaptation of Dune is one of sci-fi filmmaking’s great challenges, and Villeneuve has assembled the kind of talent, and is treating the source material with the kind of reverence, usually reserved for grand historical epics. It feels appropriate that the issue in which we chose to feature Dune is also the biggest one we’ve ever done. Literally. We’ve had to significantly increase our page count to bring it all to you! In addition to all our usual features we almost had to create

another magazine to fit in all the cool horror stuff happening so there’s a special section devoted to the events of this spooky season, full of gory recommendations by the horror experts here at Den of Geek. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to get to work on figuring out how we’re going to top this issue. Mike Cecchini, Editor-in-Chief

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Maximum Distractions, (46) Challengers Comics + Conversation, (47) Graham Crackers Comics Loop

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Universe (New Haven), (91) Alternate Universe (Milford), (92) DJ’s Cards and Comics, (93) Matt’s Sportscards & Comics, (94) Sarge’s Comics DELAWARE (95) Bethany Beach Comics and Gaming MAINE (96) Newbury Comics MARYLAND (97) Cards Comics & Collectibles, (98) Alliance MASSACHUSETTS (99) That’s Entertainment, (100) Comicazi, (101) New England Comics NEW HAMPSHIRE (102) Jetpack Comics & Games NEW JERSEY (103) Dewey’s, (104) Zapp Comics (Wayne) NEW YORK (105) Fordham Road Comics, (106) Midtown Comics Downtown, (107) Midtown Comics Times Square, (108) Midtown Comics Astoria (Queens), (109) Midtown Comics Grand Central, (110) Forbidden Planet, (111) Jim Hanley’s Universe (Staten Island), (112) Jim Hanley’s Universe (3rd Ave), (113) Silver Age Comics PENNSYLVANIA (114) Ontario Street Comics, (115) Wade’s Comic Madness RHODE ISLAND (116) The Time Capsule VERMONT (117) Earth Prime Comics WASHINGTON DC (118) Fantom Comics

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EVENT SPOTLIGHT

BIG APPLE COMIC CON RETURNS TO ROOTS New York’s self-described “community comic con” is coming back from the pandemic for its 25th anniversary with a new appreciation for what matters BY JIM DANDENEAU

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Big Apple Comic Con’s “Silver Anniversary” show takes places at the historic New Yorker Hotel on Sept. 25 and 26.

the show. According to Avanti, Big Apple got almost no requests for refunds for the canceled April 2020 show, and that generosity on the part of the fans meant they could get started on planning for shows in 2021. Unsurprisingly, Big Apple was the first con back when things started opening up. “I worked my hardest to make sure I was the first one to open a show in New York City,” says Carbonaro. “We had a show scheduled for May. We had one for June. It couldn’t happen. We weren’t sure July was going to happen. But it did.” The July show even pulled in some names—including the architect of Marvel’s cosmic comics (and creator of Thanos) Jim Starlin, and classic Nick Fury: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. visionary Jim Steranko. The big draw for September’s 25th anniversary show fits perfectly with Big Apple’s deep history: a viewing

gallery for a collection of 100 of the greatest, most valuable comics of all time, including a 1939 newsstandfresh Superman #1, valued in the millions of dollars. Most of these books are available on one of the comics streaming services but there’s a tactile component to seeing them in person that doesn’t translate when reading a scan. Attendees will be able to walk through the gallery and see these books in person and up close, connecting the deep history of superhero comics as a medium with Big Apple’s 25 year legacy. In the future, the plan is to make those community ties even deeper. “We did an auction for Covenant House [a youth shelter in New York] at the last show that happened in New York City before the shutdown,” Avanti says. “I want that to continue.” Big Apple Comic Con runs Sept. 25-26.

IMAGE CREDITS: COURTESY OF BIG APPLE COMIC CON

ON THE VERGE OF CELEBRATING its 25th anniversary, the world collapsed around Big Apple Comic Con. “We had a show scheduled for the 4th and 5th of April, 2020,” Peter Avanti, Big Apple’s show manager, tells us. “And we had to close down on the 20th of March, after we had completed our ad campaigns, had all the guests lined up… the show was set up and ready to run.” Suddenly, New York City’s longestrunning comic convention was in grave danger. With vendors paid but the show canceled, Big Apple Comic Con was facing catastrophic revenue loss. But the pandemic wasn’t Big Apple’s first brush with adversity: surviving in a con landscape—when New York Comic Con turned into a cultural behemoth 10 years into Big Apple’s life—took work. For Avanti and his partner, Big Apple’s founder Mike Carbonaro, the pandemic was the final evidence they needed that their approach was the right one. “[We’re] New York’s community comic con,” says Avanti. Big Apple’s size and age gave Avanti and Carbonaro deeper ties with attendees and vendors. And those factors, combined with the fact that Big Apple typically runs several shows a year, enabled a community of regulars—attendees and vendors alike—to grow around them. So when things got darkest for the show, Carbonaro and Avanti stuck with what they knew and cultivated that community. “I had my dealers call me up,” Carbonaro tells us, “and we’d commiserate with each other.” Ultimately, that community saved

O TH E RWOR LDLY T R EATS NEW FROM — 9.21.21 —

“A warm hug of a book about a Grinch of a man who dies and a ferryman, who helps the dead in their journey onwards. Under the Whispering Door is a kind book, full of faith in the goodness of people, full of kind people showing how compassion is a strength.”

— 9.28.21 —

“Delightful and heartbreaking. An unexpected mashup of science fiction and fantasy that will make you love music, crave donuts, and wish to read it all again.” —JOHN SCALZI, New York Times bestselling author

—CASSANDRA KHAW, author of Nothing But Blackened Teeth

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“An intricate family saga, an edge-of-your seat thriller, and an incredible story of transformation... Mind-blowing.”

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“Fun, fantastic, and delicious—I loved it!” —ANN LECKIE, Hugo, Nebula, and Arthur C. Clarke Award–winning author

—CHARLIE JANE ANDERS, bestselling author of Victories Greater Than Death

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MAGIC HOUR

The Wheel of Time showrunner on how his elaborate high fantasy TV adaptation will enchant fans old and new. BY MICHAEL AHR

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debut The Wheel of Time novel. As for the other two, Judkins says, “Mat and Perrin are so much more than sidekick characters… Sometimes people felt like they didn’t really fall in love with those characters until some of the later books when they really got to know them and got to see their point of view on the world. Hopefully in the show, right from the beginning– Marcus and Barney give such strong performances–they are a part of the ensemble right up front.” However, the story’s scope quickly widens as a host of characters from across the map come to the aid of–or pursue– the boys. For example, there’s The Wheel of Time cast headliner Rosamund Pike, who plays Moiraine Damodred, a magic channeler in an all-female Daniel Henney’s Lan Mandragoran with Rosamund Pike’s Moiraine Damodred.

IMAGE CREDITS: © [2020] SONY PICTURES TELEVISION INC. AND AMAZON CONTENT SERVICES LLC/ JAN THIJS

ROBERT JORDAN’S THE WHEEL of Time series would seem to defy adaptation with its massive cast of characters, centuries of history, and sprawling world map. The danger of alienating longtime fans of the books with inaccuracies or confusing newcomers with too many details is very real. However, showrunner Rafe Judkins was up to the challenge, deciding which aspects of the novels made the story original and bringing those key aspects to television. “I think it’s our job to both be true to the Wheel of Time books but also be mindful of... the things that could feel repetitive [and those] that are fresh and unique,” he says. The Wheel of Time doesn’t rely on a single protagonist, for example, but instead introduces three unwitting young heroes in a familiar fantasy journey, escaping those who would prevent them from fulfilling important destinies they know nothing about. Josha Stradowski is the reluctant Rand al’Thor; Barney Harris is the skeptical Mat Cauthon; and Marcus Rutherford is the quiet Perrin Aybara. The three friends leave small town life behind when they are unwittingly swept up in the forces of fate during the Amazon series’ first season. “With Rand, we wanted to find an actor that really brought out not only the goodness of the character but also the complications, and really embodied this guy who was a shepherd in the mountains and never wanted this adventure that’s been thrust upon him,” says Judkins about the point-of-view character in Jordan’s

Out for a walk, from left: Zoë Robins (Nynaeve), Barney Harris (Mat), Daniel Henney (Lan), Rosamund Pike (Moiraine), Madeleine Madden (Egwene), Marcus Rutherford (Perrin), Josha Stradowski (Rand).

order that anchors the worldbuilding of the series. “The Aes Sedai are a group of women who have access to the One Power and are able to channel,” Judkins explains. “They are not the presidents of countries or the queens of countries; they are the people who sit at the center of political power...and pull the strings of the world from the White Tower.” The manner in which the Aes Sedai magic is depicted will need to honor its singular nature both in order to appeal to existing fans and to draw in new ones. “The channeling is so integral to the world of The Wheel of Time,” Judkins says. “The author made a system that makes sense. It works; it has rules, and you have to follow them. So we’ve been really careful

THERE’S SO MUCH THAT IS IN GAME OF THRONES THAT WAS INSPIRED BY THE WHEEL OF TIME.” — RA FE JU D KI N S

on the show to make sure that we’re holding to all of those same rules.” Using magic in The Wheel of Time, however, is not simply a matter of chanting, hand-waving, and adding pyrotechnics in post-production. “We didn’t just send it off to VFX and say, ‘Give us a simple light show.’

We started with Rosamund and a movement coach,” says Judkins. “Threads [of magic] are woven together; they call them weaves; they call it channeling. We went through everything in the books and passages discussing what it feels like to embrace the Source, what it feels like to weave things together.” Other details, such as the disparate journeys of the characters in The Wheel of Time, must necessarily be compressed, with certain major characters absorbing roles of minor characters throughout the series. “We’ll never be able to achieve everything that’s in the books,” Judkins admits. “What are the iconic places that we need to do, and do we need to shift things around in physical DEN OF GEEK 13

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space in order to hit them?... I don’t want to waste all my production money putting town after town on screen.” That being said, the world of The Wheel of Time has a wealth of different cultures with their own unique customs that it would be a shame not to honor, such as the seafaring nation of Atha’an Miere or the desert dwellers in the Aiel Waste Comment end “[Jordan] really built this huge geo-political world, and the cultures of the different nations were so distinct,” says Judkins. “In the first book, they don’t go to as many of those places, but the ones we do–the detail to which they are thought through in trying to deliver exactly the culture that was represented in the books in those places is extremely thorough.” Judkins’ faith in the worldbuilding of the source material eliminates any worry about the inevitable comparisons to Game of Thrones. “The Wheel of Time came out before Game of Thrones, in terms of the books. There’s so much that is in Game of Thrones– and George [R.R. Martin] will say this–that was inspired by The Wheel of Time,” he says. “But we as creators have to be mindful of the fact that 14

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Above: The Aes Sedai take their prisoner Logain (Álvaro Morte) to the White Tower. Left: Madeleine Madden as Egwene Al’Vere and Josha Stradowski as Rand al’Thor.

Game of Thrones has already come out and is a reference point for a lot of audiences.” That accessibility is going to be a key factor in bringing in viewers unfamiliar with The Wheel of Time books, but with all of the careful attention to only the most important details, Judkins and his team appear to

be up to the challenge. As characters often say in the Jordan novels, “The Wheel weaves as the Wheel wills,” and only a fickle audience can decide whether the Amazon adaptation casts its spell when it arrives this fall. The Wheel Of Time premieres on Amazon Prime in November.

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FIVE THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT…

MANNY JACINTO The Good Place star is taking to the skies.

BY ROSIE FLETCHER

Manny Jacinto was born in the Philippines but grew up in Vancouver, Canada. However, he made his breakout as Jacksonville, Florida dude Jason Mendoza in comedy The Good Place. While Mendoza is an adorable doofus, Jacinto has a bachelor‘s degree in civil engineering.

One thing Jacinto does have in common with Mendoza, is that both are excellent dancers. Jacinto was part of a hip-hop dance group that competed in highlevel competitions. The Good Place showrunner Michael Shur built that into the character.

16 DEN 16 DENOFOF GEEK GEEK

Jacinto is in Nine Perfect Strangers where he plays Yao, the assistant to wellness guru Masha (Nicole Kidman). You can also see him in the weird Netflix horror Brand New Cherry Flavor, where he plays a drug dealer and best friend of the protagonist.

Next up, Jacinto will take flight in Top Gun: Maverick playing Fritz, one of the next generation of pilots that Tom Cruise trains. Jacinto has taken on a range of different roles. Currently in postproduction is romcom I Want You Back starring opposite Jenny Slate.

Jacinto told Men‘s Health his dream role is the charater of Levi Ackerman in a live-action version of well loved anime, Attack on Titan. Levi Ackerman is the captain of the special operation unit and a fearsome soldier. We think Jacinto would rock it.

IMAGE CREDITS: GARY GERSHOFF/GETTY IMAGES

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READING LIST

SCI-FI THROUGH TIME Alternate histories, contemporary first contact, and climateravaged futures in fall’s speculative fiction. BY NATALIE ZUTTER THEN

NOW

TRUTH OF THE DIVINE LINDSAY ELLIS (ST. MARTIN’S PRESS) OCTOBER 12

Ellis’ debut novel, Axiom’s End, transported readers to an alternatehistory 2007 in which humanity learned that Earth had made first contact, and that theories about government cover-ups were true. This sequel explores the global betrayal and protagonist Cora’s struggles with being the intermediary for an extraterrestrial, made harder when another being’s arrival ups the chaos.

YOU FEEL IT JUST BELOW THE RIBS

JEFFREY CRANOR AND JANINA MATTHEWSON (HARPER PERENNIAL) NOVEMBER 16

This alternate-history account from the creators of the podcast Within The Wires sees a 20th century transformed by the excision of personal connections. Following The Great Reckoning, The New Society eschews all kinship in its citizens, employing loner and researcher Miriam to establish this new detached status quo–at terrible societal cost. 20

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LIGHT FROM UNCOMMON STARS RYKA AOKI (TOR BOOKS) SEPTEMBER 28

Despite a plot hinging on a deal with the devil and sweetened by a flirtation with a starship captain, Aoki’s latest finds its heart in a donut shop in present-day California’s San Gabriel Valley. Intending to barter violin prodigy Katrina Nguyen’s soul in exchange for her own, Shizuka Satomi is instead drawn to protect the trans runaway and to pursue interstellar refugee Lan Tran.

BEYOND

IN THE WATCHFUL CITY

S. QIOUYI LU (TORDOTCOM PUBLISHING) OUT NOW

The cyberpunk city of Ora watches its citizens, but its eyes are extrasensory human Anima, who surveils Ora via a cerebral network. Then a stranger named Vessel arrives, carrying a collection of curios. Each item comes wrapped in a story, through which Vessel reveals secrets beyond Ora that will make Anima question the city’s purpose and overall existence.

THE ACTUAL STAR

TRASHLANDS

Byrne’s daring second novel explores humanity’s continued survival through a trio of reincarnated souls and three different interludes in the same cave in Belize spaced 2000 years apart. From ancient Mayan civilization in 1012 to a journey of self-discovery in 2012, it culminates in 3012 with a nomadic, generously supportive society that gives readers a hopeful vision of the future.

Philip K. Dick Award winner Stine (Road Out of Winter) conjures up a nightmarish future “Scrappalachia” (Appalachiaturned-trashheap) in which the most treasured resource is any plastic that can be reused for a new purpose. Single mom Coral struggles to scavenge enough to survive, while working toward earning back her stolen son. Her path crosses not only the fearsome Rattlesnake Master, but also a reporter from a flooded coastal city who offers her the impossible: a way out of Trashlands.

ALISON STINE (MIRA BOOKS) OCTOBER 26

MONICA BYRNE (HARPER VOYAGER) OUT NOW

THE WANDERING EARTH CIXIN LIU (TOR BOOKS) OCTOBER 12

Each story collected from Liu’s Chinese Galaxy Award-winning career examines our planet in different fictional periods of its existence. From a “Braking Era” of perpetual dusk to Liu’s eponymous novella about an ambitious attempt to propel Earth out of the Solar System, The Wandering Earth envisions terra firma stopped, started, and still standing at the end of time.

NOOR

NNEDI OKORAFOR (DAW BOOKS) NOVEMBER 9

Okorafor’s latest Africanfuturism novel, set in near-future Nigeria, follows AO, who struggles with dual prejudices against her cybernetic augmentations and her physical disabilities. Forced to go on the run, her every move streamed for the masses, AO’s partnering with a Fulani herdsman creates the “saga of the wicked woman and the mad man.”

FAR FROM THE LIGHT OF HEAVEN

TADE THOMPSON (ORBIT BOOKS) OCTOBER 26

Thompson sets his sci-fi mystery on the colony ship Ragtime, headed to Lagos Station and eventually a new planet. First mate Shell is tasked with the mission of delivering 1,000 sleeping passengers to their new home, but when the AI is compromised, she is Ragtime’s only hope for survival and its prime suspect.

LEVIATHAN FALLS

JAMES S.A. COREY (ORBIT BOOKS) NOVEMBER 16

The Expanse book series has spanned over 50 years in-universe, from the Rocinante crew’s first encounter with an alien protomolecule to the revelation of the extraterrestrial gate builders encroaching upon humanity. What began with Earth colonizing Mars and the Asteroid Belt has transformed into the rise and fall of the Laconian Empire, with Leviathan Falls tying up loose ends. DEN OF GEEK

COMMENTARY

RETURN OF THE CLIFFHANGER

What does a return to serial format mean for Doctor Who? BY CHRIS FARNELL ILLUSTRATION BY JESSICA KOYNOCK

DOCTOR WHO SERIES 13 WON’T be a collection of one-off episodes, but instead a single, epic, six-part adventure with “lots of cliffhangers,” according to showrunner Chris Chibnall. This is a huge change to the format of the show, perhaps even as big as the later revelation that lead actor Jodie Whittaker and Chibnall will both be leaving at the end of 2022 (following another three Specials). But as well as being a huge change, this could also be seen as a return to form. The Cliffhanger of Doom

Since 1963, the cliffhanger has always been one of Doctor Who’s staple ingredients and the “scream” at the start of the theme tune, at the end of the show is a key part of the thrill. Something frightening happens, the scream kicks in, and viewers know they have to wait until next week to find out how the Doctor survives. A list of classic Who moments is going to be littered with cliffhangers. The Dalek rising out of the Thames at the end of the first part of “The Dalek Invasion of Earth;” the arrival of Sutekh in “The Pyramids of Mars;” and of course, the first regeneration at the end of “Tenth Planet.” Some cliffhangers have landed at “hilarious” rather than “terrifying.” In “The City of Death,” the credits roll when we discover Count Scarlioni is an alien that looks like a pile of pesto tagliatelle, while in “Dragonfire” we see the Seventh Doctor very carefully, and for apparently no reason, climb over a safety railing so that he can end the episode dangling off a literal cliff. 18

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Good or bad though, the cliffhanger is core to the Doctor Who experience. Even when the series returned with its new, self-contained 45 minute episodes in 2005, the theme tune scream still capped off the end of each episode, and some of the series very best nail-biters and spine-tinglers come from this era.

WHILE CHRIS CHIBNALL IS PROMISING ONE LONG SIX-EPISODE STORY, IN DOCTOR WHO THAT COULD MEAN ANYTHING.” The Doctor and his companions surrounded by gas mask zombies in “The Empty Child;” the Daleks beginning their invasion of the Game Station at the climax of “Bad Wolf;” every time David Tennant ended an episode by looking at something that had suddenly appeared in his TARDIS and said “WHAT?!;” all the way up to “But not in the name of the Doctor!” at the thrilling cliffhanger of, well, “The Name of the Doctor.” While ostensibly Doctor Who is a more episodic show these days, the cliffhanger remains deeply embedded in its DNA and a key part of what makes it appointment viewing. So while at face value the shift to a single six-part story might seem like a dramatic throwback, what has actually changed?

What’s in an Arc?

What the question boils down to is, what makes an individual Doctor Who story? Even the very first episode, “An Unearthly Child,” is a riveting, self-contained 25 minutes of television before ending on the cliffhanger of a TARDIS marooned in a prehistoric desert. In a lot of ways, the following three episodes of cave person politics (each episode with its own title) feel like a different story altogether. Some of the longest stories of the early series, such as “The Chase” or the epic 12-episode “The Daleks’ Master Plan,” feature the TARDIS nipping nimbly between places and times, having isolated adventures strung together by the ongoing threat of the Daleks. It’s a structure that echoes the Bad Wolf arc that tied together the first season of the New Series, as Torchwood, Mr. Saxon, the missing bees, the Pandorica, Amy’s baby, the Impossible Girl, Missy, the Hybrid, and Missy again tie together the seasons that follow. So, while Chibnall is promising one long six-episode story, within the world of Doctor Who that could mean anything. Of course, there was one previous time when Doctor Who attempted to have a single, season-encompassing storyline, with mixed results. Trial and Error

The year was 1986. It was an uncertain time for Doctor Who. The series had just been pulled back from near cancellation and an 18-month production hiatus. The Doctor

himself, Colin Baker, was on shaky footing following a troubled first season. In many ways, Doctor Who was on trial. Which, depending on who you listen to, may be why season 23 of Doctor Who became “The Trial of a Time Lord.” One single story over 14 episodes, with the Doctor put on trial (again) by his people. The “Trial” consisted of the Doctor, his prosecutor, the Valeyard, and the Time Lords watching three far more traditional Doctor Who serials,

providing commentary like the robots in Mystery Science Theater 3000. The story concluded with the reveal that the Valeyard was a dark incarnation of the Doctor “from between his twelfth and final incarnations,” who had come back in time to steal the Doctor’s remaining lives. Since then, the Doctor has long-passed her twelfth incarnation, and the events of “The Time of the Doctor” and “The Timeless Children” imply she may not actually have a final one, raising all kinds of

interesting questions. But this format may be a clue to what series 13 could look like. Not the flashbacks or trial format, but the fact that, even when attempting a single, long-term arc, Doctor Who is a series that is always reaching back for the one-off story, the monster of the week, the short trip to somewhere you can have an adventure before hopping back in the TARDIS again. Much like the Doctor, the more this show changes, the more it stays the same. DEN OF GEEK

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YOUTH OF TOMORROW

It may be an animated series boasting new young characters, but the showrunners promise Star Trek: Prodigy won’t be what you expect. BY LACY BAUGHER

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Star Trek: Prodigy introduces bold new worlds and characters including Gwyn, a member of the Vau N’Akat species, purple maverick Dal and rock creature Rok-Tahk who is actually a science-loving eight-year-old girl.

WE WANTED TO MAKE AN ANIMATED SHOW TO RIVAL SOME OF THE BEST STAR TREK FILMS AND STAR TREK EPISODES.” — K E V IN H AG E MAN

to discover it contains a hologram of the famous former Voyager captain who “[teaches] them about beauty and tolerance and all this great stuff that they’ve never heard of before.”

The voice cast includes familiar names like Kate Mulgrew, Jason Mantzoukas, and John Noble alongside up-and-coming performers like Angus Imrie, Ella Purnell, and Rylee Alazraqui. The show’s main characters–none of whom are human–run the gamut from classic Star Trek deep cuts (Zero is a Medusan who wears a containment suit so others can look at him without going mad) to familiar franchise figures (Jankom Pog is a Tellarite, one of the original founding races of the Federation) to wholly new species, like the hulking rock creature Rok-Tahk, who’s actually an eightyear-old girl who loves science.

THOUGH NICKELODEON AND CBS have teamed up to create a Star Trek TV series aimed at making the franchise more accessible to younger viewers, don’t make the mistake of referring to the upcoming Star Trek: Prodigy as a kids’ show. “I think that a lot of people underestimate the show,” Star Trek: Prodigy showrunner Dan Hageman tells Den of Geek. “We knew people were going to come in and think, ‘Oh, this is little Kirk and little Spock.’” But the ambitions for Star Trek: Prodigy are much grander. “[We wanted to make] an animated show that’s going to rival some of the best Star Trek films and Star Trek episodes,” his co-showrunner (and brother) Kevin Hageman says. Yes, Prodigy features a diverse cast of young characters and tells the story of how they learn to survive–and ultimately thrive–on their own for the first time (with a little help from a holographic version of Star Trek: Voyager’s iconic Captain Kathryn Janeway). But the show also aims to provide a fresh look at the world of the Federation as we know it. “This is the first Star Trek show from the perspective of characters who are far outside [the Federation],” Dan Hageman explains. “It’s a story of characters who have grown up outside of that world who learn about it, much like the new audience would, a younger audience, or any audience who feels afraid of Star Trek canon.” Prodigy follows the story of a group of misfits who escape an alien mining planet by stealing a derelict ship, only

But Prodigy’s creators say they were constantly grounding these alien characters in emotional beats that would resonate with young audiences. “[Zero is] this genderless noncorporeal entity, but what’s the youthful quality that [speaks to] kids? Being awkward in your body and growing up and outgrowing your legs or having body issues, I think that’s something that all kids can relate to,” Dan Hageman says. These young runaways know nothing about the Federation or its rules, and much of the story of Prodigy’s first season is about them making mistakes along the way as they figure out who they are and who they want to become. “We wanted everyone to be the worst at their position and to see them grow into it,” Kevin Hageman says. “Season one is watching them mess up, and then learning lessons about how to start doing [things] correctly.” These early mistakes mean that the series’ young protagonists will face real dangers and suffer consequences. “That is where the real excitement is, seeing kids who don’t know how to fly a starship–well they better learn quick, or else they’re dead meat out there,” Dan Hageman adds. “But you have that carrot of there’s a place out there that is inclusive, that accepts all, that wants a better future and for these kids who’ve grown up in very, very hard times, this is something that’s worth fighting for.” That’s where the presence of the legendary Captain Janeway comes in. “[When they’re] in over their heads who are they going to listen to?” Dan Hageman says. “We wanted that ‘tough-as-nails, but at the same time, you can have an earnest conversation with them’ feeling–we always pictured Janeway.” Both Hagemans believe that though Prodigy is an animated series with a younger audience in mind, it should still tell stories with genuine threats, difficult choices, and consequences. “We never want to talk down to a young audience,” Dan Hageman says. “We don’t hold back on any stakes.” DEN OF GEEK

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CLASSIC ANIME COMES TO LIFE

Showrunner André Nemec talks expanding Cowboy Bebop’s universe with Netflix’s live-action adaptation. BY JOE MATAR

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WE’RE NOT REMAKING COWBOY BEBOP. WE’RE MAKING COWBOY BEBOP IN THE SPIRIT OF THE ORIGINAL ANIME.” Let’s not fuck this up.” Even people who claim not to like anime still often have a soft spot for Bebop because it draws from a cinematic language many of us are already familiar with. “What became clear to me,” explains Nemec, “is that the best way to understand Cowboy Bebop was to look at Cowboy Bebop’s inspirations, all of which were live-action films. So, John Cho’s Spike Spiegel hones his fighting skills during his downtime on the Bebop.

how do we dig back to their original inspirations—the Sergio Leone films, the noir pictures, the 1980s buddy cop movies that we all love and remember? Let’s draw inspiration from there in order to craft our story, while simultaneously making sure that if it ain’t broke, we don’t need to fix it.” To that end, the Netflix team has dressed the live-action incarnation of protagonist Spike Spiegel (John Cho) in a near-replica of the anime character’s striking blue suit. His partner Jet Black (Mustafa Shakir), is also attired closely to his cartoon counterpart, synthetic metal arm and all. The outfit of the third core member of the Bebop crew, Faye Valentine (Daniella Pineda) has perhaps received the most conspicuous alterations. It’s understandable; the anime largely IMAGE CREDITS: KIRSTY GRIFFIN/NETFLIX (CHO), NICOLA DOVE/NETFLIX (GROUP)

ASK ANYBODY ABOUT THEIR favorite anime and if Cowboy Bebop—a sci-fi Western about the misadventures of a gang of bounty hunters on a ship called the Bebop— isn’t at the top of their list, it probably won’t be too far down. Although the series aired its entire run of 26 episodes on Adult Swim way back in 2001, there’s never been anything else quite like it. With its dynamic animation, its mashup of genres, and its vibrant jazz soundtrack, it’s a singular artistic triumph. The text displayed during the show’s opening titles even asserts that it’s “a new genre itself.” Even so, Netflix is now banking on recapturing that singular spirit with an upcoming live-action adaptation. However, Cowboy Bebop’s iconic status is not lost on showrunner André Nemec, who was introduced to the anime when, on a family visit, his brother sat him down and had him watch the episodes, all of which he had saved to DVR. “I was hooked,” Nemec says. “It’s poetic, it’s beautiful, it’s artful, it’s funny, it’s violent at times. All in all, it kind of is its own genre of storytelling.” So, when the idea of taking on a live-action version of the series came up, “there was, of course, the moment of, like, ‘Oof, that’s pretty hallowed ground.’” When it came time to assemble a crew, Nemec says, “We were blessed that most of the people who came to those interviews were actually wearing a Cowboy Bebop t-shirt from back in the day.” The mantra he repeated to all of them was, “This is Cowboy Bebop.

(L-R): Daniella Pineda as Faye Valentine, John Cho as Spike Spiegel and Mustafa Shakir as Jet Black bring their iconic characters to life.

holds up, but one of the most dated aspects is Faye’s revealing outfit, which makes the character feel like fan service personified. “There’s a difference between wearing an outfit and drawing an outfit,” Nemec says. While Faye’s look was possible in animated form, the physics of it make little sense in reality. “There’s not enough double-sided tape in the universe to make that outfit work,” Nemec adds. There will be alterations to the storytelling as well. “We don’t want to serve the exact same meal,” Nemec says. “We’re not remaking Cowboy Bebop. We’re making Cowboy Bebop in the spirit of the original anime.” The pacing has been recalibrated

for live-action, too, with hour-long episodes as opposed to the anime’s half-hours. “A lot of what was important to us was really digging into the characters and understanding who they were,” he says. “It felt like we wanted to expand on the canon of the characters and that was going to require a little bit more time with them.” However, Nemec believes the Netflix version still captures the “cool, pulpy fun” of the anime. Furthermore, fans agree that Cowboy Bebop wouldn’t be half of what it is without its soundtrack composed by the brilliant Yoko Kanno. Happily, that’s an aspect that will remain familiar as Kanno has returned to score this adaptation.

Nemec says she brought an enthusiasm to “rewrite music, write new music, use iconic pieces, and really live in the show that we were telling. She brought her Yoko flavor and her Yoko genius to all of it.” Nemec understands there will always be purists. “I promise we will never take the anime away from the fans of the show,” he says, but he also stresses that “everybody came to this show wanting to tell this story, not because they wanted to change it, but because they loved it.” “I love these characters,” he says, “and it felt like there were still more stories to tell for them.” Cowboy Bebop will be available on Netflix on November 19 DEN OF GEEK

SPOTLIGHT INTERVIEW

WITCHES AND BITCHES

The Doctor Who and Chilling Adventures of Sabrina star talks to Den of Geek about her new role in Doom Patrol as the mysterious Madame Rouge. BY ROSIE KNIGHT

Madame Rouge is a lesser known character, like most of the Doom Patrol team. How would you describe your take on her for viewers who are excited for her arrival?

Michelle Gomez as Madame Rogue in Doom Patrol, with Vic “Cyborg” Stone (Joivan Wade) and Rita Farr (April Bowlby).

I think it’s just my face. It’s hard to act out from under this particular set of features, so I’ve kind of leaned into that over the years. I have fun with it. In terms of screen and for casting I guess these angles are my strengths. I’ve heard myself saying this

She’s kind of complicated and a little eccentric. She arrives at the manor and she has this very specific mission, but she can’t really remember what it is. She’s fairly enigmatic.

THESE ANGLES ARE MY STRENGTHS. I’VE LEANED INTO THAT OVER THE YEARS. I HAVE FUN WITH IT.”

You’ve been on a roll with these complex, and in many cases, villainous roles with Missy, Madame Satan, Miranda, and now Madame Rouge, if she follows her role in the comics. What draws you to these kinds of women?

many times in interviews before but it’s true, I have a face that was born to play witches and bitches really until the day I die. Listen, if there’s a casting director out there who wants to cast me as Fiona or Alison the girl

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— M IC H E L LE G O ME Z

next door, I’m ready to play a decent, loving, human being! With Sabrina and now Doom Patrol you’re carving out a space as a go-to performer in these cult comic book shows. Would you call yourself a comic book fan, or have you become one through these roles?

I certainly have fallen in love with that genre. Then to transpose that and turn it into a show where we get to kind of bust out of the page is such a delight. I’m still pinching myself that I was in Doctor Who playing The Master. And now I’m trundling into my second “Madame” role. I’m thoroughly enjoying it, and I’m so flattered and privileged really to be part of it, and to be part of that world, where I think we all need a little bit of fantasy at the moment. You’ve had some intriguing powers, from timelord-ing to impeccable

IMAGE CREDITS: NATHAN JOHNSON/ BOB MAHONEY/ 2021 HBO INC.

MICHELLE GOMEZ IS ONE OF HER generation’s best character actors. She’s been blessing genre fans with incredible performances like Missy in Doctor Who, Madame Satan in Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, and most recently as the dynamic and dangerous Miranda in The Flight Attendant. So the announcement that she’d be joining HBO Max’s groundbreaking superhero series Doom Patrol was a match made in heaven. Gomez will be playing Madame Rouge, a sometime ally, sometime antagonist of the motley crew who was first introduced in 1964’s Doom Patrol #86. To celebrate her arrival, we spoke to Gomez about her new role, her penchant for playing complex women, and the grotesque hilarity fans can expect when Madame Rouge joins the show.

knife skills, over the years, but Madame Rouge has some unusual superpowers of her own. How much fun was it to dive into a truly weird full-on superhero world like Doom Patrol?

I felt like I had come home. I really felt like with all the shows that have gone before, it was all kind of leading to Doom Patrol. I really felt immediately comfortable in this world because it was bringing to bear everything that I’d done before. The thing about Doom Patrol is that it’s a show for adults that enjoy the sort of anarchic world that we’re all actually living in on a day to day basis. But it takes that stuff, a crazy world where people are really struggling with who they are and are kind of running in the opposite direction of whatever their powers may be. It’s like an illustration of, you know, where we’re at as human beings. Then you have the struggle and the drama and the comedy. I mean, it’s funny but it’s not funny for no reason, it’s funny because we relate to it. Then it’s just bonkers, right? There’s an episode where she shows her powers; she’s a shapeshifter, she can basically turn into anything she desires or just kind of thinks about. And when I turn into something which I’m not going to reveal... you cannot believe what I’m about to turn into, there is no way. In fact I would love to set you the challenge to try and imagine what it is you think I’m going to turn into in Doom Patrol because none of you will get it.

One of Doom Patrol’s biggest strengths is its in-depth emotionallydriven character explorations that hide behind the odd powers and eclectic heroes. Could you tease that journey for Madame Rouge?

Michelle Gomez was once best know for her role in British comedy Green Wing. Now she’s a masssive international star.

I think she’s like the other characters in that she has a journey through discovery. She’s finding out things about herself that may or may not be things she can live with.

Doom Patrol Season 3 hits HBO Max on Sept. 23. DEN OF GEEK

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CRUISE CONTROL

Tom Cruise returns as the all-star pilot at the heart of the long-awaited sequel, Top Gun: Maverick. Director Joseph Kosinski explains how he lured him back. BY BRYAN CAIRNS

TOP GUN: MAVERICK HAS SOME INCREDIBLE ACTION SCENES BUT THERE IS A DRAMA AT THE CENTER.” — JOSEPH KOSINSKI

Finally taking flight in May 2022, Top Gun: Maverick finds the titular character returning home to train Top Gun graduates for a covert mission. The talented cast includes Miles Teller, Jennifer Connelly, Jon Hamm, 28

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Ed Harris, Jay Ellis, Danny Ramirez, and Glen Powell. Val Kilmer also returns as Iceman. Kosinski notes “cracking the right story was key to getting Tom on board.” “I wanted it to be a rite of passage story like the first film,” Kosinski says. “Obviously, Maverick in that film was in his early twenties and now he’s in his fifties. It had to be a different journey, but it was important it was a journey for a man at a different part of his life. We think of Top Gun as an action film, but I think of it as a drama. It has some incredible action scenes in it, but there is a drama at the center of it.” Beyond Top Gun: Maverick’s obvious wow factor, what mattered most to Kosinski was the emotional core–the strength, heart, and conflict–instilled into the characters. “For me, the way into that was through this story of Rooster [the son of Goose], who is played by Miles Teller,” Kosinski says. “That was the thing that felt like the storyline that we would be able to sink our hooks into emotionally and the thing that would get Tom excited about getting into this character again.” It’s been 35 years since Maverick donned his Ray Ban sunglasses and indulged his need for speed. So, where’s he been? What’s he been up to all this time? Kosinski spent plenty of time pondering those very questions. No spoilers here, but he does propose

Clockwise from top: Tom Cruise returns as “Maverick.” Danny Ramirez plays “Fanboy.” Jay Ellis plays “Payback.”

that, “Maverick is still Maverick.” That means a passionate guy known for pushing the boundaries and, yes, sometimes people’s buttons. But Maverick is at a different stage in life now, and the trainees often echo his glory days… for better or for worse. “For Maverick, to see these pilots at the age he was in the first film, and the way they interact with each other and the excitement and love

IMAGE CREDITS: PARAMOUNT PICTURES, SKYDANCE AND JERRY BRUCKHEIMER FILMS/SCOTT GARFIELD

TOM CRUISE IS ONCE AGAIN entering the danger zone. The highly-anticipated sequel, Top Gun: Maverick, picks up decades after the 1986 blockbuster, with the action star reprising his role as hotshot pilot Pete “Maverick” Mitchell. For many fans, the original has evolved into a timeless feel-good film. “Top Gun is the movie that took Tom from a promising young actor onto the road to superstar,” director Joseph Kosinski [Tron: Legacy, Oblivion] tells Den of Geek. “It’s just a great story and a great friendship between Maverick and Goose [Anthony Edwards]. The notion of the wingman was created with Top Gun and has entered the vernacular now. It’s a combination of all those things.”

of aviation, but also the willingness to put themselves in danger’s way, certainly reminds him of the way he was,” Kosinski explains. “He has a lot of experience and loss along the way, to give him some context on that. When he sees Rooster, the son of his old wingman, that brings back a flood of memories and emotions that he hasn’t thought about in a while.” Top Gun revolutionized how aerial

sequences were shot, and inspired by GoPro videos from Navy pilots, the sequel promises even more extreme F/A-18 Super Hornet acrobatics. And given Cruise’s panache for performing his own stunts, he and the cast strapped in. Cruise developed a progressive training program so that the actors could prepare for the plane’s incredible dynamic forces, forces

capable of making pilots pass out from lack of blood flow. Thankfully, modern technology provided Kosinski the tools to capture all those riproaring, death-defying maneuvers. “We spent a year working with the Navy to get approvals to put six of these IMAX-quality cameras inside the cockpit,” Kosinski explains. “Four of them were facing toward the actors and two of them were facing forward, in addition to cameras mounted all over the exteriors of the aircraft.” The result? A film filled with visually-stunning dogfights, crazy stunts and wild shenanigans… one Kosinski insists must be viewed on the big screen. In the end, he believes Top Gun: Maverick will not only meet audiences’ expectations, but shoot them into the clouds. “You can feel the authenticity,” Kosinski concludes. “You can feel the strain, the G-forces, the speed, something you could never capture on a soundstage, no matter how much money or visual effects you threw at it. It was a tremendous amount of effort and work, but you just can’t fake the results. I can’t wait for people to see it.” Top Gun: Maverick opens in cinemas on May 27, 2022. DEN OF GEEK

IMAGE CREDITS: SONY PICTURES ENTERTAINMENT

Timothée Chalamet as teenage prophet Paul Atreides with Rebecca Ferguson as Lady Jessica, a member of the Bene Gesserit sisterhood.

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HE STORY OF 2021’S DUNE begins with a kid falling in

ALMOST 60 YEARS AFTER ITS FIRST PUBLICATION, DENIS VILLENEUVE IS DOING RIGHT BY FRANK HERBERT’S EPIC NOVEL. HERE’S WHAT TIMOTHÉE CHALAMET, REBECCA FERGUSON, AND VILLENEUVE HIMSELF THINK ABOUT WHY THE SPICE STILL MUST FLOW.

love with a book. Before he was the world-famous film director of Arrival and Blade Runner 2049, Denis Villeneuve was a teenager who devoured sci-fi novels. When he was “between 13 and 14,” he remembered seeing “these eyes.” The iridescent blue eyes were on the face of a man staring at the young Villeneuve, painted by Wojciech Siudmak, for the 1970 French paperback translation of Dune. Villeneuve was utterly mesmerized by the cover. “When you’re a kid, the covers can really make an impact,” he says. “The artists that were drawing them were so talented that even though I had never heard of Dune, I was drawn to that title and the simplicity. I was always attracted to the desert.” Like many serious readers of science fiction, Villeneuve’s obsession with Dune began free of artistic pretension. “I instantly fell in love with it for several reasons,” he says. “The way Paul is trying to find his identity while finding his home in another culture, with the Fremen. I was fascinated by the way they need to survive and adapt... I have always been in love with biology, the science of life, of nature. The way Frank Herbert used biology was insanely beautiful. To me, reading Dune is like a paradise. The book stayed with me all these years.” When you talk to Villeneuve now, childhood giddiness illuminates the corners of everything we’re talking about. Yes, Villeneuve loved Star Wars, too (“The Empire Strikes Back is always good for the soul,” he says). But what makes Dune so much different from other popular heroic epics is that, despite the escapist sweep of the story, its underlying message is anything but escapist. The story of Paul Atreides is not an aww-shucks hero’s journey. In her 1978 review of Star Wars, Ursula K. Le Guin referred to the protagonist of that film as “Huck Skywalker.” And when you think of the story of Dune in that way, no one would confuse Paul Atreides with any member of the Skywalker clan. The story of Dune concerns a powerful family—House Atreides—being pushed into a terrible situation on the planet Arrakis by opposing forces on all sides. Smack dab in the middle of that is the notion that Paul could—and will— initiate a huge uprising against the planet’s oppressors at some point in the future. Paul, and his parents—Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) and Duke Leto (Oscar Isaac)— set out to do good, but create even more conflict as a result. “At the very core of Dune is a warning,” Villeneuve says. “Anyone who is trying to blend religion and politics—that is a dangerous cocktail. I think Herbert wrote it as a warning, [against] leaders that pretend to know what will happen, who pretend to know the truth, who might be lacking humility. When someone behaves like a messiah, you have to be careful.”

A B OY A N D H I S SA N D W O R M S S ONE OF THE messiahs of Dune is a guy destined to have

multiple names: Muad’Dib, the Kwisatz Haderach, and, of course, Paul Atreides. On our planet, he’s known as

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(Left to Right) Gurney Halleck (Josh Brolin), warmaster of House Atreides, Duke Leto Atreides (Oscar Isaac), and trusted Mentat Thufir Hawat (Stephen McKinley Henderson) gather their troops for conflict on Arrakis.

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Timothée Chalamet’s Paul Atreides runs from a terrifying sandworm.

props,” was important to feel a connection to the objects of Paul’s world. He also didn’t shy away from the idea that this was yet another adaptation of a beloved book. “I learned that from Greta Gerwig when I did Little Women. Nobody minds another good movie based on a good book.” But for Chalamet, the journey isn’t quite over. “I’m champing at the bit to film Part 2,” he says. “I read all of Dune Messiah in lockdown. I’m ready.”

A N E W D U N E, FO R E V E RYO N E X PERHAPS UNFAIRLY, being really into Dune carries

with it a kind of connotation that only the truly nerdy at heart get why science fiction devotees are so obsessed with

IMAGE CREDITS: COURTESY OF WARNER BROS. PICTURES AND LEGENDARY PICTURES

Timothée Chalamet. Ferguson says that Chalamet’s unique qualities as an actor were the “essential” elements that make the movie work. “Timmy brings the smaller to the grander,” she says. “He’s carrying this huge movie, and it’s lazy of me to use this word, but he brings such an indie feel to it.” When it comes to “indie” films that nearly everyone knows about, Chalamet is one of the most famous male actors on the planet in 2021. From his roles in Call Me By Your Name to Little Women, Chalamet has the kind of star power that is subtle and undefinable, because as Ferguson points out, he’s not playing the role to seem like a big movie hero. Paul Atreides is the opposite of a Han Solo or Captain Kirk type, and so is Chalamet. “I always tried to bring Paul Atreides back to the ground,” Villeneuve says. “I told Timothée, you are the hero, of course, you are a tremendous fighter. But I think you have the burden of having a very strong instinct that will be boosted by spice.” Chalamet reveals that in terms of becoming that “tremendous fighter,” some of his hand-to-hand training happened in a wine cellar while filming Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch. Chalamet also asserts that working with Villeneuve on Dune didn’t feel like being involved in a Hollywood blockbuster, and that transitioning from The French Dispatch to Dune made perfect sense. “It felt like working on a high-level indie,” Chalamet says. “I haven’t worked with the Coen Brothers, but I imagine it would be like this, just on a bigger scale. The Dark Knight is what made me want to act. It has incredible behavioral specifics. It has incredible performances and in the middle of it are sweeping cinematic sequences. In a way, Dune is like that. When you can get on a project of this size that has this much dramatic integrity, working with one of the best directors in the world right now, it’s exactly what I wanted.” Chalamet says that beyond fight training, immersing himself into the world of Dune and “spending time with the

hardcore fans, that they feel the spirit, the poetry, and the atmosphere of the book—but to make sure that someone who had never heard about Dune would also have fun and understand the story. I had to make sure that everyone would be on board right at the beginning.” To that end, the new Dune sports a radical narrative shift from the source material. In this version, the opening narration and framing of the story is given by Chani (Zendaya), a member of the Fremen tribe, native to Arrakis. Villeneuve describes this as one of his “bold” decisions but stresses that the narrative point of view doesn’t change the story at all. Logistically, the story of Dune is about House Atreides coming to take over the spice mining on the planet Arrakis. The native Fremen have been abused and tortured by previous occupiers, House Harkonnen, so in the new opening narration, Chani wonders “who will be our new oppressors?” a line not spoken in the book. Instead, the narrative framing of the novel is from the quasi-historical point of view of Princess Irulan, a woman Paul eventually marries for purely political reasons. So, what Villeneuve has done by giving the opening narration to Chani is flip the point of view from the aristocracy to the working class. Villeneuve also says that elevating Chani’s role, and the roles of several of the female characters, was all because the movie required “bold” decisions to become the best film version of the story possible. “A book and a movie are totally different mediums. I had to make certain decisions. This is why I decided to make the first book into two movies. I had to condense some ideas to tell the story in the most eloquent way possible so that it will be understood by

I WANT PEOPLE WHO LOVE THE BOOK TO FEEL LIKE WE PUT A CAMERA IN THEIR MINDS. DENIS VILLENEUVE

the spice. John Hodgman makes two jokes about “Third Stage Guild Navigators” in his book Medallion Status. In Russian Doll, Nadia uses the phrase “Jodorowsky’s Dune” as a nerdy password to gain access to a back room. When Patrick Stewart was cast in Star Trek: The Next Generation, to his fellow castmates he was “the guy from I, Claudius,” while to writers like Michael Chabon, he was “the guy from Dune.” Unlike Star Wars or The Lord of the Rings, the broad appeal of Dune has always been tentative. But, in addition to Chalamet’s favorable comparison to The Dark Knight, Villeneuve makes it clear that the purpose of this Dune wasn’t to just make book readers happy. “It would be so easy to make a Dune movie only for hardcore fans,” Villeneuve says. “My goal was to please the

everybody,” Villeneuve says. But he’s also quick to point out that adaptation is not the same as leaving things out on purpose. “When you adapt it’s an act of vandalism. You will change things. But, from the beginning, I said to the crew, to the studio, to the actors: ‘the bible is the book. We will, as much as possible, stay as close as possible to the book.’ I want people who love the book to feel like we put a camera in their minds.” Ferguson’s Lady Jessica is arguably the character who sets the story of Dune into motion. In this future-world, the mystical matriarchal order of the Bene Gesserit can control the sex of babies that are born into its sisterhood. And in defiance of her orders from her fellow Bene Gesserit, Jessica had a son, instead of a daughter. Jessica asserting her right to choose, in essence, makes it all happen. Ferguson believes the emotional power of these stories is more important for audiences than the nitty-gritty specifics. “We can go into DEN OF GEEK

some kind of nano version of ourselves, but if it doesn’t read through on the screen, to the audience, it isn’t worth doing.” Talking about accessibility, Ferguson says that she believes the new Dune represents an ongoing paradigm shift of artistic and thoughtful science fiction in the 21st century. “Once the door’s open and you know that there are so many incredible stories within science-fiction storytelling, there’s musicality and rhythm that is needed to create these worlds within worlds, it’s very complex, everyone doesn’t get it.” But, even though there are levels of “philosophy” and “complexity” to Dune, Ferguson feels that the film doesn’t operate in spite of its level of detail, but because of it. “The sandworms, the resources of the stillsuits, I could go on forever,” she says. “In this film, it’s the details, the smaller things that matter.”

SEEING THE FUTURED SPOILER ALERT: if you’ve never read Dune, the book itself

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Zendaya plays Chani, a member of a Fremen tribe and the character who provides the narration and framing device for the film.

yet, even if you know every spoiler, and have every detail of every character’s journey clear in your mind, with this Dune, we still don’t really know what the emotional future holds, exactly. The Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear tells us “fear is the mind-killer,” and so, for the new Dune, the hope must flow.

A D U N E M OV I E T R I LO GY? Z WHEN DIRECTING Timothée Chalamet through his

visions of the future, Villeneuve says he was careful to point out that “the future is shifting, the future is always in motion, so it means sometimes these visions are not always accurate.” The same could possibly be said for what audiences can expect for a sequel to Dune. As Chalamet confirms, “we’ve only filmed the first part of the story,” meaning, what everyone will be waiting for next isn’t a sequel to Dune, but simply the rest of Dune. With a TV series

IMAGE CREDITS: COURTESY OF WARNER BROS. PICTURES AND LEGENDARY PICTURES (ZENDAYA), CHIABELLA JAMES (CHALAMET AND FERGUSON, DENIS VILLENEUVE, SIDEBAR LANDSCAPE)

actively tries to spoil the pages ahead. Whether it’s snippets of imaginary historical texts that open each chapter or the prophetic flashes of Paul Atreides, the story of Dune sprinkles flavors of its own future into the beginning, middle, and end. There are many reasons why Frank Herbert’s book reshaped the notion of what an epic science fiction novel could be, but the idea that the narrative is always a little ahead of itself is a big part of its addictive and enduring power. “It’s not something you’d have any sort of self-conscious perspective on,” Chalamet says, speaking of Paul’s early moments of clairvoyance in the story. Before Paul goes to the titular planet of Arrakis and meets Chani, he has glimpses of his future, and later, during a fateful first meeting with a sandworm, the near-magical spice brings that vision into focus. Chalamet says that in playing Paul, these scenes required careful subtlety in order to convey a realistic sense of knowing one’s own future. “It’s a layer,” Chalamet explains. “As opposed to lucidly having visions of a pleasant landscape. These aren’t futures that are something [Paul would] be happy to skip into. What he’s seeing and feeling is a visceral experience of a hyper-specific telling of tragedy, but also that he has a hand in that tragedy. If you were going through that it would be a hell of an experience.” As Chalamet points out, the spoilers for Dune “have been out there for four decades,” so, for old fans, the true lure of the new film version is discovering how the things we know are coming, will make us feel. For longtime spiceheads, watching Chalamet in the first Dune trailer was like the opposite of Paul’s traumatic flash-forward: we see the hyper-specific events, and we’re hoping for an emotional victory. For those who have waited for a perfect film version of Dune for several decades, there’s almost no “self-conscious perspective” left. From the tribulations of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s unmade film to David Lynch’s divisive 1984 version to the uneven Sci-Fi Channel iterations from the 2000s, hoping for a worthy adaptation of Dune, has, for fans, been a hell of an experience. But this time, with this director, and this cast, the future looks good. And

SOUNDS OF THE SAND HANS ZIMMER ON CREATING DUNE’S STRANGE SCORE.

Director Denis Villeneuve with Javier Bardem on set of Dune. Bardem plays Stilgar, the leader of a Fremen tribe.

in the works for HBO Max—Dune: The Sisterhood, which will focus on the story of the Bene Gesserit—how much more of this world should we expect? According to Villeneuve, the goal is a trilogy. “I always thought there would be two movies for the first book. And I always thought Dune Messiah would be a powerful film. I always saw a trilogy.” Chalamet is also primed for one more film beyond Dune: Part Two, revealing that he thought Dune Messiah “was amazing, and in some ways, more traditional than the first book. I’d love to do it, when and if we— hopefully—get to it.” In addition to a pandemic and the shifting schedules of various actors, completing Dune: Part Two any time soon seems overly optimistic. But Villeneuve is hopeful that he will make a trilogy. “Well, my mind didn’t go much further after that!” he says. “That’s already a lot. The books after that get a little more complex. But I do see three movies.” In an uncertain time, Dune feels like a shockingly prescient social lens. Ferguson says she believes that “when people are depressed, they go for musicals or sci-fi,” and that Dune serves as a kind of balm for the anxieties of the culture at large. Though the release of the film was delayed, this could be a perfect time for its arrival. From climate change to imperialism, the book and the film shine an adventurous light on what Chalamet believes isn’t a prediction of the future, but rather “a projection” of what might happen. If Dune does its job, it won’t just start conversations about the future of cinema, but perhaps the future of the planet, too. In real life, there may be no golden path for humanity, but for now, with one ambitious work of cinematic expression, the sleeper has awakened. Dune opens in cinemas and on HBO Max on October 22

IN BIG BLOCKBUSTERS like The Dark Knight or Justice League, a Hans Zimmer score is a force of sonic nature—you know it when you hear it. But Zimmer himself says he rejects any musical labels. And if you think you know what to expect from his new Dune soundtrack, you’re wrong. For this movie, Zimmer “transgressed music,” and combined film scoring with “sound design.” Zimmer says the goal was to create otherworldly songs and voices that intentionally “don’t sound human.” To that end, he used “resonators,” which, for example, would mash up the sound of a medieval war horn with a cello. “We made up a lot of new instruments [with] some crazy synthesizers,” Zimmer explains. “There are sounds that are not of humanity. I mean, with some rhythms—there’s no way a drummer could play that.” This collaboration with director Denis Villeneuve was all about building a new cinematic vision of Arrakis. But Zimmer also layered in various references to what Dune means to people in the real world, including a bassline borrowed from an obscure Klaus Schulze track called “Frank Herbert.” Zimmer also revealed that the music for Dune won’t necessarily end when the movie ends. There’s a ton of music he recorded for the film “that might not make the final cut,” including several diegetic songs played by Gurney Halleck (Josh Brolin) on the fictional instrument known as the baliset. “We did record those,” he says. “It might be fun one day to release them because we have a massive number of songs.” So, there’s not just one album’s worth of Dune music Zimmer composed—there could be more. A lot more.

Rebecca Ferguson and Timothée Chalamet against the impressive landscape of Dune. DEN OF GEEK

RESURRECTING THE

ETERNALS KIERON GILLEN TELLS US ABOUT THE JOYS AND CHALLENGES OF MAKING THE SPRAWLING MYTHOLOGY OF THE ETERNALS ACCESSIBLE FOR A NEW AUDIENCE. by JIM DANDENEAU

IMAGE CREDIT: MARVEL

t’s not hard, when a Captain America or an Iron

Man movie hits, for Marvel to have a comic on shelves that new fans can be pointed toward as an accessible way to get to know the characters. The same can’t be said for The Eternals. In a lot of ways, Jack Kirby’s most bizarre creations—god-like beings, created by the all-powerful Celestials to do battle with the deformed, wild Deviants—have endured despite their relative scarcity. The sum total of what can be reasonably called Eternals stories only runs to about 50 issues. So the task of centering them ahead of their big movie debut in November is both a blessing and a curse, even with an allstar cast and an Oscar-winning director at the helm. Enter Kieron Gillen. Gillen is a Marvel veteran and no stranger to the company’s cultural juggernaut side. Counted among his greatest hits are a long run with Kid Loki in Journey into Mystery, a thematic touchstone for the MCU’s biggest television show to date. And he authored what is likely going to be an important comic to the MCU going forward in Young Avengers. When he’s not creating the source material for potential future blockbusters, Gillen is fairly skilled at playing with Ikaris, the central character of Marvel’s new Eternals series, takes on Thanos, the ultimate cautionary tale of what happens when an Eternal goes wrong.

mythology: his creator-owned book for Image Comics, The Wicked + The Divine (co-created with his Young Avengers collaborators, Jamie McKelvie and Matt Wilson) mashed-up pantheons from around the world with pop music culture, and was a smash success. So Gillen was a natural choice to set on the weirdness of Eternals. “The Marvel Universe is such a busy place,” Gillen tells us, “in terms of a lot of the niches are filled… What is a niche in the Marvel Universe that isn’t filled by the gods? In the original Kirby stories, the Eternals are people who’ve been mistaken for gods. In reality, they are a species of unchanging, immortal beings who have been created by the actual space gods (the Celestials that are the gods in this metaphor) in eternal battle with these demon-like creatures.” If Kirby’s Eternals concept sounds somewhat unfinished, that’s because it largely was. “One of the interesting things about Eternals in the original run is that it was cut off early while Jack Kirby was still introducing stuff,” Gillen says. “It’s not like it reached the midpoint. You’ve still got new characters coming in… all the way through he’ll throw a random issue in with a different Eternal.” While Eternals are essentially immortal—unless they meet some violent, untimely end— only the Deviants breed and reproduce. After Kirby’s initial stories, the Eternals came into periodic conflict with the wider Marvel Universe, but ultimately Gillen inherited a lot of room to work. “My approach is much more into drilling down to what makes them weird, what makes them different for audiences,” DEN OF GEEK

he tells us. “And also things that have been implicit in the concept, I can perhaps put a spin on.” Like that aforementioned immortality. When the Eternals were originally introduced, they were only tens of thousands of years old. Neil Gaiman’s landmark 2006 series upped their ages into the millions, and introduced the idea that Eternals are not immortal, but are resurrected when they die. Gillen has now added a horrible twist on that. “For me, the heart of Marvel characters, as well as trying to save the world, they’re also the problem,” Gillen says. “Thor is somebody who was sent to Earth because he was an arrogant shit. To save the world, yes, but he is also the problem… That’s why I’ve led to this idea that there’s this awful secret that when [the Eternals] die, they have to take a life to carry on living.” The grandiosity of the tragedy is matched by the art. Esad Ribić and Matt Wilson are old hands at massive superhero work, with each doing a stint on Thor stories that spanned time and space and foes, from the Midgard serpent to the gods of the Shi’ar Empire. “With Esad, it’s always how can I do something that allows Esad to actually provide the scale of things?” Gillen asks. His answer comes from the worldbuilding in the series, which has the Eternals living in six cities around the planet: Polaris, in Siberia; The Exclusion at the South Pole; Celestia, in the Andes Mountains; Oceana, in the Pacific Ocean; Titanos in Northern Canada; and the most important city, Olympia. Olympia’s location in Greece helped foster confusion that the Eternals themselves were Greek gods, and as such it is their grandest. “When we go to those cities, it’s going to be the magical moments,” Gillen says. “In the same way, when we introduce New York in the first issue, that’s also a magical moment because it’s New York. In many ways, especially to a British person, New York is as magical a city as Olympia.”

IKARIS IS THE MOST STRAIGHT-SHOOTING CHARACTER. HE’S THE CLASSIC HERO, SO LET’S PUT HIM THROUGH THE GRINDER. The impressive thing about Gillen, Ribić, and Wilson’s first Eternals story is how much conflict they manage to stuff into it. They’ve introduced problems inherent to Eternal society—the take-a-penny-leave-a-penny resurrections, but also a society of immortals with wildly divergent understandings of what “protect Earth” means. “A lot of the Eternals don’t care,” Gillen says. “In some ways, they’re the bad gods. The idea of the Eternals includes people with very different ideas and yes, their job is to protect the Earth, but that doesn’t necessarily mean protecting humans.” Ikaris (played by Richard Madden in the movie) is the 38

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most classically superheroic of the Eternals: he flies around in primary colors, shooting lasers out of his eyes and generally being super strong. He’s got a rigid moral code that veers into obstinacy, but he’s passionate and dedicated to his mission, which he understands to be protecting Earth and all its inhabitants. He’s stricken by a premonition early in the series that he’ll have to protect a human from a mysterious, horrible fate. That horrible fate turns out to be dying so that Ikaris can be resurrected. “Ikaris is the most straight-shooting character, therefore he was the person who would most be hurt by the twist,” Gillen says. “He’s the classic hero, so let’s put him through the grinder.” Sprite (played by Lia McHugh on screen) is his sidekick of sorts. She’s a classic trickster who loves causing problems, but she has a very friendly relationship with Ikaris at the start of this series, mostly because she begins the book dead, and is as invested in the mystery around the boy Ikaris is protecting as we, the readers, are. “[Sprite is] useful because

IMAGE CREDIT: MARVEL

Writer Kieron Gillen has added new wrinkles to the concept of the Eternals’ immortality, and the terrible price that has to be paid for their longevity. Here, Ikaris greets Sprite as they are resurrected. Art by Esad Ribić, with colors by Matthew Wilson.

she doesn’t know stuff,” Gillen tells us. Sersi (played by Gemma Chan in the film) arrives later in the story, but the moment she hits the page, she steals the show. Sersi knows the secret behind Eternal resurrection, but she puts on a facade of detachment to pretend that it doesn’t bother her. “I think Sersi is, in some ways, the most complicated and messiest of the characters,” Gillen says. “She’s been an amazing party girl figure. She’s always been enormous fun and I love that. I just wanted to do this alone-on-the-dance-floor kind of vibe. There’s a certain sadness to her.” And then there’s the character from the Eternals family who has probably had the greatest cultural impact of all: Thanos. Gillen sees Thanos as a sort of original sin of the Eternals lineage—what it would look like if they violated one of their core underpinnings and tried to have children. The Titanos Schism, when A’Lars decamped from the Earth Eternals because of his difference of opinion from his

brother Zuras on whether to have children or not, is one of the most important events in Eternals history. It directly led to Thanos’ creation—A’Lars would settle on Saturn’s moon, Titan, where he found his wife, Sui-San, an Eternal expat. They used cloning to populate Titan with Eternals, and had two kids of their own by using genetic engineering to tinker with Eternal DNA. One of those children, born with a strain of Deviant DNA inside him, was Thanos. “Thanos was really an attempt to extend the Eternal line, which went very badly wrong,” Gillen says of the Titanos Schism. “[The Eternals] argued as to whether they should actually have true Eternal children. They split. A’Lars, AKA Mentor, met Sui-San on Titan. They work out a way to have Thanos (which is what the special’s about) and hooray, they can breed. And then, ‘oh, no, this is what happens when we breed.’” Thanos has recently been resurrected by Phastos, and Gillen used this arc as the first step towards fully reclaiming him within Eternals mythology and adding a layer of tragedy to his existence: Thanos is what happens when Eternals breed, but the cost of their resurrections is what happens when they don’t. The second arc will see brutal, unstoppable Thanos give way to scheming mastermind Thanos, pairing him with the conniving Druig to manipulate the Uni-Mind (a sort of telepathic election of Eternal leadership). “[Thanos is] absolutely doing stuff that allows him to cause a lot of real trouble, but also discover stuff about himself he’s never really learned before,” Gillen says. Meanwhile, what the first story arc did for the Eternals, Gillen hopes the second will do for the Deviants. The original Deviants never stopped breeding, creating an everchanging society that occasionally produces a giant, manytentacled monster who threatens human lives. Following the revelation of the horrible price of Eternal resurrection, a pod of Eternals (including Ikaris, Sersi, and Sprite) decamp for a totally different life, ending up on the Deviants’ doorstep in Lemuria, renouncing their heritage to live with their inborn foes. “If the Deviants were our lead characters we would be absolutely petrified of the Eternals,” Gillen says. “Now we get to really meet the Deviants, we get to understand their life and their tragedy.” Ultimately, Gillen’s goal is bigger than character beats or setting the table for a movie tie-in. “I think what I like to say is one of the aims of Eternals was to take continuity and turn it into mythology,” he says. If that’s the point, the series’ massive scale and deep, logical reconfiguration of Eternals history, was a rousing success. Eternals Vol. 1: Only Death is Eternal is available now from Marvel. Marvel Studios’ Eternals movie opens Nov. 5 DEN OF GEEK

THE TEAM BEHIND MARVEL’S GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY TELLS US WHAT IT’S LIKE UNLOCKING THE COSMOS FOR A NEW GENERATION OF PLAYERS. BY BERNARD BOO

You know the gang: Star-Lord, Gamora, Drax, Rocket Raccoon, Groot. The space-faring band of heroes is back in Eidos Montreal’s Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, and once again, they’re in deep trouble. They’ve crossed the wrong warlord—the monster-collecting Lady Hellbender—and now she wants their heads. So, as per usual, Peter Quill and his ragtag team of weirdos hatch an outrageous plan to save their own skins while preventing an intergalactic war from breaking out. As comic fans know all too well, the Marvel cosmology offers a deep well of stories, characters, and locations 40

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to pull from, and the team at Eidos Montreal delved deep into the Marvel mythos for inspiration. “From the Nova Corps to Knowhere, from the Blood Brothers to Cosmo, from Lady Hellbender and her Hellraisers to Seknarf Nine, Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy delivers big on sci-fi shenanigans,” says Bill Rosemann, Vice President and Head of Creative at Marvel Games. Franchise mainstays like Cosmo the Space Dog and Mantis can be spotted in the handful of game trailers released so far. But a Marvel story is only as good as its villains, and Guardians of the

Galaxy has some very interesting big bads. Lady Hellbender is joined by the much more peculiar Grand Unifier Raker, a Cardinal of the Universal Church of Truth, who intends to deliver the Guardians to the Church’s mysterious, almighty Matriarch. While it’s yet to be seen whether the game will feature other fan-favorites from Guardians stories, like Adam Warlock, Yondu, The Collector, or Galactus, it’s a safe bet that we’ll see a few familiar faces across the game’s planet-hopping campaign. Deep space is a major shift from the Earth-set locales of recent Marvel titles like Avengers and Spider-Man.

IMAGE CREDIT: MARVEL

SP ACE ODDITIES

IMAGE CREDIT: TTKTKTKTK

Players take control of Peter Quill, aka Star-Lord, as he leads the Guardians on a new adventure.

The Guardians will visit many exotic locations, including the dangerous planet Seknarf Nine.

According to the game’s senior creative director, Jean-François Dugas, Eidos found the cosmic setting to be nothing short of “liberating.” “It was actually really fun to explore crazy ideas that didn’t have to be explained on a terrestrial scientific level all the time,” Dugas explains. “We aimed at developing believable concepts, not necessarily realistic ones. For example, since we travel from location to location, sometimes we end up on weird planets. We wanted the enemies the Guardians encounter to feel just as weird as the planets themselves.” One of these planets is Seknarf Nine, where the Guardians face enemies called “Jack-o-Gels,” which look like giant, jiggly Jell-O cubes on the outside but are actually deadly, sentient spiked balls on the inside. There are also Tara-taras, which are seemingly feeble, rodent-like creatures covered in gurgling orbs that allow them to mimic the forms of more formidable beasts. Unsurprisingly, they’re high on Lady Hellbender’s wishlist for her collection. And then there’s one of the most iconic locations in Guardians history: Knowhere, the planet-sized severed head of a Celestial where travelers from across the universe gather to trade (and rip each other off). It also serves as an enormous science station where the greatest minds in the galaxy can perform secret experiments. It’s definitely the kind of place where the Guardians could find a bit of trouble. Strange planets and grotesque creatures are essential ingredients in the Guardians formula, but what the game is about, at its core, is the social dynamics between the Guardians themselves. Players play exclusively as Peter Quill, better known as StarLord, who must navigate the different interpersonal relationships within the team both on and off the battlefield. It’s a bold design choice to limit player control to Quill when all of the more unique alien team members are right there, but according to Dugas, the idea is to allow players to experience what it’s like to be the leader of a dysfunctional family of mercs and misfits. DEN OF GEEK

Lady Hellbender? Who is

First appearing in Totally Awesome Hulk #1 in 2015, Marguerite Hellbender, known as Lady Hellbender to her subjects (and enemies), is the mace-swinging warrior regent of Seknarf Nine. Her mission in life is to scour the galaxy for rare beasts to add to her ever-growing menagerie of monsters who do her bidding and act as something of a found family. Lady Hellbender first visited Earth to hunt down the legendary shape-shifting alien dragon Fin Fang Foom, flanked by her grunts, Gnasher and Gasher. They were met by She-Hulk, Spider-Man, and the new Hulk, Amadeus Cho, who felled the dragon in front of her. Impressed

“When you are a leader, it doesn’t mean that people agree with your direction all the time,” Dugas explains. “You have to act as someone who can rally people towards a common goal. We wanted to tap into this while making it fun.” During the game’s story-driven sections, Peter is presented with choices, and the decisions he makes will please some team members while pissing off others, which will affect how they act on the battlefield. For example, annoy Rocket and he may not want to follow your orders during a big fight. As Star-Lord, players can 42

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by this display of dominance, Hellbender captured Hulk and tried to add him to her collection, but ultimately failed. Lady Hellbender next appeared in Venom Annual Vol. 2 (2019), in which she (surprise surprise) attempted to hunt down Eddie Brock and the Venom symbiote. It’s revealed in this story that, when she was a child, her father forced her pet monster, Beez, to fight to the death in a monster-fighting arena. She was so traumatized by this that she dedicated her life to being a fearsome ally to all monsters. In Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, her monster-whisperer gifts are on full display when she tames a deadly Tara-tara.

dart around the battlefield using his rocket boots and fire off his signature blasters and bombs, but more importantly, players must coordinate the team’s attacks. Learning to operate as a team is vital if you want to take down the game’s most challenging enemies, and it’s also one of the main themes of the story. “Every great Guardians of the Galaxy story boils down to the idea of family,” says Rosemann. “Each member of our motley crew feels that they are the last of their kind, lost amongst the stars. One of our themes is grappling with, and hopefully

overcoming past trauma, which each character will face along this adventure.” While the game’s characters and story are clearly inspired by the comics and movies that came before, the team at Eidos Montreal set out to make a version of the Guardians that stands on its own. “Whether it’s the story behind Drax’s tattoos, the detailing on Gamora’s fearsome battle suit, or the original take on why Peter Quill took on the name ‘Star-Lord,’ as you play you’re going to enjoy how authentic and familiar the Guardians feel, but also be surprised by all of the originality that Eidos Montreal delivers,” Rosemann says. Dugas explains that from the very first meeting with Marvel, the goal was to make something that felt authentic yet new. “The key for us was to make these characters look familiar. But our Guardians also have different backstories from what people may know from movies or comics. There is a lot to discover in our game that doesn’t exist anywhere else.” But one thing fans will recognize right away is the killer soundtrack. Yes, the game has its own “Awesome Mix.” Culture Club, Blondie, Hot Chocolate, and Iron Maiden are just some of the bands on the tracklist. Guardians of the Galaxy looks to offer brand-new space-capades for MCU fans and gamers alike while preserving the essence of what made these characters so popular in the first place—bad attitudes and a thirst for big adventure. Just before heading into Lady Hellbender’s Menagerie Gardens for the first time, the Guardians pack Groot into a crate as bait—a rare species of monster she really needs to see—using him to bargain their way into the warrior’s fortress. Their plan isn’t exactly foolproof—but these aren’t just any fools. They’re the Guardians of the Galaxy! And if they fail miserably, well… at least they’ll do it together. Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy is out Oct. 26 for PlayStation and Xbox consoles, Nintendo Switch, and PC.

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BY DON KAYE 44

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FOR DIRECTOR JASON REITMAN, the first official

announcement of Ghostbusters: Afterlife was, by blockbuster franchise standards, quite modest. “Before we ever started shooting, the way we debuted the idea to the world was we shot this little teaser in secret, with Ecto-1 in a barn,” says Reitman, talking to Den of Geek by phone. “At the time, I remember thinking, ‘Okay, we have the script, we’re going to make this really fast. We’re going to put it out into the world before anybody knows it, and this whole thing is going to fly by.’” That was back in early 2019. Now, more than two and a half years later, Reitman says, “I wish I could go back and pat that director on the shoulder and just be like, ‘All right, calm down. Be patient. This is going to take a minute.’” It’s taken somewhat more than a minute: like so many films, Ghostbusters: Afterlife was delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic from its original summer 2020 release. But in another sense, it’s taken more than 30 years–not just for this long-awaited second sequel to the original 1984 Ghostbusters

IMAGE CREDITS: SONY PICTURES ENTERTAINMENT

HOW JASON REITMAN, SON OF ORIGINAL GHOSTBUSTERS DIRECTOR IVAN REITMAN, PICKED UP THE PROTON PACK AND EMBRACED HIS INNER ‘BUSTER FOR GHOSTBUSTERS: AFTERLIFE.

to arrive, but for Reitman to embrace what in some ways is the mythology most closely related to his family name. Reitman’s father, producer/director Ivan Reitman, was behind the camera for the original film, which he and his iconic cast–Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, the late Harold Ramis, Ernie Hudson, Sigourney Weaver, Annie Potts, and Rick Moranis–turned into a comedy classic for the ages. Jason Reitman was not even seven years old when Ghostbusters came out in June 1984, yet his memories of being on the set are still vivid to him. “It was extraordinary,” he recalls. “It became my introduction to what it meant to make a movie. It was my introduction to really knowing my father as a filmmaker.” Even though Reitman at first resisted the idea of following in his father’s footsteps and began pre-med studies when he got to college, the lure of the entertainment business was perhaps too great. He enrolled at USC and began shooting short films and commercials, eventually making his feature directorial debut in 2005 with Thank You for Smoking.

Yet while that was the beginning of a successful string of sophisticated satires, comedies, and dramas for Reitman that included such acclaimed films as Juno (2007), Up in the Air (2009), Young Adult (2011), Labor Day (2013), and Tully (2018), Reitman says that the subject of Ghostbusters would come up constantly. “From the moment I had shown interest in filmmaking, people wondered whether or not I would direct one of these movies,” he says. “Like any young person who has tried to define themselves outside the framework of their parents, I ran away from that… I really wanted to establish my own voice and my own sense and style of filmmaking.” Meanwhile, the franchise itself seemed unable to move smoothly forward either. The first sequel, 1989’s Ghostbusters II, was, like the first one, directed by Ivan Reitman and written by Aykroyd and Ramis. While it scored at the box office (albeit earning far less than its predecessor), the film was scorned by critics and was generally considered a lackluster follow-up. DEN OF GEEK

GHOSTBUSTERS WAS MY INTRODUCTION TO REALLY KNOWING MY FATHER AS A FILMMAKER. Jason Reitman directs Mckenna Grace on set. In the background, Finn Wolfhard sits in the driving seat of the Ecto-1. This doesn’t bode well for road safety.

Although Aykroyd, Ramis, and Ivan Reitman continued trying to develop a third film for years, the death of Ramis in 2014 and an all-female remake of the original film released in 2016 seemed to bog those plans down–until it was announced in January 2019 that Jason Reitman would direct Ghostbusters: Afterlife, a direct sequel to the first two movies set 30 years after the events of Ghostbusters II. So what changed the younger Reitman’s mind about getting involved in the franchise? “I really didn’t imagine myself making a Ghostbusters movie, but then this character came to me, and that character became undeniable,” he says. “I think it didn’t hurt that she was the same age as my daughter.” The character in question is Phoebe (Mckenna Grace), who moves with her single mother Callie (Carrie Coon) and her brother Trevor (Finn Wolfhard) to a dilapidated farmhouse in rural Oklahoma due to financial difficulties. The house is their inheritance, left to them by Callie’s late father, Ghostbusters co-founder Egon Spengler (Ramis). With the help of a local teacher (Paul Rudd), the Spengler family will rediscover their patriarch’s history with the Ghostbusters and learn why the house is apparently the source of some very unusual paranormal activity–which may be the reason Egon purchased it in the first place. The film’s storyline mirrors Jason Reitman’s own complicated relationship with the franchise from both a familial and professional perspective: “Certainly, I think it is not an accident that I have questioned my whole life whether or not I would pick up the proton pack,” he says. “And we are introduced to a family that is considering the same thing.” Although Reitman (who co-wrote the screenplay with Gil Kenan) was working within the parameters of a franchise for the first time, he says he approached the project the same way he’s developed all his other films. “I come at things from character, and I come at things from the story,” he explains. “You look at all my movies, they’re all character-based movies. So as soon as I knew 46

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Phoebe, I was like, all right, I know my way into this. It wasn’t through ghosts and it wasn’t through lore. It was through a family.” Saying he was “heartbroken by the death of Harold Ramis” and that Egon had always been his “favorite Ghostbuster,” Reitman theorizes that those were two of the reasons why he decided to make the family at the center of the movie the Spenglers. Yet just as important as honoring Ramis’ memory was honoring the legacy of the original movie as well, which is perhaps how Reitman (and his dad, who is the film’s producer) got Murray, Aykroyd, Hudson, Weaver, and Potts to reprise their original roles for Ghostbusters: Afterlife (all five had briefly appeared in the Paul Feig film, but as different walk-on characters). “Gil and I wanted to make a movie that felt as though it clearly was being made by people who loved the film as Paul Rudd plays teacher Mr. Grooberson who is helping out the family. That’s a classic ghost trap in his hands. Let’s hope it’s empty.

much as the viewers,” says Reitman about including the original cast, choosing his words carefully. “We wanted to make a movie that felt as though the storytellers were handing everything you loved about Ghostbusters back to the audience sitting in their chairs. It felt impossible to do that without including the originals, even though this is very much a story about a single mom and her two kids.” Reitman is, of course, reluctant to speak any further about the role of the original cast members in the movie, or how much we find out about what they’ve been doing for the last 30 years, which brings us back to where we started: with his original intention to make the movie quickly and spring it on the world with little fanfare (filming was actually completed in the fall of 2019). “(It was supposed to) arrive on everyone’s plate before they knew it,” says Reitman. “It was just going to be this kind of hopefully lovely surprise. And now there’s been years of buildup and opportunity for people to talk about it.” The director says his original hope was that “no one was even going to know that the originals were even part of it,” adding, “I don’t really want to give away anything further, except to say that this is not a movie about the originals. This is a movie about the Spengler family, but it will touch upon everything that you love about Ghostbusters.” And that, in the end, is what making a new Ghostbusters movie–and adding his personal take on his own family’s legacy–is all about for Jason Reitman. “I know that my personal goal was to, one, make my father proud, and two, give audiences another trip into the world of Ghostbusters,” he concludes. “I hope they feel like it’s authentic. I hope they love it as much as we loved making it. The best Ghostbusters movie has already been made. It came out in 1984. Now I’m just excited for audiences to take another trip into this universe that we all grew up on. ” Ghostbusters: Afterlife is out in theaters on November 19.

WHO IS THE HISTORY OF GHOSTBUSTERS’ MYSTERIOUS OCCULTIST

A shot in the first Ghostbusters: Afterlife trailer revealed a sign for the “Shandor Mining Company,” which hinted at the return of a little known villain who nevertheless plays an important part in Ghostbusters history: Ivo Shandor. The original Ghostbusters movie mentioned him only once, where it was revealed that the film’s ghost uprising was caused by Shandor, who built the Manhattan highrise where much of the activity takes place, while dabbling in the demonic. In an earlier version of the script, Shandor was supposed to appear as Gozer’s first form, juxtaposing this apocalyptic threat with a mundane guy in a suit. They even wanted Paul Reubens to play him! He also popped up in a 2009 Ghostbusters video game that was long considered an official sequel to the films. While the game included the return of Gozer, the true mastermind was Shandor, who was hiding in plain sight by possessing the mayor of NYC. IDW’s Ghostbusters comics featured a story about Gozer’s war with his sister Tiamat. Gozer would show up in Ray’s subconscious to taunt him in various forms. One of those forms appeared to be Shandor, who, in a cool nod to that rejected idea from the first film, looked very much like a slightly-off-model Pee Wee Herman. Shandor also appeared in a short story by Erik Burnham and Rachael Stott where the Ghostbusters discussed Slimer’s possible origins. One theory was that Slimer was some kind of failed, glutton-based entity conjured by Shandor and his cult. The oft-cited Tobin’s Spirit Guide was eventually made into an actual book, which included more details about Shandor’s horrible experiments, path to Gozer worship, and the suggestion that he died from trying to give himself goat legs. -Gavin Jasper

DEN OF GEEK

IN THE DEN WITH...

EDGAR WRIGHT The auteur behind SCOTT PILGRIM and BABY DRIVER talks diving headfirst into time travel horror with LAST NIGHT IN SOHO, and what unexpected genre detours he could take next. BY DAVID CROW

“I have this recurring time travel fantasy about the idea of going back,” Wright says with the air of a confession. “But I think it’s always that thing, this nagging fear that it’s probably a really bad idea.” It’s a surprising admission for a filmmaker who has spent his career often looking to the past in order to find something new and clever to say about our present. After all, Wright’s breakthrough was directing the game-changing British sitcom Spaced, which featured so many references and nods to the movies he loved that the DVD introduced the “Homage-o-Meter” bonus feature. His early cinematic achievements in the “Cornetto Trilogy”—Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and The World’s End—are nothing if not love letters to the genres that inspired him and co-writer Simon Pegg. That sense of always being aware of the history of things weighs on Wright, even as he appears happy and relaxed 48

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when we meet on an August afternoon. He’s at the tail-end of the UK rollout for his new music documentary The Sparks Brothers, and the filmmaker is relieved to just be out of his flat and in a London hotel room (in the Soho district, of course). Sitting 90 seconds from his home down the street, Wright is taken back to both better and stranger days in Soho, including when he decided to set his first psychological horror movie there. In Last Night in Soho, audiences follow Eloise (Thomasin McKenzie), a young woman who has come to London with starry eyes for what the big city was like back in the day. Unfortunately, her reveries take a more insidious turn once she actually travels to the tumultuous ’60s, shadowing a mysterious lounge singer (Anya Taylor-Joy) to dark places. Looking back now, Wright is swept up in the excitement he found in shutting down whole streets and redressing them like their seedier past while Taylor-Joy and Matt Smith zip by in mod attire. He’s also haunted by the evenings when he found the courage to return there during

IMAGE CREDITS: VERA ANDERSON/WIREIMAGE/GETTY IMAGES

dgar Wright is trying to cure himself. That’s how the writerdirector describes his latest movie Last Night in Soho: a cure for the nostalgia that’s followed him all his life, and which still causes him to daydream against his better judgment about 1960s London as if it were a golden age.

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lockdown, becoming affected by the sudden silence of the neighborhood and memories of friends who were recently lost, like ’60s luminary Dame Diana Rigg. “It was completely and utterly deserted, which added an extra poignancy to it,” Wright says. “And there’s another separate part of it that’s bittersweet and elegiac in a way. Soho is rapidly changing. Some of those buildings with ghosts in them, they’re just disappearing, which is very sad.” Clearly such spirits walk beside Wright, be it in his wistful comedies or serious ghost stories.

Oh, my God! I mean that character says it because I believe it. This specifically is to say there are buildings in London that are hundreds of years old, of which most of Soho is like. That’s the thing that inspired the movie, really. I’ve been in London for 25 years. I’ve spent most of that time working in Soho. I’ve probably spent more time in Soho than I have in some couches in flats that I’ve been in. Because I’ve written there, I’ve edited movies there. Nearly all of the movies I’ve done, even the American and Canadian ones, have been edited in Soho. I’ve just spent an enormous amount of time there. It’s also an entertainment district, so there’s restaurants, bars, and cinemas. But it’s also that thing where, even now, it is on the border of a darker side of the underworld, which is still there in contemporary Soho in plain sight. When I first moved to London [in the mid-’90s], that side of life was a lot more prevalent, and then if you go back to the ’60s, even more so. Not necessarily always a great place to be, and I guess that’s the point of the movie: that there is a danger of romanticizing the past. Obviously the ’60s is a decade to get totally obsessed with, and I certainly am in terms of having grown up with my parents’ record collection, which was predominantly ’60s records. You can’t help but think when you go to London, “Oh my God, the swinging ’60s and Soho and film and fashion and music.” But of course there was a darker side to the place. I guess that’s what the movie ultimately is: a cautionary tale for time travelers. Like, if you could go back, should you? Do you think about how Eloise’s London in this is very different from the London Shaun moves through in Shaun of the Dead?

Well, not that there’s much that you could join the dots between the two, but Shaun is in his late 20s, living in the suburbs, and at the point when you meet Shaun in the movie, he’s clearly been around there for a long time. So he’s quite comfortable, nigh complacent, in where he lives. I think the thing is, coming to London for the first time, like any big city, is a very lonely experience. Where are you? New York. And I’m not from New York originally.

So I’m sure moving to New York is very similar to coming to London. When you first get there, it’s really forbidding. It 50

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was the same for me. I’m from the country. I’m from where Hot Fuzz was shot, in Somerset, and when I came to London, it’s that thing where we even used the term in the movie, it’s like “country mouse.” One of the mean girls at fashion college calls Thomasin country mouse, and I remember reading that book, The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse, when I was a kid, and I remember when I was going to London I was like, “Ah, I’m the Country Mouse!” [Laughs] Because I do not belong here, or even if you don’t belong, it’s like with any big city, you have to find your own way in and you have to let the city open up to you. Some people never have that experience. I’m sure you have friends as well that come to the city and never get in sync with it and leave. So when you find your place in the city, sometimes it’s really hard won. So I’m not Eloise, and I’ve never been an 18-yearold fashion student, but I certainly had a very similar experience to her coming to London and feeling totally out of place, totally outpaced by everybody. Do you think that this experience is why you have made so many stories like Spaced or Scott Pilgrim, or even Shaun, where young people feel aimless in the world?

I guess so. You’ll never not be the kid from the country. It’s a powerful thing, and it’s something that—I don’t know. That’s a good question. Yet, unlike many of those characters, you knew what you wanted to do since you were 14.

Yeah, and whatever the quality level of my first film, A Fistful

IMAGE CREDITS: PARISA TAGHIZADEH / FOCUS FEATURES.

In Last Night in Soho, a character says, “This is London. Someone’s died in every room and on every street corner.” Is that something you think about when you walk around town?

Anya Taylor-Joy plays mysterious lounge singer Sandie in Last Night in Soho. In the background, Matt Smith’s Jack looks on.

of Fingers, was.... I realized after the fact I’m really glad that I made it in Somerset and then came to London. Because then I always had this weird calling card in terms of, even if it was a slightly kitschy thing, it’s like, “Hey, this kid, he made a Western in Somerset!” Now, it may not have been a great film. It got a good review in Variety. Empire gave it one star. So opinion on it is mixed. But the thing is that because I did it in my hometown and then came to London, I had sort of done something outside of London. I think if I had come to London without having made anything and tried to make it in the film business, now you’re one of tens of thousands of people who want to be a film director. That can be really tough. You’ve mentioned on social media being enamored as a child with posters for movies like Alien and Friday the 13th, and your parents would say “no,” leaving those films to your imagination. Do you feel like that forbidden nature influenced your tastes?

Yes, absolutely. There’s something where you start to imagine what those films might be like, and sometimes they live up to your imagination and sometimes what’s in your imagination is more powerful. That particularly became the case with the VHS mania, when there were video libraries everywhere. My parents didn’t have a VCR. They sort of refused to buy a VCR. I didn’t actually have one in the house until I was in my late teens when I could pay for it myself. Prior to that though, I remember very distinctly when I was maybe 10 years old going into a video store that was around the

corner from my house. And I’d usually go in the afternoon when it was empty, and just look at the covers and the back covers of 18-rated videos. What’s funny is that some of those movies—like I’d be looking at the cover of Brian De Palma’s Body Double, and just trying to imagine what the film was like from the poster image and the little stills on the back, and maybe what the synopsis said. Then occasionally there are movies from that period where I’ve never seen the movie, and I realize it would be better not to see the movie, because I’m not sure it could ever live up to the cover art. Like, I remember specifically being quite obsessed, aged 10, with a film called Zone Troopers, which is, I discover now, directed by Rachel Bilson’s dad, Danny Bilson. But I just remember seeing that poster, and it’s got an alien pointing, saying, “Your universe needs you!” and “Zone Troopers.” I never saw the movie and it’s probably not a good time to start. What did your parents think of your genre interests, particularly as they continued into your adult professional life?

They knew that my brother and I were both very interested in genre movies, and I think we had tried to convince them on a number of levels [on why they’re great]. I mean, long before I knew that I wanted to be a director, I definitely knew I wanted to do something in film, and there was definitely, like with a lot of kids, an early obsession with makeup. There are films where those things are more acceptable as a kid, where Star Wars has the cantina DEN OF GEEK

sequence or Raiders of the Lost Ark has the whole ending with Nazis melting. Then other things are more illicit. My mum and dad were well aware that me and my brother would really like to see Alien, really like to see The Thing, really like to see An American Werewolf in London, but can’t. Then I think it was when I was 10 years old that An American Werewolf in London was shown on network TV for the first time. I managed to convince my parents to let me stay up and watch it, and they acquiesced, and they let me and my brother watch it until midway through that dream sequence with the Nazi monsters. When they slit David Naughton’s throat, my mum was like, “Okay, that’s it. Bed.” So I didn’t see the rest of the film for another three years after that! I had terrible nightmares because I never saw the story resolve. I really did, I’m not kidding around! I really had terrible nightmares because I never saw the resolution of the story. The resolution wouldn’t have prevented the nightmares.

That’s true! [Laughs]

I mean, it depends how it’s used. If it’s used as an insult then, sure, I’d rather not. But in terms of, am I a fan of cinema? Of course. You could use the word enthusiast. It doesn’t really annoy me. I guess it only is a thing where people assume that means I only like a certain type of movie, which is not true. I like all types of movies. And certainly in recent years, I’ve gravitated away from what people might think is more like the comic book nerd kind of movie, just because a lot of it tires me out to be honest. I mean, weirdly enough, I just saw James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad this weekend and I thought, “Oh, that’s the first comic book movie in quite a long time that I actually enjoyed.” But there’s a certain type of movie that I feel like I’ve grown out of for the most part, in terms of the things that I watch. I try to watch a bit of everything. In fact for the start of the pandemic, I decided to make a dent into my long list of films that I’d never seen, which had an enormous breadth to it in terms of the types of movies I was watching. In Baby Driver, you wrote into the script all the songs you planned to shoot and edit the scenes to. Is that something you’re continuing?

Last Night in Soho was similar to Baby Driver in the sense

GIMME 1 FIVE Fun facts and trivia about the auteur director 52

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that I had specific songs worked out for specific scenes. And in a lot of cases in the way that I write, especially with Baby Driver and Last Night in Soho, the song in some ways inspires the scene. Maybe not in terms of what’s happening in it story wise, but the rhythm of it or even the length of it. So there’s one song in the movie in the first dream sequence, the Graham Bond Organisation version of “Wade in the Water,” and sometimes it’s like this movie, which I’ve had in my head for 10 years. Sometimes I’ve had those songs connected with the movie for that long. So if they come up again, like maybe you’re working on something else and you hear that song and you’re like, “Ah, I’ve got to make Last Night in Soho!” So I know what this scene is. But I love making films that become music-centric. Both with Baby Driver and Last Night in Soho, working with a choreographer on a day-to-day basis, and not just the dance sequences. It’s kind of everything involved in movement and

Edgar Wright got his first Video-8 camcorder after winning a Comic Relief filmmaking competition on BBC’s Saturday morning kids’ series, Going Live!, in 1991. Wright won for making an animated short about the lack of disabled access in cinemas. He was 16.

Wright was offered the chance to direct “Rose,” the first episode of the revived Doctor Who which starred Christopher Eccleston and Billie Piper. He turned it down because he was still working on Shaun of the Dead. Years later he told a fan, “My mother has never forgiven me.”

IMAGE CREDITS: © UNIVERSAL PICTURES. OLIVER UPTON/ROGUE PICTURES/PHOTOFEST

You’ve been described in the press as the ultimate film nerd fanboy. Do you like that title?

that I absolutely adore, right back to some of the early sound musicals, especially all of the Busby Berkeley films of the early ’30s. I just find them mind-boggling. I mean the thing about those movies made in the early ’30s at Warner Bros. is that it would be difficult to better them now. Like that’s what’s crazy. Also nobody would make them with that many dancers now. The studio would be like, “Um, do you really need 60 dancers? Can you, like, CGI them?” You mention filmmaker friends, but do you have long conversations with filmmakers who you’ve heavily homaged? Has Michael Bay ever come up to you and been like, “We’re going to talk Hot Fuzz?”

I’m not sure that Michael Bay has ever seen Hot Fuzz. I once met him at a birthday and I introduced myself to him, and I think this was just after Hot Fuzz came out. So I introduced myself and said, “Oh, I don’t know if you know, I’m Edgar Wright, I made the film Hot Fuzz.” And he went, “That’s the film with the guy from Mission: Impossible III?” I said, “Yeah.” And that was the end of the conversation. So I have a feeling he’s never seen it. [Laughs] And George Romero? Edgar Wright with his cast on set of Scott Pilgrim vs the World. (L-R) Mark Webber, Johnny Simmons, Alison Pill, Michael Cera and, Mary Elizabeth Winstead.

how that relates to the music that might be in the scene. It was a great experience. Some director friends of mine have said outright, “When are you just going to make a musical?” That’s my next question.

Alfonso Cuarón said it to me after he watched Last Night in Soho! He really liked the movie and he said, “But honestly, when are you just going to make a musical?” [Laughs] Has it been in the back of your head? You flirted with it in Scott Pilgrim, and the first reference in Spaced is for The King and I.

I can’t claim credit for The King and I reference in Spaced. That was definitely a Jessica Hynes reference. But yeah, listen, if I found the right subject matter or something that I felt could be a really great movie that I could make, then yeah, for sure. It would be amazing. They’re always a genre

The Cornetto gag in Shaun of the Dead, which unintentionally led to the name of the trilogy, came from Wright’s own memories of a personal hangover cure while in university: Cornetto ice cream.

Well, George was probably the first director who was a big hero of mine that I got to meet or talk to before meeting. Specifically because when we made Shaun of the Dead, we wanted to reach out to George to watch it, because we felt that it was such a valentine to him that we’d feel bad if he didn’t like it. It was obviously a nerve-racking thing to do because what if we show it to him and he fucking hated it? Me and Simon would be devastated. But we reached out to him through Universal, and he watched the film when he was on holiday in Florida in 2004, and he called us that night. I always remember that moment. It was before the days of group Zoom calls. He called Simon first and then he called me, and I remember I was standing when I got the call, and talking to George Romero about Shaun of the Dead and hearing this voice that I knew from documentaries and DVD commentaries. Now George Romero knew who we were and liked our film, and liked it enough to give it a poster quote. So he was really the first director who I really admired that I met. But I also remember that as the moment that the world started getting smaller. Last Night in Soho opens in cinemas on Oct. 29.

Wright considers his first movie, A Fistful of Fingers, his slightest effort. When asked to name his favorite film, he likes to say, “I can’t pick between my children. That would be bad. I really couldn’t pick which was my favorite movie. But I could tell you my least favorite.”

Wright recorded himself as having watched at least 394 movies during lockdown in 2020. One he was happy to get around to was Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979). He tells us, “As I was watching it at home, I was thinking, ‘Man, I wish I’d seen this at the cinema first.’” DEN OF GEEK

The crew of the Enterprise, including (from left) Dominic Keating as Malcolm Reed, Jolene Blalock as T’Pol, Anthony Montgomery as Travis Mayweather, Scott Bakula as Captain Jonathan Archer, Linda Park as Hoshi Sato, Connor Trinneer as Trip Tucker, and John Billingsley as Phlox.

THE FIRST

ADVENTURES

STARFLEET I t ’s b e e n 2 0 y e a r s s i n c e t h e S t a r Tr e k : E n t e r p r i s e p i l o t b r o u g h t u s t h e f i r s t S t a r Tr e k p r e q u e l . W i t h t h e c a s t a n d c r e a t o r s , w e t a k e a look back at how it all began.

efore Discovery or Strange New Worlds, the early days of the future as postulated by Star Trek were explored in the television series Star Trek: Enterprise. Currently celebrating its 20th anniversary, it was set roughly 75 years prior to The Original Series, during the fledgling days of Starfleet, when humanity was first venturing out into the cosmos. Scott Bakula as Jonathan Archer captained the first starship given the name Enterprise, leading a team consisting of humans, a Vulcan, and a Denobulan. The voyage wasn’t always a smooth one, but it was certainly an important part of the canon. What follows, presented in oral history format, is a look back at the show’s formative days.

BRANNON BRAGA (executive IMAGE CREDIT: PHOTO 12 / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

producer/co-creator): Star Trek

always needs fresh blood. I left the franchise before Enterprise; I just said, “I can’t do this anymore.” I remember where I was and what I was working on and where I was standing and at what point in time when I officially burnt out on Star Trek. I decided not to do the seventh season of Voyager and then I was asked to create Enterprise. Rick Berman had a really cool idea for it and I said, “You know what? I’m going to do this one more

time.” One could argue maybe I shouldn’t have. Rick was a really good overlord, but even he needed fresh writers. One could argue maybe we both should have left earlier. RICK BERMAN (executive producer/ co-creator): As Voyager was ending,

the studio came and said, “Let’s get another one up and going.” I begged them to let the franchise have a few years’ rest. In fact, they wanted it to start before Voyager ended and I managed to get them to at least wait

by Ed Gross

until Voyager went off the air. The question was, what could we do that was different? I’d been working a great deal with Brannon, and so I asked him to work with me on creating a new series. Our decision, and I still think it was a good one, was to change the time period. We had done three shows that took place in the 24th century, and I thought it was time to go to another century. To go forward meant spacesuits that were a little sleeker and ships that were a little shinier, but it wasn’t that much to invent what had come before. BRANNON BRAGA: Rick called me

and said, “What do you think about setting it between the film First Contact and Kirk’s time?” And I said I thought that was a great idea. We started talking about it and considered what it would give us, and it evolved from there. We never considered another concept. We thought that First Contact seemed to be more of a relatable film somehow, because it had characters from the near future versus the distant future, and it allowed a more non–Star Trek audience to embrace Star Trek. DEN OF GEEK

You didn’t really have to know much to enjoy that movie. RICK BERMAN: There was no Star

Trek canon to respond to how Earth got from being in this post-apocalyptic nightmare to being in the world of Kirk and Spock with Starfleet Academy. So our feeling was to pick a time somewhere within that, when the first humans are going into space on warp-capable vessels, and they’re not as sure of themselves as Kirk or Picard were. They’re taking baby steps. We knew, with Enterprise, that we wanted to turn the ship [the franchise] around. We were dealing with the time when the first warp-drive ship was being developed for a crew of humans. There were no holodecks and people didn’t beam themselves anywhere, they just beamed cargo. It just seemed to be the right idea, so it’s the one we pursued. BRANNON BRAGA: The biggest

challenge was that the studio wanted something, but they were dubious about the prequel idea when we went in to pitch it. I don’t think they liked it very much. They thought Star Trek should be about moving forward and not moving backward. We were asking questions like, “How did we end up building the first warp ship? What was it like to meet a Klingon for the first time?” People had baseball caps and walked dogs and wore tennis shoes and are more identifiable as people than, say, a Captain Picard, who is more of an idealistic man of the future that you probably wouldn’t recognize as a person that you could ever meet today. RICK BERMAN: From the point of

view of some fans, there’s the great sense of continuity that the shows have had, and they’re very, very particular about that. A lot of them were not happy about things that they felt were outside the canon of Star Trek. A lot of them felt that Brannon and I ignored that, which we absolutely didn’t. We tried to pay great attention to it and we had people who knew Star Trek backward and forward that helped us, but obviously there 56

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Travis, Captain Archer, and Trip crowd around a console station in the Star Trek: Enterprise pilot.

were things that had to be dealt with and adjusted. SCOTT BAKULA (ACTOR, “CAPTAIN JONATHAN ARCHER”): Enterprise is

The Right Stuff. That kind of energy of being the first ones out there and being a little scared sometimes and being a little overwhelmed by the experience, which I think is a great emotion to have to play with. Americans have explored our planet in a variety of different ways. Some successfully, some not. We have a wide history of exploration in this country. Certainly different experiences in Vietnam and places like that where we tried to impose our ideas or philosophies on different cultures, and still are in many places around this planet. Making it more about the experience and less about planting the flag. In other words, enjoying the experience and learning from it, rather than saying, “Now we’re here and we’re going to tell you how to do it. We’ve got good ideas and can do things better than you.” So if you’re someone out there looking to do good, and looking to explore in a healthy way, there’s a great responsibility to that. As well as a great temptation

Communications office Hoshi, chief engineer Trip and first officer T’Pol look for danger in “Broken Bow.”

to change and alter and fix. Which became this very wonderful kind of play within the show, which is, how are we all going to deal with not only being out there, but the choices we make?

an actor and star of the show, Scott brought a top-notch work ethic and professionalism to the production. As star of the show, he set a great example for everyone.

BRANNON BRAGA: Archer is

about Scott’s take on the character was he spoke in kind of an unusual cadence when he was Archer and I could never figure it out. Someone told me he was a huge John Wayne fan. I’ve never talked to Scott about it, but I think he may have been doing a little bit of a John Wayne thing. He was our only choice.

something between Chuck Yeager and Kirk. He’s anything but the fully enlightened man that Picard is. RICK BERMAN:

It was very important for us to have a captain who was not necessarily that sure of himself, because we wanted him to be different from all the other captains. The other captains got on a spaceship at warp five or warp seven, they never thought twice about it. They ran into aliens every week and they never thought twice about it. We wanted a captain who was taking those first steps out into the galaxy; we wanted him to be a little green, a leader of men and at the same time, somebody who was in awe of everything he saw. With Scott, it just seemed like the perfect fit. JAMES L. CONWAY (DIRECTOR,

Scott Bakula was the only actor ever discussed for Archer. Problem was, his deal wasn’t closed until the table read of the script three days before production began. In fact, there were rumors he was going to a CBS comedy pilot and we got very worried. We had never met him, talked to him, or heard him do the material. All during the casting process the casting director was the only one to read Archer’s dialogue. So it was a relief and pleasure to hear Scott brilliantly bring Archer to life at the table read. ENTERPRISE PILOT):

SCOTT BAKULA: I responded to

the idea of it and this character, and then I got the script for the pilot and everything just fell into place. I liked the character and it was really a return, in many ways, to what the original Star Trek was all about. JAMES L. CONWAY: Scott brought

a humanity to Archer that’s hard to put on the printed page. Also, as

BRANNON BRAGA: The funny thing

SCOTT BAKULA: We had a different

dynamic on our show, and I’ve thought about it since then, because basically I was the older captain compared to the younger guys on the crew. John Billingsley’s in the middle there somewhere. That’s why I think the stuff between him and me was always special, even though he was nonhuman. There was a different kind of distance between characters created by the casting. We were building those relationships, but it was still from a different place. RICK BERMAN: John Billingsley is

a character actor and somebody else who’s in tremendous demand. He’s just a wonderful guy. We wanted sort of a wise, quirky alien to play that role of Phlox. Somebody who would be our doctor, and he did a marvelous job. He’s another actor I would do anything to work with again. JAMES L. CONWAY: We were having

trouble finding an actress for T’Pol. We read a lot of actresses, looked at a lot of names on a wish list, but couldn’t find anyone we liked. The role was critical, because she was a Vulcan and had to be able to “be” a Vulcan, yet still have sex appeal. Thankfully we saw a demo of Jolene’s work, loved it, and then met and read and loved her. JOLENE BLALOCK (ACTOR, “T’POL”):

I grew up on Star Trek. My favorite was Spock. I would sit there with my dad and my brother just watching DEN OF GEEK

BRANNON BRAGA: We wanted a

Vulcan babe like Saavik, and wanted a Vulcan on board because the Vulcans were very antagonistic toward humans and she was essentially a chaperone, which really rankled Archer. Their relationship worked kind of nicely, and we saw T’Pol, Archer, and Trip as our triumvirate of characters.

character, Trip, that we had written, he was just made for. CONNOR TRINNEER (ACTOR,

“CHARLES ‘TRIP’ TUCKER III”): I wanted

this job a lot. It was a good, time-tested franchise with a good audience. It had so many different things happening in it and it gave me the opportunity to play kind of a space cowboy—it was a dream job. Plus, you got to use your imagination as you’re meeting new species and races. Since this was our first time out, everything was new and we weren’t used to anything. You, as the actor, got to take in something as the audience did for the very first time, which was my experience as both an actor and a character. ANTHONY MONTGOMERY (ACTOR, “TRAVIS MAYWEATHER”):

believed that T’Pol should have more of her Vulcan culture. I didn’t believe she should be so desperate to be like everyone else, because the original Star Trek, which I grew up with, had a very simple message that I took from it, and that is that not everyone is like me, and I’m not perfect, and nobody’s perfect, and that’s okay. That really helped me.

It was incredible. There was an electricity that just ran to my core, and it was because I was sitting at the helm of a show, being a part of a franchise that I grew up with and knew about. I’m not a Trekkie by any stretch of the imagination, but I still understand enough about the franchise that it made me say, “Wow, this is real!” That was even more exciting and intense than when I got the call saying I got the part.

RICK BERMAN: Connor was the only

RICK BERMAN: We were looking

JOLENE BLALOCK: I personally

actor in four television series that I had to fight for. I just love this guy. I think he’s a remarkable actor, and I saw four pieces of tape on various things that he had done, and there was just something about him; that this

for an African American actor. We wanted someone young—we wanted this whole cast to be a lot more approachable, in a way; we wanted the audience to be able to relate to them more than they could other shows.

THE FIRST WARP DRIVE SHIP WAS BEING DEVELOPED. THERE WERE NO HOLODECKS AND NO ONE BEAMED THEMSELVES ANYWHERE. RICK BERMAN 58

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The relationship between Vulcan T’Pol and human Archer nods to the classic series dynamic between Spock and Kirk. Also: not the look you want to see on your helmsman’s face during space travel.

Anthony was gorgeous, a terrific actor, and pretty much talked himself into the role the first day we saw him. We also wanted an Asian actor to play the role of communications officer and go back to a little listening device like Uhura had had in The Original Series. We also wanted her to be a translator of almost magical abilities. And Linda nailed it. We wanted somebody very vulnerable and someone who was not into flying on spaceships. In the first audition she completely got it and did very well. LINDA PARK (ACTOR, “HOSHI SATO”):

There’s a lot of growth that happened for me, not only as an actor in front of the camera, but as a businesswoman. Sometimes it’s easy to forget that part of being an actor is that you are your own business, especially when you become successful at any level;

IMAGE CREDITS: UPN/PHOTOFEST

the show, watching the relationship between Captain Kirk, Bones, and Spock. My favorite relationship was between Bones and Spock, because it was just this animosity and this love-hate relationship. But overall there was such utter loyalty between all three of them. I love the way they worked together, just the way Bones would be, like, “You green-blooded fool.” Somewhere in The Next Generation, I got lost.

you see how you work as a business and you can’t say, “I’m just an artist, and I don’t need to concern myself with the practical,” because it’s just as important to keep your artistic tools as sharp as your business tool. That’s the biggest thing I learned. In the end, it is my career and my life that these decisions are being made about. RICK BERMAN: I had met Dominic

on the first day of the last season of Voyager. He had the role of an English character. We were still a year away from going into production on the new series, but we were already starting to write it. He came in and I said to him, “We’ve got a role for you in a series that we’re creating that’s not going to be going on the air for eight or nine months, but I don’t want to use you up here.” This guy looked at me and said, “You’re right.”

DOMINIC KEATING (ACTOR,

“MALCOLM REED”): I had a chat with

Brannon and Rick where I said, “I’m quite excited, and honestly, I’ll say whatever you put in front of me, but I would like it that he isn’t just the talking head Brit on an American spaceship.” Brannon said, “You won’t be saying lines like ‘My dear old mum.’” When I read the breakdown, he’s described as “buttoned-down, by the book, wry, dry, shy around women.” I’m like, “Oh, crap, I’ve got to act this.” JAMES L. CONWAY: The pilot

of Star Trek: Enterprise was terrific. But then the first season was very repetitive and it felt like it was written by people who were burned out. And Brannon copped to this, saying he had made some bad choices in hiring staff and he was burned

out from finishing up on Star Trek: Voyager. So I think that first season suffered and it took him awhile to resteer that ship. BRANNON BRAGA: When we were

shooting the pilot and it was time for me to start writing episodes, I had a lot of things that I wanted to do. But once the ship officially set sail, I felt constrained. I felt, “Here we go again,” and I felt very challenged. Also, it was the first time I wasn’t working with people I’d worked with before. It was a large staff of ten people, and Star Trek was notoriously difficult to find writers for, because it was a hard show to write. I don’t even want to say hard; it’s unique. It just had a specific voice, and I had this writing staff that was new to the genre. Out of ten people, I think just a couple survived that first year. DEN OF GEEK

CHUCKY

The mischievous doll’s upcoming TV series will put a new spin on the horror franchise. BY KIRSTEN HOWARD AFTER SEVEN FILMS AND an ill-advised reboot, Chucky is set to deploy a new torrent of neighborhood carnage. The killer doll has gone through several reinventions over the years, and now that he’s back in the hands of his original creator, Don Mancini, he will find another unsuspecting family to terrorize in his very own TV series. Chucky has certainly navigated a wild path to the small screen. The Child’s Play franchise originally played the character straight, and Mancini thought he may have reached the end of the road with 1991’s Child’s Play 3. But when the horror game changed with the meta movie Scream in the late-’90s he suddenly found a way to bring Chucky back from the dead. “That was really inspiring to me,” Mancini says. “We were able

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to reinvent the franchise with Bride of Chucky as a horror-comedy and embrace the absurdist particulars that are really endemic to the material. Rather than try to keep denying it, we thought, ‘what if we embrace that and acknowledge it and use it as part of the fun?’” After Bride of Chucky came Seed of Chucky, which Mancini used to brand the horror franchise as specifically LGBTQ-centric. Then he went back to the drawing board to consider where the flame-haired horror icon might fit into the zeitgeist going forward. “With Curse of Chucky, we decided to bring it back to a more traditionally straightforward Gothic horror movie, and that was also successful,” he says. “It showed me that continual reinvention is a good way to keep a character and a franchise alive.”

Discovering fresh ways for Chucky to manipulate any new owners could be seen as quite the challenge after over three decades of slicing, and dicing, but the doll that contains the soul of maniacal serial killer Charles Lee Ray will use his TV series to start an intriguing conversation about bullying. “The cultural bullying that exists in recent years among today’s youth is in itself a true life horror story,” Mancini explains. “We use Chucky as a metaphor, as the ultimate bully. He is charming and he’s funny. Bullies can appear to us in that guise and be seductive. That’s one of the things we’re doing in the TV series that’s brand new.” In the new series, an entire town is thrown into chaos after Chucky turns up at a yard sale and sets out to commit a series of horrifying murders that expose the town’s deep hypocrisies and hidden secrets. Friends and foes from Chucky’s past also return and threaten to reveal the truth behind his origins. While Chucky will bring back familiar Child’s Play franchise actors such as Jennifer Tilly, Alex Vincent, Fiona Dourif, and her father Brad, there are some new faces in the mix including Final Destination and Idle

IMAGE CREDITS: STEVE WILKIE/SYFY

AHEAD OF SPOOKY SEASON WE BRING YOU 16 PAGES OF THE JUICIEST HORROR, KICKING OFF WITH OUR CHILLING PREVIEW.

starring :

BRAD DOURIF, FIONA DOURIF, ZACKARY ARTHUR, JENNIFER TILLY, DEVON SAWA eta : OCTOBER 12 ON SYFY AND THE USA NETWORK Hands star Devon Sawa. Mancini says he’s always been a big fan of the actor, and that Sawa was such an instant hit with the established Chucky family that we’ll likely be seeing him again in some future installments. “One of our habits that we’ve developed over the course of the films is adding to our family, and finding ways to keep them around,” Mancini says. “I would certainly like to do that with Devon.” Mancini also reveals that the series has allowed him to take the brakes off in a way that he wasn’t able to with the films; having eight hours of storytelling to play with has given him an opportunity to delve into Chucky’s disturbing backstory,

which fans have been patiently awaiting for decades. Those same fans might be wondering about the elephant in the room: the 2019 Child’s Play reboot movie, where Mark Hamill was brought in to voice Chucky and Mancini was pushed out of the conversation. At one point, Mancini was concerned that the reboot would take hold and that there might end up being two Chucky franchises running at the same time. So when plans to make another movie with the rebooted cast and crew fell apart, Mancini found working on the new series cathartic and validating. “I never bore any kind of ire toward the filmmakers themselves

because I know that they were doing their jobs and it was an exciting opportunity to get a toehold in the industry with a franchise character,” Mancini stresses. “I get that. But at the same time, I’m relieved how it all worked out.” Mancini still has different irons in the fire when it comes to nonChucky-related projects, but he says he’s embraced his role in the horror genre regardless. “When you’re an actor, you can get pigeonholed. That happens with writer/directors too. It can be challenging, but at the same time I’m grateful for it. The older I get, the more I realize it’s good to have a niche. I’m thrilled that I still get to do this after 30-odd years.”

DEN OF GEEK 61

RESIDENT EVIL: WELCOME TO RACOON CITY For director Johannes Roberts, getting a Resident Evil movie right means returning to the series’ roots. BEFORE RESIDENT EVIL became a best-selling video game franchise, it was a passion project with a simple purpose: to scare the hell out of a generation of unsuspecting gamers. While 2002’s Resident Evil movie shared the 1996 game’s name, it emphasized sci-fi storytelling and action over scares. That movie—and the five sequels that followed—became box office hits, but ultimately divided video game fans who wondered if those movies really got the fabled franchise exactly “right.” For Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City director Johannes Roberts, the chance to reboot this franchise is less about correcting past mistakes than making the most out of the opportunity to explore what makes the games different. “I had a great time with those movies,” Roberts says of the Resident Evil live-action films. “But as I’ve got older, I’m much more of a gamer than I’ve ever been... I approached this film from a gaming perspective.” From that perspective, Roberts was able to focus on the one thing that the Resident Evil films haven’t quite gotten right to this point: 62

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namely, the horror. “The pitch for the movie was to go back to the series’ horror roots,” Roberts says. “The key was to make a horror movie... to make something scary... to make a survival movie... I really wanted to recreate the fear of playing that first game.” Welcome to Raccoon City may recreate the fear of the first game, but the film actually utilizes characters and locations from the first two Resident Evil games. It follows franchise favorite characters Chris and Claire Redfield (Robbie Amell and Kaya Scodelario), Leon Kennedy (Avan Jogia), and Jill Valentine (Hannah John-Kamen) as they try to survive the night across two iconic gaming locations: Resident Evil’s Spencer Mansion and Resident Evil 2’s Raccoon City Police Station. The locations and characters may be familiar to gamers, but this project is more than a chance to turn nostalgia into another big screen adaptation “With both the narrative and characters, I didn’t just want to do a cosplay thing,” Roberts says. “I didn’t want the characters to have the exact haircut or exact dialog

[from the games]. I wanted to feel emotionally attached to them and feel like they’re real people in a real town.” The film’s emphasis on Raccoon City is the first deviation from franchise norms that will catch many fans’ attention. While the town is featured in early Resident Evil games, Roberts aspires to make that location more of a key player in the film by presenting it as a kind of “company town” dependent on the opportunities offered by the Umbrella pharmaceutical corporation. “I look at Raccoon as a kind of

IMAGE CREDITS: SONY PICTURES ENTERTAINMENT

BY MATTHEW BYRD

starring : ROBBIE AMELL, KAYA SCODELARIO,

HANNAH JOHN-KAMEN, AVAN JOGIA eta : NOVEMBER 24

Deer Hunter-esque place,” Roberts reveals. “Umbrella is moving out and has left a kind of dying town... not an evil place, but a dying, sick place.” Of course, it’s not a coincidence that the Umbrella Corporation’s departure happens to coincide with the sudden appearance of an army of zombies. While Umbrella and zombies are the two defining antagonists of the original Resident Evil games, the truth is that in a post-Walking Dead world the undead aren’t as much of a novelty as they once were. They’re instead one of those iconic elements of the

games Roberts embraced but didn’t take for granted. “When we did our first major scene with the zombies, I suddenly realized their history and baggage,” Roberts recalls. “I thought, ‘Wow, I have got to make this scary.’ I was very aware that if you get them wrong, they’re not scary.” Rather than solely rely on Resident Evil’s Romero-esque zombies to still be effective all these years later, Roberts turned to an unlikely source for inspiration. “I was very influenced by Chernobyl, the TV show,” he reveals. “I found it incredibly disturbing seeing the effects of the radiation and seeing how people get sick... but it was human. I really wanted to feel that within this scary, fun horror movie.” Some of that fun will come from the film’s action sequences, but Roberts turned to another somewhat unlikely source to ensure the action doesn’t dilute the horror. “My viewpoint is that Resident Evil 2 [the game] is very similar to Assault on Precinct 13,” he notes. “It’s an action movie, but it’s also a siege movie. The foes aren’t supernatural, but they might as well be.”

For the film’s Spencer Mansion sequences, Roberts taps into the classic horror spirit that has made him one of the genre’s rising stars over the last 10 years, with films including 47 Meters Down and The Strangers: Prey at Night. “It’s more like a proper haunted house with dark, creepy, and long corridors,” he says. “You hear that [zombie] noise and think, ‘Fuck, it’s somewhere, it’s around one of these corners.’ We play with that a lot.” Such a contrast of styles reminds us that for all the talk about getting Resident Evil “right” on film, this is a video game franchise that has successfully embraced many different styles over the years. Getting Resident Evil right is really a matter of deciding which Resident Evil you’re talking about. For Roberts, though, there is one thing that his Resident Evil story needs to emphasize in order to do this franchise justice. “It’s about atmosphere, 100%,” he says. “I would just say to the cast and crew, ‘Fall in love with this world that these characters are in.’ It’s dark, it’s raining, it’s bleak, and it’s scary, but it’s also fun. You leave the cinema with a smile on your face.” DEN OF GEEK

HALLOWEEN KILLS

The Shape is back and this time he’s taking on the whole town. BY ROSIE FLETCHER IN 2018 DAVID GORDON GREEN made a bold choice. By taking on a direct sequel to John Carpenter’s 1978 classic, Halloween, he retconned out every other film in the franchise. Carpenter himself was on board as executive producer and composer and amazingly both fans and critics loved it. Perhaps even more extraordinary, its arrival seems to have marked a resurgence in slashers across the board, with this year’s Fear Street, Candyman (also a sequel to the original), and a Scream refresh on the horizon for 2022. So now, with the second part of his Halloween trilogy on the way, any hint of skepticism has been replaced with pure excitement. Green reckons the renewed interest in the genre is a sign of the times. “I feel like there’s always these waves, culturally, right?” he says, speaking to Den of Geek almost two years since Halloween Kills began filming. “One of the things I’ve talked to fans of Halloween about a lot is the ways that this [franchise] moves away from some of the traditional movie monsters that are a little bit more supernatural–your vampires and your werewolves–to things that are more immediately relatable and realistic within the world that we live in.” This groundedness was a key part of Halloween 2018, which asked “what would happen to an adult who experienced the worst ordeal imaginable as a teenager?” Unsurprisingly, the answer is dysfunction, trust issues, broken 64

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relationships, and severe PTSD. But that film forced Jamie Lee Curtis’ now grown up Laurie Strode to stand up and fight once again when her nemesis, Michael Myers, breaks out of prison 40 years after his original attack. Halloween Kills picks up right where the previous film left off, where Laurie, her daughter Karen (Judy Greer), and granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak) have left Michael for dead in Laurie’s burning basement. But you can’t keep a good Shape down. Michael escapes–and this time Laurie is far from alone. “For me, it was a chance to revisit a classic movie monster and then bring in a surrounding community of characters, some of whom we know from the previous films in the franchise and some new ones that we’ll meet. Instead of facing off Michael Myers with one victim at a time, let’s see what happens when he faces an entire mob,” Green gleefully explains. For Halloween Kills, Green has brought back several characters from the 1978 movie, in some cases played by the original cast. Charles Cyphers returns as Sheriff Brackett; Nancy Stevens, who played Dr. Loomis’ nurse, Marion Chambers, is also back, as is Kyle Richards as Lindsey, one of the kids Laurie babysits in the original. Tommy Doyle, the other youngster in Laurie’s charge, also returns, played by Anthony Michael Hall. “For Tommy and Lindsey, it was cool just to be able to reunite

starring : JAMIE LEE CURTIS,

JUDY GREER, ANDI MATICHAK, ANTHONY MICHAEL HALL, KYLE RICHARDS eta : OCTOBER 15

Karen (Judy Greer), Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis) and Allyson (Andi Matichak) have a sit down in between moments of extreme terror.

IMAGE CREDITS: UNIVERSAL PICTURES

Knives out! Director David Gordon Green on set with James Jude Courtney who plays Michael Myers.

those characters and see what their dynamic was like,” says Green. “That protective quality is there not only with each other, but with Laurie. There’s a moment where Tommy is talking to Laurie in the film and saying, ‘when I was a kid, you were there to protect me. And now I’m here for you.’ Those types of moments feed the dramatic responsibility of a movie like this. So it’s not just torture porn. It’s not just people getting killed for the entertainment of the audience, it’s trying to find some sort of depth and substance among these characters in their emotional journeys.” Although, it is also people getting killed for the entertainment of the audience. And Halloween Kills promises to up the ante significantly in terms of gore. “Part of the fun of writing it is sitting in a room with my co-writers and coming up with new ways [to kill] that haven’t been seen on film and walking around our homes and thinking, ‘what if this was a weapon?’” Green laughs. “He does have his tricks of the trade and knows how to use a knife so that does come back into play as you’d expect, but there is a little bit more of a body count in this film

than the last one.” Halloween Kills is the second part of Green’s trilogy, with the final chapter, Halloween Ends, slated for October 2022. Green has been working on re-writes for that film on the day of our interview. And not content with rebooting Carpenter’s masterpiece, for his next trick Green is taking on The Exorcist, which, like Halloween, is planned as a trilogy. “It’s a continued adventure in facing my own childhood fears,” he says. “It’s intimidating if I look at it from far away, but when I’m looking at my computer and talking to my co-writer, it really is intimate.” With The Exorcist, Green is working again with Jason Blum who, after the Halloween trilogy and The Invisible Man update, isn’t afraid of a challenge. If anyone can take on a classic and make it work, Green can. “It’s just exciting to be able to play in this world,” he says. “I can take these characters and these situations from a very vulnerable part of my youth and manifest them in my own creative way. It’s one thing to go to therapy and work through your problems and I’ve certainly done that in my life. But it’s also a way I can use my art form to generate my own type of therapy.” DEN OF GEEK

FROM PAGE TO SCREAM

DC Comics editor Katie Kubert seeks to “make really gross stuff” with DC’s new horror imprint. BY AARON SAGERS AS A CHILD, DC COMICS editor Katie Kubert was visiting the Tower of London with her family when, after a brief time there, her mother said, “I don’t want to be here anymore.” Kubert says her mom sees dead people, and saw something at the historic landmark that unsettled her. So if her mom tells her to clear out of 66

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a situation—a haunted house, for instance—she’s going to listen. While the gift of mediumship wasn’t passed down to Kubert, she loves the idea of haunted houses. She is one of those spooky folks who devours horror flicks, true crime podcasts, and all things creepy. At one point in her life, inspired by films like Return of the Living Dead

The Conjuring: The Lover is out now.

IMAGE CREDITS: DC COMICS

Occusdant quid evel et The Conjuring: Lover is faceribust autThe im nimperr the first comic to expand on ovitibus rem. Itatur, the world of The te Conjuring omnihiliqui sequati horror movie universe.

and Dick Smith’s artistry on The Exorcist, she even sought a career creating special effects makeup. “I just wanted to make really gross stuff,” Kubert says of the work she did at an effects shop on a movie “where this actress had to rip her own eyeballs out and another had to rip her chin off.” Despite early gory aspirations, it is in the arena of capes and superpowers where she has racked up an impressive body count of hit titles across DC and Marvel— including the Batgirl relaunch, Harley Quinn, and A-Force—since beginning her comics career in 2009. A horror nerd and comic book pro, Kubert is the perfect lead for DC’s new horror imprint, DC Horror. The imprint launched in June with The Conjuring: The Lover, a tie-in to the film The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It. DC Horror will follow an anthology approach, with the next being Soul Plumber. The one-two punch of major franchises and creator-owned concepts fits Kubert’s mission to modernize horror comics by making them familiar and fresh. “When a lot of people talk about horror comics [they] mention Eerie or Creepy,” she says. “I want to update people’s brains. There’s new horror stuff coming out.” Plus, she’s interested in placing core DC characters in tales outside of continuity. “When I talk to writers to pitch ideas, I ask, ‘What would be your Aquaman story if he was in Sphere? Or what is your Teen Titans Scream story?’” says Kubert. Kubert’s excitement about evolving the genre within comics is reflected in her horror tastes, spanning from early monster movies through modern cinema. “My favorite part about [horror] is seeing how it progresses through the decades,” she says. “It helps me figure out what I can make that will truly scare someone.”

SOUL MEN

The Last Podcast on the Left guys branch into comics. EDGAR WIGGINS IS A “SOUL Plumber,” and the hero of the new DC Horror title of the same name, created by The Last Podcast on the Left trio of Ben Kissel, Marcus Parks, and Henry Zebrowski, with art by John McCrea. The enormously successful podcast combines comedy with explorations into the paranormal, ufology, and true crime. Soul Plumber follows—as Zebrowski describes him—a purehearted “wet Chihuahua” of a man who builds a machine intended to deliver souls from Satan, but gets Soul Plumber is an all-new story that will still feel familiar to fans of The Last Podcast on the Left and its esoteric themes.

more than he bargains for. The first comic from the Last Podcast team is an original concept, but draws from weirder podcast episodes involving demonic possession and alien abduction, while diving deep into esoterica not previously covered on the show. What’s in this for LPOTL listeners versus folks who just want a horror comic? Henry Zebrowski: We wanted to

write something that encapsulated a lot of what we cover on LPOTL, but

also have an exciting horror story. There are little inside jokes in the book, but the rest of it is something that would entertain us. Marcus Parks: The original idea came from me going back and reading a bunch of scripts from old episodes—ideas that were a little stranger, and aren’t what you would call fan-favorite episodes. Part of it came from the Michael Taylor possession story back in the ’70s when a guy believed he was possessed by the devil and ripped his wife to shreds with his bare hands. The other part of it came from the “Andreasson Affair” which is one of our deep cut alien episodes, about a woman who believed she had an alien abduction, and the abduction was full of old Christian imagery. All these ideas kind of came together to create Soul Plumber. Has there been a moment where DC became concerned you went too far, and something had to be cut? Ben Kissel: We don’t show any

nipples because you’re not allowed to show nipples, but you can show a lot of violence. Zebrowski: We’ve been transparent about the fact that we’re an R-rated show and make R-rated content. Everybody at DC seems to be into what we’re doing. —AARON SAGERS Soul Plumber #1 arrives on Oct. 5.

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John Carroll Lynch plays Twisty the Clown in the fourth season, American Horror Story: Freak Show. Look at his little face.

FREAKS AND EEKS! SOME DAYS, IT’S HARD TO BE a Ryan Murphy fan. The minute American Horror Story comes up, people have a knee-jerk reaction. It’s either love or hate, no in-between. And that’s been going on for a decade now. But there must be some grotesque alchemy behind this lifespan. Many horror TV series have never quite achieved the liftoff and cultural imprint that AHS has. In 2011, when the first season premiered, the only horror-themed TV show on a major network was The Walking Dead. While there is a rich and under68

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explored tradition of anthology horror shows (Masters of Horror, The Twilight Zone) which fall into the tradition of the standalone TV movie, often anchored by a horror host, AHS was aiming for something that sat between prestige television and Grand Guignol. The first season, Murder House, created a blueprint for some of the elements that remain at the dark heart of American Horror Story: a coarse smoothie of true crime history, distinctly American moral panics, and a love of horror movie traditions, all wrapped up in

grotesque violence and over-the-top horniness. It’s a horrific live-action version of The Sims, each season completely unpredictable and totally familiar at the same time. Over the last decade, Murphy and Brad Falchuk have created a horror equivalent of the MCU: an expanded universe with shared rules, shared spaces, and a repertoire of recurring characters and actors. And in 2021, they’ve expanded it even more with the standalone series American Horror Stories, which takes on elements from previous seasons but has a new

Ten years after the first episode was broadcast, American Horror Story is still going strong. But what makes Ryan Murphy’s expanded horror universe so enduring—and divisive? BY ANNA BOGUTSKAYA

Lady Gaga plays the enigmatic vampire The Countess in American Horror Story season five, Hotel. Her glamorous, real life persona made her a perfect fit for the role.

In the first season of American Horror Story Dylan McDermott (left) plays Dr. Ben Harmon. Denis O’Hare stars as Larry Harvey aka “The Burned Man.”

cast and new story every episode. The 10th season of the show, Double Feature, also premieres in October this year. What makes AHS so enduring? At the start of the show, every season was billed as a standalone story with a distinct beginning and end, usually anchored by a place that implies creepiness and has a longstanding presence in horror history

(a haunted house, an insane asylum, a dark forest, a summer camp, a haunted hotel, a witches’ coven). From Freak Show, the show’s fourth season, the series started becoming interconnected, with characters from previous storylines popping up or being referenced. The show’s eighth season, Apocalypse, functions as a double-sequel, both to the story of Coven’s witches and to the fate of

the demon-child from season one. Even though every season of American Horror Story, regardless of how they are connected, explores a distinct theme and has its own separate set of characters, there are elements that are recognizably Murphy-esque. The show is concerned with Otherness. Rather than hide its monsters in the closet or in the basement (although it has, quite literally, done that), it puts them front and center and often makes them the lead character. In Murder House, Tate Langdon (Evan Peters), the ghost of a teen school shooter, is arguably the main character with the most compelling arc. In Hotel, the entire world and all the other characters gravitate around glamorous vampiress The Countess (Lady Gaga). And in Apocalypse, the antichrist Michael Langdon (Cody Fern) isn’t held back until the climatic face-off; he’s the main attraction. AHS takes all the distinctively American outsiders and builds stories around them, zeroing in on our shared, somewhat morbid curiosity about them and infusing those stories with empathy. In AHS, serial killers can be heartbroken and witches can be insecure. At its most successful, the show asks us to empathize and connect with the most monstrous of characters, peeling back the curtain to reveal the real monsters are not who we think they are. Monsters make for juicy roles. One of AHS’s superpowers is its repertoire of actors, some of whom have found mainstream recognition and success through their work on the show and other Ryan Murphy productions, including Sarah Paulson and Evan Peters. AHS is also often credited with bringing a new audience to established older actresses like Jessica Lange, Angela Bassett, and Kathy Bates. The former, in particular, has been a staple and a shining star of the American Horror Story universe, playing Southern belle bitches and DEN OF GEEK

grand witches. After a period of inactivity and lesser roles, Lange’s creative partnership with Murphy gave us some of the most despicable and watchable female characters in horror. The entire fourth season, Freak Show, which marked Lange’s last full season as a principal cast member, was an extended love letter to the actress. This approach to casting AHS is, essentially, a take on the Old Hollywood studio system of casting, where actors would be cast into roles based on their looks and what expectations those looks communicated to the audience. On AHS, the same actors are recast every season, but each time it’s 70

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a radically different character. Additional faces are added into the repertoire and become staples of the show, like Cody Fern (who first worked with Murphy on The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story), Matt Bomer (who went from a bit part on Freak Show to a leading role in Hotel), Angela Bassett (who has appeared in every season since her turn as Marie Laveau in Coven) or Finn Wittrock (whose first major role was as the psycho man-child Dandy Mott on Freak Show and has since become a go-to player in the troupe). This creates an interesting metadynamic between the audience and the show. With every passing

season, we want to see how far the cast will flex their acting muscles. Will they be a lead or a supporting character? Will they play a historical figure? Sometimes the same actor will play two or more roles in the same season, even the same episode. Evan Peters, who appeared in every season since the very first episode, played not only the lead antagonist of Cult, but five historical characters on top of that. Murphy has also known exactly when to deploy smart stunt-casting, most notably giving Lady Gaga her first major screen role as The Countess in Hotel. Her theatricality and sultry charisma are perfect for a role that requires everyone who comes into

Coven’s coven, from left to right: Jessica Lange, Emma Roberts, Jamie Brewer, Taissa Farmiga, and Gabourey Sidibe are witches having a day out.

contact with the glamorous vampire to become instantly, supernaturally obsessed with her. There is heaps of sex, but contrary to horror traditions it seldom leads to death. In fact, it’s often intertwined in ways that make sex the only respite from the onslaught of murder and dismemberment. In Murder House, the character of Moira, initially presented to us as a Halloween-shop version of a slutty maid (played by both Frances Conroy and Alexandra Breckenridge) is only seen as alluring and promiscuous by the men who are incapable of seeing her as a person. Being seen this way is her own version of hell after she is murdered by the wife of her boss who tried to sexually assault her. Horror has often provided meaty roles for actresses beyond the reductive “scream queen” term. AHS has, over the past decade, done not only that but also smuggled in difficult subjects for them to explore underneath all the camp. Throughout its run, AHS has tried to delve into ideas of motherhood, abortion, aging, power, sexuality, disability, and race. It hasn’t always succeeded (Coven, despite the glorious, spiky dialogue and fine performances, is extremely problematic in its attempt to discuss racism and its traumatic legacy). The recurring centering of the Other, and the deliberate pushing of boundaries squarely places American Horror Story in the tradition of the Grand Guignol. It’s a slicker, sexier version of the horror theatre. It takes everything we know about horror movies and infuses it with some old school Hollywood glamour, without the training wheels. While the self-aware theatrics can be grating on some horror fans, that’s precisely the charm of AHS. We don’t come to AHS for nuance, we come for extreme violence, to see every possible taboo grotesquely defiled—and then giggle at the bitchy barb that follows.

AMERICAN HORROR STORY’S GRE ATEST CHARACTERS L ANA WINTERS

In Asylum, Sarah Paulson gives one of her greatest performances as ambitious reporter Lana Winters, who gets trapped in the mental asylum and is subjected to horrendous treatment. She continues to pursue the story as she tries to escape. For many, the most well-rounded character of the series.

DANDY MOTT

A 1940s psychotic man-child, played by Murphy newcomer Finn Wittrock. Obsessed with murder, freak shows, and his own abs, Dandy Mott is a spoiled heir to a fortune who fully understands and perverts the privileges he has been afforded. Wittrock’s electrifying and grotesque performance makes it impossible to look away.

THE COUNTESS

Lady Gaga’s first major screen role was this decadent, disco-loving vampire countess. Drawing visually from vampire classics like The Hunger and Daughters of Darkness, she’s pure sass, horniness, and has a diamond-encrusted sharp glove that she uses to slash throats. Peak American Horror Story.

FIONA GOODE

One of Jessica Lange’s most glamorous roles on the show, she plays the irredeemable witch Fiona Goode, the head of her coven. Very powerful and completely narcissistic, the entire season sees her deal with losing her powers, a supernatural take on a woman aging.

TATE LANGDON

From the moment he first comes on screen, something is off with Kurt Cobain look-alike Tate Langdon. Turns out that he’s the ghost of a school shooter who also fathers the Antichrist through rape. Evan Peters’ first role on the show is still his most chilling.

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THE 13 BEST HORROR COMEDIES OF THE 21ST CENTURY

You won’t know whether to laugh or scream this Halloween with these modern classics. BY ROSIE FLETCHER TUCKER AND DALE VS. EVIL (2010)

60% LAUGHS

40% SCREAMS

SHAUN OF THE DEAD (2004)

Possibly the most iconic horror comedy of the 21st century, Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead is the first part of the director’s “Cornetto Trilogy,” which all riff on genre and all star Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. Shaun is a “zom-rom-com” which sees Pegg’s leading man trying to win back his girlfriend in the face of a zombie apocalypse. It’s achingly British in its humor but has become an international cult classic, with cosplayers regularly dressing as Shaun. It came out in 2004 but still completely holds up today. 70% LAUGHS

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30% SCREAMS

WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS (2014)

The movie that spawned the excellent TV show is a deeply funny mock-doc about vampires who share a house, written and directed by Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement, who also star alongside Jonny Brugh and Ben Fransham. Set and shot in Wellington, New Zealand, the humor is silly, self-effacing, and specific. A genuinely hilarious riff on vampire and werewolf tropes. 90% LAUGHS

10% SCREAMS

PSYCHO GOREMAN (2020)

One of the most joyful new horror comedies sees an all-powerful force of evil bested by the small girl who inadvertently releases him from cosmic jail. Problem child Mimi and the brother she bullies discover they can control “The Arch-Duke of Nightmares” and rename him Psycho Goreman. They just want to play games, he just wants to destroy the universe. Packed with over-thetop gore, great gags, and a surprising level of sweetness, this is an ’80s-style schlocker with a modern twist. 50% LAUGHS

50% SCREAMS

IMAGE CREDITS: MOVIESTORE COLLECTION LTD / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO/ LIONSGATE/PHOTOFEST/ UNIVERSAL PICTURES/PHOTOFEST

Just because you’re a redneck, it doesn’t make you a psycho, in this deceptively adorable anti-slasher where a bunch of vacationing college kids keep accidentally getting themselves killed trying to escape from the harmless Tucker (Alan Tudyk) and his lovely friend Dale (Tyler Labine). Eli Craig’s directorial debut is gruesome, gory, and very funny, but the movie is more than just a gimmick: there are some top horror twists here, too.

TRICK ’R TREAT (2007)

If a film ever truly captured the spirit of Halloween it’s this one. Michael Dougherty’s seasonal anthology movie weaves together four stories with a wraparound that brings just the right level of chills and giggles–it manages to be both funny and scary without compromising either. A murderous school principal, a bus driver with a horrible past, teenage girls reclaiming the night, and a little kid dressed in a burlap sack bring the Halloween spirit to life in this cult movie with a cool cast including Brian Cox and Anna Paquin. 40% LAUGHS

60% SCREAMS

THE CABIN IN THE WOODS (2012)

Directed by Drew Goddard, who went on to make the stylish, and starstudded Bad Times at the El Royale, this clever, surprising, love-hate letter to the horror genre is packed with rug pulls, reveals, and gags. The movie juxtaposes a typical gang of teens taking a doom-laden vacation and the white collar workers who are pulling the strings behind the scenes. If you somehow missed it–go watch! Now! If you’ve seen it before, this is a movie that rewards repeat viewing. 40% LAUGHS

SLAXX (2020)

This Canadian eco-horror about, yes, killer trousers, which played the festival circuit before making its way to Shudder, is actually smarter than it appears. Slaxx is set around a trendy designer store which purports to be ethically sound but is anything but. Yes, there are multiple pants-based slayings as a sentient pair of jeans exacts its bloody revenge on the store workers, but there’s also dark satire and a killer sense of humor at work here–and surprisingly a catchy, cool dance routine to boot. 40% LAUGHS

HAPPY DEATH DAY (2017)

60% SCREAMS

ZOMBIELAND (2009)

Zombieland: Double Tap seemed a little late when it came out in 2019, but that shouldn’t detract from the original, which was a refreshing take on the zom-com with great performances from its now-starry cast. Zombieland sees a bunch of misfits who name themselves after their respective hometowns navigate the apocalypse via a strict set of rules. Emma Stone, Jesse Eisenberg, Abigail Breslin, and Woody Harrelson star in this zippy comedy with heart, and a surprise cameo to die for. 30% LAUGHS

70% SCREAMS

This Groundhog Day-style slasher sees college student Tree Gelbman (Jessica Rothe) get murdered on the day before her birthday, only to discover she’s stuck in a time loop and destined to relive the day over and over. It’s up to Tree to work out who’s been killing her, while fixing some bad life choices along the way. Blackly funny with some good kills–even if it is, largely speaking, the same person being killed–Happy Death Day is a glossy production from Blumhouse which spawned a sequel in 2019 that is also worth checking out. 20% LAUGHS

80% SCREAMS

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JENNIFER’S BODY (2009)

Karen Kusama’s tasty teenage satire was somewhat misunderstood at its release, criticized by some for not being funny or scary enough. But in recent years it has been embraced for its feminist themes as Megan Fox’s popular cheerleader Jennifer becomes demonically possessed and begins attacking the boys at her school. Amanda Seyfried is great as Jennifer’s best friend Needy, while Fox shines in her best role. Juno’s Diablo Cody wrote the screenplay, too, so the dialogue is as spiky and sharp as Jennifer’s teeth. 30% LAUGHS

70% SCREAMS

ONE CUT OF THE DEAD (2017)

Breakout Japanese indie One Cut of the Dead is a film of three parts, and there are three stages of watching. Part one: Why does everyone keep going on about this low-budget zombie film? Part two: OK fine, it’s smarter than I thought, but get a grip people. Part three: OMG One Cut of the Dead is the greatest film ever, I love it so much, it’s so clever and funny and brilliant, I must tell everyone I know about One Cut of the Dead. That’s all you need to know. 60% LAUGHS

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40% SCREAMS

It’s a concept so cunning we wonder why it hasn’t been done before. Magic hokum means a teenage girl suddenly swaps bodies with a deranged serial killer. How will she convince anyone that he is really her, while stopping her possessed body from murdering her pals? Happy Death Day director Chrisopher Landon heads up this quirky slasher comedy which stars Vince Vaughn and Kathryn Newton having the time of their lives. 40% LAUGHS

60% SCREAMS

SLITHER (2006)

Before he became a comic book movie darling, James Gunn made his directorial debut with this icky black comedy starring Nathan Fillion, Elizabeth Banks, and Michael Rooker. A small town is invaded by an alien parasite who takes over the body of one of the residents, transforming him into a grotesque, tentacled being intent on breeding and infecting the townsfolk. Influenced by David Croneberg’s Shivers and The Brood, this is tongue-in-cheek body horror only for the strongest of stomachs. 30% LAUGHS

70% SCREAMS

IMAGE CREDITS: UNIVERSAL PICTURES/PHOTOFEST/SHUDDER

FREAKY (2020)

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COMIC COLLECTING GOES HOLLYWOOD With the proliferation of superhero movies and TV shows, Hollywood is making it really easy and fun to turn your comic book-collecting passion into a way to make some extra money. By Jim Dandeneaus

This article is part of Collector’s Digest, an editorial series powered by eBay.

THERE ARE TWO tracks to becoming a comic collector. The first is to be a comics reader: someone who likes the stories and buys the books to read and enjoy them, and just happens to accumulate them over time. The other is to take that love for comics, have a look at the media landscape, and make a little money on the side. There has always been some money in comics collecting. Ever since comics 76

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started being a specialty item and not something kids grabbed for a dime from a newsstand, people have been pricing potential resale value into their comics purchases. The biggest difference now, from when comics specialty shops first started, is how dominant superhero stories are in our culture: all it takes is a leaked audition video that might involve a particular hero or villain in an upcoming movie or TV series for that character’s early appearances to skyrocket in value. That’s one of the reasons why comic back issues are some of the hottest

collectibles on the market. But if you’re going to jump in now, there are a few things you should know before you start. The first thing to understand is how the comics industry has changed since superheroes became so dominant. Up through the 1990s, print runs were routinely ten times the size they are today. “The production numbers right now are so low,” says Gus Poulakas, owner of Silver Age Comics in Astoria, New York. “When I’m ordering [new] books, my goal is to sell through.” These days, the best-selling books

will sell approximately 150,000 copies in a good month. Contrast that with something like West Coast Avengers #45, the first appearance of “white Vision” (later seen in WandaVision). “I don’t know if it was millions [of copies], but it was definitely in the several hundreds of thousands,” Poulakas says. This impacts pricing. “The first appearance of America Chavez [in 2011’s Vengeance #1] is a lot harder to get than the first appearance of Beta Ray Bill [who debuted in 1983’s Thor #337].” Vengeance #1 is currently selling for over $200, while Thor #337 is going for, on average, about a third of that. In this case, “older” doesn’t necessarily equate to “better” or “more valuable.” The next thing to know is what you’re looking for. Collectors tend to fall into two categories, says Ryan Higgins of Comics Conspiracy in Sunnyvale, California. “We’re seeing so many people looking for complete runs,” he says. “A surprising number of people are looking to fill in random issues.” Key issues—first appearances, major life events for the characters, new creative teams—are a prime focus for the second group, he explains. But how the characters sort in those two groups is interesting: big characters like Superman, Captain America, or Batman find their prices remarkably stable. “Batman is impossible,” he says. “Every Batman book is priced correctly.” It’s the secondary and tertiary characters where the most movement happens and where the best values can be found. If you get to it in time. “If they’ve announced the character [for a movie or television appearance], it’s already too late,” says Higgins. “The needle has already moved.” A character making the jump to the big screen drives prices on collectible books in a huge way. That doesn’t preclude you from buying their key issues, but it might price them out of reach. And the rush to get ahead

of the various cinematic universes is causing people to make leaps that don’t necessarily make sense. “Seemingly overnight, 1991’s Darkhawk #1, who has no real rumor of being in a movie, went from a $5 book to a $200 book,” Higgins says. That’s why it’s important, if you’re serious about this, and at least somewhat frugal, to keep an eye on the solicitations for new books, both to spot key issues as they’re released, and to try to divine hints from what Marvel and DC are reprinting. “[Marvel] did all these Kid Loki and Lady Loki trade paperbacks leading up to the show,” he points out. “Making money is more important than spoilers.” If they’re reprinting something that looks random, chances are it’s to get ahead of something about to happen. The good thing about the comics market right now is that these price jumps seem like they’re holding up. “A book would be $2, and then a character appears on Loki, and then it spikes to $40 or $50,” explains

Poulakas. “And then it cools off and the price comes back down. But in my experience, the price will never go back to $2.” Higgins agrees, especially on key issues. “The first appearance of Captain Marvel is not going to drop,” he says. So while there are bad times to get in on a book, there aren’t necessarily bad ones to get out. Ultimately, one of the best ways to get into the comics collecting game is to get into the comics reading game. Because of the low print runs common with modern comics, it’s much easier to grab a key issue as it comes out than it is to try to hunt it down on a secondary market. This has the added benefit of exposing you to some really great comics that you’ll enjoy over time, regardless of any potential price increases. “When I was collecting in the ’70s and ’80s, you know what we looked for? We looked for Steranko. We looked for Kirby. We looked for Neal Adams,” Poulakas says. “People still look for those. Good books stand the test of time.”

HAWKEYE (2017) #1 (Marvel Comics) Jeremy Renner’s Hawkeye is one of the more underexplored characters of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But the upcoming Disney+ TV show bearing his name is extremely likely to be a breakout moment for Hailee Steinfeld’s Kate Bishop, the Hawkeye who got her start on the Young Avengers. With the MCU pointing towards an inevitable Young Avengers movie or show, now’s the time to pick up some Kate books, and her 2017 solo series is the most affordable place to jump on, with copies of Hawkeye #1 going for $10-20.

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The Savage She-Hulk #1 (Marvel Comics)

DETECTIVE COMICS #359 (DC Comics) While we’re focusing primarily on newer comics, this is the only Silver Age book you’ll see on this list. But the reality is the first appearance of Batgirl should really be going for more than $700. That’s a lot of money, but if you’re looking to invest in a comic, you could probably do worse than to jump on a clean copy of Batgirl’s debut before her movie starts picking up steam.

NAOMI #1 (DC Comics) This Brian Michael Bendis/David Walker/Jamal Campbell creation is heating up because of her crossmedia appeal. This debut issue isn’t a steal right now—duplicate printings are moving for double digits, with the first printing of the first issue topping $40. But it might be undervalued: she’s got a CW show in development and is getting a push in the pages of Justice League. Don’t be surprised if this keeps going up.

Thunderbolts (1997) #1/ Dark Avengers #1 Marvel is clearly setting up something more than just Young Avengers in this current wave of MCU shows. Valentina Allegra de Fontaine has already gathered a Captain America and a Black Widow, and who knows who else she’s pulling together. That uncertainty says, to a lot of collectors, that they’re going one of two ways: the Thunderbolts, a group of reformed villains led by Baron Zemo, who fake being heroes long enough that they eventually become them; or the Dark Avengers, Norman Osborn’s knockoff Avengers group populated exclusively by some of the worst villains in the MCU. So which of these two possibilities should you go for? Fortunately, you can hedge your bets a little bit: neither book’s first issue is selling for much more than $30-$40. 78

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IMAGE CREDIT: MATT KENNEDY/MARVEL (SPIDER-MAN), CHUCK ZLOTNICK/ MARVEL STUDIOS (HAWKEYE). PREVIOUS SPREAD: SILVER AGE COMICS, ASTORIA, NY

Jennifer Walters might be the exception to the “if it’s been announced, it’s too late” rule. The Savage She-Hulk, the Stan Lee/ John Buscema book from 1980 that introduced Hulk’s cousin and is likely serving as a significant foundation for her upcoming Disney+ show, is available for under $60 if you really hunt. Key issues with an MCU connection tend to get substantial price bumps, so don’t be surprised if this goes up by a lot as we get closer to the show, and doesn’t really come back down.

EYES ON THE BIG SCREEN WINTER 2022

Ms. Marvel

BOOKS TO WATCH:

Magnificent Ms. Marvel #1, Marvel Boy #1 MARCH 25, 2022

N OV. 2 4 , 2 02 1

Hawkeye

BOOKS TO WATCH: Young

Avengers #1 (2005), Young Avengers #1 (2013), Hawkeye Vol. 5 #1 (2017)

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness BOOKS TO WATCH:

Vengeance #1 M AY 6 , 2 0 2 2

Thor: Love and Thunder BOOKS TO WATCH:

Thor: God of Thunder #1 (2012), Thor #1 (2014) RELEASE TBD D E C . 1 7, 2 0 2 1

Spider-Man: No Way Home BOOKS TO WATCH: The Amazing Spider-Man #544

Green Lantern Corps BOOKS TO WATCH:

Far Sector #1

RELEASE TBD

Armor Wars

BOOKS TO WATCH:

Iron Man #225

RELEASE TBD

She-Hulk J U LY 2 9 , 2 0 2 2

N OV. 4 , 2 02 2

BOOKS TO WATCH:

Black Adam

JSA #1, 52 #1

The Flash

BOOKS TO WATCH:

The Savage She-Hulk #1

Flashpoint #1, Injustice Year Three #7

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Injustice: Gods Among Us Year Three #7 (DC Comics) A dream issue of the third year of a video game tie-in comic set on a parallel Earth to the main DC Universe is a very weird inclusion on this list, except it proves the point of other media driving comic price increases. The first appearance of Lara Lane-Kent, the Supergirl likely to appear in 2022’s The Flash movie, is moving on eBay for north of $25. Lara is the daughter that Superman dreams of when he’s trapped by the Black Mercy, the parasitic psychic plant from “For the Man Who Has Everything.” It’s hard to believe, but this might go even higher once more story details from the movie are announced.

JSA (1999) #1 (DC Comics) Iron Man #225 (Marvel Comics)

With the Justice Society of America confirmed to appear in Black Adam, it’s only fitting that the book that started a renaissance for the entire JSA family, one that persists today for Teth-Adam, sees a spike. This book, by David Goyer, James Robinson, Geoff Johns, and Stephen Sadowski, is legitimately one of the best comics of its era, so you can’t go wrong grabbing it either for speculation or because you want a good, meaty run of high quality superhero stories to read. And a full run is much more appealing when the first issue can be grabbed for as little as $5. Some of the Black Adam movie’s storyline appears to be influenced by later issues in this run, as well.

Armor Wars is an interesting pick for an MCU adaptation, and it will become a series on Disney+ soon enough. The story follows Tony Stark as he hunts down tech stolen from him and sold to supervillains. It’s also grossly underpriced, with copies as low as $20. However, it makes a bit of sense: it’s from an era of much higher print runs, and this is maybe the furthest out MCU project that we know of.

Far Sector #1 (DC Comics) N.K. Jemisin and Jamal Campbell’s story is one of the best Green Lantern books of all time. And from a purely speculative standpoint, it’s a huge deal right now. As of this writing, Jo Mullein, the new GL introduced in this book, hasn’t been announced as a character in the HBO Max show coming next year. But she is one of the stars of Geoffrey Thorne’s new run on the main book, and her profile is only going to rise between now and the second season of the show. It’s only a matter of time before these $10-20 first issues skyrocket.

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Amazing Spider-Man #544

Marvel Boy (2000) #1

It’s a pretty bold move, basing the plot of Spider-Man: No Way Home on one of the worst Spidey stories of all time, but if you’re a collector, this is a boon. “One More Day” saw Peter make a trade with Mephisto: his marriage in exchange for healing Aunt May from a gunshot. It’s terrible. Beautiful art, but the concept and execution were really rough. That might explain why the first issue of that story, Amazing Spider-Man #544, is still available for under $10.

With the next Captain Marvel movie being titled The Marvels, it’s worth going through everyone who might be there to see if deals can be had. Carol’s key issues are all very pricey, as are Kamala’s. One Marvel title selling for very reasonable prices is Grant Morrison and J.G. Jones’ Marvel Boy. And Noh-Varr has an added benefit to appearing in this movie: he became a quintessential member of the Young Avengers and dated Kate Bishop for a little while. Full sets of this comic are available for less than $15. Get in now.

Magnificent Ms. Marvel #1 Kamala Khan is going to be a very big deal. She was a big deal when she was introduced in the comics as the new Ms. Marvel, and we guarantee her Disney+ show is going to be a blockbuster. That’s why her first appearance (in All-New Marvel Now! Point One in 2014) is very expensive, and the start of her first solo book, Ms. Marvel #1, is pricey. But her most recent series, Magnificent Ms. Marvel, is priced very reasonably, and should see some bump when the show hits.

Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 (Sega Dreamcast) There’s a very real chance that the big bad of Marvel’s What If? is Shuma Gorath, the betentacled eye from a Cthonic parallel Earth. If so there’s good news and bad news. The bad news is nobody cares about Shuma Gorath comics. The good news is Shuma Gorath is popular because he was a character in the greatest fighting game series of all time. $100 might seem like a lot for a game on a system you can’t buy anymore, but you can probably score a Dreamcast for very cheap...

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MOUNT GEEKMORE: THE TOP FOUR OF EVERYTHING, LITERALLY SET IN STONE.

TV VAMPIRES

Characters to really sink your teeth into.

BY TONY SOKOL

ILLUSTRATION BY JESSICA KOYNOCK

Jessica Hamby True Blood

Barnabas Collins Dark Shadows

Jessica Hamby emerged as True Blood’s enfant terrible: kicking, screaming, begging for Jesus, and crying like a newborn. Why, oh why can’t she kill anybody she wants now that she’s a vampire? Undead teens just wanna have fun, but she’s destined to stay a vampire virgin for eternity. Unseen in the Southern Vampire Mysteries book series the show is based on, Deborah Ann Woll made the character her own. Jessica’s hypnotic glamour outshone even veteran vamps.

Barnabas Collins was TV’s first vampire—the remorseful bloodsucker was introduced to a failing daytime soap opera in 1967. Dark Shadows’ breakout star crossed rivers of time to be with his love, Josette, not to feast on the dregs of the modern world. Collins was bitten on the neck by a bat on a fishing line cast by the witch, Angelique. Shakespearean-trained Jonathan Frid’s fate was sealed when Dan Curtis’ low-budget supernatural filler became a surprise hit.

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Spike Buffy The Vampire Slayer Joss Whedon wanted to task Buffy with a “punk rock vampire.” Born in the Victorian Era, James Marsters’ Spike outpunked Billy Idol. He gets his rebel yell from the exquisite torture of mad vampire Drusilla, but falls for the only slayer he’s never had the pleasure of killing. Spike hates the obvious. Being “all fangy and gnarly takes the mystery out,” whereas a trench coat, peroxide, and nail polish scream subtlety...

The Count Sesame Street Four blood-suckers carved in granite, barely an appetizer for Sesame Street’s Carpathian calculator. The most OCD of TV’s vampire icons, Count von Count’s computational compulsion sucks life from all the people in his neighborhood. Ernie, Kermit, even Oscar the Grouch suffer grim subtractions to feed his inestimable need for numerical nutrition. He double parks his Countmobile just to count more tickets.

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