The Twilight Sword is Drawn and Monsters Arise!

With the core Twilight Sword books winging their way to backers as you read this, publisher Two Little Mice has announced a new crowdfunding campaign for its anime/video game-inspired tabletop roleplaying game.

Next month, on November 17, a campaign to fund the Monster Book will launch on Backerkit.

As well as a new playable Kin (species) and a new Way (character class), this new book will contain:

"...dreadful Monsters, friendly Beasts, and unique Loot!"

November 17 is, of course, an auspicious day for this blog: not only is it Life Day in the Star Wars Universe, but it is also the official anniversary of the current iteration of my blogging efforts "going live". 

I, therefore, take this as a sign that I need to back this campaign!

MUSICAL MONDAY: Mausoleum (Manic Street Preachers)

Is It Legal To Shoot A Ghost?

In 1803, London’s Hammersmith Ghost sparked terror — and a deadly case of mistaken identity. When Francis Smith shot Thomas Millwood, believing him to be a ghost, he was convicted of murder. The bizarre trial shaped British criminal law for centuries. But who, or what, was the Hammersmith Ghost?

Colony (2026)

Disgruntled scientist Seo Yeong Cheol (Koo Kyo-hwan) stages a terrorist attack on the company that stole his ideas, unleashing a zombie-like infection at a biotech conference that spills over into the attached shopping mall.

Co-written and directed by Train To Busan's Yeon Sang-ho, Colony is a taut, claustrophobic zombie horror actioner from a master of the genre. 

While it homages such classics as Romero's Dawn of The Dead and the early years of The Walking Dead TV show, the central conceit - which differentiates it from other zombified movies I'm aware of - is the idea that the flesh-eaters can rapidly evolve via a hive mind connection.

This sees them develop from bestial monsters into a near-human state through the film's two hour runtime.

The idea of zombies as an insect-like colony allows for some slick set-dressing as well as the creatures transform the walls and floors of the mall into their nest - using mucus as their building material of choice.

Parallel to this, Seo Yeong Cheol develops from a fuming nerd into a suave Lex Luthor-level master villain, creating a role you don't usually associate with this sub-genre of horror movies - that of a "head" zombie! When you look at this, combined with the hive-mind element, comparisons with Star Trek's Borg are also unavoidable.

As well as some canny foreshadowing, Colony has it all: from heroism and heartbreak to gore and political cowardice.

The main plot follows conference attendee Professor Se Jeong (Jun Ji-hyun) as she tries to guide an ever-diminishing contingent of survivors out of the locked-down mall.

However, while this is unfolding there is the equally fascinating (if not so action-packed) second storyline about the professor's ex-husband's new wife Gong Seol-hee (Shin Hyun-been), another senior scientist, navigating the political minefield of trying to contain the outbreak and find a cure for the infected.

A particularly interesting touch is the fact that, for the longest time, the authorities consider the infected as "patients" and - unlike 99 per cent of other cinematic zombie scenarios - don't start killing them straight away.

Of course, eventually, that approach is overturned - as you would expect - but I thought it was a novel (and probably more "realistic") approach to a zombie outbreak.

Yeon Sang-ho's pacing is spot-on and even though the film runs for two hours it never dragged and, to be honest, I wouldn't have objected if it had carried on for another hour or two.

Despite what you may have read elsewhere, however, Colony is not a prequel to Train To Busan anymore than The Uprising tells the origin story of Robin Hood.

Slender Man (2018)

A quartet of teenage girls decide to freak themselves out by watching an online video about summoning the urban legend known as Slender Man (think meme-age answer to Bloody Mary).

Soon afterwards, they're all having nightmares and then one, Katie (Annalise Basso), disappears on a school trip.

At first, this is thought to be an abduction, but then her friends begin to suspect more supernatural forces are at work as the mythology of Slender Man worms its way into their minds.

Released in 2018 to almost universal negative reviews, and condemnation that it was capitalising on the genuinely disturbing, real-world, "Slender Man" attempted murder case, Slender Man slunk back into the shadows, leaving nary a trace of its passing.

Which is why I hadn't bothered with it, until now.

I watched it on Sky Cinema, as a double feature with Beware The Slenderman, the HBO documentary about the stabbing of a young girl by her two friends, who claimed they were acting as "proxies" for Slender Man.

Except for the central figure of the mythical Slender Man there's no narrative connection between the fictional story and what happened in real life. Surprisingly, it's mentioned briefly in the documentary, and, to my mind, not given enough backstory, such as exactly when the character was invented for an online Photoshop challenge and even who created it.

The seriously-underrated cinematic Slender Man is a mind-bending, Lovecraftian creation (may I hazard a suggestion that it could be an avatar of Nyarlathotep?) that uses the Internet, and modern technology, to spread its insanity like a computer virus, jumping from the world wide web into human beings.

As is often the case in this style of teen-targeted horror, the script stumbles over some unbelievably poor police work, allowing the main girls to conduct their own investigations in a reality somewhere between Scooby-Doo and True Detective.

While Sylvain White's film does employ a handful of jump scares, the film relies on more psychological techniques (taking a leaf from a lot of the Creepypasta online Slender Man lore, there's often something going on behind the characters, in our peripheral vision) and psychedelic imagery as the characters' grip on sanity slips.

Although the archetype of a supernatural character that steals children has roots that go back to Biblical mythology, the Pied Piper etc, Slender Man is very much a modern fiend that works so well as its existence revolves around a relatively new creation (the Internet) that certain generations are still unsure of, because it divides as much as it unites.

The Slender Man film does a good job of twisting those themes into an unusual little horror gem.