The Krell Laboratories Podcast: The Movies and Mr. King

I had a long conversation with besties, Anna Maurya and Jenni Shwaner, about this year's crop of Stephen King adaptations, including The Monkey (2025), The Life of Chuck, The Long Walk, and The Running Man (2025). We also discuss the recent anthology of stories set in the universe of The Stand, The End of the World As We Know It. We are all long-time "constant readers," as King would have us, but we're not entirely uncritical. Join us, won't you?

Anna is also on this week's Horror 101 episode talking about Cannibal Holocaust. Like Chuck in The Life of Chuck we contain multitudes.

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Hide Me Among the Graves

"And mother, when the big tears fall,
(And fall, God knows, they may)
Tell him I died of my great love
And my dying heart was gay.

And mother dear, when the sun has set
And the pale kirk grass waves,
Then carry me through the dim twilight
And hide me among the graves."

--Elizabeth Siddal Rossetti, "At Last"

"Worms-meat, n. The final product of which we are the raw material."
--Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary.

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David Cronenberg is 82 years old at this writing and there's no telling if he'll ever make another film. The Shrouds (2025) is as good a valediction as anything. It is a more deeply personal film for the director than anything he's made since The Brood. It's a film that's drenched in an awareness of impending death. His death. His family's death. Everyone's death. As the title suggests, this film is a memento mori, more so than any other film the director has ever made. Cronenberg has always been curious about the mechanisms of life and evolution. In this film, he turns that curiosity on death, as both a physical process--a state of being in the world--and as a psychic phenomenon in which the connections between people, particularly lovers, are severed by the Grim Reaper's scythe.

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Eye of the Beholder

The plot of The Ugly Stepsister is Cinderella as seen from the point of view of Elvira, the elder stepsister. As the film opens, Elvira's mother, Rebekka, has married Otto and moved herself and her girls into his house. At the wedding feast, however, Otto dies of apoplexy. This sends Otto's own daughter, Agnes, into a depressive spiral, and in one such mode, she tells Elvira that her father only married Rebekka for her money. "What money?" Elvira declares before storming off to tell her mother that her dead husband wasn't rich after all. The entire family is now in dire financial straits, because Rebekka is already negotiating the sale of the estate's assets to pay its debts. A glimmer of hope arrives in the form of an announcement from the palace. Prince Julian is to wed and will choose his bride from the virgins of the kingdom. Elvira adores Prince Julian. She reads his poems from a book she keeps with her all the time and aspires to marry him even before the palace announces its wedding ball. Agnes is indifferent. She's got a beau, but she's also penniless, so she plays along. Rebekka will only support Elvira's chances though, even when faced with Elvira's shortcomings. She sends her to Dr. Esthetique for a make-over--removing her braces and resculpting her nose among other things--and then packs her off to finishing lessons under the strict eye of Madame Vanya and her partner, Sophie von Kronenberg. There, she learns deportment and grace, but she's initially hopeless. She also comes into possession of the egg of a tapeworm, which she swallows in order to lose weight. The mountain seems too high to surmount, though, because Agnes is too perfect and she overhears the Prince out in the woods commenting on her appearance with the vow that he could never "fuck that!" Elvira has fortune on her side, though, and Agnes is disqualified from attending the ball when Rebekka discovers that she is not a virgin. She keeps her in the house as a scullery rather than have a scandal on the eve of the ball. She destroys Agnes's dress and leaves her at home. Agnes has help, though, when the ghost of her mother summons silkworms to weave her a new dress. At the ball, Elvira's "improvements" catch the prince's eye and he chooses her for the dance. Elvira is not well, though. The tapeworm has sapped her nutrition and there are ominous rumblings from her stomach. She holds it together long enough to see a mysterious veiled stranger enter the ballroom and sweep the prince off his feet. When the veil is momentarily lifted, only Elvira sees that it is Agnes come to thwart her. But Agnes's enchantment ends at midnight and she flees the ball, losing one of her shoes. The prince vows to marry the girl who fits the shoe. At home, Elvira wrestles the other shoe away and finds that her foot is too big for it. Drastic action is required...

A warning to the curious. I am a jaded viewer of hundreds, maybe thousands, of horror movies. There are things in this film to shock even a jaded viewer like me. The filmmakers don't pull their punches here. If you are sensitive to this...well, don't say I didn't warn you.

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True/False 2025: Silent Movies

I dimly remember the events at Gallaudet University covered in Deaf President Now! (2025, directed by Nyle DiMarco and Davis Guggenheim), in which the student body closed down the campus when the Board of Trustees foisted yet another hearing president on them after over a hundred years of existence. The result was a week-long stand-off in which neither side would budge and a key turning point in the struggle for disability rights. The film presents a microcosm of activism along multiple axes of oppression, and ponders questions of assimilation versus visibility, self-determination versus a permanent state of custody by an abled majority. This particular story takes place in the deaf community, but I see echoes of it running through other communities, too. The overriding message of the film and its subjects is that no one is ever going to give anyone rights; you have to take them by force.

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A Monkey on Your Back

"I was in New York on business about four years ago. I was walking back to my hotel after visiting my people at New American Library when I saw a guy selling wind-up monkeys on the street. There was a platoon of them standing on a gray blanket he'd spread on the sidewalk at the corner of Fifth and Forty-fourth, all grinning and bending and clapping their cymbals. They looked really scary to me, and I spent the rest of the walk back to the hotel wondering why. I decided they reminded me of the lady with the shears . . . the one who cuts everyone's thread one day. So keeping that in mind, I wrote the story, most of it longhand, in a hotel room."
--Stephen King, "Story Note on 'The Monkey,'" Skeleton Crew, 1985

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The new film version of The Monkey (2025) is a bit of a departure for director Osgood Perkins. It has a grotesque sense of humor that I didn't know he had and an instinct for the grand guignol that is new to his films. Ordinarily, his films are mood pieces that trade on atmosphere and menace more than plot, but this one is a cartoon. It shares with the Stephen King story its central idea of a wind-up monkey that causes death when it's wound up to action. In the story, the monkey has a pair of cymbals. In the movie they've changed it to a drum for reasons of copyright (they did not want to run afoul of Disney and their army of lawyers). It's a minor change. It also takes from the story its central characters, two brothers who find the monkey in childhood and realize its power. Apart from that, this is a film that ranges far afield of King's story, which is nothing new to the author. "Based on" is too strong a credit for what this takes from King. "Suggested by" might have been more apt. That doesn't mean that it's bad. Just different.

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Stupid Cupid

Christopher Landon is having a ball these days making pop horror movie mash-ups. His new film Heart Eyes (2025), which he wrote and produced for director Josh Ruben, follows the Happy Death Day movies (mashing the slasher film with Groundhog Day) and Freaky (mashing the slasher film with Freaky Friday). Heart Eyes is a slasher film for lovers, a film that eviscerates the rom com and winds up being surprisingly romantic anyway. But emphasis on the word "eviscerate," because this is a film that uses the full scope of what a hard R-Rating allows.

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No Strings Attached

I've got no strings
So I have fun
I'm not tied up to anyone
They've got strings
But you can see
There are no strings on me!
--"I've Got No Strings,"
lyrics by Leigh Harline, Pinocchio (1940)

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Note: here there be spoilers. You have been warned.

One of my favorite types of movies is the sub-genre of the crime film where a bunch of characters try to pull off something shady and everything starts to unravel once some element or other goes wrong. Bonus points if the criminals involved are all dumbasses who compound every mistake with wrong decisions. These films are often hilarious. I was not expecting such a film when I sat down for Companion (2025, directed by Drew Hancock). There's a lot of noise surrounding this film about how even its poster is a spoiler, but I caught wise to the obvious spoilers early on. Any savvy viewer will recognize this film's essential nature early on. It's a variant on The Stepford Wives. What happens when a Stepford Wife wakes up to her situation? Got it. But the crime story? Oh, THAT was a surprise. And now I'm spoiling it for you. Cheers, mate.

This is also another film about the singularity along the lines of Her or Ex Machina. Like the AI protagonists in both of those movies, this film's Iris (Sophie Thatcher) has a legitimate beef with the humans who made her. If you are interested in the philosophical dimensions of AI, you are directed to those other two films, because this one is purely pulp entertainment. What philosophy there is is entirely accidental and bound up with the sub-genre rather than with any intentionality on the part of the filmmakers. Mind you, it is in the nature of genre to unconsciously marinate in what's in the culture around it and feed that culture back in the subtext, and that's what happens here. Plus, it has the vitality of pulp fiction. It's an easy watch, which is maybe the best way to smuggle ideas to an audience.

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A First-Person Haunting

Director Steven Soderbergh "retired" from movies in 2013, more than a decade ago at this point. Since then, he has continued to make movies in spite of himself. Some of these he has made for streaming (Kimi, High Flying Bird) and some for theatrical release (Logan Lucky, Unsane, Magic Mike's Last Dance). What his post-retirement films have in common is a questing curiosity about the process of filmmaking and a formal daring that wouldn't fly in his more commercial films from the turn of the century. He shot Unsane on an iPhone, for example, while Kimi is an update of sorts of Rear Window for the internet age. I am pretty sure that if Soderbergh wanted to command the kinds of budgets that have funded Martin Scorsese or Steven Spielberg in this era, he could probably do it (particularly if the word "Ocean's" is involved), but he just hasn't wanted the bother. His films have gone back to the basics, back to the kinds of films he made at the outset of his career. No big crews. He shoots and edits them himself. In his current film, Presence (2025), he goes even further than that. The camera's point of view is an actual character in the film. The conceit here is that Presence is a ghost story shot in the first person from the point of view of the ghost. If that sounds like a variant of the so-called "found footage" film, you might be justified in thinking that, but Soderbergh is smarter than that. This is more akin to the puzzle movies that M. Night Shyamalan used to make.

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The Tameness of a Wolf

"He's mad that trusts in the tameness of a wolf,
a horse's health, a boy's love, or a whore's oath."
--William Shakespeare, King Lear, Act III, Scene VI,

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Leigh Whannell's new re-imagining of The Wolf Man loses the definite article at the start and a lot more besides as Wolf Man (2025), a film that has good ideas that it fails to execute to the best of its ability. It's a film that looks at the elements of the werewolf myth and ditches most of the mythology. It drops the silver bullet and the moon and the invulnerability. It keeps the transformation and the contagion at its core, though, things that could be explained away as disease.  In doing so, it discovers the kernel of a body horror movie on the Cronenberg model. It bears more than a passing resemblance to The Fly, with a salting of the generational trauma of The Brood, but with neither of those films' instinct for violating taboos. The most galling thing about it is that Whannell is certainly capable of rising to the challenge. His version of The Invisible Man can stand in the company of Cronenberg's best horror movies unashamed. But this? This is the kind of film that Blumhouse releases in January (Blumhouse is this film's production company). It's not as bad as something like Night Swim, but it's nothing you'll remember once it's out of theaters.

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Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don't

The Damned (2024, directed by Thordur Palsson) is a film that shows the widening influence of Robert Eggers on cinema. Elements of all of Eggers's films can be spotted in this film, including the visual design of his recent version of Nosferatu. This is a film that dwells in cold and shadow, making extensive use of its bleak Iceland-in-winter location. One could see Anya Taylor-Joy in the lead in this film rather than Odessa Young, but Young is fine in the part of a woman running a remote fishing station in the 19th century. The screenplay is less disciplined than Eggers, though, including an ending that leaves the audience with questions. The rest? Claustrophobic and chilly, a crucible where close company in isolation fails to prevent anyone from going mad. Superstition runs roughshod over otherwise rational people.

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