I know what you read last summer (and it was probably horror)
Now it seems it's literature's turn. In 2023, there was a record number of new horror books both published and sold, and two years on, the trend shows little sign of slowing. Literary agents are reporting submission piles filling up with more tales of the weird and eerie, from eco-horror to folk horror to the aptly named 'femgore' – hyper-violent, female-centric body horror.
In the last year alone – and this is but a tiny sliver of what's on offer – we've had Gretchen Felker-Martin's Cuckoo, which made the very real horrors of gay conversion camps manifest in a grotesque body-snatching teen epic. Rachel Harrison's So Thirsty took a big, bloody bite out of 21st-century female friendship with its ultra-gory vampire antics. The Lamb, Lucy Rose's fairytale debut, told the touching story a young girl caring for her mother … by bringing her stray hikers to satiate her cannibalistic urge for human flesh (pair it with Monika Kim's The Eyes are the Best Part for a stomach-churning family-sized feast).
And 50 years after the publication of his first novel, Carrie, horror stalwart Stephen King released his latest short story anthology You Like It Darker (just months after a brand-new novel, Holly – also featuring cannibals).
King isn't the only elder statesman jostling for shelf space alongside the BookTok generation. George A. Romero, the man responsible for our modern conception of zombies, with films like The Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, released his final novel earlier this year, somewhat fittingly from beyond the grave.
Co-written by Daniel Kraus, who discovered the incomplete manuscript in an archive box at the University of Pittsburgh Library in 2019, Pay the Piper is a sweaty, cosmic eco-horror set in the muggy depths of the Louisiana bayou, where a nine-year-old girl named Pontiac and a rag-tag group of townsfolk from her home of Alligator Point come up against an ancient, vengeful evil that's been lurking in the swamp and preying on children.
While Romero will forever be remembered primarily as an orchestrator of gnarly kills and ground-breaking special effects, his zombie movies always had more than merely brains on the brain. His seminal Night of the Living Dead is often read as a critique of racial tensions in 1960s America; it features a Black protagonist (played by Duane Jones) who survives an undead horde only to be shot by a white sheriff. The 1978 follow-up, Dawn of the Dead, set entirely in a shopping mall, can only be seen as a satirical indictment of rampant consumerism.
Pay the Piper continues this tradition of smuggling hefty themes into seemingly straightforward horror schtick. Young Pontiac's home is under threat from a nefarious character known only as The Oil Man – a phantom-like stand-in for the entire fossil fuel industry – as well as The Piper itself, an aquatic Lovecraftian creature seeking restitution for the thousands of slaves slaughtered and dumped in its waters by the infamous Pirates Lafitte in the 1800s. Romero and Kraus' book mutates from gooey Southern Gothic to a full-throated treatise on human cruelty and environmental calamity; it's spooky, stirring Cajun cli-fi with a healthy dose of tentacles.
Closer to home, this March saw the release of Margot McGovern's riveting supernatural YA slasher This Stays Between Us. McGovern's second book boasts a little bit of everything: early 2000s nostalgia, late-night seances, teenage crushes, buried secrets and a predatory entity known only as Smiling Jack that hunts its four young female protagonists as they try to survive year 11 camp in a remote, abandoned mining town. McGovern's first book, Neverland, released in 2018, hewed much closer to magical realism – but a life-long love of horror helped inspire her sophomore stab.
'I've always been a huge horror fan,' says McGovern. 'I read and watched a lot growing up, but there wasn't a lot of Australian horror at that time. Most of the movies came from the US. And with horror books, in the '90s it felt like you had R.L. Stine and then there was this huge gap before you jumped to Stephen King and Clive Barker.'
Teen horror films filled that gap for McGovern. 'I always knew I wanted to write a book that was set here in Australia and evoked the Australian landscape and personality, but embodied all the fun of a late-90s slasher,' she says. 'Kevin Williamson's screenplays were a huge influence on me. I love Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer and Teaching Mrs. Tingle – even movies like The Craft.'
Of course, the defining feature of all these movies – and many of the books already mentioned – is teenagers. In horror, teens are often the heroes, the hapless victims and the target audience all at once.
'Horror occupies this really interesting liminal space for teenagers,' McGovern says of her passion for writing YA. 'It gives you that last little bit of make-believe.
'It offers a step up into the adult world, where things can be genuinely terrifying and violent. When you're 13 or 14, you feel like things are out of your control – you're going through this huge transition, you're figuring out who you are, your body's changing, all the rules are changing! – and horror not only explores that, but gives you a way to take back some power and agency.'
Perhaps that explains our present-day horror boom, then. We're all of us teenagers in a world that feels increasingly out of control – but instead of regressing into childhood and escaping into all-out fantasy, we're ready to confront our fears; to look the monster under the bed, or the creature in the swamp, or the thing in the mirror dead in the eye.
'Horror has always responded to what's happening in the culture,' McGovern says. 'I think that's part of the reason why it's making such a comeback now. In times of uncertainty and upheaval, horror offers a set of familiar tropes that lets you approach your darkest fears in an almost comforting way.'
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6 days ago
- The Advertiser
Eddington was meant to be divisive but the critics came out all guns blazing
A post-it note sat near Ari Aster while he wrote Eddington: "Remember the phones." Eddington may be set during the pandemic but the onset of COVID-19 isn't its inciting incident. Outside the fictional New Mexico town, a data centre is being built. Inside Eddington, its residents - their brains increasingly addled by the internet, social media, smartphones and whatever is ominously emanating from that data centre - are growing increasingly detached from one another, and from each other's sense of reality. "We're living in such a weird time and we forget how weird it is," Aster says. "Things have been weird ever since we were able to carry the internet on our person. Ever since we began living in the internet, things have gotten weirder and weirder. "It's important to keep reminding ourselves: This is weird." Moviegoers have grown accustomed to expecting a lack of normalcy in Aster's movies. His first three films - Hereditary, Midsommar, Beau Is Afraid - have vividly charted strange new pathways of dread and deep-rooted anxiety. Those fixations make Aster, a master of nightmare and farce, uniquely suited to capturing the current American moment. Eddington, which A24 is opening in selected Australian cinemas on August 21, may be the most prominent American movie yet to explicitly wrestle with social and political division in the United States. In a showdown between Joaquin Phoenix's bumbling right-wing sheriff and Pedro Pascal's elitist liberal mayor, arguments over mask mandates, Black Lives Matter protests and elections spiral into a demented Western fever dream. At a time when our movie screens are filled with escapism and nostalgia, Eddington dares to diagnose something frightfully contemporary. Aster, in a recent interview at an East Village coffee shop he frequents, said he couldn't imagine avoiding it. "To not be talking about it is insane," he said. "I'm desperate for work that's wrestling with this moment because I don't know where we are. I've never been here before," says Aster. "I have projects that I've been planning for a long time. They make less sense to me right now. I don't know why I would make those right now." Eddington, appropriately enough, has been divisive. Since its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May, Aster's film has had one of the most polarising receptions of the year among critics. Even in Cannes, Aster seemed to grasp its mixed response. "I don't know what you think," he told the crowd. Some critics have suggested Aster's film is too satirical of the left. "Despite a pose of satirical neutrality, he mainly seems to want to score points off mask-wearers, young progressives, anti-racists and other targets beloved of reactionaries," The New Yorker's Justin Chang wrote. For The New York Times, Manohla Dargis wrote: "Aster knows how to grab your attention, but if he thinks he's saying something about America, the joke is on him." Aster was expecting a divisive reaction. But he disputes some of the discourse around Eddington. "I heard one person say it was harder on the left than the right, and I think that's pretty disingenuous," he says. "In the film, one side is kind of annoying and frustrating and hypocritical, and the other side is killing people and destroying lives." For Aster, satirising the left doesn't mean he doesn't share their beliefs. "If there's no self-reflection," he says, "how are we ever going to get out of this?" Aster began writing Eddington in June 2020. He set it in New Mexico, where his family moved when he was 10. Aster wanted to try to capture the disconnect that didn't start with the pandemic but then reached a surreal crescendo. He styled Eddington as a Western with smartphones in place of guns - though there are definitely guns, too. "The dread I was living with suddenly intensified. And to be honest, I've been living with that level of dread ever since," Aster says. "I just wanted to see if I could capture what was in the air." Scripts that dive headlong into politics are far from regular in today's corporate Hollywood. Most studios would be unlikely to distribute a film like Eddington, though A24, the indie powerhouse, has stood behind Aster even after 2023's $35 million Beau Is Afraid struggled at the box office. A24 has shown a willingness to engage with political discord, backing last year's speculative war drama, Civil War. And Aster's screenplay resonated with Phoenix, who had starred in Beau Is Afraid, and with Pascal. In Cannes, Pascal noted that "it's very scary to participate in a movie that speaks to issues like this". For Phoenix, Eddington offered clarity and empathy for the pandemic experience. "We were all terrified and we didn't fully understand it. And instead of reaching out to each other in those moments, we kind of became antagonistic toward each other and self-righteous and certain of our position," Phoenix said. "And in some ways it's so obvious: Well, that's not going to be helpful." Since Aster made Eddington - it was shot in 2024 - the second administration of President Donald Trump has ushered in a new political reality that Aster acknowledges would have reshaped his film. "I would have made the movie more obscene," he says. "And I would have made it angrier. I think the film is angry. But I think we're living in a time of total obscenity, beyond anything I've seen." Eddington is designed to be argued over. Even those who find its first half well-observed may recoil at the violent absurdism of its second half. The movie, Aster says, pivots midway and, itself, becomes paranoid and gripped by differing world views. You can almost feel Aster struggling to bring any coherence to his, and our, modern-day Western. But whatever you make of Eddington, you might grant it's vitally important that we have more films like it - movies that don't tiptoe around today in period-film metaphor or avoid it like the plague. Aster, at least, doesn't sound finished with what he started. "I'm feeling very heartbroken about where we are, and totally lost, so I'm looking for ways to go into those feelings but also to challenge them. What can be done?" Aster asks. "Because this is a movie about people who are unreachable to each other and completely siloed off ... a question that kept coming to me was: What would an olive branch look like? How do we find a way to re-engage with each other?" A post-it note sat near Ari Aster while he wrote Eddington: "Remember the phones." Eddington may be set during the pandemic but the onset of COVID-19 isn't its inciting incident. Outside the fictional New Mexico town, a data centre is being built. Inside Eddington, its residents - their brains increasingly addled by the internet, social media, smartphones and whatever is ominously emanating from that data centre - are growing increasingly detached from one another, and from each other's sense of reality. "We're living in such a weird time and we forget how weird it is," Aster says. "Things have been weird ever since we were able to carry the internet on our person. Ever since we began living in the internet, things have gotten weirder and weirder. "It's important to keep reminding ourselves: This is weird." Moviegoers have grown accustomed to expecting a lack of normalcy in Aster's movies. His first three films - Hereditary, Midsommar, Beau Is Afraid - have vividly charted strange new pathways of dread and deep-rooted anxiety. Those fixations make Aster, a master of nightmare and farce, uniquely suited to capturing the current American moment. Eddington, which A24 is opening in selected Australian cinemas on August 21, may be the most prominent American movie yet to explicitly wrestle with social and political division in the United States. In a showdown between Joaquin Phoenix's bumbling right-wing sheriff and Pedro Pascal's elitist liberal mayor, arguments over mask mandates, Black Lives Matter protests and elections spiral into a demented Western fever dream. At a time when our movie screens are filled with escapism and nostalgia, Eddington dares to diagnose something frightfully contemporary. Aster, in a recent interview at an East Village coffee shop he frequents, said he couldn't imagine avoiding it. "To not be talking about it is insane," he said. "I'm desperate for work that's wrestling with this moment because I don't know where we are. I've never been here before," says Aster. "I have projects that I've been planning for a long time. They make less sense to me right now. I don't know why I would make those right now." Eddington, appropriately enough, has been divisive. Since its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May, Aster's film has had one of the most polarising receptions of the year among critics. Even in Cannes, Aster seemed to grasp its mixed response. "I don't know what you think," he told the crowd. Some critics have suggested Aster's film is too satirical of the left. "Despite a pose of satirical neutrality, he mainly seems to want to score points off mask-wearers, young progressives, anti-racists and other targets beloved of reactionaries," The New Yorker's Justin Chang wrote. For The New York Times, Manohla Dargis wrote: "Aster knows how to grab your attention, but if he thinks he's saying something about America, the joke is on him." Aster was expecting a divisive reaction. But he disputes some of the discourse around Eddington. "I heard one person say it was harder on the left than the right, and I think that's pretty disingenuous," he says. "In the film, one side is kind of annoying and frustrating and hypocritical, and the other side is killing people and destroying lives." For Aster, satirising the left doesn't mean he doesn't share their beliefs. "If there's no self-reflection," he says, "how are we ever going to get out of this?" Aster began writing Eddington in June 2020. He set it in New Mexico, where his family moved when he was 10. Aster wanted to try to capture the disconnect that didn't start with the pandemic but then reached a surreal crescendo. He styled Eddington as a Western with smartphones in place of guns - though there are definitely guns, too. "The dread I was living with suddenly intensified. And to be honest, I've been living with that level of dread ever since," Aster says. "I just wanted to see if I could capture what was in the air." Scripts that dive headlong into politics are far from regular in today's corporate Hollywood. Most studios would be unlikely to distribute a film like Eddington, though A24, the indie powerhouse, has stood behind Aster even after 2023's $35 million Beau Is Afraid struggled at the box office. A24 has shown a willingness to engage with political discord, backing last year's speculative war drama, Civil War. And Aster's screenplay resonated with Phoenix, who had starred in Beau Is Afraid, and with Pascal. In Cannes, Pascal noted that "it's very scary to participate in a movie that speaks to issues like this". For Phoenix, Eddington offered clarity and empathy for the pandemic experience. "We were all terrified and we didn't fully understand it. And instead of reaching out to each other in those moments, we kind of became antagonistic toward each other and self-righteous and certain of our position," Phoenix said. "And in some ways it's so obvious: Well, that's not going to be helpful." Since Aster made Eddington - it was shot in 2024 - the second administration of President Donald Trump has ushered in a new political reality that Aster acknowledges would have reshaped his film. "I would have made the movie more obscene," he says. "And I would have made it angrier. I think the film is angry. But I think we're living in a time of total obscenity, beyond anything I've seen." Eddington is designed to be argued over. Even those who find its first half well-observed may recoil at the violent absurdism of its second half. The movie, Aster says, pivots midway and, itself, becomes paranoid and gripped by differing world views. You can almost feel Aster struggling to bring any coherence to his, and our, modern-day Western. But whatever you make of Eddington, you might grant it's vitally important that we have more films like it - movies that don't tiptoe around today in period-film metaphor or avoid it like the plague. Aster, at least, doesn't sound finished with what he started. "I'm feeling very heartbroken about where we are, and totally lost, so I'm looking for ways to go into those feelings but also to challenge them. What can be done?" Aster asks. "Because this is a movie about people who are unreachable to each other and completely siloed off ... a question that kept coming to me was: What would an olive branch look like? How do we find a way to re-engage with each other?" A post-it note sat near Ari Aster while he wrote Eddington: "Remember the phones." Eddington may be set during the pandemic but the onset of COVID-19 isn't its inciting incident. Outside the fictional New Mexico town, a data centre is being built. Inside Eddington, its residents - their brains increasingly addled by the internet, social media, smartphones and whatever is ominously emanating from that data centre - are growing increasingly detached from one another, and from each other's sense of reality. "We're living in such a weird time and we forget how weird it is," Aster says. "Things have been weird ever since we were able to carry the internet on our person. Ever since we began living in the internet, things have gotten weirder and weirder. "It's important to keep reminding ourselves: This is weird." Moviegoers have grown accustomed to expecting a lack of normalcy in Aster's movies. His first three films - Hereditary, Midsommar, Beau Is Afraid - have vividly charted strange new pathways of dread and deep-rooted anxiety. Those fixations make Aster, a master of nightmare and farce, uniquely suited to capturing the current American moment. Eddington, which A24 is opening in selected Australian cinemas on August 21, may be the most prominent American movie yet to explicitly wrestle with social and political division in the United States. In a showdown between Joaquin Phoenix's bumbling right-wing sheriff and Pedro Pascal's elitist liberal mayor, arguments over mask mandates, Black Lives Matter protests and elections spiral into a demented Western fever dream. At a time when our movie screens are filled with escapism and nostalgia, Eddington dares to diagnose something frightfully contemporary. Aster, in a recent interview at an East Village coffee shop he frequents, said he couldn't imagine avoiding it. "To not be talking about it is insane," he said. "I'm desperate for work that's wrestling with this moment because I don't know where we are. I've never been here before," says Aster. "I have projects that I've been planning for a long time. They make less sense to me right now. I don't know why I would make those right now." Eddington, appropriately enough, has been divisive. Since its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May, Aster's film has had one of the most polarising receptions of the year among critics. Even in Cannes, Aster seemed to grasp its mixed response. "I don't know what you think," he told the crowd. Some critics have suggested Aster's film is too satirical of the left. "Despite a pose of satirical neutrality, he mainly seems to want to score points off mask-wearers, young progressives, anti-racists and other targets beloved of reactionaries," The New Yorker's Justin Chang wrote. For The New York Times, Manohla Dargis wrote: "Aster knows how to grab your attention, but if he thinks he's saying something about America, the joke is on him." Aster was expecting a divisive reaction. But he disputes some of the discourse around Eddington. "I heard one person say it was harder on the left than the right, and I think that's pretty disingenuous," he says. "In the film, one side is kind of annoying and frustrating and hypocritical, and the other side is killing people and destroying lives." For Aster, satirising the left doesn't mean he doesn't share their beliefs. "If there's no self-reflection," he says, "how are we ever going to get out of this?" Aster began writing Eddington in June 2020. He set it in New Mexico, where his family moved when he was 10. Aster wanted to try to capture the disconnect that didn't start with the pandemic but then reached a surreal crescendo. He styled Eddington as a Western with smartphones in place of guns - though there are definitely guns, too. "The dread I was living with suddenly intensified. And to be honest, I've been living with that level of dread ever since," Aster says. "I just wanted to see if I could capture what was in the air." Scripts that dive headlong into politics are far from regular in today's corporate Hollywood. Most studios would be unlikely to distribute a film like Eddington, though A24, the indie powerhouse, has stood behind Aster even after 2023's $35 million Beau Is Afraid struggled at the box office. A24 has shown a willingness to engage with political discord, backing last year's speculative war drama, Civil War. And Aster's screenplay resonated with Phoenix, who had starred in Beau Is Afraid, and with Pascal. In Cannes, Pascal noted that "it's very scary to participate in a movie that speaks to issues like this". For Phoenix, Eddington offered clarity and empathy for the pandemic experience. "We were all terrified and we didn't fully understand it. And instead of reaching out to each other in those moments, we kind of became antagonistic toward each other and self-righteous and certain of our position," Phoenix said. "And in some ways it's so obvious: Well, that's not going to be helpful." Since Aster made Eddington - it was shot in 2024 - the second administration of President Donald Trump has ushered in a new political reality that Aster acknowledges would have reshaped his film. "I would have made the movie more obscene," he says. "And I would have made it angrier. I think the film is angry. But I think we're living in a time of total obscenity, beyond anything I've seen." Eddington is designed to be argued over. Even those who find its first half well-observed may recoil at the violent absurdism of its second half. The movie, Aster says, pivots midway and, itself, becomes paranoid and gripped by differing world views. You can almost feel Aster struggling to bring any coherence to his, and our, modern-day Western. But whatever you make of Eddington, you might grant it's vitally important that we have more films like it - movies that don't tiptoe around today in period-film metaphor or avoid it like the plague. Aster, at least, doesn't sound finished with what he started. "I'm feeling very heartbroken about where we are, and totally lost, so I'm looking for ways to go into those feelings but also to challenge them. What can be done?" Aster asks. "Because this is a movie about people who are unreachable to each other and completely siloed off ... a question that kept coming to me was: What would an olive branch look like? How do we find a way to re-engage with each other?" A post-it note sat near Ari Aster while he wrote Eddington: "Remember the phones." Eddington may be set during the pandemic but the onset of COVID-19 isn't its inciting incident. Outside the fictional New Mexico town, a data centre is being built. Inside Eddington, its residents - their brains increasingly addled by the internet, social media, smartphones and whatever is ominously emanating from that data centre - are growing increasingly detached from one another, and from each other's sense of reality. "We're living in such a weird time and we forget how weird it is," Aster says. "Things have been weird ever since we were able to carry the internet on our person. Ever since we began living in the internet, things have gotten weirder and weirder. "It's important to keep reminding ourselves: This is weird." Moviegoers have grown accustomed to expecting a lack of normalcy in Aster's movies. His first three films - Hereditary, Midsommar, Beau Is Afraid - have vividly charted strange new pathways of dread and deep-rooted anxiety. Those fixations make Aster, a master of nightmare and farce, uniquely suited to capturing the current American moment. Eddington, which A24 is opening in selected Australian cinemas on August 21, may be the most prominent American movie yet to explicitly wrestle with social and political division in the United States. In a showdown between Joaquin Phoenix's bumbling right-wing sheriff and Pedro Pascal's elitist liberal mayor, arguments over mask mandates, Black Lives Matter protests and elections spiral into a demented Western fever dream. At a time when our movie screens are filled with escapism and nostalgia, Eddington dares to diagnose something frightfully contemporary. Aster, in a recent interview at an East Village coffee shop he frequents, said he couldn't imagine avoiding it. "To not be talking about it is insane," he said. "I'm desperate for work that's wrestling with this moment because I don't know where we are. I've never been here before," says Aster. "I have projects that I've been planning for a long time. They make less sense to me right now. I don't know why I would make those right now." Eddington, appropriately enough, has been divisive. Since its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May, Aster's film has had one of the most polarising receptions of the year among critics. Even in Cannes, Aster seemed to grasp its mixed response. "I don't know what you think," he told the crowd. Some critics have suggested Aster's film is too satirical of the left. "Despite a pose of satirical neutrality, he mainly seems to want to score points off mask-wearers, young progressives, anti-racists and other targets beloved of reactionaries," The New Yorker's Justin Chang wrote. For The New York Times, Manohla Dargis wrote: "Aster knows how to grab your attention, but if he thinks he's saying something about America, the joke is on him." Aster was expecting a divisive reaction. But he disputes some of the discourse around Eddington. "I heard one person say it was harder on the left than the right, and I think that's pretty disingenuous," he says. "In the film, one side is kind of annoying and frustrating and hypocritical, and the other side is killing people and destroying lives." For Aster, satirising the left doesn't mean he doesn't share their beliefs. "If there's no self-reflection," he says, "how are we ever going to get out of this?" Aster began writing Eddington in June 2020. He set it in New Mexico, where his family moved when he was 10. Aster wanted to try to capture the disconnect that didn't start with the pandemic but then reached a surreal crescendo. He styled Eddington as a Western with smartphones in place of guns - though there are definitely guns, too. "The dread I was living with suddenly intensified. And to be honest, I've been living with that level of dread ever since," Aster says. "I just wanted to see if I could capture what was in the air." Scripts that dive headlong into politics are far from regular in today's corporate Hollywood. Most studios would be unlikely to distribute a film like Eddington, though A24, the indie powerhouse, has stood behind Aster even after 2023's $35 million Beau Is Afraid struggled at the box office. A24 has shown a willingness to engage with political discord, backing last year's speculative war drama, Civil War. And Aster's screenplay resonated with Phoenix, who had starred in Beau Is Afraid, and with Pascal. In Cannes, Pascal noted that "it's very scary to participate in a movie that speaks to issues like this". For Phoenix, Eddington offered clarity and empathy for the pandemic experience. "We were all terrified and we didn't fully understand it. And instead of reaching out to each other in those moments, we kind of became antagonistic toward each other and self-righteous and certain of our position," Phoenix said. "And in some ways it's so obvious: Well, that's not going to be helpful." Since Aster made Eddington - it was shot in 2024 - the second administration of President Donald Trump has ushered in a new political reality that Aster acknowledges would have reshaped his film. "I would have made the movie more obscene," he says. "And I would have made it angrier. I think the film is angry. But I think we're living in a time of total obscenity, beyond anything I've seen." Eddington is designed to be argued over. Even those who find its first half well-observed may recoil at the violent absurdism of its second half. The movie, Aster says, pivots midway and, itself, becomes paranoid and gripped by differing world views. You can almost feel Aster struggling to bring any coherence to his, and our, modern-day Western. But whatever you make of Eddington, you might grant it's vitally important that we have more films like it - movies that don't tiptoe around today in period-film metaphor or avoid it like the plague. Aster, at least, doesn't sound finished with what he started. "I'm feeling very heartbroken about where we are, and totally lost, so I'm looking for ways to go into those feelings but also to challenge them. What can be done?" Aster asks. "Because this is a movie about people who are unreachable to each other and completely siloed off ... a question that kept coming to me was: What would an olive branch look like? How do we find a way to re-engage with each other?"
News.com.au
28-07-2025
- News.com.au
Rejuvenated Martin Harley hopes gun colt Cool Archie will define his career
A rejuvenated Martin Harley is hoping that gun colt Cool Archie can put him on the map in the same way that mighty mare Winx defined the career of fellow jockey Hugh Bowman. Irish hoop Harley returned to Brisbane on Saturday night after a much-needed holiday back home where he celebrated his epic Group 1 JJ Atkins (1600m) victory on Cool Archie at Eagle Farm last month with family and friends. Of course, Harley doesn't expect the Chris and Corey Munce -trained colt to win a world-record 33 consecutive races like the legendary Winx, but he knows that a quality horse like Cool Archie comes along once in a blue moon. Winx had six different riders during her illustrious career that netted more than $26m in prizemoney before her retirement in April 2019, but she will forever be associated with Bowman and champion Sydney trainer Chris Waller. Harley's JJ Atkins victory – which broke a 10-year drought since his last Group 1 – was just reward for his hard work, dedication and persistence after overcoming a potentially career-threatening broken neck suffered in a sickening mid-week race fall in 2023. 'The real exciting thing about having a serious injury two years ago to even being not sure if I'd ride again and then for him to do what he did and put me back on the Group 1 map, in a way he certainly has changed my life in different avenues,' Harley said. 'A lot of jockeys can win if they get the right animal but when you stumble across a horse like that, it could be real life-changing moving forward. 'Look at the Winx story regarding Hugh Bowman. And I'm not saying it'll be like that but he could be an Everest horse and (owner) Max Whitby obviously has a slot. 'There could be serious potential going forward so I'll keep my fingers crossed and we'll take it from there. To live the dream like that would be unbelievable.' Cool Archie WINS the G1 J.J. Atkins! ðŸ�† @munceracing — SKY Racing (@SkyRacingAU) June 14, 2025 Whitby has declared that Cool Archie should be a shoo-in for Australian Two Year Old of the Year honours during a gala ceremony in Brisbane on August 31. 'I would definitely agree and not just because I've been riding him,' Harley said. 'For a horse to go from a maiden to a Group 1 winner in the space of two months - over all different distances and kinds of tracks - he has conquered more than any other two-year-old in Australia this year.' The father-and-son Munce partnership has said that Cool Archie would be spelled for the spring and set for next autumn's $4m Group 1 Doncaster Mile (1600m) at Randwick. It comes after a gruelling winter campaign in which the colt embarked on an incredible five-race winning streak in all conditions. • Rutledge's 'omen' win on The Irish written in the stars While Cool Archie is resting, a recharged Harley will be coming down from cloud nine to reset for the 2025-26 racing season in Brisbane which starts on Friday. Looking at the bigger picture, the affable Irishman hopes to travel interstate this spring carnival for a few feature races after proving he can handle the pressure of riding in majors. 'Sydney and Melbourne are tough, there are a lot of good jockeys there, but I'll be putting my hand up for a few rides down south if I can get them,' he said. 'You can get brought back to earth pretty quickly in this game but we showed them we can score at the top level and can get the job done in high-pressure races. 'But I'm definitely not getting too far ahead of myself. I had five Group 1 winners that came pretty quick and then it took another 10 years to crack it for my other one (in the JJ Atkins).' In the meantime, Harley can look back at that memorable day on June 14 when his dream of finally winning a Group 1 in Australia became reality. 'I went into the jockeys' room that day and I can honestly tell you, there wasn't one jockey who begrudged me the win,' he said. 'They were that happy for me and that made me even more proud.'
Sydney Morning Herald
22-07-2025
- Sydney Morning Herald
Forget scholars – this guide to filmmaking goes straight to the sources
CINEMA Filmmakers ThinkingAdrian Martin Sticking Place Books, New York, $32.19 Melbourne-born and bred, Adrian Martin is probably best known to readers of The Age for his decade-or-so stretch as its film critic during the late 1990s/early 2000s. He might also be remembered by ABC viewers and Radio National listeners for his film reviews over the years, as well as by the hundreds of students to whom he lectured at universities around the country. And anyone who happens across Emma-Kate Croghan's endearing Love and Other Catastrophes (1996) might also recognise him playing a charismatic University of Melbourne professor named Adrian Martin opposite Frances O'Connor, Radha Mitchell and Alice Garner (whose character is writing a thesis about Doris Day as 'a feminist warrior'). He's also the recipient of several major awards for his writing (including the Australian Film Institute's Byron Kennedy Award and the Australian Film Critics Association's Ivan Hutchinson Award), and his massive CV includes audio commentaries on more than 100 DVDs, a dozen or so books and monographs, a series of video essays about films and filmmaking made with his partner, Cristina Álvarez López (to whom his new book is dedicated), and a vast and regularly updated website of his work ( Not just a bloody good film critic, insightful and articulate, even if, at times, infuriatingly idiosyncratic, Martin is also a brilliant and prolific scholar – tireless, constantly curious, forever inclining towards the role of agent provocateur, restlessly moving on to the next intellectual adventure. Now resident in northern Spain, he's become one of the most respected teachers and writers on film in the world. In Filmmakers Thinking, his central concern is with the often-complex ways in which meaning is created in films. But, instead of drawing on the work of the many scholars who have furrowed their brows over 'the language of cinema' – from Siegfried Kracauer and André Bazin to Christian Metz and Laura Mulvey – he's turned to actual practitioners for their understandings. Over the years, many of them have turned up their noses at film theorists' ponderings about the art and the craft of cinema. I recall asking one of Australia's most eminent writer-directors what he thought about Bazin's notion that the only really honest filmmaking is shooting in wide-shot and allowing the viewer to choose where to look. 'Well, he can go and get f---ed' shot back the reply. And Fred was only half-joking. However, in his book, drawing on essays by filmmakers about what (they think) they're doing and about the nature of the medium in which they're doing it, public and private interviews and conversations with them, and details in the films they've made, Martin offers an insightful survey of the 'threefold dialogue' involved in any filmmaker's creative work.
