“The White Cormorant” by Frithjof Spalder (1971)
“A prayer poured from my lips.”
The ocean’s a verified scary place, but coasts are also strangely compelling. If you ask me, that space where the ocean meets the land must be the most haunted of all. This story explores the boundary.
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“Gestation” by Marguerite Bennett, Jonathan Brandon Sawyer, Doug Garbark, Nic. J. Shaw (2014)
“I’ll deal with the corpse, my lady-love.”
It’s very satisfying when men in power are absolutely wrecked by women, so I appreciate the still too-rare opportunity to see it happen. (And you should know that this short comic story was expanded into its own series.)
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Monster (aka Humanoids from the Deep) dir. Barbara Peeters & Jimmy T. Murakami (1980)
“Somebody killed my dog, Slattery. You got any ideas?”
I haven’t watched anything from Roger Corman’s wheelhouse until this. It was a decent and straightforward creature feature with emphasis on the ecological consequences of bioengineering and ignorance about colonialism, but then there are also some clearly exploitationy scenes in which women are raped by monsters. (The poster tips the viewer off to that aspect.) It looks like there was behind-the-scenes drama in which Corman mandated the nudity and rape scenes to give the movie more oomph without telling the director or actors about it. Beyond that, this had thematic crossover with the ocean stuff from today’s short story and the birthing stuff from the comic, so it tied things together in an interesting way.