#OVERALL the show is hewing really closely to the book so far

[blujayonthewing]

okay I'm back and the thing with having now watched two different english translations of this back-to-back is that actually both versions make kind of... weird? editorialization choices? but completely different ones from each other?? like I think overall the sub better captures ~the vibe~ and hews a little closer to the manga translations but there's also a couple of things that feel over-localized in a way that's mostly weird by contrast to how the english dub doesn't do that?

like, in the prologue scene, Falin calls out 'Nii-san!' which the dub translates as "Brother!" but the sub translates as his name, "Laios!", and then later there's a bit about 'ducks don't come along carrying a leek on their back... but maybe we'll see a monster duck with a man-eating leek :D', a reference to a japanese proverb that, again, is kept in the dub but is changed to something like 'there's no such thing as a free lunch... but maybe we'll see a monster with a man-eating lunch! :D' in the sub which, like... not only is it kinda weird that the sub is the one over-correcting for cultural differences, that's also just clumsy and makes less sense??

I understand why the sub for dungeon meshi is just the script for the dub but that doesn't mean I have to like it

[arabian-bloodstream]

The Two Queens?

It was a quote from Kit Harrington that first led my mind wandering down this path. Game of Thrones had ended. Massive backlash had started from so many corners. Me? I was mostly satisfied (although, I would have liked to have seen the secret wedding that I’m convinced took place… this is an idea for another post). Still, that quote from Harrington did send my brain a'whirring. It was in the Entertainment Weekly post-series finale cover story. He said about Daenerys' turn to madness:

"One of my worries with this is we have Cersei and Dany, two leading women, who fall," he says. "The justification is: Just because they're women, why should they be the goodies? They're the most interesting characters in the show. And that's what Thrones has always done. You can't just say the strong women are going to end up the good people."

One particular aspect of that quote really stuck out to me. In George R.R. Martin's books, Cersei is *not* a leading character. Coincidentally, that is why we saw so little of Cersei in the final season (yes, that's another post coming too) because the final season of GOT–more than any season since season 04–followed the main plot points of GRRM's ending of his A Song of Ice and Fire series (as far as we know) overall as much as it could with what changes D&D had made.

So, tick, tick, tick went my brain and I started thinking of exactly who the lead characters *were* in season 08. Who were the characters that drove the plot, who were the ones that were focused upon? Who were the ones that we saw the most of and held the most relevance throughout the season?  Daenerys, Jon, Tyrion, Arya, Bran: The five main characters of GRRM’s book. Yes, other characters had big moments, but they were in support of what *those* five characters did, the moves they made.

If Cersei isn't one of the leading women, then who is Dany's counterpoint because there does have to be a counterpoint at this stage of the game. So… who is Dany's leading counterpoint? Sansa? No. Why not? Because she was a supporting character in the final season. [...] So, if it wasn't Cersei or Sansa that was Daenerys' counterpoint that leaves Arya...

And this is where I had my (maybe?) Aha! moment. I went back and looked at seasons 01 and 02, mapping out both Daenerys and Arya's arcs, alongside their arcs in season 08.  What I found was very interesting, especially when you take into account seven things:

I. Season 01 and season 02 are the seasons that most closely hewed to the source material.

II. There were four very important aspects of Arya's story that weren't included in the show.

III. The significance of Arya's direwolf, Nymeri

IV. Book 05, A Dance of Dragons, likely set up the endgame for GRRM's designated five main characters.

V. The final season (by all accounts) included many of the main plot points that were necessary to get to certain key elements of GRRM's endgame.

VI. The “No Featherbed For Me” song written for chapter 'Arya IV' in A Sword of Storms (Book 04).

I'm going to break down each of these.

-------------------------------------------------------------

And I did... in a very, very long post which I’m going to link to here. The post is mainly about Arya, but I also touch upon Dany quite a bit and Gendrya a bit (I touch on Sansa too). It is not anti-Arya, or anti-Dany, or anti-Sansa. I love all three characters (in fact, I’m working on my thoughts on her different endgame right now). I loved all three characters on Game of Thrones. I just feel that there is a better story that possibly is in store for Arya’s (and Sansa’s) endgame in GRRM’s novels.

Possibly. This is my take.

The Mirroring and Splintering of Two Queens

[josephkellywriter]

HOW TO MAKE A SIMPLE BOOK COVER IN ADOBE SPARK

Read this post on Wordpress...

Making a cover for your upcoming project can help it feel more real and give you motivation to keep going. (After all, you spent time making a great cover, better not stop!) If you don’t need something elaborate, Adobe Spark can be a simple way to bust out a basic image. You can use this as your project thumbnail on NaNoWriMo or the cover of a draft print. Later I will do a tutorial about general cover design for more complex/unique images, but for now, here’s how to make a cover in about a half an hour or less.

So first, you will need an Adobe account to use at Adobe Spark. Once you’ve signed up, click ‘create a project’ and choose ‘Flyer.’ (It gives you a book cover-esque proportion, since they don’t have a special book cover option.)

On the right side of the screen, click ‘templates’ and browse around. The ones with the shield icon are premium, but there are still decent free ones. Search around until you find one you like and apply it. Be open-minded; applying different colors, fonts, and images to a template can make it look very different. I won’t hew too far from this base image for my example, but you could really personalize it with some effort. 

So first things first, I click on the title and select ‘edit.’ A window will pop up for you to change the text. On the right side, you will see font options. 

I’ve filled in my very creative title and author name and played with the font. You could move the elements wherever you like, but I will stick to the template for now. 

That big X is actually an icon. There is a big selection of images to choose from, or you could upload your own. I changed it to a rose, because why not? 

Now I’ve selected the top left picture. On the right I can move and scale the image, apply filters, etc. For now, I will replace it with a different picture. 

I found a picture of a crow, zoomed it in and centered it. On the bottom right corner, you can see the shape vignettes that change the overall shape of the picture. Besides using the search to find a stock picture, you could upload your own. 

Now I’ve changed the top right picture and selected filters to darken and make it black and white. 

If you scroll below the filters, you have the option to blur the image, which can be useful if you want text in front of it to be more legible.

A fun thing to try is to select ‘Design’ and then ‘Variations’, and try out different layouts. Be sure to save first! It will automatically recolor and rearrange the images/text you selected. As you can see, it rearranged the text so the title is no longer on top, so you may need to adjust that kind of thing. Play with the variations but don’t select a new template, or it will replace everything you’ve done. (It automatically saves the old project and starts a new one if you do select a new template.)

A warning — If you close the window or navigate away, it will save your project in its current state. I’ve lost some important work that way! If you want to edit a project, be sure to duplicate it first on your projects page so you don’t accidentally lose your original work.

Don’t forget!

So here are some variants I made by just selecting different options. You can change the colors and images just like as before. Even if the variation shows a different orientation/size than what you have, it will automatically rearrange to fit your current dimensions. 

Once you find a layout you like, you can  select the colors option on the right side and choose a color palette that will automatically recolor everything for you. When you have a palette selected, you can randomize where the colors are used, or rearrange them manually. 

You can also choose custom colors or select their suggested ones. 

When you’re satisfied, be sure to title your project in the upper left corner, and make sure it’s saved. Then you can download the image in a larger size on the right side of the window. For free accounts, it may tag the image with the spark logo, but it’s very easy to crop out or paint over. All your projects will save to the ‘projects’ section on your main Spark page. 

I’ve made a lot of quickie covers this way, that I usually replace down the road, but it can feel good to have a cool looking thumbnail for your story. Experiment with all the options and filters. At first you might end up with some wild junk, but you can make something decent once you get used to the tools.

I hope you found this tutorial useful, and I’d love to see what covers you make for yourselves! Feel free to share them with me, and I’ll write more extensively about covers in subsequent posts.

[penniesforthestorm]

On Jane, Part 2

Actually I Mostly Talk About Rochester in This One

Greetings, pals! Today's chunk lends itself a bit more naturally to analysis, because it's primarily concerned with the development of the relationship between Jane and Rochester, concurrent with the deepening of the mystery surrounding Thornfield Hall (those 'bumps in the night' I mentioned in yesterday's post). Again, if you haven't read the book, you will probably be confused by a lot of what follows here—if you have read the book and you're still confused, I apologize. With that in mind, let's get to it.

First of all, let's talk about this Rochester fellow. By the time he actually physically enters the picture, we know very little about him. He's not a titled peer, but he's evidently wealthy enough to spend most of his time traveling around Europe. He's apparently well-liked by his tenants and employees, though Mrs. Fairfax (so far, the chief source of information for both Jane and the audience) makes a reference to his eccentric personality. Beyond that, he's an unknown quantity.

When Jane first sees him charging down the icy lane on his black horse, she thinks of a mystical creature, the Gytrash, known to haunt solitary lanes at nightfall. During their first real conversations, Rochester teasingly accuses Jane of bewitching his horse, asking if he had broken through a fairy-circle. These particular scenes are some of my favorites, because they give such a clear idea of both characters. For his part, Rochester addresses Jane as a person, with thoughts and opinions worth hearing. And Jane rises to the occasion, frankly and innocently answering his questions. In the second conversation, when Rochester asks if Jane finds him handsome, she answers ‘no’, not out of any intent to insult, but out of simple honesty. Rochester pretends to be piqued, but given the way the rest of the conversation proceeds, it’s clear that he finds her candor admirable, even as he pokes fun at her naïveté.

For a while, not much happens. Winter thaws into spring, and Rochester and Jane’s conversations deepen. He tells her the rather Romantic story of Adele’s parentage—himself, the young wastrel, seduced by the feckless showgirl Celine Varens. But the anecdote is revealing. Despite his professed lack of enthusiasm for the company of children and his rather dismissive attitude toward Adele herself, he nevertheless rescued her from a probable grim fate. In Paris, Adele was the illegitimate daughter of a woman who was about one rung up the ladder from a prostitute. In England, she is being raised in a comfortable home, and educated as a member of the upper classes, no doubt with an eye toward a future advantageous marriage, as long as nobody asks too many questions. One could argue that Rochester’s actions in this case constitute the most basic level of human decency, but within the context of the story, wherein children are either spoiled rotten or cast off and starved, Rochester comes off looking like quite the benefactor.

(I could derail this into a Whole Thing about the trend of novels in the 19th Century still functioning largely as allegory and not precisely meant to represent the Real World—Dickens, Thackeray, Hardy to an extent, and of course Wuthering Heights, but I feel like that deserves further and better research than what I’m going for here. Still, I think it’s another thing that often gets missed in discussions of this novel, and thus, the more melodramatic elements of the work seem incongruous with its overall ‘realistic’ tone.)

Now, a bit more on those bumps in the night. Ever since Jane’s earliest days at Thornfield, she’s been aware of an eerie laugh issuing from some rooms on the third story of the house. There is a servant who stays there, rarely venturing down to the rest of the house, and her name is given as Grace Poole. Everybody seems rather vague on the subject of what Grace actually does, and Jane, being observant, begins to suspect that there is something going on with Grace, despite her thoroughly ordinary appearance and taciturn manner.

These suspicions come quite literally roaring to life one night, when Jane hears that laugh in the hall outside her bedroom, and ventures outside to discover that Rochester’s room has been set on fire. Jane runs in and douses him with water, and once he is aware of the situation, he dashes off, telling her to stay there and wait until he returns. The bit that follows his return is an interesting one—Rochester urges Jane’s silence, and confirms Grace Poole as the owner of the laugh, terming her a ‘singular’ (here meaning odd) person. Jane begins to leave, but Rochester detains her for a second, sincerely thanking her for saving his life, and speaking to her in his fondest tone yet. This instant marks another significant step in Jane’s ascension—she is not just Rochester’s ‘paid subordinate’, she is his confidante and quite literally his savior. The incident has bound them together in a way neither of them understands just yet.

And this closeness is seemingly dashed the next morning, when Jane is informed that Rochester has gone off to visit some friends, and will likely not return for several weeks. When he does come back, he is accompanied by a full complement of guests, including the imposing, imperious Miss Blanche Ingram, who Rochester is rumored to be courting as a future bride. At first, Jane is crushed—Blanche has money, beauty, accomplishments, and power. Again, this could be a jumping-off point for a discussion about how marriage among the upper classes at that period of time still hewed fairly close to its feudal roots, more as a way of securing finances than as an expression of emotional attachment. But you can read Jane Austen for that. In this case, Blanche wanting to marry Rochester for his money isn’t quite as much of a stain on her character as it might seem to a modern reader. Her vanity and coldness, however, serve as kindling for Jane’s feisty side—at one point, she dismisses Blanche as ‘a mark beneath jealousy’.

Another strange incident occurs after the guests have been staying at Thornfield for quite some time. Mr. Rochester leaves on some errand, and in his absence, a stranger shows up at the house, claiming to be a friend of Rochester’s. He is described as around thirty-five, dark-haired and handsome, but somehow deficient. Jane gives particular attention to his ‘wandering eye’ and his peculiar accent. We soon learn that his name is Richard Mason, and he has come all the way from Jamaica to pay a visit to his ‘old friend’.

In the interest of keeping things moving, I’m not going to discuss the business with Rochester in disguise as the fortune-teller. Once he unmasks himself before Jane, and she informs him of Mason’s arrival, we see a reaction in him we haven’t seen before: fear. He begs Jane for comfort, asking her what she would do if the assembled company suddenly turned against him. Assured of her fidelity, he rejoins his friends and apparently greets Mason calmly enough.

Once again, however, Jane is awakened by noises in the dark—screams, this time, from the regions where Grace Poole keeps her dark vigils. In due course, Rochester summons her. The newly-arrived Mr. Mason is lying injured in an upstairs room, and Rochester enlists Jane to keep watch while he fetches the doctor. He orders Mason not to speak to Jane, which, considering that the guy’s barely conscious, doesn’t seem like a difficult request to fulfill.

Rochester and the doctor return, and it’s revealed that Mason was bitten, as well as being stabbed with a knife. Once Mason is fixed up enough to leave, Rochester sends him on his way, but not before a brief, fraught conversation, in which Mason begs him to take care of Her—that mysterious inhabitant of the upstairs room. Rochester tersely replies that he has done his best, and will continue to do it.

Rochester then summons Jane into a garden, and attempts to unburden himself to her. He alludes to his past misdeeds, without giving much in the way of satisfactory detail, and testifies to his sincere wish for his own redemption. He tells her, finally, that he thinks he has found it… in Miss Ingram. He calls her his ‘lovely one’, and suddenly becomes cheerful and jocular. Neither Jane, nor the reader, is satisfied by this.

This brings us nearly to the end of the book’s actual first volume, and (more to the point) near the end of this installment of my…whatever this is. I also think I’m going to need to do two more of these, rather than just one, like I’d originally planned. I’m assuming that if you’ve gotten this far, you’re just as invested as I am.

There is one more major occurrence: the illness and death of Jane’s Aunt Reed. Bessie, Jane’s old nurse, comes to inform her that Mrs. Reed has suffered a stroke, but has been asking for Jane. Jane pays one last visit to her former childhood home, to find it greatly changed: her cousin John has committed suicide, Eliza has become a religious obsessive, and Georgiana is a hapless social climber (though it’s worth noting that she treats the adult Jane with a certain friendliness). And what of Aunt Reed? Before she slips off her mortal coil, she passes Jane a vital piece of information—Jane has a rich uncle from her father’s side, a wine-merchant in Madeira, who has asked for information on Jane’s whereabouts, with a view toward making her his heir. Jane, for her part, offers her aunt her forgiveness, and in this way, seals off that portion of her past.

In tomorrow’s recap, we’ll get to the really juicy stuff. For anyone who’s reading along, thanks a bunch, and feel free to come tell me your thoughts. For anyone who missed yesterday’s, Part 1 is here: http://penniesforthestorm.tumblr.com/post/176721452934

[thedisappointedcritic-blog]

Hidden Figures

I love when movies can let me discover something I didn’t know before.  Hollywood exists to show people things they’ve never seen or even imagined before.  Show me what the world might have looked like in the past, what it could look like in the future.  I especially love it when Hollywood succeeds in putting me in a place and time and allows me to see through somebody else’s eyes.  Of course this also means that when Hollywood fails at this task it annoys me even more.

“Hidden Figures” is a movie, based on a book, which details the lives of three African American women who worked for NASA during the 1960′s.  These women were all brilliant at what they did, and were forced to endure and overcome obstacles like segregation and outright racism in order to help America win the Space Race.  And for the most part nobody knew they ever existed.  

I saw the trailer for Hidden Figures before it was released and looked forward to watching the film, but due to the joys of living in a smaller Canadian city the movie was not playing anywhere close to me.  Thankfully the Blu-Ray has been released and so now I was finally able to watch the film. 

Starring Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monáe star as  Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson respectively, and they carry the movie through from the early days of Project Mercury.  It’s a period that is often overlooked in America’s history of space flight.  You have movies like “The Right Stuff” of course, but that was made in 1983.  Since then Hollywood has tended to focus on the bigger name Apollo missions with “Apollo 13″ or in “From the Earth to the Moon”.  Or they have instead decided that the real thing isn’t good enough and have gone where NASA should have gone by now, with movies such as “The Martian” or “2001: A Space Odyssey”.  Between 1961 and 1963 NASA flew 6 manned Mercury missions, two sub-orbital and four missions which involved orbiting the Earth a number of times, and Hidden Figures deals specifically with the first three launches, all amazingly done before computers. Think about that.  Rocket Science done before computers.  

The three leads do a fantastic job bringing the depths of emotions needed.  From the joy of motherhood to the frustration of having to use a bathroom half a mile away because of segregation to being told you can’t do something because of your skin colour and gender and then fighting for the right to do it anyway.  

The supporting actors are all well cast and do an excellent job.  Kevin Costner plays the boss who doesn’t care how it gets done, so long as the job gets done.  Kirsten Dunst plays the supervisor of the Caucasian “Computer”s that is racist and doesn’t know it and does it well.  She’s a long way from Spider-man here.

Only Jim Parsons of “The Big Bang Theory” seems to be hesitant in his role, which forces him to be mildly sexist and to be silently hostile and racist. It’s an awkward job playing the guy who says no to progress and equality. It must have looked good as a way to prove that he’s not just Sheldon while at the same time not making him stray too far from the role which has made him famous by giving him technical jargon to explain.  It’s actually his character who explains to the audience what the problem is regarding bringing John Glenn home if he is successfully launched into orbit.  But someone has to be the bad guy for Taraji Henson’s character and he’s about as close as it gets. And really he doesn’t get remotely close enough to being a full on bad guy.  He’s just someone doing his job and being “that guy” because the rules say he has to be.   

If there is one thing dragging down Hidden Figures it is the lack of an outright blatant racist.  Examples of racism are mentioned in passing on the TV news and in the interactions each of the main stars have with various parts of society, be it segregated drinking fountains to segregated library’s and blacks only entrances to public buildings. It’s the system they are all fighting more than any individual person, and I’m not going to say that it isn’t a valid point to make.  The movie is just far too subtle about it despite showing multiple examples.  I applaud the movie for showing the insidious way the system raised people to accept that racism was normal and to treat anyone who didn’t accept that as the one who was a problem. It could have been a much more dramatic movie though if there had been some real push back to the advancements of the three stars beyond Kirsten Dunst saying “they should be happy they have jobs” at one point.  The movie was clearly trying to hew close to the history of the events, and perhaps the producers had to keep NASA happy in order to make the movie, so perhaps NASA at that time didn’t really possess anyone with those views.  

The movie mixes in real footage of the launches and events with the drama unfolding, and here the director Theodore Melfi has done an excellent job blending the two together as needed.  The music is a combination of a score by Hans Zimmer, Benjamin Wallfisch and Pharrell Williams and songs written and performed by Pharrell Willaims.  The music is well thought out and does not feel at all out of place.  

Overall the movie does a nice job of highlighting the contributions these ladies and many like them made behind the scenes during the space race.  From the music to the set design to the costumes and finally the acting.  Even if the movie isn’t the most dramatic in the history of modern cinema, it’s a good watch, and I’m happy somebody in Hollywood decided it needed to be made.

[alshamey]

The Other Stephen King Adaptations We Should Be Talking About http://yourgradgear.com/2017/09/29/the-other-stephen-king-adaptations-we-should-be-talking-about/

New Post has been published on http://yourgradgear.com/2017/09/29/the-other-stephen-king-adaptations-we-should-be-talking-about/

The Other Stephen King Adaptations We Should Be Talking About

Bruce Greenwood and Carla Gugino in Gerald's Game.

Netflix

You could call 2017 the year of Stephen King if Stephen King had ever really gone out of style. But it’s true: We’ve seen an abundance of King adaptations over the last several months, from forgettable trainwrecks like The Dark Tower in July to the record-breaking success of It just this month. Then there are the TV series — Spike’s The Mist and Audience’s Mr. Mercedes, as well as Hulu’s Castle Rock, which is currently filming.

With so much going on in the world of King, it’s easy to miss something — such as the two motion picture adaptations hitting Netflix this fall. Arriving on Netflix this Friday is Gerald’s Game, based on King’s 1992 novel, a psychosexual thriller about BDSM roleplay gone very wrong. Then there’s 1922, which debuts on Netflix on Oct. 20; it’s a nasty little horror story based on the novella from the 2010 collection Full Dark, No Stars. Both films had their pre-Netflix premieres at Fantastic Fest in Austin, prompting visceral reactions from King fans, along with well-earned sighs of relief.

In terms of source material, Gerald’s Game is certainly more well-known, but it’s still considered one of King’s lesser works. It’s also an incredibly tricky novel to adapt: The whole thing takes place in one room and in the memories and hallucinations of its protagonist, Jessie. Played in the film by Carla Gugino, Jessie finds herself handcuffed to a bed in a remote cabin when her husband, the titular Gerald (Bruce Greenwood), has a heart attack after trying to engage her in an aborted rape fantasy. As she struggles with dehydration and a very persistent dog, she begins seeing things, including visions of her own escape and flashbacks to her traumatic past. It’s essentially a kinky take on Cujo (King’s infamous rabid dog even gets name-checked). That Gerald’s Game hews close to the book and still manages to work so well is a credit to director Mike Flanagan, who cowrote the screenplay with Jeff Howard.

There is some streamlining, which is helpful. In the book, Jessie imagines several personas as she’s losing touch with reality; in the film, it’s all pretty much a debate between projections of herself (a healthier, less handcuffed-to-the-bed version) and Gerald (looking a little worse for wear now that the dog has been tearing at his corpse). Gugino and Greenwood are exceptional throughout — the former is especially good at playing both iterations of Jessie. But it’s not just the script and the performances that make Gerald’s Game so compelling; it’s that this is the kind of confined suburban horror that King does so well. Yes, there’s a boogeyman that Jessie may or may not be imagining — Twin Peaks’ Carel Struycken plays a bone-collecting giant lurking in the shadows — but Gerald’s Game is more about Jessie’s personal demons, the sexual abuse she suffered as a child, and her fears that Gerald, no matter how good he might have looked on paper, was just another monster.

King deserves a lot of credit for how deftly this story plays out, just as Flanagan should be praised for seamlessly translating it for the screen. There was a fine line to walk here, as Gerald’s Game moves from a darkly comedic nightmare to Jessie’s painful recollections of what her father (Henry Thomas) did to her. It’s here that Gerald’s Game becomes more Dolores Claiborne than Cujo — there’s also a very pointed reference to the former, as in the novel. And then the film arcs back again, as the deeply unpleasant flashbacks fade back into Jessie’s current predicament: It’s a careful balancing act. In the end, the real-life horror gives way to a scene of such heightened violence that the humor floods back in, along with a lot of screaming — from Jessie and the audience.

Thomas Jane in 1922.

Netflix

While Gerald’s Game is restrained by the nature of its story, it’s far from subtle; 1922, on the other hand, frequently holds back. It’s not exactly underplayed, but it’s slower and more deliberate, and while that pacing is sometimes questionable, which ultimately makes the film less successful than Netflix’s other King adaptation, the overall effect is a more grounded horror story that relies largely on dread. “This will not end well” is the subtext of every scene, made literal by the rats that won’t stop trailing Wilfred James (Thomas Jane).

Wilfred is not Jessie in Gerald’s Game — you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone rooting for him. He’s a selfish, petty farmer who decides his wife, Arlette (Molly Parker), is too controlling and convinces his young teenage son, Henry (Dylan Schmid), to help him murder her. Jane has done King before, in both good adaptations (the film version of The Mist) and bad (the largely reviled Dreamcatcher), but Wilfred is an especially tough nut to crack. There aren’t really any sympathetic characters in this story. Even Henry, though a clear victim of his father’s coercion, is still doomed from the start as a willing participant in matricide.

And so what we’re left with is a story that’s, again, classic King: Nothing buried ever stays buried. The question isn’t if Wilfred will get his comeuppance but how. And as things go from bad to worse in mundane but no less gutting ways, the story takes a supernatural slant. Arlette refuses to stay dead, stalking Wilfred through his empty farmhouse, and the rats who desecrated her corpse are always trailing behind. Whether it’s all in Wilfred’s head or not is sort of beside the point — he’s haunted all the same.

Writer-director Zak Hilditch creates some truly stunning visuals, as well as some deeply distressing ones. (Anyone with even the slightest aversion to rodents should steer clear.) He also knows when to hold back: While Gerald’s Game climaxes in an outrageously brutal act of violence, 1922 ends up leaving a lot to the imagination. It’s a risky gambit for a film that’s been building up to something big from the beginning, but it ultimately helps the movie leave a more chilling impression. The details matter less than the sheer fact of Wilfred’s doom, which was fated from the moment of his unforgivable transgression.

1922 is not the crowd-pleaser that Gerald’s Game will likely be: It’s meaner, less triumphant, and sparse in a way that is likely to alienate some viewers. But it’s another solid King adaptation and a good sign of things to come. Hilditch shows a lot of promise here, and he’s attracted some serious talent — Schmid is especially good as the tortured, malleable Henry. If we’re going to keep making and remaking stories from the King canon, then let’s hope they’re all as thoughtful and carefully crafted as these Netflix films, which — even when they falter — show respect for the source material as well as a desire to elevate it with distinctly cinematic flair.

Because these are stories worth telling, gripping tales of past sins refusing to stay buried and the monsters that are always lurking in the shadows. Gerald’s Game and 1922 both play with the idea of the blurry line between fantasy and reality, and how fear can overtake you whether the threat is merely imagined or plainly in-your-face. That is the essence of why King works, and it was part of what made It — about a creature that embodies the purest distillation of fear — such a memorable experience. It doesn’t matter if the giants or the rats or the evil clowns are really there: The horror always is.

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