In chronological release order today.

Nosferatu (1922): I enjoyed this enormously! I think it might be the oldest film I've ever watched, so this was a fascinating look back at a modern art form in its infancy but also a genuinely rewarding piece of art on its own merits. Of all the Dracula adaptations I've seen, this one felt like it distilled the story down to its purest essence. It was incredibly clean, evocative storytelling; I didn't think it was possible for such an old version of such a familiar story to scare me, but some of those scenes of the advancing count with his spidery fingers and dead, staring eyes were genuinely chilling. Also, it is downright criminal that greatcoats for men are no longer in style. All men should wear greatcoats, all the time. And high-rise trousers, and cavalry boots, and those gorgeous floofy shirts and cravats. Loneliness epidemic, my arse. 'Dating is so hard for men these days', my arse. Put on a fucking greatcoat and watch the ladies all clamour to pass their dance cards under your nose.

The Ritual (2017): In honour of their friend who was killed in a burglary gone wrong, four ageing British uni mates go on a hike in the Swedish wilderness for which they are all utterly unprepared. But the comedy of errors turns deadly when they stray along a woodland "shortcut" and find themselves being stalked by some malevolent, godlike force that dwells among the trees. This had a really great atmosphere, stunning visuals, and a cast of forgettable idiots who I could 100% believe would make every single one of the stupid decisions that led to their demise. There was a moderately compelling emotional through-line about the guilt complex of the Main Forgettable Idiot (I have genuinely already forgotten his name) who was present at the burglary but froze up in fear instead of defending his friend. But mostly I was in it for the gorgeous, spooky tour of a Scandinavian forest, livened up every now and then by a disembowelment (tastefully depicted, as these things go!).

Oddity (2024): I'm struggling to describe the plot of this movie without either giving away major spoilers or just making it sound very silly. I don't want to make it sound silly at all. It has its moments of levity, but it also does a really good job of blending paranormal horror with a far more grounded and mundane human evil; I really enjoyed it. It's an Irish horror film about a woman with psychic abilities investigating the murder of her sister. It's a modern setting but with a rich, old-timey atmosphere, full of quaint antique shops and centuries-old converted houses (the main filming location was the old stables at Bantry House, a real 1730s heritage location in County Cork, Ireland) and the claustrophobic halls of an old forensic hospital. There are some great hauntings and supernatural scares but there are also just so many vibes. And the ending left me with a genuine smile on my face, which is not what I was expecting from a movie this dark.

I've been in a bit of a reading slump lately, hence the sudden surge of more movies in a few weeks than I think I watched the whole of last year. But, feeling unable to commit to any new novel, I've been picking away at some interesting nonfiction:

Millennial Love by Olivia Petter is a collection of musings on love, sex and dating in the digital age. It is of absolutely no relevance to me personally, as a millennial who met her husband young, before either online dating or the concept of mobile phone apps in general had quite penetrated the mainstream, but reading it made me wonder how anyone manages to find a partner anymore now that Tinder et all have taken over the market. It sounds absolutely fucking nightmarish out there. The etiquette around read receipts and double texting and Instagram stories is positively Byzantine; I thought I knew how to use social media, but apparently, I really do not. And I think I might be happier that way. Still, this was a very heartfelt, emotionally open book that gave me some insight into what my younger/singler friends and family have been dealing with.

I did roll my eyes extremely hard at this bit:

I've heard the 'I'm shit with my phone' line so many times. Not just from Fuck Boys (see previous chapter) but from friends, too. It's only recently that I've realised it has absolutely nothing to do with being good or bad with your phone. In fact, this phrase is about arrogance. Sheer unadulterated arrogance that leads a person to believe their time is more valuable than someone else's.

Really, Olivia Petter? People not texting you back on your preferred schedule is "sheer unadulterated arrogance"? Come on. Phones are there to help us communicate when we want to, not to force us into a state of mandatory round-the-clock availability. No one thinks we should all be barging into each other's houses uninvited whenever we feel like asking a question or sharing a joke; how does owning a smartphone entitle you to a degree of control over your friends' social schedules that you wouldn't dream of demanding face to face? I plan to continue restricting my use of the device to when it bloody well suits me, and I give all my loved ones my full-throated blessing to do the same; if that puts the damper on friendships with people who see digital unavailability as "arrogance", so much the better for both of us.

I think, though, this is probably a good example of why the whole online dating world described in the book sounds so unbearable to me. I seem to have missed the cutoff for a generational shift that has embraced technology as core to our social lives rather than incidental. I can't imagine getting worked up about somebody texting me twice in a row or taking their time to respond to a non-urgent message, any more than I can imagine getting offended by a salesperson telling me "no problem" instead of "you're welcome"; my older friends would probably be equally baffled by the automatic pang of anxiety and hurt I feel when they end a short text with a period. Etiquette is always so culturally specific; impossible to grasp intuitively from the outside, and almost as hard to recognise as subjective from within.

Murder Under the Microscope by James Fraser is the memoir of a forensic scientist and a selection of the major UK criminal cases he worked on in his career. I've read books in this genre before that seemed to be largely about self-aggrandisement: look at all these important cases I've worked on, and how clever and brave I was in solving them. This is not one of those. Fraser is intensely critical of the whole criminal justice system, and especially of the police; he is less interested in recounting personal triumphs (in most of his case studies, the forensic work he did ended up being irrelevant, inconclusive or intractably problematic) than in debunking myths about the power of forensic evidence. He depicts a field rife with human error at every level, and so poorly understood by the related fields that employ it (ie the police and the courts) that even the highest-stakes investigations are vulnerable to being derailed by misunderstandings and power struggles. In places the writing dragged a bit (the Damilola Taylor case in particular was such a mess of different organisations interfering with each other's work that I kept losing track of who was who) and in other places it seemed at risk of devolving into a hit piece against the Met (Fraser really did not enjoy working with the Met) but overall I found it an interesting, enlightening examination of how what we see as "objective science" is still beholden both to the limits of human skill and accuracy, and to the foibles of the institutions producing it.

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I've also recently read a couple of books about the historical Jesus and the Bible's contradictory positions on sex and marriage. They're both fact-based, not faith-based, but I'm popping them under a cut anyway for those who've already heard more than they care to about Christianity today.

( First Century AD spoilers under the cut )