Magic In London: Whistling – Part Eight

Posted on February 10, 2023 by ashleymanningwriter

Catch up on Magic in London here: https://ashleymanning.com/magic-in-london/

The Creature lunged towards George, all of it’s arms swinging wildly towards the possessed child. George moved backwards, dancing along with every attack aimed at him. Chuck noticed that all the confidence was wiped of his face, and it was replaced with pure concentration. He hadn’t been expecting for Toby’s Creature to appear. Toby stopped screaming and moved forward, almost as if he was in control of the spider shadow.

“It’s going to take more than this to destroy me,” George shouted as he was starting to get backed up to the far wall.

Chuck moved forward, his heart racing, as he wondered if he could free Fiona and the others to help with the fight. His hesitation cost him that option as George jumped up and flipped over the Creature. At the height of his jump, he swiped his arm down towards it, and smoky shadow tendrils streamed from each of his fingers and constricted Toby’s Creature underneath him. The Creature roared in pain as the tendrils got tighter and tighter, its arms flailing about as much as possible. Toby echoed the pain and fell to his knees. Chuck wanted to get closer to make sure he was okay, but he could see George turning to face them.

“You should have taken the offer,” he said, taking slow steps towards Chuck. “Why didn’t you just leave when you had the chance. I don’t want to hurt you, but you’ve left me no choice.”

George held out his hand towards Chuck and more of the smoke tendrils appeared, moving through the air towards him, like flying snakes. Chuck was completely frozen in place, his whole body turning to jelly as he watched his death come towards him. George continued walking towards Chuck, a smile growing on his face.

“Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve killed a human? It’s been at least a hundred and fifty years. At least that long since I last tasted human blood. Since the one you all call Arthur captured me and left me here for you all to practice your spells on. Do you know what that feels like? I can’t die, and all I’ve felt for over a century is pain. You’d probably be right in thinking that it’s gone to my head a little. I was going to take my time with these people, make their deaths last a long time. I was hoping that Arthur would come back and he would be the first to die, but you will have to do.”

The whole time that he was speaking the shadow tendrils were starting to circle around Chuck, closing in on him. George walked past Toby, who was on the floor curled up in agony, and still screaming. George didn’t pay any attention to the boy, he was completely focused on Chuck as the smoke started to constrict him.

The shadow held Chuck tightly. So tightly it hurt. It then started to lift him off the ground and leave him suspended in the air like the others at the side of the room. He could feel the shadows starting to pry open his mouth and spill inside, it was moving inside his eyes, his ears, up his nose, and suffocating him from the inside.

Chuck couldn’t see as Toby started to stand up on wobbly legs and moved towards his captured Creature. George didn’t notice either, as Toby ripped the shadow tendrils away from his friend and set him free. The Creature didn’t make a sound as it stood up and faced George. It leapt through the air and landed just before George, swiping at him with one of its free arms and smacking him against the wall. George bounced off the wall and fell to the floor. He struggled to get up again, but the Creature was faster and smacked him back down the floor. Toby ran across the room, fighting the pain he was feeling running through his body, and ripped at the shadows that were holding Chuck in the air. Chuck fell to the floor with a thud, and started coughing and squirming about. His eyes were filled with water, and it felt to him like somebody had used a razor blade on the inside of his mouth and throat. The Creature stood on its hindlegs and picked up George’s body with two of its front arms and held him up towards the roof, before squeezing hard. George’s face contorted in pain, and then gave up. A black haze started to ooze our of George’s eyes, as if he was crying shadows, and then his body went limp. The shadows moved high to the roof of the room and formed into the shape of a man, that hugged the ceiling as it looked down on the rest of the people. He couldn’t believe that he’d lost George’s body in the fight. The candle light flickered underneath and he hoped that it would go out completely so he could leave the room.

As quickly as he’d freed Chuck, Toby ran over to the side of the room and freed Fiona, ripping the shadows away from her. He threw them behind him and the evaporated into the light. Fiona dropped to the floor and was alert almost instantly. She jumped up, pulled out her knife and held it up towards the shadow person on the ceiling that was trying to get to the door.

“Stop,” she commanded, and it obeyed. “The candles in this room will forever bind you.”

The brightness in the candles grew brighter, and the shadow man groaned and writhed in pain on the ceiling. Fiona noticed that there was a single candle that had been extinguished, and realised that was how he must have been able to take control of George’s body. She flicked her knife towards it and the candle was relit. The shadow man fell from the ceiling, holding its head and silently screaming.

“Quickly, help me free the others it won’t be able to hurt you now. Let’s just get out of here as soon as possible.”

Toby helped Fiona tear away the shadows that were still holding the other prisoners. His Creature had already retreated into the crevices of Toby’s mind.

“Are you able to walk?” Fiona said to Chuck, who was trying to stand up.

Chuck nodded, knowing that he wouldn’t be able to speak for a while and started to move towards the door. His feet felt like stone as he stumbled his way to the exit. His vision pulsated around him. Eventually he reached the door and then he carried on walking through the dimly lit basement hallway until he made it to the stairs leading upwards. His whole body was ready to give up, but he continued. As soon as he made his way back into the entrance foyer of Whistling Academy, it was just too much though, and he collapsed on the floor and everything went dark in his mind.  

To Be Continued…

Part Nine is available here: https://ashleymanning.com/2023/02/17/magic-in-london-recovery-part-nine/! Don’t forget to subscribe to never miss a post:

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Tatsuki Fujimoto Before Chainsaw Man: 17-21 – Manga Review

Posted on February 9, 2023 by ashleymanningwriter

Tatsuki Fujimoto Before Chainsaw Man unsurprisingly collects the stories of Tatsuki Fujimoto before he created Chainsaw Man. This volume collects four of his stories, that show he was a fantastic writer with a wild imagination straight from the start of his career.

The first story, A Couple Clucking Chickens Were Still Kickin’ in the Schoolyard, is set after an alien invasion of Earth, where the human race has been almost eradicated from existence. The aliens take a liking to human life and start to live on Earth as humans did before them, living in homes and going to school. Except, in the schoolyard, there are two humans still alive, dressed up like chickens and the aliens can’t tell the difference. It’s a strange and quirky short story, around forty pages long. Fujimoto makes the most of those pages, building the backstory of the alien invasion, and propelling the story onwards. It does feel a little rushed towards the end, but it’s still a good little story. There’s an interesting twist that does add to it, and he tries to end the story on a poignant moment while still being funny. It’s interesting to see that even at his beginnings Fujimoto was able to create something both heartfelt and funny at the same time.

Following up that story is Sasaki Stopped a Bullet, a more compact story that mostly happens in the span of a few minutes. It’s about a student, Sasaki, who’s obsessed with his teacher. While in a class, someone breaks in and threatens to kill the teacher for rejecting him when they were in school together, blaming her for ruining his life. Sasaki uses that moment to protect his teacher. This story is a bit more juvenile than the first story, although you can definitely see how Fujimoto would go from this to Chainsaw Man. It starts as a seemingly normal story, but it quickly spirals out into something completely different. People aren’t what they seem, unbelievable things happen, and there are much larger things happening. It’s the creativity within the story that really stands out. Without spoiling anything, it’s just really out there and completely unique while also being completely satisfying as a short story.

Love is Blind is the third story in the collection, which is a funny wacky story, that you can’t help but fall in love with. Ibuki is the class president and is in love with Yuri and has decided that today is the day that he’s going to confess his feelings to her. Unfortunately everything that could go wrong does go wrong. There’s constant interruptions from a teacher, a mugger, and even an alien who wants to invade. It’s a silly story that’s very quick to read, with some nice art and plenty of funny moments. Maybe not that memorable, but still entertaining.

To round of the collection is Shikaku, the longest story in the collection. It’s about a psychotic assassin, who spent her childhood pulling the legs of spiders. She’s hired by a vampire who wants to die, except she can’t kill him. The stand out part of this story is the character Shikaku. She’s a strange assassin, who loves killing people, but doesn’t want to hurt them. She’s completely self-obsessed and egotistical. It’s a fun little story.

All four stories included in the collection are fun, and for fans of Fujimoto’s later works, it’s an interesting to see the stepping stones to things like Chainsaw Man and Goodbye, Eri. They’re also just fun stories in their own right. They’re all filled with wacky imagination that takes everything as far as possible. There’s a second volume out very soon, containing other stories from before Chainsaw Man, and I’m sure that one will be just as good.

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The Terror – Film Review

Posted on February 8, 2023 by ashleymanningwriter

Director: Roger Corman

Writers: Leo Gordon and Jack Hill

Starring: Boris Karloff, Jack Nicholson, and Sandra Knight

Rating: ★★

While filming his 1963 film The Raven, director Roger Corman had the idea of using the sets to films some more scenes as the foundation for a separate movie, using the crew and horror legend Boris Karloff from The Raven, and then building the rest of the film around those initial scenes. There was a rough outline where essentially Corman was trying to capture the essence of an Edgar Allen Poe story. After those two days, Corman decided not to shoot the rest of the film himself and instead passed the film to his assistant Francis Ford Coppola who nearly finished the story, before it was passed on to others. The actual film only credits Roger Corman as director, but after Coppola there were others who directed segments of it, including Jack Nicholson, Dennis Jakob, Monte Hellman, and Jack Hill. The film would also be the basis for Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets, which also reused some of the footage that Corman shot in those two days with Karloff.

What’s surprising, is that even though there were a lot of people working on the film, a lot of it was shot with no clear plot, it does feel quite cohesive. The story does get a little wild as it goes on, with bizarre moments, a few things that don’t quite make sense and some unintentionally funny moments. When you’re watching it, there’s not much that really gives it away that it had such a fragmented production. Still that, doesn’t mean that it’s a good film. It does feel very long, even at eighty minutes, it seems to go on much longer. It’s not scary, or particularly suspenseful, and hasn’t age very well.

Boris Karloff plays a baron in an old castle, who hasn’t stepped outside its walls for twenty years since the death of his wife. Jack Nicholson plays a soldier in Napoleon’s Army who is isolated from the rest of his platoon and ends up finding the old castle after following the ghost-like Helene, played by Sandra Knight who was married to Nicholson at the time. The baron clearly has secrets and wants to be left alone, but his politeness stops him from shutting his castle off completely. Throughout the story there are some twists and turns, but it plays out like you’d expect a gothic story to.

While it’s not brilliant in any stretch of the imagination, there is a cheesy charm to it all that stops it from being completely boring and stale. The longer it goes on, the sillier it gets, with a final plot twist that makes no sense straight away but by that point you just have to go with it. It comes close to capturing the feeling of a classic Gothic story and it would be completely believable as something that had been written a century or more before. It’s also very true that the story behind the film is more interesting than the film itself. It’s not going to appeal to everyone, but if you’re a fan of old cheesy horror films, or unique moments in film history, then it’s worth watching.  

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Junji Ito Maniac – Episode Six: Mold/Library Vision

Posted on February 7, 2023 by ashleymanningwriter
Crunchyroll - Junji Ito Maniac: Japanese Tales of the Macabre Anime Counts Its Curses in New Trailer

Episode of Junji Ito Maniac contains the stories Mold and Library Vision. While yet again, there’s no reason their paired together, this is one of the better episodes of the series so far. It’s definitely the best of the double-story episodes.

The first story, Mold, follows Akasaka who comes back home from abroad and finds that his perfect house is a complete mess and covered in mould (I’m from the UK so I have to spell it this way even if the title has the American spelling). As he cleans up the house, while also asking his brother what happened, the house seems to get dirtier and dirtier around him. There’s some really horrible imagery in this one such as where he puts his fingers into the mould. It’s horrible to think about. Later in the episode as the mould spreads further it’s absolutely horrific. It’s completely unsettling and gets under your skin exactly as you’d expect from a story about mould. It’s a great short story.

Library Vision is about Goro who has an extremely large library in his house. He awakes from a dream where his collection is going missing, to find that one of his books, his mum’s favourite, has actually gone missing. He then notices others are missing and slowly goes insane while trying to find his lost treasures. This story has a dreamlike quality about it, reflecting Goro’s mental state, and it’s quite intense. Goro struggles with the missing books and sets forth to commit everything in his collection to memory. It’s a sad story that has some creepy moments, especially the figures that appear just to recite the missing books to him, where you’re not quite sure if they’re real or Goro’s suffering from hallucinations.

This episode is creepy and unsettling and has some really freaky moments that could fuel more than a few nightmares. It’s let down by some shoddy animation in places, but the writing shines through and still manages to be chilling. Neither story feels unfinished or rushed, which is refreshing this far into the series. This marks the half-way point of the anthology series, hopefully this is a good sign of what’s to come.

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Audio Books, Documentaries, and More

Posted on February 6, 2023 by ashleymanningwriter

While looking for something to watch online, I came across the documentary of Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, which is inspired by the book of the same name by Peter Biskind. Funnily enough I do have the audio book version on my phone, but just haven’t listened to it. I used to listen to audio-books while working in the office when doing repetitive stuff that I could practically do on auto-pilot and listen to audio-books. I liked to listen to non-fiction books, because if it doesn’t matter as much if I miss something. Then Covid started and working from home became a thing and I’ve not really listened to audio books since, and Easy Riders, Raging Bulls sits on my phone barely ten minutes listened to and waiting for me to one day press play once again. I’ve also pretty much stopped listening to podcasts for the same reason, I used to listen to them while walking to work and now have fallen behind on pretty much every podcast I like.

Anyway, so I was looking for something to watch and found Easy Riders, Raging Bulls and that immediately caught my attention. Somewhere in the back of my mind I knew it was a documentary, but I’d never really thought about watching it. I was picking between that and a horror film that I noticed on Netflix, Come Play. After a very long week at work, that’s only just over half-over, I opted for the documentary, something that I could just watch and enjoy and hopefully find some new films to watch (and I found more than a few). I want to mention that I’ve seen Easy Rider, but I haven’t seen Raging Bull. I don’t know why I haven’t seen Raging Bull, I own it and I’m a big Scorsese fan. There’s even been a few times when I’ve planned to watch it and haven’t been able to for whatever reason. Other things happen, work runs late, or maybe I spend four hours playing mahjong in a Yakuza game instead.

The documentary was good, and I’ve definitely added quite a few films to my list that I will hopefully be watching soon. It starts mainly focused on what was happening in Hollywood during the late 1960s and the end of the studio era, kind of a good follow up after watching Babylon. It then spends a fair amount of time on Bonnie and Clyde from 1967, which I have seen and really like. It then moves through the 1970s, taking a look at some of the best and most influential films of the decade, focusing on the young and upcoming directors of the time like Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and Peter Bogdanovich.

It last about two hours, so as you’d expect there’s not a lot of time dedicated to most of the films and some of it does seem a little glossed over. For example, they mention Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, and show a brief clip from the film. Instead of going into any detail about the film, it then jumps to Chinatown and talks about that for a moment and then jumps to the next one. It does spend longer on some films, like Bonnie and Clyde, Easy Rider, and Jaws. Star Wars also gets a fair bit of time, with some really cool behind the scenes shots of how they created the special effects.

My main takeaway from the film is that I need to see Targets from 1968. I’ve heard about the film before, when Cinemassacre covered it for his Monster Madness series a few years back, but haven’t watched it. It looks really good, featuring Boris Karloff in one of his final roles. I’ll definitely be checking that out soon.

I would recommend the documentary if you’re looking to learn a little about late 60s and 70s films and revisit some all time greats that you’ve probably seen countless times.

Thanks for reading, and until next time,

Ashley

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