Today the data revolution, complete with iris recognition, biometric data, AI, cyber, encryption and quantum computing, has placed a premium on technology in espionage.

Stewart “navigates this perilous terrain with total mastery, getting the voice and mannerisms just right but vamping everything up just a notch, in order to better lean into the film’s melodramatic, paranoiac and absurdist swerves”, he wrote.

The return of Michael Myers is just a few weeks away, and one of the studios behind Halloween Kills would like you to be as hyped as possible for that release—along with all its other horror projects that are currently coming down the pipeline. The fact that it’s officially the spookiest month of the year didn’t hurt I suppose. Blumhouse’s BlumFest 2021 spotlighted not just the latest entry in the slasher franchise, but a bunch of other titles, including some brand-new announcements.

First up, here’s “Return to Haddonfield,” a new featurette for Halloween Kills—featuring star Jamie Lee Curtis and other cast and crew members talking about how the new brings back actors and characters from the 1978 horror classic. In a quick clip from the film, we get to see Charles “Sheriff Brackett” Cyphers repeat his iconic “one good scare” line from the original.

Halloween fans can head to Blumhouse’s YouTube channel or Facebook page later today to see a live-streamed introduction (8 p.m. PT) and post-film QA with producer Jason Blum and director David Gordon Green (approximately 10 p.m. PT) in conjunction with the movie’s screening at the genre-focused Beyond Fest in Hollywood, CA.

As for the rest of BlumFest, you can check out the stream below; it features a chat with Renée Zellweger about her upcoming limited TV series, The Thing About Pam, which hits NBC in 2022. It’s more true crime than horror but here’s the synopsis: “NBC’s and Blumhouse Television’s The Thing About Pam is based on the 2011 murder of Betsy Faria that resulted in her husband Russ’s conviction, although he insisted he didn’t kill her. His conviction was later overturned. This brutal crime set off a chain of events that would expose a diabolical scheme deeply involving Pam Hupp.” Here are some other announcements from today’s event:

• “The first major collaboration between Tyler Perry Studios and Jason Blum’s Blumhouse Productions,” a thriller called Help that will be written and directed by Alan McElroy (Star Trek: Discovery, Wrong Turn).
• The as-yet-untitled feature directorial debut from John Logan (Alien: Covenant, Skyfall, Penny Dreadful), which will stream exclusively on Peacock.
• A focus on the “Welcome to the Blumhouse” quartet of thrillers and horror movies, Bingo Hell and Black As Night (premiering today on Amazon Prime) and The Manor and Madres (October 8 on Amazon Prime); read io9’s earlier coverage of the series here, with more to come.
• Premiere dates for writer-director Alex McAulay’s A House on the Bayou (November 19) and director Ali LeRoi’s American Refugee (December 10), the first two films in an eight-film series of “elevated, standalone horror/genre-thriller movies” created as a collaboration between Blumhouse Television and Epix. The films will be day-and-date streaming on Epix and available for digital purchase from paramount Home Entertainment.
• A chat with director Rob Savage (Host), whose latest film, Dashcam, is currently making the festival rounds.
• And another new movie announcement: “Donald Sutherland and Jaeden Martell have been cast in Mr. Harrigan’s Phone, written and directed by John Lee Hancock, based on the short story by Stephen King. Production begins this month—Blumhouse and Ryan Murphy producing—and will be available on Netflix globally in 2022.”

Also, not part of BlumFest specifically, but still something very cool to check out this month: Revelations, a new doomsday cult-focused podcast from Blumhouse Television and Vespucci and hosted by our former Gizmodo colleague Jennings Brown, who’s currently at the Gateway. As Deadline reports, “the six-part series tells the story of the Fellowship of Friends, which was founded by Robert Earl Burton, an East Bay schoolteacher who began preaching out of a van in Berkeley in the 1960s before founding the fellowship in 1970 and building it up to around 2,500 members. The group ran the successful Renaissance Vineyard and Winery between 1982 and 2015.” It premieres on October 3 on Spotify.

Take wherever you go.
Measure atmospheric pressure, temperature humidity

Halloween Kills arrives on Peacock and in theaters on October 15.

Wondering where our RSS feed went? You can pick the new up one here.

Actress Letitia Wright, who is reprising her role as Shuri in the upcoming sequel Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, was rushed to hospital after an accident on set

Scots teenager Caitlin Agnew couldn’t believe it when songs she wrote in her bedroom were chosen for the soundtrack of a new movie.

The teenager was stunned when her compositions – “I Wanna” and “Don’t Want to Go Home” – were given the thumbs up by the film’s award-winning actor Timothy Spall.

Now millions will hear her music when The Last Bus opens in cinemas across the country on Friday (August 27).

It tells the story of an old man who travels from John O’ Groats to Land’s End carrying the ashes of his late wife in a suitcase, using only local buses.

Glasgow, Ayrshire, Helensburgh and Lanarkshire.

Caitlin, 19, said: “When I heard Timothy Spall liked my songs and they wanted to use them in the film I was in shock. It was like seeing my life flash before my eyes.”

Spall became a household name in the 1980s TV drama Auf Wiedersehen Pet, when he played electrician Barry Taylor opposite actors Tim Healy, Jimmy Nail and Kevin Whately.

In 2015, he won a best actor award at Cannes for his role in the acclaimed Mike Leigh biopic, Mr Turner.

Caitlin, of Viewpark, Uddingston, Lanarkshire, has revealed that her big break came after a chance meeting between her grandfather Jim Agnew and the film’s director Gillies MacKinnon.

Jim worked as a vehicle wrangler on the movie, organising all the transport, from vintage buses to luxury coaches.

Caitlin said: “It’s amazing how things work out.

“My grandad and the director got chatting and when he told me he’d sent on a couple of my songs I honestly thought he was winding me up.”

But MacKinnon was so impressed with Caitlin’s work that he decided others had to hear it too.

He said: “Often when you’re making a film somebody will come to you and say here’s a book I’ve written or whatever and give it to you.

“But in this case, Jim simply said I’ve got a granddaughter and she records songs and he gave me some background which was interesting.

“She was only 16 at the time and he asked, could I listen to them? I said okay, fine, send them on anyway.”

The next thing Caitlin knew, “Don’t Want to Go Home”, about a road trip from London, and “I Wanna”, about reaching out for comfort during a difficult time, were being considered for the final cut.

Gillies explained: “I listened and I just loved these songs. The emotion really embraced the soul of the film. I sent them down to our editor and she loved the songs and she put them into the film.

“And then I thought, well, maybe it’s just her and me who love these songs? But I began to learn that almost everybody who listened did.

“I brought Tim into the cutting room about half way through the cut – he’s an executive on the film –and he just loved the songs.

“Of course that influences me a lot because, as the person who walks in the shoes of the character, he’s really emotionally tuned in.

“So I began to think this is just one of these strange and wonderful things that happens, because Caitlin apparently sits in her bedroom and records with just her guitar.

“And yet somehow there’s something within the songs that just catches a mood for the film.”

Caitlin started writing aged 15 while still at school. She is about to enrol on a Music Business course at college but is self taught, sings, plays ukulele, guitar and keyboards.

She said: “I just want to sing and write songs. My idols are people like Ed Sheeran and Taylor Swift as they are quite similar to my style.

“I use music as a way to express how I feel and just being able to get it out there and help other people that feel the same way, gives me a sense of hope.

“These songs just appear from nowhere, they are quite natural. They just kind of happen. Being able to have an audience gives me so much motivation.”

Her new album Through the Night is just about to be released on Spotify and Apple Music. For more information on Caitlin see @MusicAgnew on Twitter.

The Last Bus opens on Friday August 27 in cinemas nationwide.

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The maiden in peril is an American staple — and has been for almost two centuries. In our now-mythic past, the prospect of white pioneer women being hauled off to an unknown netherworld by the continent’s Native people stirred our fear. (The victims, for their part, were expected to resist and die rather than submit.) The formula, then as now, was to portray women as helpless victims forever in need of rescue. And the stories had a habit of going viral long before that term existed.

In 1897, it was a wealthy young Boston woman, Betsy Stevenson, whose unknown whereabouts transfixed the press. Like many stories, hers went national thanks to the news wire services of the day. (She was found a decade later performing in a New York theatrical production.) In 1909, the New York newspapers went wild when a 13-year-old named Adele Boas vanished during a shopping excursion with her mother. (Turns out, she ran away.) In 1910, 25-year-old New York heiress Dorothy Arnold disappeared and set off a nationwide search. The New York Times covered the Arnold story day after day and returned to it periodically over the years when unidentified bodies were found. False sightings — Boston! Philadelphia! Muskogee! — streamed in from wherever a newspaper picked up the mystery. When Arnold’s mother died in 1928, the unsolved disappearance was still newsworthy. “It was the really great search of the age,” United Press reported, “one that did much to develop modern newspaper ‘police’ coverage.”

The scandal-mongering “yellow journalists” of the 1890s designed the storytelling templates modern newspapers and cable networks still rely on, the endangered-girl trope being a primary one that drove whole campaigns. Publications in New York and elsewhere stumped against prostitution by portraying young prostitutes as victimized “white slaves.” William Randolph Hearst went beyond covering maiden-in-peril news to actually making it when his very yellow New York Journal broke an 18-year-old Cuban woman named Evangelina Cisneros out of jail during the lead-up to the Spanish-American War. Missing women were good business outside journalism, too: 1914’s serialized The Perils of Pauline silent films (produced by Hearst), placed a young, attractive heiress in dangerous jams and then extracted her.

Those circulation-hungry tabloid barons were scratching at something we can trace back to Greek myth. The drama of the maiden in peril awakens in us archetypal patterns seeded for centuries by culture, history and literature. It’s a story we can’t stop listening to, or reading, or clicking on. Never mind why Rapunzel got locked away, it’s simply enough for the purposes of the plot that she’s being held against her will. The same goes for the evil fairy who renders Sleeping Beauty comatose, for Darth Vader, who imprisons Princess Leia, and for the evildoers who kidnap Buttercup. Even when the Gone Girl abducts herself in Gone Girl, her abduction and implied peril is enough to move the plot. The abductions of Liam Neeson’s (movie) daughters have managed to prop up his entire late career.

So when journalists picked up their laptops and video cameras to report the disappearance of Gabby Petito story, they surely knew from experience that they would get scolded for telling the story. But they also knew from experience that the vast majority of their audience would lap it up — and if they didn’t serve extra helpings, other outlets would.

Shouldn’t it be a story, you ask? Abduction (and, in this case, possible relationship violence) are real issues, of course — but it’s worth noting that neither the press nor its audience is all that interested in those issues per se. Missing men don’t rate breathless, Petito-style coverage unless they’re celebrities, nor do missing women who have exceeded their child-bearing years. (As a sociobiologist might argue, society invests more deeply in the fates of fertile women because they are essential to the survival of the species.) When deciding which stories to pump up, the press may not consciously pick women of the young and white variety, but the roster of stories in the decades before Petito fits a clear pattern: Laci Peterson, Elizabeth Smart, Chandra Levy, Polly Klaas, Natalee Holloway, Lori Hacking, Robyn Gardner, Mollie Tibbetts, Michelle Parker and others. These cases obviously deserved some coverage, but at any given time thousands of young adults are missing. You’d have to do some fancy gymnastics to rationalize why so much journalistic firepower is concentrated on a few white women.

Besides tapping our psyches, the missing woman story endures because it’s the kind of story that reliably pulls in readers and viewers even when there is no news to report. Since Petito’s body was found, the story has gone on as media outlets have manicured their competing timelines of her disappearance and murder and continued their coverage of the search for her at-large fiancé. We’re not in Natalee Holloway territory yet, but we’re getting there.

Will all that scolding force some self-examination? Don’t count on it. The chances are slim that the press will control its appetite for the genre, or even acknowledge the cultural origins of its cravings. The next time the networks flood the zone with a missing maiden story, console yourself with this: It’s only a fairy tale cable news loves to tell itself.

******

The Washington Post’s Paul Farhi took his own swing at the damsel trope in 2018. Send fairy tales to [email protected]. My email alerts love to tell my Twitter feed nighttime stories. My RSS feed would have you know that the original version of Sleeping Beauty is darker than the darkest Cormac McCarthy.

You might not have to stay at home to watch James Bond movies if and when Amazon closes its purchase of MGM. As Deadline reports, producer Barbara Broccoli revealed to Sky News that Amazon had committed to releasing Bond movies in theaters “in the future.” Broccoli wasn’t more specific than that, but it’s safe to say you won’t need a Prime Video subscription to watch 007’s post-Daniel Craig exploits.

MGM has gone out of its way to make sure the latest Bond flick, No Time to Die, premieres in theaters. The movie was slated to debut in April 2020, but the COVID-19 pandemic prompted delays to November 2020, April 2021 and finally September 30th, 2021 for the UK. It reaches the US on October 8th. In all cases, MGM has steadfastly refused to make it available on streaming services like rival studios’ Blockbuster releases — Amazon might face stiff resistance if it tries digital premieres.

The news follows a familiar pattern: Hollywood studios are determined to stick to theater-first launches for as long as possible. While there was clearly some success for WarnerMedia and other studios that released movies simultaneously or exclusively on streaming services at the height of the pandemic, they clearly want to return to the pre-COVID status quo.

By Frank Pallotta, CNN Business

Updated 1:16 PM ET, Sun September 26, 2021