MONSTER: THE LIZZIE BORDEN STORY. (2026) A NETFLIX HORROR SERIES REVIEWED BY SANDRA HARRIS.

MONSTER: THE LIZZIE BORDEN STORY. (2026)

SHOWRUNNER: IAN BRENNAN.

RYAN MURPHY: CO-CREATOR, DEVELOPER AND EXECUTIVE PRODUCER.

ORIGINAL NETWORK: NETFLIX.

STARRING ELLA BEATTY, VICKY KRIEPS, CHARLIE HUNNAM AND REBECCA HALL.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.

Lizzie Borden took an axe

Gave her mother forty whacks

When she saw what she had done

She gave her father forty-one

(A children’s skipping rhyme)

This eight-part series is the fourth instalment in Ryan Murphy’s and Ian Brennan’s Monster anthology series, each one featuring a different serial killer.

The first one, the one about Jeffrey Dahmer the gay cannibal, was absolutely fantastic and very realistic. The second one, concerning the Menendez brothers who murdered their parents, was not as interesting to me personally but still watchable.

The one about Ed Gein, who inspired the movie Psycho and was also known as the Butcher of Plainfield, was good as far as it went but it went off on a couple of tangents.

It included segments about concentration camp guard Ilse Koch, the so-called ‘Bitch of Buchenwald,’ and Christine Jorgensen, the first man to undergo ‘sex reassignment’ surgery. The tangents were interesting but it did make me wonder if the makers of the show were a little short on material…?

Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story could have been two episodes shorter, six instead of eight, if the producers had left out the tangents here, of which more later.

The main story concerns Lizzie Borden, the woman who was famously- or infamously- acquitted of murdering her father and stepmother in Falls River, Massachusetts, in 1893. Lizzie was thirty-two years old at the time.

The way Monster tells it, Lizzie wasn’t a monster at all but a shy, sensitive young woman desperately lacking in confidence. She adored the doves she kept in a massive dovecote and the cherry trees in the Borden’s beautiful garden.

Her only friend and ally- and secret lover- is the Borden’s strange and eccentric housemaid, Bridget Sullivan, known as Maggie. Maggie is also having sex with the master of the house, Mr. Borden.

Bridget/Maggie enchants Lizzie by reading to her from a book about Elizabeth Bathory, the ‘Blood Countess’ and Hungarian aristocrat who was a serial killer of the young, attractive women in her homeland. (This is the first tangential storyline.)

Lizzie’s father, Andrew Borden, played here by Charlie Hunnam who was Ed Gein in the last instalment of Monster, is an extremely emotionally detached father to Lizzie. He mourns the loss of his first wife, detests his current one, Lizzie’s ‘wicked stepmother,’ and opts out of family life as much as he can.

His coffin-making business has made him an extremely wealthy man. He has sex with the family servants in his workshop and he seems sexually attracted to his collection of axes, which he uses to chop off the legs of taller ‘clients’ so they’ll fit in their coffins. Oh, and he’s an alcoholic, too. Nice guy…

Lizzie’s stepmother Abby is portrayed as the wickedest of wicked stepmothers. She seizes every opportunity to run her stepdaughter down and call her names such as stupid, useless or ugly.

She shames and humiliates her for her ‘heavy menses,’ which are no-one’s business but Lizzie’s, and, in a fit of rage, she kills Lizzie’s beloved doves. These scenes are deeply distressing.

You’re probably feeling right now reading this what the viewers feel: kill the bitch already! And her bastard of a husband, too! That’s exactly what Lizzie, heavily egged on by Bridget, decides to do. The scenes of murder are almost excessively shocking and gory and not, as they say, for the faint of heart.

How they get away with it is a miracle. Clearly, no-one had heard of forensic evidence back then. There was so much blood in nearly every room in the house, and we’re supposed to believe that Lizzie and Bridget were able to clean away every last little speck of it.

The timeline is non-linear and frequently confusing. One minute, Lizzie is packed and at her front door, about to be conveyed to the police station and from there to the prison where she’ll await trial. In the next scene, she’s back in her own home, holding court and baking cookies for the cops involved in her case. It’s bizarre.

Equally bizarre is the- mercifully short- storyline that sees Bridget the maid cut her hair to resemble Meryl Streep’s Auschwitz do in Sophie’s Choice and get hitched to an elderly frontiers-type bloke who lives in his long johns and could be imagined hocking into the spitoon at the saloon. Jesus Christ. What in tarnation does this have to do with Lizzie Borden?

The second tangential storyline (we touched on Elizabeth Bathory earlier) is the inclusion in the show of man-killer Aileen Wuornos. She was executed in 2002 by the state of Florida, having spent ten years on Death Row there, for the murder of six men she picked up while hitch-hiking. She claimed the murders were self-defence because the men had all raped her or were going to.

In the show, Aileen is obsessed with Lizzie Borden and the murders she committed, and she even goes to stay in Lizzie’s old house, which has become a boarding house you can rent out. In real life, there’s no evidence to support a connection between the two women.

I don’t know whether the producers are trying to pad out their eight episodes with these tangents, or trying to float the idea that Aileen Wuornos and Countess Bathory might be featured in future episodes of the Monster anthology series. (We’ve heard there could be as many as ten serial killers given the Monster treatment.)

I wholehearted agree that both lady serial killers would make great shows, but especially Aileen Wuornos, who had by all accounts a desperately tragic, wasted life.

I also think that Sarah Paulson, who does a stunning job of playing Aileen here, is the obvious choice to play the crude, foul-mouthed but deeply vulnerable murderess in a new Monster series. Aileen deserves her own show, and Paulson is the woman to do it.

Overall, I didn’t love Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story, but I didn’t hate it either. It’s worth a watch. I’m looking forward to future series as well, and hope they feature Aileen as well as maybe Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy and David Son of Sam Berkowitz. Or even Jack the Ripper. There’s no shortage of possibilities…

SACCHARINE. (2026) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.

SACCHARINE. (2026)

DIRECTED, WRITTEN AND CO-PRODUCED BY NATALIE ERIKA JAMES.

STARRING MIDORI FRANCIS, DANIELLE MACDONALD AND MADELEINE MADDEN.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.

This is the kind of film you know is made by a woman even before you find out for sure. It’s actually the work of the woman who also made Apartment 7A (2024), the decent enough prequel to horror smash hit Rosemary’s Baby (1968).

Saccharine is an Australian supernatural body horror film currently streaming on Shudder. It has mostly female characters and is very much centred around a female topic, that of weight loss in this era of so-called ‘miracle cures.’

Hana is a medical student ‘struggling’ with her weight. I put ‘struggling’ in inverted commas because she looks to be a perfectly normal healthy body weight to me, but it’s obviously the female condition to be endlessly ‘struggling’ against creeping weight gain.

Long story short, Hana is given a ‘miracle’ weight loss pill by a ‘friend.’ Some friend! When she finds the unprescribed mystery pill to be effective, she uses her skills as a medical student to study the pill’s composition.

When she discovers that the pill is mostly composed of human ashes(!!!), she decides to make her own mystery pills(!!!) by- and this is the really mind-bogglingly stupid action on Hana’s part, even stupider than taking a mystery weight loss pill from a friend that could have literally anything in it- burning parts of the corpse she’s studying in class…

The corpse is that of a woman who was very heavy in life. Now she is bald, naked and laid out on a table for the next generation of doctors and researchers to study.

The students working on the cadaver disrespectfully nickname her ‘Big Bertha.’ The film-makers have kindly made her look like Buster Bloodvessel from English ska band Bad Manners…

I must be quite squeamish, because the cutting-up-the-body-and-seeing-what’s-inside scenes made me feel sick. So did the later scenes of binge-eating. Seems like not everything to do with the human body comes all neatly tied up in a perfect bow…

Hana sneaks the odd rib here and there from Bertha and burns it, before swallowing the ashes in pill form. It’s the most shocking abuse of her body but, hey, if she wants to be a tiny bit thinner than before, who are we to argue?

The downside of the weight loss is the haunting of Hana by… you guessed it, Big Bertha. It seems like Bertha appears when Hana’s blood sugar goes below a certain level, and it also appears to be the case that Bertha gets bigger while Hana becomes thinner. Is she taking on Hana’s discarded weight?

Bertha is definitely an evil, harm-doing spectre, as opposed to Casper the Friendly Ghost. It’s really quite depressing from a feminist point of view. Hideously ugly old hags, or even just very old hags, have long formed the basis of a huge swathe of horror movies and stories.

Now we can add hugely fat, bald-headed naked women to that list. Childbirth and pregnancy are already there, with films like the aforementioned Rosemary’s Baby making us fear and dread what’s going to come out of the birth canal after nine months.

Don’t forget menstruation. I sat down to watch the addition to the Ryan Murphy Monster series stable on Netflix last night, The Lizzie Borden Story. I was surprised and a bit disappointed to find that a large part of the first episode was taken up with a chaise longue fatally stained by the lead character Lizzie’s ‘ridiculously heavy menses.’

The poor girl is relentlessly period-shamed by her awful stepmother. Is it really necessary to go on and on about it? I get it that the director is probably trying to show us how Lizzie ended up brutally murdering this woman, but is there anything of ours (of women’s) that isn’t up for grabs in this way…?

Anyway, back to Saccharine. In addition to grievously violating poor Bertha’s right to dignity in death (she was good enough to donate her body to science, after all), Hana is infatuated with a skinny, super-fit personal trainer lady at her gym.

She joins up to this woman, Alanya’s, weight loss programme, but is she destroying her health to be thinner for herself, or to impress the beautiful Alanya…?

Either way, she’s shamefully abusing her body and and her position as a medical student, not to mention disrespecting Bertha and showing us how crazy the desire to be thin can sometimes be, and what kinds of mad lengths some people will go to achieve it. Look at the celebrities who’ve gone a bit mad on the old Ozempic…

I like the backstory of Hana’s skinny mother and shut-in, grossly overweight father, and I would have loved to see it developed more than it was. Our families and backgrounds shape who we are, and this could have been a really interesting area to explore a bit more.

I also love Danielle Macdonald as Hana’s friend and fellow student Josie. She actually acted in a really good Netflix drama called Unbelievable (2019) about a rapist who breaks into women’s homes to carry out his nefarious crimes.

It’s also about how one female victim in particular isn’t believed, and the kind of damage that can lead to in someone’s life. It’s worth checking out if you can.

So is Saccharine, to be fair, and I did appreciate the way the corpses who donated their bodies are eventually honoured in a ceremony in the film, Bertha included, but for me it’ll just be a one-time watch. Some things you just don’t need to see more than once.

THE OUTWATERS. (2022) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.

THE OUTWATERS. (2022)

WRITTEN, DIRECTED AND PRODUCED BY ROBBIE BANFITCH.

STARRING ROBBIE BANFITCH, ANGELA BASOLIS, SCOTT SCHAMELL AND MICHELLE MAY.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.

I don’t usually like saying bad things about people’s films when I review them, because, as a writer myself, I can appreciate the huge amount of work that goes into something prior to its being put before the public; a film, a book, a song, whatever it is.

And this film is quite obviously a labour of love for one Robbie Banfitch, who did everything for it but write the theme tune, sing the theme tune (a reference to a running gag on comedy sketch show Little Britain!), which makes it even harder to savage it, so I’ll try to be gentle.

I thought the film had a great premise, even though I’m getting fed up with the genre of found footage, which can so easily nowadays end up as ‘thirty Blair Witch knock-offs,’ as warned against by Principal Seymour Skinner from The Simpsons, when he sets the students of Springfield Elementary a photography assignment.

The Outwaters, however, does not, I feel, live up to its initial promise, and disintegrates into a series of cool images that really need a plot to hang them on, but that plotting element could just be what’s missing here.

The basic plot sees Robbie, a film-maker from Los Angeles, head out into the Mojave Desert with his brother Scott and their friends Angela and Michelle. Why? Well, they’re going to shoot a music video starring Michelle, who sings.

The first fifty minutes or so has the four friends doing a bunch of pretty boring stuff before they even get to the desert, like visiting the boys’ mom who clearly hasn’t seen at least one of them for a long time, judging by her tearful reaction. Bad son, eh…?

Only when we’re fifty minutes in does anything resembling horror start kicking off. As the film lasts one hour and fifty, I feel like it may have been a mistake to spend so long on the set-up, for no other reason, it seems, than to be able to include some scenes from it in the hodge-podge of images that come later.

Once they actually get to the desert, a lot of weird, unexplained bloody stuff starts happening to, well, Robbie primarily. It’s completely unexplained to the viewer, who, despite the lengthy set-up, has no context whatsoever for what’s going on.

For example, take the Mojave Desert, which in the past was home to the Mojave tribe of Native American Indian hunter-gatherers. There’s tons of history there. No mention of it in the film, even though the place, a popular destination for the shooting of music videos, must be literally haunted AF.

There are no mentions of any legends or bits of folklore that might give the setting some texture. No-one warns them off going to the desert because of X, Y or Z that might have happened there and make it dangerous for a bunch of civilians to spend time there unprotected.

At least the people in The Blair Witch Project were researching an actual witch in some haunted woods, and we’d seen interviews with ‘townspeople’ who had stories about the witch and the woods to give some back-story to what eventually happens there.

There’s one cool image (I did mention the film’s not short of cool images) of a naked man holding an axe silhouetted against the night sky, but who is he? Is he the ghost of a vengeful Indian? Nope, the desert’s history doesn’t even get a mention.

So who- or what- is he? His appearance signals the start of the weird stuff happening but it’s all very confusing from there. A series of images seen by the light of a torch, and the passing of seemingly several days and nights without any food or water being consumed and the camera being held and operated by Mr. Nobody, apparently.

I love the five donkeys who appear randomly in the film, and the way Robbie puts the microphone in the hole in the rock (nothing comes of it, sadly) and the screaming snakes. I genuinely didn’t know snakes could scream. No, wait, Google says they don’t/can’t. Oh well…

Once I realised the film wasn’t going to explain literally anything, I kind of just wanted it to end, especially as it’s nearly two hours long. I think someone was trying to ‘show, not tell’ and be all, like, ‘less is more’ but the film takes it too far and suffers as a result.

I feel so bad for poor Robbie Banfitch that I can’t say anything nicer about his oeuvre, but, hey, mine is only one opinion. There might be loads of people out there right now clapping and shaking their heads in amazement at how brilliant his movie is. They’re the ones he should be listening to, not me…

This film is streaming now on Shudder.

THERE’S A PIGEON AT MY DOOR: A TINY POEM BY SANDRA HARRIS.

there’s a pigeon at my door

he’s, like, lemme in lemme in lemme in lemme in lemme in

lemme in lemme in lemme in lemme in lemme in

lemme in lemme in lemme in lemme in lemme in

lemme in lemme in lemme in lemme in lemme in

lemme in lemme in lemme in lemme in lemme in

lemme in lemme in lemme in lemme in lemme in

lemme in lemme in lemme in lemme in lemme in

lemme in lemme in lemme in lemme in lemme in

lemme in lemme in lemme in lemme in lemme in

lemme in lemme in lemme in lemme in lemme in

me: come on in, little buddy!

pigeon: no

SWALLOW. (2019) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.

SWALLOW. (2019)

WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY CARLO MIRABELLA-DAVIS.

STARRING HALEY BENNETT, AUSTIN STOWELL, ELIZABETH MARVEL, DAVID RASCHE, DENIS O’HARE AND LAITH NAKLI.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.

I watched this excellent psychological-slash-body-horror film on horror streaming service Shudder, something we usually sign up to in the months leading up to Halloween. I’ve seen some great films on it, but also some absolute turkeys, make no mistake about it.

Swallow is definitely a woman’s film, though it was directed by a man, and I loved it despite the fact that it’s not without its plotholes.

Haley Bennett does a phenomenal job as Hunter Conrad, a pregnant housewife trapped in a beautiful glass box of a show-house and an unfulfilling marriage.

Her husband Richie is a spoiled brat nepo baby who’s preparing to take over as CEO of his obnoxious father’s Manhattan corporation.

Richie doesn’t love Hunter or even pay much attention to her. One wonders why he married her at all, unless he just wanted a sweet, pretty, compliant and mostly silent wifey to take care of the house and provide an heir to the throne.

His awful parents barely tolerate Hunter, who comes from a non-rich working class background. It’s obvious they think she’s punching way above her weight in this marriage and that she got super-lucky marrying into this wealthy family.

Bored, lonely, depressed, mostly house-bound and dealing with some unresolved trauma in her past, she develops the disorder known as pica: the craving for and/or consumption of non-food objects not normally considered edible. Here’s a list of some of the things it can include:

Sharp objects

Dirt/soil/sand

Ice

Soap

Paper

Hair/wool/other fibres

Paint chips

Glass

Wood

Stones

Metal

Faeces

Vomit

Urine

In Hunter’s case, she starts by consuming ice and marbles and then moves on to swallowing thumbtacks(!), batteries, needles and pins. It’s absolutely stomach-churning and horrible to watch.

The theory behind this bizarre behaviour is that it gives the person swallowing these objects some modicum of control over their own life or body.

Hunter’s life is completely controlled by her awful new ‘family,’ and, now that she’s pregnant, she has the baby taking over the inside of her body as well. Which part of Hunter’s life or body still belongs to Hunter…?

Speaking of the baby, when the doctors remove a frightening amount of objects from Hunter’s intestine, I would have liked to know if the foetus was in any danger from the things her mother was ingesting. After all, the baby eats what the mother eats, right?

We’re told that if the batteries(!) Hunter swallows had leaked their acid in her stomach, she, and presumably, the baby as well, could have been in big trouble. Agreed!

But what about things like the needles and safety pins and the pushpins? Could they not end up perforating your oesophagus on the way down into your stomach? A little more information regarding the possible ill effects of swallowing these objects would have been welcome.

Hunter’s husband and in-laws react extremely angrily and unsympathetically to her plight. They force her into therapy, which isn’t the worst idea. It is revealed that she has a reason in her past to still be traumatised to the present day.

Can Hunter overcome this trauma and be well again? Is the method she chooses to deal with it the right one, or the safest one? And what about the ongoing trauma of being trapped in a deeply unhealthy, controlling and loveless marriage? What can she do about that…?

I like the character of the male nurse, Luay, from the war-torn Syria. At first, he clearly implies that being blown up or shot at would leave Hunter no time to be floating around the place bored and putting non-food objects in her mouth.

Eventually, however, he becomes sympathetic to her plight and may even be instrumental in helping her to reclaim her life and bodily autonomy. By the way, you know the song Louie Louie by the Kingsmen? ‘Luay Luay…!’

Although most of the Shudder reviewers who watched this film declared it to be a success, a lot of them suggested that it be rebranded as a Lifetime movie, a made-for-television film often inspired by true-life crimes or events. That is, because they don’t consider it to be a horror movie.

I disagree. I think the body horror element in the film is extremely strong and powerful enough for this film to be able to proudly call itself a superbly-acted horror offering.

Plus, it shows us the real-life horror of what it’s like to be trapped in a marriage that’s slowly suffocating you and tying you up in knots you can’t get free from. Real-life horror is horror, right?

I’m not one hundred percent sold on the neatly tied-up ending, but I still think this is a film well worth watching. Also, it introduced me to the disorder known as pica, for which I’m grateful as I love learning new things from films.

For those who prefer their horror not to teach them anything because that makes it seem too much like school, don’t worry. They don’t shove it down your throat or anything…

TWO. (2021) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.

TWO. (2021)

DIRECTED BY MAR TARGARONA.

STARRING MARINA GATELL AND PABLO DERQUI.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.

I found this strange Spanish language body horror-slash psychological thriller film on Netflix when I was looking for something else. It’s received mainly bad reviews from what I can make out, some deserved.

It’s a film with an interesting premise that started out all right but just fell apart fairly quickly and the rushed ending is something of a disaster.

David and Sara are two people, unknown to each other, who wake up naked together in a strange place with no memory of how they got there. The main thing they have no memory of, however, is being sewn together at the abdomen after the manner of Siamese twins.

Someone has quite obviously stitched them up, excuse the pun, and deliberately placed them in this position for a reason. For their own amusement or gratification, maybe, as in the Saw or Hostel movies or in Squid Game, or for some other mad reason not immediately known to the couple.

Naturally, they’re a bit panicked, but not as panicked as they should be, really, considering they’ve been sewn together without their knowledge. The seventy-minute film sees them trying to manipulate themselves into standing and sitting (for the purposes of peeing) positions and exploring the room they’re in for clues to their captivity.

A lot of the reviews heap ridicule on the film for allowing David and Sara to move about and/or lie down in positions that shouldn’t be possible given they’ve been stitched together.

Also, where’s all the blood, the agonising pain, the horror they feel as the truth of their situation dawns…? Their reactions are not extreme enough, people obviously feel, for people who’ve woken up in such a nightmare situation.

David and Sara mistrust each other too, as they don’t know if the person they’re now attached to has had anything to do with what’s happened. David is an unlikely male gigolo, who’s been paid by men to have sex with their wives. Sara is married to a jealous, controlling older man, a bit of a mad scientist by profession. Any clues there…?

Is it likely that you’d feel horny at all in such a terrible situation? David and Sara not only feel it, but they actively have sex while stuck to each other. Woman on top, as well. How is it even physically possible, given their situation? You tell me, mate…

The ‘reveal’ at the end is rushed and a bit bonkers and unbelievable. It did, however, do one thing for which I’m thankful. It brought the Bunker Brothers, Chang and Eng Bunker, to be precise, to my attention for the first time.

These were Siamese-American conjoined twin brothers whose existence and condition coined the term ‘Siamese twins.’ They lived very long as well, from 1811 to 1874.

They became rich and famous through the ‘freak shows’ beloved of European and American audiences, became American citizens and even owned slaves up until the Civil War set the slaves free.

They married local sisters (twins as well?) and between them fathered a whopping twenty-one children. Nothing wrong with their reproductive organs, clearly, and the lack of privacy to carry out sexual acts obviously wasn’t a deterrent…

The brothers died within hours of each other in 1874, and their fused livers were preserved in fluid and displayed in a jar in Philadelphia’s Mutter Museum, along with their death casts.

The brothers featured in The Greatest Showman (2017), a film about the early years of the P.T. Barnum and Bailey circus. I hated this film with every fibre of my being and I don’t remember the Bunker Brothers being in it, probably because I’ve tried to blot out all memory of the film.

Anyway, the question of Siamese twins and other of the so-called ‘freaks’ of these unenlightened eras, for example, John Merrick, otherwise known as the Elephant Man, has fascinated people for decades.

The infamous Nazi ‘doctor,’ Josef Mengele, was particularly fascinated by all things relating to twins and I daresay would have been beside himself with glee had a pair of Siamese twins turned up in his examining rooms in the concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau.

He is estimated to have studied up to a thousand sets of twins in the camp and a popular rumour, most likely untrue, has him sewing up a set of twins to produce conjoined or Siamese twins.

He was also interested in people with eyes of a different colour to each other, people with dwarfism and people with physical abnormalities. He was responsible for sending the preserved heads and organs of children with the facially disfiguring cancer known as ‘noma’ to various Nazi medical facilities for research purposes after failing to cure them.

It is also not known what the ultimate goals of these medical ‘studies’ were supposed to be. Was he just a madman who would have sewn a cat to a dog purely to view the outcome or had he actually a serious goal in mind? Even if he did, it’s unlikely to have been for the benefit of mankind.

Ironically, people sometimes pretended to be twins in order to get into Mengele’s hospital block, where they were better treated and fed than the other camp inmates. Unfortunately, this was only as long as they were useful to the evil ‘doctor.’

I can’t even describe this man as a ‘doctor’ without putting the word in inverted commas. He made a mockery of ‘First do no harm.’ He doesn’t deserve the title of a respected medic.

Anyway, briefly back to Two, the film that’s brought us together today. I found it an interesting concept, but in all honesty it was poorly executed. The end is a shambles, though the actual end scene is artistic and beautiful.

The images of Siamese twins, including the Bunker Brothers, at the end of the film are enthralling and prompted me to do this deep(ish) dive into the subject of nature’s so-called ‘freaks.’ It was probably the best thing about this film.

Enough said…

THE SECRET WOMAN. (2026) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.

THE SECRET WOMAN. (2026)

DIRECTED BY BARBARA TOPSOE-ROTHENBORG.

STARRING NATALIE WOLFSBERG MADUENO, CLAES BANG AND PAL SVERRE HAGEN.

BASED ON THE NOVEL BY ANNA EKBERG.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.

My God. Danish actor and musician Claes Bang is a truly magnificent specimen of manhood. He first came to my personal attention in 2020 as Dracula in the three-part serial of the same name by the BBC.

It was a very odd adaptation of Bram Stoker’s famous book, and apparently only ‘loosely-based’ on the 1897 masterpiece. I didn’t care, however, as Claes Bang was charismatic, devastatingly handsome and even briefly naked in it.

He was around fifty-three at the time, the absolute perfect age for a man. Sure, you might have to take a couple of Viagra if you want to be able to ‘go all night,’ but you’re a mature man by then, experienced, worldly-wise and able to find your way around a woman’s body without the aid of Google Maps…

Now Claes is fifty-nine (swoon!) and taking the male lead in The Secret Woman, a two-hour-long Netflix film that has just dropped on the popular streaming service. He’s by far the most watchable character in it, and even easier on the eye than the undoubtedly beautiful Norwegian and Danish scenery on view.

Let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start. Louise is a woman with amnesia living on a Norwegian island and running a coffee-shop. She’s just gotten engaged to her hipster writer boyfriend Joachim when her world is turned upside-down for the second time since she rocked up in Norway with amnesia two years ago.

She discovers that she has a husband, Edmund (the divine Claes Bang), in Denmark, a young son called Alexander and a shipping empire bequeathed to her by her deceased father. She hops over to Denmark and sees them for herself. Bloody hell, Claes Bang for a husband and a shipping empire of my very own? You wouldn’t have to ask me twice.

Edmund seems charming and tender, the perfect husband. His mother Caroline, who lives with them, is kindly and warm-hearted towards her newly-found daughter-in-law Louise, whose real name turns out to be Helene, and Caroline has been a good granny to Alexander in his mummy’s absence.

Helene is enchanted by her little boy, so much so that seeing him prompts her to remember her pet name for him, Duckling. This seems to kick-start the process of her gradually and slowly regaining her memory, but will the things she remembers be good things, or will she find that she’s back in the very place she was attempting to escape…?

It’s important to note that handsome hubby Edmund and his devoted mumsie Caroline have gotten super-rich by latching onto Helene. It’s her company Edmund manages and it’s her childhood home, a magnificent mansion complete with its own lake and forest, which they now comfortably occupy. They’d presumably be nobodies if Edmund hadn’t got lucky and married Helene, an heiress.

A sweet and compliant Helene is welcome and safe in the family mansion, but a feisty Helene whose memory is slowly returning and who is fighting to find out the truth about what really happened to her may be problematic for Edmund.

He can control her to an extent with lies and gaslighting, drugs, physical violence and even marital rape while she’s under the influence of said drugs, but Helene is stubborn and refuses to go under. A well-behaved woman rarely makes history…

Plus, hipster boyfriend Joachim is on the case too, doing a bit of amateur sleuthing to find out the real truth behind Louise/Helene’s departure from her seemingly perfect life and what subsequently happened.

Seems like the police might want to do a bit of investigating themselves but nope, it’s all hands in pockets, whistling and looking the other way for the boys in blue for some reason.

Edmund’s treatment of Helene is similar to the way the characters played by Amanda Seyfried and Sydney Sweeney are treated by the husband in last Christmas’s smash hit movie, The Housemaid. Gaslighting, being locked up for days at a time, druggings, scary mothers-in-law with helmets of frosted blonde hair, coercive control that’s off the charts, it’s horrible.

I know it’s ‘not all men’ but it’s enough men that it’s a problem. It’s not only in these slick television dramas or films, either. You just have to go online or read the papers or watch the evening news to know that it’s an epidemic in today’s society and it’s bloody depressing.

Enough social commentary, anyway, and back to my main reason both for watching this film and writing this review. Claes Bang is a devilishly, criminally handsome man. I want him to divorce his wife and marry me.

My God, he’s something else. I hope he starts acting in more mainstream stuff, as it’s really bad form for Denmark to keep this hot slice of beefcake all to themselves. Never mind the tins of butter cookies and Little Mermaid keyrings and bottle openers, this guy is Denmark’s greatest export. Over and out…

WHISTLE (2025) BY LINWOOD BARCLAY. BOOK REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.

WHISTLE (2025) BY LINWOOD BARCLAY.

BOOK REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.

I never usually buy what I call man-thrillers, because they bore me to tears, frankly, with all the technology stuff in them that men love so much and the clipped, terse dialogue because men writers all seem to think Ernest Hemingway is the pinnacle of man-writing.

I’m not saying he’s not, but when I signed to a publisher a few years ago, I was told that that type of Hemingway-esque writing is fine for a man-thriller but has no place in contemporary women’s fiction.

Fair enough, but I genuinely bought this Linwood Barclay book (supernatural horror rather than a thriller, a change of pace for the writer) because of the cover.

It has a picture of a house on it, a house that’s a dead ringer for the Bates Motel house, even down to the curved staircase of steps winding down to the ground below and the silhouette of a man in one of the upper windows.

The house is stark black against a yellow background and the blurb revealed the book to contain a writer as the lead character. I was sold. I love when writers write about writers and writing. I feel an affinity for them when they do that.

It’s the same with Netflix. My kids (adults now) always groan when we’re scrolling and I stop on something with a writer in it, regardless of what language it’s in, because they know I’m going to want to watch it. Lol. She who holds the remote gets to pick…

Anyway, the writer in Whistle is called Annie Blunt. She’s a children’s author who also illustrates her own books. Hang on a minute here. I thought only celebrities were allowed to write children’s books? I hope she got permission from the correct authority.

Poor Annie suffers two tragedies in quick succession: the death of her husband, and the death of a child who gets a dangerous idea into his head after reading one of her books. Awkward, eh…?

Anyway, she moves for the summer to the house on the cover of the book, the Bates Motel house lookalike, in upstate New York, to try to come to terms with her troubles. It doesn’t seem to occur to her that living in a house that’s the spitting image of the Bates Motel house is surely a bad omen for the future…

She has her small son Charlie with her and her agent has kindly filled one room with expensive art supplies in case she should feel like knocking out a new best-selling children’s book while she’s there. Agents! Always with an eye to the main chance.

Little Charlie becomes obsessed with an old train set he finds in the shed. Some weird stuff starts happening around the old Blunt homestead and Annie thinks she can trace its beginnings to Charlie’s activation of the trains.

Let’s go back a few years now to 2001, a couple of months after 9/11. In a small town called Lucknow, Chief of Police Harry Cook (Chief Cook and bottle-washer, gettit? Barclay makes this joke himself in the book!) is trying to figure out why several ordinary men have gone missing recently from the town.

When one of the men turns up dead, the state of the corpse tells Harry that he has an even bigger problem on his hands than he thought he did.

Also, a string of horrible misadventures happening to the local townspeople all seem to have one common denominator: everyone they’ve happened to has all purchased a train set from the new shop in town that seemed to suddenly spring up overnight…

Edwin Nabler, aka Mr. Choo-Choo, owner of the train shop, is a masterclass in characterisation. He reminds me of Dr. Julian Karswell as played by Niall MacGinnis in superb British film, Night of the Demon (1957).

Plumpish, balding, no longer in the first flush of youth. Kind to children, doesn’t mind entertaining them for a bit. Genial and smiling and outwardly pleasant, until you cross him. The smile disappears, and you get a glimpse of the sinister monster that lurks beneath.

The book is extremely well written and Barclay is an expert at ‘show, not tell.’ He’s also clearly a huge horror fan and loves the movie Psycho. I’ve told you already about the great cover but the fate of Finnegan Sproule in the book is highly evocative of the death of Milton Arbogast in Psycho, plus, their names! Unforgettable, lol.

Another movie he’s watched and probably loves is Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, as the book features a process I would call ‘the Mike Teevee effect.’ ‘Hey, Maw, look at me! I’m the first person in the world to be sent by television!’

He’s also clearly a big Stephen King fan and I think SK himself may have actually read the first draft of Whistle for Barclay, which is amazing. The book marks a change in direction for Barclay who normally writes man-thrillers, but this book is a proper horror and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. I hope you get to read it too.

THIS HOUSE IS HAUNTED. (2013) BOOK REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.

THIS HOUSE IS HAUNTED. (2013)

BY JOHN BOYNE.

BOOK REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.

I enjoyed this ghost story by Irish writer John Boyne. It’s a good spooky read, short enough at just under three hundred pages and easy to read and follow. I must be straight with you, though, and admit that it’s not entirely without its flaws.

It’s set in the England of 1867 and told in the first person from the viewpoint of a twenty-one-year-old female by the name of Eliza Caine. She lives in Dickensian London with her widowed father (her mother died when she was nine), with whom she has such a good and close relationship that I declare I was quite envious of it.

Her father is a devoted studier of insects- an entomologist- who works in a museum. Eliza herself works as a school-teacher in the same school in which she herself was educated. Her ‘small girls’ mean the world to her.

At the start of the novel she loses her beloved father, giving rise to perhaps one of the best opening sentences in modern literature: ‘I blame Charles Dickens for the death of my father.’ If you want to know how, exactly, you’ll have to read the book…!

Reduced circumstances in the aftermath of her father’s demise lead Eliza to take a job in the county of Norfolk, at an isolated mansion called Gaudlin Hall.

She is to be governess to two young children, Isabella and Eustace. Immediately Henry James’s novella The Turn of the Screw, later filmed as The Innocents, will spring to mind.

Isabella, the older child, is self-possessed, knowing beyond her years, mocking and rather haughty. Eustace is a little pet to whom Eliza immediately becomes attached. There seem to be no parents present, and no staff except for the elusive Mrs. Livermore and Heckling, the crude and unpleasant gardener, coachman and general handyman.

Eliza is horrified to learn that she is the sixth governess the children have had this year. What’s worse, four of the previous incumbents all died under shocking circumstances, and the fifth, the woman who placed the advertisement which resulted in Eliza’s being given the job, has made good her escape.

There are so many questions to which Eliza desperately needs answers. Where are the children’s parents? Who or what is killing governesses in Gaudlin Hall? Why is Mrs. Livermore so keen to avoid Eliza? Who or what is the malevolent presence that makes itself known before Eliza even crosses the threshold of Gaudlin?

Mr. Raisin, the lawyer for Gaudlin Hall to whom Eliza is clearly attracted, is reluctant to provide these answers. Trying to worm information out of him is like pulling teeth. His clerk, Mr. Cratchett (even Eliza is surprised at his name!), a proper Uriah Heep, is not exactly helpful either.

So, will Eliza survive the many onslaughts the malignant presence at Gaudlin Hall makes on her person? Will she ever find out who it is, and why it does the things it does?

What about the second presence, the kindly one who smells of cinnamon-infused tobacco, as if we couldn’t work out in a heartbeat who it is? So many questions, but will Eliza get the answers she needs before she runs out of time…?

I love all the references to Charles Dickens in this book. I didn’t say that Eliza lived in Dickensian London for nothing, you know! Both Eliza and her father are big fans of the writer’s, and even go to see him give a public reading of one of his most famous ghost stories.

No, not A Christmas Carol, though it gets a mention! ‘Marley was dead to begin with. There was no doubt whatever about that.’ No, it’s actually the sublime short story The Signalman, which in 1976 aired on the BBC as part of the supernatural anthology series, A Ghost Story for Christmas. ‘Halloa down there…!’

I find it fascinating that this superb short story was filmed for television one hundred and ten years after Dickens wrote it. Television wouldn’t be invented for several more decades and Dickens probably wouldn’t have believed you if you told him about it in 1866…

I love the descriptions of London in the fog, that good old pea-souper fog that was probably the result of pollution from all the businesses that operated in the Industrial Revolution and the birth of machines.

Gaudlin Hall is also an interesting spooky setting that might call to mind other films like Burnt Offerings, The Changeling and, more recently, The Woman in Black.

I was disappointed by the book’s ending, about which I can’t say too much for fear of spoilers. I was genuinely expecting there to be a justifiable reason for the attacks by the supernatural presence, something along the lines of what happens in The Adventures of the Sussex Vampire. This is the Sherlock Holmes story by Arthur Conan Doyle that was first published in The Strand Magazine in 1924. But no. Sometimes a cigar really is just a cigar…

I like all the references to women’s ‘place’ in Victorian society. Eliza takes great pains to let us know that she is ‘unattractive,’ therefore will have to work for her living as no man will want to marry her. Also, she is not wealthy and no longer has her father to protect her. In the absence of a husband, she will have to work to support herself.

Another bar to her acquisition of a husband might be that Eliza is probably more outspoken and questioning of men’s ‘wisdom’ than a more submissive woman might be. She scandalises the men in the story- Mr. Raisin, Mr. Cratchett, Heckling the gardener, the Reverend Deacons- with her refusal to take no for an answer.

She’s also determined, resilient and with vast reserves of courage. Maybe she has a future as a suffragette, or in social reform? There are references in the book to capital punishment and the dire conditions in both womens’ and mens’ prisons. Plenty of work to be done in these areas, for sure…

Anyway, enjoy the book if you come across it, as it is an interesting ghost story, even if it does feel a little unfinished and you’re constantly waiting for an explanation of Santina Westerley’s bizarre behaviour. Child abuse, which also gets a mention here, would have been an acceptable reason, but no, that’s your lot. And speaking of which…