Saturday SciFi Splash: a workshop full of dinosaurs, a vampire at Netflix, and fandom having words (news roundup).
Every so often the genre news does you the courtesy of arranging itself into a theme, and this fortnight’s theme is endings. Workshops closing, writers dying, conventions apologising, associations quietly removing people from mastheads, and one lone streaming service cheerfully announcing the last season of something before most of us had finished the first. Pour the coffee. It gets better towards the bottom, honest.
Start with the one that actually hurts. Phil Tippett has closed his Berkeley workshop, the physical studio itself, after Chapter 11 proceedings, with four decades of models, armatures, props and equipment liquidated. Not Tippett retiring, and not the end of the Tippett Studio name, which continues under PhantomFX. But the room is gone, and it was quite a room: the place where a man built the AT-ATs that walked over Hoth, gave ED-209 the gait of a filing cabinet with anger issues, animated the raptors before the computers took the job off him on Jurassic Park, and then sent a great many bugs to their deaths in Starship Troopers. Tippett coined “go motion” and won two Oscars, and if you have ever felt that a modern CGI creature has slightly too little weight to it, you were, in a roundabout way, missing his hands. A generation of effects people learned their trade in that building. Somewhere a liquidator has just sold a dinosaur skeleton by the kilo, and we would rather not think about it.
Also gone is Victor Miller, dead at 86. Miller wrote the original Friday The 13th in 1980, which means he is the man who invented Pamela Voorhees and, by extension, her rather more famous son, and thereby gave the horror genre roughly half its Halloween costumes and a permanent superstition about summer camps. He spent decades afterwards writing daytime soap opera, which, when you think about the body counts involved, is not the career change it first appears.
Netflix, meanwhile, is developing a live-action Ravenloft, reportedly centred on the origins of Count Strahd von Zarovich, with John August writing and Alfonso Cuarón executive producing. That is a startlingly good creative team for a project descended from a 1983 Dungeons & Dragons module about a sad vampire in a big house who will not stop talking about his lost love. Barovia is arguably the most-played setting in tabletop history, chiefly because every Dungeon Master eventually decides their players deserve fog. If Cuarón brings the same eye he brought to Azkaban, this could be the first D&D screen adaptation that scares somebody. If it goes the other way, we get another handsome man in a cape being moody in a castle, and the world has never been short of those.
Over in fandom governance, LAcon V’s business meeting did what many had been waiting three years for it to do, censuring officials involved in the troubled 2023 Chengdu Hugo administration and calling for future Worldcon bans. Motions and censures are not the most cinematic form of justice available to humanity, but they are what a volunteer-run global institution has instead of a legal system, and the meeting used them. The same gathering handed the 2028 Worldcon to Brisbane, which will be the third Australian Worldcon and, we are reliably informed, the first at which the local wildlife will outrank most of the costume competition for menace.
Staying with organisations having a difficult month, the Horror Writers Association removed trustee Sèphera Girón following the publication of a pro-generative-AI column in its newsletter. The HWA apologised, said the piece did not represent the association’s position, and acted. Horror writers, it turns out, have strong views about things that wear the skin of a person and speak with their voice. Who knew.
Better news, if you enjoy the sensation of being frightened by geography. Prime Video has greenlit Crouch End, a six-part limited series from Stephen King’s short story, in which an American couple take a wrong turn in north London and find that the walls between worlds are, in that particular postcode, disappointingly thin. King wrote it after getting lost in Crouch End himself while visiting Peter Straub, which remains the single most productive wrong turning in horror publishing. Anyone who has attempted to change buses at Crouch End Broadway will confirm the Lovecraftian element requires very little exaggeration.
Richard Kelly, meanwhile, has written an official Donnie Darko sequel. The Philosophy Of Time Travel is a roughly 800-page found-document novel set fourteen months after the film, and Kelly is fairly open about seeing it as groundwork for further films. Eight hundred pages. The original ran 113 minutes and nobody has agreed on what happened in it yet, so this is either the most generous act of authorial explanation in modern cinema or a man building himself a bigger rabbit hole to live in.
Apple has dated the fourth and final season of Silo for 9 July 2027, which is a long wait but does at least confirm that the series intends to finish the story rather than descend into the shaft forever. And the writers of the proposed new Star Trek film, John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein, have described their pitch: an all-new cast, a story unfolding in something close to real time, and a look at the “bad apples” within Starfleet, with Training Day and Crimson Tide cited as touchstones. It is still in development, so temper expectations accordingly, but a Starfleet internal affairs thriller is a genuinely interesting idea, and the pair did write Honor Among Thieves, which is the good D&D film. Somebody is going to say “this isn’t Roddenberry’s vision” in a comment thread within the hour. Somebody always does.
Quickly, before the coffee goes cold: Gamescom emptied its pockets, with The Witcher 3 receiving new DLC roughly a decade after everyone finished it, plus Warlock: Dungeons & Dragons, Final Fantasy VII Revelation and Total War: Warhammer 40,000, the last of which finally answers the question of what happens when the most miserable universe in fiction meets the most spreadsheet-driven strategy engine in gaming. Shudder has unveiled “Season of Screams”, its September-to-December run of premieres, fresh Creep Tapes, the Fangoria Chainsaw Awards and the annual Ghoul Log, for those whose Christmas fireplace needs more viscera. And WisCon has apologised for a 2027 Guest of Honour slate that failed its own representation policy, and will expand it from two guests to four, which is at least a problem solved by inviting more writers rather than fewer.
That is your lot. Somewhere in a Berkeley skip there is a dinosaur that changed cinema, and somewhere in north London there is a bus stop that leads to another dimension. Have a good weekend.
