As screen-to-stage adaptations go, taking on Stanley Kubrick and one of the most acclaimed comedies of all time is bold. But Dr Strangelove, which just opened at the Noël Coward Theatre in London’s West End, sounds like a tempting proposition rather than a sacrilegious one: adapted by Armando Iannucci, starring Steven Coogan, it’s a union between comedy screen royalty of our own time.

In the 1964 Cold War satire, Peter Sellers proved virtuoso in playing an Air Force captain, the US president, and a sinister German scientist. Coogan not only goes one better – also playing Texan pilot Major Kong – but pulls it off live, bouncing in and out of war rooms and B-52 cockpits. He’s consistently funny, especially as a face-twisting, arm-popping Dr Strangelove.

And yet. And yet…While there’s knowing delight to this theatrical feat, it also hampers the pace. This deferential Dr Strangelove can feel an oddly lumpen and effortful show. Yes, Coogan acquits himself well against the legend that is Sellers, but it begs the question: is that really what we want in theatre? A continual looking over actors’ shoulders for whether someone did it better on screen, 60 years ago?

As a theatre critic, I’ve watched a tsunami of film-to-stage adaptations. Right now in London, you can see Back to the Future, Magic Mike, Mean Girls, Moulin Rouge, Mrs Doubtfire, The Lion King, and the about-to-open The Devil Wears Prada musical. Large-scale touring is even more in-hoc: you could be visited by Hairspray, Aladdin, Heathers, Grease, Ghost, Kinky Boots, Mary Poppins, Madagascar, Cruel Intentions…at any moment there’s a film-to-stage adaptation quite literally waiting in the wings.

This is not a new trend: Disney twigged there were mega-bucks to be made in putting movies on stage thirty years ago. Their first attempt, Beauty and the Beast in 1994, received a critical mauling – “padded, gimmick-ridden, tacky and, despite the millions, utterly devoid of imagination”, according to Variety. Unfortunately, some of these are complaints I’d still throw at the less-inspired film adaptations today.

But then came The Lion King, which opened on Broadway in 1997 and in the West End in 1999, directed by Julie Taymor who proved you could absolutely fashion a distinctly theatrical version of a kids’ cartoon on stage. It’s surely no coincidence that one of the most inventive screen-to-stage adaptations – making magical use of masks and puppetry – is also the most enduring and profitable, earning over $10 billion worldwide. (Avatar, the highest-grossing film, made less than $3 billion.)

Yet a lot of producers seemed to learn one lesson – famous films make wildly profitable stage shows! – without giving much thought to the other lesson – famous films can make wildly imaginative stage shows.

I have no quarrel with adaptations where there’s an urgent desire to re-tell a story in a new medium or an exciting vision for how to do that. One of my favourite shows of recent years was My Neighbour Totoro – transferring in March to the Gillian Lynne Theatre – which enchanted in how it played with scale, puppetry, and live performance, giving new form to Studio Ghibli’s animations.

Similarly, Jack Thorne beautifully translated the icy, yearning chill of Let the Right One for the stage. The bombast of Andrew Lloyd Weber’s 1991 musical version of Sunset Boulevard matched the self-deluding grandeur of the film’s heroine – and recently proved sharply urgent in Jamie Lloyd’s new staging. Tim Minchin’s songs for Groundhog Day added witty and moving new layers, and putting the dancing at the heart of An American in Paris, 42nd Street, Billy Elliot or Strictly Ballroom in a theatre feels both logical and delightful.

But too many shows follow the ‘Popular Movie: The Musical’ formula without seemingly questioning whether the story would actually benefit from this treatment – adding songs, but not adding value. I suspect producers are seeing pound signs rather than real theatrical vision. Take, for example, the rash of high school movies-turned-musicals: Heathers, Mean Girls, Cruel Intentions, Clueless and Bring It On. Perfect snarky little confections on screen, these stories rarely benefit from having earnest or mawkish songs added.

Even more tricky is the casting conundrum. As with Dr Strangelove, stage versions of Back to the Future, Pretty Woman, Sister Act, Mrs Doubtfire, or the about-to-open The Devil Wears Prada have another huge mountain to climb: their legendary central performances. It’s tough to recreate their unique flavour while missing their main ingredient. How do you match the memory of Robin Williams? Can Pretty Woman work without Julia Roberts? (On the basis of the recent musical, I’d say: absolutely not). Faithful copies end up feeling like pale imitations and cultural ouroboros: content cannibalising itself, especially when hit musicals in turn then prompt new movie versions (see Mean Girls, Hairspray).

The abundance of adaptations is largely down to them being seen as ‘safe bets’ – understandably appealing in the current tough financial climate for theatres. In the same way that remakes, franchises and IP-led movies have dominated cinema recently, stage versions of well-loved titles are seen as bankable. But the churn presumably also reflects what audiences have proven willing to stump up for. There’s clearly a significant nostalgia pound, spent right across culture: when money is tight, people are more willing to shell out for something they already know they like. Nostalgia is cosy; adaptations promise comforting familiarity.

But creatively, I’d argue it’s bad news for theatre. Screen-to-stage adaptations have a flattening effect: they are by their very nature predictable, to the point of often feeling lazy and cynical at their core (even if I still applaud the huge amounts of work that goes into performances, songs, design, and so on). Dr Strangelove hasn’t convinced me otherwise: it’s fun, it’s funny, but it’s deferential to a fault. Despite Coogan, it can’t silence the whisper that says you could just watch the movie.

Still, it’s at least an unexpected adaptation – I genuinely didn’t see this one coming. And I wonder if it hints that we might be nearing the end of this wave of adaptations, or at least a slowing of the tide? Could we be running out of obvious, bankable titles to adapt?

Looking ahead, there are fewer adaptations on the horizon for 2025. There are actually some plays headed to the West End! Granted, a production of Clueless arrives in February, and Disney is doing Hercules, while a musical of 13 Going on 30 has just been announced – but surely that’s the sound of the nostalgia barrel being scraped, rather than a sign of its rude health. Personally, I’d be happy if theatre did begin to tire of simply aping the hits of the silver screen. After all, we don’t want anyone to attempt 2001: The Musical.

America’s foremost experimental animator, Don Hertzfeldt, has built a legion of fans for the emotional devastation and deadpan humour he loads into the daily doings of sensitive little stick people. Yet ME is a formal departure, even by the avant-garde standards set by his only feature, It’s Such A Beautiful Day, Oscar-nominated short The World of Tomorrow, Simpsons sofa gag and vast back-catalogue of macabre comic miniatures.

At 20 minutes ME has the sweep of an epic and the opacity of an uncompromising personal treatise. I watched it three times and still cannot say with confidence what it’s about on a conventional narrative level. Instead of plot and dialogue, there are images, themes and a peppily inhumane percussive theme titled ‘Dinner at the Sugar Bush’ by Brett Lewis.

Over the course of the three watches, I – a Hertzfeldt devotee who put It’s Such A Beautiful Day on my Sight & Sound Best Films of All Time list – had cause to ask myself whether I was compelled to reverse-engineer a positive review based on my previous self-identification with his work. This myopia makes me kin with the doomed little people in what can only be classified as a despair opera. ME is full of casually species-eviscerating images and sequences, such as a man sitting on a rooftop under the stars pulling out a hand mirror to look at himself instead of the infinity of space.

This little man dedicates his life to inventing a piece of technology for which he eventually wins an important award. The catalyst for this all-consuming project is the birth of his first child and, ever-after, he blocks out not just his immediate family, but the bodies piling up in the streets where he lives. I never thought I would watch a Hertfzfeldt film in which the mangled bodies of stick people are unloaded into mass graves. ME has a political backdrop, one that the protagonist blocks out as he stays glued to his all-consuming gadget. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to read the resonance with our digitally-connected-yet-emotionally-atomised world and the violence we sanction as we cleave to our self-important goals.

This arc is the most legible one within a film that also contains the birth of a second child that looks different to the first one (for it is an eye on legs!) and a giant opera singer with blood spurting from her head trudging through lakes of lava. Hertzfeldt’s approach to knitting everything together is as slippery as an eyeball and attempts to impose coherence is a fool’s game.

Instead, it is best to let ME wash over you. Dialogue is all but stripped away, with characters communicating in punctuation marks in speech bubbles –“?” And “!” Their inability to connect with anyone except versions of themselves gives rise to an atmosphere of bleakness and a moving irrational strain of hope. ME feels like Hertzfeldt stacking all his chips on this Chekhov quote: “Man will become better when you show him what he is like.”

ME is available to purchase now via Vimeo.

In 1980, Amos Gitaï was commissioned by Israeli television to produce a documentary about a house in West Jerusalem, telling the story of its inhabitants – Palestinian before 1948, Israeli afterwards. The result, House, was so incendiary that it was banned from broadcast and Gitaï went into artistic exile in France. In 1998, he made A House in Jerusalem, a follow-up to House that checked in with the subjects of the first film while widening the scope to their family members and neighbours, and he completed the trilogy in 2005 with News From House/News From Home, making a sort of Arab/Israeli version of Granada Television’s Up! series.

In 2023, Gitaï was invited by Wajdi Mouawad, the Lebanese-Canadian playwright most famous for Incendies (adapted for film by a pre-Hollywood Denis Villeneuve in 2010) who is now artistic director of Paris’s théâtre national – to adapt the trilogy for the stage. This production transferred to London’s Barbican Theatre for two performances in September, and Gitaï’s film trilogy played alongside it at the Barbican Cinema.

In House, as Serge Daney noted, “Gitaï wants this house to be both a symbol and something very concrete.” At first, the focus is on the concrete; formally, these are quite conventional documentaries, not essay films. All three films are largely successions of monologues delivered on the spot, in the house, on the street, on archaeological sites in Jerusalem, and finally in a Palestinian house in the hills outside Jerusalem.

The films present a sort of cross-section of Israel/Palestine society. The Jews in the films are – unexpectedly – mostly not Eastern European Holocaust survivors but Zionist migrants from Iraq, Algeria, the US, and Western Europe who made aliyah at various points between the 1920s and 1970s; the last ones to arrive were inspired to make the move by the 1973 Yom Kippur War. They tell Gitaï about the logistics and finances involved with moving into the house – how the house was “abandoned” during the Nakba, requisitioned by the Israeli government, and sold to them; how they borrowed money to buy it, split it with other families, and so on – as well as feeling spiritually fulfilled in Israel, in a Jewish homeland away from the consumerism of Western societies. It would almost be compelling if it weren’t for their lack of feeling for the Palestinians they displaced. One woman even says that she has no desire to change history.

At the same time, the house is in the process of being renovated, and the film pays close attention to the Palestinian workers who are working on it. This work puts them in a contradictory position: they rely on work in Israel for money as they denounce its expropriation of Palestinian property and territory. Menacingly – though he seems not to realise it – the Jewish contractor tells Gitaï that he fired a Palestinian worker when he realised that he was taking part in anti-Israel protests.

It’s the Palestinian workers who tell Gitaï about the house’s former owner: a member of the Dajani family – one of Jerusalem’s four or five most prominent Arab families before the Nakba. Gitaï finds the owner, Dr. Mahmoud Dajani, and brings him to the house. It’s a remarkably sober moment, though no less chilling for it. Dajani points out the new additions that have been built and new houses on the street. He explains that he left after the Deir Yassin massacre. If he “abandoned” the house, as the Israelis put it, it was only under direct threat.

Unavoidably, the play’s house takes on provocative metaphorical dimensions which are only partly expressed in the films themselves. In A House In Jerusalem, Dajani’s son says that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is like a house in which the Israelis have kicked out the Palestinians and then opened the window a tiny crack and said “Let’s talk.” Obviously, the Palestinians won’t talk until they’ve been let back into the house.

Not just the house but the film’s form also begins to feel symbolic – or maybe symptomatic. The monologue form is not always the most cinematically (or theatrically) compelling but it serves a function insofar as it mirrors the wider conflict: each side makes its case, speaking mostly to itself and maybe some imagined neutral arbiter of justice, but never to the other side, with whom there can be no dialogue.

Yet there’s more to it than that. As a Palestinian says in A House in Jerusalem, “Everybody says what they want but the truth exists.” What truth are they talking about? In the most ambiguous and compelling moments of the films and the play, a cross-cutting issue to the Israel/Palestine and Arab/Jew issues comes into focus: the dimension of class.

The fact emerges, eventually, that the neighbourhood the house is in was built in the late 19th century by German Templars and was occupied mainly by them and wealthy Arabs, the Dajani family among them. To some extent, the Dajanis have retained their status. Dr. Dajani’s son and his family appear to live in relative comfort in East Jerusalem and have obtained Canadian citizenship. A son now living in Amman is also mentioned; we are told he is wealthy enough to buy the original house – if the Israelis would ever sell to him. Gitaï also tracks down a Dajani relative who is downright glamorous, who lived much of her life in Lebanon and Kuwait and presents herself as a modern, secular, liberated woman. Though they are clearly the victims of grave injustice, the Dajanis seem to have landed on their feet.

The Palestinian stonecutters and their families stand in stark contrast. Decades after the Nakba, they are living a hand-to-mouth existence in small houses outside Jerusalem. The most devastating – and infuriating – moments are theirs. In A House In Jerusalem, the stonecutter from the original House describes finding his family’s land during the 1967 war and bringing a grape back for his father from their old tree. His father burst into tears. Later, near the end of the film, Gitaï interviews the family at their home. The son tells Gitaï that he has built a new home for his family but without the proper permits – which might actually be shakedowns from the Israeli military, police force, and planning office – and the Israeli government is threatening to demolish his house. “You’re making a film about the past,” he says, “but this is happening right now.”

The play drives this point home in a few ways. The first is staging. Two towers of scaffolding frame the stage, symbolising the house under construction, while in the centre of the stage, for the duration of the play, even as a succession of actors delivers their monologues around them, the Palestinian workers patiently chip away at stones. We can never forget that the house is not (or not only) the Promised Land but a place built on labour. Toward the end of the play, this point is driven home. A scrim drops down in front of the stage and Bertolt Brecht’s poem “A Worker Reads and Asks” is projected onto it. The poem begins: “Who built Thebes with its seven gates? / Books say it was kings. / Did kings hew and haul the rock?” Finally, as the play ends, Dr. Dajani ruminates on stage as the final images of the original House are projected on a screen behind him: the stonecutters, working away.

It makes sense that the theme song to Too Many Cooks, the viral 2014 short from the American television channel Adult Swim’s Infomercials block – short films and strange, experimental pieces that could never really belong anywhere else – is part of what made it rise to online fame. The catchy, ’70s sitcom refrain of “too many cooks/too many cooks” is impossible to get out of your head (even typing it out brings the melody back). This theme song, which repeats constantly throughout the 10-minute short, is essentially a meme, looping continually with a few changes as the short changes from an overly long gag about old-school sitcoms, to something stranger and more sinister. That is to say, Too Many Cooks is the kind of thing that we might now call “terminally online”, a designation that fits with many of the best-known Adult Swim infomercials, because of just how much they grapple with the memes, silliness, and horror of online culture.

The 2014 short Unedited Footage of a Bear, directed by Ben O’Brien and Alan Resnick, is the kind of thing that couldn’t exist without our understanding of online video sharing. From the opening 30 seconds that offer exactly what the title promises, to the way it cuts to a seemingly endless advert for the fictional drug Claridryl. The video even includes a “skip ad” button that’s now inescapable on YouTube, but instead of having the timer tick down, it goes up and up and up. Like the endless theme song to Too Many Cooks, Unedited Footage of a Bear also veers into the anti-joke territory of online humour; the list of side effects and warnings for Claridryl also seem to go on forever, gradually moving from funny to unsettling, from the caveat that “Claridryl is not for pregnant, nursing, expectant, waiting, bereaved, or sleeping mothers” to the almost threatening notice that “a person or persons will result from sustained usage of Claridryl” – something that becomes a violent reality for Donna (Cricket Arrison), who is attacked by a woman who may be another version of herself or another facet of her personality that’s brought to the fore by her addiction to Claridryl.

What both Too Many Cooks and Unedited Footage of a Bear have in common is a kind of horror and textual manipulation that feels uniquely online: the transformation of something wholesome into the unsettling or outright horrifying. For these shorts, it’s old-school sitcoms and the easy-to-parody side effects of prescription medication – elsewhere it shows up in everything from dark and edgy fanfiction to the strange online lives of Garfield. But what makes them such a compelling window into a certain way of being online is the way that they engage with these ideas in increasingly self-aware ways.

In one of the many riffs and remixes of the opening titles to Too Many Cooks, a young woman breaks out of her sitcom and runs through backstage corridors, moving past two doctors as she does so. The two doctors are treating a man who lives inside the Too Many Cooks sitcom – his name and character appear across his body in yellow text – and they can hear the theme song playing when they use a stethoscope on him. As they spend more time exposed to this theme (this meme) it sinks its claws into them and they look out to the camera, forced into the faux smile of a sitcom character, as the refrain plays out again and again: “too many cooks / too many cooks.”

The infectious, transformative nature of memes takes on the form of a contagion in Resnick’s 2016 short This House Has People in It, in which a family may or may not fall prey to an illness that may or may not exist, framed through the found footage lens of a security company watching what appears to be a perfectly ordinary family. The constant exposure of being on camera, and the way that two increasingly distressed parents yell about their daughter’s social media and who her friends are, captures a very specific online anxiety: what it means to be constantly seen, whether you want to be or not.

This intersection between digital culture and horror is taken to the nth degree in a 2018 short by Too Many Cooks director Casper Kelly: Final Deployment 4: Queen Battle Walkthrough. Final Deployment presents the many expanding, contorting layers of its narrative as a series of live streams in which the various characters, no matter how dire their situation, are constantly asking you to “like and subscribe.” While the narrative threads of Final Deployment feel like they’re constantly in danger of coming undone, the short manages to capture not only the constant stream of “like and subscribe” that comes with a digital life that’s increasingly parasocial in the way that we relate to influencers and streamers, but that also manages to grapple with the intimacy that’s expected of online personalities. Each of the narrators (everything from a Gamer Girl cliche ripped from the 2000s to a parody of Gears of War protagonist Marcus Fenix) ends up confessing their loneliness and uncertainty to the camera and the viewer with an intimacy that could only really exist through the medium of a live stream.

Final Deployment moves from the layering of various livestreams into what might be the (re)creation of a reality like ours, presented through the sardonic, self-deprecating view of a godlike figure. This reality, like an old computer, is simply dealing with too much, and crashes. This aesthetic runs through many of these Adult Swim infomercials; Too Many Cooks and Unedited Footage of a Bear also generate horror through the aesthetics of a glitch or technology breaking down. What happens to Maddison, the daughter in This House Has People In It who falls through the kitchen floor, also feels like a glitch; that strange sensation of falling off the edge of the map. In all the films there’s a shared obsession with the aesthetics of a broken internet and the lurid, seductive appeal of cursed media. This kind of media, and the Adult Swim infomercials that grapple with their legacy for a digital generation, could only ever exist through the prism of the internet.

Not far into Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, Scott Pilgrim, well, takes off. In this new, looser adaptation, created and written by Bryan Lee O’Malley and BenDavid Grabinski, the title character is de-centred, leaving his supporting cast to get their own coming-of-age moments in his absence – we see their growth from their perspective and not Scott’s blinkered one. Because of this, Takes Off is less a revisitation than another reinvention of O’Malley’s popular comic book series, in conversation with both the books and the movie within its energetic, winding new story. The showrunners refuse to simply play the hits, maintaining the same slacker vibes and reference-packed rom-com-meets-battle-shonen hybrid, but in a different key this time.

Its setup as a series, the art style’s direct lift from the comics, the fact that the English dub of the anime series features the entire returning cast of Edgar Wright’s movie – this all points towards a sort of do-over that’s “more faithful” to the comics, an expansion on subplots that a feature film doesn’t have bandwidth to cover, but Scott Pilgrim Takes Off is better than that. The series pre-empts such expectations in a myriad of clever ways – the franchise has always been cute about its meta-narratives and gags but it’s played up even further here: Wright’s movie itself becomes part of the show’s conversation with and remix of Scott Pilgrim lore. That might sound too much like navel-gazing to some, but Takes Off maintains the comic’s playful spirit, never feeling self-important.

At the centre of this renewed take on O’Malley’s series is Ramona, dream girl of many a sheltered dork in the 2000s through the 2010s – here even more self-possessed and granted the same soul-searching journey that Scott Pilgrim has bumbled through twice now. It’s now more “Ramona Flowers Versus the World”, but with a gumshoe PI style, when the show isn’t trying on different genres as often as the character re-dyes her hair (in one lovely touch, each episode opens with a gorgeous sequence of her going through that process).

As she works on solving the mystery central to the season’s arc, the show unpacks the Evil Exes’ neuroses rather than simply pitting them against Scott (because Scott is gone). Ramona reflects on the compulsions that Wright’s movie only had a moment to unpack, about her own inability to grow. Even Gideon Graves takes a backseat to the rest of the exes, the two main driving forces of the movie left behind for less trodden ground, looking into different aspects of its entertaining stable of weirdos rather than the worst versions of them, as Scott saw them. That approach goes a long way to making Takes Off feel like a more mature spin on these characters: the “evil” exes still maintain their taste for the theatrical, but also go through their own moments of introspection and growth, in the absence of a simpler unifying purpose (killing Scott).

Characters who never crossed paths in the film or barely interacted in the comics have entirely new and often hilarious arcs together, while others get chances for more earnest heart-to-hearts. Some (Knives) simply get to be cooler, now they’ve stepped out of Scott’s shadow. Case in point: Roxy and Ramona, whose relationship is taken a little more seriously here.

If there’s any one problem with the series, it’s that a sizeable portion of the returning cast doesn’t always seem suited to voice acting – the energy of the English dub can often feel rather low and the rhythms of line deliveries awkward, especially when measured against the seasoned figures in its Japanese dub. But this is certainly not the case for Mae Whitman, who keeps the absurdity of her live-action performance and even finds room for pathos, as ridiculous as Roxy is. Mary Elisabeth Winstead also compels as the calm centre to the storm of the show, making for a decidedly different dynamic – a straight woman (figuratively) to all of the chaotic maniacs and egotists from her past.

But the more some things change, the more others stay the same. Takes Off may be different but it still has all the flavour of a Scott Pilgrim adaptation, fully leveraging its transmedia construction between the books, live-action and video game adaptations, an amalgamation of all of the above. It’s not only riffing on the film but bringing in elements of the cult video game, with its composer Anamanaguchi returning, accompanied by Joseph Trapanese. Sex-Bob-Omb’s songs are still scrappy but catchy, and the composers have other delightful surprises in store.

The resultant sense of spontaneity and play makes the animation producers Science Saru – their work mostly centred around the direction of former head Masaaki Yuasa – a rather ideal fit: the studio overall known for its flexible and expressive visual ethos in films like the recent Inu-Oh.

The studio’s involvement in producing the animation might be the most exciting part of this reboot. It’s helmed by Abel Góngora (whose past efforts include “T0-B1” from Star Wars Visions, the infectious opening of Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!!), a longtime animator for the studio in his series directorial debut. Under the direction of Góngora, the show redraws the time capsule aesthetics and various homages of O’Malley’s comics. It’s not as visually out there as some of the studio’s or even just Góngora’s own efforts, but Takes Off is pleasingly cartoonish as it visually echoes the comics.

The show’s art style maintains O’Malley’s quirks, such as its costumes and cutesy character designs (via Shuhei Handa) with their squared-off fingers and blocky silhouettes, the very literal onomatopoeia (“leap”, “dash” etc). Takes Off is keenly interested in the different textures and homages that animation is uniquely equipped to undertake – like in an early Dezaki-inspired “postcard memory” shot, or throughout its incredibly kinetic action sequences. An early highlight sees a fight in a video store cross into the videos themselves, the scene evolving with the genre of each new tape – bouncing from Westerns to war movies to samurai films.

The show as a whole is steeped in Gen X cultural ephemera (Netflix video rental exists within the world of the show, winking but ominous given the company’s role in killing that business). Its throwback vibe is plastered all over its surface, the faded edges and restrained ratio of its flashbacks harkening back to 90s anime, some sequences framed like you dug out a dusty old video. In that same spirit, the show is bursting with homages and pastiches. The eagle-eyed will spot nods to Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken and Beck: Mongolian Chop Squad before the opening even finishes rolling. The series gets its own Mortal Kombat theme. Even the “anime-girl-is-late-for-school-so-she-runs-out-of-the-house-with-toast-in-her-mouth” trope makes an appearance in an extended sequence, as two characters watch anime videos in a depressed stupor. As it rewrites the story of Scott Pilgrim and Ramona, it’s the main source of nostalgia that the show allows itself.

By veering so far off the beaten path, Takes Off renews a gratifying sense of spontaneity and unpredictability that made O’Malley’s comics so fun to follow. The voice performances may not be entirely up to scratch, but those rough spots are outweighed by the show’s overall energy and sense of invention. It’s not just nostalgically circling back to the beginning like so many franchises are wont to do (a new trailer for a live-action remake of Avatar: The Last Airbender just came out). The status quo is different, the mission of the season is different, and the relationships between these characters also go through a new kind of metamorphosis as a result.

That doesn’t mean it throws everything out: O’Malley and Grabinski take the story on a new path before bringing it full circle – it was first inspired by a song by Plumtree, and so the series ends with it too. The original comics were inspired by anime and manga, and here it is as an anime series. Scott Pilgrim Takes Off gets to have it both ways, as a victory lap for a vastly beloved comic book, and as a chance for a coming-of-age series to come of age itself.

In the new Showtime series The Curse, spouses-cum-real-estate-disruptors Asher and Whitney Siegel (Nathan Fielder and Emma Stone) set out to save the environment with carbon-neutral “passive houses” that generate as much energy as they use. An entirely mirrored exterior captures sunlight and converts it to power — though a technician mentions that this could be accomplished with less conspicuous siding — while symbolically reflecting back the community of New Mexican border suburb Española, an idea Whitney insists she did not steal from an artist who did the same thing in the woods.

Never mind that sticking gigantic mirrors in the desert redirects blinding beams of light toward all who pass them, or that birds keep killing themselves by flying into its hard-to-see walls. The prohibitive cost of this solution intended for low-income locals makes it impractical to anybody but the wealthy, which Ash and Whit offset using the budget from their in-development HGTV pilot Flipanthropy as a stopgap fix. This won’t help much with the bigger problem, but for the sake of their camera, the appearance of having done something counts for more than actually doing it.

The difference between real and fake things has long nipped at the back of Fielder’s mind – an idea he’s locked onto with laser focus over the past decade. In Nathan For You, he played a self-parody with nothing on the inside, trying to fill a hollow life with elaborate ruses constructed for — or at the expense of — normal people; The Rehearsal filled a studio soundstage and a plot of land with hermetically sealed artifice, a facsimile of real life undermined by the total mediation of the unruly, unpredictable factors that make us human. Aided by a fully-scripted format at once eschewing the fiction/nonfiction hybridization of these early works and thematically addressing it, The Curse expands scope to throw a thin coat of betterment over an entire town or perhaps America, positing the empty theatre of goodwill outreach as a defining piece of the national heritage.

That Whit and Ash’s morally specious schemes put them at awkward, exploitative angles with the area’s Latino and Black populations joins Fielder’s interests with those of co-creator Benny Safdie (who also dons an unsightly goatee as the ethically bankrupt producer of the show within the show), dedicated assessor of how much misbehavior white people can get away with under cover of privilege. Amidst some admirably bizarre set pieces involving micropenises and cuckoldry fetishism, the series mines humor from the tension between liberal pieties and the difficulty — some economically unavoidable, some self-inflicted out of pettiness or cowardice — of putting them into practice.

This couple is undone by their vanity, the financial and personal imperative to be seen performing virtue that drives them to turn a camera on themselves. They can gussy up the pig of capitalism with as much charitable lipstick as they like, but the footage mercilessly punctures their image of themselves as decent people and tantalizes them with the option of sanitization through editing. Though the elisions and selective framings still leave behind an unsettling phoniness, as in the excruciating showstopper that sees Whit try in vain to recreate a candid moment of funny intimacy with Ash from a minute earlier for her Instagram following.

The mirrors on their houses distort faces into Cubist mockeries, showing the inner deformities of character that worsen as this pair of halfhearted humanitarians commit to their doomed bit. It’s a telling flourish, and representative of an overall tone close to eerie surrealism, conveyed most palpably by the sinuous, foreboding music courtesy of Safdie regular Daniel Lopatin. More than an incisive deconstruction of reality TV or a critique of incentive-chasing green developing initiatives, more than a diamond of demented hilarity, it’s a major leap forward for the most vital artist currently on the small screen.

At some point or another, while scrolling through YouTube, it’s likely you’ll come across a new trailer for an upcoming film that you’re desperate to watch. Backed by a bona fide banner, a verified account handle and millions of views, you hammer the touchpad. You watch it. And, well, if the creator has done a good job, that’s all, folks.

Truth is: you’ve been flickrolled.

See, the trailer was totally fake. Perhaps, if you have an eye for the ersatz, keep tabs on the film release calendar or just scroll down to the comments, then you’ll have realised that it was all just one big tease – a fake, fan-made trailer. The culprits? The concept trailer community – a coterie of creatives making unofficial trailers for upcoming (or even non-existent) films and posting them online for everyone to see and, perhaps sometimes, believe.

Pretty much every major commercial film now gets the trickster trailer treatment. YouTube is stuffed with them; right now, there are scores of superhero sequel teasers (with a particular focus on the tangled web of Spider-Man spin-offs) plus a load of Netflix prototypes (including a freshly-inked Squid Game 2). Sure, you’re less likely to find the new A24 mapped out – but it’s playing to a crowd of video game, animation and action fanatics, marvelling at imagined plot twists. They’re also genuinely well-made.

It all began ten years ago with Smasher, a YouTube channel started by freelance video editor Rob Long. “I’ve always had an affinity for modern trailers, so the ability to then create my own and watch people react to something I made will always be an amazing feeling,” he explains. While Long is wary of those jumping on the concept trailer bandwagon for the wrong reasons and those rushing out ideas, he recognises there’s a lot of talent out there.

For a long time, Long was pretty much by himself; soon, though, successors assembled, including Teaser PRO. Started by friends Vladimir and Ivan, it began due to the friends’ shared love of movie trailers while growing up. Recounting a story worthy of a big-screen Bildungsroman, Vladimir remembers making films on the video editor of his first phone – a Nokia 5228 – creating trailer-like montages to entertain his friends, before getting his first computer. Inspired by a GTA 6 parody, the duo went into production.

Take one? A trashy trailer for The Force Awakens. “We created a mask for the main villain, made a costume, and started shooting. However, when we started editing, we realised that what we had filmed was terrible and didn’t look serious at all,” he said. Instead, they decided to splice together existing clips from movies set in space, backed by research of past comics and theory videos – their subs skyrocketed. After that followed a version of Marvel’s Avengers: Infinity War – to date it’s clocked up 19 million views.

Now, some platforms are using the concept trailer as a content stream rather than their soul output. “I began experimenting with the actual concept trailer aspect around December of 2020,” says Connor, owner of the pop culture platform SLUURP. Starting by stitching together a Lilo and Stitch concept trailer that was well-received, Connor continued with a focus on video game movies. “It’s definitely become more competitive since I first dipped my toes into this world; every day it seems a new concept trailer channel emerges,” he says.

So how do you make a blockbuster fake trailer? “We brainstorm the plot for the future film based on what has already happened in the previous instalment and try to come up with a logical and original continuation of the story,” Vladimir says. Then, you’ve got to source your material. “We study the cast of the future film (if available), review their filmographies, and compile a list of movies or TV shows where suitable footage or lines may be found,” he continues.

For Connor, it’s paramount to choose scenes that aren’t particularly well known, explaining he didn’t pick the iconic Buzz and Woody flying moment for his Toy Story 5 trailer. “In the trailers I personally edit, I have a preference against using highly recognizable scenes or sequences from other films…my goal is always to immerse the audience, making them feel like they’re watching a teaser for an entirely new film,” he says.

Then it’s time to edit. “We need to connect hundreds of unrelated clips from different movies and give them an entirely new meaning, making the video look concise and feel like a coherent work that reflects our original idea of what the movie might look like,” Vladmir says, explaining that they use colour correction and masking to cut out characters, extract lines from other movies to create new dialogues and ensure that the music syncs up.

As expected, there’s a lot of sitting in your abode, alone, on Adobe. “I basically sit at my desk and replay the same two seconds of my editing timeline over and over again until I think it looks and sounds right,” Long says.

The advent of AI is playing a role in this process. While both the Writers Guild of America strike, which has just ended, and the SAG-AFTRA strike, which has just begun, have been used to express concerns surrounding AI, fake trailer creators are experimenting with its endless possibilities. Long, for example, is using it to create thumbs-uppable thumbnails and Vladimir is utilising it to enhance video quality up to 4K, while Connor is using AI to speed up the editing process. “It allows for intricate audio isolation and character extraction, which has been a game-changer,” he says.

Does it threaten their own art form? “I can’t say how things will be down the line, maybe people will be able to just auto-generate trailers entirely?” Long questions. “Given the rapid advancements, I wouldn’t be surprised if the near future sees us transition from concept trailers to full-blown concept films!” Connor says. Already, AI is allowing creators to make trailers for movies that aren’t even based on any sort of existing franchise, as with Genesis, a fake film teaser that caused a stir in the summer created by a product designer on his laptop. “We’ve noticed that some less conscientious creators, who don’t put much effort into their work, were among the first to adopt such services because they allow for the rapid creation of numerous similar videos,” Vladimir says warily. “I believe that AI is an excellent tool that enables incredible things in just a matter of seconds, but it all depends on how and for what purposes it is used.”

This artifice of artificial intelligence, along with the community learning on the job, means that these concept trailers are getting more convincing. Do the creators actually want to fool people? “In the early days, I was admittedly irritated when people would comment “FAKE!” I would genuinely put a lot of effort into creating these concepts. But it doesn’t bother me anymore,” says Connor, who is clear that he’s not aiming to punk viewers.

“Some creators in our niche label their videos as ‘Official Trailer’ or omit the word ‘Concept’, which I find can be misleading. It’s easy to see why viewers might feel deceived,” he continues. Vladimir and Long agree, emphasising the importance of making it clear that it’s not the real thing; though many people still don’t notice. They also all note that, because of the need to use existing clips through YouTube’s fair use policy, it’s hard to make a profit.

Most of these creators, though, aren’t staring wide-eyed at their screen into the wee hours to make big bucks; instead, it’s for the love of it all. In return, eager-eyed viewers get to enjoy one possible universe in their multiverse. “The feedback I cherish most is when viewers comment that they genuinely believed they were watching the real trailer, or they express hope that the official film follows the narrative we’ve crafted,” Connor says. “It’s an indicator that we’ve hit the mark. At the heart of it, our trailers give fans a fun glimpse into what could be,” he continues.

Long is similarly moved. “There are reactions to my videos on YouTube where viewers have actually openly cried, jumped up out of their seats from excitement or just been left with a calm sense of appreciation. Every reaction means so much to me,” he says.

Could it be, perhaps, that alongside the many viewers indulging in fantasy, real-life movie producers are taking notes? Are these trailers a form of trial-and-error for possible plots? “There have been instances where official trailers dropped, and I couldn’t help but side-eye! At times there have been striking similarities to our concept trailers from months or even years prior,” Connor laughs.

“Sometimes, the resemblance is uncanny enough to make me think that perhaps the official editor took a peek at our work. Now, if the next Jurassic World movie has ‘Extinction’ in the title, I’m definitely staking a claim on that inspiration!” he continues. Long, meanwhile, thinks that his viral Friends: The Movie trailer, which gained 100 million views and worldwide media attention in 2018, may have sparked the reunion event; Vladimir similarly claims his viral I Am Legend 2 trailer catalysed Warner Bros to commission the sequel.

Either way, the concept trailer community has made its mark on the movies. While more pretentious cinephiles may see them as a sort of cheap magic trick, these phoney trailers are far from phoned in. Looking back on it all, in his own sepia-tinged flashback, Vladimir remembers Teaser PRO’s original aim: two film-obsessed kids looking to impress their friends and enter the world of entertainment. It’s clear his fantasy has become reality.

“When we started taking this seriously, our dream was to eventually create real movie trailers and take orders from studios,” he says. “I think that by making our trailers, we wanted to touch the world of cinema, even if only a little bit.”

If you don’t know what you want to do with your life by the time you’ve left your teens, you might get the feeling that you’re somehow falling behind. Despite the fact that you’re still pretty young, society expects you to have it all worked out: the degree, the career, the full five-year plan. Often an unattainable goal, the pressure leaves many feeling lost and directionless from an early age.

This phenomenon is something thoroughly explored in FX’s sleeper hit The Bear. In season one, we’re introduced to Carmen ‘Carmy’ Berzatto (Jeremy Allen-White) and Sydney ‘Syd’ Adamu (Ayo Edebiri) who have, on paper, managed to achieve this almost impossible feat. Carmy has won a James Beard Award and is widely regarded as an up-and-coming presence in the culinary world. Syd, a Culinary Institute of America graduate, has already had a bittersweet taste of success – the catering business she established failed in part due to overdemand for her services.

Young, talented and sure of their paths from a young age, successful both academically and practically, and passionate about their work, it would be easy to assume that Carmy and Syd would be happy. But this is The Bear, and although the show allows itself occasional moments of fantasy (how did the money get into the tomato cans?!) the show is grounded in reality – where achieving your dreams presents a new set of nightmares.

Carmy, in particular, is miserable. Aside from the fact that his family’s a mess and the restaurant industry is floundering, he ends up unable to truly enjoy what he does. He’s under constant pressure to exceed himself, talking to Syd about the “panic” he felt after receiving three Michelin stars in New York: ”Your brain bypasses any sense of joy and just attaches itself to dread,” he recalls. Now that he’s achieved this goal, expectations rise and the fall from the top will only be more devastating. Success at a young age has left him in a constant state of anxiety, fearful that everything he’s built for himself could crumble in seconds.

Flashbacks and references to his time as a chef in New York are a horror story of anxiety and insecurity. Despite knowing just how damaging this level of dedication is, Carmy passes on the necessity of entire devotion to the restaurant to Syd. Without it, he assures her, the Michelin star that she dreams of is impossible. The younger chef already mirrors Carmy’s anxious tendencies, giving a concerning glimpse of what may lie ahead for her character.

Amidst the chaos of the restaurant refit, cousin-to-all Richie (Ebon Moss-Bacharach) questions Carmy on his body-and-soul commitment to his career: “You love it,” he says, to which Carmy replies, “Yeah, but it’s not fun for me.” There’s so much pressure on him to exceed the standards he has set for himself that much of the actual joy of cooking is gone, replaced by obligation and the need to live up to others’ expectations. “I don’t need to provide amusement or enjoyment. I don’t need to receive any amusement or enjoyment,” he says in his final, heartbreaking monologue of the season. “I’m completely fine with that. Because no amount of good is worth how terrible this feels.” Making it this far on the path to success has come at the cost of everything else – a personal life, well-being and happiness. Allowing himself those things now would undermine the myriad sacrifices he’s made.

While Carmy and Syd are dogged by the fear of failure and are constantly trying to outdo their past selves (whether through business success or culinary prowess), other members of the team approach their work from a different angle. Although they all have a vested interest in the restaurant’s success (neatly illustrated in episode eight’s montage), they’re also discovering their passion and talent for a certain aspect of the business for the first time. Starting from the ground up, a lot of the pressure is off. They aren’t trying to live up to lofty aspirations, they’re not competing against anyone – they’re doing this work, learning and evolving because they love it.

Tina (Liza Colón-Zayas) is a prime example of this. Once a reluctant subscriber to Carmy and Syd’s strict brigade style in the kitchen, season two sees her promoted to sous chef, flourish in culinary school and be deemed worthy of one of Carmy’s special knives. Her love for culinary school is visible from the second she puts on her new chef’s whites, and her broad smile as she’s complimented on filleting a fish by a teacher and her sauce is given no notes by Syd demonstrates just how fulfilling this job is for her.

Stepping away from the stoves, Richie’s season two storyline is where the show’s message of finding purpose gets interesting. While Carmy suffers from having found his calling, Richie suffers from a lack of it. Richie finds it difficult to really understand his friend, whose unwavering passion for cooking dictates his life. This also drives some of his frequent annoyance at Carmy, the roots of which are seen in the flashback to a far-from-peaceful Berzatto Christmas (season two, episode six, ‘Fishes’). His best friend’s kid brother has his life apparently sorted out, and has moved to New York to become a big shot. Meanwhile, Richie’s relationship is showing cracks and he’s having to beg Uncle Jimmy (Oliver Platt) for a job, already fearing that he’s wasting some untapped potential.

It’s not until season two’s seventh episode that Carmy and Richie’s viewpoints align. Initially, Richie hates his work experience in a Michelin-star restaurant, forced to wake up before dawn to polish forks in an exercise that seems beyond monotonous, but once he sees that the team’s minutely meticulous work and unwaveringly bespoke service brings people pure joy, his scepticism seems to fade away.

From yet again being an outsider in a world that feels far from the one he knows, by the end of the episode Richie has forged real bonds with the staff and has found something he excels at. From his fears in the first episode that Carmy and the team will “drop this ass” once they realise his self-perceived uselessness, his departure from the restaurant is met with assurances that he is valued and will be missed. It’s one of the few times we see Richie truly happy, and presents a more positive outcome from finding one’s calling than Carmy and Syd’s anguish.

The Bear posits that not only is it never too late to start – something we’ve heard a thousand times before – but adds that starting too early could be far more damaging. Characters who have found their calling at a young age tend to end up wrecked, whereas those who find their callings later on, like Tina and Richie, thrive as a result of their newfound passions and genuinely enjoy what they do.

It’s a reassuring message for anyone who hasn’t got their life worked out before they leave their teens, but as with anything in The Bear, it’s not certain how long the positivity will last. This season’s finale sees dessert chef Marcus (Lionel Boyce) miss vital personal calls as his cooking triumphs, while Syd throws up outside after the restaurant’s friends and family opening. Whether Carmy’s fate is escapable for the rest of The Bear’s team is currently unknown, but one thing’s for sure – even if they’re having a terrible time, they’re going down doing what they love.

After four seasons, HBO’s Emmy winning comedy Barry, has come to an end, finally answering the question that has run throughout its four seasons: Can you change your nature? Bill Hader’s answer is yes – but unfortunately Hollywood doesn’t care.

Comedian and actor Hader created the show with Alec Berg (Seinfeld, Curb Your Enthusiasm), as well as starring as the titular Barry Berkman, and directing eighteen of the show’s 32 episodes. Jostling with the likes of Succession for viewers and column inches, the show has proven a critically beloved cult hit, particularly with cinephiles, which Hader attributes partly to his own viewing habits – he’s very into movies but doesn’t watch a lot of TV, and loves true crime – and his own trajectory (he moved to LA in his 20s to become a director and suffered from debilitating anxiety during his eight-year stint on American sketch show Saturday Night Live).

When we meet Barry in the show’s first season, he’s a depressed and easily manipulated ex-marine turned hitman, handled by Munroe Fuches (Stephen Root), an exploitative father figure and old family friend. When Barry winds up at Gene Cousineau’s (Henry Winkler) acting class after following a target, he decides to pursue a new life path as an actor and almost instantaneously falls in love with Sarah Goldberg’s Sally Reed. Sally’s arc is the most tragic and fully realised for a woman on TV since Skyler White on Breaking Bad, and – no disrespect to Anna Gunn – Goldberg blows every actor on both shows totally out of the water.

A decorated veteran who was discharged for shooting civilians in Afghanistan, Barry had embraced the narrative pushed by the United States during the War on Terror: that he was the good guy, excelling in his mission of killing the bad guys. In the first few episodes Barry and his fellow acting students are told by Gene to “create the reality and let the audience live there”. With this new directive, Barry believes he can recreate his life. The tension between what you’re good at and what you desire, or what you’re told to do versus what you want to do, are evident in Hader’s own journey and his SNL detour.

The hilarity of the show’s premise and the juxtaposition of one man straddling life in the shadows and in the literal spotlight immediately lends itself to an elastic tone that snaps back to the reliable twenty minute comedy formula even after scenes of sheer horror. On social media fans have debated whether Barry can still be considered a comedy, when on the awards circuit it shares category space with the saccharine Ted Lasso and the heartfelt sitcom Abbott Elementary. But the humour existed through to the biting end, though with less of Barry imitating a London accent during a shift at LuluLemon, and more in dystopian billboards from the near future displaying social media handles in lieu of actors names.

Across its 32 episodes, Barry successfully examines a myriad of complex issues such as cycles of abuse, post-traumatic stress disorder and – above all – human nature and the ego, while maintaining its novel dual format of a TV crime procedural and a showbiz satire. Initially metatextual by virtue of being a television show about Hollywood, Barry’s plot being equally crime driven means that the series becomes concerned with TV properties that tell stories like Barry’s, examining the way criminality and violence is depicted on screen.

In season one, we are introduced to the criminal underbelly of Los Angeles. Chechan gangsters (such as fan favourite NoHo Hank played by Anthony Carrigan), Bolivian gangsters and Burmese gangsters are locked in a turf war – that is to say, foreigners control the crime in America – while Barry Berkman of course, forged and unleashed by the US military, is more lethal than all of them. Is this an indictment of US imperialism or an exercise of it?

Hader, Berg and the writers (Duffy Boudreau, Taofik Kolade, Emma Barrie and Nicky Hirschhorn amongst others) show no reverence for the criminals or police alike, all are depicted as self serving idiots. Barry himself is devoid of a personality, an anonymous white man with a gun. While Barry’s actions always catalyse the criminal plot, his scenes and lines seem to diminish over the seasons – possibly a side effect of Hader’s directing duties, as well as potentially an uncomfortable reaction to women finding Barry attractive and by extension, his ruthlessly ambitious actress girlfriend intolerable.

At the end of season one, Barry kills Janice Moss (Paula Newsome), Cousineau’s girlfriend and the detective assigned to investigate the murder of Barry’s original acting class mark. By the end of season two, Fuches shows Cousineau where Barry dumped Moss’ body, in a power move to stop Barry from leaving his lucrative hitman career behind him. Throughout the second season, the writers draw parallels between Sally’s abusive relationship with her ex-husband Sam and the dynamic between Barry and Fuches. “Everyone is the hero of their own story right?” Sam and Fuches mockingly chime at their respective prey.

Before season three started shooting, the pandemic struck and the writers regrouped in Summer 2020 to write season four and subsequently rewrite season three, organising the story like a feature film as opposed to a TV show. The overarching plot (among a lot of plot) for these two seasons is Barry getting caught and charged with Moss’ murder. It most likely made sense plot wise and as a comment on the way America values human life, that Barry is finally caught for being a cop killer. But I have always wondered if in the heat of Summer 2020, the writers decided Barry should face consequences for killing a Black woman.

Would the original season three scripts extend the storyline of Janice Moss by introducing her father, Jim Moss (Robert Wisdom)? Jim Moss is also ex-military, an expert in psychological warfare and often depicted as the only intelligent character, fuelled by an unwavering white hot rage. The final shot of season three isn’t of Barry taken away in cuffs or Cousineau’s expression of shallow satisfaction, but of Jim standing on his front lawn, watching Barry’s arrest, and a framed photo of Janice by the window inside.

Racial archetypes are so well defined in American copaganda TV procedurals and slick crime films alike, it’s perhaps generous to assume the writers are commenting on these tropes rather than retreading them. But the beauty of Barry is how it elevated the crime procedural elements through its incredible stunt coordination and directing, with the season three motorcycle chase being one of the most thrilling pieces of television in years.

However damning the violence is in Barry, the surreal yet painfully authentic Hollywood satire matches its bleakness. Through Sally’s arc, we see the various ways the effects of violence manifest within a person, and we watch as she navigates Hollywood. In season three, Sally’s streamer show based on her theatre piece about her abusive marriage is cancelled the day of release. The network told her that the algorithm objected to the lack of dessert in the first thirty seconds of the show; it didn’t hit the right “taste clusters”. Natalie (D’arcy Carden), Sally’s acting class lackey and later her assistant, soon after lands a show about a dessert shop, and is cornered by Sally in an elevator and repeatedly called an “entitled cunt”. Sally’s rant goes viral, and she loses everything, culminating in a fatally violent act of her own.

In the fifth episode of season four, we are eight years into the future, after a series of Lynchian dream sequences. Sally and Barry have assumed new identities and have a child together. Their plywood house in the middle of nowhere feels like a doll’s house or movie set, and Sally resumes the role of actress complete with accent and wig, while Barry gets to reinvent himself as a good man, listening to Christian podcasts and protecting his son John from all kinds of violence, including the perils of playing baseball. Barry now has graduated to manipulator, staging intimate moments with his son (“actually, this should take place on the swing”) and recasting himself as an army medic.

Meanwhile Cousineau is back in LA and his dormant narcissism is goaded by the idea that Daniel Day Lewis wants to play him in a biopic about the murder of Janice Moss. Cousineau’s desire to be the lead character in this story leads him to talk about Barry inconsequentially and sympathetically, which in turn leads Cousineau’s own son and Jim Moss to believe Barry was a victim of his manipulation.

Through a mountain of sophisticated plot that had the potential for a dozen loose ends, the finale wraps up masterfully. NoHo Hank, whose arc deserves an exploration of its own, confronts the evil he has done and gets a heartbreaking Tony Montana style death. Fuches, the most consistent villain of the show, is the only one who gets a semblance of true redemption, while Barry finally chooses to do the right thing and turn himself in before he is shot dead by Cousineau. Jim Moss believes he has justice for his daughter now that Gene Cousineau is spending life in prison, and Sally Reed is an acting teacher, living her authentic life with her son.

The final few minutes of Barry show John Berkman watching a schlocky true crime recreation of his father’s life as a war hero – the kind of show Barry could have been, and one that has existed for decades on American TV. Cousineau is played by a hammy English actor and Jim Cummings plays heart-of-gold ex-marine Barry Berkman, tasked with protecting LA from Cousineau’s criminal dealings with Russian gangsters. Nothing, especially not the truth, gets in the way of Hollywood’s compulsive desire to heroically mythologise the violent white American male.

The blistering final season speaks to a consistent truth: Barry is an angry show. It seethes with rage at how unremarkable violence has seemingly become in America and American media, and how resigned filmmaking is to the whims of big tech, artistry now second to the algorithm. It’s a show about writing, acting and directing, all of which rely on a level of dishonest reinvention and narcissistic control. While the show has faith that even the most violent among us can change for the better, it has no such faith in Hollywood.

To this day, I cannot cross a one-way street without looking both ways first. Rationally, I know that I have never encountered a car speeding the wrong way down a one-way street in my own life. Still, evidence or logic hasn’t been enough across three decades to counteract the gruesome advice given out at a primary school assembly. My entire year group was told to always look both ways when crossing the street, especially if it was one-way, as drunk drivers are known to speed down them the wrong way and kill children.

As an adult, I can see that this chilling mix of blunt and perhaps overprotective advice is born out of a mixture of care, fear, and maybe just a pinch of covering your own back as a teacher. The long-term effect that this and other precautionary tales had on my psyche have burrowed into my daily adult life. Although verbal tales may have had an impact, the moving image can be even more powerful. If you grew up in the United Kingdom, footage of water poured on a chip pan fire is probably conjured immediately to mind, or the memory of that one episode of 999 with the foolish kid with fireworks in his pocket.

Released in 2020, the BFI’s The Best of COI: Five Decades of Public Information Films Blu-ray collection was a gateway drug into the world of some of the notorious public information films. Established in 1946, the COI (Central Office of Information) produced and distributed thousands of informational shorts like Charley’s March of Time (1948), an animated explanation of the benefits of paying National Insurance, and Design for Today (1965), a visual tribute to the elegance and ingenuity of everyday design. That’s all well and good, but it’s the COI’s warnings about everyday peril and danger that truly fascinate.

Whatever generation you’re from, the COI films undoubtedly hold familiar characters; Dave Prowse as the Green Cross Code Man, Joe and Petunia, Tufty the Squirrel, or Charley the (barely) talking cat. These helpful heroes and comedy characters provided helpful advice on subjects including crossing the road, telling your Mum where you’re going, or calling the coastguard. But why take a soft approach to safety when you can scare the sensible into the next generation with some of the most effective horror shorts of all time?

1973 may have been the year of The Exorcist and Don’t Look Now, but it’s in the short form that some of the year’s most terrifying horror was produced. 1973’s The Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water (commonly known as Lonely Water) is a 90-second masterclass of terror. A Bergmanesque, faceless Grim Reaper voiced by Donald Pleasance delights in how easy it is for children to drown in natural bodies of water.

A blunt and unflinching approach to visualised catastrophe alongside a horrific villain, this particular film is used as a case study on the lasting impression left by the COI films in Andrés Rothschild’s Into Lonely Water. Talking to luminaries including horror aficionado Kim Newman, it is obvious that 50 years on, the clip is far from forgotten. Placing in the top 75 of Channel 4’s 100 Greatest Scary Moments in 2003, Lonely Water has found a new audience in the internet age with 231,000 views on the BFI YouTube channel at the time of writing.

If the intent of a public information film is to imprint on the young mind in a short space of time, the COI filmmakers were particularly inventive. Efficiency is key to the most chilling of the COI films, and 1973’s Sewing Machine employs an on-screen countdown of 60 seconds while a mother busies herself with sewing. The reveal is that the timer is counting down the final minute of her daughter’s life, as another chilling voiceover reminds the audience to keep watch over children when they’re near traffic. 1975’s Grain Drain is a perfect example of the use of visual metaphor; a doll is used to demonstrate how easy it would be to suffocate in the quicksand of a grain silo, featuring a harrowing vision as the fake body disappears.

Perhaps the master of the COI horror form was John Mackenzie,  best known for later directing the bombastic Bob Hoskins gangster classic, The Long Good Friday. A few years prior, Mackenzie directed one of his masterworks, 1977’s Apaches. Having grown up near farmland, it is a film that I thankfully saw for the first time as an adult, thanks to a curious recommendation in Edgar Wright’s 1000 Favourite Movies list. An expansion of the farm-horror sub-genre, Apaches is a veritable Faces of Death of fatal farmyard hazards to children.

An epic opening shot displays a group of silhouetted children emerging over the horizon. The kids are out to play and choose to make the local farm the site of their games. Inspired by TV and films, the children play cops and robbers and the rather outdated ‘Cowboys and Indians’ that inspires the title of the film. Aside from their lack of sensitive representation, the children are used as a precautionary tale of playing in and around the dangerous farm. Their punishment is being dispatched one by one in a string of death sequences worthy of any horror classic.

The surprisingly gruesome child deaths include being crushed, a particularly harrowing poisoning, and perhaps the most infamous of all, a boy who slips and drowns in a pool of pig faeces. It is a relentlessly bleak precursor to Final Destination as the tension and expectation of how and when the next child is going to be killed builds, with Mackenzie even throwing in red herrings like moving vehicles and meat hooks. Tense, suspenseful, shocking and macabre, in 21 minutes, Apaches achieves more than most horror feature films and most certainly leaves a viewer unlikely to play in a barn.

Even after feature film success with The Long Good Friday, Mackenzie would return to helm Say No to Strangers (1981), an entry into the Stranger Danger sub-genre of leary men in cars offering sweets and promises of kittens and puppies to children outside of school grounds. It’s an impressively star-studded affair in retrospect featuring Brenda Blethyn, Bernard Hill, and even Timothy Spall as a Rubik’s Cube-juggling perv. It’s another psychological chiller, albeit one less gruesome than Apaches.

TV’s Duncan Preston abducts a young girl, and as her distraught parents work with police to search for her, the film presents a series of scenarios in which children must decide whether the on-screen kiddies are right or wrong. Should they accept money from a man in the park? Should they tell the police that Timothy Spall is way too old to be hanging around with young kids? Once these questions are asked, thankfully the young girl is returned home safely.

However, considering the film is aimed directly at children, it is the film’s final scene that goes full-tilt horror. As Preston drives around looking for a new target, the narrator delivers the chillingly blunt final line: “You don’t want to end up dead or in hospital. You know what to do: say NO to strangers!” As the narrator speaks, Preston looks directly into the camera, and the film freeze-frames capturing his menacing stare. Pure nightmare fuel.

The closure of the COI at the end of 2011 saw the official end to this filmic factory of horrors. One can’t help but wonder how terrifying they might have made public safety films about COVID, vaping, or meeting strangers on Minecraft. It is rare these days for a modern horror film to keep me awake at night, yet Apaches and the childhood trauma of info-terror continue to live in my mind rent-free.