Michael Walters

Welcome!

This is my little word garden on the internet—Michael Walters, author (it’s true!). I have a speculative fiction novel, THE COMPLEX, out with Salt Publishing, and I’m deep in the writing of a follow-up. I would love it if you gave it a try.

I use Bluesky to connect with people, Letterboxd to track films, and StoryGraph to track books. Follow me and say hello in all those places.

And if you want more of my thoughts on writing in particular, you can subscribe to my posts on PATREON. There’s a Weird and Wonderful tier if you want to support me with a donation, and that now includes notes on the novels I’m reading, but I post regularly to all patrons.

• FILMS IN ALL CAPS (C if in cinema)
• Books, by author, on end date (with start date)

Here’s my list for 2023:

• 01.01 THE CONVERSATION
• 10.01 JOAN DIDION: THE CENTER WILL NOT HOLD
• 12.01 THE VELVET UNDERGROUND
• 14.01 THE BATMAN
• 19.01 LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD
• 21.01 THE MENU
• 25.01 BLUE THUNDER
• 29.01 The Day of the Triffids, John Wyndham (18.01)
• 30.01 THE CHINA SYNDROME
• 01.02 HARRY DEAN STANTON: PARTLY FICTION
• 02.02 M3GAN (C)
• 04.02 AFTERSUN
• 06.02 SR.
• 09.02 SUMMER OF SOUL
• 11.02 WORLD WAR Z; DIE HARD
• 14.02 SIBYL
• 17.02 BULLET TRAIN
• 18.02 JURASSIC WORLD: DOMINION
• 23.02 FIRE OF LOVE; BARBARIAN
• 26.02 JADE
• 27.02 The Drowned World, J.G. Ballard (02.02)
• 02.03 ORCHESTRATOR OF STORMS: THE FANTASTIQUE WORLD OF JEAN ROLLIN
• 04.03 STARSHIP TROOPERS; THE GAME
• 05.03 THE SWIMMER (1968)
• 07.03 8½
• 10.03 OFFICIAL COMPETITION
• 11.03 WE’RE ALL GOING TO THE WORLD’S FAIR
• 15.03 SPASMO
• 19.03 EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE
• 20.03 Weather, Jenny Offil (03.03)
• 24.03 THE HAUNTING OF MARGAM CASTLE
• 24.03 GLASTONBURY THE MOVIE IN FLASHBACK
• 26.03 THE LAIR
• 26.03 Hour of the Star, Clarice Lispector (22.03)
• 27.03 SAVAGE DAWN
• 29.03 NIGHTMARE AT NOON
• 01.04 THE MATRIX RESURRECTIONS
• 03.04 BARTON FINK
• 09.04 KING COHEN: THE WILD WORLD OF FILMMAKER LARRY COHEN
• 10.04 JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 4 (C)
• 11.04 A Study in Scarlet, Arthur Conan Doyle (23.03)
• 12.04 LA NOTTE
• 15.04 SAINT JACK
• 16.04 RENFIELD (C)
• 17.04 MOONAGE DAYDREAM
• 18.04 PIECES
• 29.04 STUTZ; TREMORS 2: AFTERSHOCKS
• 01.05 JURASSIC PARK
• 06.05 EASY RIDERS, RAGING BULLS
• 07.05 DUNE (2021)
• 12.05 BATMAN
• 13.05 BATMAN RETURNS
• 16.05 THE RELIC
• 17.05 Play It As It Lays, Joan Didion (15.05)
• 19.05 THE EQUALIZER
• 20.05 THE EQUALIZER 2
• 21.05 HEAT (C)
• 28.05 FIGHT CLUB (C)
• 29.05 LETHAL WEAPON; Dreams of Sleep, Josephine Humphreys (23.05)
• 02.06 SPIDER-MAN: ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE (C)
• 03.06 HAYWIRE
• 04.06 DÉJÀ VU
• 10.06 CONFESS, FLETCH; PLUNGING ON ALONE: MONTE HELLMAN’S LIFE IN A DAY; The Bloater, Rosemary Tonks (07.06)
• 11.06 THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (C)
• 12.06 THE OUTFIT
• 15.06 No One is Talking About This, Patricia Lockwood (14.06)
• 17.06 CLUE
• 17.06 THE FLASH (C)
• 23.06 Scent of a City, Aki Gibbons (18.06)
• 24.06 ASTEROID CITY (C); The Midwich Cuckoos, John Wyndham (21.06)
• 25.06 THE ADVENTURES OF PRISCILLA, QUEEN OF THE DESERT (C)
• 30.06 EXTRACTION
• 01.07 EXTRACTION 2
• 06.07 ASTEROID CITY (C)
• 08.07 ELEMENTAL (C)
• 09.07 INDIANA JONES AND THE DIAL OF DESTINY (C)
• 11.07 MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – DEAD RECKONING PART ONE (C)
• 15.07 THE FUGITIVE
• 16.07 THE BIG LEBOWSKI (C)
• 20.07 MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – DEAD RECKONING PART ONE (C)
• 22.07 BARBIE (C)
• 23.07 BERGMAN ISLAND; What About Men, Caitlin Moran (23.07)
• 24.07 LA DOLCE VITA
• 30.07 SOME LIKE IT HOT (C)
• 04.08 JAWS
• 06.08 MEG 2: THE TRENCH (C)
• 12.08 DUNGEONS & DRAGONS: HONOR AMONG THIEVES
• 14.08 ONE FINE MORNING
• 15.08 DEEP BLUE SEA 3
• 16.08 FATHER OF MY CHILDREN; SHARKSPLOITATION
• 18.08 AFTER YANG
• 19.08 [REC] 3: GENESIS; OPPENHEIMER (C); Eastmouth and Other Stories, Alison Moore (02.08)
• 21.08 [REC] 4: APOCALYPSE
• 25.08 GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES; THEATER CAMP (C)
• 27.08 Losing Track, Imogen Reid (25.08)
• 03.09 THE EQUALIZER 3 (C)
• 04.09 Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
• 05.09 SMILE
• 09.09 PAST LIVES (C)
• 10.09 INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS (C)
• 11.09 The Memory Police, Yōko Ogawa
• 13.09 AN IMPOSSIBLE PROJECT
• 16.09 A HAUNTING IN VENICE (C)
• 17.09 THE CURSED
• 18.09 THE BROKEN
• 19.09 DIARY OF THE DEAD
• 20.09 SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD
• 23.09 EYE IN THE LABYRINTH; STRIP NUDE FOR YOUR KILLER
• 24.09 THE EXORCIST III; THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA (C)
• 25.09 THE PALE BLUE EYE
• 30.09 65
• 02.10 RE-ANIMATOR
• 04.10 THERE’S NOTHING OUT THERE
• 06.10 CASTLE FREAK
• 07.10 SCREAM
• 07.10 SCREAM VI
• 08.10 THE CREATOR (C)
• 09.10 DEATH SHIP
• 10.10 SLUGS
• 11.10 THE LAIR OF THE WHITE WORM
• 12.10 CRIMES OF THE FUTURE
• 14.10 DON’T LOOK NOW (C)
• 15.10 MESSIAH OF EVIL
• 17.10 INFINITY POOL
• 18.10 LIFEFORCE
• 18.10 THE RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD
• 20.10 DUEL
• 20.10 EVIL DEAD II
• 21.10 INVADERS FROM MARS
• 22.10 YOU’RE NEXT
• 24.10 CLOVERFIELD
• 27.09 Sea State, Tabitha Lasley (23.09)
• 28.10 THE KILLER (C)
• 29.10 ENEMY
• 31.10 HALLOWEEN; Brother of the More Famous Jack, Barbara Trapido (27.09)
• 04.11 THE SOUVENIR: PART II
• 11.11 THE MARVELS (C)
• 12.11 DREAM SCENARIO (C)
• 17.11 SALTBURN (C)
• 19.11 THE HUNGER GAMES: THE BALLAD OF SONGBIRDS & SNAKES (C)
• 27.11 THE KILLER
• 28.11 6 UNDERGROUND
• 29.11 LAKE PLACID
• 30.11 MICHAEL CLAYTON
• 03.12 LOVE ACTUALLY (C)
• 09.12 SIBERIA
• 10.12 THE HOLIDAY (C)
• 11.12 SHOWING UP
• 15.12 WONKA (C)
• 16.12 Children of Paradise, Camilla Grudova (15.12)
• 24.12 PUSS IN BOOTS: THE LAST WISH
• 25.12 SHERLOCK HOLMES (2009)
• 26.12 FERRARI (C)
• 29.12 My Phantoms, Gwendoline Riley (27.12)
• 31.12 RETURN TO SEOUL

31DaysofBlackXmas2024 DarioArgento SeenRead 31DaysofHorror2023 DavidLynch 31DaysofHorror2021

Using my Letterboxd stats, I have an excellent view of every film I’ve watched this year, as well as a score for each. (In hindsight, I disagree with some scores, but that’s the risk when you give a rating in the heat of the moment.)

I watched 148 films, three of them twice (Asteroid City, The Killer, Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part 1). I gave thirty films 5 stars and only two films 1 star (Deep Blue Sea 3, The Haunting of Margam Castle). I skew high because I choose films I’m probably going to like. I also gave 30 films a heart, some of which were not 5-star films (Bergman Island, An Impossible Project, Lake Placid, The Lair of the White Worm, Pieces, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, The Game)

Anyway, here are my ten favourite film discoveries of 2023:

1. Asteroid City
2. The Killer
3. The Souvenir: Part 2
4. The Menu
5. Aftersun
6. Enemy
7. The Relic
8. Last Year at Marianbad
9. Moonage Daydream
10. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

I’m surprised how many of those are films that came out in 2023, considering the range of films I’ve seen this year.

And with less sexy stats available, my ten favourite books (in order of reading, not preference):

• The Day of the Triffids, John Wyndham
• Play It As It Lays, Joan Didion
• Dreams of Sleep, Josephine Humphreys
• The Bloater, Rosemary Tonks
• Scent of a City, Aki Gibbons
• Eastmouth and Other Stories, Alison Moore
• Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
• Brother of the More Famous Jack, Barbara Trapido
• Children of Paradise, Camilla Grudova
• My Phantoms, Gwendoline Riley

Somehow the year has tightened all the bolts on my rickety life, and I’m hitting the Christmas holidays in a good place. Dad is home from hospital with home care support — that didn’t look likely a week ago. My new job is going well. All the usual Christmas tasks are done or planned. It’s Christmas Eve. The kids are home and happy.

We won’t have my father-in-law at the table for dinner tomorrow, which is still difficult to fathom, and will only hit fully when we sit to eat. It’s been a difficult year all round, but that’s the biggest blow by far. And yet we are all okay, fundamentally. We are coping and looking after each other. This is part of life.

I haven’t written any new fiction this year, so my Patreon account has lost its way. The idea was to create a channel for publishing short stories, blog posts and photos to a smaller audience. I’m no longer sure I want to write stories. I’ll always write, I just need to think about what I want to write. I’ve had to step back from it this year, so it makes sense to look at the bigger picture and decide what I want to put my creative energy into in 2024. I posted a thank you and farewell, and I’ll delete the account before the next subscription payments are taken on January 1st.

I’m going to publish a ‘Seen, Read’ list for 2023 next week, and also some lists of my favourite films and books. There’s a week of 2023 to go, so there could still be some surprises. These lists help me tie the year off and look ahead. I hope you have some time to do whatever you need to do to feel good about the end of the year, or at least good enough. Happy Christmas. 🎄🕯️🕊️

The year keeps passing me surprises. Last week I was celebrating a new job back at my old employer, and I was looking forward to an unexpected week’s holiday before starting, then my father fell at home and went into hospital, and now I’m going to be living with him for a week to (fingers crossed) get him back on his feet. It’s like the universe lined my free week up for this task.

The transition between jobs, and sectors, from consultancy back to higher education, is an opportunity to reflect. I want to light a fire under my writing projects, and while I can’t say consultancy was bad for my writing, because I wasn’t writing before that either, getting that job did prioritise my tech career. Work consumed my attention in ways I didn’t expect. The pace, complexity and cultural differences filled my brain with unprocessed material that I had to diligently chug through during evenings and weekends.

In the strange weeks after handing my notice in, I found myself (once again) casting a net over all my creative interests. Guitar! Piano! German! Cooking! Coding! Reading! Writing! Yoga! I picked up Four Thousand Weeks: Time and How to Use It, by Oliver Burkeman, which I’d read before, and Zen Guitar, by Philip Toshio Sudo, a book that I’ve owned for twenty-five years and never read from cover to cover.

Zen Guitar is slim and conversational, but has a faintly formal tone that suits the subject matter. It applies principles of zen to learning guitar — doing things with the right spirit, from the inside out. Burkeman is funnier, taking apart the modern cult of time management and railing against the endless distractions we take up to avoid the work we want to do. We can imagine infinite possibilities for ourselves, but we have limited time, and we can only walk one path in the unknowable amount of it we have left to live.

Back in 2000, on telling my grandfather I was moving to London for a new job, he told me that he didn’t care what I did, as long as I did it well. I didn’t know then that he was in the final weeks of his life. That advice was sound, and moving coming from him then, but it bothered me, and I didn’t know why. I’ve come to know that doing things well is important, yes, but doing the right thing is more important. He gave me one piece of a two-piece puzzle.

After a rough year (which isn’t over yet), I’m setting myself up to do more of the right things in 2024. And why not try to do them well? It’s getting late. I want to make my ghosts happy.

I was caught in a work storm for a few months over the summer. Things settled enough for me to take a small risk, which paid off, and this, along with a tremendous lucky break, means I am finally able to tack for calmer waters. I’m being deliberately opaque. I’m sitting in relief’s front pocket like a joey in his mother’s pouch. Brief bliss.

That’s one part of my life. In another my father-in-law died. My wife went to live with her mother in his final weeks to help tend to him. Another storm, separate but overlapping, that eventually blew itself out. The hole where he was is stark, but he’s no longer suffering. It went from a small lump in June, to radiotherapy in August, to palliative care in September, to gone. The nurses had never seen anything like the wound on his neck that grew big enough to swallow him. Nature can be brutal.

He lived a full life and fought for it to his last breath. His death brought a different flavour of relief. I have my life partner back. We haven’t lived apart that long in the twenty-three years we’ve been together.

When you’re fighting to keep your ship afloat, you’re not thinking much beyond the next hour, the next day. Calmer waters means time to look after yourself. I’ve been limping around with a ridiculous injury that I’ve carried for over a year that I made worse with golf lessons. Golf! The least taxing of all outdoor sports! (I was wrong.) Deep gluteal syndrome. Too much sitting down, a lack of glute strength in general, and one side weaker than the other equals excruciating cramp in my right buttock. It’s funny when it’s not hurting. I found a physio and I’m doing the exercises. This was the third storm.

The final quadrant of my life, writing, is becalmed. (Work, family, health, writing - yes, four.) How could it not be with every other part in flames? Instead of writing, or even reading, I chose to lose myself in horror films instead. This worked well. It was soothing. Unreal.

This is what I wish for in 2024. I want to be fit and healthy again. I want my family to be well. I want work to be stimulating, but not overwhelming, which will allow time to stir the embers of my writing. The novel hasn’t gone away. I can feel energy for it. I want the words to flow. It’s sad that it feels like a luxury, or even a privilege, to be excited about life. I do appreciate it. I’m excited again!

Director: John Carpenter

In Haddonfield, on Halloween night 1963, the young Michael Myers, after watching his sister make out with her boyfriend, stabs her to death with a kitchen knife and is locked away. Fifteen years later he escapes and returns to his empty family home. His doctor, Loomis, gives chase, but Myers has already taken an interest in a young high school student, Laurie Strode, and her friends Lynda and Annie. He steals a mask, a kitchen knife and some rope, and sets about a night of multiple murders.

And so I return to where this horror project began, seven years ago, in October 2016, when I decided to watch a few horror films to get me in the seasonal mood. It has a purity that other slashers don’t have — the crisp cinematography, Laurie’s naive, nerdy charm, the simple (perfect) motif of the score. I can’t fully explain it. It’s like Alien in that way. It gets everything right first time. All the copycats and sequels (and requels) can’t recapture the original’s magic.

All films in 2023’s #31DaysofHorror…

Director: Denis Villeneuve

This is my favourite discovery of the month. It doesn’t give up its meaning easily, which I respect, and the performances are engrossing. Barely ninety minutes, looks beautiful, has a startling final image, and I’m still thinking about it a day later. The opening scene—a group of well-dressed men, including Adam (or is it Anthony?), watch a woman in a club masturbate before moving to impale a live tarantula on one of her heels—creates a tone of background dread that comes to astonishing fruition in the final act.

Adam is a professor at a university in Toronto, living a repetitive existence in a bland, half-empty apartment, with a girlfriend who comes and goes. He lectures on dictatorships and the different ways they control populations. A colleague at his office suggests a film, and out of boredom Adam rents it. He notices one of the extras, Anthony Claire, looks just like him, so he decides to track him down, but Anthony doesn’t like the unexpected attention.

Adam, girlfriend Mary, Anthony, and his wife Helen, dance around each other as the fantastical fact of these two men’s identical bodies with different personalities plays out. Every scene has something in it, whether a background object or a line of dialogue, that suggests something about the mystery, but nothing prepares you for the final beat and Adam’s ambiguous reaction.

All films in 2023’s #31DaysofHorror…

Director: Matt Reeves

Monster movies, or at least big monsters in movies, are about destruction, usually of cities, and about how small we are in the face of them. They’re similar to disaster movies in that way — hurricanes, earthquakes, tidal waves and tornadoes all make us feel insignificant and powerless, which has certain psychological comforts.

Cloverfield is the name given by the US military to a catastrophic alien event in Manhattan, and from the beginning we know the found footage we’re watching is classified. Rob and Beth have broken up because Rob has a new job in (amusingly) Tokyo. They meet again at his leaving party in a Manhattan high rise with their new partners, and just as we discover they might get together, explosions rock the city.

I saw this in the cinema when it came out, and I remember feeling frustrated at the shaky camera and sparse glimpses of the monster. Actually, you see quite a lot of the monster, and I wonder if I was overwhelmed on the big screen, or if I was comparing it to films like Godzilla or King Kong, where the creatures are very much on display. You have to really focus on what’s happening if you want to see the alien here. I could have done with less twenty-something relationship drama in the first thirty minutes, but it does give Rob emotional stakes to go back to the collapsing building for the finale. Not that that does him any good.

All films in 2023’s #31DaysofHorror…

Director: Adam Wingard

The super-rich Davisons are having a get-together for the first time in years at a remote family-owned mansion. Patriarch Paul has his favourites, but none of his children get along. One of his sons, Felix, brings girlfriend Erin to meet everyone for the first time. Nobody knows that a gang of masked intruders have just killed a couple in a nearby house and it looks like the Davison family are next.

I enjoyed this, but it is bleak, mainly because everyone apart from Erin, our heroine, is an awful person. Her secret ability to adapt and survive in the face of attack is surprising, then funny, and eventually unnerving as she brutally dispatches people with a variety of unlikely weapons.

It has notes from Home Alone, but I was more struck by its impact on films that came later, like Ready or Not, and 2022’s version of Scream. Is this the beginning of the trend towards final girls becoming as violent as their attackers?

All films in 2023’s #31DaysofHorror…

Director: Steven Spielberg

I watched Duel dozens of time on television as a kid, as well as it’s rip-off cousin The Car, so it was a treat to revisit it. I certainly didn’t notice our hero’s crisis of masculinity back then, but that’s one of the gifts of middle age, I guess.

David Mann is a salesman driving across the California desert to an appointment that he can’t be late for. He passes a truck, but it immediately overtakes him back as soon as he slows down. Mann is forced into more and more dangerous maneuvers to stay ahead of the truck and its driver, who he begins to realise is playing a deadly game.

George Miller must have been inspired a little by this when he was making Mad Max eight years later. The chase scenes are always exciting, even when they stretch for several minutes across a monotonous desert landscape, which is testament to Spielberg’s direction. It’s mind-boggling to think this was his first film. He was twenty-four ffs.

All films in 2023’s #31DaysofHorror…