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vibes

a screen capture from the movie The House of the Devil, showing Sam, played by Jocelin Donahue, sitting across from Megan, played by Greta Gerwig, at a pizza restaurant in the 1980s

The Vibes Are Creepy, the Hair Is Big, and It’s Free on Tubi

by admin June 26, 2025

If you’ve got a soft spot for grainy film, eerie synths and the creeping dread of vintage horror, you’re in for a treat. While plenty of modern movies try to capture that ’80s slasher vibe, few actually pull it off, but The House of the Devil isn’t just playing dress-up — it’s the real deal. From the very first frame, it feels like you’ve unearthed a dusty VHS tape from a long-abandoned video store, and it only gets better from there.

Directed by Ti West, this indie gem doesn’t rely on cheap jump scares or flashy effects. Instead, it leans into tension, atmosphere and that slow-building sense of unease that defines the best of retro horror. It’s a love letter to the genre that understands what makes it so terrifying in the first place, and you can stream it for free right now on Tubi. If you’re craving something suspenseful, stylish and soaked in vintage vibes, this one’s a must-watch.

The movie follows Samantha (Jocelin Donahue), a college student desperate for cash who takes a babysitting job in a creepy old mansion. She soon discovers she’s dealing with a much different charge than a child when she arrives on site. As she’s left alone for the night, she orders a pizza and cues up a flick on TV, while the dread builds incrementally and the audience settles in for something horrific. The House of the Devil is reminiscent of classic films like Halloween and When a Stranger Calls, but ratcheted up tenfold.

From the opening credits, The House of the Devil sets the tone with a ridiculously accurate and detailed retro aesthetic. It doesn’t just take place in the 1980s — it feels like it was made then. The grainy film texture, era-appropriate costumes and hair are absolutely perfect. It’s set to a curated soundtrack with tracks including The Fixx’s One Thing Leads To Another and The Greg Kihn Band’s The Break Up Song. The movie doesn’t just feel like it’s dressing up in ’80s tropes, but like it was birthed from that time.

The movie was shot on 16mm film, creating its specialized throwback look. It lifts cinematography straight from ’80s filmmakers along with a slew of other techniques to evoke classics of the era. Everything, down to the credits, is period accurate, and I appreciated all the attention given to making sure everything matches, down to the cups at the pizza restaurant seen early in the movie.

The Ulmans have a secret reason why they hired Sam to watch “Mother.”

MPI Movie Group/Screenshot by CNET

Sam realizes something is amiss when she stumbles upon proof that the family that hired her for the babysitting job isn’t the same one in the photos. Realizing she might have been deceived, she attempts a 911 call, but she’s already eaten a piece of tainted pizza. She passes out just as she gets a glimpse of what exactly it is she’s been hired to “babysit.”

The movie’s path is fraught with grisly moments (just ask Sam’s best friend Megan, played by Barbie director Greta Gerwig), with believably gruesome practical effects that unsettle and chill to the bone. The hideous “Mother,” who Sam discovers is connected to her original job, is an example of ’80s filmmaking that would have made audiences sick to their stomachs.

Sam’s friend Megan is not pleased at all by the situation at the Ulmans’ house.

MPI Movie Group/Screenshot by CNET

Without spoiling the climax, The House of the Devil maintains a gnawing, upsetting sense of dread throughout its runtime. It isn’t afraid to use themes of isolation, the unknown and betrayal to keep you on the edge of your seat, which I appreciated on my first viewing and only grew to love more with each rewatch. As horrific as the story is, I firmly believe that this movie wouldn’t have been possible without its commitment to staying true to the era that inspired it.

If you’re looking for a horror movie that doesn’t rely on cheap jump scares or the overwrought parable “sex is bad” with a group of teens being picked off one by one, The House of the Devil is one of the best flicks you could put on your Halloween viewing list. It brings the golden years of ’80s horror to life in believable, decadent ways that’ll have you squirming in your seat. I’m still unpacking the gagworthy climax, and I bet you will be too.

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June 26, 2025 0 comments

Game Updates

The Vibes Of Summer Game Fest 2025 Were Rotten

by admin June 7, 2025

I vividly remember the moment I truly realized Summer Game Fest 2025 was a rotten event and an example of the industry trying to pretend everything is alright.

This Narrative Adventure About Doomed Teenage Dinosaurs Feels Too Real

It was when the trailer for the upcoming third-person generic action game MindsEye started playing. The trailer included a new, slow, somber cover of “Madworld”—a song that was covered already and became infamous for its usage in the original Gears of War marketing campaign. That was when I realized the vibes were off. Everyone was running on fumes. People were desperate. Geoff, the master of throwing big, glitzy game events, was unable this time to distract from the truth: Things aren’t all right in the game industry.

But even before that, this year’s Summer Game Fest was a boring slog. It was a show dominated by the same kinds of games getting announced and showcased over and over and over. There were six trailers for six different Souls-like/Elden Ring-inspired games. A ton of anime action things that blended together. A trailer for a Fortnite Star Wars event. A Deadpool VR game. A Game of Thrones RTS. And a bunch of trailers for things that are already out or about to be released. The two-hour event (YEAH) dragged on and on, with each time a trailer ended the crowd sounded far less enthused about being there.

Sure, we got a fun Resident Evil 9 reveal, and there were a few cool games announced during the show, like a puppet boxing game, and Jurassic World Evolution 3 looks neat. But there was also a segment where a guy walked up in a hat that read “Make FPS Great Again” and yelled about Call of Duty being the same after claiming he just wanted to make another Halo.

Even Hideo Kojima, a guy who can usually bring a really awesome trailer for Geoff’s shows, appeared with little excitement, showed off a two-minute clip of people talking in Death Stranding 2, and left. The only mention of Silksong was a joke about it being absent. It was an empty show that felt lifeless and sad. It’s clear that publishers are chasing trends and only greenlighting and funding games that look like other things that people bought.

Geoff, wearing what appeared to be $750 sneakers, seemed desperate from the jump to convince fans watching at home that the lack of big AAA games wasn’t a bad thing. He dedicated the opening minutes of the show to praising indie games and how awesome they are and how popular they are. In hindsight, this was him setting the stage for his viewers: You aren’t getting Half-Life 3, GTA 6, or anything else like that tonight. Those games take 10 years to make now and come less often than ever before. And whle I do agree indie games are cool and doing awseome stuff, this showcase sucked. Two hours of the same games squeezed between ads is a horrible way to showcase anything. And doing it for this long should be classified as torture.

As summed up recently and perfectly by Luke Plunkett over at Aftermath:

Games—or at least the kind of games this week used to be about—are trapped in the belly of the machine. We love to talk shit about Andrew Wilson, but he isn’t to blame for every terrible decision at EA, because he’s the executive of a publicly-traded company in 2025, and any other person in his line of work would and is doing the same thing. Almost every major industry in the world, whether it’s games or cars or music or energy, is now at the mercy of Wall Street Weirdos, private equity in particular. We’re not looking at a bad time for the video game industry, we’re looking at just bad times.

But hey, Resident Evil 9 looks neat, I guess.

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June 7, 2025 0 comments

Gaming Gear

FromSoft leans into the nu-metal vibes and goes full Evanescence with the Elden Ring Nightreign launch trailer

by admin May 29, 2025

ELDEN RING NIGHTREIGN | Bring Me to Life Trailer – YouTube

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The FromSoftware aesthetic is best summed up by the famous quote from Dark Souls director Hidetaka Miyazaki. When presented with an early, gross and gribbly design for the Undead Dragon in Dark Souls, Miyazaki returned it with the comment that it should be more dignified, saying, “Can’t you instead try to convey the deep sorrow of a magnificent beast doomed to a slow and possibly endless descent into ruin?'”

At some point behind the scenes there must have been a meeting about how to soundtrack the launch trailer for Elden Ring Nightreign. And that meeting ended by deciding that what the majestic ruin of the Lands Between needed was the song you’d hear in a mid-2000s AMV where someone edits all their favorite clips from Berserk together.

Yes, the Elden Ring Nightreign trailer is backed by Bring Me to Life by Evanescence, a slice of crossover nu-metal coming at you direct from 2003. Back then this song was pretty cringeworthy, which is what we said instead of just “cringe” at the time, but like everything you’re embarrassed by, 20 years later you hear it at a retro night and suddenly realize it rules actually.

Fujifilm’s X Half camera is so dedicated to the analog vibes, it can’t shoot RAW

by admin May 22, 2025

Fujifilm has a new pint-size addition to its X-series cameras coming in late June: the X Half. It’s an 18-megapixel “half-frame” camera with a portrait-oriented sensor and viewfinder and a fixed 32mm-equivalent f/2.8 lens.

Despite being digital, the X Half is all about the vintage film aesthetic. The $849.99 camera is so dedicated to an analog-like lifestyle that it’s got an entire secondary screen just for picking one of its 13 film simulations, and it doesn’t shoot RAW photos at all — just JPGs, for a more what-you-see-is-what-you-get experience.

Fujifilm’s definition of a half-frame is a bit different from the traditional one. Usually, a half-frame film camera like the Pentax 17 captures images measuring 18mm x 24mm (around half the size of full-frame / 35mm format). But the X Half uses a 1-inch-type sensor measuring 8.8mm x 13.3mm, which is about half the dimensions of the APS-C sensors in other Fujifilm cameras like the X100VI and X-T5. So I guess it counts on a technicality.

But like the Pentax 17 and other actual half-frame cameras, the X Half is all about taking casual, fun snapshots and bringing it with you everywhere. It weighs just 8.5 ounces / 240 grams and is small enough to fit in most small bags or even some oversized pockets. The X Half is close in size to a traditional disposable camera, but unlike a one-time-use film camera it has a proper glass autofocusing lens with aspherical corrections, and it even shoots some basic 1080 x 1440 video. (Though, in my briefing on the camera, Justin Stailey of Fujifilm North America described the lens as having “some character.” Which is often a colorful way of saying the lens isn’t the sharpest.)

Once you take some shots via the X Half’s traditional optical viewfinder (that’s right, there’s no EVF or hybrid finder here) or its portrait-orientation 2.4-inch touchscreen, you can connect to a dedicated smartphone app (launching slightly after the camera) for extra functions. You can create your own two-up diptychs like a traditional half-frame camera, though here you can pick out the two side-by-side pictures, or you can opt for two videos or one picture and one video.

Fujifilm has baked other analog-inspired features into the X Half app, like a Film Camera Mode that collects your next 36, 54, or 72 images and arranges them into a contact sheet. But the film nerdiness goes deeper than that, as the digital film strip will be branded with the film simulation you used. There’s even a faux film advance lever for making diptychs, and in Film Camera Mode it forces you to use it between taking each shot.

You can lean further into the film kitsch by adding filters, like a light leak effect, expired film look, or a ’90s-era time and date stamp to the corner. Of course, since the camera does not shoot RAW, your chosen filter and film simulation are fully baked into the JPG file. You can’t undo any of them or change it later in post-processing like you’d normally be able to with a RAW.

Fujifilm is certainly taking a unique approach with the X Half, trying to capture the interest of younger photo enthusiasts who in recent years have been drawn to the imperfections and vibes of vintage film and aging point-and-shoot digital cameras. I don’t know how many of them will be jumping at the opportunity to scratch that creative itch with an $850 camera compared to alternatives costing a fraction of that — like a $70 Camp Snap for digital or any 35mm disposable film camera for $10 to $20 — but even if it’s half the fun I had with the Pentax 17 it should prove a good time.

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May 22, 2025 0 comments