Movies
[Book Review] Adam Cesare Earns A Raise With ‘The Summer Job’
The Summer Job (January 7, 2014; Samhain), the latest novel from emerging author Adam Cesare, is the textbook definition of a nail-biter. Gone is the whimsical creature-feature nostalgia of his last novel, Video Night, as Cesare ups the ante with a slice of hillbilly horror that packs enough mounting dread to fill a backwoods kill-shack. And at a tight 234 pages, The Summer Job is a burner––one taste, and it’s gone before you know it.
After a harrowing prologue that truly sets the tone, Cesare introduces his punky protagonist Claire, an aimless waitress with a loser musician boyfriend. Her predictably hot/bitchy bestie convinces Claire to apply for a position at the old-school but luxurious Brant Hotel, located a couple of hours away in a remote town in New Hampshire. Fleeing her shitty waitress life, Claire immediately gets the job at the Brant, only to be sucked into the village’s web of increasingly lurid secrets.
Namely, there’s some sort of feud going on between Ms. Brant the grumpy hotel owner and a feisty cult of hillbilly hippies who party out in the nearby woods, and Claire is immediately drawn into the fray. Perpetually horny, poor Claire can’t help crushin’ on local beefcake Tobin, and once accepted into the hillbilly hippie inner-circle, Claire is pressured to spy on Ms. Brant and the hotel staff. Soon rumors of ritual sacrifice and possible Satanism begin to surface, the stories so shocking and grotesque, Claire doesn’t know what to believe. All she knows is that she’s caught in the middle.
With its secluded setting and penchant for ritualistic violence, The Summer Job is a kissing cousin to inbred classics from masters like Ketchum and Kilborn. Although the story is primarily plot-driven, Cesare has a knack for breezy, natural dialogue that rarely sounds forced, an attribute that keeps the pages turning. Some readers may take issue with Claire’s increasingly moronic character decisions, but it’s worth keeping in mind that the reader always knows more than Claire, which leads to a heightened sense of suspense as the action progresses. Toss in a handful of slick plot twists and an admirably bleak ending, and the result is Cesare’s best novel yet.
There’s been a lot of talk about how Christopher Nolan snuck in some horror elements into his epic adaptation of The Odyssey. However, even before the Cyclops began to eat Ithican soldiers and Circe subjected them to magical body-horror, cinemagoers were already witnessing supernatural terror through a certain trailer that was attached to most IMAX screenings of Nolan’s film.
It turns out that this trailer was for Rob Savage’s Other Mommy, an adaptation of Bird Box author Josh Malerman’s horror novel, Incidents Around the House. With the teaser now available online and revealing that the award-winning Jessica Chastain is playing the titular antagonist (as well as her ill-fated human counterpart), not to mention the fact that the picture is being helmed by the director of hits like Host and The Boogeyman, genre fans are understandably hyped for this upcoming thriller.
That’s why I’ve decided to take a closer look at the trailer and share four things we learned from this sneak peek at Other Mommy!
4. Rob Savage is Going Back to His Supernatural Horror Roots
I know I’m in the minority when I admit that Dashcam is my favorite Rob Savage movie, but even I understand why the filmmakers’ fans have been waiting a while for the director to get back to telling more grounded paranormal stories as he did with 2020’s Host.
Other Mommy obviously isn’t a found footage movie, but moments like the poltergeist activity on the kitchen table combined with the nature of the source material, which actually features a full-on exorcism, indicate that this adaptation is more than a simple creature feature. That’s why I think Savage is once again going to borrow from the same ghostly narratives that made his debut film such a viral hit.
3. Other Mommy is a More Convincing Doppelganger in the Adaptation
Part of the horror from Malerman’s original novel came from the fact that the entity taking on the form of Bela’s (Arabella Olivia Clark) mother wasn’t very good at passing itself off as human. This resulted in several uncanny moments where other characters began to notice that there was something visibly wrong with the family and decided to keep their distance.
Savage’s film appears to be taking a different route, with the trailer showing a version of the entity that can, at least physically, imitate Chastain’s character perfectly. This change is likely the result of the filmmakers wanting to incorporate more paranoid scenes where Bela and her father, played by Jay Duplass, are confused about which Mommy is safe to interact with.
2. The Family is Also Better Off This Time Around
Incidents Around the House featured some interesting subtext about how poverty can negatively affect American family dynamics. After all, the main characters were already feeling scared and isolated before the entity emerged from Bela’s closet and began scratching at their emotional wounds. The trailer for the movie, however, depicts the family as being relatively well off before these incidents begin to occur.
I can only imagine that this part of the story was changed so that the family’s fall from grace can be even more dramatic as the mom and dad’s pasts are revealed and Bela falls further into the clutches of the demonic antagonist.
1. Jessica Chastain is Embodying Evil Dead Rise’s Alyssa Sutherland
Mothers turning against their children is one of the most disturbing horror tropes out there (just check out classics like Hereditary and Carrie if you need proof), but it takes a remarkably skilled actress to pull off such a monstrous transformation. This is especially true when both a regular, loving mother and the Other share the screen in the same film.
That’s why I appreciate how Chastain appears to be channeling another evil redhead mother that recently traumatized audiences with her performance. It’s too early to be sure, but I’m fairly confident that Chastain’s character has at least some amount of Ellie in her cinematic DNA – Ellie being the iconic deadite brought to life by Australian actress Alyssa Sutherland in 2023’s Evil Dead Rise.
Let us know in the comments if you think we missed any important details from the trailer, and don’t forget to check out Other Mommy when it hits theaters on October 9!
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