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Season One of “NOS4A2” Presents a Creepy New Take on Vampires

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Season one of AMC’s NOS4A2 is arriving on Blu-ray on October 22, 2019, and with it a wholly new version of the timeless tale of good versus evil waiting to be discovered. As the title of the horror drama series suggests, NOS4A2 features a supernatural villain that’s vampiric in nature. Like Nosferatu or Dracula, the particular vampire at the center of this story is old and powerful. Unlike his literary and cinematic counterparts, though, the superpowered vampire Charlie Manx (Zachary Quinto) presents a very different take on the classic mythos of vampires. Manx retools what we thought we knew about the vampire, offering up something far creepier and much more dangerous.

Based on the novel NOS4A2, written by author and executive producer Joe Hill, this series adaptation is told mostly through the perspective of reluctant heroine Vic McQueen (Ashleigh Cummings), a New England teenager that discovers she has the startling gift to find whatever is lost by traveling through the rickety Shorter Way Bridge. In reality, the bridge doesn’t exist; she’s creating an inscape to lost objects within her mind. That gift puts her directly in the path of Charlie Manx, another creative type with inscape abilities of his own. It’s very bad news for Vic.

At his core, Charlie Manx is a child predator. He drives his black 1938 Rolls-Royce Wraith -the license plate reads NOS4A2- across the country, saving what he perceives as abused and neglected children from a life of sadness and bringing them back to Christmasland: Manx’s created world where it’s eternally Christmas. In actuality, Manx is luring children away with the promise of endless cheer and feeding off their souls until he’s regained his youth. After he’s fed off them, what’s leftover is an unnerving, ghoulish shell of a child with rows of pointy teeth and homicidal tendencies. Christmasland is merely his inscape where he deposits the empty human husks.

Like Dracula had Renfield, Manx also relies upon a henchman to do his bidding. He seeks out disturbed or weak-minded men to assist him in his kidnapping schemes. In the inaugural season, that right hand man role quickly falls to Bing Partridge (Ólafur Darri Ólafsson), who aids Manx in procuring new victims and dispatching any adults that might get in their way. As the season unfolds, it becomes clear that the Manx-Partridge pairing is far more skin-crawling and disturbing than expected.

Manx has to keep feeding to revert his aging, he’s 135 years old after all, so he’s constantly on the hunt. Translating Manx’s look from page to screen, Quinto recommended Oscar-winning special makeup effects artist Joel Harlow, whom he’d worked with previously on the Star Trek films. They created several stages of aging for Manx, with the request by showrunner Jami O’Brien to keep the looks grounded somewhat in realism. Manx might be superpowered, but he is still essentially a human. A very depraved human.

Though the villain doesn’t see himself that way. Manx feels that the children he’s taking away in his Wraith are those he’s saving from a doomed life of neglect and sorrow. Their parents are deemed unworthy and incapable. That he sees himself as an avenging angel makes him all the more terrifying, and dangerous. Especially for Vic McQueen, who Manx perceives as his biggest obstacle. Quinto’s portrayal of the unnerving villain is perfection.

While this vampire consistently feeds off of victims to maintain his immortality, he sucks souls, not blood. The husks he leaves behind are nothing like him, though they are dangerous. Manx has no aversion to sunlight either. That he lives mostly within the inscapes of his mind or on the road in search of new children makes him tricky to pin down. All of which to say, he’s a powerful villain and the rules of fighting him are unlike any vampire before. Both Manx and NOS4A2 will make you rethink the parameters of what classifies as a vampire.

Season one of NOS4A2 arrives on Blu-ray on October 22, 2019.

Horror journalist, RT Top Critic, and Critics Choice Association member. Co-Host of the Bloody Disgusting Podcast. Has appeared on PBS series' Monstrum, served on the SXSW Midnighter shorts jury, and moderated horror panels for WonderCon and SeriesFest.

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‘Amelia’s Children’ – Exclusive Clip from Magnet’s New Horror Movie Invites You to Meet Mother

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Family isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be in Amelia’s Children, the brand new supernatural horror movie from Magnet Releasing and writer/director/producer Gabriel Abrantes.

Amelia’s Children is NOW PLAYING in select theaters, and it’s also available on VOD outlets beginning today. Whet your appetite with an exclusive clip from the film below.

The clip invites you to meet mother, and you can also watch the official trailer underneath.

In Amelia’s Children, a young man’s (Edward, played by Carloto Cotta) search for his biological family leads him and his girlfriend to a magnificent villa high in the mountains of Northern Portugal. Full of excitement at meeting his long-lost mother and twin brother, he’s eager to will learn about who he is and where he comes from.

But nothing is as it seems, and Edward will soon learn that he is linked to them by a monstrous secret.

The horror film stars Brigette Lundy-PaineAlba Baptista, and Carloto Cotta.

Find tickets or stream now.

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