vverb's Plex Newsletter, November 2025
Happy Halloweeeeeeen 👻
Ok so I didn't go as crazy this month as I did last month, but there's still a bunch of new stuff. Closing out a couple ongoing projects, adding a couple things that didn't finish downloading in time for last month's update, filling a couple requests. Not as exclusively horror this time but, you know what season it is. Also there's emoji in the newsletter now, because I felt like it.
⚠️ Server Updates
- Hey, I finally fixed the goddamn port forwarding and firewall problems I've been having, so now you should theoretically all be able to connect directly to the server and get un-bandwidth-limited streams as a result. This doesn't require any action on your part, just me being a dumb dumb.
- I also installed Tautulli on the server to provide more in-depth logging, so now if you do encounter any weirdness with a stream I will hopefully be able to see a little more about what happened without watching the dashboard literally while the problem is happening.
- Because there's always a little bad with the good, we've been having some intermittent power outages here due to storm winds and I've discovered that when the server recovers from a power outage, it doesn't actually start Plex properly without manual intervention. The good news is I think I know why and have an idea of how to fix it, so that's the next project. In the meantime though, if you have trouble connecting to the server just poke me to reboot it, and hopefully the storm has passed enough that it's not really going to be a repeated issue anyway.
➕ New Additions
Click to disclose
- The Cursed Land (2024)
- The Ritual (2017)
- Alien: Earth (2025)
- BlaKkKlansman (2018)
- Air Crash Investigation (2003) (seasons 14, 15, 18, 19)
- Rebecca (1940)
- Mieruko-chan (2021)
- Murder Death Koreatown (2020)
- The Stepford Wives (1975)
- Mama (2013)
- Bring Her Back (2025)
- Strange Harvest (2025)
- The Descent (2006)
- The Wolf Man (1941)
- Nosferatu (2024)
- Talk to Me (2022)
- Green Room (2016)
- MadS (2024)
- Star Wars: The Bad Batch (2021) (season 3)
- The Summer Hikaru Died (2025)
- Actually Happened! Most Terrifying Psychic Phenomena. Psychic Research Team Report. Relived. (2004)
- Grave Encounters (2011)
- Hell House LLC (Director’s Cut) (2015)
- Kotoko (2011)
- Focus (1996)
- P.O.V. A Cursed Film (2012)
- Laddaland (2011)
- The Collingswood Story (2002)
- Cure (1997)
- Psychic Vision: Jaganrei (1988)
- The Wicksboro Incident (2003)
- Aldnoah.Zero (2014)
- Army of Shadows (1969)
🔄 Changes
- None, other than poster art updates here and there
➖ Deletion Proposals
- None
🎞️ What’ve I Watched?
Click to disclose
Our Hallowsmonth theme this year was "Asian found footage horror," partly deliberately. We started the month off on a very good note with The Medium (2021) and Incantation (2022), two excellent films dealing in different ways with faith, transgression, and generational evils. The Medium is presented as a documentary film on the subject of shamanistic practices of the Isan people of northeastern Thailand. The team attaches to a woman named Nim, who claims to be the medium for a local protective deity called Ba Yan, and begins interviewing her and recording her work. The lines between her private and professional lives blur however as Nim appears to have a tense relationship with her older sister Noi, and it soon becomes clear that Noi's teenage daughter is exhibiting strange and unsettling behavior.
Incantation, meanwhile, has a more epistolary narrative. It opens with a plea to the camera by the protagonist, Li Ronan, who says she needs our help to save the life of her young daughter, and needs to show us footage of what has transpired in her life over the last few years so that we will understand what is being asked of us. The narrative that unfolds from there is told nonlinearly and is at first hard to piece together, but what is clear is that six years ago Ronan traveled with her boyfriend and his cousin to a remote village to take part in a traditional ritual practiced only by that family, but while there they broke a serious taboo and attracted the attention of something very dangerous that has haunted Ronan to this day.
Both of these films, though similar in subject matter, make very effective uses of their differing media, and this is perhaps where they are most impressive. The Medium opens with such effective emulation of a sociological documentary style that for a few minutes we were legitimately confused as to whether we were watching the right movie, and this affectation is used to great effect to produce a slow intensification of dread as the characters' misgivings and strange behaviors gradually increase to the level of the genuinely supernatural. Incantation meanwhile opens with a clear thesis statement; it gets going quickly and there is no question that something horrific is haunting Ronan. What is in question however is how much of the picture we lose by being tied so closely to the perspective of one character, forcing us to question the reasoning behind how she constructs the narrative and wonder what she knows that hasn't yet been revealed to us.
From there, we jumped back a bit to one of the most lauded films in the genre: Kouji Shiraishi's Noroi: The Curse (2005). Noroi is clearly an important forebear to both of the previously discussed films. It opens by introducing Masafumi Kobayashi, a paranormal researcher and documentarian who disappeared mysteriously several days ago. We then dive into the documentary he finished just prior to his disappearance, about a case he had been working for the previous few years. What is perhaps most impressive about this film is the way that it blends different media into its format, in a way that is believable but also very striking compared to the limited formal scope of some found footage. Interspersed with the footage captured by Kobayashi's team are clips from television variety shows, live conventions, pop culture interviews and joke paranormal investigations by comedy groups. Adding verisimilitude to these segments is Shiraishi's use of contemporary TV figures, interviewers, comedians etc, who would have been recognizable to a Japanese audience in 2005. Actresses Maria Takagi and Marika Matsumoto are both in the film portraying themselves, and watching this very recognizable world of silly, pre-digital daytime TV collide with the increasingly horrific mystery Kobayashi is investigating is truly joyful. Plot-wise, I was initially not as impressed with this one but it did stick in my brain for several days afterwards, and I think it is very interesting how it directly interrogates the role of the director in shaping the narrative of a documentary.
(We have not yet watched Occult (2009), Shiraishi's next found footage film, but I am given to understand it is very much a further interrogation of these themes and it is very near the top of my list of things to check out.)
Next, we checked out a much less well known film, the short independent film Actually Happened! Most Terrifying Psychic Phenomena. Psychic Research Team Report. Relived. (2004) The length of the title belies its formal simplicity. I think I don't have very much interesting to say about this one because on paper it's very simple: a man reports hearing strange noises in his house after his neighbor's suddenly burned down; a paranormal investigation team investigates; we spend one hour watching a one-man, two-camera shoot set up and record the inside of the house, and what transpires. This film feels like the genre distilled to a single, core idea. It's about an hour long, and probably couldn't support much more time than that, but the execution is impeccable. Simply by limiting the visible scope of the movie to two, imperfectly framed cameras, and giving us only one largely-nonspeaking character to concern ourselves with, it produces an amazing sense of dread as we sit with him, waiting for something to happen, wonder what's going on inside his head, and how he will respond when things inevitably get spooky.
Finally, we broke the theme with Hideo Nakata's Dark Water (2002), a more traditional example of turn-of-the-millennium J-Horror. Compared to Nakata's earlier Ring, I found it a much more compellingly human film. It follows Yoshimi Matsubara, a young woman in the midst of a messy divorce and struggling to get her life on track while also getting through the custody hearings for her daughter Ikuko. They move into a convenient and inexpensive apartment building, but soon afterwards Yoshimi notices a water stain on her bedroom ceiling, and it seems to be spreading. This is one of those films where most of the terror doesn't actually come from the ghost. Instead it centers the horror of patriarchal society, as we see Yoshimi try to navigate a world that is clearly not set up for her success, and only interested in punishing her when she fails to behave according to expectations; trying to hold herself together in hearings across from her manipulative ex-husband, rushing between her new job and Ikuko's new kindergarten as she tries to prove herself capable of being her daughter's sole caretaker, and dealing with an intransigent building manager who refuses to take action as serious water damage in her apartment is gradually revealed to be a haunting, centering around a girl who vanished from the area years ago and whose life seems eerily familiar to Yoshimi.
Oh and I also watched Alien: Earth (2025). It's not that good. At least some of the ways in which it's not good are a bit compelling though. Rather than having really any interest at all in the actual aliens, the show concerns itself much more centrally with the question of personhood raised by the setting's use of synthetic humans and cyborgs. As for whether it actually gets anywhere with those questions, well, not in the first twelve episodes. But hey, maybe with another season, if it isn't immediately canceled like most things are. It does also include perhaps the fictional billionaire character who has most needed to have his head dunked in a toilet, for whatever that's worth.
📖 Miscellany
- Here’s a nice poem by Ali Choudhary from the latest issue of Alocasia, “pyramus: root & ghost.”
- This piece by Corey Atad considers the place of Andor in the wider Star Wars canon, and how it is more contiguous than not with what came before. Contains some spoilers for the second half of season 2.
- Getting on my anti-proprietary soapbox, here's an article from iA about why we should stop using office suites and start using markdown editors. (Disclaimer that I have no experience with the markdown editor that iA sells or any of their other products, but I agree with the argument in its generalities.) (Somewhat ironically, while I typically write this very newsletter in markdown, my attempt to add foldable disclosure markers in order to make things a bit more readable forced me to rewrite a significant portion of this issue in HTML. Alas. If anyone knows a way to do that in pure markdown please let me know because I haven't found it yet.)
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