My thoughts on the Vampires And Slayers miniatures

Crooked Dice, makers of the 7TV miniatures lines of absolutely not geek TV and film characters, having spent years in the 60s and especially the 70s and then advanced to the 80s with a couple of waves are now onto the late 90s after just one early 90s release. (I assume the 2000s will get one wave and the 2010s will be announced before they all come out.)

This new wave, Kickstarting soon, is Vampires And Slayers.

I was expecting something like this for a while now.

CD have a few designers with different styles. Some I really like, most of them leaning towards “true scale” with realistic proportions. (Like the official Buffy miniatures for the Unmatched skirmish game.) But others are in more traditional “heroic scale”, big heads and hands and dumpy bodies. These are “heroic scale”.

To the extent that they look like they're being viewed through a fisheye lens.

They probably look okay in actual barely an inch high size but, urgh, disappointed.

I wonder if you could edit the STL files to make them look more people-shaped.

Oh well. Saves me some money.

Violetta post-game thought

Since the Hunter: The Reckoning game was a miniseries we all went fairly broad with the characters. Connecting the idea of a spooky medium to the Hecata from Vampire: The Masquerade and Wednesday, playing her super deadpan and way too in-the-know, was a lot of fun but for an ongoing character I’d either:

A) Play it straight, fewer connections and jokes

or

B) Lean in even more, going with the Giovanni family name and an unedited appearance for reference

Depends on the game.

Hunter: The Reckoning Portlandia session two

A cornered ghoul tries to talk his way out saying we should let him walk away and he won’t tell his masters:

“I’m sorry, just to be clear, are you threatening us?”

Visual references for the us being threatened:

Jenna Ortega as Wednesday

 

Jeffrey Dean Morgan as John Winchester in Supernatural

--

Freeing the trapped spirits of vampire victims, cleaned up after session version:

“The chain is broken! Those who wish to depart in peace are free to do so. Those who wish to act... are free to do so.”

Imagine a bass drop on the ellipsis, like when Lestat calls Claudia a very, very naughty little girl.

Big week

Three for three on weekly RPG sessions this week, and two for two on less than weekly ones, including the alternate Tuesday game being moved to the other alternate Tuesday for one night only. Now a bit socialisinged out, but in a good way.

Witchboard (1986)

31 Days Of Horror Movies 2026

Prompt 17 is “death by board game” and:

17.

Witchboard (1986)

Trailer

Having seen the remake on day 2, I spotted the original was available and so here we are.

Tawny Kitaen, mostly known to my generation as The Woman In The Whitesnake Videos, stars as a woman with a boyfriend and ex who used to be friends and the ex is really into Ouija boards. Though not into them enough to remember to take his home after a housewarming party. So she tries it alone which is a bad idea and various sorta-poltergeist-y sorta-possession-y problems ensue.

Unusually heavy on daytime horror scenes. though this may have been to save on lighting, the leads are fine if underwritten and the guys’ quarrel feels more high school than postgrad adult (but don’t quote Han Solo if you’re this much less cool than Han Solo) and the fun characters (Kathleen Wilhoite as a Cyndi Lauper styled medium and Burke Barnes as a detective who loves magic tricks as his Columbo shtick) only get a couple scenes each.

Seeing it after the remake explains a couple of the scenes there, but they largely worked in the remake as-is. The overheated shower works better here though!.

I will give it credit for a great evil joke fakeout which I loved when Buffy The Vampire Slayer did it thirteen years later, and I’m sure someone there saw it here.

The medium: Shudder

Gameability: Investigating a weird occult thing, colourful side characters, fairly straightforward answer, yesh. Maybe don’t use an actual Ouija board as a prop for reasons of taste.

They Will Kill You

31 Days Of Horror Movies 2026

Prompt 16 is “rich people doing evil shit” and I have various options here due to how much evil shit rich people do. But for something new, I already watched Ready or Not 2: Here I Come in the cinema but not this:

16.

They Will Kill You (2026)

Trailer (red band with blood and swears and stuff)

Someone is trapped in a secure location with a bunch of rich Satanic cultists not very successfully trying to catch her as a human sacrifice in a funnily over-the-top violent way. Comparisons to Ready Or Not are unavoidable, not helped by release timing meaning I saw the trailer ahead of Here I Come, but the setup and style are different enough to stand out. Here Zazie Beetz as Asia Reaves is a Big Damn Hero waiting to happen rather than having to become one, less like the bride from Ready Or Not and more like The Bride from Kill Bill.

And there’s a twist the trailer didn’t let on.

YouTube has rearranged its page layout, presumably to annoy me.

Getting there.

Those Who Wish Me Dead

31 Days Of Horror Movies 2026

Prompt 14 is “Trashy Thriller” and this isn’t particularly trashy, and about as much action as thriller, but as noted before I didn’t want to go out of my way to find something bad:

14.

Those Who Wish Me Dead (2021)

Trailer with more Johnny Cash than the film (boo)

Put in a fire watch tower after a traumatising job gone wrong, the equivalent of a desk job for a smokejumper, Hannah (Angelina Jolie) is in the wrong place at the wrong time when...

... this run of personal connections seems unnecessarily complicated but here we go...

Her ex, Deputy Ethan’s (Jon Bernthal) brother-in-law tries to bring his son there for safety after his job puts them in danger from a criminal conspiracy.

Okay, that bit is kinda trashy.

The conspiracy sends a pair of assassins (Aidan Gillen and Nicholas Hoult) after them, following a related assassination far enough away that he gets to hear about it. The assassins not unfairly observe that the conspiracy should have sent two teams for strikes at the same time, which isn’t enough to put me on their side as they casually kill innocent people but is an example of them being entertaining villains to follow. As this is somewhat like Die Hard In A Forest Fire that goes a long way.

And the connections beyond physical proximity and an existing level of trust that could have been follow emergency response workers don’t really matter as, after the killers take out the father, the son flees into the woods and Hannah just happens to find him.

So now we have several sympathetic characters in different degrees of immediate danger as the killers try to find the boy through his uncle as well as tracking him. And start a forest fire to distract emergency services. Which gets real big real fast.

There are various smart moves and observations in among some over-the-top threats and twists - the assassins spitting a warning phrase right away, Bernthal getting a great “go on and kill me” type rant knowing he’s seen too much and trying to goad them into taking him out - in among some much sillier stuff like at one point somebody gets struck by lightning and that seems like the kind of thing that should matter in a story.

It’s all a bit off topic for spooky month, but does have some brutal violence, enough sympathetic characters that we’re not sure everybody will make it, a shortish very tense sequence involving a particularly sympathetic character in particularly high danger, and a huge natural threat building throughout.

The medium: Prime

Gameability: Survival horror/thrills out in the woods, being hunted and in various kinds of danger due to the environment. And as an aside, smokejumpers have that International Rescue swagger of modern heroes going into danger to help others.

A L I E N - RUN RABBIT RUN 1,02

Dean made her first Panic roll of the game on finding an animal testing subject in the vents.

VisionQuest

VisionQuest opens with a flashback explanation and then a massive location caption saying EDINBURGH.

So off to a good start.

Winnie-the-Pooh at 100

Like the acres in the wood!

Hell House LLC II and III

31 Days Of Horror Movies 2026

13 is “hotel horror” and Shudder has the Hell House LLC series, of which I previously saw the first but Evan at Rocklin Graves says the fourth is good, so... kind of trudged through the second and third parts to get there.

13.

Hell House LLC II: The Abaddon Hotel (2018)

Trailer

Hell House LLC III: Lake Of Fire (2019)

Trailer

Hell House LLC (2015) is a pretty basic found footage horror with the format twist that the poor fools going into the scary place are there to use it as the location for a haunted attraction. So is the creepy stuff we glimpse really creepy or pretend creepy in-setting?

And the opening moment, news reports and a customer YouTube video showing the crowd going through turning into a stampede to get out works really well.

Apparently the director’s cut adds more trilogy-related context but the original cut is less on the nose so I rewatched it. And then II and III are pretty damn on the nose.

II would have been enough to get me stop without the promise of a better future instalment. A much more normal “go and look at the place we know is meant to be scary” found footage, that ends with a big theatrical villain monologue which explains lore best left vague. It also shows just how much the found footage format relies on acting as a couple of the performances let it down badly.

III swings back to the “use scary place for haunted attraction” setup of the original, with an immersive theatre show instead of a straight haunt, run by an eccentric genius who is also apparently one of the richest people in the world (this does not reflect my experience of the finances of immersive theatre companies) and carries along until an ending that certainly surprised me. It mostly struck me as funny and left me with some questions, both mythological and practical (does it apply to the victims in II who don’t get much of a mention?) but points for trying.

Will I watch the fourth after all this? Later, I guess.

The medium: Shudder

Gameability: Like a lot of found footage filming, haunted attractions and especially immersive theatre, this could easily become a LARP, and at times really feels like watching a recording of one.

Ten Thirteen

Happy 65th birthday to Fox Mulder, and happy series order announcement for the new take on The X Files from Ryan Coogler.

Vampire: Empire 2026 2

Vampire: The Masquerade fifth edition

Empire

2. Release

Daisy, Toreador jazz singer and club owner

Silas, Ventrue enforcer

Jesse, Tremere phlebotomist and Circulatory System supplier

Emmet, Hecata researcher

Echo, Malkavian fortune teller

Jesse manages to extract some blood from Marcel, the vampire in frenzy since he ingested the drug through a victim. Echo is able to get a scent of the chemicals involved, and would be able to sniff out users.

Jesse brings the blood to his lab, analysis will take some time.

They confirm Echo can scent users with a visit to the Rooftop, the club on the Rack where Marcel hunted. They’re able to find a dealer, and Daisy charms him into arranging a meeting with his source, “the Professor”, the following evening.

Jesse compares the blood sample to the drug - it’s designed to excite and agitate human users... and one of its ingredients is a trace of Kindred vitae.

Meeting the Professor at one of the coffee shops in Grand Central Station the following evening, they talk their way into seeing the factory.

Daisy and Silas meet the Professor’s bodyguard at a long-closed video store. Echo, Emmet and Jesse observe outside, close enough for a signal.

Colette calls Silas’s phone as they approach to warn Daisy that this is where she meets Dane, and that they have to help “the woman in the chair”.

The Professor leads them in, and down to a basement.

Inside, strapped to something like a dentist’s chair, is what looks like a young woman totally drained of blood - but still moving.

“You wanted to know our secret ingredient.” The Professor locks them in.

The old edition is dying, and the new edition struggles to be born: now is the time of grognards.

Resident Evil (2026)

Resident Evil (2026) from co-writer and director Zach Cregger (Barbarian, Weapons) gives us as regular-person a view of a zombie apocalypse as Shaun Of The Dead, as medical courier and mostly good person Bryan (Austin Abrams) tries to get something important to a city being taken over by a mutagenic virus. He notably lacks the not-SWAT training of the original game heroes or the super-soldier-y of the previous film series hero Alice, so he makes mostly understandable decisions, humane as well as sensible ones, and gets into all sorts of the trouble as a result.

It escalates rather than taking swings with twists like Cregger’s previous films, stays close to Bryan’s perspective and sometimes his direct POV, and the first zombie is a great reminder of just how scary one zombie can be, especially when you don’t have the relevant context.

It mostly lifts monsters from the game rather than gameplay, though there is a (quite reasonable) search for ammo and a recurring gag about padlocks.

Heavy on the splatstick and other humour, I had a lot of fun with it, and I can see why people are saying Cregger would make a good non-serious Evil Dead movie, even without the bit where Bryan’s in a rustic cabin and the camera swings around for a closeup of a shotgun.

Only two really horrific moments, involving children, and those both land on a gag as well.

And I can include this in 31 Days Of Horror, somewhere.

The medium: The cinema!

Gameability: Yes.

Send Help (2026)

31 Days Of Horror Movies 2026

Prompt 10 is “Trouble In Paradise” which could be about relationship difficulties but is a bit much three days after Bloody Bride, or considering horror could also be about a war in Heaven. Or, hey, bad things happening (and interpersonal issues) on a remote tropical island:

Send Help (2026)

Trailer

Brilliant but slovenly company cog Linda is passed up for a promised promotion by the former CEO by his son and heir, he reluctantly brings her on a business trip because she’s actually useful unlike the frat brother he gave her job to, and then the plane crashes...

Sam Raimi comes home to horror and yes we get some running POV shots, some Extreme Close-ups, some eye-gouging and quite a bit of unpleasant stuff getting flung in various character’s faces. But this is mostly about two characters getting along very badly. Sympathies shift along the way - if you want someone to really root for this not your show. But I laughed quite a bit, including a genuine roar at one point.

The medium: Disney+

Gameability: Generally this strong a PC v PC agenda base is reserved for one-shots.

Mage: The Ascension - Sunrise City

We concluded the Victorian Age time travel miniseries and normal service may resume shortly.

It was touch and go but Cara managed to avoid having to become Queen of California.

The New Mutants

31 Days Of Horror Movies 2026

Film 7 but entry 9, “PG-13” - wow, I have a lot of recent options, but have seen most of them. Mostly 15s here, some 12s.

(I will get to 7 and 8 with streaming trials.)

The New Mutants (2018-20)

Trailer

An X-Men movie-verse spinoff with no recurring characters, mixing its superheroic zapping with a horror-tinged story taken from the comic.

Some newly-empowered mutants who all have tragic backstories are being trained / imprisoned in a dingy old hospital, and now having mostly backstory-related nightmares that start to affect them physically. In the meantime they have some understandable YA issues, do some The Breakfast Club stuff unsurprisingly, and make existing fans wonder why Illyana has Kitty Pryde’s sidekick dragon as a hand puppet and is being so racist.

An outright horror with superhuman characters in danger is an interesting take, but does the tone mix work? Not really, no.

Not helped by some choices like the TV showing Buffy, where this does work, including an episode which draws immediate comparison to a much less scary monster design used here.

The medium: Disney+

Gameability: The trick would be balancing the horror stuff and the heroic stuff so it takes a while to get to the big zappy final battle.