"You're Not Scared Of the Dark, Are You?" →
I wrote about Pitch Black for BWDR’s Halloween Week:
Early on when writing a new cosmos, you get to decide: how alien is it going to be? Will the world your characters land on—or what arrives on our world—defy the audience’s and the characters’ knowledge, upend their sense of the order of things, and (er…) get under their skin, as in Alien or John Carpenter’s The Thing? Or will you stick close enough to the known world to let the characters figure things out, but deprive them of their usual means of coping, the insulation of technology and the strength in numbers of civilization, forcing them to confront what we, and they, can already guess is out there, and inside?
