DAILY CALL SHEET: JANUARY 25, 2026

Possessor (2020) Thanks to devices implanted in unwitting victim's brains, regret-ridden assassin Tasya Vos is able to transmit her mind into their bodies and use the controlled individuals to kill her real targets. However, this mingling of minds is beginning to interfere with Tasya's relationship with her husband and daughter, as she starts to have difficulty separating her own thoughts from the temporary ones she has usurped. Things go really awry when Tasya unwisely accepts one last assignment to kill a nigh untouchable executive using the body of his daughter's fiancé and her muddled mind gets stuck in it. Soon, other assassins enter the fray, including Tasya's boss, who is determined to squash Tasya's burgeoning sense of right and wrong. With bodies being possessed left and right, it becomes impossible to tell who is trying to kill who. Can Tasya and her conscience survive? Brandon Cronenberg does an excellent job carrying on his dad's legacy of body horror while also exploring the consequences of detachment and guilt.

In Catholic theology, charity is the theological virtue by which we love God above all things and love our neighbor as ourselves. The deliberate murder of another human being directly rejects charity. It places the killer's own will, passions (e.g., anger, envy, greed), or perceived good above their neighbor's dignity and above God's commandment not to murder. The resulting loss of sanctifying grace caused by murder is fundamentally a spiritual reality but, since humans are a unity of body and soul, this loss can also indirectly influence psychological and emotional well-being. Mortal sin, of which murder is definitely one, can burden the conscience, leading to guilt, anxiety, or desolation, all of which explains Tasya's problems as the movie starts. Sadly, repeated mortal sin can progressively weaken moral sensitivity, thereby deadening a person's conscience. Which is what Tasya's boss wants her problem to be by the end.

The Night House (2020) Following her husband's suicide, Beth spends most of her evenings getting plastered, especially since her own near-death experience left her with the belief that there is nothing beyond this life. Things get worse when Beth starts seeing frightened ghost women who look extremely similar to her jumping into the lake near her home. Following these apparitions across the water, Beth discovers her late husband has constructed a mirror image of her own home. Searching her husband's laptop for a reason, she discovers lots of photos of more lookalikes, as well as information on voodoo rituals. Has Beth discovered her husband was a satanic serial killer with a penchant for victims who looked like his wife, or was something much more weird going on? The movie's not entirely successful, but Rebecca Hall's performance as Beth is pretty great and there are some genuinely creepy moments.

One of the central conceits of The Night House is that death is terrifying because there is nothing awaiting you after it, no consciousness, no heaven, no continuation of any sort. There's one or two questionable plot points that seem to contradict this, but that's the movie's main gist. Obviously, the Church disagrees with this supposition, teaching that the soul's immortality can be satisfactorily known through natural reason alone. The seven proofs she offers include humankind's power of abstraction, our knowledge of immaterial realities (non-physical truths), the desire for immaterial goods, our ability to self-reflect, the innate desire for eternal life, the universal human testimony of nearly all cultures, and an objective morality that demands justice, especially if it's unrealized in this life. Each of these deserve their own discussion, which, of course, Aquinas is more than happy to give you if you're curious.

DAILY CALL SHEET: JANUARY 22, 2026

Now Showing at a Blog Near You: Need a little loveliness to counteract the ugliness cluttering up your screens? This week for Aleteia I take a look at EWTN's new series ‘Seeking Beauty’.

Tucker and Dale vs. Evil (2010) City folk have always been a little leery of what lies beyond the suburbs, and after spending the early 70s watching Leatherface dance jigs with a chainsaw and Ned Beatty get forced to squeal like a pig, one might expect no self-respecting modern urbanite would be caught dead outside the city limits. According to Hollywood's hillbilly horror movies, however, dead is exactly the way they can be caught in the countryside, at least if the local yokels have anything to say about it.

In her book, Post-9/11 Heartland Horror: Rural Horror Films in an Era of Urban Terrorism, author Victoria McCollum, PhD notes, “The rural has loomed large in the popular imagination for some time and has served as a vast repertoire for cinematic terror. Considered the provincial cousin of the American slasher film, and a lower form of 'quintessentially low' cinema, the politics of 'hillbilly horror' are said to lay bare the flipside of popularly constructed rural idylls. In doing so, American rural horror of the 1970s exposed the onerous impact of social, cultural and economic processes on rural regions in the United States.”

But whatever socio-political relevance hillbilly horrors may have held in the 70s, it had all but vanished come the new millennium. By the time such films as Wrong Turn arrived, backwoods bad guys were serving a less lofty purpose. As the fine folks at the TV Tropes website explain, hillbilly horror “too often crosses into unfortunate implications and is swiftly falling into being a discredited trope, as the social construction of the ignorant hillbilly has been compared to blackface in terms of being an unfounded stereotype used to make people living in cities and the suburbs feel better about themselves.” In short, politics has given way to prejudice.

Now, when it comes to dealing with an evil like unwarranted bigotry towards bumpkins, or any evil for that matter, there are a lot of ways to combat it. One of the most successful approaches, however, is to ridicule it. As St. Thomas More once pointed out, even the Devil himself cannot endure to be mocked. His pride makes him so vulnerable to scorn that some well-done mocking can actually cause him to withdraw rather than persist in futile temptations. Well, nothing mocks hillbilly horror better than Tucker and Dale vs. Evil.

As is the custom in the genre, the movie begins with a group of mostly obnoxious college kids headed into the wilderness for some camping and drinking, though more of the latter than the former. Stopping at a small country store to restock their beer supply, the kids bump into Tucker (Alan Tudyk) and Dale (Tyler Labine), two happy-go-lucky hicks on their way to a newly purchased vacation shack in the woods. The bashful Dale is immediately smitten with one of the girls, Allison (Katrina Bowden), and though he assumes she would never be interested in someone with his appearance, he gives in to Tucker's urgings to go introduce himself.

Unfortunately, upon approaching Allison, all the socially awkward Dale can manage is a few incoherent mumblings. No doubt having seen Wrong Turn (not to mention Wrong Turn 2: Dead End, Wrong Turn 3: Left for Dead, Wrong Turn 4: Bloody Beginnings, Wrong Turn 5: Bloodlines, and Wrong Turn 6: Last Resort), the young campers immediately assume the flustered Dale is some sort of semi-mute backwoods maniac and chase him off.

As fate would have it, Allison and her pals decide to setup camp not too far from Tucker and Dale's cabin. That evening while fishing, Tucker and Dale observe Allison bump her head and fall into the lake. The pair manage to pull the unconscious girl from the water, but when they try to call out to her fellow campers for help, their cries of “we've got your friend” are mistaken as hostile. Assuming Allison has been kidnapped, the rest of the kids make plans to rescue their friend from being tortured or eaten or whatever it is the movies say hillbillies do to interlopers in their territory.

Frightened upon first awakening, Allison quickly discovers that Tucker and Dale are actually nice guys who have only her best interests at heart. But before she can communicate this discovery to her friends, the terrified twenty-somethings launch an attack (of sorts) on the cabin. In the chaos that ensues, one of the boys manages to gruesomely impale himself on a log. Once again assuming Tucker and Dale are responsible, the remaining kids vow vengeance on the confused clodhoppers.

To reveal more would be to ruin a lot of the fun. Suffice to say that the remainder of Tucker and Dale vs. Evil is “splatstick” at its finest as both the mutual misunderstandings and the bloody body count continue to rise. With likable leads in Labine and Tudyk, a pitch-perfect mix of humor and cartoonish gore, and plenty of lighthearted jabs at the underlying provincial undertones of the hillbilly horror genre, Tucker and Dale vs. Evil is one of the finer horror-comedies of its decade. Even most city folk might agree.

DAILY CALL SHEET: JANUARY 18, 2026

Island of the Fishmen (1979) Castaway military doctor Claude de Ross and a bunch of shipwrecked convicts (aka fishman fodder) wash up on an uncharted island where Professor Marvin is transforming humans in Creature from the Black Lagoon knock-offs. The well-meaning Marvin hopes to save the planet's ecology by creating fish/human hybrids who can live off the unlimited resources of the ocean, but his evil benefactor Rackham just wants to use the scientist's creations to plunder the lost city of Atlantis. Smitten with Rackham's daughter (Barbara Bach), Clause decides to try and escape with the girl. Meanwhile, the island's local voodoo priestess Shakira (no, she doesn't dance) plots to destroy the entire island. If released 10-15 years earlier, Island of the Fishmen might be more fondly remembered for the Hammer-style creature feature it is. Alas, post-Star Wars, it was a bit too old-fashioned to make many waves.

There are, of course, no patron saint for fishmen. For fishermen, though, there's a few. St. Andrew the Apostle, who was himself a fisherman, is traditionally the go to for this role. However, St. Anthony of Padua is often invoked as well, particularly in the coastal regions of Portugal, Italy, France, and Spain, due to a famous miracle known as the "Sermon to the Fishes." The story goes that while preaching in Rimini, St. Anthony couldn't get the local heretics listen to him. Irritated, he went to the seashore and called on the fish to listen instead since the heretics were too stupid to do so. So many fish poked their heads up to hear Anthony's sermon that the heretics were shamed into converting. Interestingly enough, St. Anthony is also the patron saint of lost things and lost people, so if you combine his different patronages, he could qualify to be the patron saint of people lost at sea, which works pretty good for the characters in Island of the Fishmen.

The Incredible Mr. Limpet (1964) Although America hasn't entered WWII yet, milquetoast Mr. Limpet attempts to enlist in the military to please his super-patriotic wife, but is rejected due to his weak eyesight (and weak everything else to be honest). Wishing he could just be a fish, which he prefers to humans, Limpet accidentally falls into the ocean and finds himself transformed into an animated denizen of the deep (who still needs glasses). In no time at all, Limpet befriends Crusty the hermit crab, gets a girlfriend he names Ladyfish, and discovers he has the ability to unleash a massive underwater roar he calls a thrum. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Limpet offers his services to the Navy, using his thrum to signal the location of German U-boats. But what happens when the Nazis catch on and develop thrum-seeking torpedoes? And what will Limpet's wife have to say about his new finny female friend? There are better Don Knotts movies from this time period, but this will do in a pinch.

The little fish outline decal many Christians have on their cars is actually one of the oldest and most recognizable symbols of Christianity in history. The Ichthys (from the Greek word ἰχθύς, meaning "fish") was adopted by Christians in the 2nd century AD as way to identify other believers during the Roman persecutions. One person would draw part of the symbol in the sand, and if the other person was able to complete the fish shape, then both parties knew they were safe. It was also used to identify Christian meeting places. The name of the symbol is actually an acrostic. The Greek letters ΙΧΘΥΣ stand for:

 Ι — Ἰησοῦς (Iēsous) = Jesus

Χ — Χριστός (Christos) = Christ

Θ — Θεοῦ (Theou) = of God

Υ — Υἱός (Yios) = Son 

Σ — Σωτήρ (Sōtēr) = Savior.

Combined, this forms the phrase "Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior."

DAILY CALL SHEET: JANUARY 15, 2026

The Invisible Man Returns (1940) Sir Geoffrey Radcliffe is falsely accused of killing his brother and sentenced to death. To help him escape so he can ferret out the true murderer and avoid the electric chair, Radcliffe's pal Dr. Frank Griffin—the brother of the original invisible man—slips Sir Geoffrey some invisibility serum. However, Griffin warns Radcliffe that he has limited time to succeed in his mission as the serum inevitably drives anyone who takes it stark raving mad. The guilty party is soon revealed, but is it too late to prevent another invisible maniac from being set loose on society? A young Vincent Price (sans mustache, which is kind of weird) dons the obligatory sunglasses and bandages in this first sequel to the Universal classic and that, along with some nifty effects for the time period, help make this a pretty satisfying sci-fi romp.

Because life, and by association physical health, are gifts from God, the Church teaches we have a serious moral duty to preserve both of them through reasonable care. However, this is not an absolute duty. Given specific situations, some risks to one's health are morally permissible. Vocational duties like law enforcement, the military, or healthcare goes without saying as they save lives by risking theirs. Living organ donation and medical research are allowable within reason. Normal everyday things like sports and travel are fine, assuming they aren't done recklessly. As for the scenario in The Invisible Man Returns, it probably gets a pass as well as one may endanger their health to save others, or oneself. The key principle in all cases is proportionality: a risk to health or life is allowable if it is proportionate to the good being sought and there is grave reason for the risk.

Virus (1999) A sentient electrical surge from outer space transfers itself to a Russian research vessel and begins turning the crew into killer cyborg slaves. A week later, a down on his luck tugboat captain and his crew come upon the ship and decide to claim it as salvage. The surge has its own plans, though, which include murdering all humans on the face of the planet because it sees us as little more than a virus infecting Earth, and good for little more than spare cyborg parts. Lots of man versus machine violence ensues. Directed by a special effects artist, all the practical cyborg-thingies are definitely cool, and much gooier than the Borg for what that's worth. Unfortunately, Donald Sutherland, Jamie Lee Curtis, and the rest of the human actors are pretty much wasted.

There are a number of fringe philosophical and activist movements that view humanity as something akin to a virus on the planet. Many of these groups are either Antinatalists, who purport that procreation is morally wrong due to the inevitable suffering human existence brings, or Ecofascists, who believe overpopulation has transformed mankind into a destructive cancer on nature. Either way, they are all anti-human life. Pope Francis was having none of such nonsense. In the encyclical Laudato Si', he noted that blaming population growth instead of extreme and selective consumerism is simply refusing to realistically face the issues. The real solution to the problems pointed out by the anti-lifers is responsible stewardship of Earth's resources, not depopulation or extinction.

DAILY CALL SHEET: JANUARY 11, 2026

The Godsend (1980) The Marlowe family meets a strange pregnant woman in the park and end up inviting her home for dinner. To their horror, she goes into labor. Worse yet, once she gives birth, she disappears, leaving the baby behind. Though Mr. Marlowe has serious reservations, Mrs. Marlowe insists on adopting the child and names her Bonnie. Over the next few years, the Marlowe's four biological children begin to fall victim to a series of unfortunate accidents, with young Bonnie never too far away from the scene of their demise. Mr. Marlowe blames Bonnie, but his wife has become more and more attached to the girl, and won't hear of it. What can Marlowe do to save what's left of his family? For some reason, this one doesn't have too many fans, but I've always enjoyed its atmosphere and '70s aesthetic. Plus, little Bonnie herself is just creepy. It's easy to imagine her enjoying a nice playdate with Damien.

TIL: Okay, so adoption doesn't always turn out so well in the movies; almost never if it's a horror film. In real life, though, while there can be challenges, adoption is most often a profound act of love, mercy, and charity. As a bonus, there's also a theological aspect to adoption in that it mirrors our own adoption by God through the act of baptism. Reflecting on Jesus' adoptive father, St. Joseph, Pope Francis noted, "We should not be afraid to choose the path of adoption, to take the 'risk' of welcoming children … It is a risk, yes: having a child is always a risk, either naturally or by adoption. But it is riskier not to have them. It is riskier to deny fatherhood, or to deny motherhood, be it real or spiritual. But denial, a man or woman who do not develop the sense of fatherhood or motherhood, they are lacking something, something fundamental, something important."

The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (1992) Slimy obstetrician Victor Mott commits suicide after his patient Claire Bartel reports him to the police for sexual abuse, the shock of which causes the doctor's own pregnant wife Peyton to have a miscarriage. Following the birth of Claire's child, the perfect nanny shows up to help out, but of course it's Peyton Mott in disguise. It seems Peyton has nefarious plans to usurp Claire's place as mother and wife in the Bartel household, and she'll dispose of anyone who gets in the way of her manipulations. This is an absolute top tier entry in the 90's "From Hell" genre, and one that is best watched with as large a group of women as possible because they will have opinions and won't be shy to vocalize them as the movie plays out.

TIL: The Church has no official doctrine prohibiting institutional or in-house childcare, and she certainly doesn't mandate that parents maintain a constant physical presence, especially when economic necessities require the parents to be away from home. However, the Catechism is quick to point out that "parents have the first responsibility for the education of their children." As Pope Francis noted in a 2015 General Audience, "[Parents] tend to entrust them more and more to the 'experts', even in the most delicate and personal aspects of their lives, putting themselves alone in a corner; and thus parents today run the risk of excluding themselves from the lives of their children. And this is very grave! … parents should not exclude themselves from their children’s education."

DAILY CALL SHEET: JANUARY 8, 2026

Strait-Jacket (1964) Upon catching her husband in the act of adultery with another woman, Lucy goes all Old Testament and chops their heads off with an axe. Twenty years later, after she's released from the insane asylum, Lucy goes to live with her brother. There, she tries to reconnect with her daughter, whose future in-laws aren't too happy a murderess' daughter is joining their family. It doesn't help that Lucy's nightmares of severed heads make everyone question her release, especially once people around her start losing theirs in real life. Has Lucy relapsed into her old habits, or is a new axe-wielding maniac on the loose? After What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? kicked off the hagsploitation genre, it didn't take William Castle long to take a stab at it. Of course, Castle's effort is on a much less grand scale, but everyone's favorite psycho-biddy, Joan Crawford, classes things up just fine.

TIL: The ancient Jews were a kinship-based society, so adultery was a big deal in that it undermined the foundational institution of marriage, threatening a family's lineage and inheritance. In a sense, adultery murders families, so under the eye-for-an-eye justice system in place at the time, the death penalty was an appropriate punishment for such a transgression. There was also a holiness aspect to adultery laws, as marriage was believed to be a mirror image of Israel's covenant with God. So, you weren't just cheating on your spouse, but God as well. The Church believes that Jesus further elevated the institution of marriage to a sacrament signifying the union of Christ and the Church. Fortunately for adulterers, Jesus was also big on redemption, so he did away with the death penalty for the action, as evidenced by his preventing the stoning of an adulterer in the gospels.

Agent for H.A.R.M. (1966) When Soviet scientist Dr. Jan Steffanic, inventor of a new weapon that fires flesh-eating spores, defects to the United States, he and his niece are placed in protective custody by H.A.R.M., aka the Human Aetiological Relations Machine, whatever that's supposed to mean. (We'll get to that in a minute.) Anyway, H.A.R.M. assigns their best agent, Adam Chance, to hang out at a beach house with the good doctor. Naturally, Russia still wants the spores to destroy America, so communist spies inevitably show up. Despite adopting all the tropes its budget will allow, this is about as blandly generic as Bond ripoffs get, with little to offer fans of the genre except for maybe Barbara Bouchet, who did get to play Moneypenny in the comedy version of Casino Royale, but deserved to be a real Bond girl rather than being stuck in this. 

TIL: To save you from having to look it up, aetiology (or etiology if you're not British) refers to any study of causes, causation, or causality, as in philosophy, biology, or physics. In literature, a narrative is said to be etiological when it attempts to explain the origins of some custom, institution, natural phenomenon, etc. The Bible is full of such narratives, such as all the stories in Genesis of how certain people and places got their names, or the ones that detail how the various Jewish feasts originated. Some are more profound, though, as with the second creation story in Genesis, which tells how the distinction between the sexes and their complimentary unity came about because it was willed by God. Neat, huh? Now if only someone could come up with an etiological narrative explaining why a super-secret spy organization would use that word in their name, that would be great.

DAILY CALL SHEET: JANUARY 4, 2026

The Flying Saucer (1950) As reports come in of a UFO buzzing around Alaska, both the United States and the Soviet Union send agents to find out what's going on. The American team consists of Mike Trent, a boozy Bruce Wayne type, and Vee Langley, the best looking female Secret Service agent Uncle Sam could find. This doesn't necessarily mean romance between the two is inevitable, but things do happen when you play co-ed tackle football. As for the Russian, he isn't immediately identified, but it's quite possible it might be the caretaker of the cabin the Americans are staying in as he is constantly pointing guns at the couple when they're not looking. The flying saucer turns out to be real, but where it comes from and who will gain control of it remains a mystery. This is mostly a plodding and dull travelogue for Alaska, but it gets some respect as the first motion picture to ever involve UFOs.

TIL: While the Church didn't unconditionally support the United States during the Cold War, her feelings towards the other side were made pretty obvious when, in 1949, the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office issued the Decree Against Communism. Approved by Pope Pius XII, this document declared that any and all Catholics who professed materialistic and atheistic communist doctrine were automatically (latae sententiae) excommunicated as apostates. The automatic part of the penalty was eventually removed in the 1983 Code of Canon Law (CIC), but don't go flaunting your Marxist manifestos just yet. The Church's doctrinal opposition to atheistic communism remains, and openly professing such views could potentially fall under Canon 1364 (§1), which still imposes automatic excommunication for apostasy, heresy, or schism.

The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes (1969) College nerd Dexter (hard to believe there was a time Kurt Russell ever played a character with that name) convinces local businessman Arno to donate a computer to the university. When lightning strikes the machine while Dexter is working on it, the lad discovers his mind has been super-charged, granting him encyclopedic knowledge and the ability to make calculations almost instantaneously. It also transfers all of the contents of the computer into Dexter's brain, including evidence of Arno's illegal gambling operation. Needless to say, this causes Arno to mark Dexter for immediate deletion. This is another pleasant enough distraction made back in the days when Disney's live-action movies were original ideas rather than rehashed versions of their animated hits.

TIL: While The Church views human intelligence (aka reason) as a gift from God, it also recognizes it has limits due to its created, finite nature and the effects of sin. For instance, the document Dei Filius notes that the intellect (presumably even a computer boosted one) can never fully comprehend divine mysteries like the Trinity and Incarnation, even with the revelations that have been given. The encyclical Fides et Ratio recognizes further restrictions on human intelligence due to sin, including impediments such the tendency of modern philosophies to reduce reason to subjectivity, relativism, or empiricism, causing it to, in JPII's words, wilt under the weight of so much "knowledge" that it loses its orientation toward ultimate being.