Hey, everyone. This is a blog post I had hoped I would never have to write, and it’s surreal, bordering on unreality, that I’ve sat down to put these words together at all. I lost my best friend, Travis, less than a week ago at the time of this writing. Just writing that sentence feels like I’ve dipped my heart in liquid nitrogen and then shattered it against the floor.

His loss was shocking for the fact that it was so unexpected. He had been having some health issues the last little while, it’s true, but no one that knew him could have guessed that he was facing a life-endangering condition. But now he’s gone, and those who knew him are left in the wake of his passing — confused, heartbroken, and stricken.

I’ve written eulogies to people I’ve lost before on this blog, notably about my grandfather, my godmother, and my godfather. This is yet another in that series, but one that packs an emotional wallop the likes of which I’ve never been dealt before.

This post is an attempt to make sense of the world around me now. I won’t lie — this is going to be a rough one, but I hope you’ll stick with me on it. Travis is an essential part of my origin story, as you’ll see.

Who Was He?

I was an only child growing up. Thankfully, I had plenty of cousins on both sides of the family to fill that role. Travis was a cousin on my Dad’s side. He was six years my senior, and I looked up to him my entire childhood, and that never really stopped. He was a gentle person with the mind of an intellectual, the heart of a gamer, and the soul of a poet.

I admired all of those qualities about him, but others around us didn’t. We both grew up in the rural spaces of East Texas, and neither of us ever quite fit the country mold or mentality. We were eternally the puzzle pieces that didn’t quite fit the space we were granted. We loved comics and philosophy, history and science fiction/epic fantasy, literature and gaming, both of the tabletop variety and video games. The Venn diagram of our interests was very nearly a circle.

Those interests did not make us very popular with our peers at the time, however, but it didn’t matter because we were around each other enough that we knew we had a fellow geek and nerd in the other. We would sit in the backroom of our great-grandmother’s house, a place known as the Boys’ Room, and talk for hours about everything that was on our minds.

The irony is that most people who knew Travis would likely describe him as quiet, but let me tell you that some of the longest and most engaging conversations that I’ve ever had were with him. He had a rapier wit and no small amount of snark that he injected in these conversations that often left me laughing until my sides hurt. So, yeah, he was easily one of my favorite people on this green Earth. When I say that he’s the closest thing to a brother that I have, I want you to understand my meaning.

But even the word brother doesn’t quite cover it. I’ve known plenty of people who have actual blood siblings who were not as close as we were. We were not only a family by blood but also by choice. I was lucky enough to maintain that bond right up until the end.

Processing his loss is not going to come soon, nor will it come easily. He occupied a unique and irreplaceable role in my life. His death is a major landmark. There will always be a ‘before’ and an ‘after’ time.

The truth is that the tapestry of our lives was interwoven, and having him ripped away, stitch and seam, leaves me as ragged around the edges as the metaphor implies.

A Fanboy Education

I’ve had a lifelong love of superheroes. My first impressions of DC were shaped by Super Friends, just as my first foray into Marvel was through Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends. I watched those shows before I could read, and even though he was older than I was, Travis always watched those with me when we were together.

While the concept of superheroes was not something he introduced me to, per se, he did spark my interest in comic books. He was the first comic collector I ever met, the first to bag and board his comics, and the one who introduced me to the deep ocean of lore that made up the DC and Marvel universes. Some of the very first comics I ever owned came from Travis. My access to comics as a kid was pretty limited, and often Travis would be the one to bring issues that I had missed when we would meet up in the Boys’ Room.

I was fortunate enough to see nearly all of the MCU movies with him. I believe the last one we saw together was Deadpool and Wolverine before some of his health issues started to take their toll, making him adverse to going to the movie theater. Streaming helped with that somewhat, and we still got to watch a number of good flicks. The last one we watched together was The Old Guard, starring Charlize Theron, just a few weeks ago. 

While the MCU has been a bit hit-or-miss the last few years, both of us were really looking forward to seeing Avengers: Doomsday. Seeing it this December is going to be really weird without him. 

All the Lasts

When someone I care about dies, I start to think about the ‘lasts’ with that person. When was the last time that I saw them, talked to them, went to dinner with them, those sorts of things. I’ve mentioned a few of them already, but here are some of the lasts with Travis:

• Last text: A short message telling me to check with his roommate on some things related to Travis going into the hospital.
• Last email: a listing of different doctors appointments he had in the works.
• Last phone call: I had accidentally dialed him. He called me back to make sure everything was okay.
• Last dinner: A trip to Longhorn Steak House after the last session of his Forgotten Realms campaign.
• The list goes on, and on, and on…

The last in-depth conversation we had was about Firefly. The news that there might be an animated Firefly series in the works, with the original actors reprising their roles, made us both excited for a potential comeback. So, I had gone back to revisit the series, even introducing my young son to it in the process.

Travis and I talked about what the characters and setting meant to us while we waited in the doctor’s office. I told him that we had finished “Objects in Space,” the last episode of the regular series, and that we would watch Serenity soon. We weren’t sure how my son would react to the untimely deaths of Shepherd Book and Wash.

We finished up at the doctor’s office and I drove him home. I ate lunch at his house, though his stomach was not feeling well, so he didn’t join me. The last thing he said to me was that he really appreciated all my help.

That’s the problem with lasts; most of the time you don’t realize it was the last time you’ll do something. So, the last geeky conversation we had, out of the many thousands we’ve had over the years, was about a show that was gone too soon, and forever missed by those who loved it. Fitting, no?

Travis went into the hospital the very next day, and into the ICU that night. He never fully regained lucidity in the days before he died. One of the nights that I came home from sitting vigil at the hospital, we watched Serenity. When the movie came out all those years ago, the two of us had attended a sneak-peak of it, and loved it, of course.

Watching it now, I’m struck by Zoe and Mal’s last interaction in the movie. After the death of her husband, and the near dismembering of Serenity, Mal asks about the ship, but is really asking about how Zoe is grieving.

Think she’ll hold together?

To that, Zoe replies:

She’s torn up plenty, but she’ll fly true.

All the Firsts

As bittersweet as it is to remember my last interactions with Travis, I now face a universe of ‘firsts’ that happen without him present. His first birthday after he’s left us. My first birthday without him. The first holiday season without him here. That’s just the immediate stuff. The future holds all sorts of milestones, like graduations, weddings, and, yes, even funerals, where I will wish like hell that he was still here to be there for them. My first major book launch is in a little over a month, and now I won’t be able to share it with him.

Those thoughts are nearly unbearable. At times, they weigh down on me like I’m Atlas from myth, but a version of him that doesn’t have super strength, being crushed beneath the unimaginable weight.  

It’s going to be a long while, and maybe never, before I see or do something cool and don’t immediately think to let Travis know about it.

While it might be a very writer-y thing to throw into the mix here, one of the things that’s really damaging my calm is now referring to Travis in the past tense. I thought we had a good twenty or thirty years left to us. We were supposed to both go to a retirement home where we could spend our twilight years gaming without having to worry about any of the rest of it.

This wasn’t how our story was supposed to end.

The Games We Played

Speaking of stories, we made a fair few ourselves. Tabletop role-playing games, or TTRPGs, are a wonderful engine for those creating characters, stories, worldbuilding, and the like. I use those skills all the time in my books, and Travis was there as I developed them. The two of us had many grand adventures together, from the streets of Waterdeep and sands of Netheril, to the Siege of Kalaman, and the last stand at the High Clerist’s Tower, as well as so many other battles, adventures, and shining moments. He was an inventive and strategic player, whose characters often found ways to punch way above their weight.

He told me once that the first character he ever rolled up was a fighter in the Rolemaster system named Aelfred. This is when he was in college. If you’ve never played Rolemaster, it is far and away the most complicated tabletop RPG I’ve ever encountered. It does have one of the coolest skill systems that I’ve since adapted to other games. Suffice to say, if Travis could cut his teeth on that system, he was fearless at running other games.

The last character he played was a cleric named Gazpacho for a D&D 5e campaign. I was not involved in that game, unfortunately, but I was in plenty of others over the years, both as a fellow player and as a GM/DM. 

Here’s a litany of the characters that were in games that I played in or ran myself:

Francis Greenleaf and Malik the Reaver (Forgotten Realms), Korranderaythe “Kor” von Cristalvasser (Dragonlance), Laeryn Chanis, Gwaelon, the Rune Magus, and Phillipe “Flit” Ballantine (Valeriand), Alfon the Blade (RPG to Go), Jasper (Greyhawk), the Mimic (Reverse Dungeon), Faustindintal Krinkledoom the Gnome Beserker (One Shot), Tiny the Pygmy Storm Giant (One Shot), Rick Derris (Traveller), Sour Ron (7^th Sea), Chuck Wagon (Werewolf the Apocalypse), Adam Adamant and Sebastian Vandergriffin (Glorantha), Gruhn and Hawk (Iron Kingdoms), Quarantine (AEOS-17), Councilor Trip (Fallout), President McKenna (Far Beyond the Stars), Derek Calderon (Star Wars), and Nevarre Nightshade (Shadow of the Dragon Queen).

Travis was also a prolific GM/DM. Here’s a similar list of campaigns that he ran where I was a participant:

Shadow World (Rolemaster), Memphis By Midnight (World of Darkness), Age of Netheril (Forgotten Realms), Angels and Devils (Forgotten Realms), Silverymoon/The North (Forgotten Realms), Game of Thrones – Past Lens (Rolemaster), Malkaziel’s Cataract (Forgotten Realms/Tenede)

In all this, I have to include this story. One of my first attempts to run a game was when I was in junior high. I created a super-simple RPG system that used only six-sided dice. It was really meant for us to play while on road trips where most of it was handled through just talking it out.

A couple of my cousins had made up characters and played for a while. They had levelled a bit and found some great magic items. At this point, I hadn’t figured out that if you introduce a new character into the party that you should start them out relatively equal to the other party members. When Travis came down from college during the summer, he made up a character named Alfon the Blade, a thief/rogue character who, rather unfortunately, only had one hit point. Travis didn’t mind, however. He was adept at playing oddball characters.

After getting kicked out of the town square for plinking on an out-of-tune harp that only had one string, I introduced him to our cousin Michael’s character, an extremely dangerous Dwarven assassin named Viper. Viper had made a reputation for himself by clearing out the local forest of several gangs of bandits singlehandedly. Understand that Michael was maybe 10-years-old at the time. Travis was 19 or 20.

So, when Viper met Alfon for the first time, Viper gave his future companion the immortal greeting of: “Why don’t you come with me to kill thieves, because thieves are easy. And if you don’t, I’ll kill you.”

I really wish I had a picture of Travis’s face in that moment. Considering that Alfon was one of those aforementioned thieves, who only had one hit point, Travis quickly agreed to join forces with Viper.

Travis told me later that Viper really knew how to make a sales pitch, the proverbial offer you couldn’t refuse.

Priceless.

The Good of the One

I cannot count the number of hours that I’ve spent talking with Travis about various intricacies and nuances of fantasy and sci-fi stories. Game of Thrones, Babylon 5, Star Wars, lots of Lord of the Rings, Dragonlance, The Avengers, Watchmen, Transformers, Dune, you name it. A love of Star Trek, however, is something that we both had in our blood even from an early age.

Spock’s axiom that “the good of the many outweighs the good of the few, or the one” is a philosophy that Travis put into practice daily. He continually put the needs of everyone else around him before his own, almost to a fault. He did not seek recognition or self-aggrandizement, but preferred to fly under the radar and be left alone.

When he went to the hospital for the last time, we saw Kirk’s reversal of that philosophy that “the good of the one outweighs the good of the many” on display. A number of folks dropped what they were doing to come and show their support for him and the family. Even more called, sent texts, or showed support through various social media. This continued even after Travis left us, and I don’t imagine it will let up anytime soon, and I’m thankful for it.

I can’t imagine trying to mourn a loss this unthinkable without the community around me. I know I will be leaning on them in the days, months, and years ahead. But to put that loss into perspective, now I know something of what Kirk would have felt when Spock died at the end of The Wrath of Khan, helpless to do anything but watch as the other one slipped away, and dumbstruck at not knowing how to process that his friend was gone.

When Leonard Nimoy passed back in 2015, a YouTuber named Melodysheep put together what I think is one of the most moving tributes to the character of Spock and by extension his relationship with Kirk. It’s also just a really good song that I will embed here. It’s worth taking a look/listen.

I definitely don’t want to paint Travis as being purely logical and without emotion, because he definitely wasn’t like that. But I was always the impulsive one, the one who rushed in where angels feared to tread. He was the cautious one, always advising me to look before I would leap, and to not make important decisions when emotions were running hot.

I’m glad I took some of those lessons to heart, but I’m not done learning from Travis yet.

On Farewells

A character flaw of mine, one which I’m very well aware of, is that I absolutely hate change. Once I get something where I like it, I want it to maintain indefinitely, but of course it never does. We live in a world that is constantly in flux. Almost always those are changes that we can do nothing about.

Losing someone I care about is the ultimate kind of change that I didn’t ask for or want. Again, I can do nothing about it now. I’m not sure what the shape of my life will look like now that he’s gone, and I’m not looking forward to finding out.

Words don’t usually fail me, but they do in this case. As raw as this account has been, it can never really do the man justice. I shall not look upon his like again.

But here I am in in the aftermath. All I can do is try to move forward, though it is tearing the heart right out of me, and try to live a life worthy of his memory and legacy. So, that’s what I’m going to do. I will honor him and the many debts that will now remain eternally in arrears.

In closing, I’d like to share a bit of poetry with you. As I said, Travis had the soul of a poet. One of his favorites was The Noble Nature, which is a poem about the brevity of life and beauty. I’ll leave you with the last two lines of it, which were the last lines of the last email he ever sent me.

In small proportions we just beauties see.

And in short measures life may perfect be.      

                             —Ben Jonson. (1572-1637)

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Kleber Mendonça Filho and Wagner Moura have known each other for over twenty years. But until now they haven’t made a film together. 

“The Secret Agent,” Mendonça’s fourth narrative feature, stars Moura as Amando, a researcher who’s traveled to Recife, Brazil, in a bid to escape the wrath of the crooked industrialist Ghirotti (Luciano Chirolli). Set in 1977, at the height of the military dictatorship, the film chronicles Amarndo’s desire to obtain fake passports for himself and his son before murderers hired by Ghirotti learn of his location.

Along the way we are immersed in Amando’s network: the refugees living under assumed names who he calls neighbors, the resplendent movie theater his father-in-law Sr. Alexandre (Carlos Francisco) works at the records office where he hopes to find proof of his mother’s existence, and a group of investigators who’d like to take his testimony as evidence of Ghirotti’s crimes. 

With help from cinematographer Evgenia Alexandrova (whose energetic camera creates a kind of espionage-like tension), Mendonça both recreates 1977 Brazil and provides a window into a time when disappearances and kidnappings in broad daylight were either refashioned into myths or flatly ignored. At the center of this harrowing, at times, winking story is Moura, who won Best Actor at Cannes for his performance.

Here, Moura is smart and suave, unassuming and sexy, in a performance that combines the restlessness of Gene Hackman in “Night Moves” with the movie-star wattage of Robert Redford in “Three Days of the Condor,” for a film that says much about our fraught contemporary relationship with truth and fascism. It’s also the kind of performance that feels like a sincere partnership between actor and director. 

During the New York Film Festival, Moura and Mendonça met in person at the Thompson Central Park Hotel with RogerEbert.com to talk about the importance of journalism, censorship, and the long road that led to this collaboration.      

This interview has been edited for clarity.

You two have known each other for quite a while. Why did you decide at this specific moment to collaborate?

Kleber Mendonça Filho: I really think that things happen at the right time. There was a possibility of working with Wagner on “Bacurau,” but he had his mind too much on his own film, “Marighella,” so it wasn’t the right time. Instead, I sat down and actually wrote a script for him. It’s really tailor-made for him, tailor-made in terms of what I knew about him as a person and all the work he’s done in theater, television, and cinema, and weighing it all together. I came up with this role, which I really hoped you’d appreciate, and now here we are talking to you.

But we had met many times before. I was a film critic then, and I’ve interviewed him maybe three times. But then I made my films, and life went on, and by 2013, we developed the desire to work together after he saw my first film, “Neighboring Sounds.” So these things take time. 

In what ways do you think you grew to this moment?

Wagner Moura: There was one thing that strongly contributed to our decision to make this film. From 2018 to 2022, Brazil was in a difficult political period, and Kleber and I were both vocally opposed to what was happening. We both suffered lots of consequences for doing that. I had my film censored, and Kleber had his own issues. If we had wanted to make a film together before, that environment was what brought us together. 

Before then, we were talking informally because Kleber really takes care of his scripts. So he didn’t really show me the script until he felt like it was time to do it. But I knew exactly what the film was about because we were talking about it all the time, because we had conversations about how to survive and how to stick with your values when everything around you is saying the opposite of what you think.

KMF: I kept telling Wagner before he read the script: No good deed will go unpunished. It means that you’re absolutely right in what you do. You’re honest, and you’re a model citizen, and that is precisely why they can get you. I find that really painful, shocking, and terrible, and it keeps happening in so many places and countries. 

The Bolsonaro years brought us together first as citizens outraged by the inequality happening. But then we also had to deal with persecution because, like now, we are in this interview with you, and we often find ourselves with microphones in our hands, and then people ask: So what do you think about denying vaccines? I think it’s terrible. It’s wrong. When that goes on the record, a lot of people who believe that vaccines are ways of installing Chinese drones into your blood veins will go against us for being pro-vaccines. That statement will put us in a position to be attacked. 

WM: It’s extremely polarized everywhere, man. 

Wagner: When a role is written for you, do you find yourself using another process to get into the character? 

WM: I’ve been trying to work with Kleber since I saw “Neighboring Sounds.” I met him when he was a critic at Cannes 20 years ago, became friends with him, and then started seeing his short films. I was like: Holy shit. That critic can direct. And “Neighboring Sounds” is one of the greatest Brazilian films ever made. So, when I saw it, I knew this was what I wanted to do as an artist. I’m also a very political person, and I wanted to be part of that universe. Kleber is a master; he shoots films beautifully. You can see his references, and he manages to turn them all into a very Brazilian thing. 

It’s also very political. But politics doesn’t go in front of everything. You feel them because of the characters and the relationships the characters have. So it was like: This is what I need to do. And then I basically started to stalk him so he’d work with me [Laughs]. But to be honest, it didn’t really change the way I approach the character. I didn’t feel any pressure. I just felt happy and honored. Kleber used to say: I’m only going to give you the script, and if you read the script and you don’t like it, then you’re a fucking asshole. [Laughs]

I read it, and it was great. But even before then, we were already exchanging information, so I knew exactly what the film was. When we started shooting, I felt like I already knew what it was. It wasn’t difficult. It was very fluid. 

How did you imagine Armando as a character?

KMF: I think it’s more challenging as a piece of writing to have a great, classic hero who’s not a wimp or an idiot. He’s actually strong, full of life, and passionate, but he doesn’t have a gun. Other people might have guns, other people might kill people. Not him. That was challenging because how do you make a strong character who doesn’t push people against the wall and say, “I’m gonna kill you”? [Laughs] Which is a kind of tradition, especially in Hollywood cinema.

It feels especially defiant to have a hero without a gun at a moment when political strongmen are carrying metaphorical guns. 

KMF: That defiance comes through in the details. The way Armando talks to Ghirotti during the dinner sequence, Armando never lowers his head. He just looks Ghirotti in the face, and you can see he’s thinking: What a fucking idiot. When Armando tries to handle the situation diplomatically, it only explodes. The explosions were really interesting. There’s the moment where he punches that idiotic guy in the face. There’s another explosion when he wakes up from a nightmare. So, those modulations were necessary for the film. But I really wanted a classic James Stewart-type empathetic hero. 

You were both journalists, and this film is partly about journalism, particularly the exploitation story about the hairy leg. What do you think about the vulnerability journalism is feeling today?

WM: I have so many concerns. The truth as we know it is over. A lot of that has to do with the decline of journalism. They’re being discredited, especially by world leaders in some places. 

Journalism as a business is declining, too. People are now getting information from social media and WhatsApp. With technology, you don’t know what to believe. With deepfake or AI, you have an image of a person and a voice to go with the image, but it’s not the person. What the fuck? How can you deal with that? Where is the truth? There are no facts anymore. That’s what scares me a lot. 

KMF: I worked at a newspaper for a number of years. In the film, the information in the newspapers is always imprecise, wrong, or manipulated. I saw this from inside newspaper newsrooms. I worked in culture, and I watched other sections of the newspaper. I saw mistakes many times—natural, human mistakes, errors—and I saw manipulation openly plotted. I saw simple people being reckless and irresponsible with information. As a filmmaker, I really believe that when I shoot the machines at the newspaper, what I’m shooting is a factory of storytelling. It just depends on what stories are being told. 

One of them is the hairy leg, which is almost like a poetic fairytale, which finds its meaning in politics and censorship. The newspapers couldn’t actually say what had happened. So they made the hairy leg the culprit. Not the police or the military. So, I’m fascinated by the media, but what’s happening now is incredibly dangerous. I agree with Wagner. The truth is over. I have two 11-year-olds, and sometimes they hear or see things that have been manipulated, and I’m the one who has to look them in the face and say: “This is wrong.” And I’ve even started to feel like they’re beginning to doubt what I’m saying. That’s really scary.

Wagner: We all criticize journalism and specific mainstream newspapers, but I think that at this moment we need to support journalists. This is one pillar of democracy. The shit that our kids are reading on social media—I don’t have social media—but I know they read all kinds of crazy shit. They believe all of those things. Remember when Bolsonaro won the first election?

KMF: Of course. 

WM: When he won the first election, one of the reasons he won was because right-wingers spread a rumor that left-wingers were distributing baby bottles with plastic penises pinned to the top. 

KMF: To teach babies how to be homosexuals. 

WM: People bought that shit. That won him an election in the second biggest democracy in the Americas. 

What impact do you think returning to the dictatorship brings to viewers today? 

KMF: I don’t think films change the world, but I think films can open an interesting window to the past and inform people about the nature of their own country. The American cinema has done that multiple times. I remember growing up in the 1980s when Hollywood made the Vietnam War a major narrative in US films. That was an interesting moment for many people in the US, as they realized it was a complete thing. Now with Brazil, I think we are at a really interesting moment when it feels like, over the last month, the far-right project has collapsed and is sinking. And while I wish it would sink without a trace, I’m not sure it will. 

We have gone back to a democratic mode. “The Secret Agent” was written about a Brazil that existed 10 years ago. This is the crisis that we went through, which was basically a bunch of older men trying to reedit the best years of their lives in the military dictatorship. That was the most shocking discovery for me. This period piece that I was writing so I could work with Wagner was, in fact, a thinly disguised observation of Brazil over the last 10 years. 

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As with many festivals, but especially Fantasia, a kind of analysis paralysis can creep in with even the most intrepid critic. What do you cover? What’s worth looking at and talking about? What can be paired together for snappy festival dispatches? Even (or especially) amid the Montreal-based fest’s genre brief, there’s a lot of variety to explore: animation, horror, science fiction, comedy, the list goes on. But even as I settle into my weeklong stint in Quebec (I don’t travel well), I find my curious pull for home calling to me in a trio of horror titles—two comedic, one compelling and mournful—about the pull to defend your domicile and the people in it.

First is Steve Pink’s “Terrestrial,” which feels at once like a bit of a stretch from prior films he’s penned and/or directed (“Hot Tub Time Machine,” “Grosse Point Blank”), and yet curiously in conversation with them. “Hot Tub,” of course, echoes in the ’90s-tinged TV adaptation of a fictionalized series of sci-fi novels called “The Neptune Files” that protagonist Allen (Jermaine Fowler) worships; Rob Corddry and Craig Robinson appear in the chintzy, low-budget clips we see. And the film’s curious intersection of showbiz ambition and frantic violence connects to similar concerns in “Grosse Pointe Blank.” This one doesn’t have the highs of the latter or the slapstick lows of the former, but it’s an interesting little psychological thriller that carries its own darkly comic streak.

Allen, you see, is a struggling sci-fi writer on the cusp of success. When his old college friends (James Morosini, Pauline Chalamet, Edy Modica) meet him at his new address in LA, they’re shocked to see it’s not a rinky-dink studio apartment, but a palatial mansion filled with “Neptune Files” memorabilia courtesy of the series’ author, SJ Purcell (“Ted Lasso”‘s Brendan Hunt). He’s about to hit paydirt, he tells them, as he’s just banked a massive advance on the new sci-fi novel he’s about to get published. But he seems weird, distracted even; his stories don’t seem to add up, he gets weirdly high-strung and disappears at odd moments. And the cracks in their long-dormant friend group dynamic—from financial woes to coveting engaged partners—start to grow ever deeper.

And then, about thirty minutes in, Pink throws in a real curveball, cutting back to three months earlier, and peeling back the curtain on Allen’s apparent Hollywood success story. This is where “Terrestrial” comes alive—similar to another great indie from this year, “Twinless,” which also sets up a status quo only to reveal nastier truths lying underneath. In this first stretch, Pink does an admirable job establishing the tension between his four characters; Fowler, for his part, plays anxious quite well, all evasive grins and measured cadence as he lies through gritted teeth and hopes he won’t get caught. Once the worm turns, and for spoilers’ sake we won’t get into specifics, the circumstances of Allen’s deceptions become clearer, and we follow him as he scrambles to put out one fire after another to keep the lie alive. It’s an entertaining bit of hopscotch farce.

There are moments where the infrastructure threatens to come crashing down—as more players enter the fray, or Allen’s friends struggle to follow the wrong trail of breadcrumbs to see what’s really going on with him. But Pink juggles the tension nicely, ramping up the pressure for Allen and the fragile dream he’s trying to will into existence through sheer determination. It ends in bloody, but fitting misery, “Terrestrial” understanding the high cost of lies, and the precarious footing success can put you on.

Now for something no less bloody, but a lot sillier: Writer/director William Bagley’s “Hold the Fort,” perhaps the only horror movie in existence to come away with a positive view on homeowners’ associations. That said, it comes in the form of a brisk and occasionally charming 75-minute horror comedy about the one context in which Stand Your Ground laws could potentially apply: When a horde of literal demons from hell descend on your neighborhood.

In this case, the HOA does a lot more than fine people for having the wrong grass or subtly gatekeep those who don’t properly assimilate into the white-picket-fence lifestyle: When new neighbors, aw-shucks marathon runner Lucas (Chris Mayers) and his skeptical wife Jenny (Haley Leary), show up for the “welcome to the neighborhood party,” they find a lot more there than awkward pleasantries and cucumber sandwiches. As wacky HOA prez Jerry (Julian Smith) explains, their suburb lies right next to a portal to the underworld, and one night each year the demons come out to play. Tonight’s that night, and Lucas and Jenny have to adjust quickly to a) realizing the supernatural world is real, and b) they’ll have to get along with their crazy new neighbors long enough to survive against witches, werewolves, and (long, drawn-out sigh) kung fu zombies. (Small price to pay for no property tax, though.)

For good and ill, “Hold the Fort” has big Feature-Length Cracked Video energy, leaning hard into big, broad laughs and over-the-top gore with the kind of devil-may-care glee you need for low-budget productions like this. Every few minutes, a new wrinkle or monster gets thrown at our characters (and us), and the cast scrambles to find the right solution in Jerry’s trunk of monster-hunting weapons (The HOA’s mantra? “Magic can’t stop bullets.”)

There’s a kind of infectious glee in how much fun the cast is having while making merry play with the genre, but the humor is a bit of an acquired taste. The gags and jokes are pretty pun-based and self-satisfied, the kind that winks a little too hard to make up for how creaky the joke was. The special effects have a distinctly After Effects flavor to them, making you feel like you’re watching kids create their first YouTube video. The performances are also no great shakes, which makes sense given that the script doesn’t give our characters much to do beyond spout gags and writhe in pain as they die. (Leary maintains a good head on her shoulders, though, and Smith’s Stifler-esque commitment is the most successful comic wavelength of any of the cast.)

With all that fun out of the way, it’s time for one of the best (and most devastating) horror movies out of the fest thus far: Ben Leonberg’s inventive, heartfelt “Good Boy.” The premise is deceptively simple and elegantly delivered: What if, when your dog stared at that random corner of your house, he really was seeing a ghost? That instinct, writ large, sets the tone for an unflinching haunted house tale of grief, all centered around the perspective of an unwell man’s best friend.

“Good Boy” is told entirely from the eyes of Indy (Leonberg’s own dog), a beautiful Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever who remains fiercely loyal to his human, Todd (Shane Jensen). Leonberg keeps Todd’s face largely obscured, and our eye level right at Indy’s; we hear his voice, his raspy coughs that let us know something’s wrong, the worried phone calls with his sister as he uproots himself to the remote upstate home of his late grandfather (Larry Fessenden). Indy doesn’t know what’s going on. He just knows something’s wrong with his guy, and every so often, he sees a looming shadow in the corner of the house.

Over the next seventy-some minutes, “Good Boy” plays out its high concept in vivid, mournful fashion, as Indy plays witness to something akin to a family curse that’s cut short the lives of so many of the male members of Todd’s family (and seems to be affecting his human, too). Whether down to Leonberg’s mastery of the camera, or his innate knowledge of his furry friend, or both, he ekes out an outstanding performance from Indy—it’s abstracted, wordless (no narration here), told entirely through cocked heads, ear twitches, sniffs, and his big, expressive eyes. It’s a staggering pet performance, one so nuanced it’s hard to believe he didn’t know he was in a movie.

“Good Boy” largely rests on the novelty of that gimmick, but mines it for maximum pathos; as we spend more time in Indy’s world, chasing down the ghosts and spirits of the house that try to warn him of the trouble befalling Todd (including that of his grandfather’s own loyal companion, Bandit), Leonberg touches bittersweetly on the deep and abiding love a pet can have for his owner. Part of the film’s terror, especially as it reaches its heartbreaking conclusion, is watching this furry innocent see its entire world come slowly crashing down around it, and not being able to comprehend why. In that way, it so perfectly captures the rhythms of grief—the helplessness, the bargaining, the confusion—in ways that’ll leave you reaching for the tissues. It certainly knocked me for a loop when I saw it. A devastating, but profoundly rewarding start to the fest.

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