B’Twixt Now and Sunrise (2011/2023, Francis Ford Coppola)

I put off watching Twixt for so long that a new director’s cut blu-ray came out with a modified title, so I can just watch that instead. Movie is a digital delight, getting spectral fast and never wrapping up its loose ends. Based on the wikis, those loose ends and the final scene of Val quietly mourning are the main differences from the 2011 version, which was stuffed with more deaths and incidents and postscripts.

As a washed-up horror author, Val Kilmer looks convincingly washed-up. Blocked, he takes sleeping pills to dream an ending for his new novel (FFC wrote the movie after waking in the middle of a dream and wanting to know the ending). At a dead-end town on a book tour, he meets a vampire ghost girl (Elle Fanning) and seeks advice from the late Edgar Allen Poe (Ben Chaplin).

It’s a war on the youth: Val is haunted by his daughter’s death, the town is haunted by the murder of a bunch of kids by a minister, and Sheriff Bruce Dern wants to blame all current troubles on the “evil slut” young people across the lake.

Good time to catch up with this, FFC’s latest released film, since he’s supposedly working on his decades-delayed Megalopolis. In the behind-the-scenes doc by granddaughter Gia Coppola: Francis explaining why everything takes so long, and a line producer explaining the importance of having great food for lunch every day. FFC’s son/Gia’s dad is the ghost haunting the film, as this version’s abrupt ending makes clear.