After Guardian writers shared their scariest Halloween watches, readers respond with their picks, from Jaws to The Blair Witch Project

My parents took me to see it in the theatre, under the impression that it would be appropriate for a seven-year-old. Princess Mombi’s macabre wardrobe of disembodied heads; the psychopathic laughter of the “wheelers”, with all four limbs ending in squeaky wheels; Nicol Williamson’s sinister, vicious Nome King – all are permanent fixtures in my unconscious hall of famous terrors. And Fairuza Balk’s Dorothy is eerie to match, a perfect uncanny heroine for a truly twisted “children’s” film. gradeoneirony

As the actor approaches his 90th year and publishes an autobiography, he reflects on his early years on stage, being inspired by Laurence Olivier, becoming a Hollywood star and conquering his demons

‘What’s the weather like over there?” asks Anthony Hopkins as soon as our video call begins. He may have lived in California for decades but some Welshness remains, in his distinctive, mellifluous voice – perhaps a little hoarser than it once was – and his preoccupation with the climate. It’s a dark evening in London but a bright, sunny morning in Los Angeles, and Hopkins is equally bright in demeanour and attire, sporting a turquoise and green shirt. “I came here 50 years ago. Somebody said: ‘Are you selling out?’ I said: ‘No, I just like the climate and to get a suntan.’ But I like Los Angeles. I’ve had a great life here.”

It hasn’t been all that great recently, actually. In January this year, Hopkins’ house in Pacific Palisades was destroyed by the wildfires. “It was a bit of a calamity,” he says, with almost cheerful understatement. “We’re thankful that no one was hurt, and we got our cats and our little family into the clear.” He wasn’t there at the time; he and his wife, Stella, were in Saudi Arabia, where he was hosting a concert of his own music played by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. They’re now in a rented house in the nearby neighbourhood of Brentwood. “We lost everything, but you think: ‘Oh well, at least we are alive.’ I feel sorry for the thousands of people who have been really affected. People who were way past retirement age, and had worked hard over the years and now … nothing.”

(Columbia)
The Catalan star’s monumental fourth LP features lyrics in 13 languages, references to female saints, the London Symphony Orchestra – and Björk on ‘divine intervention’

Last week, Rosalía appeared on a US podcast to discuss her fourth album. At one juncture, the interviewer asked if she didn’t think that Lux was demanding a lot from her listeners: a not entirely unreasonable question, given that it features a song cycle in four “movements”, based on the lives of various female saints and involves the 33-year-old Catalan star singing in 13 different languages to the thunderous accompaniment of the London Symphony Orchestra; and that it sounds nothing whatsoever like its predecessor, 2022’s Motomami. “Absolutely,” she responded, framing Lux as a reaction to the quick-fix dopamine hit of idly scrolling social media: something you had to focus on.

Demanding a lot from her listeners didn’t seem like something Rosalía was terribly bothered about, which is, in a sense, surprising. Pop has seldom seemed more prone to user-friendliness, to demanding as little as it can from its audience, as if the convenience of its primary means of transmission has affected its sound: it occasionally feels as though streaming’s algorithms – always coming up with something new that’s similar to stuff you already know – have started to define the way artists prosecute their careers. Then again, Rosalía has form when it comes to challenging her fanbase: variously infused with reggaeton, hip-hop, dubstep, dembow and experimental electronica, Motomami represented a dramatic pivot away from her 2018 breakthrough, El Mal Querer, a pop overhaul of flamenco that – incredibly – began life as the singer’s college project. It seems oddly telling that the biggest guest star on Lux is Björk, whose distinctive tone appears during Berghain, somewhere in between a resounding orchestral arrangement, Rosalía’s own operatic vocals and the sound of Yves Tumor reprising Mike Tyson’s “I’ll fuck you ‘til you love me” tirade over and over again. It’s hard not to suspect that Rosalía sees Björk as a kindred spirit or even a model, someone who has predicated a decades-long solo career on making artistic handbrake turns through a glossy aesthetic.

When my son was growing up, his school recorder was the bane of my life. Now it’s what I reach for at the end of a hard day, rather than a glass of wine

I’m like a coiled spring after work. Shoulders tense, breath fast and shallow. Usually the sound of my laptop lid slamming shut would be followed by the squeak of a cork pulled from a bottle of red, the wine hastily sploshed into a glass, that first mouthful putting a much-needed full stop on the working day.

Then, a few months ago, I came across my now-adult son’s old school recorder in the attic. I idly blew into it, immediately transported back to the days it was the bane of my life – his daily practice a violent assault on my eardrums, the piercing shriek still reverberating through my head hours after he had gone to bed.

In films such as The War Game, Culloden and Punishment Park, Watkins pioneered the mock-documentary form and used it to make his historical dramas and up-to-the-minute dystopias all equally immediate and real

• Peter Watkins, Oscar-winning director of The War Game, dies aged 90
• Peter Watkins obituary

Dystopian, post-apocalyptic, mockumentary: these are common, even hackneyed genres in today’s movies and television. But when film-maker Peter Watkins deployed them in the 1960s, they were revolutionary, and Watkins himself was revolutionary as well – an English revolutionary, in fact, alive to the cruelty and iniquity of kings but also to that of people bent on decapitation. His cinema persistently asked questions about those in power, and what will happen when their power goes catastrophically wrong. An artist dedicated to challenging and upsetting, Watkins came from the dissenter tradition of uncompromising radicalism on screen and stage – the same tradition as Edward Bond, Ken Loach and Dennis Potter.

His enduringly brilliant and angry anti-nuclear drama The War Game was commissioned but then banned by the BBC in 1965. (It screened in cinemas, and was finally shown on television a couple of decades later.) It lasts just 47 minutes but viewers felt they had lived through a lifetime of fear. When I first saw it as a teenager at a CND meeting 15 years after it was made, it seemed as if I had entered a new era of disillusioned adulthood.

The massacres carried out by the RSF in El Fasher, Darfur, with the support of its UAE sponsors, will only stop when the international community acts

It unfolded in plain sight over 18 months. The city of El Fasher in the Darfur region of Sudan, besieged by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), fell to the militia group last week, and what has followed is a catastrophe.

Mass killings are under way. There are reports that in one maternity hospital alone almost 500 people – patients and their families – were killed. The few that managed to escape tell of summary executions of civilians. The RSF has embarked on a killing spree of civilians so severe that images of blood saturating the ground have been picked up by satellite. The speed and intensity of the killings in the immediate aftermath of the fall of El Fasher has already been compared by war monitors to the first 24 hours of the Rwandan genocide.

Suspect charged with attempted murder in relation to two attacks, on Doncaster to London service and on a train at a DLR station

A man has been remanded in custody after appearing in court charged with attempted murder after a mass stabbing on a high-speed train in Cambridgeshire, in which 10 people were injured, and a separate incident on London’s public transport network that left another person hurt.

Anthony Williams, 32, from Peterborough, has been charged with 11 counts of attempted murder, one count of actual bodily harm and one count of possession of a bladed article in relation to the two incidents, the Crown Prosecution Service said.

Exclusive: Leading professor at Sheffield Hallam was told to cease research on supply chains and forced labour in China after demands from authorities

A British university complied with a demand from Beijing to halt research about human rights abuses in China, leading to a major project being dropped, the Guardian can reveal.

In February, Sheffield Hallam University, home to the Helena Kennedy Centre for International Justice (HKC), a leading research institution focused on human rights, ordered one of its best-known professors, Laura Murphy, to cease research on supply chains and forced labour in China.

Reform leader refuses to commit to keeping mechanism that guarantees how pensions are increased

Farage is speaking now. He says another “depressing budget hoves into view”. It will be a budget that “doesn’t have the guts to cut public spending”.

He says Britain has been living under an illusion.

I think for some years we’ve actually been living under an illusion. We’ve not been prepared to face up to just how much of an economic mess we genuinely in.

As we slipped down the global league tables, we kid ourselves that it’s OK, we’ve got GDP growth.

Culley, 19, who was arrested on drug-smuggling charges in May, is released after plea deal

The pregnant British teenager Bella May Culley has been released from a Georgian prison, where she had been held for six months on drug-smuggling charges after a plea deal.

Culley, 19, who is pregnant, was arrested in May at Tbilisi airport and accused of attempting to smuggle 12kg (26.5lbs) of marijuana and 2kg (4.4lbs) of hashish into the country.