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For years now, I’ve been maintaining a mailing list of friends and family to whom I send a monthly update. Just a little thing, created in the wake of deleting our Facebook account, which otherwise allowed people to passively keep up with what we were doing. We needed to let them know directly, instead.

This month, I had to send out the most difficult of these updates.

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Welcome, locals, to the Signal Family Traveling Show!

Michael: The world is dimmer. My beautiful wife, my better half, my favorite person, is gone. 

Amanda Summers passed away unexpectedly last Saturday, June 20th. It has not yet been a week since I found her. I hope you’ll forgive me, but at the moment I prefer not to discuss the particulars. I would much rather you think of her as she was: an absolute delight.

As I write this, there is a fair amount that isn’t settled. Arrangements are being made for her to go back to Indiana where she’ll be buried next to her father, John. We’re planning a simple graveside gathering, a bit of speaking about her, and then a wake/gathering at Amanda’s mother’s house.

Amanda and I were both of the opinion that we are not our bodies. The real Amanda is inside all of us who knew her. The body that we are returning to the earth, we do so as a sign of respect, but that’s not her. As long as I live, she’s still here.

I have been surprised and comforted by the outpouring of support I’ve received in the wake of this tragedy. Friends dropped everything, traveling for hours to make sure I haven’t been alone for longer than I can handle. I’m being cared for. I hope that you’re cared for.

As longtime readers know, there were many months when AJ felt like she had done nothing of note and I had to pester her to contribute something to the newsletter. To honor that legacy, I’ll be pasting in AJ’s last movie review from Letterboxd. Maybe not one she would have picked, but it represents something important: a couple’s project of ours.

AJ had ADHD and had lost some of her taste for movies years ago, considering the time and attention commitment involved. Left to her own devices, she much preferred YouTube content. But she would sometimes join me to watch something, sitting at the other end of our couch, her attention split between the film and her laptop where she would be reading Letterboxd reviews, the film’s Wikipedia page, researching any idle questions that came up, etc. In recent years, we both became charmed by the actress Suzzanna, an Indonesian horror icon recently being rediscovered by English-speaking audiences thanks to some of her films finally being released outside of Indonesia on disc.

 

I bought a box set of Suzzanna films and as a couples activity, we worked our way through the whole set, finishing with Ghost Ambulance, Suzzanna’s last film… a comeback appearance for her. It’s, uh… not good. But the thing is, we loved not-good films sometimes even more than good ones. Because with a not-good film, we could talk about it afterwards: why didn’t it work? Could anything have improved it? What surprised us about the work? What did we like about it anyway?

And then we’d hurriedly write up our thoughts on Letterboxd just so we could race to read each other’s write-ups, dropping a little “like” at the bottom. A mouse-click that meant “I love you.”

It was the conversation that was important. The chance to watch her incisive mind work. To just be with her.

It’s very quiet here now. 

AJ: 

Ghost Ambulance (2008)

Watched 01 Jun 2026

If you have the Suzzanna: Empress of Darkness box set and intend to watch this, her last film appearance… I mean, don’t, it’s a waste of time. But if you insist, watch it first. This will give you a whole new appreciation for all the silly, campy touches in Suzzanna’s classic flicks. I’d even gladly take the syrupy love song serenade that goes on way too long in Satu Suro Night over this flick’s long scenes of young people walking around in the dark staring at nothing while breathing hard pretending to be frightened, which is fully 40% of the running time.

No one but Suzzanna has a personality and she’s stuck with “embattled grandmother trying to protect her family with folklore,” her family mostly being our main character, a young dude with Shia LaBeouf vibes and even less screen presence. Suzzanna does look great at 66, though, and gets a couple of nice wigs. Sadly though, she mostly fades out after the first act.

Then the focus shifts almost totally to young characters with no personalities. Our staring, cow-eyed “leading man” (the zeroest zero of all) has a girlfriend whose parents don’t approve of him; it’s his sole character trait and goes nowhere. She goes overseas to school and then returns in time to be imperiled by the final confrontation with evil, and none of it matters because who even are these people?

Nothing seems to be resolved at the end. I guess Suzzanna ritually banishes the evil, but it’s not communicated well, or maybe I was just comatose by that point. Basically, the film seemed to have no budget to do much with the titular Ghost Ambulance, no spooky ideas for ghosts, no resourcefulness to try to recreate some of the folklore ghosts from Suzzanna’s classic movies, and no ideas for things the characters might do or talk about between anemic jump scares, besides tepid crushes on each other and (for the non-leading guy) ogling girls. The demon makeup is the most basic boring dark ashpile face with whited out eyes. You’re asking me to be scared of a coupla marbles in an extinguished campfire site, movie, it’s not gonna happen. There’s just nothing to this.

They pull the old “JUMP SCARE– psyche, it was just a dream!” at least five times. Maybe more. We lost count.

My better half is gone. This was always my favorite photo of her.

She was my favorite person.