There's a new Knives Out movie on Netflix, and I still haven't seen a few of this season's awards contenders. But the film I most wish I could watch right now is Squid Invasion From the Deep. It's a sci-fi thriller directed by John Carpenter about a team of scientists led by Sigourney Weaver who discover an extraterrestrial cephalopod and then die one by one at its tentacles. The production design was inspired by Alien and The Thing; there are handmade creature FX and lots of gore; Wilford Brimley has a cameo. Unfortunately, though, I can't see this movie, and neither can you, because it doesn't exist.

James Cameron's obsession with the ocean deep began when he was an adolescent, in rural Canada. He read National Geographic accounts of deep-sea excursions and idolized Jacques Cousteau and his crew. "They always had this great French sense of style," he said recently. "They breathed it, quite literally, with their Aqua-Lungs. They got in their silver wetsuits and went exploring. It was like a science-fiction movie. I said, 'I need to do that.' " The problem: he lived five hundred kilometres from the nearest ocean.