Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

The soft, final muffling by snow

Winter Gothic: one fine story about chilly seasonal horror is "Silent Snow, Secret Snow".  We noted a 1970s tv adapation, but a 1966 version precedes it.

Whole thing on the glorious Internet Archive.

(thanks to Steven Kaye)

Satan comes to Infocult

In honor of the holiday, a little girl wants to bring Infocult's author together with an old friend:

(thanks to Hugh Blackmer, another old friend)

Eyeball to eyeball

Here's another spooky Doublequote from the Hipbone master:

Without getting into the immediate Eckhart context, that passage summons up a visceral fear: the re-use of a body part.  Think the Hands of Orlac, or phantom eye (ex: this 2002 film).  Plus there's the spooky, intrusive stare within.   

This quotepair reminds me of that fine Blue Oyster Cult song about eyes:

 

Specifically,

Harvester of eyes, that's me

And I see all there is to see

When I look inside your head

Right up front to the back of your skull...

The Infocultish elite will also recall Videodrome (1983).  Here's looking at you, Barry Convex.

Everything's Gothic about this economy

More Gothicness about the economy, from the Huffington Post.  First, the zombies, of course:

If that day comes and say ... CitiGroup isn't sitting on a mountain of wealth, we suddenly come face-to-face with The Walking Dead.

Then some HPL class:

[Y]ou can basically imagine the "Fed discount window" as some Lovecraftian Taco Bell drive-thru where Jamie Dimon waves a toxically-tranched derivative burrito at the cashier and is given billions of dollars in return.

There's also a cute, non horror, but pulpy bit about ransom notes.

 

Charles Cameron has a new Gothic-themed doublequote for us:

Several observations:

• Interesting blood-drinking parallel with the antisemitic blood libel
• Doesn't make sense to include "happy new year", given the secular nature of that event

Another Facebook death rumor

Another Facebook->death story has been spotted by Snopes.  The conceit is that a father writes a vile (if undescribed) message on his daughter's Facebook page, probably on her wall.  In reply, perhaps because of the lack of a "dislike" button, she kills herself.

The lure was a purported devastating message a father had left on his daughter's Facebook wall which prompted her to commit suicide. Sometimes the story was fleshed out with claims that the girl had taken her life on Christmas Eve, or that she'd just returned from basketball tryouts when she read the horrifying missive. It was typically accompanied by a photograph of a rather fetching girl in a pink top looking back over her shoulder and smiling, or a headshot of some other pretty girl.

So far, so classic fearsome internet: family relations soured or revealed to be monstrous; death; technology of choice.

But Snopes goes on to point out more awfulness: the story was used as a scam to coax people out of their login info.

That fearsome Nigerian cinema

The first Nollywood film was a horror story:

“Living in Bondage”, the story of a farmer in a big city who loses his wife and is haunted by her ghost, sold more than half a million copies.

Nollywood, the energetic Nigerian film scene, is getting some attention.  Naturally, there is the fear, as with every media eruption.

There's the disease metaphor:

Among Africa’s elites, hostility is almost uniform. Jean Rouch, a champion of indigenous art in Niger, has compared Nollywood to the AIDS virus.

Fear of the occult:

Cultural critics complain about “macabre scenes full of sorcery” in the films. The more alarmist describe Nigerian directors and producers as voodoo priests casting malign spells over audiences in other countries...

More occult and horror:

African elites sneer at the frequent displays of witchcraft in Nigerian films. Traditional curses are imposed, spirits wander, juju blood flows. The tribulations of modern life are often shown to be the result of shadowy machinations. Murder and the occult are never far from the surface. “It is the Nollywood equivalent of the Hollywood horror movie,” says Ms Isong, the producer.

Beyond religious fear, there's also a political angle:

Five decades after much of Africa gained independence, its elites fear being re-colonised, this time from within the continent. “The Nigerians will eat everything we have,” says a former official at the Ghanaian ministry of chieftaincy and culture.

And the now-familiar language of addiction:

Many Nigerians still remember the first time they saw “Living in Bondage”. Odion, a drug addict with a toothless smirk on a street corner in central Lagos, says, “All of us kids at the time, even the under-tens, watched it and we just had to have more. I tell you, I tried many things since then. None is as addictive.”

Not to mention links to unrelated crime:

“Films are made on the run, sometimes literally,” says Emem Isong, one of Nigeria’s few female producers, during a shoot. “Some of the guys are hiding from the police.”

There's also copyright fear:

Pirate gangs were probably Nollywood’s first exporters. They knew how to cross tricky borders and distribute goods across a disparate continent where vast tracts of land are inaccessible...The pirates created the pan-African market Mr Akudinobi now feeds.

A huge amount of stuff is going on here - race, postcolonialism, industrial imitation, video history - but I wanted to isolate the fear element, for now.

(thanks to Jesse Walker chez Reason; photo from PinkMoose)

When elevators attack

Everyone's fear of elevator doors was realized in New York City this Christmas:

A hospital visitor ... got on the elevator on the first floor. Somehow, her leg got caught in the door and her leg was dragged outside the elevator as it traveled up eight floors.

It's horrifying to think of just how long that took.  "The woman was reportedly drifting in and out of consciousness and was bleeding profusely as she lay trapped with her leg crushed."

Rescue wasn't easy, and added to the machine terror:

The FDNY was called in. It took almost an hour to free her. The floor of the elevator had to be cut to remove her after they were unable to push the car off of the woman's legs.

Christmas horror.

Horror film buffs will readily identify this as a case of life imitating art.

(red buttons from Robert S. Donovan; poster from Archiv fur Filmposter)

Mods of death

This sf short-short story explores a possible fear of tech to come.  It's based on a death due to modding - well, read it, you'll see.

Danet Arendse, the Playtel spokesperson, attributed the death to the popular underground "modding" culture that has sprung up around biorobotics and Blue Brain breeds in particular...

I like the way Beukes has the company note the warranty violation.

(thanks to Bruce Sterling)

Horror, terror, and Gothic

Interesting NGram result, if we track three major scary story keywords over time:

 

"Terror" clearly leads for the long haul.