Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Welsh monsters read aloud

Here's a terrific reading of Robert Graves' "Welsh Incident".  The voice is Richard Burton's.  The creeping monsters are from Wales, or not.

(thanks to Charles Cameron)

A royal monster

The Onion reports on a British royal's pregancy, like so:

Kate Middleton Suffering From Morning Sickness

(thanks to Jesse Walker)

 

Print your own doppelganger

In today's story of Japanese creepiness, a Tokyo firm will make you a  doll of your very disturbed self.  3d printing horrors:

A bunch of women had themselves "cloned" around their weddings, it seems:

Some more charming details:

Kaneko-san shows us how the SEU95 is inserted in the back orifice. Clone subjects have the choice of having this inserted in the front orifice (dolphin) too.

(thanks to Randy McCall)

The horror of tech company purchasing

Sometimes the buying of a technology firm can resemble Gothic horror, at least according to this New Yorker article:

[C]ompanies are so often founded explicitly for the purpose of being gobbled up and dissolved in the gullet of a gargantuan corporation, and its users are simply bait. And it is more profound still when it comes to Yahoo, which has an especially egregious track record of bespoiling the companies it entices into its purple esophagus...

Perhaps medicine is required.

(photo via Infrogmation of New Orleans)

Horror of student loan debt

"The Red" is a horror short about... student loan debt.  

The heroine is haunted by all kinds of horror tropes in a few short minutes: wounds, mysterious bleeding, uncanny voices, crawling bugs, disturbing people, creepy phone calls, and oozing monsters.  Not to mention less Gothic and more microeconomic fears, like job stress, declined credit cards, dwindling finances, and stalking creditors.

 Eventually the heroine cracks under the strain and goes mad.

"You can't outrun it.  All you can do is face it.  And fight it."

Art in disease

A new book finds beautiful visuals in the midst of horrible medical imagery.

The imagery is horrible because it usually stems from disease or trauma: Lou Gherig's Disease, ectopic pregnancy, testicular cancer.  There's something classically decadent about the project. 

(thanks to Todd Bryant)

Cthulhu meets MOOCs

The rise of MOOCs explained. They came from R'lyeh!

(thanks to Steven Burnett)

How to use a touch of Gothic

The New Yorker quietly adds just a smidgen of Gothic to a technology essay:

The primary interface element of Now is what Google calls “cards,” which are modelled after real cards. They present a clean, trim canvas for information—one recalls the discussion of tasteful business-card design in the film “American Psycho.” 

"One recalls?"  Depends on the "one" in question, but Infocult always remembers.  "That's bone."

Here's the scene, as a refresher:

(via Bruce Sterling)

More scary short videos from Popcorn horror

We shared the fine short video "Click" a few days ago.  Now it's time to examine the other Gothic tidbits from the contest which "Click" won, Popcorn Horror.

Warning: all of these have scenes of extreme violence, pain, and death.  Very NSFW.

"Mortified" is a fun short-short, barely 2 minutes long and offering a fine grin:

"Twinkle Toes" is the most complex and ambitious story of the lot, a violent piece about revenge.  It plays games with your expectations.  For instance, don't be sure as to who owns that severed foot:

"Don't Move" is a very gory and always tense bit based around a shocking in media res setting.

 

"Blood Roulette" has an interesting twist to the Russian shooting game.

Visiting the Planet of the Vampires

Thoughts on rewatching Planet of the Vampires (1965), as part of Jim Groom's Festival of Mario Bava:

I always enjoy sf from countries other than the US and UK.  Here we get manic, lush Italian design and narrative drive.  The movie races from mood to mood, introspection to manic violence.  We can easily believe characters being possessed or driven mad.  The film shows off strange, energetically rounded hardware.  There are relishes awesome uniforms, as in this animated gif:

The links to Alien (1979) are many and more than I recalled.  The human ship looks like the Nostromo, and also like the downed, Gigerized alien vessel.  There's the tricky descent of the human landing craft into a world "that's all fog!"  Best of all is the space jockey scene:

As with Alien, the ship is a huge presence, a dark and sometimes antagonistic character.  Bava loves to trawl his camera behind computer banks and along many bulkheads.  Interior spaces are weirdly huge, often empty, spacing out characters and their machines in a stage-like way. This makes its inhabitation by mysterious monsters all the more threatening.

Then there are the vampires.  Ah, Infocult confession time: this movie scared the hell out of me when I was around 6 years old.  I feared for the stressed space travelers, but was terrified by the plastic sheeted vampires.  Their Richard Powers-like statues weirded me out, as did their metal traps and hungry wrath.  Or maybe they are zombies, spawned from the astronauts' friends (and family!) - creepy stuff for a young one.

The death toll advances rapidly, more like a war movie (Aliens) than a horror film (Alien).  Bodies pile up quickly, which helps set up the zombie/vampire plot.

Overall, it's glorious fun.

(poster from Absolute Elsewhere; jockey from Alien Explorations)