Social media storytelling: apparently the Candle Cove idea spread around the social Web. The author reflects on it hitting 4chan:
Candle Cove has entered a subset of the public subconsciousness, much in the way the characters were trying to figure out if it was real within the story. It’s almost as if Candle Cove is becoming real.
there's now a user-generated video sample, which is unsettling.
A rather bizarre episode of Candle Cove, a children's show which aired on a small uhf television station in Ashland, KY about 71 or 72. I contacted the old owners of the station and they loaned me the tape and asked me to digitize the episodes for them and said I could do whatever I wanted with them. This is the last episode and is very strange.
What music should you play this season? Now that we've covered reading and watching, it's only fitting Infocult points to listening.
Artist Jon Coulthart offers a nice set of acoustic pleasures. He starts with Rachmaninov and Bartók, then moves on to Xenakis, Ligeti, and Crumb. I'm listening to Zorn's Necronomicon now.
Today's real-life Gothic comes from rural Oregon, where a couple decided to get very close to a horse. No, not zoophilically, but in a combination of necrophilia and animal fetishism with new media.
It's like something from Georges Bataille:
The 21-year-old woman told Washington County Sheriff’s Office detectives she wanted to “feel one” with a horse, according to a WCSO incident report. After the horse had been put down and gutted, the woman undressed and crawled inside the carcass of the dead horse and took pictures to prove it.
Or perhaps 19th-century French horror:
In addition to the picture of the naked woman inside the horse, there are other photos, including one of the woman and her boyfriend holding what appears to be the horses’ heart. Another shot shows them holding a piece of the horse in front of their mouth – posing as they’re about to take a bite out of it...
The report veers towards decadence at one point:
Arguably the most artistic photo of the group is a picture of the naked 21-year-old, blood-soaked from head to toe, standing over the horse’s body she had just been inside.
What movies should you watch this Halloween season?
Here's Infocult's 2011 list*. It's not a complete summary of Gothic film, but a mad sampler. It'll give you a sense of horror movies' breadth and diversity.
Some of the titles are famous, some are obscure. Some are canonical, while others are here for sheer weirdness. Most are from the US, but other countries are here as well.
Each one gets named, IMDB-linked, an image or video clip, plus a sentence or two of justification. See them all:
Dracula (1931) (Spanish-language production). One of the great monster movies, helping kick off that subgenre. Browning/Lugosi's is terrific, but this version is fascinating.
Black Cat (1934). A staggeringly weird, beautiful, and melancholy film. Karloff and Lugosi face off through time and bystanders, engaging in murder, drugging, torture, flaying alive, chess tournaments, and very strange dialogue. An unusual take on WWI, too.
The Bride of Frankenstein (1935). "To a new era of gods and monsters!" An exuberent film, an imaginative sequel to the first great Frankenstein film (1931). Everything is good here, from the bride's outrageous look to the sheer madness of Praetorius. The heart requisition scene is worth the whole show.
Gods and Monsters (1998) is a fine film reflecting on this era, among other things.
Pyscho (1960). Probably the greatest psycho killer movie. It's also noteworthy as a genre mashup, starting off as a sleazy crime story ("if any of [the money is] missin' I'll replace it with her fine, soft flesh!"), grafting itself onto Gothic, mashing the two together, then ending up with a micro-psychological thriller.
Peeping Tom (1960) The classic audience-indicting movie, both for making horror watching a plot point (ahem), and for a case study in career dooming. There's also an interesting technological angle, with devices forming fear's basis.
Black Sunday (1961) On the one hand it's a gorgeous mix of contemporary Hammer-Horror-style style: ancient castles, curses, gorgeous women, monsters, all done in a stagey, over-the-top way. On the other hand it's Bava (not this Bava), and partakes of the impending insane Italian horror school.
The Haunting(1963). A masterpiece of quiet terror, this film version of Shirley Jackson's novel is based on never showing the monster. Curse of the Demon almost did it in 1957. PS: there is no remake.
At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul (1963). The Brazilian Coffin Joe movies are hard to describe. They build on Hammer-level gore, then advance to 1980s buckets of blood. They have a demonic antihero (a psychotic, Lautreamont-like undertaker), religious plotlines, and gratuitous violence. There's isn't much like Zé do Caixão.
Onibaba (1964). Another war-related movie, Onibaba starts with murder, mutilation, and robbery, then gets crazy. Two women eke out a living by ambushing war-fleeing samurai, until the younger one falls for a returning soldier. The older one uses a demon mask to terrify the lovers, and things go very badly.
Night of the Living Dead (1968). Not the first zombie movie, but probably the best. A marvel of low-budget filmmaking, Night sics horror into everyday life with one of the best monster reveals ever, setting up a nearly continuous level of terror.
The Exorcist (1973). Helped set off a series of horror trends, including increased gore. The religious fear aspect reaches back to the foundations of 18th-century Gothic. Also has a splendid backmasking scene ("I am no one!").
Wicker Man (1973). Anothe genre-mashup, this combines horror with police procedural. A fun satire on contemporary back-to-nature culture, with a dark slash of mythic reconnection. Christopher Lee adds a jolt of power to the whole thing:
Alien (1979). The greatest sf/horror film, this combines a splendid monster (which became a franchise) with digital techologies. It also owes a lot to Bava's insane Planet of the Vampires (1965), which terrified me as a child.
The Evil Dead (1981). A low-budget gorefest, one of the HP Lovecraft-oriented films in this list, and an early part of the 1980s teen slasher movies.
The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993). A holiday-themed horror movie which isn't a deathfest, and one entirely made out of stop-motion animation, this delightful confection played a vital role in grounding the Goth subculture's identity.
Seven (1995). Another religiously-grounded horror film, Seven managed to outlast all but one of that decade's serial killer movies. Influential, and deeply bleak, ultimately heartbreaking, it pairs well with the underrated near-contemporary Dark City (1998).
Blair Witch Project (1999). Another low-budget success, Blair Witch is perhaps most famous for its successful Web-based promotional campaign. It also draws on the rich Gothic hoax tradition.
Tale of Two Sisters (2003). A rich, ambitious Korean film, a great take on the haunted house story Tale's nature and emotional heft only comes clear in the awful, final scene. It's not a surprise ending, like Sixth Sense's (1999), but a novelistic completion. The film reflects a deep awareness of horror film tradition, and thus ends our sampler neatly.
I've left off tons of stuff, obviously. Add your suggestions in comments, or wait 'til next year's.
Here's a fine set of scary story recommendations from a mix of writers.
I can warmly second these titles:
Algernon Blackwood, “The Man Whom the Trees Loved”
Edgar Allan Poe’s “William Wilson”
H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Outsider”
Stephen King’s “Strawberry Spring”
Conan Doyle’s “The Sign of Four”
Kafka’s “A Country Doctor”
Jorge Luis Borges’ “The Zahir"
Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,”
“My Kinsman, Major Molineux” by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Bottle Imp” (1891)
These, I haven't read. Any thoughts?
Sara Gran, Come Closer
John Wyndham, The Outward Urge
Bridget Clerkin, “Twenty Questions,”
Joan Aiken, “As Gay as Cheese"
Walter de la Mare, “Seaton’s Aunt”
Penelope Fitzgerald, “Desideratus”
Some nice thoughts from John Crowley:
"I see that the three define a flavor: dreadful endlessness, damnation. “A false alarm on the night bell once answered — it cannot be made good, not ever.” -John Crowley
Another robot that eats living tissue for fuel has been piloted. Two robots, actually, one from Maine, the other from South Korea. They are
[a] pair of prototype robots are designed to catch bugs, a major step on the path toward robots that can hunt, catch and digest their own meals.
Their dual inspiration ?
Engineer Mohsen Shahinpoor said the manner in which a Venus flytrap’s lobes contract looks remarkably similar to the way his IPMC contracts in the presence of a voltage.
These aren't the first - or won't be, assuming they enter production. We noted the delightfully-named EATR a few years ago, and caught the Pentagon denying the use of human corpses for bot fuel.
Observant Infocult followers may have noticed changes to this site. Pruning, smoothing, and cutting have been done.
Let's see: I killed one column, so we're down to two. This widened the content area. I also reduced marginal items. Now you should see the basics, including archives, About, RSS.
One American university has turned to the dark side in a big way. Curriculum includes "Witches, Demons, Satanism, Sorcerers and the Undead".
The UB [Buffalo] faculty specializations range from satanic practice, black magic and cultural monstrosities (like serial killers) to "real" and imagined vampires and zombies, as well as the bizarre Spanish gothic period in which our fascination with the utterly horrible is grounded.
One expert includes greedy bankers and environmentally destructive corporations among the monsters of our time.
Check out scholars there like John Edgar Browning, David Schmid, Phillips Stevens Jr., and David Castillo. Infocult salutes them!
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