All posts by scarlett

Blogs, Reading

The SPC Foundation

Old Frontier Prison, Rawlins, WY. Photo by Scarlett Messenger
Old Frontier Prison, Rawlins, WY. Photo by Scarlett Messenger

The SPC Foundation

Mankind in its present state has been around for a quarter of a million years, yet only the last 4,000 have been of any significance.

So, what did we do for nearly 250,000 years? We huddled in caves and around small fires, fearful of the things that we didn’t understand. It was more than explaining why the sun came up, it was the mystery of enormous birds with heads of men and rocks that came to life. So we called them ‘gods’ and ‘demons’, begged them to spare us, and prayed for salvation.

In time, their numbers dwindled and ours rose. The world began to make more sense when there were fewer things to fear, yet the unexplained can never truly go away, as if the universe demands the absurd and impossible.

Mankind must not go back to hiding in fear. No one else will protect us, and we must stand up for ourselves.
While the rest of mankind dwells in the light, we must stand in the darkness to fight it, contain it, and shield it from the eyes of the public, so that others may live in a sane and normal world.

We secure. We contain. We protect.

— The Administrator

Movies

The Stone Tape

Video

A research team from an electronics company move into an old Victorian house to start work on finding a new recording medium. When team member Jill Greeley witnesses a ghost, team director Peter Brock decides not only to analyse the apparition, which he believes is a psychic impression trapped in a stone wall (dubbed a “stone tape”), but to exorcise it too – with terrifying results…


Watch The Stone Tape in Horror | View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

Movies

Black Aquarius

Video

Swimming Hole, Lummi Island, WA. Photo by Scarlett Messenger
Swimming Hole, Lummi Island, WA. Photo by Scarlett Messenger

Black Aquarius
Matthew Sweet explores the dawning of the age of Black Aquarius – the weirdly great wave of occultism that swept through British popular culture in the 1960s-70s. From journals like the Aquarian Arrow to the diabolical novels of Dennis Wheatley, lurid accounts of satanic cults in the Sunday papers and the glut of illustrated books, part-magazines, documentary film and TV drama, it was a wildly exuberant seam of British pop culture.

Books, Movies

Horror independent of increased knowledge?

Link

St. Elmo, CO. Photo by Scarlett Messenger
St. Elmo, CO. Photo by Scarlett Messenger

Horror independent of increased knowledge?

I love horror films and fiction but lately I’ve begun wondering about their portrayal of knowledge. I can’t think of any horror works which do not cause horror by increasing knowledge–in Psycho and Silence of the Lambs the climactic reveal is what’s in the basement; in The Changeling it’s in the attic; in The Shining one of the most horrifying/memorable scenes shows what’s in room 227; I thought Misery might be an exception, but the reveal there is Annie’s past as documented in her scrapbook. In Texas Chainsaw Massacre there are a couple of reveals, including the nature of the BBQ the teens have eaten and Pam’s realization that she’s taken refuge with Leatherface’s brother. In The Ring, the nature of the ring and its importance to Sadako are initially a mystery, and seeing the tape is fatal unless you spread that knowledge by endangering someone else.

Have any works managed to increase horror without revealing new information? And has anyone written compellingly about the politics/philosophy of horror in regards to knowledge (in any format–mass-market nonfiction, blogs, dissertation, whatever)?

Radio

Quiet Please

Red Lion Hotel, Pendelton, OR. Photo by Scarlett Messenger
Red Lion Hotel, Pendelton, OR. Photo by Scarlett Messenger

Quiet Please

Written and directed by celebrated author Wyllis Cooper, the widely acclaimed old time radio program Quiet, Please was first aired on June 8, 1947 over the Mutual Broadcasting System. In this period, several similarly themed anthologies graced the American airwaves. However, it was this series that garnered notoriety during the golden age of radio and was lauded as an innovative and creative work of genius by both critics and academics alike. In fact, Professor Richard J. Hand from Glamorgan University praised Quiet, Please as an “extraordinary body of work,” and its writer Cooper as “one of the greatest authors of horror radio.” Quiet, Please was a mish mash of several literary genres, with supernatural encounters gaining the most prominence.