Frozen in Terror! COLD PREY, WIND CHILL, DEAD OF WINTER (AKA LOST SIGNAL), DEVIL'S PASS, COLD PREY 2

It's always nice to ride out the brutal chills of February with horror films more frozen than oneself. I'm writing this during the Winter Olympics, a time wherein watching people shooting and skiing and luging and snowboarding on TV while being all lazy and snug can after a few consecutive days make one start to feel guilty and lazy. But watching motivated, handsome, disciplined snowboarders and hikers get stuck in the middle of white-out nowhere and fight for survival against unseen foes can make one feel their decision to stay indoors, at home, the very fount of wisdom and strength.

Here are four solid examples I've seen this week, some of which are on Netflix streaming at the moment. So make sure the flask on the collar of your St. Bernard is filled with cognac and that your windows are boarded up tight. Keep the heater's close and the emergency generator closer....You'll need both.

Of course there's already some classics of this genre which hold the gold standard, now and forever, like The Thing from 1951, The Thing from 1982, and The Thing from 2011 (here). And there's also my recent most favorite, Pontypool, here.

COLD PREY

("Fritt Vilt") 2006 - Dir. Roar Uthaug
***

Viktoria Winge (above) is a gorgeous Nordic alien hybrid gone away for a weekend of snowboarding, way off the Norwegian ski map grid, with a group of friends, but when one of them breaks his leg they seek shelter at a big abandoned ski lodge / hotel and... hey, it's not totally abandoned, so it seems, and the generator still works... and there are dusty half-full liquor bottles waiting in the cozy lounge. Nice! But soft, they're not alone, and the place is mighty, mighty large. It's like a cozier Overlook if no one ever came back after Shelly and son split in dead Scat's Snowcat.

Proud of its generic slasher roots, Uthaug's film--gorgeously photographed by Daniel Voldheim--builds up careful attention to set and setting (looks like a real abandoned Norwegian ski lodge!) with measured quality, wit, and inexorable tick-tock momentum, studiously avoiding the usual dripping industrial torture basement Rob Zombie video look of so many similar 'wayfarers stranded in a remote killer's lair' horrors. Instead, the vibe is all the more unnerving for being so cozy, with just certain things 'off' that begin to mount up. As the kids take over the ski lodge lounge area, lowering the remaining booze bottle water lines, starting a fire, and goofing around, they never lapse into that annoying American imbecilic snickering kind of dialogue that feels like it was written by ephebiphobic middle-aged virgins. Here the characters interact and play off each other very well and the climactic battle way out in the middle of the frozen emptiness is unique and totally chilling, literally, figuratively, and other-ly... In Norwegian with English subtitles, not that you really need them.

WIND CHILL

2007 - Dir. Gregory Jacobs
**

Emily Blunt plays a type of college student here that very few films realize exists but whom I know very well: the old-before-her-time hottie who's gotten away with being 'difficult' for so long she doesn't know how to stop. Dismissing all the guys she meets as losers or pervs, and all the girls as jealous or fat, she grows so used to judging everyone it's only gradually she realizes how alone she's become. Having this type in a horror film is tricky --in her armored narcissistic bubble, she's impervious to threat. We have to worry for her and it's tempting not to carem especially when she's so blind to danger she even accepts a ride home to Delaware for the holidays from a creepy freshman (Ashton Holmes) who seems to know way too much about her before she even gets in the car.

Director Gregory Jacobs' film might have been creepy enough just from Holmes slowly revealing he doesn't actually live anywhere near where he's taking her, and the whole ride share thing is a ploy to meet her, but that's gradually tossed away like Marion Crane's $40,000 once they're stuck on a lonesome side road, visited by an array of ghosts, including a scary psycho cop played by an against-type Martin Donovan.

 Snowman skull subliminal!

Produced by George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh, there seems to have been some original intention to make this a creepy two-hander with a creepy freshman stalker and an antisocial upperclassman narcissist forced to depend on one another for survival, but along the way a bunch of ghosts and a complete disconnection from reality sinks in and sinks it. It's almost like the filmmakers realized there wasn't enough material for a feature in the first idea, so drug in anything they could think of along the way to keep the twists coming, hoping it would all right itself in the end. As viewers, we'll always dig the way the collapse of the social sphere that comes and disorienting symbolic structure make one privy to the tricks of ghosts, as long as there's some awesome twist or gotcha moment to snap all the disparate elements into place at the end. Not to spoil things, but there isn't. At least Blunt gets a much warranted chance to carry a film.

The journey is supposed to be through Pennsylvania, a very creepy place, but was actually shot in Canada, where life is cheap! 

DEAD OF WINTER

 (AKA LOST SIGNAL)

(2006) Dir. Brian McNamara
 ***1/4

In case you never tried it, driving at night in wintery weather when you're tripping way too hard on psychedelics is a very nerve-wracking and bizarre experience, especially wearing smudgy glasses. For one thing, your sense of three-dimensional space is way off: the road feels like it's just a postcard in your lap, yet the frost on the edges of your windshield seems to extend before you like a tunnel of ice. When the traffic lights change your heart jumps in your throat--the newly arrived colors prism through the salty windshield wiped dirt in extreme primary and secondary color blasts, like a UFO seen in a lake reflection after someone just fell in. DEAD OF WINTER gets that, sort of. And it's enough, mostly.

Taking place over one long crazy night, the film follows a young couple (Al Santos and Sandra McCoy) who do some flavored shots they don't know are spiked with LSD at a New Years party. They split before midnight, but the drugs hit on the drive home and soon they get lost and wind up either being chased by evil killers or just shadows from backyard fences and tree branches. This doesn't make too much sense as the couple does lines of coke at the party, so they should at least know they're high on something when they start hallucinating strange pursuers in the reflection of the gas station quick mart fridge doors. But they're clearly amateurs and they panic. At the first sign of ghost cops they abandon their car and get lost in the woods, the kind of ghost cops a seasoned tripper would know to ignore. But are they crazy or is someone really out to get them behind the hallucinations? Kudos to the film that for a fair chunk we cannot tell.

I like to think that if director Brian McNamara had the budget he could have created some nice woodland night-tripping hallucinations and I hiss like a rabid snake at this film's detractors who clearly have never been lost in the woods at night after having taken too much LSD, grown convinced that their girlfriend is trying to kill them, and/or felt the pressure from ghost bathroom attendants to dump all your drugs down into the safety of their throat all on the same night. I also know the feeling of seeing a face -- usually a townie with a thousand yard stare -- who always seems to be watching you from behind some partition in the basement while you and your friends are playing darts, and this townie represents your death, and no one else can see him, not that you ask them, because you're too fucked up to voice such an insanely complicated sentence. And when you finally go up to confront him he turns out to be a mix of shadow from the stairway and a macrame owl hung. Instead of being calmed by the sight of the owl you're even more afraid -  where did Death go? You can feel the darts hitting you and drawing blood though the game's long over. You turn to the 1.75 of Old Granddad to wipe the electric madness away and the weird genderless old face on the label seems to melt and wink at you. And if you're me, what do you do? Get your ass home, carefully. If you wig out on the way, just think about what you'll put on the VCR once you get home. I recommend Betty Boop or The Cocoanuts (1929). It will get you safely down from the ledge.

Still McNamara should have checked imdb.com before naming his film --there's about 80 movies called Dead of Winter. Lost Signal is a pretty weak title, too. May I suggest Acid Snow? Or Ice Tripping? No one comes to me with these things, but they should. Or shouldn't. What do I know?

Another problem is how much atmosphere gets lost through cutting over to the toasty police station with various phone calls to law enforcement both by and about the trippers: it saps the trippy momentum (it would have been great if we never saw who was on the other line, and had the lady cop just shows up out of the darkness), and yet this is all apparently based on a true story, with recorded 911 calls to prove it! Hell, I believe it. The woods are mysterious, dark and deep; anyone who's been to them at night, lost, scared, on psychedelics, knows how their ancient magic can bend reality and expose deep archetypal roots that are too vivid and real for normal adult daytime senses to decode. If the hallucinations in this film are much less elaborate than, say, the top shelf 'becoming-animal' visions of Kristen Stewart after a face full of swamp spores in Snow White and the Huntsman (2012), at least it tries, and that's what counts, and what's better, it succeeds more often than not, because it dares to be vague. Even without CGI or LSD, Dead of Winter allows us to can see what schizophrenics, animals, and psychic mediums see all the time: the fifth dimensional vortex intelligences of the woods, and how the trees are in on the cosmic joke. Which came first, the ghost or our ability to finally see it?! Those trees know, but they'll only tell when you're too fucked up to believe their answer.

The low budget is no problem in that regard and in its small way, Winter is a sleeper little icicle of modernist ambiguity and film fans who groove on modernist 'collapse of objective reality' ambiguity like Blair Witch Project, Let's Scare Jessica to Death, or The Shining or Antonioni's Red Desert, will understand what director Brian McNamara and writers Robert Egan and Graham Silver are aiming for. These cats clearly know the full range of horrors that LSD can create out of the winter sights and sounds, and having gone to college (and all that entails) up in wintry, LSD-drenched Syracuse I--as we say in AA--really related. Your mileage may vary, but the world can't wait all day for you to catch up, and Dead is--at least for a decent chunk--a fine entry in the modernist alienation collapse-of-the-symbolic horror genre, the kind where we can't tell whether or not the protagonist/s (and by extension the viewer) are being fucked with by external (ghosts - gaslighting spouses, tree spirits) or internal (latent psychosis, LSD, cabin fever) forces --and if quantum physics tells us anything, there is no difference.

\ COLD PREY 2

("Fritt Vilt II") 2008 - Dir. Roar Uthaug

***1/2

The first was so good I had to go back for seconds, especially after learning that the sequel picks up right where the last one left off, ala Halloween 2, covering both that film's similar 'later that night' immediacy and 'following the final girl to the local hospital' change of territory. Character development stays as solid as it did in the original. The new flight of actors stay likable (no sleaze bag goombas like H2's EMT), and the vibe and beautiful cinematography from the first film carry over, flawlessly. The action takes its sweet time regrouping, chronicling the interaction of a sleepy little Norwegian local hospital in the process of closing (shades of Assault on Precinct 13). Suddenly confronted by all these murders and a comatose killer, they react with typical Nordic efficiency. There's a vivid sense of the vast emptiness of all those treeless Norwegian mountain regions, the lifeless still beauty of the ice and winding roads. Those of us who have misgivings about the medical community's insistence on saving the lives of mortally wounded psychopathic killers will be very pleased at the comeuppance rewarded this 'heroic' practice (they indignantly stop the final girl from pulling his plug). The crazy loner sociopath Viking murderer figure is a nice representation of the bloody past of the Norwegian people rising up from the ancient past and into the country's current sleepy socialized medication/education system to smite the sophisticated, racially uniform, and far too-trusting youths. And it's pretty gratifying to see our heroine finally wise up and go all Ripley in Aliens. 

Check out the whole issue of Acidemic devoted to their grace and hotness -- issue #7 - The Nordics. 

  DEVIL'S PASS

(2013) - Dir Renny Harlin
**

Renny Harlin is back, his ear low to the ground, budget bloody but still existant. Has there been a director who's both made and lost so much money so fast? Now he's playing it a little wiser, ala recent work by De Palma and Coppola - getting back to their low budget roots, returning to an off-the-hip approach that allows no chance for budgetary bloating. Devil's Pass (written by Vikram Weet) work a chilled found footage plot that combines elements of many other films melded to the very real mystery of the the 1959 Dyatlov Pass mystery, but there is much wodka shots! Nostrovia! 

The thing about a great mystery like Dyatlov, though, is that any 'answer' is going to be a let-down compared to the juice of the mystery. Harlin does manage to keep the diegetic cameras whiplash-free and to ensure there's always some new layer to penetrate, and the acting is pretty top flight (especially Holly Goss in the "I gave you back the map" Heather role), but Harlin never lets the inhospitable barren mountain snowscapes tear the tent fabric of anyone's objective social reality and so the paralyzing fear associated with being unmoored from the symbolic order vanishes with the first explanatory note. In the future, Harlin, don't let the symbolic or explanatory contextualize the mystery! The refusal to commit to a set point of view about what's going on is part of what made Blair Witch and The Shining (and in this list, Dead of Winter) work so well. If you can't handle the impossibility of objective truth, you should never have looked farther than your own backyard, and certainly not ventured into the white abyss... that's for trippers with balls of ice... Roar, Uthaug! Roar.

Post-Structuralism of the Living Dead: PONTYPOOL (2008)

"Only the medium can make an event" - Baudrillard

In PONTYPOOL  the world ends not with a bang but with the words "in Pontypool the world ends not with a bang but with the words 'in Pontypool the world ends in Pontypool'..."- an ever-tightening stutter-stop loop that causes cannibalism as people try to unsay the source of the said words. It's no time to be running an early morning English speaking radio talk show, in a town so blizzarded out all winter that you have to take the world's word of it that it's still out there, past the white/gray curtain. This one early morning a slow escalating series of incoming calls, emergency broadcasts (or pirate interceptions, in French) and mass confusion envelop early morning DJ Grant Mazzy (Stephen McHattie), a self-styled outlaw with a yen for conspiracy theory; his harried but maternal line producer, Sydney Briar (Lisa Houle); and intern Laurel-Ann (Georgina Reilly). For a long stretch of film we meet only them, and a lot of voices calling in to deliver astonishing reports that go blank in big flurries of horrible chaos as people chant meaningless phrases over and over then bite each other.

Of course if you've never done angel dust then the stories sound like the ravings of the town's many drunkard local fishermen. Grant can't quite believe it, and his paranoia begins to overwhelm him -is the whole town in on some bizarre prank? It's not until BBCI phones that Mazzy realizes what was mere minutes ago a punishment assignment (Pontypool the Canadian equivalent of Siberia due to his cantankerous airwave anarchy) has led to this one Wolf Blitzer Gulf War-style moment.

He blows it, though. Too freaked out.

The sense of cozy insulation works a soothing spell for quite awhile (especially if you listen on big cushy headphones  while watching in the dead of night/early morning, as I usually do). Grant, Sidney and Laurel-Anne's studio is set up in a church basement (looks like an AA meeting is about to start) and they haven't seen any of the things described. This is a snowbound town where nothing ever happens or has happened. All Mazzy and Sydney and Laurel-Ann have are the callers, whose voices gradually devolve into repetitive cannibal madness and all other lines--police radio, AP wire, 911--are dead, or dying, just static and then the alien-like buzzing we belatedly recognize as the emergency broadcast signal. It's like the whole world has shrunk around their little studio - an island in an already island-like town. Pontypool, where they know most of the residents by name, winter nights stretch long into the following evening, leaving the town forever shrouded in a haze of booze, depression, and shuffling from heated car to radio station basement to car to home to bed to car, with no sun to indicate if you're coming or going, with windows just reflecting an opaque walls of darkness and snow. It would make sense that, of all places, here is where language and listening has such power - where everyone is snow blind so their other senses are enhanced.

What really makes it work is the power of imagination coupled to the frustration of never getting the complete story --we strain at the bits of the movie's limited knowledge, and we recall the way breaking news drips slowly with newly emerging facts buried in an avalanche of idle speculation to fill in the minutes on CNN and their ilk. It recalls back when the radio was the news delivery system, where vivid descriptions conjured mental images of disturbing power, a time when 'showing' mass cannibal carnage in all its Tom Savini-ish Fangoria glory was a subversive act, something to look away from in blanched shock. Now it's the opposite --showing us almost nothing becomes a new form of subversion, back to the fire and oral history and imagination. There are now countless zombie / mass plague insanity knock-offs and for a few seconds the 'found video footage' trick was novel but that was 10 years ago and they're still endless (and cheap). Of them all, only Pontypool (2008) finds an original tack, sailing towards the source of the original Romero film's hidden candy shell power--the news broadcasts--the way the professional newscasters with their cigarettes and thick glasses and bustling assistants behind them all both offer reassurance and terror, their steady authoritative and comforting deep news anchor voices only serving to make the pronouncements about 'packs of ghouls' more terrifying (Night never use the word zombie in that movie, or even--as I recall--the second).  Pontypool rocks that same tack. It's almost too post-structuralist for its own good at times, too lit workshop precocious, but makes terrific use of uncertainty, the unreliable aspect of oral history and delves deep into the way imperiled people instinctively turn to the media to provide a narrative structure for the chaos around them, and how the media finds itself compelled to provide one, to make it up on the spot if need be. Without clear visuals, long shots of the calamity, official press conferences, the calm but thrilled voice of a reporter standing in the snow near a firetruck, we have only our own imaginations with which to structure things. At such times radio can reach the deepest vaults of our mind, forming deep cerebral cortex responses not normally our own. The morning 9-11 went down, for example, I was at work, in the office: no TVs, AOL still relatively young, so we listened to it on the radio. Hearing Peter Jennings describe the towers falling and planes crashing into Washington, I imagined the world consumed in fire, civilization ending all around us, a happening so apocalyptic it was hard to fathom it was even real, more like Orson Welles' War of the Worlds. When I finally saw the footage, horrifying as it was, it was almost a relief (the building fell straight down rather than to the side creating a domino effect stretching the length of Manhattan- which was what I had pictured). That's kind of maybe part of the reason why I love this film so damn much. It's the only thing that's yet come close to recreating that surreal almost merry apocalyptic feeling. I was, in fact, giddy. It was only a few days later when I noticed half the "blue collar Buddha" (as we called them, mostly firemen) population of my uptown AA meeting was gone, and the few that remained, devastated with grief and survivor guilt, that the full brunt of it all sank in.

But that's it - we can't always be near a TV with CNN, but even if the power goes out we can find and old battery-operated radio. We all secretly love calamities (as long as they don't happen to us or we don't know whether anyone we know was hurt or killed) because suddenly, for once, something is happening and the mood amongst the reporters is always jubilant. They try to restrain themselves, but this shit is why they got into this. Careers are made in such moments. It's one of those rare times when absolutely no one can predict what will happen, when no one knows the whole story, and it's the newsman's turn to create a proxy, out of thin air if need be, until the real one finally coheres. The whole world seems to wake up in such moments, to be unified in their collective shock and awe, secretly loving the thrill of orbiting closer and closer to a possible armageddon, to the mad chaos of complete social chaos.

Why  I've already seen Pontypool four times is the comfortable sense of being in a warm radio booth on a frozen Ontario small town morning it provides, and the early stretches of incoming news as DJ Mazzy in the morning starts out with the usual bickering with his producer over when to read school closings and the slow mounting panic/paranoia when he begins to think people are all fucking with him, all so organic it all unfolds in more or less real time for long stretches without the viewer (me at least) noticing; as the influx of news and shaky narration causes a breakdown in our perception of reality, we trust his deep perfect radio voice (it wouldn't have worked with a high-voiced wuss actor like Edward Norton). In other words, while not being specifically scary, and always kind of funny-ominous, there's a sense that something meta is always at stake, something that might leak out and effect even your blogging about it, for more than any horror film I've seen, it gets that whole post-structuralist Burroughsian language as a virus concept.

The secret, as media studies grads know, is the news media's secret agenda has always been to cast anxieties about the prevailing social structure's solidity off on handy targets: crooks, shady pols, terrorists--which then makes the news a comfort. You see which way the finger of blame points, and you make sure you're standing behind instead of in front of it. And when you're behind it, you're strong; furthermore, you know which way to look for oncoming danger. So when the TV station reports on a mass insanity uprising, it becomes 'real' in a way it couldn't be otherwise even if you witnessed it yourself. This process strengthens you by strengthening the illusion of law and order's ultimate omnipotence within you. As Jack Torrance would say, cannibalism is okay to talk about in front of their son, because he "saw it on television." It's the same for us. In fact cannibalism's power in Pontypool lies in its invisibility. Thus one Romero news broadcast is worth three dozen CGI zombie army ant hill urban killing floors, all those tedious Matrix-rip bending over backwards, both barrels blazing slowmo shots are just video games played by some kid you pass on your way to pick up your laundry. The end of the world can't be accepted as a legitimate event until it is authenticated through the TV. Unless the revolution is televised it cannot exist. This is what Baudrillard and McLuhan can teach Gil Scott Heron. It's why so many disaster movies now get real news anchors to come on with their fake news.

In Dawn of the Dead (above) Romero yanks even that little buoy of illusory 'objective reality' away right from the start; the TV station itself starts to collapse from nervous exhaustion at the start of the film, the crew devolving into petty arguments and agendas. Those who haven't had a chance to experience the dead rising directly commandeer the zombie outbreak to suit their agenda, the black intellectual in the in progress talk show labeling it as a cover-up for cop violence in the ghetto. When the four people we follow find a TV later, there's just one continuous talk show left, with two pundits yammering in a progressively more hostile, childish manner. Reality, civilization, has in effect become totally subjective. Even bona fide facts are debated. It was always like that once, maybe, before cross country railroads and telegraphs. But each man was connected to some tribe, some family in those days. Now our tribe is purely virtual, friends from everywhere except our own neighborhoods. Without the news to structure our reality, we're all insane from cabin fever inside a week, even while inside a crowded survivor camp.

Pontypool zeroes in on this issue by presenting the entire 'event' from within a radio station on a single day. It is only Mazzy and his producer who can determine to what an extent they should continue to connect their listeners to their callers. In this town we learn the 'eye in the sky' for local morning traffic is an old dude with binoculars on the hill, playing chopper sound effects so we get the impression he is in a helicopter, which for some reason makes us feel warm, loved, guided into work by a heavenly hand. A weird musical family shows up dressed as Arabs to sing bizarre but hopelessly square 'Arabian' songs, the dad firing a plastic Uzi for accent (I had the exact same one as a kid). This isn't given much commentary in the film but it's a good metatextual meltdown signpost. We learn that the Pontypool crisis involves the repetition of phrases until they become meaningless, a weird infection of thinking transmitted through language, an idea that rewards deep contemplation if you approach it with enough McLuhan, whose concept of language as "a form of organized stutter" underwrites the film's post-structuralist collapse, where meaning and syntax become derailed, causing human brains to go crashing into the morass of subjective looping, where each new repetition increases in violence until they rend one another limb from limb. Is this something to do with Quebec separatist intellectual terrorists? The French language seems suspiciously immune.

While the chants of the crazies may seem meaningless, what we glean from Pontypool is that everything has meaning, and the power of chant is no fluke. Anyone can use repetition to either make themselves calm (the rosary, chanting) or  drive themselves crazy (All work and no play make Jack a dull boy; sections of Mingus' Black Saint and the Sinner Lady) or both (dervishes, maenads). What makes Mazzy interesting as a character is that he is aware of this and does not take his DJ power lightly; even his school cancelation snow day news carries poetic, grim observations, and he predicts the coming crisis all based on one odd morning encounter, even knowing he may be starting the very fire he's railing against by railing against it. And he gives both women cute innocuous valentine's day cards, indicating that beneath his gruff exterior and contrarian shock jock tactics (mild compared to America's) beats the heart of a regular sentimental guy, a rotgut and cigarettes innocent. In other words, this is not an American film. There's no in-fighting, cursing tantrums, misogyny, lectures, or grandstanding. Sydney's anxiety over what her DJ's going to say is moderated and modulated moment to moment as he pushes the envelope but then eases back; her riding him to be less incendiary but tempered by an almost motherly need to keep him grounded, trying to encourage Laurel-Ann to feed him the news slowly and get confirmation first so he doesn't start a panic.

This is perhaps the film's one dubious theme, the conception of language as a virus, that it's not the news driving us crazy but the saying that the news is driving us crazy which is driving us crazy. Since these media-virus concepts show up in Cronenberg a well one wonders if this interest has anything to do Canada itself, its weird placement between the USA's ever loudening media barrage and the BBC's staid tosh clarity. The movie seen on streaming (on Netflix) is itself a virus, infecting anyone who plays it. The media breakdown can extend to your life -- is there a virus within Pontypool itself, that scrambles the very particles of code within its signal, ala The Ring? Or was my girlfriend, in the throes of a phone interview with some comedian in the other room, tripping on the extension cord for the WiFi, causing the Netflix stream, as well as internet, to go out in a single flash right at a key moment in the film? It was so perfectly timed I became as unnerved as old Mazzy. Let's pause and ruminate on what version of the new 3-D that will be, when the film makes your TV explode at a key plot juncture.

Sure that's a sick idea, but that's the thing -- when the news envelops you then you don't really know what the hell is going on the more you think you do; you don't know what is real because your imagination can't stop filling in details, and neither can the newscasters. Pontypool's climactic moment of interdimensional communication is when emergency broadcast interruption comes roaring through the station, cutting out the broadcast to announce those listening should refrain from speaking, using terms of endearment or embracing loved ones, or using the English language, ending with "don't translate these words" which Mazzy reads, translated, over the air waves- Is this, then, a structuralist terrorist attack. Oh yes Quebec resistance, how very French of you!

Top: Lisa Houle - Pontypool / Bottom: Anna Karina - Alphaville

But the French, as Godard's Alphaville (1965) computer knows, are too stubborn and contrary to be as ingenious and post-modern as the unseen linguicidal agents of Pontypool, which does for the 1939 Martian broadcast what the Blair Witch Project did for found nature films, i.e the very lack of reliable 'authorized' source information gradually reduces the one on the microphone to the sole remaining authority. John Connor at the end of Terminator 3 achieved this but with nuclear certainty, while Grant Mazzy ingeniously understands that, unless the revolution is televised, it does not exist, so as long as it is only chaos, a mere riot, he can talk it out of existence; if it is more, he must know what that more is, or cease to exist. Without a pundit chattering out in the cold and another one warm and looking at them from beyond a glass or plastic screen, and us looking at them, then there's no certainty about anything. Let go of language and everything is revealed. Not even the credits can end your transmission. So stick around past the end credits... to the grave! In the words of Sir Alfred McLennan, we must take this secret to our graves.... and even beyond!

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