The Blurring of fact and fiction: True horror in the age of youtube

What scared and fascinated me the most about the whole BLAIR WITCH phenomenon of 1999 was the way its phony authenticity worked to enhance the fear. As you may remember, the film's release in theaters was preceded by a website where the footage was alleged to have been found in a bag containing several tapes and cameras, all buried under a house in the middle of the Maryland woods.

Even "knowing" this was a publicity stunt didn't stop me--or millions like me apparently--from being scared for days by that movie. I was so scared I launched Frightened Male Monthly around the concept.

What concept you ask? The idea of a willful return to pagan superstitious ignorance! Why? because its fun to be scared. BLAIR WITCH reminded me of how close my friends and I could come to a kind of LORD OF THE FLIES Paganism, making up things like effigy sacrifices to burn to appease, say, The Goatman. BLAIR WITCH worked from the same principle: it's 100% more scary if you can pretend its true.

Youtube is now full of "authentic" footage of yeti, UFOs, aliens, bigfeet and sea monsters, the whole land, sea and sky of the "unexplained." If you can suspend your disbelief, lots of chills await, especially in these disclosure times, with NASA employees coming forth with tales of high weird strangeness.

For the discerning Acidemic reader, I've taken the time to pick a handful of my favorites, selected for their graininess and scare factor. Enjoy!:





Both these show the gravitational propulsion system commonly associated with UFO technology, so I choose to believe they are real, though I don't necessarily think I am right in my choice. I pursue Jung's conception that the truth about UFOS lies beyond the 'are they real or no't dichotomy: aliens are real, but not in the clumsy vaguely scientific way we understand "real."

For a typical human to say "If aliens are real, why don't they show themselves?" is like a dog saying "If algebra is real, how come I can't smell it?" In fact, a dog's sense of smell is far more reliable than human sight; therefore, algebra cannot exist. Tripping hard frees us from ordinary perceptions of things like distance so we can remember what it was like to have a child's eye vision - of being able to really see and taste the miles between your bed and the doorway of your room during an HO scale army man maneuver, or Dungeons and Dragons graph paper. A mile is no different than a yard to a blind horse.

Read Patrick Harpur for a clearer definition of what I'm talking about. In the meantime, bring on the bigfoots!



I like this one a lot because of the high "fearful" pitch in the kids' voices; if they're sure it wasn't a bear, I'M SURE it wasn't a bear. Kids have a mainline into the dark collective psyche, right along with acid freaks, schizophrenics, yogis, mystics, aliens, yetis and... that's right, Jesus.

The Rote High School Persecution of Saint Ellen

There's something definitely original about the scattershot editing collage techniques of THE TRACEY FRAGMENTS (2007), getting a belated US DVD release after a year in Canada and the broken film festival scene. Director Bruce MacDonald delves unashamedly into the trick bags of JULIEN DONKEY BOY and MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO, with every little fragment unreservedly depicting sext teen mental illness, teen girl in danger angst, familial breakdown with a father always one step from physical abuse and all that other groovy stuff that's been done before a dozen times... but not this way!

The divine Ellen Page looks here like she's trying to be a mix of Bree from Klute and DeWayne from the homeless kids documentary, STREETWISE (1984). We constantly cut back to a long monologue Page makes to the camera, wrapped in her shower curtain on the bus -all in dreadfully sincere and morose cutter girl poetry prose. The whole film has the feeling of a collage and poetry chapbook one's weird friend might show you, the sort where their sick unconscious screams in your face from behind the morose drawings and symbolism: "I need to see a therapist." But one can't ever get these girls to listen to therapists, they're too downy and cuddled up in their madness.

And if our cutter girl lash-blasting heroines are forced to see a shrink by parents or a judge, said shrinks are all one-note passive-aggressive imbeciles, as is the one here (a passive-aggressive old transvestite).

The problem is TRACEY FRAGMENTS can't let go of the "abused child" cliche lexicon long enough to dwell on Tracey's perverse desire for her own illness. A much more brave and fearless breakdown can be seen in the indie horror film JOSHUA (2007), where Vera Farmiga fondly paints red boots on herself with her own blood. You don't see that sick joy in Page's performance because she's too like a young Jane Fonda, too sincere to see the true glory and godliness that lies in insincerity, the layers revealed when you pull back from your own position. Fonda couldn't pull back, but it was okay because she blazed so insanely upon her own position that layers were revealed in the sheer wattage; she made humorlessness sexy in THEY SHOOT HORSES DON'T THEY, and she made her KLUTE prostitute painfully open. Fonda was like that friend who uses their brilliance in the service of self-limiting rationalization. Page hasn't quite made the grade; she basks in indie blankness and it works because her face is so flawless and empty, in fact her face and Fonda's are a lot alike, almost too smooth, doll-like and yet ferociously intelligent to be sexy at all despite being agonizingly pretty. They both seem underage and too old at the same time, all the time, no matter what role or age they actually are in real life, be it 17 or 56.

But the editing is really the star and in its way this film is the anorexic poetess chapbook version of MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA. The dialogue and monologues are terrible though - the dreams of academics slumming in the teenage squalor, jotting down ideas for wrong decisions they never had or made. Tracey's narration (her last name is Berkowitz, like the serial killer!) includes lines like: '"Tracey Berkowitz... Tracey Zero-itz... Tracey Forty Below-itz...", and then there's the cover version of Patti Smith's "Horses," wherein the singer imitates every inflection from Smith's recording to a montage of Tracey running and split screened in with real horses-- and a laughing black man in a bowler hat on the bus to signify alienation and urban hostility, TAXI DRIVER-style.. and a cracked-out dude who hangs on her all skeevy-like named Lance from Toronto. And the colored girls sing "Doo de doo de doo..."


FRAGMENTS is one of those films where the chips are stacked so much against the heroine that you suspect the contest is rigged; if we're supposed to see all this social persecution as Tracy's own twisted fantasy, then don't keep rubbing it in our faces like we're supposed to have these insane AND JUSTICE FOR ALL/CUCKOO'S NEST knee-jerks about the man keeping us down. It's unfair to ask for it both ways, and our director and writer and actress can't see the humor in the fantasizing about high school tauntings ("No tits" is the student's cry, which doesn't seem quite realistic). We see her led by a creepy crackhead who promises to find her brother, and when he gets in a barfight instead of fleeing while she has the chance she waves her agape mouth and horrified eyes around like she's waiting for the director's signal on when to exeunt, and the director's gone to the bathroom. There's some nice shots of a crane machine in the bar though, for all the crane machine fans out there!

You can tell this is directed by the Canuck who did HIGHWAY 61, because it's got the same outdated dress sense (Her heart's desire dresses like he's Desperately Seeking Susan) and aimless mood-building. There's a zero point progression of story here, which is the sort of thing that happens when a director spends the first thirty minutes working to rivet your attention, then runs out of idea and hopes you'll just coast along revisiting the same footage from different perspectives.

I usually try not to write long negative diatribes here, but Page deserves better than all the idle wankery she's been enduring since HARD CANDY, films made by geeky privileged film people who have no experience of the tawdry lives they long to depict. Just as JUNO-scribe Seniorita Diablo Cody slums her way through a year as a stripper and expects the world to applaud, the hyper-stylization at play here masks a very tragic inability to connect with the material beyond the mundane open mic night surface. We only get cliches of stupid parents, abusive sleazeballs, gibbering black folks, none of the frothy depth you see today from maestros who've actually clocked time with the skate set: Spike Jonez, Guz Van Sant and Larry Clark, for example. We see Tracey being persecuted in high school and it feels as if director Bruce MacDonald has--rather than felt the sting of it himself--merely seen too many high school persecution films. Tracey passes through the gauntlet of tampon-hurling cheerleaders that's been persecuting heroines of teen movies right up from CARRIE through Ringwald and Ryder and Lohan. It doesn't seem 'right' - there's no build-up or attempt to understand the 'other.'


Maureen Medved wrote the script based on her novel, and it's perhaps not totally her fault the film is as messed up as it is, but like JUNO, it leaves a weird taste of some Amateur Mendicant Society newsletter. Medved's an academic (assistant professor at British Columbia University, with a long string of plays and publications) which--in and of itself--speaks to a lack of familiarity with the nitty gritty of street life, a lack masked by a theoretical indignation that's near fascistic in its anti-fascist oomph. I'm not trying to bash her, just bemoan the ever-dwindling indie spirit of originality and writers daring to have an actual immersion in the worlds they long to depict as opposed to immersion in screenwriting workshops. It's cool to me if Tarantino bases films on the reality of other films, since that's part of the appeal, but he's not passing it off as 'real' kitchen sink drama... he gets the mythic power like no other, better even than the films he loves themselves.

Maybe I'm still mad at McDonald for all the phony quirkiness and self-awarded hipster cred in HIGHWAY 61. Here he longs to make a movie about a confused girl, but is undone by his fear of getting too close to her. So she's naked but behind a shower curtain, yet mentally as sealed up as if loaded to the gills on Xanax and texting from her cell phone...and alone... almost all the time alone - that easiest of ways to film an actress. The whole film seems to have been shot in a week, then edited for three years, ala something by George Lucas. What's up with these crazy-deficient Canadians? Being sane can be a terrible curse, if you decide to make a movie that's not.

Karina Longworth writes a good bit about the release/distribution problems hitting the FRAGMENTS here.

On the plus side, FRAGMENTS offers a good score from the Broken Social Scene, and Tracey reads Ed the Happy Clown comics!

For a real, genuinely bizarre film about a fucked up chick in Canada, can I steer you towards the under appreciated and flat-out weird tale of incest and topless boxing PUNCH? (that link is to a review I wrote in 2004).

Read another of my diatribes about Page, this one on HARD CANDY, here.

More Tentacles from the 5th Dimensional Rift

Last night I finally saw THE MIST (2007), which is based on an old Stephen King novella I read in high school. I can't remember if the biblical elements are all in the King version, but one thing I do remember, for what it's worth, is that there was a hell of a lot more drinking! The lead character in the book drinks beer nonstop all through the story. What the hell happened? The only beer drinkers in the movie are condemned as "not taking the issue seriously." Jesus Christ, people!

I don't want to spoil things, but the presence of tentacles and the concept of the military opening a hole into another dimension, and having tentacles and mantis-like monsters escape to destroy civilization has become so common - from Lovecraft, to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, to Futurama (see below), to The Mist, and god knows how many Amazing short stories... not to mention the reports from those brave space cowboys who voyage into third eye realms with the aid of shamanic ritual, DMT, psilocybin, Salvia Divinorum, etc. And then there's "Revelations" in what you earthlings call the bible, and the eerie resemblance of "the Spaghetti Monster" to the transdimensional space octopus the Hebrews called "Yaweh." Call me paranoid, but it all fits together like a giant mantis claw pointed at the calendar to 12/21/2012, or what James Cameron would call "Judgment Day."

As I've said in the past, my own mystic visions have corroborated these fictional testimonies, and the recurring presence of a) dimensional rifts as signals of the apocalypse and c) tentacles and mantis-like beings issuing forth and devouring human souls and feeding off psychic energy (most commonly pain) in both fiction, visions/hallucinations, biblical prophecy, comedy, and paranoid crackpot UFO witness sightings/testimony, all seem to indicate the same horrible truth; a truth perhaps too horrible to look at straight on, (which also corroborates my vision of this devouring god as a sort of rotating space Medusa. To look at it head on is to die or turn to stone, so we can only glimpse it through the warped funhouse mirror of fiction, dream and astral projection).


Why am I risking condemnation, judgment, and perhaps mantisassination by telling you this? Because knowledge is power and actually every time I visit the space octopus/Medusa, She always first wants to know if I've preached Her word... i.e. to bring forth the glory that is the return of Medusa/space octopus onto the world! For the embrace of the space octopus is what shall save us from being devoured (your soul has to be nice and light first - for no mantis can eat the sun).

Other interesting paranoid parallels: the resemblance of the many-armed Hindu deities to the "vision" of flowing tentacles, and our own ability to feel and manipulate auric tentacles.

 

My Nostradamus-esque prophecy is that we will be seeing more and more images and renderings of trans-dimensional rifts, human-devouring mantis-beings, and tentacled heads rotating through space as we approach the fated date of 2012, all this as cosmic preparation for our collective journey into the fifth dimension, past the illusion of time and space. Are you ready to open your third eye and start waving hello to your new overlords with your newfound auric tentacles? You've got four years to start, my tasty human friends! And check out this crazy T-shirt!

The many tentacles of Love: FUTURAMA - THE BEAST WITH A BILLION BACKS

Every once in awhile a film comes along that justifies all your own crackpot psychedelic visions. For me, such a film is FUTURAMA: THE BEAST WITH A BILLION BACKS, a feature-length animated film released directly to DVD that's light years better than most crap out there, including the FUTURAMA TV show. And it actually brilliantly dovetails into an array of metaphysical postulations and out-there conspiracy theories! Both of which I am a huge fan of.

The titular beast is voiced by David Cross and rather than a menace is actually a loving God-like diety from another dimension who takes advantage of a cosmic rift in the universe to lock his loving tentacles into the backs of the necks of all human beings, lifting us up to ecstatic union with an all-powerful benevolent other. I won't spoil where it goes from there, but this concept alone is so brilliant it taps into the fundamental needs in the human soul for love, god, and drugs, not to mention the mythos of H.P. Lovecraft (i.e. the elder gods, Cthulu, et al)

And the idea of a tentacled overlord amongst us is in fact the exact vision that more than one of us shamanistic cosmonauts have had in our astral voyages, especially as we countdown to the end of the Mayan calendar, 2012. What the bible foretells as a hole in the earth from which the creatures of the dead shall walk, including giant mantis like beings with whips of fire, some of us have witnessed past the cosmic veil as also an opportunity, for those of us with light enough density to cross over into the arms (tentacles) of our benign ruler, the one beyond good and evil, who oversees even the lizard reptillian aliens that devour the souls of the self-centered (or dense).

These multi-tentacled intra-dimensional beasties have been described and discussed since the dawn of time, witnessed only with the third eye, usually by visionary crackpots and writers like H.P. Lovecraft. The mythological creature Medusa is also one such being (my own vision of this was a giant medusa head rotating through space, on which all humanity lives, as microbes, soon washed by cosmic noxema from mighty mistress Medusa's olive green complexion.)


Sounds like a lot of cosmic bufoonery, doesn't it? And that's exactly why BEAST WITH A BILLION BACKS is such a hilarious and essential film. All these harsh cosmic lessons are perhaps too much to endure without a great sprinkling of levity. Now I've never seen Futurama--except for the original episode which I didn't like exactly, being a dyed in the wool Simpson fan, but in this humble blogger's opinion, BACKS is actually better than the Simpson movie, that is as far as laugh a minute genius is concerned, so at least add it to your Netflix list and when you get to the part with the fabled octopus, remember, this sucker is real, and when judgement day comes, the real litmus test to whether you get eaten by the mantis beings or allowed to pass into the next dimension is going to be based on your soul density-- the more selfless and outgoing and loving you are, the less dense you get, (i.e. the extension of self reduces density), while the more selfish and self-centered you are, the more dense (your self contracts inwards, small and hardened). This has nothing to do with dogmatic interpretations of Christianity, but it does have to do with being nice and not judging others, even the stupid and ugly who deserve it. This amusing and soon to be important little nugget of information, incidentally, is something the powers that be don't want you to know, which is why they've trained you since birth to react to blogs such as this with ridicule. Stay dense! Imagine Captain Crunch at the helm of his ship, urging all the little peanut nuggets under his command to stay sugary and crisp, rather than getting themselves salty and stale and unappetizing to their giant devouring Other who even now shakes the box and sends them squirming and screaming into the milky bowl of intergalactic breakfast! I stand before you, risking your condemnation, urging you to go stale and salty, and thus be passed over during the cosmic snack time that looms large in a scant few years.



PS. If you are interested in learning more about where I pick up such nonsense, may I recommend Daniel Pinchbeck's 2012: The Flight of Quetzlcoatl, and/or High Strangeness by Laura Knight-Jadczyk, or you could just find a way to go deep into the 5th dimension and learn for yourself. Seeing through the third eye is believing! Just don't believe too much, for dogma hardens fast as cement once exposed to certainty's withering sunshine.