Eleven Days In
Oct. 11th, 2016 06:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
handful_ofdust...to October, and I still haven't done all that much in terms of content generation. Maybe this is because most people start mainlining horror movies during this month, as opposed to (say) what I do every goddamn day--I don't think it's overstating the case to claim I probably watch more horror than anything else, whether onscreen, on BluRay/DVD, On Demand or on Netflix. The other day I found a YouTube copy of the recent Turkish horror movie Baskin, watched it long enough to figure out it had no subtitles at all, shrugged, and kept on watching. (Later I ordered a copy because it has genuine power, though I'm fairly certain I didn't miss much in terms of dialogue.)
So yeah, I already watch a lot of horror, probably "too much," by most people's standards. I watch so much horror I often forget I've seen things at all, even if I sort of enjoyed them when I was inside of them; that's where the "Keep Watching?" Netflix queue comes in handy. And that's not even getting into all the horror I read, or the horror I research, pursue, ruminate on. Right now, I'm walking around with a compilation of historical exorcism accounts in my backpack that my father-in-law found in a church sale and bought because it reminded him of me. It's called Exorcism Through The Ages, edited and by an introduction by St. Elmo Nauman Jnr. Thus far, my favourite section is "Demonic Encounters, by Caesar of Heisterbach," a collection of really short, open-ended, oddly provoking Mediaeval German exorcism cases. They all have titles like "The Obstinate Girl to Whom the Devi Offered a Goose" or "Henry of Soest, the Farmer Caught up by a Devil in the Form of a Woman and Set Down in a Field," and though they're curt, they're surprisingly bloody; one case involves a demon spitting stinking, burning mucus on a nun, while others talk about how the Devil beat one woman until "[a]ll her limbs looked like human entrails," while another dragged a soldier along the pavement until "his face was in four pieces." Or then there's the convert who ate meat in a cellar, until a demon, "with God's permission, ...unable to do otherwise, seized the glutton and spread him out like a garment on the roof of the bell-tower."
The particularly weird part about all this is that these fragmentary and unsatisfying sketches remind me of nothing so much as Malachi Martin's Hostage to the Devil, my all-time favourite "nonfiction" book about possession. In Martin's stories, demons sort sidle up to you unannounced and start whispering to you--they present themselves as chance encounters, as friends ("Just...friends," the Gemini Killer might put it, in William Peter Blatty's criminally underrated Exorcist III: Legion). And this, in turn, is the way that the new TV series based on The Exorcist seems to be playing it as well, which intrigues and creeps me out. I mean, I WANT to be creeped out by it; I want it to be straight-up Blatty-esque, not some borderline Renny Harlin shit that's more interested in spectacle than the proverbial cold finger up the soul-spine. Thus far, I've mainly gotten my wish.
Anyhow. More to say about that, but I'm not feeling so great, so here I break. Feel free to ask me for details.
So yeah, I already watch a lot of horror, probably "too much," by most people's standards. I watch so much horror I often forget I've seen things at all, even if I sort of enjoyed them when I was inside of them; that's where the "Keep Watching?" Netflix queue comes in handy. And that's not even getting into all the horror I read, or the horror I research, pursue, ruminate on. Right now, I'm walking around with a compilation of historical exorcism accounts in my backpack that my father-in-law found in a church sale and bought because it reminded him of me. It's called Exorcism Through The Ages, edited and by an introduction by St. Elmo Nauman Jnr. Thus far, my favourite section is "Demonic Encounters, by Caesar of Heisterbach," a collection of really short, open-ended, oddly provoking Mediaeval German exorcism cases. They all have titles like "The Obstinate Girl to Whom the Devi Offered a Goose" or "Henry of Soest, the Farmer Caught up by a Devil in the Form of a Woman and Set Down in a Field," and though they're curt, they're surprisingly bloody; one case involves a demon spitting stinking, burning mucus on a nun, while others talk about how the Devil beat one woman until "[a]ll her limbs looked like human entrails," while another dragged a soldier along the pavement until "his face was in four pieces." Or then there's the convert who ate meat in a cellar, until a demon, "with God's permission, ...unable to do otherwise, seized the glutton and spread him out like a garment on the roof of the bell-tower."
The particularly weird part about all this is that these fragmentary and unsatisfying sketches remind me of nothing so much as Malachi Martin's Hostage to the Devil, my all-time favourite "nonfiction" book about possession. In Martin's stories, demons sort sidle up to you unannounced and start whispering to you--they present themselves as chance encounters, as friends ("Just...friends," the Gemini Killer might put it, in William Peter Blatty's criminally underrated Exorcist III: Legion). And this, in turn, is the way that the new TV series based on The Exorcist seems to be playing it as well, which intrigues and creeps me out. I mean, I WANT to be creeped out by it; I want it to be straight-up Blatty-esque, not some borderline Renny Harlin shit that's more interested in spectacle than the proverbial cold finger up the soul-spine. Thus far, I've mainly gotten my wish.
Anyhow. More to say about that, but I'm not feeling so great, so here I break. Feel free to ask me for details.
