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Horror, as I’ve established previously, rests on a knife edge. It attempts to address an object it cannot, evokes a beyond it cannot access, and insodoing emerges from a schism. In what way, however, is it reasonable to think an aesthetic experience unmasks some kind of knowledge? If the theatre of horror plays out an…
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An episode of the x-files, titled “Irresistible”, presents a conflict between the show’s fundamental preoccupation with the paranormal and real, actually existing horror. The episode, which revolves around a completely human serial killer, eschewing monsters and aliens entirely, ends on a voiceover from Mulder; “It’s been said that the fear of the unknown is an…
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“Do more stuff” was what I said to myself at the close of 2020. Unremarkable aim perhaps, but the best I can muster as the consensus of decades has a panic attack outside my window. The kind of sickening optimism Boris Johnson was hawking at the opening of the year seems to have heralded in,…
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One of the most powerfully unsettling moments in Bloodborne occurs during the latter half of the game. By this point, the Bram Stoker gothic trappings have largely given way to increasingly cosmic implications, and it’s quite obvious that one, multiple or all voices leading you through the world have been misleading you. The Healing Church,…
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It’s been far too long since I wrote anything here, and it’s about time I rectified this. Some of the reasons are typical, perhaps too boring to go into, and I have no particular wish to sit here on a self-constructed couch and recount my worries to an imaginary therapist. Suffice to say, things have…
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The conspiracy is a channelling of unbound paranoia. The figure is a stark one, a lonely silhouette surrounded by an ever-expanding patchwork of figures, scraps and immaterial connections, furtively checking the street outside for shadowy figures, helicopters in the sky, strange sounds through the walls. The conspiracy addled paranoiac is an entrenched figure in popular…
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Multiple instances recently I’ve tried to search for a piece of music on streaming services [in this instance spotify, but pick your poison], and either the version I found there was surpassed by one I found out in the wilds, uploaded to youtube or what have you, or it was nowhere to be found. Times…
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To expand on the half-formed thoughts on Fantasy in my last post on the subject, what becomes more interesting is the thread that connects it to reality. Rather than the refuge, the blueprint or diagram, perhaps more accurately the circuit-breaker. Reading this short reflection from Paul Raven over at Velcro City Tourist Board [a recent…
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I have always yearned for escape. Reading this post from Carl Neville recently reminded me of that. I don’t want to make some kind of major claim toward epiphany, a discovery of who I really am, what I’ve really wanted; such things are not only philosophically suspect but simply boring. Everyone does them, and they…
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“Thuggery” this was the term Priti Patel used, among others, in an outpouring of contempt it seemed largely towards the righteous demolition of the Edward Colson statue in Bristol. This act was conflated with mindless violence, an act of destruction and anarchy that had to be cracked down on posthaste. So when, this Saturday, we…