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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 86.185.28.199
Posted on Sunday, June 12, 2016 - 02:50 pm:   

Anyone seen this? Made by the people who produced Walking Dead it has a lot of good qualities, good production values etc and a great cast, but sadly it's the basic premise, possession, that scuppers it. It's the scenes of exorcism that are just hackneyed, basically. In fact I fell asleep when the exorcism kicked in - flaoting people, deep voices, stuff we've seen too often now, really, to have any impact. But I'll watch again, for now, just to see how it goes.
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Protodroid (Protodroid)
Username: Protodroid

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 95.44.46.233
Posted on Monday, June 13, 2016 - 01:42 pm:   

Possession can regain its power by becoming more subtle rather than more spectacular. INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS does it right.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 86.185.28.199
Posted on Monday, June 13, 2016 - 05:26 pm:   

I was thinking that that story ran with the possession idea. I sort of believe in it, but like you that it's more frightening when subtle, more parasite than spectacle.
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Protodroid (Protodroid)
Username: Protodroid

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 213.233.148.29
Posted on Monday, June 13, 2016 - 11:35 pm:   

We all wonder if we really know what's happening behind the faces, even those we love. What a horror it would be if we realized that we were wrong.

How about a story from the point of view of someone with prosopagnosia? The world could be a scary place for sufferers of that.
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Protodroid (Protodroid)
Username: Protodroid

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 213.233.148.29
Posted on Monday, June 13, 2016 - 11:43 pm:   

(Off topic, but I've been re-watching Channel 4's Vids from the early 2000s. It's gloriously scuzzy and Nigel Buckland may actually be Albie. "Join us after the break, for a bit of this...")
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Mark_lynch (Mark_lynch)
Username: Mark_lynch

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 217.43.91.119
Posted on Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - 09:29 am:   

Saw the first episode of Outcast last night. As Tony says, good production values etc, but I'm not pining for more. I get the feeling the series will drag.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 86.185.28.199
Posted on Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - 06:32 pm:   

The second episode is better, but I can't see it heading anywhere fresh or exciting either. In fact, I was as happy watching the talkie bits more than the 'scary' bits.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 86.185.28.199
Posted on Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - 06:33 pm:   

It's nice seeing a 'nice' priest in something again, though, I have to say. A relief, to be honest.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 86.169.180.118
Posted on Wednesday, April 10, 2019 - 08:44 pm:   

Proto! You were here! And Mark!
Have you read the Will Storr book, Will Storr vs the Supernatural? It's fantastic. Maybe my favourite book on the subject. In it he meets Janet from the Enfield Poltergeist case and has the disturbing feeling there's something lurking in her, keeping her down. She doesn't feel right to him. It's incredibly creepy. If a demon or whatever wants to stay somewhere cosy for as long as it can, why rock the boat?
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Protodroid (Protodroid)
Username: Protodroid

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 213.233.147.124
Posted on Wednesday, April 10, 2019 - 09:15 pm:   

Now that's a scary idea. I seem to remember inferring that Ramsey really didn't approve of anyone thinking possession could be real. I could be misinterpreting a comment, though.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 86.169.180.118
Posted on Saturday, April 13, 2019 - 05:27 am:   

Yes, or making kids scary. He did say that.
Possession is still a great theme to me. Invasion of the Body Snatchers just made it scarier by making it SF. Nowadays they would say we were being possessed by ourselves, a train of thought that takes root. A bad bit of ourselves. Nuts and Bolts it. Which might be ok. I mean, what if a demon takes over an asshole and he becomes slightly nicer in the eyes of his asshole friends?
Have I just came up with a TV series? Or a Netflix one?
Two Netflix shows to avoid; Black Summer (Zombies! Mean spirited people! Running into other people's back gardens!) and The Silence (monster bats eat noisy things - Throw out the barky family pet! Oh fucky, granny has asthma - I wonder what will happen next?).
But I mock. I switched off. Maybe they got good.
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Protodroid (Protodroid)
Username: Protodroid

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 213.233.147.109
Posted on Monday, April 15, 2019 - 01:16 am:   

Both those shows sound just terrible. I worry because physical media sales are plummeting. We'll be back to square one again with us paying what is basically a TV license and _owning_ nothing. Somehow they managed to erase the video recorder, like it never happened!
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 86.169.180.118
Posted on Monday, April 15, 2019 - 08:27 am:   

I do have a dvd recorder SOMEWHERE. I think... But yes, like books, a whole era of 'something' has gone. The thing with video was it caught the unexpected, memories and even history. I had a copy of Batman for ages that had the announcement of the Falklands War in the middle of it by Margaret Thatcher. I since wiped over it but wish I hadn't. Mind, we have three hours of family stuff from the mid nineties that is painful to watch - not embarrassing, just sad to look back on (I always try and avoid being in photos - I look terrible - and actually take few of my family because it makes me sad to see us all young. I can't look through old photos at all.)

But we are in a declutter age, too. Nobody wants stuff anymore. I even heard an artist saying he only did events now, that there's enough objects in the world. I didn't like what he said for all kinds of reasons.
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Protodroid (Protodroid)
Username: Protodroid

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 213.233.150.120
Posted on Monday, April 15, 2019 - 11:43 pm:   

Stewart Lee did a bit of observational comedy where he asked the audience: "Does anyone remember _matter_? Physical objects?"

I think there's pushback against that. Millennials have more objects than older generations. I still have video tapes with programmes I taped from the '80s. I transferred them onto a DVD.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 86.169.180.118
Posted on Tuesday, April 16, 2019 - 03:37 pm:   

Do you go around charity shops? I was shocked to see they threw the older books away. And that our Salivation Army threw away horror books full stop (for a while, anyway. They had loads out a few months later.)
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Protodroid (Protodroid)
Username: Protodroid

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 95.83.250.139
Posted on Wednesday, April 17, 2019 - 11:39 am:   

I was in a huge second hand bookshop yesterday. I really felt a need to go analogue. I found myself wanting old books from the '70s, almost regardless of the content. The trick to finding them quickly is that they have thinner spines. So much bloat today, partly from larger font sizes, partly from insecurity in the modern writer, who hopes that mere quantity will help. The thousands of books were overwhelming - beautiful, sad, poignant. Like the ending of the film version of FAHRENHEIT 451 - every person is a book.

(My phone got broken yesterday, so very limited internet now and I'm enjoying the detox process. I''m going to look into how I can make this work for me and still get the benefits that the digital world can give.)
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 86.169.180.118
Posted on Wednesday, April 17, 2019 - 02:00 pm:   

That all sounds great.
You know, I don't know if it's dementia but my mind's eye is totally fucked, moves along at a rate I can't control. My memory is ok but the images and thoughts in my head are too fast. I can't lie and close my eyes and explore places in my mind anymore. I don't like it.
Reading the Doll Who Ate his Mother again. I'm not so much enjoying the horror as much as I am the seventies setting. People smoking upstairs on buses, the national anthem playing in cinemas...stuff like that. Everything rickety and old in a way we wouldn't tolerate now. I've noticed the characters dissociate a lot, not even during scary scenes, stare at things for no reason. It's lovely because I do that myself. Ramsey's world is as much home to me as George Lucas's also is, at time.
Did you ever hear this amazing thing Lucas said, that fantasy was his parent? I'd love to meet him, even though I know he's very short with fans.
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Craig (Craig)
Username: Craig

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 99.153.254.41
Posted on Wednesday, April 24, 2019 - 08:30 pm:   

I can totally relate to both these last two posts, Proto & Tony. I too almost love any book from the 70's regardless of genre - I include non-fiction! I know that I'm a true bibliophile; and I will often not read something I might want to, if it's in a format, etc., that is not pleasing to me. (Recent example: I recently [too many years too late!] discovered the phenomenal writer Alfred Bester, with three short stories in three separate anthologies; so, I was eager to find a collection of his work. And I soon after came across one. But I didn't like the paperback printing quality, and I didn't like the page quality, nor the type-font - so I passed it up, despite being just what I was searching for!)

An interesting insight there, Tony - people in the 70's, obviously, didn't have cell phones, iPods, streaming channels, etc. There was more time to "stare at things for no reason." Law of unintended consequences, but what are the long-terms effects of the contemporary world effectively eradicating boredom, as they've eradicated malaria and polio? It will take many years of development, but I fear there's an evolutionary necessity for "boredom" - our minds now are always occupied, every second, and it can't be a good thing in the long run.

Those fabulous paperback covers of the 70's; the page edges dyed blue (Dell books, if I remember correctly?) or yellow; the larger fonts on that rough, fading paper. I would say there were bloated novels aplenty back then, too, Proto - general fiction, almost exclusively. The bibliophile in me yearns for the time to read them, just for the sake OF reading them.

I have a secret fetish for those old crime/mystery novel covers - usually 60's, 70's, but well into the 80's, too - that would depict still-lifes: an assortment of "clues" from the novel, you'd famously see these on many Agatha Christie reprints from this era - often paintings, but more than often photographs. Must have been fun to create! I would love to do a whole series of my own, assembling my own "clues" for novels I've loved - a series of paintings, or better, my own photo shoots. An aspiration for someday, when there's time and energy....
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Protodroid (Protodroid)
Username: Protodroid

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 89.19.67.43
Posted on Wednesday, April 24, 2019 - 11:31 pm:   

I heard about a psychological study that concluded that even when our phones are switched off and in our bag our focus is diminished. It only improves again when they're off and in another room.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 86.190.206.179
Posted on Thursday, April 25, 2019 - 09:26 am:   

No, it's like silence. I also heard a thing where this chap said Beethoven used to leave little gaps and silences in some of his later work and that he knew it was the moment where our brains really woke up.
I have a theory it's the key reason we like holidays. It's the time when we tend to avoid the news and contact with people. There's just us, and we see who we're with. I don't know about you two but at moments like that I have a huge sense that there's a bad thing happening in the world because of phones and stuff, a kind of poisoning that's hard to return from. With the internet I find myself (or did, before leaving facebook) walking around with rows still going on in my head. It made me vacant, irate, and there was NO NEED for it.
I too love old books and find reprints hard to reread. I think it's to do with what wiccans say (and I've said this before, maybe on here) that the more hand made something is the more power it has. I think this does not just apply to objects but things like books and paintings etc. There IS a kind of magic in the old, the genuine artefact if you will. It's unquantifiable, which some seem to hate these days, more than they ever did. I think when we read the old books our mind goes back in time to when they were unfamiliar and it's like reading them new.
It's great talking about this stuff again. I could do it all day. Unless it's just like a nice equivalent of facebook, of course, in which case it's just a nice version of wrong.

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