Melanie Gaydos and the Myth of "New Beauty"

                                                           photo by Eric Lee Bowman

Melanie Gaydos.
I love you.
I want others to love you.
But I have to be careful in my approach.

Melanie Gaydos is a model. She was born with something called ectodermal dysplasia. This changes one's ability to grow hair, have sweat glands, effects the nails and teeth, and in fact seems to be an umbrella term that encompasses a wide range of unusual detours from the norm. Hers is a severe case. But she wanted to be a model. And she is one. A high fashion, fine art model, perhaps one day on a runway, already featured in a number of music videos.

One thing straight tho.
The more time I spend with her pictures, the more I think of her, the more I understand her, the harder it is to stand the obvious pandering that happens. People love her DESPITE her face. People think, "oh, poor girl, how brave, that DESPITE her face, she wants to be a model. How sweet". They commend her on her bravery (which of course she must have, truly), they deride the norms of beauty and focus on her body (because "DESPITE" her face her body is, it is true, extraordinary, and so on).

I have to say that I honestly, truly, DO think she is beautiful. This isn't some soft-peddling of what is obviously a face that is unusual, a disease that I am sure has caused her numerous difficulties in her life. But the more I look, the more I see, and the more I feel awake. I feel like another sense opens up when I see her. It isn't some pitytrip for a woman suffering. Its someone looking at another and saying, "no, you know, I really LIKE this. I really DO think this is something else. I want more of this in my life".
Her mouth, in particular, I find beautiful. When she wears lipstick, her face takes on such a wonderful shape that it blows my mind.

The WAY she conveys in her photos- there is something she is bringing forth that i can't put my finger on. Its like she is dispensing this new wisdom or something. I kept thinking, "new beauty"....

but that's bullshit.

Beauty is beauty. As she herself said, "beauty is a state of being...I have never felt I was ugly and I don't feel that way now".
It isn't about saying, "yes, maybe, I could look at that and not feel sorry for her and I think her struggle is beautiful, poor girl". NO. NO.
It really isn't that.
Beauty is beauty. Just because you get locked in and fooled by an overwhelming majority doesn't mean that when someone like Melanic comes along (which is, of course, never) you should softpedal and make it sound like she is no different from others. She is AMAZINGLY different. She is WONDERFULLY different.

You may, upon first seeing her face, be shocked. I was. I had to know- is she real? What is happening here?
Then I got really profoundly touched by her interview for "What's Underneath". I cried. Alot.
Then I got over it.
She is so much more than even THAT.

The more I look the more I am amazed. When I spend some time with her photos and then look at other people, its just not as interesting. Its just not as....yes, beautiful.

The whole dialog of "stretching" one's idea of beauty to encompass Melanie Gaydos is just.....shit. Its shit. What is beauty? Really? Symmetry? A body without scars? A mouth that is not a cleft palate? Can a cleft palate be beautiful?

I think it is. I am glad to learn this lesson and not be someone crying. She is beautiful to me. There is no "new" beauty, just new eyes to see what has always been. Its an extraordinary lesson in my own bullshit. And a lesson in keeping your eyes and mind open.

Jamaican Noir

I decided to make a playlist that exemplified that sound that i have started calling "Jamaican Noir". There is that subsect of Jamaican stuff whether it be dub or ska that has a disquieting tone to it....like a shadow cast of a long gunman after dark in the streets of trenchtown. Noir is the only thing to call it.

The first song in this mix is Big Youth's "Keep Your Dread"....which just sounds so shadowy and worried that it starts things off at the very right tone. There are a few tracks here like "Blacula" that might not have the most worried tone, but they have a MAD tone that just sounds like everyone is on a bad trip. There are 35 songs total on this playlist, just download the zip file and open everything up and the playlist will just populate in order. Apart from the first couple songs I didn't agonize too much about the order. Didn't do any crossfades- this is all just raw MP3's. Wish I had the time and the right material to make an accompanying clip loop but I alas do not.

You can download it all here. Enjoy.

Creepypasta, Memes, Orbis Tertius and Time Away

haven't spent much time nurturing this blog of late. had a bit of a crisis of confidence, as they call it, in my life and my esthetics. i recently left a collective in los angeles that i had been a part of for five years. was hellbent on either writing a book or making a film about Broadcast, but James cannot be involved due to his schedule and his still-overwhelming grief. I am hoping that someday that story will still be told, but it might be a long while. in any case, my own work must go on, which consists of my education, and focusing more on the fine arts. I have moved into a new place which is providing me with alot of peace and time to get things realigned in my mind. i have definitely been suffering from a lack of creativity, but today i felt the forces come back and am back on the case, working on a new video and getting some other things, like my website for my video work/vjing, up and running.

now that that explanation is out of the way i would like to share some interesting intersections.

a few days ago, i spent the evening as i sometimes do wandering round the web. being at an impasse will do that to you. but i rediscovered a fascinating bit of 21st century fiddling that i have been fascinated with for a while- the creepypasta.

for those that don't know, a creepypasta is a meme or false mythology that is made with two intentions- to frighten, and to go viral. its the internet equivalent of an urban legend, but constructed specifically with the knowledge that it is not true, with (so i surmise) the hopes that others will believe it is true.

my longtime favorite in this genre centered around a 1970's children's show called "Candle Cove". Apparently this was a television show with dark undertones and lots of children screaming, and there were purported viewers of this show that remembered watching it as a child. These "memories" featured this tidbit- their parents claimed that the entire time they were viewing it, all the parent could see on the tv was static.


some more very strange creepypastas can be found here.

for some reason, it only occurred to me this weekend how Borgesian this all is. It instantly reminded me of the story "Orbis Tertius" by jorge luis borges, one of my favorite writers. In this story, a false mythology/cosmology by a Council of 100 is distributed, inseminated really, throughout the culture. The idea was to supplant reality by rewriting history. every time a member of the council died, they were replaced, ensuring that the rewriting would go infinitely. Language, flora and fauna, everything was being re-imagined over hundreds of years, seeping into the culture with the eventual aim of eradicating the previous human history completely.

i have always been a fan of urban legends, and am fascinated with the way they occur and what they say about the culture that they infiltrate. its also fascinating to realize that people are unwitting participants in the building of myths, which really are what urban legends are. the idea that groups of people purposefully have chosen to create new urban legends, release them and watch them go is very interesting to me. and it brings up a lot of interesting notions.

first off, there are a few creepypastas i have stumbled on without realizing their false provenance that scared me absolutely silly. This is one of them. The tricky thing is, that when you decide to research these, inevitably you are faced with endless blogs and posts repeating these ad infinitum, making the discovery that they are in fact, NOT REAL, much more difficult to do.

here is where my love of quantum physics comes in and leads me to ask, "if a whole bunch of people begin believing that these things happened, have they in fact happened?"

the idea of reality is something i have always questioned and even before becoming immersed in quantum physics i realized that reality is nothing but a mass agreement. its a bunch of people who have decided that this, and not this, is reality, and there is this denial that reality is far more fluid than people realize. in other words, reality as we know it is only a consensus. there is literally nothing that can be called "absolute reality". its subjective. even with a mass consensus, its simply a consensus that our subjective reality is "real". and we can of course never know what another's reality is. fascinating, really.

with this in mind, you begin to wonder if the roots of some of these memes will not become so obscured that many people will begin to believe it. people as a whole don't tend to research everything they come across. call it the death of critical thinking. if people read it somewhere, they tend to believe it. i am not so cynical as to believe that people are merely sheep, because i don't believe that they are, but i do believe that humanity as a whole (especially in the western world with our mass of "entertainments" and media overload) are VERY easily distracted. when you are easily distracted you can be easily fooled. this is something that every magician knows instinctively.

if fifty people believe that charlie noonan existed, that "candle cove" was a real show, that a demented kleenex ad screened in japan led to mass suicides, is it not, in some sense, real? in a landscape of holographic multiverses, what does this imply? does not this imply or impart a degree of "reality"?

i do believe in things like the law of attraction, having seen in manifest in my life in a myriad of ways. i need a new scarf, or a printer, and within a few days, after focusing, it will "find" me. the more sure i am, the quicker it seems to happen. the belief that it will happen is of course the one necessary ingredient to these proceedings. belief makes things so.

in twenty years, will our world be so littered with memes that we have forgotten that they are not true? I remember rumors from my childhood- that joan jett had died in a plane crash, that prince was dying of AIDS, etc- and laugh about them now. obviously, enough people believing in something does not make the thing come to pass always.

but these were actual people. these were rumors. if you create a false reality, whole cloth, what will be the long term effects? i so very much wish that borges were still alive. i believe he would have much to say on the subject- and i think it would have delighted him.

Dear Trish

Its been about 15 days since the 3rd anniversary of Trish Keenan's death. It occurred to me tonight how unreal it still feels. Even tho I never knew her, her music has been such a force in my life- akin to when I discovered punk rock. The bearing she has had far outweighs not knowing her.

I have been working for a couple years now on my Broadcast Project, where I attempt to make a video for all of their songs. I think I am on the 17th one now, but it started to feel like it wasn't enough. So, I have decided to make a full length documentary about the band, with James' blessing (which I am waiting for, and hoping for the best, as we have been in contact, crossing fingers....). Even if that blessing never comes, I still feel like there is something i NEED to do to make people more aware of them. I don't know why. You think you get past the age of that kind of fandom, but I realized with this band that I hadn't. Its like the need to build a monument to something beloved. You just HAVE to.

I believe in quantum physics and parallel worlds, and in one of those worlds Trish is still alive and is working on another EP and the band is getting even weirder and there are still many more songs to come. I would get to see them live many times, perhaps make some videos for them, I would get to tell her what their music meant to me.

But we live in this world. Rest in peace Ms Trish.

Probabilities/Possibilities

I am a Scorpio Rising. Mercury, which has been in retrograde, is now no longer, and its in Scorpio. We just had a New Moon Solar Eclipse in Scorpio as well, and for whatever you think that's worth, that's quite a heavy alignment for communication. And also for understanding things and being able to untangle and decipher and learn and listen.
So that's probably why I am getting these flights of reverie and heavy thought this evening, about the Great Wide Whatever. Heavy musing, cue hippie sitar music.

I started thinking about possibilities, versus probabilities. My favorite thing in the world is probably Quantum Physics, and that is largely a theoretical science. Black holes and anti-matter and multiverses and the Sloan Wall and other creepy, yawning, black, sonorous, massive, invisible things. But you are dealing in probabilities alot of the time here. You are saying, "if i extrapolate backwards mathematically, then the big bang would have happened this way". this is a probability, and not a certainty. its based on physical laws and likelihoods and there is that word again, probabilities. It PROBABLY happened that way. It most likely did. When it rains, and you go outside, even if it isn't raining anymore you see a wet ground and you can say, "it PROBABLY rained", and people would think you were an idiot. Because there is no PROBABLY about it. its a given that it rained.

If you writ this larger, you can probably start to see what i did, that probabilities are what most people live their lives on, and not its more ephemeral and fun counterpart, possibilities.

think about it.

you get in your car knowing that you are probably going to get to work or the supermarket or the daycare or wherever. you are on a track of probability. you turn the stove on and put a pot on to boil and you know that probably when i come back ten minutes from now the water will be boiling. and ad infinitum, on through the day, through your life.
the problem with this is is that it puts us in a mindset that deals only with probabilities, with what we like to call certainties, and which certainly do not exist. we take the probabilities in our life and we try and graft that way of thinking onto what should be a separate mindset, that of possibility. we think that we should only deal with what we have some kind of legitimate reason to believe could probably happen. we don't have a lot of time to daydream, to think out side of the box (i loathe that term, is got all these corporate connotations for me, but i digress).
but this- this is the thing that i am realizing sets us up for a life wherein we do not allow ourselves to truly absorb and understand the fact that there are NO certainties (barring one), which is actually really good news. of course by certainty i mean, something that is going to happen every time the exact same way, or that every effort and action you make will have a reaction that is reciprocal. we all know that is not true. my physics class taught me that- that you can work your ass off and still get nowhere. and by nowhere i mean "not where you thought-and farther behind than you hoped". the only certainty in this life is death. everything in between is totally up for grabs.
not having certainty is something that the anxiety-prone classically struggle with the most. you can start worrying that a piano is gonna drop on your head out of a clear blue sky, or equally fantastic and improbable things. its funny in a way that the anxious seem to realize that there are no certainties and that this sends them into a negative headspace when really, its pretty amazing WHAT could happen, but they never feel good about that. if anything can happen, then certainly, statistically, some of that is gonna be great. its the old adage, the bad news is that there are no certainties. the GOOD news is that there are no certainties. but they only seem to be able to deal with the negatives. THAT makes sense to them. its like a gravitational pull on your psyche- naturally everything must go downward. there is really no reason to not be as transported by the glory of possibility as opposed to your fears of what could happen. think about it.
what it is about certainties that make us feel so safe? why is it that we are so prone to building foundations on shifting ground, literally and figuratively? we have to have security, some kind of security. i've always noticed that gypsy types, travelers, seem to have an internal core that gives them some sort of home inside themselves. they are at home everywhere.

but again i digress.
what i am leading to here is that we take great chances on only allowing ourselves to see what is probable. what is probably going to happen. it brings us comfort. it also boxes us in, and denies us other realities. we get caught in the workaday world, and think that the entire other side of things, that which is possible, is actually only what is probable.
when i think about it really alot rests on this- its like a yin and yang, good and evil, black and white thing. probabilities and possibilities. they are two entirely different forces acting on us all the time.

if you jump off a building, there is a high probability that you are going to hit the ground. but the possibility exists that a freak wind stream could come along and bear you up to land on the next roof unscathed. babies are tossed about by tornados and are planted bottom down in a field, just fine. the probability of that baby dying is quite high. but the possibility always existed that it would NOT die, that it would it be just fine.
possibility runs both ways, of course. you could put water on to boil and take a shower and come out and your entire electrical system has gone haywire and the wiring in your wall is on fire. you can't PLAN for possibility. it just is, right there, all the time. its the multiverse in action- the innumerable possible worlds that probably do exist, but we can only imagine the possibilities (the word probably used on purpose here).

if you were to really absorb that concept, its pretty heavy to realize the ramifications. the power of positive thinking and the law of attraction is something i have been studying for a while now. i have been in a sort of mental bootcamp for the past several months, especially, trying to root out and unlearn a lifetime of inherited and naturally rotten thinking. i am still in the process. i am sure i always will be. to some degree.
but really taking a moment to realize that staking all your claims on the probable might lead you away from fantastical happenings.

i understand that not everyone is like me or most of my friends. most people are content to follow, to not question, to raise their kids and just sort of get on with it without alot of pondering. i always marveled how many people in the world were content to work the same job for years without blowing their brains out. most people don't need the level of stimuli and change that i need. not everyone would be happy cozying up to absolute possibility. this isn't a putdown. some people don't ask why. people that do are sometimes tortured by it. its not always fun and its not always productive. its sometimes a great pain in the ass.
but i think that learning to embrace that is something that must be an essential part of any life-affirming practice. getting out from under only what is probable is akin to realizing that your past does NOT have to dictate what your future is. that just because something happened one way in the past doesn't mean that its going to happen that way in the future. getting out of the prison of probability sometime and allowing yourself to graze in the land of possibility helps you ideate what exactly you want- and don't want- from this life.
that is a really heavy realization, no?

Science is Psychedelic

I spend alot of my downtime watching documentaries about physics, i am taking a physics class this semester, and i spend alot of my time (a part time job amount-easily 20-30 hours a week) doing physics homework. as slippery as the concepts are and as badly as i am failing at the math side of it, i continue to become more fascinated and more passionate about the whole prismatic realm that i am slowly walking into. its more like crawling, falling, teetering into Lidsville, like a toddler who can't do quadratic equations yet but she is in the room with it, and soon she will grow to be able to reach that doorknob to get to the NEXT level. i have chubby little baby legs in Lidsville right now. But i can SEE it. i can sense it.

there is no doubt that we really are in a different kind of psychedelic age. this is something that excites me to no end. its something i talk about and think about and read about and write about alot. i try and get everyone excited about it because artists are notoriously anti-empirical science, much more likely to believe in ephemeral concepts than what a scientist tells them.

i think the medical establishment has contributed to people's cynical view of research and facts and study of the physical world. we see medicine as a vast moneymaking machine devoid of fairness or care- at least in america. we tend to view Big Pharma and corporate medicine in the dim light they often deserve. and often science is in service to the military-industrial complex, another reason to view it with suspicion. and of course the Bomb would not have been possible without physics.

I would like to see, and be a part of, a movement that wrestles science away from the establishment even in some brief, symbolic sense, and puts it in the hands of the people who need it the most. people who need to understand the nature of the universe so that they no longer brood and worry about these things. its tied into our ultimate human potential, and its wrapped up in a lot of if not most new age thinking that artists and bohemians like myself have always been interested in. and it is absolutely essential to understanding the law of attraction or manifestation, or positive thinking, or whatever writer this week is calling it. its all part of a grand design and you no longer have to- nor can you-leave science out of the equation. there is one long hallway, and each of you have been approaching each other down this long dark tunnel, and the light you saw was each approaching the other. once you meet, you can go upward and out of the tunnel and beyond all of it, and shine a light so that everyone can see.

that is probably in some sense what was meant by all the resurrection parables in every religion- that something comes back in a wave of light or a flash from above after a period of darkness or death or a quest of some type. i think leading our way out of darkness must involve the coming together of the two halves of our potential, our collective brain- the scientific, and the spiritual. these two sides of us have always been at war. we distrust what we can't see. but what we know now is that what we cannot see is where the action is REALLY happening. for the first time in human history mankind is actually down into the cosmos spelunking into minute, teeming worlds of weirdness and wonder. we have learned so much about the workaday world but in a sense we have learned nothing that would properly prepare us for the way things really are. this is the most bizarre twist perhaps EVER in the history of mankind. such a global shift in our thinking on the cellular level is the next revolution. it will not be political and it certainly won't be artistic. but all those realms will inevitably be influenced by this shifting earth of ideas. there will be no way to avoid change.

i really intend to be a part of this world and i want my art to be informed by it as well. the more i can learn about science the more i can literally create- both mentally and physically- the world i want to reside in. the machines and synths i intend to build, the music i want to make, my creativity is general and the profession i want to take on are all now a part of the same thing. there are no longer conflicts in my life between doing art or doing something practical. it is all now literally the same thing, tho it is still in the conceptual stages while i work my way through school and process and learn.

i want to very much get beyond any preconceived ideas about space and science fiction and all the silver-clad retrofuturistic hooha that inevitably creeps up when one talks about a "tech" aspect of art. i loathe techno music. but i adore other kinds of electronic music and certainly love synthesizers and so-called artificial tones. there are other possibilities in expressing this esthetic that i am interested in now. i do not want to invoke some hamhanded futurism. i don't enjoy the typical "technoir" visual or tone or flavor. more than anything its about NOW, the present moment and the power that lies in it. its not taking off the planet Venus.

really its a bout a modern psychedelia devoid of all the trappings of the idea of psychedelia that has become codified- a swirly sitar, a tie-dye shirt. like something trish keenan said once about psychedelia being a way of seeing and challenging form and temper. going beyond a simple style to actually making people more aware of how weird the world really is. moving them to believe that through art and music.

(sidebar-honestly nothing bothers me more on an esthetic level than shock value. its the thing that i value the least in rock music, really. i am not talking about screaming jay hawkins, i am talking about "i want to fuck you like an animal" and ugliness and blood and violence without meaning or context. the coolness of violence. even tho i adore hiphop i have to take breaks from listening to it because of the swagger. i don't like ghastly images used in art just to piss people off. its really i think quite damaging and not really a revolution at all. its like GG allin smearing himself in his own shit and flinging it on the audience. its "piss christ" in a museum. it isn't robert mapplethorpe, it isn't an artist who uses something that could shock SOME people to show a kind of beauty in what used to be in the shadows, but those who simply go for the jugular out of pure spite. its the people who made "cannibal holocaust" or "a serbian film", it isn't "holy mountain"or pasolini. there is a fine line and everyone draws it themselves according to their own taste but i personally will never and have never gone for the shocking in my own art. i don't find shock necessary to bring people to a higher level. i would much rather mesmerize.)

i am not sure what all these concepts will bear but i am definitely going to continue meditating on it and planning on it and creating it, making it real.

"Let's Scare Jessica To Death"

Last night, here in our wonderland, we watched this film on the Big Wall outside. I have long considered this film to be on a very short list of best b-movies ever made, but I don't know why I have insisted on even calling it a B movie all these years. Maybe its because I first saw it on "Movie Macabre"? They didn't exactly show Polanski on a regular basis there. Whatever the reason, i think it is quite time to cease calling it and accept the fact that this is an A movie that has simply escaped too many people's attention. And its a real shame. 

Brief synopsis: Made in 1971, "LSJTD" tells the story of Jessica, played to heartbreaking effect by the wonderful Zohra Lampert. Jessica has just been released from a mental hospital, after 6 months of treatment for some vague breakdown we are never really told much about. She and her husband (Barton Heyman) and a hippie friend (Kevin O' Connor) buy a apple farm out in the Connecticut wilds to get away from it all, but strange things begin to happen immediately. The line between what is truly happening and what is simply Jessica going nuts again is of course, made purposely vague and never really comes quite clear. This gives the film a spooky tension that I find much preferable to typical horror over-acceleration. 

Zohra Lampert is the key to much of this film's charm. The fact that she is not a huge star is one more reason to loathe and despise Hollywood. On the other hand, one gets the sense that the only reason she didn't make it is because she probably didn't want to, which is something I could understand. You can tell that she has so much character, so many chops, is so heartfelt and genuine, that she must have been running purposely in the opposite direction from fame and stardom. She MUST have. there is simply no better performance in a movie of this caliber by someone who did not die shortly afterwards that did not lead to more fame than what she has received. Its quite puzzling, and while the film would have still been enjoyable without her in it, she alone raises it to its deserved status as a cult classic.
It also doesn't hurt that she is absolutely gorgeous with such a soulful, expressive manner, and says even the most ordinary things in such an extraordinary way.
It reminds me of something Patty Duke said in her autobio, regarding one of her early films, "Me, Natalie". There was scene featuring Al Pacino in what I think was his very first appearance on film, She commented that you could tell that there was something special about him even tho he only said the phrase, "so, do you put out?" I think her words were, "it was like seeing laurence olivier in dinner theatre in Florida". THAT is how Zohra comes across. Just TOO damn good to have been ignored unless it was by her own choice. One can tell that she is possessed of depths that most actors are not, and I could very much imagine her purposely flying under the radar so she could live a peaceful life and teach pottery to underprivileged kids or something. She is JUST the type.

     Mari-Clare Costello, on the other hand, is much more in the realm of normal acting chops and does a servicable, creepy job as the slutty free-lovin' folk-guitar playin' perhaps-a-vampire girl who tries to sleep her way through the whole house from the get go. Her actions in this film really do freak you out a little bit- she just seems to strike the wrong chord and go too far. Which is a GOOD thing. She gives you an added dimension of psychological squeamishness that is unexpected in the context to a film like this.











Beyond the acting is the overall oft-mentioned atmosphere of the film. It has gotten bad reviews (even from a couple of my friends) for being too slow. Its been called dated, hokey, vague. I don't agree with any of this, of course- one man's vague is another man's atmosphere. This film is filled with so much subtlety that you have to be a fan of subtlety in general to get anything out of this film. I think it takes a page out of Polanski's book in that regard. If you were to sit down and watch "Rosemary's Baby" six times in a row, you would find new things in it every time. Polanksi really does stick little bits in here and there that most people simply don't notice. People are hamhanded and lazy. They like actions that they can decipher without too much thought. They miss subtleties of dialogue because they are checking their voice mail or running their mouths. They have no idea what they miss.

I never understand those types. They miss all kinds of colors.

Another film this reminds me of is "The Innocents". It definitely belongs in some kind of sub-genre of creepy psychological horror- while watching this last night the phrase "gentle horror" came to mind. Something cold like a wind, a steady rise instead of jabs of shock. This is the MOST difficult thing to do, of course- its easier to show tits and blood and car crashes and the black cat that jumps out of the alley. It takes a deft hand to hold back.

Not that this film is without its "gotchas". The above photo of Mariclare coming out of the lake is a prime example. Other shocks are to be had but almost none are on the order of your typical horror film. Many of them are psychological and don't have accompanying action.

One of the most effective traits of this film is the constant self-talk that Jessica hears (or is it voices in her head?). Subtle whispers, shadows, looks exchanged between her and her husband, the tension presented between what Jessica knows to be happening and what she says- incredibly effective and incredibly creepy. I would even go so far as to call this film not a supernatural thriller at all, but psychological at its core. One is never sure where one ends and the other begins.

It has been one of my favorite films for many years. I watched it first, as i mentioned, as a child, and when i saw it again as an adult it actually frightened me even MORE than it had, which is a first for me. The deeper dimensions of this film were more understandable to me as an adult, but as a child the creeping dread and whispery mystery hit me very clearly. I was impressed to find a real gem that was not just a sepia-toned memory as is usually the case with half-remembered films.

Honestly, if any of these sorts of films appeal to you it would be a good bet to simply go buy a copy right off and watch this. Its a gamble worth taking. If you see only ONE film that is new to you this Halloween I highly recommend it be this one- unless you are ham-fisted and like torture porn and blood splattered on tits for two hours. I doubt you would even be reading this blog if you were a knuckledragger such as that, but the internet has many strange corners we find ourselves in. I highly recommend this for anyone with more refined horror sensibilities. I don't think you will be disappointed.