Cullan Hudson's Blog, page 21

Peanuts Take On Lovecraft

TACKY HOLIDAY SWEATERS JUST GOT AWESOME

You know those tacky Christmas sweaters that look like what
you'd get if a holiday threw up all over Bill Cosby? I mean, they even
 have tacky Christmas sweater theme parties! Well, they just got a
bit awesomer. Now you can get sweaters featuring Krampus,
Satan, Aliens, Sasquatch, Wu Tang Clan symbol, and more...

The Devil Wore A Fierce Black Sweater (might have been Dolce)

I don't know if this is a work of fiction or not. I discovered the following story on about.com's paranormal phenomena section, which is largely "true" accounts, so I am going to assume the intent of the tale was truth.

In  1995, Ami and her friends attended a Southern Baptist summer camp at Wilderness Creek in the Arbuckle Mountains of south-central Oklahoma.

The first few days were quite ordinary but one night as the children convened for an evening worship service, several noticed a boy standing several yards away the services. The boy, approximately 17 or 18 and clad in black, wasn't familiar to Ami or her friends. Looking more closely, she and her friends noted that he was even wearing a black sweater, which was quite odd for a summer night in Oklahoma.

Within a few short moments, the children began feeling ill and soon were doubled over in pain. The children were taken to the infirmary. One of the children was even rushed to a nearby hospital.

One of the children, Byron, was released from the infirmary as he began feeling better. He headed out into the night. To the others, it seemed as if something were troubling him beyond the illness he felt.

Later, in the cabin, Byron confessed that the boy in black wasn't a boy at all. It was an entity known as Ara that had oft possessed him over the past few years.

Months later, as summer was winding down, Ami and her cousin were spending time together in Ami's room when her cousin glimpsed someone in the backyard from Ami's window. Ami immediately thought of Byron because he had called recently to say he was going to visit.

But her thoughts were suddenly upended as a disembodied voice suddenly spoke to, tossing her into a sort of delirium wherein she believed herself pregnant and that voice wanted to kill the unborn child.

Ami explained the situation to her cousin and being good Baptist girls they decided to work a little witchcraft. Ami decided to perform something called a "seeing ritual," which would allow her to see the truth in things, revealing that which would otherwise be hidden.

The ritual sent the girls into a trance in which they saw a vision of Ara at a fork in the road, leading off into two distinctly different vistas: one good, the other far from it. Ara told the girls they could choose whichever path they wanted. Suddenly, in Ami's version of the vision, she was walking down the hall in her home and entering her bedroom to see herself and her cousin as they must appear at that moment from the outside. She watched in horror as her vision cousin suddenly snapped the vision Amy's neck.

At that moment, the two girls awoke from the trance and had barely composed themselves when the doorbell rang. Byron had come calling.

He wasn't alone either. A girl named Brandy had joined him.

Byron showed no surprise when Ami said that she and her cousin had been visited by Ara. "I know," he said. Byron related his own recent visitations from Ara and how the entity wanted him to sexually attack the girls to obtain their "purity".

[Cautionary note to young girls. When a boy comes calling and talks of the evil demon that wants him to rape them, you might want to get away and find an adult whom you trust and not do what these girls do next.]

Byron claimed he resisted Ara's demands. [Okay, not hard to imagine. This whole story is one boy with a lot of girl---big space---friends. Unless Ara's demands involved putting together a fierce outfit, I think they may be safe after all]

His friend Brandy at this point explained how she had read that a type of demon known as an incubus could rape a woman without the need to possess a human body.

For some unexplained reason, Byron decides to lay down on the floor and summon Ara inside him. [ahem]

At this point, Ami is fed up with all this and beginning to think Byron has been playing with their minds. She handed Byron a bible, but upon grasping it, he suddenly cried out in pain, explaining it had burned his hand. Ami was about to roll her eyes when she noticed there were marks on her bible in the shape of the boy's hand.

Throughout the following week, Ami experienced further strange events: a ouija board session [groan] only ever spelled out the word ARA; she had several waking hallucinations [Shrooms!]; and some rather bizarre dreams.

For Ami, this was a wake-up call and she stopped dabbling in the occult, doubtlessly tossing her Parker Bros ouija board in the trash and collecting her receipts to return those skull leggings to Hot Topic. She never saw Byron again. The last she heard he was undergoing some white magic ritual to cast Ara out. She never knew if it was successful, but she did later see a flyer on a rain-sodden street heralding a drag queen named Ara Byron's Night of Pandemonium.

Okay, that last bit was an ounce of levity on my part. There are some gaps and inconsistencies in the story the make me think bad fiction. But maybe something weird did happen to this happy-go-luck band of Baptists. Maybe there is somewhere a 17 or 18 year old looking boy dressed in unseasonably black attire waiting to infect the the innocent among us.

Strange Monument Heralds Return Of Ancient Cult.

Recently in the Paseo (an arts district of Oklahoma City) a roughly fashioned concrete monument weighing approximately 100 lbs showed up mysteriously on the lawn of the Paseo Grill.

What makes this weirder is the plaque affixed to the monolith, which reads: "In the year of our lord 2012 Creer Pipi claimed this land for azathoth". Azathoth, for your edification, is an eldritch deity from the demented pantheon of horror master H. P. Lovecraft whose classic works of weird terror in the 1920s and 30s have inspired pretty much everyone since.

Is this a strange bit of guerilla art? A practical joke? Or does the Cthulhu Cult yet live?!

Sad thing is the Grill wants to toss it out. Whatever. It's awesome and fun and whimsical and adds an element of funky surprise to an otherwise generic, desperate to be like one of the cool kids brand x of a city.

Classics Too Good To Die

Although often subjected to ridicule, he was one of few people to take a global look at civilization rather than a nationalistic view. 
He accepted that there was cultural diffusion as one culture influenced another, ideas, stories, and beliefs were thus spread widely in a time without nation states or nationalistic boundaries. He was definitely one to think outside the box rather than become too root bound into the contemporary and rigid thinking of the science of his day. 
While lacking in some skills, and a tendency to accept too much at face value, his ' what if we look at it this way...' approach is the epitome of what true science should do. 
Despite his being derided by some he did bring up intriguing questions and examples that seem to reveal what modern science is only now beginning to accept - ancient society was more mobile and more far traveled than previously thought.

Available from a library or Amazon.com

Graveside Ennui

I sketched this out with a ballpoint and some highlighters on a nightstand
notepad from a popular hotel chain. I then scanned it into Photoshop and
tweaked the hues and gave it a vignette. I thought it might make a nice
jumping off point for a series of illustrations if I ever get around to writing
anything that needs pictures to accompany the words. 

Did Hikers Snag Video Of Bigfoot?

Hikers near Mission, BC shot this video of what appears (to some) to be the elusive and oft-blurry sasquatch.

The Conjuring: A Review and A Deeper Look

A BIT ABOUT THE CONJURING

One of this summer's surprise hits at the box-office (taking in over 80 million during its opening week) was The Conjuring, a supernatural thriller based on truish events.

Based on a case file from Famed paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Wilson, The Conjuring tells the story of the Perron family that has just moved into a secluded New Jersey farm house only to find themselves slowly tormented by a host of pernicious spirits. The Warrens are called in and all hell breaks loose, culminating in the possession of Mrs. Perron by the vengeful spirit of a Salem-era witch.

The film's scares are at their best when executed with a deft, subtle hand--literally. The sudden, unexpected hand claps from a frolicking phantom child wanting to join the Perron children in a game like Hide-n-seek meets Marco Polo (but with clapping hands) creates some of the most frightening pucker moments. Not since High School Musical has clapping been so terrifying.

However, when chairs are hurled through space to crash near-miss style at the wall and young ladies are dragged by their hair across a living room floor, it all begins to look a little more slapstick than sinister.

The film features a fresh score that more effectively borrows the droning bass blasts that were born in Spielberg's War of the Worlds before making it big in Christopher Nolan's Inception. The device has since become cliche in countless action films and thrillers, but Joseph Bishara's score works in sparingly a new take on the motif.

The direction is solid and the editing is tight with inventive pans from the camera (it gets a little roller-coastery now and then). A good cast featuring Lili Taylor, Vera Farmiga, and Patrick Wilson lends gravitas to the script, which is by no means threadbare. Earning an 85% over at rottentomatoes.com, The Conjuring shows that it stands head and shoulder above previous offerings in this genre, including The Woman in Black, The Awakening, and Insidious.

But the real set-apart for this film is undoubtedly its based-on-a-true-story origins, which lends The Conjuring an added layer of frightening verisimilitude beyond the terror that is its well-saturated 70s pastiche. There are just some clothes we don't need to see again.

A BIT ABOUT ED AND LORRAINE WARREN

Ed and Lorraine Warren were a real life couple famous for their investigations of demonic activity, hauntings, and ghosts. Ed was a self-styled demonologist and his wife Lorraine professed clairvoyant and mediumistic talents.

Through their New England Society for Psychic Research, which they founded in 1952, the pair investigated some of the most sensational cases of the last few decades, including the controversial Amityville haunting. From many of the 10,000 cases the couple examined in their career, they collected charged objects, or items imbued with psychic energy and demonic spirits. These were kept in their Occult Museum. Later, the couple's nephew, John Zaffis, would add his own contribution to this growing collection of paranormal artifacts via his work, as exemplified in the SyFy reality program, Haunted Collector.

The Warrens are not without controversy. Much of what transpired in the Amityville case has been refuted by others in witness to the events. Some researchers have even deemed the entire incident a hoax based on statements made by William Weber, a compatriot of Jay Anson who literally wrote the book on the Amityville Horror. Another case of the Warrens, which was written about by Ray Garton, centered around the Snedeker family in Southington, Connecticut. However, when Garton tried to interview the family about their claims, he found conflicting accounts and erratic behavior seeming to stem from an environment of alcoholism and drug addiction.

Friday Roundup Of The Weird

Friday round up of the weird.

We know all too well the haunted horrors of old houses and creepy castles, but these divers have all had their own experiences beneath the surface.




Does yoga make aliens angry? Probably.

The first thing I checked were those iPhone UFO apps, but this image doesn’t match those I could find online. I thought maybe there appeared to be some type of tether since there’s the faintest hint of a dark line running from below the object. But I couldn’t resolve it from a webjacked image. I dunno. It’s a headscratcher so far. I’m inclined, as always, to say hoax, but I can’t prove it. Maybe it is a UFO and it has come to punish them for their montane yoga trek.



The Velvet Coffin is a new web series paying homage to the schlock horror theater of yesteryear and looks like a lot of fun.

Return Investment To Babylon or The Haunted Film That Can't Find Distribution

Have you seen any of the buzz and hype around the supposedly haunted film "Return to Babylon"?

The film, which stars Jennifer Tilly, María Conchita Alonso, Ione Skye, Debi Mazar, Laura Harring, and Tippi Hedren, is an homage to the silent film era and is directed by Alex Monty Canawati. According to some, the 19 rolls of 16mm film the auteur used to shoot his work were found on a sidewalk along Hollywood Boulevard.



Canawati claims that during reviews of the dailies (all the film shot from various angles on any given day) that the actors' faces appeared to be 'morphing' into various, biblical countenances, as is explained in the video above.

However, when he points out that Maria Conchita Alonso seems to transfigure momentarily into a biblical figure, one almost has to laugh out loud. What Canawati sees as the sudden emergence of a bearded countenance is quite clearly the actor's hair swinging in front of her face as she rushes down the steps.

There are other peculiar shots, but one has to wonder if these aren't artifacts created from using found-on-the-side-of-the-road 16mm film in vintage cameras and then scanning those into a computer for editing purposes. Or they could be hoaxes. No one has examined the original negatives as far as I can tell, so we can't verify that these faces are there on the film and weren't just rendered in the computer during the post-production process. Even if these unusual visages are on the film, who is to say that these 16mm rolls aren't an interpositive film created from a manipulated master being copied to additional 16mm film.

Canawati performs his own biblical transfiguration when he climbs upon an old rugged cross to play the part of a martyr who has been harassed and damaged by daring to make these claims. This whole scenario smacks of publicity stunt, a way to drum up excitement for a film that isn't making a return investment. A story that becomes even more suspicious with the allegations that Canawati has battled drug addiction along the way.

If it is a last-ditch effort to generate buzz, it seems to be working. According to the many bulletin boards and comments I've been reading, there is a sizable group anxious to see this film--if for no other reason than these mysterious morphing mugs.