Vortex Quotes

“Cinema – all art really – has great power. Power to illuminate. Power to transform. For those of us who experience film as literature, classic movies comprised an introductory education in the genre. As kids, many of us went searching through library shelves for obscure source novels after seeing some old movie or other. It was the start of many an adventure.”
― Robert Dunbar, Vortex

“Something deep in the human psyche has always seemed to yearn for ever more enhanced levels of savagery.”
― Robert Dunbar, Vortex

“They spring from deep within us, these nightmares, these folktales. They speak of our deepest needs, the ones we have all been taught since childhood never to put into words, because dreams reveal our other face, the one we keep hidden, the Hyde to mankind’s collective Jekyll.”
― Robert Dunbar, Vortex

“They say a basis in fact underlies most legends. They say it all the time, all those Wise Elders in all those old horror films, the high priests, the scientists, the gypsy fortune tellers. On this single issue they agree unanimously.”
― Robert Dunbar, Vortex

“The unfortunate Elizabeth Bathori was said to bathe in the blood of young girls in order to preserve her youth and beauty. Apparently more than 600 maidens went down the drain before anyone noticed something amiss at the castle. How very inobservant the neighbors must have been.”
― Robert Dunbar, Vortex

“No one dreamed them up. No one needed to. The vampire clawing at the window, the werewolf prowling the moor, the hags at the crossroads – they lurked here already. Some nightmares are ancient, as old as civilization. Some are older still.”
― Robert Dunbar, Vortex

“Even the spate of clearly well-intentioned films about AIDS only added to the certainty that gay characters wind up dead by the final reel. After all, in the movies, no one lives with HIV ... perhaps the ultimate stigmatization.”
― Robert Dunbar, Vortex

“In occult terms, a man’s path was viewed as a spiritual road, leading ever upward. Manifest destiny of the rational soul: he ascended. But woman? A lesser species, primitive and bound to the savage earth by umbilical cycles, her road spiraled downward, and any man who strayed onto her path might become lost. It was her function after all – the function of her debased and debasing nature – to tempt him away from salvation. The girl can’t help it. Here, have an apple.”
― Robert Dunbar, Vortex

“Never forget the gender of mother earth. This planet is a body through which arterial tides pulse and surge, and within this fluid murk stir serpents, inchoate monstrosities of the amniotic id.”
― Robert Dunbar, Vortex