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Pretty random ‘Powers of Horrrorr’ video essay art trash piece of ‘The Croning’ from Laird Barron that ran out of audio ideas near the end so I just played the ‘Phantasm’ theme backwards.
I say it in the video too, but I picked up this novel cos I’d read somewhere years ago that the wife character is secretly an alien and, also years ago, I hallucinated my wife speaking fizzy static Romulan in the middle of the night…
Turns out what I heard [about ‘The Croning’] was half right, but what I didn’t know was that the vast bulk of the novel would be an elderly guy describing the minutiae of his daily life, with cosmic horror background noise that he dismisses most of the time as stuff he can’t remember from his past e.g. almost being sacrificed in a Mexican cave, cos he’s old now and it’s probably dementia. It is a bold choice from Barron which doesn’t work at all [for me]. In fact, I suspect this novel is a forcing together of short stories he’d written previously – this was his first stab at longer work, apparently – which is something I’ve also done before so no judgment [if he did actually do that, I don’t know, it may just read that way to me].
Anyway, the Rumpelstiltskin opening segment is pretty good.
NOTE: obviously works better if you’ve read ‘The Croning’ by Laird Barron, but isn’t completely inaccessible if you haven’t. Just sit back late at night and soak in the vibes.
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Films/music used in the video:
Spider Baby
Terrorvision
The Sorcerers
Planet of the Vampires
The Green Slime
Day of the Tentacle
Queen of Blood
Barbarella
From Beyond
Phantasm III [also the theme from the 1st film]
Night Tide
Lemora: a child’s tale of the supernatural
Inferno [1980]
Battle of the Planets [cartoon]
Videodrome
Hatchet for the Honeymoon
Anti-Clock [of course]
The Other Side of the Underneath [also of course]
Rumpelstiltskin [various cartoons + 1995 movie]
Viy [Ukrainian animation]
The Rejuvenator
Nightmare on Elm Street VI: Freddy’s Dead
In The Mouth of Madness
Possession
Love & Anarchy [1973]
La Femme – Fantastic Planet OST
House of Clocks theme – Vince Tempera
Paganini Horror theme – Vince Tempera
Téir Abhaile Riú (Go Home With You, Now) – Clannad
