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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 1^st 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