--This statement feels applicable more broadly than the film, maybe/probably because when people scare themselves into believing something, the something is limited only by their imaginations, and people's imaginations seem to work especially well in the fear department.
I associate it especially with Val Lewton, but I really think of it as a tenet of horror in any medium: what you're left to imagine for yourself is always worse than what you can be shown. And you can show people some pretty terrible things! But there's something about the Schrödinger's potential of not knowing that really puts the suggestiveness in overdrive. The special effects department of radio was the human mind.
--It sounds really good.
It was one of my favorites of this marathon. It may in fact have edged its way—along with Born in Flames, which was a no-brainer—onto my list of favorite films.
I got pretty spooked just reading your description; I can imagine being well and truly unnerved trying to watch it.
I may always resent the 2013 'Thon for not showing it at four in the morning, which is such an awful hour for self-suspicion to begin with. (Jeff Rapsis usually goes home before midnight, however, so we put it in the more standard late afternoon/early evening slot.)
The idea that malice of the acts lives in the parts of the body that committed them (or that the genius does, with piano playing)--I mean with some things I suppose there really is muscle memory and so on--but I'm think how it's a folk notion of mind/consciousness that imagines us as like octopuses, with awareness and [a degree of] will distributed in our limbs.
I hadn't thought of it in octopus terms, but I love that image. As though the body remembers even when the mind no longer can—it carries its own history with it, even into a new body. And that is sort of true, but not the way these stories mean it. Like the pain of somebody else's phantom limb.
Re: Matinee and The Hands of Orlac
I associate it especially with Val Lewton, but I really think of it as a tenet of horror in any medium: what you're left to imagine for yourself is always worse than what you can be shown. And you can show people some pretty terrible things! But there's something about the Schrödinger's potential of not knowing that really puts the suggestiveness in overdrive. The special effects department of radio was the human mind.
--It sounds really good.
It was one of my favorites of this marathon. It may in fact have edged its way—along with Born in Flames, which was a no-brainer—onto my list of favorite films.
I got pretty spooked just reading your description; I can imagine being well and truly unnerved trying to watch it.
I may always resent the 2013 'Thon for not showing it at four in the morning, which is such an awful hour for self-suspicion to begin with. (Jeff Rapsis usually goes home before midnight, however, so we put it in the more standard late afternoon/early evening slot.)
The idea that malice of the acts lives in the parts of the body that committed them (or that the genius does, with piano playing)--I mean with some things I suppose there really is muscle memory and so on--but I'm think how it's a folk notion of mind/consciousness that imagines us as like octopuses, with awareness and [a degree of] will distributed in our limbs.
I hadn't thought of it in octopus terms, but I love that image. As though the body remembers even when the mind no longer can—it carries its own history with it, even into a new body. And that is sort of true, but not the way these stories mean it. Like the pain of somebody else's phantom limb.