This week at @SecondWindGroup.com, we took a look at “Exit 8”, “Backrooms” and wider subgenre of “liminal horror.”
Why does it resonate with audiences? What is it about? And why is there so much of it lately?
WATCH : youtu.be/nk404rjV5OE?...
Thank *you!*
In this week's Patreon column, @darrenmooney.bsky.social digs into the surprising sweetness of DTF - St. Louis.
www.patreon.com/posts/156077...
Week 1 of DWLit's three-part look at The Daleks' Master Plan. Thanks to the recovery of the two missing episodes, we have a lot to talk about. My guests this week are John Peel, who wrote the novelization, and @darrenmooney.bsky.social. And an audio commentary.
open.spotify.com/episode/4o3B...
An excellent video about two of my pet peeves from @darrenmooney.bsky.social
youtu.be/0TEvK09XVvY
Now catching “Juno and the Paycock” at @mermaidartscentre.bsky.social.
Quite enjoyed “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy.”
A little long, and a little too much CGI at the end, but a properly gnarly, gruesome, committed horror film about the nightmare of raising a teenager.
Blumhouse’s best “Exorcist” movie, and maybe the third best of the seventeen or so “Mummy” movies.
Here’s Lee Cronin introducing #LeeCroninsTheMummy
According to “League of Comics”, my favourite comic book character is Joe Chill, the dude who murdered Batman’s parents.
Just checking in either my favourite characters on League of Comics.
This is a fun conversation about “Lost”, and the realities of TV production, and the best laid plans of mice and men.
As somebody who only has vague memories of watching friends play “Final Fantasy 7” (we were a Nintendo family), this was a great watch.
Genki Kawamura’s Exit 8 focuses on an anonymous protagonist (Kazunari Ninomiya) trapped in a seemingly unending subway corridor, where he is confronted with variations of the same corridor over and over and over again. In order to escape, he must correctly navigate the same corridor eight times, pressing forward if it is correct and turning back if he encounters “anomalies.” If he makes a mistake, the counter resets to zero. As that summary suggests, Exit 8 is an adaptation of a popular independent horror game. It is clearly identifiable as such, with the reset functionality and the eight iterations that the character has to navigate. That said, eight is a very important number in Japanese culture associated with prosperity and even in western culture it neatly evokes the infinity symbol. Still, the film works on its own terms and makes sense in the broader culture of contemporary culture. There have been a host of recent films and television shows based around this concept of a liminal space. Kane Parson is adapting his YouTube horror Backrooms into a feature film about a furniture store owner (Chiwetel Ejiofor) who discovers a door at the back of his shop that opens into an impossibly expansive series on unending corridors. Midway through the first season of Chainsaw Man, the characters find themselves stuck on the infinite and recursive eighth floor of a hotel. In the video game adaptation Until Dawn, a group of characters find themselves trapped in a remote bed and breakfast forced to live the same night over and over again. In the television series FROM, characters find themselves trapped in a small town where every road out inevitably leads back in again. There are also shades of it to the labyrinth of strange interconnected corridors that the staff find themselves navigating in Severance.
For @secondwindgroup.com, I wrote a little bit about “Exit 8”, “Backrooms” and Gen Z’s fascination with liminal horror.
www.patreon.com/posts/column...
Call Paulie from the “Sopranos”, because I think we got a Google Whack.
(I may have literally just thrown in a video pitch.)
Doing prep for it!
I am horrendously late to the party, but I played "Exit 8."
What a delightful uncanny little game. Every accessible, too.
I mean, are people really all that surprised that the rumour is that Marvel's Trump era "X-Men" movie is going to be the all-white original team?
This is a good video by Darren Mooney on the art of adaptation, why the new harry potter isn't an artful adaptation, and how a cultural addiction to nostalgia fuels AI.
A great essay on how the causes and results can be mixed up, and how nostalgia and playing the same tunes make a lot of our culture really flat.
@darrenmooney.bsky.social can so nicely put into words very complex ideas and concepts. A must watch!
I appreciate this video not only explaining how a lot of high profile media adaptations are focused on giving vocal nerds what they want in a similar way to AI, but also stating that even the most mediocre entertainment is still being made by hardworking artists.
But, yeah, the central nightmare of “Final Crisis”, that almost half the population could easily be brainwashed into devoting themselves to an apocalyptic death cult led by a rotting corpse of a man who refuses to die, certainly hasn’t got any less relevant in recent years.
Published in the midst of the 2008 Financial Crisis, the most dated aspect of “Final Crisis”, published in January 2009 to coincide with the inauguration, is the belief that Obama was secretly a Superman who might save us.
Even before Darkseid conquers the world, there is a sense in “Final Crisis” of a world in decline and decay: a dead god on the docks, a priceless relic in a literal dump, a supervillain meeting in multiple shuttered strip clubs.
The world is in a state of collapse.
“Final Crisis” is about the collision of an increasingly hypermediated world where reality is ever more elusive with a particular brand of Christian eschatology.
A world careening head first towards oblivion, unable to even conceive an alternative.
To give Morrison credit, one of the reasons that their Bush era commentary in “Final Crisis” has aged better than many of their contemporaries is because they understand the era not as a disruption of the “end of history” existential crisis of the nineties, but an acceleration of it.
I was re-reading Grant Morrison’s “Final Crisis” recently. Still comfortably DC’s most ambitious and successful “Crisis” crossover. It gets eerily more relevant every time I read it.
A portrait of a fallen world, lost in the death throes of authoritarianism and late capitalism.
Your mileage will vary depending on your tolerance for “metaphorror”, but I had a decent time with “undertone.”
Not necessarily anything particularly radically new in it, but some really great sound design, some impressive visual discipline and a commendably eerie and unsettling vibe.
#NowWatching “undertone”
