0:00Hello creeps, I'll be your ghost. I mean, host. As we delve the crypts of spooky movies and even spooky your theory, welcome to horror vanguard. Alright everyone, you twisted our ghoulish arms long enough. Today we're talking about the bleakest, most gothic, toughest anime in the world, the Rose of Versailles. We're talking about sad, transmask boys in love with Mary Antoinette. It's going to be a beautiful and emotionally difficult episode, which is what I would be saying if this was anime vanguard. The show that we're not. Okay, so I guess that screws over the idea of doing the Bizzuck episode any time soon.
1:03Fine. With secretly the Bizzirk episode and the Rose of Versailles episode are going to be the same episode. Also, it's going to be a utenant episode. We're doing like all of it. We're going there. There's nothing, nothing's more, nothing's more souls like them being queer as the lesson of all of these anime's. Good morning dear listeners. My name is Ash. You hopefully made, you might be know this might be your first episode. You might not know that yet. You might not know that we're a couple of jokesters. I'm joined as always by John aka at the litcrica. How's it going, John?
1:36I am, you know what? I'm very good. I sent a lesson to a distant relationship of mine to see if I could spend the holidays with them. They're super keen for me to go. But I keep being followed everywhere by weird cats. So I don't know. I don't know. It's a weird time of you. It's a weird time of you. It's the holiday, the holidays are tough. You know, like it's it's it's right after right after the Christmas season. We're all a little strapped for cash. But if you want to get your distant relative a good gift, I know a guy who sells watermelon inside of a hut who can really hook you up. We will we will get to the watermelons. We will get to the watermelon guy. It's like the toxic adventure episode we did with the whole time. I'm just like I just want to talk about the damn mob except for now. It's a watermelon. We're talking about we're talking about we're talking about maybe it's a it's a common theme in horror movies right. We're talking about a house. But we're not just talking about any house. We are talking about house from 1977. Maybe maybe sort of a cult classic. You know, I think that's a kind of lazy descriptor sometimes. But I think this is it's fair enough to call it that. And Ash you know, I people probably have we're ready for another film another another discourse about haunted homes. So can you tell me what is house from 1977 about? Are you sure there are only seven people in this house? Positive except for the ghosts.
3:17I don't believe in ghosts. In considering house sue and its use of the haunted house, it occurred to me that the only way to convert the historic and experiential meaning of a house was to look at it through the lens of a permanent and intractable haunting. There is no such thing as a house. There is only the process of becoming a home. The linguistic mutilations of housing and the housing market are capitalist, reterritorializations of an essential facet of human existence. We must have homes in order to create community. In the absence of homes, we can only create hauntings. There is no such thing as a house. There are only our bones. If Mark Fisher's The Weird in the Eerie defines the ghastly manifestations of capitalism as that which is present and should not be or that which is not present but should be. We can look for that which is present and should be as a functional barometer for the pair weird. Housing is not a home. The home has a present presence that functions as a stable hub for the growing of micro-risal networks of community. It is a space where the eerie hauntings of ghosts can grow to become familiar spirits. We can say that housing is a human right but that only reforms a capitalistic phrasing to express a deeper truth. To have a home is to be human. To the extent that we are denied homes, we are denied our humanity. There is no such thing as a house. There are only the hauntings that are ourselves and the spirits that are each other. Every facet of capitalist housing is designed to reduce the human experience to the status of a pre-dead haunting. The next time you move into a new apartment, look for the signs of the dead that haunted the home before you.
5:05From the eerie presence of furniture that is no longer where it should be, to marks on the walls signaling the present absence of now departed pictures, the psychic residue of the hauntings of your home will be readily apparent. When you go to drive a nail into the wall, know that you are adding to this process of haunting. You are becoming the dead that will linger in a year or two when a new tenant moves in. The process of living a life in this world at its least and at its most is communing with the dead. The constant re-territoralization of the capitalist housing market of faces the psychogiographic landscape of homes and evicts those least able to parent.
5:46The dead that hold up our shared history. Explore the pair weird home with us as we discuss Nobohiku Obiyashi's 1977 film, Howsto. Yes, there we go. Yeah, you know, get to know this vessel, right? Species being. We are all in the economy of the dead as John Berger put it.
6:16Where would you like to begin, my friend? Well, I think we should follow the guidance of the strange watermelon selling man and go into the formalism zone.
6:33Yes, let us do it. This is, I love this movie. It is, but at the same time, I'm not sure whether I would call it good or whether it is, it is extremely interesting on a formal level and it's interesting for interesting reasons. But I don't know whether I would go, this is a good, complete, formally cohesive thing. But that is precisely why it is worth talking about, right? But there are moments in this film that I really, really love. I love them so much. There is one genuinely perfect visual gag that I have to talk about, which is where they all get off the bus going on this journey to the house. They have got this kind of gorgeous painted backdrop because it's clearly not filmed on location. That is our setup. Then we cut in for the close-up shot. They have just left the cut, the painted on backdrop. But now it is on location. It's an amazing joke.
7:59It's an amazing visual gag because they just keep it there.
8:06And I love any film that deliberately calls attention to its own artifice, like to its own constructedness. I think you're absolutely right. The kind of the language of visual comedy and this is so effective. It has this kind of like, it has this slapstick quality that reminds me a lot of top secret, I'm sorry, spy hard, airplane. The visual language of humor is so effective in this film. Yeah, it's splatstick, right? That's what Peter Jackson used to talk about. Right? This idea of like, it's scary. But like, we've said before many times about the kind of very close line between horror and comedy. Oh, absolutely. And I think even on the most basic level, you know, I believe we talked about this in a previous episode, but there's this kind of libidinal triangle between horror, comedy, and pornography. And these three kind of visual visual languages, these three cinematic languages are all attempting to rise tension in the body.
9:16And then force a release somewhere. Horror wants to scare you, comedy wants you to burst into laughter, pornography has its own goals and ends. And like, I find the kind of overlap of horror and comedy to just be like, such a natural combination. Absolutely. Absolutely. But again, it's all done in this way of like, it's a film that's constantly reassuring you that you're watching a movie. And right, because that creates this kind of like participatory anthropology of viewership, right? This participatory model of spectatorship where you are no longer just the kind of passive voyeur, but you enter into this kind of, how many, how many to space in which to make sense of what you're seeing, you have to understand the kind of the rules of the game that the film itself lays out to you. Right? This is, this is a film that is not trying to tell you a true story. This is a film that is very, very concerned with you being where you're watching a movie. And even when Abiyashi was filming this, like so many of the effects that they set up, like everybody on set was just like, maybe this will work when we go to edit it. Who knows? Let's just do it. Yeah. And like all the chroma key stuff, all the stop motion stuff, all the like deeply weird and in many ways, very beautiful animation.
10:45Like the risk, there's a kind of like game that's being played where you go, maybe, maybe this might, I don't know. And even like, even so, Abiyashi pitches this movie and then for years, the studio executives at Toho are like, no, of course not. And then eventually they reach a point where it happens in a lot of film industries where the studios can't make money on the old hat, the reliable cations that they've had for years. And so now they have to let someone new take a shot at something that they would never let get made otherwise. And it winds up. And it's almost always, those movies are watershed moments of cinema and they're often line up with horror too.
11:32Absolutely. Absolutely. I guess the question is, how do we deal with a film which on the formal level resists its own kind of my mesis? It is constantly throwing back in your face that what you're watching is a kind of spectacle. So how do you how do you deal with that? What do you, how do we kind of read that as as critics? So a lot of times when people talk about Nobuhiiku Abiyashi, they talk about him as a guy who made advertisements and commercials. And then kind of used those techniques to make a horror movie. But that also misses the fact that he was an experimental filmmaker on top of that. Like, like, how so is his wheelhouse, you know, like the commercials were the day job. And like, at least that's the sensation that I get. Like, when you watch emotion his other movie. And I think approaching this as we would kind of like the same, the same eye that I would approach like Cherkowski's outer space or like, like reflections of it. Oh my god, the god today, my brain. But like approaching this as an experimental piece of cinema, that's also horror, that's also comedy, I think, helps to acknowledge that there's going to be so many disparate pieces that resist you forcing them together. Yes, absolutely. I think I think this raises the question of like, what is experimental film for? Right? What is what is like so I kind of straightforward narrative film is trying to convince us of the truth of what we're seeing, right? Or at least if not the truth, then at least the kind of reliability of what we're seeing that we are in some way being shown a kind of like a recognizable world that is like our own or how's kind of rules that we can kind of like put ourselves into. And I can't help but think of someone like something like Ziga
13:33Vertov's man with a movie camera, right? This like, what is it? What is it? Again, this is like the foundational philosophical question of cinema, which is like, what does it mean to look at something through a camera? And if you consider, if you consider a camera kind of like, you know, less spectacular and in some ways, Krudor, non-biomechanical version of the eye, what does it mean to look? Right? And I think here the entire point is to alienate ourselves away from a sincere engagement with the kind of truth of the text and to forces to engage with the text on the level of its formal construction.
14:20I completely agree with that. One of the most powerful qualities of cinema that's openly experimental is that it wants you to see the artifice of cinema or better even more than desiring it, it forces you to see the fact that this is something constructed. This is a movie. Technologies were used to make this and decisions were made in terms of what is depicted and how it is depicted. And it really forces those issues to the foreground almost in front of the text of the movie itself. Yeah, absolutely. With experimental cinema too, there's also something incredibly playful that even the most grim experimental movies like Bogotten or the Act of Seeing with one's own eyes, there's nevertheless something darkly playful about them. You know, like there's something about the magic circle where it's like, you know, like in game studies, the Heisinger's magic circle, right? You step into the circle to accept the play space because the rules of games don't matter anywhere else. The rules of monopoly have no bearing on life. It's arbitrarily selected when you step in the magic circle of the game.
15:28And with experimental cinema, like they're almost like, hey, look at this magic circle, I just drew on the ground, please step into it. And there's something so kind of whimsical about it. Yeah, absolutely. You can't help but like go, oh, it's a game, right? Really, this is like the contingency of the effects, for example, it's not, it's not a comment on, oh, is the film going to be any good? It's a comment on the contingency of trying to make films in the first place. This movie, this movie really calls into question, what is a good film to begin with? Experimental cinema is so effective for throwing away all of these tight, entire little conventions for what makes a movie like, quote unquote good or quote unquote, watchable. Do you want, what does it mean for an effect to be good?
16:18Is it just tired, very similar to that you're after or is there something more to effects being good that we can kind of tease out? Yeah, exactly. And what are the implications of this? What is the effects of this filmic deconstructionism? And I think what it does is it raises the question of like psychedelic. Right? What are you, what are you trying to get actually, before we get to that, there's another, there's a kind of like a counterpoint because we've been talking about this in like super elevated terms, but this movie is made by an ad guy. Yeah, right? He said that he's shot like maybe 2000 commercials. I looked up some of his commercials, they're so weird. Yeah, they're these like, what and the whole point of advertising is to use all of the techniques of cinema to achieve a particular end, right? It's not to tell a good story or a true story or do a kind of representational fidelity. It's to create direct and invest desire.
17:37Oh, absolutely. And I think maybe owing to all of his work in commercials, there's something so openly libid and about this. You know, like, and I often reflect on that like a lot of other filmmakers that we see as being like the pinnacle of talent and craft and all of these formal qualities of also done a lot of commercials. David Lynch has done a fair number of commercials. You know, and that's David Lynch. Rob Zombie did a commercial, like a lot of directors also just do commercials. You know, like sometimes you got to cash a check, sometimes a commercial is just fun to do, who knows? There's plenty of reasons. And like, I think it helps open up to that libid and no quality a little bit. Like, like, you know, the commercial is all about manufacturing and synthesizing and directing desire. And like, if if for to look at this through kind of like advertisement as cinema, like if David Lynch is kind of the Trent Rezner, the nine inch nails of the experimental in horror, then the he could obiachi is like what like Charlie XC X or something.
18:57I guess.
19:02What an analogy. But like, there's so much of this film, which is using exactly the language of advertising. Right. We have like slow mo's on our main characters. We have like weird zoom close-ups on like things that they're holding or things that they're doing. We have like characters reacting to other characters in a cut way to the camera. Like it's yep. Like so much of this is shot like a commercial.
19:32I know that that's that's incredibly true. Yeah. And so this is this is where we come together in this kind of like bigger point, which is this combination of like quote unquote experimental cinema. And the cinematic language of advertising and mass culture. And this is what gives us the question of psychedelia. I just wanted to know your thoughts on this as like filmic psychedelia. We've entered into a cultural point where like visual psychedelic language has been largely recaptured by capital. You know like Dr. Strange movies. Yeah. A good example of this. Joe Rogan is a good example of this. Yeah. Tax CEOs. Did you ever do? Have you ever done DMT? Yeah. Yeah. Let's let's talk about
20:19DMT. Have you ever ever done DMT while watching house? But like like Joe Rogan's a good example. Tech tech CEOs going on like ayahuasca retreats. Like there are there are so many good examples of like what you know just decades ago would have been like unthinkably radical. You know like a the most popular broadcast personality in the country regularly talking about doing research grade psychedelics. Like what? The current robber barons of our era all being relatively open about microdosing schedule one substances. What? But it's safe now. It's totally been it's been entirely digested and reabsorbed.
21:08And now capitalism is like oh well these things are fine and good as long as you're doing them to work better. And I think that house in a way plays against it because these these are psychedelic visuals that don't fit that kind of hippie beetles paisley vibe right and they also this also clearly doesn't fit the current tech bro aesthetic either. It's taking a different stream to move through this and the whole point or one of the points rather of psychedelic more broadly. Thus psychedelic and psychedelic more broadly is that it can it can not only suppress our default ways of looking at the world but it jars us out of it. You know it forces new ways of seeing right. And this movie does that on both the level of the text as well as like the weird formal decisions that were made in its production.
22:00There's another weird element of its production that we have to talk about and I cannot wait to see how we joined what you just said which I thought was like super true and really interesting to what we're about to talk about which is that the production company wanted an answer to another film. They wanted they wanted a a Japanese version of the film jaws. And I and this is what they got. This this is what they got. And I am I am so curious to know. How do you think this and jaws are in some way in conversation? So I think that the psychedelic point ties in nicely with jaws in a sense that most most psychedelics are broadly speaking kind of harmless. Alcohol is more dangerous than most psychedelic substances right like just on a biological and chemical level. Sharks are also essentially harmless for humans. We we happen to be land dwelling mammals and they live in the ocean as there's really not a lot of conflict there. Jaws jaws fundamentally reinvented that landscape for sharks. It took sharks as something that can be dangerous in certain oceanic conditions that can be easily mitigated. Thanks to our our highly scientific human mind. And turn them into like the number one fearsome killer of nature. You know there's this unthinking, unloving machine of blood and bone and murder like. And I think that the process there is relatively interesting because how many decades before house shark the the spoof parody film comes out is how soon trying to do that with the kind of concept of the home to begin with to take it from something that's kind of benign and naturalized and to turn it into something that will devour you in a lake of blood. Yes absolutely. And I think
24:10I think what's interesting is that jaws in its own way is very much like if psychedelic is anything it's about the revelation of the unconscious right of the of thought beneath conscious thought which in another in a kind of if you twist that slightly what it is is the revelation of ideology in the in the in the dream image you see the potential utopian future yearning even if it's filtered through various layers of like historical material conditioning. Like what is jaws if not like a utopia that gets abandoned by the interference of like an almost divine supernatural force right the utopia being beach in the summertime. But what you get in jaws is you actually do get the revelation of American political ideology and full force in the in the figure of like the mayor like yep. I absolutely think these two films are in conversation and they're very weird that the very weirdness of that conversation is illuminating. And jaws jaws is also another film that is very upfront about its relationship to the formal qualities of cinema you know like the dolly zoom in jaws one of the most famous cinematic shots ever created you know like like jaws is very and like not to mention the cutting edge special effects work that went into that movie. Yeah like jaws is jazza's also another film that's very open about it but it's instead of taking an experimental route it's it's kind of going going for the going for the throne of the first blockbuster. This is a this is a good place to wrap up a full bull exploration and delve into the strange mattress covered of film discourse where sentient demon possessed mattresses will flop on top of us. Well did you say the word mattress because that makes me think of today's sponsor and that's you dear listener you're the sponsor of today's show not some horrible mattress barren selling their terrible product to whatever podcast will do an ad read but you you who support everything that we do here and you can support us at horrorvangard.com and patreon.com slash horror vangard thank you for keeping the show about as mattress free as we can get until we ultimately talk about deathbed the bed that kills amazing amazing that's maybe one of my favorite. Hey dollar shave club hello fresh anyone else who spots the podcast. Where you at we don't need you. Yeah yeah man skived do you want me to do an ad read where I critique your weird gendered advertising decisions? Call me or don't or how about just give me money and I won't talk about your product. How about that? Yeah great honestly I think maybe my favorite patreon blog we've ever done. Please dude. Oh do you keep the show going? Oh really quickly did I tell you that when I was a young boy my father took me into the city to see a marching band. Oh yeah yeah what did he say to you? What did he say to you? Seems like quite an important moment was there anything that was said that stuck with you? He said don't become a podcaster I don't know really what he meant by that. But we should okay so we need to talk we're gonna start the discourse on what talking about my chemical romances welcome to the black parade. So if you listen to the auditory experience that is house you'll notice that a certain piano melody a refrain that keeps appearing through the through the course of the film is almost identical to the piano riff and welcome to the black parade.
28:13And I could find no evidence that directly connects the two although I did find a bunch of mashups and remixes where the two were combined. But I find that to be like I honestly barely know what to make of that that is such an interesting like even if it is just just nothing nothing more than coincidence which happens enough in art right you hear a melody and then you forget where it came from and then you reproduce something very similar you know. Yeah yeah it is it is the nature of art to be eternally remixed even if that remix is unconscious. But I don't know whether it is I think you've spotted something I think you've spotted something. And I think the only thing that we can say is like Ray and Mikey I know that you listen to the show can you run this by Jared and find out because the people need to know firstly why only two of the four members of my chemical romance listen to Haravan got and secondly secondly have we spotted something here.
29:21Yeah yeah 100% call us that would be great and you know what even will open for you one day too you know podcast opening for rock bands is something that up to two people have been talking about for as long as a few months now. And we think that my chemical romance would be the good tour partner for horror band. So you know like have your have your people DM our people and we'll will hash out the details and the ticket pricing split. This is that's a plan for 2023. That's a plan. A plan for 2023 is to open for a bad. We have an amazing stage show too they're going to like lower us down from the rafters. Yeah as we're doing the intro to the show. Yeah yeah it's going to it's going to be great.
30:12It's going to be it's going to be like surprisingly sexy. Oh yeah I'm a little bit worried because you know the last time we did this I had that thing with the pyrotechnics. Most of the hair grew back but let's not do that again. That's good that's good that's good. We need to do we'll have we'll have Mike and email the guy who does Ramstein's pyrotechnics. They seem to be pretty on point of safety. Should we talk about haunting? Yeah should we should go back to what we do. Yeah. Should we do that? Should we talk about this horror movie? I'd say that of how one day we're going to open for my chemical romance. I mean it's fun to dream isn't it in the spirit of house who it is fun to dream. We get a manifest. We're manifest that. Manifesting. Hashtag Twitter do your thing but like would I find it be really interesting about the haunting in this movie is that all of the young girls right kung fu fantasy all of all of their friends they're they're really like. This reminds me of the kind of like classic children's TV formulae you know like you know like the teenage mutant interturtles right you've got the leader you've got the cool one you've got the hot head you've got the science guy none of them are complete personalities unto themselves they're all representatives of this kind of fractured entirety and there's something going on here that's very similar to this like you know what is the mind if not a haunted house what are the ghosts if not the parts of us we try not to recognize. Well really this will make a lot more sense because obia she basically wrote this with his 12 year old daughter right yes yes. I mean this is because so much of this so much of this is taken directly from like very common childhood fears like the cupboard in the dark household appliances and household objects having a kind of life and agency of their own because the house is the first point in which we come to subjective awareness the home is where we we come into this idea of ourselves as a gentle objects you know Freud has the famous story about the boy who would throw the ball and would one day realize that the ball could like someone could throw the ball back to him yeah. So like that's where we come into our capacity as agents but it's also the point in which we recognize the agency of other people and the kind of correlate of that is our own relative limitation of agency right you're a child you realize like things can be done to you which have done it's like what is every eight year old said it's so unfair right the world is full of bigger people than I am and my own limited agency consistently runs up against them and what's what's so terrifying is something acting when you believed it could not. That that I think is so incredibly important for the context of of how sue right like locating agency within this and then using that as kind of a lens to identify sources of fear you know and the kind of like the things that which are frightening in how sue are so often exactly as you were saying things that are all of a sudden expressing their own agency back against us. Yeah. As well as those horrifying moments where we come to terms with the fact that we need to also express our agency. Yeah. Yeah. And really this is what there's a kind of bigger bigger a bigger kind of theme here with gorgeous son of father right. Or gorgeous and her father and like the new mother figure because in lots of ways this is a film about the relationship between mothers and daughters. Yeah. You know there's there's very absent fathers in this.
34:21There is there are no men for reasons that we'll get into. But what do you think of that? What do you think about this is like a film about kind of matrilineal relationships? I think that is a really interesting way to explore the context of this film especially in the setting of the house. Right. Especially with all of these the domestic space being the thing that is the vehicle for this kind of mutilation and death and self-consumption. I think it's really interesting that like this is a very this is Freud's number one pick for movie of 1977 as house like there's some very clear electric complex stuff going on here. There's very clear misplaced desires just strewn about all over the place that kind of tense transition as the child reaches you know like the early stages of maturity and first begins to like you know like go beyond just identifying themself against the parents.
35:24Yeah. I mean it's like a psychedelic and Radcliffe. Right. This is like the home is the domestic space. Right. That's the long been the area in which women were confined. We can talk a lot of here about the manipulation and exploitation of domestic labor. But like this is in a way again very classic gothic story. Oh, oh, especially when we look at like the presence of cats the use of fire like this is 100% a classic gothic like archetype the way this text functions the house is a site of imprisonment like oh it just it works so well. Well, let's talk about let's talk about
36:17Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical cats. Well much much like the recent film adaptation of cats the cat in house who is also very uncanny very uncanny and doesn't have a butthole. Oh, dear. What is we live in a weird world but let's a sick sad world. John let's what what do you think about Blanche here? Obviously a street car named desire is the obvious connotation.
36:55Yeah, what do we think about the use of cats in horror film cats are almost inherently superstitious right? They're they're they're not they're not the loyal creature that the dog is in terms of like animals in the domestic sphere cats don't do anything they're not productive they're not like a host that are like cows. So like cats are almost inherently not not not inherently hostile but inherently kind of like antagonistic in their relationship to humans. Like cats don't necessarily need you. So I think I think an interesting way to approach this is through through Karpakken right like mutual aid a factor of evolution. You know one way to approach this issue is what is kind of the mutual aid factor that initially caused cats and humans to start cohabitating is that humans are messy as hell and rats love that but unfortunately we don't like rats so much for health reasons.
38:02At least large quantities of rats a few rats here or there can be very fun in entertaining pets but like you know then oh look look this tiny little apex predator rolls up that happens to love killing the thing that annoys us and doesn't do us any harm along the way. Perfect a 10 out of 10 relationship. Like if you if you look into the domestication of cats like humans have like independently domesticated cats several times in our history. Like even even if we stop doing it or have never done it before these little these little felines are just like perfect for us but I think something that's really interesting is that the relationship with cats is much more anarchistic right the cat is not subordinated to the human. It is it is it is freely associated with us. If your cat is annoyed with you it will claw you. It will give you a bite it will go run away and hide under something you know like a cat can run outdoors and never come home and live you know it might be a more painful and uncomfortable life but it can survive in ways that like you know if if your your tiny little toy dog runs away and goes outside it's getting killed by a raccoon and a fortnight you know like like those things are not built to survive in the way that cats are and so I think that there's cats around a more level playing field with us in a certain respect you know you have to give part of yourself back over to the cat if you want to you know cohabitate with one you can't just dictate everything about its existence you know it's it's very hard to go like go sit in your kennel to a cat yeah because like I say cats yeah a cat's are not subservient that's the word I was looking for yeah cats are not subservient and if anything quite the opposite yeah you know they they don't how many times if we worship cats in our history as a species like there's the there's the great
39:56Terry Pratchett line about that which is like cats were once worshipped as gods they have not forgotten this it's it is I mean like this is this is so true you know like I you know harker sitting next to me right now and I'm like I'm like I would do anything I would do anything for this thing that you know has has no like under under the auspices of capitalism has no material value for me you know he's not a mouse or anymore you know he's not an Instagram cat influencer it's just my little buddy yeah I mean I my the grumpy little demon that lives in my house is probably held up in my bed somewhere but this raises the question right what is what do you think blanche is oh see this this I think is really fun right because for me if I kind of continue that line right of of like mutual aid a factor of evolution cats as being something that we need to respect right we need to give more of ourselves over to the cat you know we we have less ability we have a smaller ability to dictate the terms of its existence and it has an outsized ability to dictate the terms of ours and if we look at this movie blanche is kind of it is the thing guiding everyone around it's it's both the object that contains the kind of paranormal forces of the haunting and it's the object that guides these young women into the house so it kind of guides them to their doom in the first place what are what are some of your thoughts yeah there's a kind of like there is something kind of like otherworldly what is what what is blanche blanche is both the spirit and the kind of like psychopath there's there's so many interesting questions because there are so many moments in the film where you go that's not a real cat anymore and then they'll like throw the real cat into shot shot yep and you go there's this kind of weird doubling because nobody notices right nobody notices this cat the cat can go anywhere and do anything cats are kind of spectral supernatural cats are see things that we don't so yeah no no wonder that we've we've we've almost always associated them with with the uncanny and the supernatural yeah and if we if we like take a step back from the text of this movie to and see it less as a a bunch of young teenager girls getting mulched by a ghost and see it more as kind of a young a young self coming into the first understanding of its kind of horrific totality the the kind of spectral nature of the cat is I don't want to say this it's the it is it is that kind of necessary encounter with this like totally unrecognizable other right it's it's like this very first and very simplistic encounter with another that cannot be fully subsumed by the self you know that the cat is at once an actual real little fuzzy white cat and a painting and a bunch of like really surreal artistic effects you know it's it's both real and it's not real it's both an object in our world and it's not an object in our world there's no way to ever fully encapsulate what blanche is or what blanche is doing this is uh this brings us to the question of reality itself right what do we mean by the real and the unreal in the context of this film because there's so much of this film which is not real but there's also so much of this film which is just not real when you look at it on the screen and I think to really encapsulate the point what I'm trying to get out here we have to talk about the water melon and the water melon seller oh okay so what let's let's unpack let's unpack dude who sells water melons on the roadside out of a height which I really appreciate as as kind of like a just just one of the great human endeavors just selling your produce selling your wares to passers-by yeah great great character in that but you're also fulfilling the kind of age old tradition of like the guy who gives the warning right that don't don't go near the old Johnson please
44:20I think oh no but let me have one of these uh clearly like a volleyball that you painted green let me take this away like the water melons are not real they're not they are they're fake and they're obviously fake and there is this kind of like hyper abundance to them they are like they're it's way too big it looks very odd and there it gives it gives there's a kind of plasticity to the world in which these young women these girls kind of live and and move through before even before they arrive at the house right the world is not real none of these there's a there's a these these are similar kind of these are like symbols emptied of content then these kind of like post modern gestures towards something that we might want to remembered and it's like you take it because it's hospitable right it's hot it's hospitality to take something uh so I I love I love the obvious not unreality of it what what about you what do you think so I I love I love the guy who is haggling with me like a seller of melons in the marketplace I love this dude so much and I think you're absolutely right and I think that's the reading that I would do is looking at him as your your Scooby-Doo-esque character the guy that's that's saying like oh don't go don't go find him behind in that old mansion and I think that in the context of our story you you you're absolutely nailing the kind of like formalist experimental interpretation of him he's he is this kind of like like barrier of surreality that these kids are pushed through and I think that in terms of the kind of text of the story he also functions as he's the last he's the last adult warning the kids away he's he's the last kind of supervisor figure the last adult figure that's like hey like don't go any further because if you go any further something's gonna happen and if we if we kind of look at like the shift between a juvenile reality which is once you you know the older you start to get the more your younger years become this hazy refracted dream and nightmare landscape you know memories memories become worn like stones in the river and this guy is this guy's warning them he's just warning them about that is like you're you're about to grow into something and becoming adult is horrific and beautiful you simultaneously realize that like the trite childhood depictions of magic no longer mean anything but now you are capable of that stuff you are capable of being the cause of all of the mysticism and wonder in the world and what is more horrifying than that realization well this is why I want to talk about the skeleton I love the plastic skeleton in that boy in the house who you can see you can see the strings dancing away he's dancing away in the background uh just bustin out some sweet moves uh if you if you follow the show on the social media website twitter twitter.com slash harivan god you may have come across uh perhaps our favorite gif which is a dancer which is a dancing skeleton we we we refer to skeletons and skeletons dancing all the time and to me there's something so interesting about the body beyond death still being a site of productive activity right isn't that the kind of very base model of the haunting like the ghost is the ghost is the body without the body right but the skeleton is the physical body without the physical body right so there is but still still even in death even as inert matter still dancers right even in all of its plasticity and the the fact that it is not uh real even in all of its glorious unreality the skeleton still dances there's a sort of there's a sort of like beautiful kind of hopeful forward-looking philosophy here because it it it means that we associate we associate the the the the skeleton with the mental mori right just uh i you know you might have seen it in the walls of a church you'll see you'll see a uh a memory of death a skeleton with the words just as i just as just as you are so just so just as just as i was so just as i am so shall you be right it's warning like everything falls into entropy but even in its entropy and decay the skeleton dances still um what do you think so i love i love the skeleton in this i love the skeleton this route like just so many reasons it reminds me of uh Vincent Price is the house on haunted hill where it it closes with with him killing people using a large skeleton marionette that looks so much like this one um it's it's this and you know the figure of you know like the kind of cheesy clearly puppeteered fake skeleton is so effective i think as as a bit of horror we need more skeletons i think i i would like to see skeletons come back um because you're absolutely right like it is it is something to grapple with because there is a vitality that cannot be extinguished it's not you know so much of our existence is concerned with whether or not you know like oh what's going to happen when i die you know like will will there be a part of me that lives on in some way whether that's religiously or through a family line but the the real creepy thing about that is you don't have a choice part of you will live on like there there is there is no true totalizing death some aspect of what you've done in this world will outlive you and and you owe it to an infinite sea of potential that you'll never be able to see the horizon of to try and make that something good you know like to try and do something materially correct with with the short time frame the unknowable time frame of existence and the memento mori is like like the literal skull staring back at you it's the skull that's in your head you know like all these wonderful memes about like like oh my god there's a skeleton in the room it's inside you you know like that kind of that kind of like playful attitude towards death is like it is literally the dancing skeleton you know like it's it's these things that will keep living on that we have absolutely no control over yes yes yes yes now I know you mentioned this you mentioned this film in 2022 best of the episode I know you wanted to kind of join the house so up to skidmer ink oo so this I think is I think we're gonna have a lot of fun with this part of the discussion right because like haunted house movies there there's so much material discourse to have here skidmer ink was my pick for the best movie of 2022 since recording that episode it has been picked up for a wide release so it's going to be released on streaming platforms which is great to see that's absolutely fantastic um in the whole the whole point of skidmer ink is that it's an exploration of the kind of haunted house from the perspective of not children but of childhood memory yeah it's it's it's this hazy disconnected imperceptible thing you know because literal literal children can't can't really make movies they can't really tell their own story you know so it has to be told by older individuals in retrospect and there's always something inconsistent about that there's always something that changes in the in the translation and one of the things I find to be really interesting about how sue skidmer ink poltergeist evil dead is is the kind of site of home ownership as as a place of unbridled terror and how it how it's gone from like or how it continues to become how it shouldn't say gone because this has never not been a factor it's only getting worse that home home ownership is just wildly precarious you know like and even home ownership is a phrase like I was talking about my praisy that's that's another capitalistic linguistic trick I don't I don't think I actually know anyone who owns a home I know a lot of people who pay mortgage to a bank with considerable interest to effectively pseudo rent a home from a bank you know like like we are so far from what true housing stability would look like that of course the space is going to become hazier harder to remember and infinitely more terrifying as the system gets worse yeah I mean I've read I've written about got a box as the purchase the whole did housefilms right okay can I can I share something yeah can I share a fun thing fun thing fun fun HV thing before you and I we were we were like Twitter acquaintances you know but like before you and I had actually met on my first trip to England I saw you give a give a speech give a presentation on the haunted house and
54:14Gothic Marxism oh yeah I was I was I was at M.M. you and I was in the audience for that and I was like this guy fucking bangs this guy knows what's up this stuff is hot like I was so stoked by that one But you're precisely right, right? Why is the why is the house a site of terror? Right? It's because there is something in there. There's something in your house. And what's in there is not a ghost or a spirit. What's in there is the kind of psychic effluvia that comes from the financialization of something that you need to live.
54:54Right? Means of life becomes a gets the occult process of turning the thing into the commodity. The marks rights about in the opening of capital, right? That's that's what is inside the house. That's what's inside your apartment. That's why you know, late at night when you hear the knock at the window, like your heart kind of jumps in your chest and your stomach drops. Like it's because especially now. Especially since 2008, especially since 2016, especially since 2020, especially now, you know, the lats are could come through the door one day and be not because of anything you did, but that it could be taken away from you.
55:37Right? That's why the house is horrifying. And really, this is a super old tradition, like you pointed out, right? Really, this idea of like a rich relative that you have to go in the sea because they might leave you property is like, it's one of the earliest and deepest financializations of things that we need, right? The property is property speculation, the ownership of land, all of these things are tied up in the emergence of capitalism. Like in the very earliest earliest kind of codifications of social relationships under capitalism determines things like, the term is like social relationships will stop, right? The whole point here is is like, marriages is this economic exchange, right? necessarily because it means you might get property and property equals some sort of safety, but it is also this phenomenal risk.
56:34Oh, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely. And this is especially the case and there is no way to escape this, right? There's this is especially the case in colonized spaces as well as in the spaces controlled by colonizing forces, you know, like every home built in the United States has to reckon to this. It's either the home of someone who's living on or near the ancestral land who's been displaced by a historic process, by a material process, or it's a home owned by someone who is kind of implicated in that process, right?
57:09Like someone who descends from this colonial force. And then, you know, you can go back to places like England, it's just as true there. A lot of the wealth that creates a lot of, you know, home ownership there owes that to a nightmare legacy throughout the world, right? Like poltergeist is such a wonderful exploration. It's wonderful. It's probably the wrong word, probably the wrong choice. I don't think I'd call poltergeist a wonderful movie. It's not the feel good hit of the year. But it is nevertheless an exploration of the fact that homes, homes have to be built on the dead, right? Every home is built above a burial ground, whether that burial ground is a literal cemetery or if it's a cultural process of a burial ground, wealth is extracted and land ownership and real estate is one of capitalism's like die hard tricks and commodities.
58:05And this brings up this brings up so many things, right? It brings up the confinement of women to the domestic space. It brings up so many things where our gender roles around the appropriation of surplus value in all different kinds of labor. But there's something in this film that we should talk about, which is the fact that there are no men. This is a film which happens with it. And this is the two reasons that I think this is the case, right? Firstly, because it's a female gothic horror. It's a female gothic horror, right?
58:44It's a film expressly about needing to secure the domestic space. The home has economic object that gives a kind of security. Secondly, I think this is a film that is in some ways often a little indirectly and often very explicitly dealing with the aftermath of the Second World War and specifically
59:13the war crime, the unforgivable use of nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And this, because one, you're absolutely correct about the gender greeting of this. It's telling that the only men that we see in this movie are not so much characters as they are artifacts of the plot. Well, like comedy bits. Oh no, he fell down and literally got his butt stuck in a bucket. Yep. And it's to move the plot forward. It's to get our young women into this side of horror, right? There are less characters in their own right and they're more shepherding things forward. And that especially works in the context of like the kind of like, you know, like young womanhood and juvenileity of our characters as they grow and age and kind of encounter the world on its own. But let's set that aside a second because I have been waiting this entire episode to hear your take on America's use of the atomic bombs at the close of World War II and Hiroshima and
1:00:19Nagasaki and how that relates to how soon. Well, okay. So in how soon the aren't is supposed to been married, right? Married to a handsome soul soldier. Yes. You go as a way to war. He never comes back. In fact, she even says later, there are no men left anymore. There are no young men left. They're all gone. So this is a post war film, right? This is about the long running generational traumas of war. The point about the dropping of the atomic bomb, I think, is necessarily, firstly, is necessarily implicit in talking about post-war Japan, right? That's a trauma that was never visited on Britain. That's a trauma that was never visited on America. It necessarily has a cultural impact. The explicit moment is the moment where Gorgeous is looking at herself in the mirror and the mirror cracks and there's this kind of shifting of perspectives and the two, the aren't in her kind of swap places until her own face shatters apart on what's left of this is basically like a burn silhouette. It looks like a radiation burn in the shape of a person. And I'm like, oh yeah.
1:01:36Hang on. Right? An entire generation of society in these cities was wiped out. People were left as literally silhouettes of ash. And it's so deliberately done that there is this juxtaposition between the youngster and the older person in the family who's lived through this trauma. And there is this kind of transference that happens and there's really rapid intercutting between the two. Literally the reflection breaks and there's one subject, right? And the glass falls away and what you have is this kind of silhouette of the face that's full of fire and burning. What do you think?
1:02:23So one of the most important things for me in Housu is the fact that how is the fire depicted? Because one of our final scenes is that one of our final scenes are our final girl, right? Who's now kind of like, you can read this a lot of ways. I read this as she's kind of internalized all of her friends and the figure of her aunt, right? She's grown into something new. The stepmother that she ran away from in the beginning shows up at the house and she goes to shake hands and the stepmother is just kind of instantly emulated in this fire and just is completely atomized by it. And it's not a campfire. It's not the fire you see when wood burns. It's something much more chemical. It's something much more atomic. It's something much harder to read and look at.
1:03:11It's visually inconsistent. And like, it's atomic fire. They're being atomized, right? And like all the girls in this movie too, they're being ground up and chewed apart by this house. They're being torn to pieces. They're also being atomized. It is a very apt and powerful read in the movie. Like, as you're absolutely right, it's openly in conversation with this. It's openly talking about the close of World War II and the immediate societal aftermath of that. And the shift from kind of older social relations into Japan is the kind of sight of experimentation for the generations of capitalism. And I think that directly ties into the cinematic language of advertising that OBS she is using in the film itself. Ooh, okay, I really like that. I really like that. Just like, oh, I got it.
1:04:06Oh, go on. Any final thoughts we've been going just over an hour now? How is there another one of those movies? I just feel like there's so much to talk about here. There's so many ways to approach it. And I think part of that owes to the experimental nature of the film, right? The fact that it's not, the fact that I mean, in many ways, you know, like part of a good experimental film is choosing what you will experiment with. It's being deliberate and a gentle with your experimentations just as you would with science, right? You know, you can't just test all of your variables randomly. Otherwise, you'll make a mess. And in this film, like a lot of the plot is very traditional. There's a lot of very traditional dialogue for the haunted house horror movie setup. But like the visuals are just like, they're, they're inviting you into this chaotic and uncertain space. And what, what I guess is just more about being alive than being invited into something chaotic and uncertain, chaotic and uncertain that you yourself did not choose. Yeah. Milton's house to everyone.
1:05:16How about you, any, any closing closing paradise house thoughts? It's a great movie. It's, it's a, it's a super, I don't know. Is it a great movie? I don't know. It's a very interesting movie. And it's a really, it's really, it's really, it's occasionally, very funny. It's occasionally, really silly. And it's like endlessly inventive with super limited resources. And it is, it, it doesn't work in all the most interesting ways. And you, you should totally watch it. Oh, I watch this as a two hour, a two hour cut on archive.org, which included like 20 minutes of like horror movie previews beforehand, which added a lot to the experience.
1:06:03Well, thank you everyone for joining us for the second horror Vanguard episode of 2023. We have, I guess something of an unofficial theme going on this month that we can't wait to share you with the next movie we're doing. There's no way, there's no way any of you saw this one coming. I hope you like goo. I hope you like mushrooms. I hope you like Italians. And I hope you like trade unionism because we're going to have a lot of fun on this next one. Until then, I will see you all in the horror Vanguard haunted, uh, cat adoption center where you can pick up your own, uh, haunted ghost cat.
1:06:42Boom, there we go.
1:06:46We hope you've enjoyed the dread discourse. Until next week, stay spooky.