I rewatched Nicolas Winding Refn's 2016 The Neon Demon yesterday and was once again completely blown away by it. The visual textures are sleek and beautiful while remaining as soulless as the industry they house in the story. This is perfect for Julian Winding's throbbing, minimalist techno (not calling it EDM, sorry).
Watch:
Interestingly enough, not a day after I read an article about Huesera: The Bone Woman in the latest issue of Fangoria, the trailer dropped:The first feature from writer/director Michelle Garza Cervera and distributed by the delightful XYZ Films; I'm kind of chomping at the bit to see this one. Something about the mythology at play here really fascinates me.
Read:
Last week I doubled down on my James Tynion reading and picked up the first four trades of Department of Truth. This is research for an upcoming deep-dive Butcher and I are doing for The Horror Vision; the project began as a lay-everything-out for Tynion's Something is Killing the Children mythology; only before we could get going, The Book of Slaughter dropped and kind of answered everything we were going to attempt to draw conclusions on. However, knowing the overall premise of Dept. of Truth, I began to realize the real deep-dive is seeing how these two connect because I am almost certain that they do.
We'll obviously get more into it on the show, which will hopefully drop in about two weeks, but for now let me just point out that in SIKTC, the thing that manifests the monsters is belief, and the titular Department in DOT's entire job is managing belief in conspiracies because the big secret of the world is that if enough people believe in something, it becomes reality.
There's a layer to my enjoyment of DOT I hadn't anticipated, and that's that it looks and reads almost exactly like a late 80s/early 90s Vertigo title. I'm still picking away at the first couple trades of Peter Milligan and Chris Bacchalo's Shade The Changing Man from 1990-1991, and there are so many similarities, it's unreal. Add to that the Bill Sienkiewicz-like art from Martin Simmonds, and I've realized this is a book I should have been reading from the beginning. Better late than never, though.
Playlist:
David Lynch - Crazy Clown Time
Metallica - Hardwired... To Self-Destruct
Various Artists - Twin Peaks (Limited Event Series Soundtrack)
Metallica - 72 Seasons (pre-release singles)
The Police - Synchronicity
David Bowie - Scary Monsters (and Super Freaks)
Off! - Free LSD
Perturbator - Lustful Sacraments
Katatonia - Sky Void of Stars
Cliff Martinez - The Neon Demon OST
Final Light - Eponymous
Jozef Van Wissem & Jim Jarmusch - An Attempt to Draw Aside the Veil
Special Interest - Endure
Lard - Pure Chewing Satisfaction
Godflesh - A World Lit Only By Fire
Card:
From Jonathan Grimm's Bound Tarot, which you can buy HERE.
