Cinema of Cruelty (Movies for Masochists)

 *NEW!* On this episodes annotated deep dive, The Cultists present Roman Polanski’s The Ninth Gate (1999).  A slow and cozy burn of paranoia through warm-lit and dusty streets, The Ninth Gate tells that classic tale of a bored and bitter book dealing mercenary who happens upon an ancient esoteric puzzle concealed in the pages of the text — a one shot, all-consuming mystery that many a mad man has tried to solve for centuries — but that Johnny Depp’s Robert/Dean/Lucas Corso might happen to solve instead through sheer divine apathy. (Albeit with a heavy green-eyed stalker assist). Curiously based on only half of Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s novel, The Dumas Club, (and on the B plot of the novel at that), Polanski’s adaptation transforms Reverte’s postmodern parable about the dangers of of looking too closely at a text, into a modernist love letter to the practice of… looking too closely at a text.  

Topics Include: Comparisons to The Dumas Club and the details from the novel that help shape the more esoteric parts of the film; the book market value of all those old tomes; the abstract tradition of Grimoires; the occult golden age of Prague; fallen angels, The Grigori , and other lesser diablos; the paradox of making a modernist film out of a postmodern source, and a (somewhat brief) history of the devil, or how satan(s) became Satan. 

Episode Safeword: Salvation

**REPOST** On this week's annotated deep-dive, The Cultists present Catherine Hardwick's wondrously absurd adaptation of Twilight (2008). The tale of a self-loathing undead stalker who has been stuck repeating high school for one hundred years, and the clumsy death-welcoming teen of his dreams, Twilight is a wild trip. Known as the phenomenon that brought a reinvigorated interest in teen paranormal romance to the masses, Hardwick's first and only adaptation circumvents any of the potential softer angles of the genre to instead create a masterpiece of the bizarre. Three parts absurdism, two parts angst, and a healthy dash of the "imp of the perverse," this strange concoction of a film stands alone outside the rest of the subsequent franchise as something truly spectacular.

(That's right, we love this movie. And we aren't even joking).

Deep Dives include:

The film's history and production; the myriad of practical effects; filming locations, comparisons with the novel source material; the joy of teen angst; the aesthetic paradox of May-December romances; Native American lore (from New Brunswick sea serpents to (the lack of) Cold Ones); and why, as even Hardwick herself claims, we have the special tonal peculiarities of this film thanks to a little thing Edgar Allen Poe once called "The Imp of the Perverse."

Episode Safeword:  Consent 

(REPOSTED Episode from 2022 that traveled over from the old Anchor platform with a broken link).

**REPOST** For our one year anniversary episode, The Cultists present David Lynch’s ‘Blue Velvet’ (1986). Yet another film that was met with a mixture of confusion, repulsion, and awe upon its release into the center of the Regan era and big blockbuster productions,  BV has since become something of a noted surrealist masterpiece of avant-garde cinema—one that, to some, single-handedly paved a new path for the landscape of 90s cinema. From  Tarantino’s hyper cool nostalgia and rockabilly soundtracks, to the Cohen brother’s wild humor set to a backdrop of blunt, brutal violence, the ripple effects of this strange little film about a strange little world continues to shudder its way through time.  

The premise is simple enough: Jeffery (Kyle MacLachlan) returns home from college to his small 1950s-tinged nostalgia  town, finds a severed, moldy ear in a field, and embarks upon a self-guided odyssey into the darker parts of the town’s worn-down crevices, only to find that his thirst to drink in the dark might be stronger than he’d like.  The premise is simple, but the film that unravels from beneath its surface is anything but.  Relying largely on sensory instincts and “day dream logic”, Blue Velvet presents a rather loose and tangled web of threads that people love to try and straighten, only to find that the harder one pulls, the quicker the strings curl into something new.  Is this film an oedipal psychodrama? A coming of age story? A heartland conspiracy? Or is it simply a mystery about mystery? 

Let’s find out. 

Episode Safeword(s): “red pleather” 

(REPOSTED Episode from 2020 that traveled over from the old Anchor platform with a broken link).

**REPOST** On this week’s annotated deep dive, The Cultists present Baz Lurman’s 90s frenetic teen angst extravaganza, Romeo + Juliet (1996).  Known for his kinetic color-fueled explosions of images and sound, Lurman’s “red curtain trilogy” put him on the film world’s map as an Auteur with a distinct and immediately recognizable style. Bright, brash, and unforgiving to anyone who prefers a more minimal Mise-en-scène, Lurman’s penchant for decadence was ripe for a world of high octane emotions, brawls, masquerades, and the lush arc of an epic demise. However, Lurman’s vision of bringing the dusty pages of the oft produced Shakespearean play into the hearts and minds of the notoriously apathetic 90s teenage market was a rather unprecedented and hard sell for commercial studios at the time. Particularly when Lurman insisted that not only would he win over a teen audience, he would do it all without altering a single syllable of the original Shakespearean language of the play. And he would use a cast of mostly young people to do it. 

Lurman’s vision succeeded and the decade to follow would be one stuffed with Shakespearean adaptations for teens, and yet, ‘R+J’ remains distinct among them all. A burning strange indefinable star, that shall not be defied. 

Deep dives include: The film’s production history, editing and cinematography; the lineage of Romeo and Juliet literature that lead to Shakespeare’s 1596 adaptation of the tale; the 1996 film’s comparisons with the exactly 400 years older play; the historical roots of the warring Guelph vs. Ghibelline factionalism that led to such constant civil brawls; how amazing it is that Romeo spends a full third of the play desperately and despondently in love with someone else; why the developing teenage mind lacks impulse control; and why even Dante personally hated the Montagues and Capulets enough to write them into his levels of Hell two centuries before Shakespeare was even born. 

Episode Safe Word(s): “impulse control” 

(REPOSTED Episode from 2023 that traveled over from the old Anchor platform with a broken link).

**REPOST** On this week’s annotated deep dive, The Cultists Present Ari Aster’s ‘Midsommar’ (2019).   

The horror genre has long been a place of shadows. And yet, what happens when those horrors are brought into direct light? Can grief, heartbreak, graduate thesis work, and human sacrifice all still thrive under the warm glowing rays of the midnight sun? Aster’s sophomore film sets forth to find out.  As such, The Cultists welcome in the encroaching autumn with a scenic tour through the incredible landscape of Aster’s reimagined lore-laden fairy tale. (Because nothing says “summer” like downing home grown psychedelics in the warm lit sunshine with a folksy Swedish death cult.)

(Topics include: allusions and inspirations from Swedish folk artists (John Bauer to Hilma af Klint); the challenge of filming outdoors; and so much Nordic folklore (Ättestupa, the old “blood eagle,” runes, beserkers, and more!) 

Episode Safeword: “metropolitan” 

(REPOSTED Episode from 2020 that traveled over from the old Anchor platform with a broken link).

**REPOST** On this week’s annotated deep dive, The Cultists continue to present Stanley Kubrick’s final film Eyes Wide Shut (1999). 

***THIS IS PART TWO OF A TWO PART EPISODE***

Deep Dives Include: production history; comparisons with the film’s “Dream Story” (1926) novella source material ; the Gustav Klimt color pallet; the meaning behind those neon Eros/Thanatos street signs; secret societies and other occult inspirations (from the Freemasons, to the Illuminati, Hellfire clubs, and Alister Crowley); Ovid’s Art of Love; what it means to “reach the end of the rainbow”; and how the film’s seemingly abrupt and hollow end comes straight from Friedrich Nietzsche’s “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”....

Episode Safeword(s): “the morning after” 

(REPOSTED Episode from 2021 that traveled over from the old Anchor platform with a broken link).

The Cultists are back! And in honor of The Resurrection, on this week’s annotated deep-dive, The Cutlists Present Ivan Reitman’s Ghostbusters (1984). A humble little film of grandiose origins (including a writer born into a family tree of generations of ghost hunters, a un-producable fever dream of a first draft, a 13 month time budget, and a die hard commitment to keeping the SNL and Second City comedy players as the B-plot to the film’s one true core purpose of introducing the doctrine of Spiritualism’s main tenants to the youth of the 1980s), Ghostbusters is one subtle but wild trip. 

Notoriously simultaneously a film about everything and nothing, the finished print of Ghostbusters has prevailed through the decades as a largely nostalgic comedy. So much so thusly remembered in the larger cultural zeitgeist that it can be all too easy to overlook just how deeply rooted nearly every line of the script is in esoteric references to over a century of real world Spiritualist practices and lore…

Deep-dives include:  The history of parapsychology; J.B. Rhine, Zener cards, the Milgram experiment, and other such ways to gaslight undergraduates in the name of quantitive research; Hittite vs. Sumerian myth (and where our lovable otherworldly gods of Gozer to Zul falls); Dan Akroyd’s real life family business of talking to ghosts; the plight of the EPA; Theosophy and the ethereal vs the etheric; Institutional Review Boards (and the film’s violations therein); Ivo Shandor Revival style cults and the occult appeal of selenium; the film’s myriad folklore references from the 1943 Philadelphia experiment to the Tunguska event; turn of the century cheese cloth regurgitation (or how you get ectoplasm); the film’s offhand references to trepanation, hypnotic dentistry, and menstrual psychosis; the special effects and the unapologetic cocaine-fueled frenzied genesis of everyone’s favorite childhood ghost; and how ultimately this film is, above all else, an esoteric love letter to a new turn of the century Spiritualism. 

Episode Safe Word: James Randi 

On this week's five-by-five bonus interlude, London and Benji each present 5 recommendations for films with a color in the title. 

On this week’s annotated deep dive, The Cultists present Baz Luhrmann’s 90s frenetic teen angst extravaganza, Romeo + Juliet (1996). Known for his kinetic color-fueled explosions of images and sound, Luhrmann's second offering in his “red curtain trilogy” put him on the film world’s map as an Auteur with a distinct and immediately recognizable style. Bright, brash, and unforgiving to anyone who prefers a more minimal Mise-en-scène, Luhrmann’s penchant for decadence was ripe for a world of high octane emotions, brawls, masquerades, and the lush arc of an epic demise. However Luhrmann’s vision of bringing the dusty pages of the oft produced Shakespearean play into the hearts and minds of the notoriously apathetic 90s teenage market was a rather unprecedented and hard sell for commercial studios at the time. Particularly when Luhrmann insisted that not only would he win over a teen audience, he would do it all without altering a single syllable of the original Shakespearean language of the play. And he would use a cast of mostly young people to do it. Luhrmann’s vision succeeded, jumpstarting a subsequent decade stuffed with Shakespearean film adaptations for teens, and yet, ‘R+J’ remains distinct among them all. A burning strange indefinable star that shall not be defied.

Deep dives include: The film’s production history, editing and cinematography; the lineage of the Romeo and Juliet literature cycle that lead to Shakespeare’s 1596 adaptation of the tale; the 1996 film’s comparisons with the exactly 400 years older play; the historical roots of the warring Guelph vs. Ghibelline factionalism that led to such constant civil brawls; how amazing it is that Romeo spends a full third of the play desperately and despondently in love with someone else; why the developing teenage mind lacks impulse control; and why even Dante personally hated the Montagues and Capulets enough to write them into his levels of Hell two centuries before Shakespeare was even born.

Episode Safe Word(s): “impulse control”

On this week’s annotated deep dive, The Cultists present Bernardo Bertolucci’s 'The Dreamers' (2003). Known for his “hot house” cinema, in which characters are crammed into isolated intimate spaces until they burst, Bertolucci returns again to offer up a claustrophobic yet sprawling visual love letter to his own memories of the French New wave —albeit through a lens of decadence, incest, and as many Jean Luc Godard references as one can still stuff into such an already compact space. Based on Gilbert Adair’s 1988 novel ‘The Holy Innocents’, which itself is an adaptation of Jean Cocteau’s 1929 novel ‘Les Enfants Terribles’ (The Holy Terrors), The Dreamers purposefully positions itself in a curious temporal space — one in which the continuous creative power of sex and cinema are the only realities worth living for. There’s also just a lot of twincest.

Topics include: Adair’s adaptation of Jean Cocteau for his own 1988 novel, as well as his tweaks when adapting his own work for The Dreamers screen play; The 1968 Parisian student riots; The French New Wave Movement; Auteur theory (and the cinema of Nicholas Ray); The incorporated collage of film references; Bertolucci’s seeming obsession with Jean Luc Godard; the protest-inspiring film archival and preservation efforts of Henri Langlois; the retrospective dark cloud Bertolucci’s past casts on the film today; and what esoteric reference this movie and Joel Schumacher’s 1997 ‘Batman and Robin’ have in common.

Episode Safeword: “vanilla”