In a rare surfacing in the contemporary world, JF and Phil discuss a film that has just been released. Bryn Chainey’s Rabbit Trap is psychological horror in the tradition of Repulsion, Jacob’s Ladder, and Angel Heart. But it is more: a metaphysical film exploring the mystery of sound and the Otherworld of Faerie—an excursion into that weird country, so deftly explored by Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood, where wonder and terror perform their eldritch duets.

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REFERENCES

Bryn Chainey, Rabbit Trap

Weird Studies, Episode 190 on “The Willows”

Alan Crosland (dir.), The Jazz Singer

Weird Studies, Episode 150 on “A Fragment of Life”

Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will

Vladimir Jankelevitch, Music and the Ineffable

Hazrat Inayat Khan, The Mysticism of Sound and Music

Herman Hesse, Siddhartha

J. R. R. Tolkein, The Silmarillion

Giles Deleuze, Cinema II  

Robert Kirk, The Secret Commonwealth

Weird Studies, Episode 120 on Radical Mystery (story of the anti-sound starts at 52 minute mark)

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