virulent.

𝚜𝚑𝚛𝚘𝚞𝚍𝚎𝚍ㅤ 𝚋𝚢ㅤ 𝚗𝚒𝚐𝚑𝚝 ,

[nosferatu-roberteggers]

Professor Von Franz Abraxas stone ring

First Century Gnostic Abraxas Intaglio Ring (intaglio in bloodstone); previously available on Peter Szuhay Antique Shop (London) // Gem with drawing of Abraxas in “Nordisk familjebok, Vol. 1” (1904) // Bernard de Montfaucon; “L'antiquité expliquée et représentée en figures” (1719)

[funeral]

Thus the problem of non-Being is not simply that of a fear of nothingness or of the vacuum. Rather, it is the quite gothic fear of a something whose thingness is under question. 'This impersonal, anonymous, yet indistinguishable consummation' of being, which murmurs in the depths of nothingness itself we shall designate by the term there is [ . . . ] The rustling of the there is [ . . . ] is horror.' The pinnacle of this type of horror—really kind of a concept-horror—is the evisceration of all noological interiority: 'horror turns the subjectivity of the subject, his particularity qua entity, inside out.'

What is the 'there is' of Life? Is the concept of Life already a 'there is', and therefore already enveloped in the gothic horror, of absolute otherness and pervasive anonymity? If 'Life', as opposed to 'the living', is always receding into the anonymous 'there is', does this then mean that Life is really Life-without-Being?

Eugene Thacker, “Nine Disputations on Theology and Horror” in Collapse Vol. IV: Concept Horror, ed. Robin Mackay

[penny-dreadful-demimonde]

[heavensickness]

obsessed. also makes sense when you remember than butterflies drink blood

[dearorpheus]

[leirelatent]

“Nostalghia” (1983)

dir. Andrei Tarkovsky

[anitapallenberg]

Immoral Tales (1973) | Dir. Walerian Borowczyk

“Erzsebet Bathory”

[digitised-celluloid]

Dracula. Dir. Francis Ford Coppola. 1992.

[dearorpheus]

“life isn’t all tarot cards and pagan blood glyphs, you know…”

[lilja4-ever]

Penny Dreadful (Tv Series 2014-2016)

[namedvesta]

Frankenstein (𝟤𝟢𝟤𝟧)

Guillermo del Toro

[toiich]

The Addiction (1995), dir. Abel Ferrara

[funeral]

Although the very term 'ghost' suggests a sliding towards the supernatural and the marvelous, away from more material and ambiguous 'unrealities' of the fantastic, the effect of ghost tales is similarly disturbing, for they imply the return of the dead as the undead. They disrupt the crucial defining line which separates 'real' life from the 'unreality' of death, subverting those discrete units by which unitary meaning or 'reality' is constituted. Gillian Beer describes the ghost story as a form eliding 'the distance between the actual and the imagined' so that 'frail and cherished distinctions collapse.' In the place of these discriminations appears a space, an absence of difference:

[With the ghost story] the fictional takes place in the everyday: it takes space, and it is this usurpation of space by the immaterial which is one of the deepest terrors released by the ghost story . . . Ghost stories are to do with the insurrection, not the resurrection of the dead.

By attempting to make visible that which is culturally invisible and which is written out as negation and as death, the fantastic introduces absences. Hence the tendency of fantasy towards non-signification. There can be no adequate linguistic representation of this ‘other’, for it has no place in life, and it is this contradiction which gives rise to the disjunction between signifier and signified which is at the centre of the fantastic. 

Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion

[bastetjewelrystudio]

Penny Slinger, An Exorcism, 1977.

[filmreveries]

Isabelle Adjani in La Reine Margot (1994) dir. Patrice Chéreau

[flowerytale]

Manuscript of Bram Stoker's Dracula playscript (1897)

The script for the theatre version of Dracula is a curious mixture of Bram Stoker’s own handwriting and printed extracts cut and pasted from the novel.

[loo-nuh-tik]

Dracula: A Love Tale (2025) dir. Luc Besson

[sictransitgloriamvndi]

Skull with Veil (2024 / oil on canvas) - Fabrice Grimard