Outside of a Dream

Horror nerd, snapper of pictures, podcast editor.

[loveboatinsanity]

[damienkarras73]

SY ABLEMAN?!?!

[prairiedeath]

april 3rd 1974, cincinnati

[damienkarras73]

Was waiting to cross the street to my work just a few minutes ago when suddenly a dude jumped out of a moving vehicle, tucked and rolled onto the sidewalk, and then immediately got to his feet and booked it away with the speed and focus of the T-1000. Didn't even acknowledge me when I asked if he was alright. The most bonkers thing I've seen in a grip.

[itseasytoremember]

So this one time I was in a hospital recovering from an emergency surgery on my leg, and had to be there long enough that they had to change my bedding, so, doped up on three kinds of pain meds and antibiotics my dad wheels me into the hallway while the nurses work.

"dad" I say, my eyes barely open "it's Colonel Sanders" while pointing down the hallway. He looks, and at the end of the hallway, there's a portrait of an old man, the donor who paid for the wing of the hospital I'm recovering in.

My dad explains as much to me, and goes "I mean the guy *kinda* looks like him, but why would Colonel Sanders pay for a hospital wing Mississauga Ontario? I think those drugs might me messing with you"

Then the nurse comes out of the room. I go "hey, who is that picture of?"

She looks at the portrait. She looks at me. She looks at my dad. She looks at the painting. She looks at me again.

"you don't recognize the Colonel??"

[fantashic]

Average Deep Space Nine A plot: "What are you willing to sacrifice for the chance at a better world? Who are you willing to hurt? Will the pain you cause now outweigh the peace that it might bring? When both choices are bad, and you do what you think is best, can you live with yourself after? Could you live with yourself if you made the opposite choice?"

Average Deep Space Nine B plot: "What do we do with all this hot sauce!?"

[notvoid]

[70sscifiart]

Break time

[latadelixo]

[rate-my-reptile]

Boy Wher Me got Dam Portado Chipps Is

[jimhenson-themuppetmaster]

Jim Hensons Masquerade Ball Photos with Gene Shalit 1984

[dogpuppy]

[handsomeboymodelingschool]

[damienkarras73]

Tell me it's not what that movie is.

[fatmagic]

[phillip-bankss]

grug dont have to change!

[damienkarras73]

I'm not going to reblog the author of this post because 1. I think it was meant at least partially to be a joke, and 2. I'd like to critique it without ragging on them directly and inviting a discussion I'm not interested in having, but man this is symbolic of how so much potentially solid film criticism gets flattened into lazy quips. It also flatly ignores one of the main points of the movie: therapy was not working for Clark! Most psychotherapeutic techniques count on the patient being able to accept responsibility for themselves and having the ability to change, but Clark is incapable of the former and unwilling to do the latter. This is one of THE biggest problems in treating narcissists and people with severe antisocial personality disorder because a lot of these patients are unable to accept when they're at fault for something (and who often end up adopting therapyspeak to rationalize their own behaviour).

I get it, a joke is a joke, but it annoys the hell out of me that people are ignoring the nuance in this surprisingly thoughtful movie for the sake of slightly modifying a meme that's been done to death. It bleeds into Letterboxd too, where the top rated reviews on so many movies, movies that invite considerate discussion, are lazy one-liners like this. Same thing with most top comments on Reddit threads. Everybody thinks they're a comedian and almost nobody actually is.

[chernobog13]

Concept art by Shigeru Komatsuzaki for King Kong vs. Godzilla (1962).

[sepublic]

I do think it’s interesting how the novel Dracula is meant to be a modern setting from its perspective. It’s very much that genre of story about an ancient fantasy archetype finding itself in a modern setting, complete with the rules-lawyering that often comes with modern parodies (that isn’t to say the stories of Olde didn’t have fun with loopholes either though).

Except Dracula is a story that plays itself straight. The vampire himself is not stupid. He’s possibly the oldest vampire of all which means he upgraded from animal instinct and mindless echoes of past memories to someone who’s regained his critical thinking skills. The story begins because he’s already adapted to how the modern world works now by hiring a solicitor who understands modern laws.

He knows now that he doesn’t have to march into London with an army like he used to; He can just buy property and the laws of London are forced to respect that. Similarly he’s already experimented in and discovered loopholes to vampire rules and limitations; Vampires are bound by the permission of owners so he simply uses his solicitor to buy and own a bunch of properties. If he needs to be invited in, Dracula hypnotizes someone to let him in.

Vampires need to return to their grave every dusk/dawn (whichever comes sooner), which causes their coffin to act as an anchor that limits how far from it they can travel? Dracula simply rations the earth of his grave into fifty coffins and spreads them across London so his range becomes exponentially larger.

All of these things make the story almost come across as a deconstruction and it might just be! It’s just that Dracula the novel became such a trendsetter that people nowadays see it as playing things fully straight. It almost feels as if the novel is written with the idea that readers have a basic understanding of vampires and their rules, so part of the thrill comes in the revelation of how the titular vampire is working around these rules. Likewise I’ve heard it used to be a trope in English literature for a traveler to visit some foreign land with a monster and escape by going home. But here the foreign aspect of the story is just the first (and final) arc; The monster’s plan hinges on coming to the UK itself!

So yeah. Dracula isn’t stupid and he reflects the idea that people of the past had just as common sense as the rest of us, they just had access to less/inaccurate knowledge and things worked differently back then. Dracula would be like… That bit of someone showing a medieval peasant a meme as they comprehend it perfectly and aren’t even wowed by the Doritos. If Dracula was set in the 21st century he’d probably understand social media well enough to become an influencer if he wanted to, though the issue of being invisible in cameras wouldn’t help.

[damienkarras73]

Dracula is absolutely one of those books where the popular perception of it (plus the countless adaptations that basically play broken telephone with Stoker's novel and each other) obscures what makes it unique, namely how grounded a story it is. We see this formally, being structured as an epistolary novel where each chapter takes the form of someone's letter, diary entry, medical journal, newspaper column, etc., but also the central vampire hunters take a decidedly empirical and even outright scientific approach. Pop culture has turned Van Helsing into a badass vampire hunter who views Drac as his (im)mortal enemy, but as Stoker wrote him he's a sweet, eccentric old man who's ultimately a very good doctor, first approaching Lucy's condition as an entirely medical matter before realizing he'll have to brush up on eastern European folklore if he's going to help her.