#annihilation 2018

[greengableslover]

ANNIHILATION (2018) dir. Alex Garland

[sci-fi-gifs]

It was dreamlike. Nightmarish? Not always. Sometimes it was beautiful.

Annihilation (2018) dir. Alex Garland

[cinematic-beauty]

It’s the last phase. Vanished into havoc. Unfathomable mind. Now beacon, now sea.

ANNIHILATION (2018) dir. Alex Garland

[beelze0-0]

Arcane x Annihilation Part 1

Made in collaboration with my dear friend @astroboibaepsae who wrote a spectacular companion fic

CW: blood, violence

(ID: sequential art image 1: Jayce in a quarantined hospital bed on a ventilator, his body showing the effects of the arcane image 2: Viktor and Dr Revek stand outside the quarantined area where Jayce is held image 3: Inside the shimmer/arcane Silco treats an injury on Vander’s hand, the figures of Viktor, Sevika, and Dr Revek in the back exploring. Vander’s arm shows effects of Hexcore scarring and infection image 4: Silco holding a rifle faces off against Vander, who has been fully mutated into a beast, Vander’s body is leaking blood and shimmer image 5: Sevika holding an automatic rifle surrounded by mutated/gloriously evolved statues, the one closest is looking directly at her end ID)

[fanofspooky]

Eldritch Horror movies

[katestewartt]

- It was dreamlike. - Nightmarish? - Not always. Sometimes it was beautiful.

[where-your-eyes-dont-go]

The Area X trilogy obviously draws a lot from STALKER, but I’m curious how much it’s also drawing from the book STALKER is an adaptation of, the Strugatskys’ Roadside Picnic.

Area X largely show a landscape of verdant nature reclaiming settlements in mostly familiar ways, with the odd details like the fungal impressions of people in the abandoned homes to remind you that something weird and horrifying happened. Outside of a few obviously eldritch landmarks like the tower, the majority of Area X appears safe and normal, which leaves the audience to fill in why so many precautions are being taken and what oddities are lurking unrevealed. There are moments of sudden eruption into abnormality, but they’re just that—sudden eruptions disturbing explorations of otherwise peaceful landscapes.

STALKER goes to even further extremes with this. It shows very few truly inexplicable things (and what it shows is much less alien than anything in Area X), while having everyone act like a completely novel and alien way to die is waiting at every wrong step. The Meat Grinder is the purest instance of this, a long shadowed passage that everyone seems deathly afraid to traverse, with a reputation that precedes it and a name that tells you everything you need to know about those who presumably travelled down it beforehand, but which our heroes go down without any incident. The alien nature of the Zone is communicated almost fully through implication, and the effect isn’t even suspense so much as a feeling of being truly and fully engulfed: by the Zone, by the landscape, by the screen, by the film.

From the first chapter I read of Roadside Picnic, the alien nature of its Zone is communicated by having weird alien shit occur every five minutes. There is still plenty of instances of danger being communicated only through implication, but we see Red and his company run into visible anomalies constantly. It almost resembles the movie adaptation of Annihilation more than it resembles the book, in terms of its constant focus on visually spectacular alien phenomena. I almost wonder if Vandermeer was trying to split the difference between Picnic and its screen adaptation, looking to achieve the more meditative dread of the movie without leaving behind the book’s inventiveness.

This honestly makes me a bit more forgiving of the Annihilation movie’s departure from the book’s tone. It would be hard to do so without essentially making another STALKER, and we already have the one. Since we already got as good a movie as we could out of the pure moodpiece version of the Zone, you might as well focus on creating distinct visual setpieces.

[imkalipso]