A double dose of the devil from the year of my birth

The first movies I've rewatched in ages whose release year didn't start with "201" were actually released in the year I was born.

On Saturday night, I had planned to actually watch a different movie from the year of my birth and then a movie from the 1990s, but I had to adapt on the fly and ended up with quite the spontaneous double feature.

Jesus Christ Superstar from my own collection was supposed to be that movie from the year of my birth, 1973. But we've been having problems with our DVD player lately and it just wouldn't play. I got the little red Ghostbusters symbol when I pushed the play button on the face of the player. The ability to remotely control this device from its native remote control, a different smart remote control or an app on my phone is part of its myriad problems and has long since gone by the wayside.

So I had to pivot to what ended up being another movie from 1973, The Wicker Man. This was only a coincidence, as the way I found it was not thinking "What's another good movie from 1973?" but rather looking at the stack of movies I just borrowed from the library on Friday. (Incidentally, one of my favorite moments from the new viewing year is when you go to the library and load up on titles without worrying about whether they help you form some kind of list or not.) The Wicker Man was actually the only movie in that group that I had already seen -- once, about four years ago -- so it helped scratch the itch of rewatching something rather than watching something new. That it would keep the groovy vibes of 1973, which I had intended to produce via Jesus Christ Superstar, was an added bonus.

You might have expected me to run into a similar wall as I had with JCS, since both were DVDs, but my player would play this one. Who knows. Maybe the issue was that JCS originated in the U.S. while this one was an Australian DVD, but it shouldn't matter since our player is region-free. Anyway.

The second movie was going to be The Cable Guy, just because. But once I'd gotten to the end of The Wicker Man, I tried JCS again to see if the successful playing of The Wicker Man had somehow resolved the player's stubbornness about JCS. It had not. But having made this attempt, I realized it would be nice to keep going with the early 1970s vibe I was working on, and having to pivot again from JCS allowed me to keep the horror vibe going as well.

I'm not sure if it was the release year itself that was more responsible for the pivot I chose, or the fact that I've been trying to get this movie on my viewing schedule for the first time in two decades, but I ended up finding The Exorcist streaming on Netflix, remembering correctly that I'd seen it there. It was kind of a shame not to watch this in October, as I did the last time I saw it (Halloween of 1999, in the theater no less), but I didn't want to wait another nine months to watch it when I could watch it right now.

It may not be totally accurate to call these both "devil movies," as the paganism of the citizens of Summerisle sets itself up in opposition to Christianity in a way that does not specifically align itself with the devil. An outsider might (and does) characterize them as devil worshippers, but they would not see themselves that way. But they were definitely both 1973 horrors, which made me realize what a great year for horror that was. There may not be any other examples (I'd have to look), but I reckon truly chilling horror movies that endure for decades don't come along very often. You're lucky to get one per year let alone two.

I also noted that the films would make a great double feature for Ari Aster to show anyone who wanted to understand his influences. The impact of The Wicker Man on Midsommar is obvious to the point of hitting you between the eyes, and this viewing was particularly instructive for me in light of seeing the latter film twice within the past six months. You wouldn't call Midsommar a remake of The Wicker Man, but it has enough elements in common that The Wicker Man is certainly the first film you'd name if you were trying to find a film most similar to Midsommar. It warrants no additional examination here.

The influence of The Exorcist on Hereditary might not be quite as evident, but it's plain as day as soon as you unpack it. Both films deal with the incursion of the devil into an innocent host, and this innocent host is actually a young girl (a 12-year-old girl?) in both instances. (Nope, Charlie is 13 in Hereditary -- totally different.) Hereditary's Gabrielle Byrne even looks a bit like Jason Miller's Father Karras, plus Toni Colette and Ellen Burstyn both give tour-de-force performances of grief.

But the thing that really interests me is the way the physicality of devil possession in The Exorcist influenced countless future horror filmmakers, Aster in particular. Regan McNeill is of course famous for the way her head can spin all the way around and the way her body can contort -- not only the writing of "help me" in her stomach and the way her body folds up at 90 degree angles to the bed, but, in a director's cut that I did not see on Saturday, the way she crawls down the stairs, crab-like, her stomach pointing toward the ceiling. That same sensibility appears in Hereditary when [a character] (might as well not spoil it) is seen clinging to the underside of the attic door, repeatedly banging his/her head against the door in a rapid motion no human being could produce.

I've probably taken up enough of your time but I'll end with a few assorted observations from my viewings of these two films.

- Brit Ekland's seductive Wicker Man nude dance remains a terrific moment of 1970s glory, as does the use of the song "Corn Rigs." In fact, I wondered as I was watching whether this movie was nearly as good when it came out as it is now. Its ability to capture a specific place and time is one of its charms, and in 1973, it would have just been a contemporary movie.

- I love the moment when Edward Woodward's character is searching houses for the missing Rowan Morrison, and what appears to be the body of a young girl falls out of a wardrobe. She seems perfectly corpse-like when she hits the ground. But then she kind of rolls her eye up toward him and grins, to indicate it's all been a joke. It's a neat acting trick and it's creepy as hell.

- The strength of Woodward's religious fervor at the end is something to behold, especially when contrasted with the similar level of fervor displayed by Lord Summerisle and his followers. It's an interesting potential bit of commentary by Robin Hardy. Who is the real wacko here?

- I'm not sure if this was the first use of animal masks in a horror movie -- probably not -- but it's incredibly chilling.

- I love the final shot of The Wicker Man, as the camera travels past the burning head of the wicker man to the setting sun, which goes behind the clouds in the time it takes for the credits to roll. That could not have been easy to pull off.

- I love the Northern Iraq prelude in The Exorcist. It doesn't at first seem like it has anything to do with the rest of the movie, but it sets the tone, which is particularly interesting as it all occurs in the daylight.

- I can't believe that Max Von Sydow, who is still around at 90 years old, was playing old in a movie that came out 46 years ago. He was only 44 in this movie and yet he has to take pills to control some kind of palsy in his hands. Also, the other priests in Washington openly wonder if he is too old to perform an exorcism. Now granted, they used makeup to make him look older, but there's no way Von Sydow looks two years younger than I am now. Maybe I'm baby-faced but it was a bit shocking to consider. It made me think of how young Ian McDiarmid actually was when he played old as the emperor in Return of the Jedi, a fact I feel like I discuss on a regular basis because I'm just so impressed by it. Which is funny because Von Sydow also appears in a Star Wars movie, very briefly, playing old when he was actually old in The Force Awakens. When you consider that The Wicker Man's Christopher Lee also has an extensive Star Wars history from the prequel trilogy, that is quite the set of coincidences indeed.

- I still think possibly the single most disturbing moment is when Regan comes downstairs during her mother's party and looks blankly at the guests, saying "You're going to die out there" and urinating on the floor. I'm getting goosebumps just typing it.

- I continue to remain impressed at how raw they allow things to get in terms of Regan's language and actions, as she drops a bunch of f-bombs and appears to stab herself in her own vagina with a crucifix. This was not your father's horror movie.

- I love the editing in this film, as William Friedkin (or really, his editors, Evan Lottman and Norman Gray) have no trouble smash-cutting out of a seemingly important moment and into the next scene. I refer specifically to Father Karras sitting with the other priest in the diner (I believe it is) and saying "I've lost my faith." Most films would allow a moment for the other priest to react and try to convince him that this is too rash of a stance. Instead, by cutting immediately to the next scene, it leaves no doubt about the fact that this is a true statement and he really means it. Which makes his steady recovery of his faith over the course of the rest of the narrative all the more powerful to behold.

Okay, fast forward again to present day, and onward.

Question your assumptions: Rosemary's Baby

Back in June, I held The Graduate under a microscope to see if I really loved it as much as I thought I did, and consequently decided to start a recurring series called Question Your Assumptions. And as I do with many of my spontaneously created new series -- I Finally Saw, I Never Meant to See, etc. -- I then pretty much dropped it.

So when I went to watch something while carving our jack-o-lantern on Wednesday night, and chose Rosemary's Baby from a Halloween-themed batch I'd picked up at the library, I realized it made a logical next addition to the previously foundering series. (I had planned to watch the original version of Carrie, which I have never seen, but decided to save it for Halloween night in case my wife wants to watch it. She has told me she wants our Halloween viewing to be something she hasn't seen before, so I knew Rosemary's Baby was a safe choice for pumpkin-carving night.)

It makes an especially appropriate pairing with The Graduate, as both films are from 1968, and both films are currently ranked between #100 and #200 (out of more than 4,000) on my Flickchart (The Graduate is #116, Rosemary's Baby is #188).

But my real interest in writing about this is that I have always considered Rosemary's Baby to be in direct conflict with The Exorcist in terms of disturbing, confronting horror classics from the late 1960s/early 1970s. If, according to me, everyone is either a Rosemary's Baby person or an Exorcist person, I have always found myself in the latter camp -- as evidenced by The Exorcist's lofty Flickchart ranking of #58.

However, that stance has been challenged by a couple things I have been mulling over: 1) the fact that I've only seen Rosemary's Baby once, and it was back in the late 1990s or early 2000s, and 2) a critic or two I respect who have taken jabs at the quality of The Exorcist.

I suppose a third viewing of The Exorcist (which would also be my first in that same 15-year time period) would really be the best way to get at the topic, but since I've at least got the new Baby viewing, let's work with that.

The movie started in a particularly spooky way, with that iconic "la la la la la" lullaby over a completely black screen. It went on for so long that I thought Roman Polanski had decided to begin with an anachronistic overture, something that probably hadn't quite dropped from the cinematic landscape by 1968 (but would certainly only be consigned to costume epics at this point). When the dialogue started and there was still no picture, I realized there was something wrong with the screen. Clicking back to the start of the chapter sorted it out.

Still, the accidental beginning of my viewing experience has a real relationship to Polanski's approach to the material. I think one of the reasons I wasn't as wowed by Rosemary's, especially compared to The Exorcist, when I was younger and less discriminating was that I still measured the effectiveness of a horror movie by how grotesque it was. While The Exorcist is all about the viscera and horror that gets shown, Rosemary's Baby is all about what you can't actually see. While evil punches you directly in the face in The Exorcist, it seems to lurk just outside the frame in Polanski's film.

Of course, the best way to talk about the effectiveness of an approach is to talk about the times it is violated. After a sinister but rather banal opening 20 minutes ("banal" is a word I apply in the best way possible to certain passages of Rosemary's Baby), you are really jolted by the image of Rosemary's simpatico neighbor Terry splattered on the sidewalk. There's something so discomfiting about the gore of her smashed head. It exists to remind you that although you feel sort of safe in this movie, you most certainly are not.

And I am still probably most affected by the movie's other really graphic scene -- its Exorcist scene -- which is the dream rape of Rosemary by the devil. I should put "dream" in quotation marks, because Polanski constructs the scene as though it could only be a dream, with clearly fantastical elements intermingling with elements we only wish were fantastical. There's a moment of horror near the end when Rosemary recognizes definitively that it is not a dream -- and that her brainwashed husband actually lurks among the participants.

Let's talk about some performances, specifically, Ruth Gordon's. This wouldn't have been a reference available to audiences at the time, but from Harold & Maude I think of Gordon as this beloved old coot -- and not just playing the role of a beloved old coot, as she does here. There is almost nothing overtly disturbing about Minnie Castevet, but a second viewing of the movie -- after you already know what will happen -- really allows a viewer to appreciate this very mild sinister undercurrent to her performance. She urges one course of action a bit too enthusiastically, while disguising it behind a blase sheen, or she reacts a little too strongly to particular pieces of news. She is the very definition of the banality of evil.

Now, let's talk about what's not seen.

I love the choice not to reveal the face of Ralph Bellamy's malevolent Dr. Sapirstein during the one moment when anyone acknowledges they may actually have something to hide from Rosemary. It's after the one living person she thought she could turn to -- Dr. Hill (Charles Grodin!!) -- turns her in to Sapirstein. (Whether he was always part of a conspiracy, or scared into compelling with the witches, is not immediately clear, and I don't know if I want to know.) Sapirstein walks up to her as she's seated and threatens to institutionalize her if she continues this talk of witches. Horrifyingly, his face cannot be seen ... so we can imagine it to be anything we want it to be. His hulking figure standing over her is also a symbol of the world crushing her last hopes to evade an increasingly preordained outcome.

But the most chilling moment of not seeing what another movie might show us is the decision not to reveal what this spawn of Satan actually looks like. "What have you done to him? WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO HIS EYES?" (I'm getting chills now just typing it out.) We never know, because we are never shown. All we hear are the cries coming from that pitch-black bassinet, so much like a baby yet somehow ... not.

Although my high ranking of Rosemary's Baby was mostly reinforced by this viewing, the second viewing did serve to remind me that The Exorcist is still my choice in this duel. Although I'm sure that the "don't show-don't tell" approach of Polanski's film impresses me more than it once did -- as evidenced by my embrace of a recent minimalist horror film like Berberian Sound Studio -- there's something about the specific brand of visceral horror seen in a movie like The Exorcist (and in Poltergeist, my favorite horror movie) that affects me more deeply.

Hey, I'm just a sucker for levitating bodies, rotating heads, shocking vulgarity and green spewing vomit.

What's a man to do?

I never meant to see: Exorcist: The Beginning

Well it looks like I'm just creating new periodic features on my blog left and right these days. I created a new one yesterday, and a Devil's Night screening last night inspired me to create another new one today.

This periodic series will be called "I Never Meant to See," and it will highlight films that were thrust into my path quite unwittingly. In an age when we have so much choice about what to watch that we rarely have to settle on something just because "it's the only thing on," it's become increasingly rare that we need to see things we hadn't otherwise planned to see. It seemed interesting to me to explore how we end up watching movies we wouldn't have normally sought out.

First up is Exorcist: The Beginning.

I love love love William Friedkin's The Exorcist, but I've never seen any other films in the Exorcist series and suspected there was really no reason to. Exorcist: The Beginning came my way because I recently received it as a birthday present. A friend who also regularly reads my blog (hi!) gave me this and another DVD that I really hope he got out of the cheap bin (just because I hope he didn't spend too much money on me). The other DVD, Traffic, was, I believe, the serious half of the gift -- an excellent film I have probably praised to him before, which he correctly surmised I did not already own. I don't want to sell Exorcist: The Beginning short by calling it the joke half of the gift, and he certainly didn't describe it as such after I opened the present. But let's just say this movie has less of a logical impulse behind it, given that he and I have rarely discussed horror, and I don't think we've ever talked about the original Exorcist and my love for it. Besides, it's directed by Renny Harlin, who has become something of a Joel Schumacher-style punching bag in cinematic circles.

I hope my friend isn't offended if I admit that I decided to watch it while carving my jack o'lantern last night. Hey, what can I say, multi-tasking is a part of our everyday lives these days. Even with movies I'm really loving, I pause them regularly and sometimes do other things. I knew it would make an ideal companion to my exercise -- something that would fit the Halloween theme perfectly, but would probably also be okay only to be receiving 87% of my attention at any given moment.

I remembered that there had been an Exorcist: The Beginning, but so little was it still on my radar that I couldn't remember how recently it was released. It could have been anywhere from 2002 to 2008, I figured. The release date was not immediately evident from a cursory scanning of the box, so it wasn't until I started watching it and made a general assessment of the age of Stellan Skarsgard that I put it closer to 2002 than 2008. As it turns out, it's from 2004.

My first impression, and one that ended up lingering, is that the movie may owe more to Raiders of the Lost Ark than The Exorcist. In fact, I'll include an asterisk in my writing for every direct link to Raiders. The Beginning follows the story of Father Merrin, the character played by Max Von Sydow in Friedkin's movie, as a younger man who has strayed from the church. He's now an archeologist*, and is involved in a dig for a buried religious artifact* -- actually, a church that has no business being here as it dates to an era before Christianity was known in this region of Africa. He's no longer a priest as a result of events involving the Nazis* in World War II, which are revealed to us as we move along. People who enter this subterranean chamber* continue to have strange things happen to them, signs of possible devil possession. And in a climactic scene, he even tells a character "not to look at or listen to"* any of the devil's lies.

Sorry, by synopsizing the movie by only showing its Raiders connections, I didn't give you a very good synopsis.

For much of the running time, the movie is a lot less scary than it wants to be. Yes, there's some disturbing stuff -- in one memorable scene, an African woman gives birthday to a stillborn child that's basically a rotting baby corpse covered with worms. But there's also some stuff that's just plain ridiculous looking, like a child being attacked by digital hyenas that just don't cut it as organic parts of the environment. The problem really is that you feel a mounting impatience as you wait for what you know is coming -- a true devil possession that resembles, in some form, the possession of Regan MacNeil in The Exorcist. A variety of isolated and generally disconnected images of horror aren't really enough to sustain us in the meantime.

What turned the movie -- which is well executed in most respects -- from a mild thumbs down to a mild thumbs up is, in fact, the climactic devil possession requiring the exorcism. It gives us what we're expecting in terms of iconic imagery from The Exorcist, and here uses CG effectively to add to it. One of the scariest elements of The Exorcist is the devil's dialogue, not only the horrible and uncensored content, but the sound of that voice (or several voices) coming out of that body. The Beginning understands this part of what makes The Exorcist scary, and has a good amount of fun with it in the final 10-15 minutes.

More than anything, I'm glad I saw Exorcist: The Beginning for the same reason I wanted to create this new periodic feature on my blog. There sheer quantity of movies in existence means that many of them necessarily disappear into the ether unless we go out and grab them. And because I have a generally democratic concept of what I'll watch -- really, I'll watch almost anything -- sometimes it's nice to have random movies thrust back onto your radar, when they should have long ago been gone from it forever.

I mean, if I'm going to accomplish my stated yet admittedly impossible and also ridiculous goal of seeing every movie that's ever been made, I can't be forgetting about movies like Exorcist: The Beginning, now can I?

Happy Halloween everyone.

Vapid pseudo-spiritual schlock

What hath The Exorcist wrought?

It's usually foolish to trace a cinematic trend back to its exact beginnings -- someone will always chime in and say that the movie you've chosen as your starting point was actually influenced by films X, Y and Z.

But I do think we owe our current spate of pretty looking, religion-themed action films to William Friedkin's The Exorcist, in which a heroic priest tried to expel the devil from the body of a young girl.

Only, The Exorcist was a brilliant classic, and the legion (pun intended, see later) of films influenced by it, in which the spiritual world hangs in the balance, are becoming increasingly hackish and insipid.

I've tried to be fair about prejudging the new releases I write about each Friday, but sometimes you can just tell a film is going to be bad -- or at least, that it comes from a bad or tired place. It seems to me that Priest, releasing today, is such a film. Starting with that poster, it looks over-dressed and under-thought.

Part of my instant impatience with this film is that it feels like even more of a retread than most, in the sense that star Paul Bettany was just involved in a terrible version of this type of film last year: Legion, which Scott Stewart also directed. In Legion, it's the apocalypse, and God has reappropriated his angels for the purposes of wiping the human race from the face of the earth. One good angel (Bettany) needs to fight the rest of the bad angels in order to prevent this from happening. The movie was ridiculous.

But movies like this have been coming at us for awhile -- movies where it basically boils down to God vs. the devil, with a lot of nice art direction and some supposedly cutting edge fight choreography thrown into the mix. Max Payne was kind of a movie like this (though it was hard to figure out what that movie was supposed to be about at all), and before that, it was Constantine. And Constantine wasn't even the first time Keanu Reeves appeared in a movie like this -- The Devil's Advocate is kind of one of these movies, too.

I suppose if you want to be generous to Priest, you could call it a vampire movie rather than vapid pseudo-spiritual schlock. But the fact that the title character is a priest, and that vampire movies always carry with them a religious undercurrent (you can kill them with a crucifix), means that the distinction may not be very meaningful. What positions it firmly as the type of movie I'm talking about is all the window dressing: the futuristic cityscapes, the goofy-looking motorcycles, the goofy sunglasses, and the crucifix painted down the middle of Bettany's face. Um, question: If you're a priest who hunts vampires, do you really want to advertise that to all the vampires by painting a cross on your own face? (The movie probably has an explanation for this, but I don't care.)

If I had a bit more energy today I would dig for other examples of this type of movie and why they are getting increasingly worse. See, I don't want to give the impression that they're all bad -- I actually had a limited fondness for Constantine. But especially with Priest, they've gotten ghettoized to the point that they're little more than marginal stories draped over some superficially cool iconography.

Don't be fooled by the May release date. This type of movie belongs in February, and it deserves to fail in February.

Okay, back to being fair and impartial -- for the most part -- with the May 20th releases next week.

Confronting what you once heard

I've been wanting to see Anton Corbijn's Control since 1991. Which is funny, because it didn't actually exist until 2007.

The fall of 1991, my freshman year in college, was when I first learned about Ian Curtis, the lead singer of the British new wave (or is it post-punk?) band Joy Division. Control is his biopic.

I was DJing a radio show with a classmate named Todd. No sooner had he introduced Joy Division to me than I learned that Curtis had hanged himself, on the eve of the band's first North American tour in 1980. But it wasn't just that he'd hanged himself. This is what I remember Todd telling me:

"He glued his hands to the side of his head first. He also rigged up the noose so that it had a blade in it. Therefore, when they found him, he was decapitated with his head in his hands."

I guess I was too young and naive back then to consider the logistical flaws in this way of killing yourself. But that gruesome image definitely imprinted itself in my brain. Especially since Joy Division's music had such melancholy to it. Thinking that the guy who wrote, or at least sang, those songs was suicidal gave the music an extra layer of profundity.

So when I finally saw Control on Monday night, it was with the hope of some kind of resolution to this persistent image I had of the probably-apocryphal way that Ian Curtis died. True enough, it didn't happen that way, and Curtis' story was actually a lot more tragic than I'd thought. Any suicide is a tragedy, but part of me assumed Curtis had some kind of narcissistic idea of being made immortal by the very rock-n-roll act of killing yourself.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Not only was the man filled with self-loathing for the way he'd toyed with the emotions of two women (one of whom was his wife and the mother of their newborn), but he was also an epileptic whose fits were getting worse. After a failed attempt to get back together with his wife and a particularly violent fit that left him passed out on the floor all night, he got to his feet, eyeballed some kind of apparatus in his kitchen with rope and pulleys, and impulsively hanged himself. Even though it was an unpremeditated act, it was executed effectively enough to kill him. I've given away the ending of the movie, but it's historical record anyway.

The larger idea Control made me think of is how we all harbor ideas and images that came to us through hearsay or rumor, some of which undoubtedly happened the way they were described. Because this is a film blog, I've chosen to explore the larger issues of spooky things that I'd heard about from certain films. Films which I therefore was excited -- and a little scared -- to see, just as I was excited and a little scared to see Control.

The most obvious one that jumps to mind is The Exorcist. I learned about The Exorcist possibly as many as 15 years before I saw it. But it wasn't any kids in the schoolyard who told me about it; it was my mom. That's right, when I was way too young to be hearing these things, I learned about the projectile vomit, the head spinning around a full rotation, and the devil writing the words "HELP ME" in the stomach of poor young Regan MacNeil. In fact, I remember my mother telling a friend and me about it as we were about to go to sleep, me in the upper bunk, he in the lower. I know this makes my mother sound sadistic, but she isn't. Maybe it was just her ill-considered idea of a spooky bedtime story.

Then there was the time Mom told us (it was the same friend again) about Jaws. I imagine the circumstances -- a sleepover at my house -- being the same as well, but maybe I'm just blending the two incidents in my head. I don't remember the details of what she told us the way I remember the Exorcist details, though I'm pretty sure she mentioned a dead body floating in the water. What I do remember is that she told us that the older brother of one of our friends had to leave the theater. She probably just said "leave the theater," but the way I remember it, it was "leave the theater to throw up."

Finally, there was Dario Argento's Suspiria, a movie I became aware of much more recently. I remember the circumstances here as well. I was watching the short-lived game show Beat the Geeks on Comedy Central. One of the geeks on this week's panel was a self-proclaimed expert in horror films, and he was naturally asked what the scariest film of all time was. Without hesitation, he produced the title Suspiria. Either from what he said or sometime later, I learned that the first 15 minutes of Suspiria are supposed to be the scariest ever committed to film. My reverential fear of this film increased in leaps and bounds until I finally saw it in, I think, 2005. I won't tell you what happens. The fact that I knew those 15 minutes were supposed to be so scary, but not how it would happen, intensified my enjoyment manyfold. And if you haven't seen it, it'll do that for you too.

Ultimately, none of these films was quite as twisted as my mind imagined them to be, though all are terrific films. And so I think there is some value to allowing some things to never be confronted, and just to remain as fragmented scary notions in your brain.

And that's why I will try to preserve Tobe Hooper's Lifeforce as the scariest film I have never seen. From what I understand, it's something about space vampires -- I'm sure the synopsis could give me a more accurate description if I bothered to look it up. And this one no one told me anything about. I simply saw the trailer for it, back when I was about 12, and I don't ever remember being so scared of anything as I was by the potential these images carried with them.

I hear it's terrible anyway.