Scary folklore springs from the mendacity of our shared experiences. It is the dirt, the fragrant decay of our collective imagination scudding through otherwise clear skies of our reasonable lives. We accrue unacknowledged contemporary rites of passage, keys that unlock older and yet older analogs to the unknow, more layers to hide the observer from the abyss. Sad face emoji. These abilities are forbidden among the peasants. We build the New Dark Age.
Superstitions can reside in schools or othered captured institutions despite their best intention. Their footprints follow our nursery rhymes into antiquity. Our video game designing edgelords populate their worlds with supernatural elements. We claim our time with sentinels who rise like hungover salarymen to lift our drooping spirits. We call on these spirits in our popular culture. The idea of their calling precedes their form. We call into the darkness of time and space. There is no escaping this place. There is no escape from the ancestral spirits. The arise like crabs every few million years or whatever. They fill a void. In theory. We have only existed here for a fraction of a second in the full day of our Universe’s existence if it were scaled to such puce hemorrhage of timeskin and whatnot. The thinnest of skins in the onion. We are an interference pattern between the abyss of the past and that of the future.
These supernatural forms we conjure, we use the living to do their dirty work. Conversely, if this were a cheery sort of essay, I would call these spirits our guardians, our…better angels. Oestre in the East. Set. Osiris. The Great Peacock, the Trinity of God, Jesus and “The Holy Spirit”, Artemis, Hera, Poseiden, Odin, Shiva, Ah Pook, gods and goddesses of, frankly, every fricking description. They clothe us in rituals to keep us asleep and docile. Our mouths fed. Our backs broken. Our graves refilled. Our waters mingle in the oceans; our trace elements escape within the magnetosheath into lunar orbit. Our microbes travel with the Voyager spacecrafts. Our stories of the dead foretold.
The dead probe malevolent forces for token aspirants to unknowable orders of chaos and death. Inside plagues, doubt. Inside political upheaval, thoughts of violence and bloodshed overwhelm social orders. The catharsis of grief. At least we can still feel anything. People gather and small talk turns to recent car wrecks, deaths, current enemies, potential enemies. In the pages of the Dead, they come back and roam the halls of your mind while your waking mind caroms from one mendacity to the next, woeful of one’s suffering maybe, aware of that of others, perhaps. Full of dread. There is no escape.
I can sit in a room with the lights off and feel fine not knowing what’s actually there yet, and I can sit in a roomful of people, and not know what they are thinking, either. I accept that I know very little about others. Observe people long enough, and learning begins. Patterns arise.
Apathy is a blind spot. Being in certain corporate functions feels like becoming blind to suffering in all its forms, apathetic. My waking life is one where I remain introverted to minimize contact with the walking dead. I only assume people crave spectacles of violence and retribution. Monarchs ruled by fear, aided by perversions of teachings of mystics and whatnot. Remember that this was a mechanical system, with holdovers from Roman-Greco tyrannies, other barbarous forces without written records, wiped cleanly from ancient homes and hills. They rose to terrorize yet older craven societies, buglike, skittering on the surface of a vast river of blood. Back and forth, and I count myself among the insects, bright, mandibles clicking in clever ways, right? Here come the Popes.
In our literature as in life, death poses an unanswerable question, so fiction crowds the void. Religions built atop the rotting submerged ruins of megacities. Laws dredged from sewers and removed from the graves of cursed woods. Popes dug up and tried for heresy. They wander blindly, these chosen ones, watch them go. Stars built upon the dust of long dead hyperintelligent civilizations wiped out by cataclysmic natural events. Gravity waves, pulsars, black holes, corruption of human or alien power structures, it matters not which side of nothing you prefer. Black Holes of Wealth consuming all and spewing decoherence. We have decoherence instead of Hell, mere anarchy and such. Solar-powered structures underground remain environmentally stable for thousands of years on dry highland plateaus, with mild oscillations in humidity and temperature providing the bioelectric anchor for amino acids to develop into self-replicating systems, cilia, combs for eyes, seeking warmth and contact with other beings. Nuclear radiation periodically heat the water into steam, warming minerals and hydrocarbons. Abiogenetic sweating of the rotting pieces of exploded stars and planets. Eventually the simple forms learn to work together. Complexity arises. Simple. Like the worms that live around the vents on the ocean floor. Like the cyanobacteria inert for millions of years in rock a mile under the ocean floor. Inert.
At least in the Underworld, or clashes with anthropomorphic demons, we can find heroism in moral courage. We can vanquish our devils with the spiritual cheat codes, our digital alms. We ingest iron and use it as armor. We ingest minerals and use them to amplify our metanarratives. Our data crushes us with its power. The Bestiary is emptying. Truly this is the best of all possible worlds choking itself with strong hands. Off they go.
Science appears as magic to the uninitiate. Religion appears to be competing analog social media platforms spinning the same yarns about anuresis of passion and constipated sartorial ephemera of philosophical forms. That is the essence of malediction, a collapse of the superposition of the unknown and the initiate. Dramatis persona no longer needed. Without change, no drama. Disproved by the wind in the prairie grasses, the wind in the eaves of an old creaking house gossips about the river. The river whispers back through the forests. The soil gathers its dreaming forms and fungi ready them for consumable material. Life is a pressure wave, just as trees have a living ring structure around inert material, living close to the bark, and half of the mass of a tree is underground and part of an organic intelligence that can warn other plants of possible dangers. Their tongue is ancient.
Evil can be beat down, battled, but never defeated. Good old, reliable Evil. Hard-working. Demanding. Unsated. The great work of understanding the secrets of the gods demands the account of humankind in its breadth and scope of abilities be revealed in vivisection. We are tools our foolish dead must direct towards ridiculously inept actions to reveal the powers of the occult within our future. But it feels there is no future to speak of.
These ghosts are here because the living persist. We do their work. Our tales are of theirs continued. No one is saved. No one answers and no one is in charge here. Dust of the Blue Dot.
Sources
- https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/de9e0a03-1e27-48fb-babc-26e2d61fda79/content
- That scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark when Indy says, “Don’t look at it.” But they look at it.
- An Encyclopedia of Horror Movies I checked out of the library two dozen times between 3rd and 5th grade. It was basically my book.
- Funk & Wagnall’s Encyclopedia of Folklore, Mythology and Legend
- Libraries.
- Stephen King books, and occult literature in general.
- Twenty years of reading about Esoteric Religions and mistaking often fraudulent passages for bona fides.
- Aleister Crowley’s biography, the good one. Stuff about sorcerers and wizards in general.
- An understanding of physics and laws placed on matter and energy in relationships which form our physical Universe through twenty years of reading volatile and sometimes unreliable pre-prints.
- Vibes, ghost farts, spirit macrame, dreams, brain chemistry issues, concussions, dreams, stories, and The Age of Bullshit with its tides of garbage and epochs of endless enshittification.
- A woman I met who spoke 9 languages, lived in a one-room hut, and abandoned her dog which happened to want to get you to look at the sky with it at night. I used to think it was because of stars, but maybe it was because of bats.
- Third Man experiences during moments of mortal terror.
- Night terrors.
- De ja mort.
- Lucid dreams.
Table of Meatbags
Intro
Indeterminism drives good occult literature, the kind that suspends your disbelief of pataphysicial forces brought on by endogenous or exogenous forces. There is a feeling of veils being lifted revealing yet more veils. There are all sorts of spoilers in here for books and movies. Turn back, greenhorns. Come back to this in a couple of years.
I wrote this to dive into the unknowns of spooky stories.
Revenge is its own hollow reward. I gain nothing.
Monster
But there are elements of Folklore that nonetheless come as easy handles to pour out the course of events of a good or bad scary story. You can build a decent horror story from just two or three elements. Throw a Monster in there, make it Beastly, stronger than you, fearsome and ravenous. How do you talk about something without talking about something? The tragedy of the Oder Vistula language commons, and the goldmines in lost languages ad nauseum. Finding lost or missing clues. You are introduced to a character who is doomed, whose heroism is cold revenge. The vampire is cursed. The werewolf is cursed. The ghost is cursed. So lame. Monsters with clear lineages, like zombies, just keep respawning any time you need a li’l Existential Dread. “I am already dead, this is a dream”. What up with your Cthulhu breath? Throw in a River Beast, a Pennywise, a Swamp Thing, a Mothman, a Lizardperson, a CHUD, a Xenomorph, a creature cursed, shaped, deformed by its experiences, and in turn shaping and denigrating the experiences of others in a violent and unpleasant way. Monsters with clear weaknesses. Flawed. Like us.
Capital “M”s have no business in proper literature, and neither do their wooden foils. We are the Monsters, we of the Peons and Peasantry, in The Forgotten Works of the poetry of Richard Brautigan. That’s comic book stuff. If something else is lurking, some other nameless force moving within a tale and menacing its protagonist, how did it get there? Can other things sneak in? How did the structure twist in House of Leaves? How did Dante’s Inferno affect Mary Wolstencroft Shelley’s Unnamed Monster’s geographic travel timeline in Frankenstein? How does primordially ancient Appalachia devour the protagonists of The Descent? Bone Tomahawk, The Terror, The Revenant, Moby-Dick, The Ruins, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Alien, Zombies, devoured by the world itself as Agent for Unknown Malevolent Forces In occult literature, you get agents of primordial forces, disposable wet wipes. They are occulted by and disposed by the same forces, trapped within the logic of its inevitably revealed snares.
Firmament
The audience must be informed, but not enough to know what is going to happen next. But because of The Age of Bullshit, knowing that one does not fully know what is happening in the world is already part of our day-to-day lives. Misinformation and AI hallucinations are part of the weather of ideas.
What is hidden is what troubles folks, a sense, a tingling, a gut feeling that something else is happening that explains everything. The twigs tied into runes in the woods of The Blair Witch Project, the Incantation of the Book of the Dead in Evil Dead as preamble to the deeper manifestations of the evil which never dies. Evil on tap. Evil so plentiful it is basically fill-dirt. They are giving it away, y’all! But in the world of cybernetic omnipresence, in the glaring eye of the surveillance state, the grimoires and sepulchers and haunted bodegas are fried with the bright light of empirical positivism. Them orbs you shared in Aughts are dust motes. Everything is permanent except attention.
The cameras erase them lingering ideas, ruminations. The cameras expose all, fills the head with spectacle like a powerful acid. The God is Spectacle Here. Our attics have Nest cameras. So, the genius of The Grudge or The Ring is its rapturous assumption that the medium is like a landscape. This technology allows us to arbitrate time and space, this TV, this laptop, this tape, this story in a book or a blog. So many portals. I mean, if the ancient Greek playwrights had portals…oh wait, they did, apò mēkhanês theós. The god from the machine. Things get bad, pull a DEM card, bounce in a fancy chariot as one does.
Some find it on conspiracy sites and podcasts. Some find wormholes in The Expanse, fold time in Dune, jump to hyperspace, and some unfortunate argonauts find hell on The Event Horizon. The science between these arbitrary shifts in attention require an understanding, a shared understanding of a fiction like a “teleportation device”, or a “time machine”. In Scooby Doo cartoons, you get some wavy lines in the cut between one place and another, and you know you’ve just experienced a jump in time, or entered a daydream, or an abrupt change in location due to the narrator being the camera. Traces of cursed places to explore. A shot of Scooby and Shaggy playing cards and gambling with snacks. You can see traces of the cave passing by through an open window. Scooby falls asleep, and we enter his dream. The story shows the actual dream from third person. The van hits bump and the dream is abruptly terminated.
They go down into the Earth in The Descent. Escape into the unknown pleasures of unnamed places. They go to the haunted places, lured by the sirens of rest and relaxation! The romance, the draw of the unknown, the illusion of discovery. The illusion of permanence is so satisfying. The Here and Now is everlasting, unchanging. Be Here, Nae Nae. Don’t go back to Derry…too late!
Old Evil Thing
In the movie Nope, Jupiter Ranch has a hidden memorabilia museum, and the association never is explicitly stated, but one is made between a shoe defying gravity during a chimpanzee rampage on a TV studio set decades before a ranch is attacked by an alien monster. You feel a connection. You have to fill in the blanks. It is an Old Evil Thing. That’s what makes it work, those invitations to complete a story. You never really know what the Monster was. Why that shoes stood up. Everybody gangsta ’til that shoe stand straight up for no reason. You have a foreboding omen, or a strange event that emerges as something ominous because of a polyp of other weird events tied tangentially to it. These things need be but surface. You never know how the Monster exists in Nope. It’s weakness must be found. The Old Evil Thing is a puzzle, a conjurer’s spell. Images. Forms. Flatness. You never understand why it had to be Micheal Myers or Jason Vorheses, why zombie metabolism works, why ghosts phasing through solid objects defy known physics, why the Blob wants to eat Ohio. These things are your predators, your fears come calling. In War of the Worlds, the aliens had waited for thousands of years to attack. But they were undone by tiny germs, new little squirmy things.
Everything becomes a trapdoor, every strength is a weakness. Every desire is punishment. Growing up in a cruel religious household, I knew that Heaven and Hell were actual places. As in a nightmare, efforts to escape become snares themselves. Paranoia sets in. Those places If you are unafraid or amused by superstition, enjoy.
Then the thrill is gone, Old Evil Thing. The evil haunting the old hotel in The Shining, the old hotel in the amazing short story “Room 1408” resets when fed victims. The graveyard under the subdivision in the movie Poltergeist. The woods about the cabin where the recitation of the Necronomicon was read in The Evil Dead movies. The crafted sacrifice to the Titans of the five different teenage archetypes in Cabin in the Woods…which looks like the cabin in the Evil Dead movies. The Outer Space Monster dug up from Antarctic ice in The Thing. Aboard the ghost ship in Alien, a Wolf in Grandma’s Housecoat awaits. Grady taunts Mr. Torrence. The Caretaker taunts.
Time and space are no barrier to an OET, a caretaker. It feeds upon the agony and death of the victims and seeks dominion over the living, so there is a certain need for amplified suffering, for a feeling of terror. There is also a need for a reason. Blame it on the place where it is felt. Blame it on heinous deeds that traumatize any who hear of it. That is essentially magical thinking. The taboo of ideas. Weak fragile eggshell minds. Their bodies, their thoughts, an Old Evil Thing needs those things to make terror worse. It needs a place. You need suspense AND Monsters, so a definite place can have limits in space. The plot within that space has a limit in time, a half-life of credible disbelief. In Lovecraft, we are the haunted thoughts of an old god dreaming our existence. Leviathan lives at the bottom of the sea, Lord of the Labyrinth, of Dreams, a remote area practically impossible to reach, natch.
Dante’s Inferno descends through circles and ends at an isolated frozen world. The Comedy slaps. The evil is indistinguishable from the place. Locked into it, woven into it. From it, but what is “it”? Reliably, it is an Old Evil Thing. But sometimes the OET is an ET. A visitor. You can have Terra Incognito. A ship returning from a crappy dimension full of ghosts and bad juju. It is not enough for Evil to just Be. That would be almost Mercy. A piece of a synthetic lifeform replicates and consumes the planet at the level of quarks, who knew? Happens all the time. The Veil over our world is indistinguishable from it. In Lovecraft, we are the haunted thoughts of an old god dreaming our existence. It has already consumed our world. Or it comes from another world, or the grave, anywhere but here. In Affliction, the alien lifeforce consumes and transforms all living things. In Arrival, we affect the alien visitor transforming and destroying our lifeforms. In The War of the Worlds, an ancient alien armada is vanquished by common viruses, ghosts of living forms, an appetite without face.
Magical Act
Drawing a door on a wall with a chalk is one thing. Chanting over the door or inscribing the door with a sigil makes it a door between worlds. I call that a Magical Act, a Deus Ex Machina or Diabolus, whatever. It needs no name. It can have a temporality. It is unleashed upon its Discoverer, like a Mummy’s Curse, or it can be recognized in Hindsight to be the only permissible outlet through which the Magical Act may manifest a malevolent force which no examination of intent offers respite. In The Ruins, the old evil comes up out of the Temple and devours everyone nearby. All the Indigenous People (very knowledgeable, tied to the Firmament, dispassionately murdering tourists who do not submit to the Curse that has them) stand outside an invisible perimeter. Like pruning a tree. They simplify the feeding of human substances to the nature of the power of the OET. Was the act completed with a desired outcome that failed to materialize, or did materialize, but in an ironic and cruel way? The pilot in Godzilla Minus One muses that his parents wanted him home alive, and when he returns, it is to his city utterly destroyed by megabombs he comes. His parents are dead, but he is alive. He lives in a Ghost World of Japan. The Magical Act is the ridiculously awesome trap the characters devise to capture and destroy Godzilla.
Fooling a spirit is never a good idea. Captain Howdy spoke to a little girl in The Exorcist. Constantine dispatches of demons through clever rituals. The Ninth Gate is all-consuming. Never go Full 9th Gate. Toying with the Emperor of the Federation makes lightning come out his dang hands’ y’all. Stealing Fire from the Gods. Stealing Knowledge from God. How do we get these forbidden powers? There’s always a target for that. There’s always irony and sorrow.
Drawings, sequences, patterns, formations of data revealing…nothing. Mysterious portals open and close inexplicably to the uninitiate. You never know WHY these things work. You accept the Old Evil Things used in Magical Acts will tap some Monsters to move to this Firmament because…a warning was disobeyed unknown. Destroying innocent people is par for the course for Scary Movies. Something Wicked This Way Comes.
Intent
With aliens, eternal angels and demons, the undead, and fear of the unknown, you have a literary market that will never really go away. Science allows for asynchronous temporality, post-modern discontinuities that somehow work. Our 20th century movie marquis blessed with the blorange of stardom. What these stories need is a key to unlock the door. These stories have no threshold to share with its audience, just echoes of previously lucrative work. Sequel City.
These days, it’s anything in the basement, a real rummage sale. Then prequels for how the stuff got in the basement. Then prequels about that, too. You have a few thousand years of human existence to mess around with.
But what’s under the basement? A little lower layer? Going Downtown. Why is it the OET is presumably at rest. It wants nothing more than to rest eternal, chillaxing. A call, a chant, a hex, a rite, a cursed object, an unknown relic, a talisman, a word, an act at a certain time or place, an purposeful movement, a crooked namaste in a cornfield. The opposite of the intended effect of a well-crafted prayer is the course of action, the Intent is to subvert and harm life grounds: Family, trusted allies, neighbors and heroes. Fantasia, but with ooga-boogas and whatnot. Power controlled by bad instead of good intelligence. So when is morality that allows one to survive strictly Evil? When it involves battling Evil.
Fight ye not with Beasts. Eye for an eye. Blood feuds. The cycle of misery only needs an a priori state in which violence or chaos may occur. So, the only reason intent is there is to remind people there is a difference between Old Things. Some are bad, some are good. It’s tribal when the chips are down. We are all on the Donner Party. We are all Grimes, the Walking Dead, living an atrocity protected from yet a worse one.
Not so much suspense as a feeling of general unease and melancholy can surround a limited piece of real estate. It has already consumed our world, drat. In Hereditary, the evil needs no place. It is coming for a bloodline, and it goes where the unlucky family members go, a curse, a need. A haunting with legs. The curse arrives from another world, heavens to Betsy. In a coffin on a boat with no one aboard. From another island, King Kong, some other place. From an ocean kingdom. An Other arrives with unspeakable plans. From under the mountain, from unreachable eternity, an outsider. It arrives to a place where it’s force may grow from Old Ancient Evil ideas or actions. We crave possession by an outsider because it is only from something from outside a system that Truth may be measured. The Observer Effect collapses a routine security detail into a detailed report of the smuggling of illegal golden bananas. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.18851
. The integral can be rewritten asA big old pile of magical phrases and donkey farts, right?
So, we have haunted Earth itself. A Large Language Model with no peer. It comes from the same place we do, from stardust, voila! We are the Titans again. Count Orlock is nothing but hunger in Egger’s Nosferatu. The Earth is hungry for corpses it makes just as we are ravenous for meaning. We came here to die on this world, to wander lost and in exile, why? The substance of this reality might have been the subject of mythologies and places more deeply woven into the universe but not knowing how this came to be is an emergent potential in modern storytelling.
I hope this simulation has some error correcting phase. https://academic.oup.com/book/60025?login=false. If anything, I need more fish falling from the sky.
The prequel gravity well creates its own weather system. A climate of Commodification. Hollywood maximizes timelines with recursive events where everything fits neatly within its packaging, and that is boring and leads to prequels and competing realities. If it sells, it will dissolve into a simulacrum of Old Evil Merch. I hope you are taking notes.
Obfuscation
The story is really easy to follow in a good horror film. What have we learned…today? She bought a house, but the house has a secret, and that secret is crazy bad, otherwise why would you go watch the movie? It takes over the town, and so on. It somehow related to demons invoked to control – like Amway – bad people, so the preamble to a morality lesson is a shedding of civil contrivances. Evil just needs a job, bro. All good foils deserve another. The psychomachia needs a center…which cannot hold. If it did, it would be boring and then we could all transmute into higher beings.
Obfuscation is a meaningful withholding of facts that would permit a Good course of events. Because of the tired nature of Western drama, foreshadowing and omens precede calamity. A smart person sees the tells. A smart evil person leaves tells to evade tracking. These are obfuscations. The use of the cursed nun in Longlegs who brings the Devil Doll into the Killing Space. Indiana Jones gets the Idol, but he never knew someone was using his knowledge to ensnare him. Indy’s knowledge is his sword and his shield, but it is also his Achilles Heel.
The Truth is obscured. The approach is what matters. By cherry-picking what sort of key is permissible to unlock the Kingdom of Thangs Currently Denied the Protagonist, it increases the quality of the demand for a spectacular process of discovery. That’s money.
These steps can be refined to reference anything but be mindful of your time on any tests of futility in the void. They are distractions. The purpose of the distraction is to veil some state from discovery. Of course, that implies there is a reality other than this one. It is AND it is not. Ridiculous. Ancients called knowledge of all things Gnosis, the knowledge of the inner workings of the universe. Agnostics believe such manna never translates, that our brains could never grasp ultimate truth. Good. At least I can relax.
There is no completeness to these arts in either case. Copping out never solves anything either. The narrator may withhold exposition or contrivance to give the audience more of a trial of discovery. Work for it. Dropping in on derivative scenes, flashbacks and other non-linear structures, repeated tokens and omens. A sequence of events involves the memories of the characters, and memories are not linear. It speaks to the power of the charms being used to enchant and mystify the hero, the victim, the creatures in frame whatever they are. Again, you wind up with gimmicks and theatrical stagecraft. Cows in tractor beams? Why? No answers, profit.
If everything that happens is expected, then the story lags. Drama is conflict. If anything, you might be missing something. Don’t trust the appearance of peace. Everything is in flux. Forces at work erupt in unusual and captivating ways. Intent is like a transducer that alters forces at play. Sometimes action or non-action is needed, as in comedies of errors where miscommunication is used to send characters off on wild goose chases or awkward encounters because of losses in translation. These provide dramatic releief from heavy emotions which will pile up later in the Akashic Record of all Things Neatly Put Away, kings and pawns, same boxes, same stars, same sorrow. So what. So Fresh, So Clean. Enjoy while the essay winds down.
Snares
Then subtle minded Hera began to coax wily Apate (Deceit) with wily words, hoping to have revenge on her husband: “Good greeting, lady of wily mind and wily snares! Not Hermes Hoaxthewits himself can outdo you with his plausible prittleprattle! Lend me also that girdle or many colours, which Rheia once bound about her flanks when she received her husband…
wikipedia – Apate (Deceit or fraud)
The Greeks called it hubris. I prefer Idiocracy. Plausible prittleprattle. Our minds are weak. https://aeon.co/ideas/the-bad-news-on-human-nature-in-10-findings-from-psychology . Our failure in communication lead to all sorts of wrongheaded ideas. Sometimes this deception is intentional. On a national scale, we call this propaganda. Whipping the mob into a frenzy. I am not differentiating myself from the mob. I get riled up about cruelty, I look for reasons. I can draw a circle starting here, and it leads me back here again.
Inhumanity
Human history is one of depraved cruelty, of grand invention. Scientists muse whether or not we find no extraterrestrial civilizations because intelligence is a flaw, that because of hubris we destroy ourselves with our own power structures, our own technology gone awry. Psychopathic rulers who take no responsibility for bad choices because they are blanketed with money, smothered in syncopates and feral nihilists. Whatever. It could be argued that the winning block in the last US election was the apathy block, the people who threw their vote away. Since our perverse system requires basically all democrats to vote to defeat a half-ass Republican Senate vote, apathy proves to the powerful that we are an irresponsible people. Who should be robbed and murdered and beaten into silent submission. Our occult literature traditions are mewlings of petulant children at odds with their own mortality. Grumped up and checked out. Aliens will study us. Probably not.
Fifty State Banana 