The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent
vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums
here.
The Guiding Principles and New Rules
document is now in effect.
The thread that goes bump in the night! [Spooky] Thread y'all!
Posts
And as an added bonus, tonight the algorithm served me this video from SIX YEARS AGO, exploring the exact mall.
I have watched a BUNCH of urban exploration videos and not a one of them has filled me with as much dread as this one did, with its calm voice over and its canned smooth jazz and its uninterrupted daylight.
The verisimilitude in Kane's video is wild, though. I wonder if he modeled and textured the mall himself or if someone built it as a level for a videogame or something...
Need some stuff designed or printed? I can help with that.
He goes over it in a stream he did with Wendigoon
https://www.youtube.com/live/Ib4BaQndTNs
TL;DW Essentially he became obsessed with the statue and then the mall it got trapped in. A friend of his actually went to the city hall to get the blueprints for the mall and then he and his friend spent months modelling and texturing it all just for this video series
He goes through a couple of other videos, including either the exploration video you linked or another one, that give you a better idea of what the series is about. He says that it can be considered complete at this point because it will be a very long time until he can return to it
The first video on this channel, The Pine Creepers, is also excellent.
As a Brit I live on an island where the forests were all cut down thousands of years ago, so I've always romanticised horror set in the wooded expanses of the US. Just a sea of trees from horizon to horizon, and it's just you and whatever calls the woods their home
I don't know what it's like to folks who actually live there but I'm always on the lookout for media that captures that vibe
When we were house shopping for the house we currently live in, Strikor and I really wanted to have a forest in our back or side yard. We unfortunately didn't actually get forest with the house (though there are a lot of trees, a river, and multiple treed lots near us so we got close), but the biggest contenders were this house with a hiking trail, forested area and creek behind it and my personal favorite, this 1+ acre lot and 80s house that makes you feel like you really are living in the forest (also has a creek in the back!) I absolutely love the romance and and inherent spookiness of forested areas.
But fuck you — no, fuck y'all, that's as blunt as it gets"
- Kendrick Lamar, "The Blacker the Berry"
Thanks for the link.
I don't know if I can do a 4 hour podcast or stream or whatever.
Yeah this one didn't do anything for me. Seemed pretty rote in execution.
I'm not done watching this, but I have to mention (this kind of ruins the spooky which is why it's in spoilers)
That mall is of course completely dead now, making it the perfect place to shoot a film about a scary liminal space.
Although speaking of liminal spaces, my favorite one currently is the Dallas Pedestrian Network, a set of tunnels under downtown Dallas that's still open today but far less known than it was 50 years ago. Certain parts of it are extremely back rooms-esque. Here's a video of some dudes exploring part of it, and frankly this video would have been amazing horror if it had slowly shifted in tone as it went on.
I don't know why a) an aspiring horror filmmaker hasn't made a film with that as the setting or b) a bunch of indie shops haven't rented more of the retail spaces for that perfect ambience. Though I do get that if people don't know about the tunnel then of course it's hard to sell your business there... but how neat would an antiques and curios shop be down there (maybe offering palm readings too?) or a literal hole-in-the-wall diner or bar.
Edit: ok, it swung around to spooky for me aga again
Edit again: OK I watched the full video and the second video you shared of the urban exploration of the mall. The whole video is excellently spooky and terrifying, even though I initially wasn't able to find the Valley View mall scary at all. Since the last time I really shopped there was 2009 or 2010, I'm pretty sure I did see the carousel at least once before they got rid of it.
I didn't realize until I re-read your post, but Kane Pixel recreated the mall digitally?! That is fucking wild, I thought he was actually in the abandoned mall (but I guess from the second video, they tore it down? I don't know for sure as I haven't gone there in a while. Though the Google map of the location looks like quite a bit has been torn down there.
But fuck you — no, fuck y'all, that's as blunt as it gets"
- Kendrick Lamar, "The Blacker the Berry"
Here in New England most of the trees were cut down during the colonial period for farming and the forests only started creeping back in the early 20th century when New England farmers got out-competed by Midwestern mega corporations.
So most forests around here have lots of evidence of the farms that used to be here usually in the form of stone walls everywhere and the occasional empty foundation or cistern.
It does lead to a certain amount of spookiness like in the movie Blair Witch Project where a forest seems empty but then oh wait, I think I see something out there ... In the darkness...
There's an exchange in the very long livestream I linked that goes like this:
Kane: Well yeah, that's kind of the point
He also shares a video of
So this is my interpretation and explanation of why it's important that the mall really existed. This is just me cooking over the last week because I can't stop thinking about it
Do places die or do they live on in our memories and what happens when everyone forgets about a place? Now that Kane has created this short film Valley View mall has gained a kind of immortality as long as the video is played and his digital version of it exists
Over the course of the video the mall goes from lit up and intact, to rotting and filled with trees to finally being torn down. Just like the real one
Now, why the fuck is it underground? Why is botany so important (the real statue is based on a famous botanist, a digital lookalike of that botanist is in the first episode of this series, the protagonist of the video says he used to study botany)?. Also, the protagonist ends up in the same forest and has the same greyscale skin tone as the botanist in ep 1, what's up with that? No idea.
Oh yeah, one final fun note from the stream I linked
Congratulations! You've just invented Shinto!
Need some stuff designed or printed? I can help with that.
Cool archways and resentful ghosts, mostly.
https://www.paypal.me/hobnailtaylor
CW: Mourning the death of child
goddamnit I think this house is haunted, and not in a "spooky thing happened and I play it up" way.
like, nightmares about the house and dark things, temperatures fluctuating, things moving or disappearing and showing up somewhere else, sometimes my cats will just bristle and start hissing and assuming battle position at nothing at all.
oh and there was a box with a cat skeleton in it in the attic.
Thanks for sharing this, I don't remember hearing about this filmmaker before! I ended up watching almost all of their short films yesterday. They've definitely gotten better at their craft with time. I think my personal favorite is Portrait of God.
But fuck you — no, fuck y'all, that's as blunt as it gets"
- Kendrick Lamar, "The Blacker the Berry"
Why not two?
http://steamcommunity.com/id/pablocampy
loved it, love these crazy ghosts, love Bill Murray, but those fucking dogs show up and, I have a clear memory of this, I went mad with fear and hid in my room for a day and my dad got in trouble for showing me Ghostbusters.
watched it like a year later, with prior experience the devil dogs weren't as scary and Gozer made quite the impression on young Depressperado
Haha, same, but I'd snuck into my parents room to watch tele after bed time. I was scared shitless, but also didn't want to get in trouble so just had to live with the fear by myself.
http://steamcommunity.com/id/pablocampy
Turns out that with TV editing and ads that put me right up to the face hugger tank jump scare. Then he grinned and said that’s it, bed time.
I was jumping at shadows for weeks.
It's the only time in my life I've been too scared to sleep because of a movie. They honestly would have been much better letting me see it through to the end instead of having the last images before going to sleep be the survivors trapped in a suburban house with no clear escape while the undead steadily broke their way in.
Im just built different. I'm not afraid of movies.
Then again those alien abduction specials on TV when I was little scared the ever living bajeezus out of me.
But fuck you — no, fuck y'all, that's as blunt as it gets"
- Kendrick Lamar, "The Blacker the Berry"
oh god, for a while, the very image of a "Grey" (or Zeta Reticulan) was enough to creep me right off. the big shark eyes they have, I hate them ugh
one time I saw an episode of Hard Copy, and it was about Bigfoot, the Chupacabra, and the Jersey Devil, I think? the image of the Chupacabra was horrifying (it was some manner of dog with very bad mange taken from a distance) and scared the shit out of me. That night, I heard a cat get killed by a coyote and was like OH FUCK IT'S THE CHUPACABRA, SLEEPIN' UNDER THE BED TO-NIGHT.
Yeah, RotLD 2 stuck with me for years when I was a kid
but I still remember, "get that damn screwdriver outta my head!"
"They won't be used to earths gravity, you can just push them over"
Really made me feel better
Not the same step brother that showed me nightmare though. That was my oldest step brother. To be fair with him around I wasn't scared of much. He was like 6'1" by the time he was 15 and has a temper but was really protective of me and claw.