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aion-rsa · 4 years ago

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Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the Seduction of Old School Movie Magic

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It was one of the most challenging shots in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Sitting before Roman Coppola’s second unit camera was a 50/50 mirror, the kind that was once commonplace in any illusionist’s magic shop, but which hadn’t seen the inside of a Hollywood studio in decades. On the other end of the glass lay Winona Ryder in bed, ostensibly asleep but soon to be bedeviled by a monstrous vampire.

Yet co-star Gary Oldman wasn’t on hand that day. Instead, at about a 90-degree angle away from Ryder’s boudoir, stood a duplicate set of the same size and shape, but buried in black velvet Duvetyne. And in that blackness, smoke created by dry ice was oozing its way around the velvet. When lit by green lights and reflected in the mirror, a sentient emerald mist suddenly appeared in the same room as Ryder. Dracula manifested out of thin air.

“That was a good one, if I may brag a little, in that it was a backwards photography [shot] with a 50/50 mirror,” Roman says in 2020. It’s been nearly three decades since that day on set at the legendary Culver Studios, and Roman Coppola is a bit older and far more seasoned, yet when he looks back at what he and his team achieved on Bram Stoker’s Dracula, he can’t help but marvel. After all, you could now run a video taken by your iPhone in reverse with the swipe of a finger. But there they were in 1991, “puppeteering” dry ice fog in reverse, so it would appear to be sneaking below a mattress when reflected off a mirror and captured at a 45-degree angle in a camera that was running its film backwards.

In truth it’s more or less the same effect John Henry Pepper invented in 1862 to conjure a ghost on stage. Literal smoke and mirrors in the digital age.

When Bram Stoker’s Dracula opened in November 1992, it astonished the industry and silenced many of Francis Ford Coppola’s sharpest critics. Snarked about in the press beforehand as “Bonfire of the Vampires”—a reference to Brian De Palma’s misbegotten Bonfire of the Vanities (1990)—the whispers were that director Coppola had created a lurid and weird vampire movie based on one of the most oversaturated characters in fiction. Well, Bram Stoker’s Dracula was certainly lurid and weird, but in the best possible way.

Originally conceived as a Victorian man’s repressed anxieties about lust and passion being given demonic shape, Coppola’s vision for Dracula was entirely divorced from the pop culture image of Bela Lugosi in a cape. While the movie was marketed as the director of The Godfather going back to the 1897 source novel that no one had ever faithfully adapted (which turned out to be only partially true), the movie’s true appeal lies in its decadent imagery. It’s a marriage of lavish costumes, freaky makeup, and half-forgotten magician’s effects. And the last bit was given new life by Francis’ son, Roman, who became the film’s visual effects director.

Somehow it all came together, with performers such as Oldman, Anthony Hopkins, Tom Waits, and Ryder going so big that their cries threatened to burst through the soundstage walls. The hypnotic union thrilled audiences, who made Bram Stoker’s Dracula a surprise holiday blockbuster, and was ultimately celebrated by the industry, which awarded the movie three Oscars, including one for Eiko Ishioka’s dazzling costumes and Greg Cannon’s makeup. The irony is that, in its way, it was the industry’s skepticism toward Francis Ford Coppola that made the movie’s unusual vision possible.

“For some reason I always thought it was unfair I had the reputation of being a director who spent a lot of money, which is not really the case,” Francis said in a recent interview with film critic F.X. Feeney. “The only movie that I really spent a lot of money on, and went way over budget, was Apocalypse Now.”

Be that as it may, when Ryder first piqued Coppola’s interest about making a Dracula movie, which as it turned out was a favorite novel from his youth, he knew the studio would never agree to Coppola’s first inclination: As with going to the jungles of the Philippines on Apocalypse Now or Sicily in The Godfather, Coppola initially imagined shooting Dracula in Transylvania and inside actual crumbling castles.

“I knew the studio would be a little leery of getting this director with three names to do this Dracula picture, and possibly go off to Romania, and it’d be a Heaven’s Gate scenario, or Apocalypse Now scenario, so I played into that. I said, ‘You know, we could go and make the film in Romania, we could go to the real Castle Dracula… or I could make it all in the studio… In fact, I’ll make the entire picture right in a soundstage, a group of soundstages right under your noses. They just loved it, they ate it up.”

That was how Francis pitched himself into the movie, but how he made it worthwhile stemmed from two separate ideas bleeding into one otherworldly vision: First that the laws of physics would never apply when you were in the presence of a vampire; and second, if he was going to attempt to authentically return to the Victorian world of Stoker’s 1897 novel, he also would return to the early world of cinema where the laws of physics were never even considered.

“The period of the turn of the century was the birth of movies,” Francis said. “And movies, as you know, largely came about because of magicians who started to use the cinema to make illusions…. That’s when I became excited about the idea of [having] this story 100 percent shot in soundstages and not only using illusions and magic, and effects, but using effects as they were done at the turn of the century, which was in-camera.”

Thus entered Roman Coppola. Only 26 when Bram Stoker’s Dracula went before cameras, Roman wasn’t necessarily his father’s first choice to lead the visual effects. While Francis’ accounts have varied over the years as to whether his first head of special effects quit or was fired, the one consistency in Francis’ telling is that modern effects experts were exasperated by the idea of using almost no optical printers or new digital effects, and instead focusing on in-camera tricks. “Absurd” was the word Francis heard. But as it so happened, his son already had a passion for magic and the old ways, absurd though they may be.

“I was involved [on the movie] already,” Roman says. “I was going to be second unit [director], and we wanted the effects and second unit all to be one group effort, and do that stuff live. And when I started to take certain leadership and do storyboards, and supervise certain preparation, it was just clear that I was able to direct these efforts in a way that was more in my dad’s wishes, which is to really genuinely, deeply embrace the idea of total adhesion to ‘how would they have done it back in the day?’”

In retrospect Roman taking over leadership on the effects in Bram Stoker’s Dracula—to the point where he’s given the title card of “Visual Effects and Second Unit Director” in the end credits—seems natural. Ever since his uncle David Shire introduced him to theatrical magic as a young child, Roman has had a lifelong fascination with the tricks of illusion and sleight of hand. He still recalls boyhood days spent at Los Angeles’ Hollywood Magic store and San Francisco’s House of Magic, learning the trade of visual trickery, such as John Pepper’s “Pepper’s Ghost,” and staying up to watch Paul Michael Glaser in the 1976 TV movie The Great Houdini. In San Francisco, he saw Tony Slydini on stage.

“After 12 and 13, I stopped being so active,” Roman says. “But later, as a younger person in my 20s, I started to get back into it and get a lot of books, and collect certain apparatuses. It’s just something I found a real love for.”

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It also perfectly positioned him to spearhead Dracula’s visual effects. And one of the first things Roman and his team did was curate a film reel, or “visual library,” of all the points of reference from classic cinema they could use as inspiration.

“The movies that were much more points of reference are a touch later, but still drawing on the same principles,” Roman says when we mention early cinema pioneers, including Georges Méliès. “Jean Cocteau was a particular influence, Beauty and the Beast [1946], Orpheus [1950], and Blood of a Poet [1930]. So those are all movies that we drew a lot of inspiration from.”

Indeed, during the scene where Keanu Reeves’ Jonathan Harker explores Castle Dracula, a single carved arm in the wall is holding a candelabra in homage to Beauty and the Beast. Meanwhile Mario Bava’s Black Sunday (1960) inspired the nightmarish imagery of Harker’s carriage ride through a desolate mountain range, with the ominous passing tree branches actually being grips whacking the carriage as it was rocked in place.

Other films in the reel might include F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) or Carl Th. Dreyer’s Vampyr (1932), but Roman cites the biggest influences as being actual books on magic he turned to for research. Some were as old as Stoker’s novel itself. Erik Barnouw’s The Magician and the Cinema (1981) was a major touchstone on the movie; Sam Sharpe, author of Neo Magic (1932) and Conjurers’ Optical Secrets (1985) was another; and then crucially there was Magic: Stage Illusions, Special Effects and Trick Photography, which was written by Albert A. Hopkins in 1897.

Explains Roman, “Those books were the bibles of the research, and those have all sorts of references.” For instance, recall the grandiose prologue of the film. With baroque glee the movie begins not in 1897 but 1462. That is the year the real-life Vlad the Impaler repelled the Ottoman Empire and protected Christendom by slaughtering thousands of Turks. The sequence was Francis’ invention, and one he called his “Origin of Batman” scene on the set. But rather than actually film a battle scene, or even actual daylight, the warring portion of the sequence is completely captured via unnatural silhouette, with shadow puppets before a blood-red sky standing in for actual humans as they are impaled on a forest of pikes.

Says Roman, “If you get the book of Hopkins’ Magic, you will see other things like shadowgraphy, which is using shadow puppets. There was a guy named Caran d’Ache, who I think became famous because he’s the namesake of the Swiss colored pencil company. But he was the originator, or at least excelled in, shadowgraphy. And when you see the opening of Dracula, all those shadow puppets, that was inspired by an example from that book.”

This focus on the classical principles of stagecraft and magic, reverse photography and compositing images with a forced perspective, is the secret of Bram Stoker’s Dracula’s lingering appeal. As Roman points out, there were no effects they feared wouldn’t work. If they could achieve how things were done then, they’d appear inexplicable in the dawning age of digital effects.

“There’s a lot of steps and a lot of process that can be painstaking, but I don’t think we did anything that was pushing a boundary,” he says. “I think everything was an accepted principle that we knew, ‘Well, this is going to work if we do it right.’ There was nothing groundbreaking. We adhered to all the old tricks.”

There could certainly be setbacks, Roman recalls during Dracula’s voyage to London on the doomed Demeter that they exposed the same negative to five passes of filming. This is to say they attempted to combine five separately filmed images as the camera swung on the set by rewinding the film before each new pass. But because the frame line was incorrect on one of the passes, the whole multi-step take was ruined.

But the effects they did achieve all have a potency that register as alien to our modern eye. Some can be as simple as running the film backward in the camera, giving a macabre, unnatural sense of movement as Sadie Frost’s newly turned vampire Lucy climbs into her coffin after being accosted with a crucifix. In reality, she was filmed simply climbing out of it. Others might be slightly more complex, such as a black matte box being used over multiple passes.

For instance, when rats appear to run upside down on a girder above Jonathan Harker in the castle, two passes were used. In the first, the camera was upside down with the black matte covering the top of the lens as rats ran across a piece of set; then the camera was turned upright, the film rewound, and the other half of the lens was exposed while the original portion was covered as Reeves was burned into the negative.

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Among my personal favorites is the extreme perspective of Ryder’s 1462 Princess Elisabeta flinging herself from a castle parapet into a river, which Roman reveals “was basically a puppet with a forced perspective, and a little river below, [with] some tricks to make the scale look correct.”

Another was the much more complex series of techniques used during the vignette of Jonathan Harker traveling by train into Transylvania. In the finished film, Reeves sits in a shadowy train compartment with stark mountains out the window. Soon they fade away into darkness as Oldman’s predatory eyes appear on the horizon. Outside the train, Harker’s journal entry about the day’s travel is visible in the frame, running the length of the train track and just below the crossing transport.

“That was done by Gene Warren Jr. at Fantasy II [Film Effects], and that was multi-pass, multiple exposures,” Roman says. Among them was a rear projection created over two passes on the same piece of film. The first was comprised of multiple layers of the mountain range background moving at different speeds from right to left, while the camera moved left to right. In the second pass, the lights were turned out and Oldman’s eyes, as filmed by Roman, were projected as the only source of light onto the same background. All of this was then rear projected behind Reeves in a separate shot while he sat in his carriage. Conversely, in one of his close-ups, a map of 19th century Transylvania appears on his face via front projection.

And as for the journal in the same frame as the train? According to visual effects camera operator Christopher Lee Warren in “In Camera: The Naive Effects of Dracula,” they built a 20-foot wide replica of Harker’s journal entry so it could stand 10 feet in each direction between the camera and a miniature train, all to get the right type of sunset shadow being cast across its pages.

As just one in a string of intricate effects and set-pieces achieved by Roman and his team, the effects’ cumulative impact is immeasurable. In its way, Bram Stoker’s Dracula works on the level Francis wanted: He was able to bring it closer to Stoker’s world and plot, if not necessarily Stoker’s themes. As Francis more openly admits in recent years, when Ryder first approached him with a draft of James V. Hart’s script for Dracula, it was about a gushing love story between the dashing Count and Mina Murray Harker.

Ironically, that may be the element of the film that lingers most on subsequent pop culture depictions of Dracula. But it was Francis’ insistence on the script being rewritten, and rewritten again, to incorporate all of Stoker’s narrative beats, side characters, and supernatural wickedness, as well as the sense of a British society in upheaval. It was the dawn of a new century, the twilight of an old monarch, and an age for scientific discovery and technology, be it in the realm of blood transfusion… or moviemaking.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula is at its best when it drinks deeply from its dreamlike environment and atmosphere, capturing the base dread in Victorian culture of suddenly being confronted by what it deemed irrational or lascivious. And those elements mingle to gory delight when the aspects Coppola cared about most took center stage.

“The focus [was] on the actors, the costumes, and this unusual way of doing live-action and multiple take effects done in-camera,” Francis said. And when it’s Hopkins, Richard E. Grant, and the rest of the ensemble standing around Sadie Frost in an extravagant 19th century wedding dress while being filmed in reverse, its sense of tone and style is overwhelming.

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On his end, Roman met that goal, and underlined the movie’s macabre madness, with ideas as primal and orgasmic as firing waves of blood out of air cannons during the scene where Dracula kills Lucy—“That was just a total last minute thing of like… ‘Hey don’t we have a bunch of blood bullets? Let’s put it in those air cannons and see what happens”—and it also paid off in old-fashioned Hollywood bravura, like the climax where Harker and the other vampire hunters chase Dracula down the Borgo Pass.

As second unit director, Roman shot much of that finale—as well as about 20 percent of the finished film—on the same soundstages where Merian C. Cooper filmed King Kong (1933) and David O. Selznick burned Atlanta in Gone with the Wind (1939). And a few years before Jurassic Park changed movie effects forever, Roman and his father were in that space, filming Reeves, Hopkins, and the rest approaching on horseback an enormous looming castle… which was created by Michael Pangrazio and Craig Barron by painting it on matted glass.

“That is remarkable that that would still be done in our time,” Roman reflects. “It’s hard to imagine that will ever happen again, latent image matte painting. It’s a great way to do something, but you need to have the skill to do it… and that’s just sort of a dying art.”

Not that Roman doesn’t still indulge the old ways. Many of his modern collaborators adore miniatures, for example. “I work with Wes Anderson often, and he likes to use miniatures, and he does it pretty liberally,” Roman says. “So I think there’s always a place for that.”

But composite shots? One where you put a sky or castle in the same shot with a miniature and live-action over multiple passes?

“It’s not possible to imagine someone wishing to do that on an optical printer, because for one, they don’t really exist [anymore],” Roman says. “Number two, it degrades the image, and there’s a lot of reason not to.”

Like the in-camera effects that fascinated two generations of Coppolas, even the optical printing techniques they were largely forgoing in 1992 have become obsolete in the age of computer generated imagery. Even the backwards-looking Bram Stoker’s Dracula has a single CG effect, with Roman conceding the transformation at the end of the movie, where demonic Dracula turns back into Prince Vlad in death, was done with CGI. But as Roman says, it was used judiciously at the conclusion as “a real punctuation mark.”

And perhaps Bram Stoker’s Dracula is itself a punctuation mark. A last hurrah for antiquated styles of moviemaking that were long gone, or about to be, and a chance to open a magician’s bag of tricks to fool the eye into believing, as Francis says, “the earth doesn’t rotate at exactly the right speed” in the presence of a vampire. It’s why the movie has aged like fine wine (if you drink the stuff), and likely will continue to do so while many other effects-driven movies are practically timestamped by their imagery.

“It was unique to a time and place,” Roman says. “I’m sure other movies, other horror movies in particular, over time will represent a time and a place, but this seems to be the one that represents that time and place.”

That time, and perhaps that of a century earlier.

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sawyersoze-blog-blog · 6 years ago

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A Tribute to Horror Part 1 - Title Listings

0:00 - Generic Preview Screen

0:01 - “Do you like scary movies?” - Scream (1996)

0:04 - “Ki ki ki ma ma ma” - Friday the 13th (1979)

0:06 - Tales From the Crypt: Demon Knight (1995)

0:18 - Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955)

0:20 - The Cave (2005)

0:22 - Fright Night (1985)

0:26 - Taking Lives (2004)

0:26 - “This is not a test. This is your emergency broadcast system announcing the commencement of the annual Purge. Commencing at the siren, any and all crime, including murder, will be legal for twelve continuous hours. May God be with you all.” - The Purge (2013)

0:29 - Halloween (1978)

0:31 - New Nightmare (1994)

0:33 - Underworld (2003)

0:35 - Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)

0:37 - Urban Legend (1998)

0:38 - Penny Dreadful (2014)

0:39 - Basket Case (1982)

0:40 - Haven (2010)

0:41 - Phantoms (1998)

0:43 - Signs (2002)

0:44 - It (2017)

0:44 “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.” - The Thing (1982)

0:44 - Into the Grizzly Maze (2015)

0:45 - The Thing (1982)

0:47 - A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988)

0:49 - Play Misty For Me (1971)

0:50 - The Exorcist (1973)

0:51 - Charmed (1998)

0:52 - “Though no one official is prepared to comment, religious groups are calling it Judgment Day.” - Shaun of the Dead (2004)

0:53 - Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse (2015)

0:54 - Alien (1979)

0:56 - Scream (1996)

0:56 - “Where you gonna go? Where you gonna fun? Where you gonna hide?” - Body Snatchers (1993)

0:57 - Boo! A Madea Halloween (2016)

1:00 - Body Snatchers (1993)

1:00 - Scream 2 (1997)

1:01 - The Blob (1958)

1:02 - “That’s death approaching.” - 30 Days of Night (2007)

1:03 - Frankenstein (1931)

1:05 - Predator (1987)

1:06 - Flatliners (1990)

1:07 - Evil Dead 2 (1987)

1:08 - I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997)

1:10 - Needful Things (1993)

1:11 - The Others (2001)

1:12 - Arachnophobia (1990)

1:14 - “We all go a little mad sometimes.” - Psycho (1960)

1:14 - Psycho III (1986)

1:16 - Poltergeist (1982)

1:17 - The Blair Witch Project (1999)

1:19 - Amityville 3-D (1983)

1:20 - Phantasm IV: Oblivion (1998)

1:22 - Grimm (2011)

1:23 - Beetlejuice (1988)

1:24 - Night of the Creeps (1986)

1:26 - Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (1986)

1:31 - Phantasm (1979)

1:33 - Elvira: Mistress of the Dark (1988)

1:35 - Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning (1985)

1:38 - Cursed (2005)

1:39 - The Collector (2009)

1:40 - Laid to Rest (2009)

1:41 - Dracula (1931)

1:42 - “He’s gonna get you. He’s gonna get you. The boogeyman is coming!” - Halloween (1978)

1:42 - Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (1988)

1:43 - A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

1:44 - This Night I Will Possess Your Corpse (1967)

1:45 - Motel Hell (1980)

1:46 - Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (2006)

1:47 - Saw: The Final Chapter (2010)

1:48 - Wolfen (1981)

1:49 - Halloween (1978)

1:51 - Return of the Living Dead III (1993)

1:51 - “When there’s no more room in hell, the dead will walk the Earth.” - Dawn of the Dead (1985)

1:52 - The Omen (1976)

1:53 - Dead Snow (2009)

1:54 - The Wolfman (1941)

1:55 - House (1985)

1:56 - The Fog (1980)

1:57 - The Strangers (2008)

1:58 - Creepshow (1982)

1:59 - “Get inside and lock your doors. There’s something in the fog!” - The Fog (1980)

2:00 - The Mist (2007)

2:01 - Nosferatu (1922)

2:03 - Maniac Cop 2 (1990)

2:05 - [REC] 4: Apocalypse (2014)

2:06 - House of 1000 Corpses (2003)

2:07 - From Dusk Till Dawn (1996)

2:08 - The Final Girls (2015)

2:09 - Near Dark (1987)

2:10 - It (2017)

2:11 - Phantasm II (1988)

2:12 - The Wicker Man (1973)

2:13 - The Walking Dead (2010)

2:14 - Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984)

2:16 - The Gift (2000)

2:17 - Twin Peaks (1990)

2:17 - Deadly Friend (1986)

2:18 - Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982)

2:19 - You’re Next (2011)

2:20 - Sleepwalkers (1992)

2:22 - Saw IV (2007)

2:22 - Supernatural (2005)

2:24 - The Ring (2002)

2:24 - From Dusk Till Dawn (1996)

2:25 - Village of the Damned (1995)

2:26 - The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones (2013)

2:27 - Scream 2 (1997)

2:29 - Eight Legged Freaks (2002)

2:30 - Dawn of the Dead (1985)

2:30 - Scooby-Doo (2002)

2:32 - Night of the Demons 2 (1994)

2:33 - Ouija (2014)

2:33 - Misery (1990)

2:35 - Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (1989)

2:36 - The Prophecy (1995)

2:37 - Bless the Child (2000)

2:39 - Planet Terror (2007)

2:40 - Zombieland (2009)

2:41 - Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990)

2:42 - Wait Until Dark (1967)

2:43 - Black Christmas (1974)

2:45 - Madhouse (1974)

2:46 - Poltergeist II: The Other Side (1986)

2:47 - An American Werewolf in London (1981)

2:48 - An American Werewolf in Paris (1997)

2:49 - Teen Wolf (2011)

2:50 - Disturbia (2007)

2:52 - Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1996)

2:54 - Eight Legged Freaks (2002)

2:55 - Scream (1996)

2:56 - The Marsh (2006)

2:57 - Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1996)

2:59 - Willard (2003)

3:01 - Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)

3:02 - Wind Chill (2007)

3:04 - Predator (1987)

3:05 - Halloween: H20 (1998)

3:07 - Carrie (1976)

3:08 - The Curse of Chucky (2013)

3:09 - Final Destination (2000)

3:10 - The Blob (1988)

3:12 - Texas Chainsaw 3D (2013)

3:13 - Innocent Blood (1992)

3:14 - Bad Moon (1996)

3:15 - The Midnight Meat Train (2008)

3:17 - The X-Files (1993)

3:18 - Bad Moon (1996)

3:18 - Black Water (2007)

3:20 - Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (1988)

3:21 - The Conjuring (2013)

3:22 - Beetlejuice (1988)

3:23 - Supernatural (2005)

3:24 - Blade (1998)

3:25 - Flatliners (1990)

3:25 - Poltergeist II: The Other Side (1986)

3:26 - Zombieland (2009)

3:27 - Lifeforce (1985)

3:29 - When a Stranger Calls (1979)

3:31 - When a Strangers Calls (2006)

3:32 - Dexter (2006)

3:33 - The Walking Dead (2010)

3:35 - Halloween II (1981)

3:36 - The Frighteners (1996)

3:37 -The Devil’s Rejects (2005)

3:38 - A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988)

3:40 - Halloween (1978)

3:42 - Pulse (2006)

3:43 - The Shining (1980)

3:45 - A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

3:46 - Dead Snow (2009)

3:47 - Drag Me To Hell (2009)

3:48 - The Descent (2005)

3:51 - The Shining (1980)

3:53 - They Live (1988)

3:57 - The Sixth Sense (1999)

4:00 - 28 Days Later... (2002)

4:01 - Ginger Snaps (2000)

4:02 - Trick ‘r Treat (2007)

4:03 - Jeepers Creepers (2001)

4:04 - Dark Skies (2013)

4:05 - Tremors (1990)

4:07 - Flatliners (2017)

4:08 - Ghostbusters (1984)

4:10 - Urban Legend (1998)

4:11 - Wolf Creek (2005)

4:12 - Dead Silence (2007)

4:14 - Starship Troopers (1997)

4:17 - Se7en (1995)

4:18 - [REC] (2007)

4:19 - Friday the 13th: The Series (1987)

4:20 - Wolf (1994)

4:22 - Friday the 13th (1980)

4:23 - House of 1000 Corpses (2003)

4:25 - Feast (2005)

4:26 - Sleepwalkers (1992)

4:27 - Innocent Blood (1992)

4:28 - The Munsters (1964)

4:30 - The Orphanage (2007)

4:31 - Phantom of the Opera (1943)

4:32 - Candyman (1992)

4:34 - Little Evil (2017)

4:36 - Jaws (1975)

4:37 - Alien Vs. Predator (2004)

4:38 - Hellraiser (1987)

4:40 - Witchtrap (1989)

4:41 - White Noise (2005)

4:42 - The Birds (1963)

4:43 - It (1990)

4:45 - Innocent Blood (1992)

4:46 - Sleepaway Camp (1983)

4:47 - Cursed (2005)

4:48 - Zombieland (2009)

4:50 - Fallen (1998)

4:51 - Insidious (2010)

4:52 - Odd Thomas (2013)

4:53 - Stranger Things (2016)

4:54 - American Gothic (1995)

4:55 - Deadly Blessing (1981)

4:56 - Stigmata (1999)

4:58 - The Exorcist (1974)

5:00 - Leprechaun (1993)

5:01 - From Dusk Till Dawn (1996)

5:03 - American Horror Story (2011)

5:03 - The Silence of the Lambs (1991)

5:05 - Jeepers Creepers (2001)

5:06 - Deadly Blessing (1981)

5:07 - Zodiac (2007)

5:08 - Gremlins (1984)

5:10 - Oculus (2013)

5:12 - The Monster Squad (1987)

5:13 - Poltergeist (1982)

5:14 - The Ring (2002)

5:17 - Stigmata (1999)

5:18 - Phantasm (1979)

5:19 - It (1990)

5:21 - Bride of Frankenstein (1935)

5:22 - The Eye (2008)

5:23 - Drag Me To Hell (2009)

5:24 - Evil Dead II (1987)

5:25 - The Amityville Horror (1979)

5:27 - Nightwatch (1997)

5:28 - The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)

5:29 - You’re Next (2011)

5:30 - Halloween (1978)

5:31 - American Horror Story (2011)

5:32 - Sinister (2012)

5:33 - The Gift (2000)

5:36 - The Vampire Diaries (2009)

5:39 - The Reaping (2007)

5:40 - Supernatural (2005)

5:41 - The Midnight Hour (1985)

5:43 - Gothika (2003)

5:43 - Midnight, Texas (2017)

5:44 - Ju-On: The Grudge (2002)

5:46 - Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles (1994)

5:47 - Gremlins (1984)

5:49 - The ‘Burbs (1989)

5:51 - Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1996)

5:54 - Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992)

5:55 - The Lost Boys (1987)

5:56 - Grimm (2011)

5:58 - Saw (2004)

6:00 - I Am Legend (2007)

6:01 - Cujo (1983)

6:02 - Dreamscape (1984)

6:03 - Salem’s Lot (1979)

6:04 - Zombie (1979)

6:05 - Army of Darkness (1992)

6:06 - Stranger Things (2016)

6:07 - The Birds (1963)

6:08 - Night of the Living Dead (1968)

6:10 - Zombie (1979)

6:12 - A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)

6:13 - Creepshow (1982)

6:14 - Doom (2005)

6:15 - Psycho II (1983)

6:16 - Nightwatch (1997)

6:17 - The Walking Dead (2012)

6:17 - Scanners (1981)

6:18 - Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984)

6:19 - Saturn 3 (1980)

6:19 - Play Misty For Me (1971)

6:20 - Twin Peaks (1990)

6:21 - Dreamscape (1984)

6:22 - The Cave (2005)

6:23 - Orphan (2009)

6:24 - Once Bitten (1985)

6:25 - Needful Things (1993)

6:26 - Jason X (2001)

6:27 - Curtains (1983)

6:28 - Silent Rage (1982)

6:29 - The Lost Boys (1987)

6:29 - Witchboard (1986)

6:30 - The Walking Dead (2012)

6:31 - Supernatural (2005)

6:32 - Cabin Fever (2002)

6:33 - Rise: Blood Hunter (2007)

6:34 - A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)

6:35 - The Breed (2006)

6:36 - The Kiss (1988)

6:37 - Stranger Things (2016)

6:38 - Cold Prey (2006)

6:39 - Land of the Dead (2005)

6:40 - The Cabin in the Woods (2012)

6:41 - Walled In (2009)

6:42 - Twin Peaks (1990)

6:43 - Whisper (2007)

6:44 - The Walking Dead (2012)

6:45 - Darkness Falls (2003)

6:46 - Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse (2015)

6:47 - The Faculty (1998)

6:48 - A Tale of Two Sisters (2003)

6:49 - Frailty (2001)

6:49 - The Good Son (1993)

6:51 - New Nightmare (1994)

6:52 - The Devil’s Advocate (1997)

6:54 - Vampire in Brooklyn (1995)

6:55 - Grimm (2011)

6:57 - Orphan (2009)

6:57 - Bloody Reunion (2006)

6:58 - House (1985)

6:59 - Pumpkinhead (1988)

7:00 - Don’t Breathe (2016)

7:01 - Disturbia (2007)

7:02 - Tales From the Crypt: Demon Knight (1995)

7:03 - Death Becomes Her (1992)

7:05 - Vampires: Los Muertos (2002)

7:06 - The Host (2006)

7:07 - Knights of Badassdom (2013)

7:08 - Taking Lives (2004)

7:09 - Don’t Breathe (2016)

7:10 The Ward (2010)

7:11 - Once Bitten (1985)

7:12 - Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983)

7:13 - Jennifer’s Body (2009)

7:14 - Nymph (2014)

7:16 - In Dreams (1999)

7:17 - The Return of the Living Dead (1985)

7:18 - Venom (2005)

7:19 - The Conjuring 2 (2016)

7:20 - Child’s Play (1988)

7:23 - Grimm (2011)

7:24 - Legion (2010)

7:26 - Zombieland (2009)

7:27 - Pet Sematary (1989)

7:28 - The Faculty (1998)

7:29 - Critters 3 (1991)

7:30 - The Return of the Living Dead (1985)

7:31 - The Final Girls (2015)

7:32 - Night of the Demons (1988)

7:33 - House of Wax (2005)

7:35 - Dark Shadows (1966)

7:36 - Feast (2005)

7:38 - Critters 3 (1991)

7:40 - Wolf (1994)

7:41 - The Witches of Eastwick (1987)

7:42 - Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2012)

7:42 - The Faculty (1998)

7:43 - I Still Know What You Did Last Summer (1998)

7:44 - Puppetmaster (1989)

7:46 - The Stepfather (1987)

7:47 - Species (1995)

7:48 - The Return of the Living Dead (1985)

7:51 - Frankenhooker (1990)

7:52 - The Mummy’s Tomb (1942)

7:54 - Night of the Creeps (1986)

7:56 - Tombs of the Blind Dead (1972)

7:57 - It Follows (2014)

8:00 - Doom (2005)

8:02 - Fright Night (1985)

8:03 - Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1996)

8:04 - The Night Stalker (1972)

8:05 - Scanners (1981)

8:07 - The Howling (1981)

8:09 - The Others (2001)

8:10 - Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1996)

8:11 - Horror of Dracula (1958)

8:13 - Angel Heart (1987)

8:14 - The Lost Boys (1987)

8:15 - A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

8:16 - The Craft (1996)

8:17 - Rosemary’s Baby (1968)

8:19 - Dead Alive (1992)

8:20 - American Psycho (2000)

8:21 - V/H/S (2012)

8:23 - The Skeleton Key (2005)

8:24 - Stir of Echoes (1999)

8:26 - Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982)

8:26 - Boogeyman (2005)

8:27 - Haute Tension (2003)

8:28 - Silent Hill (2006)

8:28 - The Breed (2006)

8:29 - The Hills Have Eyes (2006)

8:30 - The Strangers (2008)

8:31 - Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones (2014)

8:32 - The Reaping (2007)

8:32 - The Fly (1986)

8:33 - Child’s Play 2 (1990)

8:34 - The Omen (1976)

8:35 - The Omen (2006)

8:36 - Grimm (2011)

8:37 - Firestarter (1984)

8:38 - Carrie (1976)

8:39 - Freddy Vs. Jason (2003)

8:40 - End of Days (1999)

8:41 - Final Destination (2000)

8:42 - The Monster Squad (1985)

8:43 - Teen Wolf (2011)

8:44 - Piranha (2010)

8:45 - The Messengers (2007)

8:46 - Saw: The Final Chapter (2010)

8:47 - Maximum Overdrive (1986)

8:48 - The Burning (1981)

8:48 - The Vampire Diaries (2009)

8:49 - The Conjuring (2013)

8:49 - House at the End of the Street (2012)

8:50 - Murder By Numbers (2002)

8:51 - Scream (1996)

8:52 - Tru Calling (2003)

8:54 - Children of the Corn (1984)

8:55 - The Craft (1996)

8:56 - I Saw the Devil (2010)

8:57 - Resident Evil (2002)

8:58 - Tucker and Dale Vs. Evil (2010)

8:59 - Sometimes They Come Back (1991)

9:00 - Visions (2015)

9:01 - Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988)

9:01 - The House on Sorority Row (1983)

9:03 - The Addams Family (1964)

9:04 - Lights Out (2016)

9:04 - I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997)

9:06 - My Bloody Valentine (2009)

9:07 - Children of the Corn (1984)

9:08 - House of the Dead (2003)

9:09 - House of Wax (2005)

9:10 - Scream (1996)

9:11 - Day of the Dead (1985)

9:12 - Re-Animator (1985)

9:12 - What Lies Beneath (2000)

9:13 - Primeval (2007)

9:13 - Paranormal Activity (2007)

9:14 - Dawn of the Dead (2005)

9:15 - Slither (2006)

9:16 - The Final Girls (2015)

9:17 - Paranormal Activity 2 (2010)

9:18 - Planet Terror (2007)

9:19 - Dylan Dog: Dead of Night (2010)

9:20 - The Babadook (2014)

9:21 - Tremors (1990)

9:22 - Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988)

9:23 - Slither (2006)

9:24 - The Town That Dreaded Sundown (1976)

9:25 - Valentine (2001)

9:26 - Vampires (1998)

9:27 - The Vampire Diaries (2011)

9:28 - Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2016)

9:29 - The Silence of the Lambs (1991)

9:30 - Ticks (1993)

9:31 - Valentine (2001)

9:32 - Hatchet III (2013)

9:33 - The House of the Devil (2009)

9:34 - Beetlejuice (1988)

9:35 - Supernatural (2005)

9:37 - Ghostbusters (1984)

9:38 - Freddy Vs. Jason (2003)

9:39 - Dog Soldiers (2002)

9:41 - Pet Sematary (1989)

9:42 - The Conjuring (2013)

9:43 - The Midnight Hour (1985)

9:44 - The Exorcist III (1990)

9:45 - Salem’s Lot (1979)

9:47 - The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005)

9:48 - Let the Right One In (2008)

9:48 - Phone (2002)

9:50 - Near Dark (1987)

9:51 - Killer Klowns From Outer Space (1988)

9:52 - Pet Sematary (1989)

9:53 - The Mummy (2017)

9:54 - Haunted (2002)

9:55 - Joy Ride (2001)

9:57 - Stir of Echoes (1999)

9:58 - Just Before Dawn (1981)

9:59 - Blade II (2002)

10:01 - Night Stalker (2005)

10:01 - Shaun of the Dead (2004)

10:03 - Halloween: Resurrection (2002)

10:04 - The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)

10:05 - Eden Lake (2008)

10:06 - Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988)

10:07 - Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)

10:09 - Creepshow (1982)

10:10 - Evil Dead II (1986)

10:12 - Twin Peaks (1990)

10:14 - The Hitcher (1986)

10:16 - A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988)

10:17 - In the Mouth of Madness (1994)

10:20 - Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982)

10:22 - 1408 (2007)

10:24 - Elvira: Mistress of the Dark (1988)

10:26 - Unfriended (2014)

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circe-poetica · 6 years ago

Text

Cernunnos

Cernnunos - Ancient Celtic God

by J. M Reinbold

Cernnunos Sleeps (2) The Old God sleeps down in the dark, moist, odorous underfoot, Waiting for us To put down our roots.

The God In The Wild Wood (3) At the Sacred Centre, in the Grove of all Worlds, He sits with legs crossed beneath an ancient Oak. Entranced, connecting the three worlds Earth, Sea, and Sky, and the worlds behind the worlds, the god and the Great Tree are One, His immense limbs widespread, stretching into distant sky and starry space.

His massive trunk, spine of the Middleworld, is the heart of the Ancient Forest around which all Life, all worlds turn; His limitless root web growing deep into secret earth and Underworld; above him the great turning circles of Sun, Moon, and Stars. All around Him subtle movements of the leaves in melodious, singing air; everywhere the pulsing, gleaming Green awash in drifts of gold and shimmering mist; beneath Him soft moss creeping over the dark, deep, moist of spawning earth. At His feet is the great Cauldron from which the Five Rivers Flow.

Through the forest stillness they come, whispering wings and secret glide, rustling leaves, and silent step, the first Ancestors, the Oldest Animals, to gather around Him: Blackbird, Keeper of the Gate; Stag of Seven Tines, Master of Time; Ancient Owl, Crone of the Night; Eagle, Lord of the Air, Eye of the Sun; and Salmon, Oldest of the Old, Wisest of the Wise leaping from the juncture of the Five Springs. He welcomes them and blesses them, and they honour Him, Cernnunos of the nut brown skin and lustrous curling hair; the god whose eyes flash star-fire, whose flesh is a reservoir of ancient waters, His cells alive with Mystery, original primeval essence. Naked, phallus erect, He wears a crown of antlers limned in green fire and twined with ivy. In his right hand the Torq of gold, testament of his nobility and his sacred pledge; in his left hand the horned serpent symbol of his sexual power sacred to the Goddess. Cernnunos in His Ancient Forest, His Sacred Temple, His Holy Grove, Cernnunos and His children dream the Worlds.

The Origins of Cernnunos Cernnunos, a nature and fertility god, has appeared in a multitude of forms and made himself known by many names to nearly every culture throughout time. He is perhaps best known to us now in his Celtic aspects of the untamed Horned God of the Animals and the leaf-covered Green Man, Guardian of the Green World, but He is much older. Cernnunos worked his magic when the first humans were becoming. Our prehistoric ancestors knew him as a shape-shifting, shamanic god of the Hunt. He is painted in caves and carved everywhere, on cliffs, stones, even in the Earth Herself. Humans sought to commune with Him and receive his power and that of his animal children by dressing themselves in skins and skulls, adorning themselves with feathers and bones, by dancing His dance. Yet He is older still. In the time of the dinosaurs, the great swamps and subtropical forests of cycads, seed ferns and conifers, and later in the time of the deciduous plants and flowers, when the pollinators came and the first tiny mammals were creeping up from beneath the ground, Cernnunos was the difference and diversity of life, the frenzy and ferment of evolution. But, He is much older still. He is oldest of the Ancient Ones, first born of the Goddess. At the time of First Earth, Cernnunos grew in the womb of the All Mother, Anu, waiting to be born, to come forth to initiate the everlasting, unbroken Circle of Life.

The Many Faces & Natures Of Cernnunos Cernnunos, as The Horned God, Lord of the Animals is portrayed as human or half human with an antler crown. Though he wears a human face his energy and his concerns are non-human. He is protector of animals and it is Cernnunos who is the law-sayer of hunting and harvest. While He is recognized most often through his connection to animals and our own deeply buried, dimly recalled, instinctual animal natures, Cernnunos is also a tree, forest, and vegetation god in his foliate aspect of The Green Man, Guardian of the Green World. His branching antlers symbolize the spreading treetops of the forest as well as his animal nature. As Master of the Sacrificial Hunt, His is the life that is given in service of new life. His wisdom is that the old must pass away to make way for the new.

In his Underworld aspect Cernnunos is The Dark Man, the god who dwells in the House Beneath the Hill, the Underworld. He is the one who comforts and sings the souls of the dead to their rest in the Summerlands of the Otherworld. Cernnunos, as Master of the Wild Hunt, who pursues the souls of evil doers, is not associated with a biblical or even modern morality, but with the protection and continuance of the Land and Nature and the spirits that dwell therein.

Pan, lusty Satyr god of the Greeks is another aspect of the Horned God. ‘Pan is a proud celebration of the liberating power of male erotic energy in its purest and most beautiful form.’ (5) He is portrayed as playful and cunning, but He also has a darker, dangerous nature. The panic or terror often associated with Pan is not related to human violence, but to the Life and Death of the natural world. In this form he is called the "All Devourer." However, Pan, as Protector of the Wilderness and as a god prone to fits of madness and violence, can induce panic or wild fear in those who threaten his domain.

Cernnunos appears again in Elizabethan England, and is mentioned by Shakespeare, as Herne the Hunter, the demon and guardian of Windsor Forest, the Royal Wood. In this aspect it is said that he appears as Guardian of the Realm during times of National emergency and crisis. In modern times he is often called the God of the Witches and embodies uncorrupted masculine energy. A masculine energy that is fully-developed and in balance with the natural world

Cernnunos & The Sacred Wheel Of The Year We celebrate and honour Cernnunos as the Green Man in spring and summer, the light half of the year and as the Dark One or the Dark God in autumn and winter, the dark half of the year. He appears in spring as the young Son, child of the Goddess, embodiment of the budding, growing, greening world. In summer He is the Green Man, vibrant, pulsing with life essence, the consort of the Green Lady Goddess. It is in autumn, the dying time, that perhaps we see the Horned God most clearly. He is the sacrificed one, who, wounded unto death begins his journey to the Underworld, returning to the Earth from which he was born and where the seeds of light released from his decaying body will quicken Her womb with a new Sun once again.

The Path To Cernnunos The path to Cernnunos is both through the natural world: seeking out the wild places and a deep understanding of the processes of growth, bounty, decay, rest, and rebirth, and through Otherworld journeys to the Middleworld forest of which he is guardian. One may experience this both actually and symbolically by following the path that disappears over the horizon into the distance and moves away from the ‘civilized’ world and into the heart of the Wild Wood. Often experienced as traveling away from the centre to the perimeter, this is in actuality a return to the Centre. When the seeker reaches the god's forest the track ends, and her/his pathways are found by other means. After entering the Wildwood the seeker cannot be followed, nor can s/he follow another. Whatever pathways are discovered disappear in passing, and the Wood is trackless once again, for each one's way is different. In the Forest of Cernnunos there is a stillness, an otherworldly feeling, as if one has passed out of time. Here the mind is not supreme. It is instinct, the innate wisdom of the body that guides us to Him.

The Way Of Cernnunos The way of Cernnunos is the way of the shaman or any person who truly seeks Communion with the Land. Yet, one cannot speak of Cernnunos without speaking of Anu or Don, the All Mother who gave Him birth. The way of Cernnunos is through the One. Like Her, Cernnunos is a Being or Power that existed before time and before the gods, the Shining Ones. Together they are First Mother and First Father, All Mother and All Father who brought the gods into being. Limitless and everlasting His energy permeates Her matter through every aspect of life to the sub-atomic. As Lord of the Dance He is present in the billions and billions of infinitely small movements that make up the seemingly chaotic Dance of Life, the Dance of Making and Unmaking. He is truly the Life that never, never dies, for even as nothingness he is self-originating. He is triple as She is triple. He is Cernnunos: Father, Son, and Wild Spirit.

Cernnunos Chant Cern-nu-noh-oh-oh-oh-os Stag Horned Hunter, Hunted One Join Us Now Cer-nu-noh-oh-oh-oh-os Greenwood Lord of Life and Death Join Us Now Cern-nu-noh-oh-oh-oh-os Herne and Pan and Every Man Join Us Now (6)

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF SOURCES Anderson, William. Green Man: The Archetype of our Oneness with the Earth. London: HarperCollins Publishers Limited, 1990. Carr-Gomm, Philip & Stephanie. The Druid Animal Oracle: Working with the Sacred Animals of the Druid Tradition. New York: Simon & Schuster Inc., 1994. Conway, D. J. By Oak, Ash, & Thorn: Modern Celtic Shamanism. St. Paul, MN: Llewellyn Publications, 1995. Corrigan, Ian. The Portal Book: Teachings and Works of Celtic Witchcraft. Cleveland Heights, OH: Chameleon Press, 1996. Knight, Sirona. Greenfire: Making Love With the Goddess. St. Paul, MN: Llewellyn Publications, 1995. Matthews, Caitlín. Singing the Soul Back Home: Shamanism In Everyday Living. Shaftesbury, Dorset, United Kingdom: Element Books Limited, 1995. Matthews, John. The Celtic Shaman: A Handbook. Shaftesbury, Dorest, United Kingdom: Element Books Limited, 1991. Matthews, Caitlín and John. The Encyclopædia of Celtic Wisdom. Shaftesbury, Dorset: Element Books Limited, 1994. Stewart, R. J. The Way of Merlin: The Prophet, the Goddess, and the Land ¬ Techniques of Transformation from the Merlin Tradition. London: The Aquarian Press, 1991. Zell, Morning Glory. ‘Pan.’ Green Egg: A Journal of Awakening Earth Vol. 27, No. 104, Spring 1994: 12-13, 49.

https://www.druidry.org/library/gods-goddesses/cernnunos-ancient-celtic-god

https://youtu.be/n2sCerl-MJA

#cernunnos #celtic #god #animals #goddess

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skooterskootyskoot · 4 years ago

Photo

Because the print is so small (especially the years) here is each of the states transcribed (plus how many movies for each state)

Alaska: 3 30 Days of night (2007) The Fourth Kind (2009) Claws (1977)

Washington: 4 The Changeling (1980) The Tall Man (2012) The Ring (2002) Rose Red (2002)

Oregon: 7 Phantasm (1979) The Ward (2010) Hear No Evil (1993) Just Before The Dawn (1981) Mr. Brooks (2007) The Possessed (1977) Unhinged (1983)

Arizona: 7 Psycho (1960) The Prophecy (1995) Undead or Alive (2007) Haunted (1977) It Came from Outer Space (1953) Blood of Dracula's Castle (1969) Tarantula (1955)

Nevada: 6 Tremors (1990) The Stand (1994) Fright Night (2011) Hills Have Eyes (1977) Las Vegas Serial Killer (1986) The Beast of Yucca Flats (1961)

New Mexico: 6 The Hills Have Eyes (2006) The Hitcher (2007) Them! (1954) Unearthed (2007) John Carpenter's Vampires (1998) The Black Scorpion (1957)

Idaho: 1 Idaho Transfer (1973)

Wyoming: 1 Joyride (2001)

Montana: 1 Alien Abduction: Incident in Lake County (1998)

North Dakota: 2 Leprechaun (1993) The Messengers (2007)

South Dakota: 1 Beast from Haunted Cave (1959)

Nebraska: 3 Children of the Corn (1984) Hex (1973) Zombie Strippers (2008)

Minnesota: 5 Jennifer's Body (2009) Madness (2010) The Believers (1987) Someone's Knocking at the Door (2009) The Stranger Within (1990)

Iowa: 4 The Crazies (2010) Lights Camera Kill (2004) Through the Night (2007) Fell (2010)

Missouri: 2 You're Next (2011) The Sleeper (2012)

Ohio: 5 Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) The Faculty (1998) Trick R Treat (2007) Babysitter Massacre (2013) The Dead Next Door (1989)

Michigan: 6 The Crow (1994) It Follows (2013) The Carrier (1988) Mr. Jingles (2006) Exit 33 (2011) The Demon Love (1987)

Indiana: 2 Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2012) Savage Fury (1985)

Illinois: 6 Halloween (1978) Child's Play (1988) Candyman (1992) Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986) The Relic (1997) Alligator (1980)

Wisconsin: 5 Dawn of the Dead (2004) The Giant Spider Invasion (1975) Dahmer (2002) Black Cadillac (2003) Bog (1979)

Washington D.C.: 3 The Exorcist (1973) The Omen (1976) The Werewolf of Washington (1973)

Pennsylvania: 9 Night of the Living Dead (1968) The Sixth Sense (1999) Dawn of the Dead (1978) The Blob (1958) Signs (2002) Sinister (2012) Wicked Little Things (2006) Mirrors (2008) Taking Lives (2004)

Maine: 7 Salem's Lot (1979) Silver Bullet (1985) Pet Sematary (1989) The Mist (2007) Night of Dark Shadows (1971) Lake Placid (1999) The Uninvited (2009)

New Hampshire: 5 The Dead Zone (1983) Yellow Brick road (2010) The Mouth of Madness (1994) The Sacrifice (2005) The Plague (2006)

New Jersey: 6 Friday the 13th (1980) Alice Sweet Alice (1976) The Toxic Avenger (1984) The Prowler (1951) Mothers Day (1980) Christmas Evil (1980)

Vermont: 5 What Lies Beneath (2000) Wolf (1994) Dark August (1976) Bless the Child (2000) The Whisperer in the Darkness (2011)

Virginia: 3 Mama (2013) Cherry Falls (2000) Excision (2012)

Delaware: 5 Survival of the Dead (2009) Head Case (2007) I Can See You (2008) Redneck Zombies (1987) Stone House (2006)

Maryland: 5 The Blair Witch Project (1999) Silence of the Lambs (1991) Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (2006) The Boogeyman (1980) Fiend (1980)

West Virginia: 5 Wrong Turn (2003) Mothman Prophecies (2002) Tucker & Dale vs. Evil (2011) Silent Hill (2006) Dark Harvest (2004)

Massachusetts: 6 Jaws (1975) Session 9 (2001) Shutter Island (2010) The Boston Strangler (1968) Re-Animator (1985) The Dunwich Horror (1970)

Tennessee: 6 The Evil Dead (1981) An American Haunting (2005) The Cursed (2010) The Curse (1987) Dear Dead Delilah (1972) From a Whisper to a Scream (1987)

North Carolina: 7 The Descent (2005) Carrie (1976) Pumpkinhead (1988) I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) Maximum Overdrive (1986) Final Exam (1981) The Boneyard (1991)

Rhode Island: 4 The Conjuring (2013) Don't Be Afraid of the Dark (2010) Dead & Buried (1981) Inkubus (2011)

Connecticut: 7 Gothika (2003) The Haunting in Connecticut (2009) Let's Scare Jessica to Death (1971) Last House on the Left (1972) The Innkeepers (2011) I Spit on your Grave (1978) Thinner (1996)

South Carolina: 2 Slither (2006) Voodoo Dawn (1991)

Kansas: 3 Critters (1986) Night Screams (1987) The Beast from the Beginning of Time (1965)

Kentucky: 3 Return of the Living Dead (1985) Abby (1974) Asylum of Satan (1972)

Oklahoma: 5 Near Dark (1987) Bug (2006) Terror at Tenkiller (1986) Revenge (1964) [Could not confirm setting] The Ripper (1985)

Arkansas: 5 The Town that Dreaded Sundown (1976) The Legend of Boggy Creek (1972) The Day it Came to Earth (1977) Encounter with the Unknown (1972) Wheeler (1975)

Georgia: 6 Deliverance (1972) The Walking Dead (TV) (2010-) Slaughter (2009) 2001 Maniacs (2005) Squirm (1976) The Slayer (1982)

New York: 9 The Amityville Horror (1979) Rosemary's Baby (1968) The Burning (1981) Jacobs Ladder (1990) American Psycho (2000) Sleepaway Camp (1983) Maniac (1980) He Knows You're Alone (1980) The Sentinel (1977)

Florida: 6 Day of the Dead (1985) Jeepers Creepers (2001) The Screwfly Solution (2006) Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things (1972) Impulse (1984) Blood Feast (1963)

Louisiana: 6 The Beyond (1981) Interview With the Vampire (1994) The Skeleton Key (2005) The Last Exorcism (2010) Cat People (1982) Hatchet (2006)

Texas: 8 Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) From Dusk Till Dawn (1996) Devils Rejects (2005) Grindhouse (2007) Bubba Ho-Tep (2002) Borderland (2007) Blood Simple (1984) Bats (1999)

Mississippi: 3 Straw Dogs (2011) The Premonition (1976) Southern Shockers (1985)

Alabama: 4 Dead Birds (2004) Laid to Rest (2009) House (2008) Body Snatchers (1993)

Utah: 5 Carnival of Souls (1962) Don't go into the Woods (1961) Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984) Ice Spiders (2007) The Car (1977)

Colorado: 5 The Shining (1980) Misery (1990) Alien Vs. Predator: Requiem (2007) Snowbeast (1977) The Boogens (1981)

Hawaii: 4 A Perfect Getaway (2009) Black Widow (1987) Final Examination (2003) Snakes on a Plane (2006)

California: 13 Scream (1996) The Lost Boys (1987) The Fog (1980) Night of the Demons (1988) Poltergeist (1982) The Birds (1963) Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) When a Stranger Calls (1979) Paranormal Activity (2007) The Howling (1981) Vacancy (2007) Zombieland (2009) Zodiac (2007)

This map by Andrew Brick shows which state various horror movies took place in.

#Horror movies #horror #trivia #trivia facts #transcription #Horror movie trivia #movies #horror movie #I got SUPER bored at work #this took forever #had to cross reference every title to make sure i read the years right #the kicker is that I don't even like horror movies #i enjoy them.... Vicariously

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elizadoolittlethings · 6 years ago

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"The Man in Black s1-3"

THE MAN IN BLACK – YOUR APPOINTMENT WITH FEAR FEBRUARY 5, 2017 GREYDOGTALES 1 COMMENT

Have you met the Man in Black? Has he whispered to you on the airwaves? Your radio is dead, and yet his voice is still there inside you, entreating you to join him… Yes, our Voice of Horror series is back, with a hero of the genre!

Long before Johnny Cash, the Tommy Lee Jones films or even Westworld, there was a single man who embodied the concept of the forbidding stranger, the archivist of the dark – the Man in Black. Can you recall his name, or remember his sepulchral tones? No? Then we shall help. Treats are in store, including some links to where you can listen to, or watch, him in action.

Along the way we bump into Shirley Jackson, Hammer Horror, GK Chesterton, Edgar Allan Poe, Dr Who, Sid James of Carry On fame and S T Joshi, amongst others. Is that enough names yet? For today’s article we must take you back to the days when you made radio shows by rubbing two sticks together, so a few reminders may be in order.

Dyall M for Murder

Valentine Dyall (1908-1985) was the true Man in Black, and it came about because of the BBC. In the 1940s and 50s, they aired a wonderful radio series called Appointment with Fear. This was a series of dramatised horror stories which both drew on the classics and also invited new stories from contemporary writers. Each started with an introduction from the narrator, the Man in Black, either teasing the listener about the nature of the tale to come, or warning them of the terror that awaited them.

Each show was about half an hour long. When Dyall started speaking, you knew you were in the right place. His voice was dark and distinctive (some called him the British Vincent Price), and he had a resonance which just oozed menace. Occasionally the actual story was less interesting than his narration. Between 1943 and 1955 he introduced nine series of terrifying tales, with one more series being narrated by his father, Franklin Dyall. He also narrated a single series of the Man in Black in 1949.

Before we say more about Appointment with Fear, we should mention Dyall’s wider horror credentials. He had a number of parts in film and TV over the years, in addition to his radio work, and his career was packed with the sort of media trivia that we so love.

For our younger listeners, Dyall played the Black Guardian in Dr Who between 1979 and 1983.

“The Black Guardian is an anthropomorphic personification of the forces of entropy and chaos, the counterpart of the White Guardian, a personification of order. The two Guardians balance out the forces in the universe, although the Black Guardian seems to desire to upset the balance in favour of chaos and evil while the White Guardian prefers to maintain the status quo.” (Wiki)

He took the lead role in individual episodes and in three linked serials, which some call the Black Guardian trilogy, playing opposite Peter Davison as the Doctor.

Well Hammered

We mentioned Dyall’s memorable voice, and in Hammer Horror’s film Lust for a Vampire (1971), the character Count Karnstein, played by Mike Raven, was dubbed by Valentine Dyall. He also appeared as the caretaker Mr Dudley in the outstanding 1963 film version of Shirley Jackson’s novel The Haunting of Hill House. Sometimes just known as The Haunting, this is by far the best adaptation, and still sends shivers up the spine.

Going further back, he played a key part, Jethro Keane, in the wonderful City of the Dead (1960). The film was known as Horror Hotel in the States, and is the tale of a young student who seeks information on witchcraft for her college studies. What could possibly go wrong when she travels alone to a mist-shrouded New England village to ask if there are any witches about? Especially when your professor is an intense Christopher Lee, and the man who gets into your car is Valentine Dyall? The usual hilarity ensues…

Two film oddities in Dyall’s career remain worth noting. The first is the attempt to transfer the Man in Black idea to film, again by Hammer. The Man in Black (1949) was a British thriller film which starred Sid James. Adapted from Appointment with Fear, Dyall provided the introduction to the film, as “The Story-Teller”. Sid James, who rose to fame in the British Carry On films, plays a straight role for once, with none of his yuck-yuck dirty laughter. It received mixed reviews, but is worth a look.

His other role, which links to our interest in detectives and will lead us back to the radio, was as Dr Morelle in Dr Morelle: The case of the Missing Heiress. This was another Hammer Film, and was based on the popular long running BBC radio series written by Ernest Dudley.

Ernest Dudley (1908-2006) wrote many tales of Morelle, a psychiatrist with an interest in criminology. In the radio series, the part of Dr Morelle was taken by the silky-voiced Cecil Parker, a stalwart of British period films. It’s well worth seeking out the old-time radio recordings of A Case for Dr Morelle, as the sleuthing doctor is incredibly annoying and condescending to his secretary, Miss Frayne. They’re greatly enjoyable in a sort of ‘God, I want to slap this man’ sort of way (and for some unlikely, if not implausible, deductions).

Appointment with Fear

So we’re glued to our radios again, and Appointment with Fear. See, we know where we are – sort of. John Dickson Carr, the prolific mystery writer, was responsible for a number of the original stories and for many of the adaptations of classic tales. Given the number of series, we won’t list them all, but here are some of the adaptations which Dyall introduced:

The Pit and the Pendulum – Edgar Allan Poe

The Cask of Amontillado – Edgar Allan Poe

A Watcher by the Dead – Ambrose Bierce

The Middle Toe Of The Right Foot – Ambrose Bierce

The Monkey’s Paw – W W Jacobs

Oh Whistle And I’ll Come To You, My Lad – M R James

The Beast with Five Fingers – W F Harvey

Markheim – Robert Louis Stevenson

The Hands of Nekamen – Kathleen Hyatt

The Yellow Wallpaper – Charlotte Parkins Gilman

Mrs Amworth – E F Benson

John Dickson Carr (1906-1977) was an American, and yet his detective and mystery stories were predominantly English tales, perhaps due to his English wife and the time he spent there in the thirties and forties.

He was the creator of Dr Gideon Fell, a larger-than life investigator modelled on the author G K Chesterton. Fell is a great figure, an eccentric, corpulent cape-flapping fellow – an amateur sleuth who sees through the mistakes of the authorities. He too was made into a radio series, this time played by another classic British actor, Donald Sinden.

Carr and Dr Fell probably deserve their own article on greydogtales, so we’ll keep this short. There were 23 Dr Fell novels, and Carr wrote many other detective mysteries besides. He also wrote an authorised biography of Arthur Conan Doyle (1949), and with Doyle’s youngest son, Adrian, wrote Sherlock Holmes stories for the collection The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes (1954). Whilst musing on this, we were surprised to find that S T Joshi, a major figure in weird fiction criticism and a Lovecraftian scholar, produced a book-length critical study of Carr, John Dickson Carr: A Critical Study (1990).

Most of the recordings of Appointment with Fear have been lost, but one of the few surviving episodes is an original Carr tale, The Clock Strikes Eight, originally aired 05/18/1944.

Another example is And the Deep Shuddered, written by Monckton Hoffe, an Irish screenwriter, and aired 20/11/45, which can also be found on Youtube.

The Rest of the Man in Black

After Dyall, others took on the voice of the Man in Black. Revived as Fear on Four, the concept ran for five series on BBC Radio 4 (1988-1992), with Edward DeSouza in the key role. A fifth series was broadcast in 1997, but with no Man in Black.

The most recent revival was with Mark Gatiss reprising the role. There were four radio series featuring Gatiss between 2009 and 2011. Whilst not as sepulchral as Dyall, it’s fair to say that Gatiss does have the ability to make ordinary things sound quite unnerving, so he wasn’t a bad choice. We covered Gatiss’ recent audio version of Dracula here last year:

Come Freely, Go Safely: Dracula Returns, Scott Handcock Rules!

Although we must have missed it, apparently The Return of the Man In Black was broadcast by Radio 4 as two Archive Hour specials in October 1998. The documentaries were presented by the acclaimed horror writer Ramsey Campbell, and covered the history of fear and suspense on BBC radio. During the programmes, two complete episodes were presented: The Pit and the Pendulum (from Appointment With Fear) and The Beast With Five Fingers (from Fear On 4).

Buried under names and trivia, we leave you with Valentine Dyall, and his reading of The Pit and the Pendulum.

Sleep well…

wish i could listen

#MG #mark gatiss #the man in black s1-3 #audio link #the genius in action

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serendipitousrambles · 7 years ago

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Tightrope

Hand in my hand and you promised to never let go We’re walking the tightrope High in the sky We can see the whole world down below We’re walking the tightrope Never sure, will you catch me if I should fall? Well, it’s all an adventure That comes with a breathtaking view

1990

El leaned against the wall in the cabin, head in her hands as she curled on the floor. Tears streamed down her face, but the one person she wanted to talk to most, she couldn’t. Not that he would want to talk to her.

Hopper lightly knocked on her door, but she didn’t reply. He tried again but she muttered a quiet “go away.” before quickly adding a soft “please”.

He sighed and let her be. Hopper hated seeing her like this. It was so rare that when it did happen - the only ever time being when they were 16 - he didn’t know what to do.

El wiped the small stream of blood from her nose and sobbed.

They’d promised, promised that they’d figure things out together. But when Mike got accepted to Boston it all changed. He’d wanted to stay in Indiana with her, but El had insisted he couldn’t stay back because of her. She would graduate next year anyway, but she didn’t know if she’d be going to university.

All she knew was she wanted to be with Mike. But he had been busy, hadn’t called her or written her or anything in weeks now. El knew he had a lot going on, but it didn’t excuse not being able to spend five minutes to tell her he was ok.

She’d promised herself she’d never spy on him again. She didn’t need to because he was always with her, and when he wasn’t she trusted him. More than anyone she’d ever trusted before (except maybe Hopper). But it had gotten too painful. The worry and fear was eating her slowly from inside and broke. It felt wrong, but she couldn’t stop herself.

El had gone into the void for the first time in years, searching for Mike. When she saw him, she melted slightly, missing his tall frame and dark curls and freckles. But when she got closer, she saw him with a group of people. He was laughing, a drink of some kind in his hand. El stepped closer to him, trying to listen to what he was saying.

He was at a party? But he hadn’t had time to call her in weeks? This wasn’t like him. Almost as an instinct she called out his name and he stopped laughing as if he could almost feel her presence.

“El?” He whispered and the group of people stopped and stared at him.

“Mike.” She reached out her hand to stroke his cheek but he immediately faded again into mist, leaving her crying and screaming out for him.

El threw the blindfold off and ran into her room where she was now, crying. It hurt. It felt like a betrayal, as if those promises hadn’t meant anything. She thought he’d always be there to catch her, but now she just wasn’t sure.

El simply curled up on the floor and fell asleep, Mike’s face haunting her dreams.

El awoke the next morning, eyes smudged and hair stuck to her cheek. She felt rotten, her head hurting and her chest aching.

She stumbled into the bathroom to splash cold water on her face, but it couldn’t stop the memories of what she’d seen last night. She’d seen that Mike was clearly living his life without her, forgetting her.

She made her way back to her room, climbed back into bed and pulled the covers around her chin. Her old teddy bear was tightly held against her chest and she buried her face into the old fur. Hopper knocked on her door again before he left for work but she turned away, pretending to be asleep. At some point she had actually fallen asleep and she didn’t know how long she’d been out for when she heard a light tapping on her window.

She bolted upright, looking around before slowly pulling back the curtains.

“Mike?” She rubbed her sleepy eyes, sure they playing tricks on her. But he pressed his hand up against the glass and she knew it was real. He was here.

She opened the window and he climbed through. El threw her arms around his neck before remembering she was upset with him, pushing him away.

He looked hurt, confused why she was acting like this.

“What are you doing here?” She said, folding her arms across her chest.

“I missed you.” He said like it was the most obvious thing in the world. “I had this feeling last night, like you were there…I can’t explain it. But I just knew I had to come home, needed to see you, know you were alright. I don’t care if I had to miss class because…” he reached out and brushed her cheek but she didn’t respond to his touch, his hand dropping again. “Because I miss you. And, I love you, El. You know that.”

She shrugged and met his eyes. “You didn’t call.” Her voice was quiet, strained almost. “You promised.”

Mike shuffled awkwardly on his feet. “I’ve been busy. Between classes and my job. I’ve hardly got any time anymore.”

“You had time for a party….but not time for five minutes to speak to me. I just wanted to know you were ok. To hear your voice.”

Mike sighed, running a hand through his hair. “I know I should’ve called. I was a mouthbreather. But I hadn’t had a night off in weeks and my college friends dragged me out.”

“Why? Why are you working yourself so hard?” El felt tears in her eyes.

“I can’t tell you…” he whispered.

“Friends don’t lie. Boyfriends don’t break promises.”

“It was supposed to be a surprise.”

“Surprise?”

Mike slowly reached for her hand. El didn’t fight it. She’d missed him so much.

“I’ve been working every night, trying to make enough money so I can, can buy an apartment.”

El was confused. “But you have a dorm room? Why would you need an apartment?”

“Because, because when you graduate, I thought maybe…you know if you want to… maybe…move in with me?”

He gave her a nervous smile trying to read her unreadable face. Mike began his nervous mumble, a habit he still hadn’t lost.

“We’d have our own place, we’d be together every day…but if it’s too much we don’t have to. I just can’t stand not being there every day. And maybe I don’t know where I want to go in my life but I know that you’re the only thing that’s certain and -”

“Mike.” She let it all sink in. He hadn’t been ignoring her, he’d been too busy earning money so they could be together. El couldn’t hold back the smile because he was planning a future, their future. She’d always had the idea that Mike would be part of it, but he was really trying to make it a reality. It was hard to stay mad at him.

“El, I’m sorry I didn’t call. I hate that I didn’t. I’ve just been so busy but I know I shouldn’t be too busy for you. I just want to be able to give you everything you deserve…”

She was the one to brush his cheek, her hand lightly brushing over his freckles. El slowly leaned forward, pulling him down to meet her, kissing him gently.

“I’m mad you didn’t call.” She said, pressing her forehead to his. “But…yes…”

“Yes?”

“Yes, I’ll move in with you.”

Mike picked her up in his arms and spun her around, El laughing and burying her head into his shoulder.

“You know I’m always going to be there for you. Even when I’m not physically there.” Mike set her down. “I messed up but it’s never going to happen again because you’re the most important thing in my life.”

“I know.” She brushed his hair from his face. “You’ll always be there to catch me if I fall.”

#mileven #kind of an au #future au i guess #angst #fluff #mike wheeler #eleven #stranger things #still not over the greatest showman soundtrack

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bvsterkeatcn-blog · 7 years ago

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nitrateglow replied to your post: 4, 14, 23, 29, 44, 66

Oh my gosh, could you share your experiences with spirits?

Certainly! It got kinda long so I’m putting it under a read more-

So there have been a fair amount over the years, but I’ll just share the most significant ones.

I have sooooo many stories that happened at my job. For starters I work at a hospital on the overnight shift - so I’m there for twelve hours from 630 in the evening until 7 in the morning. If you want to experience a haunting, hang out at a hospital overnight, I guarantee you at some point you will experience something. The first three years I was there I worked on the mother-baby unit, which is a combined postpartum care ward and newborn nursery. Now most people wouldn’t expect that particular kind of unit to have activity, however there are a few things to consider here. 1) There’s many that believe these units end up with activity because spirits that are stuck in our world are somehow attracted to the new life/the positive energy in these areas which tbh makes sense to me but I don’t pretend to be an expert. 2) My hospital has been remodeled many times over the years, with the women’s care wards being in the original building, and in very close proximity to where the former ER was, AKA where many people died in the early years of the hospital (the ER was moved to the new building in the 1990s). 3) Its thankfully rare, but there have sadly been deaths in that area - mostly babies who were either born too early, died in utero, or something went wrong in delivery - and there has also been at least one instance I know of where a mother passed when something went wrong during a c-section, although that happened before my time.

So getting into the actual stories that happened on that ward now that you have some backstory. When I first started working there, I started seeing a woman in a patient gown. There was nothing significant about that to me, obviously. It was a postpartum ward, I was always seeing the new mothers walking around the halls, so at first I didn’t even realize it was a a spirit. It struck me as odd that she kept walking up towards the desk but never stopped to ask me anything (I’m a secretary, so usually when people come by my desk it’s for a reason), but I figured she was just strolling I would let her be. But then a few shifts later I saw her again, which had me starting to be like ????? because post-delivery patients are only there for four days, absolute max, and that’s only if they had a c-section. So I asked some of the nurses who this patient was and the first thing they asked me was which room it looked like she had come out of, and when I told them, and then described her to them (she was fair with long dark hair brushed over her shoulders, wearing a patient gown), they informed me that both one of the former nurses as well as a maintenance worker had seen her in the rocking chair of the room I had been seeing her come out of. I worked on that unit from April of 2014 until December of 2016 and I saw her several times a month the whole time I was there.

Also on that ward was the Shower Incident™. Around the corner from the nurses station/my desk, there was a room that we regularly would have reports of activity in. The patients would report seeing figures in there and hearing things, nurses had heard their names called, the call bell would go off with no patient even in the room at all. Anyways, one night we were set to get an admission in that room, and our techs were crazy busy so I offered to help her set up the room (she was also scared to go into that room alone because of the aforementioned reasons). While we were carrying the supplies into the room we heard water running in the bathroom, went in and saw the shower had turned on by itself. Not that there was something wrong with the pipes and it was leaking - the knob had been turned to the on position and there was no one else fucking in there. We both tried to turn it off but couldn’t, so we ran back to the desk and called maintenance. It took them about half an hour to get the water off and they had no idea what could have caused it to turn on like that.

Moving on to my current assignment on the Intensive Care Unit. No backstory needed there, if anyplace is going to be active within a hospital, ICU is the place to be. People die almost every single day on that unit, unfortunately, we get a lot of incredibly ill patients and that’s the nature of the beast. So one night I notice one of the call bells has been going off a while. Technically we’re supposed to let the nurses address their own patient calls, but it’s been going off for a while and I decide to pick it up and see what they need. I’m answered by a male voice who tells me he’s in pain and needs his nurse to bring his medication. I tell him no problem, I’ll give her a call. So then I look at the room assignment and notice that 1) there is no patient assigned to that bed, 2) both the patients on the rooms to either side are females, 3) all of the nurses on that side that night were females, so it couldn’t have been one of them fucking with me because it was undeniably the voice of an older man. So I call one of the nurses over there to double check that no one was in that room, and she confirmed that there was no one. Then, in the same room, the code blue alarm starts going off. I go to the room myself to turn the alarm off, also to confirm that there was no one in there, and went back to my desk. I swear to you, that fucking Code Blue went off FIVE more times. I had maintenance come down twice to look at the thing and he couldn’t figure out what was causing it to happen - between the third and fourth times it had happen he had even completely replaced the call bell panel in that room for us and there was no problem he could find with the system or the wiring.

And for one more, funnier but less impressive, story at the hospital - there’s a bathroom that I jokingly call the Moaning Myrtle bathroom. It’s situated between our unit and the main OR, and when you go in there by yourself the toilets have a tendency to start just flushing of their own accord. Which like lmao what a dumb way to haunt a place but w/e I guess if you’re a ghost you can do whatever you feel like it ain’t my place to judge.

And to wrap this up, let’s talk about Gettysburg, PA. I’ve been there twice with my mom and my sisters, and both times we stayed in older B&Bs, the first one built in the earlier 1800s, and the one we stayed in last year pre-dated the Revolutionary War. So among the things I experienced there were having someone whisper in my ear while I was trying to get ready for dinner (my mom and sisters had already gone downstairs to wait for me, I was alone in the room), I saw misty figures on the battlefield the morning we were leaving, and it was an otherwise clear day there was no other fog/mist so I don’t think it was my eyes playing tricks. And the worst was when we were taking a walking tour of the buildings that had been used as field hospitals. There were taking us along the paths the soldiers had marched, down the street where there were known to have been sharpshooters posted in the buildings on either side, and when we walked through one spot I felt a sudden pain in my leg as if I had been shot, and experienced a strange breathless feeling and if I hadn’t been trying to contain myself in front of the tour group it probably would have brought me to my knees if I hadn’t fought it, which that feeling was followed up by a dream that night about a wounded soldier who was trying to speak to me. Unfortunately however I either couldn’t understand him, or if I had I had forgotten it upon waking up.

#nitrateglow #about #meagan rambles #so much rambling

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lesbianforhorror · 7 years ago

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Halloween Marathon 2017

alright, so here is my list for the marathon next month so far. still not finished so if anyone has some recommendations on what to add, just reply to this post! :)

New Watches/Never Seen Before:

The Ice Cream Truck (2017)

Happy Death Day (2017)

The Legend of Hell House (1973)

Burnt Offerings (1976)

The Ritual (2017)

From A Whisper To A Scream (1987)

Killer Party (1986)

The Monster Squad (1987)

Leatherface (2017)

The Stuff (1985)

What’s The Matter With Helen? (1971)

Squirm (1976)

The Spell (1977)

Sleepaway Camp III (1989)

The Nest (1988)

Annabelle Creation (2017)

The Belko Experiment (2016)

Nightmare (1981)

The House On Sorority Row (1983)

Cat In The Brain (1990)

Madman (1982)

IT (2017)

The Void (2016)

Ghostwatch (1992)

Tragedy Girls (2017)

Wish Upon (2017)

It Comes At Night (2017)

The Eyes Of My Mother (2016)

Slaughter High (1986)

Saturday The 14TH (1981)

I Drink Your Blood (1970)

The Premonition (1976)

Thirst (1979)

The Love Witch (2016)

The Bye Bye Man (lmao) (2016)

Beyond The Gates (2016)

The Witch (2015)

Deadtime Stories (1986)

Candyman 2 (1995)

John Carpenter’s Body Bags (1993)

Texas Chainsaw Massacre III (1990)

Texas Chainsaw 3D (2013)

Vamp (1986)

The Tingler (1959)

Cat People (1982)

Inland Empire (2006)

Sisters (1973)

Curtains (1983)

Thesis (1996)

Ju-On (2002)

10 Cloverfield Lane (2016)

Crimson Peak (2015)

Ringu (1998)

Emily Rose (2005)

Regit (tv show)

VHS + VHS 2 (2012) (2013)

Ouija Origin Of Evil (2016)

Already Seen/Rewatches:

Friday The 13th Franchise (up until jason takes manhattan, am not torturing myself with jason goes to hell and jason x this year, thank yew!)

Halloween Franchise (1-Resurrection)

Chucky Franchise (1,2,3, bride of chucky, seed of chucky, curse of chucky, cult of chucky)

Green Room (2015)

Insidious 2 (2013)

Insidious 3 (2015)

Would You Rather (2012)

The Living Dead Girl (1982)

Night of the Demons 2 (1994)

Get Out (2017)

The Mist (2007)

1408 (2007)

Slumber Party Massacre (1982)

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)

Hocus Pocus (1993)

Slither (2006)

The Burning (1981)

Casper (1995)

I Still Know What You Did Last Summer (1998)

Tales From The Darkside (1990)

Stagefright (1987)

Carnival of Souls (1962)

Creepshow (1982)

Intruder (1989)

They Live (1988)

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)

The Haunting (1963)

House On Haunted Hill (1959)

The Conjuring 2 (2016)

Possession (1981)

The Faculty (1998)

A Tale of Two Sisters (2003)

Opera (1987)

The Thing (1982)

Let’s Scare Jessica To Death (1971)

Demons 1 and 2

#halloween marathon 2017 #my written out version of this is colour coded #that's how serious i take this lol

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forestbathing-studies-blog · 7 years ago

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. the effects of fire, human clearance and grazing probably limited forest cover to about 50% of the land area of Scotland even at its maximum. The stock of woodland declined alarmingly during the First World War and at the end of the war the Acland Report recommended that Britain should secure a strategic reserve of timber. The Forestry Commission was formed to meet this need. State forest parks were established in 1935.[10][11][12][4]

Emergency felling controls had been introduced in the First and Second World Wars, and these were made permanent in the Forestry Act 1951. Landowners were also given financial incentives to devote land to forests under the Dedication Scheme, which in 1981 became the Forestry Grant Scheme. By the early 1970s, the annual rate of planting exceeded 40,000 hectares (99,000 acres) per annum. Most of this planting comprised fast-growing conifers. Later in the century the balance shifted, with fewer than 20,000 hectares (49,000 acres) per annum being planted during the 1990s, but broadleaf planting actually increased, exceeding 1,000 hectares (2,500 acres) per year in 1987. By the mid-1990s, more than half of new planting was broadleaf.[7][13]

Historical woodland cover of England. The Domesday Book of 1086 indicated cover of 15%, "but significant loss of woodland started over four thousand years ago in prehistory". By the beginning of the 20th century this had dropped to 5%. The government believes 12% can be reached again by 2060.[14]

In 1988, the Woodland Grant Scheme replaced the Forestry Grant Scheme, paying nearly twice as much for broadleaf woodland as conifers. (In England, the Woodland Grant Scheme was subsequently replaced by the English Woodland Grant Scheme, which operates six separate kinds of grant for forestry projects.)[15][16] That year, the Farm Woodlands Scheme was also introduced, and replaced by the Farm Woodland Premium Scheme in 1992.[17] In the 1990s, a programme of afforestation resulted in the establishment of Community Forests and the National Forest, which celebrated the planting of its seven millionth tree in 2006

The writer must seek isolation, whether he or she likes it or not. So I walk through the forests and hills back to my train, marveling that yet again I found my way. Through Matsuo Bashō, veritable father of haiku, we learn that the true writer does not lead a sedentary life, and indeed must walk in order to express his or her syllables. Bashō walked for 156 days through Japan in his legendary 'Deep Road to the Far North' series of haibun that defined the term. Japan still remains a heavily forested country – at least 70% of the surface is forested. By doing so Bashō also demonstrated that the true haiku and haibun haijin’s tool is not the pen but the wooden staff. Not only does this staff lift branches and part bushes to see the dew drops and flower petals, but it can also be leant on when searching the sky for floating eagles, patterned clouds and drifting cherry blossoms. The wooden staff also taps haiku on a road perfectly, like a variant of morse code to nature; ”win—ter…is…o—ver…my…staff…is…carved…dog…barks…to…each…tap.”

A haibun journey is a pilgrimage, where what happens on the way makes the destination. And the wanderer is not only Quixotic in his, or her nature. A sword of any kind must therefore be put aside for other quests. As haibun merely take from what is walked through on paths onto lines on pages, and a blade only serves to distance the reader from the writer's words. The semiotic staff therefore takes on even more symbolic meaning.

wooden staff— reflected in the shine of samurai sword

Not Don Quixote, nor wandering samurai, then what? Like the Navajo in the south western states, who use wooden tools on mother earth lest they leave scars, I don’t set out to make an impression that might not heal.

samurai’s sword slices candle still stands, and burns and yet…

http://fractalenlightenment.com/16617/life/walk-in-the-forest-to-heal-oneself

Forest holidays. Saudi Arabia date plantation Hofuf Finland

I long for nature’s products. Not the creams from companies with names like Natura, or Flower, Plantigen, with pictures of flowers or berries on the front, and packed with goodness knows what chemicals in a plastic container ultimately destined for the garbage dump. Lies on the cover and junk in the container. Thank goodness we are finally waking up to the dangers of antibacterial soap and hand gel. And the lack of contact with germs may actually be much more harmful in the long run than we think.

When my copper shop was in full swing before it collapsed and went bust, we were trying to persuade health authorities to change door handles, kidney bowls, keyboards and other items to copper surfaces. There is no better antimicrobal surface in the world. None. Southampton hospital is changing door handles to copper or brass ones — brass is a copper alloy. If all hospitals in GB did the same it is estimated 20,000 lives a year would be saved. That is a serious estimate. Of course more lives would be saved if doctors did not wear ties, which hang down on one patient then onto the next.

We also developed an entirely natural gel we called Yakutia ● Copper Honey, then Yakutia ● Copper Dew, put into aluminium tins. Medical organisations use zinc creams for scar tissue reparation — and zinc shares very similiar properties as copper, except that these days copper receives controversial press. It didn’t use to. Traditionally copper buckets stored water and kept it fresh, and traditionally, and accordingly, many less people suffered from arthritis. When I take part in my pilgrimage through Siberia, with no destination, I wear copper insoles in my boots. I want a woolen sweater, not the popular fleece, which has plastic fibres now found in fish from the world’s oceans. I won’t wear the garish coloured technical performance sports shirts that are specially designed for people not on pilgrimages, but rather a hemp shirt and jute bag, both that grow naturally without draining an area of water like cotton does. I long to be properly back in touch with nature.

sunlit waterfall in my wooden cup the taste of a rainbow

I walked for hours, a little of it in the light of dusk, for in Siberia at this time of the year, now that we have passed through the longest night, we now get dusklight for a few minutes a day. I thought some of the snow had melted, and stepped out into the whiteness with less forbearance than usual. But I was misled by my windowpane and it's view, and that in fact between the footprints in the snow lay patches patches of dark, expressionless ice. We are in January. The sun will not rise until 11.00 am and the snow will not melt until June, so what was I thinking about? The deer have not even taken to the ice yet; they can smell the water, and they are still digging in the snow for the last of the Autumn roots, destroying the forests say the rich landowners, but they despise reindeer herders.

The sun will set just after 2:00 pm, though in fact it never really rises over the horizon anymore, but at least it will rise earlier and set later, and then we will no longer remember the almost total darkness for a few weeks, twenty four hours a day. During those days sanity is not a given, but a conscious choice, like an oxygen mask a diver consciously keeps strapped tight as he descends into the depths, ever tempted though, to succumb to the belief that he can breathe in the deep blue, like those here believe they can survive winter with a bottle and by keeping their watch off, or that they can walk home alone without being tied to another, so that in a blizzard they will only be found the next morning, if it is morning. The mist swirls around me like yesterday's troubles and tomorrow's uncertainties, making the horizon, like time, blurred. I am reminded of The Beatles, and The Glass Onion, and hum it without soul, ‛We fooled you all, the walrus was Paul..’ Winter goes on and on, motionless, humourless, and no longer virginal.

I arrived at my destination at dusk to pay a visit to a family of Bosnian refugees I knew from the old days. Arriving at dusk means arrived at about 1.45 pm and stayed for a cup of coffee, then set off for my train station again, for hours of walking in the winter dark can be a risky affair if one stumbles.

So why did you come so far

‛So why did you come so far, all my daughters are married!’ joked my Bosnian friend.

‛I’m on a haibun pilgrimage,’ I said, ‛walk, write, walk, write.’

He paused, nodding his head and stroking his chin: ‛Pilgrims and refugees are both the same,’ he said.

northern lights at the edge of the city nature whispers in colour

pots, pans and unknown medical cures. But not everyone is only a trader. A Siberian ethnic Yakut, distinguished by his weatherbeaten Asiatic features and headband takes my photograph on an old Kiev medium format camera, spending time to get the composition just right as I sit on my jute duffel bag. He tells me he can send me the photo, in black and white, if I give him my address. I tell him it is ok. I enjoyed my brief stint at fame and don’t need to physically possess the moment.

‛You have a Yakut heart!’ he laughs, confirming my guess at his ethnicity. They say that we are only ever six persons away from knowing any person on this planet, or there are six degrees of separation between us, so that a mazimum of six steps can be used to connect any two persons. The average distance of 1,500 random users in Twitter is 3.435 degrees. I scan the station. The possibilities seem almost endless.

sunlight through windows an orchestra of voices a beautiful departure!

Who has heard of Toliatti and its gulags? About 15 years ago I drank a glass or two of homemade wine on a front porch, with a retired postman who’d walked home from Toliatti, on the Volga. Yes, that’s right, he didn’t walk inToliatti, but from the non-descript decrepid town somewhere on a trainline in the middle of Russia.

Delivering the post had been his job — to the Hungarian eighth army who had invaded the Soviet Union in support of German troops during the Second World War, a not inconsequential fact when you consider the Russian/Soviet determination to ensure that did not happen again by creating the Warsaw Pact countries.

But János delivered mail. He collected it from the train, or trucks and delivered it to the front line troops. This is a more important role than it first appears, for a man cannot fight without news that has loved ones are well.

And love was what made János walk. In the middle of the Second War and the middle of Toliatti, János delivered his mail and kept walking. He walked out of Toliatti, next to the Volga, along the trainline, then through the taiga, through the trees, over the hills, across the river and in the meadows. He walked, and walked and walked, all the way back to Eastern Hungary, to the wine-growing town of Tokaj, back to his wife.

When he arrived back, he discovered his sister-in-law had been taken away, just taken to the gulags. So he turned around and walked, attempting to find her, somewhere in the hugeness that was Siberia. He never found out what happened to her, and only had stories of the bitter cold, and equally bitter sense of defeat.

As I sat in Tokaj, Eastern Hungary, drinking his delicious homemade wine, which he kept in his wine cellar dug into the hillside, I noticed her picture hanging on the wall; a beautiful young woman, the portrait soft in the evening glow. They never saw her again.

János spoke no English but the wine talked. We shared many a glass, glancing at the portrait of the young woman who died in the gulag.

sentenced somewhere deep in Siberia —memories make grapes grow

Fellow Travellers 1

American travellers busy sewing or sticking flags of Canada to bags and shirts is legendary and has almost become de rigeur. It is rare, however, that being an American is alone an offense, and cetainly not in Siberia. All the same, the three Americans across from me are very busy plastering Canadian patches on bags and clothing, before practicing the accent with a loy of lilted ‛ays.’

‛I am not sure all the matriachical train station guards in the small towns along the railroad tracks will spot the difference,’ I say.

‛Hey man, you gotta do what you gotta do,’ says one of the three,

‛Where’s Snowden anyway?’ says the other male, ‛I’d like to meet him, maybe even bring him in. There must be some kind of reward.’

‛Well, Canadians wouldn’t be saying that,’ I said, ‛and you never know what kind of microphones they have on trains.’

The two American males went quiet in contemplation, a silence broken only by the pretty sight of the slipping out of her flip flops and painting her toenails bright red.

‛I’d do this in the bathroom normally,’ she chuckled.

She was from Florida, and wasn’t exactly sure where the train was heading.

‛All the way to Vladivostok,’ I answered.

‛And no cute guys,’ she said.

She was good-looking in a disharming sort of way, with strawberry blonde hair, but as such did not stand out in the carriage, aside from her flip flops which set her apart from the high heels worn by the Russian women on the train. Inside the compartment it was too warm as usual in eastern Europe, but most passengers kept their sweaters on regardless, as if judging the temperature by the view outside, where patches of snow flashed by under the fir trees.

Linda put her heels on the seat beside me across from where she sat. ‛I could paint a little white maple leaf on,’ she giggled.

At a small station her two friends dashed off to restock on food, eschewing the fresh pine pastries being sold from baskets on the platform and buying instead overpriced stale buns in plastic packets from the buffet.

‛They even asked if we were American, man,’ said the taller of the two returning.

‛Only the mosquitoes weren't fooled,’ said the other.

http://www.myminnesotawoods.umn.edu/2012/03/the-memory-of-trees-in-a-modern-climate-epigenetics/

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3586649/

I learn two things today. First that the population of Perm and the surrounding area are the closest of the Irish along with the Basque in Spain and France.

But I also find out that about 150,000 inmates were imprisoned in more than 150 camps in the Perm region during the late 1940s. This was about a third of the working population of the region.

Perm-36 Labour Camp

Daily Schedule of a Gulag Prisoner Time Activity

6:00 AM Wake up call

6:30 AM Breakfast

7:00 AM Roll-call

7:30 AM1 1/2 hour to march to forests, under guarded escort

6:00 PM1 1/2 hour return march to camp

7:30 PM Dinner

8:00 PM After-dinner camp work duties (chop firewood, shovel snow, gardening, road repair, etc.)

11:00 PM Lights out

Yekatinberg

We are on a journey this month, my partners and I, through Siberia, though the further down the train tracks we travel, the more opens behind us. I, myself, am searching for the Russian soul, that unique, raw soul, with all its flaws worn on its sleeve, where the vodka spills.

Today, we are in Yekatinberg, in the footsteps of Coelho’s words and of the Urals. I feel immediately at home stopping here on this journey, among these mountains outside Yekatinberg’s eastern balconies in pine-scented forests again. I am not a man of the pencil line horizon. So I walk upwards, to the nearest peak, to compose my haiku.

high in mountain forests where even shadows don’t reach nature inspires through silence

Tyumen

In Siberia at last, home to so many who live with nature. Winter is when traps are laid, and fresh water comes from holes dug deep in the ice. Soon the bears will be out again, and hungry, though a bear makes fine food. It is not possible to chase them away when fishing. They will always come back, so must be shot.

In a few months the leaves will shimmer in the breeze. In Tyumen I will only see the fort from far. I feel at home among the birch and pine trees.

Tyumen fort shines at night but I shine among the birch trees that rustle with such longing

pine trees gently sway is it the wind blowing or is it my mind?

I looked over at Linda, now applying another colour of nailpolish. I imaged her taking a few barefoot steps with snow melting.

she walks in the snow until the grass at the edge of spring

early blossoms are late how thoughtless yet another haiku about snow

Acrobats

I have come to the singular conclusion that a view must be merited, that it is a right that must be earned, and that this should be our quest. Working hard for a view of the world does not mean the same as slaving away for years for a front porch, in order to be able to sit there, gazing endlessly across a stretch that slowly develops into other front porches. On the contrary.

across river Ob endless taiga nothing else matters

For four hundred years thousands of mammoth tusks have been found in Siberia, from mammoths almost intact, with many organs perfectly frozen and stomachs half full of food - at times the blood still viscuous due to the 'anti-freeze' components found in the blood, so called cryptoprotective properties, as in Arctic amphibians and fish. But why so many in Siberia remains a real mystery. Why did millions of the woolly mammoth move to the cold in Siberia, and how did they die so quickly after eating? Did a massive cold front move suddenly from the Arctic? That would be a climatic condition that does not exist today. If this is the case, it would have been very cold - freezing a mammoth suddenly and quickly is no easy thing at all. It would have taken temperatures as low as -100C. The mystery is far from solved...

fifty thousand mammoth tusks found deep in Yakutia I step on ancients

Novosibirsk

with all its philosophical and spiritual messages. One of the messages is the exploration of Tengriism, which will happen here on this blog to further depth over the next few days, as our train ride through Siberia continues.

Some you reading this have shaman blood, but you do not know it – yet. I once journeyed with a shaman, taking an inner journey as well one that saw many miles rush under wheels. In many ways I am still on that journey, though already I miss my log cabin of an ever-deepening late winter, the dry, powdery cold and morning ice crystals on the window panes playing with light as I stumble around getting breakfast after yet another night without vodka and morning without hangover.'

I find the coffee, and now feel like the luckiest man alive, with Yenisei on the journey too, and the opportunity to roast some coffee on the charcoal dawn fire and serve it to her, as she purrs herself awake and unwraps herself, naked, from the fur.

charcoal from the embers she becomes my winter tiger nude and hot with stripes

I find it difficult in Novosibirsk, the capital of Siberia, and do not need to be in the capital of anywhere. Soon she will show me how to draw the birch sap from the trees, and I will literally taste the taiga.

within a ring of fire a story is warmed deep in Siberia

Yenisei

among the pine trees only one set of footprints- mine

It is a long way. Much of the railroad has been laid by the bare hands of prisoners from labour camps, whose prison was Siberia itself. Gulags rarely needed fences or guard towers. Escapees were never going to get far. And the railroad still crushes the bones of those who perished building it.

Not everyone who laid down rail lines in Siberia was a prisoner. Many volunteered, and even stayed afterwards. Those people have a special inner peace about them. An understanding of nature, and a deep respect, too. They are people who prefer the numbing colds of winter to the pleasant summers, full of unforeseen dangers and reckless laziness.

Winter is a time when travel is often easier, across solid lakes and rivers and through frozen forests. It is a time when hospitality is offered, and when bears are not around near villages, nor dangerous ticks and bothersome mosquitos in swampy, muddy forests.

And life is more bare in winter, survival more of a test. It is first an appalling mix for the novice, but soon an appealing one. The sense of freedom is like nothing ever experienced elsewhere, and maybe all the more so because it is worked so hard for.

Freedom in the land of gulags. It is an interesting thought. But for all its history of brutality and horror, Siberia is a vast, mystical land, of shamans who reach where the church or mosque doesn't, and where temperature plunges so low that cement or metal foundations of buildings are useless next to the hardy wooden ones of the taiga, thus proving, once again that nature wins.

inhaling pine scent calmed by the breeze rustling trees spirits of the wild

A Prophecy

Up near the Arctic Circle, there is magic afoot at this time. We know here, that Santa was a shaman in his big black boots, collecting the Fly Agraic mushroom, red with white dots from the forest, and feeding it to his reindeer then drinking the mix when their livers had removed the toxins, or putting them in a big sack and later hanging them to dry above the fireplace. And these magic mushrooms that grow under the fir trees, with ethereal fertilisation, are symbolised now with the draping of silver-coloured tinsel over the so-called Christmas tree, in reality the world tree, the tinsel symbolising sperm.

Of course, after eating the magic mushrooms the deer fly, and Santa laughs, with red cheeks. The Siberian tribal and Saami people's myth of the world tree is real. If you would like to treat yourself to one of these mushrooms, make sure you boil it first, unless you have any reindeer around. And then come North, and see our northern lights, and watch, touch our magic, none-materialistic world. Just remember the Swedish saying, 'there is no cold weather, only cold clothes.'

northern lights the magic world speaks shaman inspired

Therapy from another culture

Almaty

If I remember right, when I was working in Kazakhstan, I measured the country to be as wide as Ukraine to Portugal. Hearts pretty much as wide too.

For Kazakhs, hospitality is a tradition learnt from deep within. A guest into a Kazakh home is welcomed with a cup of Kazakh tea; fragant, with indefinable and potent herbs — potent because there must be something in it to have your mind soon dreaming of never ‘’returning home’’, and of putting your own yurt in the grasslands next to the forested mountains.

It is a country of the future, possibly to rank alongside China and Brazil. Sudden new buildings seem to slide up from nowhere, almost, in the bare steppes of Northern Kazakhstan, in the new capital Astana. Almaty retains its former grandeur as capital, greatly aided by the mountains around it, where cool pine trees border paths. Yet each building’s modern, intricate design often reflects a homage to the past. The golden egg building is one, with the Kazakh theme of start of civilisation, and other buildings use much of the Kazakh connection to wildlife and nature as influence.

But I worked far from Astana, at an oil refinery near Tengiz, in Eastern Kazakhstan, somewhere far from anywhere. In the evenings the Kazakh women of the base (proud, as Kazakh women are the only Muslem women who do not wear the hijab, or cover their heads, and more Kazakh women are in upper management positions than in North America) would sometimes perform Kazakh folklore, wearing traditional dress and playing local instruments.

Here is one thing I learnt which I want to share here, as it works: After eating we stood upKazakhs briefly bring their open hands up to their cheeks or neck, flat palms facing the body and about 2'’ or 5 cms or so away from the body. They bring their palms down slowly past the chest down past the stomach and then away from their body in a wide downward movement. The action takes about 5 seconds, and can be repeated. It can also be done at any time, though definitely works well after eating: without any question of a doubt it aids digestion and brings a relaxed, yet ‘’perked-up’’ feeling.

When I tried to climb the Mont Blanc I remember when I took my gloves off, to try to keep the tent pegged into the glacier during a blizzard. I could barely move my fingers. And that was in July in France, in weather so cold I suppose there should not have been a blizzard, except maybe it wasn't. The wind was howling so strongly it may have just looked like one. It swept away my foam mattress, too, which made for a very difficult night, and movement was not possible in waist deep snow and a cliff edge somewhere, even with a headlamp.

in the taiga I long for no more than taiga

Stragglers are we. Thousands of miles over kilometres of bones. All for what? Sometimes, like now, its good to get off before the end of the journey, then the journey does not end.

The traps are set. The night is young. The snow is fresh. I’ve seen the tracks. The conditions are difficult for the elk right now. The snow is not strong enough to support elks, so they often get stuck, making easy meat for hungry wolves and awakening bears. And an elk, or caribou in north America, can provide food for a long time.

Good. I am nearly all out of frozen fish. I set off this morning into the cold snap, lowering temperatures now hovering at minus twenty two degrees. The cat is huddled on the bed in the cabin and frozen wood has been placed onto the fire. I could do with a cup of tea but will have one when I get back.

long polar winter no sunrise or sunset not asleep not awake

Shamans

Shamans, in yurts, teepees, chant their song Resounding rhythm flowing, to the drum Echoes tapped across the wintry sun ☼ And the sun, a pale echo Tipped so far from the horizon in its trance That the snow shines only by moonlight ☼ While the signs that show Spring has come Are still the sounds of the Shaman's drum The shaman, her eyes lit by fire, the yurt by song ☼ So dance, beauty, dance, dance until the sun rises For soon you will chance upon fields of fresh flowers And lie in meadows perfumed by long-melted snows

The Road of Bones

On the Road of Bones you never travel alone. Here breath suddenly freezes, and drops in tiny fragments, tinkling like a wind chime. In this cold words travel no further than a few feet, and they say words themselves freeze when the temperature drops far enough to make metal crack. This is the notorious road built by the prisoners of the Gulags, the torture camps.The road stretches to Magadan on the Pacific ocean, from Yakutsk in Yakutia, a vast mysterious republic within the even larger emptiness of Siberia. A republic that would be the eighth largest country in the world if fully independent, with a population of just 1 Million.

Here in Yakutia the temperature can plunge to -60C, rendering the road a gamble that only those needing to escape a misdemeanor take, or those imbibed with a certain madness. But who would go in summer, when the mud and mosquitoes make escape well nigh impossible and madness well nigh sure?

So the best time to go is in late winter, before the melting of snow and floods, when the cold is loosening its bitter grip - but even then it is dangerous, for when the temperature rises it begins to snow heavily again, after being too cold to snow during the winter months. And the wolves are hungry by then. And I mean hungry. Last winter a pack of 400 wolves killed 300 horses before they were finally driven away. But we gamble. We leave behind the rugged Yakutians who want us to stay until June, the summer solstice, and the start of the new year in Yakutia, when the republic is full of festivities, and greets the rising sun in the morning as one. We take the Road of Bones, where if voices have really frozen then the painful sounds of the Gulag prisoners is best not heard during the thaw if one is to keep one's sanity.

sun rises ice on pines tinkles in breeze drum - snow from branch hits ground

Ulan Ude is near the Mongolia I always wanted to walk through, and the Kazakhstan I know and like so much. Kazakhstan, perhaps the most tolerant country in the world.

All our thoughts are different in Ulan Ude. It is a chance to explore the Buddhist nature that lies within each of us. I sit facing the last of the taiga, the last birch tree, and compose my haiku.

pine needles make a comfortable rest oh! stinging ants!

And I return to the train. The Tran-Siberian, and stare at the early morning dawn.

Mud

I have seen the draining mud. Like many I played in the creeks for endless childhood hours, vagrantly defying, yet again, rules about set dinner times and sleep in my fantasy of youth, captured and explained now only in my imagination.

But I knew then, as part of my defiance, that mud is glorious, and a natural plaything. In the childhood of our civilisation we knew that too. When I walked the River Nile and sat with villagers for tea they still complained, years later, about the lack of life-giving floods, that used to provide nutrients to the parched and starved land, now changed in the name of control and real estate by the river, but for the select few.

And sitting in fountain square, in Baku, Azerbaijan, I learn from my Bengali friend, recently escaped from the latest Bangladesh flooding, how harmful the dykes and walls we built through the past generations have been, how these blockades were cleverly-designed to contain the rising waters from the Himalayas. Now the rivers rise no more. They spill, and rush over the walls suddenly, when there is barrier no more at a certain height, a masse of water spreading miles wide, all at once.

It is perhaps the same people who always carry umbrellas who conceive of the notion of blocking nature, the ones who want to disinfect themselves from the pleasure of kicking a puddle just to see. They, the seekers of sand beach and cement house can only think vertically, and can only watch a sunset from the umpteenth floor of an office insulated from the earth where it sprouted.

In the creek across a field now of memories I too made little boats from leaves and twigs and watched them float downriver slowly, or more quickly when the rains came. The creek, like my childhood, is no more, and the skill of building the best tiny boat has gone too, from lack of practice or opportunity, replaced instead by plastic models bought with cereal packs full of the latest ways of modifying taste.

But my memories are still fashioned by twigs and trees and leaves, by not avoiding puddles and staying away from the concrete of car-strewn streets wherever I can.

after the storm colourful pieces of sky in mud puddles

The Gobi

When I arrived in Baku 15 years ago, I spent the first night in a caravanserai. There, I bought a chain; a set of prayer beads, in turquoise stone. I say 'bought' but I had no local Manats, the Azeri currency.

"No problem," said the street sales man, "pay me when you see me next."

A few weeks later I saw him, in a crowd surrounding the then president Aliev's walk though the old town, near the caravanserai. I paid him, and thus became part of the mutual trust we shared for each other.

in a caravanserai on the edge of the orient I told my own fortune

Chita

I did what he asked, and only opened the small rice paper holding his three lines a few moments ago, in order to finish my passage with the haiku. It was written in Buriat script, so I was forced to call upon a Mongolian friend far in Mongolia, in Ulan Baator, to perhaps translate it. He could not, but in turn called his friend living in northern Mongolia, a Buriat living near Chita, in Ereentsav, to help. His friend told me he had a pair of Buriat winter boots he was sure I might like, and very useful for the cold Lappland winters. In turn I remembered my gortex jacket, bought once in a mountain town but too small for me, and promised to forward it.

The haiku he wrote

rain tinged with sand the storm brings dust from the steppes grasslands lands among me

We often talk about taking the train, but of course, the train takes you, just like a dream does. Everytime one steps up the steps of a train carriage, one steps into a dream.

on the train deep into the soul of Siberia we share bread and dreams

The ice patterns blown onto plants are more beautiful than the flowers that briefly bloom in summer, and more fragile. But my journey into Siberia brought me equally tender and graceful moments. They are moments on the landscape of my mind that is the memory of a journey, ever eastwards from Moscow. We passed through many temples that passed through different moments in history themselves, and are in reality only remnants, reminders of former days and ideas. For the true Siberian religion is shamanism, and it is not possible to travel through the Siberian taiga without meeting a shaman, and without taking another journey into the spirit world without one of the shamans encountered on a muddy village path, or up in a grassland meadow.

I know shamanism well from the Saami people in Lappland, and indeed fell in love with a shaman once, and travelled far with her. But that is a story I have recounted elsewhere. Still now, though, I find female shamans are able to reach further into the sky, and shamanism is a part of Tengriism, with its spiritual home of Kazakhstan, but also Yakutia, in the north.Tengriism is the religion or philosophy of open spaces. No traveller or journey man or woman can remain untouched by its simple and compelling spirituality.

to know your path follow the shadows of the tracks above you

Amur

Amur sounds like 'Amour' in French, which means Love, and is a most-fitting theme as we near the end of our journey. Amur, love, mila, in Latvian, uthando, in Zulu, liubav, beautifully, in Croatian, like Russian. And then I remember it is 'rakkaus,' embarrassingly, in Finnish, and I understand the lack of romance in that country, that I left behind in my thoughts. In Swahili it is upendo, Polish miłość, echoing somewhat nearby Latvia. In Javanese it is katrasen, which disappoints somewhat. In Khmer it looks the nicest, ក្ដីស្រឡាញ់, and I think of languages like Persian, Arabic, Japanese and Mandarin, and their beautiful calligraphy, and reflect on how important that art is.

I look at the flow of the Amur, nature's caligraphy, alive, moving, even though frozen on the surface now. But it is underneath that I took my journey, that we took our train into Siberia. I know I will be back. Back to watch the sun rise over the sparkling untouched snow, and carve its rays through the trees of the taiga, when I will be able to unwrap my haiku by hand with my wooden staff, onto the sandy banks of the river that sounds like love to some.

haiku not yet inscribed -promised for a return journey then drained into sand

There is always one person willing and able to break the mold, one who has that rebellious soul, and sometimes I am lucky enough to meet them. Each time I do, I recognise that innate need to step forward, or even sideways, to walk out of step or in another direction. They carry me. For them I will do everything, and they are much more rare than you think. They are not the ones who tell you they speak their own mind in a self-satisfied grin, but are instead the ones of small gestures at significant moments.

There was the Russian soldier I knew who had served in the Gobi desert and Afghanistan, who had a permanent karate tic, that is to say he was always chopping the air suddenly, in supermarkets and other not-natural karate chop environments.

We lived together, rather ludicrously, in the Russian embassy in Budapest - a long story if there ever was one, and our job was a little more ludicrous; to look after some high-spending Ukrainian teenage girls who thought we were the two most uncool people walking the civilised streets of bourbonville, but as they seemed impeccably connected all the way up to president Yeltsin of Russia, we remained uncoolly present, and very uncool to any cool young men who approached them, which made us even more uncool in the Ukrainian pink-outfitted teenage eyes, which further developed my Russian ex-soldier friend's karate tic, and wiped supermarket shelves of produce alongside the Danube river that cuts Buda from Pest. Those were uncommon days.

Three years later he called me from Korea, where he was studying ancient medicine similar to acupuncture, but with tiny burning pots, to congratulate me on the birth of my first daughter of three in Aberdeen, Scotland. How he got my number, or knew where I was, who knows.

there are people to meet while we walk that make it important to walk

one eagle in the blue sky

one wolf among the trees

one heart beat

hawk flies free but hunts for his master who feeds him

Vladivostok

Vladovostok is the kind of city I would like to arrive in at dawn. There has always been something fascinating about this last city on a train line one could start in Portugal if one so desired, and finish here, with a few waits on station platforms in-between.

In Vladivostok we are near the North Korean border but also near to Japan. Imagine, though, travelling through the whole of Russia, of Siberia, and arriving here, in this mysterious city. One does not immediately think of beginning another journey, and on the Trans Siberian we skirt close to Mongolia, Kazakhstan and Kyrgystan, they must be experienced too.

For now I would be satisfied to sit on a bench facing the Pacific. And I remember Irina, in Western Ukraine in 1991, joking with me about coming on the Trans Siberian, when the price was a carton of Malboro cigarettes, and smiling when I said "Vladivostok or bust!"

hello Irina! I am here at last, facing the sea -without you

her beauty

thousands of miles away

in the immediacy of my mind

It is said the if Bill Gates needed to assign someone to a complex, arduous project, he would give it to a lazy person, because they would simplify it to the easiest level.

Edward de Bono advocated an even easier step; including random factors into the problem to force thought patterns that are not the norm. Costs too high? Here, bring them down using this orange in the equation. Travel does that. Each next corner is different, and therefore subject to creativity and inspiration.

Into Ukraine

I dream of wheatfields, golden, waving slowly in the breeze, the sky spotless, and so blue, of embroidered sleeves, fingers with cherry red nailpolish ripping a chunk of bread, and dippping it in salt before handing it to me. I dream of mountains where carts trundle up mountain lanes, and pastures are decorated with haystacks yielding to the horizon, and pine trees linger next to their aroma on mountain paths. I dream of the Black Sea, in a world where simple enjoyments still have a meaning, of shashlik, of people who have endured a history not many in Europe have, yet remain proud of their almost unique hospitality.

On a geography field trip to Hyères, in the south of France late at night I stood in the sea. Technically, it was not part of the official activities of the school trip, and I stood in nothing except the sea, having removed bathing trunks. My Ukrainian classmate had lifted her flowery skirt up her thighs and walked in, as close to me as she dared raise her skirt, and beckoned. In the sea at waist height, each step was precious, but I joined her, and in fact she let the hems of her skirt drop down as we kissed, and I both learnt about and felt the passion of the Ukraine.

Years later, when I took a troop of Ukrainian college actors around Eastern Europe with a play I had written, called 'How to catch a man,' a tragicomedy, I stayed on to teach a while in a Western Ukraine fresh from the dissolved Soviet Union, and was seduced by the rustic charm of the Carpathian mountains, the people of which I knew as market traders in various countries on the border – in Hungary, Slovakia, Poland and what is now Serbia, selling all their household belongings in that turbulent era, rugs, shawls, knives, forks, samovars, skis, toothbrushes, jams that exploded from jars, barometres crafted in solid wood and gas masks from a variety of wars.

I bought the ornate samovars, plates, barometres and jugs, and an orange-coloured wine, which I sampled in the middle of a street with my Californian Chuck Norris-like US Peace Corps pal, newly returned from a tour of the country himself, in which he'd stayed with gypsies and nearly returned married. So thrilled was I with Ukraine, even its dangerous mafia, that I planned to set up a business in Sevastopol. It never happened, but I visited Odessa and L'viv, and of course Kiev, and now approaching a grey and silver age, I knew I had to again visit the country that had been so much in the news and in my life. and as we drove towards the border I sat note book in hand, pen ready, I felt the exitement of journeys old, and this one, new, to a country that had sealed my interest with its first kiss, thigh-deep on a beach at midnight in the south of France, all those years ago.

She returned to the Ukraine from Canada, as some maybe do.

`Ah, well done man!´ I said, in tailor-ruffled white suit, as my fifth piece of luggage, a large heavy chest, was pulled off the steam train onto a platform, where it landed with a clunk. `Smoothly fielded! After all, its full of champers!´

I did not really say that, and only thought it, but then that was really for a start to yet another novel without end, frequent notes in my pockets and bags, like train tickets from long-forgotten journeys with all-too temporary aims.

I would have taken my travels like that in another epoch no doubt, and somehow a travel book set in most eras including this one seem to lend themselves to the romanticm of travel that somehow quickly fizzles out in the reality of plastic bag-lumered crowds waiting at airports around the yet again the same branded fast food joints and industrial beers or that drink that still symbolised freedom in much of Eastern Europe in the early 1990s: Coca Cola.

Thirty years ago, after my first midnight kiss, I would have arrived romantically by train, had the Ukrainian girl herself been foolhardy enough to return to her motherland with me, thus following up on a challenge she had issued. But instead she headed off to Canada, and when I crossed the border in 1991 it was with other teachers in a tiny minivan, and took an hour to scrape through, as one did in Eastern European borders at that time.

This time we arrived by car, with author and photographer Ese Kļava as my translator and journey companion, though having read her fascinating book, Butterfly Thy Name, I was worried if I could pull off the literary conversation that might arise, as well as the raw intimacy that could be covered should her book be broached, which covered her innermost desires, all substantially more revealing than my baptising Ukrainian midnight kiss.

Ese was disarmingly frank. `I have an idea that half Ukrainian, half Georgian would be an exciting, exotic mix,´ she declared.

I met Ese in Burgas, Bulgaria, where she was writing her current bestseller.

`I think will need to base my main character on you,´ she said by way of introduction, `as we'll be spending time together.´

`But you'll have to drop your pants. It 's an integral part of the book.´

`And an integral part of me,´ I said.

`I'll use that line if you're not careful!´ she said.

While I proofread her manuscript she drove up through Bulgaria.

Ese was disarmingly frank. `I have an idea that half Ukrainian, half Georgian would be an exciting, exotic mix,´ she declared.

I met Ese in Burgas, Bulgaria, where she was writing her current bestseller.

`I think will need to base my main character on you,´ she said by way of introduction, `as we'll be spending time together.´

`But you'll have to drop your pants. It 's an integral part of the book.´

`And an integral part of me,´ I said.

`I'll use that line if you're not careful!´ she said.

While I proofread her manuscript she drove up through Bulgaria.

Starý Smokovec was the ideal writer’s retreat. A small town in the Tatra mountains, with clean air, not too much to do except walk, and write, a language that I did not understand but was charming to the ear, and prices that meant I was able to concentrate on the book without worrying about where my next meal would come from.

The Tatra mountains were just right for the writer — easily accessible but out of the way, with those great mountain hikes and lubrication. Even the tea was good. I wrote in all seasons, in chalets and pensions and bars, over garlic soup, cheese and bread. I took trips to Moldavia, in the new Czech Republic, just as Dubček, one of the architects of the 1968 Prague Spring died in a mysterious car crash. I took trips down to Croatia, Bosnia and Serbia, where I travelled with false documents as the Serbs in Belgrade tried to get rid of Milosovic and his Lady Macbeth, until the Serb police got rid of me.

Despite an ex-boxer prime minister who arranged to have the country’s president’s son kidnapped, beaten up, and dumped at the border, Slovakia was one of my favourite destinations some 15-20 years ago. More particularly, Starý Smokovec, in the Tatra mountains.

Slovakia was a country with an attitude in the early 1990s. In next-door Hungary the prime minister had just announced he was not prime minister of Hungary, but of all Hungarians; tantamount, just about, to a declaration of war. With its sizable Hungarian minority, history of being invaded by Hungary (the last time in 1968, as fighting strafed the streets of Prague during the Prague Spring), and while Yugoslavia nearby crumbled, Slovakia tensed.

Mercier, the infamous Slovak prime minister, argued for Slovakia joining the newly formed CIS, formed from the ex-USSR, to become the’’richest state in the CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States) instead of the poorest in the European Union, and banned shops using only the Hungarian language on their signs.

I loved the atmosphere of turmoil in Eastern Europe at the time. Writers need tension, conflict and pressure — just ask the Czechoslovak authors who wrote the masterpieces they did under the communist regime, permanently fighting censorship or worse.

But most of all I loved coming to Starý Smokovec. I was in various locations in Eastern Europe in those early years of the decade, but whenever I wanted to add a few more chapters to my burgeoning book, I would head straight for the mountain town for a few weeks, in summer, winter, spring and autumn. I stayed in various different pensions, each one clean, charming, with a table in a room with a view. Considering the pensions started around €5 per night at that time, I was able to spend all my breaks ensconced in a room, coming out for breathtaking walks among trails, or a few Tatran beers, surely the world’s finest beer, if also the most unknown.

I took trips to Romania, during those infamous days when miners were paid to come to Bucharest to crack a few demonstrating student heads open, after the fake ‘revolution’ that got Ceaucescu and his own Lady M out of the way, and I traveled to the Ukraine, with its visas issued not to the day of departure, but hour. Then I returned to Starý Smokovec to write. Those were special days of change.

You might be surprised to learn of another reason: trees maintain a memory of their origin that helps them adapt to their local conditions. In this article I will discuss epigenetics: a novel area of research that pertains to both modern medicine and forestry. So what’s in a tree seed? Tree seed contains DNA, the genetic blueprint of the tree, along with carbohydrates for the developing embryo and a seed coat for protection. But DNA alone does not determine what the tree will look like. Scientists are learning that chemicals bound to the DNA influence how the tree looks and functions. These chemicals are referred to as the “epigenome,” and they function to turn genes ‘on’ or ‘off,’ much like a light-switch. This means you can have genes for a trait, but those genes might not be expressed. In fact, there is a field of science devoted to studies of the epigenome called epigenetics, Latin for “outside the genome.”

Genes are inherited from parents, and the epigenome maintains a “record” of life experiences that you inherited from them. Sounds like a science fiction novel? Here’s the rub: the epigenome shuts genes on or off based on life experiences. For example, a child’s brain is in a heightened state of development and wiring. Life experiences can switch genes on or off through the epigenome, essentially leaving a record on your DNA. The really crazy part about epigenetics is that the “position” of the DNA switches, whether “on” or “off,” can be passed on to their offspring. In this way, your grandparents’ life experiences may influence the way your genes are expressed. between obesity and diabetes. In medicine, scientists are just beginning to understand these trans-generational links between health and inheritance that complicate studies of disease and susceptibility to disease. The epigenome provides an important mechanism by which experiences are imprinted onto our DNA to help us adapt to modern life.

Back to trees. Trees, like people, experience a huge range of environments during their long lifespan. Unlike people, they cannot run from bad environments, and spend a great deal of energy reproducing to disperse their offspring to better novel environments. In this way, trees are masters at adaptation. Like humans, experiences can be imprinted on seeds. In this case there is an evolutionary advantage at stake: trees imprint clues about the local photoperiod and possibly local temperatures onto developing seeds. Scientists recently, and unexpectedly, observed this mechanism in Norway spruce trees. Scientists in Norway conducted a simple experiment. They selected Norway spruce trees with established pedigrees that reliably produced tree seed adapted for reforestation in the northern part of the country. These parent trees were copied through grafting, and the new grafts were planted into a location farther south. After the trees matured, seed was collected from them and planted back north. Much to their shock, the seed from this southern orchard more closely resembled trees growing in the southern environment than their kin in the northern part of the country. The growth rhythms of the seed from this new southern orchard were more in tune with the day lengths and temperatures of the southern environment. In fact, the seed from this southern orchard was not suitable to plant in the northern part of the country. Genes, assumed to be the blue-print for tree growth patterns, had been trumped by the effects attributable to the epigenome. The scientists later learned that they had just witnessed adaptation due to epigenetics. This was one of the first reports of this phenomenon in trees. The effect was pronounced within a single generation. I had the good fortune to meet one of the scientists at a meeting in Thunder Bay, Canada last summer. I asked Dr. Johnsen how his colleagues accepted the news that he had essentially made a discovery that contradicted Darwin’s basic theories of evolution. Epigenetics works alongside natural selection to provide an additional mechanism for trees, and other organisms, to adapt to their environment. As the climate changes, developing seeds receive environmental cues that allows them to make adjustments to improve their ability to grow in a novel climate. At some point, our climate may change too drastically for

In order to write wtn I decided to live in Chamonix, France, next to the Mont Blanc, highest mountain in Western Europe. I took a job as a mountain refuge warden there for a while, at some 2,000 metres altitude, but soon enjoyed reading the mountains more than a reader would have reading my never-appearing novel, so I moved down to the centre of town as winter set in. I loved Chamonix.

In the town I enjoyed a friendship with the PGHM, the mountain rescue team, a friendship I struck when working at the refuge, and particularly when one night a hammering at the door woke me; a man in a terrible state, having stumbled and jumped down the steep mountain side to the refuge after watching his wife fall over a cliff. The rescue helicopter went up to look with searchlight and found her, but radioed back they could not get near her in the cliffs at night, and that anyway, she had not survived the fall, that much they could see. I had gone up anyway to find her, especially after the helicopter team told me in no uncertain terms not to tell the man his wife had been killed in the fall until morning, as he might very well just step straight over a cliff himself at the news. So I went up the mountain in order to not have to answer his questions, and after a few hours saw she was not in a state of survival, and I waited till morning, standing at the door of the téléphérique, the cable car, to tell him, at which he crumpled onto the floor of the cabin, and the big moustached cabin operator later remarked:

‘’you know Hamish, I would have expected him to fly at you in a rage and hit, beat you.’’

‘’Yeah, great. Thanks.’’

The PGHM had recovered her body and then got into an argument with the local police, who wanted to take the man back to the scene for ‘questioning’.

‘’I’ve seen it before,’’ the station head of the PGHM had remarked: ‘’we’ll have two bodies over cliffs. He’ll jump.’’

There were other solid friendships; with the ski instructor, a woman who had skied down the very difficult Bossons glacier, after walking up with her skis for over eight hours, and who giggled at my British reserve when she and her friend had thrown their tops off to sunbathe at a mountain lake only hours after meeting me; and there was Catherine D’Estivelle, the climber, who that summer had climbed the Aiguille Verte —the Green Needle, alone, over eleven days, bivouacking on the rock face, and the woman who owned the bar that let me keep a tab running all winter, the bakery owning couple who made the freshest bread on the spot, which I ate where it was cooked, and the other mountain people, who regarded the tourists with mild indulgence; the tourists who had a penchant for acting like tourists — you know what I mean, of which perhaps the most touristy were the Swedes, who drank copious amounts of booze but would not touch the water, for fear of it not being pure, who boasted of a clean Sweden while uprooting all the Christmas trees in Viking exuberance and drinking coffee slowly each morning, wearing heavy mountain gear that clinked and jangled and jarred on their nerves.

And I decided to leave. To leave the town I loved. The blue/green late afternoons in the shade of the pine tree slopes of the mountains, the cream mornings of snow-capped mountains between open shutters, the newsagent who gave me my morning newspaper and coffee every morning when I walked through the door, and the mountains, again, and my mountain climbing partners and the seasons.

My last season in Chamonix was late summer, in the Saami definition of eight seasons. I was living my last few weeks in a tent at the bottom of the Mer de Glace glacier, and my morning plunge into the water rushing off the bottom of the glacier brought a new definition to the word cold, as well as embarrassment, when one morning I had jumped in, lay down briefly in the current and clambered out quickly, and heard a ‘’coooeeee!’’, looked left, looked right, looked behind, looked in front, my skin growing red, my vital parts shivered to mere millimetres, and then heard the ‘’coooeee!!’’ again, looked left right front back sideways and finally..upwards, to see a woman on delta wing, circling before landing, and laughing at my lack of restraint.

And the morning I left I met a silver-haired solitary Czech climber, who was hammering nails in his boots and knotting old ropes — his dream happening at last: climbing Mont Blanc, his food with him in cans, his home a tarpaulin over a wire, his happiness complete.

I was going to Oymyakon, the coldest town in the world (lowest temp recorded -71.2ºC/ -96.16ºF) , in Yakutia, Siberia, and chosen because I was sure that sitting in a hut in the coldest town in the world was a sure-fire way of writing, and importantly, completing a book. Immediately I set about planning an expedition through Yakutia, until I remembered it was to write I was going, and to attempt to ensure I was getting myself stuck into a small cabin, with a pile of logs, tea pot and long lost love deep in fur. The last one was not actually a requirement, though it was true that having someone to cook always means a necessary routine can be installed into a writer’s drab existence at the table, which is in reality a window of course. Yakutia, and in particular Oymyakon, fits some requirement’s of a writer’s retreat, but not all: it was exotic, not pricey — the cash flow is going in 1 direction after all, if the book is to be scribed — and the fish can be caught and cooked, a welcomed way to meditate. Oymyakon is a small town, the nature is beguilingly beautiful, but it forces you back to the writing table quickly, and the natives are not too restless. The town is found on the infamous Road of Bones. It does get a sprinkling of tourists, which is nice, and not all are similar to the Norwegians who got stuck and needed rescuing, claiming to be broken down, or the Germans who also got stuck and chose not to leave their vehicle when being rescued to thank the rescuers. (They would have been charged in another country of course, in places like Vancouver, but then would have probably found ways to sue for being charged for stupidity, as some do.) The fact that conditions were harsh, and risky, like the mountains of Chamonix, is something of a bonus for a writer. But it is also a pleasure when the little luxuries are available — bananas were prevalent, which was comforting, because at -55ºC ( -67ºF) they are more useful to hammer nails into wood than a badly made hammer, and don’t stick to the tongue like the head of a hammer does — something I can personally vouch is true, and if you don’t think you look absolutely stupid walking around town, even in Oymyakon, with a hammer stuck to your tongue, then think again. The wolves do hunt at night, and it if true that if the cold mist descends with the plummeting temperature in the deep snow and you are lost, then you have about 15 minutes to unlose yourself and find your way. After that your chances get pretty slim pretty quick, except your chances of being found next morning when the day is clear, a mere few metres to your cabin. But this provides the tension for your novel, so is worth the risk. Did I write the book? Yes. Did I find a cook deep in the fur, in a cabin down the road? The culture in Yakutia is captivating. And for those against fur, I can honestly tell you from experience that artificial fur just shreds; falls apart at those temperatures, and not keeping warm is not a question of fashion. Everything is different in summer though, when they welcome dawn on the longest day of the year at the summer solstice. Travel narrows our horizons — the more we learn about other cultures, the more sure we are about universal truths. And in Yakutia a universal truth is hugging cooks keeps you warm, as long as you compliment the mammoth steaks - tens of thousands of mammoth bones or even frozen mammoths have been found throughout history, so there’s a chance...

Some benefits of Forest Therapy

Lower concentrations of cortisol (indicator of stress)

Increased Natural Killer Cell count (enhanced immune response)

Lower pulse rate

Lower blood pressure

Greater parasympathetic nerve activity

Lower sympathetic nerve activity

Results of physiological measures show that forest therapy effectively relaxes people’s body and spirit (emotional state).

Heart rate during forest walking was significantly lower than that in the control. Negative mood states andanxiety levels decreased significantly by forest walking compared with urban walking.

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2008/05/02/national/forest-therapy-taking-root/#.VFiY6DSUdAU

Notes from a train window

A forest cannot be tamed

time is different among the trees

baby milk powder, in Africa, cutting down trees, removes happiness from the equation.

There is no other forest like the pine forest. When I write in my haiku that I fall asleep under the boughs of a pine tree, I mean that can happen for a night, or even during winter, where heavy snow does not make it under the thick boughs that trap the warmth. I am writing a book about the benefits of forests on health, specifically pine forests, and I can honestly say that a few hours spent filtering thoughts through pine branches while dozing off under a tree is a natural way to recharge. Perhaps it is the scent I like most, as well as the gentle grandeur of the pine forest.

seeking comfort

I sleep on a mat of pine needles

I am rejuvenated

Among the many reasons to preserve what is left of our ancient forests, the mental aspects stand tall. The notion that forests have a special place in the realm of public health, including an ability to refresh the weary, is not a new one. Medical doctors, including Franklin B. Hough, reported in early U.S. medical journals that forests have a “cheerful and tranquilizing influence which they exert upon the mind, more especially when worn down by mental labor.” Individuals report that forests are the perfect landscape to cultivate what are called transcendent experiences—these are unforgettable moments of extreme happiness, of attunement to that outside the self, and moments that are ultimately perceived as very important to the individual.

In 1982, the Forest Agency of the Japanese government premiered its shinrin-yoku plan. In Japanese shinrin means forest, and yoku, although it has several meanings, refers here to a “bathing, showering or basking in.” More broadly, it is defined as “taking in, in all of our senses, the forest atmosphere.” The program was established to encourage the populace to get out into nature, to literally bathe the mind and body in greenspace, and take advantage of public owned forest networks as a means of promoting health. Some 64 percent of Japan is occupied by forest, so there is ample opportunity to escape the megacities that dot its landscape.

Undoubtedly, the Japanese have had a centuries-old appreciation of the therapeutic value of nature—including its old-growth forests; however, the term shinrin-yoku is far from ancient. It began really as a marketing term, coined by Mr. Tomohide Akiyama in 1982 during his brief stint as director of the Japanese Forestry Agency. The initial shinrin-yoku plan of 30 years ago was based solely on the ingrained perception that spending time in nature, particularly on lush Japanese forest trails, would do the mind and body good. That changed in 1990 when Dr. Yoshifumi Miyazaki of Chiba University was trailed by film crew from the Japanese Broadcasting Corporation (NHK) as he conducted a small study in the beautiful forests of Yakushima. It was a test of shinrin-yoku, and NHK wanted to be there. Yakushima was chosen because it is home to Japan’s most heralded forests. The area contains some of Japan’s most pristine forests, including those of select cedar trees that are over 1,000 years old. Miyazaki reported that a level of physical activity (40 minutes of walking) in the cedar forest equivalent to that done indoors in a laboratory was associated with improved mood and feelings of vigor. This in itself is hardly a revelation, but he backed up the subjective reports by the findings of lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol in subjects after forest walks compared with those who took laboratory walks. It was the first hint that a walk in a forest might not be the same as a walk in a different environmental setting.

Since then, university and government researchers have collaborated on detailed investigations, including projects to evaluate physiological markers while subjects spend time in the forest. The research team from Chiba University, Center for Environment, Health and Field Services, has collected psychological and physiological data on some 500 adults who have engaged in shinrin-yoku, and a separate group from Kyoto has published research involving another 500 adults. These studies have confirmed that spending time within a forest setting can reduce psychological stress, depressive symptoms, and hostility, while at the same time improving sleep and increasing both vigor and a feeling of liveliness. These subjective changes match up nicely with objective results reported in nearly a dozen studies involving 24 forests—lower levels of cortisol and lower blood pressure and pulse rate. In addition, studies showed increased heart rate variability, which is a good thing because it means the circulatory system can to respond well to stress and can detect a dominance of the “calming” branch of the nervous system (the parasympathetic nervous system).

Forest Therapy, Tree Density and Cerebral Blood Flow

Research has certainly shown that the emotions of pleasure and happiness are elevated with an increase in tree density within specific settings, even in urban settings. The bigger and denser the trees, the higher the scenic beauty scores—up to a point. If trees are too tightly packed—if a trail is too narrow or obscured—the scene becomes foreboding and fear will be increased.

Adding to the strength of the research, in many of the studies, the objective measurements were also recorded in urban environments as a means of comparison. Here, the researchers controlled for physical activity, time of day, temperature, average hours of sunlight, and other factors. In other words, they weren’t stacking the deck by recording the objective measurements in rainy and cold urban settings compared with sunny and warm forest environments. In one study, the researchers went so far as to bring an instrument capable of measuring brain activity out into the urban and forest settings. The time-resolved spectroscopy system (TRSS) device allows for a reading of oxygen use in the brain via the reflection of near–infrared light off red blood cells. The Japanese researchers found that 20 minutes of shinrin-yoku (compared with 20 minutes in an urban setting) altered cerebral blood flow in a manner that indicated a state of relaxation. More specifically, the total hemoglobin (as found in red blood cells) was decreased in the area of the prefrontal cortex while in the forest setting. Hemoglobin levels are jacked up in this area during anticipation of a threat (stress) and after periods of intense mental and physical work—complex equations, computer testing, video game playing, exercise to exhaustion. So essentially, a decrease in levels means the brain is taking a time-out while in the forest. Although sedatives are also known to reduce activity in this area of the brain, they can have detrimental influences in cognition. Stress hormones can compromise immune defense; in particular, the activities of frontline defenders, such as antiviral natural killer cells, are suppressed by stress hormones. Since forest bathing can lower stress hormone production and elevate mood states, it’s not surprising that it also influences markers of immune system strength. Qing Li and colleagues from the Nippon Medical School showed that forest bathing (either a day trip or a couple of hours daily over three days) can have a long-lasting influence on immune markers relative to city trips. Specifically, there were marked increases in the number of natural killer cells, increases in the functional activity of these antiviral cells, and increases in the amount of intracellular anticancer proteins. The changes were noted at a significant level for a full week after the trip. The improvements in immune functioning were associated with lower urinary stress hormones while in nature. None of this was observed during or after the comparison city trips. As mentioned, the reduction in stress is almost certainly at play in the improvement of immune defenses. However, the natural chemicals secreted by evergreen trees, collectively known as phytoncide, have also been associated with improvements in the activity of our frontline immune defenders. Li has measured the amount of phytoncide in the air during the studies and correlated the content to improvements in immune functioning.

This is an interesting finding in the context of the century-old reports on the success of the so-called forest cure in tuberculosis treatment. In the mid- to late 1800s, physicians Peter Detweiler and Hermann Brehmer set up sanatoriums in Germany’s pine forests, as did Edward Trudeau in the Adirondack forests of New York. All reported the benefit of the forest air; indeed, contrary to expectations, the results seemed to be magnified when the forest air trapped moisture. There was speculation among the physicians of the time that pine trees secreted a healing balm into the air, and in yet another twist of the shinrin-yoku studies, the existence of an unseen airborne healer is being revealed.

Shinrin-yoku is alive and well today; the word has entered the Japanese lexicon. At present there are 44 locations approved as “forest therapy bases.” These are sites that have been not only the subject of human research indicating benefits to stress physiology; a team of experts from the Japanese Forest Therapy Executive Committee ensures other criteria are met before designation, including accessibility, accommodation (if remote) cultural landmarks, historical sites,, variety of food choices, and comfort stations. Chiba University’s Miyazaki, who played a massive role in taking shinrin-yoku from a throwback marketing concept to credible preventive medicine intervention, continues to perform research and is now looking at the physiological effects of time spent in Tokyo’s major urban parks.Since Ulrich’s original observation, there have been additional studies confirming that the mere presence of flowering and foliage plants inside a hospital room can make a difference. Specifically, in those recovering an appendectomy and randomly assigned to a room with a dozen small potted plants, the use of pain medications was significantly lower than that of their counterparts in rooms with no potted plants; they also had lower blood pressure and heart rate, and rated their pain to be much lower. As well, those who had plants in their rooms had comparatively higher energy levels, more positive thoughts, and lower levels of anxiety.

Since a view of nature or a few potted plants can influence subjective and objective measures of stress, and maybe get us out of the hospital faster, it seems likely that nature can keep us out of the infirmary to begin with. The first indication that this might be the case was in the reporting of architect Ernest Moore in 1981. In examining the annual sick records of the State Prison of Southern Michigan, he noticed there was a glaring difference in health-care utilization based on cell location. Specifically, those inmates housed in the cells facing outside to a view of green farmlands and forests had far fewer visits to the medical division than did those inmates housed in the inner half, with a view of an internal concrete yard. In addition:

Norwegian research shows that having a plant at or within view of an office workstation significantly decreases the risk of sick leave. A 2010 study from the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia, reported that levels of anger, anxiety, depressive thoughts, and fatigue all reduced over a three-month period, and not just by a little bit—these parameters were reduced by about 40 percent, while reported stress was down by 50 percent. On the other hand, those without the stress buffer of a visible plant indicated that stress levels rose over 20 percent during the study.

• Installing plants within a radiology department of a hospital reduced short-term sick leave by 60 percent.

• Research published in 2008 in the Journal of the Japanese Society for Horticultural Science showed that greening select high school classrooms with potted plants for a four-month trial period significantly reduced visits to the infirmary compared with age-matched students attending classes without the visible plants.

In Chechnya if you are not mafia the chicks don’t dig you. The capital of Chechnya is Grozny, and the Grozny football team, run by some mafia head who may also be president of Chechnya, one forgets these days, tends to win most of it’s home games. Getting into the stadium is not exactly easy, with all the machine guns around — bodyguards, security, police, passerbys with machine guns. Since the guy who runs the team, who also has mafia written all over his black shirt black tie black sunglasses black Mercedes Benz, and may also be president of Chechnya, is very rich, some very famous stars play for Grozny, and pledge absurd alliance to this poor, developing football team. Brazilians, Africans, ex-European footballers of the year. They train thousands of kilometers away somewhere in Russia then fly in for home games and fly out again immediately. They just love the club of course, in a wry sort of way.

That’s Chechnya, and if you don’t have cash bulging out your pockets you grow a beard like the kind they would not dare in some Arab countries, and then pretend you don’t care if the chicks don’t dig you and take to the hills, where if you shout ‘freedom for Chechnya!’ loud enough and proclaim faith to a god you did not find before at the bottom of a bottle of vodka, then someone somewhere will subsidise you, not necessarily some disparate Arab group, who know you do not fully understand what Jihad means, but perhaps even a spy agency from a land yonder who likes the idea of you harassing Russians.

Some of that changed, after Beslan, where nearly 1,000 people were held hostage without water for 3 days in North Ossetia, Russia, a part of Russia that has a dialect of Iranian as the regional language. The Chechyans, who arrived fully armed for the siege and easily bribed their gunladen way passed police check points, then massacred a few hundred fleeing victims, nearly 200 of them poor children, during a totally bungled-up and quite disgraceful attempt by police and army to break the siege. Chechyans were no freedom fighters; they were really bad guys.

Being a really bad guy in the Caucasus Mountains, where Chechnya is located, puts you in good company; it’s where Stalin was born in nearby Georgia, and for that matter Sadam Hussain was born only 300 kilometers away. But it’s also a beautiful area of the world. “When God was handing out land for different countries,” they say in the Georgia, ‛he forgot about us, because we were eating and drinking and dancing when we should have been queuing up for our land. Since he’d already given all the land he had to give, he was forced to give us the special parts he was reserving for himself.”

And in the Caucasus refusing a gift can start a war. Name two republics there and they’ve probably fought each other. It’s where the world’s first Christian nation is located, and the first holocaust of the last century. Near the mountains is Kolmykia, the only Buddhist republic in Europe they say, where chess is taught as a school subject, but the rest of the countries and republics are divided between variants of Christianity or Islam, and often a mix, where traditions include bride kidnappings, when the woman is plucked off the street by a gentleman on a horse, or worse, and instantly is therefore married to him, or these days bundled into a black Mercedes.

Paganism has long been associated to the worship of trees - and particular trees have been allocated different roles, almost similar to the role of a saint in the Catholic religion.

Quite rightly, too. Place your palm against a tree trunk and feel the energy. What if the energy is coming from you, and not the tree? So what, it is flowing - and what if you feel it is only your imagination? Even better, for imagination is more important than intelligence. And that comes from Einstein so don't take it up with me.

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