#Stephen Volk

[addictivecontradiction]

Ghostwatch, 1992

[cannedbluesblog]

Gothic (1986)

[80smovies]

[burningexeter]

All of these I can see being in the same crazy ass universe.

[thebutcher-5]

L'albero del male

Benvenuti o bentornati sul nostro blog. Nello scorso articolo abbiamo parlato di una pellicola basata su un famoso romanzo di formazione che ha fatto la storia e che continua a essere apprezzato ancora oggi, Il giardino segreto. La storia parla di Mary Lennox, una bambina che, rimasta orfana dei genitori in India, viene trasferita in Inghilterra dove vive il suo unico parente vivo, lo zio Craven.…

[panmikola]

"Девичьи мечты" (Ye Maiden's Reverie), 1898 г.

Стивен Арнольд Дуглас Волк (Stephen Arnold Douglas Volk, 1856-1935) — американский художник-портретист, монументалист и педагог.

Холст, масло. Беркширский музей, Питтсфилд, графство Беркшир, штат Массачусетс.

[wine-porn]

OG Central Coast

In the grand scheme of super-black, long-aging, often un-approachable, odd red varieties: Petite Sirah, Petit Verdot, Tannat, etc., everything starts coalescing at 10. This has a year to go, but the beauty is beginning to show. Dark blood-red in the glass, hints of brick showing at the rim, a nose calm and fruity, while still mired in chalky under-pinnings and deep vegetal spice. Bright, while…

[connecticut-turnpike]

"we don't want to give anybody sleepless nights"

my OFFICIAL ghostwatch trailer as a part of my campaign to get people to watch this movie that I like a whole lot

warning for spoilers!!! I tried my best to leave out the best parts of the movie so as to not give too much away but I couldn't resist adding in some of the really good parts

song is the end (instrumental) by the doors

movie is ghostwatch (1992), written by stephen volk and directed by lesley manning

ghostwatch is a mockumentary horror film aired by BBC1 on halloween night 1992. it was passed off as a live broadcast although it was filmed and produced much earlier

there were an estimated 1,000,000 calls to the BBC switchboard the night of the broadcast with viewers expressing outrage, praise, and genuine belief in what they were seeing

the show became incredibly controversial in the time following the original broadcast and the film's producers eventually issued an official apology for any emotional distress caused by the program

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s/o capcut for letting me auto generate captions for free and thescriptsavant.com because I had no idea what pipes was saying in the bit with the tape recorder lol

[byneddiedingo]

Myriam Cyr, Julian Sands, Gabriel Byrne, and Natasha Richardson in Gothic (Ken Russell, 1986)

Cast: Gabriel Byrne, Julian Sands, Natasha Richardon, Myriam Cyr, Timothy Spall. Screenplay: Stephen Volk. Cinematography: Mike Southon. Production design: Christopher Hobbs. Film editing: Michael Bradsell. Music: Thomas Dolby. 

[twittercomfrnklin2001-blog]

Ghostwatch

Since some sources have pointed to writer Stephen Volk’s GHOSTWATCH (1992, Shudder, On Demand at Prime and YouTube) as the inspiration for LATE NIGHT WITH THE DEVIL, I felt compelled to watch it to see for myself. There are clear parallels, particularly in that they share similar dramatic arcs. But they both start from a different hook and diverge in a lot of details. That’s not to deny any influence but simply to put it into perspective. Oddly, GHOSTWATCH is classified as a mockumentary rather than a found-footage film. I suppose what keeps it from being found footage is that it’s purportedly a live telecast. It’s also formatted much more logically than most found footage films.

A BBC News show with actual BBC personalities (presenter Michael Parkinson and married reporters Sarah Greene and Mike Smith) is presenting a live Halloween broadcast about a haunted house, with Greene on the scene with the single mother and her two young daughters living there, Smith fielding phone calls from viewers with their own paranormal experiences to share and Parkinson anchoring the show from the studio alongside a paranormal investigator (Gillian Bevan) who’s been studying the case. Things start out simply, with the family sharing their stories while neighbors comment on the effect the haunting has had on their district. But then little things start happening — strange noises, a wet spot on the floor, falling pictures — until all hell breaks loose.

The program is remarkably effective (so much so some viewers believed it was real, despite disclaimers, and even complained of suffering from PTSD). Using real broadcast personalities helps greatly with verisimilitude. They don’t seem to be acting, even when Smith becomes genuinely concerned for his wife’s safety. And Bevan has captured the inflections of real people not accustomed to public speaking. Her voice keeps trailing off. There’s also a fascinating treatment of gender as Greene naturally falls into a motherly role with the two young girls, their mother (Brid Brennan) fights to protect her daughters and Parkinson attempts to exercise patriarchal authority over all concerned, particularly Bevan, whom he keeps trying to bully into giving concrete answers about her ever-evolving research. Her repeated, “I don’t know” becomes almost a mantra for the show. Volk also gets credit for cleverly constructing the script as if it were a mystery, with neighbors and callers offering pieces of the puzzle to explain what the source of the haunting might be. The result is one of the creepiest 90 minutes of TV you’re likely to see.

[addictivecontradiction]

Ghostwatch, 1992

[evilasteriskpodcast]

Our final EVIL*ASTERISK podcast of 2024 features Ghostwatch (1992) – a groundbreaking BBC horror mockumentary that was presented as a “live” broadcast 👻 Created and written by Stephen Volk; directed by Lesley Manning.

Hope you enjoy listening … and best wishes for a frightfully fun new year 🎉

In case you missed it, transcripts for previous episodes (You Are Not My Mother | Stopmotion) are available on Medium: https://bit.ly/4i9GGg1

Luis and I review obscure, odd, and wholly original horror films that might not be getting the attention they deserve – is available on Spotify, YouTube, Apple, Amazon, Audible, SoundCloud, and more! See our LinkTree for details: https://linktr.ee/evilasterisk

[anaxerneas]

The claim is that a certain territory belongs as of right to a certain historical ethnic, or cultural, or linguistic, or religious identity, regardless of what other people are living there, even if they’ve been there for centuries. And so Hungarian nationalists laid claim to the lands of the Crown of St Stephen in the nineteenth Century, and the Bharatya Janata Party feels it can and must impose a “Hindutva” identity on all the immense diversity of India today. Even more gruesome examples of the working out of this kind of claim have been visible in recent years in the territory of the former Yugoslavia.

The reflex of many people in liberal societies to this kind of thing is to blame “nationalism” and not democracy. But this is to take too quick a way with it. To start with, `nationalism’ has many senses. The original idea, for instance in its Herderian form, was a liberating one, and highly consonant with democracy. We don’t have to force ourselves into an artificial homogeneity in order to live together in peace. We can recognize different “national” (Volk) identities, even give them political expression, because each in this act of recognition acknowledges that it is not universal, that it has to co-exist with others which are equally legitimate. Herderian nationalism is a universalist idea, all Völker are equally worthy of respect; it can be used (and was so used by Herder) to defend Slavic people against German encroachment, as well as to defend German culture against the hegemonic claims of French. You don’t have to accept French as a universal language in order to live in freedom with guaranteed rights. The political identity under which you live can reflect you too. This demand allows of an impeccably democratic justification.

What this pushes us towards is the idea which I believe is the key to facing the dilemma of exclusion creatively, the idea of sharing identity space. Political identities have to be worked out, negotiated, creatively compromised between peoples who have to or want to live together under the same political roof (and this coexistence is always grounded in some mixture of necessity and choice). Moreover, these solutions are never meant to last for ever, but have to be discovered/invented anew by succeeding generations.

The idea of nationalism which creates bitter trouble is that defined by Gellner: the “political principle, which holds that the political and national unit should be congruent”. According to this idea, the problem of how to share identity space can be solved by giving each nation its territory, on which it can erect its sovereign state. The utopian, even absurd nature of the proposal immediately strikes the eye. Quite apart from the thousands of groups which can claim the status of “nation”, even giving each its parcel of land would still leave each pocket handkerchief state with national minorities, so inextricably mixed are the world’s peoples. The utopian scheme could only be carried through by massive ethnic cleansing. It is clear that this idea will only “work” by making certain nations more equal than others. These are to get their states, and the rest are to live in their shadow as minorities, if they are allowed to live at all. This idea of nationalism can only be applied by negating its own universalist ethical basis.

Charles Taylor, "Democratic exclusion (and its remedies?"

Is Herderian nationalism really "ur-nationalism" or just one possible variety?

[alchemy-fic]

My book wishlist!

Egyptian Magic by E.A. Wallis Budge (1901)

Magic of the Ordinary: Recovering the Shamanic in Judaism by Gershon Winkler, David Carson (2003)

Ashkenazi Herbalism: Rediscovering the Herbal Traditions of Eastern European Jews by Deatra Cohen, Adam Siegel (2021)

Jewish Magic and Superstition: A Study in Folk Religion by Joshua Trachtenberg (1939)

Ancient Jewish Magic: A History by Gideon Bohak (2008)

The Encyclopedia of Jewish Myth, Magic & Mysticism: Second Edition by Geoffrey W. Dennis (2007)

The Green Mysteries: An Occult Herbarium by Daniel A Schulke, Benjamin A Vierling (2023)

Reading Sumerian Poetry (Athlone Publications in Egyptology & Ancient Near Eastern Studies) by Jeremy Black (2001)

The Literature of Ancient Sumer by Jeremy Black, Graham Cunningham (2006)

Handbook to Life in Ancient Mesopotamia by Stephen Bertman (2002)

Weavers, Scribes, and Kings: A New History of the Ancient Near East by Amanda H. Podany

Auguste Racinet. The Costume History (Bibliotheca Universalis) by Françoise Tétart-Vittu

The Arthur of the Welsh: The Arthurian Legend in Medieval Welsh Literature by Rachel Bromwich (2009)

The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English: Seventh Edition (Penguin Classics) by Geza Vermes

Thomas Aquinas: Selected Writings (Penguin Classics) by Thomas Aquinas, Ralph McInerny

The Treasures of Darkness: A History of Mesopotamian Religion by Thorkild Jacobsen

The Tibetan Book of the Dead: First Complete Translation (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) by Graham Coleman, Thupten Jinpa

The Egyptian Book of the Dead (Penguin Classics) by Wallace Budge, John Romer

History Begins at Sumer: Thirty-Nine Firsts in Recorded History by Samuel Noah Kramer (1981)

The Sumerians: Their History, Culture, and Character (Phoenix Books) by Samuel Noah Kramer

Welsh Witchcraft: A Guide to the Spirits, Lore, and Magic of Wales by Mhara Starling

An Annotated Sumerian Dictionary by Mark E. Cohen

A Sumerian Chrestomathy by Konrad Volk

Toward the Image of Tammuz and Other Essays on Mesopotamian History and Culture by Thorkild Jacobsen

Early Mesopotamia by Nicholas Postgate

Amulets and Talismans by E. A. Wallis Budge

Mundane Astrology by Michael Baigent, Campion, Nicholas, Harvey, Charles

[crossroadsofchaos]

pinned info post

I'm Misha (he/him preferred, but others are fine), young adult. I'm a queer Russian artist and sometimes writer. I suspect I may also be autistic and/or have ADHD.

(Main: aroacemisha)

This is a sideblog for my drawings, writing, edits, etc, featuring both my original characters and my fandom work. I add image descriptions to any original images I post.

If you'd like to ask anything, feel free to send an ask! Anon asks are allowed.

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Creative tags:

#misha draws stuff (drawings);

#misha's edits (edits);

General original story/OC tags and info:

#misha's original stuff (general tag);

#oc info posting (info posts);

Non-exhaustive list of characters with short summaries of who they are: [here]

The universe the story is set in consists of our regular world, but with a secret extra island, which also has a country on it. The characters are human, but some have magical abilities, ranging from mild to powerful. There's some alternate history elements due to the existence of magic.

(Calling it a "story" is generous though, at this moment I pretty much just have OCs without any plot attached to them, aside from some backstories)

A few character tags (far from all), grouped into batches so it's not too long:

#levan rotshtern; #stanislav rotshtern; #zlata rotshtern; #pavlo holubenko; #augustus wang; #tran ngoc minh;

#zacarias solntsev; #luna rosado; #miguel rosado; #beatriz swift; #ginger swift; #samantha swift; #viviana swift;

#rufus swift; #stephen e. burns; #kimberly swift-burns; #howard swift-burns;

TOH tags:

General tags: #toh, #the owl house (most used) and #owl house;

I'm a firm #hunter noceda believer for canon Hunter, so that's his tag;

My TOH AU tags and info:

#retired leaders au (general tag); just FYI I don't always use the general TOH tags for the AU, but I always use this tag;

#rlau info (info posts);

Wolf Fam tags: #belos wittebane; #sebastian steven tholomule; #hunter wittebane; #kikimora volk;

Wolf Fam palisman tags: #crescent the snow leopard; #ash the wolf; #waffles the wolf; #grusha the hyena;

AU summary info post: [here]

The AU was originally created in 2021, but TOH stopped being my focus in the summer of 2023, so for a while I wasn't posting anything original for either the canon show or my AU, but my interest came back in April of 2024, so I have revived the AU. It's a "good uncle" type AU, where Belos is a better person.

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Side note: when I first created this blog, I was originally posting Hello Neighbor stuff and used to have a HN AU (which later became an original thing and eventually was abandoned), but I no longer post anything HN-related and I've stopped following the franchise years ago. I also deleted many of my old posts. But I seem to still show up among HN blogs? Or at least other HN blogs get recommended next to my blog as "similar" blogs? Idk, something something webbed site.

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A couple more things:

Do not repost/reupload my work (or any other artist's work) without permission. And get that permission before posting, instead of posting and saying you'll remove it if they ask. Ask for permission, and if they say no, or they don't reply, don't post it.

I block pr0ship/c0mship/pr0fic/whatever on sight. Carefully exploring a dark subject is great; treating it as "tee-hee silly shipping trope" akin to Tall x Short or Fire/Sun x Moon/Ice is not doing that, it's trivializing and cutesifying the subject.

FYI, I also block L*nter shippers on sight. Luz and Hunter may not be biologically related, but they are still explicitly stated to be family in the show.

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[This post may get updated sometimes]