Home
The Wendigo
- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Ideas & Questions
- Hits: 767
This is a Native American Myth common to the more Northern parts of Canada, in which a person might become possessed by a demon - The Wendigo - which was a cannibal spirit and would force one to eat ones neighbors/husband/children...
Given the nature of the long, cold and isolated Canadian Winters, it's easy to see how it arose - and for the tribes and cultures that believed in it, it was a very real thing. A great many stories and trials concerning The Wendigo appear in the early papers, news accounts and trials of Canada.
One particular version concerns the Inuit, or Eskimo, and it warned that if you met a friend while out hunting on the ice, be careful, they might be a Wendigo...
Now, dramatically, imagine: You're a hunter, working a trapline, or looking for Seals, in the long cold Northern Winter. Perpetual evening, the sun never breaking over the horizon, the brightest it gets, a late evenings twilight. The Northern Lights, the icepack, unending in all directions. Days, Weeks on the ice, filling your sled. Isolation.
And you run into a friend, and you're glad of the company, who wouldn't be after all this time here, alone, and you talk about the hunting, the fishing, and maybe you can start a fire, and sit and talk, and he's looking at you and you're a little uncertain, maybe his hunting wasn't as successful as he said, as successful as yours, and maybe, after all, he's not the same person you knew back in the camp or village...
It's got a certain resonance and appeal...the classic cautionary tale...
Struggle: The Life and Lost Art of Szukalski
- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: To Do
- Hits: 960
Netflix has a lot of good movies, "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs" being the last I saw, and quite enjoyed (but not for everyone, I agree). This looks to be pretty good as well:
{embed:youtube:sPkoW4cmqT8}
On Zombies, Vampires, and Werewolves
- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Ideas & Questions
- Hits: 823
Now, topics of the Supernatural that are of interest, and I wrote the headline before I gave it any thought, and because there are a lot of related things of interest I'll be brief...
Starting with Zombies, no explaining their popularity, or there is, it's Everyman's call to the Hero's journey, the realization of the mindless disorder of society that puts him at odds with it and allows him the liberty of war. That death here is more horrific than a natural death is because there's the realization that one could become one of them, the contagion of bad or diseased thought, another mindless shopper, consumer, citizen, and the death, the reanimation of the corpse, implies a loss of spirituality - that one has fallen into a deep and dire well of materialism. There is, surprisingly, a lot in common with this contemporary myth and virtually every major religion on earth, but those are thoughts I'll let you examine for yourself...
Vampires, the Undead come back to suck the blood of the living, are a curious thing as well, popular again across all cultures and times, and to explain the myth (I'll let go the reality for the moment) - I'd start with they are the memories of the deceased, come to haunt the living. Ghosts, a similar idea, are more fleeting, harmless; Vampires are by their nature malevolent and bent on corporeal harm. Vampires might be memories of the deceased that interfere with the survivors continuing on in the world, memories of violence or abuse, or a particularly gruesome disease or death, and the ceremonies designed to prevent the reanimation of the Vampires corpse, generally involving violence, might be a way to visit upon the corpse some portion of the abuse or violence they, in life, inflicted on the living. Consider Vlad the Impaler. The reality of Vampires - prematurely buried victims of disease or illness, that might through their rising infect others, might more pragmatically explain the pains taken to lay the Vampire more permanently to rest.
And finally there are Werewolves, or any of a number of their night-crawling and shape-shifting kin, on the surface, clearly rabies, underneath however a warning to beware the savagery of otherwise normal people in the evening. People who appear, by day, to be one thing, then by the evening turn into something completely different. The personification of Mans more bestial nature.
Now these are just a few fleeting thoughts to get you started, but the prevalence of the myths across cultures suggests that they carry a value or meaning, you might interpret them differently...
A Quiet Place
- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Film
- Hits: 810
Which was just silly, really, and I was too annoyed with the grotesquely flawed internal logic to give a damn about the characters. Just a lot of silly effects thrown thoughtlessly around a hastily written plot. Silly.
Page 392 of 1021