The Lost Child (2017)

The Lost Child, PS Vita/PS4/Nintendo Switch (2017)

    The Lost Child was released to the world on August 24th, 2017. "Something wicked lurks behind the facade of the modern world. Hayato Ibuki, occult journalist, is on the case!" reads a series of captions in the trailer for the English release. "This looks cool, I got Shinigami Tensei wibes from this" reads a comment on that same video. Absolutely. 

    A budget dungeon-crawler developed according to the specifications of the PlayStation Vita and released as the window of viability for games of this lineage had closed, The Lost Child follows on the genealogy of such works that have steadily emerged since the Japanese 'occult boom' some six decades prior, and signifies an especially diluted form of the urban-occult fantasy exemplified by the Megami Tensei series. Actually playing this game is like being whipped in the face with banality, but there is a strange specificity of context, with little to no documentation in English, that demands closer examination.

Nature and Religion in The Green Knight

The Green Knight, Dir. David Lowery, 2021

     In The Green Knight, nature and the religion of medieval Europe are uneasy bedfellows. Christianity comes to signify all of civilization in a negative-conceptual sense- in the sense that human society is an organism that exists at variance with the earth, like something feebly transposed over the vastness of the world. This feeling is realized in Camelot, a loose confederation of squalid pastures and masonry, ruled by a monarch whose infirmity* reflects the ailing character and fallibility of his realm. Structures that conceal their own decrepitude, a host of ineffectual symbols, a world that has entered upon a long senescence. We are ushered in by an image of Gawain as saint, scepter and globe in hand, head flanked by the solar disc, consumed in fire. This is a twin image: Gawain will enter the flame and die to the world and live and be transformed, but under the auspices of a self-conscious iconoclasm. 

Haxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages (1922)

Witches fly over cavorting Devils 

    Nearly one century removed from its release, Häxan ("Witch"), alternately referred to in English as "Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages", remains a peculiar milestone in the history of occult horror. A lavish production, in fact the most costly Swedish film ever produced at the time, Haxan invokes a carousel of vivid imagery to explore notions of witchcraft in the western world- although, contrary to the English title, the film steadies its focus solely on the medieval period, avoiding explicit reference to the Salem witch trials while seeming to integrate certain details to expand its description of earlier episodes of persecution. 

The Amityville Horror (1979)

Father Delaney (Rod Steiger)

    Viewed today, The Amityville Horror reads as a pastiche of thematic and narrative material culled from those genre staples which preceded and immediately followed its release, namely The Exorcist, Poltergeist, and The Shining. The influence exerted over this second film is too evident to demand elaboration, while the heritage it shares with The Shining (beyond the horror of the abusive father and the peculiar imagery which both films evoke) might be that both films are based in this idea of a terrible recurrence.