0493 – The Shape of Water (2017)

spacetime coordinates:  Baltimore during the Cold War  in 1962

The Shape of Water is a 2017 American fantasy drama film directed by Guillermo del Toro and written by del Toro and Vanessa Taylor. It stars Sally Hawkins, Michael Shannon, Richard Jenkins, Doug Jones, Michael Stuhlbarg, and Octavia Spencer. Set in Baltimore in 1962, the plot follows a mute custodian at a high-security government laboratory who falls in love with a captured humanoid-amphibian creature.

the film was primarily inspired by del Toro’s childhood memories of seeing Creature from the Black Lagoon and wanting to see Gill-man and Kay Lawrence (played by Julie Adams) succeed in their romance.

In an interview with IndieWire about the film, del Toro said, “This movie is a healing movie for me. … For nine movies I rephrased the fears of my childhood, the dreams of my childhood, and this is the first time I speak as an adult, about something that worries me as an adult. I speak about trust, otherness, sex, love, where we’re going. These are not concerns that I had when I was nine or seven.”

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5580390/

486 – The Cabin in the Woods (2012)

The Cabin in the Woods is a 2012 American horror comedy film directed by Drew Goddard in his directorial debut, produced by Joss Whedon, and written by Whedon and Goddard.  The film stars Kristen Connolly, Chris Hemsworth, Anna Hutchison, Fran Kranz, Jesse Williams, Richard Jenkins, and Bradley Whitford.

sketch105.deviantart

Goddard and Whedon, having worked together previously on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, wrote the screenplay in three days, describing it as an attempt to “revitalize” the slasher film genre and as a critical satire on torture porn. The special effects, monster costumes, special makeup, and prosthetic makeup for the movie were done by veteran horror film actress Heather Langenkamp, her husband David LeRoy Anderson, and their company AFX Studio.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1259521/

0465 – The Handmaiden / Ah-ga-ssi (2016)

spacetime coordinates:  1930s South Korea / Japan

The Handmaiden (Hangul: 아가씨; RR: Agassi; lit. ”Lady”) is a 2016 South Korean erotic psychological thriller film directed by Park Chan-wook and starring Kim Min-hee, Kim Tae-ri, Ha Jung-woo and Cho Jin-woong.  It is inspired from the novel Fingersmith by Welsh writer Sarah Waters, with the setting changed from Victorian era Britain to Korea under Japanese colonial rule.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4016934/

0464 – Altered Carbon (TV Series 2018– )

spacetime coordinates:  Bay City, year 2384 // “The Protectorate”

Altered Carbon is an American science fiction television series created by Laeta Kalogridis and based on the 2002 novel of the same title by English author Richard K. Morgan.

In the future, a person’s memories have been decanted into “cortical stacks”, storage devices of alien design which have been reverse engineered, duplicated en masse, and surgically inserted into the vertebrae at the back of the neck. Physical bodies are called “sleeves,” disposable vessels that can accept any “stack”. Takeshi Kovacs (Joel Kinnaman), a political operative with mercenary skills, wakes up 250 years after his sleeve is terminated, and he is given the choice to either spend the rest of time in prison for his crimes, or to help solve the murder of one of the wealthiest men in the settled worlds (James Purefoy). 

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2261227/

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“When everyone lies, telling the truth isn’t just rebellion.
It’s an act of revolution. So think carefully when you speak it,
because the truth is a weapon.”

0458 – Dellamorte Dellamore (1994)

spacetime coordinates: 1990’s Buffalora, little town in the north of Italy

Cemetery Man (Italian: Dellamorte Dellamore) is a 1994 comedy horror film directed by Michele Soavi and starring Rupert Everett, François Hadji-Lazaro and Anna Falchi. It was written and produced by Gianni Romoli and Michele Soavi and based on a 1991 novel by Tiziano Sclavi. Sclavi is also the author of the comic Dylan Dog, which covers similar themes and whose protagonist is a Rupert Everett lookalike. Everett plays a beleaguered caretaker of a small Italian cemetery, who searches for love while defending himself from dead people who keep rising again. It is an international co-production between Italy, France, and Germany.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0109592/

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ignis fatuus  (will-o’-the-wisp ) Medieval Latin for “foolish fire”) is an atmospheric ghost light seen by travellers at night, especially over bogs, swamps, or marshes. It resembles a flickering lamp and is said to recede if approached, drawing travellers from the safe paths. The phenomenon is known by a variety of names, including jack-o’-lantern, friar’s lantern, hinkypunk, and hobby lantern in English folk belief, and is well attested in English folklore and in much of European folklore. (read more)

0455

spacetime coordinates: 19th-century England, Yorkshire >  the Amazon and its tributaries > the Andes of Peru and Ecuador

Richard Spruce and the Trials of Victorian Bryology

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“Pushing against its scientific reputation as downright boring, moss in particular served to create some botanical, aesthetic sense of a setting that allowed for illicit sexual encounters and for primal yearnings. The reasons for this strange dual identity of bryophytes as both mundane and as primal are relatively clear: realistically, moss provided a soft bed for sexual romps that had to take place outside of stuffy Victorian homes. Serving, perhaps predictably, as a slang term for pubic hair, moss was understood to be consistently moist and jewel-like, glittering like emerald colonies under light. (…) Although tropes of sexual encounters occurring in gardens and forests far predated the nineteenth century, both realistically and literarily, these hidden moss grottoes conjured up an image of something semi-religious, some secret refuge from the trials of urban — and overwhelming imperial tropical — life.”

0433 – Il racconto dei racconti – Tale of Tales (2015)

spacetime coordinates:  17th-century. the kingdoms of Longtrellis / Highhills / Strongcliff

Tale of Tales (Italian: Il racconto dei racconti) is a 2015 European dark fantasy film, directed by Matteo Garrone, starring Salma Hayek, Vincent Cassel, Toby Jones, and John C. Reilly. It is a screen adaptation based on collections of tales by Italian poet and courtier Giambattista Basile:  Pentamerone ( a 17th-century collection of fairytales) or Lo cunto de li cunti (Tale of Tales, or Entertainment for Little Ones), which contains the earliest versions of famous fables like Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella.

The Baroque stories manage to mix real and surreal with many metaphorical usages. The three tales are La Cerva Fatata (The Enchanted Doe), La Pulce (The Flea), La Vecchia Scorticata (The Flayed Old Lady), that have been freely adapted with elements of other tales by Giambattista Basile, as well as a touch of artistic license. All three stories are told in a mixed way, pieced in fragments through the whole film, with all three briefly joining for a royal funeral near the start and a royal coronation at the end.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3278330/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tale_of_Tales_(2015_film)