movies, quotes

0531 – The Awakening (2011)

spacetime coordinates: boys’ boarding school in Cumbria 1921

Maud Hill: There’s no place on earth people understand loneliness better than here.”

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The Awakening is a 2011 British  supernatural thriller/ horror film directed and co-written by Nick Murphy, starring Rebecca HallDominic WestIsaac Hempstead-Wright and Imelda Staunton.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1687901/


Down a Dark Hall (2018)

spacetime coordinates: 2010’s  exclusive Blackwood Boarding School

imdb   /   rottentomatoes

movies, series

0527 – The Conjuring (film series)

spacetime coordinates: farmhouse in Rhode Island in 1971 //  London suburb of Enfield 1977

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The Conjuring is an American horror film series distributed by the New Line Cinema division of Warner Bros. Pictures. The films present a dramatized take on the real-life cases of Ed and Lorraine Warrenparanormal investigators and authors associated with prominent yet controversial cases of haunting. The main series follows their attempts to assist people who find themselves possessed by demonic spirits, while the spin-off films focus on the origins of some of the entities the Warrens have come across.

The franchise currently consists of two films in the main series, The Conjuring (2013) (imdb) and The Conjuring 2 (2016) (imdb), both directed by James Wan, co-produced by Peter Safran and Rob Cowan, and co-written by Chad Hayes and Carey W. Hayes. The installments revolve around two of the many famous paranormal cases the Warrens have been a part of, with the first film depicting the case of the Perron family, who are experiencing disturbing events in their newly acquired house in Rhode Island, and the second entry focusing on the controversial case of the Enfield Poltergeist while briefly referencing the events that inspired The Amityville Horror. A third film in the main series is currently in development.

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by rainny_yu_1995

The franchise also includes Annabelle (2014), a prequel directed by The Conjuring cinematographer John R. Leonetti and produced by Safran and Wan, which developed the origins of the doll of the same name before the Warrens came into contact with it at the start of the first film. An Annabelle prequel, Annabelle: Creation (2017), directed by David F. Sandberg, was also produced. A spin-off film, The Nun, is currently in post-production, based on a character introduced in The Conjuring 2. A further spin-off film, The Crooked Man, also based on a character introduced in The Conjuring 2, is in development.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valac

Horror films based on actual events

games

526 – Unravel (2016 video game)

spacetime coordinates: 20th century Northern Scandinavia

Unravel is a puzzle platform video game developed by the Swedish company Coldwood Interactive and published by Electronic Arts. It was announced on 15 June 2015 and released in February 2016 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Microsoft Windows. The game centres on Yarny, a small anthropomorphic creature made of yarn whom the player navigates through the environment, utilizing the unraveling yarn which makes up Yarny to solve puzzles, avoid dangerous creatures, and traverse obstacles.

MINIMUM SPECIFICATIONS: CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.4 GHz or AMD Athlon Phenom X2 @ 2.8Ghz AMD //  RAM: 4 GB // OS: Windows 7, Windows 8.1, Windows 10 – all 64-bit // VIDEO CARD: Requires DX11 class hardware and feature setGeForce GT 450 or Radeon HD 5750 or better, with 512 MB or greater (Laptop GeForce GTX 745M, AMD Radeon HD 8650G or Intel 4400 or better)

https://www.ea.com/games/unravel

movies

0516 – Annihilation (2018)

 spacetime coordinates: 2010’s U.S. government’s Area X facility (The Shimmer, a mysterious jungle that appeared on a United States coastline after a meteor strike.)

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Annihilation is a 2018 science fiction horror film written and directed by Alex Garland (imdb), based on the novel of the same name by Jeff VanderMeer. The film stars Natalie PortmanJennifer Jason LeighGina RodriguezTessa ThompsonTuva Novotny, and Oscar Isaac, and follows a group of military scientists who enter “The Shimmer,” a mysterious quarantined zone that is full of mutating landscapes and creatures.

Annihilation-2018-movie-poster

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http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2798920/   /   posterart

animation

0510 – Rocks in My Pockets (2014)

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Rocks in My Pockets (Latvian: Akmeņi manās kabatās) is a 2014  2D / 3D animated film written, produced, directed and animated by Signe Baumane. It was originally created in English and a Latvian version was thereafter translated and produced. The film is based on true events about five women of the filmmaker’s family, including herself, and their battles with depression and suicide. For the entire film, approximately 30,000 drawings were created.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2961890/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocks_in_My_Pockets

movies

0507 – La cité des enfants perdus / The City of Lost Children (1995)

The City of Lost Children poster

The City of Lost Children (French: La cité des enfants perdus) is a 1995 dystopian/ science fantasy/ steampunk/ drama film directed by Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, written by Jeunet and Gilles Adrien, and starring Ron Perlman. An international co-production of companies from France, Germany, and Spain, the film is stylistically related to the previous and subsequent Jeunet films, Delicatessen and AmélieThe musical score was composed by Angelo Badalamenti  with costumes designed by Jean-Paul Gaultier.

Interpretation       imdb

movies

0506 – Saul fia / Son of Saul (2015)

spacetime coordinates:  Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, Poland  6 – 7 October 1944

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Son of Saul (Hungarian: Saul fia) is a 2015 Hungarian drama film directed by László Nemes and co-written by Nemes and Clara Royer. It is set in the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II, and follows a day-and-a-half in the life of Saul Ausländer (played by Géza Röhrig), a Hungarian member of the Sonderkommando. The film’s many historical sources included the personal accounts of Schlomo Venezia and Filip Müller, the records of Miklos Nyiszli, a Romanian-Jewish doctor who was forced to work in the crematoria, and Claude Lanzmann‘s Shoah (1985).

During the preparation, director László Nemes, cinematographer Mátyás Erdély and production designer László Rajk made a pledge to stick to certain rules, or a “dogma”, which included: The film cannot look beautiful. // The film cannot look appealing. // We cannot make a horror film. // Staying with Saul means not going beyond his own field of vision, hearing, or presence. // The camera is his companion, it stays with him throughout this hell.

The film took five months of sound design, where human voices in eight languages were recorded and attached to the original recording of the production. Sound designer Tamás Zányi described the sound in the film “as a sort of acoustic counterpoint to the intentionally narrowed imagery”. The music score by László Melis is intentionally kept so subtle that viewers won’t even notice it. (read more: imdb, wiki)

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The film follows the same stylistic approach as László Nemes’ first and most successful short film Türelem (2007). In the short, the camera follows a woman proceed with her daily work routine with a very narrow focus and vision, until she walks up to a window and sees a group of Jewish prisoners stripped down by Sonderkommando prisoners and SS officers. The short is available online HERE.