(And some days it takes more Stones than others...) Where Mythical Bestiary meets Contemporary Culture and Chews On Its Leg Until Covered with Slobber.
HAXAN, a Danish silent film made in 1922 by Benjamin Christensen, contains images you won't be able to get out of your mind. Intended as a documentary about the witch hysteria of the Middle Ages, with tableaus modeled after old woodcuts more disturbing and archetypal than most modern horror films. It's easy for horror movies to repulse or sicken, but after the bloody roller coaster ride, how many get under your skin and start to worry you...?
FIVE MILLION YEARS FROM EARTH, also found in Britain under the title QUARTERMASS AND THE PIT, is a Hammer film made in 1967 with Andrew Keir, James Donald and Barbara Shelley.
Under a London alley called Hobb's Lane, workers unearth an unexploded shell that turns out to be a lost ship from an ancient, dying Mars-- with hominid fossils on board. 
Human aggression, the "killer ape" impulse that took over the Earth, is a genetic inheritance from the red planet. Our primordial fear of the Devil's horns is an imprinted memory of the Martian "locusts"' antennae, our genocidal wars a reenactment of their annual Martian culling of the weaker members of their herd. And the ship isn't dead, it's only sleeping...THE DESIGNATED MOURNER, a play by Wallace Shawn, was filmed by David Hare with Mike Nichols, Miranda Richardson, and David de Keyser in 1997. The survivor of a government purge tries to justify himself to an unseen audience after he realizes that ''everyone on earth who could read John Donne was now dead."
Imagine Winston Smith as an Edgar Allen Poe character confessing the murder of his own soul, telling us how he learned to stop worrying and love Big Brother, and yes, he really is glad that Julia's dead, because after all she just expected too much of us, didn't she, and I just want to be left alone to watch my TV and not have to think all the time...
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