🎬 #191 Solar Fear.
The unknowable vastness of the universe is awe inspiring. But it’s also equal parts terrifying, if you consider it too long. I verge on the awe inspiring more than the terrified, personally. But, there is something about how much we are yet to understand about our world, our solar system - what ‘space’ actually consists of that is fear inducing. It’s hope inducing too, but for this week’s newsletter we’ll examine it through the lens of fear.
The gigantic, colossal scale of planets and objects distinctly inhumane, the places we aren’t designed to live in, and the cold indifference of processes enveloping our planet is the most frightening thing this Halloween. Not to mention their unknowable effects on us. And one film’s title sequence sums this idea up better than most.
Please enjoy
Bry
Tobe Hooper’s title sequence to his film The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, isn’t even explicitly indicative of what is to come. But it plants the seed of the eeriest of ideas. That the activity of our closest, largest celestial body - the Sun, has no concept of us, as indifferent as a football to a microbe, can wipe us out with one lick of a solar flare, and yet has some unknown influence over our psyche. The title sequence focuses on stunningly rendered, scientific-esque footage of a violent solar storm, blood red and hell black swirls of humongous proportion. The dissonant music giving voice to those angry tongues of fire, as if making audible - their deep, curdling screams into space. What seem like tendrils of flame soon are made clear in our mind’s eye as vast - spitting flaming plasma 10’s of thousands of miles into space. Over this we hear almost a pre-apocalyptic litany of bad news stories. People throwing themselves off buildings, a huge oil fire out of control and a cholera epidemic are all mentioned in the news report - it’s bad and maybe the solar storm has something to do with it.
This idea is planted in our minds even before we’re into the guts of the film. The only presence of the sun after the titles, is in the sweltering heat the cast of characters struggle through and make mention of. That and the omnipresent sweat, dotting red faces and making stenches all the worse.
It’s frightening to me, mainly in the sense of influence, but totally unconscious influence. The idea that we aren’t even aware of why we are the way we are, or why we do what we do. Where does the ‘evil’ come from? It’s as if the ‘evil’ characters have absorbed the indifference of the solar storm. They’re just doing a process - not knowing why. Just being, not caring. This is a helio-centric horror of universal proportions - where characters are possessed by a star.
