13 Days to Halloween (9 + 8) - Hodgson's "The Voice in the Night" and Lustmord's Rising

BLOT: (24 Oct 2010 - 12:24:42 AM)

13 Days to Halloween (9 + 8) - Hodgson's "The Voice in the Night" and Lustmord's Rising

Due to a number of factors, didn't get to write #9 last night so I figured I would compress it and #8 into one entry today.

First up, we have a short story by the old master William Hope Hodgson: "The Voice in the Night" (click to read, pdf generated by ManyBooks). Hodgson's Nightland and House on the Borderland have both been quite inspirational in the strange horror and weird SF genres, and his paranormal investigator Carnacki is an early proto-type for pretty much any series involving a detective and the unknown. However, much of Hodgson's work was written in a deliberately opaque style, with massive sentences and subtle word play. "The Voice in the Night," one time adapted by Ishiro Honda—yes, that guy—into a weird Japanese horror movie called Mantango, manages to avoid most of Hodgson's less favorable techniques and focuses more on mood and the unseen.

A man rows up to a ship sitting still in a becalmed sea and begs for food. After he gets the food, he starts telling his story. He and his fiancee were abandoned by the crew of a sinking vessel and left to fend for themselves. They come across a ship floating off of an island, and try to make temporary shelter, there. Except everywhere are strange patches of fungus. Over time, they began to find the fungus growing on their skin, and they started craving the fungus as a food stuff. Which pretty much brings us to the story's present, and the strange lumbering thing seen in the raft, and the truth about the fungus on the boat.

"Voice" is an early example of the genetically infectious contaminate stories, where something ingested begins to take you over (Stephen King has two entries into the genre: one involving infection from a beer can and another involving, and I quote, "meteor shit". The concept's drift through Japanese horror is worth noting. There have been several movies about infection taking over, spreading throughout technology, driving you to do something, to spread the infection further. Books/Movies like Ringu are famous for it, but even a number of their slasher and gonzo gore types some character becoming infected and altered from within. Looking back along Japanese genre movies, Matango, which alters "Voice" but sticks to the basic elements of horror from it, is an early example of the theme, which means Hodgson in part helped to inspire one of the common ideas of Japanese horror.

On another arm of the medium spectrum is an album by Lustmord, the Welsh Godfather of Dark Ambient, recorded live in 2006 (on June 6, 2006, even): Rising. Often written out as Rising 06.06.06. While many of Lustmord's albums would make pitch perfect soundtrack albums for haunted houses and such, Rising is a great starter set to give you a wide range of several of his more visceral experimentations.

In it, he plays off several discomforting hues from his sound pallette. Something like tortured whales scream out with grinding intensity, followed the clarion call of the damned. A low, intermittent drone peeks out from the back. You can hear these three simple pieces from the Lustmord bag of tricks in this sample (2mb mp3, about 2 minutes). That is from track 2: "Decompression". If you get a chance to reach for one moody-as-hell horror soundtrack this year, this is the one I recommend.

TAGS: 13 Days Until Halloween 2010

BY WEEK: 2010, Week 42
BY MONTH: October 2010