Just watched Honogurai mizu no soko kara. Scary shit. Has been remade into Dark Water. What the fuck is wrong with film goers in the US? Can’t they see the Japanese originals of these sorts of films? Post-Fordist cultural industry attempting to capture the enthusiasm organised around an ‘exoti’ ‘oriental’ variation… Idiots.
Got me thinking about the concept of the ‘horror apartment’. Where I am now, I can hear most bathroom water sounds from surrounding apartments, such is the nature of the apartment block’s layout. It was freaky as shit watching a horror movie on the television about haunted dark water and then having one of my neighbours turn a tap on. You know that sound that water pipes somtimes make? It sounds like someone in a car with their head out the window, mouth agape, screaming into the rushing wind. You know, when the wind steals your screams so that even you can not hear them. All you get is the feeling of screaming and the reverberations through your inner ear. Yeah, I go to bed to that sound. Hell of an alarm clock in the morning, too.
Another thing. My apartment layout is weird. For the most part, the minor resonance of the fridge — as the coolant pump or whatever kicks in — reverberates around the apartment in such a way that you would expect of minor resonance. That is, until you arrive in the bedroom, about where my bed is, and about where I lay my precious little head for lights out night-night. The minor resonance must multiply, producing a standing wave of some description, and shakes my body as if I was in a subwoofer enclosure. Ok, so it isn’t that bad, but if it was a progressive political movement and not a fridge sound, then I would be elated with the awesome power of its multiplicative effect.
The most horrible thing is watching someone who you know is about to see something horrible. Like when you bare witness to realization on the face of the loving, but mildly insane mother of the living little girl when she realises she is about to see the evil little drowned girl ghost water thing. The expectation of the event. Through in-shot mirror work, or framing, or something. That is pure dread. I hate that feeling.
Real estate agents fill me with dread. I wonder what they must have been thinking when they were kids? “Oh, I want a job that makes others fill with dread.”? What sort of sick assholes decide they want that sort of job? They must be the worst Liberal voters in existence. Not the redeemable staid, conservative types, but the young go-getters who should know better and probably do, but don’t give a fuck, because they want to turn a quick buck through pure exploitation. More than Japanese horror films, that is what fills me with dread: pure exploitation. It is dread, because I have been trained to disect these sort of people through real-time analysis of the gestures of their bodies, the language they use, the clothes they wear, how long it takes them to say something, it is all fuckin transparent! Dread! I can see myself about to witness the horror of pure exploitation! My own exploitation!
What do these people do for a living? They have no skills! They occupy an impersonal social subjectivity that most would recognise as absolute fuckin’ scum inspiring hatred in the most resolute pacifist.* Why do we let these people do this? Because otherwise we go to jail…
* ok, so my real estate agent in Parramatta was tops. Must be just these inner-west assholes.