The Blasphemous Tome is the semi-annual fanzine that we create for Patreon backers of The Good Friends of Jackson Elias podcast. It contains articles about RPGs, horror films and weird fiction, not to mention plenty of sanity-blasting artwork and original content for the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game.
Everyone backing us via Patreon by the end of December 2022 will receive the Tome.
$1 backers will receive a PDF copy
$3 backers will receive a PDF copy and a voucher for a print-on-demand issue
$5 backers will receive a PDF copy and a printed copy, signed by the Good Friends
A Brand-New Call of Cthulhu scenario
Featured in this issue is a new Call of Cthulhu scenario by our very own Matt Sanderson, entitled “Educement”.
A group of strangers find themselves caught in a nightmare dreamscape, hunted by something beyond human imagining. Is there any way out or are they doomed to wander eternally in a shifting world of madness?
The cover comes from our good friend John Sumrow, whose work has graced many previous Tomes. We also have illustrations from some favourite eldritch artists, including Evan Dorkin, Daniel Harila, Nefeli Mandilaras, Jason Shepherd and Freya Stack.
Contents
Other articles in this issue include:
Arkham’s Razor
John Hagan shares an evocative and suitably weird piece of Lovecraftian poetry
Cocktail Corner
Matt Sanderson offers us a tasty cocktail of his own devising
Educement
A full-length modern-day Call of Cthulhu scenario by Matt Sanderson
Coma Dreams and Delirium
Matt Sanderson reveals the terrifying reality behind his scenario
The Doom-Love of Lith part 3
We conclude Gaspard du Nord’s strange tale of the most powerful sorcerer in all Hyperborea
The Ludomancers
The Good Friends each share their favourite gaming experience of the year
Is It Lovecraftian?
Greg Osborne tackles the big question that haunts us all
The Sanderson Collection
Matt Sanderson offers us another peek into his library of limited-edition RPGs
Episodes of Insanity
The Good Friends muse on the episodes which meant most to them this year
We create The Blasphemous Tome for all the wonderful people who back us via Patreon. Please check out our Patreon page for details of other rewards we offer our backers.
The Blasphemous Tome is licensed for the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game by Chaosium, inc.
There’s a reason why I’ve saved Flux Gourmet for the end, like a succulent dessert. As much as I love horror films, reviewing one every day for a month can be a slog. It’s easy when a film is either terrific or terrible, but it can be hard to summon the enthusiasm to write several hundred words about a mediocrity. By the time I get to the end of October, I’m usually more than ready to be done with it all. Capping things off with a film I’m really looking forward to can make all the difference.
I’ve been a fan of Peter Strickland’s work since Berberian Sound Studio some 10 years ago. While his work is often only tangentially horror, it’s usually steeped enough in the genre that I don’t feel bad about including it in the challenge. In Fabric, Strickland’s previous feature, was the highlight of my 2020 viewing, and his segment of the anthology The Field Guide to Evil, which I reviewed last year, was by far the best part of the film. As a result, I have high hopes for Flux Gourmet. Let’s see if it lives up to them.
Flux Gourmet is currently available on DVD and Blu-ray in the UK.
Synopsis
Elle di Elle is the self-proclaimed leader of a nameless collective who have recently begun a residency at the Sonic Catering Institute. Here, they practice a strange mash-up of cookery, experimental music and performance art. She has a tense relationship with her colleagues, Lamina and Billy. While they have all openly grown to hate each other, they are trapped in a co-dependent artistic relationship.
Jan Stevens, the head of the institute, tries to guide and shape the group’s work, only to find herself in escalating conflict with Elle. The whole process is documented by Stones, a deeply insecure writer who is plagued with gastric problems. He is treated by the cadaverous Dr Glock, a pompous and manipulative physician who is somehow involved with the institute.
As the residency continues, tensions grow between all the characters. This is exacerbated by a series of attacks from Mangrove Snacks, a rival culinary group who were beaten to the residency by Elle’s collective. With every aspect of the residency growing stranger and more dangerous, is tragedy inevitable?
General Thoughts
Flux Gourmet is a comedy above all else, but not a laugh-out-loud one. This is more the kind of comedy whose absurdity is design to discomfort. While only the ending really delves into horror film territory, the complex series of emotions the rest of the story provokes will be familiar to horror fans.
Most of the film’s absurdity comes from the collective’s work. The very concept of sonic catering is the kind of thing we can imagine existing in our culture, but still feels like a dream. Every aspect of the collective’s art is bizarre, from the transformation of cooking into unsettling sounds to Elle’s unhinged performances, naked, screaming and smearing herself in foodstuffs or, apparently, excrement. None of it would be out of place in the world of performance art, but the overall combination is still startling.
Whether or not it’s a deliberate nod, it’s hard not to see something of JG Ballard in Flux Gourmet. Dr Glock, in particular, feels like he could have crawled out from the pages of one of Ballard’s later novels, and the sheer excess and transgression of the artistic world portrayed here would be at home in his weirder pieces.
Verdict
Flux Gourmet is the first Peter Strickland film I haven’t loved. While I enjoyed it immensely and found plenty to laugh at, recoil from and puzzle over, it never quite transported me the way his other features have. There are moments of high strangeness, but nothing as brain-meltingly weird as, say, the workplace interview scenes from In Fabric or the final act of Berberian Sound Studio.
What we do get is an arch satire of artistic pretension. This may be an easy target, but Strickland brings enough originality that we don’t feel like we’ve seen it all before. Ultimately, a film like this is only as strong as its characters and here the characters are fascinating, flawed oddballs. Their conflicts will be painfully familiar to anyone who has collaborated on any creative venture.
If there is a fatal flaw here, it’s in the resolution. It feels obvious and predictable in a way that Strickland has never done before. While it’s dark, funny and hits the right kind of emotional notes, it’s just too neat to really haunt you after the film is over.
I suppose if Flux Gourmet had been made by any other filmmaker, I’d be singing its praises. Given Strickland’s form, however, it’s just a bit of a let-down. This is a film I’ll have to revisit in a year or two, watching it with tempered expectations. For now, however, I’ll just remain slightly disappointed.
The October Horror Movie Challenge
Please do join in and share your own thoughts with us about this or any other films as the month goes on. You can usually find us on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Discord, or lurking in the dark corners of your home.
If you would like to play along at home, my provisional selections are:
If you have been enticed here by these posts, please do look around at some of our other film reviews. We also have a podcast, called The Good Friends of Jackson Elias, which occasionally covers horror films. If this appeals, you might want to check out some of the following episodes.
I always like to try and fit one or two classics into any October Horror Movie Challenge, and they don’t get much more classic than Häxan (also known as The Witches or Witchcraft Through the Ages). It’s a film I’ve heard plenty about over the years but never got around to until now. While I was tempted to seek out the version narrated by William S Burroughs, I’ve been advised that it’s better to start with the original.
Happily, the Old Films Revival Project recently restored Häxan. This new print is crisp and smooth, clearer than a lot of more modern films I’ve watched recently. Even better, the restored version is on YouTube, so click the link below if you want to learn the mysteries of medieval witchcraft, Swedish style.
After a primer about historical belief in evil spirits, we start the first of several chapters offering imaginative vignettes about witchcraft in medieval Europe. The first shows us a witch preparing a variety of potions, including a love tincture for a local woman, who she then attempts to lure to a Witches’ Sabbath. This is followed by the witch’s dreams, in which Satan tempts and torments her, offering her riches before snatching them away.
The next few chapters follow a witch trial. When a printer develops a mortal illness, his family suspects witchcraft. They accuse an old woman who was unlucky enough to visit their house begging for food. This woman is hauled away by the authorities and tortured. Unsurprisingly, she confesses to all manner of sinister activities, describing a Witches’ Sabbath in great detail. As a parting shot, she accuses every woman who has ever wronged her of being a fellow witch.
One of these accused is the printer’s wife. She, too, is arrested. The inquisitors trick her into a confession, promising freedom if she reveals the secret of making thunder. When she makes something up, this is enough to convict her, and she is sentenced to be burnt at the stake.
We wrap up with some thoughts on superstition. The narrator talks about how the accused were driven to confess through torture, and that the belief in witchcraft was “insanity”. Switching to the present day, we see a troubled young woman in the grip of mental illness, imagining nocturnal visits from doctors instead of the Devil, being driven to pyromania and petty theft. In medieval times, she might have been burnt as a witch. Happily, in the more enlightened age of 1922, we can put her actions down to female “hysteria”.
General Thoughts
The first 15 minutes of Häxan feel like a PowerPoint presentation. The introductory talk is accompanied by still images taken from medieval texts. A few are brought to life in a way reminiscent of Terry Gilliam’s animations from Monty Python. Happily, from part 2 onwards, Häxan turns into something more like an actual film.
The depictions of medieval European concepts of witchcraft are very much the highlight of Häxan. While much will be familiar to anyone with a passing knowledge of the time, the depiction of the Witches’ Sabbath is lively and strange. We see hideous demons cavorting in a graveyard as a witch prepares a “meal of toads and unchristened children”. This all looks like something out of Fantasia, as reimagined by Joel-Peter Witkin.
Some individual details are much stranger, however, from a witch making a healing potion from a hanged man’s hand to a pair of women cursing someone by throwing urine over his door. The weirdness reaches its apex as an accused witch recounts all the children she bore for the Devil, as we see her birthing a steady stream of adult-sized monstrosities.
While the old-timey visual effects keep this and similar scenes tame, there is more nudity and suggestiveness than you might expect from a film of this era. A few of the more risqué moments are watched over by a leering demon who enthusiastically pumps a butter churn between his legs. This is not a subtle film sometimes.
The inquisitors are also unusual, from their practice of divination by dropping molten lead into water to their insistence on searching the bodies of prisoners for “witch powder”. It almost feels normal when they move on to simple torture.
Verdict
Häxan is genuinely odd. In some ways, it feels like a pseudo-documentary exploitation film from the ’60s, titillating us while pretending to educate. From the wanton excesses of the Witches’ Sabbath to the enthusiastic sadism of the inquisition, Häxan excites our senses. This sends a bit of a muddled message, condemning the horrors of witch hunting while clearly relishing them.
Surprisingly, perhaps, for the time, the narrator is pretty direct about identifying misogyny as the main driver of the witch panic. Unfortunately, his attempts to understand what led women to be identified as witches using the more enlightened attitudes of 1922 have not aged well. The narrator decides womanly hysteria is behind everything from demonic possession to shoplifting. “The hysterical woman is a mystery for us,” the narrator proclaims. Perhaps we can excuse such attitudes, however. Given that Häxan is a hundred years old, it’s as much a historical artefact now as the texts on witchcraft it dissects.
As entertainment, Häxan is a mixed bag. The opening lecture is a misstep, robbing the film of momentum even before it starts. Happily, things pick up steadily after this, bombarding us with startling and absurd images. And while the wrap-up is baffling and more than a little pompous, there is enough good stuff in between to engage.
Ultimately, whether or not you’ll enjoy Häxan will depend on what you’re looking to get from it. If you’re hoping for a straightforward horror film, even a dated one, you may be frustrated. But if you’re in the market for a strange piece of cinematic history filled with startling imagery, you’re in for a treat.
The October Horror Movie Challenge
Please do join in and share your own thoughts with us about this or any other films as the month goes on. You can usually find us on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Discord, or lurking in the dark corners of your home.
If you would like to play along at home, my provisional selections are:
If you have been enticed here by these posts, please do look around at some of our other film reviews. We also have a podcast, called The Good Friends of Jackson Elias, which occasionally covers horror films. If this appeals, you might want to check out some of the following episodes.
My one hard rule for the October Horror Movie Challenge is that I can’t have seen any of the films before. Tourist Trap feels like a bit of a cheat. I started watching it many years ago, making it about half an hour in, but got interrupted before I could finish. I’ve meant to go back to it many times but somehow never did. Once again, the OHMC is giving me a chance to put things right.
Tourist Trap is currently streaming on Shudder in the UK.
Synopsis
Woody and Eileen, a young couple, are stranded when their car gets a flat tyre. Woody heads off in search of help, only to find a gas station full of mannequins and flying objects. One of these objects, a metal pipe, skewers him with fatal consequences.
Meanwhile, Eileen is picked up from the roadside by a group of her friends Jerry, Becky and Molly. Their search for Woody is cut short by their own car troubles and they continue on foot. They stumble upon the grounds of Slauson’s Lost Oasis, a one-time tourist trap rendered obsolete by the construction of a new highway.
The kindly Mr Slauson, owner of the establishment, tells Jerry where he can find a mechanic. Meanwhile, he offers the women a tour of his wax museum. The exhibits are all animated in unusual ways, and the centrepiece is a model of Slauson’s late wife. Slauson warns the women to stay in the museum for their own safety.
Of course, the women do no such thing. This wouldn’t be much of a horror film if they played safe. Instead, Becky and Eileen explore the neighbouring house, which is even more packed with creepy mannequins. It is also home to Slauson’s supposedly deceased brother, a masked psychic serial killer with a mannequin fetish. This ends about as well for them as you might suspect.
What is the terrible secret behind all these mannequins? Why do they sometimes move and speak like people? And just what terrifyingly predictable twist about the brother’s identity awaits us?
General Thoughts
Tourist Trap‘s theme music and score are odd. They are bouncy and cheerful, like something from a 1950s sitcom, only with a few sinister flourishes. While this may sound like an odd choice, it adds to the unsettling tone of the film. The soundtrack was written by Pino Donaggio, who had scored major successes like Don’t Look Now and Carrie. His fee apparently ate up a significant chunk of the film’s budget.
This was also an early outing for prolific producer Charles Band, who would later found Full Moon Features, responsible for hundreds of straight-to-video horror and science fiction movies over the following decades.
As with Eyes of Fire, Tourist Trap rode the wave of horror movies featuring psychic powers that followed the success of Carrie. Initially, these powers feel somewhat shoehorned in, offering window dressing for what is otherwise a pretty routine slasher film. The result is still creepy enough to justify their presence. By the end, however, they play a far more important role and the resolution wouldn’t be anywhere near as effective without them.
Oddly, Tourist Trap was awarded a PG rating upon release. While the film is fairly bloodless, it still revolves around a sadistic killer doing horrible things to helpless victims. The producers were disappointed by the rating and believed it undermined the film’s commercial success. This is an interesting contrast to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, where Tobe Hooper was surprised and disappointed not to get a PG rating.
Verdict
It can be a intimidating to review a beloved classic of the genre. So many people saw Tourist Trap in their formative years and fell in love with it. And, honestly, I can see why. If I’d watched it back in the ’80s, it might even have become one of my favourite films. But now? Well, it’s not bad…
In terms of story, Tourist Trap is about as basic as horror films get. It’s a mash-up of Psycho, House of Wax, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Carrie. But we don’t really watch films like this for their originality.
What stops Tourist Trap from being just another generic slasher film is the weirdness of its execution. Mannequins and masks are always going to be creepy, and they’re used exceptionally well here. The killer’s treatment of his dummies as real people is unsettling enough, but the way his psychic powers animate them into a mockery of life makes them uniquely upsetting. Even when such scenes are played for comedy, such as Slauson dining with a female mannequin, they still make us shudder more than laugh.
Everything builds towards what I can only describe as an absolutely batshit climax. Until then, I wasn’t entirely sold, but the sheer lunacy that caps off Tourist Trap is irresistible. It wouldn’t be out of place in the most bizarre of Italian horror films.
While I don’t see Tourist Trap becoming an enduring favourite of mine, this is more because I watched it 40 years too late than any fault of the film. It’s patchy, and it drags in places, but still offers enough imagination and unpleasantness to offset its shortcomings. If you’re looking for a weird piece of horror movie history, this one is definitely worth a watch.
The October Horror Movie Challenge
Please do join in and share your own thoughts with us about this or any other films as the month goes on. You can usually find us on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Discord, or lurking in the dark corners of your home.
If you would like to play along at home, my provisional selections are:
If you have been enticed here by these posts, please do look around at some of our other film reviews. We also have a podcast, called The Good Friends of Jackson Elias, which occasionally covers horror films. If this appeals, you might want to check out some of the following episodes.
With Halloween skulking on the far side of the weekend like some pumpkin-faced monster, I thought I’d get an early start on my picks of the month. After all, if you’re planning on watching some horror to celebrate the season, this weekend is probably when you’ll do it. So what better time to offer recommendations?
The October Horror Movie Challenge
The reviews I’ve posted each day this month are my way of taking part in the October Horror Movie Challenge. Everyone has their own approach, but the main requirement is that you must watch a horror film every day throughout October. The only hard rule I had was that the films had to be ones I hadn’t seen before.
As much fun as watching all these films can be, talking about them is even better. If you fancy joining in the conversation, I would love to hear from you. The main hub of discussion is our Discord server, where we have a channel dedicated to the October Horror Movie Challenge. Alternatively, you can contact me on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, or by speaking my name into a mirror three times.
The Good
This is always the toughest category. The reason I watch so many horror films is simply that I love them. I can usually find some merit even the worst piece of dreck. When I go back over these films at the end of the month, my reaction to most is at least fondness. When a film stands out, it’s usually because it’s exceptional indeed.
There are a few near misses that still deserve special mention. Thirst is pretty much everything I want from a ’70s exploitation film, and its depiction of the mechanised farming of humans is genuinely disturbing. Luz: The Flower of Evil is a trippy, ambiguous piece of Colombian folk horror that will keep you off-balance throughout. And while I Came By might be closer to a thriller than a horror film, its constant reversals of expectations and growing sense of doom pack a hell of a punch.
This deliriously strange tale of a man who encounters a god lurking behind a rest stop glory hole was the biggest surprise of the month. What sounded like a one-note joke of a film turned out to have hidden depths, providing some real shocks towards the end. While the Lovecraftian aspects are little more than Easter eggs, they still added an extra layer of enjoyment. And there’s plenty of gore, weirdness and black comedy to keep you hooked throughout.
I don’t know whether Glorious benefitted from low expectations or if it really is as good as it seemed on a first viewing. It’s definitely a film I’ll have to go back to some day.
As I mentioned in my review, I’m trying to be less dismissive of found-footage horror. While the vast majority of such films are terrible, even by the standards of cheap horror movies, I’ve now seen enough good ones to give me hope.
Butterfly Kisses is something special indeed. Not only is it a critique of the found-footage format, using the characters’ analyses of a collection of disputed videos as a vehicle to point out the worst tropes of the genre, but it is also a chilling and entertaining found footage-film in its own right. I’m not sure I’ve ever enjoyed a horror film on so many different levels at the same time before.
In my review of Mattie Do’s earlier film, Dearest Sister, I said that it showed real promise despite its flaws. The Long Walk is that promise fulfilled. This is a strange, haunting tale of the relationship between an ageing recluse in rural Laos and the ghost of a young woman who has walked by his side for 50 years. Their story is one of regrets, second chances and terrible secrets, rooted in the man’s traumatic childhood. This is a rich, beautifully shot film that will scare, delight and hurt you in equal measure.
The Bad
Last year, I complained that I hadn’t picked enough terrible films. While I’ll always prefer to watch a good horror film, there’s a certain gleeful pleasure in tearing a bad one apart afterwards. While I still seem to have avoided picking too many stinkers, at least a couple of this year’s picks gave me an opportunity to rant.
It feels like a bit of a cheat to list Crystal Eyes here as it’s not really a bad film. There was just one particular aspect that soured me on it so utterly as to make it impossible to enjoy the rest. If you’re happy to be spoiled, read the full review to see what that was. Apart from this, however, Crystal Eyes was really just some low-budget, campy fun in the form of a giallo wannabe.
Again, I’m not sure I’d really call Broadcast Signal Intrusion bad. It was simply frustrating. There is a good film hiding in here somewhere — it’s just not the one that made its way onto the screen. Fundamentally, this is a classic paranoid thriller with some weird flourishes, taking inspiration from the infamous Max Headroom signal hijacking in 1987. Unfortunately, this premise is squandered on a narrative that goes around in circles, trying to hide its secrets so cleverly that we give up caring what they are.
OK, after being gentle about the last two picks, I shan’t hold back here. The Gore Gore Girls is one of the worst films I’ve seen in 50 years of horror film viewing. The cheapness and technical incompetence are a given with Herschell Gordon Lewis, but they usually just add to the charm of his work. Unfortunately, there is no charm at all here — just mean-spirited misogyny that feels uncomfortably fetishistic. It’s like watching an amateur porn movie, just one where the only pounding is a hammer on some unfortunate woman’s face.
The Weird
It can be tough choosing whether a film goes into the Good category or the Weird one. As far as I’m concerned “weird” is generally an accolade. After seeing enough films over the decades to be inured to most frights, I watch horror more to be surprised and awed. A wildly imaginative but flawed film is going to appeal to me a lot more than a polished but dull one.
Barring some misgivings over the ending, I loved almost everything about A Ghost Waits. While it is absolutely a ghost story, it is more romantic comedy than horror. At the same time, I almost felt like I was watching a remake of Beetlejuice, shot in the style of Clerks. This is a zero-budget film largely limited to a single location and with makeup effects from the Halloween aisle of your local supermarket. Still, the result is unlike anything I have ever seen. Utterly charming.
I’m not sure how much of the weirdness of Eyes of Fire is deliberate. While its mixture of historical drama, folk horror and Stephen King pastiche is unusual, much of what makes the film strange lies in its execution. What little budget they had was largely spent wisely, with simple tricks creating memorable visual effects. The makeup in particular looks cheap, but in a way that makes it unsettling. At the same time, the acting varies wildly from competent if over-earnest to the worst kind of amateur dramatics nonsense. What really pushes Eyes of Fire over into true weirdness, however, is the editing. Scenes fly past at such a clip that you wonder if you hallucinated them. By the end, all attempts at coherent storytelling are abandoned in pursuit of pace. The result is fevered and jarring, but not altogether displeasing.
The White Reindeer might not fit most people’s concept of a weird film, but its combination of documentary-style footage and fairy-tale folk horror is so utterly unique that I didn’t know where else to place it.
This is the story of the sexually frustrated wife of a roving reindeer herder who makes a sacrifice to the stone god to give her the power to make men love her. Unfortunately, the witch blood in her ancestry perverts this desire and she becomes a vampiric shapeshifter, stalking the land in the form of a white reindeer.
What is already a fairly odd story is made all the stranger by the unrelenting bleakness of its snowy locations and the often confoundingly cheery soundtrack that accompanies every moment of the film. There is nothing else quite like this in the history of horror cinema.
2022’s Selections
If you’d like a recap of the full list, it went something like this:
If you have been enticed here by these posts, please do look around at some of our other film reviews. We also have a podcast, called The Good Friends of Jackson Elias, which occasionally covers horror films. If this appeals, you might want to check out some of the following episodes.
Recent Comments
11 May, 2023
15 March, 2023
1 March, 2023
1 March, 2023
25 January, 2023