Each issue of SPIRAL MANIFESTOS will recommend a concentric conversation – objects that harmonize. As an inaugural theme, this Concentricity is a cinematic double feature – two films that complement each other’s purpose. Often these Concentricities will feature cultural oppositions – two sides of the same coin. This first one, however, is more self-evident. Rather than drawing on dichotomy, dissonance, or diversion, instead these two features share a common fixation – the materiality of an emerging medium. – ga

The issue’s focus is a pair of films that vitalize the horror and absurdity of the material image through missives from the beyond. Coincidently, these otherworldly missives take on the texture and vibrance of dusty VHS tapes. In Prince of Darkness (1987) and Lair of the White Worm (1988), iconic horror directors John Carpenter and Ken Russell, respectively, dream in lo-fi. In Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness, the cast of California grad students studying an ancient occult object are all beset by the same repeating scratchy dreams of a hooded figure waiting in the church doorway. In Russell’s Lair of the White Worm, A young woman in the English countryside discovers a tainted crucifix which triggers horrific religious visions featuring giant serpents, a bloody Jesus, and pillaging Roman soldiers. 

This pair of films weaponizes the lo-fi, crackling horror of forbidden objects – the mystery of an unmarked VHS tape, the potential of seeing something that you are not meant to see. In a form that internet creepypastas would eventually widely popularize and nostalgize, these films make nightmares out of VHS fuzz, crackling abstraction, and overexposed bodies.

Carpenter and Russell evoke the technological substantiation of something immaterial, and by doing so suggest that this new technology bears an unknowable power and an unforeseen danger. Like a ghost that appears in a photograph, something from another world has crossed a boundary and imprinted itself onto ours. In these dream-visions something beyond earthly form, body, or speech has yoked itself to this world and transposed its machinations into a form and style we can understand: the VHS tape.

In musician Brian Eno’s book, he describes the lasting appeal of outdated mediums, “Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature.” What at first is off-putting, becomes “the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.” That Carpenter and Russell seem to have come to this same insight contemporaneously with the mass proliferation of VHS speaks only to their foresight and understanding of both the medium and the genre.