Pagan/Witch/Occult Films

[Ethermus Prime]

The Fountain.  

[TeaDidikai]

Ethermus Prime

The Fountain.

The movie that brought us the important lesson: if you shave Wolverine bald, he'll explode.  

[godhi]

If you're a fan of classic horror films, I recommend The Witch's Mirror, a delightfully creepy and disturbing horror film from Mexico made in 1962.
Known in Spanish as El Espejo de la Bruja, the film is about a beautiful young woman whose mother is a witch, and while using a mirror to perform a divination regarding her upcoming marriage to a wealthy surgeon sees an omen of her death. Unfortunately, shortly after they are married the husband falls in love with another woman and uses a rare poison to murder her, and seeking revenge the mother-in-law summons the ghost of her daughter to haunt the husband and his new bride. Definitely worth watching!  

[TeaDidikai]

Godhi? Do you think The Serpent and the Rainbow should be on the list as well?  

[PurpleDragonsGems]

TeaDidikai

Ethermus Prime

The Fountain.

The movie that brought us the important lesson: if you shave Wolverine bald, he'll explode.

*dies of laughter*

*cough* anyway

That movie confused the hell out of me. My mom had to explain it to me.  

[Sivirs]

godhi

Unfortunately, shortly after they are married the husband falls in love with another woman and uses a rare poison to murder her, and seeking revenge the mother-in-law summons the ghost of her daughter to haunt the husband and his new bride.

That sounds like a Spanish witchy-ized version of the famous kabuki play Yotsuya Kaidan. (Wikipedia here)  

[TeaDidikai]

Dragon_Witch_Woman

TeaDidikai

Ethermus Prime

The Fountain.

The movie that brought us the important lesson: if you shave Wolverine bald, he'll explode.

*dies of laughter*

*cough* anyway

That movie confused the hell out of me. My mom had to explain it to me.

Transcendentalist Metaphor can be a b***h.  

[TeaDidikai]

Celeblin Galadeneryn

Man, this makes me wish Silent Hill wasn't such a s**t movie, because the games has two well defined cults surrounding the worship of the towns 'old gods'

Silly Yellow Cult and your burning of Alessa. Silly silly.

The movie didn't represent both cults anyway.

And it wasn't that bad. It made a lovely Otherworld metaphor.  

[Sivirs]

Celeblin Galadeneryn

Or why Harry was played by a girl (It is a big deal, DAMMIT. With him there's sequel potential! Stupid stupid people, I get less Heather this way).

Christophe Gans said (granted, I'm angrily paraphrasing, his phrasing was more subtle) it was because he couldn't believe a guy would be so concerned about his child, and the audience wouldn't believe it either, so it had to be a girl because girls are emotional and vulnerable. If it were a guy, well gosh, people just wouldn't be able to relate!

And then when I said Christophe sounded suspiciously like a raging misogynist (and this was BEFORE the movie came out and he proved me right), half the Silent Hill fandom jumped on my back over it. rolleyes

I also hated that they made the entire town abandoned. It really goes against game canon in a very big way. The whole point is that Silent Hill actually IS a cheerful, pleasant little resort town for most people. But beneath real world Silent Hill there are like 3 MORE layers of Silent Hill, and people with ties to the cult or people who are troubled enough to accidentally shift into there, only THEY see the creepy foggy abandoned place and the Otherworld place.

And I also thought shoving Pyramid Head in there was an obnoxious marketing move, because Pyramid Head is the Sephiroth of Silent Hill - covered in legions of fangirls for no discernible reason. It was a SMART marketing move, because nobody CARED that he doesn't exist outside of game 2 (which didn't even DEAL with the cult, except in the alternate ending, which is the only part of that game that I liked), they were too busy being all OMGZ TEH PYRAMID HEAD!1111 SQUEE!111

I'll shut up now though. stare I have a lot of hatred for that movie, not because it was a complete waste of space, but because it was SO CLOSE to perfection. The set design, the soundtrack, the character design, it was all *so perfect*, and they had to THROW IT ALL AWAY with that horrible storyline.  

[Sivirs]

Celeblin Galadeneryn

the abandoned part, while annoying was a little understandable, as we never really see the town, in any of the games really, with a few minor exceptions.

The third and fourth games are the ones that cinched it for me in canon, although little bits here and there in the other games make me suspect too. In 1, Harry and Cheryl are going on vacation to Silent Hill, so if it's abandoned, they didn't get the message. In 2... okay actually I have no clue about 2 because I didn't like it much so I didn't PLAY it as much as the others, but doesn't James go to Silent Hill expecting it to still be resort town land? So neither of them knew the town was abandoned, if it really was, which seems strange to me since they both loved it so much as a resort. The big one though, was at the beginning of 3, with Heather shopping cheerfully at the Silent Hill mall, and suddenly she makes the shift to abandoned Silent Hill. There were tons of other people there, leading me to believe that the town actually exists just fine and for MOST people it's still a pleasant resort town - it's those unlucky few that somehow shift "planes" (for lack of a better term) and get stuck in the cult's version of things that see Silent Hill as it really is underneath. And then in 4 (which I played even LESS than 2, because it was teh dumb), I honestly don't remember, but wasn't Silent Hill mentioned on the radio periodically as being okay? 'Cause I think I remember them talking about James' mysterious disappearance in the town of Silent Hill and how residents there didn't know what was going on or something.

But considering how muddled game canon can be at times (I was SO mad when SH3 went the way it did - I had this brilliant theory about 1 that was totally spoiled by 3. ;D I still liked 3 though.), it's up for debate, definitely. But Christophe went waaaayy too far in the other direction, IMO.

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Gans sounds like a raging misandrist too. Guys can't care about their own children? Why, because they should be doing manly things like grunting and spitting? rolleyes Well, he moreso just has really fixed gender rolls. LAME.

Yeah, I made it onto fandom wank for my assertion 'cause some stupid chick who makes crappy Sailor Moon icons thought it belonged there, and EVERYONE AT F_W AGREED WITH ME. Several of them were quick to point out that if anything ever happened to *them*, their dads would be out there with a shotgun ready to kill anything that gets between them and their child. But I dunno... watching the movie and looking for it, it seems like Christophe, I dunno, seems to have some issues with women and likes to see them hurt (hah, maybe he's secretly Pyramid Head). Was there even a single guy in the movie (aside from the husband/rescue team), and of the guys, were ANY of them hurt? Ever? And did ANY woman in that movie who asserted herself NOT suffer a horrible death?

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As for PH, I cared. He had no business there. PH represents something very specific and he was entirely decontexualised.

Thank god I'm not the only one. sweatdrop I mean, I know they tried to crowbar him into the cult's beliefs in 3, with the red god/yellow god thing, but he still never actually shows UP in the other games, so I see no reason to believe he exists anywhere outside of James' thoughtform creation based on seeing pictures of the design.  

[Sivirs]

Celeblin Galadeneryn

Played Origins yet? A proto-PH is in there. Helmet not fully formed. It could be just another marketing ploy, as I haven't seen it through the end, but I'll see.

I want to, but I don't have a PSP, and the boyfriend/fiancee claims he won't let me use his for a stinky Silent Hill game (he actually would, but he likes to tease me about my love of survival horror 'cause he doesn't like it as a genre), so I haven't gotten around to getting it yet. I will eventually though. Is it any good for someone like me? For reference, I loved 1, liked 3, mostly hated 2, and thought 4 was ridiculous (but more gameplaywise than storywise), if that helps determine my most likely reaction to Origins.

I dunno if they're crowbarring it in now, and I guess it doesn't matter what I think of it, but at the time of the movie, Origins wasn't out yet, so ya know. It's a chicken or the egg thing. If I liked the storyline of the movie more, I could probably squeak out the justification that James manifested PH because he saw artists' renderings of him done BY the cult, who HAD seen the real thing, and then kinda tapped into their mass thoughtform or something. If I like something enough, I can go to great lengths spinning it to make sense, I just don't like the movie enough to bother deluding myself. biggrin

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As for two, James does go there EXPECTING cheery town, but he's freaking delusional to begin with. Good case there for abandonment. Either that, or to go the weird a** path, certain people only see the weird town, and everyone else is normal. Which means you're killing regular, everyday people in your delusional state. Thank you, Red Cult.

Yeah, James being delusional does make a pretty good case in either direction. My personal opinion, just based off how I interpret all 4 games taken together, is that Silent Hill is for the most part just a normal resort town, but the cult(s) active there has/have either tapped into the corruptness of an alternate plane of existence that lies on the town, or has/have corrupted the plane that was originally there, or something like that, and then (at least initially) used the white flower drugs to get themselves free access. Then Alessa/Samael/whoever also created a DEEPER plane, the one with all the blood and chainlink fencing, as a punishment level of sorts, or maybe a "home base" sort of plane, where his/her true evil is apparent. So in my interpretation of events, the only people who get there are ones tied to the cult/drug or ones who are emotionally fragile enough to be brought through (although I guess 4 kinda ruins that, huh?). Harry suffers a hit on the head and his desperation to save his daughter sends him after her (and Cheryl/Alessa of course can travel between the planes because she's MADE partly of them), Sybil may or may not be dead (we see her motorcycle on the side of the road at the beginning) or at least has ALSO possibly suffered head injuries, James is completely batty and WANTING a punishment, Heather is part of the town, and... okay I've got nothing for the dude in SH4, because I only played the game halfway through until it became one giant escort mission, but I pretend like there's a reason I just haven't gotten to yet. Maybe Kurt Cobain (whatever his name was, I called him Kurt) brought them all in with him. And if you go by the alternate ending in SH2, then it's possible James was brought into Otherworld SH on purpose, because the forces that be or the cult or whoever knew he'd resort to forbidden rituals if they just put the ingredients right out there for him to find and dangled the wife carrot in front of him to bring him to Silent Hill.

But like I said, that's just my interpretation of it. So in my mind, they ARE actually killing monsters, but those monsters may be Samael's demons or they may just be collective thoughtforms made by the cult or by the person entering the Otherworld (which would explain why some monsters are present in pretty much every game, i.e. nurses, but others are just in one, i.e. Pyramid Head/mannequins), and everyday Silent Hill continues chugging along completely untouched by these events (except for the crimes associated with the white claudia drug). I know some people go more for the "it's all in their heads! It's all so very deep and psychological!" interpretation, but I absolutely HATE stories like that, so I prefer there actually being a supernatural element present.