The Space Toast Pages

Matthew Rasmussen's journal of journals on various topics of interest, published here, there or somewhere since 1999.

"Marboxian" on YouTube

Speaking of film school, a new copy of my award-winning short "Marboxian" is now available on YouTube, in one piece and in crisp 480p resolution. Slightly smaller embed below.

Nicholas Roeg's "Walkabout"

A man drives his son and teenage daughter (credited only as White Girl and White Boy) into the outback, lights the car on fire, tries to shoot them, and caps himself. Young aborigine (Black Boy) finds them, helps them return to civilization. Film.

This isn't a movie that's seen very often anymore, which is a shame.

I actually first saw Walkabout in a film class in high school. We had a video projector on the cyclorama of the school stage jury-rigged into a quasi-cinema. Our teacher, having spent his '60s youth (and met his Kiwi wife) hitchhiking around Australia and New Zealand (in a way very foreign to a '90s teenager) didn't seem to have actually sat down and watched the movie through in some time. Being reminded how risqué it becomes at times, the class could see him squirming, but we wouldn't let him turn it off.

What a remarkable film. It has moments that've stayed with me ever since, through film school and beyond. Interestingly, the current rage that year for us Black Boy/White Girl-aged students had been Aussie Baz Luhrmann's overclocked refresh of Romeo + Juliet. The two might make an interesting double feature.

Animation: "The Gremlin"

An animation loop, for your pleasure. Something to remind me both what I love and hate about doing character animation. Created in Animation:Master and Final Cut.

Does anyone else remember that old "We're gremlins from the Kremlin" Warner Brothers cartoon?

Super Life: Visual Test #2

From the team that brought you "We Heart Superman"

Super Life: Visual Test #1

Feat. Sarah Smith and Christian Hegg

Grammy Rasmussen

My grandmother passed away on January 14. I brought a microphone and sat down with her back in 2002, then shot some 16mm film on Friendship Long Island and edited a short. Here is that film:

Five Underused Horror Tropes

And properties that make interesting use of them.

1. Frankenstein Creations: Powerful, perhaps immortal confusions of once-dead human parts reanimated by Dr. Frankenstein's (always) secret method. Not to be overly confused with James Whale's 1931 film with its constricted, single-location plot, dim bolt-necked creation, and memorable use of Nicola Tesla-inspired electrical equipment as the (revealed) method of cell reanimation.

Franken Fran: A manga series about a loveable but somehow unmistakeably monsterous patchwork girl who inhabits a mansion full of equally bizarre creations, "helping" people as she sees fit, and awaiting the return of her creator.

2. Dopplegangers: Classically, a mute apparition of oneself that appears to warn against impending danger.

Arcana: Another manga, slow to start, in which a girl matching no missing person's report is found by the police, and by her ability to see ghosts proves useful in investigating a series of brutal murders.

3. Former Tenants: Beings who inhabited the Earth long before humans, and who want their world back.

The short stories of H.P. Lovecraft: Lovecraft lived in the era when man was pushing into the final dark corners of the map. His dominant theme was a fear that the dark corners would push back. The double-switch Lovecraft plays in "At the Mountains of Madness" is particularly impressive. (Cthulhu, despite his fame, is a relatively minor player.)

4. Sirens: Beautiful female creatures, often with the aspects of seabirds, who lure men (and women?) to a watery death with an irresistable song.

There is a Japanese survival horror videogame series called "Siren," but it appears to have very little to do with the western myth.

5. The Motif of Harmful Sensation: Related to the siren, a broader term for the idea of a piece of sensory input that can cause a physical effect on the victim. (Well explained in the finest deleted Wikipedia article I've ever come across.)

BLIT: David Langford's remarkable short story revolves around the discovery of a class of images that "crash" the human brain, killing anyone who views them.

The Sci Fi Channel

Father and Daughter/From My Hands

This just about made me cry:

The video is 2000 Academy Award-winner "Father and Daughter," by Michaël Dudok de Wit. It's been mashed up with VNV Nation's song "From My Hands."

Dark Water: Thoughts on Horror

I'm beginning to wonder if Dark Water is Hideo Nakata's masterpiece. It drills down through the cosmic terror of The Ring to something far more intimate: The fear of abandonment. We see the child's fear of abandonment not only in the repeated scenes of one being left after the close of school, but in the adult characters eyes as, by proxy, they're forced to re-experience its gnawing toxicity. The water, the intrusion of darkness into the rainsoaked day, and the intrusion of water into the spaces and times it's not meant to be in all mirror that forgotten feeling. The breaking of a child's trust in the parent, which is also the child's trust in the world, is a trauma that even adulthood can't banish forever. Watching an imperfect single mother struggle to hold her own crumbling world together against that invading fear is heart-wrenching. All horror is psychological horror, crystalized in the moment of realizing one has been wrong. Dark Water is Nakata's most emotionally draining film and that, I believe, may make it his finest horror film. Hell is being alone forever.

The Man With the Pointy Hat

"In the current storyline, there's a lot that I don't agree with, and I made this very clear to everybody within shouting distance . . . As an executive producer as well as a writer, I've sometimes had to insist that my writers make changes that they did not want to make, often loudly so. They were sure I was wrong. Mostly I was right. Sometimes I was wrong. But whoever sits in the editor's chair, or the executive producer's chair, wears the pointy hat of authority, and as Dave Sim once noted, you can't argue with a pointy hat.

"So at the end of the day, all one can do is try to do the best one can with the notes one is given, and try to execute them in a professional way -- because who knows, the other guy may be right . . . ."

-- J. Michael Straczynski

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