So...let me ask an easy question.

Let's say you were in a car with a young kid like Damien Thorn here, and you didn't know who he was. Let's say you were the limo driver and you'd never met Damien before. You drive towards a church, and once you arrive and the kid gets a good look at the church, the kid starts screaming their head off.

What would you, the disinterested limo driver, think was going on? I feel that the most reasonable conclusion myself was that the kid had been traumatized at church. Abused, assaulted, whatever. And now they were being made to go back to the source of their misery.

I think that's reasonable, don't you? Well...polite American society does not see it that way. They have been conditioned to regard all churches as intrinsically trustworthy. It's a continuing source of guilt to lapsed Christians and people who maybe absorbed a little passive Christianity at home, and so are vulnerable to wondering, "Am I just maybe missing out on something here?" The United States has its civic religion in which Christianity, even if not honored in any meaningful sense, still gets pride of place and an implicit "pass". If they're a pastor or a priest you're supposed to trust them with your children.

This film here, I think, partly explains why that attitude persists: "Christian horror", horror films which exploit Christian lore and which may be pitched towards Christian audiences who like to see Evil lose to Good on screen, has functioned partly as a screen for Christian child abuse. The protagonists of Christian horror films are very often children, for Christian audiences see children largely as icons and idols of innocence and frailty—or they flip that round and depict children as uniquely suited to be vessels and vectors of diabolical evils, because children are easily tricked. The heroes of these Christian horror movies are often required to inflict pain and injuries or death, usually invoking God or Jesus in the process, because it's the only way to destroy Evil.

I find myself thinking: I've now seen three films that fit the Demon Child trope: Rosemary's Baby, The Omen, and The Omen III (in which Damien Thorn's all grown up and now he's a sinister corporate superstar played by Sam Neill.) I have no idea how many cheap imitations of these movies exist in the shadowlands of Christian media, where there's a thousand fly-by-night producers of cheap entertainments, most of which attempts to mimic the styles and themes of whatever's popular outside the hardcore Christian milieu. Christians have embraced popular entertainment in a big way, but in their own way, designed to appeal to reactionary Christian values but otherwise just as cynical and trashy as any cheap novelette from a grocery store.

So...how many movies and books exist where the explanation for "child screams upon seeing a church" is "demonic possession" or something similar?

~Chara of Pnictogen

I'm going to risk talking about something that I've considered a bit...provocative. Too outlandish for airing even in a relatively quiet Internet backwater like Cohost. But perhaps I should...steam ahead with this train of thought. It's been revolving in the back of my mind for a long while.

It boils down to this: strong hints have been dropped within the Pnictogen Wing that if we ever wanted to see if human magical spells could have a measurable physical effect, something that could be studied empirically, then THIS is the one we should try to master.

Every Fate/stay night fan knows this one: Trace On. It was the one spell which Emiya Kiritsugu was willing to teach his adoptive son Shirou how to use, because Kiritsugu was thoroughly done with magic at that point. He considered it so shameful, it was the first thing he ever confessed to Shirou when Kiritsugu first visited him in hospital: "I need to tell you, I'm a mage." It's definitely a sign that, in the mundane world of Fuyuki City anyway, it's not great to admit you're a mage. Kiritsugu needed to get that out of the way immediately.

I have wondered how difficult it must have been for Emiya Kiritsugu to yield to Shirou's requests—I imagine they must have been frequent and insistent, for surely Shirou's belief in his father's heroism was cemented in Shirou's mind by Kiritsugu's mysterious past as a mage—to teach him one spell, when surely the very idea of ever casting a spell again filled him with revulsion and bitterness. That must have been a tough lesson to teach, but Kiritsugu did...and it saved the world.

"Trace On" fascinates me, because it's a spell I can very nearly understand. With our substantial knowledge of chemistry and the structures of ordinary substances, we can dimly glimpse the subtle rearrangements and realignments that might be going on when Emiya Shirou casts "Trace On" with a piece of wood or a sheet of paper or whatever. Imagine temporarily increasing the crystallinity of the cellulose in paper, for example, aligning the long chains a bit. There's wiggle room in there; these are flexible, supple molecules. "Trace On", I think, could actually work. Nasu came up with a real winner there. It makes perfect sense as a beginner spell precisely because it's relatively easy to visualize in physical terms.

And...it would be testable.

Just sayin'.

~Chara of Pnictogen

How old is the "child of Satan" trope? Surely it must be older than stuff like Rosemary's Baby. There's children of devils in some of our oldest literature—Merlin is said to have been the child of an incubus, for example—but I'm talking about something much grander here, the idea of a full-on reverse Incarnation. The notion of the biblical "antichrist", which is used rather vaguely and generally to refer to false prophets, has fused with notions of Satan and devil children, producing the popular fictional idea of Satan's Child, or sometimes Satan's Incarnation in human form. This isn't "Biblical", strictly speaking, but it's great for horror movies.

Anyway I feel like this idea is pretty modern and probably roughly cognate with the first popularization of actual Satanism, prompting fears of a Satanic Incarnation. It seems like a vaguely significant evolution of occult belief. The earlier generation of ceremonial occultists might have boasted of dealing with dark powers such as Goetian demons, and stories of people doing deals with Satan (usually in some guise like Black Philip or Old Scratch) are centuries old, but there's something new and different about just...openly worshipping Satan. None of this midnight-at-the-crossroads stuff, just...going to a building, probably rather a dull building in fact, to give homage to the Prince of Darkness.

Hm, I thought I saw someone for a second there. Anyway, I find myself curiously taken with the idea of Satan working out some trick for achieving an approximate Incarnation, and therefore getting to experience something that the Christian God had reserved for His own use—direct knowledge of what it was like to be a human being. What's more, the Christian God is restricted by his own rules to a single Incarnation, or maybe a double one, depending upon how you interpret the rules. But Satan wouldn't be restricted, and therefore Satan could have as many pseudo-Incarnations as they liked, learning a bit more every time.

Heck...isn't there a chance that Satan might end up outdoing the original, if they worked at it hard enough? Wouldn't THAT be wild!?

~Chara of Pnictogen

I have been afflicted with a high degree of horror of transformation, which I control as best I can because it's not in step with my circle of friends or, indeed, many of my own headmates. "Body horror" has always squicked me more than other types of horror, and it's been getting in the way of my cinematic interests. I suspect that this is a common problem in U.S. culture, which is suffused with Christian-tinged ideas about the body as a temple and the God-ordained fixity of all creation. Evolution horrified the Christian hardliners with its suggestion of fluid changes between forms, and they rejected it; physical transformation of the body terrifies them even more.

In order to understand my own horrors better, I have turned to one of the writers who has best evoked it, the Welsh weird-fiction writer Arthur Machen. Machen dabbled in occultism but, somewhat like H. P. Lovecraft (who drew from Machen's work) he was horrified by what he saw beyond the veil. Unlike Lovecraft, unfortunately, Machen tended to sexualize his horrors and thus weakens his fiction. His most famous work, The Great God Pan, superbly evocative in many passages, frequently sinks into mere hand-wringing about unspeakable obscenities. Machen rather suggests that Helen Vaughan's greatest problem is that she's horny and kinky.

Thus my favorite Machen story is The Novel of the White Powder, a self-contained excerpt from a larger work called The Three Impostors. The style of this book is highly discursive, with shady characters frequently stopping to tell short tales that are thematically pertinent but otherwise apparently irrelevant to the main narrative. This framing-device gives an odd quality to The Novel of the White Powder, which is related in a tone of extreme urgency and sincerity. Its horrific power comes partly from this mood of utmost seriousness—and yet there's an excellent chance the story is complete bullshit, told by an unreliable narrator playing games with her audience.

cw: extensive discourse on Machen's The Novel of the White Powder, with copious spoilers