, , _,,_ _, ___,___, , , _, ___, | ,| /_,|_) /_, ' | ' | |\ | / \,' | |/\|'\_'| \'\_ _|_, | |'\|'\_/ | ' ` `' ` ` ' ' ' ` ' ' ___, , _ ___, ___, , , _ , , _, ' | |_|,'|\' | ' | |_|,'|\ \ / /_, |'| | |-\ | _|_, '| | |-\ \/`'\_ ' ' ` ' `' ' ' ` ' `' ` __ _ ,_ ,_ ,_ _, _ , , _, '|_)'|\ | \, | \,|_) /_,'|\ |\/|(_, _|_) |-\ _|_/ _|_/'| \'\_ |-\ | `| _) ' ' `' ' ' ` ` ' `' `' + DRACULA PARISH NEWSLETTER 001: 22-12-2025 + I will refrain from making any too coherent mission statement here just because if this at any point starts to feel too involved I'm never actually going to update it. However, it seemed remiss to make a first entry in what I guess is now a blog without an explicit pretext. Of which I have several. They include: because I have just submitted a PhD proposal and will have at least a year to kill before it starts (if all goes well with securing a place and funding etc.), because I am once again ensconced in a dingy garret in North London and such toil is becoming, and because I'm bad at committing time to anything that is not at least writing-adjacent. Anyway, this is going to be a place where I talk about things I have enjoyed recently, or remember having enjoyed at some point. My tastes run extremely specific because I'm dumb - as in I'm not but I have a particular emotional deficit (or whatever) that precludes me from being able to enjoy things unless I'm able to identify some "fucked", "noided" or "spooky" component that I can latch onto as a cognitive reference point. As a preliminary format I've decided to keep it to one or more films, books/stories and albums/playlists(?) per entry with significant scope for variation. *INCIPIT* + FILM + - Angel Dust (Gakuryu Ishii, 1994) [MODERATE SPOILERS AHEAD]: I had initially planned to write about Ishii's 1995 film August in the Water, that I legitimately did watch for the first time recently, and booted up my download of Angel Dust to remind myself of the key beats in case there was anything worth bringing up. What I forgot is that it's fucking mesmerising (visually and thematically). It also does an entertaining rug pull a-la Osgood Perkins' Longlegs (2024) in which the premise of it being a murder investigation movie is more or less entirely derailed by the second act, as the focus zeroes in on the of esoteric psychodrama narrative of the (young, female) protagonist while a kind of hollow playact of the original investigation spirals out in the background. Curiously, this commonality is undercored in both cases by their respective relationships to Demme's Silence of the Lambs (1992). But while Longlegs teases its similarities through its aesthetic of polaroids, doomed innocence and fucked up revenants of former golden ages (Buffalo Bill is offhandedly described as a washed-up hippie in the book) in landscapes of wet farmlands and cold-lit suburbs in the service of a resounding "lol go fuck yourself" to nostalgia-addled cinemagoers, Angel Dust presents an inversion. We just at some point have to reckon with the fact that we're leaning into the psychosexual investigator-killer dynamic of Silence of the Lambs and we're not going back. Anyway, watching this time around my viewing was somewhat coloured by the fact that I'd just read an article [link below] by someone called Ellie on Substack. In the piece they argue that many of the defining aspects of Japanese culture that to us as outsiders seem *cute* or *quirky* are in fact symptoms of a culture in the throes of late stage capitalist decline. Symptoms of which we, as denizens of western states still reckoning with at least one lost decade of our own, would do well to know the signs. So, second time around I found it impossible not to see Setsuko Suma's narrative arc and the parody of chic, quasi-cyberpunk detective aesthetics through the lens of my own calamitous employment history. There's a quote I learned via the All Units podcast (subsequently SFULTRA podcast, which I also reference below) which is that the entire thriller genre can be neatly summarised as "the fantasy of being good at your job, which you also enjoy", or words to that effect. Setsuko is trying her best to do both, and at great personal expense. (Side note, Setsuko isn't actually police but a psychiatrist brought in as a specialist consultant, but winds up getting way closer to the action than anticipated. And also dresses the part). While I mentioned Silence of the Lambs above, the actual "investigation" parts are more reminiscent of Thomas Harris's 1981 novel Red Dragon, in that she literally does the Will Graham *this is my design* thing later memefied via the series Hannibal (2013-2015), although later visits to her incredibly fucking sinister former mentor Dr Rei Aku (literally Dr Evil) are pure Hopkins. Where I find the difference falls is that, while there are certainly throwaway remarks regarding the somewhat lax ethics of the FBI when voluntarily exposing their agents to manifest evil (be they driven by demons of their own, or simply victim to a surfeit of pluck), I get the feeling the conversation would be a very different one when even the most hardbitten detectives are a hair above the precariat. So while there is certainly some abstract principle of justice or professional pride in Setsuko's (admittedly shaky) motives, she also has an incredibly lovely house and a beautiful, mysterious and yet resourceful husband to think about - a lifestyle for which I'd play two truths and a lie with Lucifer himself to keep. Also, further to the point about work, it's particularly notable that the killer's signature is that they murder people by injecting them with poison while they are commuting on the notoriously overcrowded Tokyo subway system. But that brings up another angle that I couldn't let pass: AUM SHINRIKYO and the long shadow of MKULTRA. Even without pointing out that this happened a year before the cult's notorious sarin gas attacks (which I'm definitely not the first to point out) I could, and probably will at some point, spend a considerable period of time teasing out the numerous parapolitical threads present in Angel Dust, as well as their resonances with the more recent revelations about the Moonies cult that became the unlikely fallout from the assassination of former PM Shinzo Abe in 2022. For now, though, I will at least flag that the "Reverse-Brainwashing" practices that feature prominently in Angel Dust have, according to NUMEROUS SOURCES, their origins in either MKULTRA itself or some offshoot of its prolific operations. And while I don't have the resources to hand to offer a theoretical link between Aum Skinrikyo and the CIA, I will at least venture that Ishii's film presents a compelling thematic connection. [At the time of writing, there's a pretty decent upload of Angel Dust on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4MhRhpg-FA] [Japan Is What Late-Stage Capitalist Decline Looks Like: https://oceandrops.substack.com/p/japan-is-what-late-stage-capitalist?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true] + WRITING + - THE COURSE OF THE HEART (M. John Harrison, 1992): Harrison is an author I somehow keep forgetting is actually legitimately one of the greatest living authors of any genre (and he's run the gamut). I first came across his work via the collected Viriconium series - a sprawling sci-fi fantasy epic that bears out the Arthur C. Clarke SCIENCE--->MAGIC principle in a way similar to Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun. But while both are in their own way indebted to Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast series, Harrison definitely hews closer to the unsettling whimsy of Peake's prose, which stands to reason given Wolfe, the American, is the outlier here geographically. I'm not sure if I'd call it surreal, for functional reasons, but when I look for a literary analogue probably the first name I come to is something like Leonora Carrington in the Hearing Trumpet, and whenever I try and visualise the thing, my mind conjures the carcinised, mycologic landscapes of Max Ernst (albeit peopled by characters out of a Duran Duran video [you'll have to read it, I'm not elaborating]). I've often described Viriconium - or specifically A Storm of Wings (which is orders of magnitude more sophisticated than the first book in the series; for a good summation of why, check out Sean's [https://bsky.app/profile/nochorus.bsky.social] SFULTRA podcast on the series) - as being "like a post-apocalypse scenario, but the apocalypse event is not the end of the world but the death of sanity". Whether that accurately describes the plot I'm not entirely sure (I lent someone my copy years ago and have been meaning to get it back), but that is definitely the feeling I was left with. Also, I note that it was just over ten years ago that I read it and the death of sanity has, I regret to note, become a possibility in ways more real than I could ever have predicted at the time. But I digress. When I picked up my copy of Course [recently reissued in a beautiful edition from Serpent's Tail] I'd actually just finished a re-read of Donna Tartt's The Secret History (which I believe came out that same year), and was fully primed for some honest to god *Dark Academia* with all the poignant romance its undergrad occultist premise conveyed to me that rainy afternoon in Waterstones. I really should have known better - it's bleak as shit. Indeed, what connects Viriconium and Course is a conceit Harrison is adept at employing. That is, the formulation and depiction of distinct and profoundly unsettled psychological states, which are then transmuted into the worlds his characters occupy, becoming living universes all their own. Ones which they share, to the delectation of few and the unending horror of most. My summation might be sketchy (I once again do not have the book to hand to refer to) but, in essence, this universe is defined by a thing called The Heart, which its protagonists summon during a botched ritual during while at university, and which they are then required to just kind of live with from that point onwards. Indeed, a large part of the book details the different methods the characters employ to cope with the unending fallout from the ritual all these years later, whether it's through a sui generis history of the "Heart" across time and space in a mythic pan-European imaginary (as in the case of the lovely, doomed Pam Stuyvesant), or leaning hard into exploiting its practical applications (as in the case of the consummate Crowleyan scumbag, Yaxley). It's no spoiler to say thay we never find out what the Heart really is, and indeed the characters spend more time reckoning with what the heart is *not* - there's a quote at one point to the effect of "God vacated Europe at some point and The Heart [alternately, the Pleroma] is what came in to take its place" - but few could walk away from the book witout the sense of having been in the presence of *something*. In any case, it's wonderful and you should go read it. And Viriconium for that matter. Although if you lean more towards the horror end of things (as I do) you might also want to check out You Should Come With Me Now: Stories of Ghosts, from 2018. Also My erstwhile podcast co-host, also a Sean, interviewed him a little while back, which is pretty cool, no?: https://soundcloud.com/wyrdsignalpodcast/episode-040_interview_series-000-m_john_harrison + MUSIC + This turned out to be way harder than I anticipated but I'm loathe to change the format after fucking around with this thing over the course of a whole weekend. Anyway, probably the album I've most fucked with this year has been Waiting Room by Kathryn Mohr. Mohr came to my attention via the Machines of Loving Grace show with Midwife on NTS [https://www.nts.live/shows/midwife] back in 2022, with the song Glare Valley from her first album Holly - a moody slow-burn of a track that's more or less a singular riff (in a slightly off time signaure) that crescendoes with the singularly moribund line "I dig a hole that's just for me - valley (repeated)". It would, perhaps inevitablym become one of my all time favourites (link below). I'm actually not sure if there's an individual song on Waiting Room that hit quite as hard for me but I think it feels more cohesive as an album - alternating between distinct tracks and grainy soundscapes of heavily reverbed spoken word, off-kilter synths/tape loops and other unsettling analogue ephemera. Although, that said the tracks Take It and Elevator deliver a pretty impressive one-two punch in the midsection. Go listen! [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yio_eQuRzK0]