"Nada retrieves one of the boxes from the church and takes a pair of sunglasses from it, concealing the box in a trash pile. He finds out that they make the world appear monochrome and reveal subliminal messages in the media to consume and conform. They also disclose that many people are ghoulish, bug-eyed aliens hiding under human façades."
- Via the Wiki article for They Live, a sci-fi film from 1988 directed by John Carpenter, a master of the horror genre. Interestingly, it was written in response to Ronald Reagan, the US president at the time. The article goes on to say:
"...Carpenter decided to use the pseudonym "Frank Armitage", an allusion to one of the filmmaker's favorite writers, H. P. Lovecraft (Henry Armitage is a character in Lovecraft's Dunwich Horror) Carpenter has always felt a close kinship with Lovecraft's worldview, and according to the director "Lovecraft wrote about the hidden world, the 'world ally'. His stories were about gods who are repressed, who were once on Earth and are now coming back. The world underneath has a great deal to do with They Live."
And, so it does. But, John Carpenter is no smug evangelist and there's an element of high camp present in They Live which prevents it from being taken too morbidly, thereby taking the fatal sting from it's central motif: the horror of losing control over ones autonomy, ones own anatomy and existence, while relinquishing all existential freedom to an alien foe, an unrelenting monster whose agenda is to destroy the world upon which you and your loved ones must exist. Carpenter foresaw the immediate future.
Can't beat that for an introduction to the witching season... although discussions of evil technocracies also has its sinister appeal.
Stay tuned for more Halloween merriment! ;-)
(For more They Live and numerous other cool clips visit the YouTube channel, Fonoptikon.)
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