Horror Hospital

Produced in 1973. Directed by Antony Balch. Starring Michael Gough, Robin Ask, Vanessa Shaw. A pair of friends on a british rail trip soon find themselves in a secluded mansion with a slew of bizarre characters and an even more bizarre secret.

Robin Askwith (just prior to his shift into a sex comedy franchise) is a stressed out singer with a pop group. He decides to go for some R&R at a country retreat. He hooks up with Vanessa Shaw on the train journey in, and once they arrive at the retreat they find it's a bizarro world inhabited by mute bikers, lobotomised robots, a malignant dwarf and a mad doctor (Michael Gough) in a wheelchair!

The Secret of Roan Inish

The Secret of Roan Inish is a 1994 independent fantasy-adventure film written and directed by John Sayles. It is based on the 1957 novel Secret of the Ron Mor Skerry, by Rosalie K. Fry.

It is centered on the Irish and Orcadian folklores of selkies—seals that can shed their skins to become human. The story, set on the west coast of Ulster in the north-west of Ireland, is about Fiona, a young girl who is sent to live with her grandparents and her cousin Eamon near the island of Roan Inish, where the selkies are rumored to reside. It is a family legend that her younger brother was swept away in his infancy and raised by a selkie. Part of the film takes place in Donegal Town.

Witches: New Fashion, Old Religion (1977)

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An in-depth exploration of several covens' and practitioners' Witchcraft traditions in 1977.

A businessman who studies witchcraft as a hobby and a businesswoman who heads a coven are interviewed about their beliefs and practices. Shows the initiation of new members into a coven and the attempt by a "circle" to heal a member.

Outer and Inner Space (1966)

Outer and Inner Space is a 16mm film of Edie Sedgwick sitting in front of a television monitor on which is playing a prerecorded videotape of herself. On the videotape, Edie is positioned on the left side of the frame, facing right; she is talking to an unseen person off-screen to our right.

Outer and Inner Space is a groundbreaking multimedia document. Edie Sedgwick appears to have a conversation with herself. Time is compressed into the moment and we read a face in four parts which seems to be communicating with itself.

"As spectacularly beautiful as it is a fascinating spectacle, Warhol’s spatially dynamic and dramatically lit film-and-video portrait of Sedgwick, Outer and Inner Space, 1965, is perhaps his most brilliant articulation of the schism between private self and public image, as well as a further exploration of the serial imagery in his paintings. Shot during the summer of 1965, publicly screened in 1966, and recently rescued from oblivion, this was his first double-screen film—The Chelsea Girls would follow in September 1966—and his initial foray into video. Given the chance by Norelco to experiment with a prototype home-video recorder, Warhol used the camera to create a half-hour portrait of Sedgwick (as well as other Factory denizens). He then shot two thirty-three-minute 16 mm reels of the actress sitting in front of a television playing her videotaped image. In the final product, the two reels are shown side by side." ArtForum

Colin Wilson : Strange is Normal

One of the original Angry Young Men along with luminaries such as John Osbourne (see Thomas Maschler's book Declaration), Colin Wilson (1931- 2013) first tasted fame with his book The Outsider, a treatise on outsider genius. As is the way, the mainstream elitist press turned on this working class self taught prodigy and hounded him out of London's class based literary scene.

He fled to the West Country and London's loss was Cornwall's and The World's gain. For over 50 years and 150 books he led us through science fiction (Mind Parasites) and esoteric knowledge (The Occult Trilogy). Truly a man before his time, in the age of The Internet, his philosophy will inform us for centuries to come. Strange is Normal is a late documentary containing interviews from his home in Cornwall with himself and his wife Joy.

Nickel Queen (1971)

 

Nickel Queen is a 1971 Australian comedy film starring Googie Withers and directed by her husband John McCallum. The story was loosely based on the Poseidon bubble, a nickel boom in Western Australia in the late 1960s, and tells of an outback pub owner who stakes a claim and finds herself an overnight millionaire.

Meg Blake is the widowed owner of a pub in a small desert town in Western Australia. Corrupt American mining executive Ed Benson starts the rumour of a nickel discovery to sell shares to gullible investors. Meg heads the rumour and stakes the first claim. Benson promotes her as the "Nickel Queen".

Hippie Claude Fitzherbert (played by the late John Laws) follows Meg into Perth high society and becomes her lover. Benson is exposed as a fraud, Fitzherbert deserts Meg and runs off with Benson's wife and Meg is reunited with an old suitor from her hometown.

Atman (1975)

 

An experimental short film by Toshio Matsumoto.

The film depicts a figure sitting in an outdoor environment and wearing a robe and a Hannya mask. The film features receding and shifting images captured in a frame-by-frame manner; though these shots resemble zooms and pans, they were actually derived from positioning the camera on a series of a points.

Atman is a visual tour-de-force built on the idea of a subject fixed at the center of a circle created by 480 camera positions. Filmed frame by frame, the sequence accelerates into an increasingly rapid circular motion, turning stillness into disorienting rhythm.

The seated figure wears the devil mask of Hangan from Noh theater, accompanied by Noh music and the principle of acceleration often tied to Noh drama. The title itself, Atman is a Sanskrit term for "self," sometimes linked to destruction, infuses the film with spiritual unease.

What begins as meditation collapses into disintegration: a hypnotic, unsettling ritual where cinema dismantles identity through repetition, motion, and the terror of looking too long.