30. Time to get scared again

Image: Midjourney.

I.

It’s Halloween month (the best month), so the skeletons are dancing again, the monsters are crawling under your bed and the ghosts are haunting your dark room. I’ve started watching horror films again and I’ll be reporting back weekly. This week I watched:

Braindead (or Dead Alive), one of the first films by Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson, from 1992. Quite possibly the most disgusting film I’ve ever seen. When Lionel’s mother is bitten by a Sumatran rat-monkey, she begins to fall apart and bite others. As all manner of visitors are turning into zombies, Lionel tries to hide the chaos from Paquita, with whom he is falling in love. Not really a scary film, but enormously creative, funny and very, very gory. At one point Lionel tries to run away from a group of the living dead but can’t make any progress because he keeps slipping through a pool of blood.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre I saw for the first time. The original from 1974, nearly fifty years old. About a group of young people who get stranded at an old house. When they go looking for help they are murdered one by one by the terrifying figure Leatherface, who rampages through the woods with a chainsaw. The film builds very slowly and the first murder seems to come out of nowhere, which genuinely makes your skin crawl. It gets a bit silly later on, but it remains a film that gets under your skin.

Possession is a divorce drama with horror elements from 1981. With a young Isabelle Adjani and Sam Neill as a couple falling apart. What a gloriously unhinged film this is. After an argument the main characters completely lose it. Be grateful for the volume button on your remote because there is a tremendous amount of screaming and shouting. There is a bizarre scene in a metro station, more than just dead flesh gets cut with an electric knife, and what on earth is living in the woman’s apartment? With wild camerawork and a bizarre story that ultimately operates on multiple levels about division and duality.

II.

Since Elon Musk took over Twitter, renamed it X and keeps making baffling changes, people have been searching for an alternative for microblogging. Bluesky is cautiously emerging as the winner. I keep calling it the private party next door, because you still need an invite code to get in. It’s slowly becoming livelier in there.

It’s the kind of party where you bring your own drinks. Everyone hangs up their own decorations. Bluesky simply doesn’t work as well as X yet. It lacks flesh on the bones, too many features are missing. You can’t post videos, there are no GIFs, hashtags don’t exist and the timeline looks messy. The DJ doesn’t start until midnight, but you’re already there at nine. That’s what it feels like.

In that respect Mastodon already has the music playing. But its official app isn’t very attractive either, and for many people the barrier to choosing which server to join is simply too high. Yet somewhere in there a decent platform is hiding. Look at the Mastodon client Elk and you’ve secretly got the perfect Twitter replacement, with a clean web interface and all sorts of support for customising your posts.

To extend the party analogy: Bluesky is that exclusive party where you peak too early, at X the stragglers are sweeping up confetti from the night before to keep the evening going, and Mastodon is the one party where only you managed to get tickets. Where is that ultimate Twitter killer?

III.

What a treasure trove this YouTube channel of the defunct TV station TMF is. For ten months now, new videos have been appearing of interviews and performances by artists and bands from the ’90s and early 2000s. In pretty decent quality too.

You can barely imagine it now — TV channels programmed entirely with music videos, interviews, talk shows about music and live performances. Yes, grandpa is talking, but these days a band is lucky to get a minute of live music in a chat show.

I can’t have been the only teenager who spent afternoons watching TMF. For me this is pure nostalgia. The clips are sometimes funny, like an interview with members of N’Sync whose voices have just broken. Sometimes they’re bittersweet, like the interview Sander Lantinga had with Amy Winehouse in 2004. “I’ll still be singing at 82,” she says. “I’ll keep singing until I die.”

It’s only when you scroll through the archive (which is still being expanded) that you realise how much of a shame it is that TMF is gone. That channel mattered at the time. There were performances by Foo Fighters and Destiny’s Child. And artists like Jay-Z, Kanye West, Liam Gallagher and Lady Gaga were interviewed on camera. A beautiful piece of lost TV history.

PS.

Podcast series Dissect has recently started a new season. Each season dissects a music album, and this time it’s In Rainbows by Radiohead. The first episodes are promising. It really is a great way to fall in love all over again with an album you know by heart, because you learn to listen to it anew. Available on Spotify or in any other podcast app. Previous seasons have covered albums including Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and Frank Ocean’s Blonde.

Artist Theo Jansen has been making his Strandbeests since 1990. They are enormous art installations made of PVC tubes that move forward powered by the wind. His latest creation is called Animaris Rex. According to Jansen it is a herd of Strandbeests holding on to each other to avoid being blown away. “As a group, the chances of surviving a storm are greater.” Still fascinating.

Halide is my favourite camera app for iPhone and it’s made by a Dutchman: Sebastiaan de With. He also takes beautiful photographs himself, which he occasionally publishes on Instagram and X. Every year after the new iPhones come out, De With writes the most in-depth camera reviews of the devices you’ll find anywhere. This time is no different — thoroughly enjoyable.

Every now and then an AI image craze suddenly takes off. Think of a pope in a puffer jacket or hidden messages in landscape photographs. With the app Lensa you could make cartoon versions of yourself that were everywhere for a while. In the same vein, there’s now Epik, a TikTok craze. The app uses a few selfies to generate a series of new photos of you as a teenager. AI school photos, complete with cloud backgrounds. Here are a few of mine.

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