TULPA

Last year I spent six months participating in what I was told was a psychological experiment. I found an ad in my local paper looking for imaginative people looking to make good money, and since it was the only ad that week that I was remotely qualified for, I gave them a call and we arranged an interview.

They told me that all I would have to do is stay in a room, alone, with sensors attached to my head to read my brain activity, and while I was there I would visualize a double of myself. They called it my "tulpa."

It seemed easy enough, and I agreed to do it as soon as they told me how much I would be paid. And the next day, I began. They brought me to a simple room and gave me a bed, then attached sensors to my head and hooked them into a little black box on the table beside me. They talked me through the process of visualizing my double again, and explained that if I got bored or restless, instead of moving around, I should visualize my double moving around, or try to interact with him, and so on. The idea was to keep him with me the entire time I was in the room.

I had trouble with it for the first few days. It was more controlled than any sort of daydreaming I'd done before. I'd imagine my double for a few minutes, then grow distracted. But by the fourth day, I could manage to keep him "present" for the entire six hours. They told me I was doing very well.

The second week, they gave me a different room, with wall-mounted speakers. They told me they wanted to see if I could still keep the tulpa with me in spite of distracting stimuli. The music was discordant, ugly and unsettling, and it made the process a little more difficult, but I managed nonetheless. The next week they played even more unsettling music, punctuated with shrieks, feedback loops, what sounded like an old school modem dialing up, and guttural voices speaking some foreign language. I just laughed it off - I was a pro by then.

After about a month, I started to get bored. To liven things up, I started interacting with my doppelganger. We'd have conversations, or play rock-paper-scissors, or I'd imagine him juggling, or break-dancing, or whatever caught my fancy. I asked the researchers if my foolishness would adversely affect their study, but they encouraged me.

So we played, and communicated, and that was fun for a while. And then it got a little strange. I was telling him about my first date one day, and he corrected me. I'd said my date was wearing a yellow top, and he told me it was a green one. I thought about it for a second, and realized he was right. It creeped me out, and after my shift that day, I talked to the researchers about it. "You're using the thought-form to access your subconscious," they explained. "You knew on some level that you were wrong, and you subconsciously corrected yourself."

What had been creepy was suddenly cool. I was talking to my subconscious! It took some practice, but I found that I could question my tulpa and access all sorts of memories. I could make it quote whole pages of books I'd read once, years before, or things I was taught and immediately forgot in high school. It was awesome.

That was around the time I started "calling up" my double outside of the research center. Not often at first, but I was so used to imagining him by now that it almost seemed odd to not see him. So whenever I was bored, I'd visualize my double. Eventually I started doing it almost all the time. It was amusing to take him along like an invisible friend. I imagined him when I was hanging out with friends, or visiting my mom, I even brought him along on a date once. I didn't need to speak aloud to him, so I was able to carry out conversations with him and no one was the wiser.

I know that sounds strange, but it was fun. Not only was he a walking repository of everything I knew and everything I had forgotten, he also seemed more in touch with me than I did at times. He had an uncanny grasp of the minutiae of body language that I didn't even realize I was picking up on. For example, I'd thought the date I brought him along on was going badly, but he pointed out how she was laughing a little too hard at my jokes, and leaning towards me as I spoke, and a bunch of other subtle clues I wasn't consciously picking up on. I listened, and let's just say that that date went very well.

By the time I'd been at the research center for four months, he was with my constantly. The researchers approached me one day after my shift, and asked me if I'd stopped visualizing him. I denied it, and they seemed pleased. I silently asked my double if he knew what prompted that, but he just shrugged it off. So did I.

I withdrew a little from the world at that point. I was having trouble relating to people. It seemed to me that they were so confused and unsure of themselves, while I had a manifestation of myself to confer with. It made socializing awkward. Nobody else seemed aware of the reasons behind their actions, why some things made them mad and others made them laugh. They didn't know what moved them. But I did - or at least, I could ask myself and get an answer.

A friend confronted me one evening. He pounded at the door until I answered it, and came in fuming and swearing up a storm. "You haven't answered when I called you in fucking weeks, you dick!" He yelled. "What's your fucking problem?"

I was about to apologize to him, and probably would have offered to hit the bars with him that night, but my tulpa grew suddenly furious. "Hit him," it said, and before I knew what I was doing, I had. I heard his nose break. He fell to the floor and came up swinging, and we beat each other up and down my apartment.

I was more furious then than I have ever been, and I was not merciful. I knocked him to the ground and gave him two savage kicks to the ribs, and that was when he fled, hunched over and sobbing.

The police were by a few minutes later, but I told them that he had been the instigator, and since he wasn't around to refute me, they let me off with a warning. My tulpa was grinning the entire time. We spent the night crowing about my victory and sneering over how badly I'd beaten my friend.

It wasn't until the next morning, when I was checking out my black eye and cut lip in the mirror, that I remembered what had set me off. My double was the one who'd grown furious, not me. I'd been feeling guilty and a little ashamed, but he'd goaded me into a vicious fight with a concerned friend. He was present, of course, and knew my thoughts. "You don't need him anymore. You don't need anyone else," he told me, and I felt my skin crawl.

I explained all this to the researchers who employed me, but they just laughed it off. "You can't be scared of something that you're imagining," one told me. My double stood beside him, and nodded his head, then smirked at me.

I tried to take their words to heart, but over the next few days I found myself growing more and more anxious around my tulpa, and it seemed that he was changing. He looked taller, and more menacing. His eyes twinkled with mischief, and I saw malice in his constant smile. No job was worth losing my mind over, I decided. If he was out of control, I'd put him down. I was so used to him at that point that visualizing him was an automatic process, so I started trying my damnedest to not visualize him. It took a few days, but it started to work somewhat. I could get rid of him for hours at a time. But every time he came back, he seemed worse. His skin seemed ashen, his teeth more pointed. He hissed and gibbered and threatened and swore. The discordant music I'd been listening to for months seemed to accompany him everywhere. Even when I was at home - I'd relax and slip up, no longer concentrating on not seeing him, and there he'd be, and that howling noise with him.

I was still visiting the research center and spending my six hours there. I needed the money, and I thought they weren't aware that I was now actively not visualizing my tulpa. I was wrong. After my shift one day, about five and a half months in, two impressively-sized men grabbed and restrained me, and someone in a lab coat jabbed a hypodermic needle into me.

I woke up from my stupor back in the room, strapped into the bed, music blaring, with my doppelganger standing over me cackling. He hardly looked human anymore. His features were twisted. His eyes were sunken in their sockets and filmed over like a corpse's. He was much taller than me, but hunched over. His hands were twisted, and the fingernails were like talons. He was, in short, fucking terrifying. I tried to will him away, but I just couldn't seem to concentrate. He giggled, and tapped the IV in my arm. I thrashed in my restraints as best I could, but could hardly move at all.

"They're pumping you full of the good shit, I think. How's the mind? All fuzzy?" He leaned closer and closer as he spoke. I gagged; his breath smelt like spoiled meat. I tried to focus, but couldn't banish him.

The next few weeks were terrible. Every so often, someone in a doctor's coat would come in and inject me with something, or force-feed me a pill. They kept me dizzy and unfocused, and sometimes left me hallucinating or delusional. My thoughtform was still present, constantly mocking. He interacted with, or perhaps caused, my delusions. I hallucinated that my mother was there, scolding me, and then he cut her throat and her blood showered me. It was so real that I could taste it.

The doctors never spoke to me. I begged at times, screamed, hurled invectives, demanded answers. They never spoke to me. They may have talked to my tulpa, my personal monster. I'm not sure. I was so doped and confused that it may have just been more delusion, but I remember them talking with him. I grew convinced that he was the real one, and I was the thoughtform. He encouraged that line of thought at times, mocked me at others.

Another thing that I pray was a delusion: he could touch me. More than that, he could hurt me. He'd poke and prod at me if he felt I wasn't paying enough attention to him. Once he grabbed my testicles and squeezed until I told him I loved him. Another time, he slashed my forearm with one of his talons. I still have a scar - most days I can convince myself that I injured myself, and just hallucinated that he was responsible. Most days.

Then one day, while he was telling me a story about how he was going to gut everyone I loved, starting with my sister, he paused. A querulous look crossed his face, and reached out and touched my head. Like my mother used to when I was feverish. He stayed still for a long moment, and then smiled. "All thoughts are creative," he told me. Then he walked out the door.

Three hours later, I was given an injection, and passed out. I awoke unrestrained. Shaking, I made my way to the door and found it unlocked. I walked out into the empty hallway, and then ran. I stumbled more than once, but I made it down the stairs and out into the lot behind the building. There, I collapsed, weeping like a child. I knew I had to keep moving, but I couldn't manage it.

I got home eventually - I don't remember how. I locked the door, and shoved a dresser against it, took a long shower, and slept for a day and a half. Nobody came for me in the night, and nobody came the next day, or the one after that. It was over. I'd spent a week locked in that room, but it had felt like a century. I'd withdrawn so much from my life beforehand that nobody had even known I was missing.

The police didn't find anything. The research center was empty when they searched it. The paper trail fell apart. The names I'd given them were aliases. Even the money I'd received was apparently untraceable.

I recovered as much as one can. I don't leave the house much, and I have panic attacks when I do. I cry a lot. I don't sleep much, and my nightmares are terrible. It's over, I tell myself. I survived. I use the concentration those bastards taught me to convince myself. It works, sometimes.

Not today, though. Three days ago, I got a phone call from my mother. There's been a tragedy. My sister's the latest victim in a spree of killings, the police say. The perpetrator mugs his victims, then guts them.

The funeral was this afternoon. It was as lovely a service as a funeral can be, I suppose. I was a little distracted, though. All I could hear was music coming from somewhere distant. Discordant, unsettling stuff, that sounds like feedback, and shrieking, and a modem dialing up. I hear it still - a little louder now.

Story source.

VINCENT DJORKAEFF

© Vincent Djorkaeff

TEOS RECOMMENDS: FRANKENSTEIN'S ARMY

 

I'm just gonna come out and say it: Frankenstein's Army doesn't really have that much of a plot. And since it wants to involve the mythos of the Frankenstein legacy (which, by now, has become almost a genre unto itself), then you could argue it has even less of a plot.

I think the filmmakers kinda know what, which is why they went the extra mile in creating some absolutely jaw-dropping creatures to fill those damned bunker tunnels and maze-like corridors.

But fine, okay: the "plot."

A group of Russian soldiers, in the midst of World War II, traverse the German wilderness to root out and extinguish the Nazi threat. While doing so, they stumble across a decrepit village that no longer seems inhabited. However, below one of the many buildings in this village awaits a threat more monstrous than the world has ever known before. 

And because the soldiers are filming this journey for some reason, you get to experience it all first-hand. 

That's primarily it for your plot, but like I said: the plot is inconsequential. It is the equivalent of, "I've got this camera. Oh, what's that?" (Monsters.)

Every once in a while, that's simply okay. Sometimes we would rather just have a fun, spookhouse environment where things literally leap into corridors and thrill us with their imaginative and completely wild appearance. And that's what Frankenstein's Army is, really. It's a filmified version of any haunted hayride or Halloween walk-through you've ever visited. You walk around, you see creepy things, the things get progressively creepier, and you get hammy acting all over your sweater.

Speaking of the acting, it's good enough to not make you say, "The acting in this fucking sucks." And the use of the camera is certainly serviceable, though I am curious about the choice to go with the found footage aesthetic, considering the film is a period piece. Though they make an attempt at first to add "camera whirring" sound effects and some light old-timey grain, after a while both of those ideas are dropped, and we're left with some pretty impressive crystal-clear footage...ya know, for the mid-1940s. And even from an artistic standpoint, the found footage angle doesn't add all that much, anyway. It's still more than possible to achieve that kind of "you're really there" feeling without succumbing to the newest Hollywood gimmick. (See Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men as proof.)

But why we're really here is for what's promised by the title: we want to be surrounded by a group of walking, drooling, shrieking experiments. And that we are!

The production design and special effects/make-up teams should be universally applauded for their wicked and wild creations. They are something straight out of a nightmare, dripping with steampunk inspirations with a twist of Nazi madness. I wouldn't go so far as to say they are the only reason to watch Frankenstein's Army, but if they were not made the front and center of the action, my argument to convince you to watch otherwise would not be nearly as exuberant. I fully admit that Karel Roden (quickly becoming one of my favorite character actors) turns out an incredibly fun and insane performance as Viktor Frankenstein, grandson of the original grave-digging and monster making mad scientist, but for real y'all, here are your reasons to watch:

So do it. If enough of you do, maybe they'll make House of Frankenstein's Army.

I'd be all over that.

HAPPY EQUINOX

The leaves are falling, falling as if from far up,
as if orchards were dying high in space.
Each leaf falls as if it were motioning "no."

And tonight the heavy earth is falling
away from all other stars in the loneliness.

We're all falling. This hand here is falling.
And look at the other one. It's in them all.

And yet there is Someone, whose hands
infinitely calm, holding up all this falling.

Image source.

TRAIL CAM

A photograph was recently sent in to a Baton Rouge, Louisiana news station and has many people talking since it first appeared last week. The photo was allegedly taken by a trail cam and is, in a word, disturbing. And if you think the photo itself is creepy, wait until you hear about the circumstances behind its discovery. 

When NBC Affiliate NBC33 asked its viewers to send in their photographs, they were expecting to get a few strange holiday pictures, but nothing like the incredibly bizarre trailcam photograph they received depicting a horrific monster stalking the night in an undisclosed location and sent in by an anonymous viewer. The viewer included a note detailing the circumstances behind the image's discovery alongside the picture. According to the sender, the picture was taken by a trailcam originally set up to take photos of wild game on the premises. But then when they discovered the trail cam ripped to pieces, all they could recover from it was the device's SD card. When they examined the photos taken the previous night in an attempt to discover what could have possibly destroyed the camera, they expected to see images of teenagers or hunters poaching their land. What they discovered, was that the final image taken by the camera before it was destroyed was this strange image.

THE THING IN THE WINDOW

That thing has been there for almost a week. The figure in the window. It looks featureless - only skin on a human frame - and it's pressing itself against the glass somehow. I don't know how it got there, and I don't know how to get rid of it.

At first I thought it was a prank - a doll or mannequin that some jerks put there to scare me. But I realized as I walked out of my house to pull it away... it wasn't there. I shrugged it off, thinking that someone had hidden it while I was walking through my door. But I went back in and looked out that same window, and it was looking in, staring at me. I walked around my house, yelling for whoever it was to come out, but no one was there. The thing is hairless and naked, and it didn't look like it actually had eyes, or even a face at all. But its head is turned towards me when I enter the room. When I sit on my computer, I can feel its faceless hatred boring into my neck. But when I turn around, it's innocently turned in a different direction.

Finally on Thursday, I tried to open the window, but it's stuck. I think the thing's hands are keeping it down. But I got a good look at its face. Its eyes and mouth are behind the skin, pushing outward.

It stared at me, smiling.

I pulled back a fist and smashed it onto the glass, determined once and for all to get rid of the glaring monster. I know I’m strong enough. That glass should’ve cracked.

But it didn’t. It shuddered under my hand, but it didn’t break. And that smile just got wider and wider and wider, until I thought its head would break in half. It raised its own hand and bashed the window with its palm. It was mocking me. But I saw the faintest crack begin to appear where it had hit, and I backed away.

No way did I want that smile in the same room as me.

So I got a roll of duct tape, and I started covering the window. I couldn’t look directly at it; I nearly shit my pants just knowing it was watching me. But I couldn’t help it. I took a quick glance at that skin-covered face. A small peek.

It was angry.

That menacing grin was now a gaping frown full of teeth. The skin had ripped away from its mouth and I could see down its cavernous throat. A menacing rumble started to fill the house, and that hairline crack began to spread like splintering ice. I pulled down the duct tape. The rumble stopped, the split skin healed over, and it began to smile again.

Now it’s night, and the noise hasn’t started again. There are no sounds, no rumble, no crackling glass. Everything’s quiet now.

But I can feel its claws gripping the back of my chair. I can hear its skin stretching as it smiles.

It’s watching me type.

Story source.

SHITTY FLICKS: MUTANT HUNT

Shitty Flicks is an ongoing column that celebrates the most hilariously incompetent, amusingly pedestrian, and mind-bogglingly stupid movies ever made by people with a bit of money, some prior porn-directing experience, and no clue whatsoever. It is here you will find unrestrained joy in movies meant to terrify and thrill, but instead poke at your funny bone with their weird, mutant, camp-girl penis. 

WARNING: I tend to give away major plot points and twist endings in my reviews because, whatever. Shut up.

I don't like much of anything in this world. I suppose that would label me "pretty fucking bitter." But there are some things out there I do like. Horror films, for instance. And robots. And bad wigs. And exploding heads. And the '80s. But oh, boy...give me all of those things at once? That's like thirty birthdays.

And Mutant Hunt, a robot-, bad-wigs-, and exploding-head-having film from the '80s has given me the greatest gift of all: its existence.

Let me tell you something about Mutant Hunt. It has LASERS. LOOK OUT.

Mutant Hunt wastes no time in establishing one very essential component crucial to its plot: robots are fucking scary and dangerous.

"Total carnage. Uncontrolled fury," says Z, the guy who created all the bots. "What more could anyone ask?" (The guy in the leather catcher's chest pad always knows the drill.)

So much happens in the first five minutes that you'll already be confused. All I know is, if it's wearing sunglasses and looks like Kim Jong Un, it's a robot, and if it looks like Cher, I think it's a robot. There are also robot caste systems. They have maintenance robots that clean up the dead robots, and then go home to their robot caves and log onto the Facebook for "The Other 99% (of Robots)" and get into an argument with someone in the comments and accidentally type "your" when they should have said "you're."

Director Tim Kincaid has crafted an ultra-realistic and bleak view of the future, in which people for the most part still go on with their lives, except for the robots, who wander around and just murder human beings. There's also a drug on the streets called euphoron, which is like the same thing as our current drugs, only it's futuristic, ya know?

Head Scientist Guy and his sister, Head Scientist Guy's Sister, attempt to figure out under what circumstances the newest line of robots — the Delta-Sevens — escaped. Head Scientist Guy calls Matt Riker, a well-known tighty-whities-wearing bounty hunter, and the only fella who can take on robots, but there is no answer. And then Head Scientist Guy is taken prisoner by Robot Leader's robot minions, but his sister escapes. Really, Mutant Hunt is like if Blade Runner had been beaten savagely in the brain with a hammer.

Riker. Bounty hunter. Hunk. Wears briefs. Sometimes unable to focus.

Head Scientist Guy's Sister runs directly into his apartment screaming about robots...with two robots on her tail. It's a good thing Riker is wearing his magical underwear, because he dispatches these two robots in his signature style: slowly, and with only a mild amount of awkwardness. 

Head Scientist Guy's Sister watches all of this unfold with a bored look on her face, and with no intention of even attempting to offer some assistance. She looks upon the robot's ruined bodies on the floor and remarks, "They're not human," as she seems completely uninvolved in her own movie.

Then ANOTHER robot enters, who immediately throws Riker's girlfriend (?) out a window. But it's cool, though — she was a robot, too. ("A pleasure droid.")

This leads to another glorious fight, only this time Riker has pants on, so by default it simply could never be AS transcendent.

Yo, I wasn't lying about the lasers. Smell ya later, ROBOT!

Later, at Club Inferno, the camera spends way too much time watching a chick dance on stage wearing a unitard, because this was the '80s and the filmmakers were legally obligated to include an awkward and too-long dance number. But THEN she kicks some random dudes' asses, and we find out she's not just a funky dancer, but also a bounty hunter (just like Riker!!!!!!!!!!).

Riker and his team of bounty hunters, including Johnny Felix and That Other Girl, will battle the forces of robot evil, while leaving one of these random robots to melt on the floor of Riker's apartment.

With Head Scientist Guy still in captivity, and following Riker's promise to free him as soon as humanly possible, Riker nails That Other Girl pretty much immediately. With some boobs out, and his junk rubbing against his underoos, the two make futuristic '80s love with all the passion of a Stefan Urkel dance number. 

"This club's not weird at all!"

Whoa, no time for love, Riker! Seeing the Rikersignal up in the sky (a pair of white men's underwear), he takes to the streets to defend the innocent! Scarface, one of the escaped robots, begins karate chopping human civilians like there's no tomorrow and rips off their heads!

"You sure look ugly, cyborg," Riker says, not at all upset about the freshly decapitated girl. The two then fight, and after being body-slammed against a building fifteen times, the robot succumbs to Riker's fury. And even though Riker should know better, he leaves the massacred robot behind, allowing its limbs to crawl away into the realistic and intelligently realized futuristic night.

Riker is caught off guard by a robot and is taken prisoner, where he meets Domina, aka the Cher-lookin' gal who I think is a robot, still. She certainly acts like one, but...you know... Apparently an explosive device is implanted in Riker's head to leave him at the whim of the robot race. "I trust you," he says to Domina for some reason and then smashes her in the face, leaving her to wonder if she believes in life after love.

Head bomb or not, Riker will not be deterred.

Back in Riker's apartment, that melting robot decides to live again...unbeknownst to Head Scientist Guy's Sister (still don't know her real name), who is busy lathering herself in the shower and sniffing ALL of Riker's white underwear (when we're not looking). The robot eats...something...something that came out of his body, I think...and then attacks her. But wait!

"Don't...be...frightened," pleads the robot. "I can't harm you now." 

The robot goes on to say a LOT of stuff, and while I can only understand some of it, it's ALL squishy sounding. Then he grabs Head Scientist Guy's Sister and takes off with her down the road, whistling a happy tune and naming all of their future children in his head.

Mutant Hunt deploys a masterful ruse upon its audience, not once, not thrice, but multiple times. Using its enrapturing plot to its benefit, Mutant Hunt will have members of its cast of characters just vanish for long periods of time, so when they reappear, you will say, "Oh yeahhhhh."

Speaking of, Riker and Johnny show up outside Inteltrax, the building where all the robots are being built, I guess. After struggling to concoct a way inside, Squish Mouth Robot shows up, offers them a way inside, and then flicks his weird tongue around for several minutes, making everyone within a ten-square-mile radius of this film feel extremely uncomfortable.

With our heroes now having breached the impenetrable fortress that contains literally no barriers whatsoever, Riker, Johnny, and Squish Mouth Robot exhibit their justice the only way they know how: Molotov cocktails!

Inside, Domina unveils her finest creation yet: another robot. She takes off her shirt, rubs her boobs against its back, and moans. Then she puts her shirt back on and orders a minion to bring her creation a uniform.

Boy, this future sure is wacky!

(cheap Arnold Schwarzenegger/Terminator 9 joke)

Squish Mouth Robot, who has since become aware, attacks Z...by pushing him down. Z doesn't get back up because people in the future are really fragile.

But wait! The danger isn't over! Domina's creation — a Delta-Eight — attacks them all with his dripping goo face. Because it's the future, we're supposed to assume that the Delta-Eight is fucking unstoppable, but in moviespeak, really it's just fatter than the previous model.

"Party time, Felix?" Riker asks his partner.

"What?!" Felix responds, I swear in a completely different room where his close-ups were shot that day.

Riker and That Other Girl (who was there the whole time, BT-dubs), fight the Delta-Eight while Felix fucking seriously sits there with his arms folded, not at all intending to help, but then he gets caught up with a couple robots of his own, so he realizes he's not getting out of this without some robot fisticuff action. These robots taste the bottom of Felix's gigantic white sneakers as he kicks the goo off their faces and the circuits out of their robot bodies — all while the 20-second musical score plays on a loop.

With Riker about to meet his maker at the hands of the Delta-Eight, and while Felix is doing...something else...Head Scientist Guy's Sister saves the day with a laser gun. (These lasers are pretty accommodating — they can stop robots, cause fires, or, you know, whatever the script falls for.)

Mutant Hunt ends with a little girl becoming best friends with a paraplegic robot while she is playing in an alley, which I believe is the same ending as Pride & Prejudice.

"Miss? I ordered the salmon."

Full Moon has pulled out all the stops with this flawless DVD release. Captured dynamically in 4:3 full frame aspect ratio, and remastered by the two finest VCRs hooked up to each other that 1997 had to offer, Mutant Hunt hasn't looked this good since it ran on the UPN at two in the morning before all the Clapper commercials. Sure, you could watch this for free if you're a Netflix Instant subscriber, but not if you're me. Mutant Hunt sits proudly on my shelf. Probably because I have the mind of a ten-year-old boy savagely beaten with a hammer.

Fun, Out-of-Context Quotes:

• "Why would you want to get a robot HIGH?"
• "Mutants. Psychosexual killers."
• "I hate it when MEN save me."
• "Don't get me steamed, cyborg."
• "How do I get this bomb out of my head?"