The Concordance Dagger, and How to Deal with Snowmen

Sorry for being radio silent for a moment. To explain why, I need a moment to talk about Hollywood, and Los Angeles as a whole.

Imagine if you took an area of desert seven times the size of Washington, D.C., hired someone to drain the land around it of all water, and packed it with over four million people, several of whom don’t actually live there for tax reasons. Next, imagine it populated with people on the run from the law-- to be exact, run from patent law, as Edison was unwilling to let filmmakers use his camera technology to make films. Now sprinkle in a few decades of bigotry, sex crimes of every flavor, regular crimes of a few lesser flavors, and self-obsession so severe that it makes Narcissus look like Mr. Rogers, and we have modern L.A.

I may be a film student, but I have no illusions about Los Angeles. For God’s sake, the city doesn’t even have decent public transportation, something New York had figured out a century before it got anywhere near L.A.’s modern population.

So why, pray tell, have I wasted the last three weeks of my life in the City of Angels? Let me tell you why.

#

Hollywood is several things, but ‘wasteful’ is not one of them-- at least, not when it comes to props and sets. You might be familiar with trivia along the lines of the PKE Meter from Ghostbusters appearing in Suburban Commando, or how a early 2000’s Power Rangers series reused armor from Starship Troopers, or how Forbidden Planet’s Robby the Robot prop has been recycled so many times, it actually has an entry on IMDb as a distinct actor. Stanley Kubrick actually ordered all of the props and sets for 2001: A Space Odyssey destroyed specifically so they couldn’t be re-used for the inevitable sequel. Prop recycling has been common practice in Hollywood for decades.

Certain props, however, fall out of circulation, only to be found years or even decades later-- in some cases, even after the original film has been lost. What drew me to Hollywood in the middle of the holiday season was the alleged appearance of a prop from The Concordance; people who have been reading lately (I thank you for your continued patronage) will know this film has been a bugbear of mine for a while, and I’ve been trying to find an intact copy of it for almost six years. That said, props and pieces of the sets keep popping up, and this was a fairly notable one.

The Concordance is a 1912 silent film set during the 1500s, during a witch trial in central Europe. The titular Concordance is a ritual the film’s protagonist, Ysolde, is attempting to enact in order to catapult her somewhere more civilized, where she’s treated like a human being instead of like a woman in the 1500s. A central prop in the film was a ritual scythe-like dagger used by Ysolde to carry out the sacrifical murders needed to power the Concordance. Like most props up to the modern day, it was easier to just use an actual dagger than to make one out of a flexible or harmless material, and simply make edits to the film to make it appear as if a murder had taken place. But rather than steel or iron, the prop was apparently made of bronze, as the metal’s color made it look suitably ‘unnatural’ on film at the time.

The dagger has been missing since a warehouse fire in 1965, on the backlot of the relatively small RKO spin-off Breaker Motion Pictures. On December 2nd, 2022, it re-appeared in the LAPD evidence impound in their Hollywood precinct. I had no details beyond the fact that it was covered in fresh blood.

“Tristan, surely you’re not going to confess to stealing from a police station on your blog. Do you want to go to jail?” Cecily actually asked me this, but there were about half a dozen instances of “fuck” in there, including at least two “fucknugget”s and one “you fucking moron”.

There are several problems with this thesis: firstly, I did not steal anything, and the circumstances under which I acquired it were legal, for a certain value. Secondly, I am in the process of having any and all charges dismissed or pled down. Thirdly… it’s almost awards season, and with all due disrespect to the LAPD, they have more important anomalous phenomena to get driven mad by this time of year. They aren’t going to miss one potentially paranormal knife when they have to deal with meta-cocaine and celebrity doppelgangers.

I flew down to LAX and took an hour-long cab ride from there to Beverly Hills (L.A. traffic is one of the closest things to Hell an American can experience), where I met my contact; he had experience with extricating items from evidence lockup for research purposes, but he wasn't part of the Institute. Riley, who you may remember from my investigation into Money for Nothing, had agreed to do me another favor in exchange for information I had found in the last few months regarding actress Zelda Pleunick.

His house was small for Beverly Hills, but to someone who grew up in Rural Wisconsin, it was basically the Biltmore Estate, but with several more Fortnite action figures strewn about the floor by Riley’s grandchildren. “Their mom’s got ‘em visiting Universal Studios,” he explains as he pours a measure of bourbon for himself, notably not offering any to me. “And not just the theme park-- Goldblum owes me a favor.”

“Like Jeff Goldblum?” Easily the third-dumbest question I’d asked that week.

“No, Percy Goldblum. Christ, kid, don’t you have a film degree?”

“You looked into me, then?” I asked.

“I looked into your whole organization. You know how fuckin’ surprised I was to learn that the guy who runs you is Egyptian? Figured he’d be some pasty white motherfucker who looked too long at Ivo Dorakis’s Shattered and went crazy.”

That stunned me. “You know Hemaphyte art?”

“Some of the newer stuff’s harmless. There’s going to be a showing in New York next-- but you’re not here for that. You’re here about the knife.” He offered me a seat.

I nodded and sat down, scanning the area for exits, my hand on a bit of Institute tech in my pocket. I noticed we were far away from the windows, no clear lines of sight for anyone to see us talking, but also close enough that I could bolt if I really needed to. “You know,” I said, “There are some more… extreme members of the Institute that want Hollywood to go up in flames.”

“What, like the city?”

“Like the concept. They figure you’re too dangerous to be left alive.” I rolled my shoulders. “You hear about how the entire cast and crew of that Marvel film in Georgia got food poisoning a few years back?”

“Delayed production worse than the pandemic did. America’s ass went through a dozen pairs of--” he paused. “Fucking hell, that was you?”

“Not me personally, but there are people in the Institute who hate the MCU so much that Alan Moore looks like Stan Lee.” I left out the fact that it wasn’t food poisoning.

“Christ. Anyway, the knife.” He leaned back. “From what I can tell, a Jane Doe-- she's alive but refuses to talk to the cops and doesn't have ID on her-- walked into a secondhand store with her clothing all wrecked. She tried to buy all sortsa stuff with weird-lookin’ bills, obvious fakes. Thrift shop owner calls the cops after he realizes the bills are fake. She pulls the knife, police come in and cuff her.

"And the blood on the knife?"

"Fresh. No more than a couple of hours old. That gonna affect the value?"

“It’s not for me to sell. I’m here to get it and store it. Besides, this isn’t the first time I’ve encountered a bloody prop.”

“First time you’ve probably seen one used as a murder weapon, though."

I blinked. "Before I got on the plane, you said they hadn't found a body. Did that change?"

"Murder wasn't done this century." Riley sighed. “So, here’s the deal. The knife was lost in the Breaker Backlot fire back in ‘65. The blaze supposedly killed four people and cost the studio over seven million dollars in lost or damaged props. All of the people who died were workin’ on the same film-- a Bible epic, In the Beginning.”

“Genesis? Ambitious.”

“Yeah, but Hays code meant no Garden of Eden stuff-- restrictions against nudity. Vincent Marché was the director, and the first body they identified-- he just got new caps put on his teeth a week before the fire.”

“Marché… why do I know that name?”

“Probably because his brother Casmir was the closest thing to Epstein you could get in the 1960s. And Vince, shall we say, partook of his brother’s supply.”

“How do you know this?” I grimaced. “You’re… sixty-five? You wouldn’t even be in high school when this happened.”

“Sixty-four. And my family’s old Hollywood; my uncle worked as gofer on a lot of BMP’s films, and when I was getting into the industry, he gave me a list of people to stay the fuck away from. And no, you can’t see the list.” He took a drink of his bourbon. “Casmir caught a bullet in September of ‘83, and I’ve always wanted to shake hands with the son of a bitch who shot him.”

I nodded. “The second victim, then?”

“Simon Tzan.”

I blinked. “Like… Tarzan: Force of Nature Simon Tzan? Edgar Margullis’s Treasure Island Simon Tzan?”

“Yeah, everyone forgets he died in ‘65 because his last film got released in ‘72. He had polio as a kid, damage to his bones is how they managed to figure out it was him. He was meant to play Adam. He got along really well with the kid they got to play Cain. He was the third body-- you wouldn’t know him, eighteen-year-old named Sam Yanner. Got cast because he looked just enough like Tzan that he could pass as his son. Yanner is the only one who we know didn’t die in the fire.”

I blinked. “But you said he was the third body?”

“Yeah, but the fact that he had knife wounds all over his back, including one in the base of his skull, the M.E. was damn sure that he died before the fire started. Shape of the blade matched the dagger you're after.”

I winced. “At least he died quickly.”

"Small mercies." Riley shook his head.  “Then we have the fourth person, the reason they were all in the prop warehouse that night. Gwen Lyons. She was meant to play Eve.” He shut his eyes, and took a sip of his drink. “The way my uncle told it… she was getting ‘uppity’ with the three of them. There was a scene where Eve confronts Cain after he murdered Abel, and Yanner ‘ad-libbed’ feeling her up.”

“Fucking Christ.”

“Yeah. She slapped him and walked off the set. Tzan tried to apologize on Yanner’s behalf, but…” He sighed. “My uncle said they decided to ‘teach her a lesson’, and the school supplies were a glass of Jack with enough benzo to kill an infant. They dragged her into the prop warehouse because it was dark, unsecured, and… there were a lot of things they could use to…” He sighed. “To hurt her.”

That statement sunk in. “And… Gwen? You said there were three bodies. What about her?”

“Never found, but it was assumed she was incinerated.” 

As he raised his glass to his lips to finish off his bourbon, I said, “Bullshit.”

“Huh?”

“A fire has to be at least 1400 Fahrenheit to completely incinerate a human body.” I stood up and started pacing. “Fatal burns can be caused by temperatures as low as 180 Fahrenheit, but given the state of other props in the warehouse, the fire couldn't have been hotter than 550-- aluminum props were damaged, but they weren’t slagged. And bronze doesn’t melt until you get up to the thousands….”

Riley had a look on his face that made me wonder if he wanted to call the police, or the psych unit. “You… know a lot about fire. Should I be worried?”

I shook my head. “My dad was a firefighter. Retired after fighting a freak blaze in Douglas County back in 2015.” I sat back down, “Point is, there should have been no reason the dagger from The Concordance was lost when even the aluminum props were undamaged. And the absence of the body…” .

My eyes widen and I spring out of my seat. “God dammit. I hope I’m not right here.”

“What?”

I paced again, scratching my head. “Certain… items used to produce forbidden media can take on… odd properties. Vincenzo di Monteriggioni’s brushes can supposedly transmute oil paints into blood, the Typhon scroll constantly produces salt water, and the instruments that play the Posthumous Symphony-- I’m getting off track here.” I shook my head. “What do you actually know about The Concordance, Riley?”

“Just what you told me in your email. Witch kills people, and uses the magic to teleport somewhere where they’ll treat her decent.”

“She… doesn’t teleport, though.” I swallowed. “Ysolde’s spell… it’s alive, and it comes to the conclusion that she can never, and will never, be happy in a world where superstitious men rule. It takes her out of the 1500s… and into the middle of London on December 31st, 1910.” I’m shaking as I look at Riley. “The Concordance, among other things, was notable for being one of the first depictions of time travel in film.”

Riley gawps at me for several minutes as he processes what I just said. Then, he laughs. “You can’t be serious, kid. Time travel? That would…” He paused. “That…” he looks through texts on his phone. He gets the same nauseous look that people whose worldview has been upended tend to get in these circumstances. He pours himself another glass of bourbon, hand shaking as he types out a text. 

“Riley?”

“...my contact in the Hollywood precinct, I… I asked him why they thought the bills were counterfeit.” He licked his lips. “The Doe was trying to pay with twenties and fifties, but… none of them had security features. No reflective ink, no watermarks… and none of them have dates of issue after 1963.”

We were both still for a moment. Riley hoped it wasn't real; I’m dreaded that it was. “I need to get to the Hollywood Precinct now.”

“What?” Riley snorts. “Are fucking time cops going to come to take her away?”

Riley’s lack of imagination is probably one of the main reasons he’s such a successful producer. By the time he’s poured himself another drink, I’ve ordered an Uber to take me to Hollywood. By the time he cracks the time cop joke, it’s arrived. “I’ll text you once she’s safe.”

“Safe from what?” Riley calls after me as I nearly tripped on an action figure in the front lobby. “Kid!”

#

Oscar Wilde published an essay in 1891 called The Decay of Lying. One of the main points in it is that Life imitates Art more than Art imitates Life. But things have gotten far more complex since Wilde died; in the modern day, Life imitates Art because Art rules Life.

Look around you right now. If you’re in public, how many people can you see wearing some sort of clothing with a video tv or film reference on it? If you’re on your phone, how many apps do you have installed that are some kind of microtransaction-fueled game? If you’re at your computer, can you honestly tell me that somewhere in the last two dozen Youtube videos you watched, there isn’t a clip of some show or anime, or a trailer for a video game, or some thinkpiece about how Game of Thrones Season 8 wasn’t a complete dumpster fire? When was the last time you quoted Tv Tropes in a conversation?

Life imitates Art because Art pervades Life. But there’s a line that cannot be crossed; it’s one thing if a conversation you had with your father reminds you of a novel you just finished, but it’s another if characters, locations, phenomena or items from that work starts bleeding into reality. Bad things happen. 

People were gathered outside of the Hollywood Precinct; I could hear a fire alarm blaring within. The entities I described emit massive amounts of ozone; in a smog-filled hellhole like L.A, it wasn’t an unfamiliar scent, but someone probably assumed there was an electrical fire and pulled the alarm. The fire department wasn’t there yet, but I was at a loss as to how to actually get in--

And that’s when a member of the LAPD came up to me. He looked like he was a detective, badge on his belt, gun beneath his coat, and… at first, I thought the look on his face was anger at some tourist gawping at the incompetence of the LAPD, but then I realize the sheer terror in his eyes. “Are you Tristan?”

I started to bolt. He puts out his hands. “Whoah, easy. Riley called, he said that… said that you could take care of what… of what’s happening in there. Can you?”

I inspected the crowd, plan formulating in my skull. “Is there another way in?”

“Fire exit around the back.” He starts leading me there. “How the hell are you meant to help? You’re a kid.”

“I’m twenty-seven, and I’ve gotten rid of these things a few times.”

The fire exit was wide open. “Good news is that they hate the noise. Was she alive when you last saw her?”

“Yeah. I think so. But she… she wasn’t well. We found benzo in her system, and she was having trouble waking up.”

“Then there’s probably hope.” I entered the deafening precinct, light and sound threatening to overwhelm me, but beneath it all, I hear screaming from the direction of the holding cells. As I entered, I saw a trio of beings around the cell holding Ms. Jane Doe-- or, as I was now assuming, Ms. Gwen Lyons.

There are a variety of names for these entities; for the sake of simplicity, let’s call them Snowmen. They look roughly like people-- body, two arms, two legs, something vaguely head-shaped-- but they look, and sound, like they’re made of television static, or ‘snow’. There’s a constant low, crackling drone when you’re in their presence, a white noise that threatens to overtake all thoughts and leave you helpless. If they touch you, they pass right through you, but they can leave you numb for weeks, or even months, at a time; a colleague of mine ran through one in November 2019, and couldn’t feel the left side of her body until next June. And that’s if you aren’t their target. 

In the modern age, they’ve become their own worst enemy. Snowmen emit massive amounts of ozone, which anyone who’s touched a lightbulb in the last century will tell you is a scent associated with electrical fires. Modern fire alarms produce a sound that the Snowmen hate, and it also blocks out their white noise. The ones that are in front of the cell look like they’re writhing in pain, until I come in.

And I swear, for the barest instant, that they recognize me. There’s something about the cadence of their white noise that changes when they see me, almost inquisitive, like ‘hey, remember me?’. 

“You don’t want her,” I said. “She’s innocent. She’s here by accident.”

One of them managed to adapt to the sound, and began melting through the bars of the holding cell. Gwen screamed.

“You don’t want her!” I repeat. “I can give you what you want,” I admit, reluctantly. “Just… don’t take her. Please?”

The Snowmen leaned in close to me, their bodies of static casting a glow upon my face. “Look, you don’t even have to destroy it. I… I think I can neutralize it. Do you understand? Neutralize? Make inert? Break?”

They peeled back from me, and just stood there. I fired off a quick text to Riley, and he responded with details as to where the dagger is being kept. What I did next made me die a little inside, both as someone who’s studied The Concordance, and someone who believes in the preservation of film history.

The evidence bin was easy enough to find. The dagger was beautiful; it was cast entirely out of bronze, and it still shone in my hands as brightly as it must have when The Concordance was being made over a century ago, barring the blood across the sickle-like blade. For a moment, I can’t bring myself to do it; then I hear screaming from the holding cells, and know it has to be done.

I found what I needed in the maintenance closet-- a drill. I drilled straight through the blade in front of the Snowmen, and once it got weak enough, I snapped it in half in front of them. We’re meant to say something to the Snowmen when they leave, some sort of ritual the Institute’s head figured out back in the 90’s. I struggled with the pronunciation, they got the gist of it. “Xekínise, Eumenides.” Begone, Gracious Ones. 

The Snowmen faded away. Gwen was left sitting in her cell, confused, and sobbing.

#

For legal reasons, I can’t disclose what happened to Gwen, but I can confirm that the woman in the cell was, in fact, Gwen Lyons, removed from the 1960s to the modern day. Rest assured that, for now, she is safe.

The dagger was rendered inert by my damage, as promised. The Snowmen haven’t shown up again to check up on it, at the very least, which is something that does happen. I’ve entertained the thought of getting it reforged into its proper shape, but for now, both halves are on display on the wall above my computer.

As for me… I discovered that Riley’s power over Hollywood, however vast it may be, isn’t immutable. He doesn’t know every cop, and I ended up with a pair of taser bolts in my back when I tried to get out of the station through the fire exit. I was arrested for trespassing, destruction of evidence, assisting escape, instigating a false fire alarm, and a bevy of other things.

In short: for Christmas, I have a court date. The only reason I’m writing this from my computer in Wisconsin and not from a hotel room with an ankle monitor attached to me is that the Institute has very good lawyers. Unfortunately, said lawyers have asked me to lay low until the New Year, but they said posting an update should be fine.

So, Happy 2023 everyone, and may your pursuits of knowledge not end up with you getting handcuffed.

The Gravid Tape

When I was a freshman in college, I had no clue what I wanted to study, and I didn't have many options, either.


The first college I attended, before I transferred, was in dire financial straits. The president of the college, and her thirty-six vice presidents, had basically misappropriated so much money that the list of majors that had been cut in the previous two years and the list of still-available majors were about equal in size. I had originally wanted to major in anthropology, but that was one of the first degrees on the chopping block.


While most students would drown their existential dread in a can of Bud Light, I was neither old enough to drink nor well-connected enough to get convincing fake IDs. So, I tried joining different clubs, but I struck out in all of them. The gaming society was insular, full of Magic players who probably took out loans to afford their decks and D&D groups who were locked in campaigns that had been going on for years. Two different book clubs sneered at me when I told them I didn't think Harry Potter was all it was cracked up to be. The less said about my experience in the culinary club, the better.


Eventually, I found somewhere I belonged. The university's film school had been one of the first cuts when the financial issues started. Because of one clause or another in his contract, the dean of this particular school was kicked upstairs to an admin position instead of being fired. Let's call him Dr. Whaley. Dr. Whaley had gotten the green light for a 'film appreciation club', with the caveat he would not be paid to run it. I decided to attend a session or two.


The first session, Dr. Whaley told us something I'll never forget. "The only person who should have a say about whether or not a film is valuable isn't a body of decrepit zombies that call themselves an Academy, or a twenty-something online whose mixed up 'yelling at the camera' with 'humor', or some member of academia who insists that the medium of film declined with the invention of the talkie. You, and you alone, can decide what films are valuable to you."


We watched some of the usual suspects; Citizen Kane, A Clockwork Orange, Psycho, but we also watched newer stuff like The Dark Knight and How to Train Your Dragon. It was an attempt to get us to appreciate cinema in all its forms, but also point out where the warts were in the classics; to say there’s an uncomfortable amount of racism in Gone with the Wind would be an understatement.


By the end of the fall semester, I was the treasurer. It was a small club: there was myself; Dr. Whaley; Sidney, a senior who had once been part of the film program before it got cut, now staying at the college to fulfill a math major; Tyler, a fellow freshman who was going for a literary studies major; and… Quentin.


We all just assumed Quentin was a science student, maybe something in psychology, because of the way he dissected the Ludovico Technique in A Clockwork Orange. I took a psych class, but I never ran into him, but I always figured it was just because he was more advanced than me. He looked like he was maybe old enough to be a grad student, but I never even learned his last name, and Dr. Whaley seemed okay with him.


Towards the end of spring semester, Quentin told us he has a film project he wanted to share. This surprised all of us. Sid outright asked, “You’re a psych student. Why did you make a film?”


Quentin explained. “I’m taking a poetry class, and the final project for this term is to write and record a video poem. I used a camera from the library to record it; I think you’ll like it. It’s pretty funny.”


Dr. Whaley was one of those people who was very supportive of his students (that's what he called us, despite it not being a formal class) and invited Quentin to share the project with us at the next meeting.

***

Not all forbidden media is large-scale. Some student projects have anomalous elements in them, and his project was one of them.


Sidney, Tyler, Dr. Whaley and I gathered in the same classroom we always did to watch our films. Quentin plugged in a purple and red flash drive and started up the film, whose file name was “Gravy.mov”. “I had a friend help me with this,” he explained. “Just provided the voiceover.”


It began in a downright surreal manner-- the camera was focused on a hand holding a BLT sandwich. The sandwich was manipulated like a hand puppet to recite lines from his poem, titled Gravid. Here's how the first stanza went:


"Gravid, by Quentin N.


"Something new grows inside her,

A lemming, a lemur, maybe a spider.

It writhes beneath the dermis thin,

Threatens to pierce her virgin skin.

She screams and writhes and shakes,

Praying that soon, her water breaks,

And the thing within her aching womb

Finds itself in its father's tomb."


We were watching this in a vacant room of the student union. While we were laughing at the absurdity of a sandwich puppet, Dr. Whaley was turning pale. He said he needed to make a phone call, and ducked out of the room.


Right before the second stanza started, the hand stopped "speaking". A voice, presumably belonging to the hand's owner, asks "We good, dude?" before a sledgehammer comes down and crushes the hand. The audio track cuts out just as the hand's owner starts screaming, and Quentin's voice plays as the hand writhes in pain, bones and muscle exposed to the air.


"It will be born some time anon,

Eating the Whore of Babylon.

From its maw, it utters a cry,

That will dry the sea and rot the sky

Mother writhes and mother screams,

Mother sees the child in her dreams."


Tears of shock are in Sidney’s eyes as she asks, “Where’s Quentin?” She looks up just in time to see him doing… something to the door from the outside. He jammed the handle with something, and Sidney can’t get it open.


Tyler gets up to try the door. The handle doesn't move. He picks up the fire extinguisher to try to break the window on the door and force it open from the outside; even as he manages to shatter the window, it’s too small for him to get his hand through and clear the obstruction.


The whole time, I'm glued to the screen. I couldn’t look away; my mind was filled with equal parts fascination and disgust, as if I was watching some gruesome surgery, where the patient is screaming because the anesthetic is ineffective, but the doctor keeps operating anyway. The broken hand… changes. Lumps of flesh and bits of bone recombine to form something that looks like a cross between a human mouth and a lamprey's sucker. It eats the remains of the sandwich as Quentin's voice continues to speak.


"It shall be cesarean,

And then the child will be born again.

Polka-dots dance across her vision,

As the doctor makes the first incision.

Blood flows from unsullied skin,

As the wet nurse is pulled in.


Gravid, Gravid, Gravity,

Kill the sky and drain the sea.


The child is born, the world is lost

Within a hellish pentecost,

Child eats mother, sister eats brother,

And the whole world shall be--"


Something awful was going to happen if the poem finished. I didn’t know how I knew; it was as if there was a voice in my very soul telling me the recital could not be finished. Not knowing what else to do, I ran to the computer and unplugged every cable I could find, managing to get the power cord unplugged before the last word could be spoken. I unplugged every other cable as well, just in case the projector somehow kept playing.


I remember there being something wrong with the projector’s screen. The canvas was now blank, but it was warping outwards, to the room, as if something behind the screen was stretching out into it. It was completely stationary, which was the oddest thing about it.


Dr. Whaley came back, wearing sunglasses with X's on each lens, and a member of maintenance to get the door open. The look of relief on his face haunts me-- I think he expected at least one of us to be dead.


"Where's the data?" He asked, coming to the computer.


I unplugged the flash drive that Quentin had stored the video on. Dr. Whaley placed it in a Faraday bag, and turned off the projector. As he did, there was a soft screech from the projector screen, and then everything seemed to return to normal.

***

The club disbanded after that. I saw Sidney in the dining hall a couple of times, but I never heard from Tyler again.


Dr. Whaley met with me before the semester ended. He said that he'd already offered a letter of recommendation to Tyler (who was transferring colleges) and had told Sidney he would always be a positive reference for her. He asked if there was anything he could do for me.


"Yeah. Explain what the fuck that was."


He told me that it was a recitation of the poem Gravid by Quentin Naismith, a poet from the 1940s whose work was never widely published, due to its deleterious effects on reality. He told me that the 1996 Milwaukee explosion wasn't caused by a gas leak, but by someone playing a recording of Naismith's poem Flagrante. Gravid would likely have killed, at the very least, everyone in the building we were in through "infestation".


"And the video?"


"The student-- I doubt he was one, come to think of it-- needed a medium to transmit it. Film-- or at least, the moving image-- is one of the more powerful mediums for proliferating an anomaly like that. If it were to a larger audience, it's likely a good part of the campus would be infested."


"And… there's more like this?"


He nodded. "There's The Concordance, The Maddening Quiet, The Garrison Footage, the Kilauea Tape… that's just in film. I had to get on a phone with a colleague of mine that night to confirm that what I was listening to was actually Gravid."


I nodded. “I think I’d like the letter of recommendation. There’s a school in Ohio that’s supposed to have a good film course.”


Dr. Whaley smiled at me. “After all that, you still want to study film? You could run into some dangerous stuff in that field. I don’t want you to be hurt.”


“Can the film really hurt me if I don’t think it has value?”


Dr. Whaley sighed. “It can. And I hope you never run into anything else. What’s the name of the school?”

***

As I stated in my last post, I ended up doing my bachelor’s thesis on The Concordance and the impact it had on early cinema. That was what got me back on Dr. Whaley’s radar; he met with me a few days before graduation, and offered me a position.


“It doesn’t pay well,” he told me. “But you’ll get training, and you’ll be able to help people. You’ll be helping us stop people like Quentin. People who use films, books, games, art… people who use culture and media to try and cause harm.”


“Do you run it?” I asked.


“No. But I’ve met the people who do. They do good for us, and we have people all over the world.” He paused. “I’m actually going to be leaving the country soon. There’s been a report of someone distributing copies of the Garrison Footage in Taipei. Two people have already died. I could use an extra set of hands.”


I told him to let me think about it. Instead, I had a drink about it. The Concordance wasn’t the only thing I’d dug up during my research; Naismith’s works, the Black Rondeau, the Hemaphyte Movement, and so many ‘last known footage’ videos, depicting impossibilities, causing impossibilities. I’d fallen down a rabbit hole, and I knew it was impossible for me to climb out on my own, if at all.

So, I figured, it would probably be best if I made like Alice and find friends on an island within a sea of tears, even if those friends ended up being a bunch of dodos and lorikeets. I boarded the plane to Taipei a week later, and have been part of this Institute ever since.

Institute Q&A

The head of the Institute has encouraged me to do a Q & A session with this blog's readers. So, after collecting questions from Discord and Telegram, here are the answers.

Have you ever investigated (insert weird piece of media here)?

About half of the questions I received were along these lines, so I figured this was a good place to start. 

Polybius: Alleged arcade cabinet that dispensed LSD and was monitored by the CIA. It's a hoax, and a shoddy one at that. Probably based on a failed initiative by the CIA to attempt to bug arcade machines in areas like Berkley or NYC; the noise from the arcade made the bugs useless, and what bugs were useful were often damaged or destroyed by routine maintenance or even people just playing the games. 

SCP: A weird fiction website. I think the only people who believe that it's real are tweens who play too much Infinite IKEA on Roblox (and if you are one of those, please stop reading this blog, I don't want to be slapped by COPPA).

Atuk: Unproduced screenplay notorious for having several actors associated with it die, including John Candy, Phil Hartman, and John Belushi. Due to ongoing legal proceedings, we're unable to comment on this particular work.

Snuff Films: We have found about half a dozen. "GUTS GUTS GUTS GUTS GUTS GUTS" is the worst I've ever seen. We always report them to the authorities, but more than once, it turned out to be a film student's final project that was leaked online, and everyone involved is fine physically.

"That one Super Sentai series where the main actors all died": I have no clue what this is talking about. Super Sentai is the Japanese franchise that Power Rangers is based on, but I've not found anything about this. I know I have at least one Japanese reader of this blog, do you know what this is about?

Literally any found footage film: Do you honestly think that last known videos and/or outright snuff films would be shown in theaters? I wouldn't put it past Hollywood at this point, but found footage is almost always fictional. 

What's the Institute's verdict on the events surrounding the 1912 silent film The Concordance and the subsequent destruction of all copies of the film?

I did my undergrad thesis on The Concordance. It's more influential than people realize; the Motion Picture Production Code of 1934 probably wouldn't have had four pages forbidding various forms of "the depiction of occult acts in a positive manner" if not for The Concordance.

That said, I'm almost positive that at least one copy still exists. It is damn near impossible to destroy a braced film by burning it.

Is the 2003 Tanner Bigfoot tape real?

It's more credible than the Patterson-Gimlin footage, due to the fact that we have hospital records to back up the injuries sustained by Lacey Tanner. However, we don't believe that the creature on film is bigfoot; generally, 'capable of flight' isn't something corroborated by bigfoot lore.

I heard that the Garrison Footage killed sixteen people, is that true?

That was the death toll as of 2019. It circulated online during the height of the pandemic; the current death toll is estimated to be between 36 and 40. I should note it's safe to watch for most people-- just make sure that that you have someone to bring you back after you're done watching it. Most deaths caused by the Garrison Footage are from dehydration.

What's your opinion on 'mind_the_gap$w.mov'?

I hope to God that it's a hoax, but it's impossible to know for sure; digital media isn't braced and can be deleted with the click of a mouse, so it's harder to tell genuine anomalies from the hoaxes.

What do you think of the 1989 religious superhero musical film Exodusman?

I think that the accidents on the set were exaggerated and weren't caused by "Satanic saboteurs" as the director claimed, but by sheer incompetence. That said, the alleged 'angel' that kept appearing during production was witnessed by several people who had no ties to the film or the church providing funding, so events are a tad muddled.

Is there any veracity to the story of Lady Annabelle Jones’s psychic photographs? 

Seems like someone saw the Strange Pictures Halloween Special this year. We believe that Annabelle Jones thought the photographs were genuine, but similar photographs from the era have been proven fake with easily replicated techniques. This isn't to say spectral and psychic phenomena aren't real, I have firsthand experience with them. 

Does the institute have any knowledge as to the whereabouts of the lost tablets of Adrahasis? 

At first I thought this was referring to the incomplete tablets of the Babylonian epic Atra-Hasis, but apparently Adrahasis is something completely different, which is… confusing. After talking with some of my archaeologist colleagues, they’re convinced that at least one of the tablets is in the British Museum but haven’t been put on exhibit due to ‘undisclosed dangers’. Beyond that, we’re not sure.

Are there any extant copies of Johann Hofmann’s Ghoul Cults of the Great War, despite its ban by the Nazi government? 

Occasionally a copy pops up in an ‘esoteric bookstore’, wedged between books on homeopathy and copies of “How to Become a Werewolf”, typically on the same shelf as ‘genuine’ editions of the Necronomicon that cost $60. They’re largely reproductions; genuine copies with the anomalies intact are harder to find.

That said, the Institute did manage to procure a copy in the 1990s, when the son of a Thule Society member attempted to burn his father’s possessions (Nazi memorabilia collectors and hate groups had been alternately offering thousands of dollars and threatening the owner to attempt to acquire them) and found several braced items among them.

There are urban legends about NASA scientists trying to locate and photograph God, is there any truth to that? 

A friend of my family worked for NASA, but resigned after the stress of the Challenger incident nearly gave him a heart attack. I asked him about this, and he said that there are photographs from Apollo 13 that took images of space beyond the dark side of the moon, and that there’s something there, ‘But it isn’t God’.

 

About a decade back I swear an image file called truevoid.gif made the rounds on a bunch of paranormal web forums, but now I can’t find a single trace of its existence. Any idea as to what happened to it?

Oh shit, truevoid, there's a name I've not heard in a while. I remember that someone tried making a game based off of it some time in 2015 but apparently they used a copyrighted song in it without approval, so that got nuked from the internet too.

While the original image has vanished from the surface internet, there's an occasional mention of it on darkweb conspiracy forums. I'm not qualified to write about it myself, but I think Cecily wrote an essay about it back in 2018. I'll ask her if she wants to put it up on the blog.

How do I access Shadow Netflix?

Please let this be a joke. We had to work around the clock in 2018 to shut down Skreen, an actual anomalous streaming service. More about that later.

How long has the Institute been around?/How old is the Institute?

In its current form, the Institute dates back to July 19th, 1986, when a group of "protesters" raided a public library in Michigan and burned several items deemed "corruptive" in the parking lot. Most of the usual suspects of the time were there- Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird, Howl, Naked Lunch, and The Color Purple. Among the oddities were a few volumes of Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles, for 'promoting homosexuality'.

A librarian looking through the pile of ashes after the incident found a single volume had escaped unscathed, having been braced. It was a novel, Nemesis by Walter Brink (Not to be confused with the Asimov novel of the same name). Nemesis was about a young woman possessed by the "spirit of revenge" whose victims ended up receiving karmic punishment corresponding to their crimes; the protestors objected to the fact that one of the antagonists was an evangelical preacher. The librarian took it back into the library and kept it hidden for almost a year.

Meanwhile, a string of apparent arsons would plague the city, resulting in the deaths of the majority of the people who had attempted to burn Nemesis. Except it wasn't arson; the librarian saw one of the people who participated in the burning spontaneously combust.

From there, the librarian asked some of their friends around the country about weird things they had found during their job. They realized Nemesis wasn't a unique case, and from there, the community grew into what it is today. 

Does the Institute ever release less-harmful versions of media?

We'd like to, some day. But unfortunately, that requires talent and funding. So while we'd like to take The Rapturous Revival of the Crosse on an off-Broadway tour or release a non-fatal version of any volume of the Adventures in Alorane series, we just don't have the resources at the moment. 

What media have you debunked?

More than you think, less than we'd like. I'll write more on this next year, as this was a very common question. 

Does the Institute have any rival organizations?

Most rivalries we have are academic, and we collaborate with other organizations frequently. A few urban exploration communities partner with us so that we can train to navigate abandoned buildings and other difficult terrain. We also work with paranormal investigators, and we've consulted cryptozoologists when trying to determine what the hell was on the Mackinac Island Drone Footage. 

That said, the Nova Network has been a colossal pain since the mid-2000s, when it shifted away from documentaries to conspiracy and paranormal programming like Skinwalker Ranch, America's Most Haunted and Aliens Among Us, low-effort alternate history programming like their abysmal adaptation of Harry Turtledove's Guns of the South, and of course, Strange Pictures and its spinoff Strange Writings, which both concern forbidden and lost media. 

I won't go into it here, but anyone that claims that the Patterson-Gimlin Footage is real, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, is trying to sell you bigfoot merch. That's not even going into the Damascus Phonograph, the Diary of Martha Packard, or the Werewolf of Warsaw. All fake. And yet we're called crazy.

What preferred "eye bleach" do you have after interacting with anomalous media?

It varies. I know Mr. Draper likes to watch commercials he helped produce, while one of our audio gurus, Squirrel, cleans out their ears with songs by Coheed and Cambria and I Fight Dragons. Personally, when I see something traumatic, I just put on a Marvel film or blast some Billy Joel.

What's the oldest piece of Media the Institute has investigated?

There was a purportedly cursed copy of the Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead that was responsible for at least fifteen deaths since its discovery in the 1880s. Turns out it was just infested with mold. That's why we have a mycologist on staff.

If we're talking film, the Lumière film containing Le Chapeau is the oldest we know of. 

The History of Cardenio is one that keeps getting away from us. It's from 1613, written by William Shakespeare and John Fletcher, and has been lost for centuries. We're not sure if it's anomalous, but it's elusive. 

Pronouns?

Here's everyone who's comfortable sharing. 

Cecily: She/They

Squirrel (Audio Specialist): They/Them 

Mr. Draper: He/Him

Azula (Editing Guru): She/Her

Atticus (Mycologist): He/Him

Myself: As long as you don't call me "it", whatever is fine.

Face reveal?

Nah.

Make, model, and license plate of your car?

This was the weirdest of the "please dox yourself" questions and I'm honestly astounded by it. Do people think we're going to answer these?

Has anyone in the Institute ever died in the pursuit of their studies?

Yes.

In fact, a member of the Institute who will probably be dead before the end of the month has asked me to post his findings after he dies. But I'll need time to comb through his writing.

What's your story? How did you get involved with the Institute?

Another common question. One I think I'll answer next time.