Twilight Language: Hook Deaths

Showing posts with label Hook Deaths. Show all posts

Sunday, January 19, 2020

Cryptokubrology: Oh! Octopus

In "Cryptokubrology: 237 in Films of 1980 and Before," I asked for suggestions of other movies in which people noticed mention of "237s," before The Shining (1980) was released.

One such "237" was spied in the 1937 monster comedy Sh! The Octopus. It shows up as a room number, specifically here, with Marcia Ralston.

Sh! The Octopus is a 1937 comedy-mystery film produced by Warner Bros., directed by William McGann and starring Hugh Herbert, Allen Jenkins and Marcia Ralston. While contract players Herbert and Jenkins frequently appeared in the same picture, this is the only movie to present them as an actual team. The film's oddball qualities have made it something of a cult favorite.

Herbert and Jenkins play two bumbling detectives, who, in pursuit of a master criminal, The Octopus, find themselves inside a haunted lighthouse full of suspicious characters, including the titular character, who appears to be an actual octopus.

Reviews of this film rank talk of it as "dreadful" and truly difficult to watch. However, at "Trailers from Hell," Michael Schlesinger speaks of Sh! The Octopus as achieving near perfection in its genre. (See the original trailer here.) He also says there was a rock group that named themselves after the film

In the long discussion at "1000 Misspent Hours," Sh! The Octopus is viewed as "one of the few known specimens of a seemingly impossible genre, a parody of a parody. By all accounts, this movie was intended as a spoof of The Gorilla, which had itself been a spoof of contemporary spooky house mysteries like The Bat and The Cat and the Canary. Finally, and most importantly, Sh! The Octopus is quite simply one of the strangest and most utterly illogical mainstream movies of its— or any other— era."

That site notes that "Captain Hook (George Rosener, from Doctor X and House of Secrets), the one-handed caretaker, is a dangerously unbalanced man, and has a habit of flying into a homicidal rage whenever he hears the ticking of a clock."

Scott Ashlin, the site's reviewer, says, "The one thing stopping me from nominating Sh! The Octopus as the single stupidest horror or mystery film of the 1930’s is the disconcerting possibility that its creators understood exactly what they were doing."

As to Room 237, it may serve a special function in this film. After the lighthouse explodes, and the viewer assumes the movie is over, it is not.

There is a fade to a scene in a hospital where a major character "is on a bed, flailing about and being attended to. Turns out he fainted because of all those pills he was taking in the car at the beginning of the movie." Marcia Ralston and another actress "are nurses at the hospital, and [one] points this out in a manner that’s extremely similar to the final scene in Wizard of Oz 2 years later. So all that stuff that just happened? Never happened," writes the reviewer Stacia on April 15, 2008 (here).

###

Marcia Ralston was married to Phil Harris, once upon a time.

Sh! The Octopus, according to some sites is written by Ralph Spence, based on The Gorilla (a 1925 play), also written by Ralph Spence. IMDb credits the writing to George Bricker (screen play), Ralph Spence (from plays by), Ralph Murphy (from plays by), and Donald Gallaher (from plays by).

The movie was released on December 11, 1937. Schlesinger talks of it being targeted for Christmas of 1937.

The "Octopus" has taken on a sinister cryptopolitical meaning in recent years, with the book, The Octopus: Secret Government and the Death of Danny Casolaro by Kenn Thomas and Jim Keith. As Google notes, "Originally released [in 1996] to critical praise, this book became a much sought-after classic in the underground of conspiracy literature - today commanding high prices on the book collector's market. The new paperback edition [from Feral House in 2004] carries Casolaro's conspiratorial insights and research into the post-911 world, for which it was a harbinger."

Also, the deeper twilight language of having the character "Captain Hook" in Sh! The Octopus is an enigma. In 2010, I wrote of the mysterious series of deaths of young children, all killed in similar ways via hangings from hooks. The deaths often occurred due to coat hooks, sometimes in closets, sometimes in bathrooms. That essay appeared on January 24, 2010, under "The Peter Pan/Hook Deaths." I followed this on February 27, 2014, with "New Hook Death." In 2017, I updated this phenomena with a new posting.

BTW, Sh! The Octopus has a scene with a hanged man dripping blood, and lends itself to various twilight language interpretations.

Credit for this 237 discovery: Matt Hopewell.

Saturday, January 12, 2019

The Ortolan Connection at the Golden Globes

In a Roman Osteria (1866) by Carl Bloch.

The 76th Golden Globes took a bizarre detour into the world of wealthy twilight signaling and secret societies in 2019.

(Warning: Graphic Material: Speculative Conspiracy Theory: Ritualistic American Folklore)

It all kicked into full gear with the flacid humor of Andy Samberg and Sandra Oh when they did a strange supposedly funny skit.

Prior to a commercial break, Samberg announced, “Normally at this point of the show, the host would do something fun and spontaneous to show how we’re all just ordinary people, like ordering pizza for everyone.” Source.
Pizza. What immediately came to your mind?

Pizzagate, the rich and famous, Hollywood, Hollyweird. What was Andy Samberg thinking making this joke?

Who doesn't know about Pizzagate?

In summary, Pizzagate is a conspiracy that became widely discussed, especially by pro-Trump online sites, during the United States presidential election cycle in 2016.

In the fall of 2016, the personal email account of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton's campaign manager, was hacked in a spear-phishing attack, and his emails were subsequently made public by WikiLeaks. Proponents of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory falsely claimed that the emails contained coded messages referring to human trafficking and connecting several U.S. restaurants and high-ranking officials of the Democratic Party with an alleged child sex ring involving the Washington, D.C. restaurant Comet Ping Pong. Source.

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I've discussed the Pizzagate shooting at the Comet pizza house here (December 5, 2016).

Numerous emails from the Chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign incongruously refer to food items such as pasta, cheese pizza, ice cream – which 4chan users say is a code language used by child sex ring participants:

For anyone who hasn’t been paying attention, the elite are heavily into pedophilia and satanism because these are ways for them to (1) prove they are sociopathic enough to be trusted with great crimes, and (2) prove that they can trust each other, despite being sociopaths. They all have the dirt on each other. (4) Satanic ritual abuse is used to create controllable split personalities, like in the Manchurian Candidate....
“hotdog” = boy
“pizza” = girl
“cheese” = little girl
“pasta” = little boy
“ice cream” = male prostitute
“walnut” = person of colour
“map” = semen
“sauce” = orgy

Source.

Of course, Pizzagate is said to be a code for a deeper mystery of secret societies, as shown by Stanley Kubrick in Eyes Wide Shut.

Cryptokubruology haunted the Golden Globes.

Supposedly a message about the oceans and the environment has been seen also as this:

Flu Shots

Andy Samberg and Sandra Oh, after their brief "pizza" mention, then they went on to their flu gag.

Keith Urban registers disgust. That's Nicole Kidman next to him.

Yes, Kidman is Urban's wife (2006-Present), and formerly Tom Cruise's wife (1990-2001). She starred with Cruise in Eyes Wide Shut (1999).

Although it was a stunt that backfired, worse yet, it seemed to have an entire twilight language layer missed by some.

As People put it, in part:

During Sunday night’s glamorous event, hosts Sandra Oh and Andy Samberg paused the awards ceremony to give out something else: flu shots.
“So roll up your sleeves, Hollywood, because you’re all getting flu shots,” Oh excitedly announced, as Samberg joined in, before a large group of people wearing white lab coats and holding syringes appeared on stage.
“You know you wore a sleeveless gown for a reason!” joked Oh, as stars were approached by the white coats and needles, looking understandably freaked out.
“From the Rite Aid at Echo Park,” added Samberg, before noting, “If you are an anti-vaxxer, just put a napkin on — perhaps over — your head and we will skip you.”

BTW, Echo Park, right next to Elysian Park, is the birthplace of LA's first cinematic boom (at 1712 Glendale Blvd, in 1912, via Mack Sennett and his Keystone Cops comedies).

In 1892, Edward Doheny and his fellow prospector Charles A. Canfield discovered LA’s first oil field at Glendale, Colton, and Patton streets, around the corner from where the Bob Baker Marionette Theater now stands. The oil field extended through all of Echo Park, so exploratory prospectors were constantly drilling in search of new opportunities to strike it rich. As a result, excessive amounts of petroleum leaked into the man-made lake (it was originally built in 1870 to be a drinking water reservoir) and in 1907 the lake caught fire and burned for three days — or so legend has it.

This was well before Doheny took part in the Teapot Dome scandal — which served as the basis of Upton Sinclair’s Oil and Paul Thomas Anderson’s magnum opus There Will Be Blood— so Doheny was fairly unknown at the time. Political corruption had yet to ensnare his image. He and Canfield were merely young prospectors looking to make their lives and fortunes in the expansive West. What did it matter that their unregulated prospecting led to rampant speculative drilling and man-made environmental hazards? Oh, right, because it’s the same tactics and mythology of righteous unmitigated greed that have led us to today. Source.

Napkins and Ortolans

Who puts a "napkin on your head"?

Wealthy people eating ortolans do.

A frequently noted way of describing "a single ortolan bird" is to say it is "no bigger than a baby's fist and weighs less than an ounce." This exact description is found, for example, in a 2014 Telegraph article, a 2015 book The Tudor Kitchen, a 2017 Jon H. M. Chan essay, and a 2017 Arabian Post article. It does not seem to be a coincidence that the cooked ortolan is compared to the clenched fist of an infant.

A metaphor for pedophilia?

The birds [ortolan, Emberiza hortulana] are caught with nets set during their autumn migratory flight to Africa. They are then kept in covered cages or boxes. The birds react to the dark cage by gorging themselves on grain, usually millet seed, until they double their bulk. Roman Emperors stabbed out ortolans’ eyes in order to make the birds think it was night, making them eat even more. The birds are then thrown into a container of Armagnac, which both drowns and marinates the birds.

The bird is roasted for eight minutes and then plucked. The consumer then places the bird feet first into their mouth while holding onto the bird's head. The ortolan is then eaten whole, with or without the head and the consumer spits out the larger bones. The traditional way French gourmands eat ortolans is to cover their heads and face with a large napkin or towel while consuming the bird. The purpose of the towel is debated. Some claim it is to retain the maximum aroma with the flavour as they consume the entire bird at once, others have stated "Tradition dictates that this is to shield – from God’s eyes – the shame of such a decadent and disgraceful act", and others have suggested the towel hides the consumers spitting out bones. This use of the towel was begun by a priest, a friend of Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin. Wikipedia.

About 30,000 ortolan are still captured and sold illegally in the South of France, with a single bird going for $180, or about the price of an ounce of coveted white truffles. The New York Times

Secret gatherings featuring the elusive meal have been documented. In 2008, Esquire writer Michael Paterniti attended one such French dinner that served ortolan — the chef, who was breaking the law, "had to call forty of his friends in search of the bird, for there were none to be found and almost everyone feared getting caught, risking fines and possible imprisonment," Source.

Author and TV personality Anthony Bourdain describes his own ortolan experience; the bird, smuggled into New York, was served at a private dinner.

I bring my molars down and through my bird's rib cage with a wet crunch and am rewarded with a scalding hot rush of burning fat and guts down my throat. Rarely have pain and delight combined so well. I'm giddily uncomfortable, breathing in short, controlled gasps as I continue slowly – ever so slowly – to chew. With every bite, as the thin bones and layers of fat, meat, skin, and organs compact in on themselves, there are sublime dribbles of varied and wondrous ancient flavors: figs, Armagnac, dark flesh slightly infused with the salty taste of my own blood as my mouth is pricked by the sharp bones. As I swallow, I draw in the head and beak, which, until now, have been hanging from my lips, and blithely crush the skull. ~ Anthony Bourdain, Medium Raw, 2010.

“Zoophagy” is an obscure word that means the eating of animals. It might help if we were to appropriate its adjectival form “zoophagous” to describe the eating of endangered species, still a worldwide problem. When it came to their defining moment, Anthony Bourdain, and his French-chef pals, chose their art over respect for nature, always a poor choice. ~ Henry Voigt, July 15, 2011

In 2018...

the bird has taken wing on the small screen in Showtime’s Billions and HBO’s Succession. Both shows offer clear perspectives on (male) obsession, ambition, and excess. Both invoke the same ritual of shrouds, gluttony, and shame. Source.

Cryptokubrology

The Golden Globes reeked of a mix of Stanley Kubrick syncs and Eyes Wide Shut moments.

Christian/Bale/Baal/Satan

The most unforgettable moment, as mentioned in the following MSM headline of the night for the Golden Globes, was owned by Christian Bale, hands down. Even the Drudge Report had to highlight it.

On this blog, on January 1st, I had noted the remarkable placement of Bale in the current visual melodrama of Trump in the Yankee and Cowboy War of 2019.