The Witnesses Are Gone

As anyone who’s lived long enough will tell you, the human mind can only take so much reality before it shuts down. Ghosts are a form of censorship. We block out the night with ghosts, because the darkness is worse.

‘No, I’m telling you. The thing that Juan Nada worships, the god of nothing. It killed my lover.’

When I thought about the house, I thought ruin was the natural order of things. Mostly I didn’t think about it. My grief was slow and cold and relentless.

Deep down, despite the evidence of our lives, we can’t really believe that anything is ever made up

Do you remember reading Lovecraft or Machen for the first time and believing, just for a moment, that what you were reading was not fiction? That some documents of another reality had fallen into your hands? That these stories not only changed their genre, they changed everything?

‘I mean with the films. With Rien. Do I just forget it all?’

Padgett gazed at me for a moment, his eyes blurred with reflected light. ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘There are worse things than forgetting.’

He believes that all of Rien’s films are hints of an entity. A power, a god perhaps. Something mysterious and terrible, glimpsed only in distorted shadows. Negatives. Views of a black earth. And whatever it is, it doesn’t want to be seen

They usually claim he invoked some… sort of god that’s trying to cover its tracks

They made me feel the house was not a place for people to live in. If I shared the dark and chill of their territory, I couldn’t really be human

Films should liberate the imagination, not choke it with misery