“The effect of this cannot be understood without being there. The beauty of it cannot be understood, either, and when you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside you. Desolation tries to colonize you.”
— 📚Annihilation, Jeff VanderMeer // 🎞 Annihilation, Alex Garland (2018)
Trying to read more fiction and the Autism and Queerness and Transcendent nature of these books truly has me in a chokehold. Like there’s something so liberating in The Weird, the eco and the body horror, the undefinable, The transcendent nature of area x ugh
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Annihilation completely masters being disgustingly beauitful. Like Midsommar is a beauitful horror movie, intentionally idealic. But Annihilation is beauitful in the way that the poisonous mold growing in your fridge is beauitful, or how a gas fire in beauitful.
Like, Annihilation cannot just give you a Snow White deer mutated with antlers that are branches full of blossoms. There needs to be two of these deer that move in parrallel, but one is rotting
Annihilation can’t just give you a wall of fungus, or a corpse. It has to give you murals of prismatic, colorful fungi sprouting out of a corpse so violently it snapped him in half
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The horror of "Annihilation" is existential and rooted firmly in the ordinary. It is film confronting the gradual ways that we are changed by the things and people around us, the ways that we slowly drift from one state into another, the terror of waking up one day to realize that we've become someone else - someone we don't recognize. […] In the final moments, Lena and Kane confront the fact that they are no longer the people they used to be. They have both changed dramatically, radically, since their relationship began. Their slow drift apart, Lena's infidelity, Kane's absence and his nearly fatal illness have compounded and altered both of them down to the core of their very being. But even if they are no longer the Lena and Kane they used to be, they are still a Lena and a Kane, and their shared experience, the way they have absorbed one another into their identities has made them into the same. They are still one person and two alone.
— Folding Ideas, Annihilation and Decoding Metaphor
Annihilation (2018)
Black Sails (2014 - 2017), episode XVI
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Have you read...
Area X has been cut off from the rest of the world for decades. Nature has reclaimed the last vestiges of human civilization. The first expedition returned with reports of a pristine, Edenic landscape; the second expedition ended in mass suicide, the third in a hail of gunfire as its members turned on one another. The members of the eleventh expedition returned as shadows of their former selves, and within weeks, all had died of cancer. In Annihilation, the first volume of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach Trilogy, we join the twelfth expedition.
The group is made up of four women: an anthropologist; a surveyor; a psychologist, the de facto leader; and our narrator, a biologist. Their mission is to map the terrain, record all observations of their surroundings and of one another, and, above all, avoid being contaminated by Area X itself.
They arrive expecting the unexpected, and Area X delivers—but it’s the surprises that came across the border with them and the secrets the expedition members are keeping from one another that change everything.
submit a horror book!
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i watched annihilation again. this time, i reflected on how there are seemingly, two entirely separate films in the running; one set in area x that attempts to adapt the book, and another which clumsily attempts to reconcile the fact that this is a hollywood film starring natalie portman and oscar isaac!
the scenes set in the shimmer try to visualize an area x for cinema, i don't think the action scenes are out of place, and the dramatization of the moaning creature's existence as an encounter the twelfth expedition has together was a creative decision well made.
i have a feeling that they filmed, or at least story-boarded, scenes of the tower, the crawler, and the words on the wall; the visuals of the fungal growths seem to foretell it; the fungus fades gradually as the expedition leaves the base camp behind. but it might have gotten too weird for a hollywood film.
so there's the other film, the one with lena and kane, who are normal american people with names, military histories, and no qualms about using phosphorous grenades on the unknown. it's the story of their happy marriage, lena's infidelity, and the circumstances which lead them to area x.
now, canonically, the biologist does describe her life outside area x, but that life is nothing like the lives of lena and kane, the biologist's awful employment record is erased in favour of an academic position. lena's time in the army would be unthinkable for the biologist, but entirely plausible for the requirements of the cinematic southern reach.
hollywood was never going to make a good adaptation of annihilation, the hollywood continuity system, as it has evolved and mutated, devouring techniques from marginal cinemas, lacks the language to tell the story of annihilation faithfully, but it had a chance to interpret it, and interpret it well. and they squandered it.
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If the horror doesnt come wrapped around a beautiful arrangement of flowers I dont even wanna hear it
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