The Demons Told Me To Kill You
A Brief Review of the Worst Movie Ever
It's been a while since I watched a good horror flick. Yoshihiro Nishimura completely ruined the splatter genre for me over a decade ago, so if I'm going to watch something it had better have a good psychological angle and come with solid recommendations. That drought was ended last week when Kimberly Steele turned me on to the excellent Australian production Talk to Me (2022) about a group of teenagers who make a game out of letting themselves be willingly possessed by evil spirits. The conduit for this cross-cultural exchange between living morons and the deceitful dead was a severed hand of a medium, preserved in ceramic and scribbled with incantations. During a party the teenagers would take turns holding the hand and inviting random spirits into themselves while everyone else would laugh and record the events on their mobile phones as the possessed person engaged in all sorts of bizarre (and often lascivious) behavior.
The rules of the game stated that the ceremony had to be cut off in under 90 seconds, otherwise the connection would grow too strong and overwhelm the victim's personality. This is of course exactly what happens to Mia, the protagonist who soon has difficulty separating reality from the visions she is receiving until it becomes impossible for her to return to normal life. Apparently when the spirits are allowed to inhabit a person they gain access to everything, and immediately start using the victim's memories, prejudices, and emotions in order to manipulate them into spending time alone with the hand. Without chaperones to stop the ceremony, the connection strengthens to the point where the invader starts kicking the person out of their own body, leaving the audience uncertain of who is really running the show at any given moment.
It's an excellent little piece of storytelling that uses really good actors that American audiences will be gratefuly unfamliar with, and if you can handle the spooky stuff and enjoy occult-themed topics I highly recommend it. So why is "worst movie ever" in the lower header of this article? That's because all of us are watching the real-life version of the possession game take place at the moment, which ironically went under the name "Hands Off" this past weekend.
Those of you who are horrified by scenes of swastika-defaced cars burning in front of shot-up dealerships know exactly what I'm talking about. If you haven't had the chance yet then check out some of the footage where the vandals get caught. You can literally see the moment when the demons that were controlling them suddenly depart, leaving the person standing there trying to figure out how they went so far off the rails and ended up in handcuffs. It's like watching their internal dialogue through a window as their expression changes from defiance to confusion and then to shame. "But I'm a good person. How did this happen?"
It's actually very easy to explain. They corporate media turned their fear into a virtue, and they became addicted to the rush. Every day they go home and fill up what remains of their consciousnesses with the equivalent of bad horror movies, then excitedly share them in their daily lives with anyone who also enjoys participating in the fear ritual. The topics flow like hot sludge out of a Troma catalog, but at the moment they all seem to be culminating under the title of Orange Hitler. For at least a few hours every day these people honestly believe that half the country is evil and actively trying to kill them, therefore it's acceptable to "punch Nazis", set electrical vehicles on fire, or even mass-murder Christian children in cold blood. Toxic self-righteousness is a hell of a drug in the most literal sense.
Not too long ago this sort of dangerous paranoia was enough to get a person locked in a padded cell for an extended stay, but apparently we've grown far too accustomed to antisocial behavior with the collapse of public health that turned our streets into outdoor insane asylums. Even if we were to reintroduce the sanitarium model the required capacity simply doesn't exist, which is too bad since a even a brief time-out could accomplish a lot. After surviving the initial rage-withdrawal most of them would probably enjoy the peace and quiet of escaping the rush-and-crash cycles of the corporate endorphine squeezing machines. Since mass-rehab is out of the question it's likely that (similar to the film) this will end in a wave of suicides from those who find it impossible to reconnect with reality.
Ancient methods exist for offering a helping hand to people who want to find their way back, but the rules of triage apply since this is the spiritual equivalent of a small-scale nuclear war. Soon well will all be stepping over bodies, and unfortunately many of the fallen will remain dangerous until their last breath. That means if you don't already have plenty of experience with advanced psychological counseling it's probably best to make sure your own needs are met before going out there and trying to be a hero. I would also explicitly recommend against doing anything to unnecessarily antagonize the possessed in the meantime. According to a recent poll the majority of self-identifying Leftists who were sampled think that murdering Trump would be justified, which usually means that anyone else who dares to disagree with them is also on the menu. Even if you have your own special forces security detail, the festering boil of raw uncontrollable negative energy that you picked at could explode on someone else and result in senseless tragedy. It may not be your hand that commits the crime, but the fact that you worked them into a frenzy and sent them out into an unsuspecting world means your karma is involved in whatever happens as a result.
If you made it this far it's probably safe to say you're not a big Orange Hitler fan. Either that or you're an AI bot probing for psychological weaknesses, but that's a subject for another time. For the sake of all the actual humans out there I would like to emphasize that now is a critical moment to collectively focus on helping the world heal. This doesn’t have to be difficult, and at a bare minimum I’d like to encourage everyone to make a habit of recognizing the Orange Hitler energy and practice replacing it with a better vibe. Classical music is excellent for this, as well as meditation or even cleaning up a messy environment and restoring order to a space that you have control over. Demonic forces can't stand order, and therefore whenever we call upon the cosmic powers of creation and universal law it weakens any demonic influence in the area and hinders their ability to manipulate their victims. It’s not exactly shooting lighting bolts out of your fingertips, but you will still be using magic to fight evil albeit on a very basic level.
World War 3 might not be what most people expected (definitely not me) but when the morgues start running out of space it will be pretty obvious that something significant just happened. I’m curious what the historians will make of it all, specifically how much of the philosophically difficult context will be stripped from the official record as per the usual practice. We’re still in early days however, with much longer to go until things settle down enough to reflect on it with any accuracy. In the meantime I wish you good fortune, may the zombies never catch your scent, and for the love of the gods if the movie starts to suck just turn the damned thing off and go find something better to do.
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Thanks for the mention and this article. There is a strange borderland between mental illness and demonic obsession. In this age of spiritual retardation and mass blindness, it's almost impossible to diagnose one from the other. I think we all knew how mentally ill they already were -- the way they reacted to the government's Covid psyop made it abundantly clear -- but now that they are suffering more losses, their imbalances become ever more pronounced.
My recent article about the Covid debacle possibly being one of the largest soul transfers in history triggered a couple of people so badly, I had to delete the entire entry on my Dreamwidth blog. It is still up here on Substack. To my mind, multi-lifetime deals have been struck whether or not the people who made them know it. But of course I could be wrong.
What you described doesn't "smell like teen spirit" but like spirits in teens. I've had my share of goosebumps. Best to stay powered up (use your guarding/warding skills or get some) spiritually at all times and to avoid mass media as much as possible even if you're not usually susceptible. There be dragons...there.