Cult of Cage (Pt. I): "Longlegs" & "Mandy" w/ Orion St. Peter

An impromptu Halloween recording session with Orion St. Peter gave birth to this Nicolas Cage double feature—in which we discuss occult, cultic, & PTK themes in the loosely defined horror films "Longlegs" & "Mandy", tentpoles of the late Cage capitalism debt-induced “renaissance”.

We're also digging deep into the interplay between the "Longlegs" narrative and director Oz Perkins's personal esoteric & intergenerational familial trauma history, sussing out the obvious sources of inspiration in his own highly strange, quasi-aristocratic pedigree. Take, for example, his great-grandfather "Count" Wilhelm de Wendt de Kerlor, a psychic detective cum spy in the mold of PPM usual suspects Aleister Crowley or Erik Jan Hanussen (and possibly Harvey Spencer Lewis) who was a member of the Theosophical Society, an avid spiritualist, and supposedly the medium who prophesied tabloid journo & anti sex trafficking crusader W.T. Stead's death on the Titanic... We discuss his Italian great-grandmother & world-conquering designer (aka Coco Chanel's rival) Elsa Schiaparelli and her affiliations with Dadaists & Surrealists like Dalí and Man Ray, not to mention the fact the de Gaulle government suspected her of collaborating with the Third Reich. Oh, and that she had multiple Egyptologist & "Orientalist" academic relatives. We unpack how psychic detective de Kerlor appeared on the scene in New Hampshire to "investigate" a murder that two Bureau of Investigation agents linked to German espionage in the Northeast during WWI, and we discuss how de Kerlor & Schiaparelli would be surveilled & interviewed, Wilhelm seemingly under suspicion of serving as a foreign agent. These fascinating, little known histories re Oz Perkins's biological ancestors are an obvious touchpoint & influence on the clairvoyant FBI agent Lee Harker in the glam Satanic serial-killing-by-sympathetic-magick-or-mind-control flick "Longlegs". We also talk about how it's conceivably 9/11 as Mass Ritual pilled, seeing as Oz Perkins's mother Berry Berenson died on Flight 11 on 9/11, which gives one a headrushing vertiginous feeling indeed... Seeing as she was the granddaughter of this Theosophist spy lol. Her Birthday is repeatedly woven into the sigilistic & algorithmic subtext of the film. And we also discuss how, on the patrilineal side of Oz's family, his father Anthony Perkins's confessed childhood Oedipal complex, the early wished-for death of his father, his lifelong closeted life, and his ultimate succumbing to AIDs... how all of this doubtlessly informed the emotionally-charged, cathartic film & its unspoken traumatic seeds... As we go, our analysis of the film begins to force us to confront a theory where a kind of unstated CSA blackhole is the source of the the Longlegs mystery's gravitational pull.

We also talk:

Mandy director Panos Cosmatos’s father George Pan Cosmatos’s final film “The Shadow Conspiracy” which concerns a presidential assassination by drone; both Panos & his father having Pan in their names; the Mansonian failed songwriter vibes of both villains Jeremiah Sands & Longlegs; the Mandy scene where a planned ritualized orgy lubricated with “the chemist’s best batch” and hallucinogenic wasp injections derails when Mandy openly clowns on the cult leader; the resonances and rhyming narratives and noided riffing of both; Longlegs’s character obviously nodding at glam Satanism, Marc Bolan, and David Bowie’s infamous “Station to Station”, Dion Fortune-informed exorcism of his possessed indoor pool in what was once stripper & burlesque dancer Gypsy Rose Lee’s LA manse; the invocation of Manson straightaway in Longlegs, referencing his family, his accomplices; both cultic puppet masters in the films meet their denise’s by having their skulls crushed or crumpled, whether self-inflicted or otherwise, a subtle hint that their mind’s are the source of their power; Longlegs’s clear cinematic & filmic influences including David Fincher fare like Se7en, Zodiac, Mindhunter, etc, The Silence of the Lambs, Don’t Look Now, Robert Altman, Twin Peaks, The Omen, The Exorcist, the New French Extreme, Gaspar Noe, and Phantasm; The Wizard of Oz esque takedown of the cult/family leaders; Longlegs’s exploration of ontological evil; Longlegs as an encrypted cathartic confession and that it seems decently likely that the film is fueled by his own private traumas & traumatic inheritances; Longlegs heroine Lee Harker and the psychic test that she undergoes following her seemingly extranormal intuiting of the suburban house a serial killer is hiding in, a sequence involving lightning Rorschach rounds and a random number generator guessing game, which smacks of the Ludovico Technique, “The Parallax View”, MK ULTRA, Stargate, SRI, the Gateway Process, and more… Which is highly interesting when you recall that Harker’s character was inspired by Oz Perkins’s psychic detective ancestor Willie de Kerlor in part; and we also touch on how a skeleton key for deciphering the unspoken themes of CSA, dissociation, trauma, & repression would be Oz Perkins’s admission that a major inspiration for this noided filmic bricolage is the JonBenét Ramsey case and the life sized doll of JonBenét that was located next to her body in the basement crime scene where she was murdered in cold blood. Plus much more.

Many thanks to Orion St. Peter for jumping on for this appropriately spooky double feature at such short notice. His death/doom outfit Ilsa are back in the studio as we speak—sound engineering doesn't come cheap. Help them lay down their new record by purchasing their most recent LP "Preyer" on Bandcamp!

Songs:

| Ilsa - "Poor Devil" |

| Matt Akers - "Kill Kit" |

| Ilsa - "Shibboleth" |