The Screaming Skull was “my” first movie; or, the first movie that I saw as a movie; that is to say, the first movie that convinced me of its reality. Movies were horrors from a slightly more intelligent reality, one that can see this one by being above it. And what It can make in “a movie” it can also make here, because here is also a moving point-of-view with emotional background and dead time removed by recollective splicing-out.

A movie indicates what is actually possible in this world. But it is presented as fiction, to fool the adults, who are sinister accomplices who try to gaslight us (children) into thinking “it’s just a movie.” Children know something that adults do not—movies are messages about the real disguised as fiction and entertainment. (Not all children, just Dodger and I and the few good ones who really give their heart to terror. The rest are false children, eager to fit into the ready-made molds waiting for them in Adult Land, happy to emulate their dismissal.)

Movies reveal the real real, the one that terrifies and lingers as “haunting” or internal edge-of-panic gnawing on all sympathetic nerves at once. They are helpful reports sent from the higher dimension to warn the children. Against the falling of this mana is Consensual Adult Blindness (CAB). CAB is what Sartre called bad faith, and what PKD called “The Empire Never Ended.” It is not just physical matter im Allgemeinen, but a special sub-set of matter that causes this malady. It is a natural outgrowth of the brain’s love for time colonization. We substitute consensus for the raw real, rather than free interpretation, which is effortful. If effort can change the real, then the real is fluid. If effort is absent, then the real will already have been decided by consensus. Adults value the figured-out so much that they will believe things they know to be ridiculous just to feel it. Agreeing with the idiot literalists at church for the sake of community—and stable meaning. Agreeing with the nutty racist neighbors for the sake of camaraderie—and some fixed point of opinion to use for self-definition.

Because it infested my dreams and became a bona fide obsession, The Screaming Skull must be credited with setting my young nervous system on the Left-Hand Path—aka the Black Arts, aka occultism, aka philosophy.