These writers are amazing. Emily is to die for. Here is a sexy femme fatale that really is worth it. My gods.

There have been lots of super-crazy girl characters done seductively. The Satan-entranced suicidal maid in The Omen right before she jumps. The incredibly sexy crazy ditz “Adele Corners” played by Juliette Lewis in Kalifornia. Regan giggling after she kills Merrin in The Exorcist. Karen Black’s Amelia in Amelia crouching on the floor with the teeth of Zuni Fetish Buddy.

But none is as sexy and ethereal as lovely Angela as Emily in Emily.

This film, From Beyond the Grave, is the last of the great Amicus horror movies. The greatest product of British cultural history, and captures a refinement of pleasure unknown to the anti-intellectual patriotism of Americans. I say this: this alignment of ignorance and disdain for knowledge is no accident. It comes from the Plymouth Brethren, by which I mean those First American Rednecks who really did see blind belief as a virtue. Thanks, Germany! Thanks text-worship! This is what happens as a cultural side-effect when fundamentalism takes root. These witch-burning eejits are just as bad as the daughter stoners of today. How is fire less painful? All because the text is so right, that it is actually God-made-flesh.

Believing is patriotism. Believing pleases God, whose existence depends on our belief, and he knows this, and is desperate to have us guarantee our continual support. And continuous—the purpose of all those silly and obviously extracurricular commands is: Always keep me on your mind, or Always feed me. And if pure obedience does not work, he also makes a contract, a pyramidal-social contract. If you do what I say, and feed the priests that sustain me here on my imaginary throne. God was an imaginary friend who we sat upon a normal life-size throne, the Mercy Seat. This was like playing with Perky Pat™, with all the furniture and backstory and everything, minus the actual figurine.

And that is Judaism: figurine-worship without the figurine. God was all, “Get that shit away from here. It’s me, here, this voice in your head. The imaginary friend? Who always talks to you? That’s me. I’m the voice inside the thing—the ghost. Like you—your are not your body, because you say that it is “yours”—possessive. The possession relation kills identity. Wherever a relation is introduced, a separation is invented. And the way of variation that opens up in that moment is now owned by the self.

And—to now know something, that is OK. Most importance is believing (feeding) and flattering. That makes imaginary friend happy. Everything else—who cares. Unless it helps survival. If you lose a war, God gets mad, because if you are the conquered, your thinking changes in order to avoid cognitive friction after your body and labor-action is materially assimilated. So God wants his host humans to win their battles. In return, God bestows upon his aphids the boon of placebo aid.