ON THE SECOND NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN ... I finished this drawing. Which, again, is an illustration for the first stanza of "The Feeble Light of Dreams." On to the second stanza.
While working on it, I decided to go ahead and watch the movie I mentioned last night, Communion (1989), about Whitley Strieber's purportedly real-life abductions by the grays. I had seen parts of it previously but never the whole thing.
It is deeply silly. The best thing about it is Christopher Walken's iconically unhinged performance as Strieber. However, I will say it is creepier than No One Will Save You (and similar fare like Signs), as the grays remain both inscrutable and godlike throughout. There is also a meta-creepiness to projects like this, where at least one of the main people responsible devoutly believes the grays and their doings to be factual. Inhabiting the mind of such a person is unsettling regardless of the credibility of their claims.
The biggest mistake Communion makes as a horror film is showing the grays too much-- or showing them at all really. All of the alien effects are laughably bad. But more importantly, because of the all-powerful mind-control and memory-wiping powers of the grays, there are some truly tense scenes before we see them, where the characters know that what is happening at that moment is terribly wrong, that there is something unbelievably horrifying in the room with them, but they can't see it. And they can't remember what happened later. And the film doesn't show us what it is either. It just confirms that the terribly wrong thing is real. Communion could have built its paranoia up to genuine terror if it had never violated this constraint. Just never actually show the grays first-hand. Only show second-hand evidence, e.g. drawings, along with objects or animals that remind the characters of them. Moments like this when done right are look-over-your-shoulder spooky!
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