The ‘organization’ beheaded Japanese journalist Kenji Goto a few days previously. It had already beheaded another Japanese hostage, Haruna Yukawa, a week before.

The deliberate combination of indiscriminate and exorbitant violence is remarkable. It looks like a purposeful escalation beyond terror, aimed calmly at the entire world.

If there’s anyone who hasn’t watched Apocalypse Now recently, this might be the time to correct that. A reminder:

Kurtz: I’ve seen horrors … horrors that you’ve seen. But you have no right to call me a murderer. You have a right to kill me. You have a right to do that … but you have no right to judge me. It’s impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror … Horror has a face … and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies! I remember when I was with Special Forces … seems a thousand centuries ago. We went into a camp to inoculate some children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn’t see. We went back there, and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile. A pile of little arms. And I remember … I … I … I cried, I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out; I didn’t know what I wanted to do! And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it … I never want to forget. And then I realized … like I was shot … like I was shot with a diamond … a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought, my God … the genius of that! The genius! The will to do that! Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were stronger than we, because they could stand that these were not monsters, these were men … trained cadres. These men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with love … but they had the strength … the strength … to do that. If I had ten divisions of those men, our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral … and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling … without passion … without judgment … without judgment! Because it’s judgment that defeats us.

ADDED: “I love the smell of napalm in the morning …”

EARTH — In a seemingly unstoppable cycle of carnage that has become tragically commonplace throughout the biosphere, sources confirmed this morning that natural selection has killed an estimated 38 quadrillion organisms in its bloodiest day yet. […] “What we’re seeing here is the work of a hardened, practiced killer,” said Yale University evolutionary biologist Richard Prum … “It is painfully clear this slaughter was perpetrated by a force that holds zero regard for the value of life” …

In what many are calling its most grotesque tactic, the killer appeared to single out the most vulnerable organisms — particularly the young and the physically weak — for its murderous rampage, slaughtering them without mercy as other members of their species fled in panic. Reports indicated those who escaped the carnage were left with no choice but to try to move on with their lives and survive even as the ruthless killer continued stalking them. […] Virtually no species was unaffected by yesterday’s killing spree, experts stated. […] “This is the work of a killer without empathy, without conscience,” said Jyotsna Ramjee, a University of Calcutta zoologist who confirmed that the day’s death toll was the largest on official records dating back to 1859, when the perpetrator was first identified.

All the stuff everyone else is saying is right. The Lou Bloom character is a creation of sheer genius, and Jake Gyllenhaal’s performance in the role is beyond superb. The movie edges right up to the boundaries of the horror genre, and is also savagely humorous. Nihilism can produce high art, when it’s done right.

Nightcrawler approaches the topical subject of the relationships between the media, business, and law enforcement in a way that eludes conventional pieties. It deserves NRx endorsement just for that. In its darkness are strung subtle threads of possibility, in the working out of abnormal but powerful imperatives — of a supremely cynical kind — comparable in their diagonal subversiveness to a re-animated Scottish Enlightenment on ketamine, with all progressive hope burnt out so radically it doesn’t even register as a question.

These impulses are avatars of what is coming out of the collapse — tough, consummately disillusioned, and exploratory things.

(Via.)

1. LO, a Shadow of horror is risen
In Eternity! unknown, unprolific,
Self-clos’d, all-repelling. What Demon
Hath form’d this abominable Void,
This soul-shudd’ring Vacuum? Some said
It is Urizen. But unknown, abstracted,
Brooding, secret, the dark Power hid.

4. Dark, revolving in silent activity,
Unseen in tormenting passions,
An Activity unknown and horrible,
A self-contemplating Shadow,
In enormous labours occupièd.

It seems neither uncommon nor unexpected that if you charge a group with eliminating an evil that’s really hard to eliminate, they usually end up mildly tweaking the evil into a form that benefits them, then devoting most of their energy to punishing people who complain.

(The whole — long — post is a masterpiece of Scott Alexanderness. Read it alongside Ligotti, and the cross-echoes are notable. Extreme liberals are horroristic maniacs who haven’t yet given up for good.)

And that day was soaked in bathtubs of blood, a day of judgment overseen by a never-setting sun that burned madly red against a black sky.

(Soon.)

There are twin tracks into the gathering darkness, but horrorism is by far the more capable of feeding itself. (The chronic NRx call for ‘action’ is a symptom of malnourishment.)

Currently in a gothic inspiration — the Otira Hotel — just beyond Arthur’s Pass. Bought for one million dollars, along with the whole village of forty houses. It’s on the rail-line, but remained on the market for years because:
1) It’s a Gold Rush ghost town with no economic base
2) It’s deep in a valley that plunges it into permanent shadow for half the year
3) There’s a massive quake due (on the fault-line it straddles) which is expected to destroy everything
The new owners have stuffed the hotel bar with Gold Rush antiques, taxidermy specimens, the first telegraph cable, freaky life-size marionettes … it should be getting dark for the full effect (but it isn’t yet) …

On an Internet ration tonight (Dec. 27.), but I’m going to try to keep this alive — meaning updates undramatized by an ‘ADDED’. Also pics (but some slight time lag likely there).

The NZ west coast is dominated by a near-continuous strip of temperate rain forest, blurring into sub-tropical rain forest in the north. The peculiar local vegetation, including numerous species of giant ferns, give the landscape a prehistoric flavor. It’s also extremely rugged, with the western slopes of the NZ alps cascading right down to the coast. The sea is brutal, and the coastline deeply mauled. The early exploration of this area was tough. It’s conspicuously Gnon-tinged geography. (Patience needed on the pix front, apologies.)

Only 30,000 people live on the west coast of the South Island — and most of them are trying with greater or lesser urgency to leave. The landscape is glorious (the British Columbia comparison is inescapable). Once drone logistics make it viable to survive in web-linked isolation in this area, it’s going to make a spectacular refuge. For the moment, it’s populated by hippies, hill-billies, and extraction-industry social detritus (a great horror fiction mix, however — drugs, guns, and expendables).

Finally — NZ West Coast pics (via the better half).