Episode 155: Dispatches From the Inside: On Planet Weird's 'The Unbinding'

One of the most surprising aspects of paranormal experience is how often it takes on a storylike form, unfolding exactly as you would expect it to in, say, a Hollywood horror film. Viewers of Karl Pfeiffer's film The Unbinding will get a sense of this in the early sequences of Greg and Dana Newkirk's latest occult adventure. The haunting comes on strong and takes rather familiar forms. But the almost too-good-to-be-true frights -- effective as they are in an almost fairy-tale way -- soon give way to a procedural that invites us to ponder the ethics and methodologies of paranormal investigation in the age of Global Weirding. What do we owe the Others we encounter? What do they owe us? In this episode, JF and Phil discuss some of the questions haunting this brilliant documentary from the creators of Hellier.

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REFERENCES

Planet Weird, The Unbinding
Weird Studies, Episode 67 on “Hellier”
Alexander Wendt and Raymond Duvall, “Sovereignty and the UFO”
Duncan Barford, “Magick Versus Content”
Gilles Deleuze, Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty