Welcome back, goblins and ghouls, to the fourth annual installment of SpookyJawn! Each October, our love of horror fully rises from its slumber and takes over the MovieJawn website for all things spooky! This year, we are looking at ghosts, goblins, ghouls, goths, and grotesqueries, week by week they will march over the falling leaves to leave you with chills, frights, and spooky delights! Read all of the articles here!

by Samantha McLaren, Staff Writer

“Have you ever read any H. P. Lovecraft?” Ted Levine’s Hunter S. Thompson-inspired character, counterculture author Thomas Blackburn, asks intrepid journalist Anne Roland (Katia Winter) in 2013’s Banshee Chapter.

When Anne says she hasn’t, Thomas continues: “Wrote a story in about 1930-something-or-other, was about a scientist who created an electronic device, a giant tuning fork. It emitted a resonance wave. It stimulated anybody who was nearby, their pineal gland, allowing them to experience planes of existence outside the scope of accepted reality. He would see incredible, sometimes horrible things — these… entities. He kept turning it up higher and higher, ‘cause he was really getting off on seeing this shit. But it was too late when he realized that the entities… they could see him too.”

Thomas is referring to the short story “From Beyond,” first published in 1934. From the outside, it would be difficult to spot that Banshee Chapter is a loose adaptation of this tale, or of any Lovecraft story for that matter. There are no tentacles, no blasts of that pinkish-purple light that we’ve all collectively decided is the color out of space. Instead, director Blair Erickson’s film leverages proven real-world conspiracy theories to make us question how many horrors we might find if we peeled back the corner of our accepted reality and peeked behind.

The jumping-off point for this exploration is the CIA’s infamous MK-Ultra program, a series of horrific experiments conducted largely on unsuspecting American citizens throughout the 1950s and 60s in an attempt to induce mind control. Patients were often given high doses of LSD and other chemical agents without their knowledge, subjected to sensory deprivation, shocked, and generally treated in ways that boggle the mind even now, almost 50 years after the program was blown wide open.

It’s a story that seems too unthinkable to be true, and the fact that it inevitably makes us question what else the government is hiding from us. Banshee Chapter leans into this paranoia, opening with real footage of the 1977 Senate hearings into the program, MK-Ultra researcher James Moore speaking coldly about his lack of concern regarding test subjects, and Bill Clinton issuing a formal Presidential Apology for a similarly unethical government-sanctioned experiment, the Untreated Syphilis Study at Tuskegee.

This is spliced with clips of a character named James Hirsch (Michael McMillian) weaving in the film’s own lore about MK-Ultra. James explains that, “when the Freedom of Information Act released a bunch of documents, you found out that all these different subjects that had taken this chemical all experienced the same phenomena under the drug. They experienced something out there that came to them, that met them halfway…” An anonymized, official-looking figure builds on this, adding “These entities were kind of malignant and threatening. And actually, a handful of the volunteers had traumatic and terrible encounters with these entities.”

While we only catch brief, haunting glimpses of said entities throughout the film, the implication of them is enough to linger long in the mind. Banshee Chapter links encounters with these beings to a drug that it claims was involved in MK-Ultra, an enhanced form of the psychedelic Dimethyltryptamine known as DMT-19. “The chemical is like a catalyst,” Thomas explains. “It turns your mind into a receiver. It lets [these entities] in.”

And in they get. “They want to wear us!” Thomas’ friend Callie (Jenny Gabrielle) screams repeatedly after taking the drug. The next time we see her, her eye sockets are empty black holes, gore pouring from her mouth. She has been hollowed out by an entity that is now wearing her skin like a suit, the same fate that befell James after he tried the drug.

Why would the government want this? Banshee Chapter implies that it was an unwanted consequence of MK-Ultra — that the CIA’s probing into the unknown through the use of psychedelic drugs caught the attention of otherworldly beings that then tricked the researchers into bringing them through to our world. As Lovecraft put it, “For in these rays we are able to be seen as well as to see.”

Through faux footage of the experiments, we learn that the formula for the enhanced version of the drug came from a test subject, Patient #11 (Corey Moosa) — or at least, something in the room with him. “The CIA didn’t come up with the formula,” Anne realizes. “They did.” And once the researchers dutifully produced DMT-19 and injected it into other subjects, the entities were able to fully come through and colonize.

How many bodies the entities have taken over or what they’ve been doing with them all these years is left largely a disquieting mystery. But Banshee Chapter adds another layer of intrigue in the form of sleeper cell agents. You see, not everyone who encounters these beings is turned into a skin suit. Some seem to be left as transmitters, ensuring the beings continue to have an entry point into our world long after the government’s experiments concluded. And, Banshee Chapter suggests, they may not even know it.

The idea of covert transmissions is conveyed to eerie effect through the invocation of numbers stations throughout the film, with radios suddenly tuning to Swedish Rhapsody whenever the entities draw near. This is another instance of Banshee Chapter incorporating real-life mysteries and conspiracies that test the limits of our understanding. Numbers stations are shortwave radio broadcasts used in espionage, but the strangeness of these messages (which often involve snippets of music and synthesized female voices reciting numbers in a variety of languages), combined with the fact that you can stumble upon them quite by accident, makes them feel unsettling and a little dangerous. You’re hearing something that you’re not really supposed to hear, even if you don’t understand what it all means. Something from beyond is pushing up against the boundaries of our comfortable, known reality, and the unease that comes from that is almost indistinguishable from the kind that cosmic horror can induce.

This is the horror that lies at the heart of Banshee Chapter. By layering conspiracies behind conspiracies, Erickson’s film gradually reveals an otherworldly plot disguised by human atrocities and deception. Like the entities themselves, the true nature of this plot is only ever glimpsed, seen out of the corner of your eye, its meaning unknowable and obscene.

It’s bigger than what our limited human understanding can comprehend, and Banshee Chapter leaves us to sit with that as the credits roll.