5:22:24

Brainstorm, 1983. “The military is going to be able to plug right into the old noodle.”

Jay Dyer and Psyop Cinema on Mutant Mkultra kids, a subject (along with the1970s and 1980s horror films discussed in the interview) I have been obsessed with all my life, though I didn’t know about Mkultra until a few years ago, so that has given me a new lens. Or a deeper (deep politics) language for a lens I always understood and employed intuitively (for years I wrote about acting as a form of possession). The Mk-lens has allowed me to tie loose ends, to fill in the missing pieces, to solve puzzles that bothered and haunted me, but somehow never made complete sense. I could never figure out why, no matter how much I wrote about acting, doubles, twining, demonic possession, multiple personalities, and reality/fiction breakdown because something else was at play in these strange patterns. I wasn’t quite looking in the right places.

I was obsessed with The Fury growing up, and Carrie too, which I wrote about it in Beauty Talk and Monsters (2007) and Picture Cycle (2019). In 2018, I taught a film course called Movie Kids, which focused on the representation of children—and the divine child, in particular—in the movies. The course looked at movie kids across genres.

The subject of the mind control experiments done on children throughout the 20th century, not to mention the sexual abuses and government trafficking of children, has never been more important. 1970s and 1980s cinema is awash with these types of “special/gifted/supernatural/demonic” (like Danny in the Shining, also a Stephen King invention) children. And of course, horror films are full of “special” kids. We took these films—these kids—for granted, never digging deeper.

As a child, I was particularly obsessed with Audrey Rose, a psychological/paranormal/horror film about a reincarnated girl who suffers from past life memories. It’s an incredibly sad and eerie film. It always made me cry as a little girl. Audrey Rose was always on TV back then, as was The Shining and The Omen, and many other horror films, with suffering children at the center. Stranger Things, and its retro-theme of gifted children (a more recent addition to the Mkultra kid-genre) is a series I also taught in 2016 and 2017, as well as in my Movie Kids course the year after. There are other examples of mutant children, like John Cassavettes’ Phil in Gloria and Reagan in The Exorcist. And there is Donnie Darko, the MK-teenager.

And of course, the kid-obsessed Spielberg is KEY here.

In the video below, Jay Dyer brings up Brian De Palma’s MK-cinema of trauma-based mind control, as I wrote about last spring, which I am very happy about because this type of interpretation, as I note in my post (but also in my posts on Mkultra over the past two years), has almost been completely absent in Normie academia and film criticism. I could find nothing online last year when I was researching the theme of Mkultra in Brian De Palma’s movies. This topic is so important, fascinating, multilayered, and interrelated—it is indeed the missing piece—and thus greatly in need of serious discussion and attention in our current era of global disclosure. These films expose the intersection between the post-war counterculture, Mkultra, secret intelligence agencies, shadow governments, the exploitation of children, the financial world, and the entertainment industry—what Thomas Millary and Bret Corollo refer to as “The Hollywood-DC Complex—”all things De Palma repeatedly targeted in his movies.

Millary and Corollo (both academics) raise the important question that no one bothers to ask, and that I posed in my post about De Palma last year: why did De Palma, who made Carrie and The Fury within a year of each other, and which were the first two films about telekinesis and government Mkultra programs/experiments, pioneer this genre? They point out that De Palma himself, not to mention the film criticism and academic world, has always covered up (never naming them) his interest in these subjects—namely the clandestine, paranormal activities and covert operations of the deep state—downplaying them, and even lying about them, much like Stephen King, who wrote endlessly on these subjects, as they pertained to “mutant” children and their mysterious supernatural “gifts”; chalking it up to a “paranoid” (coked-up) period, despite the recurrence of the theme throughout his life and his own ties with intelligence agencies. It’s clear that King’s so-called wild success as a writer was arranged.

Both De Palma and King have contributed heavily to creating what I call Mkultra culture. They both introduced and popularized cinematic motifs/tropes of mind control (doubling, twining, splitting, dissociation, telekinesis, body horror, cloning, AI, transhumanism).

Psyop Cinema also recently interviewed Jasun Horsely, whose work I love and admire, on the divine occult child.

I like how Millary and Corollo point out how sketchy and suspicious Noah Baumbach and his lame documentary on De Palma is. I have always hated Baumbach, so it’s vindicating to know there is a story there…