10:28:24

The Omen, 1976

Black Roses: an interesting late 80s post-Omen B horror movie about the music industry and rock/pop concerts as mass-scale Mkultra mind control, an alchemical Satanic initiation ritual (remember all those teenage girls on the news last year saying they had “Taylor Swift amnesia” and couldn’t remember attending the Swift Eras concert?? Everyone just accepted that as normal). Black Roses is surprisingly insightful about the insidious ways ideological subversion works via the destruction of the nuclear family, the socially engineered divide between liberalism and conservatism, the entertainment industrial complex, the spiritual dangers of celebrity worship and idolization, and the difference between rebellion and cult programming. Ideological subversion is done in large part through the grooming and weaponization of young people, fostering what Psyop Cinema refers to as “the wrong kind of paranoia,” which is to say, suspicion of the all the wrong things.

Most “art” is counterfeit and propaganda. Not all art seeks to free us, and it is our job to know the difference between what degrades the spirit and mind and what elevates and liberates the spirit and mind.

It is interesting and unusual the way Black Roses juxtaposes not just two kinds of art but two different uses of art. The high school English teacher in the movie teaches the Transcendentalists: Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau. But the students are bored by the hard lessons of literature as a tool of self-examination and self-reliance. They want the quick fix and self-dissolution of the rock and roll trance. To read and think—to Know Thyself—is hard work. It is also very solitary.

It is useful to watch Black Roses alongside former KGB agent Yuri Bezmenov’s famous 1984 interview about the Four Stages of Ideological Subversion.

If I were teaching on this subject I would pair Black Roses (1988) with They Live (1988).

Both movies came out the same year.

There is also Children of the Corn, which came out in 1984, the year of Bezmenov’s interview, and which has a similar premise of Satanic children ritually killing adults and parents.

What would we do without the good teacher with the hunches, who will do anything to protect their students, especially when the post-war parent won’t because they are too brain dead, traumatized, and asleep, which is also in part the fault of the entertainment industrial complex, the war machine complex, and the post-Vietnam counterculture drug psyop.

I like that Black Roses features the trope of the library as a sanctuary of wisdom, a place of detective work, of finding answers for oneself. Deep reading is presented as a de-programming tool, a way to reclaim your stolen mind. The dedicated teacher in the movie uses his methods of scholarly training to save his demonically possessed small-town students. The teacher’s name is Matthew (as in the Gospel of St. Matthew?) and the lead singer/Devil rock star of Black Roses is named Damian, just like in The Omen.

80s movies loved to portray parents as the enemy of the false liberation pop-culture MKultra-matrix. It is the classic divide and conquer tactic of grooming and programming—Baudelaire’s popular adage, used again and again in cinema: the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled is to convince the world he doesn’t exist. Which means: the method of seduction and indoctrination is the disguise and concealment of the method of seduction and indoctrination. The “trick” with a spiritual war is that it is invisible, so no one believes we are in one. Anyone who sees through it or questions it is ridiculed, deemed insane. All classic horror movies are about what happens to the person who does see through the matrix (They Live), who can see the Devil, who fights the demons. As I wrote in my book, Picture Cycle, “Horror is danger seen too late.” A protective parent is treated like an imbecilic scrooge, behind on the times. All the teenagers in Black Roses are programmed to ritually murder their parents. But unlike many 80s B-horror movies, Black Roses knows that the parents are not the problem, they are part of the problem, corrupted and perverted by the State. When it comes to their children, a truly good parent stands in the way of the State, which is what Matthew the teacher does. But how do you protect your child when your child is programmed to think you are the enemy, and the State—and entertainment culture—their savior?

How do you create chaos and destruction? You destroy the bonds of affection. You make them meaningless.

(Note: In the screenshot above, I am reminded here of Deleuze’s great 1977 quote on vampirism: “Those who are sick, in soul as in body, will not let go of us, the vampires, until they transmitted to us their neurosis and their anxiety, their beloved castration, the resentment against life, filthy contagion. It is all a matter of blood.”)

Black Roses, 1988