THings you find hauntological that no one else does

[George White]

Reading up on hauntology, and curious is there anything you people find hauntological that is rarely mentioned amongst creepy things like PIFs, Picture Box, etc...

For me, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy - the titles with the Russian dolls, the Soviet dread, the old shops, Michael Fish on the telly and the boarding school stuff...

Also, certain types of BBC docudrama.
Like this. The opening subtitle, the grainy stock footage, lingering closeups on craggy character actors, the uncanny valley claustrophobia  of the setting(thanks to being set in New York but shot in London) - https://youtu.be/0qddcgLolAI?t=1

[shoulders]

Gottles of geer

[touchingcloth]

What is PIF, and picture box, and hauntologicality?

[bgmnts]

I dont believe in any of this but that old screen you got on telly with the girl and the creepy doll with a chalk board in the background is definitely haunted or just evil.

I wont link or post it.

[BJBMK2]

I dont believe in any of this but that old screen you got on telly with the girl and the creepy doll with a chalk board in the background is definitely haunted or just evil.

I wont link or post it.

Ahh yeah, your not wrong you know.

[George White]

What is PIF, and picture box, and hauntologicality?

Public information film, 1970s-80s ITV educational show with creepy music box titles, and

Hauntology was a phrase coined by Jacques Derrida and he described it thus.
'"To haunt does not mean to be present, and it is necessary to introduce haunting into the very construction of a concept. Of every concept, beginning with the concepts of being and time. That is what we would be calling here a hauntology. Ontology opposes it only in a movement of exorcism. Ontology is a conjuration".

However, to me at least, it has become a byword for a certain kind of nostalgia; that odd, eerie time in the 1970s when children's television programmes would often be about the occult or paganism, that time of evening when it's not quite night and not quite day and it didn't feel right to still be out ('terror twilight'), school caretakers, some public information films, Alan Garner books and Pelican Books sleeves.

[buttgammon]

Old newsflashes give me a similar vibe. There's a certain terrifying frisson to a TV programme giving way to a caption and the sober delivery of a continuity announcer or newsreader.

[ProvanFan]

The lad with the stripey trousers from the gay x-change advert

[non capisco]

I was sat with my parents in their garden last Sunday and heard the chimes of an ice cream van up the road giving it 'O Sole Mio/Just One Cornetto/It's Now Or Never'. The archaic sound of those chimes, utterly unchanged since I was a child in the 1980s, feel like the last sprouts of hauntology impinging into real life existence. On top of that a lot of them still have a badly drawn too tall Mickey Mouse on the side, looking like something from the pages of a bootleg Greek comic book called MICKEEE ποντίκι glimpsed in a shop on a childhood holiday. That's my nomination, then. Ice cream vans driving about in the here and now with their disquieting doppler effect chimes and lanky Mickey Mice on the side, hauntological as fuck. 

[George White]

Especially the tunes. The one that goes near me plays 'Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head' and 'Match of the Day' and Blue Peter themes.

[Video Game Fan 2000]

A childhood icecream van briefly returned post-millenium and it still had the Popeye theme as its jingle, except with one note fucked up. Derrida might've shat

before the definition of the term was posted my facetious reply would have been that I have a book of Derrida interviews from the early 90s with an absolutely atrocious design on the cover with a horribly dated font that makes it look like a defunct chocolate bar wrapper. genuinely depressing and bad to look at, evocative of something just a little bit before my time but I still feel an incredible anti-nostalgia for

[Sebastian Cobb]

Suggest you check out Scarred for Life, they do annuals on this sort of thing, there's general threads in Picture Box and if you start a thread on a piece of cultural ephemera around that sort of thing, you might even get a nice post back from the lads in my experience.

[George White]

I know them very well indeed.
(In fact, I wrote an article for them for Volume 2 that wasn't used -on Italian telefantasy).

[Sebastian Cobb]

Nice one!

I guess it's not no-one does but it's all fuzzy tapes of stuff nobody finds interesting.

Part of the reason I wasted a Saturday making a tape deck work is because I have a handful of nondescript tapes floating around. I think I might have at least one side of The 'Astro Jay' talk show from Kool Fm, featuring DJ Hazard taking about wanks. I really fear there's going to be a tape of voice-breaking me chatting shite in between tracks recorded off of BRMB and Wyvern FM though.

[Glebe]

My copy of Scarred for Life Volume One arrived this morning, packed to bits with haunty stuff!

[non capisco]

It will be of no surprise to any fucker who's ever lingered around the pastures of this forum that I'm in the back pages of Scarred For Life 2 ('Reader's Scars' section) mentioning that old woman at the end of the 1980 Soda Stream advert who says "THAT'S FIZZY!"

[flotemysost]

On the theme of naff renderings of famous characters, I'd like to nominate the sort of art you get on fairground rides, and occasionally on the front/back of massive long-haul lorries - those spray-can portraits of instantly recognisable figures from pop culture. Marilyn Monroe. Kylie Minogue. Danny and Sandy from Grease. Miley Cyrus waggling her tongue. He-Man. Shrek.

Always in the same style, kind of hyper-realistic yet exaggerated in an almost grotesquely uncanny valley kinda way - their cheeks are just a bit too rosy, or their smiles are maniacally wide (also the men are always comically ripped and the women always have enormous globular tits).

I've always found them fascinating and a bit creepy - as a child, there was something quite darkly sexual about them, for something that was a regular fixture at family events. As an adult, I find it hilarious how shit some of them are, yet there's also a weird sadness thinking about all the effort that the artist must have gone to. Is there one artist who does the rounds of the fairground circuit? Who knows? Def big hauntological energy there for me.

[buttgammon]

A childhood icecream van briefly returned post-millenium and it still had the Popeye theme as its jingle, except with one note fucked up. Derrida might've shat

before the definition of the term was posted my facetious reply would have been that I have a book of Derrida interviews from the early 90s with an absolutely atrocious design on the cover with a horribly dated font that makes it look like a defunct chocolate bar wrapper. genuinely depressing and bad to look at, evocative of something just a little bit before my time but I still feel an incredible anti-nostalgia for

Your Derrida book is presumably from this school of design



Took a copy of this out of the library once. It was so ugly, I had to keep it hidden away from sight.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Quite like those David M Green videos where he just showcases local Australian TV adverts off of old video tapes. Bit like a homemade version of Tarrant on TV but better than that because it's not got Chris Tarrant on it.

[Dex Sawash]

unsure due to not knowing what it means

[Video Game Fan 2000]

Your Derrida book is presumably from this school of design

exactly it, gratified that someone found the exact one

the spine is the worst part, kept it facing the wrong direction when it was with the rest of my books. even the back is bad, it has two gold bars framing the text. horrible. photo is pretty bad too. artifacts from the era of cults of personality around big intellectuals are definitely hauntological. the only thing really missing is that they didn't turn the picture into a piece of pop art, then they'd have had a full house.

[Goldentony]

those houses at fairs with the ghosts painted on man that go fuckin WOOOARGH horrible, sometimes you have to walk sometimes theres a train

[Uncle TechTip]

Norwich Union cathedral stained-glass window logo sting nightmare inducer.

The Yorkshire TV chevron. (Actually everyone was shit scared of this)

[Zero Gravitas]

I'd view it as more being: the bright possibilities of the past being presented to us suddenly and shockingly, as dead, as we catch their reflection in cultural artefacts contemporaneous to them.

[touchingcloth]

So hauntology is...another word for things?

[Zero Gravitas]

As with many words, yes, it's a word for things.

[Sebastian Cobb]

those houses at fairs with the ghosts painted on man that go fuckin WOOOARGH horrible, sometimes you have to walk sometimes theres a train

Only realised this recently but the whole purpose of the 'tunnel of love' and ghost trains in general was just a darkened hideaway for teens in conservative America to feel each up other in. It's just a coyer version of the Japanese love hotel.

[Zero Gravitas]

It's just a coyer version of the Japanese love hotel.

Except if you want fried chicken, you've got to take it in with you.

[Sebastian Cobb]

I'd view it as more being: the bright possibilities of the past being presented to us suddenly and shockingly, as dead, as we catch their reflection in cultural artefacts contemporaneous to them.

Watched CH5 launch, fuzzy as fuck on a portable in my cousins bedroom, thought it was the start of something BIG. We never got it, 'cos we got our telly from a relay and they never bothered.

Never got it until I got a Freeview box after on/ITV digital went bump. It was entirely shit, save for World's Wildest Police Videos with Sheriff John Bunnell (RET).

[Goldentony]

the idea of dog, not just dog, no, but dog with wings!