The Thing with Dark Music, Sci-Fi Horror and Real-World Horror

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This week saw only one new blog post go up, but a lengthy one, posted on Tuesday. It took its its cue from Monday's news about the passing of legendary Italian composer Ennio Morricone, famous in particular for his film music.

One of his works, the very dark music composed for the Science-Fiction horror movie “The Thing” by director John Carpenter, had a particularly strong influence on me, as I described … to the point that I inadvertently almost plagiarized some bits of it in one of my own compositions without being aware of it at the time.

The film used only parts of the original score, but it still fitted in very well. “The Thing” was at the time of its release in 1982 rather underrated and received many negative reviews. But that changed over time. I've always found it one of the best and truly chilling examples of its dark genre (“Alien” is another obvious one).

The movie is set in Antarctica, though it wasn't shot there. I then linked the musings about the film and its music score to dark tourism by complementing them with some photos from my archives. Since I've never (yet) been to Antarctica myself, I couldn't produce any photos from there, but I used an image of monster ice as the lead photo that was taken at the Perito Moreno glacier in Patagonia, Argentina. I thought some of the shapes of the broken and bent ice vaguely resembled some of the horrific alien mutant images in “The Thing” ...

I added another photo taken at that site, as well as one from Svalbard, which had been an Arctic topic the week before. I then also included several photos taken in the southernmost place I've ever been to, and hence the closest I've ever come to Antarctica, namely Ushuaia in the Argentinian part of Tierra del Fuego at the bottom of the South American Cone. This southernmost city on Earth is also the embarkation point for most ships heading for Antarctica, but is also a dark-tourism destination in its own right.

The former prison of Ushuaia, now also housing a maritime museum, is the main dark attraction here, especially the preserved cell wing. The city also has a link with the Falklands and the territorial dispute over it – the islands would be under Ushuaia's municipality if they had remained in Argentinian hands for good instead of being lost again to Britain in the war that followed the Argentinian invasion in 1982. Ushuaia has evidence of still simmering hard feelings towards the UK because of the lost war, and claims for the islands, known as Islas Malvinas here, can be seen in various places, in particular at the memorial square with the Malvinas war monument.

As for real world horrors … on top of all the current hassle and coronavirus-related issues and all that, my own personal war is currently mainly with my new computer, and that also has horrific aspects ;-)

I knew there would be losses, I had some painful ones seven years ago when I had to move from a machine with XP to one with Windows 7pro (whose XP-Mode function soon stopped working), but the problem that is particularly awkward this time around is this: none of my dark-tourism.com email addresses, including this one through which you receive the Newsletter, can be set up properly and securely on the new PC with Windows 10. I'm using Thunderbird for those addresses – can anybody offer any advice on such things? If so, please email me!

Having to deal with all this computer stuff is also partly the reason why I uploaded only one blog post this past week. I can't promise there'll be more this coming week either, as a) some computer problems still persist, and b) I should also get back to writing updates and new chapters for my main website. Eventually I'll have to try to find a healthy balance between the two angles.

Finally, I have to comment on the image above. That shows the main part of what was the film poster for “The Thing” back then. I gleaned the file from the Internet, and Wikipedia says that its use in the context of “critical commentary on the film” falls under “fair use”, so it should be fine here as well in terms of copyright.

An afterthought: people who know my website well could argue that making a horror movie part of the topic of a post here is a deviation from the principle declared on the main website not to cover anything fictional or “paranormal”. Indeed, I don't normally. But this was actually triggered by the very real death of Ennio Morricone and one thing just led to another. And in the end, the post presented several real-life sites, illustrated with photos taken in the real world. So that should balance things out ...