Latest news with #Betamax
CairoScene
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- CairoScene
Saudi Rock Band Sound of Ruby Drop New EP ‘Jaxx Invasion'
Saudi Arabia's pioneering rock band just dropped a live record, with over 30 new tracks on the way. May 30, 2025 Sound of Ruby, one of Saudi Arabia's first and longest-running rock bands, have just released 'Jaxx Invasion', their first official live album, and are currently working on a four-LP project featuring over 30 new tracks. This new phase follows a string of recent releases - 'Rock Puffs' in 2022 and 'Betamax' in 2024 - which marked their return after a long hiatus. Now, the band is entering one of its most active and creative periods yet. Formed in the Eastern Province in the 1990s by vocalist and composer Mohammad Al Hajjaj, Sound of Ruby helped shape Saudi Arabia's underground rock scene. Despite lineup changes over the years, the group has stayed true to its raw, DIY ethos. Guitarist Nader Al Fassam and producer/multi-instrumentalist Kamal Khalil have long been part of the band's core, and drummer Faris Al-Shawaf recently joined, continuing the legacy of his brother, Talal. Blending punk, noise, and local influences, Sound of Ruby's music draws from American acts like Black Flag and The Butthole Surfers, while also referencing Saudi folk artists like Fahad Bin Saeed and Bashir Shannan. Beyond the music, the band played a key role in building Saudi's alternative scene. In the 2000s, Hajjaj and Khalil launched S.A. Metal, one of the country's first online forums for heavy music, and organized underground gigs that laid the groundwork for future scenes.
Stuff.tv
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Stuff.tv
These retro wireless headphones are hotter than Mr Motivator's lycra onesie
Unless you're wearing a shellsuit while watching a Betamax video of Roland Rat driving a Sinclair C5 to Woolworths to pick up a copy of No Jacket Required by Phil Collins, there are few things that look more '80s than these KM5 Lightwear Headphones Hp1. Originally crowdfunded in Japan last year, enough people wanted to look like Marty McFly that these retro headphones are now available to buy for £159/$189 – and they've had some important upgrades to make them fit for use in 2025 rather than 1985. For starters there's Bluetooth 5.4 with LE Audio support, so you don't need to worry about finding something with a 3.5mm port to plug them into, and even though they sit on your ears rather than fully covering them you get noise-cancelling with a transparency mode too. At 103g they're more than twice the weight of the original Sony Walkman headphones they mimic, but those didn't have a 120mAh battery attached on each side, plus they still make the new Sony WH-1000XM6 look like they're made out of lead. There are no wires to connect the two sides, so you need to charge both batteries independently. Fortunately there's a special split cable included in the box, and they should last up to 24 hours between charges, which is more than enough for the full discographies of both Phil Collins and Roland Rat. As well as those batteries, each earcup is also home to a 40mm driver and a set of controls. You can adjust the volume, skip through your tunes, and also summon your phone's voice assistant. The KM5 Lightwear Headphones Hp1 are available in two different colours, both with swappable magnetic ear cushions. The white ones come with gray and turquoise, while the black ones get black and dark red. Choose the pair that best matches your shellsuit.
New York Times
26-02-2025
- Sport
- New York Times
Beyond the Sean McVay effect: Inside the coaching youth revolution that reshaped the NFL
In 2005, 41-year-old Mike McCarthy was the NFL's youngest offensive coordinator. Two decades later, 11 OCs are in their 30s. Two more are in their 20s. Ask insiders to explain the trend, and they'll point to Jan. 12, 2017. That was when the Los Angeles Rams shocked the NFL by making Sean McVay, then 30, the league's youngest head coach since Art 'Pappy' Lewis, who was 27 when the Cleveland Browns hired him in 1938. A few weeks after McVay's hiring, the San Francisco 49ers named Kyle Shanahan, then 37, their head coach. Both have led their teams to two Super Bowls, putting their (also young) offensive assistants in demand. Advertisement Teams have hired 20 head coaches younger than 40 since the McVay-Shanahan cycle, after hiring just 11 that young over the preceding 20 years. That includes four sub-40 offensive head coaches hired from McVay's tree — Matt LaFleur, Zac Taylor, Kevin O'Connell and Liam Coen, plus Brian Callahan, who worked under Taylor in Cincinnati — and one from Shanahan's (Mike McDaniel). 'The ripple effect of Sean not failing was huge,' said Cleveland Browns head coach Kevin Stefanski, who was 37 when the team hired him in 2020. That 2017 hiring cycle was indeed transformational, but McVay's resounding success merely accelerated a movement spurred by a technological revolution dating to the early 2000s, changing how the game is learned, taught and played. The old way — toil away in the college ranks, hope to catch on as a position coach in the NFL, work your way up to coordinator if you're lucky and then, just maybe, become a head coach somewhere around age 50 — no longer prevails, especially on offense. The tradeoffs are significant, many of them exaggerated on offense: The trend toward youth, especially on offense, is about more than teams trying to replicate McVay's success. The league-wide availability of digital video beginning in the early 2000s increased exponentially how much game tape teams could study. What once consumed 7-10 hours for a video staff on a Monday during the season — recording limited, situation-specific plays (red zone, third down, etc.) onto Betamax tapes — could now be replicated in seconds with greater depth on a computer by any coach. By the early 2010s, teams were tapping into detailed play-level charting from Pro Football Focus, which the company later synced with NFL game video as part of its 'PFF Ultimate' product. Staff sizes grew to explore the new possibilities, rising from about 16 per team into the mid- and even upper-20s today. Getting into the NFL became easier, so coaches spent less time at the college level. On-demand access to game video made it possible to learn scheme quickly. 'Now, it doesn't take that long to become an expert,' a veteran coach said. 'Fifteen years ago, we had to go to a clinic and drive five hours to get there, and you only learned what was at that clinic. Then you waited six months to go to another one. Now, it's at your fingertips. Advertisement 'You aren't putting VHS tapes on a FedEx to ship it to someone. The learning curve, if you know what you are doing and have a good mentor, is accelerated.' The jump from entry-level to coordinator was now within reach, particularly on offense, where teams have prioritized creative play selection over experience. Brad Childress became an NFL head coach the old-fashioned way: 18 seasons in the college ranks, four years coaching quarterbacks in the NFL, four more years as an NFL offensive coordinator and then, finally, a head-coaching chance with the Minnesota Vikings in 2006. He was five months from age 50. Kevin Stefanski, now entering his sixth season as the Cleveland Browns' head coach, followed a modernized path. He got his football education without exposure to the college ranks beyond one season as assistant director of football operations at his alma mater, Penn, where he was an All-Ivy League defensive back. Stefanski sat outside Childress' office in Minnesota, serving as his personal assistant for three seasons. He spent another five as assistant quarterbacks coach, a quality-control position, giving him eight years in the league before he coached a position outright (tight ends for two seasons, running backs for one). A one-year stint as the Vikings' offensive coordinator launched him as a head-coaching candidate in 2020. Months from his 38th birthday at the time, Stefanski has since become a two-time Associated Press Coach of the Year. 'I was lucky. It wasn't like I set out to do it this way,' Stefanski said. 'I'm sure when I got hired as a head coach, people said, 'This guy? Are you kidding me? He hasn't done anything.'' So many offensive-minded coaches specialize in the passing game, which can make them dependent on offensive line coaches to handle the running game. Coaching tight ends or other positions associated with running the ball can expand a pass-oriented coach's horizons. Stefanski had that in Minnesota. McDaniel had that with Denver under Mike Shanahan and with San Francisco under Kyle Shanahan. Advertisement Both also entered the league when quality-control coaches were fewer in number. They painstakingly logged dozens of data points for each play on their own. That level of grunt work started fading by the mid-2010s, when PFF charting across more than 150 categories became available for every play across the league. "You can't really supplement experience, but you can accelerate experience with hard work," McVay said. 'If you want to immerse yourself in this, I would venture to say that you can get two or three years' worth of experience in a year." Now, any coach can go into PFF and, say, sort all the running plays by scheme (gap, zone, etc.), then watch those plays immediately. Before, the tedious work required to perform such projects helped McDaniel and others become experts on a granular level. But efficiency lagged. As some seasoned NFL observers survey the new landscape, they see a lesser product. Most agree fundamentals have eroded as rules have limited offseason practice time and technology has shifted the focus toward plays and scheme, away from comprehensive systems with intricate answers for every scenario. We pick up the conversation there with Al Saunders, who coached in the NFL from 1983 to 2018 and became a head coach in 1986, at age 39, when Don Coryell resigned from the San Diego Chargers. A Mike Martz assistant on the 1999 Super Bowl-champion St. Louis Rams, Saunders owns advanced degrees in education from Stanford and USC. He was around long enough to coach on teams with Dan Fouts, Kurt Warner, Trent Green, Carson Palmer, Derek Carr and Baker Mayfield behind center. The Kansas City Chiefs offense that Saunders coordinated in 2005 ranked sixth in scoring. Back then, Saunders was one of 13 OCs age 55 or older. Today there are three: Chip Kelly, Todd Monken and Johnny Morton. Average ages for offensive coordinators have plummeted from a peak of 53 in 2005 to 43 now. Advertisement No one is suggesting the group from 2005 or any other long-ago season had all the answers simply because they were older. Every era has its good coordinators and lesser ones. The new wave of coordinators has helped deliver innovation: increased and varied usage of motion, tempo and packaged plays like run-pass options (RPOs). The jobs are not the same in some cases. All but eight offensive coordinators in 2005 called plays. Seventeen will not in 2025 — eclipsing 2019 (16) for the most since 2000. That includes eight of the 13 OCs under 40. "These are quarterback coaches they are hiring in some cases," a veteran offensive coach said. "The head coach is calling the plays. Sometimes they have another senior position to help with the game planning." Offensive coaches lament that as age 50 creeps closer, most fall into the "senior assistant" bin, no longer marketable as coordinator candidates, despite being better than they've ever been. "I don't have dementia," a former offensive coordinator in his 50s said. "It's not like I lost what I've learned all these years." Young offensive-minded head coaches typically hire young offensive coordinators. Front offices then frequently push for seasoned defensive coordinators as a counterbalance. The nearly four-decade age gap between McVay and his first defensive coordinator, Wade Phillips (who was months from turning 70), illustrates the dynamic. Minnesota paired O'Connell (then 36) with defensive coordinator Ed Donatell (65). Atlanta paired Arthur Smith (38) with Dean Pees (71). Partly because of this dynamic, defensive coordinators got older on average from 2008 until peaking at 55.1 in 2019. Their average age has settled near 48 as Phillips, Pees and other veterans filtered out. Leaning younger on offense and older on defense can make it tougher for young defensive coaches to become coordinators, let alone head coaches. Black coaches can feel the effects disproportionately because their numbers are concentrated on defense (for the second consecutive year, none of the league's 32 offensive coordinators entering the season is Black). GO DEEPER NFL's progress with diversity in coaching ranks yet to translate to offensive coordinator The rush to promote young offensive coaches does not exist to the same degree on the defensive side, even though defensive coaches (and special teams coaches, to some degree) can be well-suited to coach the entire team. "A guy who coaches the quarterback is coaching the most cerebral person in the building," a defensive coach said. "When you make him be head coach, he's not used to coaching that defensive lineman who will tell you to go to hell. That is why a lot of guys fail. Advertisement 'They are so computer-driven, and you have to be a leader of men when you are running a football team." Jacksonville recently stocked its leadership with first-timers at executive vice president (Tony Boselli, 52), general manager (James Gladstone, 34), head coach (Coen, 39), offensive coordinator (Grant Udinski, 29) and defensive coordinator (Anthony Campanile 42). Owner Shad Khan welcomed Gladstone to a "football leadership team of Liam Coen, Tony Boselli and Tony Khan," son of the owner. "The NFL is more and more an owner-driven league," an offensive coach in his 50s said. "They want to call a lot of the shots behind the scenes and not be responsible for them publicly." That's tougher to do when the head coach is an empowered star or even an established veteran. Younger coaches also tend to cost owners less in salary, which could be another reason behind the NFL's youth movement. As college salaries and buyouts have increased, including for assistant coaches, NFL teams have become less likely to lure established figures from those ranks. "I don't think the NFL wants coaches that are stars,' the offensive coach in his 50s added. 'I don't think they want the Belichicks, the Bill Cowhers and that like. They want pawns that they can manipulate and basically control. "So when you hire those kinds of people, they are going to hire what? Young guys that they can control." Most coaches say experience is especially valuable for making in-game adjustments. "There is no substitute for calling games where the s--- counts," McVay said. Experience also helps build foundational knowledge of a system, so that solutions become ready on the fly. Coordinating a coherent offense entails much more than picking plays. It's also about marrying concepts. Advertisement "Guys do not know how to adjust," a former offensive-minded head coach said. "Just call plays and it will work. If you go up against a Vic Fangio, who is a really good defensive coordinator, he is going to kill you." Defensive coordinators are constantly adjusting to whatever opposing offenses present, more than the other way around. That could be another reason experience prevails on defense. Defensive coordinators seem more durable. Failing on offense can seem more fatal to career advancement. "Go be a glorious offensive coach, you get a chance to be a head coach in five years," a defensive coach said. "You could be the greatest defensive coordinator, you'll be able to take care of your kids for the rest of your life." While the league churned through more offensive coordinators (115) than defensive ones (94) from 2013 to '19, teams hired nearly identical numbers on each side of the ball for the other seasons since 2000. There have been 101 offensive coordinators and 97 defensive coordinators since 2020. The 2013-19 window was notable for college-flavored schemes proliferating (think Chip Kelly) while massive amounts of new play-level data were becoming available. One defensive coach pointed to a few distinct offensive trends through this general window: quarterback zone-read, Kyle Shanahan's version of the West Coast offense on display in Atlanta, RPOs, more aggressive decision-making on fourth down and McVay's usage of jet motion and varied tempo from condensed formations. "There have been a couple more wrinkles — Miami did a little cheat motion with Tyreek Hill — but things have kind of settled down a little bit, and defenses have caught up to jet motions, tempos," the defensive coach said. There's no concrete evidence suggesting teams fare better on offense with young, offensive-minded head coaches. Last season, the top five offenses by EPA per play — Baltimore, Buffalo, Detroit, Tampa Bay and Washington — featured zero head coaches doubling as offensive play callers. Some see big gaps between McVay-level offensive architects and young copycats who know successful plays when they see them, but haven't learned enough of the why to implement the details coherently. "I was just watching a tight-red zone tape, and I think the details suck in the NFL — it is frustrating to watch," Hall of Fame quarterback and NFL Network analyst Kurt Warner said. "It's like, 'Hey, somebody ran this, so let's run it.' And they don't understand the details of how all that stuff helps the quarterbacks." Advertisement With NFL rosters and staffs turning over more frequently, only the best teams maintain the continuity required to keep adding layers. Teams are also starting rookie quarterbacks with greater frequency, another limiting factor. In 2023, the opening-week starters were younger than they had been since 1957. Some of that is cyclical, as a long list of veterans retired recently. Players have gotten younger overall since the 2011 labor agreement created a cheaper wage scale for rookie contracts.
The Guardian
24-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The ugly truth of American violence has never been plainer
Among my hazier memories of early adolescence in Qatar is a screening, at a friend's home, of an obviously pirated Betamax copy of Red Dawn. My friend's father – most everyone's father or mother or uncle, whoever – would, while on business trips overseas, visit the occasional video store or flea market and return with whatever films or books or albums they happened to find. It's a haphazard, incomplete thing to consume the culture of a faraway place in this manner, like trying to divine the contours of a mouth from the texture of spittle. Red Dawn is a bad movie. Bad in a special, sincere kind of way. It's about a bunch of teenagers who fight back against a Soviet invasion of the United States. Released in the early 80s, it belongs to a large fraternity of films in which scrappy underdog Americans fight back against the seemingly insurmountable but of course ultimately very surmountable power of the Soviet empire. In a couple of decades, the Russians would pass the baton of villainy to people who look like me, though in our case there was no real empire to speak of, and so we were mostly small-batch insidious, our specialty less tank-and-jet and more suicide-bomb-level violence. It didn't much matter; Red Dawn with Arabs instead of Soviets for villains would have still been shit. Read the Guardian's Q&A with Omar El Akkad here In 2012, almost 30 years after I first watched the original, someone decided to remake Red Dawn. This time, there was no Soviet empire to invade the mainland, and so instead the Chinese would have to do. Again, it didn't much matter – the point isn't geopolitical fidelity, the point is 90 minutes of rah-rahing American tenacity in the face of overwhelming odds. Never back down, never surrender, that sort of thing. Problem is, China is a big market for movies. And so, at the last minute, for fear of missing out on millions in potential box office returns, the producers decided to change the villain. In the final cut of the Red Dawn remake, it's North Korea that invades the United States. It's always the sign of a well-crafted movie when you can change a central narrative beam in post-production and it doesn't make any difference at all. I'm reminded of a guy in one of my old writing groups who, fearing his story didn't have enough female representation, did a find-and-replace and changed every instance of 'Sam' to 'Samantha', then went through and changed the pronouns accordingly, leaving everything else the same. Again, it didn't much matter. Except that it does, over time – this glaring disconnect between cultural self-image and pragmatic reality. In a 2016 essay, the writer and former soldier Roy Scranton describes watching Star Wars while stationed in Baghdad. He is forced in that moment to confront the reality that so much of the American self-image demands a narrative in which his country plays the role of the rebel, the resistance, when at the same time every shred of contemporary evidence around him leads to the conclusion that, by scope and scale and purpose of violence, this country is clearly the empire. A central privilege of being of this place becomes, then, the ability to hold two contradictory thoughts simultaneously. The first being the belief that one's nation behaves in keeping with the scrappy righteousness of the underdog. The second being an unspoken understanding that, in reality, the most powerful nation in human history is no underdog, cannot possibly be one, but at least the immense violence implicit in the contradiction will always be inflicted on someone else. I've seen this person many times – they occupy a hallowed place in American culture, catered to by so many of the nation's dominant cultural forces, from Monday Night Football to the Country Music Awards to the entirety of AM radio. It's the person who in self-image professes to be a rule-breaker, untamable, wild – and in the next breath sides unquestioningly with every facet of state power. I've seen the Punisher decal on the bumper, the stylized American flag denoting the thin blue line: I'm an outlaw; also, anyone who disobeys the cops deserves to be killed. My first impulse is to mock the contradiction, but there's no contradiction, not really, because the bedrock of this particular identity isn't conformity or nonconformity – it's self-interest. Anyone who buys into both the narrative of American rebelliousness and the reality of American authority understands that both have been created to serve them. The man in the action movie looks one way, the man the cops just shot in a traffic stop another. Toward the end of December 2023, the South African government brings charges of genocide against Israel at the international court of justice. The case rests on Israel's wholesale destruction of health facilities and the blocking of aid as evidence that what is being destroyed here isn't a single terror organization, but a whole people. Much of the initial South African brief relies on the words of Israeli officials themselves, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's referencing of the complete destruction of Amalek in the Bible. Among those who have been calling for an end to the relentless killing, the development inspires a set of conflicting emotions. First, there is the basic relief of watching some official entity – any entity – do something. Time and again, in conversation with friends, some of whom have lost family members in this killing spree, there is a sense that one must be going mad: to see so plainly the destruction, the murdered children filmed and presented for the world to look upon and then to hear the leaders of virtually every western nation contend that this is not happening, that whatever is happening is good and righteous and should continue and that in fact the wellbeing of the Palestinian people demands this continue – it's enough to feel like you're losing your mind. Second, there is the realization that of course it would be a country like South Africa that would take this step – a country deeply versed in the ugly mechanics of apartheid, for whose citizens checkpoints and forcefully sealed-off towns are not abstractions, but the very recent past that, from the safety of the present, everyone now claims they always opposed. Beyond relief and recognition, there is a more complicated thing – an understanding that the machinery of the west has never had much of a capacity for self-diagnosis. Who does? Who that achieves power of this scale ever does? Waiting on a western judicial institution to cast judgment on a killing spree financed and endorsed by the west means, inevitably, watching a disjointed ballet of impossible reconciling. The narrative – as enshrined in countless constitutions and declarations and charters which are so often held up as the differentiating marker of superiority of this world over the other – demands moral purity, opposition to injustice, adherence to the principle that all innocent lives are equal and deserving of dignity. The reality is that an ally of the west is killing civilians by the tens of thousands and it would be politically inconvenient to call this wrong now when for months, years, decades it has been deemed perfectly fine. And so we must watch the impotent pantomime of a Canadian prime minister declaring that while his government absolutely supports the international court of justice, it doesn't support the premise of the South African case, whatever that tortured rhetorical construction is supposed to mean. We must watch the German government – whose police forces, in the name of fighting antisemitism, arrested Jewish protesters calling for a ceasefire – come to Israel's defense at the court. In time there will be findings of genocide. There will be warrants issued, even. The structures of international law, undermined at every turn, will nonetheless attempt to operate as if law were an evenly allotted thing. As though criminality remains criminal even when the powerful support, bankroll, or commit the crime. It's no use, in the end, to scream again and again at the cold, cocooned center of power: I need you, just this once, to be the thing you pretend to be. There is an impulse in moments like this to appeal to self-interest. To say: these horrors you are allowing to happen, they will come to your doorstep one day; to repeat the famous phrase about who they came for first and who they'll come for next. But this appeal cannot, in matter of fact, work. If the people well served by a system that condones such butchery ever truly believed the same butchery could one day be inflicted on them, they'd tear the system down tomorrow. And anyway, by the time such a thing happens, the rest of us will already be dead. No, there is no terrible thing coming for you in some distant future, but know that a terrible thing is happening to you now. You are being asked to kill off a part of you that would otherwise scream in opposition to injustice. You are being asked to dismantle the machinery of a functioning conscience. Who cares if diplomatic expediency prefers you shrug away the sight of dismembered children? Who cares if great distance from the bloodstained middle allows obliviousness? Forget pity, forget even the dead if you must, but at least fight against the theft of your soul. In the summer of 2014, I began writing the first draft of my debut novel, American War. It's a piece of speculative fiction set in the 2070s and covers the aftermath of a second civil war. I never thought of it as a particularly American book, but rather an attempt to superimpose stories from the other side of the planet onto the heart of the empire. It didn't seem like a particularly clever narrative trick on my part. Three weeks or so after I finished the first draft, Donald Trump announced his candidacy for president. The novel would end up being published in April 2017 and come to be almost universally read as an exclusively American story, a literal prediction of where this country might be headed. A bidding war breaks out for the film rights. Time and again, various production company executives tell me how perfectly the novel has managed to capture this moment in American life, and I can't help but think that the exact opposite is true. Something of American life has captured the novel. The word 'dangerous' is used quite often, always as a compliment. Then, in January 2024, I receive an email from the director who was set to work on the American War adaptation, letting me know he and the production company are stepping away from the project. 'Prudence suggests this is not the time for making movies about freedom fighters or terrorists (no matter which side of that argument one is on),' he writes. A few weeks earlier, a novelist I know tells me her appearance at a small book club has been canceled – the organizer tells her it's because they 'stand with Israel'. My friend is an American of half-Egyptian, half-Scottish descent. A Palestinian artist's retrospective at the University of Indiana is shuttered. People who call for a ceasefire are demoted, fired, called antisemites and terrorist-supporters. It all feels so petty, the stakes so low. On the other side of the planet entire bloodlines are being wiped out and here in the sheltered world we are subject to relatively pathetic indignities – loss of income, disinvitations, cold shoulders from people who in a different time might have been quite proud of themselves for having a Brown friend. Every now and then we hear about those instances when the stakes turned out not to be so low, when this passive punishment transformed into something much more active, sometimes deadly. But for the most part it's just a constant trickle of reminders of one's place in the hierarchy – and it is precisely because of this that it becomes so tempting to just shut up, let what's going to happen happen to those people over there and then, when it's done, ease into whatever opinion the people whose approval matters deem acceptable. I start to see this more often, as the body count climbs – this malleability of opinion. At a residency on the coast of Oregon, I read the prologue to this book; a couple of days later, one of the other writers decides to strike up a conversation. 'I'm not a Zionist,' she says. 'But you know, I'm not anti-Zionist either. It's all just so complicated.' I have no idea what to say. I feel like an audience at a dress rehearsal. There's a convenience to having modular opinions; it's why so many liberal American politicians slip an occasional reference of concern about Palestinian civilians into their statements of unconditional support for Israel. Should the violence become politically burdensome, they can simply expand that part of the statement as necessary, like one of those dinner tables you lengthen to accommodate more guests than you expected. And it is important, too, that this amoral calculus rise and fall in proportion to the scale of the killing, so that one might always be able to say, 'Well, we could never have known it would get this bad, but now, now everything has changed.' It's almost refreshing, then, when one is faced with the ugliest and yet most honest face of western apathy, the face that knows full well the scale and severity of the horror but believes it to be absolutely justified, absolutely necessary. I know this face, too. It appears on talk shows and atop opinion pieces stating, euphemistically or not, that the same world in which you can buy avocados all year round and your iPhone keeps getting more powerful and you never have to live in fear of an occupying force obliterating your family with missiles is the world in which an insignificant group of people you'll never meet simply have to die. And whatever disgust this equation, laid bare, might inspire, many know it to be true. This is the world we've created, a world in which one privileged sliver consumes, insatiable, and the best everyone else can hope for is to not be consumed. It is not without reason that the most powerful nations on earth won't intervene to stop a genocide but will happily bomb one of the poorest countries on the planet to keep a shipping lane open. How long can the fabric of a pleasing story hold? Presented the facts of the situation without label, without real-world anchor, like actors asked to read the screenplay and pick a role, how many Americans would instinctively choose that of the Palestinian calling for an end to occupation? The South African calling for an end to apartheid? The Haitian calling for self-rule? How many would want to believe, as so much of the culture here has always strained to believe, that they side with the underdog, the downtrodden who refuses to give up, the rebel in the face of empire? And then, should the scenes be transposed back to the unforgiving reality of the world as it is, how many, knowing the limitations of the stories we tell ourselves, would just as instinctively retreat into the comforting fold of empire? One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad is out now in the UK published by Canongate. It will be released tomorrow, 25 February, in the United States by Knopf, and in Canada by McClelland & Stewart. Spot illustrations by Ben Hickey
The Guardian
20-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Novelist Susan Barker: ‘I started watching horror when I was five years old'
Everyone has a horror film they saw too young. Or perhaps just one disturbing scene that made them too jittery to sleep at night. A set of dining chairs stacking themselves into a table-top pyramid as a housewife's back is turned. A woman's discovery of a neighbour's slumped corpse, his eyes pecked to bloody sockets by murderous birds. A boy on a tricycle seeing twin girls at the end of a corridor, interspersed with flashes of their brutal axe murder … I started watching horror back in the early 80s, when I was five. A mature student, my dad would record late-night Open University lectures on BBC Two, and, once the bearded academics finished scribbling equations on blackboards, the Betamax kept rolling and the melodramatic titles for a Hammer horror would start up. From these tapes I remember hopping plagues of alien locusts from Quatermass and the Pit, Christopher Lee baring his blood-soaked fangs, and young women in Victorian nightgowns, screaming and fleeing or becoming mesmerised. As a five-year-old, could I differentiate between these supernatural fictions and reality? I saw a chiller called The Watcher in the Woods and began to creepily insist that 'the Watcher' was stalking our family, following at a distance, lurking just out of sight. This coincided with the time my parents were separating, and the Watcher now seems to me the exteriorisation of some inner anxiety and sense of threat to the family unit. These films were 'just pretend', I'd been told. But even at a young age the Hammer productions seemed to express to me a fundamental truth: that just beyond the edges of what is safe and known are destabilising forces that can throw everything into chaos. My best friend at primary school saw A Nightmare on Elm Street when we were seven. We gathered around her in the playground to hear about Freddy Krueger slaughtering teenagers in their dreams. I begged permission to watch it too, but, frustratingly, had to wait until I was 'a bit older', which turned out to be 10. How many hours of sleep did I lose to imagining Krueger leering around my bedroom door? The long blades attached to his leather glove tapping on the windowpane? Thanks to lenient parenting, secondary-school sleepovers often featured Puppet Master, Child's Play and other video nasties whose power wasn't diminished by their low-budget awfulness. Nor did the regular exposure desensitise me; it only made the monsters more persistent in my consciousness. Then I got into Stephen King novels, which were no reprieve. I was often awake until 2am with a spine-cracked paperback of Pet Sematary or It, too scared to go to the toilet, in case Pennywise was waiting to pounce down the hall. Have I mentioned yet, that this was exhilarating? Fun? It's what film theorist Noël Carroll calls the 'paradox of horror' – the enjoyment of fear and disgust, the thrilling of the sensation-seeking parts of the psyche as we vicariously experience horrifying situations and confrontations with entities both evil and grotesque. And there are none more evil and grotesque than Pipes of the infamous Ghostwatch, which I saw with my younger sister when it was broadcast on Halloween 1992. Like most of the audience of 11 million, we fell for the mockumentary hoax, and, like approximately 1 million viewers, we called the phone lines to tell the BBC we'd spotted the ghoulish Pipes fleetingly in shot, in the corner of a bedroom. Too petrified to go to bed, we stayed up until dawn, under a duvet on the sofa, watching the Halloween programming on BBC Two – Creepshow 2, The Curse of the Werewolf, The Bride of Frankenstein, Death Line – until exhaustion finally overrode our fear. As well as its ingenuity and authentic script, maybe another reason Ghostwatch was so real to us was because the setting was so close to home: the London suburb, the frazzled working-class single mother, the two highly strung adolescent daughters. I've always had the irrational sense that my Essex childhood home is a haunted place. It's familiar at the level of nook and cranny yet can sometimes be unheimlich and strange. If the house is haunted, perhaps it's by ghosts of our former selves: by second-generation teenagers clashing explosively with the first generation's authoritarian parenting style. Recently, I came across the word 'transliminal' to describe someone swayed by the supernatural. People high in transliminality tend to be introspective and fantasy-prone – the boundaries between the mental and the external world more porous, so the imaginary has a stronger grip on 'reality' and emotional states. The way terrifying scenes lingered in my mind and contaminated my post-film reality when I was younger suggest this trait in me. It suggests why, as a teenager, rain tapping my windowpane in the night became Danny Glick from Salem's Lot, hovering vampirishly outside. Why bin bags heaped in an alleyway, glimpsed walking home from a late-night screening of Scream, became the masked slasher, crouched with a 10in knife. The psychological disturbance of a film used to stay with me, rippling out into subsequent days, filling my head with imaginings of the Blair Witch or the serial killer from The Poughkeepsie Tapes, creeping about my flat at 3am. Ridiculous, my rational mind scolds. But on some more visceral, irrational level, I am spooked. And I enjoy being spooked. It's part of the draw of the genre for me. Fear heightening my senses, so I am hypervigilant and alert. Fear waking me up. Since I began writing 23 years ago, my fiction has always contained elements of the supernatural, and my latest novel, Old Soul, is an out-and-out horror: my monstrous female protagonist must make human sacrifices or she literally begins to rot. Her internal organs putrefy. Her hair falls out. Her fingernails falls off. She becomes the walking undead – all my fears of evil, ageing and mortality, rolled into one. My north star while writing Old Soul was to make readers feel the way I did when first turning the pages of The Shining or Mark Z Danielewski's House of Leaves: frightened, disturbed and utterly beguiled. The experience of reading horror is vastly different from watching a film. Books can't do jump scares the way films and TV can. But they are more adept at inhabiting a character's interiority – their fear and confusion as they mentally scramble to make sense of the door slamming in the night or the shadow flitting down the hall. A horror novel is a collaboration between author and reader; the words on the page are stage directions for the reader's imagination. The monsters are unique to every reader, too, constructed in part from your own mental archive of terrifying images and experiences. The horror I saw too young definitely had some warping influence on my growing mind. For me, the genre will always represent the disintegration of the safe, known world: the threats that lurk at its periphery metamorphosed into the poltergeist smashing vases in a suburban home, the witch cackling in the woods, the demon-possessed little girl … Horror became linked to unhappy events in my life, a grotesquely distorting mirror held up to my childhood, somehow reflecting a greater truth. But this is by no means a wholly bad thing. In fact, I feel a strange kind of gratitude for all I was exposed to at an early age. For, amid the heart-thudding terror, I've been comforted, too, by horror's metaphorical powers, and the dark recognition of all the ordinary horrors in an ordinary life. Old Soul by Susan Barker is published by Fig Tree (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
