It has been a while since I sent out a new issue of this newsletter, but unfortunately, the spring semester was rather hectic for me and I felt especially constrained by the fact that I would have to maintain my blog and my newsletter separately. So I have decided to merge the content on my blog and my newsletter, and you can find all my future newsletter posts on my blog.

With that said, in this issue/post I will be talking about my experience with 21L.011: The Film Experience, an amazing class I had the opportunity of taking at MIT last semester. Content warning: there will be some discussion of horror films, although mostly from a somewhat academic perspective.

With that said, enjoy reading the post!

Read on my blog

Note: This post was written on April 16, 2021, but I couldn't edit it until very recently. So some of the days/activities/timings mentioned here may be a bit off, as the spring semester concluded a few weeks ago. For example, I no longer have any assignments to do, and nor am I living in New House any longer.

So it is 11 PM on a Tuesday night. You have an assignment due Thursday at 9 PM. What do you decide to do?

Why, make your own badly-made short horror film with your mobile phone camera, of course!

Welcome to 21L.011: The Film Experience at MIT!

Note: Due to MIT's policy forbidding sharing of assignment work submitted for a class, I will not be posting the actual film itself, and will be rather vague about the assignment itself. However, I will spend this blog describing the zany stuff I ended up doing for the class.

Genre

Why horror, you may ask?

It starts with the length limit my film assignment had—it was supposed to be about a minute in length, and I couldn't really think of anything narrative-driven other than horror I would be able to show in a minute, given that I had neither any actors nor any film crew in a world of COVID restrictions. An effective horror short film, in my experience, often focused on one single element that built tension throughout the film, so often it would be just one prolonged narrative sequence leading to a jumpscare. But on the other end, I could just shorten the sequence to the minute just before the jumpscare, and thereby create a somewhat effective horror film (side note: it ended up being a lot less effective than I had envisioned it to be, but it still worked to some degree).

So what sequence am I talking about? As a horror movie buff, there is one sequence that I feel is fairly common in most movies of the genre. The character is in a random spooky setting (doesn't matter where, it could be an abandoned forest, an empty school building, their own bedroom, anywhere as long as they are alone), and the character sees or hears something. They go to investigate, they find nothing, they dismiss it thinking it might have been a random animal or wind or something. Then, as soon as they turn around, boom, the Horror Movie Villain (or HMV) will be right there to jumpscare the audience, and death and destruction shall ensue! The character gets punished for their overconfidence, as they believed they had solved the mystery, and the HMV claims another victim.

The HMV

Every successful horror film that involves the aforementioned sequence has an HMV. In some cases, the HMV may be abstract, such as the shadows, or it may be a collective, such as a swarm of gross humongous mosquitoes or a cult of evil. In either case, HMVs tend to require either highly skilled actors or extremely good (or bad, depending on the movie's era and budget) CGI for the horror jumpscare moment to be actually effective. It suffices to say that I had neither of them, so I was stuck trying to find the spookiest object I could use as an HMV, given that I was planning to play the role of the protagonist of the film.

One technique that I find particularly interesting is when ordinary things tend to gain a supernatural aura in horror movies. In this case, we don't have our usual fair of eight-foot-tall monstrosities or masked horrors, but some commonplace object which seems to be the root cause of all evil. Some examples include (spoilers ahead! be warned!) the mirror in Oculus (2013), dolls in the Child's Play series (1988-present), and the ventriloquist dummy in Dead Silence (2007). So I decided to take a nice, simple object, and make it the HMV by shrouding it in darkness and playing dramatic music when it is revealed.

So, without further ado, here's my HMV in one of the shots from the film:

Yep, it is a polar bear plushie, courtesy of the MIT Medlinks1 in New House2, who ordered a hundred of these as keepsakes for New House residents. Goodness knows what they would think if they knew what I did with their gift.

Here is the HMV in a more sinister shot, sitting on a tangle of wires in red lighting courtesy of a lamp I got off Amazon:

Audio

To be fair, I don't I was going for anything super professional in terms of either the plot or shooting for this film.

Here's the synopsis, as evidence: A boy (me) walks into his dorm room, sits down to work, gets up, and sees his bear plushie has moved from where it was present earlier. He puts it back and sits down to work again, only to hear the plushie move again...

For shooting, I opted for a shaky-cam/found footage approach where I am basically filming everything from the point of view of the protagonist (me). So you see things as I would have seen them, and hence you never see my face, although my hands make cameo appearances whenever doors need to be opened/actions need to be performed. It is basically shot in a first-person POV similar to many video games, although most films opt to shoot in a different manner.

However, the reasoning behind the film is to treat it as an experiment in sound, to see what sounds can make the silly seem sinister, and as a result, most of the film process was tinkering with different sounds to see how I could make things seem more intense/haunting.

Here is a selection of some pretty cool ideas I tried out to make a somewhat cohesive soundtrack:

• Haunting Piano Melody: I absolutely love the sound of a slightly out-of-tune piano playing a melody that doesn't quite sit right. I love it when I hear a slow, creepy piano melody in any horror film or game soundtrack. Although several composers use faster strings and brass notes to build tension, I feel a good piano melody does the job just as well, so I found a creepy-sounding melody to play as the title and end credits rolled.

• Heartbeats: This one is a clear homage to video games, and not necessarily horror video games at that. Plenty of video games have pulsing red screens which show up whenever you are low on health, and these are often accompanied by the thumping sounds of a heartbeat. A couple of video games even use heartbeat as a game mechanic where you have to stay quiet or maintain a steady heartbeat to escape. So naturally, whenever my protagonist faced the dreaded HMV (a.k.a. my lovely plushie), his heartbeat shot up, and the audience could hear it thumping through their speakers.

• Whispers: These tend to pretty effective, especially when you cannot tell what is being said. Is that reversed Latin? Is that a conversation about tonight's dinner? Who knows? Adding more reverb/delay gives an otherworldly feel to the audio, so I had fun tinkering with that too.

• Growl: A pretty cliche sound effect, but I had the bear growl menacingly at the end, signaling that it is about to attack right before the end credits rolled. I particularly loved what Annihilation (2018) did with the audio in their bear scene, although there are so many other iconic growls and roars that have accompanied terrifying monsters through many decades of filmmaking.

And that's a wrap!

Finally, I added the opening title card and the ending credits, which I suppose were pretty brief. They followed the format used by many of the short horror films I have seen online. The tricky part was finding a sufficiently creepy font, but I think I managed to make a fairly close replica of the type of title cards I was going for.

Here's the opening title card:

All-in-all, I do feel the film ended up becoming slightly more comedic than I intended it to, especially because it is hard to make a cute polar bear plushie threatening without any make-up or special effects of any kind. As a side effect, however, I must say, I do not feel quite as comfortable cuddling with my plushie now given what it is supposed to have done to my character in the film…

The end of my college semester is almost upon me, and what this means is that I spend more hours huddled under a duvet and reading than I did before. Now, more than ever, when the pandemic’s numbers are swelling and bulging in epic proportions, I thought I would talk a bit about the physical spaces in my world of books, in addition to, of course, my thoughts on what I have been reading recently.

🏰 How high fantasy failed us

I recently read an amazing piece on Aeon called Empire of Fantasy which beautifully describes something that I have seen repeated time and time again in fantasy fiction, and have wondered about for quite some time: why does such a large portion of fantasy fiction involve conquest and discovery of areas by characters belonging to medieval-era civilizations?

This often pops up in the subgenre of fantasy that is popularly referred to as “high fantasy” or “epic fantasy.” High fantasy is a term coined in 1971 by Lloyd Alexander that is basically used to describe a fantasy story of epic proportions (think of works such as those by Tolkien, Lewis, etc. where the fate of an entire fictional universe depends on the adventures of a chosen few, or even a “Chosen One”).

But somehow, a recurring amount of these adventures seem to involve fighting, subduing, or negotiating with inhabitants of lands otherwise unfamiliar to the protagonist. These themes, when set in the real world, may very well be considered to be in bad taste given the long history of colonialism and exploitation so many countries suffered. Yet, they have evolved to become tropes of high fantasy fiction.

This piece argues that this was intentional—it started with the very books that made fantasy what it is today, and has been continued by a series of authors who learned from their predecessors before them. I highly recommend reading the full piece here; if nothing else, it certainly provides a new lens through which one can view children’s literature.

If you agree with some of the ideas in the article, I recommend checking out the Locke Lamora series by Scott Lynch, a fantasy series that I have recently been reading. It utilizes a very different paradigm from the traditional high-fantasy approach. So far, I’ve only managed to read through The Lies of Locke Lamora and Red Seas Under Red Skies, but both of them take a very different approach to how their plots justify the hero’s journey. The books also capture the class differences in their pseudo-medieval world quite effectively, which is certainly a refreshing concept when reading a genre typically preoccupied with the lives and adventures of princes, knights, and other nobles.

🎹 Some new tunes I'm obsessed with

I’ve been listening to a lot of Vérité recently, especially her debut 2017 album, Somewhere in Between. I recommend listening to her if you like alternative pop music, and some of my favorites from the album include Phase Me Out, Need Nothing, When You’re Gone, and Saint.

Or listen to the album on Apple Music, if you prefer that!

💵 Startups and venture capital

I recently came across an article describing the rise and fall of WeWork, and how the complex relationships between VCs and founders can sometimes fall apart with adverse effects for a wide range of people, ranging from employees to competitors and customers. The story intrigued me enough that I picked up Reeves Wiedeman’s Billion Dollar Loser to understand how it all came to happen. If you enjoy reading about tech, entrepreneurship, and founders, I really recommend giving this a go—it offers a very deep look at how relationships in the startup world are made, and how sometimes, they can crash.

🖼️ Some pretty pictures

I really enjoyed looking at Marcin Sobas’s House on the Hill. It is quite interesting to see how mists and landscapes interact in his work, and how clothlike the hill itself looks like in this piece. I recommend checking out his Tuscany series—the photographs are truly ethereal.

📄 New blog posts

The last two posts on my blog haven’t strictly been about college life—rather, I decided to blog a bit about the moments I miss most from my pre-pandemic life. Through these posts, I also explore the relationships I have with the spaces where I found most of my books, and write a bit about the evolution of these spaces over the decade or so I have been involved with them.

Read my new blog post series, Book-Hunting, on my blog: Part 1 is available here, while you can read Part 2 here.

And that’s all for this issue! Stay tuned for more curated content on literature, music, and art, as well as more blog posts about college life.

Best,

Sagnik

Hope you all are staying safe and social distancing—winter has set in where I am, and as I bundle up and look outside my window, I remember that it has been over a year since the pandemic began. In this issue, I will be talking about some of the resolutions I made last year that I promised I would fulfill at college, and my attempts to maintain them throughout this virtual semester.

📄 New blog posts

This month, I taught a class at Splash, MIT’s annual learning extravaganza for high-school students. It has always been a dream of mine to teach a class, in some form or another, and in this month’s blog post, I describe how I came up with a topic to teach a class on, and the learning resources I used…

Read more

At the same time, here is an update on navigating the Firehose that is studying at MIT, and some of the cool stuff I have been involved with outside of classes. There is always cool stuff to do at MIT, and I promised myself to try to do at least some activities this semester even if they took place virtually. Let’s see how that went…

Read more

🎹 Some tunes I’ve been listening to

Last year, I told myself I would diversify my taste in music when I went to college because I felt like I didn’t listen to as much music as I would have liked to that year.

This year, my playlists are the only thing getting me through my psets, and my latest obsession is The Strike’s 2017 album Faint of Heart. It has elements of pop, rock, and synthwave, although the highlights of the album for me were its thrumming basslines and cheery arps. My favorite song is definitely Economics, although I Fall Hard and Ghosts of my Hometown are close runners-up. Definitely recommend checking them out if you’re into pop/rock music!

Or listen to the album on Apple Music, if you prefer that!

📖 Reading over the break

Thanksgiving break was this week, so I took the opportunity to catch up on another of my resolutions, to try to increase the amount of reading I do, given that I have slightly more control over my life than I did in high school.

This week, I re-read Italo Calvino’s 14 definitions of a classic (listed here) and resolved to try to include more of the classics in my reading list.

Until then, however, I stuck to satisfying my craving for locked room mysteries with Paul Halter’s The Seventh Hypothesis (originally published as La septième hypothèse), which describes a bizarre crime with a very interesting solution. Check it out on Goodreads.

(PS: I discovered it through this list of the best locked-room mysteries by The Guardian—be sure to check it out if you’re fascinated by this genre!)

And that’s all for this issue! Stay tuned for more curated content on literature, music, and art, as well as more blog posts about college life.

Best,

Sagnik