u/Serpiego2

On 4625 kHz, a shortwave station nicknamed The Buzzer broadcasts a monotonous buzzing sound almost continuously.

Every once in a while, the buzzing stops and a voice reads strange combinations of names, words and numbers in Russian.

The station has been heard for decades and appears to be connected to Russian military communications, but its exact purpose has never been publicly confirmed.

People have attached all kinds of conspiracy theories to it, including the famous “Doomsday Radio” story, but there’s no evidence that it controls nuclear weapons.

What I find creepy is much simpler: you can still tune a radio to the frequency and hear it.

La Isla Bermeja aparece en mapas del Golfo de México desde al menos 1539.
El problema es que cuando México decidió buscarla seriamente, no estaba allí.

En 2009, una expedición de la UNAM realizó búsquedas por mar y aire en las coordenadas históricas. No encontró la isla ni rastros físicos de que hubiera existido.

El asunto no era solamente una curiosidad cartográfica: su posible existencia llegó a discutirse por las implicaciones que podía tener para los límites marítimos y los recursos del Golfo de México.

No hay pruebas de las teorías que dicen que alguien la hizo desaparecer.

¿cómo logró una isla posiblemente inexistente permanecer durante siglos en los mapas y terminar provocando una expedición científica oficial?

Me gustó Delicatessen, pero creo que conviene entrar sabiendo qué tipo de película es. Tiene un humor negro muy particular, personajes exagerados y un mundo que parece funcionar con sus propias reglas. Por momentos es comedia, por momentos resulta bastante macabra y casi todo está atravesado por un surrealismo muy extraño.

La historia ocurre en un edificio donde la comida escasea y el carnicero tiene una manera bastante poco convencional de mantener abastecidos a los vecinos. A partir de ahí, mejor saber lo menos posible.

Lo que más me gusta es que no intenta normalizar lo raro. Desde el diseño del edificio hasta los personajes y las situaciones, todo parece ligeramente fuera de lugar, y la película se compromete completamente con ese tono.

La recomendaría, pero con advertencia: si no les gusta el humor negro absurdo o las películas deliberadamente excéntricas, probablemente no sea para ustedes. Si eso les atrae, vale mucho la pena.

Directores: Jean-Pierre Jeunet y Marc Caro
Año: 1991
País: Francia
Género: Comedia negra / surrealismo / fantasía

En El lado oscuro del corazón, Oliverio busca literalmente a una mujer que “sepa volar”. Toda su vida parece organizada alrededor de esa idea: poesía, deseo y la búsqueda de algo extraordinario. Pero siempre me ha parecido que la película deja una duda interesante. Por momentos parece compartir completamente su visión romántica del mundo, y por otros hace que esa obsesión resulte bastante egoísta y hasta absurda.

Oliverio no parece buscar simplemente a otra persona; busca que alguien encaje en una idea del amor que ya construyó de antemano. Entonces, ¿creen que Subiela está celebrando ese romanticismo extremo o mostrando lo destructivo que puede ser exigir que una relación esté a la altura de una fantasía?

Vi Hombre mirando al sudeste y me gustó mucho. La premisa es simple: un hombre aparece en un hospital psiquiátrico asegurando que viene de otro planeta. El médico que lo trata asume que está delirando, pero poco a poco empieza a dudar de algo más incómodo: quizá el problema no sea solamente Rantés, sino la forma en que los demás entendemos lo que consideramos “normal”.

Es una película argentina de Eliseo Subiela, de 1986, y dura alrededor de 105 minutos.

Lo que más me funcionó es que utiliza la ciencia ficción casi como excusa. No necesita grandes efectos ni explicaciones sobre extraterrestres; le interesa mucho más la relación entre Rantés y el psiquiatra, y cómo ese encuentro empieza a cuestionar la manera en que el médico observa a sus pacientes y su propia vida.

Si les gustan las películas que dejan cierta ambigüedad y siguen dando vueltas después de terminarlas, esta vale bastante la pena.

Cabe señalar que existe una película estadounidense similar titulada: K-Pax.

Director: Eliseo Subiela
País: Argentina
Año: 1986
Género: Drama / ciencia ficción
Duración: ~105 min.

Quiero recomendar Amélie, una película que seguramente muchos ya conocen, pero que sigue siendo de esas que vale la pena volver a poner sobre la mesa.

La historia sigue a Amélie, una joven bastante solitaria que trabaja en un café de Montmartre y que empieza a intervenir discretamente en la vida de las personas que la rodean. A veces para ayudarlas, otras simplemente para empujarlas un poco fuera de la rutina.

Lo que más me gusta de la película es que consigue volver interesantes cosas muy pequeñas. Romper la costra de una crème brûlée, meter la mano en un saco de granos, observar a desconocidos, imaginar sus historias o preparar pequeñas situaciones para cambiarles el día. Pero debajo de todo ese color y humor también hay bastante soledad. Amélie sabe entrar en la vida de los demás, pero le cuesta muchísimo hacerlo cuando se trata de la suya.

Visualmente tiene una identidad enorme y la música de Yann Tiersen ya es prácticamente inseparable de la película.

No creo que sea una película sobre “ser feliz” de una manera simple. Para mí habla más bien de algo mucho más pequeño: atreverse a participar en la propia vida en lugar de limitarse a observarla desde fuera.

Dirección: Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Reparto: Audrey Tautou, Mathieu Kassovitz, Rufus, Yolande Moreau y Jamel Debbouze
Duración: 2 h 2 min
Género: Comedia romántica / Drama

Es una de esas películas que tienen una personalidad tan clara que basta ver unos minutos para reconocer inmediatamente su mundo.

¿La volverían a ver hoy o sienten que pertenece demasiado a su época?

Some sounds are harmless during the day but completely different at 3 AM.
Footsteps in a hallway.

A chair scraping across the floor upstairs.

Someone softly knocking once.
A phone vibrating in another room.
A door closing somewhere in the house when you know you’re alone.

Nothing supernatural has to happen. The sound itself isn’t even unusual. It’s the combination of silence, timing, and not knowing what caused it that suddenly makes your brain invent the worst possible explanation.

For me, the creepiest is probably hearing footsteps stop right outside a door.

What ordinary sound instantly becomes horror material when you hear it at the wrong moment?

I’m not talking about being scared for a night or having a nightmare.

I mean a horror movie that actually changed something you did in real life afterward.

Maybe you stopped looking in mirrors at night. Maybe you started checking the back seat of your car. Maybe you avoided swimming alone, leaving closet doors open, answering unknown
calls, or driving behind logging trucks.

For me, Final Destination 2 is probably the clearest example. That highway scene permanently changed how I feel about driving behind a truck carrying logs.

What horror movie actually changed one of your habits, even if only a little?

One of the things I find most effective about The Eyes of My Mother is how often Nicolas Pesce refuses to show us exactly what we expect a horror movie to show.

The film is incredibly disturbing, but some of its worst violence happens partially or completely outside the frame. We see the preparation, the aftermath, or simply enough information to understand what Francisca has done.

That restraint feels especially strange because the movie itself is visually beautiful. The black-and-white photography and carefully composed images create a distance from events that should probably feel much more chaotic.

For me, that makes the violence worse rather than easier to watch. Once the camera refuses to provide the complete image, your imagination has to finish it.

It also made me think about how much modern horror relies on showing the audience increasingly explicit things.

Do you think horror becomes more disturbing when it withholds the image, or does not showing something sometimes feel like the filmmaker taking the easy way out?

Some performances become permanently attached to a movie. Everyone talks about Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs, Jack Nicholson in The Shining, or Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight.

But I’m more interested in the opposite: a genuinely great performance that somehow never became part of the conversation around the film.

Maybe the movie itself overshadowed the actor. Maybe another performance got all the attention. Or maybe the film simply never became popular enough.

One that comes to mind is Isabelle Adjani in Possession (1981). The subway scene gets mentioned constantly, but I think focusing on that single sequence sometimes obscures how physically committed and unsettling her entire performance is.

What’s a performance you think deserves much more recognition than it gets?

I’m looking for movies where the setting isn’t just a backdrop but gradually feels like an active presence in the story.

Not necessarily a haunted house or a place that’s literally alive. I’m more interested in locations that seem to impose their own rules on the characters, trap them psychologically, distort their behavior, or make leaving feel increasingly impossible.

Something like the hotel in The Shining, the house in Mother!, or the town in Dogville, although they all approach the idea very differently.

Horror is welcome, but I’m especially interested in movies outside horror that create the same feeling.

What movies made you feel that the characters weren’t simply inside a place, but somehow under its control?

Hay películas donde, mientras las ves, terminas justificando o incluso apoyando a un personaje que claramente no deberías.

No porque la película diga que es “bueno”, sino porque está escrita o interpretada de tal forma que te arrastra a su punto de vista.

Pienso en Nightcrawler, The Wolf of Wall Street y American Psycho: en las tres, el protagonista puede resultar fascinante aunque moralmente sea un desastre.

¿Con qué película te pasó que, al terminar, pensaste: “espera… ¿por qué estaba de su lado?”?

Quiero recomendar una película de terror bastante peculiar: Los ojos de mi madre (The Eyes of My Mother).

La historia sigue a Francisca, una joven que crece en una casa aislada después de que un acontecimiento brutal marque su infancia. A partir de ahí, la película se adentra en su relación con la soledad, la muerte y una idea bastante perturbadora del afecto.

Lo que más la distingue no es la cantidad de violencia que muestra, sino cómo la muestra. Está rodada en un blanco y negro precioso, con encuadres muy cuidados y largos momentos de silencio. Algunas de las cosas más horribles incluso ocurren fuera de cámara.
Eso produce un contraste extraño: visualmente puede ser bellísima mientras lo que está sucediendo resulta profundamente desagradable.

Además, dura poco más de una hora. No intenta explicar demasiado ni convertir a Francisca en un monstruo convencional. Simplemente nos deja durante un rato dentro de su mundo, y ese mundo se vuelve cada vez más difícil de aceptar.

No la recomendaría a quien busque sustos constantes o terror comercial. Sí a quien disfrute del terror psicológico, incómodo y visualmente diferente.

Director: Nicolas Pesce
Reparto: Kika Magalhães, Will Brill, Diana Agostini, Paul Nazak y Clara Wong
Duración: 1 h 16 min
Género / Flair: Terror

¿Alguien más la ha visto?

One of the things that stayed with me from Lovers of the Arctic Circle is its obsession with circularity.

Even the names Ana and Otto are palindromes. They can be read in both directions, returning to where they began. The film seems to construct their relationship in much the same way: departures become returns, coincidences accumulate, perspectives repeat events differently, and the story keeps suggesting that Ana and Otto are moving around some invisible center.

What interests me is whether Medem wants us to believe in that idea of fate, or whether he is showing us how people create patterns when they desperately need their lives to have one.

Coincidence in the film rarely feels neutral. Ana and Otto interpret events, encounters and repetitions as though they belong to a larger design. And because the film itself is organized around circles, mirrored perspectives and recurrence, the cinematic form seems to validate their belief.
But there’s another possibility.

Maybe the film isn’t demonstrating that their lives are governed by fate. Maybe we’re experiencing reality through two people who have become so invested in their shared story that everything begins to look like evidence that the story must continue.

If the coincidences are objectively meaningful, Lovers of the Arctic Circle is a romantic tragedy about two people repeatedly brought together by fate.
If they aren’t, it becomes something stranger: a film about the human tendency to turn coincidence into narrative and narrative into destiny.

Do you think Medem ultimately asks us to believe in Ana and Otto’s fate, or does the film deliberately leave open the possibility that the “circle” exists mainly because they, and perhaps we as viewers, need to see one?

Forget zombies, serial killer, demons, or the end of the world.

I’m thinking about something much smaller. Something that probably has a perfectly rational explanation… but would still make you freeze if it happened tonight.

For example: You live alone and hear someone quietly trying your bedroom door handle.

You wake up and find a photo on your phone of yourself sleeping.

Your phone rings at 3:00 AM — and the caller ID shows your own number.

Or you hear footsteps in the apartment above you… when you live on the top floor.

None of these require a monster. In fact, I think they’re scarier because you don’t know yet whether there’s anything supernatural happening at all.

What’s your scenario?

Bonus points if it’s something that could realistically happen tonight.

I’m not necessarily talking about a movie that gave you nightmares or scared you for a few days.

I’m thinking about horror movies that ruined something ordinary.

A television. A shower. Looking under the bed. Walking past a dark window. Answering the phone. Driving alone at night. Even hearing a particular sound.

The movie eventually stops being scary, but years later that completely harmless thing still carries a tiny piece of it.

The Ring made static on a television feel different. Jaws managed to make people uncomfortable in water. Final Destination probably created an entire generation that looks at logging trucks differently.

What horror movie permanently contaminated something ordinary for you?

Some characters are clearly terrible people, yet the performance makes it surprisingly difficult to simply hate them.

I’m not necessarily talking about villains who secretly turn out to be good. I mean characters whose actions remain morally disturbing, but the actor gives them enough charisma, vulnerability, intelligence, or humanity that we still find ourselves fascinated by them — sometimes even rooting for them.

A few examples: Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs, Christian Bale as Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, and Rutger Hauer as Roy Batty in Blade Runner.

For me, the interesting question isn’t whether the character deserves sympathy, but how much of that sympathy comes from the writing and how much comes from the actor.

Which performance did this best for you?

I’m looking for movies that begin in a relatively recognizable reality, but little by little the normal rules seem to stop working.

Not necessarily movies with a big twist or a final explanation. Actually, I prefer when the characters themselves gradually accept increasingly bizarre or impossible situations without the movie stopping to explain what’s happening.

Examples of the feeling I’m looking for: The Exterminating Angel (1962), Beau Is Afraid (2023), and After Hours (1985) — although they all do it in very different ways.

I’m especially interested in lesser-known movies where you eventually realize: “Wait… when did this stop being normal?”

Any recommendations?