“The Visitors” – ABBA

 

I hear the doorbell ring and suddenly the panic takes me
The sound so ominously tearing through the silence
I cannot move, I’m standing
Numb and frozen

 

Among the things I love so dearly
The books, the paintings and the furniture
Help me…

 

 

The signal’s sounding once again and someone tries the doorknob
None of my friends would be so stupidly impatient
And they don’t dare to come here
Anymore now
But how I loved our secret meetings
We talked and talked in quiet voices
Smiling…

 

 

Now I hear them moving
Muffled noises coming through the door
I feel I’m

Crackin’ up
Voices growing louder, irritation building
And I’m close to fainting
Crackin’ up

 

They must know by now I’m in here trembling
In a terror evergrowing
Crackin’ up
My whole world is falling, going crazy
There is no escaping now, I’m
Crackin’ up

 

 

These walls have witnessed all the anguish of humiliation
And seen the hope of freedom glow in shining faces
And now they’ve come to take me
Come to break me
And yet it isn’t unexpected
I have been waiting for these visitors
Help me…

 

Now I hear them moving
Muffled noises coming through the door
I feel I’m
Crackin’ up
Voices growing louder, irritation building
And I’m close to fainting
Crackin’ up

 

They must know by now I’m in here trembling
In a terror evergrowing
Crackin’ up
My whole world is falling, going crazy
There is no escaping now, I’m
Crackin’ up

 

 

Now I hear them moving
Muffled noises coming through the door
I feel I’m
Crackin’ up
Voices growing louder, irritation building
And I’m close to fainting
Crackin’ up
(I have been waiting for these visitors)
They must know by now I’m in here trembling
In a terror evergrowing
Crackin’ up
(I have been waiting for these visitors)

 

My whole world is falling, going crazy
There is no escaping now, I’m
Crackin’ up
(I have been waiting for these visitors)
Now I hear them moving
Muffled noises coming through the door
I feel I’m
Crackin’ up
(I have been waiting for these visitors)
Voices growing louder, irritation building
And I’m close to fainting
Crackin’ up
(I have been waiting for these visitors)
They must know by now I’m in here trembling
In a terror evergrowing
Crackin’ up
(I have been waiting for these visitors)
My whole world is falling, going crazy
There is no escaping now, I’m
Crackin’ up

[fade]

 

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The Visitors (ABBA album)

From Wikipedia, the

free encyclopedia

 

 

The Visitors is the eighth and final studio album by Swedish pop group ABBA, released on 30 November 1981. With The Visitors, ABBA took several steps away from the “lighter” pop music they had recorded previously and the album is often regarded as a more complex and mature effort. The opening track, “The Visitors“, with its ominous synthesizer sounds and the distinctive lead vocal by Frida, announced a change in musical style.

 

 

The Visitors album was one of the first records to be recorded and mixed digitally, and was the first in history to be manufactured on the new CD format in 1982 on Atlantic. The Visitors has been reissued in digitally remastered form three times—first in 1997, then in 2001 and again in 2005 as part of The Complete Studio Recordings box set.

 

 

The Visitors Deluxe Edition was released on 23 April 2012. As with previous releases in the Deluxe Edition series, this version of ABBA’s final album offers a DVD of archive material along with CD bonus tracks – including the demo medley “From a Twinkling Star to a Passing Angel”, the first previously-unreleased ABBA recordings since 1994.

 

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There are 2 different interpretations that can be given to the song, “The Visitors” – to do so, let us consider the following important lyrics that are the key to the meaning of this song:

 

 

“The signal’s sounding once again and someone tries the doorknob
None of my friends would be so stupidly impatient
And they don’t dare to come here
Anymore now

But how I loved our secret meetings
We talked and talked in quiet voices
Smiling…”

 

 

It is possible that the protagonist of the song is a woman whose job is to work as a ‘mole’/a spy for her employer – the British Intelligence Service, the Federal Bureau of Intelligence or the Central Intelligence Agency. She inadvertently falls in love with the man from whom she is forced to steal state secrets, as per her job instructions. When the man catches her red-handed in the act of stealing these secrets, the woman is forced to shoot him dead, against her better judgment. Now she has become a criminal-on-the-run and her name is on the front page of all the newspapers as a ‘wanted’ criminal – to the extent that prize money is being offered to the person who helps in apprehending this dangerous woman. It is not surprising that her friends have abandoned her to the winds and the stormy sea – she is now a woman-on-the-run, alone and more than a little afraid of the consequences. She knows that Death is stalking her and that she has only a few hours left to live before she dies a horrible death herself. She is terrified and panic-stricken when she sees the door-knob move of its own accord; the police and the law have finally caught up with her. She has been expecting these visitors since some time now and yet she suffers an acute anxiety attack. The time to bear the consequences of her actions has come ‘knocking’ at her door. She feels cornered and frightened as if she has just stepped into a dead-end alley. The Visitors are bound to catch her this time and they’ll be rewarded with her death – this time she is very sure that there is no escape from the Visitors.

 

 

The second explanation is even more ominous than the first – it is in connection with the same lines – mentioned above – that are the key to the hidden meaning of the song.

 

 

A woman is madly in love with the man of whom she can think no wrong. Her lover, however, turns out to be a debaucherous scoundrel and philanderer and he wastes no time in starting to cheat on his lover – the woman. One day, the latter steps into the apartment and is disgusted and shocked beyond words to see her lover in a thoroughly compromising position with the woman who she presumed was her best friend – in fact, she catches them when they were in the midst of passionate love-making. The cheated woman flies into a rage and in a moment of senseless fury, she brutally bludgeons her lover and her ‘best friend’ to death. Now, she lives in acute fear in a haunted house and none of her friends want to visit her anymore – they have somehow come to realize that she is a cold-blooded murderess. When the door-knob turns of its own accord, she knows that the tortured souls of the dead lovers have returned as ghosts to haunt their murderer and to teach her the true meaning of intense fear before a horrible death overtakes her. The woman watches the door-knob turn and is panic-stricken and terrified beyond belief. She suffers an acute anxiety attack and her screams die in the depths of her throat long before they are uttered. The Visitors are the vengeful ghosts of the helpless victims (the two lovers) who died such a cruel death at her hands. Now that the Visitors are here, the murderess knows that revenge will be theirs for the taking.

 

 

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The Others (2001 film)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

The Others is a 2001 psychological/supernatural horror film written, directed and scored by Alejandro Amenábar, starring Nicole Kidman and Fionnula Flanagan. William Skidelsky of The Observer has suggested that it is inspired by the 1898 novella The Turn of the Screw.

 

It won eight Goya Awards, including awards for Best Film and Best Director. This was the first English-language film ever to receive the Best Film Award at the Goyas (Spain’s national film awards), without a single word of Spanish spoken in it. The Others was nominated for six Saturn Awards including Best Director and Best Writing for Amenábar and Best Performance by a Younger Actor for Alakina Mann and won three: Best Horror Film, Best Actress for Kidman and Best Supporting Actress for Fionnula Flanagan. Kidman was also nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in Drama and a BAFTA Award for Best Actress, with Amenábar being nominated for a BAFTA Award for Best Original Screenplay, a rare occurrence for a horror film.

 

 

Plot

 

 

Grace Stewart (Nicole Kidman) is a devout Roman Catholic mother who lives with her two small children in a remote country house in the British Crown Dependency of Jersey, in the immediate aftermath of World War II. The children, Anne (Alakina Mann) and Nicholas (James Bentley), have an uncommon disease, xeroderma pigmentosum, characterized by photosensitivity, so their lives are structured around a series of complex rules designed to protect them from inadvertent exposure to sunlight. The new arrival of three servants at the house — an aging nanny and servant named Mrs. Bertha Mills (Fionnula Flanagan), an elderly gardener named Mr. Edmund Tuttle (Eric Sykes), and a young mute girl named Lydia (Elaine Cassidy) — coincides with a number of odd events, and Grace begins to fear that they are not alone.

 

 

Anne draws pictures of four people: a man, a woman, a boy called Victor, and an old woman, all of whom she says she has seen in the house. A piano is heard from inside a locked room when no one is inside. Grace finds and examines a “book of the dead,” which shows mourning portraits taken in the 19th century of recently deceased corpses. Doors which Grace believes to have been closed are found mysteriously ajar. Grace tries hunting down the “intruders” with a shotgun but cannot find them. She scolds her daughter for believing in ghosts — until she hears them herself. Eventually, convincing herself that something unholy is in the house, she runs out in the fog to get the local priest to bless the house. Meanwhile, the servants, led by Mrs. Mills, are clearly up to something of their own. The gardener buries a headstone under autumn leaves, and Mrs. Mills listens faithfully to Anne’s allegations against her mother.

 

 

Outside, Grace loses herself in the heavy fog, but she miraculously discovers her husband Charles (Christopher Eccleston), who she thought had been killed in the war, and brings him back to the house. Charles is distant during the one day he spends in the house, and Mrs. Mills is heard telling Mr. Tuttle, “I do not think he knows where he is.” Grace later sees an old woman dressed up like her daughter. Grace says, “You are not my daughter!” and attacks her. However, she finds that she has actually attacked her daughter instead. Anne refuses to be near her mother afterward, while Grace swears she saw the old woman. Mrs. Mills tells Anne that she too has seen the people, but they cannot yet tell the mother because Grace will not accept what she is not ready for. Charles is stunned when Anne tells him the things her mother did to her. He says he must leave for the front and disappears again. After Charles leaves, Anne continues to see things, including Victor’s whole family and the old woman.

 

 

Grace breaks down to Mrs. Mills, who claims that “sometimes the world of the dead gets mixed up with the world of the living.” One morning, Grace wakes to the children’s screams: all of the curtains in the house have disappeared, as Anne had said they might. When the servants refuse to help look for them, Grace realizes that they are somehow involved. Hiding the children from the light, she banishes the servants from the house. A series of loud noises from the upper storey of the house follows this event. That night, Anne and Nicholas sneak out of the house to find their father and stumble across the hidden graves. They find that the graves belong to the servants. At the same time, Grace goes to the servants’ quarters and finds a photograph from the book of the dead and is horrified to see that it is of the three servants. The servants appear and follow after the children, who make it back into the house just as Grace emerges to hold off the servants with a shotgun.

 

 

They then say that they had died of tuberculosis more than 50 years before. The children run upstairs and hide, but are found by the strange old woman. Downstairs, the servants continue talking to Grace, telling her that the living and the dead have to learn to exist together. Upstairs, Anne and Nicholas discover the old woman is acting as a medium in a séance with Victor’s parents. It is then that they learn the truth: the real ghosts are none other than Anne, Nicholas, and their mother, who is believed to have killed them in a fit of psychosis before committing suicide. Grace loses her temper and supernaturally attacks the visitors by ripping and throwing pieces of paper that lay on the table. However, the visitors are only able to see the paper ripping of its own accord, further confirming Grace and her children are indeed the ghosts. The truth finally clear to Grace, she breaks down with the children and remembers what happened just before the arrival of their new servants.

 

 

Stricken with grief for her missing husband and increasingly frustrated by living in isolation, she went insane, smothered her children with a pillow, and then, in shock after realizing what she had done, put a rifle to her forehead and pulled the trigger. When nothing happened and upon hearing the laughter of Nicholas and Anne, Grace assumed that God had granted her family a miracle by offering them a second chance at life. Grace and the children realize that Charles is also dead, but he is not aware of it. Mrs. Mills appears and informs Grace that they will learn to get along, and sometimes won’t even notice the living people who inhabit their house. Since the children no longer have their mortal bodies, they are no longer sensitive to light, and for the first time the children freely enjoy the sunlight coming through the windows. The occupants, unable to rid the house of Grace and the children, drive away with Grace’s ghost watching from an upstairs window. The sign on the gate says the house is for sale.

 

 

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“Bulaava” (“The Calling”) is part of a Marathi (an Indian regional language) television show that I saw many, many years ago, as a child. It was an extremely frightening horror story accompanied by the most ominous of music. It effortlessly struck panic and terror in one’s heart. I will try to relate this story to you here, in this blog, to the best of my ability. It explains how people are ruthless and unscrupulous enough to use the supernatural element for gaining their own ulterior motives. So, here goes:

 

A woman finds herself in a loveless marriage with a sickly man. The latter suffers from a nervous temperament and heart disease, to top many other ailments. Unbeknownst to the husband, the woman starts having a passionate love affair with another man and the only obstacle in their path to love is the husband. The woman and her lover devise a diabolical plan to get rid of the spouse in an extremely ingenious way. The woman’s lover starts “paying repeated visits” to the man and scares the husband witless each time he does so. The husband grows more and more terrified and even more ill each time that he sees a ghostly apparition “calling out” to him. It is as if the ghost is the Grim Reaper himself, calling the husband to his death and permanent residence in the Netherworld.  As each visit from this ghost – so openly signifying Death – continues, the man gets more and more agitated and even more panic stricken, till the day comes when he dies after a massive heart attack overtakes him. The woman and her lover rejoice in their new-found freedom. One day, out of the blue, when they are relaxing on the sands of a beach, a ghostly figure is seen stalking them. We see the skeletal feet of the dead husband and know that this time, the ghost is for real and that he will not leave till he has fed on the blood of his wife and her doomed lover. What started out as an evil prank badly backfires against the two devious conspirators.

 

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The Paranormal

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

Paranormal is a general term (coined c. 1915–1920) that designates experiences that lie outside “the range of normal experience or scientific explanation” or that indicates phenomena understood to be outside of science’s current ability to explain or measure. Paranormal phenomena are distinct from certain hypothetical entities, such asdark matter and dark energy, only insofar as paranormal phenomena are inconsistent with the world as already understood through empirical observation coupled with scientific methodology.

 

Thousands of stories relating to paranormal phenomena are found in popular culture, folklore, and the recollections of individual subjects. In contrast, the scientific community, as referenced in statements made by organizations such as the United States National Science Foundation, maintains that scientific evidence does not support a variety of beliefs that have been characterized as paranormal.

 

Paranormal subjects

 

On the classification of paranormal subjects, Terence Hines in his book Pseudoscience and the Paranormal (2003) wrote:

 

The paranormal can best be thought of as a subset of pseudoscience. What sets the paranormal apart from other pseudosciences is a reliance on explanations for alleged phenomena that are well outside the bounds of established science. Thus, paranormal phenomena include extrasensory perception (ESP), telekinesis, ghosts, poltergeists, life after death, reincarnation, faith healing, human auras, and so forth. The explanations for these allied phenomena are phrased in vague terms of “psychic forces,” “human energy fields,” and so on. This is in contrast to many pseudoscientific explanations for other nonparanormal phenomena, which, although very bad science, are still couched in acceptable scientific terms.

 

The most notable paranormal beliefs include those that pertain to ghosts, extraterrestrial life, unidentified flying objects and cryptids.

Ghosts and other spiritual entities

A ghost is a manifestation of the spirit or soul of a person. Alternative theories expand on that idea and include belief in the ghosts of deceased animals. Sometimes the term “ghost” is used synonymously with any spirit or demon, however in popular usage the term typically refers to a deceased person’s spirit.

 

The belief in ghosts as souls of the departed is closely tied to the concept of animism, an ancient belief which attributed souls to everything in nature. As the 19th-century anthropologist George Frazer explained in his classic work, The Golden Bough, souls were seen as the creature within that animated the body. Although the human soul was sometimes symbolically or literally depicted in ancient cultures as a bird or other animal, it was widely held that the soul was an exact reproduction of the body in every feature, even down to clothing the person wore. This is depicted in artwork from various ancient cultures, including such works as the Egyptian Book of the Dead, which shows deceased people in the afterlife appearing much as they did before death, including the style of dress.

 

A widespread belief concerning ghosts is that they are composed of a misty, airy, or subtle material. Anthropologists speculate that this may also stem from early beliefs that ghosts were the person within the person, most noticeable in ancient cultures as a person’s breath, which upon exhaling in colder climates appears visibly as a white mist. This belief may have also fostered the metaphorical meaning of “breath” in certain languages, such as the Latin spiritus and the Greek pneuma, which by analogy became extended to mean the soul. In the Bible, God is depicted as animating Adam with a breath.

 

Numerous theories have been proposed by scientists to provide normal explanations for ghost sightings.^[15] Although the evidence for ghosts is largely anecdotal, the belief in ghosts throughout history has remained widespread and persistent.

Extraterrestrial life and UFOs

 

The possibility of extraterrestrial life is not, by itself, a paranormal subject. Many scientists are actively engaged in the search for unicellular life within the solar system, carrying out studies on the surface of Mars and examining meteors that have fallen to Earth. Projects such as SETI are conducting an astronomical search for radio activity that would show evidence of intelligent life outside the solar system. Scientific theories of how life developed on Earth allow for the possibility that life developed on other planets as well. The paranormal aspect of extraterrestrial life centers largely around the belief in unidentified flying objects and the phenomena said to be associated with them.

 

Early in the history of UFO culture, believers divided themselves into two camps. The first held a rather conservative view of the phenomena, interpreting them as unexplained occurrences that merited serious study. They began calling themselves “ufologists” in the 1950s and felt that logical analysis of sighting reports would validate the notion of extraterrestrial visitation.

 

The second camp consisted of individuals who coupled ideas of extraterrestrial visitation with beliefs from existing quasi-religious movements. These individuals typically were enthusiasts of occultism and the paranormal. Many had backgrounds as active Theosophists, Spiritualists, or were followers of other esoteric doctrines. In contemporary times, many of these beliefs have coalesced into New Age spiritual movements.

 

Both secular and spiritual believers describe UFOs as having abilities beyond what are considered possible according to known aerodynamic constraints and physical laws. The transitory events surrounding many UFO sightings also limits the opportunity for repeat testing required by the scientific method. Acceptance of UFO theories by the larger scientific community is further hindered by the many possible hoaxes associated with UFO culture.

Cryptids

 

A cryptid is an animal whose existence is not confirmed by science or an animal that is considered extinct. The study of these creatures is known as cryptozoology. Those that study the existence of cryptids are called cryptozoologists. Claims of cryptid sightings have occurred and been documented for centuries, and there are hundreds of distinct cryptids thought to be in existence today. Some of the more popular cryptids include Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, Yeti, living non-bird dinosaurs, Mothman, the Jersey Devil, dragons, unicorns and werewolves.

 

Paranormal research

 

Approaching the paranormal from a research perspective is often difficult because of the lack of acceptable physical evidence from most of the purported phenomena. By definition, the paranormal does not conform to conventional expectations of nature. Therefore, a phenomenon cannot be confirmed as paranormal using the scientific method because, if it could be, it would no longer fit the definition. (However, confirmation would result in the phenomenon being reclassified as part of science.) Despite this problem, studies on the paranormal are periodically conducted by researchers from various disciplines. Some researchers simply study the beliefs in the paranormal regardless of whether the phenomena are considered to objectively exist. This section deals with various approaches to the paranormal: anecdotal, experimental, and participant-observer approaches and the skeptical investigation approach.

 

Skeptical scientific investigation

 

Scientific skeptics advocate critical investigation of claims of paranormal phenomena: applying the scientific method to reach a rational, scientific explanation of the phenomena to account for the paranormal claims, taking into account that alleged paranormal abilities and occurrences are sometimes hoaxes or misinterpretations of natural phenomena. A way of summarizing this method is by the application of Occam’s razor, which suggests that the simpler solution is usually the correct one. The standard scientific models give the explanation that what appears to be paranormal phenomena is usually a misinterpretation, misunderstanding, or anomalous variation of natural phenomena, rather than an actual paranormal phenomenon.

 

The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, formerly the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), is an organization that aims to publicize the scientific, skeptical approach. It carries out investigations aimed at understanding paranormal reports in terms of scientific understanding, and publishes its results in its journal, the Skeptical Inquirer.

 

Richard Wiseman, of The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, draws attention to possible alternative explanations for perceived paranormal activity in his article, The Haunted Brain. While he recognizes that approximately 15% of people believe they have experienced an encounter with a ghost, he reports that only 1% report seeing a full-fledged ghost while the rest report strange sensory stimuli, such as seeing fleeting shadows or wisps of smoke, or the sensation of hearing footsteps or feeling a presence. Wiseman makes the claim that, rather than experiencing paranormal activity, it is activity within our own brains that creates these strange sensations. Although it was initially proposed by Michael Persinger that ghostly experiences could be replicated by stimulating the brain with weak magnetic fields, this theory was later thrown out by research led by Swedish psychologist, Pehr Granqvist. Upon attempting to replicate the research by Persinger, Granqvist and his team determined that the paranormal sensations experienced by Persinger’s subjects were merely the result of suggestion, and that brain stimulation with magnetic fields did not result in ghostly experiences. However, OxfordUniversity psychologist Justin Barrett has proposed a theory to explain sensations of paranormal activity. Barrett claims that ‘agency’—being able to figure out why people do what they do—is so important in everyday life, that it is natural for our brains to work too hard at it, thereby detecting human or ghost-like behaviour in everyday meaningless stimuli. This article in the Skeptical Inquirer suggests that paranormal sensations are not the result of spirits visiting the Earth. Instead, it is the workings inside our brains causing us to attribute meaningless stimuli to ghostly activity.

 

Former stage magician James Randi is a well-known investigator of paranormal claims. As an investigator with a background in illusion, Randi feels that the simplest explanation for those claiming paranormal abilities is often trickery, illustrated by demonstrating that the spoon bending abilities of psychic Uri Geller can easily be duplicated by trained stage magicians.^[26] He is also the founder of the James Randi Educational Foundation and its million dollar challenge offering a prize of US $1,000,000 to anyone who can demonstrate evidence of any paranormal, supernatural or occult power or event, under test conditions agreed to by both parties.Despite many declarations of supernatural ability, this prize remains unclaimed.