This story is one my best friend and I always end up telling to everyone we ever meet because we’ve legit been traumatized by it. I’ve told the Werewolf On The Cliff tale to pretty much every person I know IRL.
So, as some of you know, my best friend and I are idiots and obsessed with magic and the paranormal. We very often call each other on the evenings or at night to be like “hey, wanna go on an adventure and try to capture a ghost on camera in this creepy-supposed-to-be-haunted famous mansion?” or “hey, I made a list of all the creepy trails in the woods and the countryside around, wanna go there at 1am and see what happens?” or “hey, wanna drive up the hill to the corn field and watch the stars, see if we can see a UFO?” etc etc.
Anyway, we’ve seen a lot of weird shit and a lot of terrifying shit, but THAT ONE NIGHT ON THE CLIFF… that was something else.
As we do, my best friend and I called each other and decided to have a mini road-trip around the surrounding region at night on the summer of 2013. We drove around filming random stuff and having a fun time spooking each other like the idiots we are (the video is still on my laptop somewhere). Then around 1am we decided to go up a cliff in a city by the coast we often go to because it’s pretty. It was very windy and dark so we took our flashlights and I stopped recording because the wind was messing up the audio (and because i didn’t trust myself not to accidentally drop my camera down the cliff). It’s a populated area, there’s buildings a few meters away, a lighthouse, old bunkers from WWII, and apparently a weird facility we never knew about. We first saw the “Private Propriety” and “DANGER do not enter” signs leading down the cliff after a few minutes up there, so we didn’t go that way because we aren’t that stupid. My best friend looked up and said “oh that’s weird, the night’s super dark but it’s a full moon” and indeed the moon was full and gigantic but the light wasn’t that bright. Knowing my crippling (and weirdass) Werewolf phobia, he joked about werewolves being out that night and I whacked him on the shoulder to make him shut up.
We went to the end of the cliff and directed our flashlights down to check if we could see the waves crashing down, but it was too dark and all I saw instead were glowing red eyes reflecting my light back at me. It was a few meters back down, the cliff wasn’t a sharp drop and had a slight tilt to it so it’s not like something was climbing up the side. It was just there. I called to my best friend and told him to look down, asked if he saw what I was seeing. He did. The eyes kept looking at me, slightly moving. We thought it was a cat or maybe a fox, startled by the light and scared to move too much, until it swiftly disappeared to the right. We didn’t think much of it, like I said, a bit spooked but convinced it was a cat, even if the eyes seemed a bit big and too red.
Not even a full minute passed until my best friend shakily grabbed my arm and said “someone else is here”. I looked up, and at our right, up the cliff at least 30 meters (98 feet) away from us, I saw a very tall humanoid figure appear from behind some shadows. “Apparently we aren’t the only ones going for a walk at 1:30am in this area” I thought, until my best friend (who has a much better vision than me, that’s worth mentioning, i’m fucking blind y’all) said “I think it’s coming towards us”. And at that moment the figure started fucking running EXTREMELY FAST in our direction, and we didn’t think twice before running away back to the car. My best friend looked behind him while running and the figure was still running towards us, which.. if you’re a well balanced human or a human at all, you probably wouldn’t do to people already screaming and running away from you. Its running was messy and weird.
Still screaming like babies, we made it into the car and of course he fumbled to find his keys while I was yelling “THIS IS HOW THEY GET US IN HORROR MOVIES, THE CAR NOT STARTING AND THEN THEY JUST JUMP ON THE WINDOWS OUT OF NOWHERE”, I still restarted the camera around that time. I still looked up to see where the figure was right as my best friend managed to start the car and drive away. It stopped, still in the shadows, so much closer and still impossibly tall. (edit: rewatching the videos, it apparently disappeared just like that and I didn’t look to check). We just drove back down the city. We puzzled every pieces of what had just happened together and like normal, well-adjusted adults, we came to the conclusion that a werewolf just chased us. Because fuck logic and also, full-moon and glowing red eyes, duh.
And that’s the story of how we almost got murdered and totally deserved it for being idiots. A week later we walked through an entire forest at night. We’ll never learn.
Okay, found the videos. Again, it’s only the before and after and there’s not much to see. I had to DL a shitty editing program real quick so because it’s the trial version there’s a shitty banner on it. I did what I could and it’s not much but for everyone who asked, there you go!
Remember in 1993 when Jurassic Park was like…the end all, be all of special effects?
not gonna lie that still looks intimately real
I’m still somewhat convinced that someone sold their soul to create the special effects in Jurassic Park because that shit is over 20 years old and it still really, really holds up, better than the stuff in a lot of current movies, even.
Fucking witchcraft, man.
fucking look at this shit though
Literally see this post flying around with a few different responses added to the bottom each time so I’ll say it for this one myself:
THEY ACTUALLY BUILT A GIANT MASSIVELY DETAILED FUCKING ANIMATRONIC T-REX FOR ALL OF THIS THAT’S WHY THE EFFECTS ARE SO GOOD. CAUSE IT AIN’T CGI. AND IT AIN’T GUY IN A COSTUME. IT’S A BIG FUCKING ROBOT DINOSAUR. AND EVERY PART IS DESIGNED TO MOVE. IT COST LIKE HALF THE BUDGET OF THE FILM.
amazing
And they had the film it in small increments, especially in the outdoor scenes, because the rain fall kept soaking into the ‘skin’ of the rex and would slow down and mess up its movements. So they would stop filming and have a crew out there drying off this massive, fake dinosaur, and then they’d start filming again until it was too wet. Repeat until the end of the scene.
They used animatronics and detailed costumes for most if not all of the dinosaurs in the first movie.
The triceratops for instance, was also animatronic.
One of my favorite anecdotes I’ve read on tumblr is how the t-rex robot from Jurassic park would malfunction while it was drying out. How did it malfunction, you might wonder?
Motherfucker randomly started moving.
So apparently if you were on the jp set you would sometimes hear people screaming bloody murder even though they were all well aware that it was a giant animatronic puppet and wouldn’t actually, you know, eat them.
Did not know this, had to reblog for awesome movie history insights.
So, I knew about the animatronics bit but I did not know the raptors were guys in suits and the malfunctioning t-rex sounds terrifying.
And i just googled malfunctioning t-rexand was not disappointed. Apparently in order to put the skin on over the steel frame a guy had to crawl inside thet-rex while it was turned on and glue the skin down. And if somebody turned the t-rex off or the power went out the guy in the t-rex stood a very real chance of getting mangled and killed by the hydraulics.
So of course, the power goes out.
And this guy is still in there gluing the skin down.
Apparently the way to survive getting sheered to death by huge sheets of metal while you’re inside a giant t-rex robot is to curl into a ball and hope for the best.
And this guy hoped for the best and got it.
Some other people on stage pried open the t-rex jaws and glue guy crawled out of its mouth and was totally okay.
This is getting better and better.
I think they only had like 6 minutes of CGI
I’m just waiting for the T-Rex to come to life and leave its stand.
The thing about this that gets my special effects nerd going is the fact that EVERY single dinosaur was sculpted by artists based on the current existent archeological evidence of the time.
Even better than that, this movie ADVANCED our best understanding of dinosaurs at the time. They were blowing out a budget bigger than anything Hollywood had ever seen, and along with employing almost the last hurrah of incredible physical FX, they had a bank of those newfangled digital SFX computers. Nobody’d ever really created convincing dinosaurs in a movie before. It’d all been stop-motion animation, and even when the models were exquisitely crafted, you could just tell there was something OFF about them. Spielberg wanted THE BEST DINOSAURS EVER, and he figured on using the cutting edge of digital modeling and animation technology to build them for him.
So they got hold of some of the best paleontologists they could find and said, “We want you guys to take this tech that your labs could pretty much never afford and use it to build us the most realistic, accurate dinosaur models the world has ever seen.”
The paleontologists knew an opportunity when it bit them in the ass. They plugged in everything they knew about dinosaurs, all the skeletons and their best guesses about soft tissue and all that. And when they’d created those dinosaur models, they had the computer start moving them as they realistically would with anatomy like that. One guy took a look at those walking t-rexes and velociraptors (really utahraptors, but whatevs, fam), and he said, “Wait a minute, I’ve seen movement like that before.”
He called up film of a chicken walking. Everyone in the room said, “Holy shit.”
Prior to 1989, the idea that birds were descended from dinosaurs existed–we knew about archaeopteryx, we knew there was some minor connection there–but the idea that DINOSAURS LIVE IN THE MODERN WORLD AND THEY ARE CALLED BIRDS was not pre-eminent. Jurassic Park changed our scientific understanding of dinosaurs.
That paleontologists’d be Kevin Padian. Who is awesome.
A thoughtful discussion of writing and translation that articulates some of the joy (and challenge and struggle) in finding the right word to express meaning. As much about writing and how a story is told as about translating the Odyssey and the culture of classical studies.
Tell me about a complicated man.
Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost
when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy,
and where he went, and who he met, the pain
he suffered in the storms at sea, and how
he worked to save his life and bring his men
back home. He failed to keep them safe; poor fools,
(Hands in the air for Nick Gillard, who invented an entire fighting style and gets almost no props for it unless you’re REALLY paying attention. Also, he’s a sweetheart.)
2. you know, we have fun here, with the word “meme,” but according to meme theory, which is an actual thing pioneered by reptilian human impersonator Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, most of what we call memes are very unsuccessful memes. A meme, in the scientific sense – if one is generously disposed to consider memetics a science on any particular day – is an idea that acts like a gene. That is, it seeks to replicate itself, as many times as possible, and as faithfully as possible.
That second part is important. A gene which is not faithful in its replication mutates, sometimes rapidly, sometimes wildly. The result might be cancer or a virus or (very very very rarely) a viable evolutionary step forward, but whatever the case, it is no longer the original gene. That gene no longer exists. It could not successfully reproduce itself.
The memes we pass around on the internet are, in general, very short lived and rapidly mutating. It’s rare for any meme to survive for more than a year: in almost all cases, they appear, spread rapidly, spawn a thousand short-lived variations, and then are swiftly forgotten. They’re not funny anymore, or interesting anymore. They no longer serve any function, and so they’re left behind, a mental evolutionary dead end.
This rendition of Freddie Mercury’s immortal opera Bohemian Rhapsody is about the most goddamned amazing demonstration of a successful meme I’ve ever seen. This song is 42 years old, as of 2017. FORTY TWO YEARS OLD. And it has spread SO far, and replicated itself across the minds of millions of people SO faithfully, that a gathering of 65,000 more or less random people, with nothing in common except that they all really like it when Billie Joe Armstrong does the thing with the guitar, can reproduce it perfectly. IN PERFECT TIME. THEY KNOW THE EXACT LENGTH OF EVERY BRIDGE. THEY EVEN GET THE NONSENSE WORDS RIGHT. THEY DIVIDE THEMSELVES UP IN ORDER TO SING THE COUNTER-CHORUS.
“Yeah, Pyrrhic, lots of people know this song.”
Listen, you glassy-eyed ninny: our species’ ability to coherently pass along not just genetic information, but memetic information as well, is the reason we’re the dominant species on this planet. Language is a meme. Civilization is a collection of memes. Lots of animals can learn, but we may be the only animal that latches onto ephemera – information that doesn’t reflect any concrete reality, information with little to no immediate practical application – and then joyfully, willfully, unrelentingly repeats it and teaches it to others. Look at how wild this crowd is, because they’re singing the same song! It doesn’t DO anything. It’s not even why they showed up here today! If you sent out a letter to those same 65,000 people that said, “Please show up in this field on this day in order to sing Bohemian Rhapsody,” very few of them would have showed up. But I would be surprised to meet a single person in that crowd who joined in the singing who doesn’t remember this moment as the most amazing part of a concert they paid hundreds of dollars to see.
And they’re just sharing an idea. It’s stunning and ridiculous. Something about how our brains work make us go, “Hey!! Hey everybody!! I found this idea! It’s good! I like it! I’m going to repeat it! Do you know it too?? Repeat it with me! Let’s get EVERYBODY to know it and repeat it and then we can all have it together at the same time! It’s a good idea! I’m so excited to repeat it exactly the way I heard it, as loudly as I can, as often as possible!!”
This is how culture happens! This is how countries happen! Sometimes a persistent, infectious idea – a meme – can be dangerous or dark. But our human delight at clutching up good memes like magpies and flapping back to our flock to yell about them to everyone we know is why we as a species bothered to start doing things like “telling stories” and “writing stuff down.”
“That’s a lot of spilled ink for a Queen song, Pyrrhic.”
Steel Phoenix Studios 