SACER by Nicola Masciandaro

SACER Reviews

• 
  Ştefan Tiron

  I long suspected that holding in my hands and reading SACER on paper will pull me out of the tasteless weightless touch screen ebook electronic ink stupor.
  Probably no there's better way to end a year that has seen an original remake of Argento's Suspiria than getting your hands on Nicola's book.
  On my part this will be a completly futile attempt at reviewing this welcome & high frame rate parchment, still, in its futility I find Goodreads penitence an alluring prospect.
  SACER is a recent 'closet screenplay' by Nicola Masciandaro, a book open to the mystical twitch provoked by 360° turning heads, televised beheadings and sacred cephalophore lore.
  It is a most perplexing and tasty morsel from this year's scented pulpy cadaver of dead trees books that speak in tongues audible to the horror buff (even better: italo-horror aficionados) as well as to the spiritual athletes of the late night social media covenant or cenobitic otaku VR /gamer - orientation.
  I imagine SACER is awaiting to be indexed, kept under strict oath and surveillance in certain damp corridor at Vatican's Library right next to the hidden part dedicated to a large and growing Vatican mediateque. It's all part of a cinemystical wunderkammer full of techno-possessed devices and apparatuses that comprise (amongst others) in ascending or descending order: medical eye grafts that allow you to see the dead ones just with the corner of the eye, killer VHS tapes that annul their viewers, movies that cannot be unwatched and LCD screens where characters suddenly turn around & speak back to you.
  The central frisson of the SACER ebbs and flows around the doomed cult horror movie FORSAKEN, its actors, missing director and martyr fandom.
  The dedication of this book to Elias & Nadja Merhige should provide a swift warning that our very soul might be going to plunge, retract and stretch on the altar of the big screen. SACER happens in a time when retinal surfaces have been thoroughly rendered opaque, when starry cataracts of smoky mirrors are constantly drenched in headless yota peta bytes, when flickering Insta-Psyicones, snaking Youtube threads and memetic rivulets start forming Turin shrouds. 70s supernatural horror movies such as Zombie, Omen, The Exorcist 2, Suspiria, Don't Look Now get projected on the same midnight circuit shared by Cioran & Bataille with the (dead) Pope in the front row. Eugene Thacker (From the Dust of this Planet, Starry Speculative Corpse, Tentacles Longer Than Night) once pondered what would be the dearest midnight movies that might satisfy various famous scholastics and patristic scholars. What would the best off grindhouse to satisfy a Tommaso d'Aquino, Origen, or Athanasius, or Maximus the Confessor? Probably a homily of Forsaken the movie would feature on many such lists.
  The unnatural & supernatural permeate SACER repurposing of media theory & cinematic studies, upgrading pulp imaginings to neurocinema and endgame level. It's high time for us to find out more about obscure pseudocide forums & why the 'social media gone memento mori'.
  Masciandaro Nicola is able to conjure all this and more.
• 
  Silas

  I will start off by saying this is entirely personal preference. While I enjoyed the book, I feel like it could've been more interesting if it were written as a novel. It's been a week since I finished Sacer and I can't stop thinking about the disappointment I felt emotionally while and after reading it. It's a good book, really! I greatly enjoyed the setting and the visualization, I just feel like it could've accomplished greater things if it were written in a different format.
• 
  Brian Shrubar

  Absolutely amazing. Let your imagination fill in blank matter
• 
  travis sun

  Fine playwriting by professor whim.
• 
  Michael Greer

  I'm wondering about the image on page 173, Baphomet's Meteor/Pierre Barbet.
• 
  L

  It's been close to five month since I finished this and my mind's eye keeps on forgetting that it wasn't an actual film.
• 
  RJ Hanson

  a truly interesting book, which uses its form to deepen its ideas. sacrifice is the crux of the novel, allowing it to explore occult ideas that are difficult to grasp. while not succeeding in every level, this is surely a book i will spend time turning over
• 
  s

  let me just say i would not have bought this book if i knew it was written by one of the perpetrators of the brief, c. 2014 black metal academia wave !
• 
  Black Glove

  I got into this the more I progressed through it. The quick-flow nature of the "closet screenplay" feels both familiar and perplexing in equal measure. More horror-movie script than literature, some of the confab is at times predictable, but the synthesis of the humdrum with the phantastical worked in the end. The large array of characters had me somewhat confused in places. Overall, though, an effective piece of dark entertainment, once I got into it. I liked the endnotes & images - gave me something to ponder.