16 Maps of Hell*: The Unraveling of Hollywood Superculture

by Jasun Horsley, Michelle Horsley (Images)

What if we have been initiated into secret sorcery practices without our knowledge and become assets of a Hollywood supercult(ure)?

"The real Humphrey Bogart and the real James Cagney are actors — I mean the ones you know. The real ones, they died in here. In other words, we die so you guys can play act us. We got to be the bad guys so you guys can be the good guys. But in reality we know that you're not the good guys, that you guys are worse than we are."
—Charles Manson

"Roman [Polanski] is a great guy, but he's also a sociopath."
—Polish producer quoted by Peter Bart

Polanski "has the assurance of all great imposers ... the ability not only to impose one's will on others ... but to dictate the conditions — social, moral, sexual, political — within which one can operate with maximum freedom."
—Kenneth Tynan

This art of imposing is central to a dark, ancient sorcery tradition of aggrandizement that 16 Maps of Hell locates at the heart of the Hollywood superculture. From the earliest silent images of terrified women tied to train tracks, Hitchcock's injunction to "torture the women" (and terrorize the children) is the arcane tradition behind the art and science of motion pictures. By "delivering shocks" and triggering the dissociative mechanism in the terrorized audience psyche, we are lured into a forgetting chamber of artificial realities, where our psychic energy can be harvested for the furnishing of fake worlds and the feeding of false masters.

"Anything Jasun Horsley writes compels me to an uncanny degree; the stakes feel enormous. He exemplifies a mind grappling to the very edge of itself and to the edge of collective human experience simultaneously. Language, in his hands, seems pressured into use as a spacecraft into unknown territory."
—Jonathan Lethem, author of
Chronic City and The Arrest

Genres: Nonfiction

592 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2020

About the author

Jasun Horsley is an author of several books on popular culture, psychology, and high strangeness. He is a transmedia storyteller, independent scholar, and existential detective. He lives and farms in Spain.

Artist’s Statement:

Books and things (the good ones) are like half-drawn maps of independent explorations into undiscovered lands. But to map the unknown means that first you have to get lost.

I seem to have been born that way: lost, with a question mark over my head. Creativity has been a way to fathom my own place in existence—the idea of writing for an audience is one I have always had difficulty with. Yet creative expression is like a two-way bridge between the inside and the outside, and between the one and the many.

Writing (fiction or nonfiction, there’s no difference) is an experiment in identity construction and deconstruction. It’s a way to take myself apart and see what I am made of, to have a meaningful dialogue with my unconscious, and, over time, to isolate and magnify the voice of my essential Self, to give it body—a body of evidence that is also (almost incidentally) a body of work.

The dialogue so far has been characterized by my fascination for mainstream “pop” culture (especially movies), on the one hand, and for high strangeness (political conspiracies, paranormal phenomena, Ufos, autism, and the like), on the other.

The map I am ending up with is of this no man’s land, this mysterious area of overlap between the mainstream and the margins, the inside and the outside, the seen and the unseen.

Reviews

[William EightFingers · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating, fascinating...... His insights, research, and the juxtapositions/paradoxes that unfold in his worldview are unique. The timing of this book's release as we watch the superculture spin out of control and fragment before our eyes daily(Legacy media, access media, Hollywood train derailment.) Dark Jasun takes us on a transparent mapping of his journey through para-social interactions, fantasies, dreams within dreams, and celluloid illusions through Cinema on a Saturday afternoon walk-through Hell. His sketch of the exit reminded me of a Hitchcock/Polansky/David Lynch film where the audience is being transitioned into another layer of a trap(the third Matrix.). His fascination and love of Cinema are on a Tarantino level, possibly exceeding due to his depth and thought-provoking style. This is a must-read for any "true blue" cinephile and/or seeker of gnosis.

[Brian Moriarty · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hollywood is murky place. Jasun Horsely goes into the barely known nooks and crannies of some of the influential the players involved. As someone who spent a great part of my life adoring all that Hollywood offered, I feel that this book is an appropriate exorcism from the manufactured propaganda it offers.