Speculative Fiction and Sudden Moons

Cardinal air: speculation, madness, atmospheric strangeness.

I have written elsewhere about weird landscapes.

One of the aspects of these weird landscapes is the intervention of a sudden moon; a colourful orb that doesn't belong and which makes the landscape feel alien.

I recently played the folk horror adventure game Hob’s Barrow which uses this device.

The rational archaeologist protagonist of the game spends some time exploring a sleepy village, only to discover an old horror waiting for her.

Much of the transformation of the game from mundane to numinous is achieved through the intervention of a sudden moon in cosmic magenta which changes the landscape entirely.

In Rachel Rose’s film ‘Enclosure’ she uses a black orb in otherwise realist scenes to alienate the viewer and make the landscape strange.

Marley Marius writes that “[o]ne of the film’s most striking visual flourishes a large, dark orb seen hovering amid the clouds deals in another kind of magical thinking. During the editing process, as Rose worked on color-correcting the sky. The sublime, for many people, was literally located up above, so why not give it shape there? Inspired by the selections from Yale, the painted works that Rose created for the Gladstone show go on to imagine how that orb would alter the colors and textures of the landscape.”

Museum of the Moon creates unusual installations by placing an enormous model of the moon in unexpected locations, changing their atmospheres entirely.

In ‘Enclosure’ the black orb is not explained but it changes the landscape and skyline.

What might happen to your creative project if you played around with the intervention of a sudden moon?