I admit it, this stuff fascinates me. I have always wondered how people can become so brainwashed as to join and live in cults for years. I mean, it has obviously all got to do with the original grooming and promises, the promised enlightenment, and the reading of one's weaknesses and the preying upon them. Let's be honest, if you were told upfront what it is all about, you would run a mile. Can you imagine a first-up, honest introduction to Scientology? Finally there’s a discussion of the 1970s fascination with the paranormal. Everything from Ancient Aliens and UFOs (take a bow Erich Von Daniken) to Uri Geller, Nessie, The Bermuda Triangle, hauntings and how this was all taken far too seriously by the media. I told you it was a strange decade. In the tradition of Unorthodox by Deborah Feldman, Escape by Carolyn Jessop, and Troublemaker by Leah Remini The book begins by looking at children’s television dramas, starting with the ITV serial Noah’s Castle, which dealt with food shortages and society breaking down in the face of civil unrest. Though adapted from a 70s novel, this was broadcast in the 80s, as if to mark the idea – at the start of the decade – that the discord in the world was here and not going away. Serials like The Tripods and The Knights of God dealt with young heroes fighting against controlling totalitarian regimes, showing that this has been a theme in young adult fiction for longer than commonly assumed. Sarah Edmondson was in the NXIVM cult for 12 years before she paid attention to all the red flags. For much of the book, she's explaining the teachings of the cult...many that actually make sense and sound like self-help learnings. I wonder if writing the book this way is her way to show HOW she fell for the BS. It wasn't until she was branded in a secret, nude, blind-folded, women-only darkened ceremony that she "woke up" and started working to get out.

The fact that she was responsible for bringing in hundreds of members and hundreds of thousands of dollars makes her seem even less easy to relate to. She knew exactly what she was doing, and somehow thought nothing of taking money from people for unintelligent courses that she questioned the value of. None of it makes any sense. A normal person with thinking skills would have seen the organization's fraud from the start. It was merely a money-making scheme that she benefited from as she work her way up. Like Amway or Mary Kay, only without the products. Pirating from all sorts of existing philosophies including Scientology, The Four Agreements, Dianetics, the martial arts system of growth, and ultimately components of Hinduism and the Klu Klux Klan, Keith Raniere developed a complex university of human potential. Most of the concepts are actually pretty stellar ideas—credit to the people who originally devised them—and had NXIVM continued in a direction for good, it could have done some pretty great things, much like Hitler, but we all know how that story ends. TV takes up nearly half the book, such is the rich vein of brilliance to be mined. Because it wasn’t only kid’s TV that put the willies up the nation, adults were treated to such downbeat fare as Callan, Play For Today, Gangsters and all those peculiarly British dystopias such as Doomwatch, Survivors and Quatermass. No wonder it was a troubled decade. We were basically being told the future was rubbish! But in amongst all this there was some gloriously low budget, but highly imaginative, prime time Sci-Fi to be had as well. UFO, Space 1999 and Blake’s 7 to name but a few. Plus there’s a whole section devoted to Doctor Who (of course!) The toys and games section is an interesting curio since many survived in one form or another into the 80's and the sweets section is quite interesting too. I distinctively remember the candy cigarettes with the red tip to mirror a real cigarette. And yes, us kids did pretend to smoke them, preparing for adult hood. From the very start Edmondson seems emotionally needy and mentally unstable. Leaders of the Nexium group play on these issues and slowly pull her into the organization's crazy Scientology-like system of self-esteem mixed with abuse. The author calls the group a "cult" but it's not by normal definition--they didn't force her to stay in it and she freely hopped planes regularly to fly across country to attend ridiculous seminars. The leaders would guilt-trip her and she would buy into it. Once or twice might make you feel some sympathy--but all the time over a period of twelve years? She has to shoulder a lot of the blame.From BookTok sensation Emily McIntire comes a dark and delicious fractured fairy tale reimagining of The Lion King.

As an aside I recently introduced my daughter to 1970's Worzel Gummidge and she LOVED it, but it was strange viewing the show through a modern lens. Worzel's awakening is more akin to a Fulci zombie film, Aunt Sally, the Crowman and other scarecrows are remarkably cruel and barbaric, the children are abandoned by an alcoholic largely absent father, Babs Windsor as Saucy Nancy is remarkably cheeky 70's smut, Worzel's head removing is terrifying and of course Worzel's kindly threatening of Aunt Sally plays domestic abuse for laughs - all this in a hilarious daytime TV show for kids) Nostalgia seems to define and dictate our present culture, perhaps as it never has before, in ways undreamt-of as recently as a decade ago. Ever since our ability to record, edit and re-share the visual and sonic textures of our common (and sometimes uncommon) cultural experience became a viable option to those outside the entertainment industry, people (largely, it has to be said, bespectacled introverts with testicles and optional BO) have been doing so. First by exchanging physical objects with one another in the playground: physical objects like last night’s John Peel Show or that (“Honest to God it IS!”) snuff movie we got a loan of off our dodgy cousin in the next school along. Recorded onto magnetic tape and somehow both comically bulky to the eyes of today’s Netflix-and-Spotify-reared generation and simultaneously fragile, flimsy, as delicate as a butterfly’s wing. As digital files and the internet gradually came to replace pretty much every aspect of our day-to-day entertainment and social requirements the exchange now happens invisibly, across thousands of miles of fibre-optic cabling and through the phantom miracle of wi-fi. Captive by Catherine Oxenburg (a mother’s account of rescuing her daughter from sex slavery in NXIVM) To be a child is to live in a state of fear most of the time. The fear of being lost, of being bullied, of making your parents angry, of being told off, of getting into trouble at school. This sense of dread can be amplified by the media/popular culture around them. There are the things that you know are meant to be scary, the things that are more scary than you thought they would be and the things that are scary that you didn’t think would be.

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This book was not a particularly easy read, in a large part for me due to how it was written. I found the CBC investigative journal program Uncover: Exposing NXIVM to be a much more entertaining dig into Sarah Edmondson's experience and easier to digest. I have yet to read Oxenberg's book on it all, but I am looking forward to eventually doing so. Prince Tristan Faasa was never destined for the throne. That was always his brother, Michael. The same brother responsible for both Tristan's tormented childhood and the scar that mars his face. When their father dies, Michael is set to assume the throne, and Tristan is set to steal it. The leader of a secret rebellion, Tristan will stop at nothing to end his brother's reign. But when Michael's new betrothed, Lady Sara Beatreaux arrives, Tristan finds himself in the middle of a new kind of war. The kind that begs the question of what's more important, the crown or the woman about to wear it.

You can tell this book was quite the labor of love for the two men. A lot of work went into researching, writing, and in some cases even interviewing people for the finished product. Brotherstone and Lawrence focus as much on historical information and contextualizing as they do on the scary/creepy/weird, and most every section ends with suggestions of where to go to find the particular film, board game, comic, television show, book, or whatnot should you want to experience it for yourself. Ah the 1970s. What a strange decade it was. The beige hangover to the psychedelic 1960s. Or was it? In its own way the 1970s was just as “far out” as it’s predecessor and in Scarred for Life authors Stephen Brotherstone and Dave Lawrence recall what it was like growing up in that decade surrounded by pop culture that seemingly wanted to scare the pants off you at every turn.

But other society fears – closer to home – also found their way onto the TV. The fear of unemployment and the increase of poverty are examined, with TV documentaries covering it and dramas and comedies dealing with the people experiencing it. The way that race and disability were covered began to change as well, and the book contains sections on the new wave of drama dealing with these topics; the American concept of the ‘Very Special Episode’ is also explained, where sitcoms dealt with non-funny subject matter. It certainly wasn’t enough to dampen my enjoyment. For much of the last few weeks my face has been plastered with the same silly grin it wore in the late 80s/early 90s when ‘Sapphire & Steel’ was released on VHS and I was able to revisit one of the best TV shows ever made. And ‘Scarred for Life’ has assured me that I am not alone in that opinion: not for nothing are theirs the first eyes gazing enigmatically from the cover. Although I’m reading a lot of stuff about NXIVM, this will probably be the only review I post so I’m including further reading that I am doing in case you want to embark on this little obsession with me. One of the things about the 70's was that it was absolutely a decade of boundary pushing. I've reflected on this in terms of cinema before - some of the most challenging, uncomfortable, and downright nasty films in history were made in the era. It's an era of relaxed censorship in media, of changing social attitudes to marginalised people, of social issues pushed to the forefront of popular culture. It's a decade of freedom for creative people, and yet they are experiencing a hangover of the peace and love era. In Britain at least the spectre of World War II is still remembered, and it is a decade of political and economical turmoil. What I think this led to was continual boundary pushing, and the impact of that was, that a lot of wonderful creative media was produced and aired - however, much of that would never get past a savvy media executive today. We live in an era of focus groups, of targeted advertising, of sensitivity. Parents today are hyper-sensitive to the media their children consume compared to in the past (not saying that is a good or bad thing).

The section Scarred By Public Information Films is a wonderland of innocence and injury: individual ads and films are discussed, and it’s to the authors’ credit that they can demonstrate how the hysterical and laughable nature of many of these mini-horror movies sits happily cheek-by-jowl with a very real, completely unforgettable sense of sweaty unease and existential panic: the title of one sub-chapter, Everything Kills is perfect: in the world of the PIF, a rug on a polished wooden floor could be scarier than any chainsaw. The book is studded throughout with a running roll-call of unsung heroes of British cultural life, and in this section the career of the late, great John Krish (of notorious Nationwide-bothering railway-safety film The Finishing Line, and bleak, brutal fire-prevention short Searching) gets a thorough evaluation. The chapter’s real coup is an interview with Jeff Grant, director of the authentically haunting Lonely Water, the Citizen Kane of Public Information Films. The connections he makes between the grim, fatalistic tone of his 90-second classic and the monochrome dread of Ingmar Bergman is catnip to the ageing PIF-lover.La voz y fuerza que tuvo Sarah para cuestionar y poder salir de ese agujero fue admirable y su testimonio es resistencia y resiliencia para comprender, cuestionar y aprender. Wow wow wow. What I notice most is one the curtain fell foor this Keith Raniere guy his followers. all of a sudden think nothing at all was good.It is interesting that for a lot of people when something bad happens they only see the bad. I understand that they want to say they are victims and I think they are in a way but my my my how they profited of it all as well. I do think that about Sarah Edmondson. She was so good in getting so many others to sign up for this thing which cost them a ton of money and I am sure she believed it was all so good but take some responsibility about that. Same with the filmmaker guy. I didn't know much about NXIVM until I read this book. I was surprised to learn how many men were a part of this cult, because the news coverage described it as a sex cult with famous actresses involved. More information is available now, including the documentary, "The Vow" (at this point I've only seen the first episode). Not only has there never before been a society so obsessed with the cultural artifacts of its immediate past, but there has never before been a society that is able to access the immediate past so easily and so copiously.”