The Creature With No Face

00:00:02
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
00:00:13
Speaker 2: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb.
00:00:17
Speaker 3: And I am Joe McCormick. And on today's Halloween-themed episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, we're going to be talking about creatures without faces.
00:00:26
Speaker 2: That's right. Uh... ghosts without faces, monsters without faces, whatever the case may be. This is, of course, a common enough trope in the world of monsters and ghosts and also nightmares and dreams. So we'll definitely touch on some of the pop cultural uses of this visual as we get further into the episode. But also, you know, after everything's said and done, Certainly, we want to allow listeners to write in with their favorite example of the faceless. But before we, I guess, dive into discussing specific faceless entities, probably a good time to remind ourselves exactly what a human face is. It is, of course, the largely forward-loaded array of perception organs for the human body, a thing our body points at other things. to look at them, smell them, even taste them at closer distance. Our ears, despite being on the sides of our heads, are essentially faced forward as well, both via their conical shape and the way hearing sensory data is processed in the brain.
00:01:36
Speaker 3: So the face is sort of the interaction engine. You turn the face toward things in order to interact with them in most senses. There are some exceptions, but that's like, Generally, if something is getting your attention for one reason or another, that's an orientation of the face toward it.
00:01:56
Speaker 2: Yeah, we think of like I looked at it or I, you know, we think of it very much as an eye action. But if we think of our body as this thing that's interacting with the world, then the head is the part of the thing that like is angled at whatever we're trying to perceive.
00:02:12
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:02:12
Speaker 2: On top of this, of course, our face is also a communication array that allows us to communicate a great deal of things to other human beings and to limited extent, some non-human entities as well. Like via your facial expressions, you can convey things maybe not all that well or even correctly to say household pets, primates at the zoo and so forth. And the overall system entails a number of different things. You have overt universal emotions like smiles, lowered brows, and the overall system entails also includes micro expressions that may last for half a second, but can also convey various bits of information, conversational cues, you know, the way that what our face is doing interacts with what we're saying. And then also various communication can be found in eye contact and gaze. That, of course, on top of just human speech, which is a big way that we communicate. And then again, that speech is also tweaked in ways by what the rest of our face is doing. Our face also is totally wrapped up in our idea of identity. Again, like it's hard to think of like point your face at something, you know, like, no, it's like the face is me, right? Like the popular website is the book of faces. So this idea that, you know, that our face is separate from ourselves is very difficult to process in the human mind.
00:03:42
Speaker 3: Yeah, so it's interesting to think of the face as the primary information gateway of the body in both directions. So as you were saying earlier, it's where the majority of our sensory organs are located. So you orient your face toward things when you want to gather information about that thing with the eyes or with the ears or with the mouth. But also it is the primary... informational tag for information you send out to other humans about yourself, your main identifying feature. So people can know who you are, is your face. Uh, you know, we, we primarily use faces to identify who we're talking to, to recognize somebody at a distance or up close very quickly. Uh, you know, recognizing people is very difficult if you have impairments in the part of your brain that processes faces holistically. And then also emotional information, important contextual and reaction information when people are interacting comes through as displayed on the face.
00:04:46
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:04:46
Speaker 2: And we should also point out, you know, this is not necessarily fair in all senses. Like, you know, we are not our faces. And yet this does play into the way we often read people. You know, it's rather complex. But when we encounter someone, there is that weird desire. Like we must see the face. Um, we see this in our media as well. You know, when the slasher is, is, is brought low, there is the need to unmask the slasher and reveal the face, uh, in Lucha, in, in, uh, Lucha Libre. There is the, uh, the need to see the face of the masked wrestler, be it a, uh, a Rudo or a Technico. And, um, I was just thinking, I was thinking about this just over the last like 48 hours, uh, when I've been working on this topic. Um, like I run around a track sometimes in the morning, which means people are running with me and I don't necessarily see their face. And it's weird to, to sort of, um, encounter people that I, you know, I don't know what they look like and I keep running behind them, passing them. And unless I look back, you know, I'm not going to see their face and I kind of need to see their face. Or last night I was at, um, at Netherworld, uh, haunted house here in Atlanta. And at one point they were in line to get in and there was a, like a mannequin with face, with its face obscured by hair. And I just had to part that hair to see the face. You know, it's like, what's back there? Maybe nothing. And if there's nothing, I need to see that. So we're really wired to put a lot of emphasis on the human face.
00:06:17
Speaker 3: Wait, what was back there?
00:06:19
Speaker 2: It was just a mannequin face. But I mean, it was still creepy. Like I pulled it back and it was looking right at me. So yeah, again, we're just, we're wired to to see that. We want to interact with the face.
00:06:32
Speaker 3: Wouldn't it be funny if you pulled the hair apart and it's just a butt?
00:06:36
Speaker 2: That would have been good. In fact, if someone hasn't made that already and marketed it to haunted houses and haunted attractions, then someone should get on that.
00:06:46
Speaker 3: You know, we're going to be talking about some creatures today that are not far off from that reality.
00:06:50
Speaker 2: Yeah. So other things about the face. A face is also something we put on. You know, we talk about putting on the face and presenting a certain face. In June of this year, Cal Reveley Calder wrote, What Happened to Your Face? for The New Yorker, which you can read online, pointing out that the word face derives from the Latin facies, which implies something that has been created. And we see this in the French as well. I'm going to read just a quote from this article. Quote, the cultural historian Hans Belting suggested that faces and masks were conceptually inseparable. We shouldn't think of one as real and the other as fake. One is the thing we have and the other as the thing we temporarily don. Life, he wrote, was fully, quote, a perpetuum mobili, an expressive drama in which our faces resolve into one legible position, one legible role, then resemble themselves into the next. I'm sorry, then reassemble themselves into the next. We make them up in every sense.
00:07:59
Speaker 3: So that's emphasized. I mean, I guess it's true that the face is both revealing in ways that are outside of your control. So you might want to hide your identity, but it's hard to do because people can see your face and recognize you whether you want them to or not. That's like, outside of your control. There can also be ways that sometimes you might give things away with micro expressions on your face, like feelings or thoughts that you're trying to hide. That's kind of involuntarily revealed through the face. But the other side of that is we do have some conscious control over our faces, both in terms of things we do to our faces, like applying makeup or, you know, in the modern day getting, you know, body modification or plastic surgery or anything, and also conscious control over the faces we make, the expressions that we choose to intentionally display with our faces. So it's this strange mix throughout our lives of our faces giving information away, whether we want them to or not, and then using our faces to create perceptions intentionally in the world.
00:09:04
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. Our face is constantly betraying us and also to a certain extent, perhaps deceiving others. Like the deception of the face can be overt and even harmful, but it can also just be part of our daily interactions, you know, like smile and nod when a stranger is telling you about something. Even if you're not that interested, you know, you put on a good face to receive this well-intended, you know, bit of trivia or gossip that they're sharing with you. But yeah, I want to point out one other thing from this article. The author, Reveille Calder, also quotes T.S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, a poem I think most of you are familiar with. But there's, of course, that line in the poem, there will be time, there will be time to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet. I was looking for other sources on this, and I ran across a 2026 book titled Faces, A Cultural History by the French author David Le Breton. And this is a rather interesting book. I didn't have time to really just read it cover to cover, but I was flipping around and finding things that applied to our discussion here today. And during parts of it, the author discusses the face as the anchor of human morality. and points out that to obscure the face, say with a mask, is to cut ourselves off from human morality. So I wanna read one quote from him as well here. The face embodies a morality, holds us accountable for our actions. Not having to look one another in the face creates many opportunities for transgression. The mask is not simply a tool that ensures anonymity. It reveals hidden resources, surprises, it sometimes takes over, takes possession of those who thought they were just playing a game. Changing one's face amounts to changing one's life. Freeing or temporarily distancing oneself, not without risk, from the sense of identity that once governed one's individual relationship to the world.
00:11:04
Speaker 3: I think that's really insightful. So it's not just the idea that putting on a mask is a, uh, morally significant activity because it can say hide your identity, you know, the way a bandit might put on a mask so they're not recognized before doing a crime. It actually like changes the sort of the whole way that you think about your again, the information input output gate with the world covering that up can in some ways just change the way you feel about everything you're doing and can sort of make you a different kind of being.
00:11:38
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. And I'd love, you know, if we, you know, expand this to think of the other ways of putting on the mask or putting on a face. Uh, I mean, I'm, I'm sure there are a number of different comparisons to be drawn here to, uh, to make up, you know, making oneself up, uh, for certain types of social events. Uh, would love to hear from makeup users about this particular, um, side of things. And, um, Yeah, yeah. Again, when you think about this idea that the face and the mask are interchangeable and we can't, any good way we can think about an actual physical mask, we can also think that way about the face and maybe vice versa. I think that'll be very insightful as we continue our discussion here. The author here also says, quote, it is impossible to imagine a faceless world without viewing it as a universe of chaos. And we're going to be diving into that universe of chaos a little bit as we discuss fantastic creatures, ghosts, or even masked individuals who are at least presenting the idea of a faceless entity. And I think we might continually ask ourselves, like, how do we process that? Like, what is the sense of it? How does it affect the way that we view identity in this individual universe? How does it affect the way we think about how they are viewing us? You know, is it perceiving us at all? What does it mean to not be perceived in some way? And then how does this also apply to communication? Like, it has no mouth, the faceless entity. It has no eyes. It has no nose. Maybe, maybe not concerning ears. But, you know, it's kind of cut off from human senses and maybe even human morality in a very telling way.
00:13:35
Speaker 3: So I know the main examples that we wanted to talk about in today's episode are a couple of creatures from Japanese literature and folklore. Do you want to turn to those now?
00:13:45
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. Two entities that I think are both loosely classified as yokai. It's the sort of spirit entities that are not quite like a haunting ghost and also not quite a physical monster, but somewhere in between. We've talked about yokai many times on the show before. It's an amazing world of creatures that can be, you know, endlessly amusing, but also very frightening. And also there's often a lot of historical and cultural insight to gain from particular yokai.
00:14:18
Speaker 1: Mm-hmm.
00:14:19
Speaker 2: So we have two related yokai concepts to discuss here. So there is the newpeppo. This is apparently a corruption of the slang for someone wearing too much makeup. The idea, like, someone's so made up that it doesn't look like they have a face anymore. And this emerges during the Edo period. A pale, bloated, wandering pile of hairless flesh with lumpy legs and the folds of its fat. seem to form a saggy face, but it has no head otherwise. There are lots of illustrations of this guy with the, of course, historic illustrations looking the best. I don't know, put in like pre-1960 or whatever you need to do to avoid the AI garbage these days and see some of these fabulous illustrations.
00:15:07
Speaker 3: So both of the yokai we're going to talk about here, I was reading about in a book called The Book of Yokai by the folklorist Michael Dylan Foster, who's a professor at UC Davis, writes a lot about Japanese culture. And one thing I wanted to note is that these yokai appear grouped in the section of the book called Village and City Yokai. So you get some that are very wilderness-focused or might be associated with water or with the mountains and things like that. These appear in the village and city section. I think that's kind of interesting. These are a little bit more cultured as far as yokai go. But this first creature, the nupepo, is sort of a flesh wad. I think the way you described it is good, but Foster's description is an, quote, amorphous fleshy blob with fatty folds vaguely taking the shape of eyes, nose, and mouth. So it kind of has the suggestion of a face without really having a face.
00:16:12
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:16:12
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:16:13
Speaker 2: I think that's an important point that we see this time and time again with different certainly pop cultural and horror movie ideas of the faceless. Like, is it 100 percent like a smooth surface or is there a hint of eyes or like, does it look like flesh stretched over a skeleton that has the eye holes in it, that sort of thing?
00:16:33
Speaker 3: So yeah, to picture this thing again, imagine just one big lump. You're not going to have like a separate head and body. It's one sort of egg shaped lump, a big lump of flesh with loose saggy skin suggesting the contours of a face. So the folds of the skin are going to be like eyes and a mouth. And then it's got these short stubby arms and legs, which are also covered in heaps of saggy flesh waddling or staggering around. Foster says that this creature is illustrate, despite like the disgusting description there, it is illustrated often to be kind of funny and cute.
00:17:10
Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean, he's a, he's a weird little guy, you know? Yeah. And it's my understanding. One of my sources I always turn to is a yokai attack by Hiroko Yoda and Matt Alt. Like they point out that this is not a yokai that is, some yokai are, are positioned as dangerous, but a lot, maybe even most of them are not. And this is one that's, Not really dangerous. The only dangerous thing it's going to do is scare you and maybe frighten you and then also maybe creep you out. But that's it. Yeah.
00:17:41
Speaker 3: So Foster mentions, like you said, Rob, that illustrations of this creature can be found in texts from the Edo period. But according to Foster, this yokai really experienced a renaissance in the later 20th century, probably due to the work of the folklore scholar and manga artist Mizuki Shigeru. who was responsible for consolidating a lot of disparate yokai folklore and like taking kind of different but similar stories that were going around in the oral traditions of Japan or in, you know, little isolated texts here and there, kind of consolidating them into these big creature types and making these creatures much more popular and well-known. And according to Mizuki, this yokai is a, quote, spirit of folklore. Which is funny because that almost seems like an oxymoron spirit of flesh. It's like that. But anyway, and what Mizuki says is it haunts deserted temples. So you imagine a monk traveling the roads at night needs to find a place to lay down. A lot of stories start like this. Monk finds a deserted temple, goes into the temple. It is haunted by a new pepo. So the monk takes shelter and sleeps there. If he does, he will wake up in the night and find this flesh wad stumbling around in the dark. And we don't know what it wants, but it may be, in Foster's words, quote, the flesh of a dead body walking by itself. I thought that was an interesting framing because it's not a dead body walking, but the flesh of a dead body.
00:19:19
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. Like it's just the grave flesh that has somehow accumulated into this non-human entity, this flesh spirit that just kind of wanders around. It's like something you might find wandering around in the back rooms, for those of you who are familiar with that film. It feels like some sort of a weird byproduct of the spirit and the flesh.
00:19:46
Speaker 3: So Foster also notes some linguistic overlap with the yokai that we're about to talk about, the nopera bow. He says that the word nupere and nopere both mean flat faced. And I think the way you should understand that is. Not flat as in like a perfectly flat plane in a geometric sense, but flat as in featureless or smooth. So that's what it means to not have a face in this sense. Like your face is flat because it doesn't have eyes and a nose and a mouth. Though in this case, it does have some wrinkly flesh.
00:20:20
Speaker 2: In Yokai Attack, Yoda and Alt share another story about the new Pepo. They say there's an 18th century tale that discusses one haunting... the castle or was wandering around the castle of the Shogun, uh, Tokugawa Yaosu, the founder of the Tokugawa Shogunate who lived 1543 through 1616. And according to this tale, the Shogun himself demanded the creature be removed from the premises. And, uh, so his men did that and they took it away. They released it deep into the wilderness where it couldn't trouble human settlements. And then afterwards, uh, the Shogun learns that New Pepo's flesh was said to restore youth and health to anyone who consumed it. So I think in this, it's like it's also taking this yokai and connecting it to various other traditions in Japanese and maybe even more ancient traditions in Chinese belief about various spirit fleshes like this that are maybe ghastly to behold, but have some sort of special properties.
00:21:24
Speaker 3: Yeah, so that's the new pepo. But remember, again, if you can't look it up, there you should be picturing something that does not have a separate head and body. It's just a big wad of flesh, sort of a giant face instead of a body, except it's not really a face. It's just kind of a blank flesh ball that has some feature oids that are creases in the folds of the flesh.
00:21:48
Speaker 2: Yeah, it doesn't have a face, but it doesn't have a lot of things. Yeah.
00:21:52
Speaker 3: But if you want to imagine a creature that is otherwise shaped more like a human, but simply without a face, a featureless front of the head, it's just flat skin. Then we need to move on to the next yokai, which is the no para bow.
00:22:07
Speaker 2: Now, Joe, do you want to just go ahead and read one of the more popular tellings of this story? Oh, well, we could do that. And then we can discuss what it is afterwards, because there's a. There's certain twists and turns in the story that I think are important, and maybe the best way to absorb those are just through the story itself.
00:22:27
Speaker 3: Okay, yeah, maybe we should do it that way. So one historically important Noperibo tale appeared in the Japanese ghost story collection Kaidan by the author Lafcadio Hearn. Lafcadio Hearn was a Greek-born author of Irish and Greek parentage. He was a journalist and translator who lived 1850 to 1904, and he spent many years of his life living in Japan, doing different jobs, often working as a teacher, for example, teaching English literature to Japanese university students and doing other teaching. And he published a lot of works meant for international audiences in English to introduce them to the culture of Japan. So Kaidan was a collection of Japanese ghost stories rendered and retold by Hearn. So some of them were translations of older Japanese literature. Some were his renderings of stories he had been told by Japanese people. I think one story in there, I think I've read, it was sort of an original of his. And then also this book just happened to have some essays about insect biology in it. Kind of a potpourri here. But mostly it's traditional Japanese ghost stories as rendered and retold by Hearn. And a note on pronunciation. I've heard this book in the movie based on it's sometimes called Kwaidan or Kwaidan. It is spelled often with a W in it. But my understanding is the modern Japanese pronunciation would be Kaidan. So I hope I'm saying that right.
00:24:04
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think this is probably one of the most mispronounced, certainly Japanese films ever. Because it's an important Japanese horror film, the 1964 horror anthology. But yeah, I've heard it pronounced so many different ways. And I certainly have personally contributed to the different mispronunciations for this film. But it's really good. If anyone out there hasn't seen it, I highly recommend it. I believe it's available in Criterion Edition. And it's just a spectacular, beautiful, psychedelic almost film that deserves to be seen.
00:24:40
Speaker 3: I mean, one of these days we should probably do it for an October episode of Weird House Cinema. We just didn't happen to plan it that way this year. But anyway, so I think I should note that while the story I'm about to read is often identified as a classic story of the Noparabo, the story does not use that term. So this word does not appear in the story at all. Instead, the story is called the Mugina story. And the Mugina is a type of magical shape-shifting animal, usually a badger, but sometimes a Japanese raccoon dog or a fox. Rob, I don't know if you know any other stories of Mugina.
00:25:17
Speaker 2: The Tanookis and the fox spirits are the main suspects here. And we'll get to a pretty fun cinematic example of this here in a bit.
00:25:29
Speaker 3: Okay, but here I'm just going to read the telling of Mujina from Lafcadio Hearn in Kaidan.
00:25:36
Speaker 2: So, it goes.
00:25:37
Speaker 3: On the Akasaka Road in Tokyo, there is a slope called Kinokunizaka, which means the slope of the province of Ki. I do not know why it is called the slope of the province of Ki. On one side of this slope, you see an ancient moat, deep and very wide, with high green banks rising up to some place of gardens. And on the other side of the road extend the long and lofty walls of an imperial palace. Before the era of street lamps in Jinriki-shas, this neighborhood was very lonesome after dark, and belated pedestrians would go miles out of their way rather than mount the Kinokunizaka alone after sunset. Okay, so good setup, kind of a spooky road here. But again, not like one deep in the country, not one far away. You know, we're basically, we're within civilization here. but this kind of scary road. So the story goes on. The question is, like, why were people scared to walk alone there after sunset? The story says, quote, all because of a mugina that used to walk there. The last man who saw the mugina was an old merchant of the Kyobashi quarter who died about 30 years ago. This is the story as he told it. One night at a late hour, he was hurrying up the Kinokunizaka, when he perceived a woman crouching by the moat, all alone, and weeping bitterly. Fearing that she intended to drown herself, he stopped to offer her any assistance or consolation in his power. She appeared to be a slight and graceful person, handsomely dressed, and her hair was arranged like that of a young girl of good family. And then the story is about to use a term, Ojochu. I understand that this is sort of a polite way to address a young woman that you don't know. It means something like honorable young lady. So the story goes on. Ojochu, he exclaimed, approaching her. Ojochu, do not cry like that. Tell me what the trouble is. And if there be any way to help you, I shall be glad to help you. He really meant what he said, for he was a kind man, for he's a very kind man. But she continued to weep. hiding her face from him with one of her long sleeves. Ojochu, he said again, as gently as he could. Please, please listen to me. This is no place for a young lady at night. Do not cry, I implore you. Only tell me how I may be of some help to you. Slowly she rose up, but turned her back to him, and continued to moan and sob behind her sleeve. He laid his hand lightly upon her shoulder and pleaded, Ojochu, Ojochu, Ojochu. Listen to me, just for one little moment. Ojochu, ojochu. Then that ojochu turned round and dropped her sleeve and stroked her face with her hand, and the man saw that she had no eyes or nose or mouth, and he screamed and ran away. Oh, I love that detail. She turns and she strokes her face with her hand as he sees there is no face.
00:28:41
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is a detail that apparently is very important to these stories. And sometimes I think it's kind of like the hand erasing the face, or it's implied as such. Other times this flourish isn't included. Sometimes it's just like, oh, the face is blank. But I think it goes both ways.
00:28:58
Speaker 3: Yeah, so it's like she could be, she wipes the face away or strokes the featureless face.
00:29:03
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah.
00:29:05
Speaker 3: So anyway, the story goes on. Up Kinokunizaka he ran and ran, and all was black and empty before him. On and on he ran, never daring to look back, and at last he saw a lantern so far away that it had looked like the gleam of a firefly, and he made for it. It proved to be only the lantern of an itinerant soba seller, so this is like a noodle shop, a soba seller who had set down his stand by the roadside and but any light and any human companionship was good after that experience, and he flung himself down at the feet of the old man. Soba seller, crying out,' Ah!
00:29:41
Speaker 2: Ah!
00:29:42
Speaker 3: Ah!'' Corey! Corey!' roughly exclaimed the Soba man.' Here, what is the matter with you? Anybody hurt you?'' No, nobody hurt me,' panted the other.' Only—'' Ah!
00:29:53
Speaker 1: Ah!
00:29:53
Speaker 3: Only scared you?' queried the peddler, unsympathetically.' Robbers?' Not robbers, not robbers, gasped the terrified man. I saw, I saw a woman by the moat, and she showed me. Ah, I cannot tell you what she showed me. Was it anything like this that she showed you, cried the Soba man, stroking his own face, which therewith became like unto an egg, and simultaneously the light went out. so it's a double double jump scare it's like the john carpenter double double dream jump scare yeah but here it's a second faceless person he finds the second person oh you know that was so scary i gotta tell you what happened and you think the danger has passed but then strokes his face he has no face.
00:30:39
Speaker 2: Either yes yes the no parable here yeah the um Sometimes I've seen it translated as the faceless monk, because I guess sometimes it's a monk. But the main thing is that a stranger that one encounters turns out to be faceless. You're scared. Then you flee to some perceived amount of safety. That safety might be at your random noodle salesman, a family member even. And then they reveal a faceless face as well. And then we get that double jump scare. The double jump, the double fright is certainly key to the story.
00:31:15
Speaker 3: So Foster in his book has a note on that suffix bow, which you said means monk. He says the same thing. It often means monk literally, but he says it can be used more generally to refer to a person or entity and often means boy. So Foster says that the suffix bow is sometimes used to yokai-ify a concept word, like to make a concept into a creature. So if noperi or nuperi both mean flat-faced, as in like smooth or faceless, you know, featureless skin, the nopera bow seems to be sort of the creaturely embodiment of facelessness.
00:31:56
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:31:57
Speaker 3: It's kind of like smooth face boy. Yeah.
00:32:01
Speaker 2: Sometimes they apparently work in groups. So they'll scare an individual with a group of no-face turnaround face wipes. You know, like you're approaching like a whole crowd and then like, oh, they all don't have faces. But then the same thing will happen. Run away, find another person and be like, you won't believe what I just saw. And they're like, oh, you mean like this? And then they did the faceless thing.
00:32:20
Speaker 3: Yeah, totally.
00:32:21
Speaker 2: I love it.
00:32:21
Speaker 3: So can I mention a couple of other tellings?
00:32:23
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:32:24
Speaker 3: So they're very similar. But Foster mentions a couple of other versions in his entry in the Book of Yokai. One is from Eomori Prefecture, where the Noparabo is called the Zunbarabo. And he says there's a story of a man walking along a mountain path singing when suddenly he hears someone in the distance singing the same song that he is, but singing it better, like better singing voice than his own. And he asks, who could that be? Singing that same song, but singing so beautifully. Suddenly, a Zunberabo appears with a completely featureless face and says, me! Like, I'm the one singing. Though I was wondering, how is it singing if it has no mouth? I love these contradictions. I have no mouth, but I must sing. And the man runs away in terror. He goes to a nearby village and he meets a friend of his and he tells him what happened. And when he gets to the end of the story, his friend says, did the Zunberubo look like this? And then reveals his own face to be blank. And then it says that the man who had been walking passes out and then dies soon after.
00:33:29
Speaker 2: Oh, wow. I wonder how far anyone's ever carried it, though. Can you go for the third where it's like, you won't believe what just happened? First person I encountered, faceless. Second person I encountered, faceless. And then the third person's like, you mean like this? And then we get the third faceless.
00:33:44
Speaker 3: Yeah. Well, at that point, you know, two times and it's scary, three times and it's comedy, I guess.
00:33:50
Speaker 2: Three times shame on me, right?
00:33:51
Speaker 3: I guess so. And then Foster tells another one where... a man is walking on a mountain path at night and he sees a lantern up ahead. Turns out it's a house. He goes to the house and there's an old woman who answers the door. He asks if he can stay at the house. The old woman reveals that she has no face and he's like, ah, and then he runs away to the next village. He meets a young woman. He tells her what happened. She also has no face. So again, it's a double scare. Really interesting question, actually. Why is there like a thematic reason for Or a link here for why the faceless yokai features particularly in these stories with double scares, where you think you've made it to safety, but there is a second faceless being. That does seem significant. Like, it's not just a coincidence that that is the type of creature in the story with this structure. Though, this is not the only kind of story that has this structure, to be clear. But, like, the link is very strong. It appears again and again with this creature and the double scare.
00:35:04
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I guess on one level it is like, you know, the threat has not been escaped. And we see this in so many different horror movies. It's like, oh, I got away from the zombies. And then the guy at the gas station, also a zombie. But then, yeah, thinking again about what it means for something to be faceless. It means that this person that you thought you were going to have a connection with cannot be connected with. And there's something horrifying and isolating in all of that. And then to go and try and tell that story again, to connect with someone about this and then realize that there's no connection to be made there either. It reminds me of various other horror stories where we have a similar moment, that moment when one realizes the thing that you thought you could reason with cannot be reasoned with. It's a thing that either exists outside of reason because it's not a human, it's an animal. This is a twist that is handled exceptionally well in the Jeffrey Household novel. Dance of the Dwarves. But you also see other versions of it. We were talking about The Ring recently and sort of the idea that you reach a point where you realize it cannot be bargained with, it can't be reasoned with, and that you can't solve the problem. And so I think similar things going on in all these stories, like you're suddenly just up against a wall and none of your human social skills are going to help you.
00:36:27
Speaker 3: That's a really good point, and I think that's correct. But at another level, It almost makes me wonder if these stories really have some kind of connection to longings and frustrations people could feel in which the story is almost a metaphor for a situation in life. One can find oneself in like, uh, like loneliness, you know, uh, that people are often lonely, not just if they're working at a lighthouse or, you know, they're a hermit in the mountains and they never see anyone. Like you can have loneliness among people if you feel like you are unable to have a meaningful conversation with the people around you or things like that. And so it kind of seems significant that a person is seeking comfort in trying to talk to someone because the second encounter in all these stories, the person is having a conversation. They've met somebody, not just somebody who seems safe and like, oh, you're not going to eat me or whatever, but they're trying to talk to them. They're trying to tell their story. And then it turns out that the person, it's, it's not like somebody who is listening sympathetically.
00:37:36
Speaker 2: It's somebody who is.
00:37:37
Speaker 3: Also there to reveal their, their frighteningness to them.
00:37:41
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think you're right. I think there is something to be said about loneliness here and social isolation, because it is like an attempt to reach out and have some sort of connection with a human being, another human being, and then it's shut down or it's impossible.
00:37:54
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:37:55
Speaker 2: So I think that's a good read. Um, And of course, leaning into the nature of spirits in these stories, I think the other level of horror is that this is not a thing that is going to eat you and consume your flesh. It's not something that's going to eat your soul, presumably. It's just something that is it's either going to just scare you because that's exactly how its interactions always go with humans or it is just messing with you. Like it's doing this solely just to frighten you, which is also like I mean, we can we can. humans do this sometimes too, obviously, but like the idea that this is all this creature does, like all of its interactions with humans are just scaring us. Like there's, there's something interesting and alien to that as well.
00:38:39
Speaker 3: It's trolling. Did it look like this?
00:38:42
Speaker 2: The fact that it says it is totally trolling. Yeah. Yeah.
00:38:45
Speaker 3: It's trolling you. Um, it's winding you up with this initial encounter and then, and then really like twisting the knife with the second encounter. And it, well, I guess another thing to ask is, Should we take it in these stories when they go and meet a second person? Is it like that this spirit is manifest? Is it the same spirit manifesting as another person and like tricking them, you know, by appearing to be a second person when the traveler meets them? Or is it that like underneath many people around us are actually no parabo and they could reveal themselves at any time? Does that make sense?
00:39:25
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. I mean, it reminds me of, uh, I don't have the term, um, queued up here, but there are certain neurological conditions that can lead to this perception that people are not people or, you know, and I'm not saying that really imposters. Yeah. And I'm not saying that, um, that, you know, this is a case where, oh, well, this entire tradition can be traced. to this particular anomaly. No, no, no. But, uh, you know, it's not impossible that it's somewhere in the mix.
00:39:51
Speaker 3: It's been a while since we did this, but my memory is that the neurological condition we're talking about there is what's known as Capgras delusion. And it is thought to, at least the last time I read about this, it was thought to arise from, um, a, uh, from a condition where the part of your brain that is primarily used to recognize faces is intact. So you can recognize the face in an informational sense, but the part of the brain that is usually used to generate the emotional feeling of familiarity in response to recognizing a face is impaired. So you have this mismatch in your brain where you see faces that look the way they should, but you do not have the emotional response that people normally have to that, which is the emotion of that person is familiar. So you are constantly seeing faces around you that look like they should, but you have the feeling that they're not the person they seem to be.
00:40:52
Speaker 2: Oh, since we're talking about perceptions of no faces here, I want to go ahead and mention that this doesn't have anything over describing here. It doesn't have anything to do with face blindness or prosopagnosia. This is this is despite what you might have seen on, say, TV's Hannibal. which is a great show. I loved watching Hannibal. It's sort of a sensational, even more sensational send-up of the Thomas Harris Hannibal Lecter novels. But there's one episode where someone has face blindness, and it's depicted visually in the show very much like the ghost story that we're discussing here, where you see someone's face and you just see flesh and maybe a hint of a skull underneath. That's not what people with face blindness experience. It's more of, if I understand correctly, seeing a face and then just having... certain amounts of additional difficulty in forming an identification off of that facial data. Yeah.
00:41:47
Speaker 3: So face blindness or prosopagnosia, we've talked about on the show before, and it typically is an impairment of the ability to recognize faces quickly and easily the way that most people do. Like our brains are finely tuned to look at a face and instantly know who we're looking at. People with face blindness can see faces just fine. They're just not as good at recognizing identity based on looking at a face. So often people with prosopagnosia have to make conscious mental effort to like remember details of people's faces in order to know who they're looking at. They need to remember, oh, my friend so-and-so has a mole right beside their left eye. So when I see that mole, I know that that's Jim. whereas people who don't have this condition would never have to make that kind of effort because you just see somebody and instantly know who it is.
00:42:39
Speaker 2: Yeah, having to depend on things like hairstyle, clothing choices, and so forth.
00:42:43
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:42:44
Speaker 2: Now, you mentioned the idea that Noperibo might be some sort of underlying shape-shifting entity, such as a fox spirit, such as a tanuki. And I definitely want to mention here that we see this exact ghost story pop up in the excellent 1994 Studio Ghibli film, Pompoko. This one is widely available. Last time I checked, in the US, you could stream it on HBO or HBO Max or whatever we're calling it at this very moment. It may change next week. But the film, Pompoko, is tremendous. It is about a group of shape-shifting, talking tanookis who are trapped in this struggle between like rural life and modern life between like the natural world and the artificial world of human beings. You know, a theme that we see in various other examples of Japanese cinema and storytelling that we've discussed on the show and we've discussed on Weird House Cinema. And so there's a particular, there are various parts where the Tanookis are trying to figure out how to achieve their goals and in some cases push back against human expansion and human activity. And so there's at least one major scene where The shapeshifting Tanookis just really go on the offensive. They essentially put on a yokai parade to mess with people. It's an amazing sequence. Definitely Halloween worthy. And the whole film is amazing. But at one point in the film, there is this moment where we see like a policeman on a bicycle on this kind of lonesome road, but also one with like clear streetlights. And there is a woman bent over, clearly weeping. And he comes up to check on her. And then, of course, what happens? She reveals she has no face. And then he begins to scream. She jumps on his bicycle and drives off. But in this case, the faceless entity here is actually a shape-shifting Tanuki.
00:44:42
Speaker 3: So, in the same tradition as the Hearn telling of the story where it's the Mujina, the shape-shifting animal creature, yeah.
00:44:50
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. Because the Tanukis, they're not altogether bad. They're... They're less severe, I guess, compared to the fox spirits, usually. The tanookis are a little bit easier going, but they can also play their tricks, and that's what's going on here.
00:45:06
Speaker 3: So, based on a lot of these features, the faceless yokai is often a prankster or a trickster or even a troll of sorts. But that doesn't mean that it's just having a harmless bit of fun. I mean, in at least one of these stories, it says that the person does die afterwards, after the experience.
00:45:24
Speaker 2: Probably because.
00:45:26
Speaker 3: I think it's implied that it was such a terrifying experience. They fall ill and die. A similar thing is told in some of those ancient ghost stories from the Greco-Roman world, from the haunted houses we talked about, where people's experiences with the ghost is just so frightening. They fall into ill health and die soon after. One other random note that I just think is kind of interesting is that these stories are supposed to be scary. I think the way I read them, they're not supposed to be funny, but the comparison of the face to an egg seems very funny to me, even though like, I think that line is not supposed to be funny in the, like in the Hearn telling of the story, his face was like unto the flesh.
00:46:10
Speaker 2: Of an egg.
00:46:11
Speaker 3: Uh, you know, it just communicates. It's a comparison that shows the smoothness, the featurelessness of the face. But for some reason, The egg part translates as comedy. I think that's just an interesting cultural, I don't know if that's a cultural difference or something across time, but you say egg in a horror story like this when talking about what something looks like, and that inherently makes it a lot less threatening and more funny.
00:46:36
Speaker 2: Well, I think there maybe is sometimes humor to these stories. The incident in Pompoko, I think, is played a little bit for humor. I included a couple of stills for you here, Joe, and I think you can tell by the The way that the policeman is screaming, he has that wide-mouthed anime sort of scream. I think we're supposed to laugh at this moment.
00:46:58
Speaker 3: Yeah, and he's got his fists up like a child screaming.
00:47:01
Speaker 2: Yeah. Though in this case, in Pompoko, we know who's behind it, and we're essentially on their side.
00:47:07
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:47:08
Speaker 2: So at this point in the episode, we're going to spend less time talking about some other related ideas of the faceless episode. many of which may be directly inspired by the Yo-Kai descriptions. But before we do, there's one faceless tradition from indigenous American traditions that I wanted to mention, a story of the faceless from the Haudenosaunee people, also known as the Iroquois. And it goes a little bit like this. There are three sisters, three sustainers of life, corn, beans, and squash. Corn ends up asking the Great Spirit if there's more that she can do for the people. She's pleased that people like corn so much. What else can I do? And the Spirit allows her then to form a doll that might play with the children. And so this is like a corn husk doll. And it's given a beautiful face. But what happens when you give something like this a beautiful face? People start saying, oh, what a beautiful doll. It's so beautiful. And the doll becomes vain. And the Great Spirit warns her that there are going to be consequences. But the people kept telling the doll how beautiful it is. It only got worse. It only became more vain. So finally, the Great Spirit takes her face away. And so this is the idea of why does the Cornhus doll have no face? It is supposed to teach us something about vanity and pride.
00:48:32
Speaker 3: Oh, that's interesting.
00:48:33
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:48:33
Speaker 2: So if you pull up some images of various Cornhus dolls, I mean, Cornhus dolls, by the nature of the way they're made, often have no face. And This is the story among these people as to why that is so.
00:48:47
Speaker 3: Even though in some versions of Cornhusk dolls, there can be a lot of detail on the rest of the body. So it's not just that it's lacking detail in all ways, but there can be versions where there's a lot of detail in maybe how it's dressed up or, you know, other ways the body and accessories are put together, but can still have a blank face, which is an interesting, deliberate choice.
00:49:09
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:49:16
Speaker 1: All right.
00:49:20
Speaker 2: Well, let's roll through some other examples here. Some of these we'll just mention in passing. I will mention the Night Gaunts here from the work of H.P. Lovecraft. These are like faceless gargoyles. They pop up, especially in the 1926 tale, The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadith. They swoop down, they grab you, they take you away, they tickle you a little bit. But in a way, they kind of match up with some of these yokai traditions in that they are not trying to eat you. And that makes them even more alien. Like you're not, what are you doing? You're just tickling me a little bit and you're taking me to meet something else. It's a little bit weird. And then Lovecraft also wrote about it in a 1930 poem. It's a sonnet contained in The Fungi from Ugoth. And I will read this real quick because it's rather nice. Out of what crypt they crawl, I cannot tell. But every night I see the rubbery things, black, horned, and slender, with membranous wings and tails that bear the biffid barb of hell. They come in legions on the north wind swells. with obscene clutch that titillates and stings, snatching me off on monstrous voyagings to gray worlds hidden deep in nightmares well. Over the jagged peaks of thought they sweep, heedless of all the cries I try to make, and down the nether pits to that foul lake where the puffed shoggoths splash in doubtful sleep. But oh, if only they would make some sound, or where a face or faces should be found.
00:50:59
Speaker 3: So the facelessness is part of a generally non-responsive piece. So it has no face to reflect back to him to tell it what it's feeling, and it says nothing.
00:51:09
Speaker 2: So it's just kind of mechanical. So here we reveal kind of a cosmic horror take on all of this. And there are some great illustrations of this creature. Michael Whelan in particular had a really nice one in black and white for some Lovecraft volume or another. And they actually pop up in the most recent Dungeons and Dragons Ravenloft supplement as well as a monster that your characters can encounter. We already mentioned Miyazaki, so I guess we should mention the character No-Face who pops up in Spirited Away from 2001, a movie that we've discussed on Weird House Cinema.
00:51:42
Speaker 3: This is a great character in this movie, but despite the fact that it's called No-Face, this is not a no-parabow.
00:51:48
Speaker 2: Yeah, as it's revealed in Spirited Away, what we have here is kind of an amorphous black spirit blob, again, kind of transcending that place between spirit and flesh, and we are in spirit realm at this point. It has a mouth, but no real face. It is a creature of vast hunger, but also one lacking in identity. We discussed this a little bit in our episode on Spirited Away. It needs to have an identity, and it will... consume that based on whatever is around it yeah but in uh you know i guess in physical description uh not really dealing with the identity aspects of it um a faceless creature that does have a mouth uh this is i think going to be rather familiar to a lot of people because to a large extent this is exactly what the xenomorph of the alien franchise is right it's got a mouth does it have eyes does it have a nose no but it certainly has a mouth has i guess two of them technically It's all mouth and no face.
00:52:47
Speaker 3: So a very creepy thing about the Xenomorph is that if you look up the costume design from the original movie from 1979, this did change across the different films. But in the 79 movie, there is a very faint suggestion of a more complete face or at least eye sockets and a kind of bone nose socket in the costumes. But you don't really see it in the movie. Like the creature in the movie is shot under these lower light conditions. And in the shots where we can see the alien's head, you can't really make out the eyes. But you can look this up in pictures that you can find on the Internet. Basically, in the original movie, the smooth top of the alien's long head was a semi-translucent dome. And in shots from the set where you can see the whole thing, you can see these deep, hollow eye sockets behind the translucent skin positioned over the mouth in a way that makes the front of the alien's head actually resemble a human skull. So, Rob, I've got pictures for you to look at in the outline here. Just a few you can scroll down. In some pictures, you can actually see the.
00:54:05
Speaker 3: See shots of the actor in the costume with the translucent dome on the top of the head taken off so you can fully see the skull. It's a very, extremely creepy, unsettling look, but for some reason they ended up deciding they liked it better with the dome on top. In shots where you can kind of see the impression of the skull underneath, it's a very nasty look.
00:54:29
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think they made the right choice because I think the xenomorph works better, essentially playing into some of what we're talking about here as this thing that can't be reasoned with. Like it's not human. It is totally alien. And if you could see the eyes on some level, it kind of messes with that concept. But I've always loved this detail. And I love I mean, on one hand, like this is the alien is not completely the adult alien we encounter in the first film is not completely divorced from humanity. It is, after all, Kane's son. It has some amount of human genetics to it. So it makes sense that there would be at least some leftovers of the human form in its form and that, you know, kind of like, you know, atrophied or whatever inside of it. I've also seen certainly there are various toys that will accentuate the eyes, the hidden eyes of the xenomorph and various works of art. I've also seen in some of the expanded alien lore, like the RPGs and the video games, that sometimes this will be depicted as kind of like a different sort of xenomorph. Like, I don't know, like some other type of infection causes a person to be a body burster or something where there's a different sort of transformation into xenomorph and maybe more human features are retained.
00:55:46
Speaker 3: Interesting.
00:55:47
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:55:48
Speaker 3: But yeah, I agree with you. In the end, one thing that's very creepy about the xenomorph is you can't, You kind of can't tell how intelligent it is or like this is actually discussed in the movies at some point in aliens. This comes up when, you know, they cut the power and Bill Paxton says, how can they cut the power man? They're animals. But it kind of raises the question of like, we just can't really tell quite how smart they are, exactly what they understand about us. Maybe they're something a little bit closer to human level intelligence, even though they don't communicate. And just the fact that they're without eyes and they don't have language kind of hides their intelligence from us. Or maybe they are more like animals. Like that ambiguity is part of the creepiness.
00:56:35
Speaker 2: I think so, yeah. They can also use an elevator one way or another. But yeah, I love this ambiguity of not really knowing for sure. And of course, you get into the weeds of the making of the first alien. And you realize they were really making calls on this pretty late in the picture. I think at some point in the script... the alien was going to answer a call at the very end of the film and answer in a human voice. I think we can all say, thankfully, they cut that. That's a good thing that we didn't go in that direction. I don't think the xenomorph needs to talk or mimic human language. It would have been a creepy moment, but that would have changed everything.
00:57:13
Speaker 3: It is much creepier when it's an open question. That unresolvedness is actually a source of terror in itself.
00:57:20
Speaker 2: And it plays very well with the faceless, again, not being... sure what's going on there because there's the communication is cut off and the identity is cut.
00:57:29
Speaker 3: Off totally all.
00:57:31
Speaker 2: Right let's let's roll through some other examples here um i guess we have to mention slender man um an internet entity uh you know creepypasta born out of around 2009 probably the most famous creepypasta specific entity at least as of this recording There's been at least one movie made, a lot of Internet activity around him, often depicted as like a tall man in a suit, sometimes with black tentacles in the background, but generally a completely featureless, fleshy head. So no eyes, no mouth, no ears, no hair, any of that.
00:58:07
Speaker 1: Hmm.
00:58:09
Speaker 3: It's been around the block a few times now, but I still don't know anything about Slender Man. Never checked in on this.
00:58:18
Speaker 2: I don't know any of the deeper lore. A lot of this is user-created. It's part of different people adding different things to it. There have been papers written about Slender Man, for sure. Obviously, this is just playing up on the idea that It is alien. It's not human. We can't connect with it. We don't know what it wants, but probably nothing good. Let's see, from the video game world, I was reminded of the nurses from the Silent Hill franchise. I think particularly from Silent Hill 2 in 2001, the nurses have popped up a lot, and I think it varies how faceless they are. Sometimes it's distorted meat on their face, and generally the rest of their body is like sexy lady zombie.
00:59:04
Speaker 3: Sometimes it seems like their head is sort of covered in some kind of balloon or something.
00:59:09
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:59:10
Speaker 3: Their face is hidden behind some translucent or mostly opaque kind of membrane.
00:59:17
Speaker 2: Yeah, or like, you know, weird flesh, grave flesh, kind of like with their first yokai that we mentioned here. Yeah, so their exact appearance varies. They do definitely have a faceless look. in the movies, particularly 2006's Silent Hill, and I think also in 2012's Silent Hill Revelation, though I haven't actually seen that one. But I understand it has its positive qualities as well. But yeah, I think basically we're just playing here with the idea that it's faceless, it's creepy, we don't know what it, you know, the same aspects that we've been discussing. And then, I don't know, by having the sort of like at least partially sexy female body is also engaging in some like weird territory as well, you know, like remove the head of the female form and, you know, just like an exercise in objectifying the form, generally something you see in photography and cropping of images. But here it's done via like the faceless mass at the top of the creature.
01:00:20
Speaker 3: That was my interpretation of sort of what the nurse is supposed to mean in Silent Hill 2. Is it something about.
01:00:26
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, it's about the character, right?
01:00:28
Speaker 3: Yeah, like the character is, there's some kind of suppressed misogyny and objectification within the character, within the main character. And that is expressed through these characters that have kind of sexualized bodies, but hidden faces. And, you know, that's like taking away their humanity.
01:00:45
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. It's been so long since I actually played Silent Hill 2. I remember loving it, just finding it very enthralling and all the like hidden details and lore. But yeah, yeah, obviously a great game. Let's see other examples. Oh, we have, let's see, I guess a couple of examples to mention here where it is, there's no supernatural element going on. It is just somebody wearing a mask that is featureless, like a stocking or some other kind of mask that looks at least from a distance like a blank flesh mask. And I think the two main examples that come to mind for me of this are, of course, the blank from Dick Tracy. This is a character from the, you know, I think it was introduced in 1937. And then in the 1990 film, we have this character plays a major part in the plot and at times looks kind of fleshy the way that it's lit.
01:01:39
Speaker 3: Is the character in the movie just called No Face?
01:01:42
Speaker 2: The blank. Oh, OK. I thought unless I don't know, I haven't seen this movie in a while, but generally the character is called the blank.
01:01:49
Speaker 3: It would fit because I haven't seen the movie in a long time either, but I remember a lot of the characters are just called things like Big Head or Little Face or something.
01:01:58
Speaker 2: Yeah, the way the caricature style of illustration from the original Dick Tracy comics are, of course, realized in the film as if all the gangsters are mutants. We may have to revisit it on Weird House Cinema at some point because it's a strange one. But there's another... Weird house adjacent film that is pretty famous for this. And that, of course, is Mario Bava's Blood and Black Lace from 1964.
01:02:25
Speaker 3: I was going to say that where the killer in that movie, their face is hidden behind. It's like a stocking or something, but it just renders them as a totally blank face that, you know, you just see kind of a bump for a nose and that's it.
01:02:40
Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. Riveting film. The tension you could you could cut with a knife in that one. It's great. Um, let's see what other example I have just a couple more that come to mind. There's a particular image from a film I have not yet been able to see. I can't find a version of it that is, uh, that has subtitles. Uh, yet I don't know that it has a proper release and a physical release anywhere. And that is 1950s. The man without a face at Lombres in Rostro. Uh, this is a 1950 Mexican noir film that I has some surreal dreamlike imagery in it. And, uh, look up a still from this, look it up on Letterboxd, and you'll see this horrifying image, you know, very noir-coated sequence where there's a frightened man, and behind him, putting a hand on his shoulder, is an individual in black with a big black hat, and his face looks like like flesh stretched over a skull, but with no facial features otherwise. Super creepy, yeah. Yeah, I have no idea. I've read good things about this film, but I just, and I have found streams of it that do not have subtitles, but it seems like the sort of film where I really need to know what everyone's saying. And I'm hesitant to use sort of auto-generated subtitles on a film like this because I want to know exactly what is supposed to be conveyed. Otherwise, it's like the film has no face, right? Let's see. And then the other example, there are a couple of additional examples, I guess, from the world of creepypasta. In the SCP universe, there's SCP-3008-2, which is some sort of faceless entity that kind of works like the yokai that we're talking about. And then also in the sort of expanded user-generated world of backrooms, there's also some sort of an entity known as facelings, I think. And these are like faceless humanoids that are found wandering around in the back rooms. They do not feature into the 2026 film, which I just saw the other day and really loved.
01:04:43
Speaker 3: Oh, I was curious about that movie after it got some good reviews, but I haven't seen it.
01:04:47
Speaker 2: Yeah, I highly recommend it. It's a great ride, and they play a Boards of Canada song over the end credits. So, yeah, six stars from me.
01:04:56
Speaker 3: Do they ever go to the front rooms?
01:04:58
Speaker 2: I mean, I think the front rooms are the world we live in. The back rooms are beyond, yeah. Beyond that, I really don't know much about the backroom's lore, and it's certainly not necessary to enjoy the film. In fact, I would say just go into the film cold and experience it. Okay.
01:05:14
Speaker 3: I won't ask any more questions.
01:05:16
Speaker 2: I mean, you can, but I may refuse to answer them.
01:05:20
Speaker 3: Okay, well, I think that's all I had on Creatures Without Faces.
01:05:23
Speaker 2: How about you? I think so, but obviously there are plenty that we haven't discussed here that we may not even know about. Like, for instance, I'm currently watching My Hero Academia, the anime show with my kiddo. And I'm sure like the character designs in this are amazing. There's bound to be a faceless character that's going to show up. So I just don't know about it yet. Likewise, Pokemon. I'm sure there's a faceless Pokemon out there and I know you're going to tell us about it. So please write in with these and any other examples from horror, comic books, folklore, mythology and so forth. Um, dreams. Uh, yeah, we want to hear about them and we'll discuss them, discuss them in a future listener mail episode.
01:06:04
Speaker 3: Uh, have I told you that, uh, my daughter has just started, uh, coming, coming back from meetings with other children with Pokemon information. Oh, nice. Like she didn't get here. Didn't get that at home. Uh, but Pokemon information such as Pikachu is not a Pokemon. He chases Pokemon.
01:06:25
Speaker 2: Oh, I don't know if that's canon or not.
01:06:27
Speaker 3: Yeah, lots of good stuff like that.
01:06:30
Speaker 2: That's great. All right. Well, yeah, write in. We'd love to hear from everyone. Just a reminder that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Short form on Wednesdays and on Fridays, we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film and weird house cinema. You can listen to the show wherever you get your audio podcasts. If you want to watch the video version, head on over to Netflix. However you're consuming the show, we just ask that you rate, review, give us a couple of thumbs up on Netflix, ask to be reminded about new episodes. We value any time that you give to us, and we're honored that you spend any amount of time with our podcast. But these little tweaks can help us out in the long run, and we appreciate those as well.
01:07:11
Speaker 3: Totally. Huge thanks, as always, to our excellent audio producer, J.J. Posway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stufftoblowyourmind.com.
01:07:35
Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.