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