23.1.11

Frightmare's War With the English Language - Part 2!

As promised (threatened?) by the title of the last post on this subject, here's the other notable scene from genre classic 'Frightmare':


The fascinating thing about this film is that the writer/director 'Ash Smith' demonstrates a level of competence in the film's other dialogue scenes. When characters gather together to discuss their charity haunted house or their attempts to solve a murder the use of English is, while perfunctory, still appropriate. It's only when Ash Smith attempts to write people on television that dealing with a second level of unreality causes him to become crushed by an avalanche of self-consciousness, leaving him unable to produce anything other than bizarre-sounding gibberish. Albeit bizarre-sounding gibberish that he was able to convince actors to read off of cue cards.

Now, for the record, and setting aside the fact that it was a scene about two characters debating the deeper meaning of a malapropism, here is a partial list of the words that Ash Smith doesn't know the meaning of, yet feels comfortable using:

Common
Processing
Intuitive

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