The Damned& The Projected

Austrian folk horror, 2024. A newly married woman sinking into depression in a rural Christian community where suicide means eternal damnation — so the way out is to kill someone else and confess. Based on documented historical court records. Streaming on Shudder / AMC+.

Tier one. The best available match for axis 4's even-handedness clause. A Korean village, a sickness, a Japanese stranger, a shaman and a priest — and the film refuses to tell you which cosmology is correct until it is too late to act on it. **This is the clause Saint Maud only half-meets**: belief taken seriously from more than one side, with each system given a real advocate. Axis 2 lands on a father whose choices damn his daughter; axis 5 is unrelieved; axis 6 is complete with a famously devastating ending. Craft: Hong Kyung-pyo, who also shot Parasite and Burning. **Deductions:** 156 minutes and deliberately confusing by design, and subtitled Korean — which the Dark and Devil's Bath evidence says costs nothing.

Tier one at #4. The only occult pick on this list that hits axis 3 properly. A secret Catholic sect, a cylinder of swirling green liquid in a derelict LA church, and a team of physicists asked to test it. **The even-handedness clause is fully met and that is rare** — the priest and the scientists each take the other seriously, and the film's whole conceit is that doctrine and quantum mechanics are two descriptions of one thing. Nobody is villain wallpaper and nobody is a foil. **Axis 3 is a real hit**, which almost nothing else in this lane manages: Saint Maud, The Witch and The Exorcist all end one person's world, and this one is about the end of everything. Axis 5 is unrelieved — the tachyon dream broadcasts are the most genuinely dreadful thing Carpenter shot. Axis 6 is complete with a famously unsettled final image. Axis 1 is the purest available: **Carpenter directs, writes and scores it**, the screen form of an artist colouring their own pages. **Two recorded deductions, and they are why it sits at #4 rather than higher.** Axis 2 is only partial — the leads are graduate students and a priest, not damned figures, though Catherine's ending is a bargain paid for someone else, which is the shape `evidence.md` has held a proposal about. And **the craft axis splits**: the score is superb, but Kibbe is not Cundey and this is Carpenter's cheaper-looking period — it does not have the image quality of The Devil's Bath, The Witch or The Wailing, and `comics.md` says that where two picks fit equally the better-looking one wins.

Edition: 1987

Part of Carpenter's "Apocalypse Trilogy" with The Thing and In the Mouth of Madness — all three standalone.

From the Plex list. 2000. **A weird western in everything but name** — a cursed half-vampire gunslinger in a decayed far-future frontier, which is the East of West / Gunslinger Spawn lane exactly. Kawajiri at Madhouse is a craft-axis hit; the art direction is the reason this endures.

Tier one at #5. The first cyberpunk-lobe pick in the tiered film band. A corporate assassin works by piloting other people's bodies, and is losing track of which memories are hers. **Axis 2 is the strongest hit in the band** — damnation by occupation, paid for continuously rather than bargained once, and a harder hit than Prince of Darkness manages. Axis 4 lands on the **cyberpunk lobe** through implanted consciousness and personhood, which matters out of proportion here: the entire tiered film band is occult horror, and the cyberpunk lobe has seven watched titles and two CORE cross-medium anchors behind it with no tiered film entry at all. Axis 6 is complete, self-contained and commits to its ending. Craft is a clear hit — **Karim Hussain**, whose saturated, aggressive colour is the cinematographer-as-colorist signal `film.md` describes, working largely in-camera and practical. **Recorded deductions.** Axis 3 is a **clean miss** — a corporate near-future with nothing collapsing; this is the same cap The Exorcist and Saint Maud carry, and it is why the three of them sit below Prince of Darkness. And it is genuinely nasty rather than dread-tightening — closer to the transgressive register flagged on The Devils than to the slow pressure of The Wailing, which is worth knowing before an evening.

Edition: 2020 · 103 min · uncut

Tier one. Foundational, and the engine is doctrinal. The reason the lane exists as a genre. **Karras's crisis of faith is the actual plot** — the possession is the pressure applied to it — which is doctrine as working machinery rather than as set dressing, and puts it squarely in the third lobe rather than adjacent to it. Axis 2 lands on Karras and his ending is a bargain paid in full. Complete, deliberate, and the ending is why it endures. **Deduction:** axis 3 is a clean miss — a Georgetown townhouse, nothing collapsing but one family and one man.

2019 British psychological horror. A palliative-care nurse, recently converted, becomes convinced God has charged her with saving the soul of her dying patient — a former dancer with no interest in being saved. Included with Amazon Prime Video.

From the Plex list. 2023, French, 88 minutes. A detective story about copied minds — the Ghost in the Shell lane in a European register. Complete and self-contained, so axis 6 is scoreable.

Tier two. The most axis-2 title in the lane. A private detective hired by a man called Louis Cyphre to find a missing singer. **The damned-protagonist axis in its most literal possible form** — a soul sold, and the investigation is the collection notice. Crosses the occult lane with crime noir, which is a confirmed seam in `books.md` on three Huston reads, and the Louisiana setting puts it adjacent to the weird-western lobe. Seresin's photography is genuinely mood-forward. **Deductions:** the twist is famous enough to be spoilable, and axis 3 is partial.

Tier two. Craft-axis bullseye; the lobe is cult rather than clergy. A family being moved into position by a demonic cult across generations — a bargain made by someone else and inherited, which is a variant of axis 2 the list has not tested. Craft is as strong as anything in the lane: Pogorzelski's locked-off dollhouse framing and Stetson's score are the two things everyone names. Complete, deliberate, and the ending commits hard. **Deductions:** the machinery is a cult's rather than a church's, so the third lobe hit is real but narrower than The Witch's — no institution, no doctrine argued from two sides. Axis 3 is a clean miss.

Tier two, with a real tonal flag. Loudun, 1634. A priest destroyed by a possession scandal engineered for political ends. **The institutional half of the third lobe taken further than anything else here** — the church is not a backdrop but the antagonist, the protagonist and the jury. Derek Jarman's white-tiled sets are among the most striking production design in any film on this list, which is the craft axis at full strength. **The flag, and it is a big one:** this is a genuinely transgressive, blasphemous, hard-to-watch film in the shock register that declined Preacher. Filed at tier two with that written down rather than tier one, on the same logic as The Filth.

From the Netflix list. 2021. Gundam in its most morally grey register — the protagonist is a terrorist and the film knows it. Axis 2 in an unusual key. First of a planned trilogy, so axis 6 is open.

From the Plex list. 2025. **The odd one out in every direction** — not genre, not animated, comedic-satirical rather than dread. It belongs to the same grounded-institutional lane as The Wire and Mountainhead's own Succession lineage, which `evidence.md` finding 1 argues may be a real and unmodelled seam. Flag: satire is an axis-5 miss on the profile as written.