By JILLIAN KRISTINA
The wind sounds different in isolation. The gusts become a second guess, a quick glance over the shoulder. An echoed whisper only you can hear. An invisible presence, working its way through your mind. Through your sanity. Through your life.
The wind becomes an intruder. A perpetrator. A wedge. An ever-present, slow-splitting wedge.
Emma Tammi’s 2018 directorial debut, THE WIND, is a mesmerizing supernatural Western horror that calls on the true horrors – both seen and unseen – that the early settlers of the Great Plains faced and what those horrors would cost them. St. Louis natives Lizzy (Caitlin Gerard) and her husband, Isaac Macklin (Ashley Zukerman), alone on the prairie in New Mexico, find themselves joined by new neighbors, married couple Emma (Julia Goldani Telles) and Gideon Harper (Miles Anderson), from Illinois and immediately, something feels off. The Harpers seem to carry some tension with them. Something that Isaac describes as “funny.” And although the story unravels outside the realms of chronological order, what we do know is the story opens with blood. With death. With howling.
With horror.
This place is wrong. We’re not supposed to be here.
A funny thing happens to people living in desolate isolation. There’s even an unofficial name for the symptoms many of the Great Plains settlers began experiencing: Prairie Madness. Symptoms include but are not limited to depression, character shifts and changes, withdrawal and even violence. In extreme cases, that violence could take the form of suicide. These symptoms would develop as people attempted to assimilate to their new surroundings or rather, complete isolation. Oftentimes, the closest neighbors – if there were neighbors – could be over a mile or more away. Trees and vegetation were sparse if they existed at all. Trips into town could take days, which meant leaving someone behind to tend to the home and the family.
Which meant leaving the woman behind to fend for herself in this wild, alien land.
Your mind’s looking for things to worry about.
And the wind… The wind becomes an entity all its own. It fills the silences that seem far too loud to contain. It watches. It whips. It lacerates. It lashes. It caresses the fallow cheek, chilling the falling tear. And it waits. The wind waits for those perfect moments of dark solitude to speak what it’s been dying to speak. The element of air, of communication – of words. Of speechless messages carried through sharp gusts and dry breezes. Whispers from the ether. Hisses from the bones buried beneath the soil, muffled by the screams.
The screams. The screams from Lizzy. Lizzy was the first to sense something was out there. That she wasn’t alone. She was the first to sense a presence, much more than a knocking. Much more than a rattle. A trickster using the wind as a vehicle for torment.
This land is funny, you know. It places tricks on your mind.
A trickster. But who is the real trickster here? The unseen threat or the fear that dwells within each and every one of us, especially when faced with the enormous terror of an endless, solitary night. One populated by promises of specters and demons and death upon death upon death. Emma saw the graves on their travels to their new home – the graves of those who tried, those who failed. Death hung heavy over the plains, as did the warnings of a traveling reverend in the form of a pamphlet…
The pamphlet – Demons of the Plains – that he made sure to hand to each woman entering this new, parched landscape. As if the shift weren’t seismic enough, the threat of dark, otherworldly forces was now a feasible tendril of terror working its way through the dirt and sand. The absence of everything they once knew – civilization, socialization. Society. The world. And now, the devil roams freely on these perilous plains, offering a fresh slice of dread the likes of which these women have never known.
Yes. It preys on the women. The women pregnant with hope and life and promise. The vulnerable women. The women who aren’t believed. The women who anger the men with their preposterous paranormal notions. Their ungrounded, invisible fears.
You’ve got to keep your wits about you, Lizzy.
When Emma began experiencing the same feeling during her pregnancy, the same presence, she was met with the same reception, wven from Lizzy. But there was more to that response. Because in that isolation, people become lonely, even when together. And Lizzy saw that loneliness in Emma. She saw that response in Isaac. She knew, but yet again, she was alone in her knowledge. In her awareness. And it was denied, over and over and over again. That is a horror in and of itself. And we will soon discover what that horror costs.
It’s coming for me.
Since the Full Moon in Scorpio, we’ve been given a boon of energy. Clarity. Boldness. We see what we didn’t see before. We move forward in new, more courageous ways. And when we do, the mind tends to take over because its greatest job is to protect us. Even from the truth. Even from ourselves. Now, the clarity of the last few weeks – the latest moon cycle – has started to settle, showing us what’s left to clear out. Today’s New Moon in Gemini is asking us to look at the truth that remains and what we need to do to support that truth. What we need to face – to let go of – once and for all to forge forward on the winds of our personal reckoning, clearing the way for wherever they’re wanting to carry us. Because the wind knows, maybe even better than we do.
Tarot spread for today’s New Moon in Gemini. Tag #thewindtarot to share your pull!
- What can we learn by taking time in our own personal solitude?
- What old fears are roaring up to make themselves known?
- What can we do to face those fears – our own personal demons – before we embark on this next chapter in the story of our own making?
- If the wind had a message for you, beneath the howling, what would it be?
