Haunting The Atom
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hauntingtheatom.bsky.social
Haunting The Atom
@hauntingtheatom.bsky.social
Visual and auditory dark matter: words, images, video and electronic sound.
Maker of music videos with '80-style goth duo Deadlight Dance.

I post about horror/sci-fi, real-life weirdness, synth music and film scores.

🔗 https://linktr.ee/hauntingtheatom
Pinned
I've posted a couple of times on social media about my love for the Crystal Palace transmitting station, and I'd been thinking for a while that I'd like to do a little... thing.

So I did and here it is – all 78 seconds of it. If there's demand I'll consider extending it to 90 seconds for a 12-inch.
Transmission 280356: A short synth homage to the Crystal Palace transmitter by Haunting The Atom
YouTube video by Haunting The Atom
www.youtube.com
Here's my soggy bottom (I'd just clambered over a stone wall) photographing gothic duo @deadlight-dance.bsky.social in Bowden Hill yesterday. I railed it over to Wiltshire to snap the chaps in various locations, and indeed poses. Look/listen out for their new album, Vox Populi - coming soon.
January 26, 2026 at 2:50 PM
As I've just set up a new Facebook page (the original vanished due to a glitch), now feels like a good time to plug all my socials:

Instagram: www.instagram.com/haunting.the...
YouTube: www.youtube.com/@hauntingthe...
Facebook: www.facebook.com/haunting.the...

Follow if you fancy. I won't judge.
January 23, 2026 at 5:02 PM
I was among the 300+ people who completed a questionnaire for this project, in late 2020. Great to see Pete's research coming to fruition.

I love the blurb on the clickthrough that describes '80s kids as "the first children of the video generation". Man, we were pioneers! #ScarredForLife
My book on people's memories of watching videos they perhaps shouldn't have been watching in the 1980s is finally almost here from @edinburghup.bsky.social Available to pre-order at edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-unsuita...
Use code NEW30 for a 30% discount!
Unsuitable Film and Video Audiences
Unsuitable Film and Video Audiences
edinburghuniversitypress.com
January 13, 2026 at 4:25 PM
I love this Christmas card, from my mum-in-law. Unsettling festive customs and iconography deserve a bigger look-in, I think. (Now seems like a good time to mention that 'God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen' scared me as a kid, and I still find it a bit unnerving. So much for tidings of comfort and joy...)
December 25, 2025 at 3:40 PM
Walking home from a gig the other night down an empty road, I suddenly felt as if someone was immediately behind me. I turned and saw no one, and then I twigged. In certain patches of street light, I had two shadows as I walked, which became chaotic as they merged. I was being followed by myself.
December 17, 2025 at 7:58 PM
Went to Bromley to look for Christmas presents. Came home with an ex-library hardback of The Woman In Black - for myself, of course. Despite loving the TV film, I've never read the book. It's a large-print edition too, negating my other purchase: new reading glasses from Poundland.
December 12, 2025 at 8:00 PM
Yesterday I cantered on over to the Horse Hospital in Bloomsbury for a 'hauntological holiday happening'. Ethereal dreamscapes from The Balloonist, and unnerving electronica from @hiddenbritain.bsky.social, accompanying their film Wren's Nest. Plus an episode of Dramarama! Xmas as it should be done.
December 12, 2025 at 11:08 AM
I had the thought yesterday that adverts might some day be piped into dreams. You'll be floating around town in your birthday suit, chatting to a dead relative, when they'll suddenly turn and offer you 10% off NordVPN.
December 8, 2025 at 2:13 PM
Remembering the Black Fridays of my youth, before it got so commercial: the deputy headmaster handing out asbestos, the desecration of the milk float, and Uncle Jim roasting slowly over a bed of tea-lights. Just magic.
November 28, 2025 at 11:54 AM
As of yesterday John Carpenter's store is selling freshly unearthed copies of the rarest album in his catalogue: the privately pressed 1985 LP by The Coupe De Villes (ie, they of Big Trouble In Little China). At £193 + shipping, I'm out, but cool to see it resurface. I've a soft spot for this album.
The Coupe De Villes - Waiting Out the Eighties (unsigned)
In 1985, John Carpenter and his long time friends and collaborators Nick Castle and Tommy Lee Wallace recorded the title track to John’s film, Big Trouble in Little China, under the moniker The Coupe ...
stormkingcomics.com
November 28, 2025 at 9:48 AM
Had a dream in which someone showed me their VHS of Day Of The Dead, and the rush of nostalgia quickly gave way to me fretting about the aspect ratio.
November 24, 2025 at 1:28 PM
These landed yesterday: the expanded Carpenter/Carpenter/Davies scores for Halloween Kills/Ends - not films I love but I dig the music, and there are 35 previously unreleased cues here.

A reflection in this pic makes it look like I've got my hand around Mr Myers' neck. Was gonna retake but... nah.
November 23, 2025 at 3:38 PM
Last night I watched Antrum (2018), which purports to be a cursed '70s film that could kill viewers. The prologue set up the conceit well enough to make me a tad nervous, and I found the film pleasingly off-kilter. Cracking music too, by Alicia Fricker. The main theme, especially, is <chef's kiss>.
November 22, 2025 at 3:02 PM
Remembering the days when choosing a font meant browsing the racks of Letraset* in WHSmith. #Fanzines

* Other brands of dry-transfer lettering were available.
November 16, 2025 at 10:58 AM
Ooh, an Escape From New York doc is on Sky Arts next Thursday (20 Nov) at 8pm. Also, I've just spotted that it's streaming on Now TV right now (fittingly enough). Lovely stuff.
Classic Movies: The Story of Escape from New York
Escape From New York (Season 4 Episode 6 of 6): A look at John Carpenter's 1981 sci-fi action film. Classic Movies: The Story of Escape from New York airs on Sky Arts at 8:00 PM, Thursday 20 November...
www.tvguide.co.uk
November 15, 2025 at 1:22 PM
Every week on here I see the #TOTP hashtag and think: 'I ought to dig out the pics I took last year of those neon signs in God's Own Junkyard, in Walthamstow.' And this week I've got my bum in gear and done it. I'm pretty sure these are originals.
November 14, 2025 at 7:30 PM
Reposted by Haunting The Atom
Looking through some old snaps recently, I found this curio from the late '80s, taken by my friend Jason. I asked him what the object is, and... well, mystery solved (answer in the alt-text). But I still think it's a cracking pic. I love the reflection and the way everything blurs *just enough*.
November 13, 2025 at 2:16 PM
Looking through some old snaps recently, I found this curio from the late '80s, taken by my friend Jason. I asked him what the object is, and... well, mystery solved (answer in the alt-text). But I still think it's a cracking pic. I love the reflection and the way everything blurs *just enough*.
November 13, 2025 at 2:16 PM
Now playing is an album that always hits the spot: Repeated Viewing & Timothy Fife Explore Paranormal Sounds Of The Synthesizer, a split LP from 2019 that pays homage to library records, and channels the other side* in a pleasingly retro-electronic manner.

* Meaning both 'beyond the veil' and BBC2.
November 10, 2025 at 3:57 PM
Remembering that time during the Covid lockdown when I showed up at East Croydon station at 8am to find it deserted and the announcer issuing virus warnings. In my earphones was the title track from Tangerine Dream's Phaedra, and it soundtracked the haunting, sci-fi surreality of it all so well.
November 6, 2025 at 2:37 PM
Finally saw Late Night With The Devil (it's currently streaming on C4). My verdict? It cheats with its styling - eg, multicam backstage conversations, and modern editing when the drama ramps up. But when the '70s US talk-show aesthetic is on point it's impressive, and despite niggles I enjoyed it.
November 4, 2025 at 3:11 PM
I enjoyed this new Guardian piece. I adored Poltergeist as a kid. It was one of my family's earliest VHS rentals, and a copy somehow found its way on to a blank tape (must have been a ghost), so I grew very familiar with it. For many years the US National Anthem was 'that music from Poltergeist'.
‘If I’d known the skeletons were real I’d have been even more disgusted’: how we made Poltergeist
‘Steven Spielberg lit up when I told him I couldn’t do the face-tearing scene. Those are his hands you see in the film. I could never have ripped my face off with the same joie de vivre’
www.theguardian.com
November 3, 2025 at 4:45 PM
Erm, actually, I think you'll find...

Probably a Mail reader.
November 2, 2025 at 10:46 AM
Last night I rewatched Whistle And I'll Come To You. I've long been impressed by the way it captures the terror of seeing something darkly inexplicable. I'm still not sure what I'm looking at in *those* scenes, even in terms of how the effects were done, so they tickle my lizard brain beautifully.
November 1, 2025 at 1:49 PM
Here's me carving a pumpkin tonight: 26 minutes compressed into 1m 18s. Warning: contains blasphemy, gloop and middle-aged sounds.

Happy Halloween to all my followers, including the man with the horns who's staring at me right now through my living-room window (my living room is two floors up).
October 31, 2025 at 9:07 PM