‘A weird creature that’s operating in the theater’: Cult, synaesthesia and the ethico-politics of horror in Danny Perez and Animal Collective’s ODDSAC

This article addresses experimental film-maker Danny Perez and noise pop band Animal Collective’s collaborative project ODDSAC (2010). Conceived as a ‘visual album’, this strikingly surreal and eruptive audio-visual experiment adopts a synaesthetic and disruptive aesthetic logic, embracing and paradoxically subverting generic conventions while revelling in its own visual and aural excesses. I demonstrate that its self-reflexive relationship to the genre illuminates a shared affinity with both Lovecraftian cosmic horror and cult spectatorial praxis, writ large. Because it sees itself as a cult film, throughout this article, I emphasize its production, distribution and reception, arguing that its ramshackle construction and its commitment to intertextual referencing point up its relationship to mass media technologies. In this article, I closely read several scenes from the visual album, paying special attention to sound-image relations in an attempt to explain its evocation of a transgressive and recuperative ethico-politics of relational responsibility.