Walled In

My husband gets soooo tired of my movie watching habits.

You see, I can watch just about any horror movie, no matter how cheesy. Terrible effects? TSTL characters? Silly plot? It really doesn't matter to me. I would happily stay up all night munching popcorn and watching movie after movie.

Since getting Netflix to cooperate on our Wii, I've been in hog heaven watching all kinds of horror movies when the family is away. Black and white, old and new, remakes, monsters, ghosts, you name it. None of them are spectacular movies, but I recently watched a "no-name" movie I'd never heard of....and I felt the itch.

You know, the STORY itch. This movie is important to a story that I'm cooking in the back of my brain, even if I don't exactly know which story.

The movie was Walled In. I'm not familiar with the actors or the director. What caught my attention was the mention of Egyptian mythology in the blurb. I looooove mythologies, but especially those involving pyramids! (Obviously, see The Bloodgate Guardian!) In the movie, a crazy murdering architect has deliberately walled his victims up in his buildings, believing that their pain and sacrifice would make his foundations eternal.

His argument: look at all the wonders of the ancient world. How many of them are still around other than the pyramids? He claims the reason they're still solid is because the Egyptians deliberately sacrificed people to "cement" the foundations.

Now I've never heard this particular twist on Egyptian lore before so I can't speak to how accurate it is. I know architects and workers were sometimes killed to hide the secrets of the Pharoh's tomb, but were they actually ENTOMBED in the walls? The idea is horrific and yet wonderfully compelling at the same time.

Here's where the story itch comes into play.

The Maya believed that buildings took on the life force offered through sacrifices to "birth" the foundation. That's one reason they often built on top of older ruins--because they wanted to increase the existing energy already infused into those walls. They didn't "bury" people in their foundations, but they definitely offered sacrifice, often blood, and other items were buried in the foundation in key spots (matching the three-stone hearth stars in the sky), like polished mirrors of obsidian, bits of amber, shells, sacrifical knives, etc.

I'm definitely going to have to use this idea in an upcoming book. I mean, think about it....

Bodies buried beneath the cornerstones of those magnificent pyramids. It gives me chills!