Geoff Manaugh, creator of BLDG BLOG (and occasional contributor to io9), is known for his spellbinding, science fictional interpretations of architecture. Inspired by the building that housed the old Ghostbusters headquarters (pictured), as well as the forbidding New York telephone exchange building, he's come up with an idea for the movie that involves a haunted telephone system and angelic neurobiology.

It's worth quoting at length from his post:

It's 1997. NYNEX is on the verge of being purchased by Bell Atlantic, after which point it will be dissolved in all but name.
But all hell starts breaking loose. Pay phones ring for no reason, and they don't stop. Dead relatives call their families in the middle of the night. People, horrifically, even call themselves – but it's the person they used to be, phoning out of the blue, warning them about future misdirection.
Every once in a while, though, something genuinely bad happens: someone answers the phone... and they go a little crazy.
Thing is – spoiler alert – halfway through the film, the Ghostbusters realize that NYNEX isn't a phone system at all: it's the embedded nervous system of an angel – a fallen angel – and all those phone calls and dial-up modems in college dorm rooms and public pay phones are actually connected into the fiber-optic anatomy of a vast, ethereal organism that preceded the architectural build-up of Manhattan.
Manhattan came afterwards, that is: NYNEX was here first.
It's worth recalling, in fact, that NYNEX – at least according to Wikipedia – actually stood for New York/New England, "with the X representing the unknown future (or 'the uneXpected')." It's like Malcolm X's telephonically inclined, wiry cousin.
So the phone system of Manhattan – all those voices! all those connections! leading one life to another – starts to act up, provoked by its dissolution into Bell Atlantic... and the Ghostbusters are called in to fix it.
Fixing it involves rapid drives from telephone substation to telephone substation, from library to library, all while Dan Ackroyd's character keeps receiving phone calls about a family crisis... his ex-wife is calling... his dad is calling... they're urging him to stop this whole, crazy Ghostbusters business... He starts acting funny. The voices on the phone say strange things. They call at strange hours. He feels kinship with public pay phones; they sometimes ring as he walks past. He tries to call his family back – but they're not answering.
Harold Ramis starts to suspect something.
In the background there are shadowy figures called out to fix transmission lines – but they are actually wiring something up... something big...
The whole movie then leads up to the granddaddy of them all: an electromagnetic confrontation inside the windowless, Brutalist telephone switching tower at 33 Thomas Street (rumored haunt of the ghost of Aleister Crowley).

You can read the rest here, where he goes into more detail that makes the idea sound even more fascinating. I love the idea of the telephone system being haunted, because at this point telephone systems are so ancient that they have begun to seem spooky. That is, they are as ancient and spooky as the NY subway system, which as you'll recall had a role in previous Ghostbusters movies.

I'd love to see a movie like this get made, but I'm dubious about whether it could fly in Hollywood. I could, however, imagine it as a plot arc in Supernatural - if it were the phone exchange in Lawrence, Kansas.

via BLDG BLOGhttp://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2009/06/nynex-embedded-angel-of-new-york-city.html

They Live revealed the psychological effects of late-80s Reaganism gone wild. Even Iraq War zombies have shown up on the big screen - and Cloverfield? It's the return of the repressed, the environmental effects of offshore dumping come back to tear us apart. Or something like that.

Women aren't meant to ask for divorces and move out - bad things will happen. Anthropologists should be wary of what they bring home with them; maybe they should never have left the country in the first place. After all, there are Communists everywhere. And everyone's off having a good time, doing something else, without you.

And what about The Stuff? That weird and strangely forgotten horror classic from 1985 about some sort of brain-rotting, highly addictive frozen yogurt... that turns out really to be an organism mined from the surface of the Earth by sinister retail dessert conglomerates? Edible geology. Timed perfectly for the advent of artificial sweeteners and for the arrival of frozen yogurt at your local mall, who wasn't afraid? "Are you eating it?" the film's absurd poster asked, addressing an American audience terrified less by the Cold War than by the FDA's recent approval of Aspartame. "Or is it eating you?"

More than a year ago, meanwhile, The New Yorker ran a short article about Halloween-themed haunted houses in Queens - or Brooklyn, or San Francisco, or Atlanta, I don't remember - that had been designed to provoke real fears. Not chainsaw-wielding maniacs, in other words, but tax auditors and bedroom spiders and muggers with hoods. The experience of falling from great heights. Having your in-laws round for a surprise breakfast while you're sitting on the toilet, late for work. And so on. Are you more scared of being eaten by zombies or of becoming homeless? I'm reminded of Nick Flynn's book, the unfortunately titled Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, in which Flynn, a volunteer at the local homeless shelter, finds, horrifically, that his own father has just checked in for the night.

In other words, what are we really afraid of?

The idea here is that maybe contemporary horror films only cater to one side of our world's ever-widening political divide. We've got the horrors of ecocide, of nuclear radiation, of Orwellian Christian hordes taking over the country, and robot Presidents - but what if a different sort of horror film were to come out someday in a theater near you? You're browsing Netflix in the summer of 2009 and you see Blood Rite recommended for whatever algorithmic reason. You rented something once with "blood" in the title. You have no idea, actually. But you're bored - so you click on it.

It's about gangs of AIDS-infected homosexuals kidnapping Cincinnati businessmen and forcing them to drink blood. It's directed by Jim McGreevey.

Two weeks later you see a preview for Sovereign Terrain: a lone man stands out in the desert somewhere, surrounded by undead Mexicans. There are more and more of them. He doesn't understand where they're coming from. Are they magic? They walk right through fences - and they double in number every 36 hours. What's worse, he once employed them...

Then there's the gay black couple that only adopts white boys. They watch ballet during the Super Bowl and hug quite frequently, even by normal standards. That's a lot of hugging, people mutter to themselves. That's an awful lot of hugging. Grown men shift uncomfortably in their seats. I don't like this film, they think. It's scarier than Jaws. They have their hands in front of their eyes. Women are screaming.

It gets worse.

The blacks are actually Jewish.

What's happening to this country? People literally throw popcorn at the screen. It's outrageous. We are losing control. Mexicans illegally crossing the border are just a front for an invasion by Satan - wait a minute, that was Constantine.

So what about horror for the Red States?

Sinister black athletes invade from space. Women are drawn to them.

Perhaps we've seen enough Blue State horror. Perhaps we've seen too many military coups and Fascist dystopias and suburban conformist nightmares. Perhaps we don't even know what we're afraid of anymore. Maybe we'll all live in cages, whilst endangered tree frogs rule the world. Down with these goddamn tree frogs! people scream. Humans unite!

Weird tools from the tail end of the 1800s - like Helmholtz Resonators (pictured above) and the Horizontal Kymograph - were considered by some to be a vital part of "experimental psychology," a new field whose central proposition was that psychology itself could be measured and mapped; even the most subtle reactions, on the level of conscious thought and unconscious reflex, could be predicted and repeated elsewhere, these experimentalists believed, under laboratory circumstances.

I'm reminded here of Dr. Channard, from the film Hellbound: Hellraiser II, whose mantra - "We have to see; we have to know" - became an oft-used sample in early 90s industrial music. Channard, that is, was not just a surgeon: he was an experimental psychologist.

In any case, not everyone was happy to measure the human mind - assuming such a thing exists - using instruments of brass and wood. "Many philosophers vehemently opposed the new experimental psychology," we read. "They adhered to Emmanuel [sic] Kant's view that mental events could never be captured or measured by experiment." Capturing mental events, like netting butterflies, was a task that required much more grace and skill, not brute machines - however carefully calibrated they may have been. Desktop resonators that looked like something out of a bad 19th-century stage version of Ghostbusters didn't, even then, inspire much confidence.

But let's put all these arguments aside and look at the actual objects.

The Hipp Chronoscope, for instance - a glass domed pedestal full of clockwork, gears, and dials - was adapted by legendary German physiologist Wilhelm Wundt from its original use as an astronomical instrument. After some fine-tuned tinkering, Wundt transformed it into something that could help "quantify nervous reaction times." In other words, a mechanism once meant for timing "stellar events" was retrofitted to measure the human nervous system - perhaps implying an unexpected astral cousinry between nerve endings and stars.

Then check out this auditory instrument (pictured below, left), made of "delay lines" that measure the speed and sensitivity of human hearing.

There's also the Ranschburg Memory Device and the Förster perimeter. There are aesthesiometric compasses, and there's the Einthoven String Galvanometer (pictured below, right). This latter device looks rather like a carburetor - only one you hook up to your own chest "to provide highly accurate records of heart currents."

Of course, there's also the Control Hammer apparatus, which served as "the fundamental timing device of the laboratory upon which all timing calibrations relied." Something like a musical metronome, then, ticking away in the background of the laboratory while scientists focused strange brass instruments covered in levers upon their fellow humans, the Control Hammer literally set the time and pace of these psychological experiments.

The museum's description is extraordinary: the Control Hammer was used "to generate a known and constant period of time."

However, all of these now somewhat eccentric little pieces of psychological enginery - like prosthetic testing devices for the mind - also make me think of something from David Cronenberg's old film Dead Ringers. There, amidst a variety of other things, we encounter "gynecological instruments for operating on mutant women."

These devices, specially made by a Toronto-based sculptor for a deranged and drug-addicted gynecologist, are exactly what they sound like: surgical instruments for operating on women whose bodies are somehow not right - nevermind that this "not right" status is entirely in the prescription-addled brain of our vertigo-stricken gynecologist.

The medical devices he has built, in other words, are projections of his own anatomical fears and fantasies.

What about psychological instruments, then, for treating people whose minds are somehow not right - nevermind that such a status entirely depends on whatever standards of normalcy exist at the time? After all, the very instruments pictured here, now gathering dust at a museum in Toronto, are glimpses of just such devices.

The question, then, is: What do these little wooden cases full of tuning forks and color wheels, sound pipes and timers, themselves assume about the human psychology they're meant to measure? I'm tempted to say that these were like reverse Turing machines before their time, or even early Voight-Kampff tests: mechanical devices meant to show who was human - one of us - and who was not. Call them Othering Machines, bringing down their judgments like a hammer.

When we build tools with which to test ourselves, what do the tools themselves imply?

(Elsewhere: Don't miss the Museum of the History of Reaction Time Research, a subset of the Museum of the History of Psychological Instrumentation in Montclair, New Jersey.)

Senior Associate Editor: Charlie Jane Anders
My science fiction stories have appeared in Paraspheres: New Wave Fabulist Fiction, StrangeHorizons, Flurb, Helix and Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet. My other writing has appeared in Mother Jones, Salon.com, ZYZZYVA, Publishers Weekly, the Wall Street Journal, the SF Chronicle, the New York Press, and a whole bunch of anthologies. I have stuff coming out soon in MonkeyBicycle's dirty humor anthology and Sex From America, Stephen Elliott's anthology with Harper Collins. I wrote a novel called Choir Boy and co-edited an anthology called She's Such A Geek. I co-founded other, an independent national magazine. And I host a San Francisco reading series called Writers With Drinks.

Associate Editor: Kevin Kelly
My fondest science fiction memories are from playing with the Death Star trash compactor toy sometime in the late 1970s. Why can't toys be that cool anymore? Dammit. Anyhow, I migrated west from Texas after finally finishing college after an extended stint working at Disneyworld in Florida. I spent five years working as a story editor at The Jim Henson Company, and after Disney bought the Muppets I found myself looking for gainful employment. That ended up being writing about movies, television, and video games for the past year and a half, which has also burdened my shelves with more movies, games, and toys than I ever dreamed I'd own when I was a kid, and most of 'em are robots and rayguns.

Contributor: Lisa Katayama
I was made in Japan but I'm not a robot or a cell phone. Or am I? I don't like to stay in one city for more than three years, and I'm addicted to the way my dog smells. When I'm not pondering the future or smelling my dog, I write about Japanese culture, technology, and human rights for Wired and other glossies. I record many of my brain farts on my personal blog, Tokyomango. I have a book about quirky Japanese life hacks coming out this spring. Also, this may surprise you, but I have never seen Star Wars, Star Trek, or any other movie with "star" in the title. Maybe I am a robot, after all, who was programmed not to watch these movies so I can ponder an alternate future devoid of common scifi references.

Contributor: Geoff Manaugh
My interest in sci-fi started early, reading H.P. Lovecraft and Dune and watching John Carpenter films after dark on school nights, and it's continued unabated, going all over the place, including J.G. Ballard, China Miéville, zombie horror, New Scientist, Pruned, human cloning, William Blake, hydroponic urban agriculture, Logan's Run, Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, The City of Lost Children, Baroque cathedrals, Angkor Wat, paleo-North American plate tectonics, Tesla's electricity, and the outer limits of geodynamism, not to mention bits and pieces of Robert Morgan, Ian MacLeod, Gormenghast, Max Barry, Harlan Ellison, Philip K. Dick, and even Halo, Clive Barker, Alex Garland, and Steven Spielberg. In real life, I'm the author of BLDGBLOG, a Yahoo! Top 25 Pick of the Year (2006), and a Time Magazine Style & Design 100 blog (2007). BLDGBLOG has led to a book deal with Chronicle Books, for publication in Spring 2009. I'm also now Senior Editor at Dwell Magazine.

Contributor: Graeme McMillan
Borag Thung, Earthlets. I'm Graeme McMillan, the plucky young red shirt of this particular away team. Having survived the comic blogosphere for the past five years on sites like Fanboy Rampage!!!, Newsarama and The Savage Critics, I'm finally finding a use for a childhood of cold Scottish winters spent playing with Six Million Dollar Man toys and watching Blakes 7 and Doctor Who before he was cool. Sure, I may be killed before the second ad break by an alien on a sound stage planet with styrofoam rocks, but at least I'll have my memories.

Contributor: Lynn Peril
I'm a writer living in Oakland, California. My column, "The Museum of Femoribilia," appears in BUST magazine. My latest book is College Girls: Bluestockings, Sex Kittens and Coeds, Then and Now (W.W. Norton). In the words of Criswell, "We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives." But first you can spend some time at my website.

Among the many "delicate hybrids" that a writer for The New York Times recently found "thriving in the balmy climes of Provence, southern France's traditional perfume region," were "sweet jasmine, May roses - and fresh layers of artificial human skin."

One of the companies discussed in the article uses an inspired combination of amino acids, collagen gel, sugar, water, and low levels of ultraviolet light to cook up (and then "air dry") collections of fake skin. It's worth noting that many of these skin labs are located in Grasse, once a center for French leather-making, complete with disused tanneries (and now one of the world's perfume capitals). But I digress. Scientifically, the skin-making process seems to fall somewhere between Frankenstein and Campbell's new Chunky soup - by way of late Renaissance hermeticism - and, surreally, its real purpose is to eliminate animal testing from the European cosmetics industry.

In other words, the existence of this "artificial human skin" has everything to do with an impending EU ban on animal testing. That ban, which comes into effect in March 2009, means that cosmetics companies will no longer be able to test their perfumes, eyeliners, and blemish creams on animals - so they're looking frantically for new things to run such tests on.

One of those things is fake human skin.

The New York Times thus informs us that cosmetics firms are "striving to shape a new world of beauty research - and at the same time spare the lives of thousands of rabbits, mice, rats and guinea pigs."

All of this top secret "beauty research" means that there are now "advanced materials" entering the global marketplace - and these materials include "reconstructed eye tissue and tiny circles of skin developed from donor cells harvested from cosmetic operations." It's a whole new chapter in the global organ trade: a general economy of human body parts, broken down into germ lines and tissues.

Beauty giant L'Oréal has even devoted more than $800 million to finding "alternatives to animal testing." After all, we read, the "stakes are high."

Europe is the world's leading cosmetics market, and it also exports more than $23.4 billion worth of cosmetics every year. Cosmetics exported from the United States to Europe amount to nearly $2 billion a year, about 7 percent of the European market. After the United States, Japan is the second leading provider of cosmetics to Europe.

There is a firm called SkinEthic, for instance, that has been "developing and manufacturing a line of cellular tools that includes a wide range of human tissues." SkinEthic was bought by L'Oréal last year, an investment "which propelled the parent company into a dominant position in the testing field, with two critical patents on reconstructed skin." Patented skin! Where intellectual property and the human body collide.

SkinEthic's various fields of research even include the frighteningly named "vaginal metabolism" - which makes me wonder if io9's earlier look at mutant pussy might now have to be updated.

In any case, as cosmetic scientists continue to "develop" entire new lines of human skin and the "cellular tools" that maintain them, are we simply witnessing the further privatization of human anatomy? If there is a market in body futures, in other words, with whole new types of specialty organs being developed in top secret labs, then the cosmetic industry is surely one of that market's most interesting examples.

Perhaps implying that legendarily deranged Wisconsin serial killer Ed Gein, the real-life inspiration for Leatherface, had, in fact, been a futurist, we might yet find that the Michael Jacksons of tomorrow will simply FedEx themselves special orders of patented skin - a kind of dead skin mask that you wear to the Oscars ("Just where did you get that face?" nervous reporters ask) - to make the fashion statement of a lifetime.

We'll simply wear new skin.

For now, though, these patented expanses of lab-grown flesh are being used as nothing but test swatches: Apply mascara or blush or a new perfume and watch for allergic reactions. 4-inch by 4-inch squares of raw skin tremble under harsh fluorescent lights in unmarked factories outside Marseilles.

Or so the cosmetic companies say. What else are they growing in their climate-controlled labs, where the manufacture of human flesh can proceed without cause for alarm? Given time, will we all learn of some new horror, like something out of H.P. Lovecraft's "Herbert West, Reanimator," in which a terrified journalist records his midnight flight from another lab, an unacknowledged lab located somewhere high in the Pyrenees, with dark curtains drawn over bulletproof windows, claiming that those secret acres of fake skin have started to move, self-assembling into a recognizable shape, something all too human to ignore...?