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In this bonus edition of The Pod Charles Cinecast, your hosts Jonathan Foster and Fil Freitas try something a little different, where we are talking about a book that one of us has actually read that has been made into a movie that we then watched, and how the two compare. For the first instalment of this Book Club series, we tackle Whitley Strieber's 1987 non-fiction bestseller, COMMUNION, which was made into the 1989 sci-fi horror of the same name, starring Christopher Walken.

In December 1985, renowned sci-fi/horror novelist Whitley Strieber (The Wolfen, The Hunger) had an unexplainable experience; a shattering assault from the unknown. Experiences in which he "lost time" and has terrifying flashbacks, which hypnosis undertaken by Dr. Donald F. Klein and ufologist Budd Hopkins later links to an alleged encounter with aliens. To all appearances, he and his family have had a series of elaborate personal encounters with intelligent non-human beings in his isolated cabin in upstate New York. At first, he thought he was losing his mind. Unconcerned with the whole phenomenon of UFOs and extraterrestrials, he viewed them as a false unknown, easily explainable as misperceptions or hallucinations. But the visitors marched right into the middle of the life of this indifferent sceptic.

Who are these visitors? Where do they come from? Do they represent some as-yet-unidentified aspect of the human mind - incredible, almost beyond comprehension, but essentially human - or are they what they seem to be, visitors of unknown origin? If this happened to you, and you wrote a bestselling novel about it, and decided to make a movie based on your experiences, would you let Christopher Walken come in and improvise a bunch of stuff, dance with puppets, and make you look like a lunatic? I would hope not. 

We were inspired to dive into this book and its wacky adaptation from our I Want To Believe Arc over last Halloween, where we were discussing Alien Movies. During this arc, we kept asking ourselves, "What really is the alien agenda?" Now, we don't know if we are any closer to the truth after witnessing Christopher Walken dance around with aliens and make the writer of this book look like a complete ass hat, but maybe... just maybe... the truth is still out there!

"I am you. And you are me. And we are here. I am the dreamer and you are the dream."