A brief introduction...

I would like everyone out there in cyberland to know that this is an underground film. There was no money. I am a poor filmmaker. Several failures have eaten through me as the years have marched along but I am resolute that 2008 will see a rebirth of my film career. (See my filmmaker blog for more.) And yet, despite the bitter disappointment, I have not become some corporate farm animal. I have eaten less, made some admittedly odd choices, but persisted. Had the last scrap of persistence failed me, I would inevitably have lost my share of the creative vitality that exists in us all. That loss has not occurred. THERE IS A PERSON HIDING IN THE CORNER OF THIS WEB SITE WHO WILL RETURN. IS RETURNING. You need to know this if you are wondering why this site is so bare bones. I have been trying to make other films. There is no one else to help get Unspeakable out there.

Every letter of html was written by me. I don't know many techie people so I learned it myself from scratch. I have just now finally figured out how to create and link to other pages now that my hosting company finally chose to share that information with us after a year of requests. They also now offer direct uploads so maybe this site can get better.

Please understand that I am a filmmaker and so there is not much time nor energy left to give to this particular film, this child of mine who is grown but still lives at home. Unspeakable has traveled the world yet I still have 800 dvd's sitting in my apartment from the last (and possibly final) run of dvd's. That is in part because it already came out on vhs, but mostly because distribution has been difficult.

Nevertheless, this is an important film about a fascinating and crucially relevant person. A man who became my friend and has remained so through the years since our documentary days came to a wrap and the film premiered in february of 2002 in San Francisco at IndieFest.

Listen. I am here. We are here. Subversive. Resisting. As my friend, Leyba has said, "fuck your freedom"!!!!!!!

Through the ashes, we are coming back. Every last one of us.

Marc Rokoff February 17, 2008



In The Shadows of Unspeakable...





So there were a lot of strange things that happened during the making of Unspeakable. Some of the lesser reviewers have chosen to dismiss their experience by assuming I was some hardcore Satanist or Leyba groupie. The truth is, I didn’t know much about Satanism before making this film. My friends at SFAI introduced me to Leyba and we started filming that first night I met him.

I should mention that I came from the suburbs and although I always had an offbeat sensibility, truly subversive and underground ways of being didn’t really take full hold of my mind until a bit later on for me than for most. All sorts of family and friends were freaking out about my getting so involved with Satanists in San Francsico. They thought I was lost in a cult. They were wrong, but that didn’t mean I would ever be the same after filming this, either.

And there are a few things..stuff outside personal growth sort of experiences….things that happened that should be documented, and this is the most fascinating to me, because I was so unaware of what was happening until much later….quite recently in fact.

I am speaking of the Shadow People. In childhood I had seen some strange apparitions, but as an adult those sort of things mostly fell away until shortly after I started filming this documentary. I remember being in my apartment, I was living alone as an apartment manager (in addition to my regular job) to try to raise a little extra money to make films. One evening, I saw the strangest shadow on my ceiling….it didn’t stay long. It was like a flash. But if I had to describe it, I would almost say it was like a person mixed with…some kind of animal. Who would give such an incident more than a moment’s thought. I didn’t.

But then, about a week later, after we’d gotten really serious about deciding to make a documentary, I saw – with no exception – the shadow of a man in my apartment. (And no it wasn’t my own!) It was across the room, and once I turned my head fully, it was gone. My research into Satanism, LaVey, and his influences, was in full swing, and I was nearly knee deep in books of the strangest sort. I knew. I just knew that I was plugged into something...I don’t know how to describe it. Primal…?…maybe it can’t be described. It was a connection to a timeless thread of sorts that is often ignored, but yet is right there, running alongside us all.

So that was the last I saw of the strange shadows. But when we went to the Black House, the place where LaVey lived and held many a Satanic Mass, there was a sense that we were being watched in some way. It wasn’t until I saw the footage that I realized the old black paint had peeled in the oddest way. Right above Leyba’s shoulder, was the figure of a man…one in my opinion that was shrouded in an overcoat and a hat. I never shared this feeling with anyone. In my head though, whenever I screened the footage, was the thought that this was there on purpose. I often edited in the middle of the night, and it sometimes gave me chills.

When you edit, you sometimes see footage thousands of times. I sometimes wondered if this sense that there was a “dark presence” manifesting itself visibly in the film might not be LaVey’s approval for breaking into the condemned lot where the Black House still stood. (We were among the last ever to visit the place. And the second to last ever to film the Black house. The very last person to make a film about the space, strangely enough, was David Sherman who lived two flats below me in our tiny six unit SF apartment building. His film is an avant-garde piece entitled To Re-Edit the World. We didn’t find out that we had both been sitting in our houses in the middle of the night working on footage of the Black House in its last moments until AFTER both our films were finished and he saw my film at the SF IndieFest.)

The reason why I am finally compelled to write of this experience was because of an exposure to an image I had last year. I have never felt right about not bringing my experience full circle by sharing this uncanny bit of evidence of the strange… I haven’t made a film in the six years since Unspeakable was released. But I was researching a new topic that offhandedly led me to a page on Wikipedia about Shadow People. Well…I need to stress again that I ALWAYS, every single damn time I screen the film, stare at the black shape above Leyba’s shoulder. And here is the Shadow People image:



Now, you are free to draw your own conclusions. I realize most people will not believe me, even though the comparison cannot be missed between the image in this documentary and the one that is made of a timeless dark being that countless, apparently, have seen. But some will believe what they are actually seeing here, instead of dismissing it to the trained impulse of so called “rational” thought. Those not afraid to take a look at the thread of something deeper that runs just below the surface alongside us all. You know.