chthon-oneiros

Dial Worksheet — The 3-Dial + 5-Axis Schema

A walkthrough for calibrating the three director dials and five aesthetic axes before writing a single PHANTASMATA creative fragment. Work through each dial in order. The questions force decisions; the blend recipes show how different settings produce different textures.

How to Use This

Start with a feeling, image, or situation — not a thesis.
Walk through each dial below, answering the questions honestly.
Check your answers against the Axis Check (Section 5) to identify the primary aesthetic axis.
Select the output format (Section 6) based on where your answers land.
Draft the fragment using TEMPLATE.md.
Return to the self-check questions at the end of the template.

Dial 1: $ARGENTO_GEL (0-100)

Core question: Is the dread visible? Does the horror announce itself through color, staging, and spectacle?

Sub-questions:

Color saturation (what dominates the visual field?)

At 0: The image is naturalistic. Muted palettes. What you see is what is there.
At 25: Color begins to distort — shadows deepen toward indigo, practicals burn too hot.
At 50: Bold primary gels visible in the frame. Color functions as emotional information, not record.
At 75: Every surface is a chromatic weapon. The image has abandoned realism.
At 100: Color itself is the subject. The impossible reds of Technicolor imbibition.

Is violence ritualized or chaotic?

Ritualized violence (high Argento): The kill is choreographed. It has internal rhythm, spatial logic, aesthetic design. The baroque kill — death as opera.
Chaotic violence (low Argento): Violence is functional, ugly, sudden. No staging. Grindhouse territory.
Ask: Does the victim have time to know what’s happening? (High Argento = protracted victim awareness. The seconds stretch.)

Is there a mystery structure?

High Argento: Someone saw something wrong. The protagonist has already witnessed the truth but cannot decode it. Investigation drives the narrative.
Low Argento: No mystery. The horror is not about solving — it’s about enduring or escaping.

What scores the scene?

High Argento: Goblin-territory — driving rhythmic patterns, synth textures, prog-rock that trains the body to expect violence. The Pavlovian score.
Medium: Atmospheric scoring that comments on violence rather than amplifying it.
Low Argento: Diegetic sound only, silence, or non-musical sound design.

Setting	Texture
0-20	No operatic violence. Naturalistic color. Functional kills.
20-40	Hints of stylization. One bold color. Some staging in violence.
40-60	Clear set-piece kills. Visible gels. Mystery element.
60-80	Full operatic mode. Color-as-weapon. Goblin intensity.
80-100	Total chromatic assault. The kill transcends narrative. Pure composition.

Dial 2: $LYNCH_DRIFT (0-100)

Core question: Is the dread spatial? Does the horror come from the feeling that reality itself is unreliable — that the mundane world has a trapdoor to the cosmic?

Sub-questions:

What’s the mundane anchor?

Every Lynch-drift piece needs a recognizable starting point: a suburban house, a diner, a highway, an office. The mundane anchor is what makes the drift devastating — you need to know what “normal” looks like to feel it dissolve.
Ask: Where does this piece start that feels safe? (The answer is where the trapdoor will open.)

Where does dream logic enter?

At 0: Never. The narrative is causal, chronological, explicable.
At 25: One moment of wrong-feeling. A detail that shouldn’t be there.
At 50: Dream logic drives a significant sequence. Temporal stutter. Non-sequitur.
At 75: The distinction between dream and waking is unreliable. The viewer cannot determine reality status.
At 100: The entire piece operates in dream logic. Causal reasoning has collapsed. Associative logic only.

Is identity stable?

Stable identity (low Lynch): Characters are who they say they are. Names persist. Faces match.
Unstable identity (high Lynch): Characters double, merge, swap, dissolve. The protagonist may not be the same person at the end as at the beginning. The doubled character — two people sharing a face, neither resolvable into the other.

What does the silence sound like?

High Lynch: Silence is a presence, not an absence. The electrical hum beneath everything. Industrial texture infiltrating domestic space. When sound drops out, the void is deafening.
Low Lynch: Silence is just quiet. No ambient wrongness.

Setting	Texture
0-20	Firmly mundane. Clear identity. No dream intrusion.
20-40	One uncanny element. Something is slightly off.
40-60	Dream logic in one major sequence. Identity questions emerge.
60-80	Reality status unreliable. Threshold spaces. Identity blur.
80-100	Total drift. Mundane anchor dissolved. Cosmic dread. Doubled selves.

Dial 3: $KON_SPIRAL (0-100)

Core question: Is the dread mediated? Does the horror come from the collapse of the boundary between representation and reality — from performance outliving the performer, from being watched, from the image consuming the person?

Sub-questions:

Is there a media frame?

High Kon: There is always a screen within the screen. A show within the show. A camera recording the recording. The piece contains a representation of itself or of the act of watching/making it. Media-within-media.
Low Kon: No meta-media layer. The piece presents itself as direct experience, not mediated experience.

Does performance outlive the performer?

High Kon: The image is more powerful than the person. The role consumes the actor. The profile outlives the user. The post takes on a life the poster never intended. Identity theft by performance — the performance is stronger than the performer.
Low Kon: Performance ends when the performer stops. Identity remains under the subject’s control.

Who is watching?

High Kon: Observation itself generates new reality. The crowd as mirror — audience/mob functioning as amplification of the protagonist’s internal state. Observer contamination — watching changes what is watched.
Low Kon: No audience awareness. The horror is private, unobserved.

Can memory be trusted?

High Kon: Memory is not retrieval but construction. The explanatory flashback that explains nothing. Temporal compression — time not passing consistently, chunks of experience missing. The architecture of memory — physical spaces changing configuration to match emotional state.
Low Kon: Memory is reliable. The past is stable. What happened happened.

Setting	Texture
0-20	No media layer. No performance anxiety. Memory reliable.
20-40	Background media presence. Mild audience awareness.
40-60	Active media-within-media. Performance beginning to outlive performer.
60-80	Mediation collapse underway. Observer contamination. Memory unreliable.
80-100	Full spiral. Cannot distinguish real from performed. The image consumes all.

Section 4: Axis Check

After setting your three dials, identify which of the 5 aesthetic axes is primary. Only one can lead; others may be present as secondary or tertiary.

Axis	Primary Signal	Typical Dial Profile
$GRINDHOUSE	Raw exploitation texture. Grain, VHS noise, urban decay, unflinching immediacy. The piece feels found — unpolished, confrontational, bodily.	Low-to-mid Argento (functional violence), low Lynch (grounded reality), low Kon (no meta layer)
$GIALLO	Color-as-weapon. Bold gels, operatic murder, non-linear mystery. Beauty and atrocity coexist.	High Argento (60+), variable Lynch, low Kon
$LYNCH	Mundane-to-cosmic implosion. Dream logic, identity blur, suburban dread. The familiar collapses into the bottomless.	Low Argento, high Lynch (60+), variable Kon
$FOUND_FOOTAGE	Collapse of narrative authority. Found digital, glitched calls, abandoned profiles. The camera/device is unreliable. Audience cannot determine what is staged.	Variable Argento, variable Lynch, mid-to-high Kon (media awareness)
$PSYCHO_SUBCONSCIOUS	Perfect Blue register. Madness spiral, ambiguous supernatural, obsession-as-structure. The protagonist cannot trust their own mind.	Low Argento, mid Lynch, high Kon (60+)

Diagnostic question: If a reader/viewer asked “what kind of horror is this?” — which axis is the first-word answer?

Section 5: Format Selection

Based on your dial settings and axis check, which PHANTASMATA output format carries this piece?

Format	What It Is	Best When
video-log	First-person camera address. The speaker talks to the device. Lo-fi, raw, diegetic. Breathing, room tone, bad framing.	High found-footage axis. Personal. Intimate. The speaker needs to tell someone what happened.
screen-capture	Desktop/phone screen as narrative surface. Tabs, notifications, messages, search bars. The interface is the story.	High Kon (mediated experience). Digital paranoia. The horror lives in the device.
audio-log	Voice recording. No visual. Microphone hiss, distant sounds, breathing. The listener must construct the visual.	High Lynch (imagination fills the gaps). High sound-design emphasis. When what you hear is worse than what you’d see.
text-fragment	Written text — journal entry, note, message, transcript. Raw typography. No polish.	High $PSYCHO_SUBCONSCIOUS. Unreliable narrator. The gap between what’s written and what happened.
mock-post	Social media artifact. Caption, comments, shares, algorithm behavior. The platform’s format shapes the horror.	High Kon + high found-footage. The horror is viral, public, participatory.

Calibration rule: If it looks produced, it doesn’t belong in PHANTASMATA yet. The output must feel found, not made. Audience uncertainty is the design intent.

Section 6: Sample Dial Configurations

Pre-set configurations for different horror registers. Use as starting points, not prescriptions.

“Neon Dream”

argento_gel: 75
lynch_drift: 70
kon_spiral: 15

Texture: Color-saturated surrealism. Every surface bleeds neon. Violence is beautiful and staged. Dream logic drives the narrative forward. Identity may blur. No meta-media layer — the dread is direct, visual, spatial. Primary axis: $GIALLO or $LYNCH depending on whether color or dream logic leads. Format: video-log (first-person witnessing of the impossible) or text-fragment (fever-dream journal).

“Identity Dissolve”

argento_gel: 15
lynch_drift: 70
kon_spiral: 75

Texture: The mundane world is a screen, and the screen is eating the person behind it. Performance outlives performer. Identity doubles and splits. Memory is unreliable — flashbacks explain nothing. The media frame is everywhere. Primary axis: $PSYCHO_SUBCONSCIOUS. Format: screen-capture (the dissolve happening in the interface) or mock-post (the public performance consuming the private self).

“Spectacle of Surveillance”

argento_gel: 70
lynch_drift: 20
kon_spiral: 75

Texture: Ritualized violence under the gaze. Someone is always watching. The kill is operatic, choreographed, and recorded. The recording becomes more real than the event. Beauty and observation contaminate each other. Primary axis: $GIALLO (operatic staging) + $FOUND_FOOTAGE (the recording). Format: video-log (witness footage of the ritual) or screen-capture (the recording reviewing itself).

“Full PHANTASMATA”

argento_gel: 60
lynch_drift: 60
kon_spiral: 60

Texture: All axes active. Reality is porous on every front — color distorts, identity blurs, media frames collapse, dream logic operates. The piece is simultaneously beautiful, disorienting, and mediated. Every stable ground dissolves. This is the hardest blend to execute because no single axis leads. Primary axis: reader cannot determine. Format: any — but the format itself should feel unstable (a video-log that becomes a screen-capture; a text-fragment that quotes a mock-post).

“Raw Nerve”

argento_gel: 25
lynch_drift: 10
kon_spiral: 10

Texture: Almost pure grindhouse. Minimal stylization. Violence is ugly, functional, immediate. Naturalistic color. No dream logic. No media frame. The horror is physical, bodily, confrontational. Primary axis: $GRINDHOUSE. Format: video-log (raw, shaky, too close to the event) or audio-log (you hear what happens and your imagination does the rest).

“Digital Paranoia Fugue”

argento_gel: 10
lynch_drift: 40
kon_spiral: 85

Texture: The horror lives in the device. Screens within screens. The interface is watching you. Social media has a memory you don’t control. Glitched calls, abandoned profiles, posts that take on autonomous life. Something is slightly off — dream-adjacent but grounded in digital uncanny. Primary axis: $FOUND_FOOTAGE. Format: screen-capture (the native medium of this dread) or mock-post (the viral vehicle).

Section 7: Cross-Reference — Techniques to Dials

Which craft mechanisms from the director reports tend to activate at which dial settings:

Mechanism	High Argento	High Lynch	High Kon
Found-footage framework	Moderate	Moderate	Primary
Unnatural color/saturation	Primary	Moderate	Rare
Hybrid camera style	Moderate	Primary	Moderate
Layered sound design	Primary (Goblin)	Primary (hum/silence)	Moderate
Lo-fi editing	Moderate	Moderate	Primary (acceleration)
Social/viral diegetic	Rare	Rare	Primary

Worksheet designed for CHTHON-ONEIROS (Organ II — POIESIS, Field II — Present Dreaming, Container: PHANTASMATA). Use with TEMPLATE.md to produce creative fragments.