Passionate about film, fascinated by history, captivated by folklore.

Phantasoscope is a place for writings and projects that are as eclectic and esoteric as my curiosity takes me. My name is Christopher Daniel Tubb, I am a Dorset based writer, researcher, and filmmaker. The impetus behind much of what you see here comes from my time flitting between research and writing; I’ve never been entirely certain if I research to write, or write to give purpose to studious research. Either way, it keeps this whole life lark fascinating!

Having wrangled a PhD from the University of Southampton, and having had two short films screened at festivals from Fargo in the USA to Pune in India, I continue to work on film projects with collaborators in Britain and Norway.

My main aim at present is to complete a biography charting one director’s journey through the fraught cultural landscape of British silent film. More to follow…

A Note on Our Patron Deity Here at Phantasoscope

Of Phantasos little is known and references are scant. Well, scant is overstating. He is named in Ovid’s Metamorphoses in but a few lines as part of the House of Sleep (Book XI, 640-644), where he is identified as one of the thousand sons of Hypnos, the god of sleep, and brother of Morpheus.

Phantasos’s name shares a Greek origin with the English word “fantasy,” both rooted in “phantazein” meaning to “make visible.” The fantastical in Phantasos is illustrated by how in dreams he takes the illusory form of natural features, such as earth, rock, rivers, and trees, and inanimate objects more generally. Where his brother Morpheus mastered disguising himself in human forms, and Phobetor in the shape of beasts, Phantasos crafts augury imbued dreamscapes for those he visits.

Contact: phantasoscope@gmail.com