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 As if light had been witched somehow into its opposite. . . .

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"witched somehow"
See? Black Magic! Maybe I shouldn't have been so down on my explication earlier when I felt I was rambling about nonsense. But I wasn't! Merle confirms it here! Something evil has made its way into this photograph.
    I'm not saying witches are evil! I'm saying that at the time Merle was reacting to this negative photographic plate, he would have been using the idea of something being witched as definitely not good at all and probably sinister and certainly Satan loving! He's the jerk who can't see a witch as having been persecuted and Wicca good and love the Earth and women power and I'll be over here.

"light" "its opposite"
Also remember, Me, to write something smart about light and the opposite of light (which I think is dark although it could be heavy) so that people reading this in the future don't think I'm just a stupid dolt who knows a few pop culture references. Let me put a sticky note on my computer monitor to remind me to get back to this. That should do it! Infallible plan!

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 The sky behind the tall, jagged roofline was nearly black, windows that should have been light-colored were dark.

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Remember the beginning of the television show Tales from the Darkside? It simply showed some normal natural scenes with some really creepy Casio keyboard music playing. Then some deep voiced guy was all, "Man lives in the sunlit world of what he believes to be reality. But there is, unseen by most, an underworld, a place that is just as real but not as brightly lit. A dark side." Then the image flips and BAM! we're viewing everything as its negative. Man, that used to terrify me as a kid. And I was twelve when that show first aired!

Well that feeling is what Merle's feeling right now. Getting his first glimpse of a negative world, a dark side. He might as well be twelve (or younger!) while experiencing this because unlike twelve year old me, Merle has no idea what a negative even is. What he's seeing can only be described as a dark version of the well-lit world he knows, an evil version, probably! And making it even creepier is that it's of the unheimlich place they've all been tossed into a few times that summer, the Newburgh Asylum. And even creepier yet, the slipped-from-reality inmates staring strangely out at him.

I just watched the opening to Tales from the Darkside to transcribe what the man said during it and I broke out into gooseflesh even now! At not even close to twelve!

You know what other intro scared the hell out of me as a kid (much younger than twelve, to be fair)? Doctor Who! That fricking music, man! Chills!

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 The whites of their eyes were dark gray.

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Creepy! Are you creeped out yet? Like Merle, you should be but I'm not sure why. Merle went from watching a miracle appear before his eyes to suddenly feeling weirded out by the whole thing. I guess it's a human reaction to witnessing the unknowable? Is this a commentary on scientific ignorance? How everything which you've never witnessed prior, or know nothing about, can seem so mysterious as to be proof of God or proof of ultimate Evil? Has Merle shifted from the belief that he was witnessing a miracle to now witnessing black magic?

Also, is this dramatic irony? We know he's looking at a negative but Merle would have no reason to know or believe or even understand how film development works. Common sense, that affliction of the ignorant and stupid which they believe to be the mightiest power of all minds, would simply think that a developed photo would come out looking exactly like the object the camera took a snapshot of. Why would the light and shadow be inverted? But scientific knowledge is complicated, you Common Sense worshiping buffoons! It's also scary, I guess, which is why we have so many movies like The Gods Must Be Crazy where "primitive" people react to modern technology or scientific experiments as if they're the most intense magic they've ever witnessed.

Oh! Also a negative would be like viewing the evil, dark side of existence! So that's got to be pretty creepy for Merle too.

I'm not happy about this entry. You probably shouldn't read it. I think I might be sick.