Camp Tingler

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I don’t remember in which magazine where I saw the still, but I was immediately intrigued.  I didn’t know the movie it was from and in the days before the internet, when you live in a small town, avenues for finding the answer were few.  I just knew it was a photo of a woman in a bathrobe next to a bathtub filled with some opaque fluid (presumably blood), from which a hand was reaching out to her.  Or at her.  I don’t even recall when or how I learned that the scene was from the gimmick-driven William Castle film, The Tingler.  I’d heard of the movie before, but I hadn’t connected the scene with it.  No matter how you slice it, the story of the movie makes no sense.  That doesn’t stop it from being fun.  I’ve seen it before but had to refresh my memory.

I hadn’t recalled, for example, that Dr. Chapin (Vincent Price) uses LSD to try to get scared.  While the dialogue isn’t great, there are many observations on fear and how adults outgrow it.  Chapin wants to find the physical root of fear and drops some acid (apparently the first cinematic depiction of LSD use) to enhance the experience.  Although it’s crucial to the plot, I also didn’t remember that Martha Higgins can’t hear or speak.  Interestingly, she co-owns a silent movie theater and she’s a silent character in a sound movie.  She’s also the only character involved in the two color shots in a black-and-white film.  She remains in grayscale herself in these scenes.  In other words, there is some sophistication here.  And of course, Vincent Price was always classy.

Camp is an aesthetic that I appreciate but, like a tone-deaf person, don’t always recognize.  The Tingler has become a camp classic.  Many people know that Castle had vibrators installed in select theater seats so that some audience members would “tingle” at appropriate places.  This was the “Percepto” advertised with the movie.  Having himself introduce the film as too terrifying—echoing back to Frankenstein in 1931—Castle guaranteed the movie wouldn’t be taken seriously.  There’s nothing scary about this horror film.  Speaking for myself, I spent too much time trying to figure out what happened to poor Mrs. Higgins—yes, her husband’s trying to scare her to death but then she has hallucinations as if Dr. Chapin gave her the LSD instead of taking it himself.  It doesn’t make sense, but it’s fun.  I guess that’s the definition of camp.

Personal History

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Being an historian by disposition has its own rewards.  I relate to the chronicling monks of the Middle Ages and their eagerness to record things.  On a much smaller scale, I try to keep track of what has passed in my own small life.  As we all know, most days consist of a stunning sameness, particularly if you work 9-2-5.  Although your soul is evolving, capitalism’s cookie-cutter ensures a kind of ennui that vacation time, and travel in particular, breaks.  Travel is expensive, however.  A luxury item.  It’s also an education.  My wife and I began our life together overseas, living three years in Scotland.  We traveled as much as grad students could afford.  Gainfully employed in the United States, we made regular summer trips to Idaho, and often shorter trips closer to home in Wisconsin.

We repurposed an old, spiral bound, three-subject notebook to record our adventures.  It spanned twenty-two years.  When we moved to our house in 2018, this notebook was lost.  (A similar thing happened with an Historic Scotland booklet where we’d inscribed all the dates of properties visited.  It vanished somewhere in central Illinois in 1992.)  Recently, looking for an empty three-ring binder for my wife to use, I unexpectedly came across our old three-subject notebook.  The relief—maybe even ecstasy—it released was something only an historian could appreciate.  Here were the dates, times, and places that I thought had been lost from my life.  In that morass of years after Nashotah House my mind had gone into a kind of twilight of half-remembered forays to bring light to this harsh 9-2-5 world.  I carried the notebook around with me for days, not wanting to lose sight of it.

Those of us who write need to record things.  I’ve never been able to afford to be a world traveler.  The company’s dime sent me to the United Kingdom a few times, but overseas after Scotland has been more a reverie than a reality.  But now, at least, I could remember our domestic trips.  The notebook included ventures I’d forgotten.  You see, when you get back from a trip you have to begin the 9-2-5 the very next day, particularly if your company isn’t fond of holidays.  (This explains why I write so much about them.)  Pleasant memories get lost in the mundane cookie-cutter problems of everyday life.  And yet I could now face them with that rare joy known to historians.  I had a notebook next to me, ready for transcribing.  It was going to be a good day.

Campus Monster

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Universal was the studio that gave America its monsters.  Well, it wasn’t Universal alone, but the initial—almost canonical—line-up of monsters were Universal productions.  As horror grew to be more influenced by science-fiction in the 1950s, Universal kept at the monster-themed movies, cranking out many that I missed and on which I’ve been trying to catch up.  Monster on the Campus is interesting in a number of ways.  Directed by Jack Arnold, of Gilligan’s Island fame (or future fame, since this movie was earlier), it’s a story built around evolution.  Pipe-smoking professor Donald Blake has a coelacanth delivered to his lab.  Unbeknownst to him, the prehistoric fish had been irradiated with gamma rays to preserve it—as well as being shipped on ice.  The dead fish is about to create problems.

A dog laps up some of the blood (it started to thaw) and becomes a vicious evolutionary throwback.  Then Professor Blake cuts himself on a fish tooth and sticks his hand in the contaminated water.  He becomes a murderous caveman, but the effect is only temporary.  A dragonfly eating the fish transforms into a prehistoric insect that the professor kills, but its blood drips, unnoticed, into his pipe.  He changes and murders again.  Finally it dawn upon him that he was responsible for the murders.  In a remote cabin he sets up cameras and injects himself with the radioactive coelacanth plasma and ends up killing a park ranger.  Finally, he injects himself so that following police officers will shoot him to death.  Rather a bleak story.

The film has been read as social commentary since its “rediscovery,” but what caught my attention was the easy acceptance of evolution.  This was the late fifties and the creationist backlash was still pretty strong at the time.  If evolution didn’t occur, the professor (and dog and dragonfly) couldn’t have become their atavistic selves, giving the movie its plot.  The classic Universal monster of the decade was the Gill Man—aka Creature of the Black Lagoon—also an atavistic throwback to an earlier time, but also a divergent branch of evolution.  Creature was also directed by Jack Arnold, but four years earlier.  It began with a quote from Genesis 1, bringing creation and evolution together.  The title Monster on the Campus offers many possibilities for co-ed mayhem, but instead opts for a scientist who gets caught up in the tangle of evolution.  The movie was near the end of Universal’s monster run, but in the sixties horror would change forever.  This was a little fun before things got serious—horror school was about to start.

Life Course

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Curriculum vita.  The course of a life.  I see quite a few CVs, although I’m not on any search committees.  As I was examining one the other day I recollected how, when I first tried to put one together, I was told to leave high school and its achievements out of it.  Nobody’s really interested in that anymore.  Presumably college is an indication of choice whereas high school is a matter of where your parents live.  Or how much money they have.  College says something indicative about you.  Although many parents—not mine, to be clear—help bankroll college and may have a say in where you go, college is “your choice.”  Unbounded by geography, young people mostly old enough to take care of themselves, are given a really tremendous responsibility here.  And it was certainly influenced by high school.

Some choices are economic, and that also says something about a person.  Some are faith-based, which definitely says something about you.  Some are terribly ambitious, and those tend to get you the biggest head start on your life course.  Of course, some of us did not realize that.  Some of us, not sure if college would work or not, chose somewhere close to home.  Somewhere where escape, if needed, was possible.  And of course, your college shows up ever after on your CV.  I often wonder if things would’ve worked out differently if I’d gone somewhere else for college.  I needed somewhere understanding to shake me out of the false narrative I’d been told.  Had I gone somewhere more strident I might’ve retrenched in my pre-decided ideas.  Of course, those pre-decided ideas are what made me decide to go to college in the first place.

How can we possibly measure the course of a life?  From big event to big event?  So many of the meaningful bits occur in small spaces wedged in-between the large markers of who we are.  We can’t possibly know all the consequences of our choices, even as we attempt to select the right option at each step of the way.  And there’s no guarantee regarding the outcome.  Were it a feasible option I’d go back to college again—I would start at a different place this time—to test the results of my first decade of higher education.  For, I know, although a CV can reveal more than it might intend, it leaves much more unsaid than it can possibly say.

Stalking the Stalker

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You had to’ve seen this coming.  The Night Stalker introduced how Carl Kolchak, hard-nosed reporter, became a believer in the supernatural.  This highly-rated television film led to a sequel, The Night Strangler, which appeared the following year.  It also did well.  Ditching a third script by Richard Matheson, ABC decided on a series, Kolchak: The Night Stalker.  The subtitle was probably considered a necessary reminder that the movies had done very well.  It also transferred the stalker epithet onto Kolchak.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.  The Night Strangler shifts the action to Seattle where an elixir-of-youth-drinking monster is murdering young women to keep himself alive.  Once again the police and government officials cover up what’s really going on, for fear of losing tourist dollars.  There is a bit of social commentary here.

This movie reminded me of an In Search of… episode on Comte de Saint Germain, who, as a child, I assumed was a Catholic saint.  Saint Germain (just his assumed name) was an alchemist who claimed to be half a millennium old.  He seems to be, guessing from the number of books that treat him as an actual saint, just as popular now as he was in the seventies.  At least among a certain crowd.  And it was in the seventies that this movie was released.  Saint Germain’s enduring popularity all but assures no academic will touch him.  No matter, we have Kolchak to fill in the details.  And Richard Matheson was a smart man.  The Night Strangler does have a few pacing problems, but it certainly is a film worth seeing, even though it exists in that shadowy world of telinema (the combined forms of television and cinema).

Kolchak succeeds by believing in where the facts point, although the conclusions are supernatural.  In fact, watching The Night Stalker I couldn’t help but think of those who claim to have staked the Highgate Vampire.  That’s some strong conviction.  Indeed, the will to believe is more powerful than most people would like to admit.  Our minds contribute to our reality, but we insist that minds = brains, despite our inability to define consciousness.  That’s why I liked shows like In Search of…  As a teenager I couldn’t get enough of it.  I purchased all the accompanying Alan Landsburg books with my hard-earned summer income, skimping, as always, on the school clothes that I had to buy for myself.  Funny, it seems that my mindset hasn’t changed that much since the days of my youth.  Or maybe a sign of maturity is recognizing you were closer to the truth than you realized, back when you started the quest.

Mystic Thoughts

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Those who know me primarily from my writings on horror are perhaps whiplashed when I muse about spiritual matters.  I don’t mean just religion, but spirituality—the two are quite different.  If life had unfolded differently I would likely have ended up as a mystic.  The problem is “rational mystic” is an oxymoron in most minds.  Either you’re one or you’re the other.  To become a proper mystic, in any case, you can’t be bothered with such things as secular work.  Mysticism—direct encounters with the divine—requires development and practice.  You can’t always control when a trance or vision might hit you.  What if it comes during a meeting?  Say your performance and development review at work?  You see the problem.

I seriously considered becoming a monastic as a young man but I had a problem.  I was a Protestant.  Protestantism was based on the idea that Catholic practices, such as monasticism, were wrong by default.  Miracles don’t happen—haven’t done since New Testament times—and God is a biblical literalist.  Why spend valuable church funds, then, on establishing monasteries?  Still, mystical experiences happened to me.  (You’ll have to get to know me personally to find out more about that.)  I talked to my (Protestant) professors.  “You don’t want to become a mystic,” I was told.  “They always have trouble with the church.”  Eventually I became an Episcopalian, a tradition that was more open to mysticism.  It became clear in 2005, however, that the Episcopal Church wanted nothing more to do with me.  Besides, I’m a family man.

Monasteries for married folk is an idea whose time has come.  Monasticism is based on the idea that you need to isolate yourself from the world’s distractions to grow spiritually.  To me, as I noted recently regarding sacraments, the “distraction” of marriage isn’t the problem.  It’s the constant need to earn money.  More and more money.  Monasteries became wealthy because other people were glad to pay money so that someone else could do the spiritual heavy lifting for them.  You can get into Heaven on borrowed virtue.  (Even Protestants believe that.  If you doubt it, get a degree or two in theology and you’ll see.)  So why not provide monasteries for those poor souls that just don’t fit into the capitalistic ideal?  I have the vision that such places would become havens for artists of all stripes.  And that, with the goodwill of society, locations where your needs were met for an exchange of goods—building good spiritual karma for a world where most people are content with trying to get rich—might just work.  It’s an idea whose time has come.  Who’s with me?

Photo by Luís Feliciano on Unsplash

An Interesting Prize

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If you’re born without it, you get by any way that you can.  Capital, that is.  Those of us who inherit nothing but active minds don’t stand a chance, really.  Without connections or the cash to draw others in, we tend to be scrappy.  And cheap.  This is probably the reason I’m drawn to characters like Ed Wood, and those who started American International Pictures.  I get the sense that Mark Thomas McGee must be an interesting guy.  After all, he met some of his idols when he was young.  Fast and Furious: The Story of American International Pictures is available in a second edition, I know, but I tend to find first editions fresher.  They say what’s really on an author’s mind.  Besides, used books have their own charm.

Although American International Pictures (AIP) was early on known for fast shooting schedules and cheap effects, it eventually started to earn some mainstream respectability before the company being acquired by Filmways.  Along the way they engaged some famous champions of cheap, such as Roger Corman.  A number of films discussed in this book were part of my childhood.  And as someone who’s always had to live cheaply (I just don’t comprehend finance), I found this an extremely hopeful book.  Some of these folks never became famous in the lifetimes, but they left a legacy.  And that’s a worthy goal.  I suspect that for those of us who can’t break into mainstream publishing, blogging is about building a legacy.  What some of us want, however, is to appear in print.

And I mean in print.  The book is an object.  I bought this one used.  I sometimes find interesting things in used books.  The former owner of this one (a McFarland hardcover!) carefully glued postcards of AIP movie posters to the covers and endsheets.  They didn’t put their name in it, but they (in pencil) ticked off the movies, presumably that they’d seen, from the filmography.  This is a person after my own heart.  I tend not to write in most books anymore, realizing that someday someone will probably sell them and, hey, it’s hard enough to make money in the book business.  But this personalization is something you can’t find in an ebook.  No, a book is meant to be held and loved.  This one clearly was.  As publishers chase more and more after electronic and audio books (the latter of which are also electronic) and learning moves from reading to watching, we’re losing something.  They’re called books, and they bear their own meaning.

Horror History

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Trying to make sense of life has perhaps been my only real vocation.  As I continue to work on horror-themed books, reasonable people ask why I keep doing this.  It’s a question I ask myself.  The other day, while working on one of these projects, I had a realization.  The narrative I’d been playing in my head is that I grew up watching monster movies and then, apart from a few slip-ups, fell off the wagon again after my career malfunction.  That’s largely true but I suddenly remembered that seminary was actually another period of my life when I watched a lot of horror.  Regular readers know that I’m intrigued by the connection between religion and horror, but I’d forgotten how early this started with me.

A friend, nameless here, was a fellow seminarian and a total cinephile.  He and I would watch movies together quite a lot.  As I was recollecting which ones, it suddenly struck me that many of them were horror films.  And it wasn’t just this unnamed friend.  Another anonymous comrade frequently talked me into theatrical horror.  He’d go with his girlfriend (something I lacked at the time) but he liked to chat about the movies with me and often invited me along.  So it was that I was watching horror into the mid-to-late eighties.  I stopped, pretty much cold turkey, when I married.  It seemed that the therapy horror was offering was no longer needed.  Life settled into a happy, if weird existence stretching several years into Nashotah House.  This was the locus of said malfunction.

Losing my only full-time teaching post led directly to watching horror again.  My wife had to take a job out of state.  We crammed ourselves into an apartment after having a four-bedroom house.  Jobs were not coming my way, no matter how low I aimed.  Horror was cheap therapy.  What’s more, it’s remained a hobby ever since.  (Read into that what you will.)  People who know me personally (but who don’t frequent this blog) are often surprised to learn that I watch horror.  I don’t act like someone who does.  At least according to this usual, prejudiced image of the horror fan.  What’s more, the friends who share this fascination are nice people.  I was recently asked to speak about Holy Horror to a senior seminar at Transylvania University (it’s in Kentucky).  The students all seemed to be upstanding, bright young people.  They, however, like horror.  I don’t know their stories, but I’m guessing that they’re probably quite interesting.  They’re just beginning to try to make sense of life.

Digging Again

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It’s one of those movies that I know I’ve watched before—probably on a sleepy Saturday afternoon—but couldn’t believe I had already seen.  While viewing The Mole People it looked completely new, but in retrospect some of it had seemed strangely familiar.  Had I bothered to check my own blog I’d have noted that I watched it a mere fourteen years ago.  Not that I’d have spared myself again.  I felt like watching monsters in rubbery suits.  Still, as I mentioned in my previous blog post on it, the antagonist are the underground Sumerians.  These Sumerians speak English—a fact that isn’t worthy of remark by the scientists—and express surprise that outsiders can understand them.  Assuming them to be gods because of their bright flashlight, this Gilliganesque story contains, perhaps unintended, social commentary.  The mole people are really the good ones and the “slave revolt” at the end saves our protagonists.

For about the first half of the film they refer to “the goddess of Ishtar” before finally apparently realizing Ishtar is the goddess’s name.  The “eye of Ishtar,” which looks suspiciously like a sideways Star Trek Federation logo, represents where the sun shines down on their ancient kingdom.  (They’ve become albinos from living without sunlight.)  The interesting thing here is that the monsters aren’t the scary part of the plot.  The high priest is.  Elinu is suspicious of the upper worlders immediately and it is he who plots their demise.  He’s also quite willing to depose the king, whom he sees as too weak in his foreign policy.  (In reality the interplay between religion and politics, historically, has been a tug-of-war over power.)  He succumbs to his own plans, however, and the viewer is glad to see the priest go the way of all flesh.

Sometimes billed as science fiction, this is more fantasy horror fare.  It’s literally swords and sandals among the the lackluster Sumerians.  The monsters make it horror, but they aren’t evil, although they do kill one of the protagonists.  To their credit these pre-Civil Rights Act Americans realize that the treatment of the eponymous mole people is unfair.  There is, at the same time, no regret expressed that these scientists have brought the five-thousand-year-old Sumerian civilization to an end.  The Mole People is one of those “so bad it’s good” movies.  Its plodding pace doesn’t make it idea for too sleepy an afternoon, but the story is different than a typical monster flick from the era.  And it is biblically based, as my previous post on it noted.  And a lot has happened in the intervening fourteen years.

Fear of Big Books

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I have to get over my fear of big books (I can’t find an official name for this and so I’ll coin machrysbibliophobia—and why did my autocorrect replace this with machrysbibliophobmia when there’s no such word?  It’s a scary world where my fears go unnamed—go, aporripsophobia!)  I’ve read many large novels with payoff (several by Stephen King and Neal Stephenson) and plenty of nonfiction from which I’ve learned a ton (perhaps literally).  But still, when a book I really want to read is big, I tremble.  I try to decide how to justify the time.  Now, I know I don’t have to justify time reading—that’s a constant activity.  I think it’s more a question of caesura, places to stop and perhaps claim credit for work done.  I’m not a fan of multiple volumes since that drives prices up.  Maybe just say it a bit more succinctly?

In my case—and I can only speak for myself—it’s all about a sense of accomplishment.  The distinct, discrete book that I’ve jammed into my gray matter along with its companions.  Some of us are driven by the shot of joy that accompanies completion.  I have a few compendia of authors/genres I really like.  I dip into them but never quite seem to have the time to finish them.  You see, recently watching the X-Files got me thinking about Charles Forte.  I have a compendium of his four books and I read Book of the Damned right through.  But I’ve got three more to go.  How are you supposed to count that on Goodreads, without its own ISBN?  Or the collected fiction and poetry of Poe.  It’s nice to have it all in one place, but will I ever read it cover-to-cover?  I tried once, really I did.

Scary books

As I write this I just started a big book.  It’s on a topic I really find fascinating but I’d been putting it off for some time because of my machrysbibliophobia.  I’ve been entrenched from before page 1.  I know it’s going to take me quite a long time to finish it—I have a job that takes its pound of flesh daily, and even when I do get a day off, well, mowing season is here.  And the porch needs painting again.  Maybe if non-Catholic monasteries were a thing I’d have time to devote to the reading I really must get done before my time’s up.  I like big books, but I’m also afraid of their ramifications.  Enough so even to name my fear.

Have It All

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You can’t have it all.  I know, I know.  People are all the time saying, “I want it all.”  But you can’t have it.  This is where my Buddhist side kicks in, I guess.  It’s the constant desire that makes people unhappy.  And you don’t have to take my word for it.  About having it all, I mean.  The Catholic Church backs me up on this.  There are seven sacraments.  If you follow the rules most strictly, no one can receive all seven.  Holy orders and marriage, at least for much of church history, have been mutually exclusive.  As Paul was rattling on about spiritual gifts in one of his letters, he makes the point that nobody gets them all.  And you don’t even get to choose.  

Humans are acquisitive.  It’s probably an evolved trait.  Think of squirrels hoarding more acorns than they can ever eat.  (By the way, squirrels are the real heroes when it comes to planting trees, and they don’t even mean to do it.  It just comes naturally.)   Life gives us what we need for as long as we have time on this earth.  If you’re reading this you’re living proof.  We fear for the future, however.  What if tomorrow something I need goes away?  I’ve lost jobs and I know the desperation that immediately sets in.  So we want to store up more than we need.  But those sacraments.  Those spiritual gifts.  They remind us of something important.  Something a carpenter from Galilee once said.  It’s essentially the same as therapists have told me: be in the moment.  You have what you need right now.  As a coda: tomorrow will take care of itself.

Those of us who can’t stand incompletion (don’t show me a series of books with one missing!  Please don’t.) suffer from this quite a lot.  Here’s where we need to nod to Siddhartha again and take a deep breath.  Center yourself.  When I was a seminarian discovering Roman Catholicism for the first time, really, and that mostly through the Episcopal Church, I wondered about the sacraments and why, if they were things we should strive for, we couldn’t have them all.  By seminary I was pretty sure I wanted the matrimony route.  As my wife can attest, however, I still crave a monastic existence from time to time.  Torn between two sacraments and I’m not even a Catholic.  I guess I’ve known all along that you can’t have it all.  Those who try for it, if they’re lucky, end up under the Bodhi tree.

Photo by Mattia Faloretti on Unsplash

Who’s Stalking?

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Television is a hungry beast.  Back before the internet it was probably less hungry, but still the desire for content was constant.  A few individuals worked the monster side of the tube, one of them being Dan Curtis.  Dark Shadows was Curtis’ idea, and it was in that context that he began to have an influence over my life.  I wouldn’t have recognized his name in those days, of course—do we ever really recognize those who become part of the arc of life’s direction when we’re kids?  Curtis produced a television movie that I’d never seen, taking on the vampire tale again.  The Night Stalker isn’t a great film—it was produced for television, after all—but it started something.  That something was the weekly series Kolchak: The Night Stalker.

I’ve been watching episodes of Kolchak and realized that I was missing something—the origin story.  As an historian I really like to keep things in order.  Since my research is conducted on my limited free time and limited budget, I still discover things others probably knew long ago.  In any case, I decided to hunt down and watch The Night Stalker.  It introduces, of course, the character of Kolchak.  In a way that seems unnecessary for 1972, it narrates quite a bit of vampire lore.  It even frames some scenes from Bela Lugosi’s 1931 Dracula.  As I watched this period piece for the first time, I realized that the actual night stalker wasn’t originally Kolchak.  In this movie it’s clearly Janos Skorzeny, the vampire.  The movie was based on an (at the time) unpublished novel by Jeff Rice.  And so began a number of cascading things.

I didn’t watch Kolchak as a child.  I do remember other kids talking about it, but it never made its way into our evening television watching.  (My mother was concerned that I had nightmares as a child and didn’t encourage scary things before bed.  Decades on I’m still prone to nightmares, but as I said, arcs get set early on.)  Kolchak is kind of a hapless character, rubbing people the wrong way.  The movie leaves many unanswered questions, but it was good fare for unreflective television monster purposes.  There had been monsters before—I think we all owe a great debt of gratitude to Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone—but Kolchak made the horror element, always laced with comedy, central.  The television movie received the highest ratings of any television movie to that point.  And we all know that such things lead to sequels.  Television is ever hungry.