Shaping Halloween

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Halloween is the favorite holiday of many.  I suspect the reasons differ widely.  Although the church played a role in the development of this celebration, it didn’t dictate what it was to be about.  It was the day before All Saints Day, which had been moved to November 1 to counter Celtic celebrations of Samhain.  Samhain, as far as we can tell, wasn’t a day to be scared.  It commemorated and placated the dead, but it wasn’t, as it is today, a time for horror movies and the joy of being someone else for a day or a few hours.  There isn’t a preachiness to it.  Halloween is a shapeshifter, and people love it for what it can become.  If December is the month for spending money you haven’t got, October is the month for spooky things.  Halloween is the unofficial kick-off of the holiday season.

For me, it’s a day associated with dress-up and pumpkins.  Both of these bring back powerful childhood memories.  The wonderful aroma of cutting into a ripe pumpkin can take me back to happier times.  I remember dressing up for Halloween as far back as kindergarten.  I could be someone else.  Someone better.  It was a day when transformation was possible.  I’m probably not alone in feeling this, although I’m fairly sure that wasn’t what was behind the early use of disguises this time of year.  I’ve read many histories of Halloween and they have in common the fact that nobody has much certainty about the early days of its inception, so it can be different things for different people.  Even within my lifetime is has moved the needle from spooky to scary, the season of horror movies and very real fear.

There’s a strange comfort in all of this.  A knowledge that if we can make it through tonight tomorrow will be somehow less of an occasion to be afraid.  It is a cathartic buildup of terror, followed by the release of being the final girl, scarred, but surviving.  And people, from childhood on, enjoy controlled scares.  Childhood games from peek-a-boo to hide-and-seek involve small doses of fear followed by relief.  The future of the holiday will be open to further interpretation as well.  As a widespread celebration it is still pretty young.  And like the young it tests its limits and tries new things.  At this point in history it’s settled into the season of frights and fears in the knowledge that it’s all a game.  I wonder, however, if there isn’t some deeper truth if we could just see behind its mask.

Halloween, Disney Style

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I really don’t spend much time on social media.  It’s literally just a few minutes a day, half an hour at most.  I’m too busy to spend more.  I tend not to join groups because, well, I don’t spend time there.  One group I did join on Facebook is for Halloween fans.  I believe that’s where I heard about the movie Halloweentown.  I was surprised that, as a fan of Halloween for pretty much all of my life, I’d not known about this 1998 movie.  Watching it, it became clear why not.  It is a Disney television movie.  In the nineties we didn’t have television (a few channels from a snowy aerial at Nashotah House) and certainly didn’t subscribe to the Disney channel.  While the movie failed to penetrate my consciousness, it went on to start a franchise.  Once I heard of it, I decided I should see it because I’m interested in the darker side of Disney.

Television movies, with their comparatively small budgets and limited viewerships, don’t have the finished feel that theatrical films possess.  This is the story of a family of witches, three kids and a mother, living in the human world.  The children don’t know they’re witches.  Then when their grandmother visits on Halloween, they sneak into the eponymous Halloweentown with her.  This is where witches and other monsters live because humans fear them.  The “monsters” mostly consist of obvious humans wearing masks and makeup.  There are a few mildly frightening moments as the evil Kalabar tries to take over the human world by persuading his fellow monsters to join him.  But this is Disney where threats are gentle and good fairly easily defeats evil.  While the movie isn’t even as scary as Hocus Pocus, some people watch it to get in the Halloween mood.

One thing that I’ve noticed about many movies that try to capture the autumnal feeling while being shot in California, is that they miss the more dramatic temperate shift in seasons.  This annual outdoors Götterdämmerung resulting in the colorful dying of leaves and the surrender of summer to the inevitable chill to follow is integral to my experience of Halloween.  In fact, one of the few criticisms I’d make to John Carpenter’s Halloween is that Haddonfield, Illinois was shot in Southern California.  Other movies make a similar gaff.  I’m always on the lookout for movies that manage to emulate that Halloween feel.  The film that perhaps does this best, in my experience, is The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, shot in Canada and Maine.  I’m still searching, however, for my own Halloweentown.

Naming the Dead

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It probably just goes with the territory, but I’ve noticed something.  A big part of my job is searching for people on the internet.  (Academics, of course.)  Mostly these are folks I don’t know, some of them with very common names.  This presents special challenges, of course.  Every once in a while, though, you search for a name and pretty much every entry you find is an obituary.  I’m not talking about someone prominent who has died, but rather several people with the same name who’ve passed away.  The other day, after four or five pages of Google I found nobody alive.  That particular name wasn’t an “old fashioned” name either.  It could be (perhaps is) still a very common name.  It does get me pondering whether some names are “safer” than others.  Is anyone by this name still alive?

We place a lot of stock in our names.  Being the way that others get our attention, and identify us, they do have importance.  And many names are common—parents aren’t always the creative sort.  And the internet is a source of frustration when trying to narrow down a common name and attach it to someone you don’t already know.  Growing up, kids want to be like everyone else—no standing out in the herd.  “Wiggins,” where I grew up, was an unusual name.  We got teased for it quite a lot.  When my mother remarried, my brothers and I went by our stepfather’s common last name for a few years.  In seminary I decided to revert to my birth name—Wiggins.  I was wanting to do two things: reclaim my heritage, and stand out a little.  Even so, a web-search for Steve Wiggins will bring up at least four or five individuals not me, including an obituary or two.

Before the web, when trying to find a scholar you had to use letters.  (Or maybe the phone, but cold calls weren’t really professional). You’d send them a letter.  In a way, the web is a great equalizer.  But it favors those with names that are somewhat less common.  Some people change their names—performers and some authors do this to make their persona more to their liking—but this is a fraught activity.  I know from switching back to my birth name that the process is complex and if you try it after you’ve started to publish things it adds whole new layers of complications.  So I spend quite a bit of time searching for people who aren’t easily found.  Not infrequently I seem to be naming the dead.

Learning Curve

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There’s a learning curve to cold weather living.  Now, I need to define cold weather as when you have to turn on the heat.  Around these parts that generally happens mid-October.  We keep our house chilly not because we unduly enjoy shivering, but for two good reasons: it costs a lot to heat a house and it doesn’t benefit the environment to do so with too much zeal.  The cost aspect goes without saying.  It costs more to live in the colder seasons.  At night our thermostat is set to 62.  That’s fine as long as you’re in bed under tons of blankets, but I’m a habitually early riser.  Most of my writing is done before work, when the house is at its chilliest.  I bundle up with several layers of pajamas, a stocking cap, and fingerless gloves.  The part that requires relearning each year is the exercise bit.

Before going out for a pre-work jog, I do some light calisthenics.  I can’t really do these in my pajamas, though, because they can raise a sweat, even in winter.  Besides, I have to go jogging later, so I need to get my exercise clothes on.  Every year I have to remind myself, when do I make the switch?  I don’t enjoy stripping off my warm clothes to put on some chilly ones so I tend to put it off until the exercise mat starts to call loudly.  As the sun rises later and later, as the solstice approaches, jogging gets later and later (with a slight reprieve when we pointlessly end Daylight Saving Time).  There comes a point when I have to start work before my jog.  I can never remember when that happens—November?  December?  It will mean altering my routine, particularly if I have any early meetings.

I used to wonder why, in older films, especially those set in Europe, people were shown sitting around their houses in woolen suits and vests, full-length dresses with shawls.  As a homeowner with a low thermostat, I had an epiphany.  They did it to keep warm.  Europeans often describe American houses as “overheated.”  I haven’t had any European guests lately, but I doubt they’d say that about our place.  Our daytime temperature is 64.  Outdoors, that’s getting to be jacket weather.  My European colleagues don’t mind wearing puffy vests and jackets on Zoom meetings.  Heating a house in Europe is much more expensive than it is in the colonies.  In the dead of winter it’s not unusual for me to be wearing five or six under-layers during the day, and fingerless gloves at work.  The thing is, I need to relearn this each year.  Winter’s on its way, so I’ll do my best to be a good student with my chilly lesson.

Don’t Stop Moving

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Stopmotion is a strangely affecting horror movie.  Body horror as well as Euro-horror, it follows the dream-like world of Ella, a stop motion animator.  She learned the trade from her mother who, suffering from arthritis, has Ella do the work for her.  After her mother has a stroke, Ella continues working on her final film but in a new location.  Tom, her boyfriend, gets her an apartment in a run-down building where Ella meets a precocious and odd little girl who tells her she should film a different movie and proceeds to tell Ella how it should go.  To her chagrin, Ella has to admit that the little girl’s story is better than her mother’s.  With the girl’s help, Ella animates a monster, the Ash Man, who is pursuing a girl lost in the woods.  Then Ella starts receiving visits from the Ash Man, or at least she believes so.  She ends up in the hospital. Spoilers follow.

Tom, who visits her there, is worried that Ella has let this go too far.  He threatens to delete the film while she’s immobile in the hospital.  Ella’s mother dies and with the little girl’s help, Ella gets back to her apartment to finish the film.  When Tom, and his plagiarizing sister, come to return Ella to the hospital, she kills them both.  She then, with the girl’s help, finishes the film.  The film results in her own death, or at least that’s the way she sees it.  The film features quite a lot of stop motion animation although the movie itself is live action.  It’s a very artful, if gross, film.  The little girl is never seen by anyone else, nor explained, suggesting that she’s a younger Ella following her own creativity.  And paying the price for it.

I can’t claim to understand everything that happens in this movie.  That doesn’t make it bad, but worth pondering.  Those of us who live creative lives experience dry patches, and often, self-doubt.  I know that when I compare my writing to that of others, I suffer in the very comparison.  When Stopmotion first ended, I felt both confused and intrigued.  Euro-horror of recent years, to generalize, emphasizes the art of the craft.  There was a lot of symbolism in this movie, some of which I couldn’t connect to the action.  I suspect repeated viewing might bring some of this to light.  My family has often told me that with my focus and interests, I would’ve been a good stop motion animator.  I certainly have the creating monsters part down pat.  It’s just a matter of deciding which narrative to follow.

Routine Weirdness

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I’m weird.  Nobody has to tell me that.  Like most people, I suspect, with my mental condition, I value routine.  Although the time I post on this blog varies, that’s usually due to one of two factors—the wobbling of the earth, and whether I get wrapped up in something that makes me forget.  The wobbling earth changes the time of sunrise rather dramatically, of course.  I jog at first light and my routine before that jog is pretty solid.  Then something comes along to interrupt it.  I have to begin planning the day before how to make it all fit.  So, routine bloodwork.  The lab where I have it done is within walking distance.  Of course, you have to go in fasting so everybody wants to get there first.  The lab opens at 6:30 a.m. and this time of year vampires are still safe out and about at that time.  

Edvard Munch, Vampire. Image credit: Google Art Project, public domain via Wikimedia Commons

But by 6:30 I’m usually dressed for my jog.  I’ve been writing and reading, typically for three hours.  I forgot to wash my jogging clothes this week and this was a Friday.  Hmm, better think about that.  Then there’s the whole question of my eating routine.  If I’m going to have something it has to be a couple hours before I jog—can’t do that with anything on my stomach.  Will I be too weak with nothing until afterwards?  After all I’ll be missing a vial or two of blood.  And there’s the matter of my shoes.  I only wear my jogging shoes on the local rail trail.  It’s pea gravel and it’s been raining lately which means they get a bit muddy.  All the rest of my shoes are in the bedroom where my wife’s (sensibly) still asleep.  Besides, I need to be on the trail right after giving blood, and changing shoes takes too long.

I’ll need to change my shirt when I get home.  The jogging tops are a bit too much to expect even a phlebotomist to put up with.  Besides, the under layers are tight-fitting since it’s only in the thirties today.  Why all this fuss about going to the lab before work?  That’s the magical word.  Work.  Also, lines have always been a problem for me.  Although I take a book I dislike waiting in line.  I need to get there before the doors open.  Be first in line.  There’s already a car in the parking lot, but standing beside the door in the cold has to earn you something, doesn’t it?  I’m back home just as the sun is rising.  Throw on my under layers and out before anyone else gets on the path.  I know I’m weird.

Not Frightening

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Years ago a friend, which I define as someone who wishes me no specific bodily harm, suggested I watch The Frighteners.  It finally came to a free streaming service (with commercials), so I gave it a go.  I really enjoyed parts of it, but on the whole, there was too much going on to make it an effective film.  It’s a horror comedy, and once films like that stretch beyond 90 minutes they tend to need a lot of magic juice to keep the engine running.  So, here’s the basic idea: Frank can see ghosts.  With the help of a couple of ghosts he makes a living driving spirits from peoples homes, after setting them up.  Unfortunately there’s a serial killer ghost actually killing people.  Since Frank tends to be the last one the victims see, there is some suspicion that he’s involved in their deaths.  

A young widow, Lucy, is a doctor and is trying to help a woman (Patricia) who seems to be abused by her mother.  It turns out that Patricia is associated with a serial killer from many years ago, and it’s unclear whether or not she’s innocent.  Meanwhile, a neurotic FBI agent comes to town and decides Frank is guilty and tries to kill him without due process.  Meanwhile, more and more people are dying.  It’s probably a spoiler to say that the serial killing ghost is the same as the serial killer that Patricia was in love with and she’s still helping him to get to a record number of deaths.  Frank ends up dying twice but is brought back to life at the end, after Patricia and the serial killer are taken to Hell.

The movie is stylish and a bit of fun, but if you’re watching it on a streaming service with commercials it ends up being over two hours long.  Some parts are funny, but not hilarious.  Some parts are spooky, but not really scary.  The plot is complex and takes its time unfolding.  The serial killers attempting to break a record is disturbing and not exactly in good taste.  The acting is good but the viewer’s left feeling a bit confused as to what the message is and how they ought to feel.  It’s the kind of movie that I might find myself in the mood to watch again, someways down the road, but in the short term, I’m glad to have seen it once.  I’m not sure my friend and I share taste when it comes to movies, but at least he’s not wishing me any harm.

Evolution of Psychology

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We are a fragile species.  Those of us who experienced childhood trauma carry it all our lives, even if it only seems to pop out unexpectedly from time to time.  This gets me to thinking about the evolution of psychology.  Not the discipline psychology, but of the human mental map.  Things that can upset a roomful of people these days would’ve washed over an entire village unnoticed yesteryear.  Did people then really feel as angry and breakable as we do now?  Please understand, I’m not advocating the view that people of previous ages were better, or even stronger than we currently are.  I just wonder if their circumstances made it so that what we think of as therapy wasn’t really necessary.  For one thing, much of human history has been dominated by short lifespans.  Historically, many women died in childbirth in their twenties.  The majority of men, until modernity, didn’t make it to fifty.  Sitting here musing, I’ve got ten-plus years on that and yet I wonder.

Those facts of life would’ve had to have affected people’s outlooks.  Our extreme squeamishness around reproduction also didn’t exist in antiquity.  Privacy, as we know it, wasn’t part of their world.  How many people see a therapist these days because of sexuality issues?  When did this turning point take place?  If we go back to early Cro-magnon, perhaps living in caves, did they come back traumatized from the hunt?  Surely they must’ve seen death on a nearly daily basis.  Today it’s difficult to get anyone to consider the mortuary sciences for a career.  We don’t like to think about death.  We pick up the phone and dial our therapists. 

When I was still teaching I thought often about how differently people framed their lives in the past.  It’s only now, however, that I’ve come to wonder about the psychological support we require.  I suspect life was, for most people, a literal daily struggle to survive.  Agriculture tamed the environment somewhat, and if current evidence is taken into account, religious gathering looks to have developed even in advance of that.  Perhaps the larger issues, what we still recognize as religion, helped to cope with the constant uncertainties of life.  Unfortunately, there’s no way for us to really get their mental maps.  We can read ancient writings, many of them pro forma or religious in nature.  We start to get some insight in pieces such as the Gilgamesh Epic, but that is so very brief.  I wonder when we started to require help going out the door in the morning or facing another day of the same old, well, you know.  Psychology had to evolve but it left so very few traces.  I, however, have an advantage in years great enough that I ponder our mental states.

Mirroring Reality

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I watched Oculus for two reasons: it kept coming up as a “freebie” on a service I use, and I’d been thinking about haunted mirrors.  Well, three reasons—I also liked the sound of the title.  (Not all decisions are a matter of science.). I was pleasantly surprised that it turned out to be pretty good.  I’ll probably throw in a spoiler or two, so if it’s on your list, you’ve been warned.  Kaylie and her brother Tim were attacked by their parents, but Tim was being framed by the mirror.  Both parents attempt to kill the children, but end up dead instead.  Tim is sent to an institution since he pulled the trigger, and Kaylie has spent eleven years researching the mirror.  When her brother is released she convinces him that they have to keep their promise to destroy the mirror.

The problem is, the mirror messes with perceptions of reality.  The two go back to their childhood home where Kaylie has set up a device to drop an anchor onto mirror.  This is set to happen with a wind-up timer since the mirror can control electronics.  She’s also set up the room so that everything is being recorded.  If she can prove the mirror is what she believes it to be, her father will be exonerated and her brother proven innocent.  The movie gets a little tricky to follow since their current story is intercut with flashbacks as to what happened when they were children.  Also, the mirror records events on the cameras that didn’t really happen.  Add to this the fact that Tim has undergone therapy for eleven years and he’s convinced that his sister is delusional.  It’s one of those movies that messes with your perception of reality.

When Tim doesn’t see his sister in front of the device meant to destroy the mirror, he accidentally kills her.  The police arrive, believing he has repeated his murderous attack from eleven years before.  The ending is rather nihilistic, but the scares are effective.  There are a few gross-out scenes and some jump startles, but overall it is the story that conveys the fear.  For me, the mental issues were almost triggers.  But then again, I watched it on a day when I was a bit fuzzy-headed because of waking up too soon.  I really didn’t know what to expect when I hit “play.”  I’ve done that enough times and ended up with films that were wastes of time, so I was glad to have found a competent one this time.  These are my reflections, in any case.

Author Pages

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It takes me awhile, sometimes.  Maybe it’s a generational thing.  I’ve been blogging for sixteen years now (my blog is a teenager!) and it only just occurred to me that I should be putting links to authors’ pages when I post about their books.  I know links are what makes the web go round but I assumed that anyone whose book I’ve read is already better known than yours truly.  Why would they need my humble help?  Well, I’ve been trying to carve out the time to go back and edit my old posts about books, linking to authors’ pages—there are so many!  In any case, this has led to some observations about writers.  And at least this reader.  Most commercial authors have a website.  Not all, of course.  People my age who had earlier success with writing tend not to have a site since they already have a fan base (I’m guessing).  Most fiction writers in the cohort younger than me have pages, and I’m linking to those.

I’ve noticed, during this exercise, that my reading falls into two main categories: novels and academic books.  I suppose that’s no surprise, although I do read intelligent nonfiction from non-professors as well.  In the nonfiction category, it’s fairly rare to find academics with their own websites.  They probably get the validation they require from work, and being featured on the school webpages.  Or some will use Academia.edu to make a website.  As an editor I know that promoting yourself is important, even for academic authors.  Few do it.  Then I took a look around here and realized, as always, that I fall between categories.  No longer an academic, neither have I had any commercial success with my books.  I’ve fallen between two stools with this here website.  I do pay for it, of course.  Nothing’s free. 

Almost nobody links to my website.  This isn’t self-pity; WordPress informs you when someone links to your site and that hasn’t happened in years.  Links help with discoverability on the web, so my little website sits in a very tiny nook in a low-rent apartment in the part of town where you don’t want to be after dark.  And I thought to myself, maybe other authors feel the same.  Maybe they too need links.  So I’m adding them.  As I do so I hope that I’ll also learn a thing or two.  I’m trying to learn how to be a writer.  It just takes me some time before things dawn.  Maybe it’s just my generation.

Hungry Madness

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It’s been on my wishlist of movies to watch for a few years, In the Mouth of Madness.  A tribute to Lovecraftian horror, as well as a probing of insanity, it is a heady mix.  In keeping with my usual rules for movie watching, I hadn’t pre-read anything about it that would give away the plot.  Coming to it fresh, a number of things stood out.  There were some very good scenes and parts of the movie made me want to like it a lot.  It is a great movie for religion and horror analysis, and in that regard it’s much better than Prince of Darkness (despite Alice Cooper).  In fact, had I been able to see it years ago, it would’ve been included in Holy Horror.  That itself is noteworthy since two of John Carpenter’s other movies were in it: The Fog and the aforementioned Prince.  I suppose I should provide a little summary (if possible) in case you haven’t seen.

Trent is an insurance investigator, and a hardened skeptic.  A horror writer who outsells Stephen King, Sutter Cane, has gone missing and Trent’s sent to investigate.  He discovers that Cane is in a town that doesn’t exist (Hobb’s End) and that his books are not fiction.  In fact, Trent is a character in one of his novels.  When people read his latest book, In the Mouth of Madness (a title adapted from Lovecraft), they go insane and begin killing others.  The plot gets a bit busy because people are starting to transform into slimy, Lovecraftian monsters and this reality, if the book is read, or movie watched, will spread to all of humanity, leading to our extinction.  A bit too ambitious, the plot can’t hold all this weight, but it really isn’t bad.  There’s just too much going on.

The religion elements come in because Cane has holed himself up in an unholy church.  He refers to his latest novel as the “new Bible.”  “More people,” he says, “believe in my work than believe in the Bible.”  He later refers to himself as God.  I haven’t seen all of Carpenter’s films, but there seems to be a trajectory of his earliest major films being his best.  Halloween and The Thing are classics.  The Fog isn’t bad.  When he brings religion into his stories, as in The Fog, things begin to cloud over a bit.  Prince of Darkness doesn’t deliver a believable Devil.  In the Mouth of Madness doesn’t quite hang together well enough.  It’s not a bad movie, though.  It has given me some ideas for another book, if I can stay sane long enough to write it.

Hallowed Halls

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Every time I read a short story collection I tell myself I should do so more often.  Knowing that you’re only committing yourself for maybe thirty or forty minutes at a time is one way to incorporate more reading into a life that’s incredibly busy.  I read In These Hallowed Halls, edited by Marie O’Regan and Paul Kane, because, as its subtitle declares, it’s A Dark Academia Anthology.  As with nonfiction anthologies, it is a mixed bag.  The stories are all well written and all were enjoyable to read.  They also display some of the breadth of dark academia.  Most of the stories are literary (as a genre), others dip into science fiction and horror.  Dark academia doesn’t specify whether a book (or story) will be speculative or not.  As someone who writes short fiction, it seems that some of my tales might wag that way.

In any case, discussing a collection is tricky because there is such variety.  Some of the stories stayed with me beyond reading the next, which could be quite different.  Others I have to go back to remind myself what happened.  These days it can take several weeks to finish a book and a lot can happen in real life in that time span.  The stories that stay with me the most have obsessive narrators, or characters who are obsessed.  This kind of story, I know from experience, is difficult to get published.  Many of us who write, I suspect, do get obsessed.  An idea latches on and won’t let go.  Of course, most of us also have jobs that force the jaws open and drop us down in the world of the ordinary again.

Another thread that runs through many of these stories is how students struggle for money.  That’s true to life.  Thinking back to both college and seminary, there were times in both settings that I was working two part-time jobs as well as being a full-time student.  And living like, well, a student.  That experience, except for the truly privileged, is fairly common and our writers here recognize, and perhaps remember, that.  The other unavoidable theme when writing about young people in college is, shall we say, hooking up.  For many of us, college is that period in life when, thinking of our futures, and following our hormones, we start looking for love.  (I know, high schoolers do that too, but college has a way of focusing your energies.)  All of that swirling around the darkness that sometimes falls over our tender years makes this dark academia collection worth reading cover to cover.

House Spiders

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I give them names, the spiders who choose to live in our house.  That’s how I named Henry, shown in the photo.  I grew up with an almost debilitating arachnophobia, and as with most of my fears, worked hard to overcome it.  So when a spider moves in, I let them stay.  Unless they’re too big.  Here’s where it becomes interesting.  Like quantum mechanics, there seems to be an arbitrary point when something is “too big” for the rules to apply.  What is that tipping point?  The other day I bumbled into the kitchen early to get some water, having given up coffee years ago.  There was a spider that I could see from across the room.  It was very large.  It’s a sign of how much I’ve overcome my phobia that I was able to walk around the counter and to the sink to fill up.  I kept a wary eye across the room, however, in case Octavian made any funny moves.

The spider held very still, as arachnids often do when they know they’ve been spotted.  I sometimes wonder if they know how scary they are to other creatures.  I searched around for a jar large enough to catch and release, without pinching any legs, and crept over.  Turns out Octavian was faster than I am first thing in the morning.  And, honestly, I was still recovering from a vaccine that had knocked me out the day before.  At least I can blame that.  I wonder if that’s one of the reasons fear of spiders is so widespread—they’re fast.  Or is it something inherently menacing about those eight legs?  I’ve never experienced any kind of octopus phobia, so I can’t think that it’s merely the number.  The jointed legs?  That seem disproportionate to the body size?  Whatever it is, days later I’m still cautious in the kitchen.

I have a great appreciation for spiders.  I don’t like to be startled by them, but otherwise, if they keep their distance, I’m fine with them.  I do wonder what they think, living in a world of giants.  Some insects, in the same size range as arachnids, seem ignorant of the human threat.  It’s not unusual for an ant to find its way inside and walk right up your foot and leg, oblivious to the danger.  They seem to have no fear.  Spiders, however, do.  They’re very good at running and hiding.  I like to think they know our house is generally a safe space, until the vacuum cleaner comes out.  When I’m behind it, I always try to give Henry and his friends a chance to get out of the way.

Colorful Space

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Lovecraftian horror translates to film unevenly.  Even when it’s successful, as in Color Out of Space, it really isn’t that close to reading Lovecraft.  “The Colour Out of Space” is among my favorite Lovecraft stories.  To me, it feels perhaps his closest to Poe, and Poe is my personal muse.  I knew that it couldn’t be made cinematic without changing things a bit, and that it would be pretty gnarly.  I was correct on both counts.  In very broad brush strokes, the movie follows the story: a colorful meteorite on an isolated farm begins changing the crops and the people who live there.  Instead of crumbling, however, they are struck by the color and become other.  The mother and her youngest son, for example, are fused together creating one of the most cringe-worthy scenes I’ve watched in a long while.  The movie emphasizes family, even when things go horribly awry.

Defying Lovecraft’s well-known avoidance of focus on female characters, the movie’s focal point in Lavinia accords with Poe’s concern for threats against beautiful women.  She’s the teenage daughter of the family and the film opens with a scene where she uses Wicca to try to heal her mother of cancer.  The love between Nathan (Nicolas Cage) and his wife is movingly shown.  The movie was recommended to me during a conversation about Nicolas Cage in horror.  Maybe it’s because he’s in so many movies in total, I’d never really considered him a scream king, but he’s nailed the role quite capably, with the notable exception of The Wicker Man.  Color Out of Space is pretty extreme body horror but the movie is artistically done.  You almost don’t mind feeling violated in that way because of the visual appeal of the non-horror focused parts.

The acting is uniformly strong.  In a nod to Lovecraftian fans, Lavinia uses the Necronomicon as the basis for her Wiccan rites.  Some of the scenes seem to reference Evolution and others eXistenZ.  Transforming the action from Lovecraft’s setting in the early twentieth century to the early twenty-first is done pretty well.  The family is isolated when the meteorite prevents electronics, including cars, from working.  The movie does offer some alien creatures, unlike Lovecraft’s basic story.  And these creatures point to a planet with tentacly beings that naturally tie this story into the Cthulhu mythos.  Lovecraft’s own story doesn’t make this move, but of course, the Cthulhu mythos only really developed among his fans.  In all, Color Out of Space exceeded my expectations, even though it was a box office flop. 

Unwritten

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It has been clear to me for some time now that I won’t live long enough to finish all the books I’m writing in my head.  A good number of them have a head start on my hard disc, but as Morpheus says, “Time is always against us.”  The largest culprit in the 9-2-5 job.  Eight hours is a huge amount of time to devote each day, no matter how you slice it.  Since eight hours are required for sleep, or trying to sleep, that means work is half of each day’s waking hours.  The other half includes things like making meals, washing clothes, family time, paying bills, running the vacuum, exercising because you sit in front of a screen all day, and, of course, yard work.  Plants don’t have the same constraints that humans do and can get to the business of growing larger 24/7, as long as the weather cooperates.

Some days I grow reflective about this.  My daughter often asks why I don’t draw or paint more.  I love doing both.  The answer is time.  Even weekends are eaten up with shopping for the food you need to get through the week, and yes, the yard was bigger than I realized, and the house needed more repair work than anticipated.  You see, writing well requires a lot of practice.  And even more reading.  Any successful writer (which I am not yet) will tell you that reading is essential.  I do read a lot.  A friend recently sent me an article about a writer whose heirs calculated he’d read at least 4,000 books.  I know that I’ve read about 1,200 since 2013.  I also know that I can’t count them all before that time.  I went through our living room shelves and counted 500 I’d read there, and that’s only one room.  

Ironically, as a professor reading time is limited.  Unless you have a research only post.  I read a lot as a kid and a ton as a student.  When I started teaching I had less time, except on semester breaks and I tried to read as many books as possible during those interludes.  Then the 9-2-5 began.  My current pace of reading began when trying to live as an adjunct between Rutgers and Montclair State.  Montclair was a 70-mile drive, so between classes I started reading voraciously.  Ironically, the commute to my 9-2-5 spurred me to start writing books again.  By then I was practically fifty.  Since my nonfiction books take about five years to write, well, the math’s not in my favor.  Time to stop my musing, because the 9-2-5 begins shortly.