Missed Movie

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It has been years since I read H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Dunwich Horror.”  I’d never seen this original movie made from it, often cited as being a reasonable adaptation of a Lovecraft story to film.  The visuals are sometimes impressive, but it is a slow moving, plodding movie.  It does, as far as I can recall, follow Lovecraft in general terms.  This is one of those movies that would’ve fit into Holy Horror for two basic reasons: it begins with a quote from the Bible and it has its own alternative sacred book, the Necronomicon.  In one scene the latter is explicitly compared to the Good Book.  Since religion didn’t enter horror in any kind of direct way until about 1968, this movie is an early example of how the two interact.  It came before The Exorcist.

The point is made at several junctures that the religion of the Whateleys is the antithesis of Christianity.  Indeed, the point of all Wilbur Whateley’s shenanigans is to raise the old gods.  Lovecraft, famously an atheist, used gods to set up his cosmic horror.  He’s also notoriously difficult to capture in movie form.  While Roger Corman was the executive producer he was not the director, and that may answer for the pacing.  Daniel Haller, the director, had worked with Corman before on some of his Poe Cycle films and had directed Die, Monster, Die, also a Lovecraft adaptation.  Lovecraft wasn’t a terribly cinematic writer.  His stories contain ideas that feel like they might fit on film, but executing them well is difficult.

For this movie, the house used for the Whateley residence is fitting.  It helps create a sense of dread.  The basic idea of the flick is that Wilbur needs a virginal victim to help summon the old gods.  He lures Nancy Wagner to his house where she falls under the influence of drugged tea.  There’s an intriguing glass sculpture that is never fully explained.  As Nancy begins to lose her will, her friends come to find her, and one of them is killed by Wilbur’s inhuman twin that had also killed their mother during birth.  Once released, this monstrous progeny begins killing locals (the locals hate the Whateleys) and is poised to take Nancy until a guest lecturer at Miskatonic University bests Wilbur in spells recited from the Necronomicon, saving the girl and dooming the last Whateley.  The family line ends.  Until it is rather heavy-handedly shown that Nancy is pregnant by Wilbur, so the unwholesome Whateley genealogy continues.  The visuals aren’t bad, but the story is lacking.  Still, it’s part of the canon, so I needed to see it and it used religion to intrigue me.

Field Hockey

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Friends recommended We Ride Upon Sticks by Quan Barry.  I’m glad they did.  A woman-empowering novel, it ties together so many important things: what it’s like to grow up as a girl, what it means to trust other people, and the importance of believing in yourself.  My experience of reading it as a man at times made me want to apologize for my sex.  So many guys have trouble reining it in and that leads many women to feeling uncomfortable, or even threatened.  The book’s also a great story of awakening to who you really are.  Set in Danvers, Massachusetts in the late 1980s, it’s the tale of the girl’s field hockey team and their “deal with the devil” to win the state championship after being a team having a reputation for losing.  The eleven players on the team are sketched so wonderfully that you get a good idea of that many distinct protagonists.

There is a tie-in with the Salem Witch Trials—much of which actually played out in Danvers.  Although the assumed implication is that the girls begin winning because they’ve made a pact with the darkness, the story doesn’t give it up that easily.  There’s a subtlety at play here and even if you’ve never been on a sports team, the sense of camaraderie is palpable.  The real magic comes in believing in yourself.  Barry is eloquent about such life and how it can change you during the difficult period of adolescence.  I’m always impressed with adult writers who can capture so well what coming-of-age feels like.  For many of us, I expect, there is a trauma associated with it.  Cultural expectations on young women are burdensome in so many ways.  At the same time this story is so well written that you hesitate to put it down.

While I never participated in high school or collegiate sports—I have no particular gifts in that regard—regular readers may find it difficult to believe that I played on the Nashotah House football team for a couple of years.  Lest you get the wrong idea, the seminary played one annual game of flag football against Seabury-Western Seminary in Chicago, styled as conservative vs. liberals.  I was younger, and in better physical shape than many of my students, so I made a team effort for a couple of years.  Still, the team spirit demonstrated in We Ride Upon Sticks is of an altogether different sort.  Fun and thoughtful at the same time.  It’s the kind of book I’m glad to have pointed out to me.

Note to Myself

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A note to myself (perhaps the best title for this blog) in a forgotten book.  Well, not exactly forgotten, else the post unwritten would remain.  In a book I’d been gifted at twenty-one.  I was working that summer as an intern in a church in Pittsburgh where my duties included visiting parishioners.  One of them was an elderly scientist that everyone mentioned with awe because he’d written a book.  In the eighties, writing a book still meant something.  He gave me a copy.  I could tell, even at that tender age, that the publisher was a vanity press.  Part of the satisfaction of “traditional” publishing is knowing that you’ve convinced at least a handful of people that your writing is worth publishing.  Vanity presses take your money and produce your words with wanton abandon.  Still, I read the book.

This was during those heady college years when I annotated everything.  So many books later, annotation is rare for me now.  Other people will want these books when I’m gone.  Then, I critiqued as well.  You see, the scientist (with a master’s degree) had undertaken a theological topic, trying to explain God with science.  I’m sure he died long ago and now knows more than I.  Still I had to express myself.  That’s what those of us who write do.  Here’s an image of my summary.  It took me a while to figure out the symbols the younger me made up.  One looks like a capital K with the lower diagonal ending in an arrow.  What did that mean four decades ago?  Context gave me the answer: “off the wall.”  Why not write it out?  Perhaps I was afraid someone would find the note to myself.  This is the danger of writing things down.

Another symbol gave me pause.  A circle with a stretched capital H in it within a cube.  Ah, a capital theta, my usual shorthand for God.  In a box.  I flipped through the pages.  Yes, some of his suggestions definitely put God in a box.  Did I ever discuss this book with anyone?  It occurs to me that since my teaching career tanked, I’ve discussed very few of the books I’ve read with anyone, except readers of this blog.  We who write know there’s always the danger that someone else will read our thoughts.  In my experience, putting them in book form is about the best way to ensure that nobody will.  Still, for anybody who’s written a book, if you google them, their tome will be the first thing that shows up.  That’s true of the scientist who died, I’m pretty sure, before the new millennium.  When, as it turned out, that writing a book would become as common as starting a website with a catchy title.

Coming for You

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Skimming through the freebies on a streaming service I came to Serpent’s Lair.  Having written a book about demons, I try to keep an eye out for possession movies I might’ve missed and that may add something new to the discussion.  This one turned out to borrow quite a lot from other films, most noticeably, The Omen.  Tom Bennett and his wife Alex buy a unit in a house that could’ve stepped from Rosemary’s Baby.  I kept wondering what the unnamed city was where they worked.  It turns out that the entire film was shot in Romania, so that’s why identifiable landmarks were missing.  In any case, their unit had been inhabited by a college professor who’d been dabbling in the dark arts.  Some of his stuff was left behind.  By the way, there is a lot of religious imagery in this film—maybe not directly Bible (so not Holy Sequel material), but plenty of religion.

Their kindly next door neighbor is a doctor who smokes a lot for his profession.  The couple adopts a stray cat in the courtyard.  The cat turns out to be a kind of conduit for a succubus.  Naturally, the cat takes a dislike to Alex, finally causing her to fall down the stairs and end up in the hospital.  When she’s out of the house the former resident’s sister comes to close his estate.  I don’t think I’m spoiling anything if I say she is the succubus.  While Alex is away, she coaxes the faithful Tom into a torrid affair.  Tom really loves Alex and is reluctant, but succubi can be very persuasive.  Meanwhile more cats move into the building.  When an archaeological colleague of the former tenant arrives, he notes that said tenant had no sister.  Research indicates Tom is dealing with a Bast succubus.  Of course, the colleague is killed.  Spoiler alert:

It turns out the the doctor next door is Satan himself.  The only way to get rid of a succubus is to set it on fire.  Alex has already left Tom, so the next time the demon shows up, he lights her up.  Satan, next door, sees the whole thing and laughs.  Roll credits.  While a low budget film for its time (1995), it isn’t a cheap movie.  Serpent’s Lair at least tries.  The story is a touch weak because much of this has been done before.  It takes advantage of something that had been discovered a couple of decades earlier—religion is a great setting and source for horror.  Even if the explanation doesn’t really satisfy.

Story Book

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Book people, ironically, often don’t know much about how publishing works.  That’s not a condemnation; I was the same way before I took up a job in editing.  “I’ll write a book and let someone else handle the details,” was pretty much the thought process.  Now I find the whole enterprise fascinating.  The Untold Story of Books by Michael Castleman is an important book.  It is one of the most clear-eyed accounts of publishing that I’ve encountered in my long years at this practice.  There are many myths busted here.  Most—the vast majority of—writers make very little money from books.  Most never become famous.  Publishing is a low margin business.  We see the Stephen Kings and Dan Browns and say, “that could be me!”  Dreams are fine and good and sometimes come true, but writers write because that’s who we are.

As someone historically inclined, I was primarily interested in the storied days of early publishing.  This is what Castleman calls the first book business.  You didn’t expect to make much money from publishing in those days; you usually had to pay for the privilege.  Then publishing became a business.  I found this part of the story utterly fascinating.  Publishers and authors have often been at loggerheads.  Authors tend to come out on the short end of the stick (don’t quit your day job!) and Castleman doesn’t pull any punches here.  This is valuable information.  It also helped me understand why it seems that so few people in the publishing industry are authors.  I know a few besides myself, but not many.  There are reasons for that, and this book helps the curious to explore them.

Publishers began mergers for practical, if capitalistic, reasons.  Among presses that sell primarily fiction (or trade nonfiction) there are two main sources of income: bestsellers and backlist.  The backlist is the unsung bank of many publishers.  Bestsellers may be stocks, but the backlist is bonds.  Balancing these, publishers get by.  And of course, many are bought out by bigger companies.  As I mentioned here before, there are really only five big publishing houses in the English-language market.  They own most of all the publishers that may be household names.  Castleman also goes into the third book business, which covers publishing in the electronic era.  I love his sense of optimism.  Books are durable and people do enjoy reading.  Castleman has had more success with his writing than I’ll ever have, but reading him is like meeting a friend who understands what compels you to write.  Even if the devil is in the details.

Books Left out

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I’m still working on my bibliography of this blog.  It’s going to take some time yet to finish it.  One of the things that has surprised me already, though, is the number of books I read but didn’t discuss here.  In the first five-plus years of this blog I tried to tie every post in to religion.  A friend had told me that staying on topic would get me more readers and I think he was right.  I now discuss many subjects and my readership has fallen off.  But my writing in general has moved away from all religion all the time.  The real loss, however, is that many very interesting books didn’t get discussed here.  Were I to want to do so I’d have to go back and re-read them.  And I don’t have time for the reading of the books required for my current book project.

Books have defined my life since I got past that stage of eating candy and running around to burn off the energy.  I began early with the Bible but started reading seriously when I was a tween.  And I haven’t stopped.  My bibliography, and this is just a guess, has about 600 books on it so far.  These are books that I’ve discussed on this blog.  Goodreads shows me I read far more than that since 2013 (this blog began four years earlier than that).  I don’t regret being a bookworm.  The neighbors might be out mowing the grass, but I’m behind a book living in a different world.  Maybe for a future project I’ll take the books from Goodreads that didn’t make it to the blog and give them their own post.  It might cause red cheeks because I remember that some of them I didn’t post on because I was embarrassed for having read them.

You see, to publish fiction you’re often told to read books from the independent publishing houses to which you’re pitching.  That accounts for several of the no shows.  Early in my blogging life I avoided posting on the paranormal (I like weird things—they help with writing), those books didn’t show up here either.  Others simply weren’t religiony enough.  Or I couldn’t think of anything to say about them.  Still, it might be interesting sometime.  Goodreads has my list at over 1,100 books at the moment.  I’ll be curious to see how many have shown up here.  I was in my late forties in 2009, when this blog began.  I’d been reading for some three decades before that.  How many books?  Well, the bibliography won’t be half the story.

Check for

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If after Sleepaway Camp you’re still willing to go into the woods, beware of Ticks.  Actually, for a direct to video movie, Ticks isn’t bad.  It has some production values and a story that, although very far fetched, keeps you watching.  It all begins with a group of inner-city kids going on a wilderness enrichment project.  They don’t know that some cash croppers growing marijuana have been using steroids to enhance the growth of the plants nearby the cabin.  The steroids leak onto some ticks who grow supersized and are out for blood.  The kids and their chaperones know none of this as they try to get into nature and away from their unhealthy urban lives with its crime and entitled situations.  The local sleazy drug lord, however, doesn’t like them too near his operation, and keeps an eye on them.  One of the drug growers is the first to be attacked.

The mutated ticks start out about the size of a hand.  They first attack the dog of  one of the kids, draining it of blood and killing it.  Then they go for people.  Although there’s nothing really new here, other than using ticks as the monsters, it’s a somewhat fast-paced film that satisfies the monster itch.  Only one of the kids actually dies, although several are bitten.  In keeping with the tropes of many American films, though, the one Black kid is the sole victim.  This could’ve been thought through a bit more carefully.  The only other deaths are, however, three white men—all of them associated with the drug growing operation.  A bit of humor keeps things from getting too heavy, but the fact is that ticks can be scary and it turns out that making them bigger, as tenacious as they are, can work to make them scarier.

If you’ve ever been bitten by a tick (only once, that I know of, in my case) you know they can be frightening in that they carry diseases.  In the movie, instead of Lyme their bite is, or can be, hallucinogenic.  This isn’t applied evenly, however, sometimes the bites do this, and that is used to build some tension and to resolve some issues.  In the end, though, it turns out like many of the young-people-in-a-cabin-in-the-woods movies.  I won’t tell you how it ends since you may decide to see it, if you’ve cheap like me, and have been hankering for another excuse not to spend a week in the woods.  You’re generally fine if you do rent a cabin, but it is always best to check for ticks.

Spiraling

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I’m not the world’s biggest manga fan, so when I post about it it’s a safe bet a friend lent me a book.  This happened a few years back with Kouta Hirano’s Hellsing series I blogged my way through.  (I don’t own the books so please don’t come knocking at my door.)  Another friend recently let me Junji Ito’s Uzumaki.  I lack the finer points of manga (or anime, for that matter) interpretation, but I see the appeal.  Both of these series are horror, and my friends know that I read and watch horror.  Uzumaki is fascinating in the sheer number of ways it involves both body horror and folk horror.  There will likely be spoilers here, so be warned.  It’s all about spirals.  At first I had difficulty seeing how they could be made scary, but there are some seriously disturbing images in this work, if you read through the entire collection.

The story follows Kirie Goshima and her boyfriend Shuichi Saito and their life in Kurouzu-Cho, a town infested with spirals.  The spirals become the vehicle of horror as some people go insane because of them, but others twist into spirals, or have spirals cut into their bodies, or become jack-in-the-boxes, or grow into snails with spirals on their backs, or turn into vampires because of umbilical cords.  The town is plagued with hurricanes and tornadoes.  The ancient lighthouse’s beam becomes an incinerating spiral.  There’s no way out of the town because all exits spiral back into it.  People who stay in the old houses in town twist into each other’s spiral bodies.  That kind of thing.  Kirie (and her family) and Shuichi try to escape but end up surviving until it becomes clear that an ancient spiral culture still has a grip on the town and it will never let go.

As a kid, much to my mother’s chagrin, I used to read American horror comics.  Some of them contained images frightening to a child.  I really wasn’t expecting that this could be replicated on an adult level, but I’m willing to admit I was wrong.  Uzumaki  is compelling as horror.  Creative and bizarre, the comic shows what can be done with a concept that is pressed for more and more ways of developing fear from something otherwise quite benign.  Junji Ito has an eye for horror and my limited exposure to manga makes me think I’d be open to borrowing more of it.  If I can fit it into my spiraling schedule.

Stone Children

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I’m indebted to a friend for pointing out the folk horror nature of the 1977 UK children’s television series Children of the Stones, broadcast on ITV.  Folk horror is firmly tied to place and often involves ancient religions clashing with modern ones.  The term was coined to describe three horror movies of the late sixties and early seventies: Witchfinder General, The Blood on Satan’s Claw, and The Wicker Man.  Most discussions don’t go as far as to include children’s programming, but they should.  Children of the Stones consists of seven half-hour episodes which can be, thankfully, found freely on the internet.  Set in the fictional Milbury, but filmed in the actual Avebury, the story revolves around the famous stone circle located there.  Astrophysics Professor Adam Blake and his teenage son Matthew travel to Milbury for research but soon find themselves in a disturbing scenario.

Nearly all of the villagers are incapable of experiencing negative emotions.  What’s more, they can never leave the stone circle.  The stones possess a great energy and Matthew is psychometric—he can sense accurate knowledge of a place or time by touching an object associated with a person at that place and time.  His father, naturally, is skeptical, but when Matthew and his new friend Sandra realize their friend Kevin has changed—he is one of the Happy Ones and suddenly very good at higher mathematics—they piece together a cosmic mystery that involves the stone circle, an ancient religion, and astronomical events from long ago.  There are many horror elements along the way.  People are turned to stone.  Villagers are brainwashed.  Nobody can leave.  The soundtrack was deliberately disturbing as well.  The solution ends up involving time loops as well, so this is heady stuff.

Since the series clocks in at three-and-a-half hours, it really doesn’t fit movie length.  At least not comfortably.  And it contains fairly disturbing themes for children.  Then again, children tend to like scary things; parents are the ones to object to it.  Building on the mythology of the druids and the megalithic structures in and around Avebury, the series maintains a fascination for adults, even if the action is set at kid level.  I was able to get it watched in a week since the episodes allowed for natural breaks in the story.  If my friend hadn’t pointed it out to me, I’d probably never have discovered it on my own.  It’s a pity it isn’t discussed more by those who analyze folk horror.  It is, after all, fun for kids of all ages.

A Matter of Trust

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I used to write everything by hand.  We bought a used typewriter when I was in high school, and when I was in seminary I graduated to one of those strange devices that would print, like a typewriter, but had an LCD on the keyboard so that you could back up several characters before it printed.  This let you proofread while on the go.  I write a lot.  It may be a form of sickness, but I have hundreds of story ideas and little time to develop them.  Now I write on a computer but I’ve begun to lose trust.  It’s not just the whole AI debacle.  No, it’s that even with frequent backups, computers just lose things.  After having my hard drive wiped following a scam last year, I began work on some documents that I had to back up to the Cloud when the USB C ports on my laptop went bad.

After the repair was done I could download my files and pick up where I left off.  In theory.  I was working away on a new story and thought that I might be able to connect it to an earlier story I’d started.  Looking at the file, I remembered that the tale was much further along when I’d left off.  Where was it?  I looked on the Cloud version and it was the same as the one on my hard drive.  Then a larger project came along.  I went to start it again and discovered many, many pages missing.  Again, the Cloud shrugged its nebulus shoulders saying “I dunno…”. I pulled out my back-up disc.  (This was in April.)  I tried going back to January.  Same thing.  December.  Ditto.  Finally, my last backup in November had the full files.  Why these files didn’t backup to the Cloud, when done by a professional at the Apple Store, I can’t fathom.

What was especially disturbing is that one of the files (which I duplicated and put back on my hard drive, where they belong) showed that I’d completely reorganized things in a much clearer way.  After the laptop came home from the hospital, I’d forgotten (I’m not young and I’d been using a borrowed device for a few days).  I’d probably just picked up a story and, with my usual tunnel vision, began writing.  Not unrelatedly, I’ve been going through a spate of printing out any stories far enough along to warrant such treatment.  From what I’ve seen of the housekeeping on the Cloud, I’m glad I’ve been doing so.  I miss writing by hand.

Jurassic Horror

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We recently decided to watch Jurassic Park again.  When I was younger, I often wondered why Stephen Spielberg was passed over for academy awards.  His movies always seem to be popular and they’re well made.  I think now that I’m starting to get a better sense of the subtleties that award juries use.  In any case, Jurassic Park still holds up remarkably well.  The reason I raise it here, however, is that I was wondering if it could be considered a horror movie.  Casting about for weekend viewing, I see that various streaming services list the available Jurassic franchise films as horror.  And there are certainly horror elements to the original.  Dinosaurs in a modern setting have been used as a horror formula before, and a PG rating isn’t sufficient to disqualify a film as horror.  Is Jurassic Park horror?

It certainly has the Frankensteinian mad scientist element.  The decision to clone dinosaurs without sufficient consideration of how they might interact with/destroy modern humans and ecosystems has horror undertones.  More directly, a t-rex, and in the movie, velociraptors, are portrayed as monsters.  Don’t dinosaurs qualify as monsters, almost by definition?  The scenes of them stalking and pursuing kids, as well as adults, and the fear reaction shots suggest we’re going for the horror aspect of movies.  The film includes dismemberment, dark corners, and screams.  Typically it’s considered an adventure film, or science fiction.  The science in it, however, isn’t too far advanced from where things stood in the nineties.  Horror is a genre with indistinct borders.  Even as an adult who’s seen it several times, Jurassic Park still scares me.

The point of horror need not be to scare, of course.  I keep coming back to Edgar Allan Poe’s idea of effect.  It’s mood that makes horror, in my opinion.  One of those moods may be fear, but it isn’t necessarily the main, or even primary effect sought.  Believability is another of the moods.  I’m sure we’ve all seen movies that we simply can’t accept and that makes them less of whatever genre they happen to be.  Jurassic Park, apart from the usual leaps in any speculative story, is believable.  People do try to game the system.  As both the internet and AI teach us, people do release untested inventions on the public, sometimes with tragic results.  And while cloning remains controversial, is it difficult to believe that there might be scientists somewhere who wouldn’t love to clone dinosaurs, if they could actually get viable DNA?  To me this all says horror.

Ordinary Buddhism

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Refresher courses are a good idea.  I learned bits of Buddhism from my undergraduate days as a student of religions on, but my specialization was in “western religions.”  Those outside the field often don’t understand how technical religions can be.  They require time to learn and learn about.  I picked up a bit more Buddhism when I taught world religions, but still not enough to make me a specialist.  As a religion editor I continue to learn more.  My wife and I read Noah Rasheta’s No-Nonsense Buddhism for Beginners together.  Buddhism is divided into two major branches with a third sizable one.  Many would dispute that it is a religion since it has many aspects of a philosophy instead.  Also, Buddhism is non-doctrinal—it’s a matter of outlook and what you do, not the specifics of what you believe.  This book is a handy introduction, or refresher course.

The concept of religion itself developed because of the exclusive truth claims that grew from the Abrahamic traditions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam).  The declaration that other belief systems are wrong—each of these traditions grew amidst what we might consider folk religions today, labeled “paganism” as a way of disparaging them—led to the idea of what we believe being named “religion.”  (Yours, of course, is the right one.  Everyone believes that.)  Buddhism remained largely unknown in the western world until the age of exploration, and in America was not really widely studied until the 1890s.  As a way of looking at the world, it is older than classical Judaism, having begun in the sixth or fifth century before the Common Era.  It follows, in large part, the teachings of Siddhartha Gautama, “the Buddha.”

Rasheta, the author of this book, is a secular Buddhist.  He makes the point that Buddhism doesn’t displace one’s current religion but can be practiced alongside it.  Being non-doctrinal it’s not a matter of which gods you believe in, if any.  It certainly isn’t about worshipping the Buddha.  A large part of it is mindfulness, and trying to avoid the traps that lead to suffering in human life.  This book is set up in a question-and-answer format and is a straightforward introduction to what Buddhism is and how to begin to apply it to your life, if that’s what you wish.  It’s difficult for those of us raised in the Christian tradition to get past the idea that the point of any religion is conversion.  It’s not.  Instead, Buddhism can be yet another tool to help deal with the suffering that life brings.  Is it a religion?  That’s a technical question.

Old Passion

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Something I find inherently fascinating revolves around used books.  I buy used books and I always examine the overlooked scraps of paper that get left between the pages.  Mostly it’s random ephemera, but it is the window into a stranger’s life.  They had this bit of paper lying around to mark their place.  Had I the time I’d piece together the puzzle.  Recently, while preparing to donate some books to the local AAUW book sale, I found a scrap of paper in one of my own books.  This was from the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, based on the date in my wife’s handwriting: 3-19-04.  It’s an Associated Press story from Statesboro, Georgia, involving a dust-up between a married couple after watching The Passion of the Christ.  That makes it interesting in its own right, but what’s especially striking is the couple battled, including a pair of scissors, over whether “God the Father in the Holy Trinity was human or symbolic.”  Things got out of hand.

For context, I was still teaching at Nashotah House at the time.  Theological debates, sometimes heated, took place there on a regular basis.  People get very fired up over what they believe.  This may set our species apart from other thinking animals, or perhaps it’s part of the price we pay for abstract thought.  You almost want to step between the warring spouses and say, “let us handle this, we’re professionals.”  Of course, the species of specialist that has studied theology is dying out.  Universities are cutting religious studies departments.  Churches are losing members.  Better hide the scissors.

“Passion” is the operative word here.  We get quite attached to our views.  So much so that no amount of logic or rational discourse can dislodge them.  We see this with the utter devotion to political leaders and on-screen personalities as well as to religious beliefs.  Some of us were curious enough to study where these ideas came from and how we know that they’re “true.”  This is not for the faint of heart.  Testing your core assumptions can lead you into some very unfamiliar, unmapped territories.  And since religion deals with ultimate concerns, the stakes couldn’t be higher.  Our couple felt silly after the police had been called and the bail paid.  Passion is very much what drives our species, and perhaps others as well.  We feel we need what we believe to be true, and we’re willing to fight for it.  Even if it means, as the chief sheriff’s deputy remarked, they seem to have missed the point of religion in the first place.

Failed Horror

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In general I’m not one for stopping a movie, even if it makes me uncomfortable.  I have what is perhaps a bad habit of not reading about movies before watching them, and occasionally that leads to problems.  Combined with my interest in watching films that I don’t have to pay for (i.e. they stream on services I use, or commercial sites like Tubi) this sometimes leads to bad choices.  I started watching Maniac (2012—more than one movie has this title), but stopped about halfway through.  It wasn’t because I was too scared, but rather what I was watching simply wasn’t what I watch horror for.  I’ve long preferred supernatural themes to mere slashers.  Some slashers with that supernatural element (the biggies: Halloween, Friday the 13th, and Nightmare on Elm Street) still have an appeal, but for the most part more recent bloodbaths don’t really do much for me.

A few weeks after I attempted Maniac, I tried to watch Freaks.  This is an early film that I’d read about many times and didn’t really want to watch, but it was “free.”  In this case, part of a collection of movies I’d purchased on DVD some years back.  It turned out that the disc was damaged and got stuck in my player.  Now, weekends are a precious commodity.  I hate wasting time.  My wife was still asleep so I tried watching High Tension (2003).  I stopped about halfway.  One of the more extreme slashers, it also is a home invasion story, which I dislike.  It was predictable up to the point where I left off.  Then I decided to read a synopsis and learned it has a twist ending that may have made it worth finishing.  I’m no fan of torture porn, however.

By this point it was too late to start yet another movie.  It was light already and we had to go get groceries soon.  Finding time to watch horror movies, even on weekends, has been really tricky.  And I’m getting to the point where I may have to start reading about films before I invest time in starting them.  The problem is I prefer for movies to reveal themselves.  It doesn’t take a genius to know that “free” movies are often free for a reason.  Perhaps it’s time to start specifying “monster movies” for what I want to see.  Horror has wrongly been associated with mainly slashers for many years now.  Some of us prefer monsters, and preferably ones that won’t cost us an arm and a leg.

Photo by Stefano Pollio on Unsplash

Made In

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This blog, like drain clog remover, is something I do frequently and then move onto other things.  Once in a while you stop to think, “Hey, the water’s draining well today,” but most days you don’t.  It’s just one of those things.  Which is a long-winded way of saying I don’t pay much attention to stats on this blog.  I’ve accepted my place as a middling muddler, with a constantly shifting, but small number of followers.  But WordPress likes bloggers (paying customers such as yours truly) to feel good about their investment, so they send occasional notices when you reach milestones.  Recently I received such a notice telling me that I’d topped 150 countries for visitors (welcome all!).  Curious, I went to the stats page and soon found that my largest viewership is now China.  Hmm.  As in so many other areas China surpasses the United States.

I’m not sure what I’ve written that would be of much interest to Chinese readers.  I like to think they still have a kind of reverence for older individuals, but it’s probably some robotic, AI-ish thing, in reality.  When you write, you do so aware that your chances of a large readership are slim.  I’ve been told many times that nobody reads blogs anymore.  They prefer podcasts and videos.  But the form of post I attempt—the five-minute or less read—is intended, I suppose, for busy people like myself.  With things spinning all the time, when I finally do get a day off, such as today, I spend the first several waking minutes confused.  What do I do with so much time?  There’s been so much I’ve been neglecting because of work.  And other people probably have maybe five minutes to read a post.

I don’t know what things are like in China.  I’ve never been there, but I hear people—some academic specialists—reporting about it.  I fear authoritarian governments, but it seems we’ve got ourselves one of those too.  And I suspect most people in China, like most of us, are just trying to get by.  As with most things tech, however, there’s no peeking behind the curtain.  Besides, China’s all about big numbers.  I’m glad that they’ve chosen to share some of those with me.  I try not to focus too much on this blog itself in my posts (that’s too meta) but I think about the whole enterprise daily.  If you keep doing something long enough, someone might end up paying attention.  Why they do I haven’t a clue.  I pour it in and hope it works.