Who, Forgotten

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He’s a part of American childhood, Dr. Seuss is.  Kids are still familiar with him.  Even many decades ago, I grew up with him.  (We didn’t have his books at home, but there was a library in town.)  We watched the Grinch at Christmas time—when the networks, chose, of course.  I never knew that Dr. Seuss had done a Grinch Halloween special as well: Halloween is Grinch Night.  I just learned about this from a Halloween fan page I follow.  It was released in 1977 and was subsequently acquired by Disney and shown a few times in the nineties.  Once I heard about it I had to track it down and I did find it.  This was a rare off moment for Dr. Seuss.  Part of the problem is that Boris Karloff had died and another voice had to be found for the Grinch.  The larger problem, however, is that it doesn’t scare.

Partially this is because of the songs.  They don’t have any scary sounds, being more like show tunes.  I don’t have the vocabulary or expertise to say why, but they are not inspired.  And the story is strange: Whoville battens down the hatches when Grinch night approaches.  Eucariah Who has to use the euphemism (this word for outhouse is also in a Seuss book, I don’t recall which), but the wind blows him out of the yard and he apparently gets lost and climbs Mt. Crumpet.  Meanwhile, the Grinch is on his way down with his Paraphernalia Wagon (perhaps a clue).  He subjects Eucariah to the frights inside, which have nothing really spooky about them.  I’m not sure if Theodore Geisel was never really haunted—but his story “What Was I Scared of?” (the pale green pants with nobody inside them)  is spooky until the ending.

The thing that really disappointed me was that the concept is good.  The execution, however, just didn’t work.  The Grinch is far more menacing when stealing Christmas.  And having Sergeant Samuel McPherson giving a play-by-play really seemed to serve no purpose.  Now, I’m no critic of children’s stories.  Like most parents I’ve read many of them (and I’m currently going through one set again, just for fun).  Not all of them work for me.  This half-hour cartoon made me feel bad.  I think it was perhaps the missed opportunity.  I may have felt differently about it if I’d seen it when I was fifteen, but I doubt it.  Sometimes we need haunted people to tell us their stories, even when we’re kids.  (I discuss scary kids’ stories in my Sleepy Hollow book, just sayin’.)

Sleepy Hollow Returns

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Timing has never been my strong suit.  Regular readers may know that the reason I tried to get Sleepy Hollow as American Myth out when I did was that Lindsey Anderson Beer had been announced as the director for a new Sleepy Hollow movie.  I prioritized getting the book done and settled with a publisher.  Still, even in the time it takes to write a book and get it through the production process, the movie was no closer to being seen.  Yesterday while reading a trade news article I learned that Lindsey Anderson Beer has just signed a publisher for her first novel.  Its title?  Hollow.  One guess as to what it’s about.  Beer, of course, is known as the writer/director of Pet Sematary: Bloodlines, a prequel to the Stephen King story.  An up-and-coming horror director. I was anticipating that her Sleepy Hollow venture would make a big splash.  And my book would be just out.

Sleepy Hollow is one of those stories that keeps reappearing in American culture.  That’s the point of my book.  Indeed, even as I was attempting, in vain, to get it noticed, I learned that J. W. Ocker was finishing his own book on Sleepy Hollow, due out in September.  And now I learn that the putative director of a new film is writing her own novel.  The story bears repeated retellings.  The way that I characterize it in my book is as a labyrinth.  I have also started my own fictional retelling of the story.  I’ve got a couple novels that I’d like to get out the door before turning back to it, but I certainly understand the draw.  Sleepy Hollow is America’s founding ghost story.  I do hope Beer continues with the movie.  My guess is that it will be based on her own novel, which, naturally, I will read.

We keep coming back to “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”  Even now, with August awaiting at the end of this week, autumn is swiftly approaching.  And with it rides the Headless Horseman.  As a figure, he’s ubiquitous around Halloween.  I’m already looking forward to next summer when, I hope, McFarland will be willing to drop the price of my book a bit.  I recently had a friend say they were interested in reading it but it was priced a bit too high.  I get that.  I do hope to be part of the conversation as Ocker’s book comes out and then, a year later, Beer’s.  Even if I’m not, this is precisely what my book is about.

250 Years

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America doesn’t seem to be in a partying mood.  With more than the usual inanity coming from Foggy Bottom, and hot air being added to this heat dome, well, it might just be best to keep it simple.  Algae will grow, no matter what the self-appointed-divine say.  I remember a half century ago.  America seemed optimistic at its bicentennial.  Nixon was safely gone and Reagan hadn’t reared his fanged head yet.  It seemed like the country had a future.  These days, with more than regressive rhetoric, when emails from the Social Security Administration go out of their way to say how great Trump is, well, I think I’ll just stay home and watch a horror movie.  It’s less traumatic.

For me, as a kid, the Fourth of July was all about sparklers, black snakes, smoke bombs, and staying up late for fireworks.  Black snakes were these black discs about the size of a button coin battery that you lit with a match and the ash would fizz out the top into a “snake.”  It was an ephemeral thrill.  What we called “smoke bombs” were small colorful spheres that gushed colored smoke when you lit them.  We never played with anything explosive, but even the thought of these simple pleasures still brings a smile.  I haven’t seen anything like these trinkets (except sparklers) for many decades now.  I see from YouTube that they’re still being sold.  Almost as if the past fifty years never happened.  And staying up late to see fireworks only means being excessively sleepy at work on Monday morning.

I won’t be around for the tricentennial, presuming we survive what the Republican Party has up its sleeves.  I do hope things are more optimistic then.  I’ve been around long enough to notice the distinct difference in national outlook a mere fifty years can make.  I was born less than twenty years after the Second World War when everyone knew fascists were an evil to be avoided.  In just the last decade that has done a 180.  And we see what it’s like.  Our grocery bills are double what they were before our fearless leader took his post, claiming to make things better.  If I’m to believe the propaganda from the Social Security Administration things would be just rosy, could I afford to retire.  So our social experiment in democracy seems to have lasted only about two-hundred and fifty years.  Hopefully in another fifty what’s left of the United States will have come back to its senses or will have come up with something better than we have today.

Horror for Folk

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I’ve been following a few auteurs these days, and I discovered  Damian McCarthy somewhat accidentally.  Wanting to watch a movie and relying on the two streaming services I can choose from, I watched and enjoyed Oddity.  A bit of Celtic folk horror, its story is disturbing rather than the kind of thing that destroys you psychologically.  A friend then told me that he’d directed only one other movie, Caveat, which I also watched.  Hokum is the third and most recent of the folk horror trilogy and is a movie I’m glad to have seen.  It follows an acerbic American writer, Ohm Bauman, who goes to Ireland to scatter his parents’ ashes at a place they enjoyed.  He arrives at Halloween and finds the hotel owner frightening two young boys with stories of the Cailleach, a witch associated with the coming of winter.

Bauman treats everyone poorly except Fiona, the one woman on the staff.  He hangs himself after disposing of the ashes but is rescued by Fiona and the single bellhop.  After he’s released from the hospital, Bauman finds the hotel closing for the season and Fiona missing.  He suspects she’s in the forbidden honeymoon suite and Mal, the front desk clerk, reluctantly allows him to explore it.  Bauman finds Fiona’s body and learns that Mal murdered her because he got her pregnant.  I’m leaving out a lot, but the movie’s worth watching.  The witch, in the film’s scariest scene, circles Bauman as he hides in the curtained four-poster bed while trapped in the honeymoon suite.  Mal realizes that his only option is to kill Bauman and the two end up in the hotel basement where Mal is caught by the witch.  Bauman, we learn, was playing with a gun as a boy and accidentally shot and killed his mother, thus his guilt and depression.

A little research after watching Hokum revealed some of the subtlety of the film.  The Cailleach, who drags away the murderous Mal, is associated with winter.  In Celtic timekeeping, Halloween is the onset of winter and the murder that leads to Mal’s demise took place on Halloween.  It’s even shown with a carved turnip jack-o-lantern.  Holiday horror, anyone?  Another aspect that comes out is that the witch’s minions strip off body parts as the unwary are dragged away.  The owner frightens the boys at the start by implying the witch will take their private parts.  Mal is guilty of murdering Fiona because he impregnated her.  Subtle, but effective.  There’s more to the film than I can summarize in the brief space here, but it is another example of sophisticated folk horror from Damian McCarthy.  He is an auteur worth following.

Freedom

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This year has been marked by small clusters of holidays.  I wrote about Friday the 13th, St. Valentine’s Day, and President’s Day occurring the same weekend back in February.  Then in March, I noted we had a second Friday the 13th, the weekend before St. Patrick’s Day.  Here in June we find another cluster as today is Juneteenth—an important holiday finally recognized—and Sunday is both the summer solstice and Father’s Day.  Now, Father’s Day is always a conflicted day for me.  My father was largely absentee, and an alcoholic when present and accounted for.  For many of my childhood years we didn’t know where he was.  I always have difficulty feeling mad at him, though, because his self-sabotage wasn’t malicious in any way.  He was a man overwhelmed by what life threw at him.  Besides, mothers, it seems to me, give a lot more of themselves than fathers do.  But today’s Juneteenth.

Photo by Zulmaury Saavedra on Unsplash

Those with skin darker than pink folk have a more difficult time in the society we’ve built.  With open racism in the White House the struggle has been set back many years.  One thing I sometimes feel personally, having grown up poor, is that disadvantage of any kind is difficult to overcome.  Who, after all, seeks to make friends with someone who’s poor?  What’s the advantage in that?  Sometimes capitalism seems to be the ultimate evil where even people are commodities to be sold.  Human Resources, we call it.  Human capital.  Human assets.  Meanwhile our economic system has birthed us all a new trillionaire just a few days ago.  Juneteenth is an important reminder.  Human beings are not chattels to be bought and sold.  How people who’d ever read the gospels could allow that, I simply can’t fathom.

These holiday clusters occur now and again, like the alignment of the planets along the ecliptic.  They give us time to pause and ponder.  Are we really going the right direction?  Are we lost and unwilling to admit it?  Deep down, all but sociopaths know that all people deserve fair treatment.  Some people are unable to take care of themselves.  Juneteenth reminds us that simply seeing them as some “other,” some “not me,” and steeling ourselves against their needs is a high moral infraction.  It’s close kin to murder.  We are the ones who built this system.  We have the power to change it.  Juneteenth reminds us that anyone who openly, or even discreetly, believes that one race is better than another has no business telling others what to do.  The longest day is coming, if only we’d use it to consider what we’re doing.

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.

Equal Women

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It’s been so busy this year that Mother’s Day crept up on me.  We have a lot of spring birthdays in our extended family, and what with the weird weather this year and unexpected household expenses, it just kept slipping my mind.  I like to commemorate the day on this blog because I’ve considered myself a feminist for many years.  I’m very distraught that women still aren’t treated as equals to men.  This should’ve been a no-brainer over a century ago.  (Having an historian’s outlook, I realize that in the days when women tended to die young, in childbirth, it was difficult for many to rise to positions of social prominence.  Once we got to the stage that most women survived the experience, and then to the point that economics drove us to two-income families, the male-superiority charade should’ve been dropped.)  The fact is none of us would be here without our mothers.  Father’s day has never been a big deal for me, but Mother’s Day is important.

I did manage to remember to get my wife a card in advance, but this year the day itself kept slipping my mind.  Ironically, my wife and I had watched a biopic of Mother Ann Lee last night—I’ll post on that tomorrow—and it was only as I was preparing to write about it for today’s post that I thought, “Wait.  It’s Mother’s Day.”  (We do have plans for the day; I’m not a complete barbarian.)  My excuse is that we were set off yesterday by an early encounter with a brusque and condescending Verizon employee who would not help set up a new phone purchased elsewhere.  I hadn’t slept well the night before and it rained all day, none of which made for a productive Saturday.  The movie (tomorrow’s post) was longer than anticipated, keeping me up late.  Movies, strangely enough, are now starting to really influence my dreams.

My dream for today, however, is that women’s equality will become a reality rather than something we just keep talking about.  There can be little doubt that we’d be better off with a woman president than with the alternative.  A woman has traveled further from the earth than many billions of men have.  My doctor and dentist are both women.  They can do anything men in their professions can.  They are university presidents and CEOs.  Pilots, both civilian and military.  They are religious leaders.  And many of them do the job on top of being mothers.  I consider it a personal failing that it was only as I was about to post about Mother Ann Lee (tomorrow) that I finally realized today is a very important day.  Let’s make Mother’s Day count!

Spring Halloween

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Being a lifelong fan of Halloween, it’s only dawning on me now that Walpurgis is almost precisely half-a-year from its October sibling.  This occurred to me this year for a couple of reasons.  Someone from Sweden emailed me on April 30, noting that Walpurgis was still celebrated there.  (In an amazing, almost superhuman, show of restraint I did not mention Midsommar).  I tucked that away.  Then one of the very few Facebook groups I follow (Halloween Madness) had lots of posts over the next day or so noting that Halloween is only half-a-year away.  The penny finally dropped.  Walpurgis is Halloween in April.  Well, not exactly, but it could be.  The idea of the autumn being a spooky time of year may trace its roots back to “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” as I point out elsewhere.  Traditionally, the scary season was around the winter solstice, now known as Christmastime.

Walpurgis Night in Sweden; image credit: David Castor, public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Now, I enjoy Christmas a lot.  It is family time.  It is time off work.  It is hunkering down cozy time.  I read a lot and watch movies without having to interrupt everything to stare at the computer for eight or more hours every day.  I also take a bit of horror with my holiday.  There are Christmas ghost stories from before when Christmas became a capitalistic enterprise, giving the warm glow of childhood memories of gifts and such.  I try to keep that tradition alive, without spoiling things for my family.  But things can also be spooky in the spring.

My strange schedule of awaking around 3 a.m. to do my writing means that I always wake up in the dark.  I jog when it is just light enough to see.  Yes, it can be spooky in April.  And the weather, which is still far from certain—the Germans have a saying, “April does what it wants”—can be downright scary.  And there is an extant tradition of a scary spring holiday.  Walpurgis Night (Walpurga was actually a saint) was the commemoration not only of Walpurga, but the driving out of pestilence, various diseases, and witchcraft.  Its spooky potential was realized by Disney in its first Fantasia, but it hasn’t really taken off here in the States as the second Halloween.  It is celebrated in some European countries and it seems to me that it could make a useful addition to paid holidays where Christmas is fueled by the lucre we labor to give to others all year.  If I can remember, I will try to post more about Walpurgis Night in a more timely way next year.

May’s Cool Start

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Beltane always makes me think of The Wicker Man, for some reason.  I recently got a royalty notice telling me sixteen copies had sold since the last statement.  (I never received that actual statement, but Worldcat shows that 419 libraries have a copy, making it my second best-selling book (maybe the best-selling; most royalty statements don’t include the total number sold, as much as authors would like to know that).  In any case, today is Beltane so I tip my hat to Sergeant Howie of the West Highland Constabulary and confess that I have two more books on the movie that have come out since I wrote mine that I haven’t read yet.  The reason is that I’m currently researching for a new book and Sleepy Hollow intervened.  But back to Summerisle.

The Wicker Man was a movie before its time.  The last of the three famous British films that spawned the sub-genre “folk horror,” it helped launch a new interest in ancient religions.  A friend pointed me to Children of the Stones (there will be a post on it in coming days), which was a British children’s television series with distinct folk horror undertones.  Maybe overtones.  It made me think of Wicker Man again.  And the way that folk horror has taken off in the past decade or two.  I’ve lost track of how many folk horror movies I’ve watched.  While discussing Christopher Lee with a friend lately, I was reminded how he once said that of the many movies he was in, The Wicker Man was the best.  It’s certainly a literate film.  Folk horror often tends to be.  Delving deep into what people (the folk) really believe can dredge up some very interesting possibilities.  I try to use them in my own horror writing.

Just because my book doesn’t explore the folk horror angle doesn’t mean I don’t think it’s not there.  (Sorry for the four-negative disclaimer.)  Devils Advocates at the time was looking for an approach that didn’t foreground folk horror.  Scholars tend to typecast Wicker Man.  I was working on a larger holiday horror project at the time—I may come back to it some day—and was surprised that nobody had approached the film from that angle.  The genre “horror” itself is a bit of a misnomer, and many of the sub-genres aren’t clearly defined.  For many people “horror” equates to “slasher,” but there’s a great deal more out there than that.  The Wicker Man stands witness to that on this somewhat cool May Day decades later.

A Day for Earth

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Sometimes things come just when they’re needed.  Although it was earlier this month, the Artemis II mission was a celebration of Earth Day.  It was also a much needed shot in the arm during difficult times for the environment.  Human arrogance is quite often checked by nature.  The series of very hot April days followed by extraordinarily cold April days reminded us around here that nature is firmly in charge.  Our comfort, or expectations, are secondary to the vast world around us.  And we love our world for it.  We are guests here and we couldn’t survive without it.  We may set up a base on the moon or Mars, but such places will still rely on our home.  It helps that those who’ve ventured further away than humans have ever gone sent back photos to remind us of how small we are on a fairly small planet.  Pictures of home.

Photo credit: NASA, public domain, FD06_high priority pao

From our daily perspective it’s difficult to believe that outer space surrounds us.  We’re so caught up with our own little problems, generally of our own making.  I write this after a day of shivering in a chilly house as electricians replaced the breaker box and the conduit, from service head to basement mounting.  It was a sunny day but temperatures hadn’t really recovered after a nighttime low in the twenties.  I reflected on how much we’ve come to rely on being able to shut nature out.  How difficult it would be to survive without shelter, and a little heat.  With the electricity off the furnace didn’t know to kick on, and windows had to be open to snake wires through.  For all the wonders of a household electrical system, the Earth itself is so complex we are still only beginning to understand how it works.  We love it.  We fear it.

Our dependence on things we’ve constructed makes me feel fragile sometimes.  When we first noticed our electrical issues I walked to a local shop run by an Earth-loving owner to see if their power was out too.  “Water and electricity,” she said, “are the two things we can’t do without at home.”  She was correct.  We rely on the grid.  Nature could take us with both hands behind its back.  As the replacement process stretched beyond the scheduled finish time, I had visions of a cold night without power.  No way to cook dinner, no way to keep food safe in the fridge.  I thought of astronauts a quarter-million miles from home, protected by a shell made here on Earth.  And looking back to lovingly snap a photo for Earth Day.

Easter Flowers

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Easter is our springtime holiday of hope.  Flowers are starting to bloom and the cold spells, when they come, don’t last too terribly long.  Of course, as a moveable feast Easter can come earlier than this, but here we are, in April with brave flowers making themselves vulnerable.  The weather’s fickle, as is typical of spring, with the lovely warm days often coinciding with when you have to be at work, reserving rain and chill for weekends.  Around here, anyway, it felt like winter lasted quite a long time.  It got cold early and was gray and gloomy for much of the time.  And for around here, we had a lot of snow.  Spring was reluctant to show up.  The timing of Easter was good this year.  The older I get, the more I appreciate the flowers.

As a kid, I appreciated the bright colors, but flowers were too delicate to play with and you could surprise a pollinator with a stinger, which seldom ended well.  As an adult I see that each flower is its own world.  For perennials, a resurrection.  Last year I somewhat clumsily dug up the daffodils that some previous owners had planted where nobody could see, and transplanted them in our attempts at a front garden.  Having already sprouted, they did not like that, and they withered and disappeared.  I hoped I hadn’t killed them.  This spring they showed up, reminding me that life is persistent.  It keeps trying.  That resurrection is possible.

We could spend a lifetime studying a flower and still not comprehend it all.  We see it for what it offers to us without thinking it exists for its own purposes.  All of nature interacts and we are connected, that flower and I.  We share the planet with insects for whom it is a source of life.  And other flowers with which it communicates in ways we can’t even understand.  We have to humble ourselves if we would let them be our teachers.  Our constant narrative of being on top of nature is misguided, you can almost hear them say.  There are riches here that money cannot buy and flowers would exist even without us being here to see them.  Nature carries on.  It urges us to acknowledge that we are part of it.  Easter is a holiday enfolded within hope, inseparable from its flowers.  They may be delicate but they are also wise.  We can learn from them.

Second Friday the 13th

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It’s a measure of how regimented my life has become.  The 9-2-5 workday is ruled by the calendar in a way teaching wasn’t.  But on this, the second Friday the 13th of 2026 I figured I’d reveal something that only repetitive calendar watching taught me.  It’s so simple many children probably know it, but it is something that being a drone taught me.  Ready?  Unless it’s a leap year, the dates in March are the same as they are in February.  Mathematically (and I don’t think that way) this makes perfect sense.  February’s 28 days are evenly divisible by seven, something that isn’t true of either 30 or 31.  That means in three years out of four, March begins on the same day of the month that February does.  So if February has a Friday the 13th, so does March.  

Photo credit: Andreas F. Borchert, Wikicommons

I’ve confessed to being interested in holidays and significant dates.  Last month we had Friday the 13th before St. Valentine’s Day on the 14th, and the following Monday, the 16th, was Presidents Day.  A special long weekend.  This kind of syzygy always catches my attention.  I knew even then, however, that Friday the 13th would recur in March.  The only extenuation, in this case, is that St. Patrick’s Day is on Tuesday.  Now, I have some Irish ancestry and Tuesday always vexes me a bit.  Well, the coming Tuesday, I mean.  Green isn’t really my color.  I have a green sweater that doesn’t really fit anymore, but I try to wear it just about every year.  (I’ve had it since high school.  I can still fit into my college clothes—those that I still have, but alas, nothing green.)  I keep clothes until they literally wear out.  I can’t donate them because they’re rags by the time I’m done wearing them.  I grew up poor and that shows.

So here I am on Friday the 13th wondering if I should buy something green to wear on Tuesday.  You see, I take holidays seriously.  One of my unpublished books was about holidays.  I ended up using some of it in The Wicker Man, but May Day is still a ways off at this point.  Friday the 13th isn’t really a holiday, except for horror fans.  I’ve only seen the first two movies in the franchise—slashers have never been my favorites.  So this is just another Friday at work for me.  It feels sort of like the movie Groundhog Day.  The calendar just keeps telling me it’s a work day.  But at least on Tuesday I’ll be wearing green.  And if I decide to act on my impulse, contrary to my usual practice, and spend money on a sweater instead of books, maybe it’ll even be something new.

Seasonal Horror

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It was a rare combination: Friday the 13th, Saturday Valentine’s Day, and Monday some federal holiday.  One of our first friends as a couple called unexpectedly on Friday to say she was in the area and that led to an impromptu meeting for a late supper at a diner.  Still, being Friday the 13th a horror movie was prescribed.  So I picked My Bloody Valentine.  I’ve seen it before, of course.  (I had a whole life before this blog, as witness this friend.)  But the confluence of Friday the 13th and Valentine’s Day forced me to realize that I’d never posted about it.  And the fact that Monday is Presidents Day made a horror movie mandatory, given the current denizen of the White House.  Back to My Bloody Valentine.  First of all, there was the question of which to watch.  The original from 1981?  Kids in high school were talking about this, but I didn’t watch it until several years later.  Then there was a reboot, My Bloody Valentine 3D, which wasn’t as highly rated, in 2009.  It nevertheless was well made and, it was streaming for free.  Spoilers follow.

I’d forgotten whodunit, so the movie kept me guessing.  Here’s how the story goes: a coal mine cave-in led Harry Warden to kill his fellow miners to preserve the air to survive.  He went into a coma, but after a year he awoke and massacred the hospital staff and kids partying at the mine on Valentines Day.  He was shot dead.  Ten years later, Tom, the son of the former mine owner, one of the kids at the fateful party, returns to town to sell the mine.  Instead, he becomes Harry Warden in his mind and begins killing again.  Viewers don’t know that it’s him since he wears a miner’s mask.  Suspicion is thrown on the sheriff, Axel, who was also one of the kids at the party.   And Tom and Axel are feuding over Sarah, now Axel’s wife, but formerly Tom’s girlfriend.  The movie effectively keeps you guessing whether Axel (who’s a philanderer) or Tom (who has mental problems) is the killer.

The movie has a Pennsylvania feel to it, having been filmed in my home state.  This is more in the industrial part where I grew up, rather than the Bucks County that features in M. Night Shyamalan movies.  The only thing they got wrong is that it doesn’t seem very cold for February.  (February can be a trickster in this state, with temperatures anywhere from the seventies to zero or below.)  It isn’t a bad horror offering.  The 3D effects are campy, but that only adds to the fun.  It was the right choice, given the confluence of red letter days.

Welcome 2026

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I put great stock in holidays, but I’ve never felt a deep connection to New Year’s Day.  I’m more of a morning person than the stay up late sort, and the New Year also seems cold after the coziness of Christmas.  But here we are in 2026 nevertheless.  We’re encouraged to look ahead.  I’m not much of a corporate person and I don’t see much wisdom in devising five year plans in an unpredictable world or any such nonsense.  The way things have been going in the news, it’s hard to have a five-day plan that bears any resemblance to reality.  But New Year’s Day does seem an appropriate season for optimism.  Hope stands here, anticipating better days ahead.  I am, despite appearances, an optimist.  I do believe in progress and the calendar keeps on ticking over regardless.  What will 2026 hold?  Who knows.  Best to take it one day at a time.

For me personally, I’ve got a couple books nearly complete and I do hope to find publishers this year.  And I’ve got many others started as well.  Writing is an act of optimism.  I’m always touched when someone lets me know they’ve found my work interesting, or even helpful.  Someone once contacted me to let me know Holy Horror had helped them through a difficult time.  This made me happy; writing books is a form of connection.  When I read books—a major planned activity for 2026—I’m connecting with people I don’t know (usually).  Writing to me feels like giving back.  The funny thing about it is the tension of having little time to do it seems to make it better.  I always look forward to the break at the end of the year but I find myself using the time to recover rather than for the intensive writing I always plan to do.

I have spent the last several days doing a lot of reading.  That too is a coping technique.  I’ve got some good books that I’m looking forward to finishing in 2026.  And the blog bibliography continues to grow.  Looking ahead I see reading and writing.  That to me is a vision of hope.  I didn’t stay up to midnight last night—that only makes me start out the new year grumpy.  No, instead I woke up early to start the year by writing.  And reading.  What does 2026 hold?  I have no idea.  I’d rather not speculate.  I do believe that as time stretches on some improvements will begin to take place.  I do believe holidays are important, both looking back and looking ahead.

Scary Christmas

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A few days ago I mentioned the connection between Christmas and Halloween.  I’m apparently not the only one to be interested in this because Tim Rayborn wrote Scary Book of Christmas Lore.  This little, holiday-themed book is a gathering of (mostly) scary creatures associated with the winter holidays.  Each creature, or tradition, is treated in less than two pages and the book is generous with color illustrations.  While not a research book (it’s set out as an impulse buy in some Barnes & Nobles at least), nevertheless Rayborn, like yours truly, holds a doctorate from a university in the UK and spends at least part of his time writing books on spooky topics.  (More successfully than yt.) In the process of researching Sleepy Hollow as American Myth I gathered stories of scary Christmas creatures, but didn’t include most of them in the book.

Apart from the obvious Halloween connection, a few things stood out to me about this book.  One is that the majority of these tales come from Germanic cultures.  If these branch up into Scandinavia, almost all of the creatures in the book are covered.  There are a few from other regions as well, but this suggests that winters in Northern Europe used to be seriously scary.  Some of the darker visitors around the winter holidays are clearly local variations of others.  Krampus, for example, is having a day and there are other local versions of a monstrous companion to the “good cop” Santa who comes along to dole out punishment.  Some of the other beings associated with the season are a variety of other monsters—some human, others less so.

The long, dark winter suggests itself as a season for scary stories.  It’s unlikely that this book will send anyone shrieking into the closet or under the bed, but it helpfully brings to the light that people have long found both the fear and entertainment value of telling of frightening creatures.  The Teutonic imagination gave us many of our nighttime fears.  The British, inspired by such tales, tended to codify them into the monster stories that gave the modern horror genre its tentative start.  Although, as I discussed with my daughter on Christmas morning, horror stories began in the pre-biblical era (something I wrote about in an article a couple years back).  And, of course, religion and horror have naturally gone hand in glove for longer than anyone has really traced in any level of detail.  So a little book of monsters around Christmas?  Why not?