Not Alice’s

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Sometimes I forget that movies are entertainment.  I mean, they’re big business and make some people obscene amounts of money.  In that respect they’re serious.  And also, they literally get into our heads and become part of our life’s experience.  Horror films, whatever that means, are often intelligent and thought-provoking.  I’ve been focusing on genre for a while now and when a friend recommended Willy’s Wonderland, and it was on one of my streaming services, I said “why not?”  This is entertainment, but the genre is all over the place.  Comedy, yes.  Fantasy, check.  Thriller, okay.  Action, definitely.  Horror, I’ll buy as well.  Nicolas Cage movie?  Well, he doesn’t look like he’s in his mid-fifties, and he doesn’t say a word in the whole thing.  The movie has possessed animatronic animals.  Satanists.  Small-town conspiracy.  Teens getting themselves killed.  And “one tough hombre.”

So what’s it about?  Hayesville has made a deal with the Devil.  A serial killer started an entertainment restaurant for kids’ birthdays, but along with his associates, began, well, killing.  Before the police could get them, they committed ritual suicide in a satanic pact, and they were permitted to inhabit the animatronic creatures.  When they weren’t fed, the machines started preying on townsfolk, so now they trap passersby and trick them into spending a night in Willy’s Wonderland so the machines can feed.  Cage’s unnamed character shows up and spends the night cleaning, killing machines, and playing pinball.  A young woman whose family had been killed tries to burn the place down, but, with her friends dead, and Cage leaving town after the carnage, she goes along for the ride.  It’s one of those movies that defies genre conventions.

As with many films released early in this pandemic, this one had a tough time at the box office.  I’d never even heard of it until the friend’s recommendation.  Lots of movies just disappear, but this one has at least the beginnings of a cult following.  It’s not difficult to see why.  If you can put up with the slasher aspect, it has quite a lot going for it.  Creepy kids’ stuff, children’s songs, and tawdry attractions are something we all experience in our own lives.  And a guy who goes around doing good—cleaning up other people’s messes, is something I think we tend to appreciate.  As a former janitor myself, I like the idea that the cleaning crew is the one who, well, cleans the clocks of the mechanical villains.  It’s a wonderland worth visiting.

Re-Unborn

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Some months ago I wrote a post about the possession movie The Unborn.  I don’t watch movies to pass the time.  I watch them to learn something.  And many horror movies are fairly smart.  In my blog post on this one I didn’t go into too much analysis because I already knew at that point that I wanted to share my thoughts on the larger venue, Horror Homeroom.  My piece, “Ecumenical Exorcism in The Unborn” has just been posted there.  The fairly small number of regular readers I have know that I post about horror movies with some frequency.  They help me to make sense of things, especially in this insane world where petty dictators keep rising to the top of the political spectrum because, apparently, we hate ourselves so much.  Horror helps prepare you for that.

In any case, The Unborn is a good example of how religion and horror work together.  They cooperate very nicely, in fact.  Religion is pervasive enough in horror that it would be an error to say “religion-based horror” is a sub-genre of the whole.  No, the two go together as naturally as chocolate (vegan, preferably) and peanut butter.  If I had a million dollars I might go back to grad school to explore just this nexus.  (I wouldn’t be looking for a teaching job either, because “fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice…”)  I’m not the only one who knows that there’s something there.  Ironically, before horror films proper were even invented, many churches actively discouraged the movies.  Perhaps they were inherently aware that these represented competition.  And there was already too much competition, what with other denominations and all.  But some films do occupy the same space as religion.  Quite often horror.

If you’re interested in how The Unborn fits into this picture, head on over to Horror Homeroom.  And yes, there is a book-length project in all of this.  It’s one I’ve been chipping away at for years.  That’s because the connection is obviously there, but I haven’t, to my own satisfaction, been able to figure out exactly what it is.  Perhaps I need to add a degree in psychology to my bucket list.  These things meet similar mental needs for a cross-section of people.  I suspect that most horror fans don’t think about it too much, which may be why my blog isn’t exactly jammed with traffic.  That doesn’t mean that the connection’s missing.  There are many things in life yet to be discovered.

Suitable Genre

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As I muse over genres, it seems that “low-budget Lovecraftian horror” might be an—ahem—suitable one.  This is perhaps because Lovecraft has trouble being taken seriously as a literary writer and his stories are so easily parodied.  I watched Suitable Flesh unaware that it was a Lovecraftian (low-budget) movie.  I’ve seen quite a few of these over the years and they can be pretty fun.  This one was somewhat enjoyable.  Based on Lovecraft’s “The Thing on the Doorstep,” it’s a body-swapping, possession fest that involves two psychiatrists who have been friends forever but who both become victim of a nameless possessing entity.  It took some adjusting to believe Heather Graham in her lead role here—she doesn’t strike me as the Lovecraftian type.  She does seem to enjoy her role, nevertheless.

Lovecraft famously didn’t write many women.  He was xenophobic and a racist.  He didn’t much enjoy being married.  Modern films (and even novels) based on his works tend to redress this situation, sometimes creating a little disconnect with the white-male Lovecraftian universe.  Still, the story is fun.  Dr. Elizabeth Derby (Graham’s character) encounters a young man whom she supposes is schizophrenic.  In actuality, his body is being taken over by an entity that had possessed his father.  While possessed, the patient begins an affair with Dr. Derby and that leads to her also being a target of possession.  Although not considered a comedy it does seem that part of the story has an inherent humor about it.  Some consider it camp.  Lovecraft’s mood is difficult to translate to film.

Although cinema existed during Lovecraft’s lifespan, his writing wasn’t influenced by the possibility of film conversion.  The monsters are too enormous and the concepts too broad.  The real fear here, apart from the gross-out effects, is that of losing your identity.  The whole centers around a psychiatric ward where the supernatural events aren’t really accepted by the science that reigns.  People end up dying because the supernatural is inadmissible.  In this aspect, it shares some of the overarching concepts of some great horror.  The Exorcist, for example, derives a great deal of its energy from the fact that modern people have great difficulty in accepting that a demon could actually exist and science doesn’t seem to be working.  There are plenty of other examples of this.  Lovecraft’s stories bring us close to this realm, although Lovecraft himself was an atheist.  Maybe that’s one of the reasons his works are difficult to translate to film.  Or maybe something larger is going on.

Eating Conscience

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Elections notwithstanding, people—at least many of them—are becoming more accepting of those of us who are different.  Or so it seems on the ground, in some places.  A couple of weekends ago we attended the s’MAC DOWN in Bethlehem.  In case you’re not from the Valley, s’MAC DOWN is an event where hundreds gather to compare vegan macaroni and cheese prepared by area restaurants.  I don’t think that when I was younger—and vegan could’ve been considered a protected category—that there would’ve been a healthy line to get into such an event.  But there was just a couple weeks back.  Even after those who paid extra had been already allowed in and had been given a complementary glass of wine.  It helps, as my family reminded me, that mac and cheese is something people tend to like in general.  Being a vegan myself, I do miss cheese the most but vegan alternatives are getting better all the time.

People are slowly becoming aware that industrial farming of animals simply isn’t sustainable for our environment.  It’s one of the largest pollution-generating capitalistic practices.  It contributes to global warming as well as deforestation.  And how many e coli outbreaks and animal diseases leaping to humans will it take until we realize we’re going about this all wrong?  I became a vegan because it’s very clear that animals suffer as they’re being “processed.”  I don’t want to be part of that.  I understand that others differ in their opinions, which is one of the reasons I don’t write about this often.  But attending events like this can be an eye-opening experience.

It’s safe to say that if eaters didn’t know, they wouldn’t be able to tell that this food was vegan.  Things have come a long way on that front.  Cheese and milk are fairly easy to substitute.  (As is meat, it turns out.)  Butter goes without saying because people warmed up to margarine decades ago and some margarine makers are now putting “vegan” on their packaging.  I’ve been vegan going on a decade now.  There are still places you can’t eat without violating your principles, but events like the s’MAC DOWN show that even non-vegan restaurants are willing to give it a try.  And by and large they do it well.  Of the nine samples we had (in compostable cups with compostable “plastic ware”) there was only one I really didn’t care for.  A couple would’ve been very difficult to pin down as vegan at all.  And then there was the fact that hundreds of people had paid to give this a try, and not all of them were young folks.  It’s good to feel accepted, even when eating by my conscience.

Life Plant

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If your backyard is like mine, you’ll find The Ruins scary.  It’s pretty scary even if your plant-control skills are better than mine.  There’ll probably be some spoilers here, so I’ll say upfront that I recommend the movie.  If you’re wanting to see it fresh, well, you might want to pick up here afterwards.  Two couples vacationing in Mexico befriend a German who’s off to find his missing brother, last known to have visited an obscure archaeological site.  When the group arrives, they discover that the local Maya, who don’t speak Spanish or English, try to prevent them from approaching the pyramid.  Once they touch the vines growing all over it, the locals kill anyone who tries to leave.  It takes the group a few days to learn that the vines are carnivorous, and if you get a wound, they will invade your body through it.  It gets pretty gnarly.

Plants, we are coming to learn, share some form of consciousness.  They move (slowly by animal standards, but they do).  And they can quickly “consume” such things as say, oh, paving stones, that have been deployed to control them.   In a matter of maybe three weeks crab grass had nearly completely covered such stones that I laid out to try to reduce the amount of mowing the yard requires.  Plants exemplify the tenaciousness of life.  They can far outlive humans, or any other animal.  Being rooted in the earth has its benefits, it seems.  The Ruins has been described as ecological horror, and I would agree with that.  One thing, though.  Ecological horror often makes it clear that humans “started it.”  Here, the plant grows in one location only, kept under strict control by the locals.

Although the movie didn’t rock the critics, I thought the acting was good and the premise well laid out.  This writer knows how to put his protagonists at the edge of a cliff and then throw rocks at them.  The tourists are all likable people, but they’ve stumbled upon something dangerous, inadvertently, and they have to try to survive amid plants that seem to have a kind of sentience as well.  Somewhat like Triffids.  This is a very tense story.  There’s a bit of gore as well, so be warned.  Nevertheless, it’s not a gross-out for gross-out’s sake.  The larger story is intelligent and it even raises several ethical issues along the way.  And it seems to suggest that if you’re planning to travel to Mexico, stick with the well-touristed ruins rather than trying to discover some new ones.

Dark Academia

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Dark academia is the new gothic.  It’s all the rage on the internet, as I found out by releasing a YouTube video on the topic that quickly became my most popular.  Still, I was surprised and flattered when Rent. asked me my opinion on the dark academia aesthetic.  You should check out their article here.  What drew me to dark academia is having lived it.  Although the conservatism often rubbed me the wrong way, Nashotah House was a gothic institution with skeletons in closets and ghosts in the corridors.  Tales of hauntings were rife and something about living on a campus isolated from civilization lends itself to abuses.  An on-campus cemetery.  Even the focus on chapel and confession of sins implied much had to be forgiven.  The things we do to each other in the name of a “pure” theology.  Lives wrecked.  And then hidden.

I entered all of this naive and with the eagerness of a puppy.  I was Episcopalian and I had attended the pensive and powerful masses at the Church of the Advent on Beacon Hill in Boston.  I was open to the mystery and possibilities even as I could see the danger in the dogmatic stares of the trustees.  It was a wooded campus on the shores of a small lake.  A lake upon which, after I left, one of the professors drowned in a sudden windstorm.  I awoke during thunderstorms so fierce that I was certain the stone walls of the Fort would not hold up.  Disused chapels full of dead black flies.  Secret meetings to remove those who wouldn’t lock step.  This was the stuff of a P. D. James novel.  Students at the time even called it Hogwarts.  They decided I was the master of Ravenclaw.

Fourteen years of my life were spent there.  I worked away at research and writing in my book-lined study painted burgundy.  Is it any wonder that I find dark academia compelling?  I’ve often written, when discussing horror films on this blog, that gothic stories are my favorites.  Even the modern research university can participate.  Professors, isolated and often unaware of what’s happening outside their specializations, still prefer print books and a nice chair in which to read them.  And, of course, I’d read for my doctorate in Edinburgh, one of the gothic capitals of Europe.   Even Grove City College had its share of dark corners and well-kept secrets.  What goes on in that rarified atmosphere known as a college campus?  The possibilities are endless.  On a stormy night you can feel it in your very soul.

That article again: Dark Academia Room Decor: Aesthetic Secrets Revealed

Still Sleepy

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One thing I quickly learned when beginning work on Sleepy Hollow as American Myth was that the story hadn’t really been studied too much by those with academic training.  There are some exceptions, of course.  Another thing I swiftly picked up is that many people who wanted to write on the legend chose the method of publishing the public domain story with a variety of annotations, essays, and other additions, to make a salable book.  Often these are self-published and not always immediately obvious to the researcher as to whether they contain anything important or not.  I had not run across Christopher Rondina’s Legends of Sleepy Hollow: The Lost History of the Headless Horseman until well after my manuscript was submitted.  I found it in the bibliography of a ghost-hunter version of Sleepy Hollow that wasn’t even published by the time I was going into production.  (It doesn’t even have an ISBN.)

I do have to say that Rondina’s variety of this composite genre isn’t bad.  He includes Washington Irving’s story and expands it with an introduction, and brief chapters considering any historical background that there may be.  He also adds a chapter on modern media of the story that includes one television adaption that I failed to find for my book.  Interestingly, after I’d written the manuscript I discovered Joe Nazare’s similarly annotated version, also with a number of the media I’d analyzed in it.  I’d actually corresponded with Nazare earlier, having discovered his website.  Not wanting to discuss what my book was about until after I sent it in (others have more time to write, perhaps, than I do) I didn’t mention our common interest and didn’t discover his annotated version until it was too late to include as a conversation partner.

Self-publication has perhaps become inevitable since standard publishing is difficult to break into.  And the internet gives anyone the ability to self-publish without too much effort.  It does, however, make doing research a bit more difficult.  I determined early on that I could not review every annotated version of Irving’s story.  I selected a few of the most promising and moved on.  Both Rondina and Nazare had interesting things to say about the tale, and it’s a pity that they weren’t discoverable until after the fact, at least to me.  I like to give credit where credit is due, but any ideas that seem similar to these two sources in my book will have to stand as examples of convergent thinking on the part of fans of the “Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”  I know there are many other fans out there and I hope they find the resources they need to understand the story just a bit better.

Sowing Seeds

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The Bad Seed is one of the scariest movies Stephen King lists from about 1950 to 1980.  Like many movies from before my time, I was unaware of it.  Projecting it back to 1956, when it was released, it’s pretty clear why it had trouble making it through the Production Code Administration.  Showing no blood or gore, this two-hour feature may seem to drag a little but it ends up in a very dark place.  I’ve never read the novel upon which it was based, but I’ve learned that the ending had to be changed because evil doers, according to the PCA, cannot go unpunished.  In fact, the ending is so dark that the director, Mervyn LeRoy, had the cast do a walk-on introduction when the movie was over, assuring the audience that this was just fiction after all.

The shock comes from a child psychopath.  So much so that Rhoda Penmark has become a character in her own right.  A sweet, innocent eight-year-old girl, she lies nearly as well as Trump and has skeletons in her closet.  Skeletons an adult shouldn’t have, let alone an eight-year-old.  Not only is she a sociopath, she’s convinced all the adults that she’s just as innocent as she acts.  The movie moves into psychological territory quite a lot, including a discussion of “nature or nurture” as the source of human evil.  The title of the film gives away the conclusion on that front.  Some children are born bad.  What’s more, this is the result of genetics, according to the story.  Rhoda is the child of an adopted woman—her adoption has been kept secret from her.  Eventually her father confesses that she was the child of a notorious serial killer, abandoned and adopted by loving parents.  Rhoda herself is raised in a loving, stable home, but she is her grandmother’s daughter.

I won’t spoil the ending, but I will say that if they had ended it at the hospital scene it would’ve been scarier.  The book, apparently, ends the scarier way.  I do have to wonder if Alfred Hitchcock was familiar with the tale in some form.  The movie was released four years before Psycho, but then again, that was based on Robert Bloch’s book.  Maybe he’d read the original.  In any case, I’d been watching King’s list of scary movies and mostly finding myself unbothered.  A couple of his choices: Night of the Hunter, and now The Bad Seed, have managed to rattle me a bit.  Even with its nearly seventy-year-old sensibilities, the latter still scares.

More Time

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Speaking of time… Time is one of those things that flummoxes me.  A time change, crossing time zones, trying to figure things out on a base-6 system (metric time anyone?).  Confusing.  One thing about time is that we live in it, and so reflecting on it seems a reasonable thing to do.  Brett Bowden does just that in Now Is Not the Time: Inside Our Obsession with the Present.  As an historian, Bowden is experienced at looking back and this brief book is a reflection on why we’re so fixated on now being the most important time ever.  Given recent events, his seems to be a comforting message when looking at the long term of human history, and even longer term of our humble planet’s history.  The present is a blip and the future, at least as far as we know, hasn’t been decided yet.

One of the topics Bowden addresses here is the human propensity to claim and name.  We like to name things and when we do, it implies ownership.  Who but an owner gets to decide on a name?  This leads him to reflect on Eurocentrism, as in the naming of objects, such as Mount Everest, that are very far away and in somebody else’s territory.  We name craters on the moon (which we can’t really just pop over to) and even stars and galaxies.  We’re terribly acquisitive rascals, aren’t we?  We do the same with time—dividing it into eras.  Bowden’s discussion of the Anthropocene debate is quite interesting.  It seems we need a name for the time when people really began changing the planet on a global scale, but geological time ought to hush us up, if we stop and think about it.

As Bowden notes, psychologists and life coaches often encourage us to be in the present.  I think what they mean is that we shouldn’t worry unduly about the future.  That’s good advice.   Something Brett reminded me of is that some cultures, such as those of the Bible writers, view people as moving into the future backward.  It’s like riding on a train facing away from the direction of motion.  We can see the past and we can interpret it.  The future, however, we can’t perceive quite so clearly.  As someone who has studied the history of religions, I tend to agree that looking back is often a source of comfort.  It’s also a source of horror—many bad things have happened, many of them intentionally orchestrated by our species.  But it does serve to ground us in the now.  Even if it’s no more important than what went before or than whatever it may be that will come.

Out of Time

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I don’t know about you, but I seldom think of Venezuelan cinema.  I feel a strange satisfaction, however, that the highest grossing movie produced in that country was a horror film.  It’s possible to find The House at the End of Time in streaming services, with subtitles.  And it’s worth doing.  It’s a movie that will stay with you.  Intricately plotted and having a lot of heart, it’s a story of loss and redemption.  After an apparent break-in at her house, Dulce is accused of killing her husband and son, and is sent to prison.  We’re shown, however, that she found her husband already dead, or nearly so, and that her son had been stolen away by a mysterious force.  After three decades, given her age, she’s released to house arrest.  A neighborhood priest becomes interested in her case, believing that she’s innocent.  It’s the house, it seems, that is haunted.  Previous families who lived there experienced similar fates.

I won’t spoil it for you, but this is a horror film with heart as well as smarts.  It also explores the life of the poor and learning to live with past mistakes.  It’s a story about a family.  Unlike many horror movies, the protagonists aren’t “all things being equal,” middle-class people.  In this regard, it reminds me of The Orphanage and The Devil’s Backbone—also both Spanish-language horror films.  And there’s a verisimilitude about the poor as the ones suffering the effects of haunting.  Now even that has become a trendy commodity.  A house haunted sometimes increases in value as ghosts become gentrified.  Obviously, ghosts can haunt anyone, but there’s almost a parable aspect to them.  Sometimes ghosts are all that the poor have.

That may be one of the reasons that The House at the End of Time is also Venezuela’s most internationally distributed movie.  And the reason that an American production company is working on a remake (presumably in English).  The ghosts here aren’t what we’ve come to expect, but religion plays a large part in the movie since the priest pays special attention to Dulce.  The reason why is eventually explained, but he is a non-judgmental cleric.  He attempts no exorcism.  Instead, he researches and seeks to find an explanation for what is happening at this most unusual house.  Catholicism is a large part of the culture in Venezuela, and I do hope that the remake doesn’t remove it.  A sympathetic cleric is often difficult to find.  And in this case, one that really pays off.

Festival Spirit

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Festivals.  These common events, often outdoors, are ways to be around other people while not really seriously engaging them.  I spend a lot of time by myself, or alone with family.  We don’t know many folks locally (I’m pretty sure very few locals read this blog), so online community is often how I connect.  Still, even we introverts crave the human touch now and again.  In October we attended the Covered Bridge and Arts Festival in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania.  It is one of the largest free festivals on the east coast, and just a couple of hours from us.  While there, we learned about the much smaller Riverfest in nearby Berwick, held the same weekend.  We decided to stop there on our way home.  The thing about craft fairs is that you get used to seeing pretty much the same kinds of things over and over.  That’s fine, because we’re here for the atmosphere.

At one of these events, while my wife and daughter were examining the wares, an owner came up to me (I was just outside the tent) and said, with a bit of surprise and wonder in his voice, “You have the spirit of God.  You can tell someone who does.”  Now, this can be a sales ploy, of course, but he seemed sincere.  He really didn’t nail my spirituality, but he was correct that I am a very spiritual person.  Given his talk of Jesus, I suspect he’d have been put aback if I told him that horror films are one form of spiritual practice for me.  So I remained relatively noncommittal until he turned to my wife to tell her about the products in his tent.  Still, the encounter left me reflective.  I don’t think myself any kind of spiritual guru, but I have been singled out by a number of people over the years and I wonder what it is that they see.

Some New Agers suggest we all have auras.  That’s generally considered paranormal, of course.  I’ve known people, however, who’ve been accurately “read” by strangers who seem sensitive to such things.  Or are extremely good at cold reading.  When I go to a festival I don’t mean to have my aura showing.  I spend a lot of time alone, so maybe I’m hiding my aura in my house.  No neighbors have complained about the light pollution, in any case.  I admire those who see something special in strangers, even if it’s an attempt to get them to buy something.  That’s why we go to festivals, I guess: to have a kind of spiritual experience that comes from being with others.

Bodies Cubed

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It’s difficult to know where to start with Bodies Bodies Bodies.  It was on my watchlist because it was distributed by A24.  I’ve come to trust them for smart horror, and then I saw that the movie was soon leaving one of the streaming services to which I have access.  Nothing like “leaving soon” to make a decision for you.  An ensemble cast of twenty-somethings (or so they play) gather for a hurricane party at the mansion of one of the group.  They do a lot of drugs and drinking and then decide to play Bodies Bodies Bodies—one of those games where one player is the killer and everyone else has to figure out who the “murderer” is.  They’re about ready to start the next round, but the power goes out in the hurricane.  The accused “killer” in the first game is found, dying for real, outside.  The only car on the property has a dead battery and the friends turn on each other, unsure who the murderer might be. (No bodies are actually cubed.)

All of this is interlaced with internet culture and the panic that ensues when the wifi goes out.  Now, this is categorized as a horror comedy, but the comedy is pretty subdued until the remaining four begin to accuse each other, using trendy jargon to describe relationships and psychological conditions.  The film opens with a couple of girlfriends, Sophie and Bee, who are the last to arrive for the party.  As the morning dawns the two of them are the only survivors, but they have become distrustful of each other because of things said during the hurricane night.  There is a twist ending but the house is full of bodies, bodies, bodies.

Written and directed by women, this horror film again demonstrates how intelligent the genre can be.  As for me personally, I found it pretty good.  I wouldn’t say it’s great.  That’s because of some of my own triggers—one of the trendy words they throw around.  Mainly, in my case, because of the drug scene that makes up the reality of the friends (I’ve never been part of that) and that the game resembles too much my all-time-most-feared childhood game, hide-and-seek.  The friends, convinced that one of them is a murderer, creep around the mansion in the dark, fearful of being found.  This leaves open the potential for jump startles, of course, and I’m not a great fan of surprises.  That having been written, this is a smart movie and the ending does make you think.  And perhaps wonder how well we really know anyone after all.

Paranormal Religion

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I remember well what it was like to be an evangelical.  Measuring everything by what I thought the Bible said, fearing those things that seemed to come from outside.  Being very concerned with salvation and its opposite.  At the same time, I was fascinated by the paranormal.  As I child I was teased for these interests and subsequently buried them.  Then I had a slow, protracted, and continuing waking from dogmatic slumber.  So it is natural that I would want to read R. Alan Streett’s Exploring the Paranormal: Miracles, Magic, and the Mysterious.  I didn’t know how he would approach the subject, and I didn’t know where on the evangelical spectrum he fell.  Still, I’m always interested to see how others handle what we all know—strange stuff happens and there is no real explanation for it.  Scientific method may one day be able to address some of it, but at the moment it generally falls outside the bounds.

Streett’s book is somewhat autobiographical, from his non-religious childhood, believing in parapsychology, through seminary and having an evangelical awakening, to the point that he stopped supposing such things were demonic, and on to where he stands at the moment—thinking that most such things can be explained by brain science and alternative states of consciousness.  There are a number of interesting situations and concepts described in this book; I learned quite a bit when he discussed different brain states.  I understand his theological rejection of potential realities behind the phenomena he discusses (mostly mediumship, but also reincarnation and faith healing) but don’t always agree with the conclusions.  There is much in the world that theology can’t explain.

Something that is perhaps overt between the covers, is that the paranormal is something that happens to evangelical, liberal, Muslim, Jew, Hindu, Buddhist, atheist, agnostic, and none alike.  What differs is the interpretation, based on various faith traditions and their tolerance for that which is outside.  Evangelicalism is a worldview, perhaps more so than it is a theological position.  Non-divine miracles, or whatever you want to call paranormal occurrences, don’t fit comfortably into that worldview.  Other interpreters, also raised in Christian traditions (Catholicism, for example, is quite open to mystical happenings that can fall into the paranormal category), might approach the question in a different way.  Dialogue is important, however, and trying to make sense of this world we live in, in my humble opinion, has to reach outside the reductionistic view that brains alone account for human experience.  Streett’s account offers a reasonable perspective on the issue from an evangelical outlook.

Hiding Kirk

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I recently saw—don’t ask where—a U.S. Space Force officer dressed in camouflage.  How fitting for a Trump-era agency.  I should think a Space Force uniform should be all black, maybe with little white dots on it.  Rather like my black lawn furniture that got in the way when I was cleaning my paint sprayer full of white paint.  I often wonder about our love affair with feeling safe.  Perhaps my own phobias have reached such a level that they’ve cancelled each other out.  If I was trying to hide in space, I think I’d try to look small, and dress in black.  Camouflage, which is based on colors found down here, probably wouldn’t do so well for the other planets of our solar system.  Or even the moon, for that matter.  And I personally think I might trust the aliens not to have earth-like issues.  After all, we think it’s okay to let machines think for us.

I grew up quite the sci-fi fan.  I read lots of books in that genre and enjoyed science fiction movies almost as much as my beloved monsters.  I used to watch that show, UFO in the 1970s.  The one with the interceptors with a huge missile on their noses.  I wasn’t really worried about aliens trying to invade.  Perhaps these days I think it might be better than the tedium of daily existence in the 9-2-5 world.  In any case, if we must have a Space Force, ought they not dress for the job?  I’m pretty sure I’ve got some tin foil in the kitchen with which to construct my hat.  Let’s look the part—that’s all I’m saying.

Photo credit: NASA

While all this is going on speculation has been growing about water on Mars.  There’s a good chance we may find it.  (We can always hope that if Elon Musk makes it to the red planet that he will take Donald Trump with him.)  If we are looking for invaders, though, we probably have to go further afield.  That’s alright, dynamic duo, we’ll get along without you.  Perhaps in the interim someone will realize that, dressed in earth green camouflage, our Space Force will surely stand out against the surface of Mars, or wherever they might go.   Unless it’s a planet very much like earth.  That houses intelligent life.  Maybe the beings there feel safe, knowing that their space force—for surely they will have one—is dressed in black.  Or at least, their life really is intelligent.

Hunting

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Every once in a while, I see a movie I should’ve seen a long while ago.  The Night of the Hunter is one such film.  Knowing little about it, I watched and was floored.  Not only could I have used it in Holy Horror (oh boy, could I have!), it uncovered a bit of cinema history for me.  Even just the words “love” and “hate” tattooed on Harry Powell’s knuckles have been referenced in so many places that I felt like I’d been missing a vital clue all along.  Since the movie’s now available on free streaming services, there’s no reason not to see it.  Although not generally considered horror, it is one of the genuinely scary movies of the period.  And it’s a strong blend of religion and horror, even if classified as a “thriller.”

Taking inspiration from a true story, the “Bluebeard” character of Harry Powell is a serial killer.  Styling himself as “the preacher,” he murders widows for their money.  An avowed misogynist, he’s driven purely by greed and love of violence.  Yet everyone accepts him—except children—for what he says he is during the Depression era.  He gives sermons, sings hymns, and leads revivals and even his victims come to believe what he says about himself.  This is such a good commentary on the thoughtless acceptance of religion that it’s no wonder that it was a flop in the fifties.  Since then it has become considered one of the greatest movies of all time by many.  The seamless weaving of terror and religion hearkens once again to the wolf in sheep’s clothing.  Some lessons we never seem to learn.  Nobody likes to admit to having been fooled.

In character, the closest comparison I could make would be Cape Fear, which stars the same Robert Mitchum as villain.  That movie I saw in time to include in Holy Horror.  In this one, the only adult who seems capable of seeing through Powell’s lies is a religious widow who informally adopts stray kids during the Depression and raises them with the Bible.  She also keeps a shotgun handy, just in case.  The image of the preacher slowly approaching, singing “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms,” is the stuff of nightmares.  I suspect that one reason that seminaries developed in the first place is that the laity weren’t encouraged to trust self-proclaimed religious teachers.  Of course, the town turns on the preacher once they learn, because of the children, who he really is.  If, like me until today, you haven’t seen Night of the Hunter, I can recommend it.  Especially if you have an interest in how horror and religion cooperate so nicely.