Night or Curse

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You just never know.  I’ve read lots of books about horror movies, but clearly not enough.  The field only gained academic respectability in recent years, but once the flood gates opened…  So I use my limited time off work both reading and watching horror movies—trying to catch up on what I’ve missed.  Lately I’ve been reaching back to the early stuff, movies from the forties and fifties.  Some of these are what we’ve been led to expect.  Others are not.  I’d heard of Night of the Demon (its American title is Curse of the Demon) but my sources suggested nothing remarkable about it.  As soon as I began watching, however, I realized that this story adapted from M. R. James would be worth the time.  This despite the fact that the monster is shown early and isn’t that great.  (The director, Jacques Tourneur, lost out on this one.)  After I saw it I read that it is considered by many the greatest horror film of all time.

I wouldn’t go quite that far, but I would say that it is very good and, as I learned, extremely influential.  So much so that I was rather stunned after a casual weekend viewing.  The story is about a Satanist whose true motivations are uncertain.  Those to whom he gives runes copied from Stonehenge are killed by the demon we’ve already seen.  The story plays out as a conflict between skepticism and belief—the supernatural is real, but alternative explanations are offered—you can see why the obvious demon scenes are so controversial.  The film makes effective use of jump startles and stingers.  And it’s one of those movies that, in its day wasn’t really appreciated, but reassessment polishes it as the gem that it is.

Proving later influence, such as the wind storm in The Omen, is difficult without a director revealing their sources, like a magician, but others are perfectly obvious.  Kate Bush’s song “Hounds of Love,” plays a clip of a line from the movie.  Richard O’Brien’s lyrics for “Science Fiction/Double Feature” (famous because of the Rocky Horror Picture Show) make reference to Dana Andrews passing the runes.  That line had always puzzled me.  And now I discover that I’ve been missing out on a foundational piece of horror history.  When friends recommend movies, not surprisingly, they tend to be relatively contemporary ones.  The thing is, to appreciate what’s popular now, one must do one’s homework.  And that might must mean hunting down the oldies.  You just never know when you might come across one worth the effort to find.

In Public

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Mere days after my dentist appointment I had occasion to be back in the waiting room.  Of course I had a book with me.  Then my attention was caught by either a patient or someone waiting for a patient.  This man had not one, but two books with him.  He was poring over one of them, which was an older hardcover, like an academic.  Since I’d just posted about seeing nobody reading books, I felt I needed to publish a kind of, well, not exactly retraction, but reflection.  The sight of this man, about my age, was profoundly hopeful.  I have no idea who he was and waiting rooms are not generally where I choose to introduce myself.  I do sometimes weigh, however, the demerits of interrupting someone reading with the merits of meeting another reader.  We reading sorts can be private people, although reading in public marks us.

The book I happened to have had a bright, trade cover.  His were more somber and academic.  How could I, whose reading looked facile (it was not, but it looked like it might be) approach someone perhaps awaiting a root canal, who had some serious reading to do?  Two hardcovers bespeak serious business.  This made me reflect on another occasion in Easton.  Again, I was waiting for someone and it was summer so I sat outside on a curb, at the traffic circle, reading a book.  It was actually Toni Morrison’s Beloved.  Evening was falling.  A couple of coeds, or they seemed to eyes from my age, stopped and asked what I was reading.  I explained, and, unaccountably, they seemed never to have heard of Morrison, but were interested.  It was a teaching moment.

Back to the dentist office.  Had I missed out on the opportunity for a free lecture?  If this man were a professor, he’d likely have talked gladly about his work.  One thing I learned from being a professor myself is that people rarely ask about your work.  Yes, colleagues in the same field do, but even at Nashotah House with its small faculty, nobody seemed interested in the research of their colleagues.  As academic dean I even tried to institute a faculty seminar where we could read a paper and discuss it.  I was the only one who ever volunteered to do it.  In retrospect, it might’ve been a lost opportunity, that waiting room visit.  I’ve attended many medical appointments in my life, and finding a fellow reader at one of them was a bit of a silent gift.  I was glad to have been proven wrong.

Gothic Illumination

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A mere month ago I had never heard of Sally Sayward Wood.  She has seldom received much attention, and it may be in part because her literary finesse wasn’t quite that of her compatriots.  Wood, however, was the earliest American woman to write a gothic novel.  She was also Maine’s first novelist.  I learned of Julia and the Illuminated Baron from a rather unexpected source, but my interest in the history of horror meant that I knew I would have to read it.  Original printings are extremely rare, but the University of Maine has brought them back into circulation.  Julia was published in 1800 and it is old-style gothic.  Set in France, among the aristocracy, it has gloomy castles, dastardly villains, and damsels in distress.  The story also involves an extremely complex set of titled gentry that end up being fairly closely related by the end of the novel.  Well into the story (after about 150 pages) it grows somewhat exciting, but the denouement is something you can see coming, though.

What is really striking about this gothic romance is the extreme vitriol served up to the Illuminati.  In particular, Wood seems quite affronted by their atheistic outlook, stating rather boldly that without Christian sensibilities that morals can’t be preserved.  This wasn’t an uncommon view around the turn of the nineteenth century, of course.  The Enlightenment had begun to take hold and not a few people were very concerned about the implications.  Social change must be slow, if it is to have lasting impact.  Quick change leads to reactionary backlashes, as anyone who looks at history knows.  Still, this makes Wood’s villain particularly nasty.  Perhaps even more surprising is that such biases continue today.

Gothic was an important part of early American literature.  It owes quite a bit to its European forebears, but it developed into its own form in the New World.  When she does mention America, Wood ladles praise on George Washington.  She was born, of course, before the Revolutionary War, when Maine was still part of Massachusetts.  All of this makes me feel somewhat less of a pariah, knowing that the early American tradition was part of the family tree for horror.  In today’s parlance gothic might seem far from the slasher, but without gothic we’d never have had our classic ghost stories that first gave people the frisson that begged for further expression.  Julia and the Illuminated Baron is a bit too satisfied with the wealthy overlords of the second estate.  It is a work of fantasy, however, of one of the earliest American women to try her hand at fiction.

Wax Museum

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I admit to using Wikipedia and I even support it.  It’s the starting point for looking up things for which we’re not familiar.  Since most movies I watch don’t lead to discussion (ironically, I know very few people in person who watch horror), I often go to Wikipedia to find “conversation partners” about films.  One thing I’ve noticed is that a great number of articles on cinema have a section “Later Reception.”  In my experience, this usually appears on pages about movies initially panned but which have later been reassessed as being better than originally supposed.  In the case of House of Wax, the film was even selected for preservation in the National Film Registry because of its significance.  It’s interesting to read the sometimes boorish comments of the first critics.  Of course, the story had been around for some time then, so they were perhaps too familiar with the premise.

I can’t speak for the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry, but the notable features include its status as the first 3D movie with stereophonic sound, and the first color 3D movie released by a major studio.  For me, however, this was the film that launched Vincent Price to stardom.  He would go on to become the horror icon of American movies for the next two decades and many of the films would be, to use the National Film Registry’s language, “significant.”  The title already hints at the plot.  What horror film with such a title wouldn’t involve embalming a living person in wax?  Rather like Chekhov’s gun, if you title a picture like this, you need to make sure the gun, as it were, goes off.

The 3D gimmicks (I saw it only in 2D) are pretty obvious, but there are many interesting sub themes running throughout the movie.  Even in the button-down fifties there were directors who knew how to titillate.  In any case, the 3D aspect adds another detail to the story.  The director, Andre de Toth, was blind in one eye, which meant he couldn’t see the 3D effects.  This too makes the film worthy of note, and, again, significant.  Price plays his role of the urbane villain quite well, although this villain has cause to be wroth.  An artist forced to watch his work destroyed is likely to become unhinged.  As a horror film it also works well since wax museums are inherently creepy places.  I may have seen this movie in my younger years, but if so it didn’t stick with me.  I would have to agree with Wikipedia’s later reception, however.  This is an effective movie, even for a septuagenarian.

In Praise of Paper

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There’s an old saying that the tech industry might consider.  “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”  I’m thinking books.  I work in an industry that’s running after ebooks, sometimes at the expense of actual books.  You know what I mean—the kind printed on paper.  With a cover.  An object.  What techies don’t seem to understand is that something happens to you when you’re reading a book.  It changes you.  Curled up in a chair with a half-pound of bound paper in front of you, you become absorbed.  Chair, person, paper.  All one.  And you’re taken somewhere else.  I’m not saying that reading online isn’t valuable.  Clearly it is.  The experience, however, isn’t the same.  Industry moguls express surprise at vinyl’s return.  They shouldn’t.  It wasn’t broke either.

After reading a meaningful book I’ll carry it around with me for days like Linus’ security blanket.  Its mere presence reminds me that something profound happened to me while I was spending time with that tome.  Especially meaningful books I hesitate to shelve away with the others.  No, I want them to hand to remind me.  To bring back, at a glance, the fascination they engendered.  Let’s call it enchantment.  Capitalism removed enchantment from the world.  In the heat of materialism’s fervor, it made all alternatives irrelevant.  That’s what’s driving the ebook craze.  Hey, I’m fine if you like to read on a piece of plastic, but please leave the option of paper for those who prefer to truly get lost.

I spend most of my waking hours (and all of my sleeping ones) surrounded by books.  When my eye falls on one that I really enjoyed, I take a nanosecond pause to appreciate it.  We all have to decide how we’ll spend our time on this weary old planet.  A good deal of it will be work, and if we’re lucky it will be doing something we enjoy.  Otherwise we have roughly five hours of waking time five days a week to squeeze in the necessary and the enjoyable.  Some will go out and party with friends, others will stay home and read a book.  Many will use devices to fill the time outside the office, whether alone or with friends.  I tend to be in the book crowd.  I’m not embarrassed by that.  Books have been good to me.  Very good.  They say reading is fundamental.  I would add that reading a real book is life itself.

Horror Homework

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If you write about horror movies, you have to do your homework.  Of course, this means time away from house work (the weeds love all this rain and hot weather) and regular work (which can’t be compromised).  Mario Bava has often been cited as one of the influential horror auteurs, but until this year I’d not knowingly watched any of his films.  So, homework.  I saw a list of movies that made an impact, and one of them was Blood and Black Lace.  It’s horror of the giallo subspecies, never my favorite.  But it was free on a commercial streaming service, so, well that homework’s not going to do itself!  This isn’t generally considered Bava’ best work.  Besides, giallo is murder-mystery and I prefer monsters.  Who wouldn’t?

This film, with its lurid colors and stylistic cinematography, does make an impression.  The acting is poor and the script even worse—apparently it didn’t lose anything in translation.  A crooked couple run a fashion salon.  (There will be spoilers, so if you’re sixty years out of date, be warned.)  One of their fashion models is murdered, but when another discovers her diary the body count mounts.  The film lingers over the murders, which, I suppose, is one of the reasons it’s classified as horror.  With the film’s problems, however, at least this far removed, the whole thing begins to look rather silly.  The women have to die because of the first woman’s diary.  The police are singularly ineffectual, not even taking standard kinds of precautions.  Even with a run time of only 88 minutes it felt too long.

Horror in the sixties was still finding its way.  I’ve been watching a number of movies from that era—generally considered a dry spell for American-made horror—and the results have been interesting.  There are some gems tucked in amid the gravel.  What we’ve grown to appreciate in more contemporary horror cinema learned a lot of lessons from these early exemplars.  I could see foreshadowing of Suspiria here.  I’ll need to do more homework to find other direct descendants, though.  Blood and Black Lace suffers from having too few characters you get to know well enough.  The models, who all seem to have some secrets, die off before we get to know them.  Even the criminal pair behind the killings die in the end.  There’s a kind of nihilism to the story, and it’s all done for love of money.  The story could’ve been better, but you have to start somewhere when growing a genre.  And doing homework.

Toothsome Books

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A visit to the dentist always entails a certain amount of anxiety.  Will the sins of my mouth have caught up with me?  Are my sleepy nights’ brushings thorough enough?  Is that spot where I declined to have a false molar replace the missing one causing any problems for the teeth above?  That kind of thing.  In any case, I like our dentist.  The town we live in, which is small, has four dentist offices.  The one I selected is run by three women and instead of always getting the same mouth doctor, on a standard visit you meet with the one who has an opening in her schedule.  I like to support women-owned businesses.  But still, the anxiousness.  Something happened on my last visit that may help.  I’ll try to remember it.

Unlike anyone else I’ve ever seen, I always take a book with me for those minutes in the waiting room.  I have so much that I want to read and so little time, so as long as I’m cashing in a sick day, I might as well get some extra reading done.  Since it’s summer, I didn’t have a coat in which to leave my book, so I took it back to the room with me.  They’ve never said anything about me taking up a little of their medical counter with a book, so I figured it was okay.  The hygienist did the x-rays and cleaning, then the dentist stopped in.  I had never seen this particular doctor before, and she began the conversation by asking what the book was about.  Now, as strange as it may sound, I have wondered why nobody ever asks about the book I inevitably have.  I take books to every medical appointment—I’m not a magazine reader—and in all these years no one has asked me.  Until now.

This wasn’t just a polite query either.  She asked whether I thought it was good, and even suggested some similar things I might want to read.  It was, in fact, a literary conversation.  As I walked home (teeth are fine) I pondered how rare this is.  I’ve told people that I write books and the conversation usually dies when I say what they’re about.  Of course, I don’t go around reading copies of my own books.  I already know what they say.  I guess I miss a literate society where people discuss the books they read.  I do it on this blog, and on Goodreads, but engagement is low.  At least next time I won’t be afraid to go to the dentist.

Television

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Television has lost its prominence in the internet age.  Those of us entering the “senior” category of life’s grades were raised on television.  I know I watched far too much as a kid.  Now I consider the wasted opportunity to grow minds, and sensibilities, through television.  Mostly I blame the sit-com.  There’s not much learning going on when someone else contrives scenarios to make you laugh on a weekly schedule.  They are beguiling and I watched more than my fair share of them when I was younger.  Now, as an adult, I value the more profound examples of early viewing.  We didn’t watch The Twilight Zone with the devotion of Gilligan’s Island, but those episodes I did see had a profound effect.  The same is true of Dark Shadows.  One thing these shows had in common was that they were quite literate, eschewing the mindless competition.

College led to me no longer watching television regularly.  That hiatus lasted until my wife and I began watching a couple of weeklies after I’d return from Nashotah House.  While at the seminary full-time, television reception was quite poor and we tended toward rented movies on VHS.  By the time we moved to New Jersey television had changed so that you needed some kind of magic box to watch even commercial channels.  We relied on DVDs of shows we wanted to see.  That’s how Lost came into our lives.  Now, however, facing senior issues (health, people dying, wondering if retirement might ever happen) I’ve started to revisit television I missed.  The X-Files is pretty prominent.  Being an historian at heart, I’ve been exploring the inspirations for The X-Files, picking up Kolchak: The Night Stalker, and Twin Peaks.  I have to balance this with time for writing since work still claims the lion’s share of my waking hours.

Photo credit: Smithsonian Institution, via Flickr’s The Commons

I’ve lost track of what’s on the tube.  Now we spend workday evening hours watching intelligent television that we missed back when it aired.  We can’t afford it all, of course.  Dark Shadows, for example, has over 1200 episodes and “complete sets” are pricey.  Lost was either a birthday or Christmas present years ago.  I bought The Twilight Zone over a decade ago for a week that I knew I was going to be home alone.  We accumulated The X-Files over a number of years.  Twin Peaks, since it was only two seasons, wasn’t too expensive.  Kolchak is on Amazon Prime.  Many of these shows are a kind of therapeutic watching for me.  Some might call it escapism, but it runs deeper than that.  It becomes part of who we are.

Expectations

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Our minds are our most powerful tools.  Some of us wonder what reality is, and David Robson has written a very important book that the title explains: The Expectation Effect: How Your Mindset Can Change Your World.  Now, before your woo-woo meter goes off, Robson is a science writer and everything in his book is backed by evidence.  The basic idea is this: what we expect to happen often becomes our reality due to the “expectation effect.”  The brain, as Robson describes it, is a prediction machine.  And what it expects often takes place.  In other words, belief matters.  Probably the most famous example of this is the placebo.  We all know that patients treated with placebos often recover just as well as patients given the active ingredient.  That pill the doctor gives will heal them, and so it does.  The brain expects it, and it happens.  Belief.

This book also explores the nocebo response.  This is where you expect something bad, and it happens.  The most extreme examples of this, well documented, are when people are convinced an imaginary threat will kill them and they die of it.  In fact, the book opens with consideration of such an occurrence where a cultural expectation led to otherwise unexplainable deaths among healthy Hmong populations fearing a night demon.  Hysteria grew and so did the deaths.  Robson also explores how hysteria leads to expectations that our brains carry out.  He shows how training our expectations can help good self-fulfilling prophecies take place.  Athletes, for example, can seem to do the impossible.  Why?  Partially training, yes.  But also because of their mindsets.  Their expectations.  Their beliefs.

The implications of this are very broad.  Everything from our health, to how we handle stress, to how food benefits our bodies, to how we age as we expect to.  Robson is quick to point out that this isn’t a book to solve all our problems, but it is a book that demonstrates our minds do make things real.  Or at least they can.  It is filled with fascinating examples, backed with science, showing that even how a doctor or nurse introduces a shot “you’ll feel a bit of a sting” versus “you won’t feel a thing” can make a difference to how our body perceives it.  And our brains can make our worries, or our hopeful expectations, real.  Personally, I believe that there may be even more to this than Robson explores.  But then again, I enjoy a bit of mystery.  I believe in belief.  Regardless, this is a life-changing book and I hope, for your own sake, that you’ll read it.

Deep Woods

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The output of female horror directors tends to be thoughtful.  And there are some legitimately terrifying scenes in Lovely, Dark, and Deep.  Nobody, however, has posted a Wikipedia entry on Teresa Sutherland.  At least not yet.  This movie is obviously aware of David Paulides’ work.  It went by a little quickly, but I think one of his books even made it into the film.  Lovely, Dark, and Deep is set in the fictitious Arvores National Park in California.  (Interestingly, the movie was filmed in Portugal.)  Lennon is a newly hired park ranger with what she thinks is a secret.  Her motivation is to search for her sister, who went missing in the park when they were kids.  If you like movies with flashlights in the forest at night, this is your film.  

Lennon discovers  that she’s not the only one with secrets.  Many people have gone missing in the park and the rangers know about it.  Some entity that they can’t identify requires people to be left behind.  There is a quid pro quo relationship involved.  If one of the taken ones is rescued, a substitute must be left.  Lennon learns that her sister was one of those taken, and once taken a person can’t come back.  They live in a nightmare world while their family and friends have to deal with the loss.  Lennon has trouble accepting this arrangement, but there is nothing to be done about it except pretend you don’t know it’s happening.

The movie gets its teeth from the fact that many people do go missing in National Parks.  And, as Paulides suggests, there is no public register kept.  Some who are found are often inexplicably miles from where they went missing, or their bodies are found in areas already thoroughly searched.  This is obviously a great concept for a horror film.  Sutherland, who wrote as well as directed the movie, has the makings of an art horror auteur.  Lovely, Dark, and Deep hasn’t received a lot of attention yet, but I think it deserves to.  Wilderness horror films have so much potential.  Particularly for people who seldom spend any real time in the forest.  Even those of us who have braved the wilds from time to time can find it frightening.  More than that, this is a movie that makes you think.  For anyone who likes to theologize films, it definitely has the theme of sacrifice running through it.  Deep is appropriately part of the title.

Politics As Usual

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What J. D. Vance does on, or to, his couch is his own business.  Sexual preferences between consenting adults, and furniture, is a private matter.  (Vance isn’t the first writer whose publications have come back to bite him.)   Forgive and forget.  And maybe reupholster.  What Vance has done that’s unforgivable is betray the poor.  I read Hillbilly Elegy years ago and was taken by his enumerating the harms visited on the poor by our capitalistic system.  Having grown up poor myself, I found many of those damages in my own self-inventory.  But even just after I read the book I heard whisperings that Vance really didn’t care for the poor, but for himself.  That puts him in the same category as Trump, I suppose.  A team that would only push what makes them personally look good, if elected.  It’s a mockery of democracy that a convicted felon is even permitted to run for president.

Betrayal of the poor is perhaps the most unconscionable of sins.  To have grown up knowing how difficult life is for many Americans and then to throw them to the wolves for personal aggrandizement is a move worthy of Satan himself.  Indeed, his running mate was born excessively wealthy.  I recently saw a quote from J. P. Morgan: “I owe the public nothing.”  Morgan,  one of the wealthiest men of his era, apparently believed using others to get yourself to the top is fine.  Trump, who sees people as disposable (ask his wives) never had to struggle.  Neither did Morgan.  But Vance, if his book is to be believed, did.  Knowing what it means to grow up that way and then to hitch yourself to the Trump-wagon is, in my opinion, about as low as you can go.  It’s a lack of honesty.

If we’re honest we’ll admit that all people lie.  True, Trump has made eiling (actually telling the truth) a thing.  He basically never eils, so we can assume anything he says is false.  Biden told lies.  Harris told lies.  Vance told lies.  Even though I’m an honest guy, I’ve told lies in my long time on this planet.  Not many, I hope, but I’m human.  Show me a politician who never lies and I’ll show you a liar.  I never thought I’d live to see a major party ticket pair felons, sex criminals, and betrayers together and tell Americans they’ll make the country great again.  The question that won’t let me go, however, is what of the poor?  We know that the rich, left to their own devices, tend toward Morgan’s quip.  Honestly, who will make safety nets for those who are victims of business as usual?

Lobo

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Tor Johnson—actually Karl Erik Tore Johansson—became famous but not rich.  Such was the fate of some early horror actors, including Bela Lugosi.  Johnson hung out, however, with the low-budget crowd, making the most of his size to take on a kind of “enforcer” role.  One of his recurring characters was “Lobo.”  Lobo served mad scientists and had very little of his own brain power.  He often had few, or no lines to learn.  Having watched The Beast of Yucca Flats, in which he starred, I decided to see if The Unearthly was any better.  The production values were certainly higher, but this was an earlier film by a different crew.  It’s more like the standard fare you expect for a late fifties horror show.  It features a mad scientist, and Lobo is, of course, the servant.

Dr. Charles Conway believes he has found the way to eternal life.  It’s attained by transplanting a new gland into a human being.  The problem is, it hasn’t worked so far.  Like a true mad scientist, Conway is convinced that it will work, it’s just a matter of try, try again.  And why advertise for willing subjects when you can have a local crooked doctor send you patients with various personality disorders, and no families, so that you can experiment on them?  With slow-moving Lobo as his only security system, Conway carries on until a sting operation catches him red-handed.  There’s really not much to this story.  It doesn’t have the inspired inanity of an Ed Wood production, but then, it hasn’t really grown a cult following.

My reason for watching was Tor Johnson.  Before I was born he’d attained the status of the model of a best-selling Halloween mask, based on his monster roles.  This seems to indicate that his oeuvre was well known, despite the kinds of movies he was in.  A large man who’d aged out of “professional wrestling,” Johnson had many uncredited movie roles before hooking up with Ed Wood.  He was featured in three of Wood’s films, including the infamous Plan 9 from Outer Space.  He’s part of a crowd surrounding the under-funded, independent filmmakers of an intriguing era before modern horror really came into its own.  The Unearthly, where his famous line “Time for go to bed” is spoken, suffers from banality and has become pretty obscure.  I personally wouldn’t have known to look for it had it not been for the fact that Johnson was in it, dragging it into the “must watch” category.  And that it was a freebie.

Opposites?

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Not having the money to subscribe, I limit myself to the daily headlines of Publishers Weekly.  When physically in the office in New York City, it circulated among editors in print form.  I do miss that.  The weekly is a great place to stay informed of what’s going on in the book world.  Interestingly, the headlines—which are often linked together newsletter-style—noted that the annual preview of religion books was on the way.  This was followed by “On the exact opposite side of the publishing spectrum, Orbit has launched its fourth imprint, Run for It, capitalizing on the horror boom.”  So there it was staring me in the face.  Religion and horror are exact opposites.  Now, I can’t expect even experts in publishing to be aware of all the trends, but the religion-horror connection has been alive and growing for a few years now and those of us who publish books in it might dispute the “exact opposite side” designation.

Photo by Thomas Park on Unsplash

Horror and religion are closely related.  Many in the religion camp would want to deny that, but those who know horror know that religion quite often wanders in.  More than that, religion often drives the horror.  They’re not so much exact opposites as they are playmates.  Rather like the Bible depicts God being the chum of Leviathan.  (Who is, after all, a perfectly good monster.)  While my own humble efforts are frequently overlooked, the last four books I’ve written explore different aspects of religion and horror.  This includes my forthcoming Sleepy Hollow book.

Even if you’re not a fan of horror movies, if you pay close attention religion is not the opposite of horror.  We have this mental image of religion as a pure and holy thing in and of itself.  We don’t often stop to think that religions are invented by humans.  Yes, they are often in response to what believers see as divine stimuli, but the way that they are conducted is part of our human ingenuity.  They are considered good because of their emphasis on love and positive virtues.  If you watch enough horror you’ll notice that the menace is often a threat to love.  In other words, horror too emphasizes the value of love.  It’s a perception problem that sees horror as the opposite of religion.  Simplistic categories are often necessary to get through life—that’s why we stereotype.  Those of us who like to stop and think through things can gum up the works.  Even a headline in a magazine we like can lead us to wonder about the deeper implications and the biases they perpetuate.

Yucca

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Yucca Flats isn’t the kind of place you’d like to vacation.  Not only is it highly irradiated by nuclear testing, it’s also a place where police shoot at innocent people.  The only salvation seems to be that they’re terrible shots.  Oh yes, and there’s a Russian scientist transformed into a beast by an atomic bomb blast.  As you can tell, I’ve just been to Yucca Flats.  In movie-land, of course.  The Beast of Yucca Flats, yet another candidate for the worst movie of all time, really worked hard to obtain that title.  The movie did make me curious about Coleman Francis, however.  Like Ed Wood, he tried to make his way in the rather unforgiving movie world with tiny budgets and even less native talent.  The number of scenes where guys had their butts to the camera alone raises all kinds of questions.

The numerous contradictions in such a short movie—less than an hour—and the long scenes that add nothing to the plot are signposts that we’ve entered the twilight zone of B movies.  Famously filmed without sound, the incongruous dialogue later added as voiceovers, adds to the surreal atmosphere.  The movie shares Tor Johnson with Ed Wood.  And also, apparently, a sincerity betrayed by lack of ability.  The cult status of movies like this signal hope for those who try to make their own way in a world enamored of big budgets and large crews.  It would help, though, if Francis had a clear story to tell.  He does seem to have Luddite tendencies, and he condemns violence even as he has a sheriff’s deputy literally “shoot first and ask questions later.” 

The movie has a couple of moments of cinematographic finesse.  The moment when Lois Radcliffe approaches the car, shot from the interior, when Hank lays his arm across the door, made me think something better might be coming.  Tor Johnson wasn’t the most gifted actor, but he always seems to have fun with his roles, being cast as a hulking monster.  It’s too bad he doesn’t have a bit more screen time in this, his last movie part.  He kinda makes me want to hunt down some of his other appearances beyond the Ed Wood films I’ve already seen.  There’s a story here, I expect, that really hasn’t been told.  There’s an entire world—a twilight zone—outside Hollywood where producers with no budgets but a passion for making movies plied their trade.  Their efforts, as paltry as the results may be, suggests there’s more to the movie world than it might seem.

Not Content

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I write books.  When I want to “create content” I do it on this blog.  (And a few other internet sites.)  These aren’t the same thing.  I find it distressing that publishers are trying to drive us to ebooks where content can easily be changed, as opposed to print books.  The shelves of this room are lined with books and the technology doesn’t exist to come in and change “data” without my knowing it.  Facts are secure in print, right Ilimilku?  I’m not looking forward to a Star Wars future where there’s no paper.  I was born in the last century and, perhaps, I’ll die there too.   You see, when you write a book you have a project in mind that has an endpoint.   It may change and shift as you write, but you know what a book is and that’s what you produce.  It gets shelved and you move on to other things.  (At least I do.)

Content is something different and the creative process behind it also differs.  If I find something wrong after the fact, I go into my past posts and change it.  I’m not afraid of admitting I’m wrong.  The point of this blog is to share ideas with the world, not to write a book.  (Although, I confess that I would not say “no” if someone in publishing wanted a selection of worthwhile posts for a book… just saying.)  It amazes me how publishers have pretty much gone after the money and have forgotten what the creative process is like.  Of course, they’re having to figure out how this whole internet with free content plays into it too.  But still, my book writing uses a different fold in my gray matter than my blog writing does.  All of it feels pretty different from writing fiction too.

These things together adds up to a writing life.  I have a ton of “not for publication” writing.  This is something different again.  I suspect it will never be read by anybody, moldering away on some old hard drive after some AI-induced apocalypse.  I write it for of the same reason, I suspect, that people used to spray-paint “Kilroy was here” on things.  The book of Job, it seems to me, was the preservation of words that someone simply had to write.  We know the framing story is folklore.  But those who have words to carve with iron on lead, or engrave on a stone to last forever.  It’s more, I hope, than just “creating content.”