Singing Darkly

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Euro-horror has become one of the more profound sub-genres of film.  I can’t recall who it was that recommended A Dark Song—set in Wales although filmed in Ireland—but it was immediately obvious I was in for a treat.  Dealing with Gnosticism, occult, and demonic manipulation (I wish I had the script!), it takes on the big issues of death, loss, and forgiveness.  The premise begins chillingly enough.  A woman rents an isolated country house for an entire year, paying in advance so there will be no disturbances.  She brings in an accomplished occultist to let her speak to her dead son again.  The two don’t know each other and this ritual will take many months, during which they will not be able to leave the house.  Neither really trusts the other, but Joseph (the occultist) tells Sophia that she must obey everything he says if she wants the ritual to work.  Once they begin they cannot stop until it reaches its conclusion.

Sophia hasn’t revealed the real reason she wants to summon her guardian angel.  She wants revenge on those that used the occult to murder her son.  The truth Sophia kept from Joseph requires them to restart, so he drowns her in the bathtub and then uses CPR to revive her.  As they grow increasingly tense, a fight breaks out where Joseph is accidentally impaled on a kitchen knife.  With only bandages and whiskey to treat the wound, they press on, but Joseph dies leaving the ritual unfinished.  Sophia can’t escape but after being tormented by demons, her guardian angel arrives.  Her request is actually wanting the ability to forgive.

This profound story has many twists along the way, but a scene that I would like to consider is where Joseph tells Sophia “Science describes the least of things… the least of what summat is. Religion, magic… bows to the endless in everything… the mystery.”  The suggestion that science is indeed correct, but limited.  Religion goes beyond science, however, to the world of possibility.  The movie suggests these two worlds intersect.  After Joseph dies Sophia can’t escape that other world until its rules have been met.  And when she does reenter the world of science, what happened in the world of magic has lasting effects on her.  A Dark Song is one of those movies that will haunt you after watching.  The Euro-horror of the last decade or so has been incredibly profound, showing the promise of what horror can be.

Tech Trust

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Tech problems are a part of life, of course.  The recent problem at CrowdStrike that grounded airlines and prevented 911 from working and interfered with medical services is a scary thing.  The word “fragility” was used in the New York Times.  Please allow me this jeremiad.  I appreciate technology and what it can do for us.  I really do.  I can usually find a movie to watch online on a day off work.  I can navigate most places without a map (although recently when there was no 4G coverage, I was left lost for a little while).  What’s really scary, to me, is those who claim tech, and only tech, is our future.  I’m a simple guy with simple tastes.  I enjoy reading books and watching movies to stimulate my restless imagination.  Yet I’m constantly being told that I should read on a screen, not on paper.  And that artificial “intelligence” can—or worse—should run things.  What happens when the grid goes down?

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

I love art glass, but I’ve also broken quite a bit of it over the years because life is rough and tumble.  Some fragility is part of the attraction. For a while, when I was young, I was fascinated by card houses.  Constructing one that used an entire deck was not only a goal, but its own kind of art.  Sometimes the beauty of art inheres in its very fragility. The house of cards took skill, but someone slamming a door, or even walking into the room could bring it all down.  A trembling hand or a drop from a millimeter too high could spell the end of this particular installation.  But nobody died.  No worldwide travel plans were interrupted.  The consequences were minimal.

I don’t dislike computers.  It’s just that I think balance is desirable.  After work, which is pretty much all online these days, I tend to move away from the internet for the rest of the day.  I pick up a book, made of paper.  Sometimes I’ll watch some media, preferably on DVD.  I don’t miss VHS tapes, I assure you—although we still have quite a few of them, some of which contain media that has never been released either on disc or online.  I can’t watch them.  Oh, if I had the time, gumption, and cash I could purchase a player.  I’d have to buy some kind of adapter to connect it to the TV.  Is that a downgrade?  My understanding is that CrowdStrike’s problem was all caused by an upgrade.  I’ve known smaller catastrophes with upgrades, and they seem to come every couple of months now.  What’s to be done?  Maybe we should slow down a little and read a book.

Second Peak

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It all started with The X-Files.  You see, we hadn’t watched television since about 1988.  Part of that was practical—we couldn’t afford cable and then when we landed at Nashotah House there was no cable service anyway.  Bouncing from job to job after that, when money was tight, we figured cable was a luxury we weren’t used to anyway.  Then came DVDs.  I should also say that my family heard other people talking about certain shows—some of them quite good—but we hadn’t seen them.  Then we decided to watch The X-Files.  This was followed by Lost.  Then the X-Files again.  On my lonesome I watched Kolchak: The Night Stalker.  But people had talked a lot about Twin Peaks.  Curiosity got the best of me.  We decided to see what it was about.

I knew that Chris Carter had cited various inspirations for The X-Files.  Kolchak was a major one, but another was Twin Peaks.  It helps to have watched a David Lynch movie or two before jumping into the deep end here, but the first season (it only lasted two) started out like a regular drama.  Like Northern Exposure, it had quirky characters.  Then after a couple episodes paranormal aspects began to appear.  Things were not what they seemed in Washington.  It turned out to be an evil spirit possessing people in the town.  Laura Palmer’s murder was more or less solved.  Dale Cooper, however, had been trapped in the Black Lodge in the cliff-hanging end of the second season.  We then watched Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me at the point it settled in the sequence.  Like the aforementioned X-Files, a reboot occurred many years later and the DVD set we had included the renewed season.  Things really get weird there.

It turns out that we had indeed missed some good television during those Nashotah House years and later.  Actually, doctoral years and later—Twin Peaks originally aired when we were living in Edinburgh, so we had a legitimate excuse.  Boomers, particularly late boomers, grew up with television.  As an adult (so I’m told) I can see that television had a big influence on my life, even though I stopped watching in my late twenties.  Do I understand all of what happened in Twin Peaks?  Of course not.  Then again I scratched my head after watching Eraserhead too.  The first of David Lynch’s movies I saw was Dune, which, unfortunately, wasn’t that good.  I’ve come to trust him, however, and I suspect that telinema will lead me to watch more of his films.  And we’ll probably be on the lookout for other television we missed, that, in retrospect, we probably shouldn’t have.

A Touch of Poe

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One of the more somber aspects of our staycation in the Poconos occurred on our search for Tanners Falls.  It brought to mind a story by Edgar Allan Poe.  Here’s why:  Tanners Falls is not well signposted.  This is quite a rural area.  We were following our GPS when the signal died right after she said “arrived.”  The problem was there were no signs and although we tried a couple of tick-trails that ended up at a stream, nothing like a cataract was anywhere near.  Finally we realized that a tiny sign reading “Tanners Falls” was posted on a “Road Closed” barricade.  Since to road was actually open to the Falls, my wife brought the car but I wanted the exercise and went by foot. Walking along the way I found a roadside shrine and noted that in addition to the name Laura Lynne Ronning was a small plaque stating “Murdered July 27, 1991.”  Now, there was no signal out here, and I was alone on the road.  And I had no desire to bring my family down so I kept it to myself.

At the hotel (with wifi) I learned that Laura Ronning’s murder was never solved.  She was a counselor at a nearby camp walking to the waterfall on her day off when she was raped and shot and thrown into the woods.  The only suspect was a mentally unstable man (now since deceased) and the evidence was all circumstantial.  He was, unlike some known criminals of high profile, found not guilty.  The Ronning family moved out of the state, not wanting to be where someone could literally get away with murdering an innocent young woman.  This is where Poe came in.  His “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” is the first detective fiction based on a true case—Poe was often, figuratively, first on the scene.  The murder of Mary Cecilia Rogers, whose body was found in the Hudson, was never solved.  Poe tried his hand at the by then famous unsolved case.

The murder of a young woman was a tragedy that Poe felt deeply, I suspect.  I took some academic flak for including Poe’s observation that the death of a beautiful woman was the most poetic theme in Nightmares with the Bible.  I realize this is a masculinist thing to write, but the fact is that some men feel very protective of women.  I know there’s a psychological name for this, but it isn’t chauvinism.  It is a sense of sadness, for what Goethe tried to express by writing “Girls we love for what they are; young men for what they promise to be.”  On staycations I try to look for literary angles, even when they are, from time to time, sad.

Summerween

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Okay, so why didn’t anybody tell me?  Well, I suppose it’s because few people know me.  But still, I had to find out about Summerween from the New York Times.  Folks, I don’t spend a lot of time online.  I work long days and I read books and mow the lawn.  I just don’t have time.  I wasn’t aware that Summerween was happening.  Interestingly, the idea got started from Gravity Falls, an animated television show based on Twin Peaks and The X-Files.  I actually watched this show because a couple of young friends, who spend a lot of time online, started showing it to me.  I didn’t remember, however, that in one episode the population of Gravity Falls decides to celebrate a second Halloween in the summer.  And now internet influencers (I’m more of an unfluencer) are popularizing the holiday.  

The need for spooky holidays is encouraging to me.  I’ve long been exploring the spirituality of the unexpected, and Summerween has the possibility of contributing to it.  According to the New York Times article there’s no set date for the celebration.  It’s more of a party aesthetic, but, the story notes, Michaels, the arts and crafts chain, has already caught on and is stocking scary summer decorations.  I have long opined (and fifteen years is a lot of daily posting—nearly five-and-a-half thousand of them) that people are afraid.  That’s why they run after unlikely political leaders and seek shelter beneath the wings of the Almighty.  Horror movies, and Halloween, simply bring this out into the open.  And what’s wrong with having a little fun with it along the way?

By the by, if you haven’t checked out Gravity Falls, you don’t know what you’re missing.  It’s a Disney production and it’s aimed at a younger crowd.  That’s one of the disconnects I experience here: Halloween is something younger people love.  At work I can’t count the number of people who’ve said (not to me directly, since few speak to me that way) that Halloween is their favorite holiday.  I guess you wouldn’t expect to find a kindred spirit among old guys who edit biblical studies, of all people.  I venture to guess that any of them would be surprised to learn that someone of my vintage even knows what Gravity Falls or Summerween is.  Well, they’d have been right about the latter, had it not been for an article yesterday in the Gray Lady.  And what a more adult way to find something out might there be?

Copyright: Disney. Summerween trickster, Gravity Falls

Fire Walking

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Telinema is a strange place.  (This is my word for television and cinema, since apparently no such term exists.)  My wife and I have been making our way through Twin Peaks.  We missed this when it first aired, being somewhat preoccupied living in Scotland.  As with most telinema involving David Lynch, there’s quite a lot to ponder.  (I’m less familiar with Mark Frost’s oeuvre.)  The show only ran for two seasons, but as often happens with substantial short-run shows like this, it became classic in retrospect.  Lynch had made movies before, and the initial series was like watching a several-hour film.  Then the movie came.  Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me tells the backstory of what had happened before the series began.  Like the X-Files, you kind of need to interlace the movie in with the series.  So we have.

Knowing me, I’ll probably write up a reaction after watching the third season, but I want to reflect a little on telinema.  Visual media have been around at least since cave drawings were first made and their power recognized.  People are captivated by images.  When movies started, they were short and sprinkled in with other entertainments until the idea of a feature-length film developed.  If you were going to spend an hour or more with a movie, there had to be a story.  (Some of those stories, early on, seemed to involve quite a lot of pedestrian activities, of course.)  Then television happened.  Movies could be shown on TV and movies could be made specifically for TV.  Then impressive series, like Twin Peaks, required a theatrical movie to get part of the story across.  They became hybrids.

Lately I’ve been realizing just how much “how a story goes” matters.  We are story-telling creatures.  Our lives are the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.  And some of us are obsessed with the true story.  What really happened?  Telinema sometimes makes this difficult.  Dan Curtis, for example, made House of Dark Shadows—a theatrical movie—as a version of what he’d already produced in television land as the daily Dark Shadows.  Since there’s no word doing the work telinema does for me, I’m not quite sure how to search to see what the earlier examples might be.  The point is a compelling story will draw fans.  And being visual creatures we’ll watch if the story interests us.  Sometimes we have to watch across “platforms.”  Get out of the house into a theater to see how the story goes.  Yes, we need a word for this and we need to study just how far we’ll go for a story.

Small Things Grow

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I’ve always been fascinated with origins.  I guess I’m a kid who never grew up.  Now that I’ve turned my attention to movies, I sometimes wonder about the origin of the story.  For example, The Little Shop of Horrors.  I first saw the musical movie version of 1986.  It was cute, and employed horror themes like the Rocky Horror Picture Show from the previous decade.  Then, when Roger Corman died, I read that he’d filmed the story back in 1960.  Curiosity compelled me to watch the original.  Like its remakes, it’s comedy horror, or horror comedy.  But beyond that it’s a literal farce.  Roger Corman was a showman, and that means he tried different things to entertain.  One of them was Little Shop.  The idea of the plot you probably know, but I couldn’t remember the ending as I sat down to view it.  After all, it’s not meant to be taken seriously.

I have to say that the music makes it better in the remake.  The endless malapropisms and burlesque humor are funny, but really in the original they are presented as low comedy.  The Jewish humor led me to fear that it might be anti-semitic, although not intended that way.  I empathize with Corman.  It took him nine months to find a company to release the film.  Ironically, it attained cult status after being double-billed as the B movie with Black Sunday, which was a quite serious attempt at horror.  Camp has a way of living on in cult status.  Of course, the early bit part for Jack Nicholson didn’t hurt.  It isn’t bad for a bad movie.

The idea of people-eating plants is a reasonable approach for a horror story.  (I’ve used it myself.)  Plants move very slowly, however, which is one reason that the idea’s hard to accept.  Even The Land Unknown had used the idea three years earlier.  But the seed was planted.  The idea of the film lead to an Off-Broadway show, which led to the more famous movie.  Then it reopened off-Broadway and a reboot was planned (but currently seems to be on ice).  Not bad for a movie based on a desire to reuse a set that was scheduled to be torn down, and then shot in two days.  Classic Corman.  The result was a bad film that is still fun to watch all these years later.  I did miss the musical numbers, however.  When you plant seeds, you never know what might grow.

Spirit Storm

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Some time ago, we experienced quite a windstorm.  More than wind, there was a dump of rain, thunder, hail, and all that.  My wife and I were attending a Tibetan singing bowls sound-bath with some others in the cancer support community.  I’ve described this practice before, here.  In any case, the meditation is held in a large room with a tin roof—the kind of place you don’t want to be during a tornado.  We’d just got inside when the gust front hit and knocked out the power.  The instructor still went through the meditation, but the storm sounds blended with those of the singing bowls.  Afterwards my wife asked about Job.  Specifically, God speaking from the whirlwind.  I told her that was God on a bad day, but I understood what she was getting at—there’s a spirituality to the weather.  (I was going to suggest Elijah instead, but “but the Lord was not in the wind.”  Alas.

I thought of Weathering the Psalms.  My contribution to biblical studies, had I been allowed to remain in academia, would’ve been further explorations of weather terminology in the Bible.  But the Lord was not in the wind.  I wrote that book because I noticed the juxtaposition of severe weather with daily chapel at Nashotah House.  We were required to attend, no matter what the weather.  (Such is life on a fully residential campus.)  We were reciting the Psalms one day when a storm blew the power out.  It may have happened more than once, since we’re getting on past two decades hence my memory’s a touch imprecise on the point.  In any case, the spirituality of the power of the storm fascinated me.

It still does.  The next morning, out for my jog, I marveled at the number of branches down.  Thousands in the Lehigh Valley were without power.  This is probably why the ancients considered the storm god chief of the rest.  The violence of nature is something that suggests divinity.  Other primates have been observed screeching back at the sky during thunderstorms.  It’s deep in our DNA.  That doesn’t make it any less spiritual.  There’s a lot of weather in the Bible.  I only explored a tiny piece of it by trying to tackle the Psalms.  The Good Book, however, doesn’t say much about the spirituality of weather.  It’s there nevertheless.  Anything that can snap a tree a foot in diameter like a toothpick has a spiritual message for us.  I mused on the way home—we had to take a detour because of downed trees—that had the storm claimed us as victims, dying while meditating is probably not the worst way to go.  Now I wonder, what might God’s nice words from the whirlwind be?

Powerful Belief

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Even someone who’s spent a lifetime studying religion can’t know every single sect.  People are far too creative in that regard, and some belief groups are fairly small.  I had never heard of Unarius, for example, before reading this book.  If I had, it simply washed over me, getting lost in the noise.  Part of the trouble with defining Unarius is that it calls itself a science.  Words can be slippery, and Christian Scientists also use that designation in a similar way.  The word “science,” etymologically speaking, denotes “knowledge.”  In our materialist culture we often suppose that means the physical sciences, grudgingly allowing it to be borrowed by the “social sciences.”  There is a science of religion, but this leads to its own set of discussion points.  Let’s look at Diana Tumminia’s title: When Prophecy Never Fails: Myth and Reality in a Flying Saucer Group.  That give you an idea. 

The “prophecy” part concerns a “failed” prediction, or two, of when the spaceships would land.  Being a sociologist, Tumminia’s real interest is what happens then.  And here’s where things get interesting.  Failed predictions generally don’t lead to true believers giving up their convictions.  History has played and replayed this for us—it’s happening around us this very second—and yet “rationality” supposes that when the ships don’t land, people simply move on.  The Millerites outlived “the Great Disappointment,” after all, when the world didn’t end as predicted.  Their heirs include a sizable Christian denomination.  All this talk of AI has muddled our thinking about what it means to be human.  We are emotional.  More than that, we are believing creatures.  Our society is living proof.

Perhaps the most important, and ill-studied facet of being human, is belief.  Belief (no matter what in) is a religious phenomenon.  This study of a fairly small group shows that convinced people cannot be dissuaded, no matter how many facts are presented to them.  One need not look far to find the same phenomenon surrounding Trump.  (I do not condone violence, but history can inform us if we allow it.)  Make no mistake—he is the center of a new religion.  Unarians have absolute belief that their system is right.  Mistaken predictions—even very public ones—will not convince true believers otherwise.  It seems to me that our society, our democracy, cannot survive without intensive study of belief and how it affects the way otherwise completely rational people think.  My study is full of books exploring various aspects of belief, but we are still no closer to any kind of definitive answer.  And voters, at least a great many of them, follow their beliefs.

Fun Homework

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I recently discussed the two Kolchak movies: The Night Stalker and The Night Strangler.  In those posts I noted that I’d not grown up with Kolchak.  My reason for watching them was part of a self-assigned homework project.  You see, I’d begun watching the series online.  I realized backstory was missing, and, despite what literary critics are fond of saying, I like backstory.  After a couple of episodes I decided I needed to see the movies before moving through the rest of the series.  As it turns out, you can do the movies without the series or the series without the movie.  Regardless, I soldiered on through all twenty episodes.  This series was terribly influential for the kinds of things I eventually cottoned onto.  Kolchak was formative for the X-Files and many “monster of the week”-formatted series.  I felt like a poser having never had watched it.  This telinematic experience was good homework.

Originally a television movie produced by Dan Curtis, of Dark Shadows fame, the first film was successful enough (very successful, in fact) to cause a second one.  The second film also performed well, but instead of a planned third, ABC decided on a weekly series instead.  Only twenty episodes were aired and the run was cancelled before all the ordered episodes were filmed, or even scripted.  Still, this small franchise had a solid following and led to a number of other successful franchises in its wake.  The monsters are definitely fun, but Darren McGavin’s Kolchak does tend to get on your nerves after a while.  Even McGavin was reputedly ready to leave the show as things started to get pretty silly near the end—an animated suit of armor, a very cheap humanoid-alligator, and Helen of Troy hardly seemed conventional monsters.  

In fact, the Helen episode (“The Youth Killer”), although it had a solid premise, didn’t convince that Helen was a monster.  She prays to Hecate to steal the youth of “perfect” young people around Chicago and rejuvenates herself as the twenty-somethings age and die in a matter of minutes.  And a Greek cab driver (former Classics teacher) is the one who helps Carl crack the case.  Famous for its quirky humor, this one just seemed to have all engines fail.  Of course, the series lived on as a cult classic and can be found in a variety of media today.  I’m glad to have had this particular homework assignment.  Television had a number of influential shows in the seventies, and it feels like coming home to have caught up on one that I initially missed.  Even with Cathy Lee Crosby and a monster I just couldn’t buy.

Carnival Days

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Carnival of Souls has been receiving renewed attention of late, so I decided to watch it again to see if I’d missed something the first time.  Indeed, I had. Carnival of Souls is one of those low-budget movies that was really never considered worth much until reevaluation started to take place several years after it was released (1962).  As a snapshot of an era, it offers a view of how horror and religion interact.  The story, in case you’re unfamiliar, follows Mary Henry, a young woman who’s a professional organist.  Even here a few things stand out.  She went to college, she relies on no man to support her.  And she views church work, as an organist, to be “just a job.”  This is pretty incredible on its own, but I’m getting ahead of myself.  Her car is nudged off a narrow bridge by a couple of guys out hot-rodding.

From the beginning the viewer is clued in that she drowned, although this isn’t made explicit until the end.  She makes her way to Salt Lake City where she’s been offered a job as an organist in an Episcopal church.  She “sees dead people” and becomes fascinated by an abandoned carnival on the shore of the Great Salt Lake.  The priest at first notes that she plays music to elevate the soul.  Later, however, after the dead man she keeps seeing unnerves her, she plays eerie music on the church organ (during practice) and the priest realizes that she’s not a believer.  He fires her on the spot.  Apart from getting the ethos of the Episcopal Church about right, this in itself is interesting.  The playing of creepy music is enough to lead to the loss of a church job.

John, the guy who won’t stop trying to score with her, wonders at one point if viewing church work as “just a job” doesn’t give her nightmares.  These attitudes, from only about six decades ago, seem terribly remote by today’s standards.  Many clergy have doubts about their faith.  Many don’t really believe what their church actually proclaims.  The movie shows a society that has an almost magical view of the church.  You can probably even take the “almost” out of that last sentence.  While the Bible’s not mentioned or quoted, the idea of a lost soul finding no home in the church is a telling bit of commentary.  Intentional or not.  Carnival of Souls will never be my favorite horror movie, but it has pre-echoes of Night of the Living Dead and a sincerity that invites consideration.  I can see why it’s gained renewed interest.

A Kind of Shine

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Sometimes you just can’t not comment.  A few weeks after Donald Sutherland—known by some of us for his horror roles—passed away, Shelley Duvall has died.  It feels like the passing of an era for horror fans.  I never saw Sutherland in MASH, although I’m sure he made a good Hawkeye.  I did see him in Don’t Look Now, however, and An American Haunting.  Shelley Duvall grasped her claim to fame in The Shining, of course.  I can remember the apprehension that gripped me, after years of everyone telling me how scary it was, when I first saw it.  The Shining has its detractors, of course, but it remains one of my favorites.  That’s in no small measure due to Duvall’s portrayal of Wendy.

Duvall did other things, of course.  Since I tend to fixate on the things I like, I never followed her further career, but I did see her now and again.  She was in Tim Burton’s Frankenweenie.  For those looking forward to The Myth of Sleepy Hollow (I know I am), she’ll appear as the creator of Tall Tales & Legends.  She also created Nightmare Classics, which I have to admit to never having seen.  Although she was involved in other genres, she seemed to have a real interest in horror.  She retired from acting early in the millennium, but came out for one final film, last year.  It was the horror movie The Forest Hills.  Horror gets its hooks into you, I know.  But it keeps coming back to The Shining.  

In part it’s the claustrophobia of three people, only three, in an isolated hotel.  Of course it’s haunted as well, but the isolation premise alone is frightening.  Especially when one of the three (or maybe two) is becoming unhinged.  We live in an era of remakes and it’s possible someone will be foolhardy enough to try to remake Kubrick’s classic.  Even if it were a more faithful adaptation (Stephen King’s book is scary in its own right) it’s difficult to imagine that it could be better.  Part of it probably has to do with how Kubrick’s treatment of Duvall pushed her to the edge.  Fame has its cost.  And I suppose (since I wouldn’t know) that fame in a horror role comes with its own burdens.  Duvall went on to create things of her own.  More’s the pity that they’re not easily found either for streaming or on disc.  And things seem just a little bit quieter now, don’t they?

Doing Without

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I’m a creature of habit.  Although I’m no internet junkie (I still read books made of paper), I’ve come to rely on it for how I start my day.  I get up early and do my writing and reading before work.  I generally check my email first thing, and that’s where something went wrong.  No internet.  We’ve been going through one of those popular heat waves, and a band of thunderstorms (tried to check on their progress so I could see if it’s okay to open the windows, but wait—I need the internet to do that) had rolled through three hours ago, at about midnight.  Maybe they’d knocked out power?  The phone was out too so I had to call our provider on my cell.  The robovoice cheerily told me there was a service outage and that for updates I could check their website.  Hmmm.

I can read and write without the internet.  I’m on Facebook for, literally, less than two minutes a day.  I stop long enough to post my blog entry and check my notices.  I hit what used to be Twitter a few times a day, but since people tend to communicate (if they do) via email, that’s how the day begins.  This morning I had no internet and I wondered how tech giants would live without it.  I’m no fan of AI.  I use technology and I believe it has many good points, but mistaking it for human—or thinking that human brains are biological computers—flies in the face of all the evidence.  Our brains evolved to help our biological bodies survive.  And more.  The older I get the more I’m certain that there’s a soul tucked in there somewhere too.  Call it a mind, a psyche, a spirit, a personality, or consciousness itself, it’s there.  And it’s not a computer.

Our brains rely on emotion as well as rationality.  How we feel affects our reality.  Our perspective can change a bad situation into a good one.  So I’m sitting here in my study, sweating since, well, heat wave.  It was storming just a few hours ago and I can’t check the radar to see if the system has cleared out or not.  What to do?  Open the windows.  I’ll feel better at any rate.  And in case the coffee hasn’t kicked in yet, “open the windows” is a metaphor as well as a literal act on my part.  And I don’t think AI gets metaphors.  At least not without being told directly.  And they call it “intelligence.”

Photo by Chris Barbalis on Unsplash

Book or Movie?

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I’ve read a few of Paul Tremblay’s novels.  He’s a horror writer with literary style—often a tough sell (at least in my experience.)  Horror Movie is a compelling read.  The conceit is that a group of young people decide to film, well, a horror movie.  Things go awry, but not in a funny way.  The story unfolds interlaced with the screenplay and with the overlay of the modern remake in the works.  It’s easy to get lost between the narrative account of what happened in the original shoot and what’s happening in the script.  Tremblay uses this technique very well, blurring the reality and movie aspects in a way that’s got to be intentional.  I particularly like his asides about the redeeming value of monsters.  I won’t say too much about the plot since you may want to read it yourself. It does riff on the “cursed movie” trope.

The truly remarkable thing to my regular readers will be that I finished a new book within a month of publication.  Normally I run a couple to several years behind.  And this novel contains several winks and nods to other horror movies.  It pays to know the canon.  In that sense, it reminds me of the movie Scream, one of the more self-aware horror classics.  (I have had Scream out for watching again for several weeks now, but time has a way of slipping away.)  Tremblay, like Stephen King, taught before becoming established as a horror writer.  Maybe there’s hope for some of yet!  I started writing novels in middle school—perhaps there’s still time.  That seems to be one of the themes of Horror Movie, by the way.  It has many elements of a parable.

I found Tremblay’s first horror novel, A Head Full of Ghosts, about four years after it was published.  Indeed, I was working on Nightmares with the Bible at the time, so a book about possession was appropriate.  Horror Movie is more a monster tale but it’s also about movies and reality.  This is territory I often traverse since, it seems to me, movies are more than mere entertainment.  Good ones are, anyway.  And like some other books I’ve read lately, this one is also a reflection on fame (something I wouldn’t know about).  How it’s not what it’s made out to be.  In other words, if you’re willing, Horror Movie is the kind of novel that will make you think.  I appreciate that Tremblay is giving us thoughtful horror and I’m looking forward to trying to keep up.

Hungry for Choice

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I was recently asked to speak to a senior seminar about Holy Horror (many thanks for the invite!).  One of the questions asked was how/why I chose the movies I did.  The same question applies to Nightmares with the Bible.  The thing is, my avocation is an expensive one, particularly on an editor’s salary.  The number of horror movies is vast and our time on this planet is limited, so one thing any researcher has to do is draw limits.  Otherwise you get a never-ending project (some dissertations go that way).  I had figured, for both books, that I’d seen enough movies to make the point I was trying to make.  Neither book was intended to be “the last word,” or comprehensive, but were attempts to open the conversation.  Since none of my books have earned back nearly what resources I’ve put into them, a line has to be drawn.  Movies are expensive when they get to the bottom of the “outgoes” column.

All of this is to explain why I didn’t include The Unborn in either book.  (It fits into both.)  I was aware of the movie, but I had to decide what I could afford in order to get the books written.  I confess that I wish I’d watched this one sooner.  (Remember, it’s a conversation!)   This movie has so much in it that I may break my self-imposed rule of no double-dipping for blog topics.  Or perhaps I’ll pitch something to Horror Homeroom.  The Unborn is about a dybbuk.  Like The Possession, it features a Jewish exorcism.  Like An American Haunting, a holy book is destroyed.  (The credits include a statement that no actual Torahs were harmed in the making of the film.) Interestingly, the exorcism is a joint effort between a rabbi and an Episcopal priest.  Held in an asylum.  It’s also a story about twins.

The skinny: college-aged Casey is being pursued by a three-generation dybbuk.  Her mother, who died by suicide in an asylum, had been adopted.  Casey is unaware that she was a twin, her brother having died in utero.  She discovers her birth grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, who clues her in to why all the strange things are happening to her.  Her own twin brother was possessed by a dybbuk at Auschwitz.  It is now after Casey, having caused her mother’s suicide.  The plot is pretty sprawling, and the exorcism scene over-the-top, but I’m only scratching the surface here.  There’s so much to unpack that I wish I had a bigger movie-and-book budget.  But then we all have our demons with which to struggle.