Cool Book Festival

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So yesterday I was at the Lehigh Valley Book Festival.  (It occurs to me know that I should perhaps post such notices in advance, but I know few people in the area where I live.)  I was there displaying my books.  I have participated in the Easton Book Festival for at least four years now, but I had only recently learned about this event held in Bethlehem.  The weather was clear, but cold for an outdoor event that involves a lot of sitting—it put me in mind of having to put on gym shorts and tee-shirts to go outside one November in college to have the coach lecture us about football, with no moving or actual playing involved.  It turned out to be an endurance test.  Not quite of the Shackleton magnitude, but I am sensitive to cold and it was struggling to reach 40, and this on the 28th of March.  At least there was a cool breeze.

Several lovely people stopped to talk and showed some interest in my work.  I’m grateful to all of them.  As an author you often wonder if you really are alone in your interests.  Since my table was next to a run of three tables of children’s books—when those authors decided on an unauthorized move of their tables into the sun (we were on the shaded side of the building), they did not invite me to join them—I was a bit self-conscious.  Parents hurried their kids past my modest display.  I took a quick swing through the other stands and I think mine was the only one for adults.  Many people glanced and frowned as they walked by, but several people got it.  I know there are local horror fans out there, but I have trouble finding them.

The Lehigh Valley Book Festival isn’t huge and several people just happened upon it, asking why we were there.  It was held at the main branch of the library and it is fairly centrally located in town.  Also, there was a cherry blossom festival taking place on the other side of the library.  I couldn’t be certain but it seemed that many more people were headed for that.  And honestly, I’ve lived in this area for going on eight years and I just learned about the festival last fall.  And I’m a book guy.  Not too connected locally, I’ll admit.  There was enough interest that I might consider it again next year (if selected again).  Especially if the temperatures are back towards the seasonal norm.

Together Again

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Body horror can be gruesome, but also thought-provoking.  Together shares a similar them to The Substance, namely, bodies merging.  They differ in the details, and some spoilers may follow.  Before I get there, however, I’ll say that this is yet another example of horror and religion working, one might say, growing, together.  The basic premise is that a pool of water in the woods, located at the bottom of a cave, causes two people (or animals) who drink it, to physically merge.  Tim is an emotionally immature, and troubled man and Millie, his girlfriend, refuses to give up on him.  They buy a house together outside the city, but their relationship continues to struggle.  Out on a hike, they fall into the cave and drink the water.  Soon Tim, who has refrained from intimacy with Millie for a long time, can’t be away from her.

As the movie unfolds, they try to resolve their differences, but if they try separating, they are physically forced together.  Religion comes into this in that a New Age church, which collapsed into the cave, had formerly accepted this new form of marriage.  Those who have gone through with it experience a level of belonging and intimacy that is otherwise unattainable.  One of Millie’s coworkers was a member of that church and encourages her to go through with the union.  Meanwhile, Tim discovers the horrific fate of those who resist.  Despite all these positive reassurances, the two resist it until Tim tries to stop a deep wound of Millie’s from bleeding.  Stuck together once again, they decide to go through with it.

Interestingly enough, the rationale given for the New Age church in the movie is a story taken from Plato’s Symposium.  People, the claim is made, once had doubled bodies.  When these were forced apart, they thereafter cannot be at peace until they find their other body to merge with.  The fictional church even has a painting representing this.  Anyone who’s been in love knows the feeling.  Together exploits the fear associated with it—the loss of self to become someone new.  Literally.  In that way it can almost be a parable of parenting a child, although one of the couples that merges in the movie is a gay couple.  And he, it can be argued, is the most content person in the film.  Movies like Together and The Substance tend to find praise among the critics because they concern issues of embodiment and what it implies.  That in itself is thought provoking.

Actual Intelligence

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Horror movies love a good sequel.  A self-referential genre, there’s a lot of give and take and reassessing.  I may have waited a little too long to watch M3GAN 2.0, however.  I remembered the premise of M3GAN: an AI robot companion built to keep a young girl company misreads its protocol and ends up killing people.  I’d forgotten the details of how this came about, but as I watched the sequel, it started coming back.  It might’ve been best if I’d rewatched M3GAN first, but weekends are only so long and I’ve got a lot to do.  In any case, it isn’t bad.  This is sci-fi horror, but the future it foresees doesn’t seem very far off now.  So, M3GAN was destroyed at the end of the first movie.  Her maker, Gemma, has become kind of a Neo-Luddite, such as yours truly, and is advocating for control of AI by the government.  This need is underscored when a military application of M3GAN goes rogue and starts killing people.

Fighting fire with fire, Gemma decides she needs to bring M3GAN back to stop AMELIA.  After the usual chaos and action, it seems that AMELIA is going to merge with the motherboard of the first AI system built, which is now super-smart, and will then wipe out the human race.  M3GAN, however, has “learned” empathy and is able to stop AMELIA by sacrificing herself.  The film doesn’t have a clear message, although overall it seems to advocate caution regarding artificial intelligence.  On that I agree.  (Of course, we’ll need to get some kind of actual intelligence in the White House before we can consider any of this.)  This does seem less horror and more action than the original, but it goes quickly and is fairly fun to watch.

A few months before seeing this, I’d watched Companion, another AI cautionary horror movie.  A few months before that, Ex Machina.  Companion was a bit better, I think, but the original M3GAN was out of the gate first.  Ex Machina, however, was even a decade earlier.  The films are very different.  Companion is about a sex-bot and M3GAN concerns a, well, companion for a lonely young orphan.  Ex Machina is about an AI woman developed just because she can be.  She, however, can’t be controlled either.  All three films represent the zeitgeist of an underlying, lurking fear that we are really going the wrong direction with all the tech we’ve created.  All feature female robots, and none of them end well for humankind.  At least if the implications are followed through.  It might not be a bad idea to pay attention to the human creative side when thinking about Actual Intelligence.

Still Haunted

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Having watched Haunted Summer, I was curious about the origin of the screenplay.  I’d read that the movie was based on a screen treatment by Anne Edwards, a screenwriter and novelist, but that it had been rejected.  Edwards then transformed her screenplay into a novel that was published in 1972, over a decade before the film came out.  It’s sometimes easy to forget that movies spend quite a long time in development.  For example, about four or five years ago it was announced that Lindsey Beer was going to write and direct a new Sleepy Hollow movie.  That was the proximate cause for my writing Sleepy Hollow as American Myth.  I wrote the book, found a publisher and then watched as sales only bumped along the bottom and still no Beer film appeared.  Timing isn’t always my strong suit.  In any case, I decided that it would be good to read Edwards’ book as a follow up to the film.

Marketed as a gothic novel, it came out in my beloved mass market paperback form.  It’s now not easy to find.  The story is well researched, but fictionalized, of course.  The five Regency Era creatives—Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Godwin, John Polidori, and Claire Clairmont—had gathered near Lake Geneva in the summer of 1816 (the “haunted summer”).  Famously, the idea for Frankenstein came out of ghost stories they told each other to pass the time during a rainy summer.  Polidori’s story, “The Vampyre,” also traces its origins back to that night.  Edwards’ novel focuses on Mary, making her the narrator.  Since it is a novel some fictional elements are added to what happened that summer.  To me, the most obvious was moving the ghost stories from Villa Diodati to Castle Chillon.  This allows Edwards to introduce Ianthe, a tragic keeper of the castle.

The story focuses on Mary as a strong woman very much devoted to Percy Shelley and standing up to Lord Byron.  Her lack of regard for Polidori was a little jarring since, it seems, historically, she felt sorry for him.  In any case, other than the changes Edwards introduces, the plot largely follows what happened during that summer.  The climax of the book is Mary’s telling of the  basic story of Frankenstein in Chillon Castle.  I found the Author’s Note of particular interest; novelists are also researchers, even if not always treated as such.  The historical incident of this meeting drives my interest, and this largely overlooked novel is a piece of a larger puzzle.

Summers and Hauntings

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I’ve written before about that odd Ken Russell movie Gothic, one of my “old movies.” In case you missed it, the film is a fictional retelling of the gathering of Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, Mary Godwin, John William Polidori, and Claire Claremont in the summer of 1816.  They read ghost stories to pass the time and decided to try writing them.  Two famous stories came of it: Frankenstein and Polidori’s “The Vampyre,” a story that would go on to influence the genre.  I hadn’t realized, being generally the one invited to someone else’s choice of film, that two years following Gothic a movie called Haunted Summer was released.  Directed by Ivan Passer, it is a slow-paced romance that tells about the same meeting.  It’s somewhat more believable than Russell’s movie, but it has some oddities.  Perhaps the most telling is that it doesn’t mention the famous “contest” at all.

No doubt, one of the most compelling aspects of that summer meeting was the fact that a nineteen-year old Mary Godwin would go on to write one of the most influential fictional books of all time.  The influence of Frankenstein is visible in most unexpected places.  Internet personalities create “Franken” products by mixing together discrete products.  (For example, “Frankensoap” is when you cut up and blend different soaps.  You’ll actually find Frankensoaps in our bathrooms at the moment since that’s the way I handle soap scraps.  Soap never seems to go fully away before it becomes unusable.)  Frankenstein influenced everything from feminists to science fiction.  Not to mention horror.  Haunted Summer, however, although it has Polidori as a character, doesn’t mention his story at all.  It really focuses on the sexual tension between Byron and Mary Godwin.

Our imagination of that meeting of two famous writers and one soon-to-become famous one, often doesn’t make room for the fact that Shelley and Godwin were actually traveling with their infant son William—not shown in the movie.  (Mary had delivered a premature daughter the year before, who didn’t survive.)  I suppose putting a baby in the mix might, in Puritan America, dampen the romance implied in Haunted Summer.  Both that movie and Gothic make use of Henry Fuseli’s painting “The Nightmare.”  And although Haunted Summer isn’t a horror movie there are a few moments of fairly high tension—one when Godwin has her dream of the creature approaching her bed at Villa Diodati.  The story, however, had already been told by Ken Russell’s movie and Haunted Summer failed to make much of an impact.  That isn’t, however, quite the end of the story.

Not Conan

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What are Weapons without a Barbarian?  I learned about the latter movie after reading about the former.  After watching Weapons I knew I had to see Barbarian.  It is outlandish but decidedly scary.  I haven’t been that tense during a movie for some time.  Nor have I watched one where there were so many moments when the average person in real life would’ve just left before things got so bad.  There may be some spoiler-level information here, but I won’t give away the ending.  Tess is booked into an AirBNB in Detroit, but arrives to find another renter already checked in.  It’s a rainy night and there’s a convention in town so all the hotels are booked.  Tess decides she can trust Keith and stay the night.  They end up getting along very well, and she’s planning on staying the next night as well, even with the double-booked situation.  Then Tess discovers a disturbing room in the basement.

We then learn that Keith, whom we’re all suspecting (Bill Skarsgård has become well known for playing horror villains), isn’t the real threat.  In one of the moments when I would’ve left, she goes to find him after he falls silent in the basement.  She discovers a sub-basement where a strange, inhuman woman dwells.  This woman kills Keith.  Cut to California where AJ, a guy who’s not exactly evil but certainly not good, is being accused of rape and is losing money.  He’s the owner of the AirBNB and he flies to Detroit to get the house ready for selling.  He sees that it’s occupied, but the agency says no one is staying there.  He discovers the secret sub-basement and we learn a sexual predator has for years been abducting women, having children with them, and then having children with their children, thus producing the scary woman.

As I say, outlandish, but the story is quite effectively filmed.  The real monster is not the woman, but modern people such as AJ.  The police refuse to help because they assume everyone in that neighborhood is a crackhead.  The urban blight reminded me very much of It Follows, another horror film set in Detroit.  This is kind of a new form of folk horror where the landscape becomes a monster.  Instead of using traditional folklore, however, films like It Follows and Barbarian suggest that the landscapes we build and then neglect become scenes of supernatural horror.  This is quite effective.  Having grown up in a much smaller town, but one which is equally neglected, this kind of horror really works.  Zach Cregger has become another horror director to keep an eye on.

The Vampire’s Father

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I’d been very curious about D. L. Macdonald’s Poor Polidori for several years.  This is not an easy book to find.  (I have noted before that I find university press book pricing illogical and unconscionable.)  John William Polidori was, as the subtitle states, the man who wrote “The Vampyre,” treated sometimes as a novel, at other times a short story.  Polidori, apart from being treated as a fictional character, is a difficult man to get to know.  This critical biography contains much useful information.  There are sections, however—and probably the reason for the pricing—, that interest only scholars of literature looking to find an exegesis of works of Lord Byron and Polidori himself.  My curiosity about him derives from the fact that “The Vampyre” was a very influential story and yet its author is somewhat consistently considered insignificant.  This seems to have predated his association with Byron; Macdonald points a finger at his father.

So who was Polidori?  Born in England of an Italian father and English mother, he was raised with literary aspirations but his father (who was a writer) had other plans for him.  Catholic in a period of strongly Protestant sentiments, John was sent to Catholic school and considered the priesthood.  His father eventually sent him to Edinburgh University to become a medical doctor.  Clearly this wasn’t John’s interest, but he complied.  Finishing his qualifications, he found setting up practice difficult because of both his foreign-sounding name and his Catholicism.  Lord Byron, about to exile himself from England because of scandals, wanted a personal doctor and settled on Polidori.  He knew of Polidori’s literary ambitions and frequently belittled them.  Polidori was present in the summer of 1816 when Percy and Mary (soon to be) Shelley visited Lord Byron along with Claire Claremont, Mary’s half-sister pregnant with Byron’s child.

Famously, the group read ghost stories and at Byron’s suggestion each started writing their own.  Byron’s fragment led to an idea Polidori later wrote out, after Byron had dismissed him, as “The Vampyre.”  Mary Shelley’s story, of course, everybody knows.  “The Vampyre” was published without Polidori’s knowledge and was attributed to Byron.  Even Goethe read it and thought it Byron’s best work.  Polidori was eventually credited with the story and tried to make a living as a writer.  He produced other works, but no real success.  He decided to become a lawyer.  Unable to establish his independence from his father, he died at 25 by ingesting prussic acid.  Even during his life, which was quite interesting, he was called “Poor Polidori” by more than one acquaintance.  His literary output isn’t bad, according to critics.  To me, he’s a kind of patron saint of those who would write but who are overshadowed by Byrons and Shelleys.

Vengeance Is Hers

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A Lesson in Vengeance, by Victoria Lee,  is a novel with some twists that I’ll try to conceal.  It is a kind of young adult horror-themed dark academia novel.  I really enjoyed it although there are a few improbable events.  That’s the way of fiction with an unreliable narrator.  Felicity Morrow, a girl from a wealthy Boston family, is enrolled at Dalloway School.  Dalloway is a girl’s prep school in upstate New York.  Felicity had to take some time off, during which she was institutionalized, after the death of her best friend, and lover, Alex.  Now that she’s back at school she feels the ghost of her friend coming back for vengeance.  She lives in Godwin House, which only has space for five.  It’s also part of the story of the Dalloway five, girls accused as witches when the school was founded, who all died there.

A new girl is starting at Dalloway this year.  Ellis Haley has already written a published novel and is working on a second.  She lives in Alex’s old room.  In spite of their rocky start, Ellis and Felicity become friends.  Then more than friends.  Meanwhile, they’re both working on their senior projects but Ellis wants to form a fictional coven and replay the way the Dalloway five died, for her novel.  Things grow tense as Felicity begins to remember more and more about what happened to Alex.  Then a murder takes place.  I won’t say more about the plot.  The last several chapters are ones where putting down the book is a real struggle.  You want to know who did it.  And since Felicity is the narrator, you gather that she must survive.  But this isn’t without danger.

The horror elements involve ghosts and witches.  Since Felicity is revealed to be an unreliable narrator it’s unclear whether the ghosts are real or not.  Most of the events are revealed to have had naturalistic answers, but one remains as either a real ghostly visitation or a delusion on the part of Felicity.  I read this book as part of my ongoing fascination with dark academia, and I’m glad I did.  It’s quite a well-told story.  Enough information is held back and revealed in moments of insight as the story unfolds that I was kept guessing until very near the end.  And the final realization only hits at the very end.  This is a good entry into dark academia for anyone wondering where to start, at least in my opinion.

Accidentally Backward

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I watched Regression by accident.  “How is that possible?” you might ask.  Well, I don’t read up about movies before watching them.  These days I try to save money by streaming on services I pay for anyway, such as Amazon Prime.  I had identified The Tractate Middoth as a movie that I could see without knowing anything beyond that it was based on an M. R. James story and that it was only about half an hour long.  I clicked on it.  It struck me as strange that it began with a “based on true events” intertitle, but people will do anything to sell a movie, including saying fiction is fact.  Then I noticed that the production values were pretty substantial.  I began to wonder if there were two movies by that title.   About forty minutes later, I’m needing to take a restroom break and I’m thinking, this movie should be done by now but it feels like we’re in the middle of things.

After I flushed and clicked back in, the title “Regression” flashed across the top of the screen.  Well, that explained a lot.  I didn’t recall having read any M. R. James stories like what I was seeing.  Clearly my initial click had been off and I’d hit the movie next to, or above or below, the one I wanted to see.  With that level of investment, I figured I might as well watch the rest.  It wasn’t bad but it took me a while to reassess my expectations.  Regression is about how the Satanic ritual abuse scares of the 1990s were fueled by, well, regression therapy.  A girl in Minnesota is identified as having been ritually abused.  Her story convinces police, who use a therapist to do hypno-regression to uncover what “really happened.”  Soon even the cop in charge is seeing Satanists coming after him in his own house.

The movie isn’t great, but it’s not bad either.  It has enough Bible in it to have made the cut for Holy Horror (or Holy Sequel).  And it is religion-based horror.  It wasn’t what I was expecting to see, of course, but that can’t be blamed on the movie.  The Satanic panic was real and unfortunate.  The movie is probably more of a thriller than horror, and yes, I can accept that it was based on real incidents because the panic is well documented.  There is no Devil here.  There are also no Satanists.  The real culprit, the film implies, is the fundamentalist minister who first suspected the abuse.  It is something to think about, but it was no Tractate Middoth.

Second Friday the 13th

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

Photo credit: Andreas F. Borchert, Wikicommons

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

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

Creepy Cryptids

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J. W. Ocker and I have a few things in common.  We’re both Edgar Allan Poe fans.  We both have an interest in the odd.  And we like to visit places where something strange is commemorated.  It gives me hope that there are likely more such people out there.  I read Ocker’s Poe-Land a few months back and knew I’d be coming back for more.  The United States of Cryptids caught my eye.  This book is for fun, but with a serious subtext—our world is a weird place.  Dividing the country into four regions: Northeast, South, Midwest, and West, Ocker traveled across the country looking for stories, or better yet, memorial statues and/or plaques, of cryptids.  Defined broadly.  These cryptids can be sightings of something unusual, folklore, or, in some cases, confessed hoaxes.  He makes the point repeatedly that cryptids make for great tourism opportunities.  There are people like me that will seek out such places, given half the opportunity.

Quirk Books, which has been unfortunately experiencing some difficulties of late, functions as a sort of home to oddities.  And cryptids fall into that category.  Ocker does point out, on a serious note, that any animal reported to have been encountered prior to scientific description was a cryptid.  Perhaps the most famous case is the gorilla, which many non-Africans believed to be mythic until one was actually found.  Or the coelacanth.  In any case, discussing cryptozoology is a dicey thing to do.  If you take it too seriously you’ll be ousted from polite society and if you handle it with too much humor, true believers will shun you.  Ocker manages to find the middle ground here with a book that is fun to read and yet gives you ideas of places to visit or concepts to explore.

Reading Ocker’s books makes me think that maybe I take things a bit too seriously from time to time.  That’s one reason that it’s important for me to read authors like him.  I’m plagued with a need to know.  Not everybody is, of course.  I do tend to take things with an amount of earnestness that others sometimes find too intense.  It’s probably my childhood that’s to blame.  That doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy a lighthearted treatment of unknown animals.  And I do try to keep a somewhat open, if critical mind.  There’s a line, sometimes fine, between having fun with and making fun of.  Ocker enjoys the odd enough to know which side of that line to walk.  Or drive.  Now, where did I leave my car keys?

Demon Pop

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To be honest, I hadn’t even heard of KPop Demon Hunters.  The places I look for media advice generally don’t cover such fare.  I’m not into K-pop, Manga, or boy/girl bands.  Most of my media tends a bit towards the weightier side.  Now that I’ve sufficiently justified myself, my wife asked if I’d like to see it, pointing out that there were demons in it.  The concept seemed intriguing; Huntrix, a girl-band K-pop trio, hunt demons while building a protective barrier with their songs.  Then Gwi-Ma, the king of the demons agrees to a plan for a demonic boy band, the Saja Boys, to draw attention away from Huntrix, lessening their power and the protective shield they’ve built.  When demons get through they feast on the souls of humans.  Huntrix is hampered by the fact that Rumi, one of the singers, had a demon for a father and her bandmates, Mira and Zoey, do not know this.  When they find out, internal strife leads them to losing the battle of the bands.  Until they accept Rumi for who she is.

The story is well told, even for those of us who wouldn’t normally willingly listen to K-pop.  I appreciate stories of female empowerment.  And there are, after all, demons.  The concept of demons in eastern Asia is quite different from how they’re conceived in Abrahamic religions.  Gwi-Ma is not “the Devil,” although he shares some of those characteristics in this movie.  The demons are portrayed in monstrous form, and they are very numerous.  Since this is an animated film for audiences that include younger ages, they don’t reach horror-movie levels.  All in all, this wasn’t a bad diversion for an evening’s winding down.  It did make me think about the way demons differ not only across time, but across cultures.

As I discuss in Nightmares with the Bible, the concept of demons evolved over time in the western world.  Not all demons were bad in Greek thought, but monotheism made them evil.  Meanwhile further east in Asia, the concept—which may have developed independently—was more ambivalent.  Many years ago, while visiting my brother-in-law on the west coast, we watched an Anime movie about demons, but I’ve unfortunately forgotten the title.  Since this was about two decades ago, hope of recovering that data is minimal.  Still, I remember being affected by seeing it.  Of course, it wasn’t a musical.  Boy bands and girl bands seem not to have enough world-weariness to sing songs that resonate with me.  I guess I have my own demons with which to struggle.

The Black Monk

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Back at Nashotah House the local ghost was called “the Black Monk.”  A plausible origin story circulated with the name; a student broke through the ice on the lake one winter night and met his demise.  Some even claimed to know which was his gravestone in the cemetery on campus.  I really didn’t give much thought to any of this until I learned that Anton Chekhov wrote a short story titled “The Black Monk.”  Now, I don’t know if some literate Nashotah student was referencing Chekhov or if the color was just fitting for a cassocked community of quasi-monks.  In either case, I decided to read the story.  The Russian tale involves a man named Kovrin.  He holds a Master of Arts degree, in the way that degrees in Russian stories bring the holder a great deal of respect.  He was raised by a wealthy farmer who owns extensive orchards, and, needing some time to relax from his city schedule, goes to stay with his former guardian and his daughter.  While there he relates the tale of the Black Monk, who was seen all around the world, and maybe even in space, from where he walked in Arabia or Syria, a thousand years ago.  It was rumored that he would return a millennium later, and, as it turns out, Kovrin sees him.

G.K. Savitsky’s illustration “The Black Monk,” public domain via Wikimedia

Kovrin is a successful, bright, and cheerful scholar.  He begins to see the phantom and have conversations with him.  The monk assures him that he (Kovrin) is extraordinary, a genius even.  That other people, satisfied with mediocrity, melt into the herd.  True genius, however, is often perceived by others as madness.  They have long conversations.  Kovrin marries the farmer’s daughter but their relationship is troubled.  One night she awakes to find him speaking to an empty chair—nobody else sees the Black Monk.  Convinced that he is mentally ill, she and her father put him in a doctor’s care and his new regime of lifestyle changes prevents further visits of the Monk.  Kovrin, however, grows sullen and dull.  He realizes that his genius is gone and that he has become ordinary.  His marriage falls apart and when he goes on a vacation to the Crimea, he once again sees the Black Monk.  His feelings of being extraordinary begin to return, but he dies that night.  His corpse wears a smile.

This tale had me thinking.  It’s not clear that Kovrin was really mad but no doubt he’d been quite intelligent.  He was given a university chair and received the praise of others.  It was the cure that destroyed him.  It robbed him of his enjoyment of life and also led to the downfall of the farm since his father-in-law died and his daughter, now separated from Kovrin, writes to curse him for his insanity.  The farmer and his daughter aren’t always sympathetic characters, but until his dying day (literally) Kovrin had lost all that made his life meaningful.  The Black Monk admits he’s an apparition, but Kovrin was clearly brilliant while he met and conversed with him.  I’m not sure of any parallels with Nashotah House, but it has a character in common with Chekhov’s story.

Finding October

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This post is both about and not about a movie.  On a recent weekend I tried to watch The Houses October Built.  I found it on a free streaming service (with commercials) and settled in.  I’ve been looking for good movies to watch in October for many years, and this one seemed to have promise.  Then a couple of things happened.  But first, the idea: a group of friends want to find the most extreme haunted house attraction in the country.  Fine and good.  Their banter is appropriate, and engaging.  But thing one: the backdrop is again in part of the country where the leaves don’t change dramatically.  Like Halloween, it has the Southern California feel.  Not the truly spooky mid-Atlantic, upper Midwest, or New England autumn.  This is, for me, an integral part of the Halloween, or October experience.  It’s one of the reasons I could never move to the south.

Thing two: as a found footage movie, the camera motion made me physically sick.  Now, I don’t want to give up on “found footage” films.  I really liked The Blair Witch Project.  Perhaps because one of the missing campers was a film student, the camera motion wasn’t extreme.  I do remember newspaper reviews when it came out saying that some people left the theater ill because of it.  Since then, however, found footage has become a standard horror trope.  Some of it is quite good.  The Houses October Built joins VHS Viral, Amish Witches, and even Avatar 3D,  as films I could not finish watching because of too much camera motion.  Other movies have come close.  I’m sure the condition I have has a name.  Since it mostly affects me these days when watching movies, I see no reason to go under the knife to fix it.  But the fact is, the nausea after it sets in lasts for more than a day.  The insidious part is that I notice I’ve entered that realm suddenly, usually because a movie, like The Houses October Built, are engrossing.

If enough people read this blog I’d call this a plea to movie makers—the camera does not have to move constantly to make your film scary.  You are, in fact, limiting your viewership by at least one fan by making it utterly unwatchable.  No movie is worth being physically ill into the next day.  I have a friend whose favorite type of horror movie is found footage.  I often can’t discuss this with him because I’m often afraid to watch them.  And really, does anybody else appreciate that the trees are part of what makes the fall spooky?

Oh Deere

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Strange Harvest seems to have impressed a number of viewers, but for someone attuned to religion and horror it rang false.  The Lovecraftian elements appear with the idea of a serial killer who’s the devotee of an unfamiliar god.  The story is presented as a documentary, interviewing the detectives who resolved the case, intercut with crime scene footage—often quite graphic and gory—and trying to get to the bottom of this case.  So a guy named Leslie Sykes has been killing people in San Bernardino county since 1995.  He took a hiatus in his killing spree to go to Jerusalem, after seeing something in a cave while out hiking and experiencing a religious mania.  From Jerusalem he goes to Damascus and then into Europe, learning about religions, apparently, before stealing a grimoire from a bookshop in Germany.  He’s pretty clearly trying to raise an unorthodox deity, but the police don’t connect the dots.

After his years’ long absence, he starts killing again in order to have his last sacrifice ready when a rare triangular alignment of Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn will be visible with the naked eye.  He is stopped from his final murder attempt by the police, but witness cameras captured some strange cosmic event starting to unfold as the final victim is about to be immolated.  I’m not a fan of this kind of movie but what really made it seem less authentic was the stitched together nature of this religion.  It is never spelled out, it is true, but what is shown does not seem to add up to any coherent system.  The movie does an effective job of creating a scary sociopathic killer, but it implies that the religion responsible is real.  A religion of one, however, isn’t really a religion at all.

Again, critics seem to have liked this but I found the actions of the police inscrutable and the grotesque methods of torture and execution unequal to the task of suggesting how these might be connected into even a psychotic religious outlook.  The only thing that seems to connect them is an occult symbol left behind at the crime scenes.  The letters from the killer to the police are read only in part, and that by some kind of synth voice that’s probably meant to make them sound sinister.  This kind of horror can work, but in general, creating new religions is not as easy as it looks.  Lovecraftian isn’t a bad choice, but drawing the threads a little more closely together could’ve helped a lot.