Nightmare Talk

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For those inclined to podcasts, and who plan in advance, I wanted to pass along the information on this poster.  James Annitto and Victoria Jaye have kindly invited me to be a guest on their Nine Gates Podcast.  The topic will be Demons in Media.  This is a subject that has interested me for some time since it seems that our current ideas of what demons are owe a huge debt of gratitude to The Exorcist.  Yes, exorcism did exist long before the novel and blockbuster film.  And yes, many of the reported behaviors portrayed therein had been proclaimed by witnesses to said exorcisms—this is what gave William Peter Blatty the idea in the first place.  What had also happened, however, is that public interest in the topic had waned to the point that the novel and movie were so shocking as to jolt the interest back to life.

After The Exorcist, we had a new old monster to add to the horror lexicon.  The Exorcist-styled demon.  It has only grown from there.  A ritual that the Roman Catholic Church had mostly buried became frequently requested.  Protestants, never willing to let Catholics get the upper hand for long, joined in with their own methods of expelling demons.  Popularizers such as Malachi Martin and Ed and Lorraine Warren joined in, asserting demons were not all that uncommon after all.  Those who distrust science now had a new potential source to cure ailments that may have, ironically, been spawned by movies that convinced people that demons did exist.  I dealt with this in my book Nightmares with the Bible.  

I’ve occasionally been invited to various podcasts (a list is here) and I always enjoy it.  It reminds me of being back in the classroom, where I belong.  I realize blogs are outdated, but writing is what I do.  Also, putting together a single podcast can eat up a weekend while a blog post claims much less time.  I like to think I pay back the publicity of my kind hosts by advertising books here.  I have no idea if such notice ever leads anyone to add to any author’s coffers, but I can hope.  Living by the word has never been an easy prospect.  Certainly book royalties (in my experience) don’t come near reimbursing the expenses.  I suppose they’re more legacy building than anything else.  My “Kilroy was here” spray painted on the internet.  In any case, if you’re interested, on a forthcoming Tuesday night, look for me on the Nine Gates Podcast.

Augustine’s Children

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A horror film that relies more heavily on religion than just about any I’ve seen is Tin & Tina.  What really happens is up to you to decide because different characters have different interpretations.  Adolfo and Lola can’t have children.  Lola was pregnant with twins but a miscarriage with complications left her sterile.  The couple visits a convent to adopt two children.  Lola is attracted to two seven-year-olds with albinism.  The twins are very religious, while Adolfo and Lola aren’t.  The religion of the kids leads them to strange behaviors which can be disturbing, or even dangerous.  Lola begins to suspect they are trying to kill her, and, after she miraculously becomes pregnant, her son.  In a fit of rage Adolfo burns their Bible and the couple return the children to the orphanage.  Then Adolfo is struck by lightning and the house burns down.  Or is his death really the doing of the children?

In the view of the nun at the orphanage, the children are completely innocent.  Her teachings, however, raise some doubts.  When the family dog, which is terrified of the children, bites Lola, the children “cleanse” him by taking out his heart and washing it, assuming the dog will be resurrected.  Or do they?  A bully who teases them at school has an accident, but Lola believes that the twins caused it.  (There is some evidence of this, but it is ambiguous.)  When Lola refuses to let her newborn be baptized, the twins do it by holding him upside down in a fountain.  Are they attempting to drown him?  Each time they act innocent and quote the Bible to justify what they’re doing.  Lola believes they were in the house the night Adolfo burned to death, and the children believe whatever someone sows, they reap.  He had burnt their Bible.

Horror is often ambiguous.  Tin & Tina (their names short for Augustine, for they were in an Augustinian convent) remains ambiguous throughout.  Are these kids really just doing what they believe is right and only look guilty, or are they carrying out rough justice and using the Bible as an excuse?  The movie opens by defining the word “theophany”—an appearance of God.  The nun insists that they’re innocent, so Lola adopts them again at the end.  Many scenes here resemble The Omen, but overall the movie is unnerving.  And the tension doesn’t end when the credits roll.  In many ways this is a textbook example of religion and horror.  And like most matters religious, what you believe, in the end, is up to you.

KK from OS

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It was probably a silly reason—the misspelled word—that kept me from watching Killer Klowns from Outer Space.  That, and the bad taste left in my eyes from Morons from Outer Space.  Then I noticed it was leaving the streaming service in a matter of hours.  Killer Klowns came out during that liminal period between finishing my master’s and beginning my doctorate.  It was a time of not much money (some things never seem to change) and we didn’t go out to a lot of movies.  I was preparing to move to Ann Arbor at the time since my wife, fiancé at the time, lived there.  And I wasn’t watching much horror then.  Killer Klowns is sci-fi horror and comedy horror and I was expecting it to be much worse than it is.  Camp, yes.  But camp played sincerely by the actors (apart from the purely comic roles).  Given the many people these days who are afraid of clowns, it’s fairly easy to see what the film has become a cult classic.

As the name implies, the klowns are actually aliens who fly around in a spaceship shaped like a circus tent.  They kill and consume people using standard, but deadly clown props.  The curmudgeonly police officer Mooney doesn’t believe any of it while his partner, Dave, is willing to listen to his ex-girlfriend Debbie, who witnessed the klowns and saw a couple of their victims.  The ship lands in a closed amusement park where Dave, Debbie, and her boyfriend Mike find them.  Several other people are killed along the way, but not with the gore that many horror films use so gratuitously.  Although the plot is farcical, it’s nevertheless well done.  It winds up with a happy ending, at least for the principals.  Many of the others wind up encased in cotton candy.

Comedy horror always has the danger of devolving into schlock, but Killer Klowns somehow manages to avoid that without taking itself too seriously.  Visually, the colors used add to the appeal.  The horror/fun house of the ship’s interior encourage viewer interest.  While the klowns are difficult to take seriously, they are scary-looking, even for those of us with no inherent fear of earthly clowns.  For a movie from the late eighties, it manages a lot without CGI, making it somewhat impressive in the effects department.  That title, with its misspelled word, gives the viewer a good idea of the silliness in store.  It manages, however, to make it scary when it needs to be. 

Gothic South

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Southern gothic has a certain appeal even to northerners.  Casting about for a weekend movie included in one of our streaming services, A House on the Bayou suggested itself.  I hadn’t heard of it before, but it bore the Blumhouse brand, so I gave it a try.  In this age of digital production, it is the equivalent of a “straight to video” release.  The story is a bit confusing but the atmosphere is creepy and most of the acting is good.  Spoilers may arise from this point on.  John is having an affair with a younger woman and Jessica has found out.  She insists that if John wants to save their marriage he has to agree to a vacation with her and their daughter Anna.  Down on the bayou.  Once they get there both Jessica and John’s passive aggression towards each other is on show.

A couple of locals, eighteen-year-old Isaac and his Grandpappy, stop over.  It’s pretty obvious from the beginning that there’s something off about the pair.  Isaac clearly has supernatural powers and soon begins to threaten the family.  It turns out that John, knowing Jessica would insist on coming to this house, had pre-hired Isaac and Grandpappy to kill Jessica and make it look like a robbery.  Thing is, Isaac and Grandpappy have moral fibre.  They lock John in a hidden room with a demonic coyote that eats him.  And they burn his lover to death.  Jessica and Anna, who still love John, want to save him and after Jessica kills Grandpappy and Isaac, goes to the police.  It turns out that there is no house on the bayou and they all know about Isaac and Grandpappy, who are still alive, because they’re beings who kill evil-doers.

While not a great movie, this is one that’s heavily invested in religion and horror.  Morality is defined, according to Isaac and Grandpappy, by the Bible.  There is some confusion in the plot, however, when Grandpappy denies Isaac is his grandson and the locals seem to say he is.  Isaac implies that he’s the son of the Devil.  Grandpappy says Isaac never ages, but he tells John he’s 21 and has been in the Army (he tells Anna he’s 18).  Although he protects morality, Isaac attempts to abduct Anna to “marry” her, although she’s only 14.  There’s a good attempt to integrate religion into this horror, but as often happens, the religion is inconsistent with what it claims to be.  I’m not sure how many viewers pay attention to such things, but some of us do write books about it.  Overall, it is passable southern gothic for a rainy afternoon.

Made to Order

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Like those who’ve commented on IMDb, I watched Tiago Teixeira’s Custom because of its brief 77-minute showtime and its horror label.  An artsy film, it feels kind of unfinished.  It’s clearly a movie about demons, but it doesn’t give enough to really figure it out.  Jasper and Harriet are young artists who are having a difficult go of making a living (something we all recognize as true).  They decide to try making custom erotic films for the internet and this brings them to the attention of a mysterious benefactor who pays them 10,000 pounds for each film made to his specs.  They have to shoot on VHS, and once the film begins rolling, and a strange chanting starts, they fall into a trance and don’t recall what they did.  They’re instructed never to watch the tapes, but when they do what they find disturbs them.  Jasper tries to find out something about the purpose of the films (they’re not posted anywhere) only to discover that they are somehow laced with the Key of Solomon.  In case you haven’t read Holy Horror, the Key of Solomon is a grimoire for summoning demons.

At one point, the friend who brings them this gig asks Jasper what his idea of Hell is.  Jasper says being stuck, not able to move forward.  Towards the end of this short movie, Jasper is shown being stabbed by Harriet, something he experienced at the beginning of the film (without showing who’d stabbed him).  The implication is clearly that he’s stuck in a loop.  He’s reliving being attacked—maybe fatally wounded—by his girlfriend.  At one point their patron asks him if he knows who Harriet’s sleeping with when she’s not home.  It seems, between the demons and the nightmare scenario, that Jasper is in Hell.

This strange, little film engages religion and horror.  At one point, the friend who brings Jasper this job, says that the saints were the original perverts.  He mentions some mutilations in the lives of a few saints, including St. Lucy of Syracuse, who is often shown carrying her own gouged-out eyes.  This brought to mind The Nun II, a film released some six months earlier, that also involves the same eyeless saint.  There’s no doubt that the stories of the saints are good fodder for horror.  It seems that one of the reasons such stories were told was to evoke just that feeling.  So Custom is a film that engages religion and horror.  The connection with demons isn’t made clear, but they’re obviously part of the story of one artist’s personal Hell.

Sluggish

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If you enter into it with the spirit of the thing, Slugs is actually better than you might expect.  You have to expect that it’s going to be hokey and outlandish, with bad acting.  With all of that in the assumed category, it’s a passable horror film.  I was surprised to learn, in the opening credits, that it was based on a novel.  That makes me almost curious enough to read it.  Set in a small town in upstate New York (Ashton), the movie is about carnivorous slugs.  There’s an incipient humor about the idea and although no planned laugh-out loud moments permeate this film, there are plenty of incredulous snort opportunities.  The local health inspector is the first to cotton onto the fact that the slugs are attacking, but even he doesn’t believe his own wife at times when she points out their unusual behavior.

There’s a lot of running about and trying to get officials to do something about it, but who takes slugs seriously?  Meanwhile the gastropods eat the town drunk, a gardener, a young couple making out when the parents are gone, and are responsible for the death of a local developer.  That leads to the gore required by the tale.  Finally the health inspector teams up with the local sewage inspectors and a high school science teacher who figures out a way to blow up the slugs.  In some respects the movie resembles Evolution at this point—using a pumping truck to spray the invaders with a chemical solution that saves the day.  The best friend of the protagonist does get eaten by the slugs while trying to save the town, but otherwise there’s a happy ending.

This is a bad movie but it’s better than many “so bad it’s good” features.  Some competent work is done with special effects and the story itself is laughable (I don’t know about the original story).  I have a weakness for innocuous creatures turning dangerous—it’s one of the more interesting applications of existential horror in a world full of different types of animals, plants, and fungi.  (And occasionally even minerals can attack, cue The Monolith Monsters.)  As a kid these were the kinds of movies, in addition to the usual vampires, werewolves, and mummies, that helped me cope with an uncertain world.  There are those who find Slugs profoundly bad, but I’m not among them.  Is it great?  Not by any stretch.  Is it worth watching for free when you have a spare moment?  Certainly.  If you get into the spirit of the thing.

Scary Scripture

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The question’s not as simple as whether chocolate and peanut butter go together.  What is it with horror and the Bible?  A number of us have explored that question in book form, but probably the most prolific is Brandon R. Grafius.  His Scared by the Bible is a mapping through terrain that will feel foreign to some: if you live for the beach in summer, why would you fly to Antarctica to visit the South Pole instead?  Part of the reason is clearly that the Bible isn’t the rainbow-and-unicorn book that it’s often made out to be.  Some parts—not a few—are pretty scary.  That’s Grafius’ entry point into how horror and the Bible are surprisingly compatible.  Interestingly, we had similar starts down this path.  A Bible given to us by a grandmother when we were a child, and the determination to read it.  My world was a bit more hellfire and brimstone than Grafius’ but we’ve ended up near the same place.

Often I thought, as I was reading it, “Are people going to get both these references?” (i.e., both the biblical story and the horror movie being cited).  After all, many Christian denominations still teach that horror is not helpful at best, and satanic at worst.  I just wonder how many of us there are who never found watching horror a spiritual problem.  I grew up thinking about death a lot.  Part of this was because Evangelical children’s literature raised the question of where would you spend eternity if you died today.  Seriously, some of the stories I read, along with Dick and Jane, still scare me today.  Religion often uses fear for its own purposes.  So does the Bible.  Grafius comes down to this at the end, asking if it’s intentional on the Bible’s part.

It seems to me that this is an important question to explore.  Religion has been weaponized through fear since at least the Reagan years.  More recently it has been aimed specifically at us “evil” liberals and our “culture of death” even as conservatives rain bombs on Iran.  We desperately need to understand religion’s now very intentional use of fear to retain power.  People are afraid.  They have reason to be.  Generally it’s not the emotional issues politicians hand-pick to garner votes.  Yes, the Bible is a source of fear.  Horror films are often also a source of scary thoughts.  They do have a lot in common.  We just need someone to come along with an open jar of peanut butter to run into someone eating a chocolate bar.

Remembering Downtown

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Monroeville Mall.  Even those who’ve never been to Pittsburgh may recognize it as the site of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead.  I have to confess that, although living in Pittsburgh for a little while I never got there myself.  It has nevertheless been a pilgrimage site for fans of the movie, but, according to the New York Times, the mall has been purchased by Walmart.  Their plans?  Tear it down.  No empathy.  No sense of decorum.  Just cheap prices and sub-par goods.  I recently had to go to a Walmart.  It had literally been perhaps a decade since I entered one.  I dislike their business practices and they have ruined many a small town downtown area as well as many a mall.  In fact, the one I’d be in prior to this recent trip was the store located in Seneca, Pennsylvania.

Across from that giant Walmart stands the husk of the once trendy Cranberry Mall.  Not far away is the struggling downtown of Oil City.  My aging mother lived in Seneca—had once worked in the mall—but getting down the hill into Oil City was more difficult than nipping over to the super Walmart for groceries or other necessities.  Prices were cheap and she wasn’t flush with cash.    The same applied to many of her neighbors.  Walmart exploits such situations, becoming the only show in town.  Mom and pop stores can’t compete with their prices.  Malls, although many affluent specimens still exist, have struggled in working-class areas.  They served for more than shopping, however.  They were meeting places.  They too contributed to the troubles downtown.

Monroeville Mall never went upscale enough to survive.  Ironically, it was the message that shopping had become a source of meaning that was critiqued by Romero’s movie.  It’s that same corporate greed for more and more market share that will be the eventual death-knell of capitalism.  Any system founded on greed is the same thing as “might makes right.”  We’re seeing that in the politics of our own day.  The paradox of this ouroboros will become clear eventually, if our species survives long enough to observe.  We become attached to places.  While not all movie props can be preserved, we’re compelled toward pilgrimage, and Pittsburgh is the home of the modern zombie.  A message that may not always come through in Dawn of the Dead is that all of us are being made into zombies.  Not by some satellite picking up something in space and then returning to earth, but by good old capitalism.

Horror for Folk

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

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

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

Shy Incubus

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Shelby Oaks is one of those horror films that benefits from more explanation than the camera gives.  Or maybe I just missed some things.  Yet another religion and horror movie that utilizes demons, which are legion these days—paging Nightmares with the Bible—it goes like this: Riley, along with three friends, is a YouTuber.  (I sincerely think my life would’ve been different if that were a career option when I was in high school.)  They run a channel under the name Paranormal Paranoids.  While investigating the Ohio ghost town of Shelby Oaks, they disappear.  Many think it’s a publicity stunt, but the three friends are found murdered and Riley is still missing.  Her sister Mia can’t rest not knowing the fate of her sister.  She’s interviewed by other YouTubers, but after a man (Wilson Miles)  shoots himself in the head at her front door, she becomes an investigator herself.  Her husband is less enthused by the idea.  There will be spoilers below.

Throughout, it becomes clear that Mia and Riley were close and that Riley, and once Mia, saw a demon looking through her second-floor bedroom window at night when she was a child.  The demon, Tarion, it turns out, is an incubus.  The man who killed himself was Riley’s kidnapper/rapist.  It turns out that Tarion, unlike the usual incubus, doesn’t perform the sex himself.  Mia finds Riley alive, but her child is dedicated to Tarion—a step removed from Rosemary, whom the Devil himself raped—and Riley tries to kill the boy.  Mia accidentally knocks Riley through a window where hellhounds consume her.  Tarion had planned, since childhood, that Mia would watch his progeny that Riley would bear.

There are some creepy things here.  The use of Wilson Miles’ initials to form the sigil for Tarion brings Blair Witch elements to she story.  The use of the sisters’ initials to show their connection was a nice touch.  And the found footage aspects are done pretty well—the camera doesn’t move excessively, making viewers ill.  Overall, however, the movie has trouble hanging together.  This is a demon without a Bible, a shy incubus who sends others to do his work.  Ideas aren’t fully developed, leading viewers to wonder a number of things—why didn’t Mia wash the blood off herself until after watching the video Wilson had in his hands?  Why did Wilson kill himself in the first place?  This isn’t a bad horror film, but the religion in it could be further developed.  The two naturally go together.

Re-Telling Poe

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Retelling stories is a very old tradition.  Fiction writers often do it.  Some even argue there are no new stories (I tend to disagree with that).  In any case, T. Kingfisher decided to try retelling my favorite short story, Edgar Allan Poe’s, “The Fall of the House of Usher.”  What Moves the Dead has Roderick and Madeline Usher and their creepy house but the story revolves around the narrator, Easton.  (There’s a helpful author’s note at the end that discusses this.)  As Kingfisher notes, the narrative warps around fully-formed new characters and the question is whether that works or not.  Anyone who’s spent much time on this blog will know that I’m a diehard Poe fan.  It takes a lot to convince me that anyone has done him justice.  What Moves the Dead is a quick read, but perhaps unsurprisingly I had trouble accepting Easton as the interloper to the story.  

One of the most compelling aspects of Poe’s tale is the point of view of his unnamed narrator.  He expresses his horror at what happens but manages to keep himself out of the spotlight.  Easton intrudes a bit too much in the narrative.  And other characters also tend to overshadow the Ushers.  The main thing that is missing, however, is Poe’s unity of effect.  There is a dread running throughout Poe’s “Usher,” and analysts have suggested that every detail of the story is relevant.  There’s a reason it’s my favorite short story—it is just so good!  So good that the few times I’ve ridden on a horse in my life, the first thought that always comes to mind is the opening of Poe’s story.

If you’re looking for a quick horror book to read, which has a bit of humor to it, What Moves the Dead isn’t bad.  Kingfisher is a talented writer and her characters are creative.  It’s just that they muddy the waters, as it were, of Poe’s masterpiece.  Ironically, I think the story would’ve been much more compelling without the Poe tie-in.  The idea of infecting mushrooms (she also discusses this in the author’s note) can be a really compelling tactic.  In fact, it is used quite a lot in horror these days (and I completely understand Kingfisher picking up another book that does what you’re trying to do when you’re in the middle of a project—that has happened to me more than once).  For me, Poe’s story is pretty much perfect and it’s difficult to improve on perfection.

Smile for a Second

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I’d read that Smile 2 was better than the first Smile.  But there was a gap of about a year between seeing the sequel and I might’ve forgotten some details about how this was supposed to work.  The “smile” entity possesses someone when they see the previously possessed person die by suicide.  Okay, we’re back where we started.  The movie makes a fairly heavy use of hallucinations, so it’s difficult to know how far to “rewind” to get back to what “really” happened.  So let’s start at the beginning.  Skye Riley is a pop artist who’s trying to stage a comeback tour after a bad stint with drug abuse that led to the death of her boyfriend in a car crash.  Since Skye was in the car, she sustained several injuries but she’s healed up and ready to perform again.

The problem is that she’s still in pain.  A high school friend, who unfortunately is possessed by the smile entity, deals in drugs so she tries to get some Vicodin from him.  She witnesses his death by suicide and becomes infected.  From that point on the hallucinations start.  We learn that the possessing entity drives the victim, or host, insane within a week.  Skye meets a nurse who offers to help her by stopping her heart, thus killing the entity, and then reviving her at the last moment.  She naturally thinks him insane.  Meanwhile the hallucinations continue and the viewer doesn’t know what is “real” and what is not.  After reconciling with her best friend, and killing her mother, Skye decides she has to take the nurse’s offer.  She’s tricked by hallucinations into not having the procedure done and (somewhat predictably) dies by suicide in front of a huge audience, thereby infecting them all.

The film was praised for its acting, and no doubt, it is good.  The premise is scary enough, but somehow it just didn’t convince me.  Perhaps it was a little too slick.  A little too self aware of the previous film.  The explanation for the entity is that it’s some kind of demon or spirit, but when the movie ends up showing its “true form” it doesn’t seem as scary as all that.  Maybe because it’s smiling.  I’m glad that the critics found it good.  Horror does deserve more positive press than it tends to get.  The creepy smile is effective, but the movie itself, while introducing religion, in the form of a demon, felt like more of the same.

Rumblings

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Despite the many books on Tambora, it surprisingly gets little press.  Of the volumes on the volcano I’ve read, Gillen D’Arcy Wood’s Tambora has been the best.  He, like many others, makes a case for the world-changing impact of that eruption that led to “the year without a summer” in 1816.  Knock-on effects remain with us to this day.  Wood also throws in a good bit of concern about our current climate crisis.  As he points out, the volcanic aerosols of Tambora remained in the stratosphere for three years (leading to three chilly summers), but our current carbon emissions, on-going, have no end in sight.  We all already know that weather has become more extreme.  As I write this, family members in Europe are experiencing 100-degree temperatures that used to be unheard of on that continent.  We’ve seen hurricanes increase in intensity, and have had our own erratic weather for a few years now.  The atmosphere’s too large for us to predict just who might receive the God-like wrath of the weather.

Wood uses Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein both as an illustration of the year without a summer and as the atmospheric monster we’ve created.  He also narrates other historical events brought on by the temporary change in climate in the eighteen-teens.  One of them was the breaking up of Arctic ice that led to the ill-fated Franklin expedition many years later.  (I was unintentionally also reading Dan Simmon’s The Terror even as I read Wood’s chapter about the expedition.)  More than that, this book describes the typhoid outbreak and pandemic that followed on from erratic weather in South Asia.  And deadly changes in parts of China.  The disaster of the breaking of the Giétro glacial ice dam, and an earlier famine in Ireland fueled by British hostility toward the Irish, as well as Tambora’s weather.

The developments that grew out of the human response to the changed climate caused by Tambora led to many institutions still with us.  Governments, slowly, of course, realized that disaster preparedness and care for the working class were necessary for any nation to remain strong.  The privileged lose said privilege when there’s nobody else left to compare it with.  (Capitalism has blood all over its hands.)  Overall, this is a provocative book making the case that the world we recognize today evolved this way largely in response to an environmental crisis that occurred before steam engines had been invented, when sails drove shipping and horses drew vehicles.  When a single volcano changed everything.  And although we should learn from such things, being what we are, we tend to overlook that largest volcanic eruption in recorded human history.

Long Winter

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I have to confess that I often feel uncharitable towards very long books.  Mainly, I think, that is because one of my main blogging topics is books and when it takes a long time to read one I have to come up with other things to write about.  Still Dan Simmons’ The Terror had been strongly recommended.  I found it in an indy bookshop on independent bookstore day and began reading it sometime back in May.  It started out strong, but about three-hundred pages in began to feel a bit tedious and self-indulgent.  (I’ve done that myself with my fiction, so this criticism is also aimed at the one writing this reflection.)  In case you haven’t read it, the Terror of the title is HMS Terror, the ship captained by Francis Crozier under the command of Sir John Franklin, captain of HMS Erebus.  Both ships, seeking the northwest passage, froze in the Arctic ice in 1846 and their combined crews of 129 died without ever being found.

That’s a strong basis for a horror novel.  Your mind can’t help but wonder what it’d be like to be stuck in the dark, sunless winter, temperatures well below what most of us could survive, and realizing that you were never going to get out.  Simmons traces the story arcs of several of the crew that historically populated the ships.  Since there were no survivors, just about anything is fair game.  Including creating a monster to attack them.  Even as I began to warm to the book in the last hundred or so pages, it seems that some of this could’ve been trimmed and the same sprawling majesty been preserved.  Maybe I’m just jealous because none of my novels have been published and I keep being told you have to keep things short to get any traction.

In any case, by the end of the book I was really drawn in.  This was after the villain got his own, and Crozier starts to recognize the indigenous Arctic people for their truly remarkable survival skills.  (Not vegan friendly, of course, since vegetation doesn’t thrive in ice-bound conditions.)  It comes to a remarkable conclusion and I gradually found myself letting go of my petulance for having to invest so much time in one book.  I’m a slow reader with a very large pile of books yet to read.  In any case, Simmons won me back.  I quite enjoyed his Night of Summer and A Winter Haunting many years ago.  If you’re not afraid of big books, and you’d like to read about what can go wrong with a group of men trapped in the Arctic, then The Terror may be for you.

Spliced

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Predictably, I watched Splice again after reading the novelization by Claire Donner.  It is, as I indicated in my post on the book, a sad story.  During this rewatch, a few things stood out.  First and foremost, how many times you must rewatch a film to pull off writing the novel.  Either that, or hit the pause button constantly.  When I was writing Holy Horror I did both of those things quite a lot.  A detail you want to catch, and you have to see what’s on the screen.  I’d pause a scene and put my face right next to the screen, seeing individual pixels.  You have to know your stuff.  Another factor is that actors really do have influence on your understanding of character motivation.  An ambiguous look for the camera comes away pregnant with meaning in the novelization.

The emotional life of the characters is really filled in, in print.  The movie felt like it was going too fast.  That’s a finger on the pulse of reading a book versus watching a movie.  For a writer a movie deal can be a real boon but often you read about how they dislike the results.  That’s really no surprise.  A book takes time to read and you reflect as you go.  Movies hit you with constantly shifting images.  Both can be powerful media, but in different ways.  Another thing I noticed (I hadn’t seen the movie for thirteen years before reading the book) is that the mental image I’d formed of the characters was quite different from what the actors looked like.  

In the introduction to the novelization, screenwriter and director Vincenzo Natali notes that he likes how Donner explores Dren’s inner life.  Dren, in case you’ve not read or watched, is the hybrid.  Indeed, that is an element largely missing from the movie.  Some critics suggested that it should’ve explored that more.  For many of us, emotion is a major motivating factor of life.  We are frequently driven by our feelings, and, despite what AI says, they are integral in our thought process.  What was going through the mind of a creature, part human, with no parents?  I know that having grown up not really knowing my father left deep impressions, voids, in my life.  The novelization explores these kinds of things for all the main principals.  In my opinion, reading the book enhances watching the movie.  Of course, I’ve always been on the book side of the equation to begin with.