Old Vampyr

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Early movies are fascinating.  I learned of Vampyr, a 1932 production by Carl Theodor Dreyer, from Raymond T. McNally and Radu Florescu’s In Search of Dracula, where they praise it.  I’d never heard of it before.  There are probably a few reasons for that.  One is the movie was considered not very good when it was released, and it never garnered much of a reputation.  Another is that the original prints, including the soundtrack, had been lost.  Three language versions had been shot—German, French, and English.  Since this would obviously lead to lip-syncing problems, there is very little dialogue.  The movie as it exists today is accessible in the German version, and it tends to fall into that category that includes work by directors such as Ingmar Bergman and Stanley Kubrick.  It has art house elements and the story requires some pondering.  It isn’t bad, although in today’s viewing culture, it might seem dull.

It is a vampire story based on the works of Sheridan La Fanu.  The star, and also financier of the movie, was an actual Baron from France (in real life), Baron Nicolas de Gunzburg.  He plays a student of the occult who happens upon a gentry-class family plagued by a vampire.  Interestingly enough, this kind of character is distinctly Lovecraftian, and there is a passing resemblance between de Gunzburg and H. P.  The acting isn’t great, but the story is good.  It includes shadow people who assist the vampire—a female, in this case—and a kind of mad doctor who helps her reach her victims.  The occultist and the household servant of the gentry family locate the vampire’s grave and stake her.  And in a scene that may have inspired Witness, they suffocate the mad doctor in the bin of a flour mill.

Like many vintage movies, Vampyr has received a more positive reevaluation over time.  While some consider it great, the consensus seems to be more at the “very good” level.  It is an early vampire movie, apparently filmed before Tod Browning’s Dracula.  While not scary by today’s standards, there are some definitely creepy scenes.  Particularly when the elder daughter of the gentry family begins to become a vampire, leading to some quite effective facial expressions.  McNally and Florescu weren’t film critics by any stretch but they felt that, up to the early seventies, this was the best vampire movie made.  I might not go all the way with them, but I would suggest it is certainly worth viewing by those who like old cinema, and who appreciate vampire stories.

Low Stakes

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Elsewhere on this website I refer to myself as an “unfluencer.”  This quasi-serious attempt at humor does bear a kernel of truth.  It’s difficult to get your voice heard on the internet.  By the time I began blogging, vlogging had already become a thing and people prefer watching to reading.  (I do have a few YouTube videos out there, but they take an awful lot of time to put together and I’m kinda busy trying to write obscure books.)  The reason I mention this at all is to make a point.  People sometimes wonder why a guy who has a doctorate in religious studies wastes his time with horror.  There’s a good reason.  People will pay attention when the stakes are low.  Is horror important?  I think it is, but most people don’t.  Genre fiction is easily dismissed as being off in fantasy land, despite the growing number of voices suggesting we should be paying attention to how it influences (unfluences?) religion.

Those who delve in such blue collar things sometimes grow to be taken seriously.  I suspect—since I wouldn’t know—that it’s a matter of sticking with it long enough, and producing enough content that people have some standard for comparison.  And the interesting thing is, you often notice fascinating features along the way.  While working on my next book the other day, I realized a major gap in the study of history of religions.  I can’t say what it is here, of course, because someone without a 9-2-5 may scoop me.  But the gap is clearly there.  And I would never have noticed it if I weren’t spending my time writing about low-stakes monsters.

I’m a blue-collar thinker pretty much through and through.  Talking it over with my brother the other day, I realized that despite the years and years of higher education, I was brought up working class and I look at the world through those lenses.  When I was actually a professor that began to change, but in retrospect, I think that’s why my students liked what I did in the classroom.  I wasn’t some child of privilege handing down tired observations meant to impress other children of privilege.  I’m just a peasant trying to figure things out.  I can point to no highly educated forebears—neither of my parents finished high school.  No, I have been fortunate enough to have clawed my way through three higher degrees only to realize that people only listen if the stakes are low enough.  And I’m alright with that since I get to spend the time with my beloved monsters.

Black History

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The first of the “blaxploitation” movies, Blacula is a period piece.  In 1972 vampires were still all the rage, following from Dark Shadows and the continuing Hammer hammering of the monster.  They even produced Dracula AD 1972, not to put too fine a point on it.  American International Pictures wanted in on the action and produced the first Black vampire in cinematic history.  Rather than a remake of Bram Stoker’s novel with a Black cast, the story begins with Mamuwalde, an African prince, entreating Dracula (whom he doesn’t know is a vampire) for help ending slavery.  Instead, Dracula turns Mamuwalde into a vampire that he names “Blacula,” and places him under a curse.  In the seventies, a homosexual couple purchases Dracula’s castle, intending to sell the contents on the antique market.  One of those antiques is a locked coffin.

Once he’s freed in America, Blacula quickly runs into Tina Williams, the spitting image of his long-deceased wife.  Meanwhile Tina’s friend Dr. Gordon Thomas, suspects that there is a vampire on the loose in LA.  Although the opportunity for camp is clearly present, this movie is played straight.  Mamuwalde is a monster—he kills several people—but his real motivation is to regain his dead wife, whom, he is convinced, is Tina.  When Tina is shot by a trigger-happy cop in the tunnels below a chemical plant, Blacula turns her into a vampire.  When she is staked, Mamuwalde tells the doctor that he need no longer pursue him.  He voluntarily climbs into the sunlight and dies.

Now, this wasn’t a great movie but it does seem to have a reasonable bit of social commentary.  It was the seventies, but racial and orientation slurs were still widely accepted.  And people dressed like, well, it was the seventies.  The Black characters, however, are portrayed with dignity, and Mamuwalde is presented as nobility.  Perhaps more importantly, this movie opened the doors for further horror films featuring African-American lead characters and plots.  A few decades later Blade, based on a comic book hero, would once again foreground a Black vampire who’s on the side of good.  It’s still some distance from Black Panther, but the process had to begin somewhere.  Watching Blacula was like watching history, and I suppose viewing movies is like a selective piece of history.  By this point AIP was well established, and influential in its own way.  I’d heard about Blacula since childhood, but until streaming it never really came across my screen.  Nevertheless it remains an important piece in this country’s ongoing vampire mania.

Red Dress

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Horror sometimes takes a creative turn.  In Fabric is an art film as well as a horror offering.  The basic premise is that a certain red dress, sold at a bizarre fashion store, causes the death of those who wear it.  Sheila, recently divorced and having trouble with her adult, at home son, buys the dress for a date.  After leaving her with a rash, the dress leads to an arm laceration, a German Shepherd attack, an attack on her son’s girlfriend, and finally, Sheila’s death in an auto accident.  The dress is then picked up by a guy as a stag party prank where the groom has to wear it.  His soon-to-be wife finds it and wears it also.  The man, Reg, loses his job as a washing machine repairman and has no luck finding another.  While Babs, his wife, is shopping at that same strange shop, Reg’s furnace malfunctions, killing him with carbon monoxide.  Babs is trapped in the shop as it catches fire and burns down.  All those killed by the dress are shown working on new ones at the end of the film.

The movie is also called a dark comedy and there are some funny bits.  The sales clerk, Miss Luckmoore, speaks in cryptic, quasi-poetic style, never giving a straight answer to anyone.  The shop’s owner does the same.  And some of the scenarios are amusing.  Although horror, the movie isn’t really scary, but it is stylish.  Unlike some horror comedies, the tone isn’t really funny, but more wry.  And it’s a bit confusing.  The overall story arc is easy enough to follow, but some scenes just confound.  I kept waiting for an a-ha moment when everything would fall into place.  Of course, ambiguity is a hallmark of many intellectual films.

Something that I’ve been noticing, no matter the era that it’s from, is that films really need to justify that last half-hour, if they’re going for 120 minutes.  Maybe it’s just that we’ve become accustomed to the 90-minute feature, but I’ve notice that most two-hour movies (not all) seem to suffer from some pacing issues.  Of course, an art-house movie will defy conventions.  For example, the point of view is Shelia’s for about the first half of the film, then she’s killed and new characters are introduced.  Yes, this shows that the dress goes on killing, but another approach might’ve been to have the protagonist learn about past killings and realize the dress is coming for her.  But then, that might’ve been less creative.

Grown-up Jane

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Watching Stephen King’s list of scary movies in the 30 years prior to 1980, I’ve found one or two that hardly strike me as horror.  Some of the others remain remarkably effective today.  I had the wrong idea about What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?;  I’d supposed from the title that it had to do with an abducted child, a topic I generally avoid.  When looking up yet another movie on Tubi that was free, but only in Spanish, I saw Baby Jane on offer and decided to give it a try.  I was pretty impressed.  It’s overly long and drags a bit, but the story is good.  One thing about horror films from the period is that they relied on story because the special effects really didn’t exist to make movies such as many we now see—splashy, but shallow.

In case you’re even more outdated than me, Baby Jane was a successful child actor whose sister grows up to outshine her.  Blanche, the sister, is crippled in a car accident that has been blamed on Jane for the last couple of decades.  Jane really can’t act, and once her sister is disabled, the two live on Blanche’s money until Jane’s growing insanity threatens her wheelchair-bound sister.  Trapped upstairs without any means of communicating with anyone who might help, Blanche is tortured and starved by her sister.  There’s an incredible amount of tension, even if the events begin to seem unlikely as the two hours roll on.  There are a few dropped subplots—the neighbor who harbors no suspicions at all, and the musician Jane hires who discovers her secret—but overall the tension keeps building.

One thing that occurred to me was that part of the plot involves leaving a phone extension off the hook to prevent Blanche from getting help.  I pondered how some young people who only know phones as personal devices might not understand this.  How, when I was a child that if you left an extension off the hook no calls could go in or out.  And that the annoying “off the hook” tone didn’t yet exist.  Ironically, now you could watch the movie on your personal phone that you carry with you at all times.  While this isn’t a perfect movie, it is an engaging one on many levels.  The sisterly rivalry, the growing insanity of Jane, and the helplessness of an invalid all work together to create some frightening moments.  Technology sure makes life convenient, but it cuts off some avenues for horror.  Of course, as Unfriended shows, it opens new venues.  I agree with King—this is one of the actually scary films from before the eighties.

Like Father

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There’s just something about old movies.  After Universal discovered that Depression-Era people would still pay to see scary movies, they made a kind of industry of filming new monsters (for them) or spinning off of their successes.  Several years ago, when Universal was selling collections of their famed monster line up on DVD, I bought a few.  I realized recently that I had never watched Son of Dracula, included in the Dracula DVD set.  While it’s not a great movie, it’s by no stretch a bad one.  The story is complex and soulful, and even though Bela Lugosi’s not in it, the film participates in the ever-growing vampire lore.  It also introduced the world to Alucard, a character that would take off in Japan as a vampiric character in video games and manga.

Katherine, a well-to-do southern belle, met a Count Aculard while traveling in Eastern Europe.  He’s now visiting her in America, much to her fiancé’s chagrin.  A local doctor and friend of the family comes to expect that Alucard, Dracula spelled backwards, of course, may be a vampire.  He brings over a professor acquaintance from Hungary to test his hypothesis.  Meanwhile, Alucard, Dracula’s son, marries Kay and in so doing inherits her estate.  She becomes a vampire, which was her plan all along.  She, however, plans to turn her fiancé into a vampire, after they kill Alucard, so they can spend eternal life together.  The doctor and professor figure out what’s going on, but the local police don’t believe them and are ready to commit the doctor as insane.  Frank, the fiancé, refuses to go along with Kay’s plan, so he kills the Count by destroying his coffin before daybreak, and then also immolates Katherine as well, ridding the New World of vampires.

This is definitely a period piece, but it manages to have a southern Gothic appeal.  The black folk are all servants, and the Hungarian doctor sounds just like Peter Lorre, but the story is complex enough to retain interest.  Lon Chaney, as Alucard, doesn’t have as much screen time as you might expect, but there’s a lot going on in various subplots.  The movie was released in 1943, when there was still a ban on horror movies in war-time England.  The concern about invading foreigners is pretty clearly spelled out but the story is fairly well-told, even with some small holes remaining in the plot.  All of this makes me think I’d better check my other Universal monster DVDs.  There may be some other good bits that I’ve been missing.

Not Afraid

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It’s something many of us do.  Trying to explain why, while religious, spiritual, and moral, we find horror fascinating.  I read Brandon Grafius’ Lurking under the Surface, and when I learned about Joseph Haward’s Be Afraid: How Horror and Faith Can Change the World, I figured I’d better read it too.  Haward is a British Baptist minister who seems to support progressive causes.  He also enjoys horror.  He even finds it prophetic.  I have to admit that when I read the foreword by John E. Colwell I was afraid that this would be one of those books.  You know, the kind that only half-likes horror because their religion tells them so.  Colwell is no horror fan, and his foreword doesn’t set the tone for what follows.  Haward finds horror homiletical.

When I was young I used to see movies and analyze them theologically with my friends.  This was in college and seminary, mostly.  We’d discuss the implications of movies—sometimes horror—and how they fit into our Christian worldview.  This book is like that.  It’s Haward’s reading of various horror films, some television, and some novels, integrating them into his theological outlook.  The book is more about theology than it is about specific horror films, although it does mention quite a few.  The discussion is sometimes hard to follow because the paragraphs are so incredibly long and the style is very theological.  I got the feeling that Haward would be an interesting person to have a conversation with.  His book didn’t really do it for me, however. Some things are simply better in person. (I do know Brandon Grafius, and enjoy our talks.)

I’m not into horror for the violence.  Haward tends to point to that element, but I’m generally looking for the mood.  And avoidance.  Also when I was young I learned the truism, “He who lives to run away, lives to run another day.”  I like to think that I’m brave, but violence really bothers me.  My family finds me a contradiction; I won’t watch movies that are based on “true events” unless they’re speculative.  I don’t need reminding that people can be horrible to each other.  I know that from scanning the headlines and from watching the election results.  No, I use horror to help me cope.  And it works best when I know there’s something supernatural going on.  I’ve grown out of theologizing about movies.  I took plenty of theology courses in college and seminary, but they seemed a bit too abstract to be helpful.  Then I’d go out with my friends and watch a horror movie on the weekend so we could talk about it.  There’s a bit of that nostalgia here.

Not Friendly

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A ghost-revenge story, online.  Unfriended is one of those low-budget horror films that manages to be remarkably effective through the acting and its overall verisimilitude.  It’s also a kind of parable about the dangers of living our lives online.  The only problem is that technology is moving so fast that a ten-year old movie looks outdated.  The scary thing is many people are online even more, especially since the pandemic that came a few years after the movie was released.  Six high-schoolers are chatting on Skype (see what I mean?).  A friend in the group died by suicide a year ago because of an embarrassing video posted of her on YouTube.  Even a mature viewer like me can easily recall how deeply peer pressure cut in high school.  It’s a difficult time for all of us.  In any case, an unidentified person has joined the call and makes threatening comments via chat.

Of course, there are multiple apps (we called them programs long ago) running and nearly the entire movie is on the screen of one of the kids’ laptops.  In real life I was waiting for my low battery warning to come on, because I was watching it on a laptop, and all the notices that appeared on the upper right-hand corner made the thing look real.  Naturally enough, the kids start getting killed off.  Since this is horror their deaths are shown, if briefly, on screen and mostly they’re bizarre.  Hovering in the background is a webpage that warns against opening and answering messages from the dead.  As Blaire (whose screen we’re seeing) comes to realize that the unknown person is the girl who died by suicide, Laura (the dead friend) forces them to play a game of Never Have I Ever.  This leads to dissension and fighting as confessions come out and friends begin dying.

There’s a heavy moral element involved—the teens are being “punished” for typical teen behaviors.  Interestingly, toward the end I noticed that Blaire had a crucifix on her bedroom wall.  The kids don’t talk about religion at all (something I did do as a teen) but they all have a moral sense of what they did wrong.  The webpage about not answering online messages from the dead suggests confessing your sins, if you do open such a message.  Blaire tries to confess, but she has a secret that’s kept until the very end, so I can’t say what it is here.  I wouldn’t want to be unfriended for providing a spoiler.

Slimy Monsters

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Stuart Gordon apparently had in mind to do an H. P. Lovecraft cycle, as Roger Corman did with Poe.  I first saw Dagon—clearly his best—and some time later picked up Re-Animator.  From Beyond was his second Lovecraft movie and it doesn’t have the visual appeal of Dagon, but it is certainly a passable gross-out for those who enjoy slimy monsters.  Gordon was pretty obviously of greater libido than Lovecraft ever was.  From Beyond puts sex in the spotlight’s periphery without making it absolutely central to the story.  A Dr. Pretorius has built a “resonator” that allows him to see extra-dimensional beings.  It does this by stimulating the pineal gland.  His assistant Dr. Tillinghast, is present when a creature from, well, beyond, kills Pretorius by wrenching off his head.  Tillinghast is suspected in his murder but is being held in an asylum rather than a traditional jail.

Dr. McMichaels, the love interest in the film, believes that Tillinghast is sane and that he actually did witness these beings from beyond.  As a scientist, she wants to see if the resonator really works.  It does, but in addition to providing the ability to experience the other realm, it also boosts the sex drive of those under its influence.  She decides, against the warning of Dr. Tillinghast, to try the resonator once more, but this time the other-dimensional Pretorius has become strong enough to prevent her from shutting the machine down.  Tillinghast is transformed into a modified human with an extension from his forehead and as she tries to explain what she witnessed, McMichaels is classified as insane.  She and Tillinghast escape the asylum and McMichaels manages to blow up the machine, ultimately going insane for real.

Lovecraft strenuously avoided sex in his written work, limiting the number of women characters who appear.  I suspect he would not have been pleased with this treatment of his story.  Gordon went on to make one more Lovecraft movie beyond Dagon, a television movie of Dreams in the Witch House (which I haven’t seen).  Of the three theatrical releases, I find Dagon the most convincing since the mood is serious and it seems to capture much of the feel of Lovecraft’s “Shadow over Innsmouth,” one of his best stories.  Lovecraft himself apparently didn’t care that much for that particular tale.  And he was critical of the conversion of stories into movies.  It’s a good thing that one doesn’t have to see eye-to-eye with Lovecraft to appreciate his works.  And some of them transfer to film reasonably well.  Especially if you’re in the mood for slimy monsters.

Non-Believer

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Heretic may be the ultimate horror and religion movie.  It’s also a film you may need to see multiple times to follow the all-important dialogue.  It’s a movie that would’ve been front and center in Holy Horror.  And it’s deceptively simple.  As I’ve written many times before, I try to know very little about a film before I watch it.  This if often difficult with the internet and people wanting to tell you about the latest cinematic marvel.  I managed to watch Heretic knowing only that it was about two Mormon missionaries visiting a potential convert.  If you want to leave your level of knowledge at that point before seeing the movie you might not want to read on.  You have been warned.

e two women in on an inclement evening, assuring them his wife is in the next room.  He then, ever so innocently, questions them about their beliefs and about religion in general.  The missionaries grow increasingly concerned that there is no wife and that Mr. Reed (Grant) has been toying with them.  They find themselves locked in his house as he unrelentingly questions them and asking them what, and why, they really believe.  Charmingly he assures them they can leave at any time, but they have to pick a door—the lady and the tiger-like—marked either belief or disbelief.  (Both lead to the same place, and it’s not out.)  Using a trick he attempts to get them to die by suicide.  When they refuse, he kills one of them but the other discovers the truth, “the one true religion.”  I won’t tell you what it is.

The film is remarkable in that there is no horror without religion.  I made a similar argument about The Wicker Man, in my book on the movie.  When we ask ourselves what makes a horror film scary, seldom is the answer overtly “religion.”  Usually it’s a monster of some description.  Or the threat of annihilation.  Or plain old death.  Religion can be scary.  In fact, it has historically been the nepenthe for death and sorrow in this life.  Some would trace the origin of religion to that very phenomenon.  I’ve been writing for years on this blog that religion and horror belong together.  They overlap.  They blend.  They, on occasion, may be the same thing.  Heretic displays that clearly.  If I haven’t spoiled it for you, I highly recommend it.  I can honestly say it’s the first movie that has literally given me nightmares, in many, many years.

Book Stages

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Books appear in stages.  All publishers are different.  These platitudes encapsulate my experience in finding a venue for my ideas.  Sleepy Hollow as American Myth has just appeared in McFarland’s spring and summer catalogue.  I haven’t seen the proofs yet, but I suspect I will before too long now.  What’s with the spring and summer catalogue?  Well, believe it or not, books are seasonal.  Publishers go by seasons.  For many academic publishers there are two seasons: Spring/Summer and Fall/Winter.  The timing of certain books may fall in a specific place within those seasons but many academic books are aimed at classroom adoptions so early spring and early autumn are the most popular times.  It’s no coincidence that academic conferences also cluster around the semester system, the big ones being either autumn or spring.  Academics have a migratory instinct.

Personally, I’m hoping Sleepy Hollow will be out in late summer.  I don’t have any control over that, but it’s about then that normal people’s thoughts start turning toward falling leaves, long nights, and monsters.  Every year there’s a day in August when I step outside and literally smell autumn in the air.  As a kid seasons seemed like something as rigid as a biblical law: spring was March through May, summer June through August, and so forth.  The older I get, the more I realize how negotiable seasons are.  The Celts celebrated the start of spring in February.  Yes, there are lots of cold days yet to come, but the early signs of spring have begun.  For early risers, we finally start to observe earlier sunrises.  (These technically start around January 10, but they’re slow getting out of bed.)

You might think the ideal season for a book on spooky stuff, like Sleepy Hollow, would be timed for release in the fall/winter cycle.  Not necessarily.  Both Holy Horror and Nightmares with the Bible hit the market after Halloween.  Normal people’s thoughts had shifted to Thanksgiving.  I’m pleased that Sleepy Hollow will be released a bit earlier.  Summer is ideal for Halloween-themed books.  And yes, I devote a chapter to Halloween and the Headless Horseman.  They are closely related.  So I was glad to receive McFarland’s spring/summer catalogue and find my book on page two.  I don’t have a publication date yet, but I’m looking forward to being part of the discussion about one of my favorite ghost stories of all time.  Speaking of which, it’s almost time to begin gathering firewood for next winter, or at least it will be in summer.  And it’s not that far away.

Dusk’s Early Dark

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It may be the strangest vampire movie ever, and that’s saying something.  To understand this, you have to realize that I read as little as possible about a movie before seeing it.  I try to avoid trailers, and recommendations from well-wishers play a big part in my choices.  I came across From Dusk till Dawn in a couple of online lists and when I saw it was Quentin Tarantino and George Clooney, I doubted the vampire part.  Indeed, for the first twenty minutes to half hour I was convinced I’d stepped into Pulp Fiction 2.  (Tarantino wrote it, after all.)  Those kinds of movies unnerve me, and just when I was wondering if I’d made a mistake, it became a monster movie.  An action horror film.  Lots of vampires and, surprisingly lots of talk about God.

In case you haven’t seen it, Clooney and Tarantino are brothers out on a crime spree.  Harvey Keitel is an ex-minister out on a road trip with his teenage kids.  After his wife’s death, he lost his faith although he still believes in God.  (Classic theodicy.)  The criminals abduct the family to get them into Mexico where they’ve made a deal with a guy.  They meet at about the most salacious strip club you can imagine, one that caters only to truckers and bikers.  It turns out that the staff and strippers are all vampires and they prey on the patrons.  Okay, so the story doesn’t hold together.  Clooney’s character, which is hardly the sort you’d want anywhere near you, tells Keitel’s that unless he re-finds his faith none of them will make it out alive.

There’s quite a bit of humor packed into the over-the-top fight scene, including dialogue about how to defeat vampires.  A couple of the patrons, it turns out, are pretty adept at that sort of thing, but the human holdouts keep getting bitten and have to be killed.  Finally, the titular dawn arrives, leaving just Clooney and the minister’s daughter alive.  I couldn’t help but to be reminded of Willy’s Wonderworld, in overall story arc, but the two are completely different in tone.  The fact that the movie is 28 years old and that I’d only heard of it recently really surprised me.  Especially since religion is so heavily involved in the story.  Not only that, but the message about religion, in service of the story, is that belief is good.  And this from a murderer and a thief.  Strange indeed, but not easily forgotten.

Worse Seed

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Not too long ago I watched The Bad Seed.  In the 1950s it probably wasn’t considered horror, but it is quite a scary movie.  I’d classify it as horror—not all fifties horror was guys in rubbery suits.  When reading about the movie afterwards, I learned the novel had a darker ending (the movie was pretty dark as it was).  So I decided to read the book by William March.  The movie’s fairly faithful, up to the ending.  As usual, the novel adds more detail and reveals some things rather differently.  For example, Christine Penmark, the mother of Rhoda, can’t ask her father if she’s adopted.  She “learns” this through inference.  Indeed, the book leaves you wondering if she’s actually mentally unstable.  The proof that she’s the daughter of a serial killer is strong but not definitive.  And her father is already dead when the story opens.

The school outing, where Rhoda claims her second victim, is where the movie opens.  Rhoda is expelled from the school because the women who run it can’t abide Rhoda’s dishonesty.  The character of Leroy is very well portrayed in the movie, but he too seems to have some kind of mental illness.  Monica Breedlove is accurately presented as a busybody, but she too spends a lot of time analyzing people, including herself.  Rhoda is, of course, a literal sociopath.  It’s fair to say the novel is an extended exploration of mental illness of various sorts.  I remember from growing up in the sixties that many conditions that are now regularly diagnosed simply weren’t recognized.  Kids were blamed for bad behaviors that were, in all likelihood, caused by being somewhere on the spectrum.

Much water has passed under the bridge since the fifties.  This book was a bestseller then, but I only learned about it last year.  Indeed, it’s been adapted to film three times and was a Broadway play before all that.  There was a sequel released a couple years back.  Rhoda Penmark is herself a trope of the narcissist who lacks empathy.  Hmm, where else do we see that?  It’s still analyzed as primarily a “nature verses nurture” novel, but I suspect there’s something more going on.  We’ve moved beyond Freud and this novel probes what goes on in the minds of those who spend too much time alone, as well as who happen to be the mothers of pathological child murderers.  And the ending is different, but the movie’s is equally as bleak.  The Bad Seed a good book for this particular January.

Light Shadows

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I often do things backwards.  It’s not really intentional.  You see, I’m busy with my day job and something most people may not realize is that researching and writing are also a full-time job.  Only they don’t pay well, unless you’re a professor.  In any case, I find out about things in odd ways.  A friend got me watching What We Do in the Shadows, the current FX television show.  I then realized it was based on a movie so I decided I should see that before going any further.  The movie is funny, but the television show develops some of the same bits so really, it is best to see the movie first.  It turns out that while I’ve been busy working, and writing books on other types of horror movies, this franchise has been developing.  So what’s it about?  Vampires unliving together.

One of the contradictions about vampires, as the undead, is that they live by certain rules that make them distinct.  Going back to Bram Stoker’s Dracula, they don’t always live alone.  In fact, three female vampires live in Castle Dracula (although the Count moves to England without them).  What We Do in the Shadows is based on the premise of vampire roommates in contemporary housing.  How would they get along as roommates?  Many of us have experienced roommates and we know the kinds of conflicts that normally arise.  Would the undead have some other complications?  In case you haven’t gathered so already, this is comedy.  There are a few vampire chase scenes and a hilarious interaction with werewolves, all filmed as a mockumentary.  It’s pretty funny stuff.

There’s nothing too serious here, but there is bloodshed, of course.  And the developing of different characters for the undead and putting them together in one house does lead to all kinds of situations, some of them adult.  The television show is binge-worthy, if you’ve got the time and if you like vampires.  If you want to start from the beginning, the movie sets the premise well.  Vampires are so well established culturally that there’s plenty of room to fly.  Comedy horror has really come into its own.  Vampires have been culturally ascendant for quite some time now.  They are yet another thing I was fascinated by as a child that later became cool.  I wrote one of my senior term papers on vampires in high school, before college convinced me such things were puerile.  Now I’m finding that the culture has gone after them.  As I say, sometimes I do things backwards, even on a large scale.  

Poe Day

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Perhaps best known for his rabidly racist The Birth of a Nation, D. W. Griffith was nevertheless influential in early filmmaking.  I’m fascinated by how literature made its way to celluloid, particularly in the early days.  It was thus that I discovered Griffith’s Edgar Allen [sic] Poe, a silent film from 1909.  A dramatized version of Poe’s writing of “The Raven,” this seven-minute movie opens with Virginia Poe—the “Lenore” of the poem—in the process of dying at the Poe’s hovel.  Not able to keep warm or to find nourishment, she languishes on a cot until Poe arrives home and covers her with his coat.  At that moment a raven appears on the bust of Pallas above the chamber door, leading Poe to write the poem in a white heat.  He knows it’s a masterpiece and leaves Virginia promising success.

In a scene only too familiar to any writer, Poe takes the poem to the publishers, three of whom simply dismiss him, the third laughing at his work.  This particular scene rings so true.  A fourth editor buys it from him on the spot.  This is, in fact, how publishing works.  I’ve had 33 short stories either published or accepted for publication.  By far the majority of them were rejected multiple times.  One of them, previously turned down by six editors, ended up winning a prize.  So it goes.  You’ll never find an editor who “gets” you every time.  Even those who like your work may eventually start sending you elsewhere.  I often wonder how many writers of what would be classics died unpublished because of some editor’s choice.  But back to Poe.

Screenshot: public domain,

Newly paid for his work, he buys food and a blanket and returns home jubilant.  Of course, it is only to find Virginia dead.  Poe’s life did have its share of intense drama.  His death remains mysterious all these years later, and Virginia’s death was a severe blow to him.  “The Raven” was published in 1845 and Virginia died two years later, with Poe himself passing yet two years beyond that.  This film, which I learned about from Jonathan Elmer’s In Poe’s Wake, was made sixty years after Poe’s death.  He’d already become an icon by then, instantly recognizable in pancake makeup.  But even now, more than a century later, publishing is still a matter of the same process.  One of my own novels has been declined over 100 times, despite having once been under contract.  I do know the feeling of being rejected by publishers, even as I participate in a ritual as old as writing for publication.  Happy birthday, Mr. Poe.