Historic Vampires

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Vampire movies have always been a guilty pleasure.  The thing is, there are so many of them that watching them all would be the task of a lifetime (and a substantial budget).  Those of us who are constantly looking for, shall we say, new blood, can find that our lack of knowledge extends back for years, particularly if a movie didn’t make it big in our home country.  Daughters of Darkness is an early Euro-horror about Elizabeth Báthory.  A stylish, almost art house movie, what particularly struck me about it is that it was very well written.  The use of blood is restrained, given the topic, but verbal descriptions of Báthory’s excesses makes for a particularly gruesome scene.  So, about the story.  (This is from 1971, so I won’t worry about spoilers too much.)

A young couple (his backstory is inadequately explained in the movie, apart from being aristocratic), newlyweds, are headed to introduce her to his family.  Stefan (he) isn’t exactly the ideal husband (played convincingly by John Karlen), but Valerie (she) really wants to meet “mother.”  Stefan stalls the trip, and, in the off season, the couple have a luxury hotel to themselves.  Then Elizabeth Báthory shows up with her “secretary.”  Stefan is a little too interested in violence, as a string of murders make the headlines.  Meanwhile, Elizabeth begins making moves on Valerie.  We come to understand fairly early on that she’s a vampire, but no fangs appear and she’s always impeccably dressed and sophisticated.  Her secretary, who is having second thoughts, is accidentally killed while setting up Stefan as an unfaithful husband—again, the writing here is quite good—and Valerie becomes Elizabeth’s new secretary.

There’s a strong feminist aspect to this film, perhaps because Delphine Seyrig (Báthory) was a prominent feminist and would be attracted to such roles, it would seem.  The daughter of an archaeologist in Beirut, she supported women’s rights and there appear to be elements of this in the movie, although it was written by four men.  I was a bit too young for this movie when it came out, and art movies wouldn’t have stood a chance where I grew up, at least not in circles my family knew, so although Dark Shadows mainstay Karlen took a rare male lead role in the movie I’d been completely unaware of it.  But then, vampires are that way, aren’t they?  They tend to be old and well-hidden in the shadows.  Then they come at you with a bite when you least expect it.

Feeling Gothic

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Gothic is an odd movie.  I first saw it while in seminary and have come back to it now and again.  I had been thinking of Frankenstein, so I decided to refresh my memory.  A pastiche of opium-fueled images and hedonism it nevertheless brings some religion into the horror.  In case you aren’t familiar with this Ken Russell piece, it’s a movie version of the stay of the Shelleys with Lord Byron, his physician John Polidori, and Mary’s stepsister Claire, in the summer of 1816.  During that visit, the basic ideas for Frankenstein emerged, and Polidori wrote an early vampire story that later inspired Dracula.  The religion comes in the form of Polidori’s Catholicism and his fear of condemnation for being a homosexual.  At one point, when the friends are about to read ghost stories, Percy Shelley says they’re more fun than any Bible.

Of course, in actual life Shelley and Byron were atheists, but the movie portrays the five raising some kind of entity during a seance.  They then spend the remainder of that stormy night trying to drive the entity back into their minds from the physical reality they gave it.  It’s a weird movie with lots of incongruous shots and some gross-out moments.  Ken Russell was known for his flamboyant style, and this movie is a good example of that.  It’s not great but it is moody and I come back to it when I want something, well, gothic.  The year 1816 was called “the year without a summer,” because of the volcanic winter caused by an eruption of Mount Tambora, and some have speculated that the bad weather of that year may have led to the creation of Frankenstein.

Every time I watch it, I wonder what the appeal is.  There’s a lot of God and Devil talk, and Byron was a fascinating character.  Julian Sands’ overacting in every scene makes me wonder what Shelley was like in real life.  I’ve occasionally read about his relationship with Byron and each seems to have had at least a supporting role in the iconic pair of monsters, Frankenstein and Dracula.  The two would be forever associated with the Universal release of movies named after them in 1931.  Gothic never made it big—I only found out about it because a seminary friend invited me over to watch it on VHS one weekend.  Still, it made enough of an impression to bring me back when the mood is right.  Even if it’s strange.

Yes, Yes

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You had to’ve seen this coming.  Ouija: Origin of Evil, with a different director and writer, and the same producer, pulled off the better prequel/sequel.  I don’t give that accolade lightly.  Now, I’m not a professional film critic, and I like to say nice things whenever possible, but even sequels/prequels that professional critics do say are better often find me in disagreement.  In this case I stand with them.  And I have some ideas, apart from natural talent, why it is so in this case.  The problem with ouija, and spirit boards, is that you have no way of knowing who or what may be answering your questions.  In the first movie we just know it’s someone with bad intent, and we need to wait until all the twists are finished to find out who.  The second begins with the premise that we already know who, but we want to know why and how.

But it goes deeper than that.  The first movie left religion out completely.  The prequel scoops it back in by the shovelful.  And if you want to make a movie about ouija work, you need to have demons.  To begin with, the family previously in the house is Catholic.  The kids go to Catholic school.  The headmaster is a priest who wants to help the family.  He quotes the Bible (Holy Sequel, anyone?)  He recognizes that the entity isn’t who it says it is.  Although showing demons is always a bit of a dicey proposition, the prequel opts for the preferred look from the period, and show them only dimly.  It still has to work with the world built by the original, which leads to a strange backstory of a Nazi in the basement operating on homeless people, but you have to work with what you’re given.

So the second movie is scarier and better made.  It didn’t earn as much as the first one did, though.  The idea hadn’t, I don’t think, been tapped out.  Rather, I think once you’ve laid out the premise, viewers have to be enticed back.  If a subject is mishandled, it does require extra work to convince viewers that the next experience will be better.  The critics, however, immediately saw the difference.  You really don’t have to know the story behind Ouija to see this movie, but it definitely helps.  It earned enough that unofficial sequels were released before the official prequel.  One of them only by a matter of days.  It pays to get it right the first time, and if you’re working with a naturally religious topic for your horror, you shouldn’t be afraid of religion.

Lovecraftian Advice

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It seemed natural enough to follow up Stephen King’s On Writing with H. P. Lovecraft’s famous essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature.”  This piece, widely quoted, is available online but it is lengthy and I wanted the convenience of not reading it on a screen.  What can I say?  I like to turn pages.  I found a print copy, along with two other, shorter Lovecraft essays in Supernatural Horror in Literature & Other Literary Essays.  This was published by Wildside Press, which added a brief introduction by the speculative writer Darrell Schweitzer.  The text of the main essay was obviously computer-read—a couple reading errors remain—but it is clear enough to read.  Like Poe before him, and King following, Lovecraft put down some of his thoughts on the craft of writing.  Interestingly, Lovecraft is seldom considered as a producer of belles-lettres, but he is world famous as a horror writer now.

The essay itself is worth reading.  Mostly it is a summary of what Lovecraft felt was worthy weird fiction.  I tend to agree with much of what he says here, as would be evident were anyone to read my own fiction writing.  I can’t say that I learned this at Lovecraft’s knee.  I only discovered who he was when I was teaching at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh.  I did not have literary friends growing up; my reading tastes were determined by myself, largely based on what was available at Goodwill any given week.  Nobody I knew read Lovecraft and although his books may have been in that bin, he wasn’t really someone I’d have known to keep an eye out for.  As a child I didn’t think of myself as a horror reader.  I liked monsters, and vampires were among the most immediately recognizable.  My brother, if I recall, got me started on Poe.

When I began writing fiction, probably around twelve or thirteen, it was weird fiction.  One of my other influences was Ray Bradbury.  I agree with Lovecraft that, to be interesting, fiction often requires a speculative element.  I do read realism, of course, but I really enjoy tales with a bit of supernatural.  It’s useful to read Lovecraft’s ideas about influential writers.  I’ve got my homework cut out for me.  I can certainly recommend this edition for anyone who wants to read this lengthy essay in print form.  The one thing that struck me as weird was the cover design.  It features a woman wearing a strapless dress in a cemetery.  Lovecraft famously didn’t really have women as one of his main themes, and his women characters are among his most inaccurately drawn.  Still, it’s best not to judge a book by its cover.

Yes, Maybe

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The truth is, only experts and professionals can really keep up with horror films.  As the most successful genre of, well, genre films, there are tons of them.  I completely missed Ouija when it came out about a decade ago, despite the fact that it did well at the box office.  The only reason I watched it now was that a friend sent me a list of horror films from a reputable website that recommended the prequel to Ouija, but I felt that I needed to see the original before finding out what happened behind the scenes.  The original didn’t fare well with the critics and it’s pretty clear why.  The story, although it has twists, isn’t really convincing and the acting is off at times.  (Five teens left alone to watch a haunted house while their parents just take off for weeks at a time?)  Still, it’s atmospheric, and it plays on a scary theme.

I must confess that ouija boards frighten me.  I consider myself both rational and skeptical (in the classic sense), but there’s just enough doubt with spirit boards.  I’ve never owned or played with one.  (Interestingly, the movie was funded in part by Hasbro, the current seller of the game.)  In fact, when I discovered the Grove City College yearbook was called Ouija, I was a bit put off.  (By the time I graduated they’d changed it to The Bridge.)  Although GCC wasn’t really traditionally gothic, like most colleges it had its share of ghost stories.  Even in conservative Christian country things go bump in the night.  And while most stories told about tragedy after using an ouija board are unverified in any way, still…

So, the movie posits a deceiving entity that kills teens who contact it.  I suspect I need to watch the prequel to find out why.  It does manage to have a few scares, but it’s mostly about atmosphere.  I agree with Poe on this point—atmosphere’s often the point of a story.  Although the critics are right (who discovers a body in the basement and goes to an asylum for advice instead of notifying the police?), some of us do watch horror films for this kind of haunted house experience.  And while I’ve got Poe in the room, the threat to young ladies is there.  One thing missing, though, is any talk of religion.  No Ed and Lorraine Warren warnings of demons.  This is a straight-up nasty dead person who likes to kill those who want to communicate with their dead friends.  It does create a mood.  And it cries out for a prequel.

Academic Publishing

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I had lunch with a friend a couple months back.  He is one of the few people who’s read The Wicker Man (the Devil’s Advocate version).  Not many reviews appeared and no royalties at all have yet followed its publication.  The funny thing is, when I search for reviews I notice that the book is “for sale” on far more websites than copies actually sold (I’m assuming).  You see, one of the best-kept secrets in publishing (both trade and academic) is the number of copies sold.  Publishers are terrified of poachers after their authors, and don’t advertise actual sales figures.  For an author only the royalty statements reveal just how many (or few) copies ever made it to the hands of potential readers.  We’re all adults here; we know that not every book purchased is read.  I do wonder if there has been any interest in this little book at all.

My friend actually went and watched the movie because of my modest little book.  The film The Wicker Man is widely known in certain circles, but it is still a movie with a cult following.  Horror fans know it, of course, with some declaring loudly that it’s not horror.  It gets referenced all the time in more mainstream media.  I occasionally read quirky little books like Your Guide to Not Getting Murdered in a Quaint English Village.  I wasn’t surprised to see The Wicker Man (the movie) referenced there.  As I discuss in the book, it’s even the subject of a Radiohead video for their song “Burn the Witch.”  Beyond a few academics, however, nobody’s really interested.

My friend suggested a topic for a new book for me to write.  I didn’t have the heart to tell him that, barring a teaching post coming my way, I’ve given up writing books for academic presses.  I’m pleased McFarland accepted Sleepy Hollow as American Myth, but the crude cost-benefit analysis that I do tells me writing books for academic presses, without library access, is always a money-losing venture.  Remember those old Guiness Book of World Records paperbacks?  I recall seeing, as a child, the least successful author listed.  Of course I don’t remember his name.  I now know that at least that record hasn’t been broken.  Not officially, but when books cost so much to write… Academic publishers are facing hard times but I don’t see the wisdom in pricing your books so that nobody can afford them, just to scrape in a few university library sales.  Not to sound as mercenary as a Hessian, but what’s in it for me?  Certainly not tenure or groundskeeper Willie’s retirement grease.  I’m not paid like a professor. Right now, though, I’m wondering if maybe I’ve broken that record after all.

Not the Witch

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Hagazussa came to my attention from, I believe, the New York Times.  In the autumn normally staid news sources start suggesting horror films to watch.  Subtitled A Heathen’s Curse, this new Euro-horror (filmed in German) immediately reminded me of Robert Egger’s The Witch, but with a lot less plot.  It’s a moody and disturbing story of the life of an outcast young woman in the sixteenth century.  Raised by a poor, goat-herding mother, Albrun watches her mother die of the Black Death, when Albrun’s a tween.  She continues living in her childhood home, with a daughter whose origin, like that of Albrun, is never explained.  The locals shun her as a witch but a seemingly friendly villager befriends her before turning against her and betraying her.  After this neighbor, and then others, die, Albrun drowns her infant daughter after eating a toadstool in the woods.  She then bursts into flames atop a hill in the Alps.

As folk horror, the movie is more about the haunted landscape than about an intricately plotted story.  There’s nevertheless a great deal of symbolism used, including much regarding Eve—apples, serpents, and goddesses all play a part.  Locals fear pagans, and the church interior lined with bones reminded me strongly of St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna, where plague victims’ bones fill the underground vaults.  Seeing such a place reminds you forcefully of your insignificance.  Hagazussa is an art film as well as folk horror, and it appeals to gothic sensibilities.  There’s very little dialogue.  Indeed, the loneliness of Albrun is a major aspect of this moody, atmospheric work.  Such stories always remind me of how difficult life was for those who had to try to scratch a living from the land.  Existence was tenuous at best.  Especially for women alone, as determined by Christian society.

The movie left me reflective.  It also underscored how religion and horror tread the same paths repeatedly.  The village priest tells Albrun that sacrilege must be cleansed, even as he hands her her mother’s skull, polished and decorated.  He wearily admits that he struggles to led the community.  Indeed, Albrun’s new “friend” castigates Jews and heathens, even as she takes part in the robbing of Albrun’s livelihood.  Witches, as “monsters” were invented by the church as fears reached out to point to new sources.  Even if they had to be fabricated at the expense of innocent people.  Fear operates that way still, as anyone who watches political ads knows.  It’s easier to persecute than to educate, it seems.  In the end, Albrun burns up and we realize we’ve just watched a parable.

Learning to Write

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If you’re not famous as a writer, nobody asks you for advice on improving their game.  Part of that is simply having a writer’s outlook.  We all have our own ideas about how it’s done.  I admire the work of Stephen King.  He’s a gifted storyteller and his books often deal with the kinds of things I think about.  I had his book On Writing on my reading list for years.  What finally got me to read it was finding it in a local independent bookstore and wanting to support said venue.  I found it both helpful and a little scary to read.  This is part memoir and part instruction manual by someone who isn’t full of ego, despite his success.  Egoism isn’t uncommon among writers, but King realizes that many people have talent, but not all know how to bring it to any kind of success, no matter how modest.

I really enjoyed reading the memoir parts.  Indeed, I wish I could’ve read them when I was, say, in college.  My own trajectory as a writer might’ve turned out differently.  His instructive sections are also helpful, but the part about finding an agent is hopelessly out of date.  The internet has made doing so both easier and more difficult.  Too many people now flood agents’ offices with pitches that you practically need an agent to get you an agent.  I know this from experience.  Nevertheless, King’s advice generally feels quite solid.  And it’s encouraging to hear of the commonalities we share in our upbringing.  Writers often begin in less-than-ideal situations.  If we can struggle out of them, some can find success in writing while others manage to do it on the side (this isn’t my day job).  But write we do.

As with most of King’s books that I’ve read, this one went fairly quickly.  Not every book that I read makes me feel eager for reading time, but King always does.  In part, at least with On Writing, it’s because I can’t help but wonder if I’m doing this right.  During the course of reading his book, two more rejection letters came for my fiction projects.  Any writer knows that you have to deal with lots and lots of these.  King started earlier, but, like me, he kept his rejection slips.  Eventually I ditched mine because they’re too discouraging.  And I still submit to what has become, since this book was written, a very, very crowded fiction market place.  Still, this is an encouraging book, offering advice from someone who knows what he’s doing.  It’s a shame I waited so long to read it.

Dead Trilogy

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When we lived in New Jersey our internet wasn’t fast enough for streaming.  I’d watched George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, but I was never able to find a DVD of Day of the Dead.  Well, it finally came around to streaming (thanks, Freevee), so I was able to complete the trilogy.  It doesn’t get discussed as much as the previous two, and it’s clear that it doesn’t come up to their level.  Still, the discussions of larger issues—God, civilization, and military power—are worth pondering.  There are a few jump startles but less intensive gore than the previous two, until well into it.  So, here’s the story: a base of operations has been set up in Florida where the military is overseeing civilian scientific experiments on the animated dead.  The military guy in charge is a real jerk and threatens to shoot those who don’t comply.  Also, there’s just one woman among them (who made that decision?).

As might be expected, things go haywire.  The head scientist, “Frankenstein” to this crew, is trying to teach the dead not to eat the living—to coexist.  The living are hopelessly outnumbered, and despite the Jamaican civilian, John, suggesting they go to a deserted island and start all over, everyone seems content to hang out and fight each other.  In the end, military overreach leads to everyone being killed except John, Sarah (the woman scientist), and Bill, who seems to be Irish.  In the end the three of them fly to a deserted island and you kind of get the idea that this will be a bit more of an R-rated Gilligan situation.  The film is campy and there is a comic tone throughout despite the serious issues raised and the actual horror elements (blood and zombies lurching out of the dark).

It actually also attempts to explain how the dead continue to move and why they eat with no internal organs.  The brain, down to its reptilian base, retains the eating instinct.  Frankenstein, before being killed by the military, is training the promising dead, especially Bub.  In the end, Bub kills the military guy.  As far as the story goes, it seems to send mixed messages.  The good guys do prevail and the dead, at least Bub, is more righteous than the fascist military that holds sway via constant threat.  One does get the sense that Romero was having fun with his zombie movies and some of the special effects were quite good.  I’m glad to have finished the trilogy, but I don’t think I’ll bother watching the remake, which was, back in the day, fairly easy to find on DVD.  They’re never as good as the dead they try to reanimate.

Another Level

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Jack Finney is probably best remembered as the person who came up with the idea for The Invasion of the Body Snatchers.  His book, The Body Snatchers, was the inspiration behind the two movies based on it, as well as various knockoffs.  The Third Level is a collection of short stories he wrote.  I’ve been trying to introduce more short stories into my literary diet, and this one was recommended by Stephen King in Danse Macabre.  Specifically, he mentioned it as being more like what The Twilight Zone should’ve been than much of what Rod Serling wrote.  Now, I’m an unapologetic Rod Serling fan.  This is based on memories from childhood when I watched the show and, let’s be honest here, wished he could be my father.  I already had a taste for the unusual and sometimes macabre, and so I was curious what King thought might do Serling better.

The Third Level was labeled as science fiction, but sci-fi and horror share more than a boundary or two and at least four of the stories have nothing sciency about them.  As a collection it’s good in the same sense as a mature reading of Ray Bradbury is good.  I would’ve liked this—probably loved it—as a kid.  I was reading, however, for The Twilight Zone.  There are some good twist endings here, but not all the stories have them.  A couple of them are pretty straightforward whimsical romances.  Many of them feel very much like they were written in the forties and fifties.  A couple of the stories, late in the collection, I really liked.  They were a bit more Zonish than some of the others.

One of the problems in writing a brief post on a collection—and no collection is uniformly great—is that it’s difficult to give a sense of the whole.  So instead I’ll just focus for a minute on the last story, “Contents of the Dead Man’s Pockets.”  This one shows the power of Finney’s descriptive writing and it caused physical reactions I seldom get when reading.  It involves a man climbing out on an eleventh-story ledge to reclaim an important bit of paper that blew out the window.  More than once I almost had to put the book down.  Fear of falling is deeply embedded in the human psyche and Finney is able to probe it for more pages than I was comfortable reading.  Well done, sir.  Overall, the collection is good to have read.  It won’t change my mind about the Zone, however.  It reached me a little too late to do that.

Oblong Box

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When Borders was closing—a sad day in the annals of American readers—things were marked down.  On one venture to a remaining store somewhere in New Jersey, where the checkout line snaked like one of those around a Times Square theater before the doors open, I picked up Edgar Allan Poe Complete Tales and Poems.  Poe has, of course, been in the public domain for many decades so anybody can publish his works.  I did attempt to sit down and read through this behemoth that contains 73 short stories, but stumbled at “Hans Pfaall,” the first.  This story is really a novelette, in today’s measure, coming in at nearly 19,000 words.  (It took Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque to get me through it.)  So I’ve been content to dip into it now and again to read one of Poe’s stories.  In print. When the mood hits.

I read “The Oblong Box” in preparation for watching the movie.  I had never encountered this story before, and I prefer to read the base before attempting the latter adaptations (particularly by AIP).  The problem with reading Poe from this remove—in the light of his reputation—is that even the title tells us the box is a coffin.  How it is to be used in Poe’s tale may be unknown at first.  Here Poe divides his characteristic obsessiveness between the narrator and Mr. Wyatt, his temperamental artist friend who is newly married.  Wyatt, the owner of said oblong box, takes it on a voyage by boat from Charleston to New York.  The narrator obsesses over what might be in the box, being kept in a cramped stateroom rather than in the hold.  A storm leads to a shipwreck and rather than be rescued, Wyatt binds himself to the box and leaps into the ocean.  I won’t put the reveal here, but you get the idea. Today the title gives away Poe’s original twist.

There are still many of Poe’s stories that I haven’t read.  I’ve had enough of a head start, however, that I may eventually make it through those he published.  I’m aware that some of them may be funny, and some are tales of ratiocination.  Some may be completely unexpected.  Like many writers, Poe’s reputation is based on certain of his most well-known tales.  But also like most writers, his interest ranged fairly widely.  And he had that sense of “what if” that tends to drive those of us who write in a similar vein.  But these days we know that if we see an oblong box we’ll already have a pretty good idea of what’s inside.

Photo by Tom Oates, 2013; This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license. Attribution: Nabokov at English Wikipedia

Ending the Cycle

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Curious to finish out the “Poe Cycle” of American International Pictures, I looked up The Oblong Box.  The only thing similar to Poe’s tale is the title, as viewers must’ve come to have expected even in 1969.  Poe was the marketing to sell the film, but not much more.  Okay, the theme of premature burial has Poe’s fingerprints all over it, but that’s not part of his story “The Oblong Box.”  Now, as for the movie, it has several subplots and a pretty high body count.  Its ending isn’t really explained, but after starting out as seeming racist, it comes out justifying the actions of the Africans at the beginning.  In the middle it’s a muddle.  Pacing is completely off and some sub-plots, such as the police investigation, are summarily dropped.  Apart from the positive view of Black people, which is important, the film is a confusing criss-cross of unsavory motivations.

The Markham brothers own an Africa plantation and the trampling of a slave by a horse leads to revenge on the part of the slaves.  The scarred brother, Edward, is driven insane and he escapes his brother Julian’s care by being buried alive.  Grave-robbers, however, want him so Christopher Lee can experiment on his corpse.  Edward escapes again and dons a scarlet mask, but his insanity leads him to kill a variety of people, looking for the witch doctor who can cure him.  Meanwhile, an unscrupulous lawyer is cashing in on the brothers’ wealth but ends up being killed by Edward.  There’s a rather pointless bar fight, and, after killing Lee, Edward and Julian finally face off with Edward getting shot but biting his brother before he dies.  The witch doctor raises Edward from the dead, buried in his coffin, and Julian now has his brother’s scarred face (and presumably, his insanity).

The movie was the first to feature both Vincent Price and Lee.  The film had a change of directors, pre-production, and a script that was added to by another writer.  The plot verges on tedious and it’s difficult to feel sympathy for any of the characters, apart from the women, who don’t seem out to hurt anyone.  Price (Julian) also plays a “good guy” until the reveal near the end, but Edward dominates the screen time, all the while wearing a mask.  The “Phantom of the Opera” reveal is shot in the dark, however, and the results are not so grotesque.  And those who’ve read Poe’s story wonder where the ship might be.  This is the only Poe Cycle film not directed by Roger Corman, and he, as well as Poe, are both missed.

Shocking Story

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Much of life, it seems, we got right in childhood.  We “grow up” only to learn that others are always right about any multitude of things.  Then you reach an age when you realize, “I was right the first time.”  All of which is to say I’ve been thinking about my childhood.  It has some commonalities with horror writers who are well known, but even us obscure, private intellectuals experience similar things.  I was a middle child of three for about a decade.  My father was of the absentee variety and my mother, like most women, had greater coping skills than she realized.  But the fact is, with three kids there’s no way to keep an eye on them all at the same time.  I always felt my big brother got the privileges first and they were sometimes forgotten when it was my turn.  And my little brother got special attention for being youngest.  I developed that middle child mental map.

One day I was playing with the cheap microscope my mother had bought for us.  As kids, one of my fantasies was that I’d grow up to be a scientist.  Probably because of the Professor on Gilligan’s Island.  In any case, this microscope had a “reflection mirror” that was made of authentic plastic coated with something somewhat shiny and slightly metallic.  It illuminated nothing even in the strongest sunlight.  There was also one of those night-light bulb attachments you could use to provide weak, artificial light.  I plugged it in and tried to see something enlarged (I don’t recall what).  All you ever really saw through the eyepiece was your own eyelashes backlit by a yellowish circle of night light.  I went to unplug the bulb but accidentally grabbed the metal prongs.  I felt my body jerking and couldn’t control my hand to let go.  It probably lasted only a second, but felt like eternity, before I forced my fingers open and pulled away.  I don’t recall ever telling my mom about it, but I probably did.

That moment, one of the many scary parts of my childhood, comes back to me now and again.  It was a potentially fatal situation, which is pretty heady for a seven- or eight-year-old.  I knew that even as it was happening.  What stands out to me about it was that I was all alone when it occurred.  The childhood lesson I learned, to which I’d had introduced many times before, is that life is scary.  I came a long way in the next half-century to overcoming my fears.  But they still lurk.  And I realize that I have quite a bit in common with horror writers who’ve been better able to make use of their childhood fears.  It’s worth thinking about.

The Next Phase

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Sometimes I get things backwards.  You have to understand that in the pre-internet era finding information was somewhat dicey.  Those of us from small towns had limited resources.  The movies I saw were on television, with a rare trip to the theater being a treat.  Books, on the other hand, could be had for a quarter or less at Goodwill.  There I found the sci-fi horror Phase IV by journeyman writer Barry N. Malzberg.  I knew there was a movie, which I hadn’t seen, and I assumed it was based on this novel.  Actually, the book was a novelization of the movie.  But it’s more complex than that.  The movie was based on an H. G. Wells story, screen-written by Mayo Simon, then novelized. That novelization made a real impression on me as a kid and I knew that I would eventually have to see the movie.

Some scenes from the novel were still alive to me before watching the film.  It occurs to me that maybe you don’t know what it’s about.  Intelligent ants.  Some cosmic event boosts ant intelligence and two scientists are sent to Arizona to sort it out.  A local family ignores an evacuation order, and when one of the scientists destroys the oddly geometric anthills, a war is on.  (I remembered the destroying the anthill scene.)  The war is both of might and wits.  Meanwhile the family is attacked—I remembered the scene of the ants eating the horse—with only a young woman surviving.  She’s found by the scientists after the first pesticide is released.  The ants attack, intelligently, the research station.  We never do see the expected ants popping out of Dr. Hubbs’ infected arm, but it’s clear by the end that the ants have won and we’re living in Phase IV.

A few observations: this is a scary movie, even if seventies’ fare.  The sci-fi elements dampen the horror down a bit, but it is still scary.  And it also references religion.  I watched the movie a few weeks after seeing The Night of the Hunter for the first time.  What does a Depression-era serial-killing preacher have to do with ants?  The hymn, “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms.”  Now, there’s a project out there for someone inspired by (if such a thing exists) Holy Horror.  Is there a discernible pattern of how hymns are used in horror?  I suspect there is.  That hymn is used so differently in these two movies that I’m convinced something deeper is going on.  If you’re interested, the idea’s free for the taking.  I’ve just spelled out two of the movies for you.

Escape Room

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I didn’t go out looking for horror films in 1979.  I knew about Alien, of course.  Everyone did.  Even in a small town.  I didn’t see the movie until many years later, though.  I was still in high school and money was scarce (college was all either scholarship, loan, or work-study money).  If Tourist Trap ever came to town I didn’t know about it.  In fact, I didn’t know about it at all until reading Stephen King’s Danse Macabre.  Enough time has passed that the movie is now streaming for free and, indeed, it is David Schmoeller’s first film.  Critics didn’t love it, but King thought it had some appropriate eeriness, so why not?  It isn’t horrible—I’ve definitely seen worse.  And movies with animated mannequins hit that uncanny valley at just the right angle, even if poorly written.

The story’s a bit convoluted.  Five young people are on vacation and get drawn into, well, a tourist trap.  There’s a fair amount of psychokinesis that goes on, and the tourist trap is Slausen’s Lost Oasis, which is filled with animated wax-work figures/mannequins.  These are what make the film creepy.  As the plot unfurls, the kids get killed off, one-by-one, as horror viewers come to expect.  There is a bit of a “reveal” toward the end, so I won’t spoil it.  It is fair to say that insane antagonists were fairly common by 1979 and that the blurring of real people and manufactured ones is a bit unnerving.  There are some questions of motivation, and many times the characters don’t take the obvious steps to help themselves.  Still, the movie isn’t too bad.

I was drawn to it, having seen Schmoeller’s real groaner, Netherworld.  And King’s recommendation.  There is something about movies that are lacking in undefined ways that keeps you watching.  I was curious how Tourist Trap was going to end up.  There were several points at which I thought I’d figured it out, only to be told, “but wait, there’s more!”  The more wasn’t always really worth waiting for, but the ending has a bit of a payoff.  There is some slasher aesthetic here, but it’s unconventional enough that you may at least be kept guessing.  The thing that the movie gets right is that human figures that aren’t human are scary.  Many films play on this, of course.  Even if you’ve seen others, it still tend to ramp up the shudder factor a bit.  It only took four decades for me to stumble into this tourist trap, and it was a reasonable brief vacation from reality.