Television

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Television has lost its prominence in the internet age.  Those of us entering the “senior” category of life’s grades were raised on television.  I know I watched far too much as a kid.  Now I consider the wasted opportunity to grow minds, and sensibilities, through television.  Mostly I blame the sit-com.  There’s not much learning going on when someone else contrives scenarios to make you laugh on a weekly schedule.  They are beguiling and I watched more than my fair share of them when I was younger.  Now, as an adult, I value the more profound examples of early viewing.  We didn’t watch The Twilight Zone with the devotion of Gilligan’s Island, but those episodes I did see had a profound effect.  The same is true of Dark Shadows.  One thing these shows had in common was that they were quite literate, eschewing the mindless competition.

College led to me no longer watching television regularly.  That hiatus lasted until my wife and I began watching a couple of weeklies after I’d return from Nashotah House.  While at the seminary full-time, television reception was quite poor and we tended toward rented movies on VHS.  By the time we moved to New Jersey television had changed so that you needed some kind of magic box to watch even commercial channels.  We relied on DVDs of shows we wanted to see.  That’s how Lost came into our lives.  Now, however, facing senior issues (health, people dying, wondering if retirement might ever happen) I’ve started to revisit television I missed.  The X-Files is pretty prominent.  Being an historian at heart, I’ve been exploring the inspirations for The X-Files, picking up Kolchak: The Night Stalker, and Twin Peaks.  I have to balance this with time for writing since work still claims the lion’s share of my waking hours.

Photo credit: Smithsonian Institution, via Flickr’s The Commons

I’ve lost track of what’s on the tube.  Now we spend workday evening hours watching intelligent television that we missed back when it aired.  We can’t afford it all, of course.  Dark Shadows, for example, has over 1200 episodes and “complete sets” are pricey.  Lost was either a birthday or Christmas present years ago.  I bought The Twilight Zone over a decade ago for a week that I knew I was going to be home alone.  We accumulated The X-Files over a number of years.  Twin Peaks, since it was only two seasons, wasn’t too expensive.  Kolchak is on Amazon Prime.  Many of these shows are a kind of therapeutic watching for me.  Some might call it escapism, but it runs deeper than that.  It becomes part of who we are.

Deep Woods

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The output of female horror directors tends to be thoughtful.  And there are some legitimately terrifying scenes in Lovely, Dark, and Deep.  Nobody, however, has posted a Wikipedia entry on Teresa Sutherland.  At least not yet.  This movie is obviously aware of David Paulides’ work.  It went by a little quickly, but I think one of his books even made it into the film.  Lovely, Dark, and Deep is set in the fictitious Arvores National Park in California.  (Interestingly, the movie was filmed in Portugal.)  Lennon is a newly hired park ranger with what she thinks is a secret.  Her motivation is to search for her sister, who went missing in the park when they were kids.  If you like movies with flashlights in the forest at night, this is your film.  

Lennon discovers  that she’s not the only one with secrets.  Many people have gone missing in the park and the rangers know about it.  Some entity that they can’t identify requires people to be left behind.  There is a quid pro quo relationship involved.  If one of the taken ones is rescued, a substitute must be left.  Lennon learns that her sister was one of those taken, and once taken a person can’t come back.  They live in a nightmare world while their family and friends have to deal with the loss.  Lennon has trouble accepting this arrangement, but there is nothing to be done about it except pretend you don’t know it’s happening.

The movie gets its teeth from the fact that many people do go missing in National Parks.  And, as Paulides suggests, there is no public register kept.  Some who are found are often inexplicably miles from where they went missing, or their bodies are found in areas already thoroughly searched.  This is obviously a great concept for a horror film.  Sutherland, who wrote as well as directed the movie, has the makings of an art horror auteur.  Lovely, Dark, and Deep hasn’t received a lot of attention yet, but I think it deserves to.  Wilderness horror films have so much potential.  Particularly for people who seldom spend any real time in the forest.  Even those of us who have braved the wilds from time to time can find it frightening.  More than that, this is a movie that makes you think.  For anyone who likes to theologize films, it definitely has the theme of sacrifice running through it.  Deep is appropriately part of the title.

Lobo

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Tor Johnson—actually Karl Erik Tore Johansson—became famous but not rich.  Such was the fate of some early horror actors, including Bela Lugosi.  Johnson hung out, however, with the low-budget crowd, making the most of his size to take on a kind of “enforcer” role.  One of his recurring characters was “Lobo.”  Lobo served mad scientists and had very little of his own brain power.  He often had few, or no lines to learn.  Having watched The Beast of Yucca Flats, in which he starred, I decided to see if The Unearthly was any better.  The production values were certainly higher, but this was an earlier film by a different crew.  It’s more like the standard fare you expect for a late fifties horror show.  It features a mad scientist, and Lobo is, of course, the servant.

Dr. Charles Conway believes he has found the way to eternal life.  It’s attained by transplanting a new gland into a human being.  The problem is, it hasn’t worked so far.  Like a true mad scientist, Conway is convinced that it will work, it’s just a matter of try, try again.  And why advertise for willing subjects when you can have a local crooked doctor send you patients with various personality disorders, and no families, so that you can experiment on them?  With slow-moving Lobo as his only security system, Conway carries on until a sting operation catches him red-handed.  There’s really not much to this story.  It doesn’t have the inspired inanity of an Ed Wood production, but then, it hasn’t really grown a cult following.

My reason for watching was Tor Johnson.  Before I was born he’d attained the status of the model of a best-selling Halloween mask, based on his monster roles.  This seems to indicate that his oeuvre was well known, despite the kinds of movies he was in.  A large man who’d aged out of “professional wrestling,” Johnson had many uncredited movie roles before hooking up with Ed Wood.  He was featured in three of Wood’s films, including the infamous Plan 9 from Outer Space.  He’s part of a crowd surrounding the under-funded, independent filmmakers of an intriguing era before modern horror really came into its own.  The Unearthly, where his famous line “Time for go to bed” is spoken, suffers from banality and has become pretty obscure.  I personally wouldn’t have known to look for it had it not been for the fact that Johnson was in it, dragging it into the “must watch” category.  And that it was a freebie.

Opposites?

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Not having the money to subscribe, I limit myself to the daily headlines of Publishers Weekly.  When physically in the office in New York City, it circulated among editors in print form.  I do miss that.  The weekly is a great place to stay informed of what’s going on in the book world.  Interestingly, the headlines—which are often linked together newsletter-style—noted that the annual preview of religion books was on the way.  This was followed by “On the exact opposite side of the publishing spectrum, Orbit has launched its fourth imprint, Run for It, capitalizing on the horror boom.”  So there it was staring me in the face.  Religion and horror are exact opposites.  Now, I can’t expect even experts in publishing to be aware of all the trends, but the religion-horror connection has been alive and growing for a few years now and those of us who publish books in it might dispute the “exact opposite side” designation.

Photo by Thomas Park on Unsplash

Horror and religion are closely related.  Many in the religion camp would want to deny that, but those who know horror know that religion quite often wanders in.  More than that, religion often drives the horror.  They’re not so much exact opposites as they are playmates.  Rather like the Bible depicts God being the chum of Leviathan.  (Who is, after all, a perfectly good monster.)  While my own humble efforts are frequently overlooked, the last four books I’ve written explore different aspects of religion and horror.  This includes my forthcoming Sleepy Hollow book.

Even if you’re not a fan of horror movies, if you pay close attention religion is not the opposite of horror.  We have this mental image of religion as a pure and holy thing in and of itself.  We don’t often stop to think that religions are invented by humans.  Yes, they are often in response to what believers see as divine stimuli, but the way that they are conducted is part of our human ingenuity.  They are considered good because of their emphasis on love and positive virtues.  If you watch enough horror you’ll notice that the menace is often a threat to love.  In other words, horror too emphasizes the value of love.  It’s a perception problem that sees horror as the opposite of religion.  Simplistic categories are often necessary to get through life—that’s why we stereotype.  Those of us who like to stop and think through things can gum up the works.  Even a headline in a magazine we like can lead us to wonder about the deeper implications and the biases they perpetuate.

Yucca

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Yucca Flats isn’t the kind of place you’d like to vacation.  Not only is it highly irradiated by nuclear testing, it’s also a place where police shoot at innocent people.  The only salvation seems to be that they’re terrible shots.  Oh yes, and there’s a Russian scientist transformed into a beast by an atomic bomb blast.  As you can tell, I’ve just been to Yucca Flats.  In movie-land, of course.  The Beast of Yucca Flats, yet another candidate for the worst movie of all time, really worked hard to obtain that title.  The movie did make me curious about Coleman Francis, however.  Like Ed Wood, he tried to make his way in the rather unforgiving movie world with tiny budgets and even less native talent.  The number of scenes where guys had their butts to the camera alone raises all kinds of questions.

The numerous contradictions in such a short movie—less than an hour—and the long scenes that add nothing to the plot are signposts that we’ve entered the twilight zone of B movies.  Famously filmed without sound, the incongruous dialogue later added as voiceovers, adds to the surreal atmosphere.  The movie shares Tor Johnson with Ed Wood.  And also, apparently, a sincerity betrayed by lack of ability.  The cult status of movies like this signal hope for those who try to make their own way in a world enamored of big budgets and large crews.  It would help, though, if Francis had a clear story to tell.  He does seem to have Luddite tendencies, and he condemns violence even as he has a sheriff’s deputy literally “shoot first and ask questions later.” 

The movie has a couple of moments of cinematographic finesse.  The moment when Lois Radcliffe approaches the car, shot from the interior, when Hank lays his arm across the door, made me think something better might be coming.  Tor Johnson wasn’t the most gifted actor, but he always seems to have fun with his roles, being cast as a hulking monster.  It’s too bad he doesn’t have a bit more screen time in this, his last movie part.  He kinda makes me want to hunt down some of his other appearances beyond the Ed Wood films I’ve already seen.  There’s a story here, I expect, that really hasn’t been told.  There’s an entire world—a twilight zone—outside Hollywood where producers with no budgets but a passion for making movies plied their trade.  Their efforts, as paltry as the results may be, suggests there’s more to the movie world than it might seem.

Singing Darkly

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

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

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

Second Peak

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

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

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

A Touch of Poe

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

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

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

Summerween

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

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

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

Copyright: Disney. Summerween trickster, Gravity Falls

Fire Walking

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

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

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

Small Things Grow

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

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

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

Fun Homework

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

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

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

Carnival Days

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

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

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

A Kind of Shine

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

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

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

Book or Movie?

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

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

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