Famous Cemeteries

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I have to confess that I really didn’t know about Père-Lachaise Cemetery before this book.  I knew that Jim Morrison was buried in Paris, but I’d never really paid attention to where.  My wife picked up Benoît Gallot’s The Secret Life of a Cemetery: The Wild Nature and Enchanting Lore of Père-Lachaise and we decided to read it together.  It seems likely that Père-Lachaise is the world’s most famous cemetery.  This little memoir by the current curator of the cemetery is a delightful read.  It is reflective and sensitive (and spawned by the attention the author’s social media was getting, so hey, help me recruit some fans!).  Gallot began posting pictures of wild animals that he snapped in the course of his work and Parisians, and others, were fascinated to learn about wild animals at home in the capital of France.  This book reflects on the animals, plants, and people of the graveyard.

I enjoyed this book, but one aspect gave me pause.  Gallot notes that the cemetery doesn’t permit jogging.  Perhaps this is a cultural thing, but cemeteries have been some of my favorite jogging spots.  I mean no disrespect by it.  Cemeteries are peaceful and have very little traffic (one of a jogger’s concerns).  I’ve never found people walking their dogs (another jogger issue) in cemeteries.  I can see how mourners might not want to see someone taking their exercise near the grave of a departed family member, but a jog is simply a fast walk.  And we are, as a species, part of nature.

Many famous people are buried in Père-Lachaise.  I visit cemeteries to find famous people’s burial places.  Indeed, that’s what I tended to post on my Instagram site, but I found no followers.  We had visited Highgate Cemetery in London—another famous burial ground—and discovered many familiar names there.  Perhaps to Anglophones, Highgate is more famous than Père-Lachaise.  But even Highgate would’ve been off my radar had it not been for the Highgate Vampire incident that I’ve written about before.  Gallot, who lives in the cemetery, is skeptical of ghosts in Père-Lachaise, although he’s well aware that the stories are told.  This brief book is contemplative autumnal reading.  There are several black-and-white photos of animals among the graves.  They are the living among the dead, and an appropriate symbol that life goes on.  If you’re looking for a place to reflect on mortality and you want to learn about cemetery life, this may be the book for you.

Preying

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Several aspects of Let Us Prey don’t make a whole lot of sense.  The police in this small Scottish town are all corrupt, at best.  And when push comes to shove, they choose to murder one another.  For some reason the sergeant wraps himself in barbed wire as he tries to bring the wrath of God onto his subordinate officers.  The night starts out with four prisoners being locked up and only one survives.  He’s shown emerging from the sea, with ravens, at the start of the movie and he’s never really explained.  He’s there to collect the souls of sinners and he seems to be able to control other people.  The whole thing turns into a bloodbath before it’s over.  In other words, it lacks the subtlety of much Euro-horror that I’ve watched.  One thing it does have, though, is plenty of use of the Bible.

I suppose with a title like Let Us Prey such a development shouldn’t be unexpected.  Rachel is a new constable in the police station.  The story begins with the stranger, Six—the number of his jail cell—nearly being hit by a car.  Or having been hit.  The teenage driver is arrested and finds a pedophile teacher already in the lock-up.  Two other police officers, after having sex in their patrol car, find the stranger and bring him in.  The local doctor examines him but when the doctor attacks him, he’s arrested as well.  Finally, Six is locked in.  It’s discovered that the doctor had murdered his family earlier in the evening, and the reckless driver had earlier hit and killed a classmate while out driving.  The pedophile kills himself and the two other police officers murder the doctor.  Then the sergeant, who’s a serial killer, comes back to kill everyone left alive.  Six and Rachel survive and Six reveals that he’s collecting wicked souls and invites Rachel to join him.

The Bible quotations (some not accurate) all come in the context of retribution.  The sinners are to be punished.  Rachel, however, escaped a childhood abduction and seems to bear no burden of sin.  The other police—who had all decided Rachel should die—end up dead themselves.  A gritty, supernatural police story, this film suggests a larger backstory without providing a lot for viewers to go on.  The openly Christian sergeant wears a cross, drinks when he drives, and kills his homosexual lovers.  Is there perhaps a message that the movie’s trying to convey?

Dark Pliny

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My current dark academia kick has me looking at the Classics again.  I taught Greek Mythology for three semesters as an adjunct at Montclair State University.  In the course of my New Testament studies I’m sure I encountered some of the classical Greco-Roman writers, but being focused on the Bible at the time, I never really followed through.  Then my doctorate got me interested in even earlier classics.  In any case, I’ve been trying to self-educate myself about Pliny the Younger.  To be honest, this is because he wrote one of the most famous Roman ghost stories.  Pliny wasn’t some guy into woo-woo subjects.  He was a magistrate and a lawyer and a noted orator.  His most famous work is the collection of his letters.  One of those letters tells his ghost stories.  Others describe Mount Vesuvius’ eruptions.  So, Pliny.

Image credit: Daderot, Angelica Kauffmann’s Pliny the Younger and his Mother at Misenum, 79 A.D. (detail), public domain via Wikimedia Commons

My fully-loaded bookshelves don’t have any Pliny.  I’m sure he’s mentioned in many of the books on these shelves, but I don’t have a copy of his letters.  I used BookFinder.com to search for used copies only to discover that the Loeb Classical Library divides his letters into three volumes, which feels like too much for casual reading.  Then I realized that most editions are edited, leaving out some of the, I suspect, less interesting missives.  Even as an editor, I don’t trust editors.  What if they left out the ghost stories because, well, serious scholars pay no attention to such things?  I discovered that Penguin Classics has an edition and from what I can tell, it seems to be complete.  I mark books that I want to remember on Amazon because they have pages even for the obscure stuff.  I try to buy the actual books from Bookshop.org.

What makes all of this noteworthy is that as I was on the Amazon page I noticed that you can “follow the author”—Pliny the Younger himself!  He must be a ghost by now.  So what the heck?  I clicked “Follow.”  I’m not in the habit of following authors on Amazon; I find my books in many different ways and most authors I know don’t like to talk about their writing, so why add another social media commitment?  I’m hoping that Pliny will be more willing to chat about writing.  He may be dead, but I’m not a prejudicial sort of individual.  I won’t hold it against him.  Who knows, maybe in addition to ghosts, I’ll learn something about Vesuvius?  And if he ghosts me, well, at least he’s a professional.

Nostalgic Shadows

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Nostalgia is a funny thing.  Although it can strike at any age, somehow after the half-century mark it’s particularly easy to get swept into it.  As I written about many, many times, I was drawn into the Marilyn Ross Dark Shadows novels as a tween.  In my mid-to-late forties, when the internet made it possible, I started to collect all the volumes from 1 through 32.  It took several years.  I had to find them via BookFinder.com and our level of income didn’t support buying more than one every few months.  Then in 2022, having difficulty locating the last of the original series, I found a seller on eBay offering up the whole set.  The price for that set was less than the least expensive final volume I could find.  I did what any nostalgic guy would do.

We don’t really buy antiques, but I’d been looking for an office desk (this was before the scam).  I’d been using a craft table for a desk for years and it seemed that I really needed something with a better organizational range.  This led me to stop into a local antique shop.  They ended up not having much furniture, but they did have aisles of nostalgia.  A few weeks later when it was too hot and humid to be outdoors, I revisited the shop.  This time, relieved of the burden of seeking a desk, I was able to browse at leisure.  It’s like going to a museum but not having to pay admission.  I turned a corner and I saw something I’d never seen before.  A collection of Marilyn Ross Dark Shadows books.

It wasn’t a full set, but I had, prior to finishing my own collection, never seen more than one or two together in any single place.  As a child I’d buy them at Goodwill.  As an adult, on BookFinder.  All those years in-between, I always looked for them when visiting used bookstores.  I visit said shops whenever possible.  In decades of looking I’d only found one in the wild once or twice, and always by its lonesome.  This was a completely new experience for me.  It was also quite odd to be seeing them and not having any need to buy them.  I have a full set.  The nostalgia was almost overpowering.  I couldn’t help but think of how even a few years ago I’d been pawing through to see if there were any I hadn’t yet found.  All for reliving a bit of my childhood.

A Presence

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Presence is a fairly new movie, for me anyway.  I was able to stream it at the price of commercials, so I gave it a chance.  It was provocative and to discuss it I’ll probably need to reveal the ending.  For now, however, I’ll just say it’s a ghost story from the point of view of the ghost.  It reminded me of A Ghost Story, which I also saw shortly after it was released.  Both are melancholy and explore the dilemma of a ghost having to watch as time passes.  In the case of Presence, however, it is a future ghost.  As I say, more will be given away, so be advised.  The movie is about a family of four buying a very nice house in Cranford, New Jersey.  Well, it doesn’t say Cranford, but that’s where it was filmed.  The parents, who have a bit of a troubled relationship, have a teenage son and daughter.  The daughter’s close friend has recently died and they’ve moved, in part, to try to shake her out of it.

We watch from the ghost’s point of view as the realtor shows them the house, the painters get it ready, and they move in.  The daughter, Chloe, is having trouble adjusting and the presence lingers about her room.  It’s obviously concerned about her.  Chloe sometimes senses it.  When Tyler, her brother, brings a friend over the friend starts to show an interest in Chloe.  The presence tries to intervene to prevent him from taking advantage of her.  When the friend drugs her, intending to kill her (as he did her friend earlier, which, of course, she doesn’t know), the ghost rouses her brother who saves her by tackling his friend out the window, killing them both.  As the family is about to move again, the mother sees in a mirror that the presence is Tyler, their son.  He was protecting Chloe, as a future ghost.

I found it an engaging film.  Sibling rivalry—the parents play favorites with the opposite gender children—and Tyler’s often harsh dismissal of his sister’s grief, dominates their family life.  The fact that Tyler is the presence protecting his sister even when, in real time, they don’t get along, is a form of redemption.  That brief reveal at the end is what makes the movie.  Is it horror?  It has a ghost and there are moments of considerable tension.  As I’ve argued from time to time, horror isn’t a precise genre at all.  I found this listed as horror in a streaming service and although jump startles and visible monsters aren’t evident, the affective aspect is clearly there.  Yes, in my opinion, it’s horror. And it’s well done.

More Curtis

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Dan Curtis was the mind behind Dark Shadows, an important part of my childhood.  Reading about his work in film and television, I learned that he produced a lot more than Barnabas Collins, and was an influence in horror in his own right.  A friend recommended that I find The Norliss Tapes, which I did.  This made for television movie was cut from the same cloth as The Night Stalker, which Curtis also produced.  The ending of the movie makes clear that The Norliss Tapes was a pilot for an intended series that never materialized and is a good representation of religion and horror, which is likely why it was recommended to me.  Here’s the story.   David Norliss was given a large advance by a publisher to write a book debunking the supernatural.  Before he can, he goes missing, leaving behind a set of tapes explaining what happened.  The first tape is the pilot episode.

Norliss is contacted by Ellen Sterns Cort, a widow who claims to have had a supernatural episode.  Upon following her dog to her late husband’s studio one night, she encounters her undead husband.  She shoots him, but the police can find no evidence of any body.  It’s revealed that he purchased an occult scarab ring that permits him to return to life to raise a demon who will, in turn, bring him back to real life.  To get the raw materials he needs (such as blood) he has to kill a few people and this again alerts the authorities but they insist on covering it all up.  Removing the ring from his finger will stop him, but that’s easier said than done.  At the end the demon is stopped but this is just the end of the first tape.  His publisher starts to play the second tape.

Dan Curtis productions have a certain feel to them.  I’m not sure how directors and producers do that—I’m not sure of all the tools they have in their box.  What is obvious is that watching The Norliss Tapes brings back echoes of Dark Shadows.  That’s not surprising since Dark Shadows wound down just two years before the Norliss Tapes came out.  The Night Stalker was sandwiched between them, but Kolchak: The Night Stalker was not a Curtis production and doesn’t have a Curtis feel to it.  Even though I’d never seen Norliss before, it was nostalgic watching the movie for the first time.  There’s a trick to it, I just don’t know what it is.

That’s Odd

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Some vaccines just wipe me out.  The shingles vaccine did it, and so did the pneumonia one.  It was bad enough that I had to take the next day off work.  One benefit of such things is being able to watch movies during the day, when you can stay awake.  The downside, as always, is affording them.  A bit fuzzy-headed, I selected one not on my list (which seems only to consist of expensive movies—I wonder why?) and found a very good one streaming on a subscription service I use.  From Ireland, Oddity is Euro-horror.  And it is distinctly creepy and, perhaps because of my state, made me literally jump once or twice.  (My usual, critical headspace scans for jump-startles on a regular basis, but this one caught me.)  A doctor in an asylum for the criminally insane is on the phone with his wife.  She’s alone at their secluded country house when one of his patients shows up and tells her someone crept into the house while she was at the car.  You don’t know whether to believe him or if someone is locked in with her.  She doesn’t survive the night.

Her identical twin sister, who is blind, runs an antique shop called Oddities.  The doctor has found a new girlfriend and she suspects that his wife’s (her sister’s) death wasn’t accidental.  She sends an oddity in the form of a wooden man, essentially a goy golem, to the house before showing up herself.  Much of the creepiness comes from that life-size figure sitting at the dining table in a shadowy room.  As the plot unfurls, it becomes clear that the husband had met his new girlfriend prior to his wife’s death.  His patient wasn’t her killer, but his orderly was.  Justice only comes when the golem comes to life.  Even so, the doctor gets away with it.  The sister, who is also murdered, sent the doctor another oddity from her shop before expiring.

Much of the movie takes its energy from the utter skepticism of the doctor—he presents himself as completely rational, not believing in anything supernatural—and the clearly paranormal events taking place around the oddities.  Also, the rational doctor is very immoral, preferring murder to telling the truth.  The sister, however, is concerned for justice and the supernatural is on her side.  This makes for a very creepy, compelling film.  I’ve been impressed by much of the Euro-horror that I’ve seen over the last several years.  This one is going into my personal cabinet of curiosities.

Being a Fan

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Fandom is a weird thing with me.  Having wide-ranging interests, coupled with an at times obsessive personality, my likes are intense but fall short of the kind of fan who purchases everything associated with their fascination.  A friend kindly sent me the Dark Shadows Almanac, edited by Kathryn Leigh Scott and Jim Pierson.  I try my best to read books friends  send me, and working my way through the Almanac, I realized just how far short of real fandom I fall.  Dark Shadows was likely my gateway to horror.  Watching it after school is one of my early memories.  But I was quite young at the time and beyond Barnabas, Quentin, the wonderfully gothic house, and the opening music and waves crashing into the rocks, specifics didn’t last.  Dark Shadows was one of the earliest fan-congregating shows.  Before Comic-Con, there were Dark Shadows conferences.  Kids eagerly bought all things Barnabas related.

I was about seven when the show hit its zenith.  I do remember watching it, and the wonderful, creepy feeling it gave me.  As a child I couldn’t have named any of the actors.  A lot was happening in my life at the time.  My mother was divorcing my alcoholic father.  My grandmother, who lived with us, lay bed-ridden and dying in what had been our dining room.  We lived in a run-down old apartment with very little money.  Heavy stuff for a kid.  And television also offered funny shows in the evening.  And Saturday morning cartoons (which included, yes, Scooby-Doo). I’ve always been amazed at just how much stuff there is in the world and I yearn to understand it deeply.  It was probably pretty much fore-ordained that I would try to be a professor.

Reading the Almanac not only reinforced how influential the series was, it also made me aware of just how complicated producing a television show is.  Many, many people are involved, specialists in artistic and technical fields.  Most of them make modest livings with, if they’re lucky, mentions in the credits.  The stars we know.  I think, for me, Barnabas Collins was a father stand-in.  What I noticed, even as a child, was that he was sad.  A certain type of person is drawn to sad individuals.  I always want to cheer them up because I know how it feels.  This is the part of me that wanted to be a minister.  I tried that a number of times but it never worked out either.  Reading an almanac like this isn’t really a deep intellectual exercise, but it is a learning experience.  And one of the things we might learn about is ourselves, whether a true fanatic or not.

That Night

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I’m pretty sure I’ve seen Fright Night before.  It seems that it may have been on one of those trans-Atlantic flights where you exit the plane not quite sure what took place during those missing hours on earth.  I do recall that I had the hazy idea I wanted to see the movie under more controlled circumstances—with my feet on the ground and no pressurized cabin anywhere in sight.  It is certainly a passable vampire movie.  Tom Holland’s first as director.  Ironically, just the weekend before I’d had a hankering and rewatched Child’s Play, which he directed a few years after Fright Night.  I hadn’t realized they had the same director.  In any case, since the movie is now forty years old I’m not going to worry too much about spoilers.  Besides, I’d forgotten most of it since my last viewing, which was thirty or fewer years ago.

Copyright HAG ©2008

Charley Brewster and his mother live next door to a fixer-upper.  Charley, who’s a fan of the campy television show Fright Night, keeps getting distracted from his girlfriend Amy by goings on next door.  He immediately and correctly deduces that their new neighbor, Jerry Dandrige, is a vampire.  But nobody believes him, not even Amy.  As a teenager, he’s rather helpless and can’t take on the vampire alone.  When Amy sees their friend “Evil” has been transformed, she believes and eventually the unemployed star of Fright Night, Peter Vincent, styled “the vampire killer,” also joins them.  They have to stop Dendrige before Amy ends up a vampire forever.  There are a few good frights and the story still feels rather fresh.  The weird thing, it seemed to me, was the long, lingering reaction shots of Vincent (Roddy McDowall).  The pacing felt a bit off, but otherwise it was a fine movie.

The name Peter Vincent combines the two stars Holland wanted for the role, Peter Cushing or Vincent Price.  The campy performance of this character balances the body count and gore.  Although it involves teens, it landed an R rating, almost considered necessary for any serious horror movie.  The movie poster also makes it look like this might be more comedic than it is.  It has a distinctly 1980s horror film feel to it.  Now this is going to make me feel old, but I’m starting to be able to discern the differences between seventies and eighties horror films by remembering what those decades were like.  I don’t know when I saw Fright Night before, but I’m glad I saw it again.  And I’m keeping an eye on the neighbors, just in case.

Eyes Have It

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Seeing things from another person’s eyes is perhaps the most important social trait our species has.  We can empathize because we see someone else’s suffering.  It’s a shame to see this breaking down in real time.  Nevertheless, in the case of Laura Mars it may have saved her life.  The Eyes of Laura Mars is a psychological horror film about a controversial photographer (Mars), who suddenly sees things through the eyes of a killer.  The movie is a whodunit, keeping viewers guessing who it is that’s stabbing the eyes out of those Laura works with and cares about.  It’s not a great movie, despite the fact that it was written by John Carpenter.  Both this film and Carpenter’s Halloween were released in 1978.  Eyes is often considered a photo-slasher and Halloween was, of course, a full-blown slasher.  The former was Carpenter’s first major motion picture, while the latter was his first as director.

Screenshot

I’m about to spoil the ending, I fear, so please be warned.  Before I do, however, I will say that the film isn’t bad, even if it isn’t that good.  I had guessed the villain reasonably in advance of the reveal, but the movie did keep me second-guessing my conclusions.  The speculative element of Mars’ ability makes this a supernatural horror film, but one which seems relatively believable.  And the Bible is quoted in it, making it eligible for a Holy Sequel.  The characters—a high society artist and a New York City cop—aren’t terribly religious, but John Neville, the detective, moralizes about Mars’ work at a publicity event.  Okay, so here comes the spoiler.

After floating several possible murderers—a couple members of Mars’ crew are hinted at, as is her ex-husband—it turns out that the detective has dissociative identity disorder and although he and Laura have fallen in love, the moralizing part of his personality is a killer.  He provides Laura with a gun and tells her to shoot the man who comes after her.  When he finally does, he begs her to do it.  The twist ending, at this remove from the original, may be guessed ahead of time, but there is still quite a lot of tension in the story.  The murderer falling in love with his intended victim is a reversal of the more common lover-turned-murderer trope.  It’s not a bad freshman try on the part of John Carpenter, but when his directorial debut came out two months later, his ability in the horror genre was more fully in view.

Play Time

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Of course I’ve seen Child’s Play before—what kind of poser do you think I am?  But that was back before I started blogging.  After writing a post about Puppet Master, I thought I should watch it again because it didn’t really strike me as memorable the first time around.  Probably the reason for that is I knew the basics of the story before I saw the movie and, like zombies, possessed dolls are a little hard to buy into.  Still, on this second viewing I was a bit more impressed.  The idea of the monster that won’t stop coming is a scary one, and I’d forgotten just how much Chucky had to be dismembered before being stopped.  And there are some legitimately scary scenes, despite unanswered questions.  In case you’re not familiar: criminal Charles Lee Ray is shot to death in a toy store, but not before transferring his soul, through voodoo, into a Good Guy doll.  This doll is bought on the black market by a widow who can’t afford one, for her son’s birthday.

Chucky befriends the boy but starts taking revenge on those who’ve wronged him, including the police officer called to investigate his first murder.  The officer happens to be the one that shot Ray at the beginning of the film.  Nobody believes that the doll is alive until it attacks them personally.  Nobody, that is, except Andy, the six-year-old owner of Chucky.  (Although it isn’t cited as such, I have to wonder if Toy Story’s Andy wasn’t actually based on this one; that’s not the official story, but still…)  Child’s Play wasn’t the first horror film to portray an animated doll, but it was perhaps the most influential.  Chucky went on to become a repeat slasher villain with wide recognition.

I’d completely forgotten the appropriation of voodoo as the animating force behind Chucky.  Of course, that leads to the very obvious weirdness of a doll using a voodoo doll to kill someone.  To modern sensitivities, the use of Vodou feels inappropriate, but this was in the eighties, and other religions were fair game for horror.  In fact, religion was fair game.  Without it, no animated Chucky, and no threat to Andy and his mother.  Religion and horror have played together from the very beginning.  The possession aspect also ties into religion and there have been no end of possessed dolls since Chucky first lunged out the screen with his knife.  It was a good play date, it turns out.

City Children

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Some movies are very difficult, if not impossible to classify.  City of Lost Children is one.  One label that seems to have stuck is steampunk, and I think that’s accurate.  A touch confusing, not least because it’s in French, it is visually stunning.  So, the lost children are kidnapped by a kind of mad scientist who cannot dream.  He takes the children’s dreams (with pre-echoes of Inception).  The initial dream sequence of multiple Santa Clauses could be horror—much of the film is unnerving, as well as disorienting.  This mad scientist is attended by a set of clones, a tiny wife, and a brain in a fish-tank.  Meanwhile, thieving orphans, controlled by women who are conjoined twins, steal valuables.  A circus strongman, One, sets out to find his kidnapped “little brother,” and finds the orphans.  He helps them on one job but one of the lead orphans, Miette, takes pity on him and tries to assist in finding his brother.

The brother is in the hands of the mad scientist.  Miette is nearly drowned but saved by an amnesiac submarine pilot.  She leaves to fine One, whom the twins tried to kidnap.  One and Miette team up once again to rescue “little brother.”  They find the mad scientist’s lair, but the submarine pilot is about to blow it up.  One and the children escape, but at the last minute the submarine pilot regains his memory and realizes that he was the creator of the mad scientist and clones, but he is blown up along with the lab.  Accompanying this there are striking visuals in a world that is a cross between Existenz and The Matrix, but with steampunk overtones.  I suspect multiple viewings may be needed to get it, but the cinematography would make that a pleasure.

The cyclopses (did I mention them?) are the religious part of this world.  They believe in the plucking out of eyes in order to see.  This they do with eyes from the scientist and the cyclopses, in turn, capture the children for him.  Their religion is violent but somewhat biblical.  Although this is an alternate universe, it’s one where such features as religion might cross over.  Often religion is neglected in world-building, even though it comes naturally to our species.  It’s easy to get lost in this kaleidoscopic world.  Even so, you come to care for One and Miette and the value of loyalty.  Funny, creepy, confusing, and emotional, City of Lost Children is a movie that has to be seen to be believed.

Discovering Witches

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On a number of best of dark academia novel lists, A Discovery of Witches was a book I knew I had to read.  Frightened by the size of the tome, I put it off.  Although it says it on the cover (by which I don’t buy a book) that it’s part of a trilogy, I was hoping it’d be self-contained.  Of course, it ends without resolving what happens to the main characters, more or less coercing the reader into the remaining two volumes.  Now, this is not unique.  Many authors do it.  Publishers especially like books with series potential—assured sales.  My eight novels (none published) are stand-alone.  One is over 200,000 words, but the rest are reasonably svelte.  Big books take a large commitment of time and, well, at my age you have to make some choices.  This one took me nearly a solid month of daily reading, sometimes multiple hours at a stretch, to finish.  I have some decisions to make.

Set initially in Oxford, this world created by Deborah Harkness contains three kinds of humanoid creatures besides humans: witches, vampires, and daemons.  The daemons aren’t really defined, but they don’t seem to be the kind that possess girls like Regan McNeil.  The witches seem pretty traditional and the protagonist/narrator is one.  The vampires are quite different than the Hollywood version, as well as the traditional sort.  Vampires can be out in the sunlight, they aren’t affected by crucifixes, and, indeed, can be quite religious and Christian.  They can eat things other than than blood.  The protagonist, Diana Bishop, is a witch who doesn’t use her powers.  A professor, she’s doing research at Oxford where she meets, and eventually falls in love with Matthew Clairmont, a vampire.  An ancient pact between witches, vampires, and daemons forbids them from consorting closely, and herein lies the tale.

The dark academia aspect comes in a couple of guises.  One is that much of the first part of the novel takes place at Oxford University, and even in the Bodleian Library.  Also, vampires seem to be quite compatible with dark academia as a whole.  The dark aspect comes not only from the creatures, but their situation.  There is ancient animosity and tension that results in murders.  The novel ends with a war starting and Diana and Matthew taking a risky journey.  I may be content to let this state of affairs stand.  From the look of things, the sequel is also a long book and I am content to let my imagination fill in the blanks.  I’m glad to have read it, but I’m going to look for a novel with a little less time-commitment next.

Folk Kill

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Kill List is a movie that I wish came with some interpretative material.  It’s a touch hard to follow.  The basic idea is that Jay and Gal are Army buds who take a job as hit men.  Jay is married, but not exactly happily.  Gal’s girlfriend leaves him early on.  It seems that Shel, Jay’s wife, knows what he does for a living but seems strangely unconcerned.  Jay is recognized by his victims, but he doesn’t know why.  He becomes insanely brutal on the second of their third jobs, torturing his victim before killing him and then going after his accomplices (not on the eponymous kill list).  At this point Gal and Jay want out of the deal but their unnamed employer won’t release them.  Jay is presented as a man traumatized by a past military action.  He fights frequently with Shel but is very devoted to their son.  Spoilers follow.

The last job is a hit on a member of parliament.  The MP, however, is in a folk religion group that requires human sacrifice.  Jay begins shooting them but he and Gal are outnumbered.  Gal is killed and Jay is subdued.  He then has to fight a hunchback in front of the masked believers.  He frees the knife and kills the hunchback only to discover it is his wife with their son attached to her back.  A rather bleak ending for a rather bleak film.  Kill List is generally considered folk horror.  That is to say that fear derives from both the landscape (less rural in this example) and from the native religion of the non-Christian traditions.  What exactly this religion is is never specified, and it seems that, unbeknownst to himself, Jay is a pretty major player in it.

Perhaps not surprising for a film titled Kill List, this is quite a violent movie.  The somewhat constant fighting of Jay and Shel is unnerving in its own right, and Jay’s berserker-like attacks are also disturbing.  There is a religious element involved, however, beyond paganism.  The first victim on the hit list is a priest.  The reason’s not explained, but the expected religious imagery is there.  This is never tied in with the folk religion exposed at the end.  Although effective as a horror film, it leaves quite a few questions unanswered.  That being said, this Euro-horror is one that I’m unlikely to go back to.  I’m not even sure who made the recommendation to me in the first place.  Folk horror is a fascinating genre and this movie has been compared to The Wicker Man in that regard.  Only in the latter case the plot was easy enough to understand.

Nibbles

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With a career as prolific as Roger Corman’s was, it’s difficult to keep up.  I knew his horror movies mostly from the sixties and maybe early seventies.  Having stumbled upon Humanoids from the Deep, which he produced rather than directed, I was pointed to Piranha.  I knew about this movie, of course, but never had a reason to watch it.  Well, Corman rabbit holes are easy to tumble down.  Corman was the executive producer of Piranha and since I was already splashed with water-themed horror, well, why not?  As with Humanoids, it has a different feel from movies Corman directed, but some of the trademarks are there.  Piranha has so many shark-sized holes in it it’s not difficult to believe that it was exploiting the popularity of Jaws.  In fact, the movie opens with one of the characters playing a Jaws video game.

So the government had been weaponizing piranhas to help in Vietnam but when the war ended they kept the program going.  A woman who finds missing persons releases these fish into a Texas mountain stream.  Anyone on the river is in danger and, of course, it flows past a new resort that is having its opening weekend downstream.  The government wants a coverup because the colonel in charge has invested heavily in the new resort.  You get the picture.  Lots of people screaming in the water and a gratuitous use of movie blood and a story that keeps the viewer asking “why?” The film has a way of somehow steering just clear of bad movie territory.  Also, it becomes obvious, that even without appropriate music cues, this is a horror comedy.  I lost track of how many unanswered questions there were within the first fifteen minutes.

Piranha is a sort of fun knockoff from Jaws.  There’s nothing really profound here, although one scene did make way for a little social commentary.  When Maggie (the skiptracer) wants to distract an army guard with her feminine wiles, she wonders if he might be gay.  This was in 1978, well before “don’t ask, don’t tell,” and she asks with a pre-Trumpian nonchalance that it’s downright refreshing.  Otherwise it’s pretty much your typical exploitation film.  The concept has led to a couple of remakes, so watching swimmers getting nibbled to death obviously has some appeal.  The plot is so outlandish that there’s nothing scary here, even though it’s clearly horror.  There’s even a scene with some stop-motion animation of a creature in a subplot that’s simply dropped.  There are worse movies for summer escapism, given that we’re now post-pre-Trump again.