Diabolical

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Diabolique, the 1996 remake, is sometimes tagged as horror.  It’s also considered drama and a thriller, so how you classify it has some flexibility.  One thing it’s generally not classified as is “good.”  Most remakes suffer in comparison to the originals, and their originating novels explain a lot more.  Still, it’s set near Pittsburgh and it has a lot of religious imagery in it.  In case you’re not familiar—it’s the story of a love triangle involving a particularly odious man and two women who inexplicably adore him.  One of the women is a young, wealthy heiress who inherited a private school outside the city.  She’s a teacher at the school and her cheating husband is the principal.  Her best friend, beknownst to her, is sleeping with her lecherous husband.  But the best friend also protects the wife from her husband’s bullying.

The wife, a former nun, has a heart condition.  Her husband and best friend plot to scare her to death and inherit the school and all her money.  They do this via an elaborate—almost Rube Goldberg-esque—ruse where the women drown the man and he then “comes back to life” frightening the former nun into a heart attack.  Her best friend, apparently, repents along the way and along with the wife, end up drowning her husband for real when he attacks both of them.  You kind of get the sense that there are few characters with whom to empathize and although this could’ve been a feminist manifesto, it was directed by a man and missed that opportunity.  So why am I discussing it here?

The use of religion in this film is intriguing.  Throughout the school there’s discarded religious imagery.  Crosses cast aside, empty holy water fonts, grace not said before meals.  The husband, not a believer, has put all of that aside.  His wife, convinced she’s murdered her husband, confesses.  Then engages a private investigator, for appearances’ sake.  The thing is, the religious imagery doesn’t really come into contact with the story.  The only real exception is when the wife uses the cross she’s wearing to gouge her husband’s face.  A strange form of salvation indeed.  The movie isn’t that good (it’s free on Amazon Prime, though) but it underscores once again that religion does find a natural partner in crime with horror.  Or in this case, a thriller.  However you want to classify it.  The plot twists aren’t effectively executed but I suppose it’s better than a crucifix in your eye.

Skin Deep

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The thing about art-house movies is they’re meant to be discussed.  I spend a lot of time alone and I watch most of my movies alone.  There’s a kind of danger in that, I suppose.  Under the Skin was recommended by one of the books I read, analyzing horror.  I knew nothing about it and it became clear from the opening that director Jonathan Glazer had been heavily influenced by Stanley Kubrick.  In particular, 2001: A Space Odyssey.  There’s also the question of genre—is it science fiction or horror?  Art-house goes without saying.  The story is minimal and the movie is about images.  Even so, Glazer spent years working on the script.  The results won critical acclaim but box office failure.  We know the feeling.

So what is Under the Skin about?  Quite a bit is implied rather than stated outright.  The woman—the characters are generally unnamed—is an alien trying to learn about, while living off of, humans.  Early on she learns that sex appeal will nearly always entrap men so that they can be used for food.  Much of the film involves her driving around Scotland, seeking victims.  She has a co-conspirator who goes around making sure she leaves no traceable clues.  Conversation is minimal and shots linger to a point that viewers might feel the need for some explanation.  When she finds a victim with a deformity, the woman begins to learn empathy.  This victim is apparently set free, but is rounded up by her companion.

The woman tries to befriend a kindly man who tries to help her.  She can’t eat human food and doesn’t know to wear a coat in a Scottish winter.  The intimacy scares her and she comes across a logger in the forest with rape on his mind.  When he discovers she’s not human, he burns her to death.  Her companion, apparently seeking her, has no idea where she’s gone.  Roll credits.  As I say, the story is conveyed by the images and they stick with you.  The beautiful Scottish scenery can’t help but appeal to someone who’s lived there for a time.  The movie leaves you reflective and in the mood for conversation, the way art-house films do.  It’s also another example of Euro-horror.   This has captured my attention of late since it’s generally intelligent and light on the violence.  It makes you think.  Critics loved it, but the paying public didn’t want to hand over cash to see it.  That means, in my private calculus, that it’s well worth watching.

Making Meaning

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The last book I slipped in under the wire of 2022 was Philip Ball’s excellent The Modern Myths: Adventures in the Machinery of the Popular Imagination.  It would be easy enough, if judging by the cover, to suppose this to be a book about horror, but it’s not.  At least not wholly.  Ball is actually addressing the idea, in his wonderful writing style, that certain myths in modernity can be traced to various speculative tales, mostly from the nineteenth century.  Not intended to be comprehensive, this study makes brilliant cases for several stories that offer meaning, which is what myths really are.  The first such myth analyzed is Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.  This novel led to the modern tope of being stranded on an isolated island and we see it everywhere from Gilligan’s Island to Lost.  Ball isn’t offering an encomium to the literature—in fact, he points out the problems with the stories and their writing and indicates that this is part of the mythic process.  Along the way we learn about the authors and their lives, as well as the afterlives of their stories.

Similar treatments are offered for several culturally significant speculative stories that many people have never read but nevertheless know.  Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes tales, and the twentieth-century phenomenon of Batman are all given similar treatment, leading to insight after insight.  The book also gives the reader the distinct sense that ours isn’t the final word on anything.  We’re part of a tradition and those who produce speculative material—future myths may not be anchored in literature—and those who analyze us will also, in their turn be analyzed.

One such mythology currently under development, Ball suggests, is the zombie myth.  Grounded more in movies than any literature, the canonical traits of how it goes are widely recognized and have been taken in several directions, including parody.  Of course, projecting which stories will be future myths, outgrowing their original settings to provide cultural meaning, is something we can’t do with accuracy.  We all know, however, what it means to be a Jekyll and Hyde, or what to expect during a zombie apocalypse.  Such stories tend to come from speculative genres because those are what people tend to like.  We read and gravitate toward science fiction, horror, super heroes, etc.  And we do so, Ball makes a great case for, because they contain the stories that explain our world.  And given this world, some explanation is definitely necessary.

Disappearing

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It might be easy to suppose that horror uses religion gratuitously.  Or it may be that the connection runs much deeper.  Yes, many people are still religious as growing numbers are becoming less so, but both kinds watch horror.  As is usual for a guy who doesn’t get out much, I learn about movies often by reading about them in various analyses.  That’s how I came across the box-office flop, Vanishing on 7th Street.  While various critics point out its flaws, to me it watches like an extended Twilight Zone episode, exploring interpersonal dynamics when a bad situation overcomes a community.  For reasons unexplained, people without a light source disappear.  This is somewhere not too far from Chicago, but we don’t know exactly where.  Five people have managed to survive and four of them end up in a bar that has power because of a back-up generator.

Jim, an African-American boy, is waiting for his mother to return to the tavern.  She was the bar tender but had run to the local church to find other people because the lights were on.  She didn’t return and three other people make their way to the bar.  Disagreeing on a course of action, or what has happened, they try to work together to stay in the light.  Jim eventually makes a break for the church.  He alone manages to survive there until daylight reveals a young girl named Briana, spotted throughout the movie, with a solar-powered flashlight.  The others have all vanished, so Jim and Briana decide to try to make it to Chicago together as night falls.

Wikipedia calls the film “post-apocalyptic,” but I would say it’s more metaphorical.  The only two characters to survive do so by finding refuge in a church.  No prayers are said, but candles keep the darkness and its dangers at bay.  There’s plenty to reflect on here, even though we don’t know what has led to this situation or why the shadows snatch people, leaving rapture piles of clothes all over the place.  Not a fast-paced movie, it’s a film with only one jump-startle and plenty of time to think.  That was my take on it.  Not all horror has to be slasher-oriented.  I was really puzzled why this one ended up with an R rating.  Sometimes horror just makes you think.  Often that thinking involves reflections on the meaning of life.  Some would call that philosophy, but those who consider the light and its relationship to darkness tend to call it religion.

All Wet

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If I keep up this pace I’ll finish next year.  Reading the full set of Dark Shadows novels by Marilyn Ross, that is.  Since they tell me I’m an adult, this might seem a strange avocation.  Driven by nostalgia, and frankly, a love of gothic literature (the latter defined loosely), I’m revisiting my childhood reading.  Long ago I ditched the copies of these books that I originally found in a haphazard way, and it is possible—in this universe of improbabilities—that I have repurchased one of the exact same books I had as a child.  No matter.  I don’t think I read Barnabas, Quentin and the Sea Ghost before.  If I had, no memory of it is within easy recall.  It does seem that W. E. D. “Marilyn” Ross was making some slight progress with his writing as the series went on, but this one isn’t great.

An undersea salvage operation, run by Claude Bliss—accompanied by his daughter Norah (someone has to fall in love with Barnabas, after all)—comes to Collinsport to find the treasure of Jenny Swift, a ship named after its pirate captain.  There is, however, a ghost that haunts any who try to attain the treasure.  In one of the “Scooby-Doo Effect” versions of the Collinwood estate, the ghost turns out to be a man, a neighbor, literally in a rubber mask.  The salvage operation had been a bust from the beginning and Quentin shows up just to stir up trouble and then suddenly leaves before the story finishes.  This particular fascicle feels unfinished to me.  Who was the woman with Quentin?  What happened to the daughter of the man pretending to be a ghost?  Did Norah and Jim Donovan ever get together?  And what of Dr. Hoffman and Professor Stokes?

I’m not naive enough to expect belles-lettres from these books, but the last couple in the series built some hope as they seemed to have been making progress.  The stories were tighter and more innovative, even if still formulaic.  Some seem more cookie-cutter than others.  Since I have only three more novels to go (having read five of them this year), I see no reason to stop now.  I know there are other Dark Shadows fans out there.  I’ll probably put a YouTube video out on the topic down the road.  I did watch many of the episodes, but my memories come primarily from the novels I managed to find back in the seventies.  And like back then, I wasn’t really accurately called an adult, I suppose.

Word of the Year

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I still have to look up “goblin mode” each time I read it.  I’ve been reading it quite a bit because it was Oxford University Press’ word of the year for 2022.  Throwing voting open to the public for the first time, goblin mode was overwhelmingly chosen, edging out my personal favorite, “metaverse.”  (It’s not every day that a word your brother-in-law invented gets that kind of accolade!)  But goblin mode is in the Zeitgeist.  It means to live an unkempt existence, perhaps hedonistically, without caring what others think.  It is, of course one of the offspring of the Covid-19 pandemic and its lock-downs.  Like social distancing, it’s something some of us had done before we knew what it was called.  But only partially.  I have a mental self-image that I don’t allow myself to show because I don’t like being judged.  I’d be safer in the metaverse, perhaps.

Image credit: Goblin illustration by John D. Batten from “English Fairy Tales” via Wikimedia Commons

Somewhat a natural hermit, I do crave human company and, like most people, I worry about what others think of me.  The thing is, people are natural actors.  We keep our goblins well hidden, usually.  Social life is quite different from the moments we spend alone.  Goblins are, of course, a type of monster.  Somewhat undefined and malleable, they can be compared to demons or fairies.  They do tend to be associated with households, which may make their use with this phrase appropriate.  Goblins tend to be thought of as ugly, thus goblin mode is letting your “ugliness” take over, no matter who may see.  You could be in permanent goblin mode in the metaverse, though.

I have to admit that such things make me feel my age.  The lessons of conformity, even though I was born in the sixties, were pretty deeply impressed.  “Do you want other people to see you like that?”  I wonder if we’re not all insecure at some level—it’s our primate inheritance.  Going into goblin mode, then, is striking back at the natural human acting ability.  It comes at a time when the message of not judging is also prevalent.  In the metaverse, as it was first used in Snow Crash, you chose an avatar that could look like anything you wanted.  I suppose that’s a form of goblin mode too.  We are natural actors.  Watch people in a crowd sometime.  Or at the office.  Or even at home, if they’re not alone.  If other eyes are watching the question always remains “do you want others to see you like that?”  And what we see is probably not authentic.

Holiday Horrors

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Holiday horror is a genre—really a sub-genre—that is still being explored.  It’s the subject of my my latest YouTube video.  Typical definitions suggest that it builds on a haunted or inauspicious history of the day.  I tend to think that really to fit the category that the holiday can’t be simply incidental.  It has to contribute to that fear that the movie brings.  The most popular holiday for horror films has long been Christmas.  Halloween may be starting to catch up, but Christmas has a long head start.  I ask myself if Black Christmas fits.  The title suggests as much, but how does it derive fear from the holiday?  It is, like When a Stranger Calls, one of the early cinematic renditions of the urban legend “the babysitter and the man upstairs.”  Yes, the calls are coming from inside the house, but there’s more going on here.  The sorority house is invaded during a Christmas party.

The fear, however, comes from both the juxtaposition of the cheerful holiday and the ambiguity of a slowly emptying residence.  Coeds are leaving for the holiday.  Or are they?  The bleakness of the weather adds to the dreariness of the plot.  The function of holiday horror is to make viewers address what’s really important about the occasion.  Tragedy can strike any day of the year—it’s no respecter of birthdays or other holy occasions.  John Carpenter got his idea for Halloween from this film, so in many ways Black Christmas does fit the sub-genre.  Its titling, however, complicates this.  Originally called Stop Me, the movie was to be set on Christmas break but the focus was not to be on the holiday.  Even as it was released the title continued to change, in America it was first called Silent Night, Evil Night.

Like the remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, critics initially didn’t like this movie but time has shifted that.  It is an effective horror film and probably part of the objection (I’m psychologizing here, without a license) had to do with implicating a holiday—a happy holiday—with horror.  Christmas is, for many, a stressful time of year.  Instead of quietness and relaxation, it’s a season of intense socializing and measuring one’s generosity against that of others.  We try so hard to make others happy with material things.  Holiday horror need not add to that stress.  In fact, it can make you stop and think about what’s really important.  There’s a reason that Christmas was long the holiday associated with scary stories before Halloween really took off.

Best Beasts

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Strange Beasts of China left me strangely affected.  Yan Ge’s novel received quite a bit of acclaim for a book of speculative fiction.  Of course whether or not it is speculative fiction is open to debate.  The narrator, an unnamed former graduate student, makes her living by writing about the “strange beasts” of the fictional city of Yong’an.  Uncertain of where she fits, she’s been researching any number of creatures that resemble humans in various aspects, and who lived often hidden lives among the population of the city.  Her relationships revolve around people who, and this may be a spoiler, often turn out to be beasts.  It could almost be a parable.  I wasn’t quite sure what to expect.  The word “cryptozoologist” occurs in the copy and it was blurbed by a couple of horror writers.

It’s not really a horror novel, though.  There’s some action and even a bit of violence—not too explicit—and some well-executed twists.  I wasn’t sure where the story was going, but I found myself eagerly awaiting the opportunity to pick the book back up again.  One of the truths of our species is that we find ways of othering those who are different than we are.  Othering so that we can fear and mistreat them.  And feel superior.  That’s why this story feels so much like a parable to me.  The beasts aren’t really monsters, but then, monsters are really us.  What matters is how we treat them.  Yan Ge handles them with sensitivity—her narrator, after all, is very interested in these beasts—and our suspicions grow as the novel goes on.  We shouldn’t be judging here.

That this book should come out even as American attitudes toward China veered decidedly toward “othering” (the book was published in Chinese back in 2006, but appeared in English in 2020), is significant.  There are reasons to fear the autocratic government of China, but a significant portion of Americans seem to favor the autocratic style over democracy.  So it is that parables continue to be made.  We live on a planet with billions of other human beings, each with cultures, hopes, and dreams.  They may look a little different and thy may speak in ways that we don’t immediately understand, at least not without some effort, but they are just as human as those who speak English and who live in their own fictional cities isolated by a couple of oceans.  Strange Beasts of China really made me think.

For the Eyes

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A Welsh horror film?  Lately Euro-horror has caught my attention.  European sensibilities give horror a distinctive flavor, and The Feast doesn’t pull the usual horror tricks.  And reading the subtitles keeps you on your toes.  It’s more a slow build that manages to be unnerving from the start.  A family of four—parents and two boys in their late teens or early twenties—is hosting a feast.  A local girl, Cadi, is hired to help cater the affair.  The family is really seeking to get a neighbor to allow exploratory mineral drilling on her land.  She refuses, horrified when they mention that they’ll only drill on the rise.  The neighbor, aghast, says they know better because they’ll awaken “her.”  The unnamed her is a goddess who is within the rise and who’s been disturbed by the family’s drilling on the land adjacent to their neighbors’ property.

A number of aspects push this beyond Euro-horror.  The goddess, treated as superstition by the family, introduces religion into the horror.  (Cadi, as it turns out, died on her way to the house and the goddess inhabited her body.)  The remote location and role of the countryside also bring this into the folk horror realm.  Having an underlying ecological message, the film is eco-horror as well.  As such it has a positive message, even as all those at the feast, apart from the uncompromising neighbor, die before the evening is out.  Gods will express their wrath.  Although there’s gore, the concept is intelligent and possessed Cady’s unwillingness to speak throughout much of the film adds to the tension.

Horror films with subtitles sometimes don’t work, but The Feast manages pretty well.  Much of the disturbing atmosphere comes from the house.  A modern construction, built over what had formerly been the family’s farm, stands in stark contrast to the natural world all around.  As is often the case in eco-horror, the land is waiting to take its revenge.  It’s a message appropriate for a time when we fail to live up to our own environmental standards, and consider the checks and balances of nature itself as “superstition.”  Maybe a goddess will not awaken and kill everyone at the dinner party, but the wealthy will not be spared, as the movie prophesies.  We share the planet and the earth allows us to survive.  There’s a sense that we deserve to be reminded that living on a finite planet requires careful stewardship of it all.  If you’re going to throw a feast, at least make sure it’s not at the expense of nature.  Some goddesses are best not aroused.

Not Relic

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Someone somewhere sometime recommended The Relic to me.  I can’t recollect who, where, or when, so I’m not sure in which direction to point the blame.  (Or maybe they recommended Relic…)  Weekend afternoons are drowsy times, and rather than sleep, I prefer to watch movies.  Those on my wish-watch list don’t often coincide with what’s on the streaming services available to me, so I try to recall those recommended to me at some point.  I mean, The Relic sounds like it should be good: a Meso-American god that’s part lizard, part beetle, and part mammal rampaging through a major museum?  Well, what’s not to like?  Monsters are usually fun.  This one requires hormones from the hypothalamus to survive, so it beheads people to get at their brains.

Now, if you’re not a fan this will sound goofy to you.  The thing is, in the right hands such a film could be very good.  I hear that the novel upon which it’s based is.  Unfortunately the script and the acting don’t really hold up.  The sciencey explanation doesn’t make sense—the evolution from eating certain leaves is too rapid, outpacing even the monsters in Evolution.  And when we learn that the mammal DNA comes from a human, it raises the question of whether indigestion was mistaken for evolution.  Of course, the monster—shown a little too early—is a chimera.  Since it’s part bug and part gecko it can walk up walls, which is admittedly pretty cool.  But the holes in the plot don’t ever really get filled so it’s a lot of running through tunnels in the dark with flashlights.

When I read the description that it involved a god-monster I thought I’d figured out why it’d been recommended.  Religion and horror share gods and monsters, so I thought maybe something would’ve been made of this.  The scenes where the carving of Kothoga is being prepped make no sense—you use carving tools to excavate fossils, not statues—and we learn nothing of this intriguing deity beyond that it was released to eat your enemies brains and when it ran out of brains, it dies.  Of course, it can eat leaves as well.  Ironically and paradoxically, the film makes me want to read the novel to get a fuller explanation.  The combination of gods and monsters is rich territory to explore and when those making a movie credit the audience with enough intelligence to make this work, it might be enough to keep you awake on a drowsy weekend afternoon.  Or it might keep you awake even if they don’t.

Haunting Hudson

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After Maine, the one place I’ve always wanted to live, but never had the opportunity, or could never afford, is upstate New York.  My ancestors were from the state but I just happen to’ve been born in Pennsylvania.  So it goes.  Perhaps it comes with professionally studying mythology, but one of my longterm interests is folklore.  I’m always fascinated by what people tell of their local setting.  Now when I approach books about the paranormal in a region, such as Cheri Farnsworth’s Haunted Hudson Valley, I know to take most of it with a grain of salt.  People love to tell stories and local people like to talk about where they’re from.  The Hudson Valley has had a long history of strangeness and several tales that reflect that are collected here.

I often think of ghosts.  They generally seem to prefer a single place that’s familiar.  And although you can’t take everything everyone says as gospel, there do seem to be regions beset with them.  I wonder if regions early settled by Europeans are particularly prone to haunting.  It’s difficult to imagine that, at the time with the unquestioned rectitude of church and empire, that they ever stopped to think “Hey, we’re stealing land that belongs to someone else.”  Did that idea ever come back to haunt them?  Perhaps such unspoken guilt leads to ghosts.  Or maybe simply dwelling in a place for a long time leaves plenty of opportunity for ghosts to gather.  And, of course, people do stretch the truth at times and misinterpret things otherwise explained.

No matter the reasons or rationale, these kinds of books are always a guilty pleasure read for me.  I don’t expect the get the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth from them, but I enjoy them nevertheless.  Since I can’t afford to live in the Hudson Valley, the other result of such books—and one of the reasons locals appreciate them—is to make me want to travel to the region and see for myself.  For many years we lived not too far from the Hudson while in New Jersey.  Still, we didn’t make it up that way very often.  It’s a bit more of a hike now, but isn’t a hike worth making when you might see something unusual after you arrive?  My ancestors had settled north of the Hudson Valley and eventually migrated further south.  The end up in Pennsylvania, where I find myself.  But I’m still haunted by upstate New York.

Pods

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Some cultural assets (ahem) are so well known that you come to know them by association.  I knew the story behind Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956 and 1978) long before I saw the original, within the last couple of years.  I may have been body-snatched myself since I can’t remember when it was or why I didn’t write a blog post about it.  In any case, I’d long been curious about the remake and discovered it free (for the time being) on Amazon Prime.  The fact I’m still looking for free stuff proves I’ve not been body-snatched, I guess.  If you’ve been raised with our cultural assets you know that the eponymous body snatchers are pod people who look exactly like the victims they destroy.  Their goal is a well-ordered society with no emotions.

The thing that’s so interesting about the 1978 version is that its assessment has changed over time.  When it first came out, many thought, and opined, that the 1956 black-and-white version was better and this one really added nothing.  However, over time this judgment has been questioned.  Critics taking a second look have now scored it as one of the best remakes ever made, and not only that, but it is considered one of the best science-fiction horror movies of all time.  I suspect nothing in that category will ever displace Alien, but still, my first viewing of the ’78 Body Snatchers agreed with the latter assessment.  It is quite good and it has even aged well.  You can kind of guess how it’s going to end, largely because the final scene has been played over and over, but still it’s definitely worth watching.

The social commentary in the film runs deep and strong.  Non-conformity is suppressed.  Life without emotions is better than really feeling something.  Simply go along because everyone else does.  The parable has changed actors over time—fascination with social media/virtual reality have perhaps become the modern pods—but the story is as old as our species.  Probably even older.  It’s non-conformists, generally after their demise, that are realized as visionaries.  Shooting a car into orbit requires tons of money but not much vision.  I’m not conforming, however, when I agree that the 1978 remake is good.  My taste in movies has always stood apart from others, at least from my own experience.  I also think that horror is often among the more intelligent genres of film.  But then, I tend to side with the emotional.

Not Sleepy Yet

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Working on a doctorate changes the way you think.  Or at least it’s supposed to.  Easy answers have to be examined closely, and sources critically scrutinized.  One of the side-effects of this is that many Ph.D.s tend to think that only others of that status are able to do good research.  An essential piece of research, however, is passion.  This part isn’t always logical and can’t always be explained.  A recovering academic, I first resisted Gary Denis’ Sleepy Hollow: Birth of the Legend because it was self-published.  I’ve had bad experiences with self-published books before but what I discovered here is that Denis is quite a capable researcher, driven with a passion for Washington Irving’s tale.  The execution may be a little rough, but the data-gathering is very good.  He tries to point out where accounts have problems and attempts, where possible, to resolve them.

Denis is driven by the question of what in Irving’s story is factual, if anything?  This is probably not a question an academic would ask, presuming that fiction is fiction.  Still, there is data.  The first four chapters are very good.  Here he lays out the background to the region, Irving, and stories of headless horsemen.  I learned quite a lot from it.  The final three chapters turn to the main characters of the story—Ichabod Crane, Katrina Van Tassel, and Brom Bones—asking who they might’ve been based on.  The best drawn of these is the first and there’s good reason to suppose Irving based Crane’s situation on that of his friend, Jesse Merwin.  The other two, however, are sketched rather hastily and lots of people have suggestions for who might’ve been behind them.

Clearly aware that authors borrow and make things up, Denis knows that Katrina and Brom may well be pretty much imaginary.  He also knows that Irving did indeed borrow much from previously known stories and legends.  Irving’s real genius was in the way he expressed these stories in colloquial English, making American literature a blend.  Although Irving wrote many books, his fame was largely due to two of his stories published early in his career.  One of those stories, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” has left quite a paper trail and Denis leaves no rock unturned in his efforts to collect data on it.  I’ve read a fair number of self-published books over the years—they’ve been easy to produce since the internet began—and I’m wary of them.  This book, however, is one that I’m glad I found and it serves as a useful reminder that good research isn’t limited to the privileged few in the academy.

Prosthetic Horse?

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Old habits die hard.  As a young researcher, I was dogged about reading everything possible on a subject before writing on it.  Both the profusion of information and the endlessly ticking clock of mortality now suggest that if you want to say something, say it.  You need to do a reasonable amount of research, but you’ll never read everything.  This is the kind of thinking I should’ve heeded before spending a couple of bucks on Headless Horseman.  I should specify, the 2022 film by that name.  The name has been used before and it has an unspecified coding.  Often it has to do with Washington Irving, but not always.  A 1972 Russian film by Vladimir Vajnshtok is titled The Headless Horseman, but it has to do with a completely separate story.  In any case, Jose Prendes’ 2022 film isn’t what you expect.

Sophia, a girl with a former boyfriend who’s a drug dealer, gets engaged to Brandon.  He’s not too bright, but he’s clean.  When her ex, named Angel, tries to kidnap her back, Brandon dies defending her.  The Devil shows up and a deal is made.  Brandon has 24 hours to kill the gangsters.  He’s given a bladed glove (where have we seen that before?) and a burning jack-o-lantern head (ditto?).  Did I mention this all happens on Halloween?  Well, Brandon just isn’t up to killing people and he fails in his mission, defeated by bad guys with holy water.  So Sophia sells her soul to get Brandon back.  She manages to kill the thugs, but gets shot in the process.  Brandon make a third counter-offer with the prince of darkness, to harvest souls.

The pacing for the film is all off.  The writing is about the worst I’ve ever heard.  Someone being sucked to Hell stops to discuss semantics with his girlfriend?  Really?  And not only that, the special effects are sparingly used.  You’ve got a flaming pumpkin head—use it!  I guess part of me felt cheated by the premise that never materialized.  The “headless horseman” isn’t trademarked, nor can it be copyrighted.  It does, however, convey an expected story that viewers know.  The point of this effort seems to be, if you sell drugs you’ll ultimately get yours.  Those who are innocent will also get theirs, although perhaps will remain on Satan’s good side.  For all its faults it does demonstrate how religion and horror play well together.  Even when they haven’t much good material to work with.

John Quidor‘s The Headless Horseman Pursuing Ichabod Crane

Goodbye, Linda

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It’s out of the ordinary for me to post twice in one day, but I’m compelled to do so by the passing of a friend I’d never met.  I’ll already published today’s post when I learned the news.  Linda S. Godfrey was a Wisconsin journalist.  She’s known for her many books on paranormal and weird subjects.  She was the reporter who first took “the beast of Bray Road” seriously.  I only discovered her after we’d moved from Wisconsin, although we didn’t live far from her in those days.  Fascinated by her work on the beast, I contacted her with some information I’d read and we opened a very occasional exchange of stories.  She was my very first Twitter follower, and she published one of my true stories (anonymously, by request) in one of her books.

I know that academically-inclined folks are dismissive of her work, suggesting she was credulous.  I always looked at it differently—Linda was willing to listen to people.  Yes, she probably talked to some people with mental issues, but here’s a true secret—all people have mental issues.  Although I never met her in person I had the sense from her writing that she didn’t simply accept what others told her, but she was willing to consider it.  I remember visiting Rutger’s University library while I was an adjunct there, to find a difficult-to-locate reference for her.  I mailed her a photocopy of what I’d found.  As I say, we never met, and we only corresponded once in a great while.

Seeing that her blog hadn’t been updated for some time (so this is related, you see, to my earlier post), I began to wonder if she was well.  Like most of us born to write, I knew it was unusual for her not to post.  Not knowing her personally, I didn’t think it polite to ask.  I’ve read several of her books, some of them highlighted on this blog.  Often dismissed as “only a cryptozoologist,” my sense is that Linda was hounded by the need to know the truth.  Yes, the world is a mysterious place—it’s not nearly as well understood as we’re often confidently told that it is.  Some of us simply can’t rest without finding out for ourselves.  Linda earned a reputation as an expert on werewolves—many suggest the beast of Bray Road was some such creature.  She recognized the tie-in to folklore but she also knew that monsters always, always cross borders.  Linda is missed already, and it’s about time I caught up on some of her latest books, for I’m compelled to believe she now knows.