The Evil Living

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Returning home from my campus visits, I needed some brainless relaxation. Since we don’t have any television service at home, this means watching movies. I’d heard quite a bit about The Evil Dead over the years—a movie that was scary back in the 80’s when it appeared. Improvements in special effects and the intensity of engineered sound are capable of drawing a person into an alternate reality for a couple of hours these days, and the endless reiteration of earlier movie effects somehow robs the early thrillers of their impact. The Evil Dead, however, capitalizes on confusion about the menace and teeters on the brink of morality for the entire 85 minutes. Naturally, when looking for a source of fear, it seeks a religious agent. The source of the evil in the woods is narrated in a voice-over of the presumably dead scientist who has discovered Sumerian texts that release demons in the forest (mostly in the form of falling trees).

Sumerian is always a safe bet if you want a language that your viewers will not be able to identify. The earliest known recorded language, Sumerian is still difficult even for experts, and it conveys all the strangeness of long ago. We do know that the Sumerians recorded myths that involve what we might call “demons” today, but the possession of humans was a much later development—probably a pre-scientific way of explaining epilepsy. As our five students seek a weekend getaway in the woods, they become possessed and face the moral question of just when a person ceases to be human. At what stage does someone have the right to kill someone else? Perhaps unintentionally, the movie gives us the answer, “Never.” This kind of morality has a place in America, one of the very few “first world” nations in which the death penalty is still legal. Often promoted by those dead-set against abortion. Where do we draw the line saying a person has crossed over into the unforgivable other?

The Evil Dead has become a cult classic over the years. Its relatively low budget of less than half-a-million dollars brought an astonishing box office return on the investment. The gore, tame by more modern standards, does not mask that what is really at issue here: the question of right versus wrong. What is truly evil? Sumerians aside, what possesses people and drives them to destroy one another? The Evil Dead, like many horror films, reaches for a religious answer. As the supernatural fog begins to clear, however, we might not like what we see in the clear light of day. Religion may be an excuse, but the assaults upon one another are what Nietzsche famously called “human, all too human.” The sooner we clear our vision and pay attention to what is actually happening, the sooner we can combat the horror.

Let the Left One In

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When you’ve got a good thing going, why stop? Reading Timothy Beal’s Religion and its Monsters put me in the mood for a vampire flick over the holiday weekend. I had watched with longing as Matt Reeves’ Let Me In flew into and out of theatres back in 2010. Advertised as a thoughtful vampire story based on John Ajvide Lindqvist’s novel, Let the Right One In, and having a real moral struggle unlike the Twilight saga’s dulled fangs, it had been on my “to see” list for quite some time. This movie doesn’t disappoint. The specific aspect to which I refer, of course, is the religious. Vampires may be the most religious monsters ever invented, and like all good, subversive movies Let Me In casts the religious aspect in an unexpected role. Religion and the vampire interact through the character of Owen’s mother. Her face never seen on the screen, she shuffles outside the range of view and tells her son of the need for prayer and belief. Her life is a shambles and 12-year-old Owen knows it.

Abby, the vampire next door, is a monster capable and desirous of love. Her vampiric self is not exposed to crucifixes or blessed communion wafers, but to the torment of outliving those she loves. Eternal life is her curse, and religion can do nothing to solve it. When Owen slips twenty dollars from his Mom’s purse to buy Abby some candy, Jesus is watching from the mirror. When the bullies torment Owen, Jesus is nowhere to be found. The symbolism, whether intentional or not, is apt social commentary. Our religion is there to punish us, not to help us. If in doubt, listen to the politicians and televangelists; God is intensely angry—Jonathan Edwards wasn’t even halfway there. Their surfeit of rectitude puts the rest of us to shame. Until they’re elected.

Vampires have their origin in creatures that steal the life-essence of the living. Whether blood, semen, or psychic energy, the vampire feasts while the victim withers. Let Me In, by telling the story of a pre-pubescent vampire, shifts the focus of culpability. A 12-year-old is beneath the age of responsibility according to the Judeo-Christian tradition. Unable to determine right from wrong, the child simply seeks what all living creatures do—the possibility of existence. When Owen discovers that his new friend, his only friend, is a vampire, he tries to find answers from his religious mother. She is asleep. He calls his absent father who blames the religion of his mother. The moral guidance here comes from the monster. The bullies would win if it weren’t for what the authorities call evil. Sometimes I think Jonathan Edwards got it all backwards, for when power determines who is righteous it is the bullies who dangle spiders over the fire.

Hic Sunt Dracones

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Even a visionary like Thomas Edison can’t know the directions in which an invention might be taken. The idea of the moving picture has immersed human beings in an alternate reality that is sometimes difficult to separate from the physical world we daily inhabit. As soon as movies were invented, producers and directors began to explore the depths of fear with the monster movie. What they were really exploring was the mystery of religion. I frequently write of the nexus of religion and the monstrous, and Timothy K. Beal wrote a book on that subject a decade ago in which I found another affirmation of my suspicion. Forthrightly titled Religion and its Monsters (Routledge, 2002), Beal’s playful yet serious exploration of the scary traces the origins of monsters to Genesis, and even earlier. Taking on Leviathan, the biblical sea serpent, Beal demonstrates the pre-biblical pedigree of this fierce monster and shows that, like most truly frightening entities, it began as a god. Indeed, what we call religion today grew up around fear of those forces beyond our control, a nature so harsh it could be none other than divine. The writers of the Bible clearly knew this story as Beal traces it from Genesis to Job, from Psalms to Jonah, from Leviathan to Devil.

In a shot/reverse shot formation, Beal takes us to modern-day monsters and shows their religious origins. Those things that frighten us on the big screen crawl there from their origins in the temples, shrines, and chapels of religions that don’t manage to subdue evil completely. The claims are made that the gods are stronger than the chaos that surrounds us, but they are still fighting nevertheless. From Dracula to Godzilla, the monsters have the gods on the run. And when the human protagonists finally get their monster pinned down, they discover that it is often God wearing a mask. Our monsters are gods gone bad. How else could they revive from the dead at the end of the reel? They never truly disappear. And if they do, there’s always more where they came from. The reason, Beal concludes, is that we are, in fact, the monsters.

According to the analysis of W. Scott Poole, Timothy Beal, like myself, falls into the “monster kid” generation. As I grew up, I quickly learned that to confess my interest in monsters was to risk the labels of juvenile, naïve, and immature. Grown ups are interested in money and sex and power. Only kids have any interest in dinosaurs, mythology, and monsters. An epiphany of sorts, however, seems to be unfolding. Scholars of religion in my generation are peeling back the rubber masks of our movie monsters and are discovering the face of the divine. Perhaps we are all adolescents at heart, fixated on the weird and bizarre because the paths to money, power, and temptations of the flesh are blocked to us. Or perhaps we are the Magellans charting a course for regions off the map. It is those regions, as Beal reminds us, that are illustrated with sea serpents and inscribed hic sunt dracones, “here be dragons.” Doubt it? Read your Bible and find out for yourself.

Trouble with Triffids

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Some time ago, I posted about the John Wyndham novel, The Day of the Triffids. In playing on the loss of humanity’s primary sense of sight, the story creates a truly eerie scenario in which people are harvested by plants. Not just any plants, but alien plants! Of course, such an idea demanded a movie rendition. The film was released the year I was born, but I only just got around to watching it. Compared to the psychologically thrilling novel, the movie doesn’t ever reach the intended level of terror. Nevertheless, religion, as usual, plays a role in the movie. As Bill Masen, the protagonist, makes his way from London to Paris, attempting to find other people who retain their sight after a devastating meteor shower blinded most of the world, he comes upon a mansion where the wealthy owners are caring for the disabled. (Hard to imagine that these days, but it was the 60’s, and idealism was kicking in.) While discussing their rather hopeless options, Bill suggests there is little reason for optimism. His new-found love interest, Christine, says “We must keep faith,” to which Bill replies, “It’s going to take more than that to get through this.”

Indeed, God is no help against the triffids. These intelligent, moving plants are soon everywhere, consuming humans and intent on taking over the planet. Bill and Christine, along with their adopted daughter Susan, make their way to Spain in hope of finding a military solution. They stop at a mission, topped with a cross and inhabited with a helplessly blind, and expecting, couple. The message is clear—there is no god to help those left to their own devices. Even those who live in god’s real estate have been abandoned. Those who survive are those who help themselves. Eventually our hapless heroes are rescued by the navy and a submarine moves them safely away from triffid-infested Europe. Then, in the final scene, our blended family is seen walking into a church while a voiceover declares that the triffids did not defeat humanity after all, and “Mankind survived and once again have reason to give thanks.”

Exegeting this film, however, leads to some uncomfortable conclusions. Those who had no divine aid give thanks to an impotent deity after it is all over. The solution for destroying triffids—salt water (you might want to store that away for future use)—is discovered by scientists and is applied at their personal peril. Even the heavenly-based origin of the menace has divine overtones: colorful portents in the sky are the provenance of God. In 1962 science had not yet even reached the moon. The default fallback, based on decades of evangelical sculpting of culture, is to give thanks to the Lord, despite the devastation. Indeed, a new Garden of Eden might be said to have resulted from the triffid assault. In this garden parasitic plants teach humans to give thanks, but the vast majority of humanity remains blind.

Persistence of Demons

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Although released in April, Insidious is a film for the long nights of winter. At least with my schedule of keeping up with a culture that is moving too fast, this feels like a reasonable rationale for having just watched it. I tried not to read reviews of the movie when it came out since I prefer to experience the thrills first hand when I watch a film. Like many horror movies, Insidious revolves around the supernatural. Specifically, Insidious takes on the specter of the afterlife. Unlike The Exorcist, the demon in Insidious is not expelled by a priest, but by a psychic, borrowing a few celluloid feet from Poltergeist. Adding a couple of ghost hunters to the plot reinforces the idea of the secular demon that so often appears in the learned discussions of the TAPS team as they tilt with unseen entities on SyFy.

In an increasingly secular society, the fear of the dead is very much alive. Even a casual stroll through Barnes & Noble (the only show in town now) will demonstrate the popularity of the paranormal. Somehow sitting in pews listening to a sweaty orator go on about what he (sometimes she) thinks God is wanting us to do has disconnected us from the realm of the dead. Paul Tillich famously declared that God is a person’s “ultimate concern.” In an age when technology is hovering on the edge of keeping consciousness alive forever, people wonder what happens to the self when the body dies. Call it soul, consciousness, mind, or personality, we can’t deny—no matter how secular—that something inside makes each of us unique. The myth of flying about with angels playing harps doesn’t match everyone’s expectation of an afterlife any more. At least some of us hope for electric guitars.

Insidious opts for a realm like Limbo known as “the Further.” This is a place we have been before. The hopelessly corny The Seventh Sign gave us “the Guf” as a now empty federal reserve of souls. The Greeks gave us Tartarus and the Zoroastrians “the place of worst existence.” No matter what we call it, our brains like to believe there is some place out there that we go when the biomass we drive each day finally hits the wall. Increasingly it has become a negative place where darkness reigns. Insidious’s “the Further” is a hopeless realm of the dead, acting out their evil intent. There are no angels, but demons abide. It seems that we’ve outgrown the concept that angels are watching over us, but we can’t escape the creeping sensation that diabolical entities are peering at us from the shadows. During these long nights of winter, Insidious invites us to take a journey to where there is no heaven, but hell is surely not hard to find. All we have to do is close our eyes.

Crimes and Misogynies

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Mill Creek Entertainment has, through no fault of its own, accounted for many an idle hour of my weekends. Assiduously gathering and collating public domain movies, mostly of dubious quality, into sets of fifty movies per box, sold at a rate that probably isn’t actually cheap since most of the movies are available free online, Mill Creek panders to the connoisseur of B, C, D, or even lower, movies. Sometimes, however, a good one slips through. That’s how I discovered Bluebeard (1944). One of John Carradine’s many movies, this version of the seventeenth-century tale of a murderous husband is set in Paris sometime in the not-too-distant past, Gaston Morel is a demented puppeteer who murders his models because of a religious incident. In the final confession scene Morel explains how he, as a starving artist, took a homeless girl to his studio to nurse her back to health. As he sketched her, he realized she reminded him of the Maid of Orleans—Joan of Arc. After her recovery, she turned to a life of debauchery, driving Morel insane with rage. He thus comes to kill his models due to his tattered faith (and fragile psychology).

Despite some typical overacting and strange plot twists (why would a Paris police inspector take his American girlfriend to examine evidence to solve a crime about which he is clueless? Was he planning to run for president later?), the movie manages to provide an intelligent number of turns in the plot to keep viewers interested to the end. The concept of a killer deranged by an idealistic fiction of a female victim is somewhat frightening because it continues to this day. Long before Eve bit the fruit, ancient Mesopotamians feared the demonic female of the night who later came to be called Lilith. When the unruly female entered Judeo-Christian tradition, however, she became the target of the hate and fears of too many men who had their own ideas (backed by their own religions) of how women should act.

Witch-hunts (of all varieties) have their basis in religion-fueled misogynies. Religious texts, written mostly by men, set the standard of female behavior. Those who fail to live up to it must be enemies of the world order of masculine ideals. They are the heretics, the expendable, the feminine. As someone raised by a woman without benefit of her husband, I have never had any doubts that women were just as, if not more, capable of making it in the world as men. Yet even then, in the 60’s, many women believed equal rights with men to be immoral because of the magisterial pronouncements of the male Bible. Remember, God for the Bible is a bearded man. And upon close inspection, at times at least, one may discern in that beard a touch of blue.

Parable

National Fear

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Back in my full-time teaching days, the American Academy of Religion and Society of Biblical Literature annual meeting was an excuse to buy books. Not that we were flush with money, but the prices were so good (we’re talking academic books here) that they simply couldn’t be passed up. Those days are long gone. This year I limited myself to a single book: W. Scott Poole’s Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting. I was not disappointed. Poole gives us a smart study with considerable insight into American culture. Not only that, but it also proved an excellent source of self-understanding. I had never come across the phrase “monster kids” for those of us born in the blue light of the television when the Universal monster movies were released for television viewing in the 1960s and 70s. Poole classifies himself in that camp, and it is clear that we share this “guilty pleasure.”

Categorizing our monsters into types that fit various aspects of the American self-image, we find our national phobias reflected in our fictional fears. Throughout the book the uneasy sense of uncertainty towards sexuality, science, and death, like the revenants described, keep arising from the ground. Although Poole is a historian, it very soon becomes clear that one of the main driving forces behind both identifying and challenging these monsters is religion. It is a view Poole shares with Douglas Cowan and Stephen Asma and other analysts who take seriously the origins of our fears. Monsters creep out of the same mental space as gods. That which is not real is no less scary for its non-existence.

Particularly insightful was Poole’s analysis of the subversive nature of monsters. They challenge convention, forcing a cultural catharsis. The notable exception, Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series, also has a religious rationale. Meyer, a conservative Mormon, effectively extracts the fangs of the vampire to make it a safe, if not Christian, monster. Monsters make establishment believers uncomfortable, for they remind us of the darkness that always follows the light. Humanity responds with efforts, religious and scientific, to banish the dark. But at the end of even the longest day, night will come. When it does, I would recommend curling up with Poole for an evening of cultural self-understanding. Followed by a bowl of popcorn and a movie from his filmography.

Nightmare Behind Holidays

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Among the first mythical creatures to go extinct when the early rays of the Enlightenment began to filter through the blinds of superstitious antiquity, were demons. It was recognized that the activities attributed to demonic possession closely resembled epilepsy and psychological illness and that Occam’s Razor would remove any unseen entities with its no-nonsense straight-edge in one deft pass. And yet they remain. Among the ghost hunting crowd, demons have been recategorized from fallen angels to entities that have never been human. Their reality is assumed, and results of investigations, not surprisingly, support that assumption. It was, however, a Dirt Devil advertisement that created a desire to watch The Exorcist now when darkness comes early and the leaves have fallen from the naked branches and a chill has permeated the air.

As I watched the still disturbing film, I realized that I had also watched the Exorcism of Emily Rose and The Last Exorcism within the past few months as well. I am no fan of demon movies; even with no demonic forces out there, inevitably young women are tormented by what ultimately turns out to be a male establishment. My threshold for watching the suffering of others, even if only acted, is minimal. Movie makers—and often horror writers—know and exploit this, bringing us to face the real demons, the shadowy regions of our own minds. The Exorcist is particularly effective in this since it is Fr. Karras’s demon that ultimately wins out. Having never read the novel, I’m not sure whose idea it was to make the demon Pazuzu, but once again the origins of demons does not fit modern media’s expectations.

Pazuzu was a Mesopotamian “demon.” Akkadian doesn’t have a proper word for what the Judeo-Christian tradition would introduce as a fallen angel. Demons were simply a way of explaining profound misfortunes such as droughts, pestilence, or the Bush administration. Eventually such misfortunes became personified and took on the ability to possess a human being. Here is where psychology and neurology have come to banish demons. Part of the terror of The Exorcist is that such scientific explanations are laid flat in the face of real supernatural power. The lessons of over-consumerism, as evidenced in Black Friday eclipsing Thanksgiving for many (the lines were formed in many locations well before midnight, cutting into family time in order to get first crack at the bargains) show the demon more clearly. Holidays are measured in importance by the amount of money spent. Perhaps it is no wonder that Halloween’s demons have lingered through November and even to the end of the year.

Cthulhu’s Revenge

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H. P. Lovecraft. Monsters. Aliens. UFOs. Ancient Egyptians. Sumerians. Is there nothing this book doesn’t have? Having read many of H. P. Lovecraft’s stories over the years, I have always been taken by how, as a writer, Lovecraft disappeared from public attention only to spring back in the 1990s. I discovered Lovecraft while doing research on Dagon, the putative “fish god” of the “Philistines.” Every time I typed the name of the deity into Google, I came up with pages and pages of Lovecraft. In my lonely room on a gray Wisconsin campus, I began to read his stories and shiver with fear as I walked across a dark parking lot to my car. Jason Colavito obviously has a great appreciation for Lovecraft as well, and his book The Cult of Alien Gods: H. P. Lovecraft and Extraterrestrial Pop Culture is a fun read for a November night. Colavito suggests that the “ancient astronaut” craze that has informed many a young mind stems back to Lovecraft’s fiction. Cthulhu and his ilk.

I’m not sure that Colavito convinced me that the ideas of ancient aliens began with Lovecraft, but he does an excellent job of exposing the foibles of many theorists who build houses of cards on shifting sand. One of the most interesting connections Colavito makes is that Creationism and Ancient Astronaut-ism are not dissimilar. “Both are, in essence, a concession that science is the ultimate arbiter of truth, and both seek to (mis)use science to give absolute authority to their beliefs” (331-2). This is an aspect of Creationism I hadn’t considered before. In the uncompromising desire for scientific respectability, the only option open is to bend science to the will of religion. This distortion must be carefully executed, convincing the followers that true science has validated a religious ideal. Rhetoric and occluding argumentation must be utilized carefully here. It seems Cthulhu has world domination in his squishy mind again.

Lovecraft famously gave us fantasy worlds where ancient space creatures left their impressions as gods upon a vulnerable humanity. Mysteries of the past—and Colavito doesn’t deny there are mysteries—are so easily explained by dei ex machina, and working with fantasy is so much easier than working with physics. To approach the mysteries with an answer already in hand, however, is to deny science its glory. As a civilization we owe much to a scientific understanding of the universe we inhabit.

All Saints

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The movies of Guillermo del Toro, despite their success, must be watched with an astutely analytical eye. Although my movie watching runs a few years behind at best, a recent viewing of Pan’s Labyrinth left me feeling a little hollow and very reflective. The gruesome story is well told, and the fantasy world, even at the end, is hardly believable. Like most films that deal with disturbing issues, religious concepts are not far from the surface, or sometimes, the depths. In this case, the distinctly Christian trope of self-sacrifice opens a portal to a mystical world where a God-like father sits on a shining throne. But is it real? We are warned from the very first scene that this will not end well for young Ofelia, that “heaven” is but a fantasy seen through the hopeful eyes of a dying child. Even the faun (“Pan” of the English title) wears horns that suggest to modern minds the slightly diabolical, although he is in the service of the mystical king. I was so conflicted by end that I was glad the next day was a workday.

It is not difficult to notice that the heroes of the film are the female characters. Even the good men are generally ineffectual, but the strength of Ofelia and Mercedes bear the weight of showing any hope at all. Captain Vidal betrays his name of “life giver” time and again unless life is understood as unremitting pain and torture. Even the end of the film is set up as someone having to pay the price; the king demands innocent blood—will it be Ofelia or her baby brother? Of course, the girl must pay the price. In an interesting interpretation of the sacrifice of the only child, the daughter here becomes the savior.

Fantasy often has the power to heal. This is a key aspect that it shares with religion. Scientists have sought in vain a mechanism that would explain the brain’s remarkable ability to heal the body under conditions of belief. At times we’re reduced to name-calling, suggesting that somebody’s got something up their sleeve. After all, could a disreputable character like Rasputin really hold the key to physical wholesomeness (to say nothing of moral rectitude)? And yet, there are those who are made well by the most unlikely means.

The peoples of northern Europe believed that the veil between this world and the next was severely effaced at this time of year. Darkness is more prevalent than light. Pan’s Labyrinth begins and ends in darkness, and even the daylight—when it briefly occurs—is subdued. With Halloween behind us, the most veracious season of the year
lies ahead. Let us hope that this labyrinth contains fantasy.

Zombie Jesus

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It must still be October. Despite a snowstorm before Halloween (one of nature’s trick-or-treats), all the signs are still there. My daughter showed me a Venn diagram yesterday, during a whole-day marathon of putting plastic around our drafty old windows, showing the intersection of three “monster” traits: resurrected from the dead, local townspeople fear and revere him, and convert as many mindless followers as possible. The creatures that inhabit this eerie universe are Dracula, Frankenstein, Zombie, and, where all three intersect, Jesus Christ. Obviously this was just for a laugh, but interestingly, one of the traits of Penn Jillette’s book, God, No!, is his rather frequent reference to Jesus as a zombie. Then I clicked over to Religion Dispatches, and the lead story is headlined, “Praying to the Zombie Jesus.” Ours is a world of mindless, quick connections where the compelling idea of resurrection has lost its appeal. Despite our religious culture—or perhaps because of it—we have come to see Christianity as just one more peddler of a wonderful, disturbing idea.

As regular readers of this blog know, I find the abuse of religious ideals inexcusable. Using one’s faith to beat another down is just plain wrong. Nevertheless, to focus on the folkloristic aspect of resurrection (or perhaps it is a metaphor) is to miss what drew the very earliest followers to Jesus. Before the idea of rising from the dead came a message that people should love each other and treat one another with respect and dignity. By the end of the first century of the common era, or perhaps as early as Paul, that idea grew to be a quasi-magical resurrection from the dead. No longer were women counted as equals among the followers of Jesus, and no longer were wealthy compelled to give it all up. Paul’s faith looked to a future world, beyond death, and was willing to consider this world, well, to be polite, crap. The reasons for this transformation are legion: the persecution that Christianity was undergoing, the failure of an apocalypse to take place, the disenfranchisement of the believers. They needed something to look forward to.

Zombies are likely a passing fad. When we start seeing books of zombie Christmas carols, zombie haikus, and zombie apocalypse survivors’ guides, we seem to be reaching the peak of the plateau. The zombie is mindless, rapacious, and entirely selfish. It will not go away. It is the perfect denizen of October. When I stare into those uncomprehending eyes, and see the disturbing lack of compassion and the desire to consume human brains, I start to make connections of my own. Analysts often describe zombies as the ghoul of the common folk. But all these characteristics taken together suggest that perhaps the month in which to expect zombies is November. Surviving another snowpocalypse, earthquake, and hurricane, the human spirit is difficult to dominate. And yet, when the polls open up in the darker season of the year, zombies will rise. The plastic on my windows does nothing to stop these chills.

Borrowed from a friend's site

Zombie Reality

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The origins of zombies notwithstanding, they are the autumnal monster of choice in a post-modern society. They are the symbol of secular resurrection—no faith commitment is required, no pristine, moral lifestyle. Resurrection happens to you by accident, a chemical, a disease, cosmic radiation—whatever the cause it is not divine. And the zombie is fair game for the release of violent aggression; already dead, there is no moral imperative to keep them alive and well. Each year the mass of zombie walks increases where children and adults alike become the living dead for a day. Macabre? Indeed. It seems that the very word “macabre” may have come into English from Hebrew. Hebrew words are based (mostly) on triliteral roots, words with three unchanging consonants. The Classical Hebrew word for “grave” is based on the root q-b-r. The prefixed m is often the preposition “from.” Macabre, morphed through Latin and French, could go back to the root meaning “from the grave.” Literally, the source of zombies.

Resurrection is among the most poignant of human hopes. Religions often assure us that death is not final, but we can never know that this side of the veil. Those we love go away, we hope, to a better place than this. It is no surprise that the largest zombie walk in the country is in Asbury Park. We can imagine better. Why can’t God?

According to Wade Davis, there is a powder that vodoun priests use to zombify a person. This involuntary treatment does not actually prolong life, nor does it really resurrect the dead. It is, like many religious treatments, a show of faith. In The Serpent and the Rainbow Davis describes how psychosomatic attacks span the globe. All they require is belief. If a person believes in curses or the evil eye, the results can be physical and fatal. We create our own reality. Over the weekend I watched What the Bleep Do We Know? again. I sometimes showed this movie to my classes. Here physicists and gurus together affirm that we create our own reality moment by moment.

Zombies have migrated from the realm of religion to secular society. It is hard to imagine our modern world without them. They are cut from the same cloth as All Souls Day, reminding us of our mortality and suggesting that there might be something more. It is a reality we create ourselves.

Serpents, Rainbows, and Black Pearls

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Riding on a bus with a bunch of coughing commuters may not be the best setting for reading about poisons and zombies. I am also aware that Wade Davis has come into criticism by some of his professional colleagues and that the movie based on his book, The Serpent and the Rainbow, may have led to an aneurism or two among scholars of Haiti. Nevertheless, Borders was closing down and a copy of the book remained on the shelf for an insanely low price, and October would soon be upon us. This past week I read Davis’ intriguing account of his experience with real-life zombies and the fascinating religion of vodoun. A number of issues were raised by his account, not least of which is that the feared religion of “voodoo” is a direct result of the evils of African slavery that brought indigenous gods into the realm of Christianity, and mixed them vigorously. My first “exposure” to vodoun was in the old James Bond movie, Live and Let Die. It terrified me as a child, and even with rational eyes, I’m not sure I fare much better as an adult.

No matter what one thinks of Wade Davis and his work, The Serpent and the Rainbow is a fascinating work. One of the most interesting aspects Davis raises is the continuing issue of defining death. Premature burial may sounds like the hysteria of a Poe-induced nightmare, but, as Davis shows, most methods of measuring death are susceptible to being fooled. Those who are termed “zombies,” in the vodoun sense of the word, are people declared dead by medical professionals, yet who are later found, after their burials, very much alive. Many readers will find this difficult to accept, but it is a phenomenon that goes back to Seabrook’s swashbuckling adventures of early last century and even before. If Davis is to be believed, it is thoroughly documented.

Paradigm shifts are seldom welcomed. We prefer to live within the comfort of the universe in which we grew up. Science and religion agree on this point—things are not what they seem. Zombies in the Walking Dead sense do not exist despite the fact that they are the kind most popularly known. We like them because they can’t hurt us; they lurch through the streets of our nightmares and our zombie walks, but they are not real. It could be, however, that our understanding of our world is woefully incomplete. Confronted with that which challenges our tidy universe, whether it be quantum physics or Haitian religion, we must consider the benefits of a mind kept open to the possibilities. Do vodoun priests in the hidden shadows of the Caribbean enslave the living dead? Disney answered with a resounding yes in Pirates of the Caribbean, but then, in Hollywood it is sometimes preferable to have the zombies in front of the screen.

Yeti Again

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Time magazine announced last week, in a story spelled out on Time.com, that “There may be solid evidence that the apelike yeti roams the Siberian tundra.” This is surprising news given that even in the face of good evidence, science is reluctant to admit new large animals to our biological family. The reasoning goes that since humans (mostly white, male humans of the western hemisphere) have explored most of the landmass on this planet, we could not have missed any large land creatures. There are rare exceptions, such as the mountain gorilla, added to our database only about a century ago, but it seems to have been the last of the large animals to avoid detection. Now the yeti, the bogeyman of many childhood dreams, may be coming to life.

Science is our way of describing and theorizing about what we have discovered. Many therefore assume that science is all about new discoveries. Some of us feel a tinge of sadness at having been born after the great era of discovery. Reading about how adventurers (responsible for far more fundamentally earth-shaking discoveries than scientists of their times) ventured into new worlds and declared the wonders of God revealed in the formerly unknown, is always a humbling experience. We know so little. The mark of the truly educated is not the claims of great knowledge, but the admission of how little we really understand. Does the yeti roam the inhospitable and very sparsely populated regions of Siberia and the Himalayas where it has been a staple of folklore for centuries? We may never find definitive proof, but Time holding out a candle of hope seems a step in the right direction.

Relegated to the world of the “paranormal,” elusive animals demonstrate that the ways we know about the world are multitude. Science does not, and does not claim to, know everything. Indeed, science has a limited frame of reference within which it works. Going out seeking cryptids is not, properly speaking, science. The belief that those seeking evidence display is closer to religious conviction. That does not mean it is wrong or that it is founded upon faulty suppositions. It is simply a different kind of knowledge. It is common to say science is in conflict with religion. It need not be. If we accept science at its word, as doing what it claims to do, there is no need ever to question assured results. Belief, on the other hand, seldom crosses over into the realm of objective truth, empirically demonstrated. If it did, it would not require believing. If yeti is discovered, there will be much celebration among believers, but the creature will necessarily pass into the hands of science. For this reason alone, many are glad to leave it in the realm of folklore and myth. Either way, to some people, yeti will always be real, whether scientifically verified or not.

Cenobic Marvels

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Among the most explicitly religious of horror movies, Clive Barker’s Hellraiser series exploits biblical themes and tropes to blur distinctions between sacred and sacrilege. Not a fan of gratuitous gore, I began watching the series after reading Douglas Cowan’s Sacred Terror. Cowan utilizes this particular series to illustrate how deeply the religious mythology may reach, awaiting the fourth installment before finally having an explanation. Curious, I have been making my way through slowly. October seems a good time to consider the unsettling aspects of human nature, so I watched the third installment, Hell on Earth, this weekend.

Funnily, I do not find Pinhead particularly evil. Perhaps that is the intent. His eyes seem too kind to be a true villain. As the leader of the demonic Cenobites, he leads the curious down the path of exploration to ultimate destruction and, appropriately enough, Hell. The Hell presented throughout the films, however, is the true desire of the victims. They stumble upon a puzzle box, but when it is opened the curious find themselves trapped. The very use of monastic ideals as emblematic of Hell is surely a commentary on the futility of self-inflicted means of grace. Does not the flagellant at some level enjoy the pain? Where is the religious value in that? In Hellraiser III, Joanne runs to a Catholic church for help with Pinhead in pursuit. As any horror fan knows, the church is never a haven against evil. Pinhead makes himself a parody of the crucifixion while a helpless priest tries to defend God.

Horror films are a remarkably successful genre. At least one aspect of the appeal is the unabashed use of religion. Conditioned by the old films such as Dracula, the early twentieth century taught us that the church kept us safe—crucifixes always used to work against vampires! By the end of the century that vision had shifted. The church of the early twentieth century was a preserve of male power, a place where men made the rules and abused the rules and no one questioned them. As the century progressed, we became wiser. And more vulnerable. By the dawn of the new millennium, when such movies as Hellraiser III were being filmed, the security of the cloister had itself become a source of fear. October is the season of reflection on the transience of summer and ease. Perhaps it is also the season to reflect on how our perceptions of religion are ever shifting as winter wends its way toward us once again. And Mr. Barker will be standing there to remind us that we each create our own Hell.