Halloween Tale

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Halloween movies are hit or miss. Anthology movies are the same. My interest in holiday horror keeps me coming back for more nevertheless. Tales of Halloween has been fairly well reviewed over the years. As intimated, it’s an anthology film. There are ten separate stories squeezed in, leading to an average of nine minutes per episode. To make matters more interesting, each story has a different director. The end result is kind of like a pillowcase after trick-or-treating, you get some good stuff and some you’d rather not have received. The movie’s also a comedy horror so you’re meant to laugh throughout. Kind of like Halloween itself, I suppose. At least for some people. The movie didn’t do anything for me. There were no takeaways, and nothing really memorable.

Halloween is an unusual holiday.  For one thing, the way it’s celebrated is fairly recent.  Childhood memories of costumes and trick-or-treating and ghosts and goblins are all pretty new.  Well, maybe not the ghosts.  For some of us it’s a spiritual time.  A reflective season.  I’m not sure how anybody can not try to figure out what life’s all about.  Some of us have steered our lives (in as far as we actually steer them) in the direction of trying to figure these things out.  For me, Halloween is a time of spiritual growth.  Not exactly fun, but enjoyable nevertheless.  I know it’s different for different people.  Some people live for the fun and the partying.  It’s like that pillowcase all over again.  There is, at least in my experience, no perfect Halloween movie.  I won’t stop trying to find it, however.

John Carpenter’s Halloween is the movie that really kickstarted films based on this particular holiday.  Although I’m no fan of slashers, I do enjoy this one from time to time.  It’s a well-made movie, moody like autumn.  In Tales of Halloween, the background movie in two segments is Night of the Living Dead, a classic by any standards.  Carnival of Souls is shown in another episode.  Horror is a notoriously self-referential genre.  Last year I watched Trick ‘r Treat, another such anthology film.  It likewise made little impact.  On me, anyway.  Perhaps Halloween isn’t about horror after all.  It’s a time for reflection.  And pretending.  Since we all pretend most of the time it is perhaps the most natural of holidays.  Pretense on other holidays, although it happens, is considered in bad taste.  At least on Halloween we can be honest about it.  Some day someone may actually capture that in a movie.

Ginger Wolves

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I’ve known about Ginger Snaps for years but the reason I finally watched it was a rainy fall weekend.  The kind of day that suggests imminent winter and you wish that you had a fireplace instead of waiting on the furnace guy to check everything out for another year.  Surprisingly, in my experience, there aren’t many movies that capture that mood very well.  The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane is one of the best.  But movies new to me give me topics for blogging, and so I watched Ginger Snaps.  It’s not a typical werewolf movie.  It’s become a cult favorite over the years since it didn’t get much of a box office boost.  It’s smart, and sad, and moody.  And, as is becoming more important to me, well acted.

Brigitte and Ginger are teenage sisters, 15 and 16 respectively.  They share a room and morbid interests.  Their affluent, suburban parents just don’t understand them.  They’re ostracized at school.  Then Ginger gets bitten by a werewolf.  The plot is a coming-of-age story for women, and it has attracted feminist interest over the years.  The sisters are devoted to each other because both are pariahs and, well, sisters.  This begins to change when one of them becomes a monster.  But only to a degree.  Brigitte is determined to stick with her lycanthrope sibling, and tries to cure her.  There’s quite  bit of dark humor along the way but this is pretty effective body horror.  Making it about growing up adds an emotional poignancy to the story.

Werewolves have always been my favorite classical monster.  Ginger Snaps made me realize that it’s almost always a guy problem, however.  Men are the ones struggling to keep the beast inside.  Having this apply to a young woman throws into relief all the uneven standards society harbors.  Some exist for pretty obvious historical reasons, but others are matters of convention, often religious in nature.  Religion is pretty much absent from this movie, however.  Lycanthropy is transmitted like a virus and you don’t need silver bullets to stop a werewolf.  This is a world, in fact, where teens have to try to figure out their own way because parents are too distracted with their own problems.  It is a kind of modern parable, but without a religious angle.  The girls are conflicted about what’s happening to Ginger.  She enjoys the power but fears the consequences.  It is a good Halloween movie, but mostly it’s about growing up, whatever that may be like.

Not Grant

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Grant Wood’s painting, “American Gothic,” is undoubtedly his most famous work.  The image is so evocative and suggestive that countless interpretations have been offered for it.  The idea of debilitating isolation suggests itself.  An unhappy self-reliance that has taken its toll on an aging couple (some say the woman is his daughter) often comes to mind.  For some it suggests a movie.  Normally I like horror films from the seventies and eighties.  There’s almost an innocence to them that gets lost in the new millennium.  On a rainy weekend afternoon when I couldn’t be mowing the lawn I found American Gothic on Amazon Prime and it had received four stars and even IMDb showed it as better than average.  The longer I watched the more I was inching toward “bad movie” territory, but I had to see how it ended.

Six young people, four of whom are distinctly unlikeable, have plane trouble and get stranded on a lonely island in the Pacific northwest.  They discover a house furnished from the twenties and it turns out there’s an older couple there who don’t really cotton onto strangers.  As the plot unfolds it turns out they have three adult children who think they’re still adolescents.  And—this is the good part—they are a very religious family (in part.  Again, as often happens in such films, the writers really don’t understand religion).  In any case, the predictable killing off of the kids starts to happen when they continue to be rude and insult the family.  Since we’re in slasher territory here, there’s a final girl—one of the two sympathetic women—who ultimately takes over the house.

Part of the problem with the film is the utter paranoia with which it treats mental illness.  The family clearly has problems and, in a way typical for the genre, they turn toward killing.  Ironically, Pa, when he finds his family has been killed by the one mentally ill visitor (everyone with psychological problems in this movie turns to murder), renounces God and sells himself to Satan.  Interestingly, he doesn’t survive long enough to do anything about it.  Reading about this movie after watching it I came across a new word: hixploitation.  Exploitation movies are familiar to anyone who watches much in this genre, but I’d never considered that Deliverance and company exploit “hicks.”  It’s all about how others look at you.  And, as a movie made in Canada and the UK, it shows us what others see when they look at us.  There’s some ground to explore here in a sequel to Holy Horror. 

An EAP

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It may be superstitious, but one of the best ways to assure something else going wrong is to say, “I need something to go right just now.”  This year, since June, has been that way.  In the midst of dealing with everything, small moments of joy slip away—moments we want to hold onto during trying times.  One of the touristy things we did in Charleston—or Sullivan’s Island, more precisely—was to visit Poe’s Tavern.  We knew we had to grab a bite to eat there since Charleston is one of the many places to lay claim to America’s iconic writer.  Poe was stationed at Fort Moultrie, perhaps a mile from the modern tavern, in his short-lived military days.  His story “The Gold Bug” is set on the island, and it’s rumored “Annabel Lee” was about a girl he met in Charleston.  We’d wandered around the fort and were shortly to meet family for the gathering that drew us here.  But first we went to see Poe.

Poe himself never ate here—the establishment only dates back to 2003 (opened April 24)—but it participates in the mythology of Edgar Allan Poe.  We have followed Poe—who lived and died as a writer—along the east coast.  My family has visited his birthplace in Boston, his home in Philadelphia, his college dorm room in Charlottesville, his grave in Baltimore, and his Sullivan’s Island home at Fort Moultrie.  There are many more places to visit, and although much of this is mythology, that makes it no less real.

Poe is a controversial figure.  Both the anonymous peer reviewer and a named reviewer objected to my use of Poe in Nightmares with the Bible.  What they perhaps misunderstand is that books are deeply personal effects.  Something few understood about even my academic books is that they were intended as somewhat artistic pieces.  Holy Horror and Nightmares with the Bible are bookends, carefully crafted to go together (and both priced beyond the reach of regular readers, and not marketed at all).  Poe may well be the most recognizable American writer, largely because of an image that has taken hold.  The Poe Tavern has Poe-themed artwork throughout and it participates in that image.  It was crowded already around 4 p.m. when we stopped in for a nosh on a Sunday afternoon in October.  Such drawing power speaks to the mystique of Poe all these many years after his short life and strange death.  And of the fascination he holds for those of us who wish to write, driven by the same bug.

What Message?

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The search for autumnal horror movies is a never-ending one.  Can it really be that auteurs just don’t—drenched in the California sun—get that October feeling?  There’s something in the turning of the leaves and the appearance of pumpkins that changes everything.  And it works every year.  So it was that I thought of The Messengers.  I’d watched this years ago but found it somewhat unremarkable.  I seemed to recollect that, being based on a farm, it was autumnal in character, so I decided to try it again.  I remembered once more why I hadn’t watched it for years.  It’s a serviceable movie, but it is really set in summer (short sleeves the whole way through) and although August farm visits put me in the fall mood, this one is incoherent enough to prevent that feeling from catching on.

Jess is a girl with a past.  Driving under the influence, in Chicago, she was in a crash that rendered her baby brother mute.  In response her parents decide to move to a sunflower farm in North Dakota.  There the crows (actually ravens) attack them.  A stranger arrives and offers to help out.  Of course the house is haunted because of some past murders, but when the crows attack the hired help, it spurs him into a relapse—he’d lived here before and had killed his family, and so he decides to kill this new one too.  Being PG-13, they survive and the house swallows up the murderer from the past.  It’s never quite clear what the crows (the presumed messengers) really want to convey.  Are they trying to warn the family?  Are they trying to awake a killer’s memory?  What do they want?

This is an early Kristen Stewart movie—she’ll go on to more sophisticated horror films.  William B. Davis, with only cameo appearances, offers echoes of The X-Files.  Casting the generally congenial John Corbett as a killer is a bit of a stretch, however.  More intriguing, in this more global world, are the directors—the Pang brothers.  Known for their east Asian movies, including award-winning horror, they took on this American-themed, shot in Canada, project.  It had the backing of a few production companies and a reasonable budget.  Still, it struggles to be memorable.  I seem to recall that the prequel might’ve been a bit better.  But was it autumn-based?  I can’t recall and it’s that time of year when seeing falling leaves and a pumpkin or two make for essential viewing.

Something Wicked

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There comes a morning each year, pre-dawn, that it happens.  I crawl out of bed and things feel slightly chilly.  The furnace hasn’t been turned on yet, and ever sensitive to cold, I put on long sleeves and slippers to do my morning writing before the sun.  I start getting a powerful hankering to watch my autumn movies.  This year when that happened, in September, I finally watched Something Wicked this Way Comes.  Now, Disney isn’t a studio known for its horror films.  Over the years, however, they’ve produced some family-friendly efforts toward the scary end of the spectrum.  I tried to make the case in Holy Horror (and a list on IMDb agrees with me) that Pirates of the Caribbean falls into that gentle horror category.  I’ve read established writers on horror claim that The Watcher in the Woods was the movie that frightened them most.  I don’t think Something Wicked falls into that category, but I can say I liked it better than the novel.

And that’s saying something, because it was written by Ray Bradbury.  Bradbury’s stories were an integral part of my childhood.  In fact, much of my fiction writing is modeled on his work.  I didn’t really care for the novel Something Wicked this Way Comes, which I read last year.  The film is an improvement.  And it had a tortured way to the silver screen.  It began as a short story.  Bradbury himself adapted it into a screenplay anticipating a role for Gene Kelley.  This was in 1958.  When that didn’t pan out, he wrote it as a novel.  Filmmakers began to show an interest in the early seventies, but the movie didn’t come out until 1983, after Disney bought the rights and took over production.  The screenplay is mostly Bradbury and the soundtrack rips off Star Wars more than once.

Bradbury could get a little too nostalgic about boyhood.  His yesteryears seem far too innocent to me.  Although, having a few scenes where Jim shows curiosity about sex was a bit racy for Disney, I should think.  Jonathan Pryce does a fine job as Dark, and the mood isn’t bad for family-friendly fare.  I was never much of one for carnivals.  I can’t do rides and it’s easy to see through the games you can’t win and even if you do your prize is cheap.  Other entertainments always appealed to me more.  Still, the film sets a mood, and that’s generally what I’m after when the mornings begin to feel chilly and I’m looking off into another winter.

Frightening Legacy

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Like The Wicker Man, The Exorcist also turns fifty this December.  I was caught up in this half-century mania and so I got ahold of Nat Segaloff’s The Exorcist Legacy: 50 Years of Fear right away.  The reading was disrupted by life events, but I’d been enjoying it, as time permitted.  Written by a movie insider (as opposed to an ex-academic wannabe), this is a fairly full treatment of the film.  It’s actually not unlike what I tried to do with Nightmares with the Bible, but it is yet another testimony of the importance of The Exorcist to our understanding of demons.  Although one book can’t really be one-stop shopping for any worthwhile movie (there are plenty of books out there on the subject), this one is well worth reading.  For those who enjoy learning about cultural phenomena with a bit of horror tossed in, this is a very good introduction.

One of the things I’ve learned as I’ve tried to break into film reading is that a lot more goes on in making a film than most of us imagine.  And when we see a movie we miss an awful lot.  I’m no shill for Hollywood, but watching a movie multiple times brings out things that writers, directors, and producers didn’t even notice.  Think of the Bible, for comparison.  Readers two thousand years later are still finding new things to say about it.  The Exorcist has influenced religious outlooks in extremely important ways.  Our modern ideas of demons and possession largely go back to this film.  Details may change over time, but even the church has had to respond to it, and actual exorcists reference it.  The Bible says little about demons (again, Nightmares), so we have to pick such knowledge up from elsewhere.

The one part I found somewhat thin was, not surprisingly, parts of the final chapter, “The Mystery of Faith.”  It tends to show when a writer really knows religion.  William Peter Blatty, who wrote the novel and screenplay (the latter at least partially), knew Catholicism cold.  One of the things I’ve been yammering on about for years is that understanding religion enhances our understanding of horror movies.  I’m certain that the connection goes even deeper than that, but books written on horror mention religion often in amateur ways.  If we want to get at what’s really going on here, it’s going to be important to listen to those who understand religion as well.  None of that detracts from this fascinating book that will throw new light into shadowed corners.

An October Movie

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October means different things to different people.  I know what it feels like to me and I suspect, and hope, that there are others who experience it like I do.  When I search for October movies I’m looking for a kind of happy melancholy unique to the season, but others seem to think movies about witches capture the feel.  So it was that I came to watch Practical Magic, which was recommended on more than one October movie list.  It’s not a horror film, in fact it’s a rom-com and it doesn’t try to frighten anyone, although there is one tense scene.  Like many movies about modern-day witches, it has a good message of female empowerment.  I’m glad I watched it for that reason, and the story isn’t bad.  Set on an island community, presumably in Massachusetts, but shot in California, it’s not exactly falling leaves and pumpkins, though.

Witches seem to be the preferred monsters for feminine endorsement.  Most people, I suspect, wish they had magical powers.  We all want things to go our way and would like to manipulate them in that direction.  But there’s something more to it.  It’s tapping into an ultimate power—something that can’t be challenged.  Practical Magic, although not always in a serious mood, does portray the struggles witches have against occult powers.  The story is of the Owens family, which have been witches since the pilgrims landed.  They suffer under a curse dooming the men with whom they fall in love.  Not all the women are cut out for such a life.  So it is that Gillian and Sally set out to break the curse, each in their own way.

Other occult powers are at work, however.  One is clearly the curse itself and another seems to be an undead boyfriend who eventually possesses Gillian.  The women of the community have to come together to exorcise this entity, and that finally leads to communal acceptance of witches.  A major studio production with a reasonable budget and star power, it really didn’t do well at the box office.  Barbie seems to have struck a feminist chord that Practical Magic was reaching for, but the late nineties were a time when women’s power seemed to be starting to secure itself.  I noticed that, when looking for the movie on streaming services, it’s now having a limited theatrical run—it’s October, after all.  This may not be my October movie, but it has a good message that still needs to be learned.

Horror Therapy

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It’s Friday the 13th.  Like Barbra and Johnny I’m driving to rural western Pennsylvania to visit a cemetery.  It must be October.  I’m not a magazine reader (this has probably hampered my development as a writer [I prefer books]), but the October issue of The Christian Century is devoted to religion and horror.  This morning I watched an interview with Jessica Mesman on her article on horror as therapy.  In it she discusses her mother’s death.  Since we have this in common, I was intrigued.  Mesman states that studies substantiate that watching horror functions as therapy for people with PTSD.  It has been suggested to me more than once that my career malfunction at Nashotah House led to PTSD.  It may be no coincidence, then, that I started watching horror after that happened.  When The Incarcerated Christian podcast was still going, I was interviewed three times and the topic was, broadly, how horror acts as therapy.

Until today I’ve had to work daily and then make arrangements for an unplanned trip to celebrate my mother’s life as I could.  I’ve never met Jessica Mesman, but I sense that she would understand what I’m going through.  As I grapple with grief, loss, and relief (my mother was ready to die, but I had been unable to see her for a few years because of the pandemic and other circumstances) what I feel I really need is to watch a horror movie or two.  I have found—and 2023 has been a traumatic year for me—that when I’m feeling overwrought, taking ninety minutes to watch a horror film can get me back on track.  It helps me cope.

None of this is intended as any disrespect for my mother, whom I love deeply.  Although she didn’t read my books, she knew I watched monster movies as a kid.  She occasionally grew annoyed with me when such things made me too clingy—she had two other sons and her own dying mother in our home and she was trying to keep it together with my father gone.  Looking at photos of my young self, I wonder if that early loss of a parent translated to a kind of childhood PTSD.  Once I’d successfully (?) made it to adulthood, Mom told me—“you were the one I worried about; you seemed to have difficulty adjusting.”  I sought therapy in religion.  I’ve dedicated my life to it.  Until it too became a source of grief, horror, and pain.  As I prepare to drive to her funeral, I’m pretty sure that Mom understands.

Personal Psalms

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I haven’t heard it yet, but a New York Times article encourages me to.  Paul Simon has joined the ranks of those aging music stars to record albums presaging their deaths.  The article was about Simon’s latest album, Seven Psalms.  And, yes, the religious reference is pretty hard to miss.  Like most kids from the sixties, I grew up hearing Simon and Garfunkel on the radio.  We didn’t have money for albums, but I always liked their songs when I heard them.  After their breakup I really didn’t pay much attention to Simon until Graceland, and since then I’ve listened with half an ear.  You see, I’m wired in such a way that I can’t listen to music while I write.  Or read.  My mind grips one thing at a time.  That means I don’t listen to background music much.

That doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate music.  I do.  Almost religiously so.  On occasion I come back to Simon, with or without Garfunkel.  I posted about his song “Werewolf” some years back.  I eventually listened to that album, and I’m not sure I got it.  Artists are that way.  Some pieces you like, others are just okay.  I am curious about Seven Psalms, though.  I’ve posted about David Bowie’s Blackstar, Leonard Cohen’s You Want It Darker (both discussed in the Times article), and Bruce Springsteen’s Letter to You.  No longer young myself—these guys were young when I was a kid—hearing them reflect on death is powerful, and, if the mood is right, peaceful.  We fear death because it’s unknown.  And also, we all know, deep down, that we’re flawed.

Psalms aren’t necessarily biblical, of course.  Sinead O’Connor’s “Take Me to Church” is a psalm.  So is “Sounds of Silence.”  Artists have been writing psalms for as long as they’ve been writing songs.  The biblical psalms are among the most quoted bits of literature in the western world.  They were likely originally sung as well, but we can only guess what they may have sounded like.  We know that across the world people turn to song to express strong emotion.  I’m not sure what Paul Simon’s Seven Psalms might be, but it seems that thoughts of mortality go naturally enough with emotion.  I don’t write much about music because it’s so deeply personal.  I try to be intellectually honest on this blog, but if you want to talk music you really have to get to know me first.  Then I’ll reveal my psalms.

Creeping Again

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The morality of Creepshow 2 is pretty straightforward.  Of course, this is early Stephen King.  Sometimes it’s good to keep things simple.  Horror anthologies sometimes work and sometimes they don’t.  This one falls somewhere in the middle.  Of course, George Romario didn’t direct, although he wrote the screenplay.  And King didn’t write the screenplay, as in the first installment, but he shows up for a bit part.  Campy and funny, as the first film established, there are a few scary moments, but you get the sense that the bad guys deserve what they get.  There are only three regular segments, apart from the cartoon framing, each with a “do something bad, get punished” theme.  “Old Chief Wood’nhead” seems to start out insensitively to First Nations people, but it features an avenging statue “cigar store Indian” whole doles out justice.  It’s the most disturbing of the three segments since the robbers show no human compassion at all.  Of course, the chief gets them.

“The Raft” features less obviously bad protagonists.  Four teens drive out to an isolated lake with a swimming platform (the eponymous raft) in the center.  They all get high on their way there, and it’s clear the guys want to get their girls to the raft to have sex with them.  A mysterious floating blob surrounds the raft and eats them one by one.  You start to think Randy might survive for being good but when left alone with Laverne (his best friend’s girl) he begins to seduce her while she’s asleep.  None of them survive.  The last segment, “The Hitch-hiker,” follows a woman who’s having an affair.  Late getting home, she hits a, well, hitch-hiker and ends up as his victim.

The Creepshow franchise is, of course, comedy horror.  This film does end with a moralizing message that comic books don’t lead to juvenile delinquency, but rather other factors do.  This feels like an important message in days of increasing efforts to ban books.  Easy solutions by unthinking adults never solve the “problems” they hope to address.  Often what it comes down to is an aesthetic difference rather than true morality.  Morals don’t fit across the board, especially if you don’t think through your own motivations.  Of course, it’s nice to have a movie where such deep thinking isn’t really required.  Kids being eaten alive for being kids may be a bit harsh, but the others in this pleasant little diversion really just get what’s coming to them, and right soon.

Of Wolves and Humans

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Time has a funny way of distorting perceptions.  I remember when The Wolfman (2010; please, I’m not old enough to have seen the classic initial release in 1941) came out.  I’d already started this blog by then, and I was occasionally watching and writing about horror movies.  Initial reports said this reboot was too violent and bloody.  I had the impression that it’d done well at the box office, but I didn’t see it.  I found a used copy on DVD several years later and still I waited to watch it, a bit afraid from the initial assessments I’d read.  (I tend not to read reviews or watch trailers before seeing a movie—I prefer to come in fresh.)  All of this is to say I finally got around to seeing The Wolfman and I was disappointed.  I really wanted to like it too.  The wolf man was my favorite classic monster as a kid.

I do need to praise the gothic setting and landscape cinematography.  This is beautiful and well done.  Part of the problem is the way the story is changed.  Another is that, apart from The Silence of the Lambs, Anthony Hopkins doesn’t seem to fit the horror genre very well.  Claude Rains made a believable Sir John Talbot, despite being so much smaller than Lon Chaney.  Hopkins has trouble pulling it off.  It could be poor directing, I suppose, but it was difficult to take him seriously.  And two werewolves?  That suggests just a little too much CGI.  Still, there are some good moments.  I did appreciate Sir John encouraging his son to let the wolf run free.  I suppose if you’ve got a werewolf issue, having a dad to talk you through it would be a good thing.

Werewolves, like most classic monsters, are thinly disguised psychological tendencies.  Civilization isn’t always easy, even for social animals like our own species.  There’s a werewolf inside.  Transformation, however, always suggested redemption to me.  The ability to become something better.  I saw The Wolf Man as a parable.  That may have been unusual for a kid, but when religion and monsters come together strange things can happen.  The wolf may be angry, but it need not be dangerous.  It turns out that I really didn’t have to wait thirteen years to see this movie.  I’ll probably watch it again for the points it scores on the gothic scale.  The action features aren’t necessary for a good monster flick, though.  The 1941 version worked just fine.

Starting October

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October’s a difficult month to quantify.  When it rolls around I get in the mood for certain books and movies, but I like to see and read new things.  I check lists to see what others recommend for what I hope is a similar mood.  A book that kept coming up was Roger Zelazny’s A Night in the Lonesome October.  Published thirty years ago, it’s not exactly new, but it was new to me.  It’s a humorous story, told by Snuff, a dog.  But not just any dog—he’s a player in a game that takes place when the full moon lines up with Halloween.  There’ll be spoilers hereafter.  The game involves two sides deciding the fate of the world, and each has the usual monsters lined up.  Dracula, the wolf man, Frankenstein’s monster and others are involved.  One side tries to awaken Lovecraft’s Old Gods and destroy the world while the other side tries to stop them.

Each chapter is a day in October and what the game is is only slowly revealed.  The antagonist for all of this is really the parson.  It turns out that he’s a minister for the Old Gods’ true believers.  Various monsters or players are killed and Sherlock Holmes is hanging about, trying to solve the mystery.  The story’s really a mash-up of several characters from yesteryear.  It’s not scary, nor is it particularly moody.  It’s a good example, however, of how religion and horror, even if it’s comedy horror, work together.  The Old Gods are an existential threat and require clergy to perform the correct rituals.  Roger Zelazny was fond of using characters from existing mythologies in telling sci-fi-ish stories, and this fits that writing mode.

This is an enjoyable story, but my October mood isn’t only a monster one.  Set in England, A Night in the Lonesome October doesn’t really have the leaves, pumpkins, and ghosts of my melancholy season.  Also, the humorous aspect is fine, but acts as a distraction from what I generally seek.  This is a magical time in northern climes.  Of course, I read a good deal of this while traveling to and from South Carolina, so getting the right mood was tricky when it’s beach weather and the flowers are still in bloom.  October means different things to different people, I know.  I’m still looking for the novel that manages to encapsulate my experience of it.  There’s something difficult to quantify about it, and that’s perhaps what I need to define.  

Squidish

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I was attracted to the Lovecraftian aspect of the title.  Of Tentacles, I mean.  I wasn’t aware that Into the Dark was a Hulu series of television shows based on holiday horror.  I watched Pure without realizing that.  Movies these days are complicated.  In any case, Tentacles caught my attention and although it isn’t a tier-one horror film, it’s fun in its own way.  Tara, a desperate young woman, is looking to buy a house.  She finds Sam, who’s trying to sell his parents’ place and seduces him into letting her renovate it.  The two fall in love and Tara reveals she’s being stalked by an ex.  Sam has, however, come down with an illness that doctors can’t identify.  Something is putting tentacles into his ears as he sleeps.  It doesn’t take long to figure out that Tara’s not what she claims to be.  She’s some kind of creature that originated in the ocean, but survives on land by taking part of her victims and slowly becoming their double.  The original, of course, must be disposed of.

This is a serviceable little movie.  The acting is good, particularly on Tara’s part.  There’s enough mystery and energy to keep viewers engaged, despite the commercials.  It also made me realize that Into the Dark might be worth exploring a little more intentionally.  When I went to my usual places to find out more about what I’d just watched, it was a little tricky.  To find the write-up on IMDb you needed to find the series title first so that you could click onto the individual episode.  This is so different than either the major studios or independent filmmakers.  Streaming services, however, have been offering some good home-grown horror.  I’ve seen some notable examples from Netflix, Amazon, and, of course, Hulu.

Anything with tentacles seems to have a tangible Lovecraft connection these days.  In large part it seems to be because of the internet success of Cthulhu.  Those who spend lots of time online know who the Old One is without having ever read H. P. or having watched horror.  He’s become the monster with tentacles, something my college sci-fi professor would doubtlessly have commented upon.  Lovecraft himself would have, I suspect, enjoyed the notoriety but would likely have felt some disappointment regarding the point he was trying to get across.  (That’s more evident in Older Gods.)  The vacuousness of being alone in a meaningless universe was more his aesthetic.  Still, it inspired some fun films for a sleepy weekend afternoon, and its tentacles keep on reaching.

Beautiful Vampire

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It’s been a quest years in the making.  I first found the Dark Shadows novels by Marilyn Ross at the Goodwill Store in Seneca, Pennsylvania.  The series had recently finished its television run and, as this was a used book bin, and limited in size, you could never tell what you might find.  My teenage self, fascinated by vampire lore, eagerly read those I could find.  I got rid of the volumes I had when I attended college and began to miss them when I was old enough to admit such things.  It took at least fifteen years to locate all of them, and now, for the first time in my life, I have read the entire series.  Barnabas, Quentin and the Vampire Beauty isn’t always easy to find.  I certainly hadn’t read it before.  Not that it’s high art—the campiness shows through the gothic setting from time-to-time—and yet it’s an accomplishment.

This particular story again shows some development from what had gone before.  The vampire beauty is a young woman tricked into having weight reduction surgery in Switzerland.  The surgery, naturally enough, transforms her into a vampire.  She needs help so she seeks out Barnabas Collins, which leads her to Collinwood.  From there a set of adventures head toward the typical climax of this series of books.  Nevertheless, W. E. D. Ross seems to have shown some improvement over the thirty-two novels in the series.  This story seems less similar to others in the series as a whole.  Quite a bit of effort is spent on trying to find a vampire cure, but for Adele Marriot rather that Barnabas Collins.

I have to wonder if Ross knew this would be the last Dark Shadows book he would write for the series.  He did write other gothic fiction, and even a novelization of the movie, House of Dark Shadows, but the initial series ends with a kind of knowing that we’ve reached the end of something.  Was he told by someone at Paperback Library, “Hey, we’re pulling the plug on the series” or did he simply run out of steam?  The daily television show ran for about 1225 episodes.  This original novel series had far fewer.  Still, the thrill of hunting all of them down, lining them on my shelf, and then reading them in order was a rare pleasure.  It was a recapturing of, perhaps even a completing of, part of my childhood.  It may have taken decades to accomplish, but an accomplishment is an accomplishment.