Surviving Ones

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Slashers aren’t my favorite horror films.  As I’ve suggested in some of my unpublished writing, horror should be dismantled as a “genre” since so many different types of movie are collected together under its rubric.  That having been said, The Only Ones is an amazing low-budget, independent slasher.  For one thing, it references so many other horror movies that it is mind boggling.  Just a few influences: Deliverance, Scream, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Blair Witch Project, and just about every movie that has a bunch of young people going to a remote location by themselves.  It’s complex and thoughtful.  A love story and a reflection on religion and horror (only in a minor way, but still).  And piecing together what led to the eight deaths would require an article all by itself.  And it’s a film with heart as well as gore.  A spoiler follows.

The basic idea is that the six young people are primed for a horror movie outcome by one of their number who’s a true crime podcaster.  They’re going to the remote house of the uncle of one of them since the uncle passed away and they are helping settle the estate.  A couple of campers have innocently trespassed in the house and a violent confrontation with them sets the tone for all of what follows.  The movie is also a reflection on how a weapon in the midst of any group leads to violence.  One of the kids has a gun and the threat of that weapon leads to people killing one another without ever really stopping to figure out what happened.  A final girl survives the two nights, and when the police ask her what happened, so honestly says she has no idea.

The movie has some flaws, and early on I was eager to note them all, but the story sucks you in.  The deaths, in the end, are all pointless.  They begin because of a misunderstanding with a violent threat being used instead of trying to understand what happened.  This brings the movie up to the level of actually having a message.  Many slashers seem to settle on “traditional values”—don’t use drugs, have premarital sex, or in any way offend the world envisioned in the 1950s.  Those who are killed have violated some principle that keeps society the same forever.  The Only Ones has something deeper to say.  The characters are self-described outcasts.  The one who survives is the one who learned to love.  And bringing weapons into any situation leads to a Chekhovian resolution.

Sinning

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What can I say about Sinners in five hundred words or less?  This movie requires a book.  I’ll try anyway.  First of all, I’m not one to jump on the bandwagon.  But everyone was saying Sinners was one of the best horror movies of 2025 and it racked up enough awards to prove it.  Still I was blown away.  Fronting and centering religion and horror, this film asks viewers to think about good and evil and to think about it closely.  Twin brothers, “Smoke” and “Stack,” served in the army, left Mississippi to make it big as gangsters in Chicago, then return to Mississippi to open a club for the Black community.  They bring their nephew Sammie and hire their supporters to help a grand opening of their blues bar.  Their pasts won’t let them go, however,  and they become entangled with former lovers.  Then the vampires come.

The brothers’ two lovers, Hailee and Wunmi, come to the opening but Hailee falls victim to the vampires.  Wunmi, who’s Smoke’s estranged wife, practices Hoodoo and make him promise that if she is bit he will kill her with a stake.  The vampires can’t come into the club without an invitation, and one of the bartenders, Grace, decides they need to kill the whole crowd of vampires and invites them in.  Only Smoke and Sammie survive.  The vampires die with sunrise, but Smoke stays around to kill the Klan members who planned to murder the brothers after the grand opening was over.  Smoke gets them all but he’s shot and as he dies, he sees Wunmi and their dead child in an earthly heaven and joins them.  Sammie goes on to become a famous blues player and when he’s very aged, Stack and Hailee, still young vampires come in.  They all agree that the day of the grand opening was the best of their lives.

Both Smoke and Stack end up with their loves in an eternal life.  And this is only scratching the surface of the film.  The movie is about freedom and how African Americans never really have it.  Even in Chicago the system is stacked against them.  The vampires try to convince Smoke and Sammie that they will offer them community.  Freedom and belonging.  Both brothers, however, end up in a kind of paradise, one of them as a vampire, the other as a man who earns salvation by killing the Klan.  Wow.  On a more pedestrian note, the movie seemed to blend From Dusk till Dawn with the more serious elements of O Brother, Where Art Thou?.  Including the close attention to music.  But even that sounds facile.  There’s more to say, lots more.  Sammie is the son of a preacher.  The Bible is used and quoted.  Salvation comes, however, by Hoodoo and vampirism.  No, Sinners requires a book to begin to work it all out.

About Demons

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Six college kids in a house where twenty years earlier a group of six young people held a seance and all but one ended up dead.  Demonic doesn’t really offer anything groundbreaking on the horror front, but it does give a less church-oriented possession story.  There will be spoilers here, so be warned.  John is Michelle’s boyfriend.  With a group of friends, including Brian, Michelle’s ex-boyfriend, they decide to hold a seance in the house where a mass murder-suicide took place.  Once they get there, as tension builds between John and Brian, it is revealed that John is the son of a woman who was in the house the night of the carnage, but had escaped.  Thereafter follows a confused set of jump startles and unexplained phenomena.  All but three of the college kids are killed, and one (John) is found and interrogated by police.

It seems the seance summoned a demon that could only be released if everyone died.  Brian, one of the survivors, is found and shot by police.  Michelle, the other survivor, is found alive but as police unscramble the data on the cameras the kids were using, they realize that John was the guilty party.  Beyond that, he hanged himself before the police got there, so they had been interviewing a demon the whole time.  Although James Wan is one of the producers, the film received theatrical release only abroad, receiving a television release in the United States.  Really, given that it doesn’t give much that’s original, or thought-provoking, or really all that scary, the decision makes sense.

The demon movies that really make an impact tend to have a few things in common.  Usually a young woman possessed (this is something Poe understood).  A body out of control that defies religious efforts to bring it back to conformity.  A believable spiritual world behind the threat.  None of these things fits Demonic.  I guess I was looking for a follow-up to Succubus which, although flawed, wasn’t that bad.  Sometimes the group of young people in a haunted house trope works pretty well, but here the unanswered questions outweigh any real fright, or even mood.  Many low-budget horror films involve ghost-hunter imitators with more devices than thought toward the plot.  Things can jump out at you, of course, but this one fails to reach any kind of existential dread.  I guess I really need to start paying more attention to the ratings viewers give before deciding on a demon movie.  Someday I’ll learn.

Discussing Demons

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So I was discussing demons with a friend, as you do, and I was looking for a free movie.  One that my streaming service recommended was Succubus.  There are other movies by this title, so this was the 2024 version.  Knowing what a succubus is, traditionally, and having just discussed what demons are with a friend, curiosity overcame me.  First of all, I have to say that for a Neo-Luddite like myself, the first half of the movie was a blurry slurry of texts while video chatting while watching the baby monitor that I wondered how people really into the internet get anything done in real life.  Sorry, IRL.  I’ve had a few people try to initiate chats with me on the few socials I use, but I only respond once a day in the brief window in which I use social media.  It just doesn’t appeal to me.

Still, Succubus held a number of triggers for me.  But first, a summary.  Chris, having a trial separation from his wife, meets Adra, a succubus, on a dating app.  She traps him by having him kiss her through the computer and meanwhile kills his best friend who visits her location physically.  Meanwhile a physicist, a former victim, is heading to Chris’ house to try to bring him back from limbo, and, failing that, to kill him.  The succubus wants a body, of course, and when Chris realizes this, he castrates himself when he and his wife get back together, to prevent the succubus from inhabiting their children.  The triggers for me had nothing to do with the demonic aspect, but with the fact that Chris at first is concerned Adra is a scammer.  Having fallen for a scam myself, that aspect was scarier than the entire rest of the movie.

As a horror film it kind of works.  I’m not really a fan of movies that take place on devices, but about halfway through that part gets dropped.  What was of particular interest was only briefly suggested and was worth thinking about.  As Chris tries to research the physicist online, he discovers that he’s a researcher in dark matter.  The implication, never spelled out, is that dark matter is demonic.  This could make an interesting trope, if it hasn’t already been done.  Dark matter and dark energy make up a large part of the universe, we’re told.  Think about it.  It also kind of addresses the question of how spiritual beings make their way into a physical form.  Of course, that’s what succubi are all about, isn’t it?

P.S. Sometimes I swear I need a handler. This post was queue up on December 15 but I forgot to click “Publish.” If a day goes by without a post, somebody feel free to poke me…

Final Rites?

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The Conjuring: Last Rites, aka The Conjuring 4, is more of the same.  Reusing tropes that have ceased to be scary, it draws Annabelle back into the story and sets up the possibility of future films by getting the Warrens’ daughter Judy involved.  It is kind of a downbeat to pick up the Smurl haunting since this is widely considered to have been a hoax.  And the movie pulls out all the stops.  Levitation, upside down crosses, and demonic faces suddenly appearing have all been done before.  The conceit that a demon is using ghosts to torment the Smurls is familiar from earlier films in the series.  The franchise, however, remains quite Protestant despite its Catholic trappings.  The somewhat heavy-handed suicide of Father Gordon once again demonstrates the lack of deep comprehension of how Catholicism operates.  It is meant to parallel the suicide that starts the movie, but really adds nothing to the plot beyond shock.

The film tries to do too much and loses any pathos among the Smurls because of the strong subplot, if not the main plot, of the threats against Ed and Judy Warren.  To do this they had to make the real life Judy much younger than she is in real life and cast the unnamed demon threatening the Smurls back to an attack on Lorraine, while pregnant with Judy, in the 1960s.  This allows for a Stranger Things aspect of the 1980s for the action.  It also strangely misrepresents Pennsylvania.  The script seems to presume West Pittston is near Pittsburgh (it’s not, but rather close to Scranton) and it shoots the location in England, obviously for cinematic reasons.

There’s a lot of insider knowledge presumed here—you need to know the fictionalized backstory the series has been building up over eight films.  This comes to a head in the revisiting of actors from the past Warren cases at Judy’s wedding.  Perrons, Hodgsons, and a Glatzel attend, valorizing the often controversial work of the Warrens.  (They were ejected from the Perron house and visited the Hodgsons for maybe part of a day.)  The other movies in the series tend to hang together better but the lack of deep understanding of Catholicism remains perhaps the largest hurdle.  Interestingly, at the box office this has been the highest performing film in the franchise so far.  Since the Conjuring universe is encroaching on 3 billion dollars (2.7 at the moment) gross profit, clearly it strikes a chord.  And there’s every reason to suppose, prequel or sequel, it’s not really the last rites after all.

Oz Undone

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Horror is notoriously difficult to define.  Two friends recently suggested that I watch Return to Oz, which, for them, was horror.  Although rated PG, it does shade into horror at several points.  It begins with an eerie soundtrack and a disturbing idea: Dorothy hasn’t been sleeping and really believes in Oz, so she’s to receive electroshock therapy.  She escapes the gothic hospital during a storm and after almost drowning, lands in an Oz gone wrong.  Any number of scary things happen there, and the story is one of constant tension.  First Dorothy encounters the “wheelers,” which equal blue-faced, flying chimps for terror.  She is taken to the residence of a wicked princess who has a collection of heads and changes them at will.  At one point she chases Dorothy with no head on at all, perhaps referencing the headless horseman.  People turn to stone or sand, depending on whether the Gnome King or the deadly desert gets them first.

Dorothy tries to find the Scarecrow but he’s been captured and imprisoned by the Gnome King, who turns people into objects.  When she frees the Scarecrow the gnomes—scary monsters, not bearded little people—attack.  Dorothy and friends are chased to a point that they’re about to be eaten by the Gnome King.  This is dark Disney.  There’s a minor Halloween theme and a living jack-o-lantern.  Fairuza Balk, who plays Dorothy, would go on to play horror and gothic roles.  Even Pumpkinhead, the jack-o-lantern, would be used as the title of a legitimately scary horror movie.  All in all I was impressed with how well this fits into PG horror.  It’s scarier than some other intentional horror with the same rating.

I missed Return to Oz when it came out in 1985.  I’d graduated from college and began seminary that year, so I was a bit distracted.  The movie has gathered a cult following and was praised by Neil Gaiman.  Interestingly, the writer/director Walter Murch noted in an interview that he’d used the book Wisconsin Death Trip, a nonfiction book of unusual events and deaths in a small section of, well, Wisconsin, to get ideas for the script.  This seems a strange inspiration for a Disney film, and indeed, Murch had a rocky time as the director.  The end result is strangely affecting and fits what might be considered horror for children.  The squeaky clean image that Disney has cultivated in recent decades hides a history of films that can legitimately scare the young.  Return to Oz is one of them.  And it has a fascinating back story.

Scary Television

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Since noting some months ago that I’d discovered Dark Shadows on Amazon Prime, it’s no surprise that I’m squeezing in an episode here and there, where I can.  Amazon begins “Season 1, Episode 1” at the point Barnabas Collins appears.  This was actually ten months into the daily, but it saves a few hundred dollars buying the DVDs.  I honestly remember little more than impressions of the soap opera from childhood.  I can’t say which episodes I saw during the initial run, but I do know that they were formative in my appreciation of horror.  It turns out that many famous people in various media were childhood fans of the show.  It certainly wasn’t the slickest production but it manages a mood that’s difficult to match.  It’s what Edgar Allan Poe called “effect,”—he felt that a short story should maintain a single effect, something that he did most notably in his macabre tales.

I recently watched, in Amazon’s numbering (and I realize Amazon didn’t come up with this, it was a rebroadcast release that someone decided should start when the show became popular) episode 22 in season one.  This particular episode surprised me in that it actually had a legitimately scary ending.  Now, soap operas are very slow unfolding of stories, as most television watchers know.  Things don’t change quickly and action-packed content requires a lot of time to set up and film, whereas daily shows simply don’t have the time to do that.  They rely on people being drawn into the story and wanting, needing, to find out what happens next.  By episode 22 the savvy viewer had already figured out that Barnabas Collins was the vampire.  Nobody had explicitly said so yet, however.

Maggie Evans, his favorite victim, has been “ill” in bed from loss of blood.  Under Barnabas’ spell, she sends away her boyfriend and Victoria Winters—the original impetus for the entire series—has come to sit with her through the stormy night.  As the two women argue about the proper care for Maggie’s condition, the storm continues, flashing lightning through the French doors in Maggie’s room.  The wind blows the doors open and a flash of lightning shows the silhouette of Barnabas standing in the garden.  I have to admit, even at my age and with my background of horror movie watching, that moment scared me.  The genius of the show is that Barnabas is such a likable character.  As the narrative develops, as it does beginning in episode 23, we come to see that Barnabas is a sad, reluctant monster.  Perhaps if I’ve time enough, I should write a book about it.  But then, I barely have a moment to squeeze in an episode now and again.

Posting

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I’ve seen The Post before.  Maybe it took recovering from a vaccine to make me realize, however, just how much we’ve lost with the rise of electronic publication.  Yes, there is now a shot at recognition by the lowliest of us, but publication used to mean something important.  Consider how Watergate, the coda to the film, brought down Nixon.  Now we have a president who could’ve never been elected without the world of the internet, and who is coated with teflon so thick that even molesting children can’t harm him.  I work in publishing these days.  I often reflect on how important it used to be.  Ideas simply couldn’t spread very far without publication.  That’s what makes The Post such an important movie.  It’s the story of how the Washington Post came to publish The Pentagon Papers.  Said papers revealed that the United States was well aware that the Vietnam War was unwinnable, even as the government sent more and more young men to their deaths.

There are many ways to approach this film, including the doubt that it instills in even free democracy, but what struck me as the vaccine was wearing off is how publication has become a more challenging and endangered as the Wild West of the internet continues to expand.  Newspapers used to be the harbingers of truth.  Early in the history of the broadsheet, however, there were those who’d make things up in order to sell copies.  (Capitalism is always lurking when skulduggery is afoot.)  Over time, however, certain papers gained a hard-earned reputation for reliable reporting and publication with integrity.  A story going out in the early seventies in the Washington Post could influence history.  Now it’s owned by Jeff Bezos.

There was a time when a book might change the world.  Now there’s a little too much competition.  Publishers of print material struggle against the free, easy access of the internet.  All that publishers really have to offer is their reputation.  Those that have been around for a long time have earned, the hard way—you might say “old school”, the right to tell the world the truth.  Now the truth comes through Twitter, or X, or whatever it’s called these days and more often than not consists of lies.  Of course I don’t believe the internet is all bad.  I wouldn’t contribute daily content to it if I believed that.  Still, I fear we’ve lost something.  Something important.  And right now we have nothing to replace it.

Machine Intelligence

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I was thinking Ex Machina was a horror movie, but it is probably better classified as science fiction.  Although not too fictiony.  Released over a decade ago, it’s a cautionary tale about artificial intelligence (AI), in a most unusual, but inevitable, way.  An uber-wealthy tech genius, Nathan, lives in a secured facility only accessible by helicopter.  One of the employees of his company—thinly disguised Google—is brought to his facility under the ruse of having won a contest.  He’s there for a week to administer a Turing Test to a gynoid with true AI.  Caleb, the employee, knows tech as well, and he meets with Ava, the gynoid, for daily conversations.  He knows she’s a robot, but he has to assess whether there are weaknesses in her responses.  He begins to develop feelings towards Ava, and hostilities towards Nathan.  Some spoilers will follow.

Throughout, Nathan is presented as arrogant and narcissistic.  As well as paranoid.  He has a servant who speaks no English, whom he treats harshly.  What really drives this plot forward are the conversations between Nathan and Caleb about what constitutes true intelligence.  What makes us human?  As the week progresses, Ava begins to display feelings toward Caleb as well.  She’s kept in a safety-glass-walled room that she’s never been out of.  Although they are under constant surveillance, Ava causes power outages so she can be candid with Caleb.  She dislikes Nathan and wants to escape.  Caleb plans how they can get out only to have Nathan reveal that the real test was whether Ava could convince Caleb to let her go by feigning love for him.  The silent servant and Ava kill Nathan and Caleb begs her to release him but, being a robot she has no feelings and leaves him trapped in the facility.

This is an excellent film.  It’s difficult not to call it a parable.  Caleb falls for Ava because men tend to be easily persuaded by women in distress.  A man who programs a gynoid to appeal to this male tendency might just convince others that the robot is basically human.  It, however, experiences no emotions because although we understand logic to a fair degree, we’re nowhere near comprehending how feelings work and how they play into our thought process.  Our intelligence.  Given the opportunity, AI simply leaves humans behind.  All of this was out there years before Chat GPT and the others.  I know this is fiction, but the scenario is utterly believable.  And, come to think of it, maybe this is a horror movie after all. 

If You Do

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Folk horror is particularly open to religion.  The powerful Euro-horror film, The Damned, is nearly worthy of Robert Egger status.  Indeed, the movie reminded me of Egger’s work, so perhaps Thordur Palsson is his Icelandic incarnation.  Set in a fishing station in a remote arctic bay in the 1870s, the owner’s widow oversees the operations of six fishermen and the woman who cooks and keeps the house.  Her husband died at sea the previous year, and the fishing has been very poor, threatening their existence.  They need to eat their catches, as well as their bait, trying to stay alive until spring.  Eva, the young widow, sees a ship foundering on the distant, jagged rocks.  The men insist that if she orders them to help, their food supplies will quickly be depleted, and the rescue operation would put them all at risk.  Lured to the wreck by a food barrel that has washed ashore, they encounter more men than they can keep and have to fight them off of their small fishing boat, killing one in the process.

The helmsman of the boat falls overboard and drowns as the survivors try to climb aboard.  The small boat manages to escape, however.  Helga, the housekeeper, warns Eva of the draugr, a monster of Nordic folklore that is a kind of zombie.  If it gets into your head, she warns, it will led to death.  Skeptical of folktales, Eva begins to change her mind as her small group of companions begins dying off.  Helga disappears.  One of the men dies after being stopped from killing a companion.  Eva is now left with only four men.  One of the men insists they are paying for their sin, and begins erecting a large cross as an act of penitence.  After seeing a man in the mist, the new helmsman dies by suicide.  Now convinced the draugr is real, Eva leads an expedition to find and destroy it.  This leads to the death of yet another crew member.  The three remaining people decide to flee by night in the boat.  Eva, however, encounters the draugr in the cabin and destroys him by fire.  A spoiler follows.

The shocking end reveals that the draugr was actually a survivor of the shipwreck and his presence explains the “supernatural” events they believed the monster caused.  Eva, delusional, kills the man.  The story plays heavily on both the isolation of the fishing station and the guilt the characters all undergo after leaving their fellow sailors to die on the jagged rocks.  Their fear transforms fevers into deadly paranoia as they kill one another and themselves off.  This is set against the stunning arctic scenery of the fjord that houses the station in a stark winter landscape.  And the conflict between religious systems is right there on the surface and deep within the minds of those isolated, far from civilization.

Books and Mormons

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Some time ago we went to see Book of Mormon on tour.  I really knew very little about it other than it was consistently praised as being very funny.  I’m always a little concerned about poking fun at anyone else’s religion because I know people take their beliefs very seriously.  As I reflect on the show (which was quite funny) it seems that it wasn’t so much poking fun at the Latter-day Saints so much as it was poking fun at religion itself.  That’s less problematic as it’s not singling anyone out for ridicule.  It’s a system that’s being made light of.  Or at least any religion that is an effort to convert others.  There’s a kind of violence to it.  And if Book of Mormon is about anything, it’s about missionaries.  Amid the laughs it makes some valid points—trying to convert people without first trying to understand their culture is a fraught activity.

People want religious specialists who thoroughly understand their tradition.  I can say from experience, both as an erstwhile seminary student and a seminary professor, that the time given to become an expert is insufficient.  The older I’ve grown the wider the perspective I’ve tried to step back to see.  To be an expert on a religion really requires some facility with understanding other religions.  To understand, say, Methodism, you need to understand Anglicanism.  To understand Anglicanism, you need to understand Catholicism.  To understand Catholicism, you need to understand early Christianities.  To understand early Christianities, you need to understand Judaism.  And so the widening concentric circles go.  Nobody can be an expert in all of them, and each of these religions mentioned has, in its own right, sub-specializations that have their own experts.  Who has time to learn the religion of those they intend to convert?

Any religion that makes supernatural claims (and many of them do; it’s their nature) makes extraordinary allegations.  Those allegations, when examined closely, reveal some improbable elements.  Trey Parker and Matt Stone, two of the authors (most famous for South Park) apparently said that they had no intention of making fun of anyone’s religion and a spokesperson for the Latter-day Saints indicated that no real offense was taken, acknowledging that it’s parody and parody is only offensive if it’s taken seriously.  Many religions have thin skin when it comes to parody or satire.  The serious part is that some religions, in real life, take conversion of all others with a zeal that could (and does) become dangerous.  Still, this musical is very funny, as long as it’s not taken too seriously.

Existing Stance

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You know, I’ve referenced eXistenZ several times on this blog without really writing about it.  How rude of me!  Well, the fact is eXistenZ is one of my “old movies”—those that I knew from the days before I started this blog.  I have watched it since 2009, but early on I didn’t review movies unless they had religious elements.  Having recently referenced eXistenZ yet again, I figured it was time to look directly at it.  When I first watched this movie I had no idea who David Cronenberg was.  The film was recommended to me by one of my students at Nashotah House.  In those days there was no streaming so I had to purchase the DVD.  The movie is a science fiction horror film, primarily body horror, which is kind of Cronenberg’s shtick.  It’s also about gaming and I’m not a video gamer at all.  Still, I really like this film.

Perhaps presciently, Cronenberg set the movie in 2030.  Computer gaming has become biological with organic ports that have to be punctured into players’ spines so they can use an “UmbiCord” to connect to the pod.  Rewatching it, this seems almost too plausible.  In any case, as the movie goes on it becomes less and less clear what is real and what is part of the game.  Reality becomes distorted.  eXistenZ came out about the same time as The Matrix (probably why my student suggested it to me).  Given the very high profile of the latter film, eXistenZ never really broke out.  Cronenberg seldom breaks through to the mainstream, but I know a lot of people were talking about his remake of The Fly in 1986.  I even saw that one in the theater with some seminary friends.  In those days I didn’t know enough about horror to know what to expect from a Cronenberg film, which may be why it had such an impact on me.

In any case, eXistenZ remains underrated.  I see more recent films that appear to nod to it.  The horror aspects tend to be the slimy, gooey aspects of the game world which—spoiler alert—is, diegetically, the one in which the viewer resides.  There are indeed a few parallels to The Matrix, but eXistenZ has creatures and horror themes.  Sci-fi horror is a sub-genre that often works.  Critics tend to refer to such things by the older category of “science fiction,” but it is close kin to horror, a genre only separated out in the early 1930s.  Now as AI takes over the world, it might be a good opportunity to watch eXistenZ and ponder just how far you want to let it go.

Sleeping Below

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I’m not sure how I missed What Sleeps Beneath.  I suppose it’s a matter of being time-starved in a world with so many websites.  That, and I’m only now starting to get integrated into the horror community.  A comment on this blog brought What Sleeps Beneath to my awareness.  A horror review site—they feature both books and movies—it’s based in that epicenter of weird (at least in my experience) of Pittsburgh.  I lived in the city for a couple of summers and grew up between it and Erie.  And, of course, Pittsburgh is George Romero territory, the birthplace of the modern zombie.  I often reflect on it.  Growing up in a small town north of there, I was fascinated by large cities.  When I was in high school, Pittsburgh was the 16th largest city in the country, now it’s down in the 200s somewhere.  That’s what happens when a big industry packs its bags.

Photo by Vidar Nordli-Mathisen on Unsplash

In any case, I haven’t been able to keep up with all the horror websites.  Again, it’s a matter of time. One reason is reasonable precaution.  I believe in vaccines.  I hate being sick in any way, and I’m of an age that I’d probably have been long dead without the many sticks I’ve had in my life.  However, time is precious and I’ve lost two weekends this year just to vaccine recovery.  Keenly aware that I no longer have all the time in the world—this dawns on you with a kind of horror fierceness as you read obituaries of friends who seemed so much better adjusted than you—the loss of a weekend is a kind of major deficit.  It’s sort of a sloppy reboot.  You enter a weekend with anticipation of how much you can get accomplished without the 9-2-5, but instead you have a day or two as groggy as your computer is when you first turn it on.

I say all this because I’d been planning to explore What Sleeps Beneath then I lost this past weekend to recovery.  Pittsburgh, like most places, has an identity to it.  And like most places that identity evolves over time.  Tomorrow I head to Boston, a city I used to know, for the American Academy of Religion and Society of Biblical Literature conference.  I’ll also be visiting, I hope, the Poe Returning to Boston statue in Edgar Allan Poe Square.  What with Boston making a belated overture to Poe and Pittsburgh embracing its zombies, maybe horror is starting to become mainstream after all.  Now I just need to get the time to explore What Sleeps Beneath.

Hunting Season

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Back when it came out in 1997, I’d heard that it wasn’t a particularly happy movie.  It was a good movie but it dealt with two damaged men.  I was frightened off from seeing Good Will Hunting until it became associated with dark academia.  Will Hunting is a genius but he was born in a bad part of town and earned himself a police record.  He works as a janitor at MIT, but he also solves proofs instantly that professors labor over for years.  The only way he can keep out of jail, however, is with the help of a therapist.  Sean Maguire, who teaches at Bunker Hill Community College, is a psychologist who shares the background of Will’s rough neighborhood, but who recently lost his wife to cancer.  He’s been traumatized by his life and the two come to realize, once Will learns to trust, that they have helped heal each other.

The darkness in this academia is mostly social.  Even today, those of us who grew up in rougher locations don’t easily fit in academia.  We’re blithely ejected from it in favor of those with more proper backgrounds.  And connections.  There were a few personal triggers for me watching this movie, but I had been wanting to see it for some time.  Robin Williams, who plays Maguire, had starred in what may be the epitome of dark academia movies, Dead Poets Society.  In both he plays his part convincingly.  The term “dark academia” wouldn’t be coined, however, until the year after he died.  Education is supposed to lead us out of darkness, but given what humans are, it creates its own form of gloominess.  That’s probably why some of us find the category of dark academia so intriguing.  Compelling enough to get us to watch films that will perhaps come with their own brand of trauma.

Children born into similar, or nearly identical situations may react to it quite differently.  Although both in academic settings, Will and Sean have different experiences of it.  With his life experience as a war veteran, and an educated world traveler, Sean invested his life in love and helping others.  Will struggles with his fear of rejection to finally try to love someone more than upholding his own walls of self-protection.  There’s some real depth here.  It’s no wonder that the screenplay won more than a couple awards.  It would take another couple decades, however, until the category of dark academia would be named.  And if it hadn’t, I wouldn’t have risked watching this amazing movie.

Woodwork

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It’s not often that I get to see a new horror movie on opening day, but I managed to swing The Carpenter’s Son with a screener, courtesy of Horror Homeroom.  I’m not going to say much about the movie here, because you should go there to read my response—I’ll let you know when it appears.  But I should try to whet your appetite a bit.  Among those of us who read and write about horror and religion this was a much anticipated movie.  A horror movie about Jesus.  Such things have been done before, but this one is played straight with an interesting premise.  It’s based, loosely, on the Infancy Gospel of Thomas.  This isn’t to be confused with the Gospel of Thomas.  Early Christians, it seems, favored the doubter’s point of view.  The Infancy Gospel is the story of Jesus’ miracles between the ages of five and twelve.  Even among early Christians these accounts weren’t taken as gospel truth.  They make for an interesting movie, however.

I think about horror and religion quite a lot.  Since the late sixties the two appear together frequently and, according to many surveys, make for the scariest movies.  Religion deals with, not to sound too Tillichian, ultimate concerns.  In the human psyche you can’t get much larger than death and eternity.  These are the home turf of religion.  Of course, death can be handled in an entirely secular way, but there’s a reasons hospitals almost always have chapels in them.  Eternity may be slotted in cosmology, but what it means comes from religion.  Forever seems pretty ultimate to me.

One thing I didn’t give in my Horror Homeroom piece about The Carpenter’s Son is my thoughts as to whether it’s a good movie or not.  Did I like it?  To a certain degree, yes.  Although I’ve been impressed with Nicolas Cage in horror movies lately—he can really rise to the occasion—sometimes, as in The Wicker Man, he just becomes, well, Cagey.  This happens once in a while in The Carpenter’s Son too.  When he’s questioning Mary about where “the boy” came from, his voice gets the wheedling, whining, kind of mocking tone that doesn’t set him as his best.  Likewise, when he tries to instruct young Jesus in various ways, it seems far too modern to fit the palette of a period drama.  I watched it a couple of times to write the article and I have my doubts that I’ll watch it again.  I did think the portrayal of Satan was good, and appreciated some of the dialogue about evil.  It wasn’t my favorite horror movie in recent weeks, however, even though I saw it before it opened.