Meeting Places

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It’s one of those quirky British television plays that’s its own movie.  It was part of the Play for Today series.  I turned to Penda’s Fen after receiving some very distressing news, as a means of self-healing.  (I may seem distracted for some time, please forgive me.)  Sometimes considered folk horror, it really isn’t a horror film although it may be treated as one.  The dialogue is heavily religious, involving a lot of theological discussion of Manichaeism, the “heretical” belief in the struggle between the powers of light and powers of darkness.  It plays out through the maturing of Stephen Franklin, son of the local vicar who is, unbeknownst to himself, adopted.  He also discovers his homosexuality as he begins to rebel against the strictures of his private school education.  Underlying all this is the fact that he lives in Pinvin, in reality Penda’s Fen.

The story deals with the past interrupting into the present as Penda’s pagan kingdom never really fell.   A local writer claims that there is an entire escape city beneath the British landscape to which those deemed “important” to the government are to be evacuated in case of emergency.  In reality, the kingdom beneath, and overlapping, Pinvin is that of Penda.  Penda was an actual Anglo-Saxon king and here he encourages Stephen to know himself—one of the mottos of the school.  That knowing involves coming to question the conservative, Christian belief system he has wholeheartedly embraced.  His adoptive father, the vicar, has broader beliefs, including the reality of other gods.  Stephen discovers this and learns of his adoption, making for some heartfelt religious dialogue.

My reason for watching, apart from the much-needed therapy, was that it had been recommended as a piece of religion and horror.  There are some horror moments, but generally it’s difficult to say whether they’re hallucinations of Stephen or they’re really happening.  One is presented outside his viewing, which suggests that they are meant to be real.  One involves a demon, but not the scary kind of The Exorcist, which had been released just a few months ahead of Penda’s Fen.  In all, it’s a thoughtful movie, the kind you might expect when based on a play.  Given the themes, I’m not sure it was the best therapy, but it did engage the religion and media dialogue.  I hope to come back to it some day under better circumstances.  The dialogue is worth engaging with more depth than I’ve been able to muster here right now and there’s much I still don’t understand.

Liking Everyone

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I’m not really interested in politics.  Powerful people deciding the fate of the rest of us seems inherently depressing.  We could use a good laugh.  I’ve been curious about Will Rogers for some time now.  He’s a name that everyone in my generation seems to recognize but few people know anything about him, beyond some of his famous quips.  So I read Gary Clayton Anderson’s Will Rogers and His America.  It was an eye-opening experience.  Rogers died in 1935, the year my mother was born.  What a difference less than a century can make!  At the time of his death he was one of the most famous people in the country, personal friend of U.S. Presidents, an international traveler, and widely syndicated newspaper columnist.  He was also a film actor and comedian.  When he traveled internationally world leaders gladly met him.  Not bad for a poor boy from Oklahoma.

Anderson’s book is a good introduction to who Rogers was, but it does tend to focus on the politics.  Arguably that’s where one’s greatest impact in life might reside.  Still, there’s a lot more to an individual than politics.  I’m curious about Rogers’ career as an entertainer.  He started out as a Vaudeville roper—literally, a rope act.  His noted wit, however, made him famous.  At various points he was one of the highest paid entertainers in the country.  His sympathies, like many of us born in humble circumstances, tended to be with the average person who, it seems, is always struggling against an economy that favors the wealthy.  See?  There I’ve done it myself, gone and got political.  It’s difficult to avoid.

Perhaps the most widely read columnist in the country, who influenced political opinions and could rake in the money at just about any form of comedic enterprise, Rogers nevertheless faded from view after his death in a plane crash.  He was part American Indian.  He never completed college.  He was homespun and yet influential around the world.  Fame comes with no guarantees, of course.  I guess it would be helpful to know what Roger’s motivations were.  Was he, like most people, simply trying to secure his future for himself and family?  Was he trying to change the world?  Can anyone manage to do that for very long before things come along and everything’s suddenly different?  (Think AI, for example.)  I’m glad to have met Will Rogers through Anderson’s book.  Even though I’m not really interested in politics, I learned something about them too, along the way.

A Tumble

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So beautifully shot, Fallen is a movie worth watching despite its disjointed plot.  Worth watching for horror fans, that is.  Apart from the night scenes, this is art house cinematography, and that may be because it’s an independent movie.  What’s it about?  That’s difficult to say, definitively.  The night scenes are so dark that you can’t tell what’s happening and the plot seems to have been intentionally obscure.  (That’s hard to substantiate because the 2022 film hasn’t generated too much discussion.)  This may have been another case of mistaken identity, like The Entity, because my notes only had the title down.  There are at least three movies with this title.  I’m learning my lesson to jot down the year when I add a movie to my “to see” list.  In any case, here goes…

A young priest (?) is warned by an older priest that it is time to take up violence because the darkness has started.  The younger priest is called “Father Abraham,” but he wears a tie in church services, and a small pectoral cross, making identification of the denomination difficult.  Since this is religion-based horror you’d think that that much, at least, ought to have been sorted out.  The heavily accented dialogue is often delivered so low that it’s difficult to follow.  In any case, this minister, after fighting “darkness” for many years, is in an isolated farmhouse with his disabled daughter.  He hunts and traps for their needs and a local boy delivers groceries, and is secretly in love with the daughter.  The minister, who seems to be presented as a tortured soul, isn’t really likable.  At night the house is attacked by physical demons.  There will be spoilers in the next paragraph.

It’s finally revealed that Fr. Fallen (apparently that’s his surname) had killed his wife for being a witch.  His daughter is also a witch, out for revenge for her mother’s death.  She summoned the demons and eventually kills her father and leaves the farm.  Religious imagery is everywhere in this film and begs for interpretation.  The lack of coherence, however, makes that very problematic.  The disabled daughter is the only survivor at the farmhouse, and is healed at the end.  By the demons?  Or because she’s a witch?  The influence of M. Night Shyamalan is evident, but his clean plotting is absent.  Online discussion is minimal, but there could be something of substance here.  If only it were better put together.  If only it were more discussed.

World’s End?

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I’ve been writing on religion and horror for quite a few years now.  Sometimes you come across a horror movie, or novel, which addresses this directly.  Paul Tremblay’s The Cabin at the End of the World is one such novel.  A friend strongly recommended this, and indeed, the first half went impossibly fast.  This despite my dislike of home invasion stories.  It nevertheless kept me on the edge of my seat.  I should probably say there will be spoilers here (there will), in case you haven’t read this but intend to.  I’ll hold off on them until the next paragraph, though, so if you’re a faster reader than I am a writer you won’t accidentally run upon them.  So, a family consisting of two fathers and an adopted daughter find the cabin, where they’re vacationing, invaded by four people who believe the world is going to end.  Spoilers follow!

The world is going to end unless the family agree to sacrifice one of themselves to stop the apocalypse.  The strangers are armed while the vacationers are not.  And, as usually happens when those with weapons confront the innocent, the armed prevail.  But.  But the family refuses to sacrifice anyone.  Then the brainwashed four do something unexpected—they kill one of their own.  They continue to do this, attempting to convince the men that if the invaders all die, and neither of the men is sacrificed, the world will end.  Quite a bit of the novel then becomes a theological discussion regarding what kind of god would make such a demand.  Of course, if you read Genesis you’ll already know the answer, right Isaac?

Tremblay knows not to tip his authorial hand as to what’s really happening.  As the cabin becomes a mess of blood and gore, the television seems to be showing predicted apocalyptic events.  The invaders can’t reveal their source of secret knowledge because they receive visions telling them what to do.  The whole thing raises that most troubling of questions: who is really in charge?  Is there a bloodthirsty deity who requires a willing death or are the invaders simply good at acting out their paranoia and interpreting events to meet their expectations?  So it is that Cabin becomes a disturbing story—nearly a theodicy—asking age-old questions of what happens when religious belief conflicts with rational materialism.  There are enough hints of supernatural happenings to make the reader wonder.  And when it ends it affirms something many of us are exploring these days—religion and horror have much in common but neither is clearly understood.

Not Dagon

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There’s an aesthetic to bad movies.  And when your production company is Crappy World Films you’ve got to wonder if it’s intentional.  Chad Ferrin’s H. P. Lovecraft’s The Deep Ones, which was released in 2020, isn’t a great movie.  It is kinda fun, though.  I’ve had a weakness for explicit Lovecraft films ever since Stuart Gordon’s very moody Dagon.  That film was clearly the inspiration for this one.  With the “low” budget of only a million dollars (it feels strange to write that), it nevertheless has a clean cinematography that shows some artistry.  The story just isn’t that good.  A young couple is seeking a getaway at an oceanfront AirBNB only to discover it’s part of a “gated” community.  Their hosts, who are living in the boat down at the marina, keep on stopping in, not leaving them much privacy.

The set-up is very much a Rosemary’s Baby scenario.  The community, as the title suggests, worship the Old Ones.  They introduce Cthulhu early on, but the young man of the couple has never heard of him (he obviously doesn’t spend much time on the internet).  Speaking of the internet, the film makes the point that everyone spends too much time on it, and there’s perhaps some truth to that, but, if you’re streaming the movie you’re also participating.  In any case, the community wants women to offer to Dagon—and the monster here is clearly low-budget—so they can bear more children for the Deep Ones.  Well, not so much bear children for them as to be pregnant with tentacles that can somehow convert newcomers.  Once you’ve been tentacled, it seems, you’re a member of the community.

There is a kind of Lovecraft vibe to the film despite the often wooden acting and throwaway dialogue.  One thing Lovecraft had learned from Poe was the consistency of mood.  It’s here that the movie runs into some trouble.  At times it’s a little scary, at times dramatic, but too much of it just feels silly.  The case could be made that Lovecraft’s writing tends toward the puerile and there’s some truth to that.  It is never silly, however.  Sometimes when translated to the screen the outlandishness of Lovecraft’s view of the world comes across as so weird as to be funny.  It takes an able director, and a strong writer, to adapt him to cinema successfully.  It’s no accident, then, that the movie is dedicated to Stuart Gordon, whose Dagon is still difficult for me to watch, so full of Lovecraft as it is.

Bad Movies

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It’s embarrassing.  No, really it is.  The other day I was posting on yet another bad movie I’d watched and I realized that I should add a new Category (although I’m likely the only one who uses them) on this blog.  Now, it’s a pain to add a new Category to a blog with over 5,000 posts.  I reasoned that my bad movie watching, although a lifetime pursuit, really only appeared on this blog recently.  I had to scroll through the existing Category, “Movies,” to remind myself of what I’d posted on.  I found a few to add to my new Category, then a few more.  Finally the number grew to embarrassing portions.  I kept scrolling until it made me dizzy.  I couldn’t remember whether I’d posted on The Room or not.  It’s not a horror film, but it is very bad.  So bad I watched a parody of it.  Using the search function “The Room” brought up just too many hits and I was already woozy.  Maybe I didn’t want to admit to that one.

Photo by Denise Jans on Unsplash

There’s an aesthetic to watching bad movies.  In fact, there are books written justifying the practice.  I thought maybe I had started my bad movie watching posts with Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space, but no.  No, it went back further than that.  As someone who writes books about movies (maybe bad books about movies?) I need to do my homework.  Not only do I write books on movies, I also write on them for Horror Homeroom on occasion.  I’m scheduled to teach a class on a movie this fall.  I’ve even presented on movies to church groups (they never invite me back to talk on that topic again, however).  I know the reason lies much deeper, though.

Part of it derives from a childhood of watching bad movies.  There’s nostalgia involved.  More than that, however, I grew up poor.  Unless you’re a rags-to-riches story (I’m not) that mentality stays with you your entire life.  I’m always trying to cut costs, but I love movies.  On weekends I look for what’s free, with or without ads, on Amazon Prime.  They cater to bad movies, it turns out.  And before long it becomes like an addiction.  There’s a fascination to watching something so obviously poor that nevertheless ended up in theaters.  In other words, hope glimmers through.  My books are far too expensive to sell well.  My name isn’t widely known.  There is, in other words, a validation in watching bad movies.  I’ve got a well-populated Category for them right here.

Der Golem

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The golem is a monster of fascination.  It has been the subject of movies from quite an early period.  The earliest, now mostly lost, seems to have been Paul Wegener’s Der Golem (1915).  This film became the first of a trilogy, with the second (also lost) being, The Golem and the Dancing Girl (also originally titled in German, 1917).  The third film mostly survives and is therefore often called The Golem, based on the fact that it is the one we can still see.  Der Golem: wie er in die Welt kam (The Golem: How He Came into the World, 1920) is considered a must-see early horror film, although that designation comes from the fact of there being a monster.  It’s not scary.  It is, after all, a silent film.

Having watched some recent examples of Jewish horror I realized that I’d missed this one and set out to rectify the situation.  This film is actually the prequel to the other two, with Wegener’s golem having already established a cinematic presence.  I wasn’t sure what to expect from the story, but I supposed that it would be the oppressed Jews creating a golem to protect them and that it would eventually go berserk, as soulless people generally do.  It may have helped to have seen the two missing films, I suspect.  This golem is made to protect the Jews, but the edict against them is cancelled by the fact that the golem exists.  The emperor is impressed with the Jewish magic and allows the Jews to remain in their ghetto.  The golem, however, develops feelings for Rabbi Loew’s daughter, which is an interesting twist.

The rabbi does lose control of his creation, and it refused to allow him to deactivate him by removing the secret word revealed by Astaroth, under a star on his chest.  A little girl outside the ghetto, picked up by the golem, playfully pulls off the star and saves the day.  This really isn’t Jewish horror, at least not in the sense of more recent films.  It’s not very close to the Jewish golem legend and saving the Jewish community is left up to a gentile girl.  The ending clearly inspired James Whale’s Frankenstein some eleven years later, but the messaging of the film is pretty much what you might expect for a non-Jew trying to tell a Jewish story.  The fact that a demon is involved in bringing the golem to life puts us into a more Christianized view of things.  Still, this historic film, which is just over an hour in length, started something that has grown more sophisticated as Jewish horror started to come into its own.

Spider Planet

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Misnomers aren’t uncommon when it comes to click-bait.  I’ve fallen victim more than a few times.  But such misdirection is probably as old as humanity, and is perhaps part of consciousness itself.  (Some birds are known to practice deception, as are some other primates.)  Earth Vs. the Spider is drive-in-bait as a title.  In the 1958 horror-sci fi movie (also titled The Spider), the danger isn’t really to the earth but to one small town.  There is, however, a giant spider and somehow it’s not as scary as the real thing can be, writ small.  Occasionally, such as when a spider comes out into the open in the house, I ponder why this is such a deep-seated human fear.  I know spiders are beneficial to the ecosystem and that they pose very little danger, at least in places where I’ve lived.  So why are they so scary?

Scientists, including those of the mind, have proposed looking to our primate cousins for an answer.  They too are afraid of spiders, and it’s posited that since primates climb trees to escape danger and that spiders also climb, the phobia is hardwired.  For me it’s only certain body-plans that are scary.  I don’t mind the cute little jumping spiders that get in around the windows.  They don’t seem out to hurt anybody.  It’s the kind with long, grasping legs that bother me.  As a child I used to try to identify spiders with a picture book identification guide, but soon the guide started to scare me and I had to put it down.  I wasn’t cut out to be an arachnidologist, I guess.  The movie could’ve used one, however.  They kept calling the spider an insect.

The unblinking advocacy of DDT was the scariest part of the film.  Got a problem?  Spray chemicals all over it!  It gives me the same fear as when I see all those pallets of RoundUp every time I go to Lowes.  That stuff is deadly to the environment, and I’m kind of attached to the environment.  Spring arrived around here late this year, but it was spider season by the time I watched Earth Vs. the Spider as part of my minor quest to see the “so bad they’re good” movies.  They’re also part of the history of horror.  Apart from Psycho in 1960, horror was kind of on vacation for the fifties and into the late sixties.  Of course, movies kept being made.  It’s just that they couldn’t be taken seriously.  And even though drive-ins seem to be extinct, I still fall for drive-in bait from time to time. Even when watching alone.

Cat Nipped

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Holy Horror began with movies from 1960 on.  You see, I had watched the 1982 remake of Cat People without ever watching the original from 1942.  The remake has Paul Gallier, the brother of Irena, as a religious leader.  He doesn’t cite the Bible, so the movie fell outside the limits I set for that particular book.  I recently watched the 40-year older original version and was surprised to find not only the religion intact, but also the Bible as part of the story.  Both versions integrate religion and horror and some of the scenes are very close between the two.  The original centers around Irena Dubrovna, a Serbian immigrant.  In addition to originating the The Lewton Bus technique, the film also introduced a religious origin for the horror.  When Irena meets Oliver Reed, she explains to him that in Serbia, in her home village, some witches were driven out into the woods of the surrounding mountains by the Christians.  There they formulated a curse leading to becoming cat people when aroused.

Irena, fearing sexual arousal, spends time apart from Oliver after they marry, mainly watching the black leopard at the zoo.  One of the custodians warns her it’s an evil animal, a monster as described in the book of Revelation, which he quotes.  Of course, this leopard is an ordinary big cat, and the woman to whom he quotes Scripture is a cat woman.  Irena knows inside that she’s one of the cat people, but nobody will believe her.  The film also makes use of a quote from John Donne regarding sin.  Indeed, the film makes it clear, even after Irena dies, that she had never lied.  While she’s stalking Oliver and Alice in their office one night, Oliver pulls down a T-square, the shadow of which forms a cross on the wall, and he abjures her, in the name of God, to leave them alone.  Religion, the clash of religions, makes the monster.

Cat People, despite having had a mixed reception, was an influential movie.  Like much of early horror, it’s tame by today’s standards.  And yet it’s aged well.  I didn’t expect to be drawn in as much as I ended up being.  After all, I’d seen the remake first.  America at the time had a fear of the Balkan region, where mysterious eastern Europeans still had tales of vampires, werewolves, and cat people.  Of course, the last of these was invented for the film.  The director, writer, and producer wanted to create an intelligent horror film, which they did.  Moody, atmospheric, and based on religious tension, it is worthy of a Holy Horror sequel.

The Goodreads Zone

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It happened on Goodreads.  I suspect she had no idea how much that simple “like” meant to me.  Social media is too big to be everywhere, so I primarily engage with those who reach out to me (without trolling), on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Goodreads.  Even with my activity on these venues, comments are rare.  Likes a bit more common, and always appreciated.  Several months after I posted a review of her book, As I Knew Him: My Dad, Rod Serling on Goodreads, Anne Serling liked it.  That may not seem like much, but this was the actual daughter of Rod Serling himself, liking something I wrote.  If you feel the way I do about The Twilight Zone this will be a personal brush with greatness.  Almost as if Serling himself approved.

I’ve met a few famous people in my time.  Mostly they are ordinary people and act like ordinary people.  Only those of us around someone famous know that millions of people have heard of one of us.  Heard of and admire.  The rest of us manage to get along, but we do so without notice.  Unless someone “likes” what we do.  It’s kind of like having someone famous blurb your book.  In any case, my childhood consisted of many snippets of things that made me who I am.  One of those snippets was The Twilight Zone.  I watched a lot of television growing up.  We were not a reading family (neither parent finished high school), so the television was the item of choice after work/school.  Much of what I watched washed off.  Not The Twilight Zone.

Like reading through the Dark Shadows novels, I’ve been slowly watching my way through The Twilight Zone alone.  Nobody else in my family cares for it and since I don’t have much free time I only get to it on rare occasions.  Now that mowing time is here, those occasions are even fewer.  I guess I feel that I have to justify why I’ve come around to writing about horror as an adult.  You don’t get to be an adult without having some kind of childhood first, and mine involved The Twilight Zone.  Anne Serling’s involved being raised by the creator of The Twilight Zone.  To me, that’s a validating kind of fame.  To be seen by someone who could, if she wanted, have an instant and ready-made audience.  A reverie, started by something that happened on Goodreads.

More Water Monsters

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Monster from the Ocean Floor, one gets the sense, wouldn’t have merited a Wikipedia article were it not for the fact that it was the first film Roger Corman produced.  Despite its B-movie quality, there’s quite a lot to like about it.  First of all it has a strong female lead.  Julie Blair is the only gringo in Mexico to believe the locals that there’s a monster just off shore.  Steve Dunning, the scientist, is an avowed skeptic.  The plot is cheesy—the monster is an overgrown amoeba irradiated by the Bikini Island underwater nuclear tests, and it’s killed by getting a submarine in the eye—but there are some very effective cinematographic moments.  When the young boy talking to Julie in the opening turns to stare at the ocean where his father disappeared, the framing and emotion are perfect.

The theme music for the approach of the shark, and then the amoeba, anticipate Jaws by a couple of decades, and I have to wonder if John Williams hadn’t watched Monster from the Ocean Floor.  (I’m sure even cultured people watch the occasional B-movie.)  There’s also an unexpected religion angle.  A series of episodes in the film have a couple of locals trying to kill Julie as a sacrifice to the monster.  Despite the holes in the plot, it’s remarkable that in 1954 there could be dialogue suggesting that the Christian God (“the other god” according to a local woman) isn’t the God that Quetzalcoatl is.  All the same, the sacrifice is based on the folklore that the sacrifice of the “fairest” (Julie is, naturally, blonde) will appease the monster.  Maybe not the most solid theological basis, but still, not bad for a bad movie.

I’ve recently published a piece on Horror Homeroom about women and water monsters.  Having a strong woman in a 1954 film is especially remarkable.  Julie, despite the skepticism of the scientists, takes the initiative to dive right down and see the monster for herself.  It’s only when she comes up with physical proof that the men consider that she may be right (and in danger).  Of course, the men do have to rescue her—you can’t have it all.  Yes, it’s a cheaply made movie with a paper-thin plot but it was beginning to show that a woman could take the reins and with good motives (if nobody else will do something about the monster, she will).  Although she’s the love object of the movie, she’s so much more.  And a submarine in the eye—that’s gotta smart.

Many Days

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Science fiction.  I used to consume it by the bookful, and even now I occasionally turn back to it.  Having read Doris Piserchia’s A Billion Days of Earth, I do have a confession to make.  I don’t know why I read it.  Literally.  As I’ve indicated many times before, I keep a reading wishlist.  It’s comprised of books that others recommend and things that catch my eye.  Every now and again a used book sale will bring something unexpected into the mix, but overall, I rely on my list.  I can’t remember who recommended A Billion Days of Earth, or why.  The cover is striking in that 1970s sci-fi way, and it took me back to the actual seventies when I was reading sci-fi quite a bit.  Some of that cover art still mesmerizes me.  So, about the book…

I didn’t know what to expect and received what I was expecting.  This is a philosophically heavy novel that, in the style of some other seventies fiction I read, was a bit difficult to follow.  The main idea (and there will be spoilers) is that Sheen, a silvery, shape-shifting being, emerges a billion days along.  Evolution has taken multiple tracks with animals such as dogs and rats becoming essentially what humans are today (or were in the seventies) and humans evolving into what the other animals call gods.  Sheen slithers about the world taking the egos from all creatures, kind of assimilating them.  A rat person and a dog person resist the relinquishing of their egos while the world around them begins to collapse.  The “gods” refuse to help.  Then, at the end, the gods board their spaceship, and released by Sheen, leave for another planet.

Although I was confused most of the way through, the book leaves a lot to exegete.  This is definitely a retelling of Genesis 1–3.  Sheen offers people (and animals) paradise in exchange for their egos.  Nearly everyone, except those who think (a small number) accepts this offer.  Even the gods are tempted.  We’ve got the snake (Sheen), the expulsion from paradise, and the gods who separate themselves from humanity.  But still, I’m sure there’s something more that I missed.  There are subplots for Rik (rat man) and Jak (dog man) and the rich Filly family that seem to evade conclusion or resolution.  Or maybe once the gods are gone there’s nothing more to say.  This seventies classic left me thinking.  And wondering who it was that recommended it to me.

Entitled Titles

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Movies have a tremendous impact.  Nowhere is this more obvious than in movie titles moving into standard vocabulary.  “McGuffin” (which autocorrect thinks is “McMuffin”) and the Wilhelm scream may not be household terms, but many people know what they are without being movie experts.  Even more impressive is when a movie title becomes its own noun.  I learned about the Rashomon effect not from movies, but from history.  When a story is told from more than one point of view, often with contradictory accounts, this is known as “the Rashomon effect.”  It’s named after a movie, Rashomon, that I’ve never seen.  I suspect I’m not the only one to use the phrase who hasn’t.  Movies can become points of reference.  We’re quite often visual creatures and movies can reach large audiences. The title plays a crucial role.

As the writer of a small blog with a small readership, and of books with small circulation, I often think of how movies manage to reach so many people.  I’m constantly discovering movies from before when I was born, or from countries far away.  They ask, like this blog, for only a little bit of time and yet they provide so many things to think about.  In many ways they are the mythology of our age, and no matter whether you watch on your phone or the big screen, you’re joining the ranks of believers.  Sometimes a movie becomes a cultural reference, such as is the case of “the Rashomon effect.”  But this can lead to its own set of problems.  Movies, like some bestselling books, often have one-word titles.  Sometimes that word fits many movies (as in Entity/The Entity).  Or sometimes it has a wider meaning, such as Avatar.  Or it refers to another well-known reference, such as Titanic.  I’m not picking on James Cameron here, but making a point that movies may make meaning, but they also bear the weight of their titles.

Titles are often sticking points with authors.  Many academic writers like the draw of the clever or pithy title, but such titles often hurt the sales of their book.  Using a quote as a title, apart from making confusion, also runs into duplicates.  Titles can’t be copyrighted, so multiple books (or movies) can use the same one. Quotes have long been favorites, so using them for titles is not a good idea.  I was distressed (mildly) when I realized that my fifth book, The Wicker Man, would bear the same title as the movie.  (That’s the way the series rolls.)  I’m now reading the proofs and thinking about titles.  My next book may not have a one-word title, but I hope I’m getting close.  And maybe it will have a little impact?

Wrong Entity

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In one of those weird synchronicities the universe likes to play, the very next day after I watched The Entity (2015) and wrote a blog post on it, this happened.  In yesterday’s post I noted that I couldn’t remember where I’d read about the movie, or who had recommended it to me.  I couldn’t even be sure which The Entity it was, since I didn’t write down the movie’s date.  The next morning I had the privilege of watching Claire Donner, of the Miskatonic Institute, talking about The Entity and it immediately came to mind that it was she who’d suggested I might like it (or might not).  Also, that I got the wrong one.  I haven’t had the opportunity to watch the one actually recommended yet, but it brings back to mind just how the Miskatonic Institute contributes to understanding horror.

The Institute has asked me to present a course this coming October and I will be posting more on that closer to the time.  It got me to thinking about a couple of things.  One is that I missed some major horror films growing up.  When I “got religion” in high school (I always had it, of course, and saw no problem with enjoying monsters too) I began to steer away from horror.  In college I had a dating occasion or two to watch horror, but it really only started again in earnest after being booted out of academia.  I was interviewed in seminary by a sociology grad student interested in why people watch horror, but my watching was (and still is) circumscribed by lack of cash flow.  The Entity made quite a splash in the early eighties, but it took someone in the 2020s telling me about it before I realized I probably should watch it.

The other thing Donner’s talk brought to mind is how religion and horror relate.  Such films are scary because of an existential threat—THE existential threat.  There’s nothing more powerful than God, but in such movies God can do nothing.  I haven’t seen the movie yet, but I suspect that’s true.  It’s certainly true of The Exorcist, with which it’s sometimes compared.  God doesn’t deliver Regan McNeil, no, Fr. Karras does.  And only by sacrificing himself to do so.  The existential threat has to involve a universe entirely out of kilter.  What is a God that’s powerless (it’s implied) to drive out evil?  The exorcism in The Exorcist doesn’t work, does it?  Yet there’s some benevolent force in the universe that gives us synchronicities and, it seems, is looking out for goodness in an often cruel world.

Entities

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When you’re a regular scholar, you take notes.  I’m not a regular anything, I guess, and I’ve fallen out of the habit of noting who makes movie recommendations to me.  Many of these come from books, but I don’t always remember which book made what suggestion.  In my list of movies to watch is The Entity.  The thing is, there are at least five movies by that title.  One of them was free on Freevee, so that was the one I watched.  I’m not sure it was the right one, but since it featured something like a demon it represents my interests in Nightmares with the Bible.  This one was, for the record, from 2016, or 2015, and directed by Eduardo Schuldt.  Like Paranormal Activity, it’s “found footage” from hand-held cameras and it made me more woozy than scared.

Based in Lima, it’s in Spanish and claims to be from the dark web.  I don’t have any desire to go there (the dark web, that is.  Lima would be okay), but the movie wasn’t that frightening.  It was like Sinister and Ringu’s unholy offspring.  With a bit of Blair Witch Project as a sibling.  A curse from the Inquisition brings this into the realm of religion and horror.  Film students working on a class project learn that those who see a certain film are going to die.  Being modern people, they’re skeptical so, of course they watch it.  The thing about religion is that it’s unrelenting.  It doesn’t give up just because people stop believing.  Movies like this underscore how we keep turning back to religion to frighten ourselves.  You can guess what happens to the students.

The thing is, I’m not sure that I watched the correct one.  Film scholars now make a habit of citing movies by not only title and year, but also director’s name.  There are a lot of “Entities” out there, and if you take the article off there are even more.  I’ll probably end up watching a few of them, but since I didn’t write down which book, or which friend, made the recommendation, I’ll never know if I got the right one.  I keep a list to try to prevent myself from just going for whatever’s free on the weekend because you generally get what you pay for when you do that.  Even though I ended up a bit nauseous (from the camera movement) I was glad to have seen this.  There were some good moments in it.  And I can tick one off my Entity list.