Demeter at Last

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Now that official scary movie season is here, and now that I’ve had a chance to watch The Last Voyage of the Demeter, well, I guess I can share my thoughts.  First of all, it immediately went into Holy Sequel.  There’s a lot of religion in this vampire film.  If you’re not familiar with Dracula, as written by Bram Stoker, or its many adaptations, the Demeter is the ship which carries the vampire from the Balkan peninsula to England.  Dracula has purchased Carfax Abbey and since he’s traveling alone he has to ship himself there.  He has crates of his native earth loaded on the Demeter, along with his coffin.  Along the way he snacks on the crew until the fateful Demeter arrives at Whitby as a ghost ship, no crew anywhere.  Anyone who knows Bram Stoker’s story knows that nobody survives aboard the ship.

That conceit makes this an interesting angle from which to tell the story.  Critics were unkind, but the reason, it seems to me, is that you pretty much know how it will play out from the title.  Personally, I’m more generous than the majority of critics.  This is a perfectly serviceable horror film, well made, and with a message.  Not only does the Black man not die first, he’s also the sole survivor.  The fact that Drac picks off the crew one-by-one will come as no surprise.  You need to guess who’ll go last and the successful escape of Clemens is, in some ways, unexpected.  I did wonder, apart from the inclusion of the Bible right out there in the open, at the name Clemens and the dog Huckleberry.  Was there a Mark Twain subplot going on here as well?  I found Anna’s presence a bit strained but having a strong woman aboard was a nice touch.  She almost survives too.

André Øvredal directed a couple of other horror films I enjoyed: The Autopsy of Jane Doe and Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.  Having seen three good horror films from him made me add Passengers to my list of movies to watch.  There are a number of directors that are making horror that I’m starting to follow.  Jordan Peele, Robert Eggers, Damian McCarthy, Osgood Perkins, Zach Cregger, Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, Ti West, and Ari Aster, among others, are taking horror in some interesting directions.  If I didn’t have to work for a living, and if I could afford all the horror movies I wanted, I have a feeling that the future would be pretty bright.

Sweet Horror Music

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I don’t often write about music because it’s far too personal.  And very important to me.  I’m not a casual listener, for the most part.  When I listen to music I listen to music.  Still, sometimes it seems to hit the spirit of the moment.  When innocently watching a horror movie (When the Lights Went Out) I heard a catchy song I’d never been aware of hearing before.  The film was set in the seventies and the song was the slightly salacious single “Little Willy” by The Sweet.  Since this was a “based on a true story” movie, they were shooting for period authenticity.  I was alive and somewhat aware during the seventies.  I knew, and liked, The Sweet’s hit “Fox on the Run.”  I really couldn’t name any other song of theirs.

Image credit: Majalah Varianada. Public domain in Indonesia, where published, via Wikimedia Commons.

I lived in a small town and there was no internet.  We got our information from school, television, books, newspapers, and magazines.  And word of mouth, of course.  Much of what I learned about music was from someone telling me something.  I heard Alice Cooper bit the head off of a live chicken.  Actually, Ozzy Osbourne had bitten the head off a live bat.  You couldn’t rely on word of mouth, but about popular music that was about all that was available.  In other words, I knew nothing about The Sweet.  Since I never heard anything more after “Fox,” I’d figured they were a one-hit wonder.  They got shelved, in my mind, until I saw When the Lights Went Out.  As these things usually do, my curiosity about them had to await a day off work when I could indulge my curiosity.  I looked them up online and discovered, to my surprise, that they’d been around since the early sixties, making them an early rock band.  In the often tangled history of early rock, they didn’t become The Sweet until the late sixties.

Their peak came in the seventies, although according to the internet, in the way of George Washington’s axe, they still exist (one of the original lineup is still alive).  We live in an age of antique early rockers still performing.  I’m sure music must be a tough business.  Staying popular for decades can’t be easy.  Now we can find the history of a band with just a few keystrokes.  We can call up their music on some streaming service.  Or hear it over the loudspeaker in just about any shopping venue.  When I hear music, I pay attention to it.  And about the only thing I remember from that horror movie is a song by a band I’d long forgotten.  Not bad for a mediocre film.

Old Man Country

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As a movie fan, you eventually come to trust certain filmmakers.  The Coen Brothers produce consistently good work.  I’d missed No Country for Old Men and was somewhat reluctant to see it.    Films about sociopathic killers bother me, and I knew that the Cormac McCarthy novel was about a drug deal gone bad (and made him a household name).  Drugs are another of my triggers, having grown up in an alcoholic household.  But still, the film won the Academy Award for best picture, and it was a rather glaring hole in my viewing of Coen Brother major movies.  While the film isn’t horror, it is one of the scariest movies I’ve seen in some time.  The ending is devastating, and sad, and reflective.  It’s easy to see why it appealed to the critics.  Nothing is neatly tied up at the end.  I haven’t read the novel, but I hear the film follows it closely.

Llewelyn Moss comes across a drug deal gone bad.  He finds a couple million in cash and takes it to the trailer park so he and his wife can retire.  A hit man, Anton Chigurh, pursues him and eventually Moss realizes that a transponder has been hidden among the cash, giving away his location.  Meanwhile, the local sheriff, Ed Tom Bell, does what he can to protect Moss’ wife and tries to save him from what he realizes is an unstoppable foe.  Chigurh proves as tenacious as his reputation suggests, and viewers learn that Moss is as equally tenacious, but has both a conscience and morality, both of which Chigurh lacks.  The scenes where Chigurh appears to be fair-minded are the scariest in the film.

The log line “There are no clean getaways” about sums up the outcome.  Often classified as a western, the feel is more of a thriller.  “Coen Brothers movie” might be a genre all its own.  The relative lack of humor puts it much closer to Fargo than to O Brother, Where Art Thou? or Raising Arizona on the Coen Brothers scale.  The unrelenting violence also brought Pulp Fiction (different director, different feel) to mind.  The bleakness of the outlook of Sheriff Bell, as well as the look in his eyes, is haunting.  His conversation with Ellis near the end stirs thoughts of Ecclesiastes and the reflection on just how violent people can be toward each other is profoundly disturbing.  I’ve seen many horror films that didn’t scare me half as much.

Slip Sliding

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The world is quiet here.  The Baudelaire orphans have been reunited by the end of The Slippery Slope, but Quigley Quagmire gets separated from them at the denouement.  As a friend of mine once said regarding movies, it’s difficult to watch people who long to be—and belong—together being separated.  Indeed, it is one of the saddest of plot points.  Count Olaf and his band of villains kidnap Sunny while, they think, sending Violet and Klaus hurtling to their deaths.  The orphans were on their way to the V.F.D. headquarters in the Valley of Four Draughts. They eventually arrive to discover that the schismatic group of V.F.D. has already burned it down.  And we get a strong inkling that Volunteer Fire Department is what stands behind the mysterious initials.  Reading this again as an adult also reminds me that this is where we caught up with the series since we began buying the hardcovers for my daughter as they came out.

This segment of the Series of Unfortunate Events once again has the orphans wondering if they’re becoming as bad as the villains.  They decide that instead of fighting fire with fire they need to work to make the world a quieter, more peaceful place.  And two of Count Olaf’s associates, the women with white faces, leave his troupe.  A pair of criminals that have even Olaf nervous show up in this episode as well.  Lemony Snicket’s humor remains intact, despite the darkness of the tale.  There are laugh-out-loud parts in the last two chapters.  And some memorable quotes/ideas: “Count Olaf, like any good businessman, has committed a wide variety of crimes.”  The idea that somebody well-read is potentially trustworthy is repeated throughout the story. I mentioned a biblical connection (of course I did!) for The Carnivorous Carnival, but here there’s an explicit one as Snicket categorizes Adam and Eve’s decision to put on clothes “to leave the snake-infested garden” as an impulse passion.  After drying my tears, the cleverness of all this sank in.  Typically the impulse passion in Eden is precisely because the primordial couple is unclothed.  There’s much to chew over in these books ostensibly for children.  The message of what distinguishes good from evil wasn’t lost on me.

I recently discussed with my daughter how some authors are able to bridge from children’s, or young adult, novels into those for adults.  There’s kind of an invisible line there.  Adult life can be serious business, and it often is.  There are some great funny novels as well for the adult crowd.  And sometimes they can even be disguised as books for young readers.

Bible Movies

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I’ve noted elsewhere that no database exists, that I know of, where every movie showing or featuring the Bible is catalogued.  I used clips from films that had the Bible in one of my Rutgers’ Jan Term classes (four hours is a bit long of a stretch to talk).  The years have worn away some of the memories, but while thinking about The Sheep Detectives I thought of Nell.  Not because the movies are similar at all, but because they both use the Bible.  I’m not discussing horror here, since I do that plenty elsewhere.  I single out Nell because I remember it.  Since I tend to keep things, my notes from the class—probably on some unreadable disc—may preserve the movies I used.  Absent the notes, I’m having trouble with my recollection.  I may have discussed them on this blog but even the search function grows weary with so many posts.

It was in that class, however, that the seeds for Holy Horror were planted.  Two of the movies were Sleepy Hollow and An American Haunting.  Those I remember.  (It helps that I met the author of the novel on which the latter was based while at Rutgers.)  I do wonder, apart from Nell, which non-horror movies I used.  There was a good handful of them.  Since that class was over 15 years ago, instant recall is lacking.  For purposes of understanding how the Good Book is understood, however, having a comprehensive list would be useful.

I excluded movies based on the Bible.  These are the kind of thing that make a web search useless.  All they bring up is The Ten Commandments and its ilk.  What struck me at the time was that the Bible occurs quite frequently in movies.  Typing this out reminded me that O Brother, Where Art Thou? was also among the cohort.  Who can forget the cyclops Bible salesman Big Dan?  But what were the others?  Constantine was probably among them.  And Pulp Fiction.  I’m sure a couple more weren’t of the scary sort.  Ah yes, Muppet Treasure Island had to’ve been among them.  Was Footloose?  Probably.  I may not remember all the movies whose clips I used, but I do remember doing web searches even then and finding them frustrating.  The Bible appears in tons of films.  As far as I’m aware, nobody has thought to catalogue all of them.  Were I still a professor, I’d be suggesting a research project for some eager doctoral student.  And, of course, I’d still have ready access to my notes.

Hollow Singing

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Since it’s Sleepy Hollow season I suggested to my wife that we watch the Disney version of the movie last night, rainy weekend evening that it was.  I discuss in my book Disney’s strange pairing with “The Adventures of Toad,” but one of the points I emphasized in Sleepy Hollow as American Myth is that Disney is largely responsible for making the story what it is in our culture.  It doesn’t stand alone, of course, but most people I’ve asked learned of it through the Disney film.  Except my wife.  She learned of it through the Disney record based on the Disney film, released in 1971.  My wife didn’t grow up with monsters the way that I did, but her parents got their kids the vinyl version.  She found it online to play for me—I’d more or less overlooked it in my book, which deals primarily with movies and novels.

First of all, the record more naturally pairs Sleepy Hollow with Irving’s other hit, “Rip Van Winkle,” on the B side.  Narrated by Billy Bletcher, it includes two songs from the film, “Ichabod Crane” and “The Headless Horseman,” the latter sung by the formidable Thurl Ravenscroft.  A shortened version of the story is narrated and, of course, the showcasing of Bing Crosby is missing.  The cartoon itself is only half an hour, and the record cuts the telling to twelve and a half minutes.  As my wife read the comments of others who’d rediscovered the recording online, I pondered how many people might’ve discovered “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” through Disney’s record.  The story as written by Washington Irving isn’t aimed at children.  Despite its early nineteenth-century language, it’s kid friendly, but not the kind of thing children seek out.

I don’t want to give away too much of my book, but I would point out a couple of things.  Disney borrowed the idea of making a movie with Sleepy Hollow from Ub Iwerks, the co-inventor of Mickey Mouse, who began his own cartoon studio after working with Walt Disney.  The second point is that Disney made it an explicitly Halloween tale.  Whenever autumn and its pumpkins roll around thoughts turn to Sleepy Hollow.  The Disney song “The Headless Horseman,” by Don Raye and Gene DePaul, does most of the heavy lifting for inventing a new mythology of said Headless Horseman.  Even though my book was published last year, there’s more digging to be done around the origins of America’s ghost story.  I’m reading another book about it right now myself.

Monster Mash

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You think you know a guy.  Actually, I never claim to be a Washington Irving expert.  Sure, a read three or four biographies, while researching Sleepy Hollow as American Myth, but the idea of that book was to trace the story he wrote forward, not to make stunning claims about Irving himself.  Still, doing this kind of research you tend to think you know a bit about the life of a person.  Irving was awkward around women but he seemed to fall in love from time to time.  He was engaged at least once (in his mind, at least twice).  His first love, like that of his younger contemporary Edgar Allan Poe, died young of tuberculosis.  Irving had considerable success with his first novel A History of New York, putatively written by Diedrich Knickerbocker.   He was sent off to England by his family and it was in Europe that he wrote the book that made him famous, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.  It included “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”

Irving stayed in Europe for 17 years and wrote other books that kept him going.  None would match the acclaim of The Sketch Book.  (It also included his tale, “Rip Van Winkle.”)  Since he remained in Europe, his fame was trans-Atlantic.  He was doing what few could—making a living by writing.  Most who did so, or tried to, struggled financially.  One of those people was Mary Shelley.  She’d begun writing Frankenstein when she was 18.  Twenty when it published, two years later she was widowed when her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned.  Shelley had a rocky relationship with his aristocratic family and Mary made a living by publishing lesser known pieces.

At some point—keep in mind Mary Shelley was a young widow and often lonely—Shelley tried to initiate a romance with Washington Irving.  He was older and, perhaps playing into her thoughts, an established writer.  That’s what she longed to be.  Irving was not interested in this particular relationship.  He’d fallen in love with an American girl traveling Europe with her family, and had been burned.  As Halloween approaches, this interesting confluence of the creators of Frankenstein’s monster and the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow—two iconic seasonal monsters—has its own kind of wonder.  Neither Irving nor Shelley were “horror writers.”  That concept wouldn’t emerge until much later.  Nevertheless, they had brought to life two characters without which Halloween as we know it would be severely diminished.  You never know what might happen when you publish a monster story.

Otherwise

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I’ve read all of Diana Pasulka’s books.  A religion professor with a range, she’s worked in Catholic Studies (and served as a consultant on The Conjuring), UFOs, and, more recently, in entities and consciousness.  The Others: UFOs, AI, and the Secret Forces Guiding Human Destiny is an unusual book.  As a Catholic herself, she doesn’t come out and say that the secret forces are God, traditionally defined.  The book doesn’t answer the question directly as to what these forces are, but makes a good case that they’re there.  For a lifelong liker of the weird and unusual, and also an erstwhile professor of religion, I found this book intriguing as well as a bit of a head-scratcher.  As regular readers know, I’m no fan of AI.  Pasulka gave me a bit of pause here, but not enough to change my mind. She also engages with Catholic thinkers and Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End.

Consciousness is the elephant in the room.  We don’t know what it is, where it comes from, or how far down it reaches.  I’ve read serious philosophers who suggest the planet is conscious.  If so, it stands to reason that the rest of the physical universe is too.  What we do know is that the government has been taking UFOs seriously since at least the forties.  We also find out, from books like this, that tech moguls use what we might well call the paranormal to guide their decisions, including about AI.  Meanwhile, the average person on the street scoffs at anything they’ve been conditioned to think of as “crazy.”  Those in places of power aren’t laughing.  Reagan believed in astrology.  I understand it’s kind of “in” these days among the rich and powerful.

I come away from books like this realizing just how little the average person knows about what goes on behind the walls of power.  Those walls enclose the government (or at least some in the government), the ultra-wealthy, and some research facilities.  While Pasulka doesn’t discuss this, I’ve always been fascinated that the very wealthy businessman Robert Bigelow makes no bones about his belief in aliens and their presence on earth.  I suppose if you have lots of money it doesn’t matter if people laugh you out of a job.  Meanwhile, such things are still used as measures of “sanity” for ordinary folk.  Who are the others?  We don’t really know.  We do know that there are those among our own kind who take such things very seriously.  And they are, generally, the ones calling the shots.  I still don’t think Al’s a good companion to the human race.

Burton on Mars

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Tim Burton’s aesthetic falls outside of my own by only a matter of degree.  Some of his films I really enjoy—Sleepy Hollow remains his best—while others leave me in an uncanny valley.  Mars Attacks! came out when I was just starting my teaching career at Nashotah House and before I’d really knew much of Burton’s work.  I’d seen Batman and Edward Scissorhands, and probably Batman Returns.  These I felt were all good, but were outside my scope of films that really did it for me.  I found Mars Attacks! on a streaming service on a rainy weekend and was immediately surprised by the level of the ensemble cast.  These were big names!  Why wasn’t the movie more talked about in the day?  I guess because the story fails to impress.  I wasn’t sure if it was supposed to be funny or not.

PœN

Like Burton, I grew up with the B movies of the fifties and sixties.  I still have a soft spot for them.  The mean and deceitful Martians of this movie were mostly fun to watch, but the human actors failed to elicit much sympathy.  The invaders experiments on the bodies of captured humans evoke Burton’s fascination with disturbing mixtures, but it’s the aliens themselves that stay with you long after  the credits roll.  Reading about the film afterwards, clearly some cinematic import clings to it, and its many head-nods to other movies are numerous.  Coming out the same year as Independence Day, however, meant that it faced a contender taken more seriously.

The plot is fairly simple: technically superior Martians surround the Earth with flying saucers.  They broadcast messages of peace but zap the party out to greet them.  They issue an apology and when they come to meet the president, attack again.  They kidnap some high-level people and experiment on them.  The movie focuses on Washington, Las Vegas, and rural Kansas.  A bullied teen in Kansas figures out, with the help of his grandmother, that a Slim Whitman song makes aliens’ heads explode.  That part was actually pretty funny.  The integration of computer-animated aliens and people is pretty well done.  The movie feels like maybe one of the cylinders isn’t firing properly, but it’s the kind of film I could see myself coming back to on another rainy weekend, if the mood is right.  Of course, Tim Burton’s next movie hit it out of the park and I did watch seven of his next eight productions after that.

Thorny Path

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Although we’ve all heard “Don’t judge a book by its cover,” we all do.  An image, or artfully done cover design, speaks to us.  I admit I bought A. G. Slatter’s The Path of Thorns because of the cover.  I don’t remember exactly where, but it was in an independent bookshop, probably either in New Hope or Lititz, or some town in-between, and it was face out on the shelf.  I noted it was somewhat thick, and I have a penchant for shorter novels, but the thorns, werewolf, and hand of glory on the gothic cover spoke to me.  I have to confess that it took quite some time to get into it.  Asher Todd is an unreliable narrator.  And she keeps secrets.  It took several chapters to be grabbed by the story.  But to be honest, I’m finding lately that stories that take their time building are frequently worth the wait. Trust the author.

Placed in a setting that a couple of the blurbs classify as “fairy tale,” Path of Thorns is told by Asher, a mysterious woman who we know is a witch.  She’s on a shadowy mission not revealed until quite late, to the Morwood estate.  There she uses her magic discreetly to help both members of the family and some people on the grange.  Witches are still hunted and killed.  She introduces the priest, called a “god-hound,” and it turns out that he has a minor, but important part to play in the story.  The Morwood estate is run by a vain, self-centered son Luther, while the matriarch, Leonora, technically in charge, is more or less an invalid.  Until Asher, out of pity, cures her blindness.  From there the story unfolds.

There is a werewolf, and the hand of glory has a role.  It’s not really a horror novel, though.  It does have a gothic, dark fairy tale feel to it.  And once the major turning point in the plot is revealed, it’s difficult to put down.  This is made even easier because the chapters are uniformly short, which means you can pick it up and reach an obvious stopping point without committing half an hour.  In the end it’s quite a well-told story that I’m glad to have read.  Whenever I go to a bookstore, I do so with a list.  Given the nature of my interests, I often have trouble locating anything on said list.  Those of us who prefer not to walk out of an independent bookstore empty-handed frequently benefit from judging a book by its cover.

Sky of Hope

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When I stepped out for my jog yesterday, I was given a little hope.  It was a clear morning and I glanced up to see if the spider (how seasonal!) I saw hanging from our porch roof Monday was still there.  Instead of the spider I spied the moon.  And just above it, looking as if it was falling into the bowl of its crescent, was Jupiter.  It was beautiful, but I know better than to try to photograph nighttime objects in the sky with a phone.  (I’ll show you the spider instead; after all, it’s October.)  What gave me hope, though, was when I stepped off the porch, I saw a neighbor about half a block away, outside with their children, all looking at the sky.  I presumed they were looking at the moon and Jupiter, because it was really a stunning sight.  This gives me hope because someone was showing their children the wonders of the sky.

I go jogging as soon as it’s light enough to do so.  I’m generally back home before the sun rises.  And I pay attention to other people I encounter in the twilight.  I’d never seen this family outside before.  I can only start my jog around 6:30 these days; in the summer it’s closer to 4:30.  Looking at the sky is cause for hope.  We need to teach our children to do so as well.  It’s been cloudy around here the past few days.  I had a later start on Monday, the day of the spider, because clouds kept it darker than the naked sky.  A clear firmament is a thing of wonder.  I don’t look at the sky nearly enough any more.  I stare at a screen for most of the waking day.  

Last October a colleague invited me to talk about Weathering the Psalms to her students at Princeton Seminary.  The class was held outside so we could see the sky.  That memory is one I treasure.  While writing that book I explored, not nearly enough, the idea that the sky has always been associated with the divine.  It holds more than we can imagine, despite all the “empty” space.  I took an astronomy course in high school.  When I took one in college the math stymied me.  But still, when it’s clear, I can be caught staring at the sky.  I don’t know who the neighbors were—we only know the names of the family next door—but I do know that we both have some kind of appreciation for the beauty of the heavens.  And that’s cause for hope.

Thriller or Horror?

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Shutter Island is a movie my wife often suggests when a kind of autumnal day puts you in the mood for a certain kind of film.  There are surprisingly few of them (films, that is).  What I call “October movies.”   I’ve written about Shutter Island before.  It’s not really horror.  “Psychological thriller” fits better, although, if it were horror it’d be in Holy Sequel.  More on that soon.  So the movie—spoiler alert!  The following gives away the ending!  So the movie follows an inmate at Ashecliffe Hospital on the eponymous island.  He has delusions that he’s still a US Marshal investigating an escaped patient who is really an anagram for his dead wife.  His partner is actually his psychiatrist.  Andrew Laeddis, the patient, is really there to find himself.  Thinking he’s Edward Daniels, another anagram, he’s on the island when a hurricane hits.  The staff play along with a massive role play to try to get him to face the truth that he killed his wife for drowning their kids.

So far, so good.  I’ve seen the movie probably half-a-dozen times.  In the most recent viewing I finally spotted the Bible in it.  In the scene where Laeddis is really coming to grips with what he did to his wife and she did to their kids, when he arrives home the television is playing in the background. Someone’s saying, “rise, take up your bed, and walk.”  (Or similar; I didn’t quite catch it—it’s in the background, after all.)  The quote is from the gospel story of Jesus healing a paralytic.  That got me to thinking about how the warden tells Laeddis that violence is God’s gift.  That God loves violence.  A former military man, he says, “Why else would there be so much of it? It’s in us. It’s what we are. We wage war, we burn sacrifices, and pillage and plunder and tear at the flesh of our brothers. And why? Because God gave us violence to wage in his honor.”

We’re pretty far into Holy Sequel territory here.  Some of the movies discussed in Holy Horror were perhaps better labeled as psychological thrillers rather than horror.  The line is thin.  Although I’d watched Shutter Island in time to have included it, that quote from the Good Book eluded me until I watched the film to fulfill the need for an October movie.  It doesn’t feature the fallen leaves and pumpkins I like in my seasonal films, my October movies.  But watching it again brought something to the surface like an island newly rising in the sea.

Icelandic Magic

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There’s a danger when you get together with friends.  They might lend you a book that you know you’ll have to buy.  Not because you lost theirs, but because it’s so good you want a copy.  This happened when a friend lent me The Galdrabók: Forbidden Icelandic Folk Magic, by Kári Pálsson.  I’ve always been interested in folklore and Iceland has held a fascination for me ever since we lived in Scotland.  My wife and I, for some reason, took to Icelandic sagas from medieval times.  We read several, including the Orkneyinga Saga (so-called by Penguin; the subtitle is The History of the Earls of Orkney).  We’d visited the Orkney Islands after taking an adult education class on the Vikings.  (Norway’s not far from Scotland.)  So I tucked into this little lent book with gusto.  People naturally enough believe in magic.  This book contains the titular Galdrabók and  the Jarðskinna manuscript.  They’re an intriguing blend of Christianity and Norse folk belief.

The book didn’t take long to get through, but when you’re reading a book about magic at 4 a.m., it refocuses you quite a bit.  You almost find yourself believing.  It happened that I was reading another book at the same time, one which has me questioning reality.  Together the two had an impact on the thought process with which I start the day.  Galdrabók is a grimoire.  After the Christianization of Iceland, such things were feared to the point that you could be burnt at the stake if you were found in possession of one.  The political church wants no rivals.  The book itself has prayers—some very Christian—spells, and magic symbols.  An introduction by the translator helpfully places this material in context.  A brief book, I was reading it in the interstices between my regular morning reading and when I was doing my daily exercises.

Another reason I knew I’d have to buy this book was the publisher, Hyldyr.  First of all, Hyldyr is a publisher with the fortitude to reject AI.  Would that all publishers do the same!  Environmentally conscious and aware of the importance of design, they make paperback books that are works of art.  And they care about academic respectability.  The books are on topics that fall beyond what a usual publisher might take on—Icelandic grimoires, for example.  I found this a stunning little book.  Even as I read it I knew I’d want to refer back to it.  Of course, this friend has lent me books before, and I always ended up buying copies for myself.  Such is the danger.

Found Unfound

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I think I need to swear off found footage films.  My first horror attempt this October failed with Hell House LLC.  I was watching at the behest of a friend.  Hopefully one who isn’t aware of my very low dizziness quotient.  Extreme camera motion!  I was determined to try to make my way through because the Bible was introduced early on, earning it a place in Holy Sequel, but I could only make it half-way through by watching about half of that first half out of the corners of my eyes.  Even that wasn’t enough to help.  I understand they’re going for “authenticity.”  I know that walking with a camera makes it difficult to keep still, but hey, Steadicam was invented for a reason.  But instead of enjoying my weekend, I’m lying absolutely still in a darkened room.

I’m guessing demons are involved, from what I’d been able to see.  Demons that move a clown dummy around.  From the Wikipedia summary it sounds like I’m not far wrong.  So let’s step back a bit: Paul, with his girlfriend Sara and a staff of three, are setting up a haunted house attraction for Halloween at Hotel Abaddon.   The property is a fixer-upper, but sufficiently creepy that they don’t need to do a ton of work on making it unsettling.  Since it’s a hotel, they stay on site while getting it ready.  They hire scare actors and things are progressing, but the cameraman (especially) is getting freaked out, mainly at night.  That’s as far as I got.

The framing story is that a mysterious accident occurred on opening night leaving 15 people dead.  The “found footage” explains what happened.  They do make reference to Abaddon as a demon who guards Hell.  The Good Book actually uses the term as a reference to Hell itself also.  One of the scare actors informs Paul that the hotel really had the reputation for being haunted before they started setting it up as a haunted house.  Of course, the movie spawned a franchise.  Perhaps my condition is getting more acute as I age—I watched Blair Witch without any trouble—but as I write this a few hours later I still have to be careful about moving my head too much.  I can scratch it, though.  And I wonder as I do so if a little less camera motion would’ve ruined the effect they were going for.  To me the most frightening aspect is being nauseous for the remainder of the day, especially when weekends are precious free time.

Losing My Head

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It must be the season.  The same day two friends sent me articles about headlessness.  I sometimes feel that way myself; my book on the Headless Horseman has proved my worst-selling title, although some have told me it’s my best book.  No matter.  It’s headless season and I’m glad for the information.  One story came from an image in an Early Modern book from Amsterdam, showing an encounter between a man and a headless person, both on foot.  The article notes how Kabbalistic tradition includes seeking the answer to the question of whether one’s name is written in the Book of Life.  Nachmanides, a rabbi from the 13th century, suggests going outside on the last night of Sukkot and looking at your shadow cast by the moon.  If it’s headless, you’re in trouble.  This tradition is at least medieval in age, and it may have circulated when Washington Irving was traveling around Europe, working on The Sketch Book.  (Curious?  It’s discussed in my book.)

The second story is about the Irish Dullahan, or headless rider.  The piece traces the earliest written version to 1828, too late to have influenced Irving.  The Dullahan, according to the article, is a piece of Irish folklore.  The author, Irish around the World, points out that there’s no evidence that Irving knew of this tradition.  Irving didn’t invent the Headless Horseman, but his story brought it to popular consciousness.  Every year as October nears, I start seeing Headless Horseman on Halloween pages.  I do explore this connection in the book as well.  I still read about the Sleepy Hollow version of headlessness.  In fact, the book next on my pile (the one I just finished will be posted soon; I’m in the middle of another one at the moment) is J. W. Ocker’s new book on Sleepy Hollow.  (We exchanged emails about it last year.)

Being associated with the Headless Horseman, unlike either the Dullahan or the headless person in the Early Modern Jewish book is an honor.  Very few people may have purchased the book, but I’m glad to have had the chance to participate in the discussion.  Lindsey Beer’s novel Hollow is due out next fall and apparently the movie based on it is moving forward.  Perhaps it will reignite some interest in the headless fellow that was my companion for the years I was working on the book.  I don’t have a ton of free time, but I’m always glad for tips on mentions I miss.  Hints that the Headless Horseman is still relevant in a world dominated by those with much louder voices.  After all, October is when he rides.