The Next Phase

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Sometimes I get things backwards.  You have to understand that in the pre-internet era finding information was somewhat dicey.  Those of us from small towns had limited resources.  The movies I saw were on television, with a rare trip to the theater being a treat.  Books, on the other hand, could be had for a quarter or less at Goodwill.  There I found the sci-fi horror Phase IV by journeyman writer Barry N. Malzberg.  I knew there was a movie, which I hadn’t seen, and I assumed it was based on this novel.  Actually, the book was a novelization of the movie.  But it’s more complex than that.  The movie was based on an H. G. Wells story, screen-written by Mayo Simon, then novelized. That novelization made a real impression on me as a kid and I knew that I would eventually have to see the movie.

Some scenes from the novel were still alive to me before watching the film.  It occurs to me that maybe you don’t know what it’s about.  Intelligent ants.  Some cosmic event boosts ant intelligence and two scientists are sent to Arizona to sort it out.  A local family ignores an evacuation order, and when one of the scientists destroys the oddly geometric anthills, a war is on.  (I remembered the destroying the anthill scene.)  The war is both of might and wits.  Meanwhile the family is attacked—I remembered the scene of the ants eating the horse—with only a young woman surviving.  She’s found by the scientists after the first pesticide is released.  The ants attack, intelligently, the research station.  We never do see the expected ants popping out of Dr. Hubbs’ infected arm, but it’s clear by the end that the ants have won and we’re living in Phase IV.

A few observations: this is a scary movie, even if seventies’ fare.  The sci-fi elements dampen the horror down a bit, but it is still scary.  And it also references religion.  I watched the movie a few weeks after seeing The Night of the Hunter for the first time.  What does a Depression-era serial-killing preacher have to do with ants?  The hymn, “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms.”  Now, there’s a project out there for someone inspired by (if such a thing exists) Holy Horror.  Is there a discernible pattern of how hymns are used in horror?  I suspect there is.  That hymn is used so differently in these two movies that I’m convinced something deeper is going on.  If you’re interested, the idea’s free for the taking.  I’ve just spelled out two of the movies for you.

Those Who Know

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I felt a little bit odd being asked.  A local school invited me to be consulted on classroom decoration.  I took a total of one class in interior design as an undergrad and that hadn’t been my highest collegiate grade.  So why were they asking me, of all people?  Let me put this into context for you.  It was in Wisconsin.  I’d been the Academic Dean at Nashotah House for a few years and had served for a few on the Parent Teacher Organization, one as president.  While at Nashotah I’d been tasked with making the three classrooms more appealing—choosing paint colors and replacing drapes that had been falling off their hooks since I’d arrived a decade ago.  But I believe the real reason that I was asked for a consultation was that I was a professor.  Yes, a professor of Hebrew Bible, but a professor nonetheless.

Such requests, no matter how mundane, ceased immediately when I had to take a job in publishing.  People don’t turn to an editor as an expert.  (Not even most academic authors—trust me on that.)  We like to put people in neat categories.  Boxes.  Professors are smart, so when we need advice we seek them out.  Whether or not they know anything about the topic.  I was even assigned to teach accredited courses in fields that I’d never studied.  It was a heady feeling, I have to admit, being treated like my position qualified me to speak on “ships and sails and sealing wax” and everyone listened.  What has always struck me as odd is how abruptly this stopped.  Even among church folk.

When I was teaching I was frequently asked to address adult education classes on Sunday mornings.  I had arcane knowledge that priests and ministers wanted me to share.  Once I began working as an editor I had someone from a church in Princeton contact me to ask if I could recommend someone else to do such a course.  They were somewhat taken aback when I suggested that I had some expertise in the area.  I’ve even had other academics, in the same field in which I taught, react with total surprise that I know something about the discipline.  I have a sneaking suspicion that the ease of categorizing people has been substituted for actually getting to know someone.  It’s easier to call, or email, the local university—or even, in my experience, a small, obscure seminary—to find the expert you want to consult.  You’d like to think that we might be able to ponder a little more deeply.  But trust me, you don’t want to ask me about interior design.

Escape Room

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I didn’t go out looking for horror films in 1979.  I knew about Alien, of course.  Everyone did.  Even in a small town.  I didn’t see the movie until many years later, though.  I was still in high school and money was scarce (college was all either scholarship, loan, or work-study money).  If Tourist Trap ever came to town I didn’t know about it.  In fact, I didn’t know about it at all until reading Stephen King’s Danse Macabre.  Enough time has passed that the movie is now streaming for free and, indeed, it is David Schmoeller’s first film.  Critics didn’t love it, but King thought it had some appropriate eeriness, so why not?  It isn’t horrible—I’ve definitely seen worse.  And movies with animated mannequins hit that uncanny valley at just the right angle, even if poorly written.

The story’s a bit convoluted.  Five young people are on vacation and get drawn into, well, a tourist trap.  There’s a fair amount of psychokinesis that goes on, and the tourist trap is Slausen’s Lost Oasis, which is filled with animated wax-work figures/mannequins.  These are what make the film creepy.  As the plot unfurls, the kids get killed off, one-by-one, as horror viewers come to expect.  There is a bit of a “reveal” toward the end, so I won’t spoil it.  It is fair to say that insane antagonists were fairly common by 1979 and that the blurring of real people and manufactured ones is a bit unnerving.  There are some questions of motivation, and many times the characters don’t take the obvious steps to help themselves.  Still, the movie isn’t too bad.

I was drawn to it, having seen Schmoeller’s real groaner, Netherworld.  And King’s recommendation.  There is something about movies that are lacking in undefined ways that keeps you watching.  I was curious how Tourist Trap was going to end up.  There were several points at which I thought I’d figured it out, only to be told, “but wait, there’s more!”  The more wasn’t always really worth waiting for, but the ending has a bit of a payoff.  There is some slasher aesthetic here, but it’s unconventional enough that you may at least be kept guessing.  The thing that the movie gets right is that human figures that aren’t human are scary.  Many films play on this, of course.  Even if you’ve seen others, it still tend to ramp up the shudder factor a bit.  It only took four decades for me to stumble into this tourist trap, and it was a reasonable brief vacation from reality.

Mind the Gap

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One of the general rules for writers is not to engage in too many platforms on social media.  There are a few reasons for this advice, the largest one being time.  Social media can easily become a time sink.  And time on social media is time not spent in writing.  Another reason, also related to time, is that becoming proficient in various platforms takes time.  And again, time spent on social media…  This has been on my mind because when people find me on various media they sometimes (not often) want to engage in discussion.  They often don’t use email.  They want me to join their favorite app or platform, and that’s where conversation breaks down.  I don’t use many platforms.  Those that I do use I do sparingly.  I’m still on Twitter, but I’m trying to move that following to Bluesky.  (I’m glad for followers/friends there!)  And I’m on Facebook, but I only check it once a day.

I don’t do this to be difficult.  I work 9-2-5 and after that I’m too exhausted to learn new platforms.  The first hours of the day (and it starts early for me) are spent writing.  There’s simply no more time for additional platforms.  The largest culprit is Academia.edu.  I suppose that’s because much of my pre-horror work is posted there.  People want to discuss it, but on their terms.  The thing about producing content—whether for this blog or for YouTube—is that it takes time.  And I’m just a working slob.  Those folks you see doing this professionally (there are professional bloggers and vloggers and podcasters) are paid for what they do.  Some of us rely on a full-time job for that.

Most of the people who reach out want me on a chat platform.  I prefer not to chat.  Or text.  Long-form writing has less opportunity for creating misunderstandings.  If you can’t take the time to say what you really mean, thoughtfully, doesn’t that open the door to hastily scrawled, easily misunderstood comments?  Communication breaks down.  I’m very flattered people are discovering my work.  I’ve been at this for decades now.  Like anyone who researches and writes, I’m very happy to learn someone, anyone is interested.  I’ll respond briefly on Facebook, and more fully to a comment on this actual blog.  Email is probably the best way to converse without devolving into mere chat.  I seldom use my phone, so all I humbly request is to meet me where I am.  I’ll get back to you, but I prefer long-form.  Tell me what’s on your mind.

Photo by LUM3N on Unsplash

After Daytime

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When you’re looking for freebies to watch, it helps to get some advice of what to see.  Particularly if it’s older (and more likely to be available).  I hadn’t heard of Night Watch until I saw it in Stephen King’s Danse Macabre list of really scary movies.  Granted, this was nearly a half century ago and many horror classics had yet to come.  Still, I was surprised at just how “ho-hum” Night Watch was.  Yes, it has a twist ending that makes some of the foregoing less credible, but that little hook was kind of neat.  Otherwise, the pacing is slow and the characters largely unsympathetic.  And scary it is not.  Granted, had I seen it as a young man in a theater, that might’ve made a difference.  I know that Fatal Attraction really bothered me in those circumstances.

The story of a rich couple with a traumatized wife and an unfaithful husband, it has trouble garnering the sympathy of some viewers.  Elizabeth Taylor’s acting is pretty good, and the setting (lots of British thunderstorms), and some good, creepy music do help the mood.  And if you’ve seen Rear Window and Gaslight a bit of this will look familiar.  Taylor’s character thinks she sees a murdered person in the adjacent house and as her hysteria increases nobody will believer her anymore.  Of course, her husband is having an affair with her best friend (who is living with them), so what could possibly go wrong?  The movie’s generally not considered horror, although a number of King’s favs aren’t.

That got me to thinking about what the scariest movies would’ve been to me back then.  Keep in mind that most of my childhood fare was Saturday afternoon monster movies.  If we move it ahead a few more years, say to the early-mid eighties, I was in college and saw more that was properly scary.  Of course, I didn’t see the really scary stuff until I lost my job at Nashotah House.  So by the mid-eighties my scare list would have included Jaws, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Psycho, and a Dracula movie that I didn’t catch the title of and for which have been trying to locate the specific scene that really set me off.  Oh, and The Cross and the Switchblade.  I was a child with many obvious phobias, and my mother didn’t allow really scary viewing.  A couple episodes of The Twilight Zone really bothered my young psyche.  Perhaps I need to put together a post on movies I’ve seen since then that fall into the Danse Macabre time frame.  There’d definitely be things scarier than Night Watch in there, I assure you.

Gray Matter

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It seems to me that I was living in Boston the last time I read Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.  That was long enough ago to have forgotten almost everything except the central premise that everyone knows.  Recently, I had been reading some analysts who consider it a kind of horror story.  Wilde was a great and notable wit, not typically cited as a horror writer.  More recently I’d seen the novel classified as dark academia.  Since there are no students, and there’s no school in the novel, that genre seems forced.  In any case, it is a classic and I was curious about what I had forgotten.  The dialogue regarding morals stands out rather boldly, with traditional Christian values being the gold standard.  In his own life Wilde was known to flaunt these things, but in his story they stand mostly unchallenged.

At the same time, it is a book about seeking redemption.  Toward the end, Dorian regrets the lifetime of evil he’s led.  He wants to turn over a new leaf.  Corrupted from an early age by Lord Henry Wotton, he learned to live a cynical and self-centered life.  He shut out the feelings and needs of others for his own pursuit of pleasure.  As an old man still appearing young, he comes to have his regrets.  Although Wilde didn’t really live long enough to reach this stage in his own, he seems to have understood psychology well enough.  He even tried to have a half-year Catholic retreat.  Length of life often trails regrets in its train.  Of course, for Gray it is too little, too late.  He has made his mark on the world, but it hasn’t been for good.  His final act is a stab at redemption, but the novel gives no hint whether he achieved it or not.

Whether intentional or no, the novel considers the fact that we all wear masks.  And we do so for much of the time.  And there is a bit of horror involved in discovering that we aren’t who we pretend to be.  The real Dorian Gray was locked away in an attic room while his life of dissipation  led to the ruin of many.  The witty dialogue maybe makes this a comedy horror.  At times it seems to get in the way of the mood of the story, but it never stopped the novel from making a similar impression to the nearly contemporary Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.  Late Victorians knew something that we, as a society, seem to have forgotten.  The attics of some prominent individuals surely have portraits that belie their appearance on the ubiquitous screen.

Thankful Time

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Thanksgiving’s late this year, for which I’m thankful.  I must be nearing retirement age because I really could use a little more time off.  Of course, I’m a big fan of holidays and I wish our late capitalistic system might throw a few more bones to the dogs.  Autumn is always my favorite season.  In September I feel the migratory urge of the classroom, but that’s an unrealized desire now, so I set my eyes on Labor Day and Indigenous Peoples’ Day.  Some of the more progressive employers give the latter off.  From there I can see Halloween, although it’s often a working day.  Still, it’s Halloween.  It’s yet a long stretch from there to Thanksgiving, but if I’m careful with my vacation days I can take a few long weekends as stepping stones to this four-day weekend.

I’m not being sarcastic or facetious at all.  I don’t believe I could survive the calendar year without the holidays and I am deeply, deeply grateful for them.  Capitalism seems to have a death grip on the idea of people as “assets”—a brand of thinking that should be buried with a stake through its heart.  People are people and we work for a living.  We don’t sell our souls for health care and a roof over our heads.  The internet has increased productivity immensely, but most companies are reluctant to consider the costs of overwork.  When you can check your work email from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m., for those of you who can stay up late, don’t you think that a few more holidays might prevent burnout?  Do assets burn out?  Engine parts have to be replaced when they wear out.  Why are we so slow to learn the lesson?

Today we reflect on the things for which we are thankful.  Even in difficult times there are many.  I’m thankful to live in a world with books in it, for one.  On those rare days off I read, trying to catch up with an ever-growing stack of intellectual stimulation.  And I try my best to contribute to literary life, although my books appeal to few.  I’m thankful for hope.  Without it this last year would’ve been impossible.  And I’m thankful for family and friends, whether actual or virtual.  This is an interesting world that I’ve come to inhabit.  The more I learn the more there’s left still to learn.  And with Thanksgiving so late this year, Christmas is less than a month away.  I look ahead and I’m thankful.

Hungry Eyes

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They’re watching.  All the time.  I may be a quasi-paranoid neo-Luddite, but I have proof!  Who’s the “they”?  Technology nameless here forevermore.  So my wife and I attend Tibetan singing bowls once a month when we can.  It’s the night I get to stay up late even though it’s a “school night” and get bathed in sound.  Our facilitator is a kundalini yoga instructor.  To those of you with experience, you know what that means.  At the end of each session we sing the “Longtime Sun” song.  Each and every month the next morning I groggily look it up.  I know it’s a recent song (hey, I’m in my sixties) but I can never remember by whom.  So for the record it was written by Mike Heron of the Incredible String Band and it’s part of a piece called “A Very Cellular Song” on the 1968 album The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter.  (Now I remember!)  Okay, so I’ve got that out of my system. (I must add that this is disputed, with some claiming it’s an old Irish blessing. But note, AI only complicates the issue because it doesn’t do actual research.)

Incredible String Band: Image credit—Bert Verhoeff / Anefo, under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication, via Wikimedia Commons

So how’s that proof?  Well, there’s an unconventional website I check daily.  Are you surprised?  Really?  To get headlines I have to reload it daily and the ads sometimes refresh.  I checked this site a mere five minutes after searching “Longtime Sun” for maybe the fifth time and the ads in the refreshed page were for singing bowls.  Just five minutes earlier I’d been searching a hippie tune and already they were preparing ads for me.  You see, “Longtime Sun” is a standard of many (I gather from the interwebs) kundalini yoga classes.  So much so that it’s commonly said that this is a traditional Tibetan song.  Well, I suppose to call it “Very Cellular,” or even “Hangman’s Daughter,” might harsh the experience a bit.

Kundalini yoga is very esoteric stuff if you read a little more deeply.  For me such reading is an occupational hazard, so I’ve read enough to know that many respectable people might be a bit shy upon hearing the details.  That’s not to say that it’s ineffectual on the level of singing bowls.  I have great respect for esotericism, although Hinduism isn’t in my background.  But if “they” know what kundalini teaches, what kinds of ads might begin to show up on the websites I visit?  What’s truly amazing is that a web search for a specific song brought up an ad for something that would be puzzling, were a reader innocently wanting to find out about “A Very Cellular Song.”  For academic purposes, for instance.  Of course, they know, you can merch anything.  You can trust the internet only so far. And they are watching.

Not Plan 9

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Dementia 13 is a strange little movie.  It’s Francis Ford Coppola’s directorial debut, and it was produced by Roger Corman and released by American International Pictures.  Like many Corman/AIP movies, it was low budget and quick.  It seems that Corman had some money left over in the budget from a previous movie and he offered Coppola the opportunity to direct a film shot quickly and funded by the leftover funds.  With a script written in three days (and it shows), he set out to film what was intended to be a Psycho knock-off.  The title might give that away, although I’m not sure what the 13 has to do with it, other than being “unlucky.”  Shot in Ireland with mostly American actors, the film is suitably gothic, but the original start to the movie is a red herring.  So what’s it about?

A rich heiress has never recovered from the death of her young daughter, who drowned in the rather sizable pond on the estate.  One of her three sons dies early in the film, setting up a subplot that goes nowhere.  The two remaining sons, unaware of their brother’s death, keep the ritual of the annual acting out the sister’s funeral.  While the widow of the deceased son tries to work her way into the will, she is axe-murdered, bringing this into the horror genre.  The family doctor suspects something’s wrong (although viewers are led to suspect him), and finally solves the crime after another bit character is beheaded.  Part of the problem is the film is too brief to develop the ideas properly.  Released at only 80 minutes, with a 5-minute gimmicky prologue, you really don’t have time to absorb the psychology of the characters.

The influence of Psycho is pretty obvious, the wet woman slowly chopped to death while in the water, is the scariest scene in the movie.  It’s shot in such a way that it’s not obvious that she’s actually being struck until the end of the act (a budget thing, I suspect).  The wealthy widow drops out of the story as the family doctor becomes the self-appointed detective.  Of course, the previous deaths have been undetected, so no actual police come.  In sum, creepy (but not too creepy) Irish castle, siblings working at cross-purposes, a scheming daughter-in-law, and the irruption of the past into the present, along with the black-and-white filming, ofter a quick gothic thrill.  Otherwise, it seems more like homework than an example of foundational horror, but still, it has had inspired a remake, and that’s saying something for a three-day script.

Being Somebody

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I am deeply honored, and a little puzzled, to have been recently selected to appear in Marquis Who’s Who.  It came out of nowhere. (Actually, LinkedIn.) As far as I can determine, inductees are chosen for having an impact.  In my case that means having stuck with it for so long—about 15 years of being a professor, 15 years of being an editor, and 15 years as a blogger (with some overlaps).  I’ve not seen the bio that will appear, but I suspect it will say little of my fiction writing, but it may mention the nonfiction books I’ve had published.  From my perspective—and I told the interviewer this—my life has been a long series of struggles and not giving up.  When you’re raised in difficult circumstances the temptation to give up is all around.  But I would be disingenuous if I didn’t point out that my siblings also pushed through as well, and I’m proud of who they’ve become. Three of them are over sixty.  Maybe Who’s Who should be a family thing.

All of us depend on those around us.  Although I tend to work alone—my blog, my books, most of my YouTube videos, these things I do largely by myself—I have the support of my family, both birth and marriage branches.  I have friends, the vast majority of them remote and seldom seen.  They support me in quieter ways and if you’re one of them, you know who you are.  Nashotah House, it is true, discarded me like a used diaper.  They also, however, gave me my professional start.  I was also tossed aside by the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, Gorgias Press, Rutgers University, and Routledge, all in their own ways and for their own reasons.  I would not be who I am, however, were it not for all of them.

I don’t mean for this post to sound like I’ve just received an Emmy or anything, but the situation has made me quite reflective. And humbled.  I work hard, and I have worked and struggled for many decades now.  I’ve received very few awards along the way, so this is like a bolt from the blue.  I doubt it will make any difference in my day-to-day existence.  I still work 9-2-5, struggle to meet unexpected expenses, and write.  Always write.  But being chosen is a rare feeling for me.  I suspect that’s true for most people who are, like me, just trying to get by with what they’ve got. We get by.  We face four rough years ahead, but we’ll get through them, because we’re all in this together.  Everybody’s somebody who deserves the notice of others.

Not Alice’s

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Sometimes I forget that movies are entertainment.  I mean, they’re big business and make some people obscene amounts of money.  In that respect they’re serious.  And also, they literally get into our heads and become part of our life’s experience.  Horror films, whatever that means, are often intelligent and thought-provoking.  I’ve been focusing on genre for a while now and when a friend recommended Willy’s Wonderland, and it was on one of my streaming services, I said “why not?”  This is entertainment, but the genre is all over the place.  Comedy, yes.  Fantasy, check.  Thriller, okay.  Action, definitely.  Horror, I’ll buy as well.  Nicolas Cage movie?  Well, he doesn’t look like he’s in his mid-fifties, and he doesn’t say a word in the whole thing.  The movie has possessed animatronic animals.  Satanists.  Small-town conspiracy.  Teens getting themselves killed.  And “one tough hombre.”

So what’s it about?  Hayesville has made a deal with the Devil.  A serial killer started an entertainment restaurant for kids’ birthdays, but along with his associates, began, well, killing.  Before the police could get them, they committed ritual suicide in a satanic pact, and they were permitted to inhabit the animatronic creatures.  When they weren’t fed, the machines started preying on townsfolk, so now they trap passersby and trick them into spending a night in Willy’s Wonderland so the machines can feed.  Cage’s unnamed character shows up and spends the night cleaning, killing machines, and playing pinball.  A young woman whose family had been killed tries to burn the place down, but, with her friends dead, and Cage leaving town after the carnage, she goes along for the ride.  It’s one of those movies that defies genre conventions.

As with many films released early in this pandemic, this one had a tough time at the box office.  I’d never even heard of it until the friend’s recommendation.  Lots of movies just disappear, but this one has at least the beginnings of a cult following.  It’s not difficult to see why.  If you can put up with the slasher aspect, it has quite a lot going for it.  Creepy kids’ stuff, children’s songs, and tawdry attractions are something we all experience in our own lives.  And a guy who goes around doing good—cleaning up other people’s messes, is something I think we tend to appreciate.  As a former janitor myself, I like the idea that the cleaning crew is the one who, well, cleans the clocks of the mechanical villains.  It’s a wonderland worth visiting.

Re-Unborn

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Some months ago I wrote a post about the possession movie The Unborn.  I don’t watch movies to pass the time.  I watch them to learn something.  And many horror movies are fairly smart.  In my blog post on this one I didn’t go into too much analysis because I already knew at that point that I wanted to share my thoughts on the larger venue, Horror Homeroom.  My piece, “Ecumenical Exorcism in The Unborn” has just been posted there.  The fairly small number of regular readers I have know that I post about horror movies with some frequency.  They help me to make sense of things, especially in this insane world where petty dictators keep rising to the top of the political spectrum because, apparently, we hate ourselves so much.  Horror helps prepare you for that.

In any case, The Unborn is a good example of how religion and horror work together.  They cooperate very nicely, in fact.  Religion is pervasive enough in horror that it would be an error to say “religion-based horror” is a sub-genre of the whole.  No, the two go together as naturally as chocolate (vegan, preferably) and peanut butter.  If I had a million dollars I might go back to grad school to explore just this nexus.  (I wouldn’t be looking for a teaching job either, because “fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice…”)  I’m not the only one who knows that there’s something there.  Ironically, before horror films proper were even invented, many churches actively discouraged the movies.  Perhaps they were inherently aware that these represented competition.  And there was already too much competition, what with other denominations and all.  But some films do occupy the same space as religion.  Quite often horror.

If you’re interested in how The Unborn fits into this picture, head on over to Horror Homeroom.  And yes, there is a book-length project in all of this.  It’s one I’ve been chipping away at for years.  That’s because the connection is obviously there, but I haven’t, to my own satisfaction, been able to figure out exactly what it is.  Perhaps I need to add a degree in psychology to my bucket list.  These things meet similar mental needs for a cross-section of people.  I suspect that most horror fans don’t think about it too much, which may be why my blog isn’t exactly jammed with traffic.  That doesn’t mean that the connection’s missing.  There are many things in life yet to be discovered.

Suitable Genre

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As I muse over genres, it seems that “low-budget Lovecraftian horror” might be an—ahem—suitable one.  This is perhaps because Lovecraft has trouble being taken seriously as a literary writer and his stories are so easily parodied.  I watched Suitable Flesh unaware that it was a Lovecraftian (low-budget) movie.  I’ve seen quite a few of these over the years and they can be pretty fun.  This one was somewhat enjoyable.  Based on Lovecraft’s “The Thing on the Doorstep,” it’s a body-swapping, possession fest that involves two psychiatrists who have been friends forever but who both become victim of a nameless possessing entity.  It took some adjusting to believe Heather Graham in her lead role here—she doesn’t strike me as the Lovecraftian type.  She does seem to enjoy her role, nevertheless.

Lovecraft famously didn’t write many women.  He was xenophobic and a racist.  He didn’t much enjoy being married.  Modern films (and even novels) based on his works tend to redress this situation, sometimes creating a little disconnect with the white-male Lovecraftian universe.  Still, the story is fun.  Dr. Elizabeth Derby (Graham’s character) encounters a young man whom she supposes is schizophrenic.  In actuality, his body is being taken over by an entity that had possessed his father.  While possessed, the patient begins an affair with Dr. Derby and that leads to her also being a target of possession.  Although not considered a comedy it does seem that part of the story has an inherent humor about it.  Some consider it camp.  Lovecraft’s mood is difficult to translate to film.

Although cinema existed during Lovecraft’s lifespan, his writing wasn’t influenced by the possibility of film conversion.  The monsters are too enormous and the concepts too broad.  The real fear here, apart from the gross-out effects, is that of losing your identity.  The whole centers around a psychiatric ward where the supernatural events aren’t really accepted by the science that reigns.  People end up dying because the supernatural is inadmissible.  In this aspect, it shares some of the overarching concepts of some great horror.  The Exorcist, for example, derives a great deal of its energy from the fact that modern people have great difficulty in accepting that a demon could actually exist and science doesn’t seem to be working.  There are plenty of other examples of this.  Lovecraft’s stories bring us close to this realm, although Lovecraft himself was an atheist.  Maybe that’s one of the reasons his works are difficult to translate to film.  Or maybe something larger is going on.

Eating Conscience

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Elections notwithstanding, people—at least many of them—are becoming more accepting of those of us who are different.  Or so it seems on the ground, in some places.  A couple of weekends ago we attended the s’MAC DOWN in Bethlehem.  In case you’re not from the Valley, s’MAC DOWN is an event where hundreds gather to compare vegan macaroni and cheese prepared by area restaurants.  I don’t think that when I was younger—and vegan could’ve been considered a protected category—that there would’ve been a healthy line to get into such an event.  But there was just a couple weeks back.  Even after those who paid extra had been already allowed in and had been given a complementary glass of wine.  It helps, as my family reminded me, that mac and cheese is something people tend to like in general.  Being a vegan myself, I do miss cheese the most but vegan alternatives are getting better all the time.

People are slowly becoming aware that industrial farming of animals simply isn’t sustainable for our environment.  It’s one of the largest pollution-generating capitalistic practices.  It contributes to global warming as well as deforestation.  And how many e coli outbreaks and animal diseases leaping to humans will it take until we realize we’re going about this all wrong?  I became a vegan because it’s very clear that animals suffer as they’re being “processed.”  I don’t want to be part of that.  I understand that others differ in their opinions, which is one of the reasons I don’t write about this often.  But attending events like this can be an eye-opening experience.

It’s safe to say that if eaters didn’t know, they wouldn’t be able to tell that this food was vegan.  Things have come a long way on that front.  Cheese and milk are fairly easy to substitute.  (As is meat, it turns out.)  Butter goes without saying because people warmed up to margarine decades ago and some margarine makers are now putting “vegan” on their packaging.  I’ve been vegan going on a decade now.  There are still places you can’t eat without violating your principles, but events like the s’MAC DOWN show that even non-vegan restaurants are willing to give it a try.  And by and large they do it well.  Of the nine samples we had (in compostable cups with compostable “plastic ware”) there was only one I really didn’t care for.  A couple would’ve been very difficult to pin down as vegan at all.  And then there was the fact that hundreds of people had paid to give this a try, and not all of them were young folks.  It’s good to feel accepted, even when eating by my conscience.

Life Plant

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If your backyard is like mine, you’ll find The Ruins scary.  It’s pretty scary even if your plant-control skills are better than mine.  There’ll probably be some spoilers here, so I’ll say upfront that I recommend the movie.  If you’re wanting to see it fresh, well, you might want to pick up here afterwards.  Two couples vacationing in Mexico befriend a German who’s off to find his missing brother, last known to have visited an obscure archaeological site.  When the group arrives, they discover that the local Maya, who don’t speak Spanish or English, try to prevent them from approaching the pyramid.  Once they touch the vines growing all over it, the locals kill anyone who tries to leave.  It takes the group a few days to learn that the vines are carnivorous, and if you get a wound, they will invade your body through it.  It gets pretty gnarly.

Plants, we are coming to learn, share some form of consciousness.  They move (slowly by animal standards, but they do).  And they can quickly “consume” such things as say, oh, paving stones, that have been deployed to control them.   In a matter of maybe three weeks crab grass had nearly completely covered such stones that I laid out to try to reduce the amount of mowing the yard requires.  Plants exemplify the tenaciousness of life.  They can far outlive humans, or any other animal.  Being rooted in the earth has its benefits, it seems.  The Ruins has been described as ecological horror, and I would agree with that.  One thing, though.  Ecological horror often makes it clear that humans “started it.”  Here, the plant grows in one location only, kept under strict control by the locals.

Although the movie didn’t rock the critics, I thought the acting was good and the premise well laid out.  This writer knows how to put his protagonists at the edge of a cliff and then throw rocks at them.  The tourists are all likable people, but they’ve stumbled upon something dangerous, inadvertently, and they have to try to survive amid plants that seem to have a kind of sentience as well.  Somewhat like Triffids.  This is a very tense story.  There’s a bit of gore as well, so be warned.  Nevertheless, it’s not a gross-out for gross-out’s sake.  The larger story is intelligent and it even raises several ethical issues along the way.  And it seems to suggest that if you’re planning to travel to Mexico, stick with the well-touristed ruins rather than trying to discover some new ones.