One Another

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Like much of the other information that I’ve managed to pick up in these six decades of wandering the planet, my knowledge of horror is self-taught.  In truth, I’m an eclectic reader—my various, periodic obsessions generally stem from books I’m writing.  For my unwinding time, however, horror stories seem to do the trick.  Nobody I know in person reads horror, so my recommendations are generally the results of other books I read.  That’s how I found Thomas Tryon’s The Other.  Although I’d only learned of it recently, it has been a classic in the field for many decades.  After having read it, I can see why.  And unlike many fiction works with an afterword, this edition has one worth reading.  Maybe you’re unfamiliar with the novel?  If so, in brief, it’s about twins.  It’s about twins.

Identical twins.  Holland and Niles Perry were born over the cusp of midnight, giving them different birthdays while still being the same age.  Unlike stereotypical identical twins, however, Holland is evil and Niles is good.  As the novel unfolds it contains some twists that, if like me you haven’t heard the story, really do work.  They live in a small town in Connecticut with their widowed mother, older sister and brother-in-law, maternal grandmother, and a couple of domestics.  An aunt and uncle, along with a cousin, settle in.  (It’s a large house.)  Family dynamics are strange and the locals grow increasingly impatient with Holland’s antics.  The Perry family is, however, long established and well respected.

Doesn’t sound very scary, does it?  That’s the genius of the work.  It’s a slow burn but when the fuse reaches the powder it leaves you trembling.  Nobody taught me how to find and read horror.  I’m still pretty much a novice and it seems that novels these days tend to have weight problems.  I was glad to find The Other wasn’t excessively long.  It shows that literary horror is possible as well.  Like Shirley Jackson, Tryon received acclaim for his work.  (And like Jackson, his novel doesn’t balloon out to over four hundred pages—something of a rarity these days.)  I guess I’m just a bit surprised it took so long for me to find out about this one.  I don’t want to give any spoilers because this is a beautifully constructed novel and knowing what happens might deter other readers.  I wouldn’t want to do such a disservice to a book I wish I’d known about when I was younger.

Strangers

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Okay, so I like to think that I’m a reasonably intelligent person.  I can drive a car.  I’ve read over two thousand books.  I have been blogging for nearly a decade and a half.  Why can’t I figure out this password thing?  My brother has a blog on WordPress too.  His posts are quite different than mine, but I always like to read them since we think a lot alike.  Anyway, I wanted to leave a comment on a recent post he wrote.  You’d think that’d be easy since this blog is also hosted on WordPress.  (I’m the one who suggested WordPress to him.)  When I went to post the comment I received a dialogue box basically asking “and who might you be?”  When I gave my web credentials it wanted a password, but it wasn’t clear which password it wanted.

An actual word press; image credit: DANIEL CHODOWIECKI 62 bisher unveröffentlichte Handzeichnungen zu dem Elementarwerk von Johann Bernhard Basedow. Mit einem Vorworte von Max von Boehn. Voigtländer-Tetzner, Frankfurt am Main 1922, public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Like most human beings alive today I have more passwords than atoms in a typical tardigrade.  With a brain over sixty, trying to recollect them all in an instant, well, let’s just say that ain’t happenin’.  As I laboriously lumber through all relevant passwords (I’m pretty sure they don’t want all the unique ones I use at work, in addition to my private accounts), it rejects each and every one.  You see, WordPress is funny.  My own account, now 14 years old—maybe that’s the problem—those teenage years!—doesn’t recognize me at times.  Indeed, on my own blog (and I have a paying account) it sometimes blinks its virtual eyes and says, “and who might you be?”  I try not to take this personally.  I mean, we’ve only known each other for years.  And all I want to do is put a supportive comment on my brother’s blog—we share the same surname, and even the same web host.  What could be so difficult about that?

I’m pretty much logged into my WordPress account constantly.  I post every day.  There’s over 5,300 mini-essays of about 400 words.  That’s over 2 million words.  Is this relationship really so one-sided?  I’m trying hard not to let my aporripsophobia get the best of me here.  Just tell me which password you want!  And, if I can use it to log into my own WordPress account, why won’t it work for the WordPress accounts of family and friends when I want to make a comment?  We’ve been together for so long, do you really not know me any better than this?  Hey, I think I need a private moment with WordPress—you can check out my brother’s blog while you wait…

Mind Echoes

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One of the things that must be frustrating about making movies is that so much competition exists.  Even when you hit on a great idea, such as using a Richard Matheson novel for a story basis, others might be producing something similar.  This isn’t unique to movies, of course.  Some of us have had the experience while writing books.  For those of us who watch movies online, rather than in theaters, the timing differential can still warp perspectives.  I’d not heard of Stir of Echoes until I stumbled onto a website that lists horror movies that have a little something extra.  While watching it I couldn’t help but think of The Sixth Sense, which I also saw at home, but quite a few years earlier than Stir of Echoes.  The acting in the latter is quite good.  The haunted kid pulls this off effectively.  And Kevin Bacon and Kathryn Erbe do a great job as parents (actor-wise).  Spoilers follow.

If you’ve intuited that the child sees dead people, you’re not far off.  It’s actually only one dead person and it’s not a Shyamalanian counsellor.  But the spooky part is his dad begins to see them too, after he’s been hypnotized by his sister-in-law, who’s an amateur.  At its heart the story follows the traditional trope of the undiscovered murder.  It does a good job of hiding the perpetrators until near the end.  The build-up is good also, with Bacon portraying Roy Neary-like obsession (interestingly, they’re in similar professions) quite well.  

The scary part, for me, was the sense that you’re not in control of your own mind.  There’s perhaps just a little too much possibility here.  We tend to think we own our minds, but what if they’re really just on loan?  I remember reading, as a high schooler, that religious people are difficult to hypnotize.  Hypnosis is still not well understood.  The larger fish in the pond is consciousness itself, which we really can’t even define.  We do know that memories are altered with time, and we can demonstrate this to ourselves by rewatching an old movie and seeing what we got wrong.  I suspect that’s why Stir of Echoes is so effective as a horror film—taking us into the realm of mind exposes us to so much that we really don’t understand.  And since ghosts seem to be pretty believable, well, the combination works.  Stir of Echoes is unsettling and a cut above much of what’s available for free streaming.  So if you’re in the mood for a ghost story, this might just fit the bill.

Not so E-Z

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Paying for someone else’s mistake.  That’s what technocracy brings.  We’ve used E-Z Pass for years.  We first got initiated in Pennsylvania although we lived in New Jersey at the time.  In those days we were taking lots of trips from New Jersey to upstate New York, for which you generally have to drive through Pennsylvania.  Hey, we’re a tri-state area.  One of the ironies my wife and I noticed is that you have to pay tolls to get out of New Jersey, but not to get in.  That’s not a scientifically-verified fact, just a pedestrian (or vehicular) observation.  Since I’ve got more things on my mind than I know what to do with, we set the account to auto-replenish.  When funds get low, it automatically refills.  Nifty, huh?!

For some reason I can’t even remember the card on which this system was based had to be reissued.  Like most people I can’t remember all the auto-renews on any given card, so when I get a notice that there’s a problem, I update immediately.  So let it be with E-Z Pass.  See, there—wasn’t that easy?  But apparently not.  The day after I updated (and given that transactions are instantaneous these days, what, me worry?) we happened to drive to New Jersey.  My wife had four work-related trips to our neighboring state over the next two weeks.  Then the violations started arriving.  From New Jersey E-Z Pass.  I’d spoken with a rep from Pennsylvania E-Z Pass the day before and he assured me everything was set up correctly.  But New Jersey plays hardball.  They won’t even talk to you until you’ve received the violations by mail—weeks after the fact.

Any violation comes with a $30 surcharge.  I needed to speak to a person since NJ’s E-Z Pass menu doesn’t offer an option for “If our system has screwed up and your being charged for it, please press 666.”  The message immediately says there will be a forty-minute wait to speak with a representative (PA E-Z Pass picks up on the first ring, just sayin’).  Forty-minutes of muzak turned into an hour.  My phone died.  I recharged and tried again.  Another hour passed.  Finally I called at 8 a.m. the next morning—there’s still a forty-minute wait, but it’s only forty minutes.  I finally spoke with a truculent rep (if you’re already out of sorts by 8:40 a.m. perhaps it’s time to look for a different job) who told me I had to set up an account for NJ E-Z Pass—they don’t have truck with PA E-Z Pass—and check it seven-to-ten business days later to see if the charges had cleared.  E-Z Pass really isn’t that easy.  Keeping a pocket full of quarters might save you time in the long run.

Photo by Possessed Photography on Unsplash

Heavy Machinery

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Funny how some things just stick in your mind.  And then come back at odd times.  Killdozer was a television movie from 1974.  I must’ve watched it pretty close to when it first aired.  Why it came back to me half a century later I just don’t know.  I haven’t been around any heavy earth-moving equipment lately, nor have inanimate objects been threatening me.  When I found it on a free (albeit with commercials, but hey, the original had commercials, so it’s a full circle kind of phenomenon) streaming service, I figured why not?  I was really expecting something cheesy, like I would’ve liked at eleven or so.  It wasn’t really that bad.  There’s actual characterization and the acting is believable.  Only the special effects of the meteorite and the blue glow were obviously low budget.  But you might not be familiar with the D9, so let’s go.

An uninhabited island off the coast of Africa.  Six guys on a construction job—building an airstrip for a petroleum company.  The supply ship’s a few days away and when the Caterpillar D9 hits the meteorite, it becomes a murderous machine, like Stephen King’s Christine.  You can outrun a bulldozer, for a while, anyway.  But if it never runs out of fuel, and you’re trapped on an island, your chances aren’t good.  They’re even worse if the thing is sentient and knows what you’re planning to do.  Six men were sent to the island, and only two make it back.  You get the picture.

As a child I had no idea who Theodore Sturgeon was.  When I saw that this was based on one of his stories, I had to ponder a bit.  Sturgeon wrote several of the original Star Trek series episodes.  His most famous stand-alone story seems to be Killdozer.  In fact, it’s become a cult classic.  I don’t have many friends, so I’m not always aware of what’s in during any given decade.  I think kids at school were talking about Killdozer, but nobody has really uttered that word in my hearing since Gerald Ford was president.  So if you don’t mind commercials, and you have a sleepy spare hour, some of us would be interested to hear what you think about this movie.  The sense of isolation and people being killed by something they construct to be basically indestructible struck me as a lesson worth pondering.  And I’ll continue to try avoiding heavy earth-moving equipment, just in case.

For the Music

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Believe me, I’ve tried.  I took a year of piano lessons but just couldn’t get it.  I married a musician.  I tried to learn guitar.  (I would still play with it, but I broke a string last time I tried to tune it and who has time to get to a music store where it can be restrung?)  I can’t sing—I’ve never been trained and I just don’t seem to have the voice for it.  (In fact, since I no longer teach those close to me say I speak so softly that it’s a strain to hear me.)  But the fact is I love music.  That’s why I don’t listen to it as background.  If there’s music playing, that I like, I find it difficult to concentrate on anything else.  It goes directly to my brain, it seems.

My memory is such that if a piece of music is too familiar I sometimes just don’t want to hear it.  I’m also out of touch with contemporary music.  I have strong tastes, and not too much appeals to me.  When something does, it’s transcendent.  It’s like I’ve fused with the performers.  It’s mystical and amazing.  Growing up, we couldn’t afford much in the way of records.  (I’m sure I need not say anything about cassette or 8-track tapes.)  I listened to the radio with my brothers from time to time, and enjoyed what we heard.  I secretly enjoyed what I heard coming from my older brother’s room.  Left to my own devices, however, I tend to pick up a book and I can’t listen to music and read at the same time.  I know that this is my own neurological issue, but I’m letting you in because anything transcendent is worth sharing.  

Photo by Jefferson Santos on Unsplash

Although the quality isn’t as good, services such as Spotify and Amazon Music Unlimited have slowly introduced me to music of the nineties and later.  Why the nineties?  That’s when I began teaching and my spare time was spent researching (reading) and I had little time for other diversions.  You see, music may just be what it’s all about.  It’s being absorbed and enjoying every second of it.  Humans are visually oriented, but when we focus on sounds something happens to us.  I can be in a crowded store and stop dead right in the middle of the aisle if one of my special songs comes on in the background.  I have to stand and listen, shopping forgotten.  Transcendent moments are few.  If we were in transport all the time I fear it would become ordinary.  And such things are worth pondering on Groundhog Day.

In Praise of Libraries

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It felt like a rare, and momentous moment in a young writer’s life.  While working at Routledge I happened to notice that the New York Public Library did not have a copy of A Reassessment of Asherah in their catalogue.  The first edition was published in Germany, so I wasn’t surprised that it was not there.  Gorgias Press, however, had published a second edition and few people were citing it.  I contacted the office on Fifth Avenue and offered to donate a copy.  A librarian contacted me and we set up a time.  I went between the stone lions (Patience and Fortitude by name), met my contact, and handed my work over without ceremony.  He seemed genuinely glad to have the book and I felt like I’d made a small contribution to a big city.

When I need a pick-me-up I look at WorldCat.  WorldCat is a conglomeration of library catalogues where you can find just about any book, including obscure ones, such as mine.  I recently hopped on to see how many libraries had Holy Horror.  (The answer is 90.)  While there I decided to check my others.  Nightmares with the Bible registered 68.  These numbers aren’t bad considering neither publisher markets the books and they’re priced too high.  The Wicker Man is still new and is only in 42.  What surprised me was when I looked back.  A Reassessment of Asherah is in 305 (total for both editions, one being in the New York Public Library).  What really surprised me was Weathering the Psalms, which 324 libraries claim.  Since it’s priced under $30, maybe there is something to the idea people will buy books if they can afford them.  As an editor I know that sales of monograph over 300 are considered successful.  Two of my books qualify.

Publishers don’t share sales information.  I can look up those at my current publisher, and I can check some on Nielsen’s BookScan (now called NDP BookScan), the service publishers use to get an idea of other publishers’ sales.  That’s the same Nielsen that does television ratings, by the way.  Searching my own titles there is too depressing, so I stick to library catalogues.  Libraries are feel-good places.  (I couldn’t help but notice that Princeton has all my books—thank you, Tigers!  The seminary has my first two, but the university has my books on horror films.)  I can just feel all the ideas in the air.  And I’m humbled to have contributed to them in a way, no matter how small.

Not All Vampires

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Early film research owes great debt to YouTube.  Many historic and significant films cannot be purchased or watched anywhere else.  Even in this uber-greedy late capitalist era, few (if any) are willing to sell that for which many would pay.  This is brought on by my learning about Alice Ida Antoinette Guy-Blaché, also known as Alice Guy.  Guy was the first female film director.  She left a substantial body of work and is credited with being the maker of the first narrative-based film in history.  If you’ve not heard of her, you’re not alone.  Even during her lifetime she wondered why she was never recognized for her cinematographic achievements, incredible though they were.  She filmed one of the first adaptations of an Edgar Allan Poe story known, The Pit and the Pendulum (1913).  This one is partially lost—many early films are.

I wanted to see her 1915 film, The Vampire.  Given the date, you will have correctly guessed that it’s a silent movie.  It still survives and the only place it can apparently be found is on YouTube.  Before you run off and watch it, be aware that it’s not about a literal vampire, but rather “a woman of the vampire type.”  The current term is “vamp.”  The movie, which takes a feminist approach, is framed around Rudyard Kipling’s poem, “The Vampire.”  It runs for about an hour, which was pushing the envelope in those early days of cinema.  It tells the story of a happy, wealthy family broken apart by a “vamp.”  The husband receives a government appointment in Europe and his wife and daughter can’t follow for a month.  On the way over by ship, the vampire seduces him, after compelling her current love to shoot himself.  This isn’t a comedy.

The film doesn’t end happily—the statesman, aging prematurely, just can’t break the vampire’s hold on him.  Still, friends and family urge his wife to wait for him because divorce is wrong.  The film lingers on the suffering of the wife and on how much his young daughter misses her father.  The film quality is quite good for the time, although the YouTube version has been digitally restored.  So this isn’t a horror film, but watching it is a tribute to a woman who influenced filmmaking and then was summarily forgotten, largely because of her gender.  Alice Guy was the first woman to run her own movie studio.  Sadly, her husband left her and their children just three years after The Vampire.  Shortly after that Guy’s filmmaking career was over.  Fortunately for history, Guy has been rediscovered and has been receiving credit for her pioneering work.  Although The Vampire was about a dangerous woman, the reality is, and was, that patriarchy continues to ruin women’s lives.

First Stories

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I won’t say more than that her first name was Tina.  She lived next door to us in the earliest boyhood home I can remember.  She was a few years older than my brothers and me and, according to my mother, grew into quite the delinquent.  She ended up in jail, I’m told.  Still, even in a childhood full of scarring memories, I remember Tina as being the first person who told me a scary story.  Funny how these things stick with you.  We lived in Franklin, Pennsylvania, a town on the edge of the woods.  Indeed, Venango County is largely wooded and populated by some of the most avid hunters I’ve ever seen.  There were woods across the street from our house, climbing one of those ubiquitous hills that make the area so beautiful.

There was a man in those woods, Tina told us, who’d been kidnapping small boys and cutting out their hearts.  She was telling it as the truth and well over half a century later I remember the fear that story instilled in me.  Of course, Mom told her to stop telling us scary stories.  I was only five or six at the time.  Maybe four.  My path to watching horror movies wasn’t straightforward.  We were a religious family, but taking care of three young boys and an ailing mother with no husband around eats up all your time.  Mom was content to let the television babysit us in the next room at times.  And as late monster boomers, we watched monster movies on Saturday afternoons.  They gave me a cozy feeling.  Things could be worse than not having a father.  Much worse.

After high school I gave up monsters for the Gospel.  Went to college to become a preacher.  I ended up teaching in a seminary and didn’t want my daughter to grow up scared, like I had done.  Then my world collapsed.  Fundamentalists fired me from my first and last full-time teaching position.  I dealt with it by watching horror films.  Perhaps I was reverting to childhood coping strategies.  Over the years, however, I never forgot that story that Tina told us when my brothers and I were little.  It is a scary world out there, and you’ve got to learn that one way or another.  Many people don’t understand my fascination with horror.  In times of trouble, however, we go back to those self-soothing practices that we associate with good feelings.  For some of us it was watching monster movies on Saturday afternoons and knowing things could be worse.  

Nun too Soon

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Following a horror franchise from the beginning is a rarity.  At least it is for me.  Now that I’ve seen The Nun II, I’m caught up on the Conjuring universe, for now.  I’ve written an article, still awaiting publication, on the Catholicism in this cinematic universe, and The Nun II has me wondering: how hard is it to find out the basics about Catholicism?  The movie is okay for big-budget horror, but not great.  The Catholicism in it feels like it’s imagined by writers who speculate on what it might be without ever, say, attending a mass to find out.  And the demon Valak isn’t exactly rank and file either.  The idea of using St. Lucy’s eyes as a relic was, however, pretty creepy.

So, after The Nun, Sr. Irene has gone to a convent in Italy.  A series of bizarre clerical deaths sweeps across Europe and all the Vatican can think to do is send the one young nun who’s faced this demon before.  No priest this time because Fr. Burke is dead, rather laconically stated.  Sister Debra sneaks along and the two nuns find themselves facing a demon that immolates priests because it can’t find a relic it wants that will make it even more powerful—the eyes of St. Lucy.  Said eyes are buried in a ruined chapel in a Catholic girls’ school in Aix-en-Provence.  This is the school where Frenchie (from The Nun) now works as a handyman.  We all know he was somehow possessed at the end of that film.  The girls’ school used to be a winery and Valak is defeated when the nuns consecrate a pool of wine that banishes the demon.

At this point in time, the Conjuring universe has grossed over two billion dollars.  All of the films are explicitly religion-based horror.  Putatively in a Catholic setting, they feel like Protestants trying to guess what Catholicism must be like.  At least they feel that way to me.  The Nun sequence in particular, has demons responding to defenses that would not, in a Catholic world, work.  As much as I may disagree on the theology, nuns can’t consecrate wine.  And it turns out that Sr. Irene is a descendant of St. Lucy, one of the virgin martyrs.  Although that title is sometimes given as an honorific, it does generally mean that such saints had no progeny.  Death by thurible is fairly clever, though.  Like all the films of the franchise, The Nun II is worth watching, but it fails to convince on the religion front.  It just doesn’t feel Catholic.

Why Write Then?

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People far smarter and more prominent than yours truly have pointed this out, generally in vain: academic writing is driving itself extinct.  And some of us will not mourn it, if it does.  You see, academics are taught to write with an erudition and pomposity that satisfies dissertation committees made up of people who had to do the same.  This academic hazing generally obscures otherwise interesting observations.  Now thoroughly indoctrinated, academics go on to write their next book, and their articles, in this same turgid prose that obfuscates mightily.  To what purpose?  So that those critics higher on the food chain won’t be tempted to take on this morsel, preferring instead some “popularizer” who actually knows the craft of writing?

Poor writing is poor writing.  Those of us who’ve graded undergraduate papers have spent many red pens (I used to use green, so as not to be so negative) correcting bad stuff.  Why then do we give in to writing even worse ourselves?  I’m not proud.  I’ll admit that I’ve read academic books I really didn’t understand.  And it wasn’t because I’m not properly trained.  It’s because the writing was so full of jargon and “scholar X said but scholar Y rebutted”s that I get lost in the jungle.  One of the things repeatedly said about my teaching, back in the day, was that it was effective because I could explain complicated things in ways people could understand.  Isn’t that the purpose of publication in general?  Too many scholars write only for other scholars.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but if they wrote clearly maybe some of the rest of us could get in on the conversation.

I’m sure I’m not the only one to get really excited about a book.  The topic doesn’t matter.  Shivering with anticipation you order it and await its arrival, staring out the window awaiting the postie or the Amazon van.  It arrives and you caress it a little before opening it.  Then you find it’s written in academese.  You struggle to get through it, uncertain that you’ve really learned anything at all.  Except how not to write.  Those in higher education lament that the system is crumbling.  One of the reasons, I contend, is that nobody can understand what they’re saying.  What’s wrong with writing for the average, educated person?  Do you need sixteen five-syllable words in one sentence?  Look, I bought your book because I already believed in you.  If you make me regret my spending you can be sure that I’ll be purchasing someone else’s books from now on.

Brain Exercise

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Why do we read, if not to expand our minds?  I’ve read all of Diana Walsh Pasulka’s previous books but Encounters is mind-blowing.  I feel particularly honored that a scholar of religion has been able to put together so many pieces of a very strange puzzle.  Pasulka’s first book was about Purgatory.  Having grown up Catholic that seems a natural enough choice.  Her second book, American Cosmic, focused on a topic that academics were just starting to address at the time—UFOs.  That book justly earned her acclaim.  Encounters takes a few steps further into the mysteries of being human.  Those who experience UFOs have much in common with people who have other extraordinary encounters.  The profiles in this book will give you pause time and again.

Many of us have felt that the unfortunately successful government strategy of ridicule toward experiencers has been a blanket covering up the truth for too long.  I was interested in UFOs as a child and was unmercifully teased for it.  One of the reasons I was interested was that I learned, when I was about eleven, that my grandfather had been interested as well.  I was only two when he died, so there was no way to learn this personally.  It came through discovering a couple of his books that my mother had kept.  Since she was one of five siblings, it’s difficult to say if he’d had any other books on the subject, but being a reasonable kid, I wondered why this was a forbidden topic.  You could talk about ghosts (at least a little bit) and be considered “normal.”  Mention UFO’s and you’re insane.

When the Navy’s video recordings of UFOs—renamed UAPs—were released in 2019, there was silence in the room for about half an hour.  Serious people began to realize there might be something to this.  Of course, those who’d internalized the ridicule response continued to fall back on it, perhaps as a defense mechanism.  That revelation has allowed, however, serious consideration of what is a very weird phenomenon.  I’ve deliberately avoided saying too much about what Pasulka covers in her book.  As I generally intend when I do this, what I’m hinting is that you should read this book.  You should do so with an open mind.  If you do, you might find yourself thinking in some new ways.  Of course, some will ridicule.  Others, however, may walk away with an expanded perception of reality.

Don’t You Sleep

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Sleep is pleasant but it’s such a vulnerable time.  Something deep in our animal DNA tells us to find a sheltered place to do it.  That vulnerability is compounded by demons.  So claims Slumber.  While not the most original story, it’s pretty effective for a while, but then holes begin to appear in the plot and you find it difficult not to keep asking why the problems weren’t addressed.  Let’s take a step back.  Doctor Alice Arnolds lost her younger brother to a demon when they were children.  This demon, called Mare, causes, well, nightmares.  These nightmares lead to sleepwalking and ultimately death.  As a doctor specializing in sleep disorders, Arnolds helps others scientifically.  She’s come to believe that her brother’s death was because of natural causes—the supernatural doesn’t exist.

Okay, so sleepwalking is creepy, and the idea isn’t a bad hook.  Then Arnolds meets a family of four, all of whom sleepwalk with nightmares.  The demon’s target here is their young son, who reminds Arnolds of her lost brother.  At the sleep clinic the monitors show something odd, but circumstantial evidence points to the father as the guilty party.  But here’s where the big hole appears.  Once Arnolds becomes convinced something supernatural is happening, she decides to handle it herself, at the family’s home.  Even when it’s clear they’re out of their league, nobody calls the police or even an ambulance, let alone a priest.  Instead they rely on a janitor’s father whom they’ve just met.  They try to keep the boy awake until they’re endangering his life, then they fight the demon in their dreams.  There is a kind of twist ending, and the production values are good.  

The demon, which Arnolds researches on Wikipedia, is a notsnitsa.  Why this Slavic demon targeted both her brother and the family under distress isn’t explored.  The connection is made with “the night hag”—a folkloric demon that attacks in your sleep and is generally explained as sleep paralysis.  This is not a possessing demon.  In the film it’s said to be parasitic, and the sleeping victim acts out what the demon tells it to do.  The lack of any religious tension hurts this movie.  As does that lingering question—why not call in some kind of expert?  Either sacred or secular will do!  I won’t ruin the ending of the movie, but I’ll warn those tempted to watch to come armed with a great deal of suspension of disbelief.  You’re gonna need it.

Dark House

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Last year I completed an odyssey that began over a decade and a half ago.  I finished reading the Dark Shadows serial novels by Marilyn Ross.  Not because they were great literature, but because they were an important part of my childhood.  Slowly, over the years, I regathered the books and read them until the whole series was done.  One of the used book sellers was offering a collection of the books, and although the collection had some duplicates of what I’d already found, it contained some of the more difficult to locate titles.  When it arrived, I found it also included House of Dark Shadows.  This novelization wasn’t part of the series, and like most things in my life, I can’t claim to know everything about Dark Shadows.  As a child I didn’t know there had been a movie, let alone a novelization.  (I bought the books as I happened to find them, at Goodwill and watched the TV show.)

In the present, I’d just finished Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Talents and felt that I needed something lighter for my next fictional project.  House of Dark Shadows proved a better read than most of the series books, perhaps because it was based on a movie script written by the screenwriters.  Marilyn Ross was actually William Edward Daniel (W. E. D.) Ross, and he wrote more than 300 novels.  His Dark Shadows oeuvre became repetitious in its dialogue, across the series.  His characters always seem to say “at once” instead of “immediately” or “right now.”  I’m pretty sure the word “mocking” appears in each of them—certainly the latter ones—multiple times.  Having the script must’ve really helped keep those trademarks to a minimum.

Of course, now that I’ve read the novelization I need to go back and watch the movie again.  It’s been almost two years and some of the details escape me.  It’s largely because the movie goes “off script” from the long-running daily show (and the other novels).  I also realized that Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows movie was really a kind of reboot of House of Dark Shadows, unfortunately screen written by Seth Grahame-Smith as a comedy.  I’m no expert on Dark Shadows, just a reasonably enthusiastic fan in search of a lost childhood.  The movie makes the premise of the series untenable—both can’t exist in the same world, so it’s kind of a Dark Shadows multiverse, rather than a simple universe.  And it’s very complex.  I’d need to start again at childhood to become an expert in it, but at least now I’ve read all the books.

Sequel Pondering

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Of course I’m working on another book.  I can’t say what it is at the moment, but one of the projects I’ve long been contemplating is a kind of sequel to Holy Horror.  The problem is that if the first book didn’t sell very well (the premise is perhaps too academic), a sequel couldn’t be expected to do any better.  I’m still working on sloughing that academy skin.  But I keep watching what we insist on calling “horror” and the more I do, the more I find the Bible in it.  Others have taken up the gauntlet—mostly academics who have jobs that encourage such behavior—of connecting horror and religion.  The Bible’s role, while a subset of the larger field, has its own particular parameters.  In one of my notebooks I have a list of 23 movies to add to my analysis.  I know that there is a twenty-fourth, but it’s only streaming on an exclusive service and still costs a bit too much for something that doesn’t come with a plastic case.

In any case, Holy Horror just scratched the surface.  One of the factors I’ve mentioned before is that there is no database of the Bible’s appearances in film.  It would be an extensive list altogether, and a substantial number of horror films would be on it.  In general, it seems, people really aren’t too interested or intrigued by this fact.  I certainly am.  Our society is a curious mix of sweet and salty.  We want to think we’re too sophisticated for religion, but religion undergirds just about everything we do.  Otherwise it’s pretty difficult to explain how the Bible keeps showing up in horror.  Usually as a mysterious artifact.

I recently saw myself referred to as a biblical scholar.  There’s no doubt that I taught biblical studies for many years.  I even wrote a book interpreting one aspect of the Good Book.  My degree, and my interest, however, has always been historical.  I follow this history of ideas.  Although many people don’t understand my current horror fascination, it’s clear this is another jog down a trail of history.  How did we get to the point that a totemic (the scholarly phrase is “iconic”) Bible became a stand-in for God in movies?  I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to write Holy Sequel, although, if my profession ever permitted it, I’d certainly have the interest in doing so.  There’s a lot to be learned from such explorations.  That’s true even if the books containing the information only appear on a few dusty library shelves.