Ghost Belief

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I haven’t read Plato since I was a college student.  It’s not that I don’t want to read more, but as with most things it comes down to a matter of time.  If I’m honest I’ll confess Plato wasn’t the reason I read Cathy Gutierrez’s Plato’s Ghost.  It was the second word.  And the subtitle: Spiritualism in the American Renaissance.  I’ve always been interested in Spiritualism.  In fact, Lily Dale is on my bucket-list of places to visit.  The idea that ghosts can inform our spirituality is an intriguing concept.  While Gutierrez’s book is an academic one, it contains many stimulating ideas and shows that the Spiritualists were perhaps the truest progressives of their era.  And they had their heyday during the Victorian Period.  I enjoyed learning more about their theology and social views.  And, of course, ghosts.

When academics venture into esoterica, some amazing things can result.  I occasionally discuss Jeff Kripal’s books—he’s on the forefront of this movement—and now and again the books of other academics who engage the unusual.  Ghosts have, of course, been noted and believed in since the earliest humans who wrote.  Probably before.  They are still reported and chasing them has become a business model by which one might make a living.  A religion foregrounding the departed, however, is fascinating.  As Gutierrez demonstrates, Spiritualists were very forward-looking while keeping an eye firmly on the past.  While reading her book I kept stumbling upon astonishing observations that made me stop and wonder.  Spiritualists supported abolition, feminism, fair treatment for all, and, at least some of them, free love.  Numerous historical asides also brought me to a halt.  The idea, for example, that patients with multiple personality disorders might benefit from putting a non-dominant personality in charge.  There are Easter eggs like that throughout the book.

While Plato’s Ghost is academic, and there are parts that require some careful reading, it is the kind of book that laity interested in Spiritualism could benefit from picking up.  There are sections that enlightened me, and I’ve been studying religion for many decades now.  In general I’ve been steering away from reading academic tomes in my time off.  When I go to do my own writing it tends to veer back toward getting published only in academic presses, which I’m also trying to avoid.  I’ll make exceptions for books like this one, however.  I was drawn in by the promise of ghosts, and while they weren’t exactly what I was expecting, they were a rich feast nevertheless.

Made to Order

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Like those who’ve commented on IMDb, I watched Tiago Teixeira’s Custom because of its brief 77-minute showtime and its horror label.  An artsy film, it feels kind of unfinished.  It’s clearly a movie about demons, but it doesn’t give enough to really figure it out.  Jasper and Harriet are young artists who are having a difficult go of making a living (something we all recognize as true).  They decide to try making custom erotic films for the internet and this brings them to the attention of a mysterious benefactor who pays them 10,000 pounds for each film made to his specs.  They have to shoot on VHS, and once the film begins rolling, and a strange chanting starts, they fall into a trance and don’t recall what they did.  They’re instructed never to watch the tapes, but when they do what they find disturbs them.  Jasper tries to find out something about the purpose of the films (they’re not posted anywhere) only to discover that they are somehow laced with the Key of Solomon.  In case you haven’t read Holy Horror, the Key of Solomon is a grimoire for summoning demons.

At one point, the friend who brings them this gig asks Jasper what his idea of Hell is.  Jasper says being stuck, not able to move forward.  Towards the end of this short movie, Jasper is shown being stabbed by Harriet, something he experienced at the beginning of the film (without showing who’d stabbed him).  The implication is clearly that he’s stuck in a loop.  He’s reliving being attacked—maybe fatally wounded—by his girlfriend.  At one point their patron asks him if he knows who Harriet’s sleeping with when she’s not home.  It seems, between the demons and the nightmare scenario, that Jasper is in Hell.

This strange, little film engages religion and horror.  At one point, the friend who brings Jasper this job, says that the saints were the original perverts.  He mentions some mutilations in the lives of a few saints, including St. Lucy of Syracuse, who is often shown carrying her own gouged-out eyes.  This brought to mind The Nun II, a film released some six months earlier, that also involves the same eyeless saint.  There’s no doubt that the stories of the saints are good fodder for horror.  It seems that one of the reasons such stories were told was to evoke just that feeling.  So Custom is a film that engages religion and horror.  The connection with demons isn’t made clear, but they’re obviously part of the story of one artist’s personal Hell.

Sun Shines

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The world is a much stranger place than we are taught in school.  Even as a kid I was drawn to the weird and uncanny.  Yes, I was teased by others.  The mocking response is one that is intended to bring outsiders to conformity.  Nobody likes being shunned.  A friend, knowing my continued interest in the unusual, sent me a piece that mentioned, among other things, the Marian apparitions at Conyers, Georgia.  On October 13, 1998, while I was ensconced at Nashotah House, an event took place of which I’d never heard.  It was similar to the “miracle of the sun,” known worldwide as part of the phenomenon witnessed by between 50,000 and 70,000 people at Fátima, Portugal.  Both events included several solar anomalies.  The Catholic Church, always reticent toward modern miracles, didn’t claim Fatima as an official one.  In 1998, on the farm of Nancy Fowler in Conyers, the phenomenon was repeated in front of 100,000 witnesses.  Interestingly, the Wikipedia page on the apparitions doesn’t mention this.

News reels and Polaroid photographs (which can’t be tampered with) show something clearly unusual happening with the sun.  There are videos on YouTube that present these.  I’m always a bit skeptical of any modern videos, however, since so much can be faked.  There is no source whence the curious might go to find a rational, but not debunking, description.  Mainstream science dismisses such things out of hand—they can’t happen, so they don’t.  Faith-based treatments are also suspect.  The fascinating thing, to me, is that I was at a religious, quasi-Catholic institution at the time and heard nothing of it.  Television reception at the seminary was notoriously poor, and although the internet existed, the seminary had not yet jumped on the bandwagon.  At least not to the point of say, getting news online.

The article my friend sent was making the point that when large crowds of credible witnesses see something we should pay attention.  With events that don’t regularly repeat—the problem of occasional phenomena—setting up scientific observation doesn’t work.  For instance, ghosts tend not to show up when actual scientists (not those who play them on television) set up equipment.  One conclusion is “that’s because ghosts don’t exist.”  Another, however, is that they don’t act on cue.  And scientific experiments take both time and money and aren’t wasted on things that have a high probability of not showing up.  Our world is full of weird things like this.  All of us have had something we’ve brushed off as “just one of those things.”  But when 100,000 people see something, I’m curious as to what it was.

Scary Scripture

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The question’s not as simple as whether chocolate and peanut butter go together.  What is it with horror and the Bible?  A number of us have explored that question in book form, but probably the most prolific is Brandon R. Grafius.  His Scared by the Bible is a mapping through terrain that will feel foreign to some: if you live for the beach in summer, why would you fly to Antarctica to visit the South Pole instead?  Part of the reason is clearly that the Bible isn’t the rainbow-and-unicorn book that it’s often made out to be.  Some parts—not a few—are pretty scary.  That’s Grafius’ entry point into how horror and the Bible are surprisingly compatible.  Interestingly, we had similar starts down this path.  A Bible given to us by a grandmother when we were a child, and the determination to read it.  My world was a bit more hellfire and brimstone than Grafius’ but we’ve ended up near the same place.

Often I thought, as I was reading it, “Are people going to get both these references?” (i.e., both the biblical story and the horror movie being cited).  After all, many Christian denominations still teach that horror is not helpful at best, and satanic at worst.  I just wonder how many of us there are who never found watching horror a spiritual problem.  I grew up thinking about death a lot.  Part of this was because Evangelical children’s literature raised the question of where would you spend eternity if you died today.  Seriously, some of the stories I read, along with Dick and Jane, still scare me today.  Religion often uses fear for its own purposes.  So does the Bible.  Grafius comes down to this at the end, asking if it’s intentional on the Bible’s part.

It seems to me that this is an important question to explore.  Religion has been weaponized through fear since at least the Reagan years.  More recently it has been aimed specifically at us “evil” liberals and our “culture of death” even as conservatives rain bombs on Iran.  We desperately need to understand religion’s now very intentional use of fear to retain power.  People are afraid.  They have reason to be.  Generally it’s not the emotional issues politicians hand-pick to garner votes.  Yes, the Bible is a source of fear.  Horror films are often also a source of scary thoughts.  They do have a lot in common.  We just need someone to come along with an open jar of peanut butter to run into someone eating a chocolate bar.

Whose Bible?

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“What the Bible really says.”  That’s a phrase you find in many places.  In academic books and on the lips of “true believers.”  Nevertheless, it’s a problematic formulation, no matter who uses it.  Biblical scholars often like to “correct” public assumptions about the Bible, but since the association of most people with the Bible is emotional, chances of changing any opinions remain slim.  There seem to be two troublesome words in the phrase: “Bible” and “really.”  Let’s take them in turn.  The Bible doesn’t exist.  Well, it does, but it’s an intellectual formulation, not a book.  This can be asserted with a great deal of certainty.  Why?  Because the boundaries of the Bible are porous and nobody, but nobody, has the authority to close them.  Just a quick example: the books of the Apocrypha—Bible or not?  Most Protestants fall on the “not” side of that question, although the King James Bible included some of the Apocrypha.

The question gets more vexed when we start asking about books like Jubilees and 1 Enoch.  There are ancient Christian churches that include them.  Since they are African, however, Europeans/North Americans have privileged the western canon, and have excluded them.  They are, however, part of “the Bible” for millions of people.  The book of Jude quotes Enoch as Scripture, just saying.  Things get even dicier when you include scholarly opinion.  Many biblical scholars believe The Gospel of Thomas has just as much credibility as (if not more than) the canonical four.  Since biblical scholars can’t add or remove books, however, it’s a moot point, although they are the best informed. 

“Really” is really problematic.  Who has the authority to determine what the Bible “really” says?  Doesn’t this actually mean, “the correct interpretation”?  Who is qualified to make such a statement?  A preacher?  Did God tell them personally?  Did they think to record it?  Or should it be the experts—biblical scholars who spend their lives and careers learning everything possible about the Good Book?  Again, no person, or body of people, has the right and authority to make that decision.  What does the Bible really mean?  I wouldn’t leave that up to any of the many, many clergy I know.  It requires a bit more training than they have.  And I’m still really bothered by the “really” part.  It’s always going to be a matter of interpretation.  Yes, I know hermeneutics always spoil a good time.  Until, however, we can all agree on what “the Bible” is, nobody can say what it “really” says.

Folk Exorcism

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The consensus seems to be that The Old Ways is pretty good.  This folk horror, demonic possession film didn’t impress me too much, however.  The premise is good: there is a ruin in Mexico that explorers leave having been possessed.  They don’t know it.  At the same time, it seems that the possession of Cristina, the protagonist, came from her mother.   And she also visited the ruin.  Most of the movie takes place in a room where a bruja and her adult son attempt to exorcise Cristina while her cousin Miranda watches.  Things are a bit more complicated than that, however.  Cristina has returned to her hometown with the intention of dying via a heroin overdose.  Apparently the demon was luring her there to finish her soul.  In any case, it felt quite confusing to me.  

The story actually begins with Cristina finding herself held captive by a bruja named Luz.  She insists that Cristina can’t go until the demon has been destroyed.  Cristina feels fine, though, and doesn’t believe there is a demon.  Meanwhile she’s able to smuggle in her heroin and uses it at night.  But she also starts seeing what seem to be demonic entities.  She escapes but finds that she can’t cross a line of salt.  She’s forced to admit that she does have a demon and submits to a painful “old way” extraction.  Luz performs the ritual—nothing like Exorcist style—and even performs surgery on Cristina with her bare hands.  In the end, the exorcism leads to Luz’s death.  Cristina prepares to go back to Los Angeles, but then discovers the demon has taken possession of her cousin Miranda.

Becoming a bruja herself Cristina performs the ritual on her cousin.  The results are less dramatic but lead to a confrontation with a particularly nasty demon.  The cousins together are able to destroy it.  Meanwhile, Cristina’s boss has come looking for her and he too went to the ruin and has been possessed.  Cristina prepares to do another ritual, the old way.  There seems to be too much going on here and much of it is unfamiliar and therefore difficult to understand.  It is a good example of religion and horror cooperating and the use of folk methods for handling a demon felt fresh.  The eeriness of the situation is perhaps more uncanny than scary, but the biggest problem for me was that the origin of the possession kept shifting.  There is a character (a little boy) who’s not really explained, but who isn’t a good sign.  This isn’t a bad movie, but it made The Exorcist feel like old school.

Ordinary Buddhism

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Refresher courses are a good idea.  I learned bits of Buddhism from my undergraduate days as a student of religions on, but my specialization was in “western religions.”  Those outside the field often don’t understand how technical religions can be.  They require time to learn and learn about.  I picked up a bit more Buddhism when I taught world religions, but still not enough to make me a specialist.  As a religion editor I continue to learn more.  My wife and I read Noah Rasheta’s No-Nonsense Buddhism for Beginners together.  Buddhism is divided into two major branches with a third sizable one.  Many would dispute that it is a religion since it has many aspects of a philosophy instead.  Also, Buddhism is non-doctrinal—it’s a matter of outlook and what you do, not the specifics of what you believe.  This book is a handy introduction, or refresher course.

The concept of religion itself developed because of the exclusive truth claims that grew from the Abrahamic traditions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam).  The declaration that other belief systems are wrong—each of these traditions grew amidst what we might consider folk religions today, labeled “paganism” as a way of disparaging them—led to the idea of what we believe being named “religion.”  (Yours, of course, is the right one.  Everyone believes that.)  Buddhism remained largely unknown in the western world until the age of exploration, and in America was not really widely studied until the 1890s.  As a way of looking at the world, it is older than classical Judaism, having begun in the sixth or fifth century before the Common Era.  It follows, in large part, the teachings of Siddhartha Gautama, “the Buddha.”

Rasheta, the author of this book, is a secular Buddhist.  He makes the point that Buddhism doesn’t displace one’s current religion but can be practiced alongside it.  Being non-doctrinal it’s not a matter of which gods you believe in, if any.  It certainly isn’t about worshipping the Buddha.  A large part of it is mindfulness, and trying to avoid the traps that lead to suffering in human life.  This book is set up in a question-and-answer format and is a straightforward introduction to what Buddhism is and how to begin to apply it to your life, if that’s what you wish.  It’s difficult for those of us raised in the Christian tradition to get past the idea that the point of any religion is conversion.  It’s not.  Instead, Buddhism can be yet another tool to help deal with the suffering that life brings.  Is it a religion?  That’s a technical question.

Simple Gifts

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During my many years of studying religion I learned about the Shakers.  It was many years ago and my knowledge isn’t extensive.  I was caught off guard when my wife suggested we see The Testament of Ann Lee.  I hadn’t heard of it and knew nothing about it, but she had me at “Shakers.”  This is a most unusual and engaging movie.  I didn’t realize it was a musical until after it was over.  (It had been a long day and I did, a time or two, think, “hey, this is like a musical, the way characters break into song.”)  The thing is the songs are all diegetic; they fit into the plot and the Shakers were known for their music as well as for their furniture.  The movie follows, in broad outlines, the life of Mother Ann Lee, the founder of the sect.  It made me curious to learn more.  

The Shakers emerged during that period of intense religious foment in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  They settled in upstate New York where numerous other sects came into the world, such as the Mormons and the Millerites.  The Shakers had their origins among the Quakers, but it is unclear if Ann Lee’s family were members of the latter denomination.  In the movie an encounter with George Whitefield awakens Lee’s spiritual curiosity.  Historically, Whitefield was one of the first trans-Atlantic superstars, drawing rock-concert-sized crowds to hear his outdoor preaching.  In my head much of this was muddled during the film—it had been a long and disappointing day and I was totally unprepared for it.  I’m glad to have watched it, however; it rekindled my interest in American sects.

I have on my shelf an unread history of the Shakers.  It has consequently been moved to my “to read” pile.  I read, a few years ago, a history of the Oneida community in Upstate, and also a biography of William Miller.  The Oneida community practiced open marriage and eventually became known as the producers of flatware—Oneida silverware is still easily found.  Shakers, on the other hand, believed in celibacy, meaning that they could only grow through conversion.  The many Shaker communities founded by Mother Ann Lee dwindled and now appear to be down to three members.  The movie, which is quite good, is unlikely to lead to a resurgence of celibacy and revival of the Shakers.  They did have an outsized influence, not only for their furniture (think Oneida) but also for their music.  Add to that now, a musical.

Reclaiming the Past

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It started after Nashotah House.  That event shook me to my very core.  And I was approaching middle age.  I started taking an interest in my childhood.  I learned some uncomfortable truths that probably help explain the way that I am, but more tangibly, losing that job launched me back to both monster movies and the earnest need to collect books that I’d given up when I went to college to “grow up.”  Fortunately (perhaps) the internet had been invented and it was possible to locate used copies from the seventies.  I’ve written many times about the Dark Shadows books that I began collecting shortly after the incident in Delafield.  But there were others.  Many others.  Often it became a matter of identifying and finding the same edition that I’d had as a child.  (Modern reprints complicate this, but with enough patience the exact book editions can be found, and usually no more expensive than  contemporary bookstore prices.

The goal has never been to replace all of my childhood books, but those that evoked a palpable sense of wonder in my young psyche.  This was strange because I was very religious and these books sometimes challenged what my fundamentalist upbringing taught.  Some years back I had to find the exact edition of Erich van Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods? that I had.  The curiosity did not extend to several of his other books from the seventies.  I got rid of these because they caused me to question my faith.  Teenagers.  In any case, I also had a compulsion to replace a book of Twilight Zone adaptations.  The cover of that book still sends me back to Rouseville.  Then I had a hankering to reread Logan’s Run.  It’d been reprinted many times, and the one I had as a kid was itself a reprint.  I needed that exact one.

My wife has been very patient with me.  I’m seeking something here.  I’ve always been haunted by the truth and there is a nagging feeling that I had grasped, only by the very tips of my fingers, a little bit of it before college.  Facing higher education (the first in my family to do so), I felt I needed to “put away childish things.”  The library that sustained me through those difficult Rouseville years was scuttled.  There’s a saying about babies and bathwater.  I’m beginning to think there may be something to it.  There were some very dark incidents in my early childhood, before I learned to read.  I think of them often.  And yet, a sense of wonder remains.  Mostly in the escapism of  old, mass market paperbacks from the seventies.

First, Kings

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Recently I sat down to read 1 Kings.  Of course, I used to teach Hebrew Bible so I have more than a passing familiarity with it.  This time, though, I was reading it through the lens of Game of Thrones.  I wonder how much George R. R. Martin drew inspiration from the biblical book.  Indeed, a movie could be made from it—sex, conspiracy, battles, deception, it’s all there.  Perhaps someone should novelize it.  If you read it without knowing that it’s holy writ, you might be surprised to learn that it is.  Of course, having been edited by the Deuteronomists (so it’s supposed), it’s a bit preachy, but the action is pretty much the same.  In fact, Game of Thrones has quite a few biblical tropes in it.  And 1 Kings, if excised from the Bible, with its chapter and verse format, is pretty gripping itself.

Another thing that occurred to me is how little politics has changed over the millennia.  Powerful families want to retain power and privilege.  They aren’t too concerned with religious niceties but they rely on the backing of religious authorities.  (The priesthood and monarchy were always a tag team for keeping power in “the proper place.”)  And a number of the characters are quite colorful, even if you wouldn’t want them in the Oval Office.  Outside that context they can be quite loved, or at least people love to hate them.  Immature boy kings, seductive queens, and armed conflict at the slightest provocation are parts of the story across the ages.  The truth of power in powerful families plays out even in democracies.  Consider father and son presidents from the Adams and Bush families, husband and wife (nearly), in the Clintons, and countless powerful families represented in the senate or in the house.

Politics never change. Image: Saul threatening David, by José Leonardo, public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Biblical tales are often more earthy than they might be supposed.  Viewed through the lens of faith, we’re willing to excuse behavior that wasn’t even condoned in that day: David’s adultery, (ahem) or literal political assassination (ahem).  Alas, poor Uriah.  The problem arises when these earthy texts are taken for something magical.  People still believe in magic.  Widely so.  This belief drives much of politics in two related nations far apart but bound together by a book.  Reading 1 Kings is a useful spiritual, and practical exercise.  We can learn much about how people behave.  The Good Book isn’t shy about the motivations either.  Sex, power, and fame drove leaders of antiquity even as they continue to do so today.  The Bible tells me so. 

Earnestly

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Christening.  The subject may sound old fashioned, but it was once, within Christendom, where a name was officially conferred.  These days a birth certificate, issued very shortly following a live birth, is the official record of name, but not so long ago religious authorities had the final word.  This came to mind upon seeing a local (Lehigh University) stage production of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest.  I’ve read the play before, but hadn’t seen a stage production.  As is likely widely known, the play’s title plays on the name Earnest.  Two characters, Jack and Algernon, both claim to be named Earnest only to learn that the women they’ve proposed to both insist on marrying a man whose name is indeed Earnest.  In order to remedy this situation, both men ask the local vicar to be christened, changing their names.

Names are chosen for us and given to us.  Although it is possible to change one’s name (I’ve done so twice), many consider this almost insulting to the parents who provided the name.  Since baptism, or christening, was so widely practiced in medieval Europe, this experience was fairly universal in western culture.  The Reformation eventually changed that; some traditions declared that a person had to be old enough to consent to baptism and you couldn’t very well wait until seven or eight to be given a name.  I was baptized in a river at about six or seven, and by then had learned my given name quite well.  Names become our identity.  I still recall the lines about names from another play, Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. “Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life! Because I lie and sign myself to lies! Because I am not worth the dust on the feet of them that hang! How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul; leave me my name!”  Thus spake John Proctor.

The Importance of Being Earnest is, of course, a satire.  Even the name of the priest, the Rev. Canon Chasuble, DD, is a joke.  A chasuble, in the ecclesiastical world, is the outer vestment worn by a priest who is the celebrant at a formal mass.  Clothes make the man, so the saying goes.  Those of us who write fiction often wrestle with names.  In my day job I quite often encounter what seem to be unbelievable names.  Names that, were I to put them into a novel, would earn the scorn of critics (assuming any) that it was made up.  So I enjoyed being earnest for an afternoon.

Accidentally Backward

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I watched Regression by accident.  “How is that possible?” you might ask.  Well, I don’t read up about movies before watching them.  These days I try to save money by streaming on services I pay for anyway, such as Amazon Prime.  I had identified The Tractate Middoth as a movie that I could see without knowing anything beyond that it was based on an M. R. James story and that it was only about half an hour long.  I clicked on it.  It struck me as strange that it began with a “based on true events” intertitle, but people will do anything to sell a movie, including saying fiction is fact.  Then I noticed that the production values were pretty substantial.  I began to wonder if there were two movies by that title.   About forty minutes later, I’m needing to take a restroom break and I’m thinking, this movie should be done by now but it feels like we’re in the middle of things.

After I flushed and clicked back in, the title “Regression” flashed across the top of the screen.  Well, that explained a lot.  I didn’t recall having read any M. R. James stories like what I was seeing.  Clearly my initial click had been off and I’d hit the movie next to, or above or below, the one I wanted to see.  With that level of investment, I figured I might as well watch the rest.  It wasn’t bad but it took me a while to reassess my expectations.  Regression is about how the Satanic ritual abuse scares of the 1990s were fueled by, well, regression therapy.  A girl in Minnesota is identified as having been ritually abused.  Her story convinces police, who use a therapist to do hypno-regression to uncover what “really happened.”  Soon even the cop in charge is seeing Satanists coming after him in his own house.

The movie isn’t great, but it’s not bad either.  It has enough Bible in it to have made the cut for Holy Horror (or Holy Sequel).  And it is religion-based horror.  It wasn’t what I was expecting to see, of course, but that can’t be blamed on the movie.  The Satanic panic was real and unfortunate.  The movie is probably more of a thriller than horror, and yes, I can accept that it was based on real incidents because the panic is well documented.  There is no Devil here.  There are also no Satanists.  The real culprit, the film implies, is the fundamentalist minister who first suspected the abuse.  It is something to think about, but it was no Tractate Middoth.

Demon Pop

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To be honest, I hadn’t even heard of KPop Demon Hunters.  The places I look for media advice generally don’t cover such fare.  I’m not into K-pop, Manga, or boy/girl bands.  Most of my media tends a bit towards the weightier side.  Now that I’ve sufficiently justified myself, my wife asked if I’d like to see it, pointing out that there were demons in it.  The concept seemed intriguing; Huntrix, a girl-band K-pop trio, hunt demons while building a protective barrier with their songs.  Then Gwi-Ma, the king of the demons agrees to a plan for a demonic boy band, the Saja Boys, to draw attention away from Huntrix, lessening their power and the protective shield they’ve built.  When demons get through they feast on the souls of humans.  Huntrix is hampered by the fact that Rumi, one of the singers, had a demon for a father and her bandmates, Mira and Zoey, do not know this.  When they find out, internal strife leads them to losing the battle of the bands.  Until they accept Rumi for who she is.

The story is well told, even for those of us who wouldn’t normally willingly listen to K-pop.  I appreciate stories of female empowerment.  And there are, after all, demons.  The concept of demons in eastern Asia is quite different from how they’re conceived in Abrahamic religions.  Gwi-Ma is not “the Devil,” although he shares some of those characteristics in this movie.  The demons are portrayed in monstrous form, and they are very numerous.  Since this is an animated film for audiences that include younger ages, they don’t reach horror-movie levels.  All in all, this wasn’t a bad diversion for an evening’s winding down.  It did make me think about the way demons differ not only across time, but across cultures.

As I discuss in Nightmares with the Bible, the concept of demons evolved over time in the western world.  Not all demons were bad in Greek thought, but monotheism made them evil.  Meanwhile further east in Asia, the concept—which may have developed independently—was more ambivalent.  Many years ago, while visiting my brother-in-law on the west coast, we watched an Anime movie about demons, but I’ve unfortunately forgotten the title.  Since this was about two decades ago, hope of recovering that data is minimal.  Still, I remember being affected by seeing it.  Of course, it wasn’t a musical.  Boy bands and girl bands seem not to have enough world-weariness to sing songs that resonate with me.  I guess I have my own demons with which to struggle.

Oh Deere

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Strange Harvest seems to have impressed a number of viewers, but for someone attuned to religion and horror it rang false.  The Lovecraftian elements appear with the idea of a serial killer who’s the devotee of an unfamiliar god.  The story is presented as a documentary, interviewing the detectives who resolved the case, intercut with crime scene footage—often quite graphic and gory—and trying to get to the bottom of this case.  So a guy named Leslie Sykes has been killing people in San Bernardino county since 1995.  He took a hiatus in his killing spree to go to Jerusalem, after seeing something in a cave while out hiking and experiencing a religious mania.  From Jerusalem he goes to Damascus and then into Europe, learning about religions, apparently, before stealing a grimoire from a bookshop in Germany.  He’s pretty clearly trying to raise an unorthodox deity, but the police don’t connect the dots.

After his years’ long absence, he starts killing again in order to have his last sacrifice ready when a rare triangular alignment of Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn will be visible with the naked eye.  He is stopped from his final murder attempt by the police, but witness cameras captured some strange cosmic event starting to unfold as the final victim is about to be immolated.  I’m not a fan of this kind of movie but what really made it seem less authentic was the stitched together nature of this religion.  It is never spelled out, it is true, but what is shown does not seem to add up to any coherent system.  The movie does an effective job of creating a scary sociopathic killer, but it implies that the religion responsible is real.  A religion of one, however, isn’t really a religion at all.

Again, critics seem to have liked this but I found the actions of the police inscrutable and the grotesque methods of torture and execution unequal to the task of suggesting how these might be connected into even a psychotic religious outlook.  The only thing that seems to connect them is an occult symbol left behind at the crime scenes.  The letters from the killer to the police are read only in part, and that by some kind of synth voice that’s probably meant to make them sound sinister.  This kind of horror can work, but in general, creating new religions is not as easy as it looks.  Lovecraftian isn’t a bad choice, but drawing the threads a little more closely together could’ve helped a lot.

Funerals

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Attending the funeral of a teen is a somber experience.  I can’t even begin to imagine what tempests the parents are facing.  After having given my condolences last night, I became reflective.  My thoughts went back to my teenage years.  First of all, there was that disturbing song, “Seasons in the Sun.”  The Terry Jacks rendition was popular during my teen years and it haunted me even then.  Perhaps more influential in my own life was Alice Cooper’s album Welcome to My Nightmare.  And the context.  I was a somewhat sickly child.  Raised in the Fundamentalist camp, I thought about dying quite a lot.  I became comfortable with the idea.  In seventh grade I missed a lot of school, having come down with the flu, then chicken pox, then a flu relapse.  And yet another bout.  Lying at home, feeling sick, having had pneumonia as a kid, I’d listen to Cooper repeatedly and read the Bible.

One of the lines from that concept album that stood out to me was one of the spoken interludes.  “I don’t want to see you die, but if that’s the way that God has planned you…”  God has planned you.  There was a fatalism there that in the context gave me a strange sort of hope.  I listened to it over and over again.  Our teenage years are when we’re just starting to get a sense of what our lives might be.  Most of the time our expectations don’t match reality, and sometimes reality is simply outside of our hands, such as a with an incurable disease.  Back to “Seasons in the Sun.”  I found myself without the words I felt I needed to console the parents.  I realize my view is the odd one out.

Early in my own life, I found myself of a philosophical bent.  I wanted to know what the meaning of life was.  I guess I was looking for instructions.  Probably my senior year in high school I discovered existentialism.  I identified with that school, especially after learning that Søren Kierkegaard was a Christian existentialist.  That seemed to mean it was okay.  Existentialists believe “existence precedes essence”—we make our own meaning.  Life has been a lesson in that as I studied and worked in religion, which should be some consolation, for over half a century.  The skies are silent regarding the meaning we attribute to our lives.  The song on Welcome to My Nightmare continues, “You’ve only lived a minute of your life.”  And those words come back to me now.