Spliced

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Predictably, I watched Splice again after reading the novelization by Claire Donner.  It is, as I indicated in my post on the book, a sad story.  During this rewatch, a few things stood out.  First and foremost, how many times you must rewatch a film to pull off writing the novel.  Either that, or hit the pause button constantly.  When I was writing Holy Horror I did both of those things quite a lot.  A detail you want to catch, and you have to see what’s on the screen.  I’d pause a scene and put my face right next to the screen, seeing individual pixels.  You have to know your stuff.  Another factor is that actors really do have influence on your understanding of character motivation.  An ambiguous look for the camera comes away pregnant with meaning in the novelization.

The emotional life of the characters is really filled in, in print.  The movie felt like it was going too fast.  That’s a finger on the pulse of reading a book versus watching a movie.  For a writer a movie deal can be a real boon but often you read about how they dislike the results.  That’s really no surprise.  A book takes time to read and you reflect as you go.  Movies hit you with constantly shifting images.  Both can be powerful media, but in different ways.  Another thing I noticed (I hadn’t seen the movie for thirteen years before reading the book) is that the mental image I’d formed of the characters was quite different from what the actors looked like.  

In the introduction to the novelization, screenwriter and director Vincenzo Natali notes that he likes how Donner explores Dren’s inner life.  Dren, in case you’ve not read or watched, is the hybrid.  Indeed, that is an element largely missing from the movie.  Some critics suggested that it should’ve explored that more.  For many of us, emotion is a major motivating factor of life.  We are frequently driven by our feelings, and, despite what AI says, they are integral in our thought process.  What was going through the mind of a creature, part human, with no parents?  I know that having grown up not really knowing my father left deep impressions, voids, in my life.  The novelization explores these kinds of things for all the main principals.  In my opinion, reading the book enhances watching the movie.  Of course, I’ve always been on the book side of the equation to begin with.  

Novelization

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I watched the sci-fi horror film Splice a few years ago.  Long enough that I don’t recall many details.  When Claire Donner, a friend of mine from Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies, told me she’d written a novelization of Splice, I knew I had to read it.  If you’ve seen the movie then you know the story.  If you haven’t, you can read it in her book.  I don’t often read novelizations—I read the one for Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow, and as a young person read the original three Star Wars novelizations.  Such books really only apply to movies not already based on a novel, of course.  They give the reader a path into the inner lives of the characters.  Naturally, now I have to watch Splice again to see it through Donner’s lens.  The basic idea, if you want some encouragement, is that a couple of scientists add some human DNA into a gene-spliced animal being lab grown for enzymes to fight disease.

In the rawest sense, this is the story of Frankenstein for a more technological crowd.  Like Frankenstein, it is a sad story.  And like said sad story, it involves reproduction without two human parents.  The real builder this time, however, is Elsa and Donner gives considerable development to her motivations and thought process.  (I’m very curious to know if I can see that in the movie or not.)  Clive, her partner, isn’t aware of the source of the human DNA.  The spliced creature grows into the passably human Dren, who finds herself asking the questions Frankenstein’s creature asked about his own existence.  Like said creature, Dren has to be hidden away, and controlled.  At the same time, she is evolutionarily superior to her maker.  There’s a lot to see here, folks!

Having written a fair bit of fiction in my time, I do wonder what it might be like to do a novelization.  I suspect most of us, if a movie is well made, decide on the motivations of characters but how often do we delve into their inner lives?  I’m not sure that I do that most of the time.  When I write fiction I do it all the time.  I want to know my characters and why they are the way they are.  Sometimes they remain mysteries to me, but that doesn’t prevent me from trying.  This novelization is deftly done, and approved by the screenwriter/director.  And the deep motivations make the scenario plausible.  If you haven’t seen Splice you might enjoy doing so.  And then read the novel.  Or the other way around.

Freedom

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This year has been marked by small clusters of holidays.  I wrote about Friday the 13th, St. Valentine’s Day, and President’s Day occurring the same weekend back in February.  Then in March, I noted we had a second Friday the 13th, the weekend before St. Patrick’s Day.  Here in June we find another cluster as today is Juneteenth—an important holiday finally recognized—and Sunday is both the summer solstice and Father’s Day.  Now, Father’s Day is always a conflicted day for me.  My father was largely absentee, and an alcoholic when present and accounted for.  For many of my childhood years we didn’t know where he was.  I always have difficulty feeling mad at him, though, because his self-sabotage wasn’t malicious in any way.  He was a man overwhelmed by what life threw at him.  Besides, mothers, it seems to me, give a lot more of themselves than fathers do.  But today’s Juneteenth.

Photo by Zulmaury Saavedra on Unsplash

Those with skin darker than pink folk have a more difficult time in the society we’ve built.  With open racism in the White House the struggle has been set back many years.  One thing I sometimes feel personally, having grown up poor, is that disadvantage of any kind is difficult to overcome.  Who, after all, seeks to make friends with someone who’s poor?  What’s the advantage in that?  Sometimes capitalism seems to be the ultimate evil where even people are commodities to be sold.  Human Resources, we call it.  Human capital.  Human assets.  Meanwhile our economic system has birthed us all a new trillionaire just a few days ago.  Juneteenth is an important reminder.  Human beings are not chattels to be bought and sold.  How people who’d ever read the gospels could allow that, I simply can’t fathom.

These holiday clusters occur now and again, like the alignment of the planets along the ecliptic.  They give us time to pause and ponder.  Are we really going the right direction?  Are we lost and unwilling to admit it?  Deep down, all but sociopaths know that all people deserve fair treatment.  Some people are unable to take care of themselves.  Juneteenth reminds us that simply seeing them as some “other,” some “not me,” and steeling ourselves against their needs is a high moral infraction.  It’s close kin to murder.  We are the ones who built this system.  We have the power to change it.  Juneteenth reminds us that anyone who openly, or even discreetly, believes that one race is better than another has no business telling others what to do.  The longest day is coming, if only we’d use it to consider what we’re doing.

Forever Young

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It’s strange.  People my age (and younger) are retiring.  It’s strange because in my head I’m still a teenager.  The mirror lies to me when I glance at it.  I’m not a guy old enough to have colleagues I’ve known for thirty years retiring.  Not me.  This hit me kind of suddenly at work.  One of the things an editor has to do is arrange for peer reviews.  One of my usual sources for reviewers has been showing names I don’t recognize, as of late.  Look, I was never some super-professor, but I knew quite a few of those who worked in biblical studies.  The same names would come around year after year at conferences.  They would age, but I would not.  I was still the same guy, teaching at Nashotah House, publishing articles, chatting with friends.  Where have they gone?

I recently saw a survey to which some colleagues I know and trust had responded.  They listed themselves as “late career.”  How is that possible?  I still work 9-2-5 and likely will until I die.  Who are these young people taking their places at the table?  Our minds, it seems, are as Bob Dylan termed it, forever young.  We remember, however imperfectly, our younger selves as we discover our lives entangled in work and other complications, and our bodies aging.  Me, I’m still trying to get through each day, just like I was in college.  Just like I was in high school.  Awaiting some ill defined destination where I might be able to relax for a while.  Like I could when I was young.  Before capitalism got its hooks in me.  Before AI.

Consciousness is a strange thing.  Our thought processes are formed by early experiences in our lives and we spend most of the rest of our time on earth reacting to them.  Our brains evolved to help us survive.  We do this communally (which is why Trumpism, tearing communities apart, is so dangerous).  I couldn’t survive with my desk job if many people—most of them younger than me these days—didn’t contribute to this experiment we call society.  I sometimes see people born the same year that I was and think, “they’re old.”  Why doesn’t that apply to me?  It’s not that I want to feel old, but rather that I’m still looking for the things I was seeking as a young person.  Financial security, books, love and acceptance.  And trying to avoid tedious tasks—there do seem to be more and more of those as you age.  I’ll have to ask some people who are old if that’s true.

Shocking Development

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With life being lived on the internet, electricity is now as important as food and shelter.  We bought our house going on eight years ago.  The former owner claimed to be an electrician and, based on his mail that we’re still receiving, has his own electrical business.  First-time buyers, we didn’t know to be skeptical.  It didn’t help that the home inspector we’d hired bowed out a week in advance of closing and we had to hire someone with no recommendation on the fly.  He said nothing about the electrical box (and many other flaws that should’ve been spotted and reported).  We started having some electrical issues soon after moving in.  We found a local electrician (not the former owner) who was friendly and once saved us by returning to the house as night was falling and hooking up the power so we could have heat (this was in a November).

Before picture

When the power went out completely in April, and the electric company said there were no issues on their end, we decided we’d better have the whole system checked out.  We hired from a larger, regional company.  These guys were good.  After being here for only half an hour they’d found the problem, and it was a big one.  The mast, or conduit, on the side of the house hadn’t been properly installed.  Water had been seeping into the breaker box and several of the breakers had rusted.  The repair cost was mighty, but it would be done correctly.  This led to a chilly April day without heat, but they did supply a line that let us work by powering the router, and kept the fridge cold.  They were here for ten hours.  For the first time since moving in, we have an uncompromised electrical system.

What makes all of this so strange is that we had been trusting of the seller that he knew what he was doing electrically.  As laypeople, we had no way to assess this, and the inspector apparently didn’t as well.  The good electricians (the most recent) suggested that our former electrician was afraid to tell us the real cost of doing the job right, and had decided to cut corners.  He may have been acting out of kindness.  Or he may not have been able to see the problem from a larger view.  So we’re poorer, but wiser.  And we have power.  As long as the electric company can be trusted to keep up its end of the deal, we shouldn’t run into internet access problems.  And that’s life itself.

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.

Facing Identity Crisis

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It was one of those periods when time fails to work properly to keep major events spaced out.  We had three major economic events hit us simultaneously and unexpectedly.  Two of them required financing and yet a third involved the government and trying to get our taxes filed.  In any case, I tend to need chronological space to keep these things discrete and make sure I can pay them.  After all of this was done I realized that “secure” information is being collected by all kinds of places these days.  The thing that really got me was that two of them, including the federal government, involved facial recognition software.  In order to confirm my identity I had to hold up my phone and smile pretty for the camera.  Since I can’t speak for the experience of others, I had to wonder if maybe this was because I filed a report of a major scam last year.

I don’t trust AI at all (sorry Al), and governments that collect facial recognition data scare me.  I couldn’t complete my taxes without doing it, though.  A few years ago when I was volunteering for an organization (I can’t recall which one) I had to have my fingerprints put on record.  I thought that was pretty invasive.  I’ve never committed a crime (at least that I’m aware of) and I’ve never been arrested.  Having your fingerprints on record, and your face imprinted in databases certainly makes it feel like it.  Especially since doppelgängers do exist.  On my first visit to Kentucky in the 1980s to help a friend move, the local people all insisted that I was John’s son, a spitting image.  Would Al know the difference?

Once, at Nashotah House, during an accrediting team visit, I was struck by the fact that one of the assessors was a near-perfect doppelgänger of myself.  So much so that when I showed my young daughter a picture I found of him on the nascent web and asked her “Who’s that?” she replied without hesitation “Daddy.”  The facial recognition capacity of kids is pretty keen.  I don’t put a ton of trust in technology.  Of course, the software is probably measuring things like pore depth and nostril hairs.  In neither case did I have the chance to comb my hair and make sure nothing green was stuck in my teeth.  Besides, my face is in a number of spots on this blog.  It doesn’t get as many hits as our finances took in that period when time broke down, but I guess my face is now officially recognized.

Big Feet

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It’s a strangely affecting film.  Among certain groups, Sasquatch Sunset was discussed long before it was released.  I knew it was categorized as a comedy, and that it featured a Bigfoot family, otherwise I knew nothing about it.  When it finally came to a streaming service, with commercials, I convinced my wife to watch it one weekend evening.  I was surprised how deeply it invaded my dreams.  It was still stuck in my head when I awoke the next morning.  Now, movies will sometimes do that to you, but it’s difficult to say why this one does so.  First of all, there’s no dialogue at all.  No “humans” are shown in the film.  The Sasquatch—parents, a child, and an another adult male—communicate by grunts and howls, but you soon begin to feel for them.

The plot, such as there is, is simple.  The movie follows the group through a year, during which two of them die.  The remaining Bigfoot bury them.  They are perplexed by the human intervention in the wilderness.  They have no permanent residence, but are nomadic.  They come across as road and it frightens them.  Then they find a tent.  And logged areas.  A leg-trap.  Finally they don’t know what to make of a Sasquatch statue that they find outside the Bigfoot Museum in Willow Creek, California.  The whole movie engenders a sense of loss.  Loss of the wilderness, and loss of connection with the natural world.  And, of course, there are many comic moments.  We see ourselves in Sasquatch, and since they are played by human actors, that’s only natural.  They play the parts midway between ape and human, which is oddly disturbing.  All of this acted without words somehow forces concentration, and stays in your head.

Bigfoot has become less of a taboo subject in my lifetime.  Sasquatch outdoor statuary has become common.  The cryptid adorns whimsical tchotchkes and even Christmas tree ornaments.  Although they aren’t recognized by mainstream science, some prominent scientists have cast their vote with the “may exist” camp.  Reports of sightings continue to grow as the ridicule factor declines.  It’s a topic, however, still best handled with some humor.  The 1987 Harry and the Hendersons, which wasn’t as good as Sasquatch Sunset, was also a comedy.  Stephen Spielberg was an executive producer of Harry but kept his name out of the credits, even though he directed UFO movies.  Ari Aster is one of the executive producers of Sasquatch Sunset.  The topic’s becoming more mainstream, and this is  one of those movies, I warn you, that may get stuck in your head.

Things Lost

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Here’s an honest question, and if anyone can answer, please do. Why is it that software can’t keep track of the latest version of anything? Let me put some legs on that. I recently backed up my files to “the Cloud.” When I went to open one of them, the version that was backed up was several months old, not the one I’d worked on (and backed up) that very day.  I looked on my back-up hard drive, likewise backed up that day.  Both only showed files from several months ago.  This was for an app that doesn’t even have a “save” option because it saves automatically.  How can this happen?  I’m having trouble understanding.  Do I leave my files open too long?  (It takes quite some time to write a book.)

Then someone in my family used my laptop for a minute and closed my browser with all my tabs open.  No problem.  I went to “restore all tabs from last session.”  The tabs that appeared were over a month old.  No record anywhere of the tabs I’d kept open as reminders more recently.  What is it about software that makes this so very hard to do?  My laptop’s losing data like a sieve.  To make matters interesting, in a different context after all this, someone had moved and renamed a folder I’d created on a shared drive.  They didn’t bother telling me this, so to all appearances, the folder had been deleted.  I even did a windows search, and nothing showed up with the folder name at all.  I had to get IT involved.  While they were investigating someone finally (at my prompting) admitted that the file had been moved and renamed.  This, on top of my losing my own data at home was a lot for a single day.  (Of course, even bigger issues were about to show up that I had no idea were coming.  Expensive issues.)

Whatever my mental condition is (I don’t have an official label for it), I tend to get overwhelmed when I can’t find something.  My memory isn’t that of a thirty-year-old but I have excellent recall as to where I store important things (like my writing).  Not being able to find it drives me frantic.  I’m not wealthy and the only real asset I have is my mind and I write things down so that thoughts that mind has won’t get lost.  The Cloud seems pretty good at doing that for me.  I’m a believer in backing things up.  Data loss can be devastating.  I just wish I knew how to avoid it.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Bad Boy

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I’m still trying to figure out what I think about it.  The introduction by Grady Hendrix got me interested in the novels of Ken Greenhall.  The introduction was in Hell Hound and it described how Greenhall’s books whispered horror rather than shouted it.  That’s also true of the horror stories I write, and it’s clear I still have plenty to learn.  Baxter is a bull terrier whose thoughts are recorded for part of each chapter in this short book.  What we read isn’t terribly welcome.  Baxter is aware and intolerant of human weakness and he has a strong will.  So strong that he uses it to get people he doesn’t care for out of his way.  At the same time, as the story unfolds, you can’t see Baxter as evil.  He obeys his nature but he has morals.  Spoilers follow.

His first owner, an old woman with little joy in life, is his first victim.  He’s adopted by a young couple but they’re about to become parents and when they do his jealousy appears in the worst way.  They couple give him away to a young boy who aspires to be a Nazi.  A fan of Hitler, he appreciates Baxter for his power and his, as he thinks, killer instinct.  But Baxter doesn’t kill for the sake of it.  Misguided as he might be, his kills all have a purpose.  The boy is a bit different.  He demonstrates his callousness by trying to have Baxter kill another boy.  Then the Nazi kills the pups Baxter has sired.  The two face off and the story is written well enough that you find yourself hoping that Baxter will prevail.  But alas, opposable thumbs do give a fatal advantage.

It’s unclear by the final chapter how much, if at all, the boy has changed.  He knows how to manipulate others and his own interest is what guides his actions.  It’s kind of a bleak story in the end.  It is, however, well told and compelling.  Greenhall wasn’t known much during his life, but he did manage what’s rather difficult today—he had a series of novels published.  He died over a decade ago and is now starting to be recovered.  That’s often the sign of quality writing.  Those who make an impact are often overlooked in their own time.  Hell Hound isn’t my favorite horror novel, but it is a strangely affective and effective one.  And it shows that dread need not take place over many hundreds of pages to work.  I’ll likely be coming back to Ken Greenhall for more.

Things Seen

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I disagree with the critics on this one.  Things Heard & Seen is a remarkable horror film.  That’s not to say it’s without its flaws, but it is quite engrossing for the right kind of viewer.  It has elements of dark academia, as well as ghosts and a respectful treatment of Swedenborg.  And it takes place in the Hudson Valley (the headless horseman is even mentioned once).  The Bible appears both visually and is quoted.  In short, it encapsulates many of my personal interests.  And it’s not badly made.  There will be spoilers here, but it’s difficult to discuss religion and horror without them.  George Claire married Catherine because he got her pregnant.  He has, however, finished his doctorate and been offered a post at Saginaw College, in the Hudson Valley.  It quickly becomes clear that George is an entitled, self-centered liar (sounds familiar).

As the story unfolds, both Catherine and their daughter Franny see ghosts.  George dismisses them but even at the college the head of his department is a Swedenborgian and tells him not to dismiss the spiritual world.  George’s true character starts showing through.  He cheats on his wife.  He forged his letter of support from his Columbia doctoral advisor because his work was substandard.  When a fellow faculty member finds out, he runs her off the road, putting her into a coma.  He drowns his department head while boating on the Hudson because he also learned the truth.  He even claims to have painted pictures done by his brother.  In other words, he’s a real piece of work.  The ghosts aren’t able to save his wife when he murders her, but his colleague comes out of her coma and spills the beans.

In the end, George sails away into a Thomas Cole painting where a Swendenborgian ending overtakes him.  The use of Swedenborg adds an etherial element to the film, figuring thoughtfulness to what otherwise might be just another story about an unhinged academic.  The department head’s advice about seeing death in a Swedenborgian way was also strangely affecting.  In other words, this is thoughtful horror.  And once again it demonstrates that religion can be crucial to understanding what we really fear.  I suppose some critics dislike the unambiguous use of ghosts and the supernatural breaking into “reality,” but that seems to be precisely the point.  I only learned of this movie because Netflix recommended it, but they hit on several major themes in my work over the past several years.  I would watch this one again.

Access Denied

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We like to pride ourselves on our levels of knowledge obtained.  But access to it is limited to the club.  I’ve run into this several times since being booted from academia.  I still research and write books.  They sell like academic books (not well), but I am blocked from academic resources.  I was attempting to access an article in a book from an academic press, named here nevermore, only to find every path blocked.  I had to verify that I was human a time or two, but being human isn’t enough.  You need to be a wealthy human.  I went to Academia.edu.  The author hadn’t posted the chapter.  It was posted on Research Gate, but to request a PDF I had to have an institutional email, which I do not.  I tried Internet Archive, which has saved me many times.  They didn’t have a full view and the link to the book told me I could purchase for a mere $150.

I know other academic presses that do this.  Limit the knowledge to those in institutions that can pay such high fees.  Academia is becoming more and more privileged all the time.  I get it.  You can’t just give the stuff away.  Whenever possible I post my articles for free on Academia.  I wrote them to be read, not to be tucked away and inaccessible as the world made love to the electronic revolution.  Not all scholars think that way.  And academic presses charge prices that can only be described as exploitative.  It’s as if they think we’re all paid like professors are.  Privileged.  And this pains me.  As a former professor I know that not all academics are paid well.  We’re in it for the knowledge.  But once you lose that academic email, it’s access denied for you.

Sadly, I’m not the only one in this category.  There’s an entire generation of us who’ve been thrown from the ivory tower.  Here’s the thing: your curiosity doesn’t die just because you’re not called “Professor” any more.  Maybe this is why I enjoy dark academia so much.  The truth is that there is something very wrong with our higher educational system.  University presses, stressed to make money when everyone just asks some AI that was never human and has no knowledge for an answer to a difficult question.  There used to be a way to find that answer through the hard work of research.  And when you were done you had the pride of accomplishment.  Now all that we have is access denied.

Medical Emergency

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Fire drills.  We’ve all been through them.  When an alarm goes off legitimately, people don’t know what to do.  At least not at first.  I was accompanying my wife for a routine colonoscopy.  We were in the recovery room, and she was still coming out of anesthesia when I thought I smelled something chemical-like, almost the caustic kind of petroleum-product smell with none of the sweet undertones.  Now, I have no idea what they use in facilities like that, so I said nothing.  About fifteen minutes later the fire alarm went off.  My wife had already gotten dressed, thank goodness.  The staff was all walking around, apologizing to everyone for the noise.  After about five minutes, the surgeon came over and said, “We have to go outside.  Let me go over this briefly.”  He did and I helped my wife down the stairs and outside.  Firetrucks came.

This was something new in my experience.  Hospitals and clinics are buildings, with all the usual limitations of physical structures with complex machinery in them.  I’d never been in one when an alarm went off before.  There’s always a period of disbelief among staff as well as patients.  I wondered what they did with those in the midst of a colonoscopy.  They’re in a somewhat delicate condition to be rolled outside (and it was none too warm that day).  I can imagine how I might’ve panicked had my wife not yet been in recovery.  As it was, we thought we were clear to leave, so we just came home as others less fortunate stood outside awaiting the all clear.

Image credit: Jason Lawrence,  Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license, via Wikimedia Commons

After a medical procedure we’re used to being able to ask questions.  Take your time.  Come out of anesthesia.  After we got home I could find nothing online about the incident.  It did seem to have “news story” written all over it.  Or “horror story.”  I’ve watched enough MASH to know that doctors sometimes work in less than ideal conditions.  And there must certainly be standard procedures for what to do when the unexpected happens.  Colonoscopies are one of those highly recommended procedures that compromise dignity like few others.  As such, being interrupted by a fire drill puts this particular procedure into a class of its own.  I never look forward to them (few do) but now it seems I have a new worry to add.  What was really missing was a sense of closure.  Too often these days transactions of all kinds are left open-ended.  As the firetrucks came we asked ourselves, is it okay to go?

Missed Movie

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It has been years since I read H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Dunwich Horror.”  I’d never seen this original movie made from it, often cited as being a reasonable adaptation of a Lovecraft story to film.  The visuals are sometimes impressive, but it is a slow moving, plodding movie.  It does, as far as I can recall, follow Lovecraft in general terms.  This is one of those movies that would’ve fit into Holy Horror for two basic reasons: it begins with a quote from the Bible and it has its own alternative sacred book, the Necronomicon.  In one scene the latter is explicitly compared to the Good Book.  Since religion didn’t enter horror in any kind of direct way until about 1968, this movie is an early example of how the two interact.  It came before The Exorcist.

The point is made at several junctures that the religion of the Whateleys is the antithesis of Christianity.  Indeed, the point of all Wilbur Whateley’s shenanigans is to raise the old gods.  Lovecraft, famously an atheist, used gods to set up his cosmic horror.  He’s also notoriously difficult to capture in movie form.  While Roger Corman was the executive producer he was not the director, and that may answer for the pacing.  Daniel Haller, the director, had worked with Corman before on some of his Poe Cycle films and had directed Die, Monster, Die, also a Lovecraft adaptation.  Lovecraft wasn’t a terribly cinematic writer.  His stories contain ideas that feel like they might fit on film, but executing them well is difficult.

For this movie, the house used for the Whateley residence is fitting.  It helps create a sense of dread.  The basic idea of the flick is that Wilbur needs a virginal victim to help summon the old gods.  He lures Nancy Wagner to his house where she falls under the influence of drugged tea.  There’s an intriguing glass sculpture that is never fully explained.  As Nancy begins to lose her will, her friends come to find her, and one of them is killed by Wilbur’s inhuman twin that had also killed their mother during birth.  Once released, this monstrous progeny begins killing locals (the locals hate the Whateleys) and is poised to take Nancy until a guest lecturer at Miskatonic University bests Wilbur in spells recited from the Necronomicon, saving the girl and dooming the last Whateley.  The family line ends.  Until it is rather heavy-handedly shown that Nancy is pregnant by Wilbur, so the unwholesome Whateley genealogy continues.  The visuals aren’t bad, but the story is lacking.  Still, it’s part of the canon, so I needed to see it and it used religion to intrigue me.

Field Hockey

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Friends recommended We Ride Upon Sticks by Quan Barry.  I’m glad they did.  A woman-empowering novel, it ties together so many important things: what it’s like to grow up as a girl, what it means to trust other people, and the importance of believing in yourself.  My experience of reading it as a man at times made me want to apologize for my sex.  So many guys have trouble reining it in and that leads many women to feeling uncomfortable, or even threatened.  The book’s also a great story of awakening to who you really are.  Set in Danvers, Massachusetts in the late 1980s, it’s the tale of the girl’s field hockey team and their “deal with the devil” to win the state championship after being a team having a reputation for losing.  The eleven players on the team are sketched so wonderfully that you get a good idea of that many distinct protagonists.

There is a tie-in with the Salem Witch Trials—much of which actually played out in Danvers.  Although the assumed implication is that the girls begin winning because they’ve made a pact with the darkness, the story doesn’t give it up that easily.  There’s a subtlety at play here and even if you’ve never been on a sports team, the sense of camaraderie is palpable.  The real magic comes in believing in yourself.  Barry is eloquent about such life and how it can change you during the difficult period of adolescence.  I’m always impressed with adult writers who can capture so well what coming-of-age feels like.  For many of us, I expect, there is a trauma associated with it.  Cultural expectations on young women are burdensome in so many ways.  At the same time this story is so well written that you hesitate to put it down.

While I never participated in high school or collegiate sports—I have no particular gifts in that regard—regular readers may find it difficult to believe that I played on the Nashotah House football team for a couple of years.  Lest you get the wrong idea, the seminary played one annual game of flag football against Seabury-Western Seminary in Chicago, styled as conservative vs. liberals.  I was younger, and in better physical shape than many of my students, so I made a team effort for a couple of years.  Still, the team spirit demonstrated in We Ride Upon Sticks is of an altogether different sort.  Fun and thoughtful at the same time.  It’s the kind of book I’m glad to have pointed out to me.