Spiraling

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I’m not the world’s biggest manga fan, so when I post about it it’s a safe bet a friend lent me a book.  This happened a few years back with Kouta Hirano’s Hellsing series I blogged my way through.  (I don’t own the books so please don’t come knocking at my door.)  Another friend recently let me Junji Ito’s Uzumaki.  I lack the finer points of manga (or anime, for that matter) interpretation, but I see the appeal.  Both of these series are horror, and my friends know that I read and watch horror.  Uzumaki is fascinating in the sheer number of ways it involves both body horror and folk horror.  There will likely be spoilers here, so be warned.  It’s all about spirals.  At first I had difficulty seeing how they could be made scary, but there are some seriously disturbing images in this work, if you read through the entire collection.

The story follows Kirie Goshima and her boyfriend Shuichi Saito and their life in Kurouzu-Cho, a town infested with spirals.  The spirals become the vehicle of horror as some people go insane because of them, but others twist into spirals, or have spirals cut into their bodies, or become jack-in-the-boxes, or grow into snails with spirals on their backs, or turn into vampires because of umbilical cords.  The town is plagued with hurricanes and tornadoes.  The ancient lighthouse’s beam becomes an incinerating spiral.  There’s no way out of the town because all exits spiral back into it.  People who stay in the old houses in town twist into each other’s spiral bodies.  That kind of thing.  Kirie (and her family) and Shuichi try to escape but end up surviving until it becomes clear that an ancient spiral culture still has a grip on the town and it will never let go.

As a kid, much to my mother’s chagrin, I used to read American horror comics.  Some of them contained images frightening to a child.  I really wasn’t expecting that this could be replicated on an adult level, but I’m willing to admit I was wrong.  Uzumaki  is compelling as horror.  Creative and bizarre, the comic shows what can be done with a concept that is pressed for more and more ways of developing fear from something otherwise quite benign.  Junji Ito has an eye for horror and my limited exposure to manga makes me think I’d be open to borrowing more of it.  If I can fit it into my spiraling schedule.

Stone Children

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I’m indebted to a friend for pointing out the folk horror nature of the 1977 UK children’s television series Children of the Stones, broadcast on ITV.  Folk horror is firmly tied to place and often involves ancient religions clashing with modern ones.  The term was coined to describe three horror movies of the late sixties and early seventies: Witchfinder General, The Blood on Satan’s Claw, and The Wicker Man.  Most discussions don’t go as far as to include children’s programming, but they should.  Children of the Stones consists of seven half-hour episodes which can be, thankfully, found freely on the internet.  Set in the fictional Milbury, but filmed in the actual Avebury, the story revolves around the famous stone circle located there.  Astrophysics Professor Adam Blake and his teenage son Matthew travel to Milbury for research but soon find themselves in a disturbing scenario.

Nearly all of the villagers are incapable of experiencing negative emotions.  What’s more, they can never leave the stone circle.  The stones possess a great energy and Matthew is psychometric—he can sense accurate knowledge of a place or time by touching an object associated with a person at that place and time.  His father, naturally, is skeptical, but when Matthew and his new friend Sandra realize their friend Kevin has changed—he is one of the Happy Ones and suddenly very good at higher mathematics—they piece together a cosmic mystery that involves the stone circle, an ancient religion, and astronomical events from long ago.  There are many horror elements along the way.  People are turned to stone.  Villagers are brainwashed.  Nobody can leave.  The soundtrack was deliberately disturbing as well.  The solution ends up involving time loops as well, so this is heady stuff.

Since the series clocks in at three-and-a-half hours, it really doesn’t fit movie length.  At least not comfortably.  And it contains fairly disturbing themes for children.  Then again, children tend to like scary things; parents are the ones to object to it.  Building on the mythology of the druids and the megalithic structures in and around Avebury, the series maintains a fascination for adults, even if the action is set at kid level.  I was able to get it watched in a week since the episodes allowed for natural breaks in the story.  If my friend hadn’t pointed it out to me, I’d probably never have discovered it on my own.  It’s a pity it isn’t discussed more by those who analyze folk horror.  It is, after all, fun for kids of all ages.

A Matter of Trust

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I used to write everything by hand.  We bought a used typewriter when I was in high school, and when I was in seminary I graduated to one of those strange devices that would print, like a typewriter, but had an LCD on the keyboard so that you could back up several characters before it printed.  This let you proofread while on the go.  I write a lot.  It may be a form of sickness, but I have hundreds of story ideas and little time to develop them.  Now I write on a computer but I’ve begun to lose trust.  It’s not just the whole AI debacle.  No, it’s that even with frequent backups, computers just lose things.  After having my hard drive wiped following a scam last year, I began work on some documents that I had to back up to the Cloud when the USB C ports on my laptop went bad.

After the repair was done I could download my files and pick up where I left off.  In theory.  I was working away on a new story and thought that I might be able to connect it to an earlier story I’d started.  Looking at the file, I remembered that the tale was much further along when I’d left off.  Where was it?  I looked on the Cloud version and it was the same as the one on my hard drive.  Then a larger project came along.  I went to start it again and discovered many, many pages missing.  Again, the Cloud shrugged its nebulus shoulders saying “I dunno…”. I pulled out my back-up disc.  (This was in April.)  I tried going back to January.  Same thing.  December.  Ditto.  Finally, my last backup in November had the full files.  Why these files didn’t backup to the Cloud, when done by a professional at the Apple Store, I can’t fathom.

What was especially disturbing is that one of the files (which I duplicated and put back on my hard drive, where they belong) showed that I’d completely reorganized things in a much clearer way.  After the laptop came home from the hospital, I’d forgotten (I’m not young and I’d been using a borrowed device for a few days).  I’d probably just picked up a story and, with my usual tunnel vision, began writing.  Not unrelatedly, I’ve been going through a spate of printing out any stories far enough along to warrant such treatment.  From what I’ve seen of the housekeeping on the Cloud, I’m glad I’ve been doing so.  I miss writing by hand.

Jurassic Horror

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We recently decided to watch Jurassic Park again.  When I was younger, I often wondered why Stephen Spielberg was passed over for academy awards.  His movies always seem to be popular and they’re well made.  I think now that I’m starting to get a better sense of the subtleties that award juries use.  In any case, Jurassic Park still holds up remarkably well.  The reason I raise it here, however, is that I was wondering if it could be considered a horror movie.  Casting about for weekend viewing, I see that various streaming services list the available Jurassic franchise films as horror.  And there are certainly horror elements to the original.  Dinosaurs in a modern setting have been used as a horror formula before, and a PG rating isn’t sufficient to disqualify a film as horror.  Is Jurassic Park horror?

It certainly has the Frankensteinian mad scientist element.  The decision to clone dinosaurs without sufficient consideration of how they might interact with/destroy modern humans and ecosystems has horror undertones.  More directly, a t-rex, and in the movie, velociraptors, are portrayed as monsters.  Don’t dinosaurs qualify as monsters, almost by definition?  The scenes of them stalking and pursuing kids, as well as adults, and the fear reaction shots suggest we’re going for the horror aspect of movies.  The film includes dismemberment, dark corners, and screams.  Typically it’s considered an adventure film, or science fiction.  The science in it, however, isn’t too far advanced from where things stood in the nineties.  Horror is a genre with indistinct borders.  Even as an adult who’s seen it several times, Jurassic Park still scares me.

The point of horror need not be to scare, of course.  I keep coming back to Edgar Allan Poe’s idea of effect.  It’s mood that makes horror, in my opinion.  One of those moods may be fear, but it isn’t necessarily the main, or even primary effect sought.  Believability is another of the moods.  I’m sure we’ve all seen movies that we simply can’t accept and that makes them less of whatever genre they happen to be.  Jurassic Park, apart from the usual leaps in any speculative story, is believable.  People do try to game the system.  As both the internet and AI teach us, people do release untested inventions on the public, sometimes with tragic results.  And while cloning remains controversial, is it difficult to believe that there might be scientists somewhere who wouldn’t love to clone dinosaurs, if they could actually get viable DNA?  To me this all says horror.

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.

Old Passion

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Something I find inherently fascinating revolves around used books.  I buy used books and I always examine the overlooked scraps of paper that get left between the pages.  Mostly it’s random ephemera, but it is the window into a stranger’s life.  They had this bit of paper lying around to mark their place.  Had I the time I’d piece together the puzzle.  Recently, while preparing to donate some books to the local AAUW book sale, I found a scrap of paper in one of my own books.  This was from the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, based on the date in my wife’s handwriting: 3-19-04.  It’s an Associated Press story from Statesboro, Georgia, involving a dust-up between a married couple after watching The Passion of the Christ.  That makes it interesting in its own right, but what’s especially striking is the couple battled, including a pair of scissors, over whether “God the Father in the Holy Trinity was human or symbolic.”  Things got out of hand.

For context, I was still teaching at Nashotah House at the time.  Theological debates, sometimes heated, took place there on a regular basis.  People get very fired up over what they believe.  This may set our species apart from other thinking animals, or perhaps it’s part of the price we pay for abstract thought.  You almost want to step between the warring spouses and say, “let us handle this, we’re professionals.”  Of course, the species of specialist that has studied theology is dying out.  Universities are cutting religious studies departments.  Churches are losing members.  Better hide the scissors.

“Passion” is the operative word here.  We get quite attached to our views.  So much so that no amount of logic or rational discourse can dislodge them.  We see this with the utter devotion to political leaders and on-screen personalities as well as to religious beliefs.  Some of us were curious enough to study where these ideas came from and how we know that they’re “true.”  This is not for the faint of heart.  Testing your core assumptions can lead you into some very unfamiliar, unmapped territories.  And since religion deals with ultimate concerns, the stakes couldn’t be higher.  Our couple felt silly after the police had been called and the bail paid.  Passion is very much what drives our species, and perhaps others as well.  We feel we need what we believe to be true, and we’re willing to fight for it.  Even if it means, as the chief sheriff’s deputy remarked, they seem to have missed the point of religion in the first place.

Failed Horror

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In general I’m not one for stopping a movie, even if it makes me uncomfortable.  I have what is perhaps a bad habit of not reading about movies before watching them, and occasionally that leads to problems.  Combined with my interest in watching films that I don’t have to pay for (i.e. they stream on services I use, or commercial sites like Tubi) this sometimes leads to bad choices.  I started watching Maniac (2012—more than one movie has this title), but stopped about halfway through.  It wasn’t because I was too scared, but rather what I was watching simply wasn’t what I watch horror for.  I’ve long preferred supernatural themes to mere slashers.  Some slashers with that supernatural element (the biggies: Halloween, Friday the 13th, and Nightmare on Elm Street) still have an appeal, but for the most part more recent bloodbaths don’t really do much for me.

A few weeks after I attempted Maniac, I tried to watch Freaks.  This is an early film that I’d read about many times and didn’t really want to watch, but it was “free.”  In this case, part of a collection of movies I’d purchased on DVD some years back.  It turned out that the disc was damaged and got stuck in my player.  Now, weekends are a precious commodity.  I hate wasting time.  My wife was still asleep so I tried watching High Tension (2003).  I stopped about halfway.  One of the more extreme slashers, it also is a home invasion story, which I dislike.  It was predictable up to the point where I left off.  Then I decided to read a synopsis and learned it has a twist ending that may have made it worth finishing.  I’m no fan of torture porn, however.

By this point it was too late to start yet another movie.  It was light already and we had to go get groceries soon.  Finding time to watch horror movies, even on weekends, has been really tricky.  And I’m getting to the point where I may have to start reading about films before I invest time in starting them.  The problem is I prefer for movies to reveal themselves.  It doesn’t take a genius to know that “free” movies are often free for a reason.  Perhaps it’s time to start specifying “monster movies” for what I want to see.  Horror has wrongly been associated with mainly slashers for many years now.  Some of us prefer monsters, and preferably ones that won’t cost us an arm and a leg.

Photo by Stefano Pollio on Unsplash

Made In

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This blog, like drain clog remover, is something I do frequently and then move onto other things.  Once in a while you stop to think, “Hey, the water’s draining well today,” but most days you don’t.  It’s just one of those things.  Which is a long-winded way of saying I don’t pay much attention to stats on this blog.  I’ve accepted my place as a middling muddler, with a constantly shifting, but small number of followers.  But WordPress likes bloggers (paying customers such as yours truly) to feel good about their investment, so they send occasional notices when you reach milestones.  Recently I received such a notice telling me that I’d topped 150 countries for visitors (welcome all!).  Curious, I went to the stats page and soon found that my largest viewership is now China.  Hmm.  As in so many other areas China surpasses the United States.

I’m not sure what I’ve written that would be of much interest to Chinese readers.  I like to think they still have a kind of reverence for older individuals, but it’s probably some robotic, AI-ish thing, in reality.  When you write, you do so aware that your chances of a large readership are slim.  I’ve been told many times that nobody reads blogs anymore.  They prefer podcasts and videos.  But the form of post I attempt—the five-minute or less read—is intended, I suppose, for busy people like myself.  With things spinning all the time, when I finally do get a day off, such as today, I spend the first several waking minutes confused.  What do I do with so much time?  There’s been so much I’ve been neglecting because of work.  And other people probably have maybe five minutes to read a post.

I don’t know what things are like in China.  I’ve never been there, but I hear people—some academic specialists—reporting about it.  I fear authoritarian governments, but it seems we’ve got ourselves one of those too.  And I suspect most people in China, like most of us, are just trying to get by.  As with most things tech, however, there’s no peeking behind the curtain.  Besides, China’s all about big numbers.  I’m glad that they’ve chosen to share some of those with me.  I try not to focus too much on this blog itself in my posts (that’s too meta) but I think about the whole enterprise daily.  If you keep doing something long enough, someone might end up paying attention.  Why they do I haven’t a clue.  I pour it in and hope it works.

Still Early

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I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the history of horror movies of late.  Although they began being labelled “horror” in the early 1930s, the idea had been around for some time.  When I learned that the problematic director D. W. Griffith presented an early horror film based on Edgar Allan Poe in 1914, I had to see it.  Fortunately it’s easily found.  Long in the public domain, this silent film can be watched in its entirety on YouTube.  The Avenging Conscience is an adaptation of “The Tell-Tale Heart.”  The set-up is quite different, and it has a happy ending.  The characters aren’t named, apart from the sweetheart, who is called Annabel.  She’s taken from Poe’s poem “Annabel Lee,” which is also used in the film.  A young man owes his good fortune to his uncle, who raised him as an orphan.  When he falls in love with Annabel, the uncle objects.  The lad owes him loyalty.

The young couple decide to break up, so as not to upset the uncle.  The young man has been reading “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and thinks about killing his uncle.  He falls asleep in a chair and when he awakes decides to do the murder.  He is witnessed, however, by a passer-by.  He has to pay him off, but he is now free to pursue his love.  He walls the body up next to the fireplace.  A detective, alerted by the uncle’s friend, interviews the young man and the tapping of his pencil reminds the nephew of a beating heart.  He begins to see the ghost of his uncle.  His guilt eventually comes out and he begins a shoot-out with the detectives.  When he can’t win, he hangs himself, which causes Annabel to leap off a cliff in despair.  Then he wakes up.  The uncle is still alive, and has had a change of heart about the young lovers.  The couple marries and a weird coda involving Pan and some strangely dressed children, apparently a book the nephew wrote, winds things up.

The ghosts, insanity, and the murder mark this as early horror.  Although the actual deaths, except the uncle’s, take place off screen, they are still horror territory.  And, of course, horror properly didn’t quite exist.  Although The Avenging Conscience can’t really take credit as the first horror film, it is certainly an early one.  And it is based on Poe.  Silent, black-and-white, and not really scary at all, this movie has a place in the history of what we now recognize as horror. Watching it is to watch a bit of history.

New York Scent

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I recently had to go into New York City for work.  Now, I haven’t been to Manhattan for at least six years.  It’s like riding a bike, though.  For seven years I commuted there daily and I know my part of Midtown tolerably well.  There were a few things I noticed after my absence.  Despite the rumors that the pandemic had depopulated the City, it was plenty crowded on a Wednesday in May.  And I noticed how much had changed.  Manhattan is so large and complex that nobody can know it all.  Still, as I walked through parts of it I’d been through many times before I found no stores that I remembered.  I’m sure there are some that have remained unchanged, but New York is a city that is constantly reinventing itself.  Change may take place slowly, but six years accumulate small things.  Overall, however, the experience remains the same.

Like many visitors to the Big Apple, I sometimes think it might be fun to live there.  At least for a bit.  I’m not the biggest NYC fan, but once in a while it seems like it’s worth spending unrushed time in the City.  It’s iconic.  Being at work and seeing the Empire State Building, or the Chrysler Building, out the window has its distractions.  Walking down streets you’ve seen in many movies.  Encountering many thousands of people in the same day.  Heady stuff.  This time I took the train and I emerged into a Penn Station I didn’t recognize and in which I got lost.  It’d changed so much that I wasn’t sure I’d be able to find my way back when it was time to go home.  The workings of New Jersey Transit were comforting in their familiarity.

The commuting life is something I never craved and which I don’t miss.  I can dedicate more time to my job as a remote worker.  I’m sure the culture of Manhattan has changed a bit in the years since it was a daily practice for me.  It’s a place that inspires stories, regardless.  On the way home, now beyond the end of the line, I did feel a little sad that I couldn’t spend a bit more time there.  New York is funny that way.  I arrived home in time for a late supper and bed, but I noticed that my clothes smelled like the Manhattan I remembered as I undressed.  It was a scent I’d almost forgotten.  Although much has changed since last I’d been there, it was pleasing to know that some things always stay the same in the midst of constant change.

Cool Summer

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Daily readers may recognize the cover of this book.  Some time back I posted on a misprinted book I’d received from Amazon.  It was the first time I had to return something to the retail giant in exchange for the book I’d actually ordered.  Although the volume itself  doesn’t say, I suspect William K. and Nicholas P. Klingaman, the authors, are kin.  (Some publishers make a big deal of such things.)  Regardless, I was reading for content.  It was strange reading this during a May when temperatures have generally been running about 1816-average levels below normal (mean temperatures can be deceiving).  It was also a good reminder how erratic weather can be and how dependent we are upon it.  So, basically, the volcano known as Tambora had a massive eruption—the largest during human recorded history—in 1815.  The ash in the atmosphere contributed to a year (1816) with cold temperatures that in many places devastated agriculture and led to widespread starvation.

The Year Without Summer is an interesting book, even if overwritten (which could be a function of having two authors, each with a lot to say.  One is a meteorologist and the other an historian.  And historians, especially, tend to write long.  That’s partially because so many interesting connections can be made.  Certain things happened because precipitating events owed their existence to a volcano.  There were several points, however, where I said to myself, wait, now, what does this have to do with the weather?  All authors (including yours truly) are selective and tend to focus on what they find interesting.  Detours are permitted.

The combination of meteorology and history was very interesting in its own right.  The weather is something we talk and perhaps think a lot about, but to which we tend not to ascribe too much ultimate importance.  The many, many pages of loss, despair, and death that make up this book should belie that understanding.  The weather is vitally important for our entire way of life.  We often take food for granted, but it’s anything but.  Many of those who starved to death in 1816 did so because they couldn’t afford food.  It was sometimes available, but at princely prices.  Many otherwise law-abiding citizens opted for riots and many governments didn’t see it as their responsibility to care for the people they governed (that still happens in capitalism).  This book, a bit overwritten, is nevertheless full of interesting information and creates some weighty thoughts.  If a Tambora-level eruption were to take place today, we’d see capitalism on display with all of its very ugly teeth.

Sleepy Thoughts

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It happens as you age.  Sleep patterns get disrupted.  This is normal and expected by all.  Except work.  That 9-2-5 has no sympathy for the sometimes days in a row when you awake looking forward only to going back to bed.  The day stretches out so long before you, many weary hours through which to slog, where younger employees wonder at your lack of energy.  A good night’s sleep is a gift.  One of the things I’ve observed about this is that poor sleep tends to occur in runs.  Overall, I don’t have much trouble sleeping.  I’m not in control of the quality of it, however.  And that’s what makes all the difference.  The mere handful of sick days won’t cover the inherent ageism of the few days off policy when poor sleep is the culprit.  In the non-profit world early retirement isn’t really an option, so lots of yawns it is.

It’s amazing how much we take youth for granted.  We could pull all-nighters in college and recover quickly.  Eight or nine hours hardly seemed like anything for work.  Then those hours begin to show their weight.  You have a vast gulf of meetings and self-starter projects stretching in front of you even until supper time, let alone the chance to redeem that previous night’s poor slumber.  I stopped caffeinating myself years ago.  I reasoned that I didn’t need chemical assistance to remain awake.  Was that self on coffee the same self as undrugged me?  And besides, you can save a lot of money by not buying coffee (which is now a luxury item).  So we pray to Morpheus and open our laptops.

The demand to be “on” for eight or nine hours a day, pretty much unbroken, for five successive days each week, wears a soul down.  And a body.  How I long to take a walk on a lovely spring day, only to be reminded that my lack of engagement online is noted.  I even receive work emails after 5 p.m. telling me something has to be done that night.  What I plan to do that night is sleep.  Make up for lost time.  Be human in an aging body.  The thirty-something that sent that email will understand.  Some day.  Age used to be equated with wisdom.  Now, it seems, it is considered lack of productivity.  It comes for everyone, if they survive that long.   No, I’m not ready for the ice floe just yet.  A good night’s sleep will set me straight.

Photo by No Revisions on Unsplash

Early Horror

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The origins of the horror film are hazy.  Although solidified as a genre name in the early 1930s, the ideas that eventually led to horror movies probably began with the 1896 George Méliès offering “The House of the Devil” (“Le Manoir du diable”).  This trick film features many of the macabre elements that would later become horror.  The Devil enters an old castle in the form of a bat.  We see him conjuring all kinds of magic—an Igor-like assistant, a cauldron, a skeleton, ghosts, and witches.  So much of what would feature as the genre developed is here already.  Others have pointed out that Méliès didn’t produce this film with the intention to scare.  It was a three-minute set of trick photography with typical exaggerated gestures and stage-magician tricks.  Still, there’s something there for horror fans.  Especially those of us pressed for time. 

Image credit: George Méliès, public domain via Wikimedia Commons

The film itself is easily and freely found on the internet.  It is sometimes mistaken with “The Haunted Castle,” which was a remake lasting only 45 seconds, that came out the next year.  George Méliès was a visionary in many ways and his techniques in this film would pave the way for both independent producers and Hollywood studios as the early forms of the genre appeared.  “House of the Devil” also shows several tropes that will become standard vampire fare.  The Devil transforms from a bat,  he wears a cape, and is frightened off by a cross held aloft.  This was a year before Bram Stoker’s Dracula was published.  The idea of making films scary in their own right would be a later development, but these early pieces of cinema contain many of the elements we would later associate with horror.

It’s difficult to imagine these days, but in the 1920s the Disney short “Skeleton Dance” was considered too macabre for children.  (I discuss this in my book, Sleepy Hollow as American Myth.)  There was furor after the release of Dracula in 1931 with some critics finding no redeeming value in it.  Horror films had a difficult road to acceptance, which is still true today.  They weren’t regularly called horror films until the early thirties, although they existed before that.  Some are for lighter entertainment, like Méliès’ work.  Comedy horrors are a popular sub-genre.  Even today they continue to be made and are more funny than scary.  Think Scary Movie,  Shaun of the Dead, Jesus Christ: Vampire Hunter.  And many, many others.  George Méliès showed what film could do.  And he inadvertently created the first horror movie.

In the Genes

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One of the easiest rabbit holes for me to trip into is genealogy.  Now, I know that other people’s ancestry quickly gets boring, so I’m not going to write about that.  But I will note some things that among the few real benefits of our electronic life—how the web has made the search much easier.  I have the advantage of having unusual ancestral names (back a few generations some Smiths enter in, but before that none of them are terribly common).  I first fell for genealogy in high school.  For a class project I had to sketch out a family tree, on paper.  I still prefer to look at them this way but you need a very large sheet.  The work was all done prior to computers (at least affordable ones).  My uncle had a copy of information my grandfather gathered and sent me a copy.  Then, when teaching full-time at Nashotah House, I’d occasionally make trips to Madison, Wisconsin to use the resources at the university library.  I wrote letters, met distant relatives, on paper.  Or microfiche.

About three years back, when my daughter was home for the holidays, we got to talking about family.  I’d searched for years for my maternal great-grandfather’s wife.  She died young and nobody in the family even knew her name.  While chatting, I logged in and was surprised to find that by using Find A Grave, I could quickly answer that question.  I’d been seeking that answer for decades, and there it was.  By that time I’d graduated to Reunion software.  The problem is, you have to keep rebuying it every time computer systems reach a certain upgrade-level.  We’ve purchased it at least three times, which seems predatory to me.  Time to put it all on paper again!  In any case, while reading about German immigration recently, I got curious.  I’d found that same great-grandfather’s parents’ names, but could go no further back without going to Germany.

I’m astonished at the work the Mormons have been doing behind the scenes for the past several years.  In seconds I was able, without paying, to get my ancestry back four generations further than ever before.  I know that Latter-day Saints have a theological motivation for what they do, but it is a real service for anyone interested in where they came from.  I’ve often heard that genealogy is a retiree’s habit.  I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to retire, but if I could, I could see how I would spend hours forgetting to eat or sleep, tracing roots, exploring rabbit holes.  I’ll need a very large sheet of paper, though.

Lights On

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Poltergeist horror movies are a touch difficult to make convincingly.  Part of that, I suppose, is because the actual phenomenon is already scary and dramatizing it often ameliorates rather than increases the fear factor.  When the Lights Went Out is a “based on a true story” movie about a poltergeist in Yorkshire in the 1970s.  One of the problems is that none of the adults are really sympathetic enough to care about, with the exceptions of Rita and Mr. Price, the teacher.  All of the other “grown ups” are so mired in their own problems that you just can’t empathize.  Part of that is probably an attempt to show the life of the poor—it isn’t easy, I know from experience—but there are a lot of good people of humble means.  Not all of them are mean, self-centered, and unsympathetic.

In any case, an elaborate backstory is built to set up the plot.  A monk, from before Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries, rapes and nearly murders a young girl.  He cuts out her tongue so she can’t tell what he did.  She is educated enough to write, however, and the monastery collectively hangs the monk to preserve the honor of the church.  We’ve got religion and horror here, obviously, but a very poorly understood Catholicism.  In the nineteen-seventies the Maynards move into a council house haunted by both the girl and the monk.  The poltergeist activity begins but nobody will believe Sally, the young daughter.  Instead they blame her.  Until the activity happens to her parents as well.  They try to get a Catholic priest to help, but he’s too busy banging his cleaning woman (and besides, he needs the bishop’s permission for an exorcism).  The Maynards call in a medium who is, predictably, attacked.  The priest is blackmailed into an anticlimactic exorcism.

But the evil monk isn’t gone.  After life returns to normal, he attacks again but is driven off by the girl he murdered, or almost murdered.  In real life, apparently, the poltergeist was much more low key.  The dramatization makes it very much like other horror films we’ve all seen.  I do find the lack of research on how the church operates of interest.  Unfortunately, sexual abuse of the young is, and has been a problem with enforced celibacy from pretty much the beginning.  The priest from the seventies is much more concerned with his reputation than plight of the family.  The movie does do a good job of isolating poor Sally, and you can’t help but to feel sorry for her and her friend Lucy, who just don’t fit in.  That’s where the real horror lies.