Boston’s Poe

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Among my parasocial relationships, the strangest are those with people long dead.  Poe is among them, and, I suspect, this is probably a common thing.  As I age and find it difficult to muster the energy to attend large meetings with lots of people, the one factor that excited me about this year’s AAR/SBL, apart from being in New England again, was meeting Poe.  Now, I know that “Poe Returning to Boston” isn’t actually Poe himself.  But I do believe that places retain something of the essence of what happens in them.  Poe was born in Boston, on Carver Street.  The building itself was demolished some time ago.  I set out to see the site yesterday morning before the conference began, only to find that it is now fenced off, having been acquired by MassDOT.  As I stood there, wondering, fearing, it occurred to me just how much of a role pilgrimages play in our lives.

I’ve written about my SBL experiences before on this blog—look at my November posts for many of the years I’ve been doing this—but Boston is by far the most personal.  Part of it is certainly the fact that I lived here for about three years, but Poe is definitely part of it too.  As I went to do an uncrowded photo essay of Stefanie Rocknak’s statue, although it was quite early on a Sunday morning, and also quite chilly, I wasn’t the only one there.  A couple came along to pose with Poe.  When I took my initial photo (on my Saturday morning post) I had to await a different couple consorting with Poe.  I know this isn’t Poe, but it has come to represent his presence is my favorite city.  The mingling of emotions was strong.  

The sign designating this as Edgar Allan Poe Square is faded and weather-beaten.  I can imagine that local politicians have headier issues with which to wrestle, beyond replacing an aging sign for aging tourists.  And having read J. W. Ocker’s Poe-Land, I know there’s a bust of Poe in the Public Library now.  I walk by it each morning and evening, but the conference schedule keeps me out.  Poe himself was no great fan of Boston but this is where the world first met him.  I know that I should get my head in the game of academic conferencing, but I’m a little distracted by the presence of a friend I never met.  And breathing the rarified air of New England.

Old School

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How often do hotels refurbish or do they all look the same?  I met someone in the lobby of a hotel in which I had stayed, okay, 26 years ago.  Nothing about it looked the slightest bit familiar .  Look, I grew up poor and only remember one hotel from before college (we never stayed in them)—the one I remember was a place we stayed on a family trip to Washington DC.  Ironically, I had a stuffed elephant toy with me on that trip.  With the career upgrade to professional and conference attendance, stays at hotels became more common, although they’re still somewhat infrequent.  Conference organizers entice with luxury hotels in major cities.  Some remain in memory.  Most don’t.

I know hotels pay a lot to decorate and brand, yet the places of the monied seem anodyne.  This hotel could be just about anywhere and will eventually blend into that haze of places somehow very alike that cost many hundreds of dollars to stay.  I might’ve stayed here before.  Maybe not.  This lobby doesn’t look familiar but the street outside does.  When I stayed here in 1999 [check] my wife and daughter were able to come.  Not being an editor, we’d been to the New England Aquarium that day and my daughter wanted a seahorse rubber ball as a souvenir.  On the way to this hotel she dropped it and it bounced into Tremont Street.  In a poor object lesson, I ran after it.  I wasn’t hit by a car, but my doing so traumatized my daughter enough that she still won’t talk about it as an adult.  That’s how I know we stayed here before.

When I visited Boston for work I 2012, I stayed in a hotel I remember but whose name I do not.  It’s never been a conference hotel or I’d choose it.  It was a bit run down, but it had character.  I don’t even know if it’s still there.  Cities change.  Some parts of Boston are unrecognizable since I lived here.  Even the hotel in which I’m staying (which is nice enough, except for the loud music that suddenly starts at 2 a.m.) used to be a school.  I suppose that’s appropriate for a hotel used as an educational conference venue.  Generations of young people were once educated where I’m trying to sleep as the room shakes with someone else’s rock beat.  I may remember this hotel as a place where sleep fled, or I may find it fading into that space where all conference hotels merge even as a poignant thought arises that nothing ever remains the same.

Revisiting

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It’s funny returning to a city you once felt you knew well.  Cities are constantly evolving creatures and even though I got around Boston as a student and then as an employee of Ritz Camera, there were places I simply never found.  There was no internet in those days so we relied a lot on word of mouth.  If others weren’t talking about it, I’d never hear.  I first realized Boston had a Chinatown when attending my first AAR/SBL here.  That was in the day when you had to mail or fax hotel registrations in, if I recall, and I do remember staying up to midnight to try to get first choice after that.  Ironically, this year I again ended up in that neighborhood, south of the modestly-sized Chinatown.  I really didn’t mind, though, since the hotel isn’t too far from Edgar Allan Poe.

I first learned about “Poe Returning to Boston” from my daughter.  She saw it while visiting Boston with a friend.  I learned more about it by reading J. W. Ocker’s Poe-Land.  When I lived here, from 1985 through 1988, I knew of no public markers of Poe’s presence.  None of the more prominent ones were here then.  On a trip to Boston for Routledge I sought out the Poe birthplace plaque—the actual house had been torn down—and found it.  It’s still here as I saw last night.  But the place that was formerly marked only by a painted electrical box now has a statue.  Poe, preceded by his raven, walks across the area named for him with a suitcase in hand.  Behind him, pages from his manuscripts lie on the ground.

It’s long been known that Boston and Poe had an ambivalent relationship.  Poe was born here and lived here for a time, but never felt that the city accepted him.  He lived in New York City, Philadelphia, and Baltimore for some time, but mostly considered Richmond, Virginia home.  That’s where the Allans lived and where his mother is buried.  Poe himself famously and mysteriously died in Baltimore.  He had some measure of fame at the time but still lived in poverty.  The feeling seems to be that Poe would’ve liked to have liked Boston—it has been my favorite major US city ever since I first moved here four decades ago.  Now, of course, I only get back on occasion, mostly when AAR/SBL comes to town.  Although Poe wasn’t here the last time I was, I always find something new when I return.

Boston Bound

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Honestly, I’ve reached a stage where travel seems quite a burden.  I’m a creature of habit and I haven’t had to interrupt that habit for three years now.  I missed the last two years of the AAR/SBL conference due to a variety of issues.  I’m pleased that this meeting is in Boston, a city of which I have fond memories.  Still, getting there from here isn’t as easy as you might think.  It’s simple enough to catch a direct train from New York or Philadelphia, but I don’t live in either.  To be there in time for my meetings later today I have to catch a fairly early train.  That’s not a problem; I’m an early riser.  To get to a station where a car might safely be left for four nights is a bit more difficult.  It involves an hour’s drive no matter where you end up going.  I’ve driven in Philly enough to know that I don’t like driving in Philly.

Although Allentown is the third largest city in the state, there is no train service from it to the Amtrak lines that lead up and down the coast.  So I’ll be driving a while.  Once on the train at least I won’t have to worry about traffic.  At least for a few days.  In Boston I wasn’t able to get into one of the close hotels.  In warmer months that wouldn’t be much of an issue, but November in Massachusetts can be chilly.  I remember that from living there.  There are shuttles from my hotel to the conference center, but I like walking Boston.  It brings back memories.  Beantown is one of those places that many people fall in love with and want to stay after they get there.  Although I lingered three years that didn’t seem enough.

Photo by todd kent on Unsplash

I was a young man when I moved to Boston.  Looking back, I knew so very little.  Almost as little as I know now.  For this conference, I’ve stayed in this same distant hotel in the past.  It’s in a part of town I’d never explored as a student.  It isn’t far, however, from Edgar Allan Poe Square.  I’m hoping the weather allows for some photographic opportunities around there.  The conference itself, in my more familiar Back Bay, is work.  Not much time to relax and see the sights.  Still, I know that once I get there I’ll again feel the old attraction.  It happens every time I go.  Even it means a drive and a train ride into late November.

Sleeping Below

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I’m not sure how I missed What Sleeps Beneath.  I suppose it’s a matter of being time-starved in a world with so many websites.  That, and I’m only now starting to get integrated into the horror community.  A comment on this blog brought What Sleeps Beneath to my awareness.  A horror review site—they feature both books and movies—it’s based in that epicenter of weird (at least in my experience) of Pittsburgh.  I lived in the city for a couple of summers and grew up between it and Erie.  And, of course, Pittsburgh is George Romero territory, the birthplace of the modern zombie.  I often reflect on it.  Growing up in a small town north of there, I was fascinated by large cities.  When I was in high school, Pittsburgh was the 16th largest city in the country, now it’s down in the 200s somewhere.  That’s what happens when a big industry packs its bags.

Photo by Vidar Nordli-Mathisen on Unsplash

In any case, I haven’t been able to keep up with all the horror websites.  Again, it’s a matter of time. One reason is reasonable precaution.  I believe in vaccines.  I hate being sick in any way, and I’m of an age that I’d probably have been long dead without the many sticks I’ve had in my life.  However, time is precious and I’ve lost two weekends this year just to vaccine recovery.  Keenly aware that I no longer have all the time in the world—this dawns on you with a kind of horror fierceness as you read obituaries of friends who seemed so much better adjusted than you—the loss of a weekend is a kind of major deficit.  It’s sort of a sloppy reboot.  You enter a weekend with anticipation of how much you can get accomplished without the 9-2-5, but instead you have a day or two as groggy as your computer is when you first turn it on.

I say all this because I’d been planning to explore What Sleeps Beneath then I lost this past weekend to recovery.  Pittsburgh, like most places, has an identity to it.  And like most places that identity evolves over time.  Tomorrow I head to Boston, a city I used to know, for the American Academy of Religion and Society of Biblical Literature conference.  I’ll also be visiting, I hope, the Poe Returning to Boston statue in Edgar Allan Poe Square.  What with Boston making a belated overture to Poe and Pittsburgh embracing its zombies, maybe horror is starting to become mainstream after all.  Now I just need to get the time to explore What Sleeps Beneath.

Hunting Season

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Back when it came out in 1997, I’d heard that it wasn’t a particularly happy movie.  It was a good movie but it dealt with two damaged men.  I was frightened off from seeing Good Will Hunting until it became associated with dark academia.  Will Hunting is a genius but he was born in a bad part of town and earned himself a police record.  He works as a janitor at MIT, but he also solves proofs instantly that professors labor over for years.  The only way he can keep out of jail, however, is with the help of a therapist.  Sean Maguire, who teaches at Bunker Hill Community College, is a psychologist who shares the background of Will’s rough neighborhood, but who recently lost his wife to cancer.  He’s been traumatized by his life and the two come to realize, once Will learns to trust, that they have helped heal each other.

The darkness in this academia is mostly social.  Even today, those of us who grew up in rougher locations don’t easily fit in academia.  We’re blithely ejected from it in favor of those with more proper backgrounds.  And connections.  There were a few personal triggers for me watching this movie, but I had been wanting to see it for some time.  Robin Williams, who plays Maguire, had starred in what may be the epitome of dark academia movies, Dead Poets Society.  In both he plays his part convincingly.  The term “dark academia” wouldn’t be coined, however, until the year after he died.  Education is supposed to lead us out of darkness, but given what humans are, it creates its own form of gloominess.  That’s probably why some of us find the category of dark academia so intriguing.  Compelling enough to get us to watch films that will perhaps come with their own brand of trauma.

Children born into similar, or nearly identical situations may react to it quite differently.  Although both in academic settings, Will and Sean have different experiences of it.  With his life experience as a war veteran, and an educated world traveler, Sean invested his life in love and helping others.  Will struggles with his fear of rejection to finally try to love someone more than upholding his own walls of self-protection.  There’s some real depth here.  It’s no wonder that the screenplay won more than a couple awards.  It would take another couple decades, however, until the category of dark academia would be named.  And if it hadn’t, I wouldn’t have risked watching this amazing movie.

Not Personal

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I’ve read that horror and dark academia go together.  You might almost say like peanut butter and chocolate.  One example of this is Confessions, a novel by Kanae Minato.  There are no monsters in it, but two people driven by revenge.  The difficulty with such a book would be to describe it without giving too much away.  So I’ll start by placing it in the category of dark academia.  It is a middle-school story with a distinct darkness and dread to it.  As a kind of epistolary novel, it’s told in several voices, beginning with a teacher in Japan and her final lecture to her students.  The lecture is final because her four-year-old daughter had died on the school grounds.  More than that, she was murdered by a couple of the students.  The novel explores the motivations and actions of the students involved, and sometimes their parents.  The school setting makes it dark academia.

The horror part comes through the slow building of the ruined lives that follow in the wake of the murder.  Believing that one form of revenge is at play, the reader finds subtle shifts as characters become monstrous.  One is clearly a sociopath.  Another is becoming one.  The idea of people harming one another because of their grievances is real enough.  We are emotional beings and sometimes our pain for those we love reaches a point of striking out.  Most of us learn to refrain, accepting that suffering comes into every life.  A minority insist on bringing others into their personal hell.  This novel explores people like that.  This makes it a horror story.

Originally written in Japanese, it has a kind of gentleness to it.  A decorum.  Underneath, however, trouble is brewing.  It accumulates over the novel as additional perspectives join the narrative of what happened.  Stories like this take a bit of rethinking for those of us who like to believe our narrators.  Most events have more than one outlook and Confessions ably guides us through several, reaching a conclusion that is both satisfying and chilling.  This is one of those novels that underscores what a fraught time middle school is.  Powerful emotions are at play and even though they may be sublimated for adults in society, they still exist.  We learn when we can and can’t act upon them, and how we may do so.  That’s a large part of education, beyond simply learning from books.  As reading becomes more and more electronic, I do wonder if we’re ushering in a new darkness that hasn’t been fully considered.

Bibliography

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For serial readers, my Horror Homeroom piece is now live, here.  Speaking of websites and blogs, you never know where a project might go when you start it.  This blog has a search function, as well as category options, but I know I have a few readers on Facebook and Goodreads who might never set foot here.  The other day someone asked me about a book and I had to do a search myself to see if I’d ever blogged about it.  This project has been going for more than a decade and a half and it’s nearing 6,000 posts.  I can’t remember everything.  Then it occurred to me: I could put together a bibliography for this blog.  This has to be a long-term process, though.  As a test, I scrolled through the first year, writing down the books.  There were about sixty of them.  Since there are over 170 months to go through, well, it’ll be a big bibliography when it’s done.

I’ll need to find a way to note the books I haven’t read.  Sometimes I’ll post on a book, or mention it, without having read the whole thing.  I don’t want to misrepresent myself here.  Other times I mention a book obliquely without actually citing it.  I need to include those as well.  Only, however, if I’ve actually read them.  Then there’s the problem of not remembering if I read a book or not.  After 2013 I can check on Goodreads, but between 2009 and then, I rely on memory.  Those were tumultuous years.  In 2009, just before I started this blog, Gorgias Press let me go.  I made a living for a couple of years as an adjunct professor at both Rutgers and Montclair State Universities, feeling like I was driving at night without the headlights on.  I was reading a lot, but job security was a mere myth.

Then in 2011 Routledge recruited me and my commuting life began.  I started reading about 100 books a year as I commuted my life away.  Most of those got discussed on this blog.  I was still at Routledge when I began my Goodreads account, not aware that there was employer writing on the wall.  I started my current job that same year and commuted to Manhattan for five more years, reading all the while.  It’s going to be a big bibliography when it’s done.  The nice thing is I don’t have to annotate it since that’s what this blog does.  Since I’ve got about a thousand other projects going, and a 9-2-5 job, don’t hold your breath for it.  But the bibliography’s been started and, God willing and the crick don’t rise, it’ll eventually appear here.  That’s the way of ongoing projects.

Woodwork

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It’s not often that I get to see a new horror movie on opening day, but I managed to swing The Carpenter’s Son with a screener, courtesy of Horror Homeroom.  I’m not going to say much about the movie here, because you should go there to read my response—I’ll let you know when it appears.  But I should try to whet your appetite a bit.  Among those of us who read and write about horror and religion this was a much anticipated movie.  A horror movie about Jesus.  Such things have been done before, but this one is played straight with an interesting premise.  It’s based, loosely, on the Infancy Gospel of Thomas.  This isn’t to be confused with the Gospel of Thomas.  Early Christians, it seems, favored the doubter’s point of view.  The Infancy Gospel is the story of Jesus’ miracles between the ages of five and twelve.  Even among early Christians these accounts weren’t taken as gospel truth.  They make for an interesting movie, however.

I think about horror and religion quite a lot.  Since the late sixties the two appear together frequently and, according to many surveys, make for the scariest movies.  Religion deals with, not to sound too Tillichian, ultimate concerns.  In the human psyche you can’t get much larger than death and eternity.  These are the home turf of religion.  Of course, death can be handled in an entirely secular way, but there’s a reasons hospitals almost always have chapels in them.  Eternity may be slotted in cosmology, but what it means comes from religion.  Forever seems pretty ultimate to me.

One thing I didn’t give in my Horror Homeroom piece about The Carpenter’s Son is my thoughts as to whether it’s a good movie or not.  Did I like it?  To a certain degree, yes.  Although I’ve been impressed with Nicolas Cage in horror movies lately—he can really rise to the occasion—sometimes, as in The Wicker Man, he just becomes, well, Cagey.  This happens once in a while in The Carpenter’s Son too.  When he’s questioning Mary about where “the boy” came from, his voice gets the wheedling, whining, kind of mocking tone that doesn’t set him as his best.  Likewise, when he tries to instruct young Jesus in various ways, it seems far too modern to fit the palette of a period drama.  I watched it a couple of times to write the article and I have my doubts that I’ll watch it again.  I did think the portrayal of Satan was good, and appreciated some of the dialogue about evil.  It wasn’t my favorite horror movie in recent weeks, however, even though I saw it before it opened.

Visiting Poe

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J. W. Ocker’s Poe-Land is a book I read too late.  That’s not to denigrate its status as the best book I’ve read this year—no, not at all.  It’s just that, unaware of Ocker’s book, I’d visited many of the Poe sites in America without the advantage of the full story.  Since my daughter also appreciates Poe, we’d gone to the Poe house in Philadelphia and the Free Library where Dickens’ stuff raven lives (sort of).  We’d gone to see Poe’s grave in Baltimore and his reputed dorm room at the University of Virginia while she was on college campus tours.  We attended the Poe exhibit at the Morgan Library in Manhattan.  We’d even gone to Fort Moultrie in South Carolina, stopping at the Poe Tavern on a family reunion trip to Charleston.  On my own, I’d sought out Poe’s birthplace on a business trip to Boston.  (The plaque was not there when I lived in the city.). Poe-Land is Ocker’s travel log of an intentional visit to all of these places.  (I should mention that we also went to Richmond to see the southern family but I arrived with a migraine and we had to put off the tourist stuff for another trip.  And I was distracted by Lovecraft on my two trips to Providence.)

To a Poe fan, and I can count myself as no other, this book is itself a treasure trove.  Ocker took a year to visit the Poe sites, north to south and even to England.  He writes about what he found and the people he met.  These people are likely my tribe, but I tend to work alone and know people primarily virtually.  I’ve tried to get museum people to let me behind locked doors, but I don’t have the clout.  (When I was a professor I had a bit more pull.)  I enjoyed every page of Poe-Land.  It was a book I didn’t want to rush through since it made me smile knowing that for reading time the next day I’d still have more to go.  And I learned a ton about Poe.

I’ve read several books about Poe, of course.  As an ignorant kid, I bought a used copy, in five volumes, of his collected works and biography.  I bought it at Goodwill and treasured it.  Until as an ignorant (and poor) college student, I resold it along with many of my childhood reading treasures.  I read biographies in the school library.  And I’ve read (and bought for good) some as an adult.  I even mention Poe in most of my books, including Sleepy Hollow as American Myth, because he’s part of my story too.  Poe-Land was easily my favorite book of 2025.  Now I want to read more about Poe.  But in the end I face a dilemma.  Do I read more about Poe, or do I go back for another of J. W. Ocker’s books?

Witching Season

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Tis the season for movies about witches.  The cult classic The Craft is another one of my old movies—I don’t think I’ve written a blog post about it before.  In any case, this autumn felt like good timing for a movie about female empowerment.  Rewatching it, it was difficult to miss how religion and horror are tied together.  Indeed, the Bible appears in the film as well.  This makes sense since the girls attend a Catholic school.  So what is this one about?  Teenage Sarah has moved to Los Angeles and is having trouble fitting in at school.  She is a “natural” witch who catches the attention of the small coven consisting of Nancy, Bonnie, and Rochelle.  They invite her to complete their coven so that they can invoke Manon, a deity larger than God.  Once they attain their powers, they begin redressing personal wrongs, but begin to hurt others as they do so.

Sarah is the daughter of a witch and her mother died in childbirth.  Sarah has difficulties with using powers to hurt others.  She was primarily interested in a love spell, but it too has consequences.  The coven experiments with even more powerful spells, giving the girls very obvious powers.  Especially Nancy.  Nancy is angry and enamored of power.  Sarah decides she wants out of the coven, but they’ve become too powerful.  Since Sarah tried to take her own life before, Nancy tries to force her to do so, only to succeed this time.  She’s backed up by Bonnie and Rochelle, both enjoying their powers.  Their attack, however, brings out the natural power of Sarah’s witch nature.  In the end, all of them lose their powers except Sarah.  

There’s a strong moral streak through the movie.  Unrestrained power leads naturally enough to abuses—something we’re living through daily in real life.  This is played off against a largely ineffectual Catholic Church.  A street preacher, who doesn’t seem very Catholic, also tries to warn Sarah but his method of using snakes is off-putting, to say the least.  He dies off pretty early in the film.  Religious structures of the monotheistic world have historically closed doors to women.  Some still do.  The power of nature encompasses both women and men, and the power that women have often frightens men.  Again, we see the fear of losing power played out.  This is comically addressed in another witch movie, The Witches of Eastwick.  Indeed, it is directly addressed there.  That’s yet another of my old movies, unless I’ve written about it here before but have lost my powers of memory.

What Bots Want

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I often wonder what they want, bots.  You see, I’ve become convinced that nearly every DM (direct message) on social media comes from bots.  There’s a couple of reasons I think this: I have never been, and am still not, popular, and all these “people” ask the same series of questions before their accounts are unceremoniously shut down by the platform.  Bots want to sell me something, or scam me, I’m pretty sure, but I wonder why they want to “chat.”  They could look at this blog and find out much of what they’re curious about.  I could use the hits, after all.  Hit for chat, as it were.  

Some change in the metaverse has led to people discovering my academic work and some of them email me.  That’s fine, since it’s better than complete obscurity.  Within the last couple months two such people asked me unusual, if engaged questions.  I took the time to answer and received an email in reply, asking a follow up query.  It came at a busy time, so a couple days later I replied and received a bounced mail notice.  The other one bounced the first time I replied.  By chance (or design) one of these people had begun following me on Academia.edu (I’m more likely on Dark Academia these days), so I went to my account and clicked their profile button.  It took me to a completely different person.  So why did somebody email me, hack someone’s Academia account to follow me, and then disappear?  What do the bots want?

Of course, my life was weird before the bots came.  In college I received a mysterious envelope filled with Life cereal.  The back of said envelope read “Some Life for your life.”  I never found out who sent it.  Another time I received an envelope with $5 inside and a typewritten note saying “Buy an umbrella.”  If I’m poor now, I was even poorer in college and didn’t have an umbrella.  Someone noticed.  Then in seminary someone mailed me a mysterious letter about a place that doesn’t exist.  There was a point to the letter although I can’t recall what it was without it in front of me.  No return address.  I have my suspicions about who might’ve sent these, but I never had any confirmation.  The people are no longer in my life (one of them, if I’m correct, died by suicide a couple years after the note was sent).  It’s probably just my age, but I felt a little bit safer when these things came through the campus mail system.  Now bots fill my paltry web-presence with their gleaming DMs.  I wonder what they want.

Photo by Possessed Photography on Unsplash

The Prom

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I had always assumed Prom Night was a knock-off of Carrie, and in some ways it is.  The story is significantly different, however, and the impetus to watch it came from Scream, where it’s referenced a few times.  In case you’re under the same delusion I was, here’s how it unfolds.  Jamie Lee Curtis, after starring in Halloween and The Fog, takes the role of Kim Hammond, older sister of a girl (Robin) accidentally killed at the start of the film.  A kids’ game at an abandoned building leads to the death, in which four children participated.  Six years later, it’s prom night.  The kids present at Robin’s death all receive mysterious phone warnings that they dismiss as crank calls.  Meanwhile, a Carrie-inspired sub-plot is introduced as Wendy, the leader of the killer kids, is outvoted as prom queen by Kim.  She gets a local thug, Lou, and his buddies, to plan a disruption to the crowning of the king and queen.  No pig’s blood, but this isn’t Stephen King.

Meanwhile, yet another subplot is introduced, riffing on Halloween, of an escaped psychopath as suspect.  The police are fearful after finding the body of a nurse he kidnapped at the site of Robin’s death.  He was falsely accused of Robin’s murder and was disfigured in a fire.  They fear he may be targeting the kids there that fateful day.  Nobody except the four kids know what really happened.  There’s a hint that someone saw the accident, however.  If you’re getting confused, apart from my faulty summary, it may be because the movie goes to great lengths to misdirect your suspicions of who the murderer may be.  Since the movie is over 45, there will be a spoiler in the next paragraph.  You are warned!

The killer is Robin’s twin brother, who is also Kim’s younger brother.  He witnessed Robin’s death and tries to murder those he holds responsible on prom night.  He succeeds in killing three of the four.  I’ll leave it at that.  This is one of those teen movies and a fairly early slasher.  The plot is too complex to hold up, however, with characters simply dropping out because the action shifts focus.  Too many false lead-ons and too much disco music make it less than stellar.  Of course, as a very religious kid shy around girls, I never attended my high school prom.  I guess I may have missed out on what was, by then, becoming a night of horror.  At least in the eyes of those exploring the emerging slasher genre.  

Dreaming

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To be honest, I’m not quite sure what to make of NightBorn.  It’s not a bad novel but some of the action isn’t explained enough, leading to a little confusion as to what’s going on.  This is pretty minor, however.  I was enjoying Theresa Cheung’s debut novel but I kept thinking of Dream Scenario and how the premise, at least at first, is so similar.  I was very impressed by the movie Dream Scenario, and wondered if this was going to play out in the same way.  The basic idea is that Alice Sinclair, a professor of psychology, begins appearing in people’s dreams.  The dreams of people who don’t know her.  Then the dreams start to become scary.  If you’ve seen Dream Scenario you’ll recognize the many touchpoints: professor, appearing in strangers’ dreams, dreams becoming nightmares.  Back in the novel, Alice joins forces with her psychic boyfriend, two psychic friends of his, and her dog, to explore why this is happening.

Alice discovers that her absentee father, whom she’s never met, is also a psychology professor and he’s been experimenting with a technology that makes a person go viral in other people’s dreams.  He randomly chose her, not ever knowing Alice as his daughter, or knowing her at all.  The novel deals with synchronicities, and this is one of them.  Her father, who is rather a slime-bag, is working for the government where an unpopular president (this is a novel of its time) is paying to have himself interjected into people’s dreams to get reelected.  Alice was simply a test case to see if it was possible to, well, do a Dream Scenario.  In the movie, of course, a company has been developing the technology for profit, so that advertising can be interjected into dreams.  Another synchronicity.

I won’t spoil the ending of the story.  The ethical concerns of the author come through clearly.  In many ways this is a Trump book—that category of books that, had this particular individual not been elected (or reelected) would likely never have been written.  It’s more, however, about the power of dreams than it is about the power of potentates.  The publisher, 6th Books, prefers paranormal plots, so expect a bit of that when you pick this one up.  Dreams not only feature Alice, they also guide the plot.  In the end, the scenario isn’t the same as that in Dream Scenario, but the vehicle is quite similar.  It may, if viewed from a certain angle, be considered dark academia.

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There’s an aesthetic to bad movies.  Some are so bad that they’re good.  Others are just plain bad.  Many years ago, during some Amazon movie sale or other, I purchased a DVD of Morons from Outer Space.  Now, horror comedy is a recognized genre, but sci-fi comedy is a bit harder nut to crack, even though horror and sci-fi are siblings.  Morons sat on the shelf for at least a decade, in case of need.  Having been scammed out of our life’s savings, a Friday evening when my wife said “Pick whatever you want, I’m likely to fall asleep anyway,” scanning the shelves my eye landed on it.  The movie had been distributed by MGM, how bad could it be?  Worse than anticipated, it turns out.  I don’t recall ever seeing an intentional comedy where the entire laugh potential was so misaligned.  There were one or two spoofs that worked, but mostly it dragged and begged to be put out of its misery.

Three aliens, anatomically human, crash land on earth after leaving a crew-mate behind on their deep-space vehicle.  The extended scene of their spaceship tooling down the highway might’ve been funny had it lasted maybe a tenth of the time.  The knock-off of Close Encounters’ use of music to communicate was a little funny.  The alien interrogation missed several potentially humorous opportunities.  The aliens eventually become celebrities while an American commander insists that they be killed because of their threat to life on earth.  Ironically, I’ve often wondered how it would be if aliens who came to earth were badly behaved members of their species.  I can honestly say that that would be better than the way this movie played out.

Meanwhile, the abandoned alien gets a lift with a spooky-looking alien.  In perhaps the funniest scene, the spooky alien asks the human alien his sex.  That part was funny on a couple of levels and showed the potential that the movie might’ve had.  He ends up on Earth and tries to connect with his three shipmates, who are now, literally, rock stars.  When they finally meet up, they summarily dismiss him again, only to be hauled off back to space by a closing Close Encounters parody.  I confess that I am still trying to appreciate bad movies on their own aesthetics.  I’ve seen so many that I added a “Bad movies” category to this blog.  Bad movies are often unintentionally funny.  It’s a different beast when a comedy is unfunny.  Particularly when there was potential there, if it’d only been effectively used.