Movie Ancestors

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I’ve read quite a few Very Short Introductions, but this one struck me as particularly good.  Donna Kornhaber knows how to write for non-specialists, and she knows how to single out what’s interesting in the vast collective known as Silent Film.  As is the series trademark, this book is very brief, but it covers the essentials.  Kornhaber divides the silent film era, roughly 1895 to 1927, into three periods: early cinema, the transitional period, and the classic era.  During each of these, new developments demonstrated the sophistication of the industry and groundwork was laid for cinema as we know it today.  I learned quite a lot from this short treatment—so much that it’s difficult to know how to summarize it here.  Of course, it’s short so you can read it for yourself if you’d like to learn more. 

Perhaps what stood out to me the most was the correction of a misperception that, I hope, is not unique to me alone.  I’ve always thought of silent films as being grainy, poorly exposed, and choppy when showing people’s movements.  Kornhaber explains that most movies were of sound quality in their day, when projected properly.  Early film stock deteriorates, however, and not all stock was properly preserved.  This accounts for the graininess and the sometimes “overexposed” look of such films.  Even modern projectionists don’t use the proper speed and that leads to choppy motion.  In their own day, and with film handled by people who knew their business, early movie goers would have experienced realistic, well-rendered images.   These issues are our issues, not those of the original footage.

Another feature of the book is its focus on diversity in filmmaking.  Early silent film was dominated by France and the United States, but several other nations contributed to what we now think of as standard elements of cinema.  And the fact is that until sound was introduced many women played important roles in the development of what we expect from films.  Women directed.  Became business-savvy.  Ran their own studios.  Once the industry established itself as particularly lucrative, men began to edge women out.  The majority of early films—Kornhaber suggests around 80%—were lost as studios saw no reason to preserve them once “talkies” were the way to make money.  Consequently we’ve lost a good part of that early history.  We pretty much take movies for granted.  We can stream them any time, and we know what to expect (roughly, anyway).  What we don’t often consider is how much we owe to those who established what the movie-going experience should be, and did so before sound was added to the mix.

Running out of Time

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How can you let a solstice slip past without noticing it?  Admittedly, it’s sometimes easy to do in summer, but for the winter solstice it’s more serious.  Ironically for me, the issue is that I’m still a jogger.  When you start your work day early, and you try to jog before work, the shortness of the day works against you.  Even if you prefer the after-work jog, December and January give you that perpetual feeling that you’re running out of time.  Each year around about now I look at charts.  Some organizations helpfully publish sunrise and sunset charts free on the internet.  I trace them to see when there will be enough light to jog in the morning.  Because of the offset between latest sunrise and earliest sunset, the evenings have been getting microscopically longer for a couple weeks now.  Sunrises, however, are still coming later.  They’ll continue to do so until about mid-January.

For those of us who parse out our days into minutes, trying to feed the beast that requires our utter devotion, finding time to jog can be difficult.  It’s dark after work, and besides, I’m exhausted and hungry by then and need to start on supper.  Morning’s an easier thing to control.  With pagan fervor I await the lengthening days.  Particularly the early mornings, which I crave to be earlier again.  So we light a Yule log and pray for the best.  Not that it ever changes sunrise times.  Around here there’ve been a couple of epic December rainstorms and cloudy days push available light back even further.  With the sun technically risen, it can still be dark.  There’s a metaphor here, dear reader.

Winters are for reflection.  Unless we’re busy cramming each day full of seasonal festivities, we spend a lot of time indoors with our thoughts.  That’s one of the reasons I jog.  It clears my head.  It’s the reboot that comes after the reboot of a night’s rest.  I’ve generally been awake for hours before sunrise.  These little thoughts I share with you daily are courtesy of those quiet moments in the dark.  A winter is wasted if we don’t use it for reflection.  Employers should be more generous with their December holidays.  It’s in sync with nature, which is more in keeping with being human than “business,” or “busyness” is.  Today is the winter solstice.  Around sunset we will light some candles of hope.  And we know that even if we can’t really tell, tomorrow will have a bit more light than today.

Which Love

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Perhaps some content creators use genre as a guide when writing, or when filming a movie.  Some categories are pretty well defined—the western, the romance, or in writing specifically, the literary.  Others are less easily settled.  Horror is particularly slippery.  Although The Love Witch was an interesting story with a feminist message, the horror trappings weren’t entirely obvious.  In fact, it reminded me quite a bit of The Wicker Man.  (Not in any literal way, of course.)  Afterward I read that it is also a comedy and that helped make sense of it.  It gets generally high marks although, to me, the acting seemed pretty wooden.  The Love Witch follows Elaine, a young, present-day witch, who’s moving to a small town in California that tolerates witches.  Her husband has recently died and flashbacks imply that Elaine may not have been entirely innocent in the matter.

Once she settles in Arcata, she starts looking for her “prince charming” as she continues to practice the craft.  She finds an emotionally unstable professor who take her home readily enough, but he quickly proves to be too needy.  Part of this is because he took a love potion she gave him.  He dies that very weekend.  Elaine seems less than distraught as she buries him and begins seeking the next possibility.  The husband of a friend comes over when the friend is out of town and he too proves emotionally immature.  After their affair he dies by suicide.  A policeman investigating the missing professor comes to suspect Elaine, but he too feels drawn to her.  The locals, meanwhile, aren’t as witch-friendly as they seem.  They riot in a burlesque club, chanting, “Burn the witch, burn the witch!”  I won’t spoil the ending.

I was watching all of this with the genre “horror” in my mind.  I’d not seen it labeled as “comedy,” and, as an art film there’s nothing so crude as a laughter track or cheesy and obvious comic music.  Instead, the film is an example of “the female gaze.”  Film analysts, and even religion scholars, have long written about “the male gaze,” which looks at women a certain way.  This movie’s writer, director, and producer, Anna Biller, experiments with the female gaze instead.  The results for some men, I suspect, are disturbing.  They certainly aren’t in control in this film.  Retro in execution, it’s unlike most other horror I’ve watched.  Unusual for the genre, the critics responded well to it.  It was a fun flick, but I’m still not sure how wide “horror” stretches, but I do sense that it’s quite inclusive.  And I applaud the female empowerment on display, even if I’m confused.

Modern Gnostics

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It’s not exactly a standard church.  At least I don’t think it is, but I’m just learning.  (That’s my life’s motto—I’m just learning.)  A convoluted path brought me to the Gnostic Catholic Union’s website.  I’m quite curious about this group.  I’m kind of busy, however, and I’ll hope to come back to it later.  You see, Gnosticism and Catholicism don’t sit easily together in my mind.  There’s a standard myth, accepted by many, that Christianity grew in linear fashion from Jesus through today’s weaponized Evangelical.  Or today’s Roman Catholic.  Or today’s—you fill in the blank—denomination.  Those of us who study the history or religions know the story is much more complicated than that.  It’s more like cladistics than theology.

It wasn’t so simple as a baby born in a manger.  Christianities were a variety of thought pools (not quite think tanks) in the first century.  There was a mix of Jewish ideas and messianic fervor.  One of those pools developed into a type of Christianity known as Gnosticism.  Gnosticism also had branches but one of the main ideas was that only initiates know a hidden knowledge necessary to make it work.  We still see this at play in both religious and secular organizations.  You need to know the secret handshake to be on the winning team.  Meanwhile different Christianities grew different ideas.  We rather simplistically think that Constantine unified them at the Council of Nicaea but you can bet that the guys leaving the council room did so with different ideas on the way home.

Roman Catholicism today is a very diverse religion.  You see, religious identity is something you tend to be born into.  Many people never question it because they’ve got other things to do with their lives.  Still, if you look you can see just how different “Catholics” can be.  It’s perhaps ironic because “catholic” means “universal.”  What’s really universal, however, is that people think differently about religion.  It’s the human condition.  There’s no reason a person can’t be both Gnostic and Catholic, just like there’s no reason you can’t be, say, a Unitarian-Universalist and a Hindu.  Religion is perhaps the most misunderstood of human enterprises.  Since most of us are too busy with other things we hire experts to tell us what to believe.  When enough of these experts are close enough in thought a denomination is born.  And it has many, many siblings.  I ran across the Gnostic Catholic Union quite by accident, but even those of us who are religionists by profession have limited time for everything.  I’m just learning.

Sights of Silence

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To an historian who cut his teeth on deep antiquity (if circumstances were different I would’ve ended up a Sumerologist), my current fascination with film feels manageable.  The form of communication we call “movies” really only began around 1895.  For those of us who find 1000 BCE a bit too modern, the nineteenth century seems strangely contemporary.  Simon Popple and Joe Kember offer a service, therefore, by giving us a Short Cuts on Early Cinema.  I’ve never formally studied cinematography, of course.  I have watched movies my entire life—grew up with them—and have learned to write about them (with some degree of intelligence, I hope!).  The history of the industry itself is fascinating.  Short Cuts are written for students, and this one covers the first twenty years of cinema, 1895–1914.  The cutoff coincides with the start of World War One, although not the introduction of sound, but it works nevertheless.

Although I learned a lot from this little book, the writing was sometimes verging on the technical.  Also, and this is a personal pet peeve, many of the paragraphs were too long.  This is an academic epidemic, not applying to this book only.  Look, I know the whole topic sentence and development thing, but paragraphs may be divided in different places, hopefully compelling the reader on.  When I see books intended for “general readers” with a wall of unbroken left margin, I shudder.  Give the eye a break.  This little digression shouldn’t be taken to imply that this book does it a lot, but there are some long paragraphs and they can make you lose your way.  In any case, there’s lots of good info here to balance out the occasional academic framing.

I especially found useful the year-by-year breakdown of major development in the early film industry.  Movies required quite a few breakthroughs, not the least of which was photography itself and also film stock that could be measured in hundreds of feet.  The machines to both film movement and project film.  Although not by 1914, syncing sound.  Color photography.  Movies are technical marvels.  And my approach to anything that is so gripping is to research its history.  In the case of cinema, it’s not a terribly long history.  Although 1895 is getting further away each passing second, it wasn’t even a century before I was born.  For those of us who look backwards, length does make a difference.  A lot was going on behind the scenes as movies went from one-minute side-show attractions to feature length productions where people went to specially designed theaters to view them.  This little book gives a walk through that world and what helped make cinema what it’s become.

Could Have Understood Differently

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A lesson many authors need to learn (and I include myself here) is that titles matter.  Cutesy, clever titles may work for well-known writers, but something that describes your book, or movie, is essential.  And avoid acronyms.  I avoided watching C.H.U.D. for years, put off by the title.  I’d read a few books where it was discussed, but finally decided it was something I should see.  If you’re as put off by acronyms as I am, C.H.U.D. has a double meaning.  Initially Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers, but more importantly, Contamination Hazard Urban Disposal.  I suppose that’s a bit of a spoiler, but since the movie’s been out since 1984 I’ll let it stand.  Although largely panned, I think C.H.U.D.’s a perfectly serviceable monster movie and despite what the critics say, it has a larger message.

Set in a gritty New York City, the film focuses on the homeless who live underground.  Although it’s not preachy about it, the underlying message is that these are people too.  Until, of course, the contamination hazard mutates some of them into C.H.U.D.  Then they start looking for human victims.  In a city the size of New York, they don’t have much trouble finding them either.  A government cover-up is behind all the mayhem.  Nuclear and other hazardous waste is a very real problem, and none of us really knows what happens to it.  With much of government boiling down to political theater, I’ll take my chances watching movies and wondering.  The good guys in this movie are those who actually care about the homeless.  They are a rather unsympathetic photographer and his wife, a police captain with a missing wife, and a guy who runs a soup kitchen.  They learn something isn’t right beneath the streets but can’t get the authorities to admit it.

This isn’t a great movie—there are gaps in the plot all over the place—but it’s not a horrible movie either.  Sympathetic portrayals of the poor are, in my experience, rare.  These are people who’ve organized themselves into a society that’s come under threat because of those who dwell in the light.  Some classify C.H.U.D. as science fiction,  but that’s a very loose use of the term.  It’s actually a low-budget horror film with a bit of heart.  Unfortunately the title obscures that this is a little gem of a monster movie.  I really had little idea of what it was about when I started streaming, but ninety minutes later I was glad I’d done so.  And I went down to the basement afterwards, you know, just to check.

Author! Author!

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It happened in Salem.  In 1861.  The classic American card game, Authors, was published.  G. M. Whipple and A. A. Smith devised the game, which has remained available ever since then.  It’s one of the few games I remember having as a kid.  We, of course, had the Bible Authors game as well, which I’m kind of nostalgic for, but not enough to see if it’s on eBay.  The object of Authors, an early form of “Go Fish,” is to collect sets of four cards for each author.  Each card lists a different work.  Poets are represented by poems, of course, but prose authors mostly by books.  I have to confess to having eBayed this some time back and having beetlebrowed my family into playing it with me.  I noticed, however, a few curious omissions.

Edgar Allan Poe isn’t among their number.  Neither is Herman Melville.  Rather strangely, they included Shakespeare—centuries earlier than the others—and Alfred, Lord Tennyson.  The only female is Louisa May Alcott when there were perfectly acceptable Brontës in the room, as well as Jane Austin.  The game reflects its time.  A couple years back I was in Michaels—you know, the arts and crafts supplies store.  In fact, Michaels is one of those places for family outings, for families like mine.  (We tend to be creative types.)  While I’ve never been into scrapbooking, I walked down that aisle and found a set of stickers labeled “Literature.”  Two authors were represented: Shakespeare and Poe.  People smarter than me have argued that worldwide Poe is probably the best recognized American author.  I think it’s safe to say Shakespeare occupies a similar role in Britain.

Poe had fallen afoul of many in America because of an intentionally damning obituary by Rufus Wilmot Griswold, whom Poe had named his literary executor.  If it weren’t for Poe nobody would likely know Griswold’s name today.  In 1861, when Whipple and Smith were inventing their game, Poe wasn’t really considered worthy of emulation, largely because of Griswold.  He wasn’t the kind of guy you’d want your kids to be too curious about as you tried to teach them about literature.  Authors has gone through over 300 editions over the years.  I’ve never seen any of them (apart from Bible Authors) other than the Whitman edition from my childhood.  Each time I pick it up, smell the cards (go ahead—try smelling your Kindle), and thumb through the authors I feel like I’m missing something.  Go fish.

Beyond Reason

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Emotions are tricky.  They’re an essential part of being human, but they don’t function rationally.  At least they don’t do so reliably.  And nobody is emotionally pristine.  People have anger issues (quite a lot of that, I know), insecurities, esteem problems (either too much or too little), abandonment concerns, and the list could go on and on.  The thing about emotions is that they’re difficult to fit with logic.  Sometimes it’s hard to believe that logic is an artificial construct and that emotions are just as important to survival as reason is.  Evolution gave us emotions.  Fight, flight, or freeze still operates in most human beings—I’ve seen all three responses when a threat arises.  Feeling sad when unfortunate events take place is normal and natural.  Dogs and other higher mammals feel it too, as has been amply demonstrated.

It’s easy to let our emotions speak for us, even when doing so causes damage we would never rationally seek to impose.  You push me and I push you back.  Something I realized long ago, and this is just to do with my own situation, is that I can’t easily let go of negative emotions.  I recently learned that a relative I never knew very well had a similar trait.  Such people have invisible scars that they bear their entire lives.  The logical mind says, “Let’s use chemicals to erase them.”  The artistic mind says, “Erase my emotions and you erase me.”  It’s important—vital even—that we don’t question a sincere person’s reasons for their emotional responses.  Most people are just trying to do the best that they can.

Religion is generally based on emotional need.  That’s not to say it’s bad or for “the weak.”  It seems that evolution has deemed it a valuable asset for human beings.  As someone who’s studied religion for many, many years, this aspect has become quite clear to me.  Religion is a coping technique and, in the best of circumstances, it contains some of the truth.  As I used to tell my students, nobody intentionally believes a false religion.  The stakes are far too high.  And we have no rational standards by which to measure which religion is right.  It’s a matter of belief.  Religions have to meet us emotionally where we stand.  During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries a shift took place where religions were supposed to be logically, literally true.  This was believed with intense emotion and it led to a situation we still face.  Emotion and rationality must work together, but some ways seem much more productive than others.

What Poe Saw

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It must be quite a draw, making a film based on Edgar Allan Poe.  The psychology of his tales of terror is compelling and modern filmmaking offers endless possibilities.  I wasn’t looking for anything too heavy, so I watched Requiem for the Damned.  Vignette movies are like a box of chocolates (I’m sure you know how the rest of it goes).  This particular feature doesn’t seem to have had a theatrical release, perhaps because it is an independent film made by students and faculty at the Douglas Education Center.  The opening credits cite the Allegheny Image Factory, and when I think of Pittsburgh and horror my mind eventually wanders to George Romero.  The Douglas Education Center began as a business school south of Pittsburgh and it offers training in filmmaking.  And that seems to explain this particular film.

Five vignettes are taken from Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Black Cat,” “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and “The Pit and the Pendulum.”  Only “The Black Cat” is set in Poe’s period and it is heavily CGI.  The rest are modernized versions of ideas inspired by Poe rather than following his plots.  “Usher” uses Poe’s characters and an introduced illegitimate son, to present the Usher curse—the unfeeling business practices that brought the Ushers wealth have made theirs a haunted estate. “Tell-Tale” has a modern urban legend feel as a guy starts seeing his ex-girlfriend’s broken heart everywhere he goes.  “Rue Morgue” is a lesbian revenge story involving an improvised gorilla suit.  “Pit” is a post-apocalyptic vision with almost no dialogue and a somewhat confusing resolution.

Horror anthologies seldom work.  Like edited volumes in the book world, they lack coherence.  Poe insisted that short stories should be single-sitting forms so that mood could be maintained.  Putting five together, each with different directors, writers, and styles, makes for a disjointed viewing experience.  A couple of the segments, “Black Cat,” and “Pit,” seemed to drag a bit.  The former because you already know the story and the CGI was so abstract that it interfered with the telling and the latter because you really don’t know what’s going on.  The visuals are impressive, but story seems to have been sacrificed.  I was looking for something not too heavy and I did find that.  I also learned about a place where filmmaking is taught and you don’t have to have connections to get in.  Who knows?  Perhaps in another life I might’ve gone that direction.  I tend to follow Poe.

Call Me AI

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Let’s call them Large Language Models instead of gracing them with the exalted title “artificial intelligence.”  Apparently, they have great potential.  They can also be very annoying.  For example, during a recent computer operating system upgrade, Macs incorporated LLM (large language model) technology into various word processing programs.  Some people probably like it.  It might save some wear and tear on your keyboard, I suppose.  Here’s what happens: you’re innocently typing along and your LLM anticipates and autocompletes your words.  I have to admit that, on the rare occasions that I text I find this helpful.  I don’t text because I despise brief communiqués that are inevitably misunderstood. When I’m writing long form (my preference), I don’t like my computer guessing what I’m trying to say.  Besides, I type faster than its suggestions most of the time.

We have gone after convenience over careful thought.  How many times have I been made to feel bad because I’ve misunderstood a message thumbed in haste, or even an email sent as if it were a text?  More than I care to count.  LLMs have no feelings.  They don’t understand what it is to be human, to be creative.  Algorithms are only a small part of life.  They have no place on a creative’s desktop.  I even thought that I should choose a different word every single time just to see what this feisty algorithm might do.  Even now I find that sometimes it has no idea where my thoughts are going.  Creative people experience that themselves from time to time.

Certain sequences of words suggest the following word.  I get that.  The object of creative writing, however, is to subvert that in some way.  If we knew just which way a novelist would go every time, why would we bother reading their books?  LLMs thrive on predictability.  They have no human experience of family tensions or heavy disappointments or unexpected elations.  We, as a species tend to express ourselves in similar ways when such things happen, and certain words suggest themselves when a sequence of letters falls from our fingers.  LLMs diminish us.  They imply that our creative wordplay is but some kind of sequence of 0s and 1s that can be tamed and stored in a box.  I suppose that for someone who has to write—say a work or school report—such thing might be a boon.  It’s not, however, the intelligence that it claims to be.

Black Bird

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Although we prefer typecasting—it’s so much easier!—Edgar Allan Poe had both depth and width as a writer.  He penned funny as well as scary, love poems and detective stories, even something like a scientific treatise.  One thing I’m sure he didn’t anticipate was his name being suborned for cheap horror movies.  Roger Corman is a Hollywood legend—a good example of a guy making it in the film industry on his own terms.  He paired Vincent Price with a number of Poe titles that had little to do with the actual works of the writer.  One that oddly stayed with me since childhood is The Raven.  This was well before I’d read the poem.  It’s funny how very specific things will stick in your mind.  I remembered the strange hat Price wore.  And I remembered—misremembered, actually—Price using a spinning magical device with sparklers.  Misremembered because that was Peter Lorre’s character, not Price.

That was it.  I didn’t remember that Boris Karloff was also in the film.  I was too young (as was he) to recognize Jack Nicholson as well.  Although I watched The Twilight Zone, I didn’t realize the script was by Richard Matheson.  This film was loaded with talent, but it really was goofy.  I recollected Price was a magician, but I didn’t know this was a rather silly battle to become chief magician.  Lorre’s ad libbed lines were surprisingly funny, even after all these years (I was about one when the film came out).  Surprisingly, the movie did well at the box office, despite its taking a sophomoric approach to perhaps Poe’s most serious poem.  

I’d avoided watching it again for all these years because of that sparkler scene.  I’m not sure why that particular moment wedged itself so firmly in my young brain.  It seemed so not Poe that I couldn’t get back to the movie, apparently.  With Price and Lorre camping it up—Karloff was, by all accounts, most professional as an actor—and Nicholson uncharacteristically timid, the cheap special effects, it’s obvious that viewers enjoyed a good laugh at this one.  It’s not true to Poe, of course.  It’s true to Roger Corman, however, a filmmaker who knew how to deliver cheaply and quickly and still earn some money at it.  I’d last seen The Raven about half a century ago.  I may be tempted to watch it again, after having seen it as an adult, but if I wait too long I’ll need to leave that duty to someone who’s read this and who isn’t afraid of sparklers. 

Intimate Thoughts

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Although I haven’t had much time to devote to my fiction writing—I’m finishing yet another nonfiction title—I do have a Twitter account for my pseudonym.  I’ve always found it ironic that that Twitter account, which gets very little attention from me, has gained well over twice as many followers as the account in my real name.  On both accounts I follow back, but few notice the account where I post more often.  Strange.  Lately I’ve noticed that my pseudonym account has been getting attention from what seem to be cyber-prostitutes.  I’m not sure if that’s the proper name, but these users purport to be young women and they direct message you with solicitous intent (at least online).  Needless to say, I don’t respond.  It does make me wonder if that’s why Twitter is now known as X.

Social media has given new license to strangers, of course.  For a while there I accepted any invites I received on Facebook (publishers look at how many “followers” or “friends” you have on social media).  Many of these people I don’t know.  One, in particular, happens to be online quite early in the morning and has tried to video call me a few times on Facebook.  Those who do actually know me are aware that I spend less than five minutes a day on Facebook.  I post my post, check my notifications, and move on to other things.  In other words, anyone who knows me would never try to video call me through Facebook.  There are other ways to reach me.  I do have a blog, you know.  Social media has mediated a level of intimacy that I’m not ready to engage.

What am I doing here?

For all my daily shooting off at the fingers, I’m a pretty private person, really.  I’m shy—who knows? Maybe even on the spectrum—but also social.  Working in publishing I know that those who have the power to promote your book (and price it so mere mortals can afford it) want you to have internet exposure.  I guess that means some people will take it as an invitation to try to get sexy with you, or to call you at what is, in reality, the middle of the night.  I want people to get to know me first.  As much time as I spend writing, it’s a mere fraction of how I spend my days.  Intimacy should be reserved for friends.  At least I believe so.  Those who know me well know my pseudonym and its real-life counterpart.  For when I have time for that sort of thing.

After Effects

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Every once in a while you find a book you wish had been published sooner.  The Exorcist Effect, by Joseph P. Laycock and Eric Harrelson is one of those books.  Although it covers many of the same films I talk about in Nightmares with the Bible, it does so with a different target in mind, and a lower price point.  Drawing on the observation that human recall is often accompanied by “source amnesia,” they explore the idea that famous horror films (and some less famous) get remembered as “facts.”  This seems to be a greater danger to those who don’t actually watch horror or who watch it uncritically.  Movies such as The Exorcist become the basis for what individuals believe about demons.  But it’s far more dangerous than that, because in a culture where everything’s politicized, horror movies become “the truth” for groups like QAnon.

Considering Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, and The Omen as prime examples, they then move on to consider the fascinating, if weird, lives of Ed and Lorraine Warren, and Malachi Martin.  Popularizers such as these three influenced both horror films and general public opinion about demonic possession and exorcism.  The study moves on to the Satanic Panic of the eighties and nineties and how heavy metal music both utilizes and ties into the Exorcist Effect.  This important book ends by discussing the very real dangers of a society that elects presidents and others based on this Effect, which confuses reality and movies.  The book shows how many of the ideas behind conspiracy theories either misremember, or intentionally misuse, horror films.

Back in the days when I started Nightmares with the Bible there was comparatively little published in readable terms that discussed demons or, specifically, the portrayal of exorcism in movies.  Laycock and Harrelson’s book would’ve been a welcome contributor to that dearth of resources.  As someone who works on the fringes of the fringe, I don’t always hear the discussions other scholars have and I’m often left to my own devices when it comes to finding and reading information on horror films.  Without library privileges, it often means having to purchase the books to access them.  I was thrilled when I first learned about this book and I’m glad to have finally had the opportunity to read it.  I’m sure I’ll be coming back to it on occasion.  After writing Nightmares, I took a bit of a break from demons because being in the dark for too long can do odd things to a person.  But not knowing about them, as this book shows, might cause even greater problems.

Edge of Civilization

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This is not a movie to be watched by someone with PTSD.  I watched Outpost for the scenery (I’ve been to the area it was filmed many times) and because the New York Times highlighted it.  It ended up being the scariest movie I’ve seen since The Shining.  I mean the kind of scary where your heart is still battering around your chest even after the credits roll.  As an indie horror film it may not be well known.  For clarity’s sake I need to say it’s the Outpost released in 2023.  The one about a woman who goes to spend a summer in a fire tower to recover from domestic abuse.  If you haven’t suffered PTSD, and you’re not as emotionally involved as I let myself become, you might guess by about halfway through what’s really going on.  But there are a bunch of people in the northern Idaho woods that you just don’t trust.

I’ll try not to spoil the ending, but here’s how it goes: Kate was beaten by her husband.  And sexually abused by an uncle when she was growing up.  Against the advice of her best friend, whose brother works for the forestry department, she takes a summer job on a fire lookout tower.  The locals at the store, all men, are threatening in her eyes.  Her new boss doesn’t think she’s a good fit for the post, but to help smooth things over with his sister, he lets Kate have the job.  Along with lighthouses, fire lookout towers are some of the loneliest places in the civilized world.  When a couple of young guys hike by, noting she’s all alone in the tower, your skin begins to crawl.  She keeps having flashbacks to the violence in her past.  Then she meets an older woman hiker who stays awhile and teaches her how to shoot.  A local retiree teaches her how to chop wood.

Kate still doesn’t trust the local retiree.  One of her colleagues from the forestry service has surreptitiously taken photos of her and ogles them.  And day after day after day she has to follow a routine and sees no one.  You get the picture.  I don’t want to give too much away, but for some of us this may be among the scariest movies we’ve ever seen, despite most of it being in the clear summer sunshine of northern Idaho.  The movie ends with a contact number for the National Domestic Violence Hotline.  Joe Lo Truglio, the director, is an actor known for comedy.  Outpost makes me think there’s something else behind the laughter.

The Gift

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Each day, each hour is a gift.  With my mother’s passing two months ago, I’ve been struck by the sheer number of colleagues that have died this year.  Not all of them older than me.  I wrote some months back about Michael S. Heiser, a blogging buddy from days past.  An email about a potential author just yesterday sent me back to the Society of Biblical Literature necrology.  This author had died unexpectedly the day before.  Glancing over the top of the list, I saw that three people with whom I’d worked died in November.  This was quite a shock since two of them were younger than me and the other not much older.  The thing about professors is that you kind of expect them to grow old.  To be old.  Life is a gift, and it’s sometimes easy to forget that.

Both tenacious and tenuous, life is a mystery.  Perhaps it’s perverse, but this makes Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” seem like a metaphor.  In fact, those of us who read and watch horror generally do so with a purpose, consciously or not.  It helps us face difficult things.  Five colleagues in one year sounds like a lot.  Someone in my family, younger than me, had six funerals to attend this year.  Life can feel difficult at such times.  Horror can be a coping mechanism.  At least for some of us.  It can be profoundly hopeful.  The meaning of life can be elusive, which is why, the existentialists conclude, we must make our own.  Existence precedes essence, as they say.

Carlos Schwabe, Death of the Undertaker; Wikimedia Commons

Other than profession, one of the few things these five fallen colleagues had in common was my perspective on them.  I don’t think they knew each other.  Had I not been an editor I likely wouldn’t have known three of them at all.  We live in a web of interconnection.  And I don’t mean the world-wide web (does anyone even use that term any more?).  Lives are gifts and gifts cross paths with other gifts.  Such information, all at once, can be difficult to process.  It makes me wonder why we allow wars.  Why we don’t think of consequences before we vote autocrats to power.  Instead, if we focus on that ephemeral gift we have, and how we might share it with others, appreciation rather than hatred grows.  To this lonely existentialist who watches horror for meaning, that just makes sense.