People of Slime

Leave a comment May 8, 2023 Steve A. Wiggins

An old saying advises not to speak ill of the dead. And I suspect this also applies to the living dead. Night of the Living Dead (1968) is a classic horror film that represents the maturing of the genre. Of course, it’s not the only horror film of the sixties, and I don’t mean to speak ill of it by suggesting that George Romero—who was used to working with a small budget—had seen The Slime People. But I wonder if he had. Directed by and starring Robert Hutton, The Slime People was released in 1963 and although it’s really bad, some of the scenes from this black-and-white groaner seem to have been borrowed five years later by the more able director. The interviews by the newscasters and the driving country roads, and even the chasing of the angry mob could’ve served as direct inspirations.

The slime people are from subterranean earth, forced into action by underground nuclear testing. Building a solid fog wall around Los Angeles, they take over the city while a pilot, a scientist and his two lovely daughters, and a marine, save the day. Although the military had been fighting the monsters, they just couldn’t win. The scientist really doesn’t help solve the issue but the pilot (Hutton) finds the creatures’ wall machine and the scientist is able to blow it up with a spear, saving the day. This is one of those films so bad that it’s good. The writing is poor and the plot makes little sense overall. It doesn’t quite have the style of an Ed Wood film, but it participates in the aesthetic of watching bad movies.

Hutton isn’t a bad actor. Hampered by a too-low budget (one of the signs that a movie might be one of the good bad ones), he couldn’t film the story he envisioned. Much of the budget was reputedly spent on the slime people costumes, ensuring that Hutton drew no salary for his own role in his movie. A couple of the other stars were veteran actors, and this prevents the movie from being a mere hack job. I take some hope from the fact that many films like this eventually become cult classics. Yes, sometimes it’s so that we can laugh at them, but I think there may be something deeper involved. Those of us who watch bad movies might recognize something of ourselves in them. We too struggle to tell our story, without big budgets and without studio support. And yet we persist.

Wicker Wondering

Leave a comment May 7, 2023 Steve A. Wiggins

Why The Wicker Man? It’s a fair question. My book is now starting to appear on Amazon and other venues (it’s on Goodreads!), so it’s time to try to get the word out. The BBC ran a recent story, “Why The Wicker Man has divided opinion for 50 years,” and that offers a springboard into the “why” question. I’m not Scottish, but my wife and I lived in Scotland for a little over three years. That’s one reason. While there I did some research into Scottish folklore—historians of religion are curious people—and traveled widely, and that’s another. As one of those writers who’s never been able to break out of the academic market, the third and most direct reason is that I’d begun a book on holiday horror. A friend pointed the series Devil’s Advocates out to me. Back then the series books were priced in the twenty-dollar range, but the pandemic put an end to that!

I’ve always thought The Wicker Man derived its fear from the strangeness of the holiday. I’ve also often wondered why Anthony Shaffer and Robin Hardy didn’t make more use of “Beltane” in the dialogue. Maybe the unfamiliar was too unfamiliar? I suggest a different reason in my book, but I won’t reveal that here. Writing a book on The Wicker Man would allow me the opportunity to share my thoughts about holiday horror without trying to convince an agent that people actually do like to read about horror as well as reading horror itself. Come on, agents! It’s called pop culture because it’s popular!

I pitched the idea and the series editor liked it. So did the reviewers. They were tired of hearing/reading about The Wicker Man as folk horror, as if there was nothing more to the movie. Like most films that grow an afterlife, this one is complex and can be approached from many angles. In fact, there’s another book, one by John Walsh, coming out on the movie just weeks after mine. I wasn’t the only one who knew the fiftieth anniversary was on the horizon like a Beltane sunset on Summerisle. For those who prefer a more television-like explanation, I’ve posted a video on The Wicker Man on my YouTube channel. This blog, I realize, doesn’t get enough hits to drive traffic that way, but it’s nevertheless part of the package. Why The Wicker Man? The answers likely lie in several posts on this blog, a few years in Scotland, and a love of strange movies.

Coronation Bible

Leave a comment May 6, 2023 Steve A. Wiggins

The scene from The King’s Speech doesn’t show it at all, but there was even more drama around the coronation of George VI than the movie reveals. It may not be obvious, especially to Americans, but there is a great deal of prestige in being the supplier of a coronation Bible. The two ancient presses in the United Kingdom, Cambridge and Oxford, vie for that honor. In 1937 Oxford had won out. Coronation Bibles are works of art and are extremely rare. You’ll never find one at your local library’s used book sale. As a recent Oxford University Press blog post indicates, the Bible at George VI’s ceremony was a last-minute replacement. What could possibly go wrong with a ceremonial Bible, of all things? Quite a lot, but this one had to do with an aging cleric.

Despite being the eve of war time, an elaborate Bible had been designed and manufactured. Symbolism is important. Britain faced not only the aggression of Hitler, but also the abdication of Edward VIII. Instability was in the air. In such times, as we’ve seen in American politics, leaders look to the Bible for support. Printed on special paper, chased with gold on its cover, the coronation Bible was a work of art. However, the Bishop of Norwich, Bertram Pollock, couldn’t lift it. At 73 he wasn’t in the best of health, and he had a role in the ceremony. At the last minute a lighter, replacement Bible was sent. According to the OUP blog post, the Archbishop of Canterbury issued a rare apology to the press, but also noted “I cannot but wish that you had given some more consideration to the physical infirmities of those who would have to carry it.”

Swearing on the Bible is an archaism that seems likely to persist into the foreseeable future. The future of the British monarchy (which I do not follow) itself seems in doubt, but to quote the Good Book, “The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever.” As long as many people believe this, such swearing will persist. Even if such belief fades, the solemnity of swearing on a Bible is likely to continue. The Bible has, in its tangible way, become a stand-in for God. And as another archaism, a king, is sworn in today, it is to be hoped that the bishops involved have kept their muscle tone intact. At least to heft, for a little while, a ceremonial Bible.

Insane Illusionist

Leave a comment May 5, 2023 Steve A. Wiggins

The Dark Shadows novels supplemented my early watching of the television series. It’s funny, but when I remember watching the show, in my mind I watched it alone. During a conversation with one of my brothers recently, he assured me that he had watched the show too, pointing to the selectiveness of memory. What I do know is that I was the only one who read the novels. I bought them when I could find them used, and I kept them in an old pasteboard suitcase (we had no bookshelves and my parents didn’t read). I didn’t have the entire collection by a long shot and I can honestly say I don’t know which ones I read back then. I am now, however, two novels from finishing the entire series—a project I began around 2006.

Barnabas, Quentin and the Mad Magician follows the usual formula, although this time around Barnabas is temporarily cured of his vampire curse and Quentin doesn’t turn into a werewolf at all. They are on friendly terms and both are being set up by the rather obvious antagonist, the mad magician. I guess you can begin to see the series winding down. Most of the thirty-two stories are broadly similar and the writing is that rushed, breathless kind that seems characteristic of those who make a living delivering pulp fiction. There have always been people like me who will buy it. That’s the reason I typically use the phrase “guilty pleasure” when describing these novels.

As I note in my YouTube video on the phenomenon, Dark Shadows was quite popular in its day. It’s what we might now call a cultural meme. Television series, novels, two movies, comic books, lunch boxes—the whole coffin. The monsters were likable. That was true of some of the greats—you felt sympathetic toward them. As horror began to “grow up” the monsters often became entirely reprehensible, with no redeeming qualities. So as Barnabas and Quentin do their best to expose the true monster, their supernatural powers currently on hold, they have to rely on their money and connections. Even at the end the “confession” is made suspect by the longer tacked on ending. If you’ve read enough of these, you grow suspicious when there are ten pages left after the antagonist dies. Stories such as this aren’t great literature, but they do fill a gap in the world of monsters that nostalgia leaves for those who knew Dark Shadows in the late sixties.

Surviving AI

Leave a comment May 4, 2023 Steve A. Wiggins

A recent exchange with a friend raised an interesting possibility to me. Theology might just be able to save us from Artificial Intelligence. You see, it can be difficult to identify AI. It sounds so logical and rational. But what can be more illogical than religion? My friend sent me some ChatGPT responses to the story I posted on Easter about the perceived miracle in Connecticut. While the answers it gave sounded reasonable enough, it was clear that it doesn’t understand religion. Now, if I’ve learned anything from reading books about robot uprisings, it’s that you need to focus on the sensors—that’s how they find you. But if you don’t have a robot to look at, how can you tell if you’re being AIed?

You can try this on a phone with Siri. I’ve asked questions about religion before, and usually she gives me a funny answer. The fact is, no purely rational intelligence can understand theology. It is an exercise uniquely human. This is kind of comforting to someone such as yours truly who’s spend an entire lifetime in religious studies. It hasn’t led to fame, wealth, or even a job that I particularly enjoy, but I’ll be able to identify AI by engaging it with the kind of conversation I used to have with Jehovah’s Witnesses at my door. What does AI believe? Can it explain why it believes that? How does it reconcile that belief with the the contradictions that it sees in daily life? Who is its spiritual inspiration or model or teacher?

There are few safe careers these days. Much of what we do is logical and can be accomplished by algorithms. Religion isn’t logical. Even if mainstream numbers are dipping, many Nones call themselves spiritual, but not religious. That still works. We’ve all done something (or many somethings) out of an excess of “spirit.” Whether we classify the motivation as religious or not is immaterial. Theologians try to make sense of such things, but not in a way that any program would comprehend. I sure that there are AI platforms that can be made to sound like a priest, rabbi, or preacher, but as long as you have the opportunity to ask it questions, you’ll be able to know. And right quickly, I’m supposing. It’s nice to know that all those years of advanced study haven’t been wasted. When AI takes over, those of us who know religion will be able to tell who’s human and who’s not.

Spiritual Alterations

2 Comments May 3, 2023 Steve A. Wiggins

I’d been meaning to watch Altered States for quite a few years. I suspect the reason (it’s been long enough that I can’t recall for sure) is that I knew it had a story line tied in with religion. The tale follows Edward Jessup, a psychopathologist, who is attempting to understand schizophrenia. He’s particularly taken by the religious nature of some schizophrenic delusions, and he uses sensory deprivation on himself to trigger something similar. A trip among tribal Mexicans leads him to a psychoactive substance that he decides to combine with sensory deprivation to enhance the effects. Along the way he explains to his girlfriend, and eventual wife, that his father was religious but died a horrible death. He therefore became irreligious but his altered states of consciousness are often full of images from Revelation.

While the Bible theme eventually gives way to biological regression to pre-Homo sapiens, one of Jessup’s experiences has him coming to his dying father again and dropping a Bible on him which turns into the veil of St. Veronica on his face, which he then rips off and throws, flaming, to the floor. Another instance of the Bible in horror, the film also uses crucifixes and hellish images to demonstrate the religious nature of these alternative states. Jessup’s goal is to regress to the original thought, to encounter, as he puts it “God.” This desire, combined with the potent Mexican drug, transforms him physically, and, in the end, emotionally. Instead of being dissociated from his wife (whom he is planning to divorce), he realizes that love is the only thing that can save him from the terror of his experiences.

This is some profound stuff. Paced like a movie from 1980, it has a quality not unlike 2001: A Space Odyssey. The message seems to be sound—the need for encountering the “divine” ends up convincing Jessup (that may autocorrect keeps changing to “Jesus”) that love is really what it’s all about. The transformation scenes, while not shown in the detail of An American Werewolf in London, are nevertheless convincing enough. It’s a rare movie that treats religion respectfully. Here Ivy-League scientists are motivated to understand it. In real life, alternative states of consciousness are quite real, if poorly understood. They’ve been part of religious practice from the beginning and are a far cry from sitting in the pew and singing anodyne hymns week after week. The more movies I see, the more it seems that a sequel to Holy Horror will be necessary some day.

Atomic Apocalypse

Leave a comment May 2, 2023 Steve A. Wiggins

Avoiding Apocalypse, as the title suggests, is something most reasonable people would agree is a good thing. This book by Jeff Colvin, a science advisor in the George H. W. Bush administration’s Department of Energy, tells the story, in the words of the subtitle, How Science and Scientists Ended the Cold War. Long time readers of this blog will know a couple things: I only comment on politics when I’m forced to by circumstances, and I’m an eclectic reader. The latter point led me to this book and led to a bit of the former. Nuclear war terrifies me. Growing up in the seventies and eighties, when at times it seemed that we were a hair-trigger away from mutually assured destruction, I wondered why world leaders couldn’t see what all the rest of us did. There may be some answers to this in Colvin’s book.

He initially makes the point that the only way for science to thrive is to have a democratic government. (Think carefully, card-carrying Republicans, about running anti-democracy candidates!) Colvin clearly shows how in the Soviet Union, repression and state-run thought-policing hampered scientific exchange and prevented Russian development. It was only under the leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev that this connection was realized and dismantling of the Cold War was led by scientists, such as Andrei Sakharov, who was instrumental in the Soviet development of nuclear weaponry, but who was exiled for his activism in trying to prevent the apocalypse of the title. The Soviet administration had to change enough to permit scientists to speak out before reason could enter the equation.

This is a scary book. Democracy, which many of us advocate and which seems the best, even if flawed, system of government, is often captive to ideologues. Even today anti-rational people adore Trump, despite the fact, as this book shows, he brought us dangerously close to annihilation by his sheer incompetence. Tracing the history of arms control, and its great successes, leads to the little ray of optimism that shines through.

One of the problems with the publishing world is its inherent slowness. Although only published this year, this book was written in 2020. I, for one, would be interested in the author’s take on things over the last year or so. His understanding of what had been happening in Ukraine would, no doubt, shed some light on the tragedy going on there now. One thing this important book makes abundantly clear is that democracies only work when, like scientists, people vote rationally, not with some gut feeling that a self-made messiah will lead us to bankrupt salvation.

50 Years Ago on May Day

Leave a comment May 1, 2023 Steve A. Wiggins

Word is starting to get out about The Wicker Man. One of the most intelligent of horror movies, it turns fifty this year. Aware of the coming anniversary, I pitched a volume in the series Devil’s Advocates on the movie a few years back. I was delighted that my take on the film was unique enough to qualify and my volume has now appeared on Liverpool University Press’ website. And, as an added bonus, a blog post I guest wrote on the book will also appear shortly. And it’s May Day. The Wicker Man is the third person of the unholy trinity of folk horror. The other two films are Witchfinder General and The Blood on Satan’s Claw, both of which I’ve reviewed here. But 1973 was also the year another person of another unholy trinity, The Exorcist, was released. This other trinity began with Rosemary’s Baby and concluded with The Omen. If you’re curious about it, I wrote quite a bit about it in Holy Horror.

Fiftieth-year anniversaries are significant, given how young the film industry is. Depending on the publisher, it may be difficult to get advance notice out. My colleague Joseph Laycock, along with Eric Harrelson, wrote The Exorcist Effect. This is a book I’m very excited for, although it’s not yet on its publisher’s website. Academic publishing can be slow that way. Another fiftieth anniversary Wicker Man book is coming out in October—John Walsh’s The Wicker Man: The Official Story of the Film. The publisher, Titan books, not hampered by university press processes, had the book well advertised a couple of months back. I’m looking forward to reading that one as well. These fiftieth anniversary books are a boon for those who watch intelligent horror.

Academic publishers, you see, classify books in different ways than trade publishers do. If you’re not sure what a trade publisher is, it is essentially anyone whose books you see in actual bookstores. Academic publishers tend to focus on library sales and sales to academics who are willing to shell out fifty, a hundred, or sometimes more, bucks for a book. (In my teaching days, although we had no expense budgets at Nashotah House, I would occasionally (very rarely), after careful family consultation, shell out the academic press price for a book I needed for research and the library wouldn’t buy.) My last three books have been written for wider readerships, but have been published by academic presses. On this fiftieth anniversary year, I’m planning on reading a couple of good books. And thinking about May Day fifty years ago.

Lilith Be Gone?

Leave a comment April 30, 2023 Steve A. Wiggins

One of those questions it isn’t politic to ask is “Are you Jewish?” I get asked that once in a while but mainly by Jews. I’m not Jewish but some people tell me I look like I am. In any case, as a Bible editor at an academic press, the question of someone’s ethnic affiliation sometimes comes up. The dilemma is that we can’t ask that. And it is very difficult to know the answer if someone doesn’t tell you. The reason that this is on my mind is that I recently watched John R. Leonetti’s horror film Lullaby. The film was one of at least two that came out with that title in 2022. And since it deals with Jewish themes, that question naturally comes to mind: is the director, or are the writers, Jewish? I suspect, from the way all of this plays out that the answer is “No.” Or, if they are, they didn’t do their homework.

Lullaby is a Lilith story. A young couple—she’s Jewish, he’s a convert for her—have a newborn. The woman’s sister has sent to them, among other things, a book in Hebrew that contains a Lilith-summoning lullaby. Lilith shows up and steals the baby but a tattooed rabbi gives the husband some Jewish rituals to combat Lilith. Apart from the spurious etymology of “lullaby” as “Lilith be gone,” this rabbi doesn’t seem convincing. His Hebrew handwriting looks as if he might be a first-year student. And keeping a menorah lit all night is supposed to keep a demon at bay? Not only that, his assistant can be bribed to regain the cursed book. All of this begins to look like a gentile trying to direct a horror film in a religion he doesn’t understand.

Religion and horror go naturally together. I’ve written several posts about Jewish horror that really works. In those instances, it’s clear that the writers and directors understand what Judaism is. The solution here is that the convert husband must “really believe” in order to conquer Lilith. The rabbi tells him to have faith. The thing is, Judaism isn’t a religion based on having faith—Christianity is. And taking that aspect of Christianity and using it to try to make other religions faith-based is one of the most common mistakes of those who don’t study religions professionally. Horror works well with religion when those doing it actually understand the religion they’re trying to portray. When they don’t, it can end up looking like appropriation of the worst kind. I watched the movie because it was about Lilith. What I found was a basic misunderstanding of how religions work.

Inventing Chaos

Leave a comment April 29, 2023 Steve A. Wiggins

A recent (in my personal interaction with time) article from the New York Times recounts two bad inventions by Thomas Midgley Jr. Namely, leaded gasoline and the practical use for chlorofluorocarbons. Besides making me interested in Midgley, the article got me thinking about inventors and inventions. We never know, in real time, if innovations are good ideas or not. We have no crystal ball and what seems like a good idea now may prove to be a catastrophe. I’ve given a couple of talks on the Antikythera mechanism. If you’re not familiar, it is essentially an analogue computer invented in the first century. Experts suggest there were likely multiple such devices, but they never caught on and transformed society. Why? Nobody saw the practical benefits.

The Antikythera mechanism was made essentially to predict eclipses and track the movement of heavenly bodies. The fact that such a thing existed within a century of when Jesus of Nazareth lived and died is mind-blowing at first. Still, it makes a point. We never know when an invention will take off and change the world. And we never know if that change will ultimately be good or bad. There are many who suggest that the invention of agriculture was a mistake. We eat less healthily than our hunter-gatherer ancestors, and they may have been much happier (in general) than we are. Still, agriculture (despite creating desk jobs) has its benefits. We live longer. We have medical science. And we can entertain ourselves with clever people on YouTube. While we sit around too much and eat things that really don’t benefit us, we seem to be doing okay. We’re living longer, at any rate.

The problem, it seems to me, is when capitalism takes an idea and blows it up into a huge money-making venture. People just can’t take their eyes off that shiny, shiny gold. And ideas, when they start making unreasonable demands (a new cellphone every other year? Really, is that necessary?) tend to lead to the same results as leaded gasoline and chlorofluorocarbons. If they can be monetized, ideas will push themselves into this unbroken feedback loop we call economy. Often at the price of ecology. Inventors are both necessary and dangerous. Their efforts often make the world more comfortable, more convenient. They might, however, cause immense harm. Being a vegan, I’d have a difficult time surviving as a hunter-gatherer. Gathering is more my style, in any case. If only I had a way of tracking the movement of heavenly bodies, I might just be content.

Finding Family

1 Comment April 28, 2023 Steve A. Wiggins

Sea Change is a probing story of learning to live with loss. Of learning how to say goodbye. I’m sure that I didn’t catch all that was being offered in this novel, but for those of us who did grow up without a father there’s a kind of therapy here. I know that I eagerly awaited the end of work each day so that I could pick it up and read a bit more. Framed as the story of the only child of Korean immigrants, the novel features Aurora (Ro), a young woman who has had to find her way ever since her father has gone missing. And even before that, actually. Her father, as a marine biologist, had captured an octopus (Dolores) who now lives in the aquarium where he once worked. Ro, whose relationship with her mother is strained, takes a job in the aquarium after her father goes missing and befriends the remaining part of him—Dolores.

At the same time Ro’s boyfriend is accepted into a mission being launched to Mars. (This isn’t science fiction, just to say.) The loss is another deep cut to a woman who had to deal with the earlier significant loss of her father. I won’t say much more about the plot since I think you should read the book, but it is a thoughtful, and from my experience, realistic journey through the mental states of those who cope with abandonment issues early in life. Of course, I can’t speak to the experience of being a child of immigrants, but the novel shows we all deal with the same kinds of issues, no matter where we’re from. At least we do in modern civilization.

Sea Change made me ponder, however, whether children raised communally would feel the same kind of loss if a parent they didn’t know was theirs left. The mother-and-child bond is a deep one, so I guess it could be that fathers, after conception, would be expendable in such a situation. It’s difficult to project how such a society would work. The family unit is so deeply engrained into our experience that, unless a situation is truly dire, we know we can rely on our parents not to try to harm us, but rather to protect and love us. Those of us who grew up without fathers (I’m not sure if that’s the case with Gina Chung or not) deal with insecurity issues that never quite go away. This beautifully written novel was, for me, a healing kind of experience.

Planting Knowledge

Leave a comment April 27, 2023 Steve A. Wiggins

In an effort not to harm other living creatures, I became a vegan about seven years ago. Generally it’s not too difficult, although many eateries still think you have to exploit animals to eat anything. Vegan fare is quite good, and some of it is remarkable. Then I saw the article in Popular Mechanics, “So It Turns Out Plants Have Had Voices This Whole Time” by Jackie Appel. Well, “voices” may be stretching it a bit, but they do make sounds. According to the article, plants “talk” at the same volume as humans tend to, only it’s in a range that we can’t perceive. Other animals, however, may. That’s right, your dog may be able to hear the noise plants make. This is one of the reasons I marvel at scientific arrogance. Human senses simply can’t perceive all stimuli—how can we claim that what we term “supernatural” doesn’t exist? We don’t have nearly all the data.

Meanwhile, we live with animals whose sense of smell would send us running even more frequently to the showers. Animals who can hear plants “talking.” Animals who can perceive magnetic fields. We’ve evolved knowing what we need to know. (At least in part.) What then do plants communicate? Can they hear one another? The sounds plants make, if “translated” to human perception, seem to be “I’m thirsty,” “I’ve been hurt,” or “I’m fine.” The terminology here is Appel’s but you get the idea—plants broadcast their status. Can plants scream? One of my students reminded me a few years back that I once wondered to her what a tomato felt when it was being sliced. I responded, “That sounds like something I would’ve said.”

So now I’m a vegan and plants are joining the conversation. My hope is that they don’t feel pain. As far as we know, plants don’t have brains. Even so, heliotropes are smart enough to follow the sun across the sky. And even fully grown trees move—very, very slowly—to optimize the light they require. Such intelligence in nature always leaves me in a state of wonder. We’ve been told for centuries of human exceptionalism. Sure, we have opposable thumbs and have figured out how to communicate intricate things vocally. So much so that we can represent them in written form (such as you’re reading right now) and can know what someone’s saying even at great distances. That doesn’t mean we’re the only remarkable creatures. But it does leave me with the dilemma of what to eat.

How to Write a Book

2 Comments April 26, 2023 Steve A. Wiggins

When I worked at Routledge I was told never to mention William Germano’s name. I’ve never been one to dabble in workplace politics, but I did wonder why. Over time, as I tried to commission the kinds of books I knew Routledge for, I was told that they didn’t do those kinds of books. Not since the Germano days. Years later I still don’t know what all of that was about, but I do know that Germano wrote a book that would make nearly every academic editor’s life easier if it were handed out at every doctoral graduation ceremony. From Dissertation to Book is a classic in the field. Now in its second edition, in it Germano explains, in non-technical language, why and how a dissertation is not a book. He also explains how to make it a book.

You see, academic editors, such as yours truly, see more dissertations than the most ambitious professor. The doctoral student, flush with the praise of his or her examination committee, sends off their thesis, largely unchanged, and wants it to be published. Hey, don’t be embarrassed—that’s what I did too. The truly amazing thing to me, as someone who’s been both professor and editor, is how little publishing and academia know about each other. If I had to guess who knows whom better, I’d have to say publishers take an edge over academics. Their knowledge is far from perfect, however. Academics have to publish for promotion and tenure, but they don’t bother to learn about how publishing works. Germano’s book would help them too.

For many years well-known academics have been stating in highly visible places that academic writing is poor writing. It is. Germano explains why in this little book. Better than that, he gives solid advice on how to improve your chances of getting published. I’ve been working in academic publishing for a decade and a half and I learned quite a lot from this little book. Dissertations are written to prove yourself to a committee. Books are written for a wider readership that wants to be able to understand what you’re talking about. Day in and day out, people like myself read dissertations. Generally there’s a kernel of something good there. (Sometimes, honestly, there’s not. Not all theses are created equal, although that’s not one of the ninety-five.) Germano’s book offers a way to find and plant that kernel so that it grows into something any editor would be pleased to receive—the proposal for an actual book. It should be read widely—much more widely than it is.

Monsters of Mystery

1 Comment April 25, 2023 Steve A. Wiggins

Sunn Classic Pictures was responsible for much of my young movie viewing. Or at least a reasonable portion of it. As I predicted, I ended up watching The Mysterious Monsters in the wake of Boggy Creek, and that got me curious about this unusual production company. As a film distributor, the company began in 1971. One of its early films was the aforesaid Mysterious Monsters. Unlike other film distributors, their practice was to rent out a theater (this was before multiplexes) and take all the profits for the run of their film. This was no risk to a theater owner and apparently it worked for Sunn. They sponsored documentaries on unusual topics, likely because of the tastes of one of the founders, Charles Edward Sellier Jr.

In addition to cryptids, the company also made films of the Bermuda Triangle and Noah’s Ark. They even had a hand in a television version of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” Ever since my college days, I’ve tried to figure out whether they had a religious motivation. I suppose it was In Search of Noah’s Ark that made me wonder. They even distributed work by Alan Landsburg, who would go on to initiate the series In Search of…, which claimed many of my childhood viewing hours. Sunn lasted only a decade before being bought out by Taft International Pictures, but what a formative decade it was! As I’ve noted in a couple of my books, the bestselling nonfiction book of the seventies was Hal Lindsey’s Late Great Planet Earth. That level of interest firmly fixed the Apocalypse in the American imagination. I even saw the 1978 film (not Sunn Pictures) in the same theater that’d housed Mysterious Monsters.

Come to think of it, the Drake Theater in Oil City had an outsized influence on my thinking. The Drake is now gone. It served the Oil City area for many years. I saw Star Wars there for the first time, as well as Clash of the Titans. We didn’t have much money, which may be why the escapism of movies was so important to my young self. Now that I’ve finished my third book about movies it seems that perhaps I missed my calling. Life is all about finding something someone will pay you to do. The most fortunate find meaning in it as well. The rest of us generally have to wait for the weekend to have the time to watch movies. But like the Drake, Sunn Classic Pictures is gone, leaving memories of formative ideas behind.

Golem Events

Leave a comment April 24, 2023 Steve A. Wiggins

It doesn’t have a title yet. At least not one that’s announced. Still, when a friend pointed out this article that Daniel Handler, better known as Lemony Snicket, is writing a horror film about a golem, I sat up straight in my chair. Since I don’t tend to dwell on children’s topics here, it may not be obvious that I was a real fan of A Series of Unfortunate Events, by Lemony Snicket, back when they came out. Alerted to this series by a cousin who was my daughter’s age, we made this bed-time reading for a few years. Handler, in the early days, did a pretty good job of keeping his identity secret. He’s written some adult fiction, and those of us who write know that readers want more of the same thing from a writer—if you want to survive you do what they ask.

I’m a very eclectic reader—that may be one reason I don’t have many followers on this blog. People like the same thing time and again. (I’ve always been suspicious of genres. One of the reasons, I suspect, that my students found my lectures interesting is that I drew from my eclectic reading, but that’s ancient history now.) In any case, A Series of Unfortunate Events was formative in my own writing. The movie remains one of the most gothic available, but it pales next to the novels. Yes, they’re written for young readers, but they’re also very well written for young readers. I discovered Snicket, or Handler, was Jewish when he wrote The Latke Who Couldn’t Stop Screaming. And now he’s turned his attention to one of my favorite monsters. The golem has been part of horror from the earliest days of the genre (that word!).

Paul Wegener and Henrik Galeen’s The Golem, part of a trilogy, came out in 1915. Before the Universal monsters. Even before Nosferatu. The legend of the golem—which may have inspired Frankenstein—has a long history. While not biblical, the golem does go back many centuries. Unfortunately these early horror films are lost, or mostly lost. The Golem and the Dancing Girl, from 1917, is a lost comedy horror. The third film, The Golem, How He Came into the World, from 1920, survives and is sometimes called “The Golem.” I wrote earlier about the excellent 2018 film The Golem by Doron and Yoav Paz, sensitive to Jewish issues in the seventeenth century. This sub-genre of golem movies may be starting to come into its own. It remains to be seen what Handler will do with it, but if his previous work is anything to go by, we may be in for a real treat.