Haunted States

1 Comment April 3, 2020 Steve Wiggins

I’ve been going through a spate of watching “The Haunting” movies. Just to be clear, I don’t mean The Haunting, by Robert Wise (1963), which is excellent. Instead I mean movies spun off of the Discovery Channel’s series A Haunting. Several years ago, between jobs and too near an FYE store, I picked up a cheap two-fer. This set contained the television movies A Haunting in Connecticut and A Haunting in Georgia. I watched them once and then traded them in to get something else. The first one really bothered me. The Connecticut story deals with a childhood cancer victim, and that alone is scary enough. It had the limitations of a television movie and left me thinking it wasn’t too satisfying. The Georgia haunting was more of a documentary, but it was also open-ended.

Then someone got the idea to make a movie out of the two. The Haunting in Connecticut blows the plot over the top. I kept thinking as I watched it, isn’t it in bad taste to make a horror movie based on the true life horror of tragic disease? The protagonist of the story, Philip Snedecker, died about three years after the movie came out. Although the plot generally followed the first movie an entire subplot was added to pad it out. A nineteenth-century funeral director has enslaved a young man to be his medium. The undertaker steals and marks dead bodies to enhance the boy’s powers. These completely fictional characters intermingle with the real life tragic Snedeckers. As you might expect, chaos ensues.

The oddly named The Haunting in Connecticut 2: Ghosts of Georgia also had to add an entire fabricated story to the troubles of the Wyrick family. In real life the Wyricks moved into a house where their daughter started seeing things, including a kindly ghost named Mr. Gordy. She also saw some sinister spirits. So much so that her family invited a parapsychologist to investigate. The theatrical version adds in a stationmaster on the underground railroad who was also a taxidermist. Instead of helping all the slaves to freedom, he saved some for stuffing later. No real motivation is given, beyond his enjoyment of sawdust and thread and death.

While these two movies really didn’t help much, I generally find watching horror during a pandemic therapeutic. Horror films sometimes help viewers envision worst-case scenarios and figure out how they might deal with them, learning from the victims’ mistakes. I suspect that’s why, a few years back, the CDC posted instructions on what to do in case of a zombie apocalypse. It was all about disaster preparedness. Of course, in those days we had no idea what was really coming to Connecticut, and Georgia, and to every state of the union.

Travel Ban

Leave a comment March 14, 2020 Steve Wiggins

I’m not at home. I know in the current crisis that sounds like heresy, but I can honestly say that getting out of the usual routine where COVID-19 is all you hear about feels right. More and more organizations are instituting work from home policies—many of them mandatory. I’ve worked from home for going on two years now. You need to get out a bit. I know travel isn’t recommended, but I’m really not afraid to die. Besides, I put a box of latex gloves in the car and when we stopped for a restroom break, wore them until they could be safely removed. Exposed surfaces in the rest area were being continually wiped down. Don’t get me wrong—for an introvert like me working at home is fine. It’s just the idea of feeling like this virus is some zombie apocalypse happening just outside my door that I needed to dispel.

When I told a friend I was no longer going to be commuting on a regular basis he said if it were him he’d only ever buy sweatpants again. Now that my reality is life with my wife being the only person I regularly see, I’m beginning to realize just how much our clothes purchases are for impressing others. My haberdashery is akin to that of Henry David Thoreau; I wear clothes until they’re no longer functional. They can be badly out of date but they still work. The fashion industry is built on pride. To put it in the words of my old friend Qohelet, vanity. We want others to see what we’re wearing. If we’re still donning last year’s gay apparel we’re not playing the game. Never mind those of us whose wardrobes could be carbon-dated. The pandemic can be revealing.

So I’m away from home for what is really the first time in months. I had to stop in the grocery store for a few things. Only one person I saw was wearing a mask, but I was wearing prophylactics, so who’s going to cast the first stone? Many shelves were bare. The CDC has become our new gospel provider. I’m limiting my outside exposure. Driving door to door, greeting no-one along the way (that actually is the gospel, but substitute the walking for the driving part). I know when this weekend’s over I’ll be back to my cloistered existence as the rest of the world tries to get used to the loneliness of the sweatpants crowd. If you’re one of them take it from me—the rest of the world is still out there.

Decomposition

1 Comment May 24, 2011 Steve Wiggins

The following video report addresses a number of issues recently raised on this blog: apocalypses, zombies, fear, and humor. Zombies, of course, have been clawing their way to the top of the monster pile for a few years now. Media analysts have suggested that they represent the triumph of the working class—no sartorially suave vampires these—instead they are spattered with blood and gore, multitudinous, and clumsy. Having watched the most recent apocalypse come and go, and having been a victim of an unstable economy for several years of my professional life, I think zombies represent something else. Instead of being the triumphal usurpers of vampiristic free markets, zombies represent the breakdown in culture we are experiencing in the present.

If history gives us anything to go by, we know that powerful world empires ebb and flow. The Persians succumbed to the Greeks, and the Romans could not stop the Goths. The Holy Roman Empire was dissected into the nations of the modern European Union (roughly), and the sun now sets regularly on the British Empire. The United States, the capital of the zombie craze, has perhaps passed its zenith and the zombies know it. Since the 1970s we’ve watched as religious extremists have made a mockery of a political system that had already grown problematic. Like decaying corpses that won’t go away, the factors that propelled the United States to a place of prominence have been undermined so that the non-undead can continue to feather nests already stuffed with down as high as Babel. In the constant see-sawing of political parties the imperialist trends of the obscenely wealthy have rocked their way into the dominant. Is it any wonder that zombies are brainless, yet insatiably driven?

What does it feel like to watch the azimuth decline on a great empire? It is difficult to say. History, as the aphorism states, is written by the winners. Revisionist history has become quite fashionable to those who find that the facts refuse to bow to their worldview. Zombies are those who, historically, do the will of their masters without question. Instead, the zombie of the twenty-first century bows to no master. Pure selfish survival is its sole aim. Perhaps the CDC is too late, the zombies have already overrun us.

Newsy.com’s Report

Of the Zombies, By the Zombies, For the Zombies

Leave a comment May 19, 2011 Steve Wiggins

In what is sure to be a controversial move, the Center for Disease Control has posted an official government blog post entitled “Preparedness 101: Zombie Apocalypse.” (Be warned, if you click on this link it may be considerable time before the page loads—it has been receiving a tremendous number of hits.) Written by Ali S. Khan, the Assistant Surgeon General and head of the CDC, the article is actually about hurricane preparedness, but with zombie furor being what it is, many on the Internet are taking the warning seriously. Literally even. Citing the tsunami in Japan and the concerns for leaking radiation, the article begins with a lighthearted fear-fest that then reveals the actual concern. Humor in the government? This is something we should all encourage!

The analogue with the current rapture fever was immediately obvious. I grew up in terror of the rapture, but when I began to take courses on the Bible from scholars who knew about apocalyptic literature, its context, and what it was intended to do, I realized that the rapture was invented in the nineteenth century by evangelists with no critical training, misreading the book of Revelation. As much as we like to break history into discrete units, time simply keeps flowing and the current of fear generated in the nineteenth gushed into the twentieth century culminating in the birth of the Christian fundamentalist movement. For many people in the twenty-first century, fundamentalism and Roman Catholicism are the two ancient strands of Christianity that legitimately lay claim to the title. At least half of this history is backward.

The Bible itself, when read in context, shows the errors of the rapture-hungry. The idea is a blend of obscure bits of Paul’s letters, mixed into Revelation and stirred vigorously. Then half-baked. The Bible does not give us a rapture. The CDC does not give us a zombie apocalypse. We know where the myth of zombies originates (I have posted on the topic before) and we know zombies are as fictional as griffons and centaurs. Nevertheless, faith springs eternal. Those dissatisfied with all that life has to offer turn to zombies for an equalizingly grim future for all humankind. It’s all gonna rot, baby. Except, of course, for those who’ve been raptured before it happens. When the zombies fail to show up after Saturday’s non-event, all of us will feel pretty silly just looking at each other as Ali S. Khan comes up with his next zinger.