Vlad Fest

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I may or may not have read at least part of this book before.  When I found it at a used book sale somewhere, it looked familiar.  Having read it, I’m not sure if it was the same one as before.  There are certain parts that I would’ve thought a high schooler would have remembered.  I recognize the names of the authors, Raymond T. McNally and Radu Florescu.  You see, one of my senior term papers in high school was on vampires.  Unable to afford books, my research was done in the school library and this book is old enough to have been in the collection.  While the subtitle, A True History of Dracula and Vampire Legends, may seem to indicate a book primarily about vampires, In Search of Dracula is mainly about Vlad Tepes, or Vlad the Impaler.  I can’t imagine myself wading through all the Romanian history in high school.

You see, I remember reading a book on the history of vampires.  The strongest memory is of reading it in our church sanctuary.  Lest you get the wrong idea, I was very involved in our youth group.  We occasionally had chaperoned sleepovers at the church and I had already had a leadership role, serving on church committees and district and conference-level events.  Nobody had a problem with me sitting in the sanctuary.  On one of the sleepovers, I awoke early (as I have always tended to do), and I went to the sanctuary to read the book by the dawn’s early light streaming through the stained-glass window.  I have kept a look out for the book, and I thought this might have been it.

I’m pretty sure it wasn’t.  While this history does have a good summary of vampire customs and even movies, it takes a stout stomach to read the material about Vlad III’s reign.  Although he is a Romanian hero, he was a cruel man and his infamy was well established during his own lifetime.  I’m pretty sure that he would’ve been diagnosed with a mental disorder, had psychology existed then.  This book does trace his history and surveys various places associated with him.  One thing that might’ve been helpful would have been more maps.  The authors are clearly well versed in Transylvanian geography, but the average reader may not be able to find some of the many place names on the one map they include.  Otherwise, this is quite an informative book, mostly about Vlad, but with useful chapters on Bram Stoker and the vampire in the media up to the early seventies.

Not Fantasy

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There’s a reason I watch horror.  One of the many things you can’t find online is how popular movies were before the internet days.  This is an issue for me because I only just now found out about Phantasm, which was released in 1979.  Granted, I lived in a small town, but I did know about The Amityville Horror—everyone knew about The Amityville Horror.  The films were released the same year, but Phantasm was an indie production and probably didn’t have reach into my local region.  Nobody talked about it at school and I only became conscious of it a few weeks ago.  I learned that it was quite a box office success, but the critics didn’t care much for it (and I can see why).  It was, however, rediscovered and has become a cult classic.  I can see that too.  The thing is, it is a bad movie.  I’m learning to appreciate such things.

Part of the reason the film bothered me is that I really dislike “but it was all a dream” endings.  Even though there’s a final suggestion that some of it “really happened,” or Michael is dreaming within a dream, such endings always make me shrug.  Horror, to really work, has to be in that liminal zone between believability while on screen and the deeper knowledge that it’s fiction.  Phantasm just had too many strikes against it to be believable.  The dwarves were lifted straight from Star Wars’ Jawa.  The Tall Man isn’t scary (this is from a current-millennium perspective, granted) and while you’re just trying to get into the horror mood (the music is appropriate) a flying ball of death, a sudden sci-fi element, is thrown in.  Of course, the plot takes a kind of sci-fi turn near the end.  It didn’t, however, do any heavy lifting.

I was surprised to learn that it became a franchise, no members of which I’d ever heard.  It is interesting that speculation exists that the creepypasta stalwart, the Slender Man, was developed from the Tall Man concept.  Given that I was seventeen when this movie came out it might be someone of my vintage—but from a different vineyard—would find Tall Man scary.  Of course, if I’d seen it when it was first out, and in a theater, I might’ve gotten some chills from it.  I could have included it in Holy Horror since there is some Bible in it, but it isn’t used to its full extent for a movie that mostly takes place in and around a funeral home.  There is some comfort in knowing that even if your work isn’t great, it can still be rediscovered if enough time passes.  And there’s good reason to watch it.

Alien Invaders

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I’ve been pondering genre for some time now.  And since Stephen King assures me (not personally) that Earth Vs. the Flying Saucers is horror, I figured I’d give it a try.  In fact, given the various themes of the movie, I’m surprised I hadn’t seen it before.  The title pretty much gives it away—aliens try to take over Earth with a swarm of flying saucers.  Two scientists figure out how to make their saucers stall, and even though the aliens have a disintegration ray that pretty much destroys anything, the earthlings prevail.  Having summarized it all in less than a hundred words, is there really anything worth comment here?  I think so.

Like many older movies this one makes use of stock footage to fill in action sequences and to keep the budget reasonable.  So there are big guns going off and rockets being launched.  (This was a pre-Sputnik movie and it depicts America having eleven satellites in orbit.)  But the additional footage that stayed with me was a scene of two planes colliding and crashing.  It was clear these weren’t models and the footage was authentic, apart from the flying saucer shooting the planes.  It turns out that this scene was indeed real, and that the pilots of both planes died in the crash.  During an air show outside Spokane, Washington in July 1944 this collision was caught on film by a Paramount news crew and it was reused in this film.  This got me to thinking about war footage—something that really only became possible in the Second World War.  And what we now see today in real time on the internet because the world is wired.

It’s as if those who wage war are fine with it as long as people with a conscience don’t know what happens.  There’s even a phrase used to excuse unspeakable barbarism during combat: the haze of war.  This we know about our species—there’s a tipping point beyond which rationality shuts off and we’re no longer responsible for our behavior.  We also know that war puts people in that zone.  It was fine as long as only surviving warriors were left to tell the stories of their bravery.  Photographing, particularly in motion pictures, combat revealed a much darker truth.  Well, at least in Earth Vs. the Flying Saucers the enemies under attack were fictional.  Except.  Except, some of the casualties were real people whose final moments were caught on camera.  Be sure to get out and vote today, if you’re in the United States.  There’s a party even less understanding than aliens out there, desiring to take over.

Thinking about Vampires

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Any book on vampires has to be limited.  I first read Matthew Beresford’s From Demons to Dracula: The Creation of the Modern Vampire Myth back in 2009.  It has lots of information, but it was long enough ago that much of what I’d learned had grown fusty with age.  I began re-reading it as Halloween approached, and am glad I did.  The thing about vampires, however, is that you do have to compare sources.  Like many explorations of the vampire, Beresford’s notes that there are ancient analogues, but nothing precisely like we think of vampires today.  From my own perspective, I tend to think that our modern vampires, like our demons, come from movies.  Starting with F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, but more clearly from Tod Browning’s Dracula, our idea of what vampires are have been mediated by the silver screen.

This book ranges widely across time, region, and genre.  It discusses early reports that clearly considered vampires an actual threat, as well as movies made purely for entertainment.  One thing that I noticed this time around is that the author, being British, seems not to have noticed the tremendous influence Dark Shadows had on the popularity of vampires prior to Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire.  I suspect that soap operas were not widely known internationally, and even if they were, they were likely not taken too seriously.  Dark Shadows was different, however, and it made vampires chic in a way they simply weren’t before the early seventies.  At least in the United States, Barnabas Collins helped define the vampire.

Beresford makes the point that there is no single defining characteristic that applies to all vampires.  Early European vampires didn’t necessarily drink blood—they were revenants (they’d returned from the dead) but they weren’t always after blood.  In the nineteenth century bloodlust became the defining feature of vampires.  There are historical points on which to quibble with the argument here, but overall this book is a good overview of how ideas like vampires have been around for quite some time.  As someone who specialized in ancient literature for a good part of my life, I would not have called the various ancient analogues pointed out “vampires.”  Beresford is making the case that they lay the groundwork for what later became vampires.  And Vlad Tepes of Wallachia played his part as well.  As did the ancient Greeks.  It seems to me there’s more rich ground to explore here and this book provides a very good starting place.

Vampire or Not?

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I’d heard that Martin was a depressing movie but I felt I should watch a Romero film that wasn’t about zombies.  I’d read bits and snatches of what happens, but I didn’t know the storyline in total.  Now that I’ve seen it, I’m still not sure what to make of it.  Martin is a young man who believes himself to be a vampire.  He does drink blood, murdering his victims, but there are no fangs, no “magic stuff” as Martin himself calls it.  It seems pretty clear that he’s mentally unbalanced, but he’s brought into his older cousin’s house in Braddock, Pennsylvania.  Cuda, his cousin, believes him to be a vampire, calling him “Nosferatu.”  He has protected his house with garlic and crucifixes, but Martin demonstrates that such things (magic stuff) doesn’t work.  

Daylight and eating regular food don’t bother him.  His cousin gives him a job at the grocery store he runs, while constantly warning Martin about looking for victims in Braddock.  Shy around women, he only has sex with his victims, after he has drugged them.  (This is a pretty violent movie, and the tone is downbeat throughout.)  Since he has no friends, he calls into a radio talk show to discuss the problems of being a vampire, and people love listening to him.  Meanwhile, Cuda arranges for an exorcism on Martin, which doesn’t work.  There are black-and-white sequences that aren’t really explained—either as fantasies or as past memories for a real vampire.  After his cousin becomes too suspicious, he stakes Martin to death and buries him in his back yard.

There are many unanswered questions about this movie.  If Martin is a vampire just about everything in traditions about them is wrong, apart from needing to drink human blood.  When Martin begins an affair with a troubled housewife, his bloodlust lessens, but he still gets “shaky” and has to find victims.  For those of us who tend to find ambiguity both beguiling and confusing, this is a vexing movie.  It makes you wonder what a vampire really is, and, as with most of Romero’s work, there’s a fair bit of social commentary—intentional or not.  Life itself has its fair share, perhaps more than its fair share, of ambiguity.  The only real certainty that Martin gives is that his victims die and he himself dies in the end.  Is his cousin correct?  Is Martin himself correct?  He may be mentally ill, but society is too.  And the working-class people of Braddock should know who the real vampires are.

This Is Halloween

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He was probably trying to impress his wife with his wit.  I was in a department store—a rarity for me.  I was wearing a mask, because, well, Covid.  As this guy, older than me, walked by he said “Halloween’s over.  Take off your mask.”  It bothers me how politicized healthcare has become, but what bothered me more was that it was only October 20.  It wouldn’t even be Halloween for another 11 days.  What had happened to make someone think Halloween was over so early?  Yes, stores had switched over to Christmas stuff by then.  In fact, I wandered into another store where Christmas carols were playing.  Capitalism seems to have wrenched the calendar out of order.  We’re tired of All Hallows Eve before it starts.  In fact, just the day before we’d gone out to a pumpkin patch to get our goods and the carved pumpkins are now showing their age.

If that little exchange in the store had been in a movie, it would’ve been a cue for me to transform into some big, scary monster.  Of course, Halloween is what it is today because of relentless marketing.  And a handful of nostalgia from people my age with fond childhood memories of the day.  For some of us, however, it is a meaningful holiday in its own right.  It makes us feel good, even after we’ve grown out of our taste for candy.  It is significant.  Christmas is a bit different, I suppose, in that there is nothing bigger following, not until next Halloween.  Besides, Christmas is supposed to go for twelve days.  The fact that Halloween is a work day makes it all the more remarkable.  We have to work all of this out while still punching the clock.

I had really hoped to be able to get to Sleepy Hollow this Halloween.  Sleepy Hollow as American Myth tries to make the case of how that story and Halloween came of age together.  It is the iconic Halloween story, what with ghosts and pumpkins and all.  And the month of October is spent with scary movies for many people.  This month I’ve posted about horror movies every other day, pretty much, trying to connect with my audience.  If that is my audience.  I tend to think of Halloween as a community.  Those of us who, for whatever reason, think of this as our favorite time of year.  A time when perhaps we don’t feel so stigmatized for liking what we do.  A time that we’re not hoping will shortly end so we can get onto the next thing.  It may have been meant as a joke, but I wasn’t laughing.  Happy Halloween!

Premature

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The last, for me (but actually the third), Roger Corman Poe Cycle film is The Premature Burial.  Released the same year as Tales of Terror, it departs from the other Poe films in not starring Vincent Price.  Indeed, this is because it was originally not an American International film, but was later brought into the fold.  This particular story by Poe doesn’t have the superstructure of this film at all.  Indeed, Poe’s tale is spare, beginning with reported events of premature burial and ending with a first-person fictional account.  The movie does have a quote or two from the story, as well as the elaborate preparations that the narrator, in the movie the protagonist Guy Carrell, undertakes to be able to escape his mausoleum.  In the movie Carrell has to be an aristocrat, so as to afford such a fancy contrivance.

Although the screenplay was written by Charles Beaumont, a frequent Twilight Zone contributor, it lacks pacing and contains some improbabilities.  The theme of grave-robbery is also prominent and doesn’t fit well with what actually happens in the plot.  Since the movie is over sixty years old it’s safe to say that it involves a twist ending.  The marriage—missing in Poe—of Emily Gault to Guy is a ruse to get the family fortune by murdering Guy by fright.  Emily exploits his fears of premature burial (his father suffered catalepsy)  to lead to his own premature burial.  The grave-robbers, however, visit Guy that night, not realizing that he was only catatonic.  Guy then takes his revenge, only to be shot by his sister when he attempts to kill an innocent family friend.

Fitting for the Victorian era, Poe used the theme of premature burial in a number of his stories.  “The Premature Burial” is the tale that contains Poe’s famous quote, “The boundaries which divide Life from Death, are at best shadowy and vague.”  This remains true even going on two centuries later.  Accounts of Near Death Experiences (NDEs) complicate our simple binary of life and death.  The movie is, of course, coded as horror and is part of the suggestive string of interpretations that cast Poe as a “horror writer.”  Corman had been growing a reputation as a director of horror (but he, like Poe, worked in other genres) and it was this recasting of Poe into what was developing into a mature cinematic genre that partially solidified the writer’s reputation.  Premature Burial isn’t the best of the series, but I do feel as though I’ve accomplished something by finally having watched all of them.  Or have I?

International Horror

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As someone who has written a couple pieces on Jewish horror for Horror Homeroom, I have developed a natural interest in international horror.  I was one of those who scrambled hard to find The Golem (2018) when it came out, but was able to see it only in 2020.  When I learned about New Israeli Horror, by Olga Gershenson, I knew I had to read it.  The subtitle, Local Cinema, Global Genre, pretty much captures how she approaches the subject.  It also helped me understand a bit better the way filmmaking works.  I once, rather naively, asked a film scholar how many movies had been made.  He responded, “It’s impossible to know.”  Even experts in cinema can’t see every movie, and those of us who watch horror can’t see every horror film.  (I wouldn’t want to.)  I hadn’t realized, however, until reading this book, that in places like Israel it often comes down to state funding.

I’ve written quite a lot about Euro-horror over the past few years.  Often cooperative ventures, these are horror films that aren’t part of the Hollywood system, and they are frequently quite good.  Those of us who enjoy movies may not often think of who pays for them.  It’s kind of like book publishing—someone’s got to pay for all this, and hopes to make their money back in the process.  In Israel many movies are funded by official agencies.  And such agencies tend not to like horror.  New Israeli horror, by Gershenson’s reckoning, began only about 2010.  One of the reasons I’ve turned to writing about horror is that its history isn’t so long as, say, ancient West Asian studies, which reaches back thousands of years.  Reading about something not even two decades old, but still history, is fun.

I learned a tremendous amount from this book.  Of the films discussed I’ve only seen one, the aforementioned Golem.  Before writing Holy Horror, I paid no attention to where films were produced.  I’d seen some international movies, sometimes obvious because of subtitles, but my usual fare is homegrown.  I gather that I’ve been missing a lot by not seeing more Israeli horror.  When you add Jewish horror (Jewish-themed horror, in my way of seeing things) to the mix, there’s a new angle to take on religion and horror.  Many of the films Gershenson reads are about Israel’s army and critique of the militarism that has become part of life in Israel.  I confess to not keeping up on politics because to me it tends to be scarier than horror.  But I can see, from this book, that I’ve been missing some interesting cinema.

Won’t Tell

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This one is pretty darn close to too tense to read before bed.  I don’t remember how I found out about Ivar Leon Menger’s What Mother Won’t Tell Me.  That’s usually a pretty good sign that I found it in a bookstore.  Those are still places to linger while trying to find something a bit different.  This one is a page turner, but also one that I’m not quite sure how to classify.  It may be horror but the “monsters” are all humans.  I almost don’t want to describe the plot because it is so exquisitely suspenseful.  When I’m reading to get sleepy, I often find myself trying to grasp pieces of a story that are floating away like dandelion fluff, unable to put them back together.  Then I know it’s time to close my eyes and re-read a paragraph or two tomorrow.  That never happened with this one.

I think I can say this much without giving it away: Juno lives on an isolated island in a lake with her parents and younger brother.  The parents warn them of the murderous strangers who are seeking them—the father was a states’ witness against a powerful criminal family—so the children must never be seen on the island.  If anyone happens to come, they must hide and remain quiet until they leave.  They have to practice drills in case this ever happens.  It gets pretty creepy, from nearly the first page.  I would also advise against reading the back cover copy, since it will give some of it away.  I tend not to read the copy until after I read a book—you just never know what they might let slip.

This is a story about perseverance and discovery.  Discovery that is full of tension.  It’s a reminder of how precarious childhood is.  There are plenty of twists in the story and chapters generally end with information that creates a tension that the next chapter will only partially resolve.  The end result is a story that pulls you along and is pretty chilling.  I’m not sure if I’d call this horror or not.  If there’s a good case for a thriller being a separate genre, this could be useful as evidence.  Even if it’s not horror, it is likely to appeal to many who read in that genre.  There’s nothing speculative about it.  Perhaps that’s why the story scares in the way that it does—this could happen.  What happens?  Like mother, I won’t tell you either.

More Poe

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Having admitted to not having seen the entire Roger Corman Poe cycle, I figured I’d better get to work.  I had two movies left to watch and I found Tales of Terror for free on a commercial television streaming service.  As the title indicates, it is an anthology film, bringing together four of Poe’s stories in a three-featurette format.  At the same time, I am trying to catch up on Poe tales that I’ve never read.  More on that to come.  Tales of Terror begins with “Morella,” one of those stories I’ve not read.  There is a danger, of course, in watching a movie first since Corman loved to sensationalize.  I’ll need to wait until I find the time to read “Morella” to know just how much invention there is.  The movie version is an undeserved revenge from beyond the grave story.  Of course it stars Vincent Price.

Although “The Black Cat” gives Price top billing, the story focuses on Peter Lorre’s character, Montresor, borrowed from “The Cask of Amontillado,” with which it’s interlaced (The Cat of Amontillado?).  Montresor is an alcoholic who hates both his wife and cat.  Taking his wife’s money to buy alcohol (something I personally witnessed as a child), he eventually stumbles into a wine tasting convention where he meets Fortunato (Price).  When Fortunato begins an affair with Montresor’s wife it becomes an excuse to wall them both up in the basement.  Lorre plays his Poe characters funny and that makes this segment more a comedy.  Also, there’s a black cat.  The last featurette, “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” also stars Basil Rathbone.  I haven’t read this story either, so I’m not sure of its fidelity to Poe.  Yet.

The “Poe Cycle” was part of American International Pictures (AIP’s) collaboration with Corman.  Most of the movies were produced quickly and cheaply, although Richard Matheson did write the script for this anthology.  Of course, I hope I haven’t spoiled the two Poe stories I hadn’t read.  I do own an anthology of all of Poe’s fiction, and sometimes it takes movies to make me remove the ponderous tome from my shelf.  (Yes, I’m aware that Poe’s tales are also available for free online, but Poe deserves to be read from an actual book.)  As I’ve mentioned before, I never kept a record of the movies I saw, particularly on television, as a child.  Since the Poe Cycle was still being shown in theaters for part of my youth, I likely missed most (but not all of them) when they were aired on television.  I do remember seeing The Raven decades ago.  At least the internet does allow for a strange kind of resurrection since most of the cycle can be found for free online.

Short Story

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I often reflect on how little I know.  No matter how much I read there is more to be read.  Works worthy of time but sacrificed to circumstance.  I was recently reading a short story by Poe that I’d never read before.  As others have noted, Poe was a prolific author of a great deal of forms—poems, a novel, letters, a scientific treatise, literary criticism, and, of course, his stories.  I came to know his stories through cheap collections available in my small town, mostly not along the lines of those Poe himself selected.  Indeed, editions of his own chosen works, such as Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, before the advent of internet-based publishing, were difficult to come by.  Original editions cost many thousands of dollars.  Poe isn’t alone in this category—short stories are an unusual genre.

I know from personal experience that finding a publisher for a collection of such stories is nearly as difficult as finding a publisher for poetry.  Publishers are looking for money, of course, and like Poe, all writers produce stories that interest some but not others.  The novel is safer, and even today’s amazing writers have to find success as novelists before publishers will offer volumes of their short stories.  Tis a pity, really.  I have many volumes of short stories on my shelves, including some of Poe’s, but for some reason publishers tend to cram such volumes so full that they become unwieldy.  Intimidating almost.  It leads to that feeling of existential dread that I felt approaching War and Peace—would I indeed survive to finish it?  (I did, but that is such a Poe-like question I had to employ it.)

The short story is an important literary form that is singularly difficult to publish.  I have managed to find homes for about thirty such pieces, but many more have failed to move even just  the internet critics.  Those that have been published have brought no income at all.  In Poe’s day, an author attempting to make a living could not afford to give away their life’s blood.  Indeed, Poe’s older contemporary Washington Irving struggled with pirated copies of his works being sold overseas (he spent a great deal of time in Europe).  Like Poe, Irving excelled in the short story, or sketch.  We’re often at the mercy of editors who select the stories for us, making them available.  I suspect there’s much that we miss by not stepping outside their personal tastes regarding what to include.  Or, just as importantly, exclude.  Some day, perhaps, I will have read all of Poe’s short stories.  Until then, I’ll find them when necessary.

Whence Evil?

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I’m at a stage where horror-comedy, or comedy-horror is becoming appealing.  This sub-genre is really perfect for those horror fans who like to laugh and still get something of substance.  Tucker and Dale Vs. Evil is a great example of the dangers of stereotyping.  Like Scream, it is very aware of horror tropes, but it makes fun of them in creative ways.  At points it’s laugh-out-loud funny, but it is pretty gory.  It begins with the usual folk gothic scenario of a group of college kids going camping deep in rustic country.  At the last gas station, they encounter Tucker and Dale, whom we’ve been primed to think of as potentially murderous hicks.  In reality, they’re a couple of hapless but nice guys on their way to fix up a cabin they bought as a vacation house.

The college kids end up camping nearby and interpret everything Tucker and Dale do through the lens of assuming hillbillies are inbred evildoers.  It’s kind of a reverse Deliverance.  So it sets up a love story between one of the coeds, Alison, and Dale, who rescues her from drowning.  Meanwhile Alison’s friends assume Tucker and Dale have kidnapped Alison and plan to attack to set her free.  Of course, mayhem ensues.  Dale, who is big and shy, and who suffers from an inferiority complex, keeps on making missteps in trying to convince the other kids that his intensions are good.  That’s the most brilliant part of the movie—it cautions against reading people in the light of our biases.  Often when I find myself in areas where we see lots of Trump signs, the locals, in non-political contexts, are very nice.  I feel sad that one man has decided hatred is the only way to power.  Making people distrust and hate each other so that he can win.

People, overall, are pretty descent.  There are some bad ones out there, for sure, but the number of times I’ve encountered helpful strangers—in both rural and urban settings—reinforces my underlying belief that if we don’t try to set people against one another their natural goodness will come through.  It’s hard to do when all the campaigning, and even the rhetoric from 2016 to 2020 was of distrust of others and personal superiority.  The real hero of Tucker and Dale Vs. Evil is Dale, the one with an inferiority complex.  Those who humbly assume that others are better than they are seldom try to hurt other people.  And yet, those who don’t know “salt of the earth” types, who may live in less-than-ideal circumstances, frequently approach them with fear.  It’s a horror-comedy in the making.

Ichabod’s Body

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Maybe you’ve noticed this.  When Halloween comes around, the Headless Horseman and the Legend of Sleepy Hollow reemerge.  There’s a reason for that, and I discuss it quite a bit in Sleepy Hollow as American Myth.  Right now there seems to be quite an interest, or maybe I’m just noticing it more.  For example, a local theater where we saw a Poe performance last year is offering a Headless Horseman show this year.  Articles have recently been appearing on Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow movie, given that it was released 25 years ago—online discussion, however, is often eclipsed by the Fox television show by the same name.  And before it switched over to Christmas decorations, Michaels had its share of Sleepy Hollow merchandise.  Halloween and the Headless Horseman go together.  (Read the book to find out why!)

One of the tchotchkes I picked up at Michaels was Ichabod Crane’s tombstone.  In the many renditions of Washington Irving’s legend, Ichabod is treated as the protagonist of the story.  Although Tim Burton’s movie wasn’t the first to have Crane survive, besting the Horseman, the old wives’ tales, according to Irving, had him spirited away by the Horseman.  That’s why I found his gravestone so interesting.  The dates on it (1787–1857) indicate, at least according to this recension, that he died at seventy, surely not the victim of the attack that took place around the turn of the century.  If you’re not familiar with the original story, Irving set it “some thirty years since” the 1820 in which the tale was published, putting the events around 1790.  Burton shifted this to 1799, partially, I suspect, because that was two centuries before the release of his movie.

I do wonder where the maker of the Michaels tombstone got their information.  According to their reckoning, Crane would’ve been but three years old in 1790.  Of course, the story never tells us his age.  Since it is intimated that he relocated and became a judge after dabbling in politics, all of which would seem to indicate that he was a somewhat young man at the time of the tale.  To make Sleepy Hollow scary, though, having Crane cut off in his youth would seem to be more in keeping with the spirit of the season.  Of course, Sleepy Hollow is a legend that has become mythic through its many retellings.  Enough of them that someone could write a book about it all (ahem).  And this is the time of year to ponder it.  

Why, Cathy?

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Learning to appreciate bad movies is a skill like any other.  It takes practice.  “Why?” I hear you ask?  Why climb a mountain?  Actually, there is a motive for seeing bad movies, apart from the good feeling they can leave you with.  (I might’ve actually done it better!)  That’s because they’re often free streaming.  If I had an endless budget I might well be able to avoid bad movies, but what’s the fun in that?  I found out about Cathy’s Curse because I was looking for a movie about a cursed doll.  (Don’t ask.)  I’ve seen many, of course.  Child’s Play and the whole Annabelle series.  But I felt I was missing something.  Wikipedia actually has a page on haunted doll movies, and Cathy’s Curse stood out to me.  Yes, I was forewarned, but I was also curious.

A Canadian horror film from 1977, Cathy’s Curse has become a cult classic.  The story line decidedly makes no sense.  Cathy, a young girl, moves into her grandparents’ house with her father and mother.  Her father’s father had died in a car crash with his daughter Laura, about Cathy’s age, some 30 years earlier.  Cathy’s parents are troubled, her mother having recently had a nervous breakdown.  Laura’s vengeful spirit possesses Cathy through a doll the latter finds in the attic.  For some reason, Cathy kills the housekeepers and attacks other children.  She tries to drown herself.  She kills the handyman’s dog.  The dog, which is clearly male, is explicitly said to be female in the movie, perhaps because one of the favorite words of the writer is “bitch.”  After about an hour and a half of running around screaming, the opening of the cursed doll’s eyes suddenly brings normalcy to the house.

There are some genuinely good things about the movie.  The late fall-early winter mood is nicely framed.  Why people hang out outdoors without coats in freezing weather is never really explained, though.  Neither the writing nor the acting are stellar.  And have I pointed out that the story makes no sense?  But still, there’s something there.  The idea of possession, a young girl under threat, the scary old mansion—these are classic tropes.  It’s unclear why, when Cathy’s father is fixing breakfast, he immediately sends her to bed and it’s suddenly night.  Or why the detective calls him by the wrong name.  Or why nobody can take a doll away from a little girl.  Ah, but that’s it, you see.  The haunted doll.  You have to learn how to appreciate these things, you know.

May I?

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The thing about horror is that it’s an intensely personal preference.  Some people really like a movie while others find it, well, meh.  When the nights begin to lengthen you get lots of curated lists (I’ve never been asked to do any, but I’m working on one anyway) suggesting October viewing.  One such list that a friend sent me appealed to me because it was for movies on Netflix.  Since that’s one of the few streaming services to which I have access, it makes the movies seem free.  This particular list recommended May the Devil Take You, a 2018 movie from Indonesia.  The almost polite title suggests it wasn’t named in English.  In any case, I didn’t really find this one particularly scary and in part that was because of the apparent incongruity of the culture and the monster.  I knew that Indonesia was a highly Muslim majority country, and I know Islam also recognizes the Devil.  Still, Satanism feels kind of out of place here.

The story isn’t terribly deep: a man makes a deal with the Devil, through one of his dark concubines, to become rich, in exchange for the souls of his family.  His wife is the first to go, but he remarries a retired actress who has three children, two young adult.  His only biological child, from his first marriage, Alfie, feels herself estranged.  (It’s unclear to me whether the youngest daughter of the second wife was also biologically his, but it seems so.)  When the father falls into a serious, undiagnosed illness, the children, and actress, all converge on the house where the pact was made.  Of course they open the basement door—locked and with warnings posted—where the Devil’s concubine waits.  The actress becomes possessed and the two older daughters, Alfie and her stepsister, try to fight it off, only to have the stepsister become possessed.  She kills her brother and intends to kill Alfie and her own young sister as well, but the latter two manage to overcome her.

The plot is a bit convoluted but the basic story is maybe too familiar—make a deal with the Devil and all Hell will break loose.  I also wonder if some of the lack of real impact here comes from the subscript translation.  I don’t know how this is done, but I suspect it’s not dissimilar from Google translate.  That may be fine for academic purposes, but it does seem to lead to stilted dialogue among a group of twenty-somethings trying to fight the Devil in Indonesia.  My personal October list is more moody.  Seasonal.  And by no means complete.  The only way to find the movies, it seems, is trial and error via curated lists.