Fun Homework

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I recently discussed the two Kolchak movies: The Night Stalker and The Night Strangler.  In those posts I noted that I’d not grown up with Kolchak.  My reason for watching them was part of a self-assigned homework project.  You see, I’d begun watching the series online.  I realized backstory was missing, and, despite what literary critics are fond of saying, I like backstory.  After a couple of episodes I decided I needed to see the movies before moving through the rest of the series.  As it turns out, you can do the movies without the series or the series without the movie.  Regardless, I soldiered on through all twenty episodes.  This series was terribly influential for the kinds of things I eventually cottoned onto.  Kolchak was formative for the X-Files and many “monster of the week”-formatted series.  I felt like a poser having never had watched it.  This telinematic experience was good homework.

Originally a television movie produced by Dan Curtis, of Dark Shadows fame, the first film was successful enough (very successful, in fact) to cause a second one.  The second film also performed well, but instead of a planned third, ABC decided on a weekly series instead.  Only twenty episodes were aired and the run was cancelled before all the ordered episodes were filmed, or even scripted.  Still, this small franchise had a solid following and led to a number of other successful franchises in its wake.  The monsters are definitely fun, but Darren McGavin’s Kolchak does tend to get on your nerves after a while.  Even McGavin was reputedly ready to leave the show as things started to get pretty silly near the end—an animated suit of armor, a very cheap humanoid-alligator, and Helen of Troy hardly seemed conventional monsters.  

In fact, the Helen episode (“The Youth Killer”), although it had a solid premise, didn’t convince that Helen was a monster.  She prays to Hecate to steal the youth of “perfect” young people around Chicago and rejuvenates herself as the twenty-somethings age and die in a matter of minutes.  And a Greek cab driver (former Classics teacher) is the one who helps Carl crack the case.  Famous for its quirky humor, this one just seemed to have all engines fail.  Of course, the series lived on as a cult classic and can be found in a variety of media today.  I’m glad to have had this particular homework assignment.  Television had a number of influential shows in the seventies, and it feels like coming home to have caught up on one that I initially missed.  Even with Cathy Lee Crosby and a monster I just couldn’t buy.

Carnival Days

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Carnival of Souls has been receiving renewed attention of late, so I decided to watch it again to see if I’d missed something the first time.  Indeed, I had. Carnival of Souls is one of those low-budget movies that was really never considered worth much until reevaluation started to take place several years after it was released (1962).  As a snapshot of an era, it offers a view of how horror and religion interact.  The story, in case you’re unfamiliar, follows Mary Henry, a young woman who’s a professional organist.  Even here a few things stand out.  She went to college, she relies on no man to support her.  And she views church work, as an organist, to be “just a job.”  This is pretty incredible on its own, but I’m getting ahead of myself.  Her car is nudged off a narrow bridge by a couple of guys out hot-rodding.

From the beginning the viewer is clued in that she drowned, although this isn’t made explicit until the end.  She makes her way to Salt Lake City where she’s been offered a job as an organist in an Episcopal church.  She “sees dead people” and becomes fascinated by an abandoned carnival on the shore of the Great Salt Lake.  The priest at first notes that she plays music to elevate the soul.  Later, however, after the dead man she keeps seeing unnerves her, she plays eerie music on the church organ (during practice) and the priest realizes that she’s not a believer.  He fires her on the spot.  Apart from getting the ethos of the Episcopal Church about right, this in itself is interesting.  The playing of creepy music is enough to lead to the loss of a church job.

John, the guy who won’t stop trying to score with her, wonders at one point if viewing church work as “just a job” doesn’t give her nightmares.  These attitudes, from only about six decades ago, seem terribly remote by today’s standards.  Many clergy have doubts about their faith.  Many don’t really believe what their church actually proclaims.  The movie shows a society that has an almost magical view of the church.  You can probably even take the “almost” out of that last sentence.  While the Bible’s not mentioned or quoted, the idea of a lost soul finding no home in the church is a telling bit of commentary.  Intentional or not.  Carnival of Souls will never be my favorite horror movie, but it has pre-echoes of Night of the Living Dead and a sincerity that invites consideration.  I can see why it’s gained renewed interest.

A Kind of Shine

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Sometimes you just can’t not comment.  A few weeks after Donald Sutherland—known by some of us for his horror roles—passed away, Shelley Duvall has died.  It feels like the passing of an era for horror fans.  I never saw Sutherland in MASH, although I’m sure he made a good Hawkeye.  I did see him in Don’t Look Now, however, and An American Haunting.  Shelley Duvall grasped her claim to fame in The Shining, of course.  I can remember the apprehension that gripped me, after years of everyone telling me how scary it was, when I first saw it.  The Shining has its detractors, of course, but it remains one of my favorites.  That’s in no small measure due to Duvall’s portrayal of Wendy.

Duvall did other things, of course.  Since I tend to fixate on the things I like, I never followed her further career, but I did see her now and again.  She was in Tim Burton’s Frankenweenie.  For those looking forward to The Myth of Sleepy Hollow (I know I am), she’ll appear as the creator of Tall Tales & Legends.  She also created Nightmare Classics, which I have to admit to never having seen.  Although she was involved in other genres, she seemed to have a real interest in horror.  She retired from acting early in the millennium, but came out for one final film, last year.  It was the horror movie The Forest Hills.  Horror gets its hooks into you, I know.  But it keeps coming back to The Shining.  

In part it’s the claustrophobia of three people, only three, in an isolated hotel.  Of course it’s haunted as well, but the isolation premise alone is frightening.  Especially when one of the three (or maybe two) is becoming unhinged.  We live in an era of remakes and it’s possible someone will be foolhardy enough to try to remake Kubrick’s classic.  Even if it were a more faithful adaptation (Stephen King’s book is scary in its own right) it’s difficult to imagine that it could be better.  Part of it probably has to do with how Kubrick’s treatment of Duvall pushed her to the edge.  Fame has its cost.  And I suppose (since I wouldn’t know) that fame in a horror role comes with its own burdens.  Duvall went on to create things of her own.  More’s the pity that they’re not easily found either for streaming or on disc.  And things seem just a little bit quieter now, don’t they?

Book or Movie?

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I’ve read a few of Paul Tremblay’s novels.  He’s a horror writer with literary style—often a tough sell (at least in my experience.)  Horror Movie is a compelling read.  The conceit is that a group of young people decide to film, well, a horror movie.  Things go awry, but not in a funny way.  The story unfolds interlaced with the screenplay and with the overlay of the modern remake in the works.  It’s easy to get lost between the narrative account of what happened in the original shoot and what’s happening in the script.  Tremblay uses this technique very well, blurring the reality and movie aspects in a way that’s got to be intentional.  I particularly like his asides about the redeeming value of monsters.  I won’t say too much about the plot since you may want to read it yourself. It does riff on the “cursed movie” trope.

The truly remarkable thing to my regular readers will be that I finished a new book within a month of publication.  Normally I run a couple to several years behind.  And this novel contains several winks and nods to other horror movies.  It pays to know the canon.  In that sense, it reminds me of the movie Scream, one of the more self-aware horror classics.  (I have had Scream out for watching again for several weeks now, but time has a way of slipping away.)  Tremblay, like Stephen King, taught before becoming established as a horror writer.  Maybe there’s hope for some of yet!  I started writing novels in middle school—perhaps there’s still time.  That seems to be one of the themes of Horror Movie, by the way.  It has many elements of a parable.

I found Tremblay’s first horror novel, A Head Full of Ghosts, about four years after it was published.  Indeed, I was working on Nightmares with the Bible at the time, so a book about possession was appropriate.  Horror Movie is more a monster tale but it’s also about movies and reality.  This is territory I often traverse since, it seems to me, movies are more than mere entertainment.  Good ones are, anyway.  And like some other books I’ve read lately, this one is also a reflection on fame (something I wouldn’t know about).  How it’s not what it’s made out to be.  In other words, if you’re willing, Horror Movie is the kind of novel that will make you think.  I appreciate that Tremblay is giving us thoughtful horror and I’m looking forward to trying to keep up.

Hungry for Choice

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I was recently asked to speak to a senior seminar about Holy Horror (many thanks for the invite!).  One of the questions asked was how/why I chose the movies I did.  The same question applies to Nightmares with the Bible.  The thing is, my avocation is an expensive one, particularly on an editor’s salary.  The number of horror movies is vast and our time on this planet is limited, so one thing any researcher has to do is draw limits.  Otherwise you get a never-ending project (some dissertations go that way).  I had figured, for both books, that I’d seen enough movies to make the point I was trying to make.  Neither book was intended to be “the last word,” or comprehensive, but were attempts to open the conversation.  Since none of my books have earned back nearly what resources I’ve put into them, a line has to be drawn.  Movies are expensive when they get to the bottom of the “outgoes” column.

All of this is to explain why I didn’t include The Unborn in either book.  (It fits into both.)  I was aware of the movie, but I had to decide what I could afford in order to get the books written.  I confess that I wish I’d watched this one sooner.  (Remember, it’s a conversation!)   This movie has so much in it that I may break my self-imposed rule of no double-dipping for blog topics.  Or perhaps I’ll pitch something to Horror Homeroom.  The Unborn is about a dybbuk.  Like The Possession, it features a Jewish exorcism.  Like An American Haunting, a holy book is destroyed.  (The credits include a statement that no actual Torahs were harmed in the making of the film.) Interestingly, the exorcism is a joint effort between a rabbi and an Episcopal priest.  Held in an asylum.  It’s also a story about twins.

The skinny: college-aged Casey is being pursued by a three-generation dybbuk.  Her mother, who died by suicide in an asylum, had been adopted.  Casey is unaware that she was a twin, her brother having died in utero.  She discovers her birth grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, who clues her in to why all the strange things are happening to her.  Her own twin brother was possessed by a dybbuk at Auschwitz.  It is now after Casey, having caused her mother’s suicide.  The plot is pretty sprawling, and the exorcism scene over-the-top, but I’m only scratching the surface here.  There’s so much to unpack that I wish I had a bigger movie-and-book budget.  But then we all have our demons with which to struggle.

Monster of Aging

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Movies with no likable characters, or none with any redeeming personality traits, are difficult to remain awake through.  At least on sleepy weekend afternoons.  The Leech Woman is one such movie.  It was difficult to get past the premise that an aging woman is cause for alarm among the overly entitled male characters.  Dr. Paul Talbot is disgusted by his older wife until he finds credible evidence of a concoction that will cause a person to grow young again.  Wanting her to be his experiment, he takes her to Africa where he witnesses the rejuvenating formula in person.  It requires, however, a murder to be effective.  For her victim, June chooses her husband.  The effects, however, are only temporary so June will need to keep on killing to remain young.  Each time the formula wears off she’s prematurely aged.

When she’s young again, the men around her feel it is their right to claim her, which, in a sense, provides her with a ready pool of victims.  On the other hand, it reflects attitudes beginning to die out as the sixties began.  Many of these movies from the fifties throw in a woman to provide little more than love interest.  Sometimes these women have a profession—reporter is one that shows up occasionally, or perhaps in a military role or as nurse—but mostly they are there to find a husband and become, ideally, a housewife.  Many unrealistic men today still think that should be the case, but few jobs earn enough for the possibility of being a one-income family.  Besides, did anyone ever think to ask the women what they wanted?

Aging isn’t the easiest thing to do.  This movie plays up the stereotype that men become “distinguished” with age while women don’t.  Such unreflective outlooks on aging completely overlook things like aching backs and forgetting things that are typical for just about anyone who makes it past a certain landmark.  In fact, aging is something we all face in common, and our attitudes toward it can make all the difference.  Fortunately since this movie came out, we’ve had many role models showing us that women do retain their worth and dignity as they age, even as men do.  We are an aging population.  One benefit, hopefully, to the passing years is the accumulation of wisdom.  And that applies, no matter gender or sex.  We reach a certain age and we look back and wish we’d known then what we know now.  That takes place with generations, too.  That way we can say Leech Woman is a period piece, but that still doesn’t make it a good horror movie.

A Land Forgotten

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In case anyone’s noticed (which I doubt) that I’ve been discussing a spate of 1950s sci-fi/horror movies, I have a confession to make.  Several years ago I needed to see Tarantula.  (Anyone with similar headspace will know this need.)  The only place it was available at the time was in The Classic Sci-Fi Ultimate Collection.  Volumes 1 and 2 were sold together.  I did what I had to do.  Then I forgot I had the set before finishing volume 1.  Who knows what might’ve been going on in my life then?  Rediscovering it has been a budget-saving way to address my fix.  I had never heard of The Land Unknown before, and although it has one of the goofiest T-rexes ever, it is actually a good story.  Of course there are holes in the plot, but it is about the necessity of being humane, even when emotion dictates otherwise.

A helicopter crew on a South Pole expedition makes an emergency landing in a volcano that harbors prehistoric life in a hot spot in Antarctica.  The crew has a female reporter with them—these movies certainly have fifties attitudes about women!  Not having the parts to repair their copter, they try to survive among dinosaurs and an aggressive, giant monitor lizard.  There is another person there, the sole survivor of an earlier expedition, who’s become mostly feral.  The commander of the modern crew demands that they give him the dignity and fair treatment that all people deserve.  There’s a bit of drama around who will get the girl (again, the fifties), with the commander ultimately winning out.  How do our heroes escape this peril?  They’re able to repair the helicopter with parts from the earlier expedition’s crashed vehicle.

With its budget the special effects had to be cheap, but the story has redeeming value.  The message that we mustn’t let isolation drive us to bestiality is still as important as ever.  There are those who watch such movies solely to laugh at the special effects.  Hey, I laughed a bit too, but I’m only human!  There is, however, more to this movie than the dinosaurs, which drew audiences then just as the Jurassic Park franchisedoes now.  There’s even some serious talk about evolution, which was often present in these Universal creature features.  There are some slip-ups on the evolution part, but apparently the monitor lizards were meant to represent stegosauruses—did I mention the budget was tight?  I actually found the movie to be worth seeing for its intrinsic value.  Not bad for a forgotten set purchased mainly for one movie in a time unknown.

Praying for Mantis

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Now this is a Cold War movie.  And I mean “cold.”  The Deadly Mantis is one of those movies that hovers between “so bad it’s good” and just plain “so bad.”  I was kind of rooting for the mantis.  In any case, this was an ambitious movie for the time but it reflects the post-war paranoia in the United States.  It also makes very abundant use of stock footage, much of it military.  You almost expect a recruiting ad at the end.  (It does thank the Ground Observer Corps in the closing credits.)  Okay, so here’s the story.  A volcano in the south Atlantic causes the calving of an enormous Arctic iceberg near the North Pole.   That iceberg contains the frozen body of a 200-foot praying mantis from dinosaur times.  Even earlier.   Said frozen mantis, quite hungry after millions of years, begins attacking Arctic radar bases and flying south.  The Air Force calls in a paleontologist to help identify what they’re looking for.

The mantis is so big that it prefers people for food, although, one might note, a polar bear would’ve been easier prey.  In any case, given the technology limitations of the time, the military has trouble keeping track of the insect as it flies over the most populous part of the country.  They do get the cloudiness of the East Coast about right.  Eventually they shoot it down—actually a fighter jet crashing into it does the job—over Newark and the mortally wounded mantis crawls into the Lincoln Tunnel (called “The Manhattan Tunnel” in the film).  By this point the viewer is saying “just let the poor thing die in peace,” but they pump smoke into the tunnel, presumably to hide wires and other props, and commit a protracted insecticide.  

Now, I’m one of those people who hates to hurt any animal.  The death twitches of an insect are quite troubling, so I try to catch what I can indoors and release them.  I have trouble with the instructions to kill spotted lantern flies—it’s not their fault that they’re here.  The movie shows a bravado regarding the military and a machismo regarding the main female character that hearkens back to why it was so necessary to evolve out of the fifties.  Of course, we learned nothing from The Deadly Mantis and have catapulted back into a new Cold War and an even more robust military.  William Alland, the producer, had a real love of this genre of movie, and for that we have much to be grateful.  But even the big bug genre can produce a real groaner now and then.

Cryptid Caper

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I don’t recall how it got on my fiction reading list—I probably saw it on Goodreads—but I picked it up because it was short.  And surprisingly, multiple copies were in Barnes and Noble.  Since James Daunt bought the chain out it has definitely improved.  In any case, Hunter Shea’s To the Devil, a Cryptid looked like it might be a fun romp, and if it turned out that I didn’t like it, well, it was short.  Ads in the back keyed me in that this was a part of a series of horror novels about cryptids.  Besides, I like to support publishers that aren’t part of the big five.  I’d just finished reading a five-hundred-pager, so something under two was very welcome.  The title seems to riff off the horror flick To the Devil a Daughter.  As much as I try to keep up on my cryptids, I was unfamiliar with the Goat Man.  And I did like it, by the way.

So, the real Goat Man is mostly associated with Maryland, but in Texas, where the novel is set, there is the Lake Worth Monster.  This seems a good fit for the cryptid part (whether intentional or not I don’t know).  A bunch of kids messing around with Satanism decide to sacrifice a goat in the woods where a Goat Man cryptid is said to live.  Something goes wrong and the goat fuses with a guy trying to break up the ceremony and mayhem ensues.  Lots of bodies torn apart in this version of the Lone Star State.  Still, the story is fun.  I’ve been writing cryptid fiction for years, and this may be a targeted demographic, but that doesn’t prevent this from being a good horror novel.  Particularly interesting is the resolution.  I’ll try not to give too many spoilers, but the next paragraph reveals something.

How do you stop a demonic, bulletproof Goat Man?  You call in a priest to do an exorcism.  The truly remarkable part of this is that the priest is treated sympathetically.  None of the characters are religious.  And of the two main young people who survive, you really don’t expect them to be found in church.  The story isn’t intended to be believable, of course.  The Goat Man is an urban legend.  Urban legends are often difficult to tease apart from actual cryptids sometimes.  Cryptids remind us that there’s still more to be discovered in the world.  And I may have just discovered a series of stories that work for a quick fix.

Invisible Again

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Sequels are a fact of life.  Movies, although some of us look to them for profundity, are made for selling.  (I guess my writing for so long with no profit from it has skewed my view a bit.)  Still, The Invisible Man Returns isn’t too bad.  In my mind, there were a set of six canonical Universal monster movies: Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, The Invisible Man, The Wolf Man, and The Creature from the Black Lagoon.  In reality, each of these successful films was followed by a clutch of sequels, filling the thirties and forties—into the fifties—with monster movies.  I never really bothered with the sequels, but some of them are pretty good.  And I still haven’t seen the more recent Invisible Man, which I hear is quite good.

When I was a kid, Vincent Price represented horror like no other single person.  He had developed a persona that was lucrative and that influenced other monster boomers as well.  He was a relative unknown when he was hired for The Invisible Man Returns.  His face only appears in the last minute of the film and his voice had not yet settled into its characteristic menace tone that would make him a genre icon.  Still, the story has a typical plot for the period.  Sir Geoffrey Radcliffe is set to hang for killing his brother—they own a coal mine.  Dr. Frank Griffin, a friend of the family and brother of the original Invisible Man, believes him innocent and makes Radcliffe invisible so that he can escape the gallows.  As we all know, the problem with the invisibility drug—here duocaine rather than monocaine—is that it causes insanity.  Radcliffe discovers the real murderer before going insane, all the while being chased by police.

These “invisible” films demonstrated what special effects could become.  Shot in black-and-white, “black screen” technology was used to make Radcliffe appear headless and handless.  In fact, this movie received an Oscar nomination for the effects.  It’s not a scary film, but it’s a reasonably told story.  And the special effects really were cutting edge for 1940.  Probably somewhat scandalous for the time, Radcliffe has to undress in front of his fiancée at one point, leading the men who discovered her fainted to suppose that seeing a naked, if invisible, man could do it.  There is a subtle humor here.  Other films followed but they veered into the comedy realm.  Until the recent remake.  I guess I’ll need to add that one to my ever-growing list of must-see movies.

History Lesson

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This blog, which has come to define me in many ways, wasn’t my idea.  A niece started it for me when Neal Stephenson suggested I should have a place for podcasting.  I still have ideas for podcasts, but finding the time to put them together (and a place to host them) has proven quite challenging.  In any case, the title, “Sects and Violence in the Ancient World,” reflected where I was at the time.  I started posting when I was 46, and now I’m over 60.  Things are bound to change a little.  From the start, I wrote about books.  Indeed, for things I’ve read since summer of 2009, I check the blog to find out when.  I also noted significant movies.  In the early days I tried to limit the posts to religion-themed topics since, well, I have three degrees in the field.

As I gradually grew comfortable discussing pop culture (generally horror), I gradually addressed movies and books without a religious bent.  It could be that I didn’t record everything I read or watched here, and that makes things before 2009 kind of a muddle.  While the muddle really began before 2005—my last year at Nashotah House.  That period was a kind of maelstrom of desperation to find a job, teaching classes, pretending to be an editor, making my way in a world unfamiliar to me and certainly unchosen.  Eventually this blog came to focus on horror movies more than religion.  Now, like my life, it’s a jumble of conflicting impulses trying to make sense of the world as an existentialist with a bit of faith.  I’m still aspiring to that mustard seed.

I’m not sure when it was that I began commenting on most movies I watched.  I’ve used movies as therapy since 2005—for some reason horror made me feel better.  Even now, when I want to remember when I saw a movie I check this blog.  Or if I want to know when I read a book.  My wife pointed Goodreads out to me in 2013, and that became another place to post on books, even if they didn’t qualify for “Sects and Violence.”  But that slushy period between 2005 and 2013 was full of books, I know.  In addition to movies, I read incessantly.  If I want to remember when I read what, however, I’ve only got the last decade really covered.  Goodreads says I’ve read about a thousand books since 2013.  For movies, I have no way of knowing how many I’ve seen.  Or where, for the most part.  Maybe I need to start keeping a proper diary.  Maybe one with a lock and a key.

Under Bite

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Religion and horror have long been bedfellows.  And quite companionable ones at that.  I’ve written a longer piece that I’ve not yet managed to wedge into a book about how the earliest Universal monster movies all involve religion in some way.  Maybe some day it will come out into the light.  In the meantime, I submit, for your consideration, The Cult of the Cobra.  This 1955 horror film was one of a series of movies about shapeshifting.  We’ve recently seen The Leopard Man on this blog, and before that Cat People.  Cult of the Cobra, set in amorphous “Asia” to start, involves the invented religion of the Lamians.  A group of US Airmen pay a Lamian to watch a woman transform into a cobra in an “Asian” ritual.  They’re revealed by trying to take a photograph—they’d been warned that if they were discovered the cobra would hunt them down and kill them.

Convinced this is all superstition, despite one of them dying the next night from a cobra bite, they return to New York City and civilian life.  The cobra woman follows them to carry out her mission.  She’s killed, however, before getting the last two.  What’s so interesting here is the discussion of belief that takes place throughout the movie.  Americans can’t believe in some “cult”—it’s clear from the start that anything not western is cult—but none of them show any inclination to church, or crosses, or even references to God or the Bible.  The only religion shown is that of the Lamians.  The cobra woman falls in love with one of the Airmen and tries to explain that she’s coming to doubt something she’s believed all her life.  She’s caught between religious duty and the experience of falling in love.

The movie failed to impress critics and was largely dismissed as a knock-off of Cat People.  There’s too quick a judgment here, however.  One of Universal’s earlier monsters had encountered a non-western religion but became much more famous for it.  The Mummy was based on “ancient Egyptian” religion.  Indeed, the whole story is premised on it.  The Cult of the Cobra, however, engages with the religion.  As jingoistic as it is, it nevertheless tries to represent “the cult” as a religion taken seriously by an exotic group of believers.  “Lamians” seems to have been borrowed from Greek mythology, however, where lamia were demon-like devourers of children.  I write about them in Nightmares with the Bible.  This isn’t a great movie by any stretch, but it shouldn’t be dismissed either.  It’s an important piece of the puzzle of how religion and horror interact in film.

Number Six

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Signing a book contract always makes me happy.  There’s a validation to it.  Someone thinks my thoughts are worthwhile.  And now I can reveal what it’s about.  Regular readers likely already have some inkling, due to the number of times I referenced Sleepy Hollow over the past couple of years.  I’ll provide more details closer to the time, but it struck me back when working on Holy Horror that few resources exist for “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” despite its status as such a well-known story.  An agent or two agreed with me that the topic was good but they really weren’t sure it was a commercial project.  This despite the fact that Lindsey Beer is slated to write and direct a reboot of the famous 1999 movie.  It seemed that a book on the topic available at the time might sell.

John Quidor, The Headless Horseman Pursuing Ichabod Crane, public domain via Wikimedia Commons

I tried a number of independent publishers that don’t require agents.  I learned that most of them won’t even reply to your emails.  It seems that to get published by any trade publisher you have to be already famous.  Or maybe my idea’s just not good.  Weird.  Finally I found a university press that thought it might be a good fit, and it occurred to me that McFarland, who recently dropped the price on Holy Horror, would be a good press for this kind of thing.  McFarland made an offer first, and yesterday they sent a contract.  Hopefully the book will be out next year.

This is quite a personal project.  The story is one of my early memories—most likely due to the Disney version of the story, and most likely as seen on television.  My treatment is, as in all of my books, idiosyncratic.  I look at things differently than other people do.  And I’ve been looking at Sleepy Hollow for half a century or so, and I’ve read quite a lot about Washington Irving and the Hudson Valley.  I don’t want to say too much since others write more swiftly than I do and some presses speed books along.  For the time being I can enjoy that rare feeling of having a book contract and an editor who’s excited about my project.  I do hope that the next book, number seven, might find a trade publisher.  What’s it about?  Well, I’m working on two at the moment, and it depends which reaches book length first.  And I can’t say anything since someone may scoop me.  So I’ll just bask a little bit before starting another work day.

Camp Tingler

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I don’t remember in which magazine where I saw the still, but I was immediately intrigued.  I didn’t know the movie it was from and in the days before the internet, when you live in a small town, avenues for finding the answer were few.  I just knew it was a photo of a woman in a bathrobe next to a bathtub filled with some opaque fluid (presumably blood), from which a hand was reaching out to her.  Or at her.  I don’t even recall when or how I learned that the scene was from the gimmick-driven William Castle film, The Tingler.  I’d heard of the movie before, but I hadn’t connected the scene with it.  No matter how you slice it, the story of the movie makes no sense.  That doesn’t stop it from being fun.  I’ve seen it before but had to refresh my memory.

I hadn’t recalled, for example, that Dr. Chapin (Vincent Price) uses LSD to try to get scared.  While the dialogue isn’t great, there are many observations on fear and how adults outgrow it.  Chapin wants to find the physical root of fear and drops some acid (apparently the first cinematic depiction of LSD use) to enhance the experience.  Although it’s crucial to the plot, I also didn’t remember that Martha Higgins can’t hear or speak.  Interestingly, she co-owns a silent movie theater and she’s a silent character in a sound movie.  She’s also the only character involved in the two color shots in a black-and-white film.  She remains in grayscale herself in these scenes.  In other words, there is some sophistication here.  And of course, Vincent Price was always classy.

Camp is an aesthetic that I appreciate but, like a tone-deaf person, don’t always recognize.  The Tingler has become a camp classic.  Many people know that Castle had vibrators installed in select theater seats so that some audience members would “tingle” at appropriate places.  This was the “Percepto” advertised with the movie.  Having himself introduce the film as too terrifying—echoing back to Frankenstein in 1931—Castle guaranteed the movie wouldn’t be taken seriously.  There’s nothing scary about this horror film.  Speaking for myself, I spent too much time trying to figure out what happened to poor Mrs. Higgins—yes, her husband’s trying to scare her to death but then she has hallucinations as if Dr. Chapin gave her the LSD instead of taking it himself.  It doesn’t make sense, but it’s fun.  I guess that’s the definition of camp.

Campus Monster

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Universal was the studio that gave America its monsters.  Well, it wasn’t Universal alone, but the initial—almost canonical—line-up of monsters were Universal productions.  As horror grew to be more influenced by science-fiction in the 1950s, Universal kept at the monster-themed movies, cranking out many that I missed and on which I’ve been trying to catch up.  Monster on the Campus is interesting in a number of ways.  Directed by Jack Arnold, of Gilligan’s Island fame (or future fame, since this movie was earlier), it’s a story built around evolution.  Pipe-smoking professor Donald Blake has a coelacanth delivered to his lab.  Unbeknownst to him, the prehistoric fish had been irradiated with gamma rays to preserve it—as well as being shipped on ice.  The dead fish is about to create problems.

A dog laps up some of the blood (it started to thaw) and becomes a vicious evolutionary throwback.  Then Professor Blake cuts himself on a fish tooth and sticks his hand in the contaminated water.  He becomes a murderous caveman, but the effect is only temporary.  A dragonfly eating the fish transforms into a prehistoric insect that the professor kills, but its blood drips, unnoticed, into his pipe.  He changes and murders again.  Finally it dawn upon him that he was responsible for the murders.  In a remote cabin he sets up cameras and injects himself with the radioactive coelacanth plasma and ends up killing a park ranger.  Finally, he injects himself so that following police officers will shoot him to death.  Rather a bleak story.

The film has been read as social commentary since its “rediscovery,” but what caught my attention was the easy acceptance of evolution.  This was the late fifties and the creationist backlash was still pretty strong at the time.  If evolution didn’t occur, the professor (and dog and dragonfly) couldn’t have become their atavistic selves, giving the movie its plot.  The classic Universal monster of the decade was the Gill Man—aka Creature of the Black Lagoon—also an atavistic throwback to an earlier time, but also a divergent branch of evolution.  Creature was also directed by Jack Arnold, but four years earlier.  It began with a quote from Genesis 1, bringing creation and evolution together.  The title Monster on the Campus offers many possibilities for co-ed mayhem, but instead opts for a scientist who gets caught up in the tangle of evolution.  The movie was near the end of Universal’s monster run, but in the sixties horror would change forever.  This was a little fun before things got serious—horror school was about to start.