Ash Indomitable

What did I do to get dropped into this sad alternate universe in which people apparently prefer interminable shambling zombie soap operas to the exploits of a chainsaw-armed, boomstick-toting deplorable from Michigan who battles Deadites all the way from the medieval past to the post-apocalyptic future?

In other words, I just finished Season 3 of Ash vs Evil Dead, which concludes with – I tell you, you wouldn't even believe it! only to find that the show has been cancelled, and that Bruce Campbell has decided to hang up his boomstick…forever.

So here I sit, all alone, while the rest of the world eagerly debates post-credits scenes and wonders what Robert Downey Jr. and Friends will do with their next billion dollars in the search for Infinity Whatsits, and possibly the most glorious slingshot ending in the history of humanity remains a tantalizing, unanswered what-if.

I mean, geez, the show was scary, gory, disgusting, offensive, hilarious – everything a decent show should be – but, on top of all of that, it was kind of inspiring in a weird way, and even – dare I say it? – touching. In that face-meltingly awesome final episode, Ash, the lovable idiot feared by hordes of evil demons, actually…grows a little bit. I don't know. Maybe, in the divine scheme of things, that meant it really was the End. And that's to say nothing of the fact that he actually gave up his own life, descended to hell, released souls from bondage, and ascended on high to sit on his own throne as the "prophesized" savior of humanity. Where do you go from epic closure in the mythos of summer? Narratively speaking, I mean.

Oh, who am I kidding? There are plenty of places to go from there, and the world is a lesser place because we don't get to see them.

Well, at least we can say this. We got fifteen hours of unadulterated awesomeness that the world simply did not deserve. Plus, the show was made by people who care about their fans, and they made sure to bring the story to an emotionally satisfying if sadly truncated conclusion. Maybe in the long run it will be better this way. Maybe I'll find my way into that alternate timeline where Evil Dead Beyond Thunderdome: Ash vs the Army of Dark Ones is a thing. For now, though, I'm just a little sad to see El Jefe ride off into the sunset, and to bid Pablo and Kelly a fond farewell. (Although, to do them justice, "Pablo" and "Kelly" are having none of it.)

I'll always remember you, Ash. Not for what you were, but for what you've become. You've completed your journey from zero to hero. You've become a king by your own hand. And you know what? If, at this point in my life, I do get back up, and continue to fight for what's right no matter what crazy s**t may happen to me, and go on living as though I have a destiny to fulfill even though 100% of the world around me thinks I'm an idiot, it will, in some part, be thanks to Ash vs Evil Dead. Crazy, isn't it?

Hail to the King, Baby.

Yes, that's a tank. We live in a world in which a show about
Ash battling giant demons with a tank wasn't renewed.

"White Rainbow and Brown Devil" at HFQ

The vagabond conquistador Francisco Carvajal y Lopez continues his grim, rapacious, and not-terribly-successful trek across southwest Texas in the latest installment of his exploits, "White Rainbow and Brown Devil," a tale of high adventure and weird horror appearing in Issue 35 of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly. Published out of chronological order because of the awesome Triple Crossover Event that, as the perspicacious reader may have noticed, took place at HFQ last year, it falls between "Heart of Tashyas" and "I Am Become Death, Destroyer of Worlds," being a sequel to the former but preceding the latter by an as-yet-undetermined-by-historians amount of time.

"White Rainbow and Brown Devil" takes place in a geographically telescoped version of what's now Val Verde County, following the Rio Grande and the route of U.S. 90, from Sycamore Creek in the east, past San Felipe Springs, across the Devil's River, and through Seminole Canyon, to the Pecos River in the west. As my bio states, I'm a circuit-riding professor; this is one of the circuits I ride. (In a pick-up truck, not a horse.) Past Del Rio, the country is desolate, torturously prickly, beautiful, and slightly sinister, with ruined stone buildings here and there, and abandoned bridges from the old highway paralleling the modern one. The bed of the Devil's River is under the Amistad Reservoir now; one wonders what other dark secrets those placid waters hide.

Fate Bell Shelter, Seminole Canyon

Seminole Canyon, which is named after Black Seminole Scouts posted there by the U.S. Army in the nineteenth century, was first inhabited something like 10,000 years ago, with paintings in Panther Cave and the Fate Bell Shelter dating back some 8,000 years, among the oldest in North America.

Other items of note appearing in HFQ Issue 35 include stories "That Sleep of Death" by Mary-Jean Harris and "Things of Shreds and Patches" by Norman Doeg, and poems "Washer at the Ford" by James Byers and "Dragon Mountain" by Mary Soon Lee. The issue also contains HFQ's first foray into audio, with the poem "Fire Lover" written and narrated by Karen Bovenmeyer, who also narrates for the horror podcast Pseudopod. Please go check it out!

The picture that accompanies my own story is an original watercolor. You can read about it here.

The Four-Dimensional Lord of Dance

I wrote two posts last year dealing with the fourth dimension:

• Views of a Tesseract
•  Arts and Crafts in Four Dimensions

The focus was mathematical, but along the way I looked at how the fourth (spacial) dimension appears in the works of authors like H. P. Lovecraft, Robert Heinlein, H. G. Wells, Jorge Luis Borges, and, most memorably, Madeleine L'Engle, whose A Wrinkle in Time is about to appear as an uninspired-looking Disney movie in March (sigh). I also talked about mathematical visionaries and mystics like Paul S. Donchian and Charles Howard Hinton, both of whom made real contributions to the field, if only in the sense that they developed and humanized what the academics were saying in their inaccessible research articles, and both of whom might be labeled as cranks or crackpots.

Since then I've done a little research on Hinton, Donchian, et al., and have found a number of other links between the idea of a fourth spacial dimension and various forms of spirituality or mysticism. For instance, the German astronomer Friedrich Zöllner (1834 – 1882) apparently tried to use the fourth dimension explain Spiritualist phenomena. In his eagerness, he was imposed upon by the medium Henry Slade in experiments that have since been debunked. Fantasy and horror authors in their turn used the claims of Spiritualism in their stories; some, like Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood, actually subscribed to its views. Hinton, who wrote a number of "scientific romances" himself, was a post-Christian altruist who speculated that spiritual agencies might work by means of the fourth dimension and believed in something like eternal return.

Some Christians of the late Victorian era, disconcerted by the advance of materialism, attempted to colonize the fourth dimension themselves. For other Christians, such as the liberal theologian Edwin Abbott Abbott (author of Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, a book much admired by Hinton), higher spacial dimensions were merely a metaphor for gradual way in which the human mind must approach divine truths. 

[source]

Salvador Dalí appears to have used the fourth dimension in a similar way, in his famous 1954 painting Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus), which portrays Christ crucified on the net of a tesseract / hypercube / 8-cell (Schläfli symbol {4,3,3}) hovering over a square grid (Schläfli symbol {4,4}), illustrating the incomprehensibility of God to man.

I have in my hands a Dover edition of Speculations on the Fourth Dimension: Selected Writings of Charles H. Hinton, which includes several of Hinton's scientific romances. It's edited and has an excellent introduction by Rudolph v.B. Rucker, also known as Rudy Rucker, author of the Ware Tetralogy and a modern tribute to Flatland and all-around sci-fi author of note. So no doubt I'll soon be posting about all of this yet again.

*

My post on four-dimensional arts and crafts includes an account of my building the sections and net of a 120-cell. More recently, I've printed and built the sections and net of a 24-cell, which is a regular four-dimensional polytope built from twenty-four octahedra.

The sections proceed as follows, with colors given as the craft paints I bought at Wal-Mart: (I) the octahedral cell at the "south pole" (Parchment); (II) the truncated octahedral section cut by a hyperplane through the midpoints of the edges "above" the south pole (Parchment and Real Brown); (III) the cuboctahedral equatorial section cut by a hyperplane through the set of vertices to which these edges connect (Look At Me Blue and Real Brown); (IV) the truncated octahedral section analogous to Section II but in the "northern hemisphere" (Look At Me Blue and Real Brown); and (V) the octahedral cell at the "north pole" (Coffee Latte).

The net has the "south pole" at the center and the "north pole" at the base. For reasons fully known only to my subconscious, but partly inspired by Dalí's painting above, I decided to model it after traditional depictions of the Hindu god Shiva as Nataraja or Lord of Dance, with three-fold rotational symmetry.

Shiva is the destroyer, and his dance is the cosmic dance of creation / destruction. That puts me in mind of the line from the Bhagavad Gita, uttered by Krishna, quoted by Robert Oppenheimer, and used by me in the title of a short story: "Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds."

Ashes to Ashes

Today I'd like to talk about a man. We all know who he is. Some think of him as a great man; none more so than himself. He is, in many ways, the man for our times. True, he's not the most intelligent person. He's not the most emotionally mature. Most of his injuries are self-inflicted. He's apt to say whatever comes into his head, and his decisions reflect an extreme lack of forethought. His words and actions are frequently reprehensible, sometimes even disgusting. He's a bit of a racist, a bit of a xenophobe, a bit of a sexist. He thinks very highly of his attractiveness to women of all ages, and feels welcome to take what he wants when he sees it. Still, time and again, he's proven his detractors wrong. He's proven that he does have it in him to be a winner.

This is Donald Trump, the President of the United States.
He is not the subject of this post.

Yet More Hauntings

Our leisurely ramble through the haunted houses of yesterday and today continues! Previous posts on the subject include:

• Ghosts, Personal and Otherwise
• Two More Hauntings, and a Madhouse

The Haunting of Hill House

First, I've finally gotten around to reading Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House. I was deeply impressed with the Robert Wise film, which I discussed here earlier this year, and had been meaning to read the book ever since. The film is, for me, the definitive haunted house movie; but now that I've read the book, I can offer the movie no greater compliment than to say that it faithfully and sensitively represents the spirit of the book, which is easily one of the best things I've ever read.

It's not so much a ghost story as a bad place story, which I'm beginning to think is really what a good haunted house story is all about.

"You will recall," the doctor began, "the houses described in Leviticus as 'leprous,' tsaraas, or Homer's phrase for the underworld, aidao domos, the house of Hades; I need not remind you, I think, that the concept of certain houses as unclean or forbidden – perhaps sacred – is as old as the mind of man. Certainly there are spots which inevitably attach to themselves an atmosphere of holiness and goodness; it might not then be too fanciful to say that some houses are born bad. Hill House, for whatever the cause, has been unfit for human habitation for upwards of twenty years. What it was like before then; whether its personality was molded by the people who lived here, or the things they did, or whether it was evil from its start are all questions I cannot answer. Naturally I hope that we will all know a good deal more about Hill House before we leave. No one knows, even, why some houses are called haunted."

There are various supernatural occurrences, though their ultimate cause is left unsettlingly ambiguous. The house's geometry is disturbing, misanthropic, hateful. It was designed by a sick, demented man. But what's truly terrifying is that the house is itself a monstrous and voracious organism. It's never made clear what order of "intelligence" (which is too anthropocentric a term) the house represents, however.

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

Jackson's supreme mastery of style is exhibited most surely in her ability to convince you that, whatever is going on, it's much more worse than you imagine. A classic haunted house story, paranormal investigator and all; a delicate, sensitive exploration of a repressed soul; a humorous satire of heavy-handed spiritualism; a bone-freezing read for the small hours of the morning: The Haunting of Hill House is all these and more.

The Shining

If a good haunted house story is one that uses subtle brushes of style to build up an ineffable atmosphere of dread, an atmosphere that clumsy delineations and explanations would tear to shreds, then Stephen King can safely be said never to have written a good haunted house story. Still, The Shining is clearly a good story; the laws of inference therefore indicate that The Shining is not principally a haunted house story.

For me, it's really the story of a father and husband destroyed by his own small-mindedness and inner demons. There are a few creepy moments, but King simply doesn't know how not to explain every supernatural occurrence in precise detail by the end. That's okay, I think. The truly disturbing events are those that occur entirely within Jack's sane mind, when he soliloquizes on his own life and doggedly lies to himself about who he is and what he has done. The ghosts' making him into a monster is merely a reflection of what he had done to himself and his vision of reality, freely and willingly, before ever setting foot in the Overlook Hotel. As a father and husband with his own inner compromises, I found that it all hit a little close to home. It got under my skin, which, I suppose, is what a good novel does.

It had been a long, long time since I'd read any Stephen King. Like Fletcher Vredenburgh, I got into him when I was in junior high; I read The Stand first, I think, and then moved on to various other things, such as Carrie, Misery, The Eye of the Dragon, The Dark Half, and The Dead Zone. I recall being unimpressed with King's portrayal of good and evil, his plot resolutions (in his longer novels), and his frequent conflation of seaminess with wickedness. He has a way of reducing people to ugly, brutal caricatures, and at the time I found it so dehumanizing that I eventually decided – as a fourteen-year-old! – to leave it aside for a future date. Well, I suppose that date has now come.

I find myself kind of wanting to read Dr. Sleep now. If it shows up at the county library, I just might! I've also been wanting to read his Dark Tower books for some time. A buddy of mine has them, so that's probably next on my list.

The Shining

Of course, I haven't been looking for haunted houses in books alone. For years I've been meaning to watch Kubrick's version of King's novel, and for years I've refrained from it, as I wanted to read the book first. Somehow I managed to hold out all this time, despite being a great admirer of Kubrick's other films, and despite somehow becoming aware of the entire plot, down to numerous scenes, by subconsciously absorbing it from the universal cultural Id.

I can see why King doesn't like Kubrick's vision. It is, nevertheless, sublime. The members of the Torrance family are reduced to opaque archetypes enacting some kind of horribly eternal play in a snowbound universe that they alone inhabit, out of space, out of time. It reminds me of 2001: A Space Odyssey more than any of Kubrick's other films. It also makes me think of Ingmar Bergman's surreal horror film, Hour of the Wolf, and Tarkovsky's Solaris.

Perhaps the less I say about The Shining, the better. If you're looking for a psychological thriller, a scary ghost story, or a point-by-point adaptation of a King novel, you'll probably be disappointed. If you're looking for a quiet, unsettling island universe existing unto itself and violating conventions of time and space like a cosmic M. C. Escher design, you've come to the right place, my friend.

The Conjuring 2

I suppose I should mention this one, too. Yes, I watched it, and, yes, I thought it was okay, though not quite so good as the first one, which I also thought was okay but not great. This one committed the exact same errors as the first installment, but more so, and with fewer memorable scenes (like that clap scene, brrr). It's genuinely scary, with good production values, an intelligent script, a realistic texture, and an ending that's actually kind of positive and inspiring. Oh, and toys. Creepy, creepy toys. (What is it with creepy toys these days? The real Annabelle was a Raggedy Ann doll.) Anyway, it's a good Halloween movie, but nothing to compare with The Haunting or The Shining.

This is neither here nor there, but the aftermath scenes in both Conjuring movies make me think of the little picnics and gatherings they always ended stories with on Rescue 911.

Local Hauntings

A couple weeks ago I discussed The Haunting of Hill House with a friend of mine, a psychology professor. He told me of a house in town that he'd been told is haunted. Bad things happen to people who live there, he said, and no one stays there long. This is all hearsay. But it's up the street from where we both live, so I went to check it out on the way home from work. It's a small, rather run-down one-story house with an oddly convoluted floor plan. Is it haunted? Hard to tell from my pick-up truck.

My own house, which was built around 1901 and actually bears some resemblance to the house in the first Conjuring movie, has a filled-in well in the back corner of the lot. The spot is visible merely as a pit of soft earth. I've always found it a bit unsettling.

There's a small pioneer cemetery at the end of the block, within sight of our upstairs windows, inhabited mainly by nineteenth-century casualties of arrow wounds and bullet holes. I've been told, however, that there are graves sprinkled here and there around the entire block...

Speaking of arrow holes, my best friend from the town where I grew up, a few towns over from where I now live, has an ancestral family member who was killed by arrows...and his family still has the shirt. It's a white shirt with little bloody arrow holes. His grandmother, who was born in the nineteenth century and lived to be well over one hundred, resided practically next door to us, and one day I was taken into a small, slightly stuffy back room of her house to see the family artifacts. Old photographs stared down on us from the walls. That was an unsettling place.

Last But Not Least

In conclusion, while we're on the subject of paranormal investigators and creepy things, I'd like to mention that John Linwood Grant of greydogtales fame, together with Sam Gafford and Travis Neisler, are starting up a quarterly print (print? yes, print!) magazine called Occult Detective Quarterly, a revival of the kinds of stories that feature William Hope Hodgson's Carnacki and his various relatives and descendants. You can check out their Kickstarter campaign here.

Two More Hauntings, and a Madhouse

My search for haunted house movies continues. I saw a very good one recently: Burnt Offerings (1976), starring Karen Black and Oliver Reed. As it began I resigned myself to poorly lit, foggy-lensed, muffled-sounding, ill-carpeted seventies schlock, but I very quickly got into it. It's underrated and, I think, quite good.

I'll not reveal much about the plot, except to emphasize that it's not a ghost story. The house itself is a character, as it is in the best movies of this kind, from The Haunting to Crimson Peak. It's not enough (and may be a great deal too much) to have creepy carved newels. The Haunting does amazing things with the illusory faces you seem to see in patterns on the wall at night. Burnt Offerings seems to rely mainly on an attic window that stays lit a lurid red at night. It was shot at the Dunsmuir House, where a number of movies have been filmed. There's a pool, unfortunately, but it's used to good effect.

I'm familiar with Karen Black mainly from Trilogy of Terror. That little doll has lived in my nightmares since I saw it as a fourteen-year-old. I thought Black was quite effective in Burnt Offerings, especially in the final moments, which I saw coming from a mile away, but was still genuinely scared by. That's what a good haunting story does well. It lets you in on the secret pretty much right from the get-go, but toys with you, taunting you until just the right pitch of suspense has been reached. Timing is everything.

And there's this chauffeur. With shades. Sometimes he smiles. It's terrifying. And a mysterious locked room that no one can ever go into. That right there is the stuff of bad dreams. In fact, put a sealed room in pretty much any kind of movie, and you've got a ho

All in all, the movie has a weird kind of logic that reminds me of the nightmares I had when I was a little kid. Like the one about the picture in the yellow living room that silently wanted me to go get a candy from the candy dish. Ugh. Everything is out to get you, the movie seems to say. It's watching you. What is watching you? Who knows? But it watches. The world is sunny. It smiles. It smiles at you.

Though marred by one or two cheesy scenes, this is a good movie that I won't soon forget.

*

And then there's The House that Dripped Blood (1971), one of those horror anthologies released by Amicus Productions. As a haunted house movie it's terrible. The stories, though taking place in the same house, are all quite different, and have nothing at all to do with the setting, except for one or two ominous references shoehorned into the script. Contrary to the advertising, the house doesn't drip blood, and as a matter of fact I don't think there's one drop of blood in the whole production. And it's got vampires, even. What a waste of a good set! A rather nice and creepy little house, murky and slightly run down and with just the right amount of ornament.

Still, it seems a bit churlish to grouse about a movie starring both Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. Two of the shorts are fairly creepy, one involving waxworks and the other a little witch-girl, and a third is mildly amusing. All were written by Robert Bloch. As a whole the film would have been better if it hadn't been so painfully awkward about linking the stories to the house.

So, as a schlocky horror movie, thumbs moderately up, but as a haunted house movie, thumbs down.

*

I also happened to watch Asylum (1972), another Amicus anthology written by Robert Bloch, and it's much better. Humorously campy at some points, genuinely scary at others, and delightfully bizarre (or gross! – like that little robot's guts!) at still others. In addition to Peter Cushing, it stars Herbert Lom, an actor I'm fond of. Not a haunted house movie, though.

On Reptoids from Alpha Draconis

In keeping with my time-honored tradition of writing a blog post whenever I encounter a network of ideas connected in any way, shape, or form with speculative fiction, but also in keeping with my equally time-honored tradition of not commenting on current affairs, I hereby commence a post about

THE REPTOIDS AMONG US

without explaining what, precisely, has motivated me to pursue this particular avenue of discovery.

I will tell you what set me upon the path, however.

One day at the office, whilst devouring the salami sandwich, granola bar, and green apple that constitute my lunch, I happened to watch a Mental Floss YouTube video about weird conspiracy theories. Among the factoids presented therein is the assertion that 12 million Americans believe that shape-shifting lizard people secretly hold the reins of world government. This is according to Public Policy Polling.

Now, if a survey company called me to ask whether I believe shape-shifting lizard people are in control of the government, I would respond with an enthusiastic YES, YES, I DO STRONGLY BELIEVE THAT. And surely I'm not alone in my love of trolling the strangers who call my house to ask stupid questions. So, perhaps the number is a little misleading. Still, there must be some truly devout lizard-people believers, right? A little googling (not for the faint of heart in this case) would seem to confirm that, yes, there are some believers out there.

The leading proponent is one David Icke, British ex-footballer and conspiracy theorist. He asserts that reptilians (or reptoids, as I prefer to call them) from Alpha Draconis have been selectively breeding the human race since its inception, creating the Babylonian Brotherhood, a hybrid race of Illuminati who now control the world. He suggests that the aliens first came to earth in search of monatomic gold, which enhances the capacity of their nervous systems ten thousandfold.

Hm. A race of superintelligent extraterrestrials who inhabited earth long before man's coming and now treat the human race as a pet project and secretly orchestrate events from behind the scenes? Remind you of anything? Here we have the connection with my blog's purported focus. It has been suggested that the Reptoid Hypothesis owes a large debt to the writings of H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Clark Ashton Smith; they, in their turn, took much of their material from nineteenth-century theosophical writings on Atlantis and Lemuria.

The idea that disguised aliens secretly control everything of course puts me in mind of John Carpenter's They Live (1988). I love eighties sci-fi actioners, and They Live is one of the most enjoyable. The screenplay was written by Carpenter under the pseudonym Frank Armitage, an allusion to Dr. Henry Armitage of "The Dunwich Horror." Like most Carpenter assays, They Live has a B-movie feel, but it's also hilarious, sharply satirical, and eerily contemporary. It takes place in a not-so-distant future when the middle class is being squeezed out of existence, the underemployed live in shantytowns on vacant lots, racial discord and police brutality are on the rise, and a media-induced malaise seems to have overcome the human race. One day, a down-and-outer (played by pro wrestler Rowdy Roddy Piper) discovers a pair of cheap-looking sunglasses that let him see a whole new reality. Turns out the rich and powerful are all aliens or people who have sold out to the aliens. This leads to one of the greatest and cheesiest one-liners in action sci-fi history: "I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass...and I'm all out of bubblegum."

Now, it's one of my little pleasures in life to post extremely weird links and opaque commentary on Facebook to see if my aunts, cousins, in-laws, coworkers, and high school friends will think I've gone off my rocker. (I used to go in for politics, but eventually you learn what everybody is going to say, so why bother?) So I recently posted the above picture of George W. Bush, Tony Blair, and Queen Elizabeth II as reptoids. Imagine my surprise when, immediately afterward, the "people also posted" thing popped up with three stories about...Donald Trump.

Let me pause here to assure whomever might be reading this that I, for one, welcome our new reptilian overlords.

Now, what's interesting to me about They Live (which is awesome and you should watch soon if you haven't yet) is that it appeared shortly before David Icke began his career as New Age prophet. Was it an influence on his ideas? Icke is also supposed to have been influenced by 1940s non-fiction writer Mark Doreal, who took some of his ideas from Robert E. Howard. So apparently there's been a strange cross-fertilization between weird horror and cranky fringe conspiracy theories. Each influences the other; both grow together.

For all that, though, there's a distinct psychological line between the weird horror fan and the wild-eyed conspiracy theorist. For the former, there's a big element of play, of fun. The latter is in deadly earnest. I would even assert that the fan is the unlikeliest person to go down that rabbit hole. They're inoculated by their sense of humor.

But what does make someone start thinking that the celebrities and politicians they see on TV and in the news are all reptoids in disguise? That, I'm afraid, is a question above my pay grade, so I'll just conclude with a word from our sponsor:

ADDENDUM: D'oh! While writing this, I forgot to mention another ridiculous eighties movie making use of the same idea: the inimitable The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984), which pits humans and Black Lectroids against the evil Red Lectroids of Planet 10. Less pointed, much weirder, with an awesome cast. I'll have to start reviewing fantasy and sci-fi schlock from the eighties sometime soon.

Bone Tomahawk

Did you know that there were two westerns starring Kurt Russell last fall? There was Quentin Tarantino's The Hateful Eight, and then there was S. Craig Zahler's Bone Tomahawk. The latter was an indie film by a first-time director. It did well at festivals but had only a limited release, meaning that there was zero chance for me to see it in the theater. But I finally watched it on the small screen the other night, and, dang, that was a good movie.

First off, I have to say that I'm not a huge fan of westerns. This is not due to lack of exposure. Quite the contrary, perhaps. I live half an hour from the Alamo Village movie set, where they filmed both the John Wayne film and Lonesome Dove. Growing up, I watched John Wayne movies until I had them memorized. When the local UHF station featured one in 3D (I forget which), we actually went out to the county courthouse – in a different town, mind you – to pick up the glasses to watch it as a family. There's some good old-fashioned red-blooded American fun for you. (It was like John Wayne's horse's nose was popping right out at us!) But, sadly, I simply can't stand westerns now. At least ones that don't involve some combination of Sergio Leone or Clint Eastwood.

However, Bone Tomahawk is better described as a horror-western, certainly an unusual combination of genres. It's like The Searchers stitched by a degenerate backwoods psychopath onto The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. So here let me also say that I'm not the target audience for brutal slasher horror films. So, why would I like Bone Tomahawk so much?

Well, I first became interested in it when I encountered this interview with the director. In it he trashes both The Hateful Eight and The Revenant, and explains that what inspired the story "comes a little bit more from the disciplines of lost race fiction, like H. Rider Haggard kind of stuff, really, than from westerns."

H. Rider Haggard kind of stuff? Sign me up!

So, the basic plot is this: A young foreman's wife (who happens to be a doctor) gets kidnapped by a tribe of degenerate cannibal troglodytes. The sheriff (Kurt Russell, who is and will always be awesome) forms a mismatched little posse to rescue her. They cross the wilderness, experiencing various Old West setbacks, and then step right into the mouth of Hell.

Really, most of film consists of these four men riding across the landscape with each other. The characters are well drawn and quite enjoyable to watch. The mood is quiet and brooding, with a rising sense of menace as they get deeper and deeper into this back corner of the wilderness. The horror is only hinted at until the last thirty minutes or so of the film. And then...hold onto your chair. Seriously, don't watch this movie if you're sensitive to graphic violence. I've never seen anything like it. What makes it hard to watch is that the characters never lose their basic humanity in the viewer's eyes. There's no emotional detachment, as you might have in a straight-up slasher. But the horror is also offset by a kind of grim but compassionate humor. And Kurt Russell is the man.

The main feature, of course, is the cannibal troglodytes. There's a lot to love here, but I don't want to say too much. They're very scary and very cool. And I love this idea of riding deeper and deeper into the American wilderness, encountering stranger and stranger things as you go, until you come to the final horror of all. In the interview mentioned above, Zahler says this:

If I could have picked anywhere to shoot this movie, probably my first choice would have been New Mexico, and certainly the thing I am least happy with in the entire movie are the exterior locations [...] I had a very specific geographical progression throughout this movie from hills and green, to flatter and green, to green and dirt, to dirt and red, to white, to rocky, to an almost primordial setting that someone compared to Journey to the Center of the Earth. It was very specific in the script how the landscape was supposed to progress, and I spent an enormous amount of time going around with different people in Los Angeles trying to find the best substitutions I could.

Too bad. I can just imagine what he could have done with a free choice of locations in New Mexico, where I've traveled, camped, and backpacked more times than I can count. But he does a very fine job with what he has at his disposal, and it's just a beautiful, beautiful movie.

So, if you want something a little different, but well worth your while if you like H. Rider Haggard kind of stuff, give Bone Tomahawk a chance. (It's currently available for free streaming if you have Amazon Prime.)

Ghosts, Personal and Otherwise

O day and night, but this is wondrous strange! 

– Hamlet

Ghosts, it is advanced, either do not exist at all, or else, like the stars of noonday, they are there all the time and it is we who cannot see them.

I…have never been able to understand why the unvarying question should be, "Have you ever seen a ghost?" when, if a ghost cannot exist apart from visibility, his being rests solely on the testimony of one sense, and that in some respects the most fallible one of all. May not his proximity be felt and his nature apprehended in other ways? I have it on excellent authority that such a visitor can in fact be heard breathing in the room, most powerfully smelt, and known for a spirit in travail longing for consolation, all at one and the same time, and yet not be seen by the eye. And even short of signs so explicit as these, who at some time or other has not walked into a room, known and familiar and presently to be known and familiar again, but that for a space has become a different room, informed with other influences and charged with other meanings? Something has temporarily upset the equilibrium, which will be restored by and bye. 

– Oliver Onions, "Credo"

A person I know believes, or half-believes, that he once came into contact with a certain something in a nineteenth-century house turned restaurant. Throughout our dinner, he felt the presence of someone waiting at his elbow, and actually turned to see who it was several times. Contrary to what's shown in the movies, that seems usually to be the way of it: the person who has "seen" a ghost has experienced some sort of psychological disturbance – an upsetting of the equilibrium – that has convinced him personally, on some level, that something was there, but is unable to offer much more than a subjective impression as proof.

The materialist would simply say that a belief in ghosts is irrational. To me that seems to miss the point. Of course it's irrational. Ghosts are irrational. That's the very reason they're so terrifying: they represent a dissonance in the logical framework of the universe, a thing that could not and should not be but yet somehow is.

And what exactly is a ghost? The disembodied spirit of a departed person? Calling up visions of Jacob Marley and Hamlet's father, who are basically just bodiless people, that seems hardly an adequate definition. Sometimes a ghost is more the decayed psychic remains of a person. At others, it's a sinister, inhuman semi-intelligence or force, a watchful presence at work in a place or object. And quite often it's something else altogether.

Perhaps ghosts, like love, elude us when we try to define them.

*

My grandfather passed away when I was nineteen. His was the first death I had witnessed with my own eyes. The semi-mechanical winding-down of his body – his brain had already died its own death as the result of a medical error, and the family had made the decision to take him off life support – may be the most horrible thing I ever watched.

He had served as my confirmation sponsor two years before. I can't say why I'd asked him, as he wasn't in communion with the church, refused to communicate in the course of my confirmation, and died as he had lived. Still, we had a certain bond because of it. My grandmother, though herself not entirely orthodox in her opinions, didn't approve of our free-thinking collusion.

After his death, I began dreaming of him. The dreams were always the same. I'd be at a family gathering, and my grandfather would arrive, sitting down in a corner without saying anything or making eye contact with anyone. Gradually, the realization would grow in me that he oughtn't to be there, that he was, after all, dead, and that I had seen him buried. Mixed with the sense that something just wasn't right, I had the anxious feeling I get in those dreams where I'm supposed to depart on a journey, but things keep happening to delay me, so that I end up wandering around, getting farther and farther from my goal. In this dream, the feeling was vicarious, experienced on my grandfather's behalf. Go! I would tell him. You don't belong here! But he would hang on disconsolately, saying nothing.

This went on for such a long time – years – that I finally told my father about it. He related a story about my great uncle, my grandmother's brother. I was named after him but never met him, as he died before I was born. An air traffic controller and (I'm told) something of an alcoholic, he had remained in Puerto Rico all his life; it was he who had introduced my grandparents. After his death, my great uncle began "visiting" my grandfather much as my grandfather was visiting me. According to custom, my father said, the way to stop such visitations was to light a candle while one slept. I know not whether my grandfather employed this remedy, nor with what success. At any rate, I never sought such relief. If my grandfather was visiting me, why would I want to drive him away? The visitations gradually ceased on their own, however.

Now, I was not the only one to report being visited by my grandfather. Soon after his death, my grandmother, who used to confide in me, began telling me that he would come to her in the house they had shared, and not merely while she was asleep. Whenever she asked whether I thought this possible (for some reason she considered me an authority on spiritual matters), I would tell her, noncommittally, "I don't know, Granny," and change the subject, which, I felt, was not conducive to her mental health.

To explain what this meant to me, I find that I must describe my grandmother and her house more fully.

My grandmother had long, straight white hair. She was, as my grandfather had been, considerably overweight, and usually dressed in black, never showing any flesh above her wrists, which were banded with quantities of jangling bracelets. She had a peculiar horror of light and space. She kept her house as dark as night, with layers of curtains over the windows, which were also iron-barred and overgrown with ivy. Even when she was in good health and my grandfather was alive, curiosities and knick-knacks filled every room, from a Kermit-the-Frog phone and a giant wooden fork and spoon to a number of terrifying (to a small boy) relics from Japan, where they had once lived, and other Oriental bric-a-brac – serene smiling Buddhas, pictures painted on gold silk, tapestries of scowling Noh players, green porcelain dog-lion things sticking out tongues between long white tusks. Bulky furniture turned the small rooms into spaces a large adult could hardly move around in. I had never even seen into certain corners of the dining room. A large, soft canopy bed swathed in yellowed white lace took up most of my grandmother's bedroom, and I remember sleeping there once or twice as a little boy, and also on the thickly cushioned sofa under the frowning Noh players, always an unsettling experience.

Imagine a small version of the house from The Haunting combined with a small version of the house from The Others, decorated like the unsettlingly Oriental death-house in Howard Hawks' The Big Sleep, surrounded by monkey grass and loquat trees, and placed on a sunny street on the south side of San Antonio. That was before the outright hoarding began. The claustrophobic closeness and decay mounted nightmarishly after my grandfather's death. For that period, Miss Havisham's house in Great Expectations comes more to mind:

I crossed the staircase landing, and entered the room she indicated. From that room, too, the daylight was completely excluded, and it had an airless smell that was oppressive. A fire had been lately kindled in the damp oldfashioned grate, and it was more disposed to go out than to burn up, and the reluctant smoke which hung in the room seemed colder than the clearer air—like our own marsh mist. Certain wintry branches of candles on the high chimneypiece faintly lighted the chamber; or, it would be more expressive to say, faintly troubled its darkness. It was spacious, and I dare say had once been handsome, but every discernible thing in it was covered with dust and mould, and dropping to pieces. The most prominent object was a long table with a tablecloth spread on it, as if a feast had been in preparation when the house and the clocks all stopped together. An épergne or centre-piece of some kind was in the middle of this cloth; it was so heavily overhung with cobwebs that its form was quite undistinguishable; and, as I looked along the yellow expanse out of which I remember its seeming to grow, like a black fungus, I saw speckled-legged spiders with blotchy bodies running home to it, and running out from it, as if some circumstance of the greatest public importance had just transpired in the spider community.

I grew up not three miles from my grandparents' house, and went there as often as you might imagine. But it was not until I was twenty-seven – years after my grandfather had died – that I first went upstairs. Not once in all the countless times I had been there had I ascended the staircase. On this occasion, I found my aunt's bedroom preserved as it had been when she was a teenager, stuffed animals and all, and my grandfather's bedroom untouched as well. My grandmother herself never climbed the stairs, but my parents once saw an light on when they dropped her off at night, so perhaps she went up there sometimes, after all.

That house was, in many ways, the embodiment of my grandmother's mind, full of secrets and decay and things left untended. Twelve years after my grandfather's death, she began having outright hallucinations – which naturally call into question her reports of ghostly visitations – and had to be placed in a psychiatric ward. It was a grim place, high up in an old high-rise downtown. I went to see her as frequently as I could, living as I did some ninety miles away. Security measures required that she receive only a single visitor at time, which turned my visits into strange colloquies, even when I accompanied other family members to the hospital.

Generally, she seemed lucid enough, making sarcastic remarks at the expense of all the "crazy people" in the ward, but at times she would fall into weird fugues. After seeming to nod off, she would sit erect and begin playing games with children who weren't there, or talking about buildings that stood on forgotten cemeteries, with "creepy things" crawling out of holes in the walls.

Eventually she was diagnosed with dementia and moved to a nursing home. There she became morbidly preoccupied with assisted suicide and the work of Jack Kevorkian, whom she admired. But she was always pleased to see me, and also my wife and children, who were now allowed to accompany me. She died not long after.

Now I dream about both my grandparents.

*

My narrative abounds with rational explanations for those who want them, but there's something about it, an unsettling quality I can't quite put my finger on, that still bothers me. The same, I've noticed, is true of the best ghost stories.

Since I reviewed Crimson Peak last fall, I've been on a kick of trying to find the best ghost stories and movies I can find. Crimson Peak, incidentally, is not particularly successful as a movie about ghosts, falling as it does into the rational Jacob Marley trap. Simply put, it shows too much and explains too much. Since it is, in fact, a gothic romance, rather than a movie about ghosts, this is excusable. But I can't exonerate the many failed horror movies that make a similar mistake.

The very best ghost movie I have seen is Robert Wise's The Haunting (1963), which is based on a story by Shirley Jackson. It explains little and shows less – nary a ghost is seen on screen – but certain parts make my blood run cold. Atmosphere, the play of light and shadow, and sound effects all combine to create a force more terrifying than anything that could be trotted onstage. So, for me, The Haunting is the standard.

Other haunted house movies attempt the same thing but fail. The Legend of Hell House (1973), though it has a promising beginning, ends with the technological contrivances and scientific elucidations that made me think immediately of Ghostbusters. The highly acclaimed The Others (2001), with its sunless rooms and brooding unease, preserves its perfect atmosphere throughout, but relies in its denouement on a trick ending, an ending I unfortunately saw coming. And then we have The Conjuring (2013), which comes close to The Haunting, at least in parts. However, it shows too much toward the end, opting for jump-scares rather than numinous dread, and it also tries too hard to interweave the Annabelle doll into the story, in preparation, I suppose, for that doll's lackluster prequel. But there are a couple scenes – the nighttime clapping scene, the clothesline scene – that still give me goose bumps when I think of them.

As for literature, I've been making my way through the Modern Library Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural, a large volume I recently acquired at a used bookstore. Standouts include stories by Oliver Onions, M. R. James, and Sheridan Le Fanu. The only author I hadn't read before was Oliver Onions; actually, I'd never even heard of him before, which is much to my shame, for he seems to be a very gifted writer. I'm currently working through a collection of his ghost stories as well.

Unlike, say, heroic fantasy, the ghost story is a genre that real "literary" authors try their hands at from time to time. Henry James and Edith Wharton are famous examples. Perhaps this is because ghosts stand closer to real life than swordsmen and sorcerers. No one ever fears meeting a dragon on a blasted heath. But just spend a night alone in an old house that makes peculiar creaks and sighs of its own volition, and you will begin to feel uncomfortable.

For me, that's what has made me avoid ghost stories in the past. The reality I inhabit is already haunted enough as it is, be it actual ghosts or merely my neurotic temperament. But lately I've found that the various strains of horror fiction have a cathartic effect. After all, people have enjoyed telling ghost stories for a long, long time. Surely there is some reason why small doses of terror are found pleasurable.

My theory is that they help to brace us up against the onset of the lonely night, which might otherwise drive us mad with fear.

Crimson Peak

Feeling prodigal and carefree with the proceeds of my recent art show, I decided to take in some fine cinema yesterday at the local theater. Actually, the Sunday matinee here costs all of $4.00, somewhat more than I make from the sale of a copy of my book, so I'm naturally selective when it comes to spending my hard-earned cash. But Guillermo del Toro's Crimson Peak opened this weekend, and I've so enjoyed most everything I've seen by him that I couldn't possibly stay away.

Though it contains elements of horror, Crimson Peak is in fact a gothic romance, which is a genre of its own with a long history and well-established tropes. The seminal work is said to be Horace Walpole's 1764 The Castle of Otranto, subtitled (in later editions) A Gothic Story, but perhaps "Bluebeard" is the basic template for the specific type of story in question. At any rate, gothic romance or (more broadly speaking) gothic fiction became widely popular through the nineteenth century. Some of the most well-known English novels from the period, like Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, have elements of gothic romance, and Jane Austen parodied the genre in Northanger Abbey.

Today the term is used to describe a subgenre of the twentieth-century romance novel owing to this tradition, by authors such as Daphne du Maurier or Mary Stewart. I read some of the latter many years ago, having found them among my mother's books, but don't recall the titles or authors. According to my vague memories, the plots invariably involve a lady who marries into a decadent old family with a large, creepy house and a few (literal) skeletons in the (secret) closet, generally of the former-wife variety. Of course I was there for the secret passages and skeletons.

So the appearance of a film like Crimson Peak is something of a phenomenon. It's a beautifully faithful cinematic adaptation of a literary genre that's (now) almost as storied and neglected as the houses that feature so prominently in its exemplars. It has a spirited young heroine, a brooding, titled scion of a decadent family, a horrifically decayed old house with paintings hung in salon style and interior décor so spiky and gothic it's almost perverse, and a dollop of intra-familial feminine animosity.

Oh, and blood. Lots and lots of blood. The whole movie is drenched in blood.

The film also involves a certain number of ghosts. It begins and ends with ghosts. These ghosts are as scary as hell. Some people might therefore be led to believe that it's a ghost story. But the ghosts are only a metaphor, you see. Amusingly, that assertion is one the heroine, a budding novelist, makes of her own manuscript. Crimson Peak is, to a certain extent, a commentary on its own genre. "Bluebeard" is never far off, but there's a twist.

The visuals are, of course, stunning, and equal to anything in Pan's Labyrinth, which is probably del Toro's best work to date. Allerdale Hall is the most gorgeous, most decadent haunted house I've ever seen on the screen. The movie ticket is more than worth the price just for that. The ghosts are, as I said, delightfully monstrous. They emerge like slow spiders from the inky blackness that seems always threatening to engulf the protagonist.

Insects and clockwork form important motifs, as they do in practically all of del Toro's films from Cronos on. Crimson Peak features some lovely, horrific images of butterflies being devoured by ants; huge, grotesque moths inhabit the old house. There are plenty of wind-up gizmos and steam-powered machines as well, including a creepy elevator that takes you down to the basement you're not supposed to go down to.

No spoilers here, but, familiar as I am with the genre, I guessed all the secrets in the first ten minutes. That didn't lessen the enjoyment, because I don't really watch movies or read stories like this out of a desire to see the mystery solved. I've avoided any and all reviews, as I do whenever I plan on reviewing a movie myself, but I have seen that Crimson Peak hasn't done as well as hoped. I can guess why: people go expecting horror, and instead get gothic romance, which is its own thing. And Crimson Peak really is a romance. That is to say, it's structured as a love story, and its eroticism is (how shall I put this?) female-centric, with a focus on emotion rather than skin. You might almost call it a chick flick, though the various brutally graphic skull bashings and splittings tip the scales a little bit the other way. So it's a blood-soaked horror-romance, which kind of seems like a tough sell.

But it's lovely, I tell you, simply lovely. Please go see this film. If you do, maybe your ticket will be the one to convince the studio to let del Toro make that At the Mountains of Madness movie he's wanted to do for years.

Hope and Horror

Tolkien was a watershed in fantasy, but I've always found myself drawn to what went before rather than to what came after. The analogy's not perfect, but H. P. Lovecraft has something of the same role in weird horror, and in much the same way I generally prefer to explore his predecessors. Not that I'm denigrating either author; it's just that they're so big in their respective genres that nothing that came after could be quite free of their influence, either positively or negatively. They brought about a loss of (literary) innocence, and to me there's always something wild and free about their forerunners.

For instance, while more developed, Lovecraft's mythos or whatever you want to call it is tame compared to what you find in Arthur Machen, William Hope Hodgson, Robert W. Chambers, Oscar Wilde, &c. By tame I don't mean boring or not worth reading; I simply mean that it's been taught its place, answers when called, and retires when dismissed. For all their eldritch grandeur, Lovecraft's alien gods are too well delineated to be truly horrifying to me, and I've always read him as a fantasist rather than as a horror writer. But Machen's Pan, while of course quite familiar in a cultural sense, has something unspeakably perverted and wrong about him.

Hodgson is my favorite of the aforementioned authors; this spring I read his masterpiece, and one of my favorite novels: The House on the Borderland. Not content to recount a brutal battle with swine-things from the mysterious subterranean world beneath his house, after the manner of The Boats of the "Glen Carrig", he expands the scope to cosmic proportions, traveling far beyond the compass of even The Night Land. Here H. G. Wells' The Time Machine, another favorite of mine, was clearly an influence (and how much a one, I wonder?), but House delves much deeper into the temporal abyss.

*          *          *

Now, this is neither here nor there, but when I was a kid I was a huge fan of the Infocom games – I've beaten Zork I, II, and III, which, if you've played them, should impress you! – and the setting of Zork I vaguely reminds me of The House on the Borderland. The programmers seemingly took grues from The Dying Earth:

It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

What is a grue, you ask?

> what is a grue

The grue is a sinister, lurking presence in the dark places of the earth. Its favorite diet is adventurers, but its insatiable appetite is tempered by its fear of light. No grue has ever been seen by the light of day, and few have survived its fearsome jaws to tell the tale.

I wonder if they were Hodgson readers as well?

*          *          *

As an OCDS I sometimes ask myself, Self, what business does a person with religious pretensions have reading (or writing!) supernatural horror? Shouldn't the things I read and write have some kind of moral or eucatastrophe or epiphany or something? Certainly the kindly old ladies I meet with every month would be scandalized if they knew the sorts of things I've put out there, which happens to be one of the chief reasons I write with a pen name. And some of my unpublished pieces – my Hodgson fan fiction, for instance – are quite openly at odds with received dogma. But more than anything, what characterizes supernatural horror is a plot of hopelessness, of despair that an end exists to be attained, i.e., the negation of a theological virtue. Otherwise it would be a thriller or some such thing. Who ever read Lovecraft hoping the protagonist would somehow get out of it all and find that, really, God's in his heaven, and all's right with the world? But isn't it an imperfection or a sin to dally in such crooked fancies?

Part of the answer (if there is one) is, I think, that stories are works of art, and not religious tracts. A stunning revelation, I know. But it's one not many people these days seem to understand, and it's not just religious-types. For instance, if you make the progressive in your story a good guy, and the stick-in-the-mud a pharisee or a doofus, then everyone will think you're scoring points for progressivism (or whatever -ism you like), even if you're actually attacking it by exposing its weaknesses in some subtle way.

Graham Greene understood the narrative weakness of making your protagonist the one who's right about everything, and the Catholics in his novels tend to be no-goods, like the whiskey priest in The Power and the Glory. In Brighton Rock, for instance, the crusading protagonist is a modern pagan named Ida, while her opponent, Pinky, who eventually gets what's coming to him, is a vindictive, hateful little hoodlum and a Catholic. Plenty of readers conclude that Greene is attacking Catholicism – just look around on the Internet – but by giving Ida her head what he's actually doing is exposing every joint and rivet in her naked worldview and allowing the reader to see its inherent poverty and blindness. It's the contrapositive of optima corrupta pessima.

So people nowadays facilely assume that the white hats are the truth-tellers and the black hats the liars, and that what happens in a story is a working-out of the way the author thinks the world should be. But even granting that authors with an ax to grind can be slightly more sophisticated in their approach, can we admit authors who deliberately subvert their own worldviews?

I say yes. Because the point of a story – especially a short story, as I see it – is to form a beautiful pattern, and if its inner logic calls for the violation of some deeply held truth, well, then truth must be violated. In the story, all that matters is narrative truth, plot-logic, and the writer who sins against it sins against beauty, a transcendental in its own right. Furthermore, the thing about Lovecraft and his circle is that there's a very great element of playfulness about it all. We can play make-believe, can't we?

And even if I were to cede that literature must have a moral purpose (which I do not), who's to say that it can't be a thought experiment in which I start with certain assumptions and take them to their logical conclusion? Consider also that even great saints can experience hopelessness – e.g., Thérèse of Lisieux, the young Carmelite whose temptations to blaspheme and despair while dying of tuberculosis were censored from the earliest editions of her autobiography – and it might be said that there's something cathartic about stepping into a malign cosmos for a brief moment. Because, really, that's the human condition, that's what we face every day. "The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me" (Pascal).

So, there's that, a little apology in case any of my church-lady friends find this blog, which, since I doubt they're out trolling the Internet for musings on weird fiction, seems unlikely enough.

See also: Catharsis and the Post-Apocalyptic