TheoFantastique: Peg, it’s a pleasure to talk with you. Thanks for making the time, and for your recent help with my research project into cinematic treatments of the Witch. Let’s begin with a little of your background. How did you come to embrace the Pagan pathway, and why did this also become an area of academic specialty?

Peg Aloi: It’s a pleasure to do this interview, and it’s gratifying to see so much interest in Paganism and academia on the web these days. I also have to thank you for finally nudging me to finish Chris Partridge’s book [on the re-enchantment of the West] which is wonderful.

It is always interesting to me to hear how people first “found” Paganism or Witchcraft or Wicca, because even as there are any similarities that modern Pagans have in common when it comes to the roots of their backgrounds, there are just as many unique differences. For me, I was raised in what I’d call a somewhat lapsed Catholic household. My father wanted us to be good church-going Catholics but my Mom rejected the church based on, well, let’s say the local parish priest did not approve of decisions she made based on her doctor’s advice, and that was that. I did not know the reasons at the time, but I did know my mom did not have much use for the church. I just always found the experience of church to be both wildly exciting (the robes and songs and beautiful stained glass and shiny things) and incredibly boring (the liturgy and rote recitations) at the same time. Shortly after being confirmed I decided it was not for me at all, but I still had to go to church occasionally.

I was also required to attend religious instruction classes once a week; we called it “relidge.” It got interesting briefly when I had this teacher who told us juicy stories about teenage girls using Ouija Boards and doing séances at slumber parties who got into all sorts of trouble. It was real satanic panic kind of stuff, which was pretty ubiquitous in the 1970s when I stop to think back on it. The people who ran the classes, who were basically all volunteers from the parish, decided the students should all bring their Ouija Boards one night and we’d burn them in a big bonfire. I really wanted to go and see this spectacle, but I definitely did not want to burn my Ouija Board, so I faked illness that day. I guess I have a kind of perverse relationship to my Catholic upbringing!

More significantly, I was raised in a family that really valued the beauty and utility of the natural world. My dad was a hunter, fisherman and avid gardener, and my mom’s ancestors all had farms, so as far back as I can remember we were either growing or catching our own food, or going into the country to pick fruit or gather nuts. We’d spend summer days fishing or wandering around in the woods at my uncle’s place in Pennsylvania, or picking blueberries in the woods in New York. In winter we’d chop firewood and cut down our own Christmas tree and smoke a goose my dad had killed for dinner. At the time, this sort of thing was not considered unusual but it’s really a dying way of life in this country now…I mean, many families do not even cook dinner or eat together. If I were a sociologist, I’d love to research the connection of these sorts of foodways that are going out of fashion and chart their decline against the proliferation of Paganism and other nature-based spiritualities. I am completely convinced that my affinity and appreciation for nature and love of the natural world are a direct result of my childhood experiences.

As a child, I was always interested in the occult and Witchcraft. I remember seeing the movie Crowhaven Farm on TV when I was little and somehow identifying with the idea of someone being reincarnated as one of the Salem witches. My aunt and uncle let me watch The Exorcist on HBO with them, but made me cover my eyes during certain parts. I think I never actually saw the film in its entirety until the director’s cut came out a few years ago. I loved the images of Witches or other magical beings I saw on TV, I Dream of Jeannie was a favorite show of mine, and I loved The Twilight Zone. I vaguely assumed there must be modern witches somewhere in the world because the occult revival and the hippie movement were happening but had no idea there was any sort of living tradition in the United States, so I just devoured books on the history of the occult and folklore and the Salem witch trials and vampires and whatever.

I first found my way into the actual Pagan community when I was working one summer for Greenpeace in Amherst, Massachusetts. One night we were sitting around a fire after a day of canvassing, drinking beer and whatnot, and someone started doing some Pagan chants, you know, what we now call “Pagan Top 40″ stuff like “The Earth is our mother” and that kind of thing. I was fascinated, here were these environmental hippie types, singing this Native-American-infused melody, it was the 1980s and the New Age was everywhere and I had only started to become aware that there was a Pagan community out there. Someone looked at me and said “Come on, Peg, you know the words!” I didn’t. But they were easy enough to pick up. We had some great times that summer, usually looking for secluded wooded areas to hang out in after work at night, sometimes swimming in forbidden places or sneaking onto private beaches on the Cape to sleep near the ocean.

Not long after this, I started to discover a Pagan community that was less connected to environmental or neo-hippie groups and more about Witchcraft and magic. I was attending the University of Massachusetts for graduate school, and one day I saw a flyer advertising the UMASS Pagan Student Organization. I think it was the first campus Pagan group in the US. I went to a meeting and, again, had this odd experience, just as with the Greenpeace group, of people expecting I knew more than I actually did. I had never attended a Pagan ritual before but at that first meeting when they were planning a Beltane ritual they asked me to be the high priestess. Who knows why? But I thought it was interesting that these strangers were assuming I was experienced in something I knew very little about, and I had not said or done anything to mislead them on this. Anyway, I hung out with these folks a while and they were not quite the kind of group I was looking for (they were a bit socially-awkward and not terribly interested in nature), but eventually I met some other people and attended all kinds of public and private events and I was off and running! I later moved to Boston which is a real vortext of Pagan community, so there was a lot going on, and eventually met people from the coven I later joined and still belong to. But now that I live in Albany, I do not attend rites as often and have become more of a solitary practitioner, which is what many people who belong to groups for a long time eventually become.

As for Paganism being an academic specialty of mine, well…I have an MFA in English. This is a terminal degree with a focus on creative writing. That and a couple bucks might get you a latte at Starbucks. I mean, it used to be a good degree but there are no jobs now, even PhDs are finding it hard. Fortunately, I did a minor in film when I was at UMASS. I also did an independent study course on Witchcraft in contemporary fiction, with a professor who specialized in myth and fantasy literature. After moving to Boston I was writing for an erotica magazine and a local arts weekly wanted to interview the women behind the magazine. This writer happened to be a film columnist and when he learned of my interest in film and my background he said he’d like to hire me to do short reviews for the paper. I had also taught a couple sections of Film and Literature in grad school. I did little bit of adjunct teaching here and there, including a course on Witchcraft in Film and Fiction. And eventually a friend I’d met through a film festival he was organizing hired me to teach at Emerson, where I have had freedom to develop a lot of unique courses. But I am still not really a bona fide film scholar or even a traditional scholar of any one subject. I have presented papers and published scholarly articles on everything from Celtic studies to travel writing to poetry, and of course film and media. The first time I presented a paper at a conference, the topic had a Pagan focus (it was on the unintentional destruction of sacred sites by Pagan tourists in the UK). Then the second paper I gave, I think it was on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, also had a Pagan focus. So I decided that every time I did any sort of academic presentation or research or published writing, it would have a pagan theme or focus. And that has held true for the last few years. It’s not like some sort of spiritual pact with the gods of livelihood, (here’s where I’d be laughing if we were doing this interview “live”), it’s just a quirky personal challenge that happens to fit well with my eclectic academic path. My spiritual path and my academic one have been similar in that they’ve both been rather untraditional, I guess.

TheoFantastique: How did you come to study film and its expression of the esoteric?

Peg Aloi: Like I said, I more or less fell into it. When I finally got a chance to teach something besides composition as a graduate teaching assistant, I had the choice of teaching Creative Writing or Film and Literature. Tough choice but I am glad I picked the film track as it has led to more teaching opportunities, and getting the job as a freelance film critic as helped, too. Anyway, one of the film classes I taught at UMASS was “Terror vs. Horror: The Psychological and Visceral Sources of Fear.” So of course I was exploring the difference between two models of horror cinema, the one a gory, shocking approach (such as one sees in slasher films, etc.) and the other a more subtle (but perhaps ultimately more unnerving) approach, the less-is-more approach. I wanted to try and expose students to things they might not normally think of as horror, like the Australian film Picnic at Hanging Rock, one of my favorites. At first glance, it looks like a costume drama but it has the qualities of mystery, horror and the paranormal as well. I am very intrigued by films that can’t be easily categorized, and television shows that meld different genres together, like Buffy or Twin Peaks.

My interest in the occult and in horror films has led me to design courses, on cinema and the occult, supernatural television, and Witchcraft and Paganism in contemporary media, and that’s all been really interesting, and the classes have been popular with students. Also, this is a very fertile field in academia now, especially since there is now a whole new branch of study known as “popular culture” which can be approached from within a variety of contexts. I have noticed for some time now that what we are currently calling “Paganism Studies” is still not a separate discipline unto itself, but is comprised of scholars whose specialties are very diverse: history, sociology, film and media, cultural studies, folklore, gender studies, you name it. And even if some scholars who want to be specialists in Paganism might find this frustrating, I think it works very well, in that it shows how this spiritual movement and its attendant imagery and texts and social implications have really permeated the culture in a very comprehensive and diverse way.

TheoFantastique: In a previous blog post I commend on Robert Ellwood’s observations of the influence of the “occult revival” of the 1960s counterculture on various aspects of popular culture such as television programming. You will touch on this in your forthcoming book. Can you summarize some of this revival for us, why it might have come about, and give us some examples of how it surfaced and continues to be worked out in television and film?

Peg Aloi: I think when one talks of an “occult revival” it is important to distinguish among the different occult revivals. There was an occult revival in England at the turn of the 20th century, one in the United States shortly thereafter, and one in the U.K. in the 1960s, concomitant with a revival in the U.S. The one we are most concerned with for our book is the most recent one, and in particular we wish to chronicle the ways in which film influenced it, and was influenced by it, both in the U.K. and the U.S. There are many factors which led to this revival, and interestingly these factors were quite different in these respective countries. For example, the rise of the American counterculture in the 1960s was a conflation of many societal tensions, including women’s liberation and the sexual revolution, civil rights, the Vietnam war protest movement, the environmental and back-to-the-earth movements, and of course drug use and, overlaying it all, the increasing social influence of popular music. As well, various works of literature were influential, both older classics and newer works. All of this had an impact upon increasing interest in the occult and the spread of Neo-Paganism. (Of course, the occult and Paganism are not the same thing, but there was and is enough overlap of these communities that they are generally seen as being interchangeable, at least to the mainstream observer). The U.K. did not have the same stake in the Vietnam situation, but the runaway popularity of the Beatles and their ability to directly influence the youth culture through their own spiritual exploration (after 1966 the Beatles were pretty much done with pop love songs) generated a similar sense of unrest among working class youth, and just as the British Wave of music had dramatic impact on the U.S., the energy of the American counterculture infused this unrest in the U.K.

As everyone knows, the behavior of many young people during this period of social unrest was seen as a very negative and corrupt trend in the culture, not to mention the widespread political shift. Once people started to really understand the atrocities and the rather hopeless situation in Vietnam, the general population followed the lead of the young in denouncing the American government’s actions; but at the same time, there were so many other aspects of youth culture that were widely disapproved of, and the occult was part of that. Sex, drugs, rock and roll: this phrase had both very negative or very positive connotations depending which side of the fence you were on. I think this was a source of great ideological conflict for many people and I picked up on it as a kid (I was born in 1963). I mean, on the one hand, everyone thought that the wholesale slaughter of young men was a problem; but some people were still caught up in the 1950s and early 1960s- era fear of Communism and the Cold War and were very protective of their burgeoning American dreams. Obviously, change was in the air, and the religious underpinnings of American culture were becoming unmoored by the large questions of morality that were blazing on American TV screens and newspapers. The coverage of the war was something no one could argue with: in those days, journalism was still a very straightforward and objective discipline. The images of Vietnam spoke for themselves. This really primed the canvas for the media to have a huge influence on the culture.

Those areas of social tension I mentioned earlier were and in many ways still are seen as “liberal” causes and interests. Which made the adoption of Pagan mindsets, such as earth-based spirituality and nature worship which are part of modern Wicca and other paths, seem like a natural outgrowth of the social zeitgeist. But interestingly, in the U.K., the factors which led to a Pagan revival were seen as “conservative” or right-wing sorts of issues. Ronald Hutton discusses this far more eloquently than I am doing in Triumph of the Moon. So not only were the roots of the revivals different, the types of people interested in them may well be very different. On a personal note, I have noted an interesting difference between American and British Pagans during my travels in the 1990s, that, in general, manifested in a much more male-dominated and dogmatic way of doing things than once sees in the more goddess-centered, eclectic paths in the U.S. The reason I mention all this is that I think we will find in our research that the popularity of certain occult film texts in both these nations will be to some extent a reflection of the occult communities.

But to offer a summary of the occult revival in film, for the purposes of our book we will probably try to determine a singular moment when it all began. Since we are mainly interested in popular culture, we will consider the influence of the works of experimental filmmaker Kenneth Anger in the 1950s. But the first example of occult cinema that had widespread and culture-changing impact was Roman Polanski’s 1968 film Rosemary’s Baby. In addition to its being a very artful and entertaining film, based on an equally artful novel by Ira Levin, there were some real-life occurrences that added to its aura of evil, and fuelled a widespread spirit of protest against all things occult, even as the film ushered in a palpable fascination with the occult. Namely, the murder of Polanski’s pregnant wife, actress Sharon Tate, by the members of the Manson family. Not long after, Polanski was accused of raping a 13-year old girl, and has lived abroad ever since because if he ever enters the U.S. again he will be indicted on that crime. Because the news media today is so obsessed with crime and scandal, we might think such a story is all in a day’s news. But at the time, the Manson family’s killing spree was a horrific, almost surreal narrative that engendered fear of “murdering cults.” Their association with the lyrics of various Beatles songs (scrawled on walls at crime scenes) helped convince the public that their aberrant behavior was somehow the result of the cultural climate.

I think also this is where the word “occult” became imbued with such negativity, because of course Manson’s clan were referred to as a “cult” under the influence of this crazy, charismatic guy. I hate to suggest the American public is incapable of making the distinction between these two very different words, but I recall the word “cult” became a buzzword associated with anything “occult.” What we now call “satanic panic” has its roots in the fear of the public that any sort of interest in the occult (evidenced by the Beatles lyrics that reflected their interest in Eastern spirituality and social protest) could potentially lead to involvement with murdering cults. A ridiculous leap in logic, perhaps. Anton LaVey founded the Church of Satan in 1966, and his spurious claim that he portrayed the demon who impregnated Rosemary in Polanski’s film further reinforced the idea that fiction and real life were frighteningly linked. And the portrayal of the “old folks next door” as a coven of murdering witches was somehow both campy and horrifying. Suddenly your neighbors were capable of anything. By the time The Exorcist came out in 1973, portraying incidents of Black Mass desecrations and the demonic possession of a pre-pubescent girl, the American public was completely convinced that Satanism, Witchcraft and the occult were a dangerous trend stealing away the souls of our young people. I mean, little Regan had a Ouija Board! I am sure that was the reason for why I was encouraged to burn mine. Then Linda Blair went on to star in all these rather shocking made-for-TV films, which were great, but underscored again that this actress played nothing but troubled or evil characters.

It’s also true that we saw a real dearth of occult film and TV in the 1980s, and I think that is directly due to the rise of the Moral Majority under Reagan. It was not until the early 1990s, when we saw the rise of the New Age and Neo-Paganism and Wicca, that we see a return to television of occult, Pagan and paranormal shows, like The X-Files or Xena, Warrior Princess. Let’s face it, Buffy could not have existed without Xena.

TheoFantastique: Scholars like Christopher Partridge in the U.K. have commented on this and referred to it as a process of re-enchantment in the Western world. He says this has given rise to a “popular occulture” that surfaces not only in film and television, but also video games and music. Would you agree with this sentiment? And if so, how would we differentiate between esoterically-influenced forms of pop culture and a simple increased interest in general fantasy, myth, and fairytales?

Peg Aloi: I think Partridge was right to try and explore the shift in those terms. I also appreciate his use of the term “neo-Romanticism” over other descriptive terms because if you really look at it, the Romantics were so very instrumental in both periods of occult revival. Without the poetry and perhaps more importantly, the ideology of the Romantics, which of course was rooted in a desire to revive the imagery of classical mythology and the dream of the pastoral life, Neo-Paganism would never have happened. Some theorists also credit the Romantics with influencing not only the occult revival but the entire 1960s cultural shift. Camille Paglia wrote an essay exploring various aspects of this, including the idea of rock music and the live concert experience as an expression of Dionysian impulses. We had a movement in the 1980s called “New Romanticism” which was mainly about music and fashion…and to some extent a renewal of interest in Romantic poetry and the paintings of the Pre-Raphaelites, for example. Partridge acknowledges the influence of various works of fiction on renewed interest in fantasy and fairy takes but also in Pagan worldviews and alternatives to mainstream spirituality, in particular Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy and, more recently, Terry Pratchettt’s Discworld series. Then there was the very popular artwork throughout the late ’70s and ’80s of Brian Froud, Boris Vallejo, Sulamith Wulfing, Susan Seddon-Boulet and others. That kind of art is still very popular with lots of new artists joining the ranks, although it seems to me it is getting more and more twee, maybe because it’s all aimed at little girls now. I don’t think there necessarily was or is a general increased interest in fairy tales that has fed the trend in literature and art; I think a few writers and artists whose personal visions have led them to produce work concerned with these worlds is what has fuelled that revival of interest. And I think perhaps their interests are more likely to have originated in esoteric interests, at least Pratchett’s. But there have been non-fiction works that no doubt influenced this as well, such as the work of Joseph Campbell, which started to be popularized in the 1980s thanks to Bill Moyer’s televised interviews. Or the documentary film version of The Ascent of Man.

I think it’s very complex and difficult to trace what influenced what, because clearly there is a lot of overlap. I mean, I personally think video games that are very fantasy-oriented these days have their basis in role-playing games which started in the late 1970s with Dungeons and Dragons, which of course was directly influenced by Tolkien’s worlds and lexicon. To be honest, I think that the reach of popular culture has become so pervasive and in a way insidious, in that many of us may have no idea where an idea or image or cultural trend of phrase first emerged. This makes it hard on artists because often their ideas or work is imitated and then it is the imitation that gets noticed more widely than the original. This has certainly been true in terms of Pagan literature and art. For years now I have abhorred the trend in the Pagan community to value mediocrity, to choose the cheap imitation over the original. Maybe we have the mainstreaming of Paganism to thank for this. And people also choose the simple over the complex, the quick fix over the thoughtful solution. Someone can become a Witch overnight, no need to engage in training or study, We certainly have Llewellyn Publishing to thank, or blame, for this. That’s not to say all their books are bad, or their practices are questionable, they simply gave the public what it wanted.

Something else that intrigues me about the idea of “occulture” is the way in which some entities have co-opted the imagery or message of the occult or Paganism in order to subvert its actual ideology. I have noticed a really disturbing trend in late night television commercials for the army, though: they have these really well-produced, special-effects laden ads that make military maneuvers look exactly like role-playing games, and seem to be suggesting that, if you are good at video games, you’d be good at using this equipment. But it seems really odd to me to suggest that the sort of teenager who would be interested in fantasy video games (and who this sort of ad is clearly aimed at) would be someone inclined to join the army. Now with all the young men and women at risk in the Iraq war, I wonder if this sort of advertising campaign has been successful in reaching disaffected young people. The majority of soldiers killed have been very young and from very small towns. Okay, I am starting to think I don’t want to take this too much further but readers can draw their own conclusions.

TheoFantastique: There has been a close connection between speculative fiction and Paganism for some time, from interest in the writings of H. P. Lovecraft to Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange World informing the mythos of the Church of All Worlds. Why do you think there is such a strong connection between Paganism and speculative fiction in its various forms?

Peg Aloi: As I understand it, speculative fiction, is different from science fiction in that it posits a possible and plausible future based on the way things are now and the way things seem to be going. So in science fiction, it’s all about space travel or technology, but in speculative fiction you see a lot of interesting ideas having to do with things like ecology, biology, evolution, politics, gender and sexuality, societal structure, drugs, etc. Sometimes this kind of fiction posits a very positive vision, as with the Heinlein book, and sometimes a negative one (like Ursula LeGuin’s The Word for World is Forest). Speculative fiction often functions as a cautionary tale, and usually offers a hopeful vision, because it can point out the mistakes made along the way and perhaps inspire ways to avoid an undesirable future. At its heart, the Pagan revival is a form of speculative fiction. Modern Pagans look at the world as it is and want to change it. They (we) see a lack of connection to nature, resulting in a range of problems from pollution to obesity. We see a dearth of compassion, leading to a loss of civility and cultural awareness. We see the absence of the childlike sense of wonder all humans need to access from time to time, which is making us all cynical and depressed. We see a failure to challenge and engage our children in traditional ways, which is making our children into spoiled, underachieving, entitled little zombies. We see an obsession with technology that is making us lose touch with what it means to be human.

Paganism means rejecting the world as it is, and sometimes you find Pagans who try their best to live in a sort of fantasy world. They might spend too much time involved with sub-cultural communities or role-playing games or escape into literature or the Internet. To some extent this kind of activity can help perpetuate the popular stereotype that Pagans are anti-social or geeky or whatever. But most Pagans want to effect change in ways that will effectively allow them to exist in the world as it is, but to improve the quality of life and in some cases, effect change in the culture. To do this they look to “the old ways” and to ideas, images, stories and myths of the past, and integrate this into contemporary living, using whatever technology and products are available. And now you see a real integration of different kinds of subcultures that are engaging with Paganism. It is impossible to gauge the importance or the Internet in spreading awareness and information, but of course it also levels the playing field and perhaps makes Paganism less unique or special. And of course some “old school” Pagans would rather have the community remain insular and underground, but there is no turning back now. I do think modern Pagans should give some thought to how such changes are affecting our spirituality and social interaction. The only way to get any perspective on this kind of thing is to remove yourself from it for a while. Which is why I like to attend Pagan gatherings outdoors where you can remove yourself from the online milieu and see how this movement really is a living one.

TheoFantastique: What do you think the future of our media culture holds for the continued expression of esotericism in cinema?

Peg Aloi: It’s been interesting to see the response to esoteric texts aimed at children. The Harry Potter franchise has been hugely popular and also has generated a lot of rage. People ban the books and burn them and actually think that the whole Hogwarts model is endangering our children by introducing them to Witchcraft. Some protest literature even tries (ineffectually, in my opinion) to compare the Hogwarts style of magic to Wicca, which it has nothing to do with, of course, but the kind of people who want to ban a series of books that actually get kids reading again are the kind of people who want as accessible a target as possible, and Wiccans are the new Satanists, really, aren’t they? There is a growing atmosphere of protest aimed at the new film The Golden Compass (based on the first book in Philip Pullman’s trilogy His Dark Materials) have garnered accusations of promoting atheism and being anti-Catholic. I did not read the books but having seen the movie I can’t understand where these accusations come from at all!

I have also heard that the studio funding for the sequel to The Wicker Man being filmed by Robin Hardy, Cowboys for Christ, is being held up because some of the financial backers are fundamentalist Christians offended by the title. It seems unlikely there will a change anytime soon in this kind of public scrutiny. I won’t get into the whole political situation we’re in now and how there is really a problem with people recognizing the appropriate separation of church and state. But clearly the climate of indignation and panic-mongering about the future of our children goes hand-in-hand with the very pervasive effort to turn this into a Christian, right-wing nation. It’s really feeling like the 1980s all over again, where the public outcry against the occult really did lead to an avoidance of occult topics in popular media. The only difference between how things are now and the more visible kinds of protest one saw during the era of satanic panic in the 1980s, is that the protest is now taking place among well-organized groups on the Internet, which is of course where many people believe all the most significant cultural discourse is taking place (she said/typed, in the interview which will appear on a popular esoteric blog).

TheoFantastique: You’ve already alluded to this, but does Paganism and esotericism in pop culture represent a continuing area of promising possibilities for researchers from a variety of disciplines?

Peg Aloi: Oh, absolutely. We’ve been seeing a surge in this for some time now. Perhaps the one place this really caught fire was within Buffy studies. The first international Buffy conference in England represented an astonishing array of disciplines. That was where I met Hannah. There were talks on Buffy that explored this TV show from very diverse contexts, including history, media, literature, psychology, ethnomusicology, queer studies, anthropology, etc. It was amazing. I think that has really helped set the tone for academic conferences that deal with Pagan-oriented topics as well, and in fact a lot of the same scholars who are into Buffy are also involved in Paganism studies. Hannah and I have co-organized two conferences with the Department of Folklore and Mythology at Harvard, the first one on Witchcraft and Paganism in Contemporary Media, and the second on Paganism, Folklore and Popular Culture. These were both very successful and dynamic, and the most exciting part was the wide variety of disciplines represented, even for the media conference.

One thing that has changed a lot since the 1980s is that now it is permissible to approach topics in Paganism and the occult as someone who is both a scholar and a practitioner. It used to be sort of controversial to be “out” as a Pagan if you were studying Paganism; partly because being an ethnographer usually connotes the image of an outsider. When Tanya Luhrman’s book came out (Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft) people were conflicted; it was a great book, very sensitive and thorough and insightful, but she posed an interested seeker to gain access to rituals and private Pagan events. I think that made some Pagan scholars uncomfortable and in some cases stymied their efforts to do research within the Pagan community. I also think that academics in the 1980s risked being seen as “weirdos” or being targeted with discrimination in the workplace if they came out as Pagan, but there is so much more awareness now of what contemporary Paganism is, it is less of a problem. This new trend of research being conducted by believers and practitioners is definitely an exciting trend, but a problematic one, too. Just as you find non-academic Pagans who are very dogmatic or inflexible in their beliefs, some academics are the same way, and in some cases may unwittingly or even intentionally imbue their work with aspects of their own beliefs or traditions. It is obviously crucial to remain as objective as one can if one is to maintain an academic perspective. This is the new challenge for Pagan and occult academics: objectivity fuelled by study of the many diverse traditions and expressions of esoteric beliefs and culture.

TheoFantastique: Peg, thanks again for sharing with us. I look forward to hearing more about your book as it nears completion. Please keep in touch so that we can promote the book when it becomes available.

Peg Aloi: It has been my pleasure! Thanks again for your interest and support.

Doug Cowan

TheoFantastique: Doug, thanks for being willing to sit in the interview chair again for further discussion on your book. Thanks too for allowing me the privilege of reviewing the drafts of the chapters. The book is great, and it will make for a wonderful contribution to the academic exploration of religion and horror. I’d like to ask a few questions that arise out of Chapter 7, “The Unholy Human: Fear of Fanaticism and Fear of the Flesh.” You begin this chapter with a discussion of two films, Cult of Fury and The Devil’s Nightmare. From these you move to discuss how “cinema horror to prime-time television, [and] popular entertainment [have] contributed to reinforcing the sociophobic of religious fanaticism and the dangerous religious Other.” Can you share an example of how this has taken place in regards to some of the new religions have been treated in this fashion, and how this is reinforced and played out in horror films?

Doug Cowan: It’s my pleasure to be back again. As I’ve told a lot of people, yours is the only blog I read with any regularity. And glad you like the book. I’m certainly looking forward to seeing it out.

In terms of your question, which is an important one, the issue of popular entertainment as cultural reinforcement seems key to me. Consider, for example, any number of Law and Order episodes that are advertised as “ripped from the headlines”—though they almost inevitably also include an oxymoronic disclaimer that there is not meant to be any correlation between the show’s narrative, characters, and action and real people or real events. It’s a patent falsehood, of course, because the producers of the show are counting on viewers resonating with precisely those events on which episodes are based in order to secure their audience share. The same holds true for other aspects of popular entertainment, and the issue, to put it one way, is concision: how quickly, and with how little effort, can we convey the central sense of threat, of dread, or of danger? That is, what is the minimum amount of information we have to include before we can move on to the characters in the series saving the day?

In terms of new religious movements—or any religion, really—three things are significant here: a basic religious illiteracy that is pandemic in our society; the sociophobic power of the word “cult”; and three decades of media stigma and stereotyping that has contributed to both of these.

First, the appalling religious illiteracy with which this country (and mine) is bedeviled—and which Steve Prothero points out so devastatingly in his new book—means that the vast majority of viewers are simply not equipped to tell where the “real life events” end and the commercially produced fantasy begins. If this lack of basic information and understanding is true for the dominant religious tradition and its participants (which is Prothero’s point), how much more true must it be for marginalised or stigmatised religious traditions about which people are already primed to believe the worst? People who watch The Exorcist or The Craft—the former allegedly based on a true story, the latter which had a real Witch as a consultant on the production—cannot discern which are the “real bits” and which are pure Hollywood. In The Craft, actual lines from the First Degree Initiation into Gardnerian Wicca is mixed with more sensationalised action sequences. The problem is that many people seem unable (or unwilling) to make adequate distinctions between these, and this is something filmmakers can exploit. Indeed, when I was researching Cyberhenge, my book on modern Pagans and the Internet, I followed numerous online discussions in which those who want to be (or claim to be) Wiccans or Witches ask each other whether they’ve been able to manifest the powers they saw on The Craft or the latest episode of Charmed. I even remember one online conversation in which one of the participants was outraged at the suggestion that the spells used in Harry Potter were not real and would not work for her.

Second, there is the sociophobic power of the word, “cult.” As I say in the chapter you’re referring to, in late modern society, few labels function so effectively as a lightning rod for the fear of fanaticism and the often terrifying power of religion. Indeed, this is part of the reason behind the book that David Bromley and I have just published, entitled Cults and New Religions: A Brief History—to point out that there is far, far more to these groups than the controversies that brought them to public attention. Though there are, literally, thousands of new, alternative, and non-traditional religious groups and movements in North America, Europe, and Asia—the vast majority of which pass largely unnoticed by wider society—two comparatively isolated themes have come to dominate popular discourse about them: control and violence. Of these, the former is lodged in concerns about “brainwashing” and “cult mind control,” while the latter lives in recurring fears over the possibility of religiously motivated mass suicides, ritual murder, violent confrontation with civil authority, or even the potential for attacks on civilian populations—all represented iconographically through groups such as Peoples Temple, the Branch Davidians, the Order of the Solar Temple, Aum Shinrikyo, and Heaven’s Gate. Though the now voluminous social scientific literature on new religions demonstrates that there is little if any credible evidence for “brainwashing,” and that, when we consider the sheer number of new religious movements involved, instances of violence are extremely rare, panic over the power of religion to motivate antisocial behavior thrives just below the cultural surface, continually reinforced by a wide range of media products. All a newspaper or broadcast report has to do is use the word “cult” and all manner of negative associations are immediately mobilised.

Which brings us to the third point. In terms of new religions, popular entertainment has three decades of really problematic journalism to r
ely on for preparing the ground. For a wide variety of reasons—including editorial position, the time constraints of news production, the lack of education many reporters have in religion of any kind, and the need to connect with the extant prejudices of their target audience—reporting when it comes to new religions has been appalling to say the least. I remember one reporter calling me for an interview. He wanted to do a “light, humourous, offbeat piece about these wacky cults people join—you know, like Jonestown and Heaven’s Gate!” The fact that Jonestown is a place not a group, I reminded him that nearly a thousand people died in those two incidents, and that I found his attitude deeply offensive. Needless to say, the interview was off…

This is not to say that new religions don’t get played for laughs, though the humour seems a bit black to me at times. In The Simpsons episode in which the family joins a group called the Movementarians, the portrait of the leader is clearly a caricature of L. Ron Hubbard, while the leader driving through the fields in a Rolls as his followers toil in the dirt is a reference to Baghwan Shree Rajneesh. The third episode of Family Guy has Meg join a group that is based almost entirely on Heaven’s Gate, while a number of episodes of South Park have dealt with new religious movements—most notably, perhaps, the Church of Scientology.

In terms of cinema horror, though, the important point to note—and this is also true for the television dramas and comedies—is that the fear of new religions is deeply enough embedded that very little explanation is needed to communicate what the audience is meant to perceive as the threat. You simply need to use the word “cult,” or make unambiguous reference to well-known incidences of new religions and violence.

TheoFantastique: In this chapter you discuss a number of films with satanist elements that usually include secret societies engaged in evil. I recall watching a number of these as a teenager, usually those produced by Hammer Films. Can you touch on the sociophobic that undergirds such films, where the popular mythology that informs the portrait of such groups comes from, and to what extent these things influenced the satanic panics of the 1980s and 1990s, and may still be subtly influential today?

Doug Cowan: In some cultural domains, I’m not convinced the influence of these beliefs is so subtle. It’s also important to point out that there are satanically-oriented films, and then there are those that have no satanic connection at all, but which are presented that way either through the ignorance of the characters in the film (which is later dispelled, as in The Believers) or the more general fear of these groups extant in the so-called “satanic panics.”

There are a number of things working here as well, I think. First, in terms of the satanic coven, the secret group, the evil cabal, there is a history that is many hundreds of years old feeding the fear exploited by cinema horror. The association of witches with Satan goes back at least a thousand years in the Christian church—though the tenor of that association shifts depending on where you are and when—and there is a fund of popular “knowledge” about such things as the Witch hunts, the Inquisitions, the Witch trials that filmmakers draw on. Once again, though, they are counting on both the willingness of audiences to accept dramatic license with these events, and the general ignorance of those audiences about what actually happened. Though modern Pagans, for example, have worked diligently to dispel the association of Wicca and Witchcraft with satanism, the connection is still made quite regularly in the media. We go back to the issue of religious illiteracy: since few people, relatively speaking, know very much about either modern Paganism or Satanism, they are not in a position to discriminate between them, and so, very often, they simply don’t. They accept one as the other, whether there is any logical connection or not. This is exactly the kind of fear that is fed by satanic panics—and by spiritual entrepreneurs like Malachi Martin and Bob Larson, whose livelihoods depend on stoking the fires, as it were. Books like Martin’s Hostage to the Devil, and Larson’s long-running crusade against all things demonic receive far more popular attention than the efforts of scholars like Jeffrey Victor to bring some sanity to the stage.

Second, conspiracy theories—whether satanic cabals, JFK’s assassination, UFOs at Area 51, or US government involvement in 9/11—function both as a means of explanation and a mechanism of personal control. That is, they explain why bad things happen and locate the perpetrators. Doing this allows for some sense of control over one’s environment. In many ways, it’s much easier to believe that there are dark forces at work—a belief that is reinforced, once again, by an entire range of media products—than to accept that bad things happen, sometimes at the behest of bad people, and that we suffer because we are at the wrong place at the wrong time, or because we have contributed to our own suffering. How many people do you know are willing to blame everyone from Satan to Stalin for the things that go wrong in their lives, without ever once looking at how they contribute to their own misfortune? Now, extrapolate that to entire segments of society, and you have the power of the conspiracy theory. Tie that to the universalising force of religion—in the sense of being caught up in a grand chess game between God and the Devil—and you begin to see some of the power of the conspiracy theory and the sociophobic it both relies on and reinforces.

Third, for hundreds of millions of people Satan is very real, hell is very real, and the demonic is a part of their everyday lives. A number of Gallup polls, for example, indicate that in the U.S. belief in the Devil runs over 90% in people who attend church weekly. It’s much lower in Canada and Britain, but the U.S., obviously, is the major market for these films. Indeed, in one poll, 50% of those who either rarely or never attend church say they believe in hell! That’s an incredible figure that implies something very significant about the depth to which these fears are embedded in our society.

TheoFantastique: Another section of this chapter touches on Wiccan and Witchcraft in cinema. I was struck by your discussion of dueling theologies as expressed in the original The Wicker Man and The Craft. What does this duel look like in both films, and how has it changed in the decades between the first film and the second?

Doug Cowan: In The Craft, it’s much more subtle; it’s there, but you have to be much more in tune with different religious traditions to pick up a lot of it. You have to pay attention to see it. The girls begin their group—which they call a circle, never a coven—in the midst of a Catholic high school. When Bonnie, Nancy, and Rochelle are considering Sarah for membership, they’re shown sitting under a mural of the Madonna, who seems to be inclined in prayer towards (for?) them. At daily mass, as the girls giggle and fuss, flush with the powers they believe they’ve tapped, in the background is the priest talking about the tree of knowledge and the disaster its fruits can bring. Oh yes, and there’s the crucifix over the main entry to the school,
with Jesus giving the finger to all who pass beneath. I don’t know whether that was a trick of the light, though I’ve run the shot in zoom and super-slow, and it looks intentional on director Andrew Fleming’s part. He makes no mention of it on the DVD commentary, however, and if you were watching the movie in a theatre, it goes by so quickly you might have said, “Hey, was that Jesus just…?” None of these is conclusive, in and of itself, but cumulatively they point to The Craft drawing on a decades-old tradition in cinema horror of what I call in the book “dueling theologies.”

Subtlety, on the other hand, was never Hammer’s long suit. Films like The Wicker Man, which I point out is really only a horror film on a couple of fronts—the general horror that Sergeant Howie feels when he encounters the people of Summerisle, and the more specific horror in the last six minutes as he is sacrificed in the wicker man—are an extended and often very explicit debate between contending belief systems. When Howie (Edward Woodward) arrives on Summerisle, he is appalled at the rampant paganism he sees around him, and by the open way in which the children are socialised into the religion. As a good churchman—in a dream sequence, we see him reading scripture at his church and receiving communion—he feels as though he has fallen fully down the rabbit hole. This is only confirmed for him when he meets Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee, who took no payment for the film, and which he still regards as one of his finest roles). Consider this brief bit of dialogue:

SUMMERISLE
It’s most important that each new generation born on Summerisle be made aware that here the old gods aren’t dead.

HOWIE
And what of the true God, to whose glory churches and monasteries have been built on these islands for generations past? Now, sir, what of him?

SUMMERISLE
Well, he’s dead. He can’t complain. He had his chance and, in the modern parlance, he blew it.

Though there are more mundane, and, indeed, insidious explanations offered for the Paganism that has taken root on Summerisle—in a quasi-Marxist manner, Lord Summerisle’s grandfather used the old religion to rouse the islanders from apathy when he took over the island in the mid-eighteenth century—we are left at the end ambivalent about the nature of religion and the power it wields over its followers. The theological conflict remains unresolved, allowing viewers to map onto the story their own experience and expectation of religious belief and practice. When Summerisle tells Howie, for example, “We don’t commit murder up here, Sergeant, we’re a deeply religious people,” he is being entirely truthful. In his mind, and in the minds of the islanders, the Wicker Man sacrifice is not murder; it is, in fact, an honor of sorts for the victim. While Howie dies hoping for the life everlasting his religion has promised him, the Summerisle pagans continue hoping that their propitiatory sacrifice will bring back a bountiful harvest. Both, though, are caught on the point between faith and fear: with his dying breath, Howie entreats his god, “Let me not undergo the real pains of hell because I die unshriven,” while the final shot of the film shows the sun setting in the Atlantic, as the Wicker Man’s head falls, burning, out of the frame. Is Howie right, then, that the bounty will not return because apples were never meant to grow in the Hebrides, and the sun has indeed set on their Pagan beliefs?

These two films present their dueling theologies in very different ways, and I think one of the main differences is what audiences are willing to accept now. Hammer films are nostalgic in their directness, while movies like The Craft strive for a realism that filmmakers hope will not only allow audiences to suspend their disbelief, but will in some sense transcend it.

TheoFantastique: In this section on Witchcraft in film you also touch on the issue of differing interpretations. you state that, “Finally, there is the way in which The Craft has been interpreted by those who have either been influenced by it to explore Paganism, by those who critique it as an inaccurate representation of their religious tradition, or by those who see it as the latest foothold in Satan’s war of spiritual domination.” Of course, we see the same dynamics involved in interpretations of Harry Potter. What accounts for these differing interpretations, and what does this say back to the careful film interpreter about the nature of literature and film as artistic genres, and how these relate to the religions concerns of the various interpreters?

Doug Cowan: The original Wicker Man had a very interesting epigraph at the beginning: before the opening credits roll, the producers thank “the Lord Summerisle and the people of his island . . . for this privileged insight into their religious practices and for their generous co-operation in the making of this film.” It’s entirely fictitious, of course, but it feeds the sociophobic we’ve been talking about, and, as well, it serves to reinforce belief systems people want to consider historically accurate and in which they want to participate. A number of online discussions about the film speculated on the nature of sacrifice, and how the wicker man could be symbolically represented in modern Pagan ritual, for example. They used the film almost as a text for their deliberations—which is what it became, in fact.

I think it’s relatively rare that people are “changed forever” by a film, although we see this kind of claim from time to time. Rather, I think that what people take from a film—any film—is largely a function of what they bring to it. Of course, this is hardly a new insight, but it bears repeating in the context of sociophobics and what I have called elsewhere “sociospera”—the culturally constructed hopes of different groups. Those who identify themselves as Pagans or who want to identify themselves as such are going to see in a film like The Craft something very different than conservative Christians who, like Bill Schoebelen, regard Wicca as “Satan’s little white lie.” A film like this—indeed most horror films, I would imagine—are not going to change anyone’s mind about anything. What they will do is exploit and reinforce those beliefs, fears, and hopes that audience members bring with them to the theatre.

In terms of “the careful film interpreter,” I’m not really sure what to say. If someone takes a piece of art—a novel or a poem, say—and builds a belief system around it, attracts followers, uses the mythology either implicit or explicit within the novel or the film to touch some part of the human spirit, are they any less careful in their interpretation than someone who correctly points out that witches were not burned in New England (they were hanged) despite what a movie like Horror Hotel shows? On the other hand, we have examples where artistic products have generated real life movements. Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, for example, was the impetus for what became the Church of All Worlds, the first legally incorporated modern Pagan group in the U.S. In the 2001 British census, on the other hand, somewhere around 400,000 Britons wrote in under “Religious Preference” that they were “Jedi Knights.” Now, an author or director can say all they want, “Hey, that’s not what I meant, you’ve got it all wrong!” But that’s not going to stop people from interpreting things according to their predispositio
ns, and taking from them what they find useful—whether a bouquet or a brickbat.

TheoFantastique: In our exchanges you have raised the question of authority as it relates to interpretation in this and other areas. How might Christian and Pagan views of authority be more alike than both systems might like to acknowledge, and how might this lend itself to similar concerns being expressed by how Witchcraft is allegedly being portrayed in literature or film?

Doug Cowan: This is an important, and very complex, issue. Obviously, both modern Pagans and Christians have a vested interest in differentiating themselves, one from the other. Many people have left Christianity for modern Paganism, and are vitriolic in their renunciation of their former religion and their insistence that their current path is entirely different. Of course, the reverse is also true. And, people have a need to be right, or at least feel that they are right in what they believe, and they will go to all kinds of lengths to reinforce that belief. Which is entirely reasonable, since it makes no sense for people to believe things they know are wrong or untrue. However, simply believing something, or pointing out where another’s belief system is problematic, is no guarantee that one’s own system is either consistent, logical, or in accord with reality in any way.

That said, one of the places I see a convergence is at the level of authority and orthodoxy, in the case of modern Paganism incipiently so. Put bluntly, in terms of their claims to religious authority, and especially who is an authentic member of the group, the Pagans I read online in any number of discussion forums sound amazingly like fundamentalist Christians I follow on a couple of different countercult lists. The difference is that one group is very explicit about the fact and the terms of its orthodoxy, the other isn’t. However much modern Pagans do not want to admit it, there is a will to orthodoxy running right through the tradition—or family of traditions. Consider, for example, modern Pagans whose belief system is predicated on an affective and authoritative personal gnosticism—if it feels right to you, then it must be right. Modern Pagan literature is replete with this kind of claim. Then look at the reaction of modern Pagans when someone wants to claim explicitly Christian figures—Jesus, Mary, St. Francis, or even Satan—as part of their personal Pagan pantheon. The reaction is, shall we say, energetic. That is, you can include any god or goddess you want in your pantheon, as long as it has nothing to do with Christianity. I’ve seen modern Pagans blithely contend that Kwan Yin is a Wiccan deity, yet refuse to acknowledge Mary in the same way. What this demonstrates, of course, is that there is an orthodoxy; it is just hidden and operates differently from the kind of orthodoxy that says “ours is the only way to access the Divine.”

In terms of films, on the other hand, this is important because they participate in the cultural representation of, say, modern Witchcraft. In a number of recent films, The Craft among them, but more obviously in TV series like Charmed, the cultural construct of the Witch has changed. She is now a young, beautiful woman with extraordinary powers. Rather than a wicked temptress, in terms of Charmed, for example, she is a magically powered superhero. This is important for two reasons. First, entertainment products provide us with images for emulation—think of the fashion craze ignited by Miami Vice two decades ago, the young girls trying (God knows why) to emulate Paris Hilton, carrying little imitation Gucci bags and stuffed dogs and oversized sunglasses, or, in our case here, the thousands of young men and women who see in products like Charmed and The Craft something to emulate—perhaps not entirely, but in part.

Second, this emulation draws on and reinforces cultural standards (read: impossible ideals) of beauty. As I say in the chapter, it is hardly unimportant that the main characters in many of these products are exceptionally attractive young women, just like the four Charmed ones (three of whom have been named to different magazines’ “100 Sexiest Women in the World” lists, while the fourth has posed several times in Playboy). Try to imagine either production succeeding with a storyline about three young Druids played by Pauly Shore, Jack Black, and Pee Wee Herman. An unfair comparison, perhaps, but not unrealistic given Hollywood’s obsession with an ideal of physical (and by implication sexual) perfection, and the effect that obsession has had on hundreds of millions of young men and women around the globe. Online Pagan discussion forums, for example, reveal a wide range of opinions about The Craft. Some participants love the film and see it as an accurate, though essentially admonitory portrayal of their religious beliefs and ritual practice. Others despise it, wanting to concentrate only on the salutary aspects of their faith and noting the positive influence of Lirio (the owner of the Pagan bookstore, and the wisdom figure in the film). One Yahoo! discussion group even includes a “Cool Entertainment or Bad Idea” item in its new member questionnaire, and lists both The Craft and Charmed. Participant profiles in that particular discussion community are shaped, however modestly, by their reaction to these particular media products. For many members, it is indeed “cool entertainment,” though almost all point out what they consider its flaws. Once again, they focus only on the positive aspects of their faith, falling prey, as do so many other religious believers, to the “good, moral, and decent” fallacy that marks modern Paganism no less than any other tradition.

TheoFantastique: In the final section of the chapter you touch on the area of sexual power and women, and you note how this has particularly been portrayed in vampire films. How has fear of sexual power and women played into various historical depictions of Witchcraft, and how have these influenced various cinematic treatments?

Doug Cowan: This is one of the sections of the book I really wish could be longer, since it is a vastly underexplored area. Perhaps there’s another book there… Anyway, as I say in that last section:

Fear of witches and the sexual power of women go back many hundreds, if not thousands of years. By the Middle Ages, this fear had become so deeply embedded in Christian systematic theology that works such as Malleus Maleficarum and Compendium Maleficarum today read like pure studies in sexual repression and projection. Reinforced by journalistic “exposés” such as Sex and the Occult, Sex and the Supernatural, and Sex in Witchcraft, twentieth-century cinema horror has followed diligently in this wake. The advertising poster for Hammer’s The Witches, for example, which relies on an unsteady amalgam of witchcraft, voodoo, and indeterminate occultism, reads ominously (but invitingly):

What does it have to do with sex?…
Why does it attract women?…
What does it do to the unsuspecting?…
Why won’t they talk about it?…
What do the witches do after dark?

The message, of course, is “Come see the movie and we’ll show you!” Tigon British Films, one of Hammer’s competitors in the late 1960s and early 1970s, produced a couple of similar attempts: The Curse of the Crimson Altar, starring Barbara Steele as the deathless witch, Lavinia Morley, and Virgin Witch, an otherwise forgettable lesbian romp whose star, Vicki Michelle, is best known for her portrayal of Yvette Carte-Blanche in the long-running British comedy, ‘Allo ‘Allo. Mario Mercier’s ultra-low budget Erotic Witchcraft leaves nothing to the imagination, while on this side of the Atlantic, many films
based on the premise of erotic witchcraft quickly devolved into little more than supernatural vehicles for softcore pornography. The cinematic association of witchcraft and overt sexuality even extends to light comedies such as Bell, Book and Candle. When Gillian (Kim Novak) is still a witch, her dress is bohemian and alluring. When she falls in love with Shep Henderson (Jimmy Stewart) and loses her powers—when she is no longer a witch—her costume also changes, from slinky pullovers, bare backs, and bare feet to a conservative, high-necked dress, and satin pumps.

Sex and fear couple in virtually all aspects of cinema horror, from vampire movies to witchcraft films, from Universal monster features like Creature from the Black Lagoon and The Mummy to Italian giallo cannibal films and more recent American slasher/torture efforts. Whether hetero- or homosexual, most focus on the woman’s body as the object of fascination and desire, the site of repression and aggression, and, often, the locus of evil and catastrophe. Indeed, in many of these films, especially the nunsploitation films I also discuss, it is as though Augustine and Tertullian—two principal architects of Christian misogyny—sat in on the script sessions, costume meetings, and principal photography.

TheoFantastique: Doug, thanks again for allowing me to ask some questions that tease out elements discussed in your book. I look forward to its release and to promoting it on this blog.