Apparently something of a controversy has arisen as a result of The Legend of Cain, not because of the film itself, but because of the idea that the biblical Cain may be the source of the vampire in folklore. One aspect of the controversy comes from Christians who are up in arms over the idea that the Bible has anything to do with vampires. After his analysis, in his conclusion Laycock writes:

As for the accusations of sacrilege, perhaps we should look at the link between vampires and Cain not as a revision of a biblical story, but a testament to this story’s enduring effect on the Western imagination.

The accusation of sacrilege is interesting. It’s not as if there has not been a fantastic element associated with the early chapters of Genesis. For example, in popular Protestant fundamentalism and evangelicalism there is a belief that the “Nephilim” mentioned in an obscure reference in Genesis 6 are a race of giants produced through a sexual union between human woman and demons. It is difficult to see why this is more palatable than the idea that Cain became a vampire, but perhaps its because this fantastic idea is connected to a figure Protestants often equate with the sinister and the esoteric, and for them this is a connection being made by outsiders rather than one they see within their own religious tradition.

At any rate, I agree with Laycock in this assessment, and hope that Christians will be more cautions before alleging sacrilege in this latest instance of friction with the fantastic in popular culture.

Related posts:

“Joseph Laycock: Vampires Today”

“Joseph Laycock: Vampires and Eclipse”

I am working my way through my growing stack of reading relating to the fantastic, and this weekend I read a few chapters in The Philosophy of Horror, edited by Thomas Fahy (The University Press of Kentucky, 2010). There are several interesting chapters in this volume, but one that caught my attention this weekend was by Jessica O’Hara titled “Making Their Presence Known: TV’s Ghost-Hunter Phenomenon in a ‘Post-’ World.” In the chapter O’Hara considers why the numerous ghost-hunting “reality shows” are so very popular in our post-9/11 world and a postmodern skepticism toward meta-narratives. As the author develops her case she makes an interesting connection between ghost-hunter programs and home-improvement programs. I understand why the reader might be skeptical, but consider an excerpt where O’Hara notes the parallels:

In any case, the home-improvement show trend is massive, and ghost-hunter programming can certainly be seen as an extension of the genre. Consider the home-improvement and ghost-hunter’s shows’ common elements: clients call in experts to solve a problem with their home; the said problem compromises the clients’ ability to enjoy the home as a sanctuary; the team applies its expertise and solves the problem. The only difference is that instead of moving a cooking island, adding granite countertops, and replacing tacky linoleum with earth-toned tile, ghost-hunting shows work on getting rid of the spirit hanging by the refrigerator. Indeed, Ghost Hunters directly imitates the conventions of the home-improvement genre, including the up-tempo music, the infighting among team members, and the dramatic “reveal” to the clients, whose reaction of being pleased or not pleased draws upon the narrative struck of shows like Trading Spaces or While You Were Out.

Just one of the gems for reflection found in this book and the probing of horror and popular culture.

Related post:

Phillp Tallon: The Philosophy of Horror

My friend and fellow academic horror explorer, Matt Cardin of The Teeming Brain, recently brought an item to my attention that shows that this area of scholarship is growing. Of all places, The Chronicle of Higher Education featured an article on July 22 titled “Taking a Slash at Horror.” This piece looks at the academic analysis of various genres of film, and suggests that horror is the most popular genre for such exploration. To substantiate this claim the article quotes Bernice Murphy, editor of The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, interviewed here previously. In the middle of the article it includes a listing of several academic books on the subject as examples of this academic study, most of whom will be featured here in interviews over the course of the next few weeks and months.

Readers may wonder why there are so many involved in this area of academic analysis, and the article provides a few suggestions. One has to do with the “video explosion” of the 1970s and 1980s, which, according to the article, “schooled many film scholars of today, who as teenagers haunted video stores brimming with exploitative horror films with salacious, beckoning covers.” This is certainly the case for me and remains so as I build my DVD collection which provides an opportunity for reassessment and analysis of films in the horror genre.

Although this is certainly a niche focus in the blogosophere, I am pleased to see that TheoFantastique is situated within a robust academic subculture that shows no signs of slowing down in the near future.

The trailer for the horror film Devil from Universal Pictures is now available. This supernatural thriller is based upon a story by M. Night Shyamalan as part of a Night Chronicles series. It tells the story of a small group of people trapped in a stalled elevator in a high rise who come to learn through this crisis that one of them is Satan.

Satan has long been a popular theological and pop cultural figure of interest. Two previous posts at TheoFantastique are particularly relevant to this topic and as background to Devil. Readers may recall my previous interview with W. Scott Poole, author of Satan in America: The Devil We Know (Rowman & Littlefield, 2009) where we discussed this topic. Moving from cultural considerations to cinematic, readers may also want to review my discussion of Nicholas Schreck’s book The Satanic Screen: An Illustrated Guide to the Devil in Cinema (Creation Books, 2001).

It will be interesting to see how Satan is presented in this forthcoming film, how it contributes to the pop cultural representations of the Devil, and whether this film does better than many of Shyamalan’s recent films.

The author then develops a list of differences between 1950s fears expressed through alien invasion and monster narratives in contrast with our current preferences for the zombie as the monster of the moment. Among the author’s uncomfortable conclusions we read the following:

What does the Zombie Genre tell us about modern America? For starters, it tells us that there is an overwhelming sense of frustration, that the promises of our parents and grandparents about the potential and future of America were, perhaps, not grounded in reality. That we will never reach the promised land.

It also tells us that our real underlying fears today aren’t of some evil foreign aggressor, even a hidden enemy like Osama Bin Laden, but instead, of the overwhelming and totally enveloping spectre of loneliness, of being alone, without friends and family, surrounded by a world that is alien to you and, for all intents and purposes, objectifies you and sees you as something to “use” or consume. It shows us our disconnect from other.

These films also show us our growing anxiety over lawlessness. The images of failed states saturate the air-waves. Images of cities that have ceased functioning, like Sarajevo, Grozny, Mogadishu, and Haiti after the earthquake, like New Orleans after Katrina and Los Angeles during the riots of 1992. A growing sense, awareness of, and sense of powerlessness in regard to a growing section of society that is anarchic and lawless and ruled by gangs, of growing poverty, a growing Lumpenproletariot and concomitant demise of the middle class. Isolated islands of humane civility taking refuge in a growing and ominous ocean of predatory anarchy.

The reader may not agree with everything the author of this open salon piece puts forward, but it does make for interesting food for thought as our fascination with the zombie (as well as [post]apocalyptic) functions as a mirror for our psychological and social state of affairs.

This critical survey examines the historical and thematic relationships between two of the cinema’s most popular genres: horror and film noir. The influence of 1930s- and 1940s-era horror films on the development of noir is traced and detailed, with analyses of over 100 motion pictures in which noir criminality and mystery meld with supernatural and psychological horror. Included are the films based on popular horror/mystery radio shows (The Whistler, Inner Sanctum), the works of RKO producer Val Lewton (Cat People, The Seventh Victim), and Alfred Hitchcock’s psychological ghost stories. Also discussed are gothic and costume horror noirs set in the 19th century (The Picture of Dorian Gray, Hangover Square); the noir elements of more recent films; and the film noir aspects of the Hannibal Lecter movies and other serial-killer thrillers.

Meehan has addressed noir previously in his book Tech-Noir: The Fusion of Science Fiction and Film Noir (McFarland, 2008), which he discussed here. Horror Noir is due for release in the Fall/Winter of this year.

The idea became perfectly clear–there would be an agency that handled real monsters as talent, and once they cornered the market on Universal Studios, they would want to gorge into the future and open a new wing, developing creatures and monsters for future films.

The film has wrapped production and updates on the film’s release can be found at the KNB EFX Group website.

The second item of interest in the magazine comes in the form of an article titled “A Way with Clay,” which provides a little textual background on the sculpting work of artist Mike Hill, and beautiful photographs of some of his work. The photo of Boris Karloff with the Frankenstein creature makeup on in this post is an example of Hill’s work. No, that’s not a photo of Karloff behind the scenes, that is a stunning example of Hill’s work. The essay also includes a photo of Lon Chaney, Jr. as the troubled Larry Talbot and as the Wolfman, as well as Elsa Lanchester in The Bride of Frankenstein.

Fans of classic Universal Studios horror films will find these elements of Make-Up Artist worth securing for their magazine collection.

HOUSE OF USHER, and the other series of Poe films directed by Corman, have the distinction of being part of the brief revival of American gothic horror that had been fueled by television broadcasts of the Universal Studios horror films of the 1930s and 1940s, as well as the fresh interpretations of these classics by Britain’s Hammer Films. While this classification has some merit, HOUSE OF USHER may also be understood as a hybrid in keeping with another trend in horror from the period. HOUSE OF USHER is in a sense Gothic, in that it takes place against the backdrop of a mansion that appears at first glance to be a haunted house; however, it is not haunted in typical supernatural fashion by ghosts or poltergeists. Instead, the haunting of the Usher House takes place through the troubled psyches of the homeowners who wrestle with their family legacy. In this sense it is similar to another classic of 1960 cinema, PSYCHO, which signaled a shift from supernatural horror in the 1930s and 1940s, and the science-fiction-horror of the 1950s, to an internalization of horror (horror is not the supernatural other; it is us) that would later take a quantum leap forward with NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD.

House of Usher can be purchased through the TheoFantastique Store at this link, or it can be viewed online via Amazon’s Video on Demand.

Monsters. Real or imagined, literal or metaphorical, they have exerted a dread fascination on the human mind for many centuries. They attract and repel us, intrigue and terrify us, and in the process reveal something deeply important about the darker recesses of our collective psyche.

Stephen Asma’s On Monsters is a wide-ranging cultural and conceptual history of monsters–how they have evolved over time, what functions they have served for us, and what shapes they are likely to take in the future. Asma begins with a letter from Alexander the Great in 326 B.C. detailing an encounter in India with an “enormous beast–larger than an elephant three ominous horns on its forehead.” From there the monsters come fast and furious–Behemoth and Leviathan, Gog and Magog, the leopard-bear-lion beast of Revelation, Satan and his demons, Grendel and Frankenstein, circus freaks and headless children, right up to the serial killers and terrorists of today and the post-human cyborgs of tomorrow. Monsters embody our deepest anxieties and vulnerabilities, Asma argues, but they also symbolize the mysterious and incoherent territory just beyond the safe enclosures of rational thought. Exploring philosophical treatises, theological tracts, newspapers, pamphlets, films, scientific notebooks, and novels, Asma unpacks traditional monster stories for the clues they offer about the inner logic of an era’s fears and fascinations. In doing so, he illuminates the many ways monsters have become repositories for those human qualities that must be repudiated, externalized, and defeated.

Asma suggests that how we handle monsters reflects how we handle uncertainty, ambiguity, insecurity. And in a world that is daily becoming less secure and more ambiguous, he shows how we might learn to better live with monsters–and thereby avoid becoming one.

The next volume is Music in the Horror Film: Listening to Fear (Routledge, 2009), edited by Neil Lerner:

Music in Horror Film is a collection of essays that examine the effects of music and its ability to provoke or intensify fear in this particular genre of film. Frightening images and ideas can be made even more intense when accompanied with frightening musical sounds, and music in horror film frequently makes its audience feel threatened and uncomfortable through its sudden stinger chords and other shock effects. The essays in this collection address the presence of music in horror films and their potency within them. With contributions from scholars across the disciplines of music and film studies, these essays delve into blockbusters like The Exorcist, The Shining, and The Sixth Sense together with lesser known but still important films like Carnival of Souls and The Last House on the Left. By leading us with the ear to hear these films in new ways, these essays allow us to see horror films with fresh eyes.

The final volume is The Living and the Undead: Slaying Vampires, Exterminating Zombies by Gregory A. Waller (University of Illinois Press, 2010):

With a legacy stretching back into legend and folklore, the vampire in all its guises haunts the film and fiction of the twentieth century and remains the most enduring of all the monstrous threats that roam the landscapes of horror. In The Living and the Undead, Gregory A. Waller shows why this creature continues to fascinate us and why every generation reshapes the story of the violent confrontation between the living and the undead to fit new times.

Examining a broad range of novels, stories, plays, films, and made-for-television movies, Waller focuses upon a series of interrelated texts: Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897); several film adaptations of Stoker’s novel; F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, A Symphony of Horror (1922); Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (1954); Stephen King’s ‘Salem’s Lot (1975); Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979); and George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Dawn of the Dead (1979). All of these works, Waller argues, speak to our understanding and fear of evil and chaos, of desire and egotism, of slavish dependence and masterful control. This paperback edition of The Living and the Undead features a new preface in which Waller positions his analysis in relation to the explosion of vampire and zombie films, fiction, and criticism in the past twenty-five years.

Look for interviews with these folks and discussion of these volumes over the course of the near future.

Like the 1941 version of the film starring Lon Chaney, Jr., the current version tells the story of Lawrence Talbot (Benicio Del Toro) who responds to the pleas of Gwen Conliffe (Emily Blunt), his late brother’s fiancée, in returning to the family estate in England in an attempt to discover the cause of his brother’s brutal death. His return home brings Lawrence face to face with his estranged father, Sir John Talbot (Anthony Hopkins), that he has not seen for years. As Lawrence investigates the strange and grisly circumstances surrounding his brother’s death he soon finds that it is connected to a vicious beast stalking the countryside, which may have a long connection to the Talbot family and Lawrence’s lifelong nightmares and tensions with his father.

When I first heard the announcement of this film’s production I was cautiously optimistic. It was good to hear of an attempted return to the iconic monsters of old and a move in horror away from our current fixations on “torture-porn” and slasher films, but with the current state of horror I was wary that a good film could be made, and one that would appeal to modern audiences. Sadly, my fears played out. On the positive side, The Wolfman includes some elements that I enjoyed, including a shift away from a contemporary setting to the “foreign” settings of horror in the days of Universal’s classics. The makeup effects under the leadership of Rick Baker were outstanding, as were some of the CGI effects in the recreation of nineteenth century England. But beyond this specific elements of the film were lacking, leading to an overall dissatisfaction withe project as a whole. The CGI effects related to the werewolf were not convincing, and more attention should have been paid to this key aspect of the film or it should have been abandoned in favor of makeup and prosthetic effects. I also found the concluding element of the story’s narrative disappointing in pitting werewolf-cursed father against son in a lycan battle to the death.

But even with an overall disappointment with this film I did find one element of particular interest. As Lawrence comes to terms with his curse he eventually comes to realize that his father shares it with him. Indeed, it was his father who killed his brother and mother, and bit Lawrence creating the next generation of the werewolf. As part of this unfolding revelation, in one scene Sir John shows Lawrence a room which includes a restraining chair and a memorial to his wife. Sir John explains that he was driven by guilt over his curse and the murder of his wife to restrain himself with each full moon so that he could not go on killing sprees. But eventually, Sir John came to embrace his curse and the violence that goes with it. He hopes that his son, struggling with the reality of his uncontrollable violent nature, will as well. As he says to Lawrence, “The beast will have its day. The beast will out.”

In past depictions of the werewolf the focus has been on human beings who lose control as they are transformed and consumed by an inner monstrousness. Little interest has been shown by the cursed individual in attempting to control the monster. But as time goes more more reflection has taken place on understanding the werewolf as a metaphor for our inner evil selves, and with it has come the occasional depiction of attempts to control this evil. For example, in Buffy the Vampire Slayer the character Oz (Seth Green) is a werewolf who locks himself away each cycle of the full moon so that he cannot harm others. Oz recognizes his inner beast but takes steps to control and contain it. In similar fashion, The Wolfman raises the specter of humanity’s inner beast and presents us with the choice of reveling in the beast’s ability to destroy, or taking whatever steps are necessary to control it.

News broadcasts demonstrate each day that our beasts roam all too freely. But films like The Wolfman remind us that we have a choice and we must constantly ask ourselves individually and collectively, must the beast have its day?