I’m a little slow at watching new film releases. But since Coco won the Best Animated Feature at the 2018 Academy Awards, and my youngest granddaughter is staying with us for a while, I figured it was time to purchase the film and take a look. I can now understand why it has been so well received by audiences and critics alike. One of the most significant aspects of it for me has been the focus of several news stories (such as this one here), and that is its treatment of death. It draws upon the Mexican Day of the Dead (Dia de Muertos), which makes for an interesting study in its own right, and in contrast with America’s Halloween celebration. I’ve commented on this previously in an old blog post of mine elsewhere, and I’ll copy it here with modifications.
We can trace the historical and cultural origins and development of Halloween, from its earliest antecedents in Pagan Samhain as an agricultural and mythical festival, to the influence of Catholic All Souls’ and All Saints’ Day, to its continued development in North America as a form of public pranking and significance in courtship rituals expressions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As Halloween continued to develop in response to the cultural and subcultural contexts of America, it eventually became influenced by popular culture, particularly in the 1970s through the horror film genre. Today it is increasingly popular, and functions as a means for children and adults alike to engage in costuming, identity exploration, and social inversion, existing largely as a secularized and consumer driven pop culture phenomenon far removed from any religious or spiritual aspects of previous Pagan influences.
The Mexican Day of the Dead is very different. This is a deeply religious celebration with some similarities to Halloween in the form of costuming, street requests for sweets and foods, and engagement with issues related to death, but the differences far outweigh the similarities. Celebrations include the making of sweets and special foods (such as “Bread of the Dead” and sugar skulls), the creation of family altars for the dead (ofrendas), and visits to grave sites. For Mexicans the Day of the Day is a marker of ethnic identity which encompasses festival, symbol, and ritual as a means for families and communities to both mock death and embrace it as a reality of life while also facilitating the continuing bond between the living and deceased ancestors.
As much as I am passionate about Halloween, we should also note the strong contrasts between Halloween and the Day of the Dead in North American and Mexican cultures. In America the Halloween celebration functions on a superficial level in the culture in ways that entertain aspects of popular culture from an individualistic perspective as participants engage in costuming and identity play. But the secular Halloween celebration really does not deeply and meaningfully engage death. By contrast, the Mexican Day of the Dead provides a religio-cultural festival for individuals and the culture to engage the reality of death and the continued connection of the living and the dead through a rich reservoir of symbol and ritual. It would seem that North Americans can learn a lot from our neighbors to the South in terms of cultural festivals. As stated in the article in The Independent:
Our relationship to the dead is a key theme of Coco, introducing us to the concept of the “final death”. Those who reside within the colourful, bountiful Land of the Dead can do so only as long as there is someone to remember them in the Land of the Living; once that last memory is lost to time, that individual – quite literally – fades into nothingness.
Lexington Books/Fortress Academic is pleased to announce a new series: Horror and Scripture. The series seeks monographs that explore horror, monsters, and the monstrous in early Jewish and Christian scriptures (including canonical and non-canonical texts). Books in the series will be grounded in the disciple of Biblical Studies, but will exhibit a wide range of methodological diversity, including, for example, Film Studies, Psychoanalytical Theory, Anthropological Approaches, Monster Theory, and Postmodern Readings. Monographs should aim for a target audience of graduate students and scholars.
For details on how to submit a manuscript, please contact Brandon Grafius and Kelly Murphy at horrorandscripture@gmail.com.
This conference looks interesting, and i’s connected to the work of Robert Geraci who has been featured here previously.
April 5 – 6, 2018. Inside the Big Top at the Panacea Museum gardens, Bedford, United Kingdom
CenSAMM Symposia Series 2018
Deadline for abstracts extended to February 16.
We invite papers from those working across disciplines to contribute to a two-day symposium on the subject of AI and Apocalypse.
Recently ‘AlphaGo’, a Google/Deepmind programme, defeated the two most elite players at the Chinese game ‘Go’. These victories were, by current understandings of AI, a vast leap forward towards a future that could contain human-like technological entities, technology-like humans, and embodied machines. As corporations like Google invest heavily in technological and theoretical developments leading towards further, effective advances – a new ‘AI Summer’ – we can also see that hopes, and fears, about what AI and robotics will bring humanity are gaining pace, leading to new speculations and expectations, even amidst those who would position themselves as non-religious.
Speculations include Transhumanist and Singularitarian teleological and eschatological schemes, assumptions about the theistic inclinations of thinking machines, the impact of the non-human on our conception of the uniqueness of human life and consciousness, representations in popular culture and science fiction, and the moral boundary work of secular technologists in relation to their construct, ‘religion’. Novel religious impulses in the face of advancing technology have been largely ignored by the institutions founded to consider the philosophical, ethical and societal meanings of AI and robotics.
This symposium seeks to explore the realities and possibilities of this unprecedented apocalypse in human history.
We welcome papers in any disciplinary field including, but not limited to Religious Studies, the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences that contribute to understanding and promote discussion and debate on this topic. Approaches could include interdisciplinary scholarship, cross-cultural and inter-religious engagement in literature and theology, history, exegesis, anthropology, social sciences, cultural studies, political theory or theology and so on.
Abstracts of no more than 300 words should be emailed to simonrobinson@panaceatrust.org no later than February 16, 2018. In the body of your email, please include your name, institution if applicable, contact information, and the title of your abstract.
Accepted abstracts will appear in the conference programme. It is the lead author’s responsibility to ensure their abstract is accurate and ready for publication at the time of submission.
Papers should be no longer than 20 minutes in length in order to accommodate questions.
Presentations and subsequent discussions will be livestreamed via the internet and will be digitally archived and made available for future reference.
We encourage the use of accessible language and approaches to communicate concepts and ideas to a broad public audience.
Applications for accommodation and travel cost reimbursements may be considered.
Guillermo del Toro recently won the Best Director award at the Golden Globes for The Shape of Water. He was true to himself and his lifelong faith in monsters, as evidenced in his acceptance speech. Excerpts below:
“I thank you. My monsters thank you.”
“Since childhood, I’ve been faithful to monsters. I have been saved and absolved by them. Monsters, I believe, are patron saints of our blissful imperfection.”
“For 25 years, I have hand-crafted very strange little tales… in three precise instances, these strange stories have saved my life – once with The Devil’s Backbone, once with Pan’s Labyrinth, and now with The Shape of Water. As directors, these things are not just entries in a filmography. We have made a deal with a particularly inefficient devil, that trades three years of our life for one entry on IMDb. And these things are biography. And they are life.”
“Somewhere, Lon Chaney is smiling on all of us.”
Del Toro’s full backstage question and answer session following his win can be viewed here.
I’ve just become aware of a new book based upon a PhD dissertation. It’s titled Drawn to the Gods: Religion and Humor in the Simpsons, South Park, & Family Guy by David Feltmate (NYU Press, 2017). The dissertation was supervised by Douglas Cowan, a friend of TheoFantastique who has been interviewed here several times previously on his great work on religion and horror and science fiction. Feltmate’s book is the subject of a recent podcast at ReligiousStudiesProject.com. Here’s the description:
If you were asked to name the TV programs with the most religious content and references what would you name? 7th Heaven, Supernatural or perhaps Games of Thrones? How many of us would name animated television series such as The Simpsons, Family Guy or South Park? These television series are amongst the most religions on our screens. Indeed, 95% of The Simpsons episodes, 84% of Family Guy episodes, and 78% of South Park episodes contain explicit religious references. These animated comedy shows are critically influential in teaching viewers about religious people and religious institutions. The commentary created via the intersection between humour, satire, and religion in these TV shows, particularly in their own context of America, creates an interesting image of what it supposedly means to be a “good religious American”. In this podcast Associate Professor David Feltmate, author of Drawn to the Gods: Religion and Humor in The Simpsons, South Park, and Family Guy, chats to Breann Fallon about the manner in which these three television shows create a broad commentary on religion for the general public. Feltmate highlights the central place these animate programs have in the proliferation of ideas about the spiritual and the religious, as heavily consumed mediums of popular culture.
Terry Wright of the Sacred Writings blog made me aware of a new essay applying monster theory to biblical studies. The title and abstract are reproduced below.
Abstract
While biblical scholars have long been interested in the monsters of the Hebrew Bible, it is only in the last several decades that theoretical approaches to monsters have made their way into biblical studies. Originating in the fields of psychoanalysis and anthropology, monster theory looks at the construction of various monsters, arguing that the way a culture creates its monsters reveals the anxieties held by that culture. This article will explore the uses of monster theory in recent works of biblical scholarship, demonstrating that monster theory has been used to read the figure of the monster as a representation of chaos, identify monstrous imagery as a rhetoric of trauma, and explore how the boundaries between the monster and the self are shifting and unstable.
From vampire apocalypses, shark attacks, witches, and ghosts, to murderous dolls bent on revenge, horror has been part of the American cinematic imagination for almost as long as pictures have moved on screens. But why do they captivate us so? What is the drive to be frightened, and why is it so perennially popular? Why Horror Seduces addresses these questions through evolutionary social sciences.
Explaining the functional seduction of horror entertainment, this book draws on cutting-edge findings in the evolutionary social sciences, showing how the horror genre is a product of human nature. Integrating the study of horror with the sciences of human nature, the book claims that horror entertainment works by targeting humans’ adaptive tendency to find pleasure in make-believe, allowing a high intensity experience within a safe context. Through analyses of well-known and popular modern American works of horror–Rosemary’s Baby; The Shining; I Am Legend; Jaws; and several others–author Mathias Clasen illustrates how these works target evolved cognitive and emotional mechanisms; we are attracted to horrifying entertainment because we have an adaptive tendency to find pleasure in make-believe that allows us to experience negative emotions at high levels of intensity within a safe context. Organized into three parts identifying fictional works by evolutionary mode–the evolution of horror; evolutionary interpretations of horror; the future of horror–Why Horror Seduces succinctly explores the cognitive processes behind spectators’ need to scream.
What’s the most important take-home message for readers?
I think there are two important take-home messages: One, horror entertainment isn’t just mindless junk. No, the horror genre is ancient and universal, and horror stories serve important psychological, social, and moral functions for us. They give us insight into the darker extremes of our emotional register; they teach us about the vicissitudes of life and the complexities of psychology and sociality; and they provide moral calibration and help us grapple with notions of good and evil. They help us plug into our culture and connect with our humanity.
The other take-home message is that we can’t really make sense of horror without taking into account evolved and adapted human nature. Humanists have traditionally focused only on culture and context in their attempts to explain literature and films and so on, but we really have to take human biology seriously. Culture grows out of, and is constrained by, biology. That goes for horror entertainment too. Horror is enabled and constrained by human nature. If we weren’t fearful, imaginative creatures we’d have no horror stories—and if we want to understand why we are fearful, imaginative creatures, we have to get a fix on our evolutionary history and the biological forces that shaped our nature. So, my take-home messages are these: Let’s take horror seriously, and let’s take our own biological heritage seriously, because that heritage helps explain how and why scary entertainment works.
The Open Graves, Open Minds Project unearthed depictions of the vampire and the undead in literature, art, and other media, before embracing shapeshifting creatures (most recently, the werewolf) and other supernatural beings and their worlds. It opens up questions concerning genre, gender, hybridity, cultural change, and other realms. It extends to all narratives of the fantastic, the folkloric, the fabulous, and the magical. Supernatural Cities encourages conversation between disciplines (e.g. history, cultural geography, folklore, social psychology, anthropology, sociology and literature). It explores the representation of urban heterotopias, otherness, haunting, estranging, the uncanny, enchantment, affective geographies, communal memory, and the urban fantastical.
The city theme ties in with OGOM’s current research: Sam George’s work on the English Eerie and the urban myth of Old Stinker, the Hull werewolf; the Pied Piper’s city of Hamelin and the geography and folklore of Transylvania; Bill Hughes’s work on the emergence of the genre of paranormal romance from out of (among other forms) urban fantasy; Kaja Franck’s work on wilderness, wolves, and were-animals in the city. This event will see us make connections with the research of Supernatural Cities scholars, led by historian Karl Bell. Karl has explored the myth of Spring-Heeled-Jack, and the relationship between the fantastical imagination and the urban environment. We invite other scholars to join in the dialogue with related themes from their own research.
From its inception, the Gothic mode has been imbued with antiquity and solitude, with lonely castles and dark forests. The city, site of modernity, sociality, and rationalised living, seems to be an unlikely locus for texts of the supernatural. And yet, by the nineteenth century, Dracula had already invaded the metropolis from the Transylvanian shadows and writers such as R. L. Stevenson adapted the supernatural Gothic to urban settings. Gaskell, Dickens and Dostoyevsky, too, uncover the darker side of city life and suggest supernatural forces while discreetly maintaining a veneer of naturalism.
In twentieth-century fantastic and Gothic, perhaps owing in part to a disillusionment with modernity, all manner of spectres haunt our cities in novels, film, TV, and video games. Radcliffean Gothic saw the uncultivated wilderness and the premodern past as the fount of terror; the contemporary fantastic discovers the supernatural precisely where space has been most rationalised—the modern city. Civilisation, rooted etymologically in the Latin civitas (‘city’), is itself put into question by its subversion by the supernatural.
Supernatural cities emerge in a range of contemporary fictions from the horror of Stephen King to the dark fantasy of Clive Barker, the parallel Londons of V. E. Schwaab and China Mieville, magical neo-Victorian Londons in the Young Adult fiction of Genevieve Cogman and Samantha Shannon, and Aliette de Bodard’s fallen angels and dragons in a supernatural Paris. Zombies lurch through scenes of urban breakdown while, in TV, there is the vampire-ridden noir LA of Angel. The large metropolises are not alone in their unearthliness—see the Celtic otherworld that lies behind Manchester in Alan Garner’s Elidor. Then there are the imagined cities of high fantasy, which form a contrast to the gritty familiarity of the cities that feature in the distinct genre of urban fantasy itself or the frequently urban backgrounds of paranormal romance. Supernatural cities are haunted, too, by such urban legends as Spring Heeled-Jack and Old Stinker, the werewolf of Hull.
The conference will explore the image of the supernatural city as expressed in narrative media from a variety of epochs and cultures. It will provide an interdisciplinary forum for the development of innovative and creative research and examine the cultural significance of these themes in all their various manifestations. As with previous OGOM conferences, from which emerged books and special issue journals, there will be the opportunity for delegates’ presentations to be published.
The conference organising committee invites proposals for panels and individual papers. Possible topics and approaches may include (but are not limited to) the following:
The urban wyrd
The English eerie
Folk horror’s encroachment on the city
Magical cities
Alternative/parallel cities
Urban folklore/legends
Urban fantasy and genre
YA and children’s magical cities
Monsters and demons at large in the city (Dracula, Dorian Gray, Angel, Cat People, King Kong, Elephant Man, The Werewolf of London, Sweeney Todd, Jack the Ripper, Lestat, Zombie ‘R’, mummies, witches, etc.)
Psychogeography
Gothic architecture
Cities and the incursion of the wilderness
Civilisation and nature
Alternative urban histories; neo-Victorianism and steampunk
Gothic/magical fashion, music, and subcultures of the city
Supernatural city creatures (demons, gargoyles, ghosts, vampires, angels)
Animal hauntings and city spectres
Decay, entropy, and economic collapse
Supernatural cityscapes in video games
Gotham City/comic books/dark knights
The disenchantments of modernity and re-enchantment of the city
Dark spaces/borders/liminal landscapes
Wild, uncanny areas of the city
Drowned/submerged cities
Keynote Speakers:
Prof. Owen Davies, historian of witchcraft and magic, on ‘Supernatural beliefs in nineteenth-century asylums’
Dr Sam George, Convenor of the Open Graves, Open Minds Project, ‘City Demons: urban manifestations of the Pied Piper and Nosferatu Myths’
Adam Scovell, BFI critic and Folk Horror film specialist, on ‘the Urban Wyrd’
Dr Karl Bell, Convenor of Supernatural Cities, on ‘the fantastical imagination and the urban environment’ (title tbc)
Delegates will engage with our Gruesome Gazetteer of Gothic Hertfordshire and accompany us on a tour of Supernatural St Albans and its environs.
Abstracts (200-300 words) for twenty-minute papers or proposals for two-hour panels, together with a 100-word biography, should be submitted by 1 January 2018 as an email attachment in MS Word document format to all of the following:
Dr Sam George, s.george@herts.ac.uk;
Dr Bill Hughes, bill.enlightenment@gmail.com;
Dr Kaja Franck, k.a.franck@gmail.com;
Dr Karl Bell, karl.bell@port.ac.uk
Please use your surname as the document title. The abstract should be in the following format: (1) Title (2) Presenter(s) (3) Institutional affiliation (4) Email (5) Abstract. Panel proposals should include (1) Title of the panel (2) Name and contact information of the chair (3) Abstracts of the presenters.
Presenters will be notified of acceptance by 30 January 2018. Visit us at OpenGravesOpenMinds.com and follow us on Twitter @OGOMProject @imaginetheurban
My complete panel list for Salt Lake Comic Con. Some great and thought provoking discussions, two of which I moderate.
Harry Potter is My Bible: Fandom as Faith
Thursday September 21, 2017: 3:00 pm to 4:00 pm
People turn to fandoms for more than just entertainment. We find comfort and inspiration, guidance and even spirituality, in the art we consume. Drawing on the example from the podcast “Harry Potter and the Sacred Text” this panel will discuss the deeper ways fandom can help us in life.
Digital Geek Etiquette: How to Remain Civil and Not Feed the Trolls
Thursday September 21, 2017: 8:00 pm to 9:00 pm
Sometimes a healthy debate online turns personal. This presentation will talk about ways to encourage civility and communication on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter and other online forums. We will also discuss cyberbullying, trolling and how to better share your fandom passions—without coming across like a jerk.
Planet of the Apes: A Mirror for 21st Century Humans
Friday September 22, 2017: 1:00 pm to 2:00 pm
1968 saw the launch of the PLANET OF THE APES phenomenon. Years later this was rebooted with a new trilogy with the final film in the summer of 2017. The original films addressed things like potential nuclear warfare and human self-destruction. This panel will discuss how the rebooted trilogy has tackled contemporary questions, such as animal rights, human violence, dehumanization and genocide.
War and Peace in Science Fiction and Fantasy
Saturday September 23, 2017: 3:00 pm to 4:00 pm
Based on a prospective course I have created – Since the inception of popular science fiction and fantasy into the human psyche we have gained great insight into our own nature in fantastical ways. Notions of appropriate and inappropriate patriotic behavior, in times of war and peace, as well as varied aspects of weapons of mass destruction, evil, torture and genocide are frequently transmitted by fiction, film and television. This panel will strive to encourage dialogue and debate as well as create a deeper understanding of issues of war and peace using science fiction and fantasy conflict.
When humankind faces what it perceives as a threat to its very existence, a macabre thing happens in art, literature, and culture: corpses begin to stand up and walk around. The dead walked in the fourteenth century, when the Black Death and other catastrophes roiled Europe. They walked in images from World War I, when a generation died horribly in the trenches. They walked in art inspired by the Holocaust and by the atomic attacks on Japan. Now, in the early twenty-first century, the dead walk in stories of the zombie apocalypse, some of the most ubiquitous narratives of post-9/11 Western culture. Zombies appear in popular movies and television shows, comics and graphic novels, fiction, games, art, and in material culture including pinball machines, zombie runs, and lottery tickets.
The zombie apocalypse, Greg Garrett shows us, has become an archetypal narrative for the contemporary world, in part because zombies can stand in for any of a variety of global threats, from terrorism to Ebola, from economic uncertainty to ecological destruction. But this zombie narrative also brings us emotional and spiritual comfort. These apocalyptic stories, in which the world has been turned upside down and protagonists face the prospect of an imminent and grisly death, can also offer us wisdom about living in a community, present us with real-world ethical solutions, and invite us into conversation about the value and costs of survival. We may indeed be living with the living dead these days, but through the stories we consume and the games we play, we are paradoxically learning what it means to be fully alive.
Introduction: Raising the Dead
Chapter 1: Life, Death, and Zombies: Who Are the Walking Dead?
Chapter 2: Hungry for Each Other: How Zombie Stories Encourage Community
Chapter 3: Carrying the Fire: The Ethics of the Zombie Apocalypse
Chapter 4: And In the End: Is the Zombie Apocalypse Good or Bad?
Chapter 5: Conclusion: Living with the Living Dead
This 
I’ve just become aware of a new book based upon a PhD dissertation. It’s titled 
Terry Wright of the 
The Open Graves, Open Minds Project unearthed depictions of the vampire and the undead in literature, art, and other media, before embracing shapeshifting creatures (most recently, the werewolf) and other supernatural beings and their worlds. It opens up questions concerning genre, gender, hybridity, cultural change, and other realms. It extends to all narratives of the fantastic, the folkloric, the fabulous, and the magical. Supernatural Cities encourages conversation between disciplines (e.g. history, cultural geography, folklore, social psychology, anthropology, sociology and literature). It explores the representation of urban heterotopias, otherness, haunting, estranging, the uncanny, enchantment, affective geographies, communal memory, and the urban fantastical.
My complete panel list for Salt Lake Comic Con. Some great and thought provoking discussions, two of which I moderate.
