Earlier this week Ray Harryhausen passed away. There was a wealth of coverage all over the media, and as expected, the fan community expressed a lot of appreciation and a sense of loss with his passing. But this has got me wondering. In the past I interviewedPaul Davids who produced the documentary The Sci-Fi Boys. The film looked at the influence of Forrest J. Ackerman, Ray Bradbury, and Ray Harryhausen on generations of fans, many of whom went on to produce various fantasy, science fiction, and horror works of their own. With the death of Harryhausen the sci-fi boys are now gone. As a result I have some questions I’d like to share with readers, and I’d be interested in feedback and discussion:
Who and what are the primary influences of the imagination for current fans?
With the shift from the work of larger-than-life creative individuals in genre to faceless teams of people in a production crew, which individuals stand out with the potential to inspire us today?
Given current audience preferences in literature, film and television, is it less likely that we will see future titans of the imagination?
Will there ever be others that inspire us to the extent that Ackerman, Bradbury and Harryhausen did?
I’d love to hear your thoughts. I’m pessimistic, but hoping others will rise to fill their very big shoes.
For a few years now I have wondered when the day would come that I would have to write this piece. Sadly, today is that day. Various media outlets are reporting that Ray Harryhausen passed away Tuesday.
Harryhausen was a huge influence on me as a child and teenager. When I first encountered his fantasy and science fiction films on television, the stop-motion animation had a profound impact upon my imagination. I dreamed of becoming a stop-motion animator, and to that end I saved my paper route money and purchased an 8mm camera with single frame capacity. I made several animation test films using jointed action figures and one from clay, and collected everything I could get my hands on that told the story of Harryhausen and the Dynamation magic he used to bring his creatures to life. Back in those days it was far more difficult to find fan material, but through a book dealer I was able to secure a copy of From the Land Beyond Beyond, as well as Film Fantasy Scrapbook. These volumes, coupled with the articles that would come out in publications like Starlog and Cinefantastique, were enough to feed my continual interest in Harryhausen and the stop-motion process. Today a number of books are available for fans, including Ray Harryhausen: An Animated Life, A Century of Stop Motion Animation, and The Art of Ray Harryhausen, not to mention the three volumes in the Ray Harryhausen Master of the Majicks collection available through Archive Editions.
Harryhausen’s influence is difficult to overstate. Many people currently involved in special effects, makeup, and film direction point to being captivated by his fantasy films which led to their career paths. In the wake of his death, Ray and Diana Harryhausen Foundation released this statement that includes tributes from genre notables:
Raymond Frederick Harryhausen
Born: Los Angeles 29th June 1920
Died: London 7th May 2013.
The Harryhausen family regret to announce the death of Ray Harryhausen, Visual Effects pioneer and stop-motion model animator. He was a multi-award winner which includes a special Oscar and BAFTA. Ray’s influence on today’s film makers was enormous, with luminaries; Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, Peter Jackson, George Lucas, John Landis and the UK’s own Nick Park have cited Harryhausen as being the man whose work inspired their own creations.
Harryhausen’s fascination with animated models began when he first saw Willis O’Brien’s creations in KING KONG with his boyhood friend, the author Ray Bradbury in 1933, and he made his first foray into filmmaking in 1935 with home-movies that featured his youthful attempts at model animation. Over the period of the next 46 years, he made some of the genres best known movies – MIGHTY JOE YOUNG (1949), IT CAME FROM BENEATH THE SEA (1955), 20 MILLION MILES TO EARTH (1957), MYSTERIUOUS ISLAND (1961), ONE MILLION YEARS B.C. (1966), THER VALLEY OF GWANGI (1969), three films based on the adventures of SINBAD and CLASH OF THE TITANS (1981). He is perhaps best remembered for his extraordinary animation of seven skeletons in JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS (1963) which took him three months to film.
Harryhausen’s genius was in being able to bring his models alive. Whether they were prehistoric dinosaurs or mythological creatures, in Ray’s hands they were no longer puppets but became instead characters in their own right, just as important as the actors they played against and in most cases even more so.
Today The Ray & Diana Harryhausen Foundation, a charitable Trust set up by Ray on the 10th April 1986, is devoted to the protection of Ray’s name and body of work as well as archiving, preserving and restoring Ray’s extensive Collection.
Tributes have been heaped upon Harryhausen for his work by his peers in recent years.
“Ray has been a great inspiration to us all in special visual industry. The art of his earlier films, which most of us grew up on, inspired us so much.” “Without Ray Harryhausen, there would likely have been no STAR WARS.”
– George Lucas
“THE LORD OF THE RINGS is my ‘Ray Harryhausen movie’. Without his life-long love of his wondrous images and storytelling it would never have been made – not by me at least.”
– Peter Jackson
“In my mind he will always be the king of stop-motion animation.”
– Nick Park
“His legacy of course is in good hands because it’s carried in the DNA of so many film fans.”
– Randy Cook
“You know I’m always saying to the guys that I work with now on computer graphics “do it like Ray Harryhausen”
– Phil Tippett
“What we do now digitally with computers, Ray did digitally long before but without computers. Only with his digits.”
– Terry Gilliam
“His patience, his endurance have inspired so many of us.”
– Peter Jackson
“Ray, your inspiration goes with us forever.”
– Steven Spielberg
“I think all of us who are practioners in the arts of science fiction and fantasy movies now all feel that we’re standing on the shoulders of a giant.
If not for Ray’s contribution to the collective dreamscape, we wouldn’t be who we are.”
– James Cameron
It was not only those of a previous generation who found Harryhausen’s work captivating. A couple of years ago I came across two young boys dressed in plastic warrior garb, including swords and shields. I assumed they were acting out some Roman warrior film or cartoon they had seen, but their mother was quick to correct me. It turns out that their grandfather had recently shown them Jason and the Argonauts, and the young boys were dressed as argonauts in pursuit of the golden fleece! Every generation finds those who encounter Harryhausen’s work anew as it fills their imagination.
With the passing of Harryhausen, and the prior losses of Forrest J. Ackerman and Ray Bradbury, the monster kid generation has lost another hero. Goodbye, Mr. Harryhausen. I was never able to meet you personally, but you inspired me in profound ways. Thank you for bringing your creatures to life, and giving me a sense of wonder.
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Over at Crave Online Joe Belcastro has a piece on “How to Revive Universal’s Iconic Monsters.” Along the way he suggests ways in which the creatures might be re-invented, even with the potential, as he sees it, of them becoming “modern blockbuster franchises.”
I really appreciate Belcastro’s attempt. I have a fondness for these monsters and would like nothing more than to see them rise again for a new generation of fans. However, I wonder whether this represents a case of idealism rather than a realism. I would never say it is impossible. After all, we have seen these classic monsters come and go over time, and just when we count them out they seem to return as both shadows and reflections of our culture. But our monsters evolve with us as a society. These Gothic horror icons seem more like monstrous fossils from a previous cultural age. Their general species of monster remains with us: vampires, werewolves, mummies, and so on (not to mention their ongoing light hearted legacy expressed through things like Monsters vs. Aliens, Hotel Transylvania, and Frankenweenie). But the specific iconic monsters of Dracula, Frankenstein’s creature, Imhotep/the Mummy, the Wolfman, etc., may have seen their day. Today we prefer more generic types of monsters that allow us to explore our fears without a specific connection to a single iconic monster, and the reigning creature is certainly a general one, the zombie, that represents many things, but surely a general fear of deadness reanimated with little desire beyond endless consumption.
Belcastro presents a number of suggestions to support his pitch, but what do you think? In light of the sociological and cultural aspects of these monsters, can the iconic monsters themselves be revived to blockbuster status?
Emily McAvan has been on my radar since I first encountered her research in the sacred aspects of science fiction and fantasy. She teaches cultural, media and gender studies at Murdoch University and Curtin University, both in Perth, Australia. In the interview that follows we discuss aspects of her fine book The Postmodern Sacred: Popular Culture Spirituality in the Science Fiction, Fantasy and Urban Fantasy Genres (McFarland, 2012). (You can learn more about that book and many other fine volumes and other items in the TheoFantastique Store.)
TheoFantastique: Emily, thank you for your time in discussing your book. I have enjoyed your work in this area and was glad to see your fine research come out in book form. Can you briefly define what you mean by “the postmodern sacred,” and how our “terminal identity” plays a part in forming this?
Emily McAvan: What I was really getting at in naming the postmodern sacred is the virtualisation of religious belief and practice in the digital world. With the proliferation of virtual technologies, ever present internet connections, right in the palm of our hand or in our laps, there’s a sense that these form what Scott Bakutman called “terminal identities.” Identity is produced, mediated by, both the kinds of content available and the way it’s delivered, which for me has an impact on the way we experience religion today.
I set out to explore those through a variety of media texts, particularly science fiction and fantasy, terming them collectively as the postmodern sacred because of the religious implications of the stories these texts are telling.
TheoFantastique: How does the postmodern sacred adopt a particular epistemology in relation to those of “real world” religions, and how might this inform clashes from certain religious segments of society over expressions of the postmodern sacred such as those in the past over Harry Potter?
Emily McAvan: In terms of epistemology, way of knowing, the postmodern sacred takes a kind of syncretic approach, pulling together signifiers from various traditions without having any master ideology. Quite naturally, this upsets people who want to maintain their singular purchase on truth. The interesting thing with Harry Potter is, okay it’s a representation of witchcraft on the page and the screen, and yes the Bible says not to suffer a witch. So what? It’s fiction. So why the conflict? The answer I think is that fiction is a way of telling truth slant, to quote Emily Dickinson. Harry Potter gives a little too much life to witchcraft, fires the imagination a little too much, for the comfort of some people.
TheoFantastique: Some scholars have argued previously that at times the experience of film may approximate a religious experience. In your book you take this further and argue that the process of consuming religiously- or spiritually-inflected texts is a form of spiritual experience. How is this so, and how does it relate to more traditional expressions of religiosity? Also in connection with this, how are these encounters with the postmodern sacred in media forms of “second-hand experience of transcendence and belief?”
Emily McAvan: Well, one of the main differences from traditional religious practice is that there’s no communal expectations involved really, no institutions forming. There’s no priests or rabbis. It’s not there’s no ties there – popular culture fandoms definitely create bonds between people – but not to the same degree, not the birth, life, wedding stuff for the most part. This is why I call the postmodern sacred a supplement, an addition and replacement in the Derridean sense. It adds to, and displaces.
But at the same time, of course a text that is drawing on Christianity or Buddhism or whatever for its symbolic power is always a degree removed from the intensity of religious mystic experience. The numinous, as Rudolph Otto termed supernatural elements, is onscreen, it’s not with you.
TheoFantastique: You note that the postmodern sacred is willing to play with the sacred. Is it this element, perhaps through a willingness to go so far as to play in ways that threaten to transgress conceptions of the traditional sacred that make it so appealing to the postmodern mindset?
Emily McAvan: It absolutely is. It can combine, recombine, religions in fairly plastic ways. In that sense, it’s transgressive and indeed pleasurable. Rather than stake out a single religious tradition, it’s perhaps easier – and definitely more profitable – to play with disparate signifiers.
TheoFantastique: In your chapter on “Virtual Religion” you note that the postmodern sacred “temporarily suspend(s) the ‘rational’ laws of the universe that prohibit Gods and monsters from existence.” Does this represent a curious mix of the embrace of an Enlightenment rationalist metanarrative along with a postmodern skepticism of metanarratives, which is then applied to Gods and monsters, as well as to things like the paranormal in expressions like The X-Files as well? How is the postmodern sacred “caught somewhere between belief and unbelief…”?
Emily McAvan: Well, when something’s onscreen, there’s a certain vacillation between belief and unbelief, the suspension of disbelief. When you have a God or a monster onscreen it incarnates the supernatural in a certain sense. As we see with the Harry Potter example, to portray the numinous onscreen in hyper-CGI detail is a powerful thing, there’s a kind of concreteness that these new digital technologies give to the unreal, the supernatural.
TheoFantastique: You state that “we are dealing with a post-Christian polytheistic pop culture, one that feels free to pastiche from many difference religious and mythical traditions.” Can you share an example or two?
Emily McAvan: Sure. Think about the melange of religious signifiers in the TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spinoff Angel. There’s vampires, King James style language, as well as various demons from fairy tales, and so on. Buffy dies in a kind of Christ-like fashion, but when she comes back from the dead she describes a Zen-like nirvana state where she felt nothing. Angel goes to Hell. And of course at the linguistic level, the infamous Buffyspeak way of talking on the show is in dialogue with diasporic Judaism I think, it’s a kind of unacknowledged teen Yiddishkeit. So the point is, there’s all of these signifiers floating around the series from various religions, all of whom incarnate a certain kind of belief in their concreteness onscreen. So what does that mean? It means that we don’t have a singular Christian purchase on truth, that ideas of the supernatural are diffused, perhaps even confused depending on your point of view, between all these traditions. Spirit, the sacred, becomes relativised.
TheoFantastique: One last question if I may. You write in your conclusion that: “The postmodern religious culture finds itself somewhere between a fundamentalist belief in a singular God, a pagan belief in everything, and a modern skeptical belief in anything – three often incompatible belief systems.” But you go on to note that these incompatible positions have adopted elements of the other. Is this the inclusive and syncretic aspects of postmodern spirituality at play?
Emily McAvan: It absolutely is. Traditions begin to take on elements of each other. For example, the fundamentalists are far more postmodern than they would like to believe, especially the American Evangelical and fundamentalist Protestants. New Age style self-help talk has permeated so much of the culture, and it has changed the way that people think about God and spirit. “Spiritual, not religious” is for more than the Oprah crowd now. The thing is, though, it’s in many ways unacknowledged, which produces an interesting tension in these religions between their Christian elements and the Eastern-influenced New Age elements they’ve taken on. It’s inclusive, but unintentionally so.
TheoFantastique: Emily, thank you for your fine work, and the time you’ve carved out for this interview. I hope your book does well as people explore science fiction and fantasy in more depth.
Edited by Anthony R. Mills, John W. Morehead and J. Ryan Parker
Foreword by K. Dale Koontz
Print ISBN: 978-0-7864-7290-1
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-4766-1253-9
notes, bibliography, index
softcover (6 x 9) 2013
Not Yet Published, Available Fall/Winter 2013 through McFarland
About the Book
This is a collection of new essays on the religious themes in, and the implications of, the works of Joss Whedon, creator of such shows as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Firefly, and more recently writer and director of the box-office hit Marvel’s The Avengers. The book addresses such topics as ethics, racism, feminism, politics, spiritual transformation, witchcraft, identity, community, heroism, apocalypse, and other religiously and theologically significant themes of Whedon’s creative enterprises. The disciplinary approaches vary as well; history, theology, philosophy of religion, phenomenology, cultural studies, and religious studies are all employed in different ways. The existential faith commitments of the various essay authors are also different. Some are clearly believers in God, some are clearly not, and others leave that matter aside altogether in their analyses.
About the Author
Anthony R. Mills lives in St. Paul, Minnesota. Researcher and writer John W. Morehead lives in Syracuse, Utah. J. Ryan Parker received a Ph.D. in religion and the arts from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, and a master of divinity degree from the Wake Forest. He lives in Clinton, Mississippi; his website is www.poptheology.com.
For a while now we have heard of the lost footage from Hammer’s Dracula (U.K.)/Horror of Dracula (U.S.) that was found in Japan, and that a few seconds of this footage was incorporated into the ending in the restored Blu-ray of the film released in the UK. This footage has surfaced on YouTube and it is included below until Lions Gate removes it.
Previously Mark Gatiss produced the BBC documentary A History of Horror. More recently he expanded on an exploration of horror’s historical expressions with Horror Europa:
Actor and writer Mark Gatiss embarks on a chilling voyage through European horror cinema. From the silent nightmares of German Expressionism in the wake of World War I to lesbian vampires in 1970s Belgium, from the black-gloved killers of Italy’s bloody Giallo thrillers to the ghosts of the Spanish Civil War, Mark reveals how Europe’s turbulent 20th century forged its ground-breaking horror tradition. On a journey that spans the continent from Ostend to Slovakia, Mark explores classic filming locations and talks to the genre’s leading talents, including directors Dario Argento and Guillermo del Toro.
This documentary aired on the BBC in November 2012. It is highly recommended for those interested in European horror, and for understanding how cross-cultural currents in the genre inform and shape each other.
PopMatters includes a lengthy excerpt and summary of an intriguing volume by William Sims Bainbridge, eGods: Faith Versus Fantasy in Computer Gaming (Oxford University Press, 2012). The publisher’s website includes the following description:
What is the relationship between religion and multi-player online roleplaying games? Are such games simply a secular distraction from traditional religious practices, or do they in fact offer a different route to the sacred?
In eGods, a leading scholar in the study of virtual gameworlds takes an in-depth look at the fantasy religions of 41 games and arrives at some surprising conclusions. William Sims Bainbridge investigates all aspects of the gameworlds’ religious dimensions: the focus on sacred spaces; the prevalence of magic; the fostering of a tribal morality by both religion and rules programmed into the game; the rise of cults and belief systems within the gameworlds (and how this relates to cults in the real world); the predominance of polytheism; and, of course, how gameworld religions depict death. As avatars are multiple and immortal, death is merely a minor setback in most games. Nevertheless, much of the action in some gameworlds centers on the issue of mortality and the problematic nature of resurrection. Examining EverQuest II, Lord of the Rings Online, Rift, World of Warcraft, Star Wars: The Old Republic, and many others, Bainbridge contends that gameworlds offer a new perspective on the human quest, one that combines the arts, simulates many aspects of real life, and provides meaningful narratives about achieving goals by overcoming obstacles. Indeed, Bainbridge suggests that such games take us back to those ancient nights around the fire, when shadows flickered and it was easy to imagine the monsters conjured by the storyteller lurking in the forest.
Arguing that gameworlds reintroduce a curvilinear model of early religion, where today as in ancient times faith is inseparable from fantasy, eGods shows how the newest secular technology returns us to the very origins of religion so that we might “arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”
Features
A book from a leading scholar in the study of virtual gameworlds.
Based on five years of intensive research into every facet of the gameworlds, including 5,000 hours inside the virtual worlds.
Covers 41 different games.
The PopMatters essay includes the following conclusion:
This book does not claim that multiplayer online games will supplant religion, but that many of religion’s historical functions have already been taken over by other institutions of society, in the process of secularization, and games will play a role in the further erosion of faith. Quite apart from what psychological and social functions games may play, they provide a vantage point from which to consider changes happening in the wider culture and to celebrate human creativity. Thus fantasy is not a perfect substitute for faith, but it has some advantages. One is freedom, because a player can decide from moment to moment which game to play, which avatar to play inside it, and within certain limits what goals the avatar should seek. Precisely because religion has traditionally oversold its value to humanity, and such value as it has may decline as many competing cultural institutions arise, fantasy need not simulate faith. Indeed, to describe secularization as the erosion of religious faith is too negative a way to define it. We might better say: secularization is a form of cultural progress that liberates the playful human imagination.
Jordan Hembrough, known as the Toy Hunter on Travel Channel’s program of the same name, is back with the first episode of Season 2. It airs Wednesday night at 9:00/8:00 Central.
This interview was deleted at the request of Alan Friswell due to concerns raised by Tony Dalton at the Ray & Diana Harryhaussen Foundation. Please see the Ray Harryhausen Categories and Tags for related interviews and items.
Earlier this week Ray Harryhausen passed away. There was a wealth of coverage all over the media, and as expected, the fan community expressed a lot of appreciation and a sense of loss with his passing. But this has got me wondering. In the past I interviewed Paul Davids who produced the documentary The Sci-Fi Boys. The film looked at the influence of Forrest J. Ackerman, Ray Bradbury, and Ray Harryhausen on generations of fans, many of whom went on to produce various fantasy, science fiction, and horror works of their own. With the death of Harryhausen the sci-fi boys are now gone. As a result I have some questions I’d like to share with readers, and I’d be interested in feedback and discussion:
