Interview with Victoria Nelson on Gothicka: Vampire Heroes, Human Gods, and the New Supernatural

This is an exciting time for those interested in the intersection of religion, popular culture, and the fantastic genres. A number of scholars are producing fascinating works in this area, and one of those is Victoria Nelson. Victoria is an essayist and fiction writer who teaches in the Goddard College graduate program in creative writing. She is the author of The Secret Life of Puppets, and the new volume, Gothicka: vampire heroes, human gods, and the new supernatural (Harvard University Press, 2012). Victoria agreed to return to TheoFantastique. In the past she discussed the work of Guillermo del Toro, and now she responds to my voluminous questions on Gothicka.

TheoFantastique: Victoria, thank you for an enjoyable read, and your patience with my questions. I’d like to explore some of your ideas in Gothicka. When you talk about the “sub-Zeitgeist” of dark supernaturalism in popular culture, what do you mean by this, and how does it relate to the Gothic of the past?

Victoria Nelson: “Sub-Zeitgeist” is a label I coined, a bit tongue in cheek, in The Secret Life of Puppets. It refers to the no-man’s-land of popular culture in all its lowbrow manifestations—genre film, mass market paperbacks, comic books — the fads, fancies, and stories the high culture of “serious” art and intellectual inquiry routinely excludes.

Through most of the 20th century, you rarely find the supernatural represented outside pop culture genres. Even there, it has mostly been cast in terms of the bad stuff — evil, terror, horror. The only exception was Victorian children’s fantasy, another Gothick subgenre that eventually morphed into the Harry Potter series and so much more.

That’s our unique cultural legacy from the Protestant Reformation, which planted the idea that anything uncanny was likely to be the Devil’s work, and also from the Scientific Revolution, which focused squarely on cause and effect within the material world. By the end of the 17th century, miracles and other divine/supernatural interventions in daily life were no longer considered possible in mainstream Euro-American culture.

The Gothic genre began in the mid-18th century as part of a sub-Zeitgeist reaction to this new rationalism. These lurid novels about violence, incest, fornicating nuns and priests, brooding castles and abbeys harboring dark secrets began pouring out of England as part of a wave of nostalgic medievalism and a love-hate relationship with the old Catholicism. One strand of the classic Gothic incorporated supernatural events, another didn’t, but as this very durable literary shock genre flourished and morphed over the next two hundred and fifty years into Victorian ghost stories, pulp horror fiction, 20th century B movies, and mainstream films and novels today. By the 21st century, significantly, the supernatural element it carried became greatly magnified and the Gothick stopped being all about the dark and scary side.

TheoFantastique: How do you see this incorporating elements of gnosis and premodern Catholicism?

Victoria Nelson: Gnosis is a huge category that covers a lot of territory. There’s the original Gnosticism of Western late antiquity, a religious-philosophical tradition that influenced and overlapped with early Christianity.

Then there’s the gnosis we think of generically as an intuitive, nonrational, transcendental way of knowing. It contrasts with the rational-empirical, scientific, information-bearing episteme most Westerners valorize today as the only legitimate way of accessing knowledge. I did a whole long rap about these two in the puppet book.

For Renaissance thinkers like Giordano Bruno, gnosis was a process, a mystical act of knowing God in which the knower himself also becomes divine. This is the kind of gnosis I see all over the Gothick today, and in particular in the kind of spiritual practice called “personal gnosis,” where a person basically fills his or her Internet shopping cart full of mix-and-match eclectic beliefs drawn from Wicca, Buddhism, Egyptian mythology, and many other mythic strands to create a kind of personal religion. There’s a tendency to laugh at this practice, but I don’t. A lot of very thoughtful people do it. The only danger I see is a tendency to overtrust one’s own intuition at the expense of collective wisdom or higher principles that have been debated and refined by many minds over a long period of time.

As for premodern Catholicism, the kinds of personal gnosis practices we see growing out of Gothick fictions and films in the last thirty or so years show some odd similarities to the popular religion of medieval Catholic Europe — all that worship of the female god Mary, a host of strange and peculiar saints of both sexes, even a female or hermaphroditic Jesus. The medieval Christian gods, goddesses, and demigods are very much equivalent to the divinities, demigods and demigoddesses of other traditional religions like Hinduism. More significantly, these female and “monstrous” supernatural figures were mostly benign and beneficent. So are the main characters of today’s Gothick. Think Bella, Shrek, Hellboy. Characters like these form a kind of subliminal anti-pantheon to Protestant Christianity’s three male gods.

TheoFantastique: You refer to Gothick subgenres as involving “an implicit heterodox spirituality,” and further you state that we “are moving intuitively toward an image-based, animistic, supernaturalist orientation that has some common features with the worldview that fueled this older historical substratum of our culture.” Can you unpack some of the meaning of this for us, and provide a few examples of how this plays out in popular culture?

Victoria Nelson: Protestant Christianity is supremely a religion of the word. It’s text based and iconoclastic, anti-image, and it came, as all great religious movements do, at exactly the time it was most needed. It reformed a corrupt and backward-leaning institution, gave every person who could read and write access to scripture, and as an extra benefit paved the way for the mind-bendingly wonderful developments that science and technology have given us.

But history isn’t linear and progressive; it’s cyclical and repetitive. The very technology that grew out of the epochal separation of spirit and matter that took place between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment is leading us not backward but spiralwise into an intensely visual culture in which we navigate iconic imagery fueled by film, videogame, and the Internet. We tend to allegorize the Net into a “real” space, an unconscious habit that leaves us far more open to the possibility of dimensions that aren’t experienced by the five senses. An integral part of this new culture is the budding spirituality of personal gnosis I mentioned above that uses pop culture stories of fully realized alternative worlds to spin new mythologies and inspire new spiritual practices. I believe the influence of these new pop mythologies, as they saturate our imaginations, may paradoxically begin to foster a more sophisticated consideration of spirituality in mainstream secular culture.

I think we live in the most exciting of times, at the beginning of a century where mystical and rational ways of knowing have the potential to approach the equal footing they once had in the Renaissance. Neither way of thinking is right or wrong in itself; they cover completely different territories. But sparks fly when one doesn’t completely squash the other and they are forced to rub up against each other out in the open.

TheoFantastique: I was struck by this statement in your book: “The cultivation of feelings of terror or dread in the face of evil forces serves as a flawed vehicle to the transcendent – a dark transcendent shorn of the larger metaphysical context that embraces the divine as well as the demonic.” In my view there tends to be a dualistic dynamic in relation to such things, and conservative Christians in particular tend to sanitize their views on such things so as to embrace the divine and the light but to the neglect of the darkness. How does this observation connect with some of what you were trying to get at in this section of your book?

Victoria Nelson: I’d distinguish here between orthodox religious doctrine and types of alternative spirituality that get activated from the imaginary worlds of individual writers and filmmakers. Christianity contains within it the light and the dark in equal measure, but conservative Protestant Christians especially tend to put an emphasis on the Devil’s side of things, as witness the very popular Halloween “Hell Houses” I talk about in Gothicka. When I speak of “the cultivation of feelings of terror or dread,” I refer to the sensations one has on reading a horror story or watching a horror film — until recently the only kind of representation of the supernatural you could experience outside a church, temple or synagogue — as a weird kind of repressed and rather negative religious experience. And weird and rather negative because of the centuries-old link between the supernatural and the Devil in our culture. Some people — not everyone — take this feeling farther and turn it into a religious practice based on the story or film they consumed.

TheoFantastique: The tendency of many, whether academics or religious conservatives, is to ignore or dismiss the Gothick in pop culture as “low brow,” or an inappropriate vehicle for consideration of the transcendent. Why have you interacted with these elements so positively as elements of the sacred?

Victoria Nelson: Great religious shifts tend to come from below, from a common sentiment that reaches a kind of critical mass, which is then catalyzed by a leader who emerges seemingly from out of nowhere, not from a theological seminary. Joseph Smith, the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who was steeped in the popular folklore of his day, produced a narrative that situated Jesus Christ in North America. That twist filled a perceived need to update an Old World religion to a New World framework, and it doesn’t diminish the Mormon contention that this information was divine revelation to say so.

TheoFantastique: In your chapter on Gothick Gods you discuss the significance of the mythic narratives of horror and science fiction, as well as those who consume such things in the categories of fans and believers. How are these fantastic myths fueling the imagination in ways that blur the lines between imagination and belief, fans and believers?

Victoria Nelson: Fan culture is a very broad continuum these days. I divide it into the categories Consumer, Performer, and Believer. It’s important to note that there’s not necessarily a slippery slope from one category to the next.

Consumers consume and enjoy. Performers take it a step farther into interactivity. They write fan fiction based on the fictional works they love or take on the identities of favorite characters at conventions, film premieres or other gatherings (for instance, the summertime “orc” meetings in Sweden). Extreme Performers are fans like those Trekkers who adopted the characters’ identities in daily life, either as Klingons speaking that invented language or as Star Fleet officers in uniform, living their daily lives within the code of behavior they see as governing them. Same with the Na’vi kinfolk out of Avatar. They adopt a fictive identity and engage in a lifestyle practice that is primarily ethical, not spiritual.

Believers, finally, are those who resonate so deeply with certain books, TV shows, or movies that they form a spiritual practice for which the fiction serves as a kind of scripture. The Church of All Worlds, founded more than forty years ago, is based on Robert Heinlein’s sci fi novel Stranger in a Strange Land. Many groups and individual practitioners base their spiritual practice on the imaginary universe of H. P. Lovecraft. Most recently, a small group of “Cullenists” profess that they worship the vampire Cullen family of Twilight as gods and read the four volumes of the series randomly every day as a form of spiritual practice. And there are many other examples, most of them Christian influenced in one way or another.

TheoFantastique: Although I am not a fan of Twilight, I found your discussion of this and paranormal romance of interest. How has this series of novels and films helped construct a new Dance with Death, the divine feminine, and human deification?

Victoria Nelson: What I found fascinating in the Twilight novels, besides a compelling love story very much in the Gothick tradition of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, was the rich strand of Western esoteric traditions that Stephenie Meyer reflects in her novels. Bella, the human girl who decides she must become a vampire to be a fit partner for her vampire lover Edward, actually becomes the Bride of Death — a very ancient pancultural myth. Like the Christian Mary, she births a half-human, half-immortal child (in this case, a girl, not a boy!). Like Jesus, Bella suffers her own harrowing of hell, a three-day sensation of unbearable burning, as she turns into a vampire. Once she’s a vampire, she enters a world of immortal beauty and perfection—these are abstinent vampires, remember, who have overcome their lust for human blood — where she has superpowers of every imaginable sort as well as immortality. Theosis, the idea that humans can become gods on a par with Jesus after death, is an important Mormon doctrine that I suspect Meyer, a Mormon, may have drawn on in creating her beautiful, beneficent godlike vampires.

So the Twilight series is a great example of the evil-becomes-good turn in Gothick supernatural narratives at the end of the 20th century. This is the big, big shift at work in this new century and it has profound implications. Somehow the collective imagination has gotten to work on these dark Gothick narratives and brightened them, and that broader, sunnier framework is what has allowed these stories to start working as scripture, as the basis for a spiritual practice for more people.

The hunger for some kind of transcendental worldview or experience people outside organized religion feel is immense, it can’t be underestimated. If they only find the non-material, the supernatural, in stories of evil spirits, they are going to start working on that to make it work for them! Out of all humankind, only a very few want to worship the God of Darkness. The big trend is now to open the door and let some daylight in. Repentance and salvation are open to every creature in the Gothick universe today, even zombies. Why worship Dracula if you can pray to Carlyle Cullen? Why not worship a reformed immortal vampire?

TheoFantastique: You may recall from our last discussion on Guillermo del Toro that I am a huge fan of his work. Although he professes skepticism, how do you see his work as exhibiting the monstrous sacred as a spiritual reality?

Victoria Nelson: Del Toro professes skepticism around the religion of his birth, Catholicism, but not around the existence of other dimensions or realms beyond the material. He has famously stated that his main character Ofelia of Pan’s Labyrinth is not fantasizing her world of fairies — one possible interpretation of that story — but is perceiving a fully blown spiritual reality.

He also admits the deep influence medieval Catholicism has had on him, from the bestiaries of fanciful creatures to gargoyles and other religious images. He has created a unique and distinctive mythic pantheon assembled, personal gnosis style, not only from Catholic iconography but also from a mélange of other influences ranging from Celtic mythology to Mexican folk creatures to Lovecraftian monsters. And his two Hellboy movies, adapted from the Mike Mignola graphic novels, present yet another half-human, half-supernatural character who comes from a dark place (hell, in this case!) only to become a good guy. But he doesn’t like nice vampires particularly. In that subgenre he’s still very much on the dark side.

So del Toro’s hybrid imaginary universe certainly contains monsters, but whether it also holds the possibility of the sacred is up to him to tell us. I don’t think he has yet.

TheoFantastique: In the Los Angeles Review of Books analysis of your volume, Mark McGurl asked his readers to assume atheism and materialism, and then proceed to engage your book as flawed in interpreting the Gothick. For him one of the problems is that this supernaturalism ignores atheistic realism. I have seen similar debates where those from a skeptical orientation assume the nihilism of horror and find its connection to the sacred improbable or impossible. How would you respond?

Victoria Nelson: As a writer, I am always happy when a reviewer shows he has read my book all the way through and attempts to address its arguments seriously. That was the case here. A belief system is a belief system, however, whether it’s spiritual or atheistic. I presented a cultural phenomenon, and out of his own belief system this reviewer conflated the phenomenon with my presentation of it. You can argue against an interpretation, as he does against mine, but not a phenomenon.

TheoFantastique: Victoria, thank you again for this discussion and your book. I hope it gains a wide readership and lots of discussion.

Zombie Documentary Airs on the Discovery Channel

Last night a new “documentary” aired on the Discovery channel titled Zombie Apocalypse. For several years now apocalyptic dread has been in the cultural air, and this week the Mayan calendar has been a major focus of this in 2012 that has included various television treatments, but zombie apocalyptic variants are not far behind. Recently several media outlets reported that gun sales have risen, not only in connection with angst surrounding the recent school shooting, but also in keeping with doomsday preparations, including concern over a possible zombie apocalypse. Discovery’s documentary includes many people who share this fear, and while the program may be understood as more of a pseudo-documentary where tongue is set in cheek as questionable or highly theoretical subject matter is treated as a real possibility, it is also indicative of fact-fiction reversals, and that the line between fictional monsters and the real world is close to being erased. Earlier this year a handful of independent attacks by individuals that involved biting and consuming parts of victims was scooped up by the media which quickly involved speculation as to whether these were the beginnings of zombie attacks. This was apparently taken seriously enough that the Center for Disease Control responded in an attempt to calm public fears. This phenomenon is featured in the Discovery channel’s recent program, and it provides yet another example of the power of zombies in expressing our deepest fears, which threatens to move from the imaginative and metaphorical to the real world in which we live.

Review of The Theology of Battlestar Galactica at Colloquium

My review of Kevin Wetmore’s The Theology of Battlestar Galactica: American Christianity in the 2004-2009 Television Series (McFarland, 2012) has been accepted for publication in Colloquium: The Australian and New Zealand Theological Review. The review will be published in issue 45, no. 2 in November 2013. A copy is available on my Academia.edu page. Here is an excerpt:

Battlestar Galactica incorporated a number of religious and theological elements. In his analysis, Wetmore devotes the first section of his work to summarizing and systematizing the theologies of the primary groups in the series: the humans; the Cylons, mechanized beings that look human; and “the Baltar cult” (17), a sect that arose around one of the major figures in the series. Wetmore is ambitious in this endeavor, in that he has sifted through several seasons worth of television, incorporating a methodology that is “hermeneutical and analytical and correlation[al]” (18), in order to discern the various expressions of beliefs, rituals, and other practices. Wetmore recognizes that these are “invented theologies” (18), but they are nevertheless helpful as they are considered in contrast with religious and theological constructs outside this fictional universe.

Kirk Hammett on the Inspiration of the Horrific

Kirk Hammett has a new video out promoting his book Too Much Horror Business. Not only does the viewer get a look at some of Hammett’s pieces in his collection, but the commentary associated with it is of interest. Along the way Hammett notes the influence of Bob Wilkins, the Bay Area horror host of Creature Features, and Hammett also shares his feelings of being on the margins of society growing up, and of his collection providing a sense of nostalgia, energy and inspiration. I resonate with Hammett’s feelings that also echo those of others in fan or geek cultures related to the fantastic.

Related posts:

Geek Wisdom: The Sacred Teachings of Nerd Culture

Fan Culture Exploration – MTV’s True Life: “I’m a Fanboy”

GE Commercial, Robots, and the End of the World

General Electric has a new commercial that taps into both the apocalyptic angst related to a possible robot uprising, as well as the alleged Mayan calendar prophecy of doom, both of which have been in the news lately. An article on this on North Illinois University NIU Today website described the background behind the commerical:

The advertisement, created by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris (the husband/wife team behind “Little Miss Sunshine”), depicts many of the iconic robots of science fiction traveling across great distances to gather before some brightly lit airplane hanger for what we are told is the unveiling of some new kind of machines – “brilliant machines,” as GE describes it. And as we see Robby the Robot from “Forbidden Planet,” KITT the robotic automobile from “Knight Rider” and Lt. Commander Data of Star Trek making their way to this meeting of artificial minds, we are told, by an ominous voice over, that “the robots are on the move.”

Although it doesn’t look like your typical robot apocalypse (e.g. “Terminator” or “Battlestar Galactica”), GE’s vision is an “end of the world” scenario. But what is ending is not the world per se but our deep-seated assumptions about the place and function of technology in our world.

Enjoy the video, and note how many of the robots you remember from pop culture.

The Walking Dead Season 3: Social and Cultural Reflections

Last night AMC aired the mid-season finale for The Walking Dead until the series resumes in February of 2013. In light of the break I thought I’d share some reflections that came to mind as a result of the last few episodes.

One of the interesting plot elements that connect The Walking Dead to previous explorations of the zombie in film is the character in Woodbury who is conducting experiments on the walkers/biters. This is reminiscent of Romero’s Day of the Dead (1985) where a small group of military and scientific personnel hide underground and experiments are conducted on the zombies in an effort, perhaps, to train them not to be cannibalistic. In The Walking Dead the viewer isn’t quite sure what the intent of the experiments are, but they suggest that there is a hope that aspects of the “pre-walker” personality remains after “resurrection” and can be tapped into. This is evident in the experiment with Mr. Coleman who is dying of prostate cancer, and who volunteers for a simple experiment where a routine is established connected to a sound, music, and responses to a series of simple questions that are learned before death, and then repeated after death and reanimation so as to hopefully connect with the pre-zombie personality. It is likely that the Governor’s emotional connection to this daughter who is a walker is the driving force behind these experiments. Even so, the experiment fails as Mr. Coleman shows no signs of his prior personality and is quickly dispatched by Andrea. This aspect of the zombie narrative also picks up an element that goes back to the first episode of the series in Season One where a walker returned continually to her prior home in life and looked at the door as if she had some lingering memory of connection there. This ongoing narrative thread not only makes for an interesting storyline, it also makes it more problematic for those in the series. It is one thing to kill reanimated rotting cannibals with no mental connection to their previous selves, but if vestiges of their former selves remain after reanimation then it presents new ethical considerations for the survivors. In addition, one can connect the dots to our conversations and debates about self and personhood and ethics in connection with those with diseases and disorders of the brain.

The city of Woodbury also presents other areas for reflection. I find the name of the new town of interest in that it is similar and dissimilar to Mayberry from the popular comedy television series The Andy Griffith Show. In that program an idealized small town of the South was presented, and Woodbury has some similarities in that it represents an idealized town that attempts to shield its citizens from the realities outside the artificial construct. But Woodbury is very dissimilar in that it is a municipality that does not have a benign sheriff as its leader, but instead, a manipulative and abusive, self-appointed, dictatorial “Governor.”

In this context the program also raises the issue of gender roles. Last season Andrea worked to establish herself as an individual who transgressed gender role expectations. On the farm women did the cooking, cleaning and other work related to female gender roles in past decades, but Andrea rebelled at that and was actively involved in roles occupied by male characters. Now in Woodbury, Andrea has attempted to occupy the same redefined gender role, but has met resistance, including from her new romantic interest in the Governor, who prefers that she assume a more traditional gender role and not be as vocal as the males in the group.

In a final observation, the mid-season finale also saw the use of loaded terminology that connects to one of our pressing national debates. As Rick’s small group attempted a rescue of two of its members, and violence ensued, the Governor, in a speech to Woodbury citizens, was quick to label this as a terrorist action and those responsible as terrorists. The use of this terminology was calculated on his part, as it attempts to categorize the offenders as violent outsiders (including one who was previously an insider) with no legitimate claims in relation to the citizens of Woodbury, who can be easily dismissed and even executed as a threat to the Woodbury “way of life.” This, of course, echoes much of the American rhetoric of the War on Terror. In one of the behind the scenes videos on the AMC website, one of the production crew comments on this episode and states that from the perspective of the citizens of Woodbury, Rick and his group are terrorists, reminding us of the subjective and point of view aspect of labels and relationships. One group’s freedom fighters or rescue party is another group’s terrorists.

The Walking Dead continues to do well in the ratings, and this may be understood as relating to its gripping storytelling. Viewers are also fortunate that this series incorporates elements that related to some of our most pressing social and cultural issues for those who want to find and reflect on them.

Science Fiction and the Bible Workshop

From the European Association of Biblical Studies, an announcement and call for papers on science fiction and the Bible. Thanks to James McGrath of Exploring Our Matrix for making me aware of this.

This workshop invites papers which engage with the possibilities of discussing the Bible informed by Science Fiction (SF). Proposals for papers are invited that apply knowledge from SF (specific works, tropes or SF theory) to consider whether new insights can be derived from applying concepts of SF to biblical concepts or passages, thereby possibly uncovering avenues of inquiry that have not been thought of before.

Themes could include but are by no means limited to: visions of future architecture or future modes of being, encounters with self and other, extraordinary physiology, biology or geography, extraordinary modes of travel, extraordinary spaces and locations, accounts of transformations etc.

Using the concept of SF is a multidisciplinary approach. SF can be used to investigate a number of literary, sociological, theological and ethical issues pertaining to cultural artefacts by putting SF or SF theory and the artefact into a hypothetical dialogue. Critical self-reflection is necessary to constructively deal with the obvious anachronism of using SF and SF theory to discuss the Bible.

Visions of future(s), alternative pasts and presents are an important aspect of SF. These visions are often utopian or dystopian, and are thought to be extrapolated from a so-called “zero world”, the cultural environment of the author. In SF, what is realistically possible can be manipulated to draw attention to fundamental philosophical questions, e.g. of what it means to be human or what it means to belong to a certain community. As such it can potentially offer an insight into ethical conundrums encountered by the authoring culture.

This workshop is open for free proposals.

Submit papers here.

The Teeming Brain Podcast #1: “Cosmic Horror vs. Sacred Terror”

I was privileged to be a part of a good group in a podcast discussion at The Teeming Brain through an invitation from my good friend and colleague Matt Cardin that addressed “Cosmic Horror vs. Sacred Terror.” Following is their description of the subject matter:

Do nihilism and cosmic meaningfulness stand in fundamental tension with each other at the heart of the horror genre? Were Lovecraft and Machen getting at fundamentally different moral, aesthetic, and metaphysical points with their respective horror stories? Does the (possible) tension between Lovecraftian cosmic horror and Machenian sacred terror constitute a fault line running right through the center of the horror genre and impacting its literature and cinema today?

These are the questions driving this first-ever Teeming Brain podcast, which has been, if you count back to the blog’s original launch, six years in the making. More immediately, it was recorded between November 20 and 28, 2012. Its origin can be found in three items: first, an article titled “Meaning to the Madness” — about Lovecraft, Machen, and the moral and philosophical ideas playing out in the current horror movie scene — written by Christian horror novelist Jonathan Ryan and published in Christianity Today; second, a response to and rebuttal of Ryan’s argument by Teeming Brain founder Matt Cardin in “Cosmic Horror, Sacred Terror, and the Nightside Transformation of Consciousness”; and third, the vigorous conversation that grew up around that response both here and at Thomas Ligotti Online. There is also, fourth, John Morehead’s suggestion that this could all be turned into a stimulating podcast.

Participants:

This debut episode presents a roundtable featuring eight authors and thinkers in the areas of horror, philosophy, and religion, all of whom engage the questions described above plus a whole lot more.

• Peter Bebergal, a graduate of Harvard Divinity School and author of the widely praised memoir Too Much to Dream: A Psychedelic American Boyhood.
• Matt Cardin (host), founder and editor of The Teeming Brain and author of Dark Awakenings, Divinations of the Deep, and the forthcoming To Rouse Leviathan.
• Nicole Cushing, author of the forthcoming horror novella Children of No One and the trippy bizarro fiction collection How to Eat Fried Furries.
• Richard Gavin, author of the numinous horror collections At Fear’s Altar and The Darkly Splendid Realm and the Teeming Brain column Echoes from Hades.
• T. E. Grau, fiction editor at Strange Aeons, author of the Teeming Brain column The Extinction Papers, and co-author (with his wife, author/editor/screenwriter Ives Hovenessian) of the forthcoming horror fiction collection I Am Death, Cried the Vulture.
• John W. Morehead, Director of the Western Institute for Intercultural Studies, creator of the blog Theofantastique (“A meeting place for myth, imagination, and mystery in pop culture”), and co-editor of The Undead and Theology.
• M. Scott Poole, Associate Professor of History at the College of Charleston and author of Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting.
• Jonathan Ryan, author of “Meaning to the Madness,” the highly praised supernatural/spiritual horror novel The Faithful (as Jonathan Weyer), and the forthcoming urban fantasy novel 3 Gates of the Dead.

Click here to listen to the podcast “Cosmic Horror vs. Sacred Terror.”

Men in Suits: An Interview with Frank Woodward

Computer-generated imagery and motion-capture are all the rage in special effects today, but actors in monster suits can still be found as well. They tap into a form of special effects work, as well as an art form, that goes back for decades in cinema.

Frank Woodward and the team at Wyrd Films have produced a documentary that explores this subject in MEN IN SUITS. Below is our interview on this topic.

TheoFantastique: Frank, thanks for coming back here to discuss your latest film. Readers may remember your documentary on Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown. How did the original concept arise in terms of focusing on those unsung heroes of genre films, actors in suits?

Frank Woodward: I think it helped that I was already a monster fan. I knew the names Tom Woodruff, Jr., Bob Burns, Nakajima, Brian Steele, Doug Jones. They were talented actors in my mind and it was always vexing that most people didn’t know who they were. Godzilla, Predator and the Gill Man are icons of cinema yet, unlike James Bond or Indiana Jones, most people can’t tell you who played these characters.

When I started brainstorming about our next documentary with fellow Wyrd producers Jim Myers and Bill Janczewski, the first thing we came up with was a history of make-up. That was immediately seen as too broad and something that had been done to death. We focused on guys in suits because we couldn’t think of any film that explored that topic in depth.

What really convinced us though was when Bill told his wife Stacy about the idea. “We’re thinking about doing a documentary about guys who wear creature suits.” Her response was, “That’s a job?” It was no question after that.

And MEN IN SUITS is made for more than fanboys already in the know. We made the film to show that it’s not only a job…it’s an art.

TheoFantastique: You assembled quite a cast of interview subjects for this documentary. I would assume this is a tight knit group of people who were excited about the opportunity to talk about their work. Is this the case?

Frank Woodward: Most of these guys are familiar with each other for sure. In some cases like Doug Jones and Brian Steele they’ve worked together on a few films. All of them seemed happy to be part of a documentary that finally acknowledged the work they put into their roles.

The term “suit performer” which is often used to describe what these people do really sells them short. It makes them anonymous more than any gorilla head does. These people are actors and have put in that level of training. I hope SUITS can show this to people.

TheoFantastique: Your film begins with a historical perspective, looking at some of the early “men in suits,” from robots and aliens to gorillas and other apes. Who were some of the early pioneers in this form synthesis of special effects and character acting?

Frank Woodward: Animal roles like apes and bears were among the first guys in suits Hollywood required. We’re talking back in the 1930s. Gorilla men like Charlie Gemora and Janos Prohaska really brought something to their roles. It wasn’t just a P.A. in a furry suit.

In the case of Charlie, he played monster gorillas and comedic ones. Those genres require different timing and it takes an actor to make that work. Charlie Gemora held his own opposite Lon Chaney, Bela Lugosi, Lou Costello and The Marx Brothers. That shows a wide range.
And many Gorilla Men like Charlie and Ray “Crash” Corrigan went on to play aliens and such. Charlie was the Martian in THE WAR OF THE WORLDS. “Crash” was the alien in IT! THE TERROR FROM BEYOND SPACE.

TheoFantastique: I was pleased to see The Creature from the Black Lagoon recognized as providing special legitimacy to this craft. How did that film contribute to this unique form of work?

Frank Woodward: As Bob Burns says in the documentary, “The Creature changed things.” In this case it started with the suit. The Gill Man designed by Millicent Patrick is simply elegant. It was also above and beyond the average monster of the 1950s which were often made on a shoe-string.

What also made the Gill Man stand out were the two actors portraying him: Ben Chapman and Ricou Browning. Chapman played the creature on land, Browning in the water. In the case of Browning, he had a unique swimming style that gave the Gill Man that extra something. It made him seem alien. An extra layer hiding the human inside.

You take all of these factors and put them in a solid movie with more than the usual B-movie budget behind it…you get a classic!

TheoFantastique: I also enjoyed the international dimension of your film which included a look at Haruo Nakajima with his work on Godzilla and Ultraman. How did Japanese genre film make a unique contribution to this work?

Frank Woodward: Well, you can’t talk about guys in suits without mentioning Godzilla. The Japanese made kaiju films a cornerstone of their film industry. Godzilla also had international appeal and I think that was due to a very distinct character that evolved throughout the films. Like King Kong, Godzilla wasn’t a mindless beast.

I mention King Kong because that was the inspiration for special effects wizard Eiji Tsuburaya (who designed the suits and directed all the creature scenes for Toho’s kaiju films until the 1970s) and actor Haruo Nakajima. Tsuburaya and Nakajima watched KING KONG before shooting GODZILLA. I think you can see the influence.

In the end, though, I think the greatest contribution made by kaiju films is that they’re just so damn fun! One of the first movies I ever saw was GODZILLA vs. THE SMOG MONSTER so I was imprinted early on.

TheoFantastique: At one point in the film there is an acknowledgment of the fear that CGI would destroy suit work just as it largely did stop-motion animation. How have things changed in the industry after a short dry spell for suit actors?

Frank Woodward: I think we’re seeing a mixture of digital and practical more than we did in the honeymoon days of CGI. We’re seeing digital expand and enhance the practical like the Faun’s legs in PAN’S LABYRINTH.

The problem with CGI comes when you overuse it. Magicians say that you should never do the same trick one after the other because eventually the audience will be able to see the trick. This tends to be the problem with films that only do CGI effects. We get wise to it. It’s why films like THE LORD OF THE RINGS succeed so well. They mix miniatures and forced perspective with CG. Practical creatures with motion capture ones.

The biggest problem with CGI as I see it is that producers still think it’s a cheaper solution than doing it practical. Why have a whole crew waiting for the animatronic head to work right when you can give it to one guy at a computer? The thing is that to get motion picture level CGI takes just as much time and in many cases just as much money It’s a wash.

The other thing about CGI vs. practical is you don’t get anything for free. Every turn of the head or twitch of the finger requires someone to animate that in the CG world. An actual actor on set with a symphony of actions and behavior can give you life-like moments for free.

Even Mo-Cap isn’t a guarantee of a full performance. It’s rarely one to one. Animators always have to fill in the blanks that weren’t captured. No offense to Andy Serkis because he brings such a rich foundation to all his roles, but Gollum was also created by a host of animators.

This is true of practical creatures, too. It takes an actor like Brian Steele and a team of puppeteers to realize a character like Mr. Wink in HELLBOY II. It’s just that the current fascination with mo-cap seems to say that actors in leotards with shiny balls can do it all. That’s simply not true.

What’s worse is that some producers and studio heads are actually buying their own hype. Look at a film like RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES. Not a practical ape in there as far as I know. And we’ve been doing realistic gorillas for decades now.

TheoFantastique: As you said earlier, many except for the most devoted fans would not recognize these actors because their faces are hidden in layers of rubber and mechanics. Was your film an attempt to bring some much needed attention and respect to these actors?

Frank Woodward: Definitely. These are deeply talented actors and they deserve all the respect and honors their fellow actors receive. Like I said before… it’s a shame that someone can tell me Sean Connery played James Bond, but hardly anyone can tell me Haruo Nakajima played Godzilla. And I think the big green guy has appeared in more films than Bond.

TheoFantastique: What was your favorite moment in the making of this film?

Frank Woodward: Meeting a lot of my heroes. Realizing how generous and delightful they are. This monster kid got to make a movie about monsters and the folks who played them. How cool is that?

There was also that time that Godzilla gave me a big bear hug. Mr. Nakajima is over 80 and he nearly broke some ribs. That will stay with me forever.

TheoFantastique: Frank, thanks again for a great film, and for this interview.

MEN IN SUITS can be purchased in the TheoFantastique Store.

Related post:

“Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown Documentary – Director Frank Woodward Interview”

King Kong as Epic Musical Theatre

King Kong is now being transformed into an immersive stage performance via puppetry and robotics. The preview performance is scheduled for May 2013 at the Regency Theatre in Melbourne, Australia. Visit the website for additional videos. I hope it becomes an international touring event.