Apocalyptic thinking seems to be the order of the day lately. As Max Brooks, author of various zombie survival guides has said, “People have apocalypse on the brain right now…. It’s from terrorism, the war, [and] natural disasters like Katrina.” The nation with perhaps the greatest sense of apocalypse is Japan. The devastation wrought in World War II by two American nuclear bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki seared the national conscience in such a way as to shape the country’s daily life in post-apocalyptic terms. This is clearly evident in Japanese popular culture in things like anime.
Susan J. Napier addresses this topic in her fine book Anime from Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle: Experiencing Contemporary Japanese Animation, updated edition (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) in a chapter titled “Waiting for the End of the World: Apocalyptic Identity.” Napier opens this chapter with a discussion of the significance of Japan’s devastating experiences in shaping apocalyptic thought as expressed in anime:
Princess Mononoke’s vision of natural disaster is a distinctive one, but its emphasis on apocalypse is certainly not unique in Japanese animation. Indeed, perhaps one of the most striking features of anime is its fascination with the theme of apocalypse. From Akira‘s unforgettable vision of the mammoth black crater that was once Tokyo to Neo Genesis Evangelion‘s bleak rendering of social and psychological disintegration, images of mass destruction suffuse contemporary anime. While some, such as Princess Mononoke, hold out a promise of potential betterment alongside their vision of collapse, many others tend to dwell on destruction and loss. Destructive or hopeful, these anime seem to strike a responsive chord in the Japanese audience. In fact, it might be suggested that the apocalyptic mode, often combined with the elegiac, or even the festival, is not simply a major part of anime but is also deeply ingrained within contemporary Japanese identity.
Napier goes on to mention the aspect of Japan’s experience that has contributed to this, including the atomic bomb, a ten year recession, followed by great economic growth. These factors, she suggests, have led to an “apocalyptic identity” that she feels is embraced by its citizens.
Japanese popular culture has wrestled with this apocalyptic identity and post-apocalyptic cultural development in various ways. In decades past it was the creature Godzilla who rose from the sea to wreak havoc as a result of the effects of radiation. More recently it has been anime that has served as a major vehicle for conveying apocalyptic identity. Sadly, this island nation has recently experienced a great natural disaster through earthquakes and tsunamis. This too has resulted in the threat of nuclear disaster as several of Japan’s reactors experience at least partial meltdown. Japan has many years of experience in living with a sense of apocalyptic identity and in carving out a nation in a post-apocalyptic world. Here’s to hoping that this latest incident will stabilize even as these events surely reinforce apocalyptic thinking, and may lead to the development of future Japanese monstrosity in popular culture.
Could we ever possibly see a “terminator” type scenario with robots turning on their human creators?
You can’t write a book about robots and war, including even one that is actually a serious non-fiction book that is now on the recommended reading list for the US Navy and US Air Force, without wrestling with that question. The second to last chapter actually explores whether this is something to take seriously or not and what would be the actual preconditions for it to happen. Not to give it away, but the Terminator is less a risk than the Matrix. That is, not so much a worry of Keanu Reeves in leather pants, but us waking up to find ourselves in a world run by machines that we barely understand. Indeed, given everything from the use of over 7,000 drones in our military to the “flash crash” that hit the stock market last year (caused by AI malfunctions) to my reliance on an iPhone that I couldn’t even begin to tell you how it works, we may already be enmeshed in a matrix of technology of our own making.
Today I ran across a book at Barnes & Noble that caused me to connect a few dots and pose a question to myself which I’d like to share with my readers. Please follow along as I draw the dots and put them together.
As I looked at the various tables of books in the front of the store for new material one caught my eye. It was titled The Spiritual Doorway in the Brain: A Neurologist’s Search for the God Experience (Dutton-Penguin Group, 2010) by Dr. Kevin Nelson. Nelson is Professor in the Department of Neurology, University of Kentucky Assignments. Since the intersection of neuroscience and religion are of interest to me the book was intriguing. To understand what Dr. Nelson argues in the book, consider its synopsis:
The world’s leading neurologist on out-of-body and near-death experiences shows that spirituality is as much a part of our basic biological makeup as our sex drive or survival instinct.
If Buddha had been in an MRI machine and not under the Bodhi tree when he attained enlightenment, what would we have seen on the monitor?
Dr. Kevin Nelson offers an answer to that question that is beyond what any scientist has previously encountered on the borderlands of consciousness. In his cutting-edge research, Nelson has discovered that spiritual experiences take place in one of the most primitive areas of the brain. In this eloquent, inspired, and reverent book, he relates the moving stories of patients and research subjects, brain scan analysis, evolutionary biology, and beautiful examples of transcendence from literature to reveal the machinery in our heads that enables us to perceive miracles-whether you are an atheist, Buddhist, or the most devout Catholic. The patients and people Nelson discuss have had an extremely diverse set of spiritual experiences, from arguing with the devil sitting at the foot of their hospital bed to seeing the universe synchronize around the bouncing of the ball in a pinball machine. However, the bizarre experiences don’t make the people seem like freaks; they seem strangely very much like us, in surprising ways. Ultimately Nelson makes clear that spiritual experiences are not the exception in human life, but rather an inescapable and precious part of every one of us.
Rather than engaging in materialist reductionism that sees all spiritual experiences as limited to internal brain experiences with no possible connection to transcendence, Dr. Nelson allows for the possibility that spiritual experiences connected to the hard-wiring of our brain are real and significant. This is the first dot in my thinking.
Next, recall that a basic part of zombie narratives is the idea that something, whether radiation, a contagion, or some unknown element, somehow reanimates the dead by activating the most basic parts of the brain, bringing the dead back to a state of “undeadness.” In this reanimated form the zombie acts through sheer instinct due to the more primitive functions of the brain being activated rather than those parts which produce higher brain functions. So the various expressions of the zombie narrative rely upon basic brain reactivation as an essential element of the zombie icon. This is the second dot.
Third, I’ve written previously on the connection between neuroscience and theology, and have connected this to aspects of popular culture, specifically zombie theology. Of course, I’m not the first or only one to connect zombies and theology or other religious considerations, but the two have come together previously. This is the next dot.
Bringing these together as we connect the dots, I wonder that if in the zombie narrative something activates parts of the brain, and if, as Dr. Nelson argues, “spiritual experiences take place in one of the most primitive areas of the brain,” and “spirituality is as much a part of our basic biological makeup as our sex drive or survival instinct,” then would it be possible for zombies to be spiritual? We have seen a development in zombie mythology that includes a crude social order as in Land of the Dead and I Am Legend, (although in the latter they are not technically zombies as defined in Romero’s universe), as well as romance in Fido and Zombie Honeymoon (and the forthcoming Warm Bodies). Will we ever see filmmakers build on this and explore zombie spirituality? It’s probably a long shot. But until such time, the Hare Krishna zombie in Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978) may be as close as we get.
This stylistically self-conscious contemporary story of an American teenage murderer, who may actually be a vampire or may only believe or fantasize that he is one, complicates – “re-vamps,” to use Romero’s word – not only our assumptions about the undead but also about the living. In Martin the vampire hunter is a monomaniacal, dictatorial, egotistical old man, who is obsessed with preserving the rigid and seemingly absurd conventions he has inherited from the “Old Country” and with simplifying all ambiguity and complexity he encounters in the New World. By pounding a stake into the boy’s heart, the old man attempts to force life to confirm to his expectations…. The death of the teenager does not regenerate the economically depressed, deadeningly ugly modern world or restore its broken families or rebuild its decaying churches.
I think there is much to commend this quote, not only to its application to Martin and the social context of the film and 1970s America in which it was embedded, but also to our time. Martin is presented as a “vampire” film, as the poster accompanying this post indicates, for an “age of disbelief.” It was also a time very similar to our own in terms of the oppressive effects of a recession, unrest in the Middle East, high gas prices, and America struggling at home and abroad. In response Waller suggests that Martin features a vampire hunter who seeks to destroy someone not only for their personal crimes, but also for what he represents in a desire for a return to the old ways of familiarity.
I wonder if we aren’t doing the same thing in our time. Is it possible that we act as monster hunters, identifying various creatures that function as scapegoats in our quest for returning our times of social upheaval to the more familiar ways of the Old Country? They may be self-identified vampires, members of unpopular religious groups, or even fallen soldiers which some protest as alleged evidence of God’s displeasure with America and homosexuality. But like the failure of the old man in Martin, it is highly unlikely that identifying, hunting, and slaying such monsters in our world will “regenerate the economically depressed, deadeningly ugly modern world or restore its broken families or rebuild its decaying churches.”
Lovecraft’s horror stories have become not just a literary cult like many others, but a tangible cult of the occult. The Cthulhu Mythos of the Old Gods with Unspeakable names are evoked and worshipped, and respected practitioners of the esoteric use the symbolism and mythos as the basis of a magical system. This essay examines some of the individuals, orders and doctrines of the adherents of the Cthulhu Mythos.
Surveys indicate that two-thirds of Americans have experienced or believe in various paranormal phenomena. This is evident in the fact that not only do channels like SyFy and the History Channel include documentaries or pseudo-documentaries on the paranormal, but now so does the National Geographic Channel. This will be the case with a new program Beast Hunter hosted by “Pat Spain, a biologist and explorer who travels the globe in search of mythical creatures, immersing himself amongst the tribes, people and cultures on his quest to find the truth between fact and fiction.” The search for various creatures in the program’s episodes include “Man Ape of Sumatra,” “Nightmare of the Amazon,” “Mongolian Death Worm,” “Sea Serpent of the North,” and “Swamp Monster of the Congo.”
The program premieres Friday, March 4 with “Man Ape of Sumatra”:
In the vast jungles of mystical Sumatra, locals have reported seeing a creature that looks something like an ape, yet it walks just like us. They’ve named it “Orang Pendek” – the little man of the forest. A recent scientific discovery proposes that another species of humans – nicknamed ‘hobbits’ – did once live in Indonesia. So could there be a new great ape waiting to be discovered? Or is it possible we’re not the only human species living on earth? Biologist and beast hunter Pat Spain investigates.
See the Beast Hunter website at the National Geographic for more information including photos and video clips from the series. Check your local television listings for broadcast times.
In my research on the paranormal I was fortunate to come across the work of Jeffrey J. Kripal. Kripal is the J. Newton Rayzor Professor in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University. He is the author of a number of books, which are mentioned below, including Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (The University of Chicago Press, 2010) with an examination of key contributors to the development of the paranormal and popular culture. I am pleased to discuss this topic with Jeff below.
TheoFantastique: Jeff, thanks for your willingness to discuss your book and its subject matter here. To begin, the paranormal is not recognized as a legitimate subject matter in the academy, including your discipline in religious studies. In fact, many times scholars shy away from expressing an interest in, let alone exploring the paranormal. What is your personal interest in this, and why do you find this a a legitimate topic for religion scholars?
Jeffrey Kripal: Long story. But I’ll try to keep it short. I came to the subject very late, that is, within the last few years. I was trained as a historian of religions, with a special focus on mystical literature in both India and the West. My fourth book, Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion (University of Chicago Press, 2007), was on the human potential movement of California. This project put me in direct contact with many modern-day mystics and some fascinating scientists, philosophers, and historians who were writing about topics that I had never considered: psychical research and UFOs, for example. I realized two things fairly quickly: (1) such phenomena are real in the simple sense that they happen and cannot be explained away in every instance as fraudulent, misperception, etc.; and (2) that I had no real way of thinking about these things, and this despite the fact that both are loaded with religious implications (particularly around the nature of mind, consciousness, or what was traditionally called the “soul”). So I set out to try to trace the histories of “the psychical” and “the paranormal” and see where I might locate myself and my field in these histories. It turns out that the terms originated in elite academic contexts (Cambridge, Harvard, and Duke, mostly), but that they were later disciplined and repressed for a variety of (mostly bad) reasons. It must also be said that I underwent a spontaneous mind-blowing paranormal experience in Calcutta in 1989, and that was always in the back of my mind (or in the front of it) too. I wrote about this experience in my second book (Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom [University of Chicago Press, 2001]) and begin with it again in my next book (Mutants and Mystics [University of Chicago Press, forthcoming]).
TheoFantastique: In your book you refer to the “esoteric currents of American popular culture”. Can you share some examples of this for those to whom such currents might not be readily visible?
Jeffrey Kripal: By this phrase, I mean to point to such things as the way, say, metaphysical energies (or “radiation”) function in the creation of superheroes (think Spider-Man or the Incredible Hulk); or the way, say, the alien functions as a quasi-religious or transcendent figure in the Superman mythos (Superman is basically a crashed alien) or in the classic alien abduction experience; or the way, say, the motif of “mutation” or spiritual evolution enters a mythology like the X-Men or, for that matter again, Superman, that “Man of Tomorrow.” These are scientific-sounding motifs that are in actual fact deeply indebted to earlier esoteric and mystical notions of metamorphosis, magical powers, spiritual flight, transcendence, and so on.
TheoFantastique: How do you define the paranormal in your book, and how do you see this related to the concept of the sacred as Rudolf Otto referred to it?
Jeffrey Kripal: I define the paranormal as an event or experience in which the assumed division between the subjective or mental and objective or material dimensions of reality breaks down; or, a little differently, when reality begins to behave not in a causal, but in a meaningful or metaphorical way—as if one were caught in a story or movie. Put differently again, I mean an experience in which consciousness appears to manifest itself in the physical world. Think mind-over-matter. I also employ the category of the sacred, which does not mean “the good,” but the sacred as an awesome power encountered in the world that is at once terrifying and beautiful, alluring and dangerous. Hence the paranormal can appear in both positive or negative forms and elicit either fascination or fear, holiness or horror. Or, more likely, both.
TheoFantastique: I’ve seen some discussion in print and on the Internet trying to define science fiction in differentiation from fantasy. The logic seems to go that sci-fi tries to paint scientific worlds of possibility. But it’s interesting to me that many times sci-fi includes elements that appear scientific, such as matter teleportation for example, which is portrayed scientically, but which really appears to be magical or esoteric. Is science fiction at times used to portray the esoteric in ways that makes Western rationalists feel better about esoteric or magical experiences?
Jeffrey Kripal: Great question! This is basically my answer in Mutants and Mystics, where I show how modern science is taken up as a mystical code and used toward paranormal ends within popular culture. So cosmology feeds into the alien and the UFO, physics feeds into the whole language of “radiation” (itself deeply indebted to earlier movements like Mesmerism and Reich’s orgone), and evolutionary biology feeds into the meta-motif of mutation. The stories may look scientific, but they are not, not at least in any orthodox sense. What is really going on here, in my opinion, is the creation of a new mystical code, a mysticism of science, as it were. The situation is really complicated, though, since, if you look close enough, what you also find are scientists speculating along these very lines. So Carl Sagan seriously suggested a kind of ancient astronaut thesis. Francis Crick experimented with panspsermia. And Alan Rusell Wallace (the co-creator of evolutionary theory) was a committed Spiritualist and was convinced that there is a separate spiritual or moral line of evolution. And so on.
TheoFantastique: It has occurred to me recently that an interesting thing takes place in terms of paranormal experiences in contrast with what would seem to be similar types of experiences in more “mainstream” or traditional religions in the West. The former are considered fringe, whereas the latter has some credibility, at least among religious believers who frown on the former. Is this a case of privileging one type of religious experience due to its social location in culture?
Jeffrey Kripal: Yep. Hence the piece the New York Times did on my work last fall. “The Burning Bush They Will Buy, but not ESP or Alien Abductions.” This is my point. These paranormal events are often religious experiences, even if we do not recognize them as such. Why do we feel comfortable with weird stuff that allegedly happened a long, long time ago, but not the weird stuff that is happening, right now, in our backyards and, more likely, in our beds?
TheoFantastique: What do you mean in the title of your book in referencing certain individuals, specifically Frederic Myers, Charles Fort, Jacques Vallee, and Bertrand Méheust, as “authors of the impossible”?
Jeffrey Kripal: I mean to suggest that we, as social groups and cultures mostly, are authoring the feel and shape of reality; that the real behaves differently in different cultural frames; and that what we consider “impossible” at this particular point of space and time may not be impossible in another. I do not mean to suggest that anything goes, that we as individuals are omnipotent. Not at all. But I do mean to point to the incredible force and power of language, ideas, and culture, and the ways these actualize (or repress) basic human potentials.
TheoFantastique: Why did you select the individuals that you focused on in your book? What was it about their approach or subject matter that made them stand out for you?
Jeffrey Kripal: I chose these four authors of the impossible because I consider their books and thought especially sophisticated and nuanced. Most simply, they do not fall into the usual traps of either-or, but rather think along the lines of paradox and the both-and. This is my basic sense of the paranormal. It is a dead-end to approach it as either literally true or completely false. This is why fantasy and the paranormal are so close. The truth needs the trick to appear at all. The fact needs the fantasy.
TheoFantastique: With more scholars involved in the study of Western esotericism, as well as the fantastic in popular culture, do you see the possibility for the paranormal receiving greater positive academic treatment?
Jeffrey Kripal: Maybe. Not quite yet, though. I am not particularly optimistic here in the short run, but I am in the long run. That is why I write anyway. For the future.
TheoFantastique: I am interested in the idea of tech-gnosis, and science fiction as sacred text. Can you share a little about your next book in process that looks at the paranormal in popular culture through things like science fiction and comic books?
Jeffrey Kripal: My next book, Mutants and Mystics, looks very closely at a set of gifted pulp fiction, science fiction, superhero, and fantasy authors and artists and examines how their works were partly inspired by their own paranormal experiences. I look at authors and artists like Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, Ray Palmer, Jack Kirby, Otto Binder, Alvin Schwartz, Barry Windsor-Smith, and Philip K. Dick. I also examine the roles played here by mystical movements like Rosicrucianism, Theosophy, psychical research, and Charles Fort. I also examine what I call the mythology of science and its impact on all of these genres, particularly around the discoveries of cosmology, atomic energy, and evolutionary biology. Hence the alien and the motifs of radiation and mutation. The book attempts to pull all of this together into what I call the Super-Story, a grand set of “mythemes” that, or so I suggest, is taking shape right in front of our eyes, right now.
TheoFantastique: Jeff, thank you again for your time, and your book. I look forward to the next one on the paranormal and popular culture.
Jeffrey Kripal: John, thanks for having me. I’m a fan of what you are doing here. It’s a great site.
There aren’t a whole lot of reality shows that are of any interest to me. Our current fascination with pop culture voyeurism is troubling, particularly in regards to some of the reality shows (and their “stars”) that my teenagers find captivating.
One recently came to my attention that is worth watching for fans of the fantastic, made even more startling by the fact that it appears on the SyFy Channel, not a place known for the best genre programming. The program is called Face Off that pits makeup artists against one another in competition. As the program’s website describes it:
Face Off is a competition/elimination series exploring the world of special-effects make-up artists and the unlimited imagination that allows them to create amazing works of living art. The contestants are tasked with elaborate feature challenges including executing full body paint make up on models and creating their own horror villain. Not only will the show incorporate effects make-up, it will include a wide range of skill sets including prosthetics, 3-D design, sculpting, eye enhancers, casting and molding. Each episode involves incredible reveals of the competitors’ finished work, and the drama of one contestant being sent home by the panel of expert and celebrity judges. It all culminates in one winner and one grand prize that will launch a career.
To determine who emerges victorious, Syfy has signed three-time Academy Award winner Ve Neill (Pirates of the Caribbean, Edward Scissorhands) and Hollywood veterans Glenn Hetrick (Heroes, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The X-Files) and Patrick Tatopoulos (Underworld, Independence Day, Resident Evil: Extinction) as Face Off‘s judges.
The series premiered at the end of January and airs on Wednesday evenings. Now if only there were enough interest in such things to see a program with competition between CGI artists or stop-motion animators.
The Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts is soliciting book reviews for various titles and I recently received a list. Following are a few that caught my eye. If only I had more time and funds for my personal library of the fantastic.
The Scary Screen: Media Anxiety in The Ring, edited by Kristen Lacefield (Ashgate, 2010). In 1991, the publication of Koji Suzuki’s Ring, the first novel of a bestselling trilogy, inaugurated a tremendous outpouring of cultural production in Japan, Korea, and the United States. Just as the subject of the book is the deadly viral reproduction of a VHS tape, so, too, is the vast proliferation of text and cinematic productions suggestive of an airborne contagion with a life of its own. Analyzing the extraordinary trans-cultural popularity of the Ring phenomenon, The Scary Screen locates much of its power in the ways in which the books and films astutely graft contemporary cultural preoccupations onto the generic elements of the ghost story—in particular, the Japanese ghost story. At the same time, the contributors demonstrate, these cultural concerns are themselves underwritten by a range of anxieties triggered by the advent of new communications and media technologies, perhaps most significantly, the shift from analog to digital. Mimicking the phenomenon it seeks to understand, the collection’s power comes from its commitment to the full range of Ring-related output and its embrace of a wide variety of interpretive approaches, as the contributors chart the mutations of the Ring narrative from author to author, from medium to medium, and from Japan to Korea to the United States.
Spaceships and Politics: The Political Theory of Rod Serling, Leslie Dale Feldman (Lexington Books, 2010). Spaceships and Politics: The Political Theory of Rod Serling examines the political themes in The Twilight Zone. In this unique show, Rod Serling used fantasy and the supernatural to explore political ideas such as capital punishment, the individual and the state, war, conformity, the state of nature, prejudice, and alienation. He used aliens and machines to understand human nature. While the themes in The Twilight Zone often reflected political concerns of the time, like the Cold War and post-industrial technology, the messages had broader political implications. This book looks at Serling’s mechanistic view of the world and emphasis on fear through Hobbesian themes like diffidence and automata.
The Ring and the Cross: Christianity and the Lord of the Rings, edited by Paul E. Kerry (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2010). The conversations, sometimes heated, about the influence of Christianity on the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien has a long history. What has been lacking is a forum for civilized discussion about the topic, as well as a chronological and thematic overview of the major arguments that have engaged scholars about the impact of Christianity on Tolkien’s oeuvre, with particular reference to The Lord of the Rings. The Ring and the Cross addresses these needs through articulate and authoritative analyses of Tolkien’s Roman Catholicism and his use of Northern mythology and the role they play in understanding his writings. The volume’s contributors deftly explain the kinds of interpretations put forward and evidence marshaled when arguing for or against religious influence. The Ring and the Cross invites readers to draw their own conclusions about a subject that has fascinated Tolkien readers since the publication of his masterpiece, The Lord of the Rings.
Paranormal Media: Audiences, Spirits and Magic in Popular Culture, Annette Hill (Routledge, 2010). The paranormal has gone mainstream. Beliefs are on the rise, with almost half of the British population, and two thirds of Americans, claiming to believe in extra sensory perceptions and hauntings. Psychic magazines like Spirit and Destiny, television shows such as Fringe, Ghost Whisperer and Most Haunted, ghost-cams and e-poltergeists, bestselling books on mind, body and spirit, and magicians like Derren Brown have moved from the outer limits to the centre of popular culture, turning paranormal beliefs and scepticism into revenue streams. Paranormal Media offers a unique, timely exploration of the extraordinary, unexplained and supernatural in popular culture, looking in unusual places in order to understand this phenomenon. Early spirit forms such as magic lantern shows or the spirit photograph are re-imagined as a search for extraordinary experiences in reality TV, ghost tourism, and live shows. Through a popular cultural ethnography, and critical analysis in social and cultural theory, this ground-breaking book by Annette Hill presents an original and rigorous examination of people’s experiences of spirits and magic. In popular culture, people are players in an orchestral movement about what happens to us when we die. In a very real sense the audience is the show. This book is the story of audiences and their participation in a show about matters of life and death.
A History of Horror, Wheeler Winston Dixon (Rutgers University Press, 2010). Ever since horror leapt from popular fiction to the silver screen in the late 1890s, viewers have experienced fear and pleasure in exquisite combination. Wheeler Winston Dixon’s A History of Horror is the only book to offer a comprehensive survey of this ever-popular film genre.
Arranged by decades, with outliers and franchise films overlapping some years, this one-stop sourcebook unearths the historical origins of characters such as Dracula, Frankenstein, and the Wolfman and their various incarnations in film from the silent era to comedic sequels. A History of Horror explores how the horror film fits into the Hollywood studio system and how its enormous success in American and European culture expanded globally over time.
Dixon examines key periods in the horror film—in which the basic precepts of the genre were established, then burnished into conveniently reliable and malleable forms, and then, after collapsing into parody, rose again and again to create new levels of intensity and menace. A History of Horror, supported by rare stills from classic films, brings over fifty timeless horror films into frightfully clear focus, zooms in on today’s top horror Web sites, and champions the stars, directors, and subgenres that make the horror film so exciting and popular with contemporary audiences.
There have been several worthwhile news items since my last post on news of the fantastic. Below are some of the more notable items. Those interested in receiving these items as they become available can do so via my Twitter or Facebook posts.
Edgar Allan Poe House and Museum in Danger
Baltimore is where Poe is buried, the location of the “Poe Toaster,” and home to a museum that is located inside a rowhouse in which Poe used to live. But now, with the downward-spiraling economy, the Poe House and Museum is being threatened. Not by monsters or flocks of birds or ghosts, but by something far more insidious: budget cuts. For more than thirty years, the Poe House and Museum has been run by Baltimore’s Commission for Historical and Architectural Preservation. But nagging budgetary problems led the city to declare that the museum must become self-sufficient or be closed down. Read that last part again. CLOSED DOWN. Current projections state that the museum will cease operations at the beginning of 2012, if not sooner, unless the city of Baltimore changes its mind.
Walking Dead Gets 6 Saturn Nods
The Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror announced today the nominees for this year’s 37th annual Saturn Awards and one of the big winners is our favorite new AMC mini series The walking Dead. It got 6 nods in the Television category.
Director Behind Coraline Making Stop-Motion Horror Movie For Disney
It’s hard to imagine stop motion ever becoming the norm amongst non live action film releases, but the genre has seen almost unparalleled growth recently. Two separate 2009 films, Coraline and Fantastic Mr. Fox, dazzled audiences with their skewed takes on the animation game, and now Disney is getting into the act, hiring Henry Selick, the man behind Coraline and The Nightmare Before Christmas, to put something new together for the re-energized studio.
Walking Dead Season 2 Coming in July
The Walking Dead Season 2 was supposedly going to be arriving next October but it seems that AMC is preparing to unload the new season on us fans much sooner then we all expected. Emmy Award winning actor Bryan Cranston told New York Magazine ( via The Daily Blam ) that Walking Dead season 2 is coming in July, 3 months earlier then we all expected.
The 37th Annual Saturn Awards horror nominees
The Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films has announced the nominations for the 37th Annual Saturn Awards, and leading the way on the horror film front are LET ME IN, BLACK SWAN and SHUTTER ISLAND, among others.
The British Name Alien as the Scariest Movie Ever
The monster from Ridley Scott’s 1979 classic Alien has been voted the scariest monster ever in a poll of British movie goers released on 24 February 2011.
Oscars: Why doesn’t sci-fi win best picture?
When it comes to the Oscars, science fiction films are rarely rewarded outside the technical categories. So what chance does British director Chris Nolan’s nominated film Inception have of being named best picture this year?
From the ‘X-Files’ Dept: Harry Truman -“UFO’s not constructed by any power on Earth.”
Retired Army Col. John Alexander, 74-year-old former Green Beret A-Team commander and developer of weapons at Los Alamos, N.M., says UFO disclosure has already occurred, and that the ultimate solution to UFOs is more complex than most people think. Alexander quotes President Harry Truman: “I can assure you the flying saucers, given that they exist, are not constructed by any power on Earth.”
Kayakers snap photo of England’s version of the ‘Loch Ness Monster’
Nothing puts a damper on a serene afternoon’s kayaking like the sight of a primeval sea monster. That was the rude lesson for Tom Pickles and Sarah Harrington, who’d taken their watercraft out on the foggy waters of Lake Windermere, only to encounter what appeared to be “an enormous snake” swimming by. “It was petrifying and we paddled back to the shore straight away. At first I thought it was a dog and then saw it was much bigger and moving really quickly at about 10 mph,” the 24-year-old Pickles told The Telegraph. “Each hump was moving in a rippling motion and it was swimming fast. Its skin was like a seal’s but its shape was completely abnormal—it’s not like any animal I’ve ever seen before.”
Apocalyptic thinking seems to be the order of the day lately. As Max Brooks, author of various zombie survival guides has said, “People have apocalypse on the brain right now…. It’s from terrorism, the war, [and] natural disasters like Katrina.” The nation with perhaps the greatest sense of apocalypse is Japan. The devastation wrought in World War II by two American nuclear bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki seared the national conscience in such a way as to shape the country’s daily life in post-apocalyptic terms. This is clearly evident in Japanese popular culture in things like anime.
Japanese popular culture has wrestled with this apocalyptic identity and post-apocalyptic cultural development in various ways. In decades past it was the creature Godzilla who rose from the sea to wreak havoc as a result of the effects of radiation. More recently it has been anime that has served as a major vehicle for conveying apocalyptic identity. Sadly, this island nation has recently experienced a great natural disaster through earthquakes and tsunamis. This too has resulted in the threat of nuclear disaster as several of Japan’s reactors experience at least partial meltdown. Japan has many years of experience in living with a sense of apocalyptic identity and in carving out a nation in a post-apocalyptic world. Here’s to hoping that this latest incident will stabilize even as these events surely reinforce apocalyptic thinking, and may lead to the development of future Japanese monstrosity in popular culture.
