I have finished reading, and enjoying, The Philosophy of Horror, edited by Thomas Fahy (The University Press of Kentucky, 2010), and with this concluding post on the book I will comment on Paul Cantor’s chapter, “The Fall of the House of Ulmer: Europe vs. America in the Gothic Vision of The Black Cat“.
Cantor’s chapter was of great interest to me not only because it interacts with an often neglected Universal Studios horror film from the classic age, but also because Cantor brings a fascinating cultural and historical analysis to the subject matter. Cantor’s discussion focuses on the work of the director of The Black Cat, Edgar Ulmer. Ulmer was an immigrant to the U.S. from Europe who had experienced the darkness of World War I, and had also worked with German expressionist film directors. These experiences would come together to provide an interesting mix in The Black Cat.
For those who have not seen the film, it tells the story of an American couple in Europe on their honeymoon who end up in the home of Hjalmar Poelzig (Boris Karloff) after being rescued from a bus accident by Vitus Werdegast (Bela Lugosi). As it turns out their stay with Poelzig is anything but an accident as they get caught up in a plot for revenge by Werdegast who seeks justice for his sufferings under Poelzig in the past during the Great War. We come to learn that Poelzig has an even darker side in that he has stolen Werdergast’s wife (who is now deceased), has been married to his own daughter, keeps the preserved corpses of his wives below his home, and is the high priest of a Satanic cult. As the film ends Werdegast finds his justice by torturing Poelzig and eventually blowing up his home, and with it the Satanic cult.
Although many fans familiar with this film no doubt enjoy it on the surface level of a Universal horror film involving two of classic horror’s greatest stars, Cantor reveals in his discussion that Ulmer worked in greater levels of depth into the film that drew upon his experiences. This includes not only various Gothic archetypes such as the dark and brooding home, the living dead, and incest, but also commentary that pits European sophistication against American naïveté, even while offering critique of European darkness and optimism about America’s possibilities. In Cantor’s view, “[t]he genius of The Black Cat lies in the way it maps the Gothic psychodynamics of the family onto a political landscape.” Ulmer accomplishes this as a European immigrant to America who had seen the horrors of the cultural situation which resulted in World War I, thus including an interesting and somewhat contradictory set of elements into the story. This involves the depiction of the “innocent” American travelers from a “low culture” background who are contrasted with the more sophisticated, yet potentially dangerous Europeans from a “high culture” background. As Cantor describes the depictions of these characters, the Europeans
are deeply neurotic, obsessive-compulsive, and self-destructive, not to mention downright evil and even Satanic, while the Americans are free, open, good-natured, and optimistic. But at the same time the Europeans are simply more interesting than the Americans. The Europeans are intelligent, cultured, and artistic, while the Americans are bland, prosaic, and more than a little obtuse.
It is Cantor’s view that Ulmer, through the vehicle of a horror film, was trying to work through the medium of pop culture in order to “tell a deeply serious tale of European tragedy.” Indeed, Ulmer’s lingering concerns over Europe not only looked back with concerns over the “horrors of World War I and, as a result, bordering on the bring of madness, ready to plunge into a nihilistic abyss,” but also sounded a warning of cultural dynamics that made possible the great evils of World War II.
Fans of classic Universal horror, as well as students of culture and history, will find a great deal to reflect upon in Ulmer’s masterpiece of The Black Cat. As Cantor concludes:
Along with the other European émigrés who directed horror movies in the 1930s, [Ulmer] helped make the avant-garde cinematic techniques of the German expressionists part of the Hollywood mainstream. In the end Ulmer’s project in The Black Cat is internally contradictory — to create a very European movie to argue for the cultural independence of America. Fortunately for him and us, this self-defeating quest resulted in a horror movie masterpiece, an unusually thoughtful product of pop culture that philosophically reflects on the relationship of pop culture to high culture.
There is an interesting post that came to my attention today while checking my daily Google searches for topics related to the fantastic. The source for the post is in the WIRED blog “GeekDad.” The article is by Curtis Silver is titled “Is Being a Geek a Personality Trait or a Way of Life?”. In the piece Silver confesses that while he is a geek, his children do not share this status. Sadly, my own experience is similar, but with a few grandsons in the family, and possibly more in the future, I haven’t given up hope yet that I can create yet another family geek as it relates to the fantastic. Silver describes his early love for all things geeky in pop culture, and then moves to consideration of the source for such interests, whether this is the result of personality traits developed early in life or something else. After considering a couple of scientific and psychological studies which seem to indicate that childhood personality traits are locked in early in life, and then carried through into adulthood, Silver is not convinced that this best explains his geek obsessions. For him it’s something deeper:
You see, while being a geek may embody certain personality traits I don’t think it itself is a personality trait. I think it’s more of a way of life, or perhaps an encompassing state of being. There are plenty of environmental and social factors that can change how one perceives and interprets life. There are always paths for new interests, new roads into the convoluted and ADHD world of geekdom. So there is plenty of time for your budding geeklet to morph into his eventual place in the world of geek. There is also just as much time for that same geeklet to put the way of the geek behind him. No matter what, our support as parents will make them successful no matter which path they choose, no matter what piques their interests.
I am sympathetic to Silver’s perspective on this issue, but for me it’s a case of both/and rather than either/or. In my view, our exposure to certain things in childhood resonates with aspects of our personality, which is then carried over and adapts into adult life. When this is nurtured it becomes “a way of life” and “a state of being.” I throw the question to my readers. As a sci-fi/horror/fantasy geek, if you own such a moniker, is this a personality trait, a way of life, or both?
The American media has picked up on the British government’s decision to release hundreds of previously classified documents related to UFO sightings. (For a BBC News report see here.) The files are a part of the National Archives. The story includes a link to the web page for the archives which includes PDF files for the documents, as well as a sample of UFO historian Dr. David Clarke’s book The UFO Files, and an audio file where Clarke discusses the new material.
Beyond the phenomenon itself, another interesting facet of this story is the way in which both the US and UK media are reporting on the release of the files. Both refer to the materials as the “British X-Files,” and in the video clip below from UK television The X-Files theme can be heard at the beginning, and the closing scenes of Close Encounters of the Third Kind with the giant mothership is shown in the conclusion. Evidence, of course, of the impact and crossover between science fiction and paranormal television and film and real-world phenomena.
Video games have been an important part of pop culture for man years now, having come a long way from my first experiences with Atari in the 1970s. The genres of the fantastic has been an important part of game play, and with this post I’ll highlight a couple of my favorite games from the 1990s. It includes online casino games of course, I like playing free casino slot games for fun, the thrills and excitement I get it all while playing!
The first game I remember fondly is Zombies Ate My Neighbors which came out in 1993 for the Sega Genesis as developed by LucasArts. This game incorporated elements from horror and science fiction films from the 1950s through the 1980s, and included various monsters such as werewolves, zombies, aliens, and as the title indicates, a major focus on zombies. The player had to work their way through various levels, avoiding or killing monsters, while trying to save at least one neighbor per level in order to advance to the next level. As an interesting piece of trivia, this game was controversial overseas due to the blood depicted in game play (extremely mild by comparison to today’s horror and war games), as well as the title, going by the name Zombies outside of American culture due to concerns about creatures consuming one’s neighbors. This game was a lot of fun for a fan of the films which provided the inspiration for the creatures that chased you across the screen.
Another favorite game came for me as I upgraded and moved beyond my Sega Genesis to the first Playstation. This game was darker than the previous game discussed above. It was Nightmare Creatures which came out in 1997. I enjoyed this game quite a bit because it drew upon Gothic horror elements, taking place in a dark and foggy London and incorporating a number of monstrous creatures. Still in my collection of video games, the back of the game case describes the storyline:
In 1834 on London’s on London’s blackest eve, a secret cult known as The Brotherhood of Hecate, rediscovered the key to man’s unholiest fears. It was through this arcane act of terror that the evil leader of the Brotherhood, Adam Crowley, swore to overtake the world…Ever since this fateful night, not a London street, alley or town square has escaped the whispered screams of “Nightmare Creatures!”
One of the more interesting aspects of this game for me as an academic working in part in the area of new religious movements, and with some experience in Pagan studies, is the villain in the game, the character of Adam Crowley. For those with some familiarity with Western esotericism and the magickal family of religions, this is an adaptation of Aleister Crowley, the infamous esotericist and practitioner of sex magick, who proclaimed himself the “Great Beast 666.” Nightmare Creatures draws on the infamy of Crowley’s name for those who are aware of him and make the connection, and then creates a fictional villain who uses his magical abilities in the service of his cult and their desires for world domination. I must admit I was only able to defeat the final “boss” in the game, Crowley himself who takes one of his magical alchemy potions to transform himself into an uber-monster, as a result of the use of cheat codes. But heck, the monster had to be defeated, right?
Resident Evil was the next horror game I gravitated to, but with the various video game sequels, not to mention the various films that have come out based on the game, I don’t need to tell readers about a phenomenon they are already very familiar with. Horror had a significant expression in video games in the 1990s, far beyond the zombie subgenre so prevalent in today’s gaming.
CNN Living included a feature on legendary science fiction writer Ray Bradbury which revealed a surprising aspect of the author’s life and writing inspiration. The title of the article is “Sci-fi legend Ray Bradbury on God, ‘monsters and angels'”. In the piece Bradbury describes himself as a man of religious faith, although not one to which one can easily apply a label. In fact, Bradbury doesn’t want any labels applied to his religious pathway. He describes himself as a “delicatessin religionist” inspired by a number of religions from the East and the West in pluralist fashion. Christianity has been part of this mix, with the Gospel of John and its focus on love a key aspect of it, although surely not the only aspect. The significance and positive role of religion in Bradbury’s life and fiction is a surprise in that two other influential sci-fi authors similar to Bradbury, Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, were atheists, or at least agnostic in the latter case. My assumption would have been that Bradbury would have had irreligious views similar to their’s.
Another interesting aspect of this article is the description of his writing as a “summoning [of] ‘the monsters and angels’ of his imagination for his enchanting tales,” and his own description of his writing career as one where he has been “[a]t play in the fields of the Lord.” I find this connection between play, the sacred, and the imagination of interest and have written on this connection previously both in my graduate thesis on Burning Man Festival, as well as my chapter on videogames and digital cultures in Halos & Avatars (Westminster John Knox, 2010).
At times play may be superficial, but at other times it expresses the human desire for the sacred dimension of life. We might recall that experiences of the transcendent in connection with play were part of C. S. Lewis’s discovery of spirituality that eventually led to his embrace of Christianity. In addition, the noted sociologist of religion, Peter Berger, mentions the “argument from play” and connects it to conceptions of human religiosity in his discussion of “signals of transcendence” in ordinary human experience that point beyond that experience and toward the transcendent. It is not a stretch then to view the imaginative play with the fantastic as a signal of and window into transcendence.
The connection between religion, or at least the sacred, and science fiction as well as the broader realm of the fantastic, surfaces from time to time, and it was an interesting pleasure to see this as an aspect of the life and work of one of the most influential writers of science fiction, and grandfathers of the children of the fantastic.
As regular readers of this blog are aware, I am a huge fan of 1950s science fiction/horror, those films that had an early formative influence on my love for the fantastic. In reading through a science fiction magazine today I came across a documentary that makes interesting use of these films as it argues for their positive impact on our culture. It is titled Monsters From the Id: Science is Mankind’s Last Great Hope. The documentary’s website provides this synopsis:
The 1950’s was an idealistic time in American History, filled with hope, opportunity, and wonder. It was also, “The Atomic Age”, where new technology promised to both save humanity as well as put it in jeopardy. All of these factors gave birth to one of the most prolific genres in film history, 1950’s Science Fiction Cinema. More then just bug eyed monsters and little green men, 1950’s Sci-fi Cinema provided science inspiration for millions of eager youths across the country.
While monsters and invaders of many forms have always existed in cinema, it wasn’t until the 1950’s that Hollywood created a new character. This new character is the Modern Scientist. His predecessor, the Mad Scientist was evil and intent on using science for his own personal gains, no matter the outcome. With atomic energy now a part of the world everyone lived in, this type of scientist was more dangerous then ever. Instead, the Modern Scientist was created to calm the fears associated with the atomic age. This new American Citizen was brilliant, polite, thoughtful, charming and not surprisingly very good looking. Just as science took the lead in much of the news of the 1950’s, the scientist became Hollywood’s new leading man and a role model for young boys and girls across America.
Although Hollywood was mostly interested in selling tickets and popcorn, there were others that understood the power of these films and the influence they had on society. Soon filmmakers like Walt Disney and George Pal started collaborating with famed rockets scientists, Werner Von Braun and Willie Ley in an effort to energize the American public and peak their interest in manned space travel. What followed were technically accurate sci-fi films that both entertained and educated the next generation of scientists in America. However as progress marched on, it was a real life event that finally sent the wheels into motion.
On October 4, 1957 the Russians provided the spark in the form of the first man made satellite, Sputnik. America immediately went into a panic and suddenly science and the need to match the Russians in space became a top priority. From that point forward, the American Government took exploratory space flight seriously and the first man they called was Werner Von Braun. With the help of science fairs and a revamped science curriculum an inspired population worked toward one of the greatest achievement of mankind, spaceflight. Along the way, Sci-Fi cinema and science fact worked together to change the lives of American Students in ways we only dreamed of before.
Through the use of the movies themselves and expert analysis from scientists and educators, Monsters From The Id weaves the intersecting themes of over thirty classic films in order to tell the untold story of the Modern Scientist and his role in inspiring a nation. The film continues to explore the psychological and cultural impact of 1950’s Sci-Fi cinema and asks, “where is science inspiration found today?”
As mentioned in the introduction to this post, finding inspiration for careers in the sciences through 1950s science fiction/horror is indeed an unusual and unique approach. But the positive aspects of science and the scientist in these films must be held in tension with the science run amok and “mad scientist” elements also frequently found in these films, and with the anti-rationalizing element in them as discussed by Mark Jancovich in Rational Fears: American Horror in the 1950s (Manchester University Press, 1996).
Author and TheoFantastique contributor Paul Meehan introduces the story of Picnic at Hanging Rock and its possible connection to a paranormal phenomenon. Paul is the author of a number of books including SAUCER Movies: A UFOlogical History of the Cinema (The Scarecrow Press, 1998).
The Strange Case of Picnic at Hanging Rock
By Paul Meehan
“On Saturday, 14th of February 1900 a party of schoolgirls from Appleyard College picnicked at Hanging Rock near Mount Macedon in the state of Victoria. During the afternoon several members of the party disappeared without trace…”
So begins Peter Weir’s 1975 mystery-thriller Picnic at Hanging Rock. Based on a 1967 novel by Australian writer Joan Lindsey, the film follows the plot of the book fairly closely to weave an eerie tale of mass-disappearance that would become an urban legend and suggest deeper, more alien mysteries behind the strange events.
The girls at Appleyard College embark on their fateful picnic on Valentine’s Day, in the full heat of the Australian summer. They are transported in a horse-drawn wagon to Hanging Rock, a geologic formation comprised of weird volcanic monoliths. The spinsterish headmistress Miss McCraw (Vivean Gray) is in charge of the expedition, and warns the girls against any “tomboy foolishness,” but in spite of her admonitions four of the girls go off exploring by themselves. As Miranda (Anne-Louise Lambert), Irma (Karen Robson), Marion (Jane Vallis) and Edith (Christine Schuler) traipse off to the Rock on their voyage of discovery, they are briefly observed by two young men, Michael (Dominic Guard) and his valet Albert (John Jarratt), who are also picnicking at the Rock with Michael’s parents. While they are gone Miss McCraw notices that all of the party’s watches have mysteriously stopped at exactly 12 noon.
Ascending amid strange-looking rock formations, the girls reach a plateau where they suddenly fall into a deep, mysterious slumber. Back at the picnic, all of the members of the Appleyard party also fall asleep, with the exception of Miss McCraw. Then, just as suddenly, the four girls awaken. As Edith watches in horror, Miranda, Irma and Marion march up the hill in lockstep as if they are in a trance. Edith also notices an anomalous red cloud hovering over the Rock as she is consumed in a sudden terror and runs back toward the picnic site.
When the picnickers return to the college late that evening the three girls, along with Miss McCraw, are missing, and a massive police manhunt from the nearby town of Woodend fails to find any trace of them. Edith’s recollections of the event are confused and fragmentary, but she does rememberseeing Miss McCraw walking toward the hill where the girls were last seen in an entranced state, wearing nothing but her underwear.
After a week goes by there is little hope that the girls or the headmistress will be found alive, but Michael, who harbors a lingering obsession with the students after glimpsing them on the day of the picnic, decides to look for them on his own. He winds up spending the night at Hanging Rock, and is found the next day in a confused state, clutching a piece of lace from one of the girl’s dresses, Soon afterward, Irma is discovered alive in a nearby cave. A medical examination reveals that she has not been raped, and that her feet are curiously unmarked although she is not wearing shoes or stockings. Oddly, her hands are bruised and her fingernails torn, and she was found not to be wearing her corset.
When she recovers, Irma can remember nothing that transpired during her disappearance at Hanging Rock. The strange goings-on cause a furor in the town as rumors fly, including a report of an anomalous light flashing around a pigsty on a farm about a mile from the Rock. Ultimately, the missing people are never found and the mystery is never solved. As one townsman wryly observes, “There’s some questions got answers, some haven’t.”
Weir’s offbeat film, shot on location at Hanging Rock, brilliantly utilizes the Australian landscape while deftly evoking the quirky sexual repressiveness of the late Victorian period. While the film is slow-paced by American movie standards, the director builds a powerful sense of mystery around the inexplicable events. The film was a critical success in Australia and overseas, and helped pave the way for the popularity of Australian cinema of the 1970s and 80s in the international market. Weir would go on to direct The Last Wave (1977) an imaginative apocalyptic thriller that explored the magical world of aboriginal shamanism.
A curious urban legend grew up around the events portrayed in the novel and the film. Joan Lindsey’s book coyly suggests that the story is based on true events. She wrote: “Whether (the book) is fact or fiction, my readers must decide for themselves. As the fateful picnic took place in the year nineteen hundred, and all the characters who appear in this book are long since dead, it hardly seems to matter.” Similarly, in an interview with the Melbourne Herald, Lindsay stated that, “I can’t tell you whether the story is fact or fiction…but a lot of very strange things have happened around the area of Hanging Rock…things that have no logical explanation.” However, after many extensive journalistic
investigations, no documentary evidence of the alleged event has ever surfaced, leading to the conclusion that the plot of Picnic at Hanging Rock is entirely fictive.
Even after the story was proven to be fiction, fans of the movie and the book continued to try to solve the mystery over the years. In 1980, Yvonne Rousseau published a book entitled The Murders at Hanging Rock, which offered up a number of scenarios explaining the enigma. It theorized that the missing girls and their teacher could have been raped and murdered by Aborigines, or by Michael and Albert, or they could simply have been buried underneath a rockslide. In 1987, another book, The Secret of Hanging Rock appeared, which contained Lindsay’s previously unpublished chapter of the original novel that provided a more mystical resolution to the mystery. According to Lindsay, the girls were confronted by a kind of time warp and were transformed into little crab-like arachnid creatures who disappeared into the interior of the earth by crawling through cracks in the rocks.
But while more conventional explanations of the disappearances and Lindsay’s own bizarre resolution to the mystery fail to satisfy, there is one phenomenon that would seem to offer a more likely solution for the enigmatic events–alien abduction. Many of the anomalies described in the Hanging Rock narrative are consistent with features reported in cases of UFO close encounters.
First, there is the matter of the strange red cloud observed hovering above the Rock during the disappearance. As if to underscore a viewpoint looking down from above, Weir shoots the scene of Edith running from the Rock in terror from an extremely high angle. UFOs have long been associated with anomalous clouds, as evidenced in the encounter of Rex Heflin, an Orange County, California highway traffic inspector who took a series of Polaroid photos of a metallic craft transforming into a cloud in 1965.
Then there is the matter of the stopped watches at the picnic. In the famous abduction case of New Hampshire couple Betty and Barney Hill in 1961, both Betty and Barney found that their watches had stopped after the abduction event. In 1979, Minnesota Deputy Sherrif Val Johnson had a late night close encounter with a glowing UFO that damaged his police cruiser. Johnson’s mechanical wristwatch and the car’s electric dashboard clock were both found to be inexplicably running exactly 14 minutes slow. Some researchers theorize that UFOs are actually time travel devices that sometimes cause temporal anomalies to occur.
The odd behavior of the picnickers is also consistent with events reported during abductions. All of the students and staff at the picnic fall into a mysterious sleep, while only those who are slated to disappear awaken. This phenomenon parallels what is known as being “switched off” in UFO parlance, where those chosen for abduction remain conscious while those not selected are rendered unconscious. Non-abductees being “switched off” is a fairly common feature of abduction reports. Abductee Betty Andreasson, for instance, claims that several members of her family were switched off while she was taken aboard a UFO.
Abductees often report that they are compelled to perform certain actions as if they have been placed in some kind of hypnotic trance in which they are placed under the control of their abductors. Betty and Barney Hill, for instance, felt compelled to inexplicably turn off the main road they had been traveling on and onto a secluded side road where the abduction took place. In Picnic at Hanging Rock, Amanda, Irma, Marion and Miss McCraw are drawn to the place where they will disappear as if they are entranced.
When Irma returns, she has total amnesia about what occurred during the time when she was missing. This “missing time amnesia” is another common feature of alien abduction reports, and was first explored in depth in researcher Budd Hopkins’s 1981 book Missing Time. The Hills experienced this type of amnesia in connection with their abduction experience, the details of which only emerged as they underwent hypnotic therapy. Researchers don’t know if missing time amnesia is imposed upon abductees via alien mind control, or if it is a natural function of the human mind that suppresses unpleasant experiences.
Joan Lindsay’s novel was written in 1967, when little was known about the abduction phenomenon. Nonetheless, her work of fiction eerily anticipates exotic details of alien abduction narratives. There are other examples of life imitating art in the history of the UFO phenomenon. Bernard Newman’s 1948 novel The Flying Saucer, for instance, posits UFOs that stop automobile engines long before this became a common theme in many UFO reports. Similarly, Arthur Koestler’s 1933 play The Twilight Bar portrays a UFO that causes an electrical power blackout decades before this aspect of the phenomenon was reported in the UFO literature.
Oddly, the fictional vanishings in Picnic at Hanging Rock also seem to prefigure a mysterious real-life disappearance that occurred in the same general area of Victoria, Australia. Just three years after the release of Weir’s film, on the evening of October 21, 1978, a young Australian pilot named Frederick Valentich was flying a Cessna 182 light aircraft on a relatively short flight from Moorabbin Airport in Victoria to King Island. While over the area of the Bass Strait, Valentich radioed that he encountered a large, brightly lit UFO that hovered over his plane. Soon afterward, all radio contact with the aircraft abruptly ceased. A massive, three-week search of the area failed to find any trace of Valentich or his airplane. No debris or even an oil slick on the water’s surface was ever discovered. Like the picnickers from Appleyard College, the young pilot seemed to have simply vanished into thin air under mysterious circumstances.
The Valentich disappearance remains one of the most puzzling incidents in the history of the UFO phenomenon. Like the Australian farmer in the film explains, “There’s some questions got answers, some haven’t.”
Two items recently came to my attention that originate from the same source, that is, the interaction of Christians with elements of the fantastic. In this case the contexts are those of a former writer of vampire fiction, and comic fans.
Anne Rice made news this week with an announcement that she had left Christianity. At least that’s how it was originally reported. Rice was raised as a Roman Catholic, but embraced atheism for much of her life, but eventually returned to Roman Catholicism, even as she gave up writing vampire fiction in favor of fiction that resonated with her Catholicism. Rice’s recent announcement of a departure from Christianity caught the attention of the media in general, and the atheist subculture in particular:
As I said below, I quit being a Christian. I’m out. In the name of Christ, I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control. I refuse to be anti-Democrat. I refuse to be anti-secular humanism. I refuse to be anti-science. I refuse to be anti-life. In the name of …Christ, I quit Christianity and being Christian. Amen.
But the most recent reporting from examiner.com clarifies Rice’s views from Facebook comments where she has issues with the political and social stances of Catholicism but still embraces Christ:
My faith in Christ is central to my life. My conversion from a pessimistic atheist lost in a world I didn’t understand, to an optimistic believer in a universe created and sustained by a loving God is crucial to me. But following Christ does not mean following His followers. Christ is infinitely more important than Christianity and always will be, no matter what Christianity is, has been, or might become.
Moving from Rice’s issues with institutional Catholicism to the troubling reactions of a Protestant fundamentalist church, the Westborough Church, infamous for its picketing of soldiers’ funerals with signs like “God hates fags,” also has issues with comic fans and culture. According to The Celebrity Cafe.com, at the recent Comic-Con in San Diego members of the church picketed and accused attendees of idolatry. A video of the protest can be seen below.
These incidents are interesting as they illustrate some of the reactions of those intersecting the worlds of both Christianity and the fantastic.
In my view Midnight Syndicate is one of the leaders, if not the leader in Halloween and horror music. They have proven so again with the release of their latest albums, and have raised the bar with the accompanying release of their first movie in a three-disc set as FearNet and Rue Morgue Radio recently noted, and with good reason. Ed Douglas of Midnight Syndicate has made some time to discuss this great project.
TheoFantastique: You recently set up a deal with Hot Topic stores for a release of your DEAD MATTER DVD. This seems like a perfect partnership. How did this come about, and what can people anticipate on this DVD?
Ed Douglas: Midnight Syndicate has been working with Hot Topic for the past eleven years so they were the perfect retail partner to team up with on The Dead Matter DVD. The cool thing is that Hot Topic is going to be selling a deluxe 3-disc set of The Dead Matter at all of their stores for the price of a regular DVD (for a limited time). This 3-disc set includes the DVD, the soundtrack CD from Midnight Syndicate, and a 13th Anniversary Midnight Syndicate greatest hits type CD called “Halloween Music Collection.”
As far as extras go, we’ve really loaded the DVD up pretty well. Not only do you have the requisite gag reels and commentary with the director and producers but we’ve also added two Midnight Syndicate music videos and Eternal Legacy’s “The Dead Matter” music video. We are also featuring the three finalists from the Midnight Syndicate Video Contest we ran earlier this year – some really creative home-grown short films set to our music. Lastly we have this cool feature called Maximum Dead Matter. It’s a feature-length behind-the-scenes program. You watch the movie in one window while in other windows you see footage of us filming those scenes, interviews, location trivia, concept art, and stuff like that. I think it’s really interesting for fellow filmmakers and enthusiasts who are interested in seeing exactly how we made our little indie horror film. We have a 0:40 second trailer from Maximum Dead Matter on YouTube if you’d like to see what I’m talking about.
TheoFantastique: You also produced a horror film, The Dead Matter. What is the story behind this, and how can fans catch clips if not a copy of the whole film?
Ed Douglas: Before I started Midnight Syndicate, I made an earlier version of The Dead Matter movie for about $2000. The goal of me and my partners was to get the experience and put ourselves in a position to remake the movie someday with an actual budget. After we released the original version I started Midnight Syndicate. As Midnight Syndicate grew in popularity with the haunted houses, gothic music fans, roleplaying gamer, and Halloween folks we began to get approached by a lot of indie filmmakers, TV producers, and game companies looking to license our music in their productions. It culminated in 2006, when Robert Kurtzman moved to Ohio (near to me) and approached us to score his film, The Rage. When I visited the set of The Rage and saw how Bob and his producing partner Gary Jones ran their sets, I knew they would be the perfect partners for The Dead Matter remake I had envisioned ten years earlier. I pitched the idea to Bob, he enjoyed the script and the rest is history.
The Dead Matter tells the story of a grief-stricken young woman who is desperate to contact her deceased brother. She comes into possession of an ancient relic that can raise and control “dead matter.” Her dark obsession leads her down a nasty path which includes two warring vampires (Andrew Divoff and Tom Savini) that want the relic and a vampire hunter (Jason Carter) who wants to destroy it. Classic horror themes with some modern twists and a touch of humor. It’s a fun movie.
Hot Topic stores will have The Dead Matter DVD this Friday, July 30th. Until then you can catch the trailer at www.TheDeadMatter.com. On the 30th you will also be able to order the DVD online through the Midnight Syndicate website (www.MidnightSyndicate.com), Amazon, and Hot Topic.
TheoFantastique: I was pleased to learn recently about your first music video. What was the inspiration for a move from producing quality horror and Halloween music to creating a video to accompany it?
Ed Douglas: We wanted to do something special to celebrate Midnight Syndicate’s 13th Anniversary. We had ten CDs out but never a music video and we thought it was about time we did. My friend David “House” Greathouse (who did special FX makeup on our movie, and recently released a documentary entitled, Legion of Terror) was the perfect director for the project. He’s done a lot of great music videos for the heavy metal band Mushroomhead and really understands the Midnight Syndicate mythos. He really delivered a great visual treat.
TheoFantastique: Are there any plans to perhaps take the musical performance live on the road, like a Halloween version of Manheim Steamroller? And what about the possibility of creating dramatic stories combined with music and sound effects in connection with horror and Halloween like a generation of us listened to as we grew up in previous generations?
Ed Douglas: Yes we are talking seriously about doing that in early 2011 and might even have some announcements regarding that soon. The old radio dramas were a big part of my inspiration for Midnight Syndicate (the integration of sounds and soundscape with the music). I’d definitely like to explore something like what you are talking about. To close your eyes and be taken away to a world in your own imagination – that’s what we’re all about.
TheoFantastique: Ed, your new release is great, and a perfect way for fans of horror and Halloween to get into the spirit early. Thanks again for letting us know about the new release and for giving us an insider’s view.
Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back recently celebrated its 30th anniversary. With it came a lot of television programming related to the Star Wars series of films, and one included commentary from the editors and contributors to Culture, Identities and Technology in the Star Wars Films: Essays on the Two Trilogies (Critical Explorations in Science Fiction and Fantasy), edited by Carl Silvio and Toni Vinci (McFarland and Company, 2007). My interest in this volume was peaked by the cultural approach to the subject. Silvio and Vinci have made time in their schedules to discuss the book and what we might learn about Star Wars through the lens of cultural studies. Tony M. Vinci is an instructor of English at Monroe Community College, and Carl Silvio is an assistant professor of English at Monroe Community College in Rochester, New York.
TheoFantastique: Carl and Tony, thank you for your willingness to discuss your book. I discovered your work on The History Channel while watching Star Wars – The Legacy Revealed. This program focused largely on the mythic aspects of Star Wars, particularly through the interpretive lenses of Joseph Campbell. Why has so much of the exploration of Star Wars been from the perspective of myth?
Carl Silvio: It all goes back to the publication of Andrew Gordon’s seminal article, “Star Wars: A Myth for Our Time,” in 1978. That essay had a tremendous influence on the future of Star Wars scholarship. George Lucas has also claimed that Joseph Campbell’s conception of the monomyth influenced him in the creation of the Star Wars saga. These two factors are probably the most significant reason why Star Wars and mythology/myth criticism have been so strongly associated with each other.
Tony Vinci: Andrew Gordon published his article, “Star Wars: A Myth for our Time,” in 1978. In it, he argues that Star Wars is more than childish entertainment, as many of his contemporaries contended. In order to validate this claim, he utilizes Campbell’s notion of the monomyth to explicate the significance of the film’s plot and characters by pin-pointing step-by-step how Star Wars follows Campbell’s thesis of The Hero with A Thousand Faces. Ultimately, he attempts to position Star Wars as myth. Add this publication to the fact that Lucas himself has been rather open about his interest in Campbell’s monomyth, and I do not find it that surprising that myth criticism has been such a prevalent mode of analyzing Star Wars. What I do find surprising, is that for almost three decades, it has been the dominant mode of analysis applied to the films, despite the dominance of cultural criticism applied to other speculative fiction texts in those decades.
TheoFantastique: But in the face of mythic perspectives on Star Wars your book takes a very different approach as you look at the significance of cultural studies. Can you describe your book’s approach and why you think it is helpful in understanding the significance of Star Wars?
Tony Vinci: The Star Wars films are laden with cultural representations of race, gender, economics, and spirituality; they fetishize technology and fashion; they use the most cutting edge film-making techniques—yet they are presented as simple pieces of entertainment without much social or political commentary. This paradox of a wildly complex matrix of competing representations delivered as a simple commodity is what makes the franchise such a significant cite for cultural criticism. Our hope was to analyze how the films influence and reflect the cultures that created and view them in hopes that we will understand more clearly how they function as pieces of cultural meaning.
Carl Silvio: We have nothing against myth criticism per se. But the analytical work on Star Wars has been so dominated by it that other critical perspectives have been crowded out. All too often, myth criticism becomes a kind of intellectual cul de sac. Let’s set aside for the moment the question of whether or not the monomyth actually exists independently from the perspective of critics bent on finding it everywhere. How many times can we observe and point out how this or that narrative corresponds and conforms to the monomyth template? Moreover, once such a correspondence has been demonstrated, where does that take us beyond affirming over and over again that the monomyth pattern seems to repeat itself in a wide variety of cultural narratives? For me, it’s just so much more interesting to look at Star Wars from other perspectives, to see it as a rich repository of ideology and cultural values.
TheoFantastique: Let’s talk about some of the specifics explored in the book by its various contributors. Tony, in your chapter you discuss the shift in how individualism is treated in the first trilogy versus the latter trilogy of films. Can you sketch some of what you put forward in your chapter?
Tony Vinci: What makes the original trilogy engaging is how it manifests a clear and stable anti-establishmentarian stance through its depictions of political and spiritual figures; however, the prequels subvert all of this progressivism, turning strong revolutionaries into lapdogs of the parties in power, turning the open spiritual exploration of the force into dogmatic religion, and turning spiritual figures into police officers, economic negotiators, and generals. To me, this reflects a disturbing transformation in the culture that created the films: the radical exploration of the late ‘70s gave way to the neo-conservatism of the early part of the new millennium.
TheoFantastique: Carl, in your chapter you touch on the differing ways in which Star Wars engages global capitalism. What is the thrust of your thesis on this subject?
Carl Silvio: Basically, I examine differences between the two Star Wars trilogies, the original and the prequel, in order suggest a parallel between them and the rise and consolidation of global capitalism. I argue that, as part of our larger cultural imaginary, each trilogy to some extent stages and dramatizes the cultural anxieties and ideological contradictions provoked by this social transformation. To be sure, I’m not arguing that a purely causal or deterministic relationship exists between the economic system and the Star Wars films. To some extent, I’m constructing a deliberate parallel between these two phenomenon in order to highlight certain aspects of each of them.
TheoFantastique: John Lyden has a chapter where he touches on how Star Wars taps into the long tradition of American apocalyptic, particularly an apocalyptic determinism in these films. What similarities and differences do you seen in Star Wars‘s apocalyptic as contrasted with other sci-fi franchises such as the Terminator or The Matrix series, for example?
Tony Vinci: I see Star Wars as being a bit different than the others in that what makes it apocalyptically deterministic is the fact of the prequels. Despite the Emperor’s declaration that he “foresees” the future, the original trilogy doesn’t explore that terrain too much, but the moment you have a prequel, the audience knows what is going to happen to this universe and its primary characters. Think Orson Welles’ Othello or Citizen Kane. We begin knowing the end, and all that comes after will never alter the outcome. Though, in the case of Star Wars, what we know is to come is redemption and victory. The other franchises you mention, especially Terminator, seem to work at creating a real sense of doom for the entire world, whereas in Star Wars, the deterministic mood is focused mostly around the Anakin/Vader character or a world that we know is going to be saved. Though, I believe this is ultimately overshadowed by the politics of the prequels, that they darken irreversibly the “triumphs” at the end of Return of the Jedi because we have now seen the old republic, its frailties and hollowness. Surely the New Republic will have many of the same issues.
TheoFantastique: For me one of the more interesting chapters was by Dan North titled “Kill Binks: Why the World Hated Its First Digital Actor.” CGI actors are now fairly common, and of course Avatar may have helped take digital actors to new heights. Why did so many people hate the digital Jar Jar Binks?
Tony Vinci: There are some serious flaws in the prequels. I think Jar Jar became a scapegoat for all of the other issues that people had with the films but couldn’t necessarily articulate. Beyond that, and the obvious, I think North nails it by arguing that we have anxieties about what watching a digital actor means, and that we projected those onto a character that is not only annoying and potentially racially offensive but represents some difficult questions about what it means to be human.
Carl Silvio: North does a great job of arguing that much of the hatred directed at the Binks character had less to do with its overall silliness and more to do with a deeper anxiety felt by the audience regarding the replacement of live actors with digital ones and the pervasiveness of CGI technology in Lucas’s film making in general. I find his argument to be pretty convincing. Ultimately, I don’t think that the CGI technology is the problem, or at least it’s not why so many long time Star Wars fans rejected the films. It’s more a matter of how Lucas used the technology to alter the franchise in ways that fans found troubling. The whole “Han shot first” controversy is a good example of how Lucas used digital technology to perform a kind of cultural vandalism on his own creation. Jar Jar Binks’s status as a virtual, digital actor allows him to become an emblem that represents all the ways that Lucas has used the CGI technology in ways that upset his fans.
TheoFantastique: Carl and Tony, thank you again for making time to discuss your book. I hope it helps others explore the significance of Star Wars as a cultural artifact.
I have finished reading, and enjoying, The Philosophy of Horror, edited by Thomas Fahy (The University Press of Kentucky, 2010), and with this concluding post on the book I will comment on Paul Cantor’s chapter, “The Fall of the House of Ulmer: Europe vs. America in the Gothic Vision of The Black Cat“.
Although many fans familiar with this film no doubt enjoy it on the surface level of a Universal horror film involving two of classic horror’s greatest stars, Cantor reveals in his discussion that Ulmer worked in greater levels of depth into the film that drew upon his experiences. This includes not only various Gothic archetypes such as the dark and brooding home, the living dead, and incest, but also commentary that pits European sophistication against American naïveté, even while offering critique of European darkness and optimism about America’s possibilities. In Cantor’s view, “[t]he genius of The Black Cat lies in the way it maps the Gothic psychodynamics of the family onto a political landscape.” Ulmer accomplishes this as a European immigrant to America who had seen the horrors of the cultural situation which resulted in World War I, thus including an interesting and somewhat contradictory set of elements into the story. This involves the depiction of the “innocent” American travelers from a “low culture” background who are contrasted with the more sophisticated, yet potentially dangerous Europeans from a “high culture” background. As Cantor describes the depictions of these characters, the Europeans
It is Cantor’s view that Ulmer, through the vehicle of a horror film, was trying to work through the medium of pop culture in order to “tell a deeply serious tale of European tragedy.” Indeed, Ulmer’s lingering concerns over Europe not only looked back with concerns over the “horrors of World War I and, as a result, bordering on the bring of madness, ready to plunge into a nihilistic abyss,” but also sounded a warning of cultural dynamics that made possible the great evils of World War II.
