Joseph Laycock continues to demonstrate that he is the up and coming religion and vampire scholar for the next generation. He recently wrote an article for Religion Dispatches titled “Vampire Bible: Will Smith and The Legend of Cain.” The article begins with the recent announcement that Will Smith will play the Old Testament biblical character of Cain as a vampire. Laycock then discusses the various articulations of the idea of Cain as vampire, including that in the role-playing game Vampire: the Masquerade, as well as expressions of literature, both historic and modern.
Apparently something of a controversy has arisen as a result of The Legend of Cain, not because of the film itself, but because of the idea that the biblical Cain may be the source of the vampire in folklore. One aspect of the controversy comes from Christians who are up in arms over the idea that the Bible has anything to do with vampires. After his analysis, in his conclusion Laycock writes:
As for the accusations of sacrilege, perhaps we should look at the link between vampires and Cain not as a revision of a biblical story, but a testament to this story’s enduring effect on the Western imagination.
The accusation of sacrilege is interesting. It’s not as if there has not been a fantastic element associated with the early chapters of Genesis. For example, in popular Protestant fundamentalism and evangelicalism there is a belief that the “Nephilim” mentioned in an obscure reference in Genesis 6 are a race of giants produced through a sexual union between human woman and demons. It is difficult to see why this is more palatable than the idea that Cain became a vampire, but perhaps its because this fantastic idea is connected to a figure Protestants often equate with the sinister and the esoteric, and for them this is a connection being made by outsiders rather than one they see within their own religious tradition.
At any rate, I agree with Laycock in this assessment, and hope that Christians will be more cautions before alleging sacrilege in this latest instance of friction with the fantastic in popular culture.
What do any number of ghost-hunting and home-improvement television programs have in common? Nothing, you might say? Don’t be so sure.
I am working my way through my growing stack of reading relating to the fantastic, and this weekend I read a few chapters in The Philosophy of Horror, edited by Thomas Fahy (The University Press of Kentucky, 2010). There are several interesting chapters in this volume, but one that caught my attention this weekend was by Jessica O’Hara titled “Making Their Presence Known: TV’s Ghost-Hunter Phenomenon in a ‘Post-‘ World.” In the chapter O’Hara considers why the numerous ghost-hunting “reality shows” are so very popular in our post-9/11 world and a postmodern skepticism toward meta-narratives. As the author develops her case she makes an interesting connection between ghost-hunter programs and home-improvement programs. I understand why the reader might be skeptical, but consider an excerpt where O’Hara notes the parallels:
In any case, the home-improvement show trend is massive, and ghost-hunter programming can certainly be seen as an extension of the genre. Consider the home-improvement and ghost-hunter’s shows’ common elements: clients call in experts to solve a problem with their home; the said problem compromises the clients’ ability to enjoy the home as a sanctuary; the team applies its expertise and solves the problem. The only difference is that instead of moving a cooking island, adding granite countertops, and replacing tacky linoleum with earth-toned tile, ghost-hunting shows work on getting rid of the spirit hanging by the refrigerator. Indeed, Ghost Hunters directly imitates the conventions of the home-improvement genre, including the up-tempo music, the infighting among team members, and the dramatic “reveal” to the clients, whose reaction of being pleased or not pleased draws upon the narrative struck of shows like Trading Spaces or While You Were Out.
Just one of the gems for reflection found in this book and the probing of horror and popular culture.
As I watched horror films when I was younger I especially appreciated those learned individuals who devoted their lives to developing expertise in the area of the monstrous. Perhaps the most iconic of such figures is Abraham van Helsing from Dracula, pictured in association with this post in the image at left as portrayed by the late, great Peter Cushing in The Horror of Dracula. Later in my adult life I rekindled my love for such things, not only as a fan, but also as a scholar. When I first started this blog some two years ago it was largely a forum for me to share my thoughts on issues related to the fantastic, including horror. But I had begun interacting with some of the academic literature on these areas and soon discovered that this was an area largely untapped in the blogosphere in terms of making some of these reflections accessible to a popular audience.
My friend and fellow academic horror explorer, Matt Cardin of The Teeming Brain, recently brought an item to my attention that shows that this area of scholarship is growing. Of all places, The Chronicle of Higher Education featured an article on July 22 titled “Taking a Slash at Horror.” This piece looks at the academic analysis of various genres of film, and suggests that horror is the most popular genre for such exploration. To substantiate this claim the article quotes Bernice Murphy, editor of The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, interviewed here previously. In the middle of the article it includes a listing of several academic books on the subject as examples of this academic study, most of whom will be featured here in interviews over the course of the next few weeks and months.
Readers may wonder why there are so many involved in this area of academic analysis, and the article provides a few suggestions. One has to do with the “video explosion” of the 1970s and 1980s, which, according to the article, “schooled many film scholars of today, who as teenagers haunted video stores brimming with exploitative horror films with salacious, beckoning covers.” This is certainly the case for me and remains so as I build my DVD collection which provides an opportunity for reassessment and analysis of films in the horror genre.
Although this is certainly a niche focus in the blogosophere, I am pleased to see that TheoFantastique is situated within a robust academic subculture that shows no signs of slowing down in the near future.
The trailer for the horror film Devil from Universal Pictures is now available. This supernatural thriller is based upon a story by M. Night Shyamalan as part of a Night Chronicles series. It tells the story of a small group of people trapped in a stalled elevator in a high rise who come to learn through this crisis that one of them is Satan.
Satan has long been a popular theological and pop cultural figure of interest. Two previous posts at TheoFantastique are particularly relevant to this topic and as background to Devil. Readers may recall my previous interview with W. Scott Poole, author of Satan in America: The Devil We Know (Rowman & Littlefield, 2009) where we discussed this topic. Moving from cultural considerations to cinematic, readers may also want to review my discussion of Nicholas Schreck’s book The Satanic Screen: An Illustrated Guide to the Devil in Cinema (Creation Books, 2001).
It will be interesting to see how Satan is presented in this forthcoming film, how it contributes to the pop cultural representations of the Devil, and whether this film does better than many of Shyamalan’s recent films.
Kim Paffenroth of the Gospel of the Living Dead blog, as well as editor and author of several zombie books, recently made a Facebook post which referenced an interesting item. It is an article at open salon titled “What Does the Zombie Genre Say about the Modern West?”. This piece, by an author listed as RW005g, presents a psychological and sociological analysis of what the prevalence of zombies in popular culture might mean for us in the late modern Western world. The author contrasts scholarly analysis of 1950s horror/science fiction films with its concerns over Communism and conformity (to which we could add the reaction against “Fordism” and rationalization as argued by Mark Jankovich in Rational Fears: American Horror in the 1950s), with the very different social and cultural situation in the West in the late modern period.
The author then develops a list of differences between 1950s fears expressed through alien invasion and monster narratives in contrast with our current preferences for the zombie as the monster of the moment. Among the author’s uncomfortable conclusions we read the following:
What does the Zombie Genre tell us about modern America? For starters, it tells us that there is an overwhelming sense of frustration, that the promises of our parents and grandparents about the potential and future of America were, perhaps, not grounded in reality. That we will never reach the promised land.
It also tells us that our real underlying fears today aren’t of some evil foreign aggressor, even a hidden enemy like Osama Bin Laden, but instead, of the overwhelming and totally enveloping spectre of loneliness, of being alone, without friends and family, surrounded by a world that is alien to you and, for all intents and purposes, objectifies you and sees you as something to “use” or consume. It shows us our disconnect from other.
These films also show us our growing anxiety over lawlessness. The images of failed states saturate the air-waves. Images of cities that have ceased functioning, like Sarajevo, Grozny, Mogadishu, and Haiti after the earthquake, like New Orleans after Katrina and Los Angeles during the riots of 1992. A growing sense, awareness of, and sense of powerlessness in regard to a growing section of society that is anarchic and lawless and ruled by gangs, of growing poverty, a growing Lumpenproletariot and concomitant demise of the middle class. Isolated islands of humane civility taking refuge in a growing and ominous ocean of predatory anarchy.
The reader may not agree with everything the author of this open salon piece puts forward, but it does make for interesting food for thought as our fascination with the zombie (as well as [post]apocalyptic) functions as a mirror for our psychological and social state of affairs.
After a few months of thinking about a few things related to the fantastic, and bouncing an idea off a few friends and colleagues, I’ve created a Facebook page in order to create a network for the individuals in the subcultures who appreciate horror, science fiction, and fantasy, which we hope will eventually make up the Fantastic Culture Preservation Society. Through this network we hope to educate our community, and preserve our history. This is a work in progress as the page’s administrators fine tune what we hope to do for the communities that make up the network. Thanks for your interest, and please feel free to contribute, and to tell others in your network via websites, blogs, and message boards.
A little over a week ago the media relayed that three Utah men were reported missing by their families after leaving to search for the legendary Lost Dutchman Gold Mine north of Mesa, Arizona. Today the media is reporting that the search has been called off. One wonders what might have happened to these men as they searched in underground caves.
My friend and TheoFantastique contributor Paul Meehan has completed his work on his forthcoming book Horror Noir: Where Cinema’s Dark Sisters Meet (McFarland, 2010). From the publisher’s website:
This critical survey examines the historical and thematic relationships between two of the cinema’s most popular genres: horror and film noir. The influence of 1930s- and 1940s-era horror films on the development of noir is traced and detailed, with analyses of over 100 motion pictures in which noir criminality and mystery meld with supernatural and psychological horror. Included are the films based on popular horror/mystery radio shows (The Whistler, Inner Sanctum), the works of RKO producer Val Lewton (Cat People, The Seventh Victim), and Alfred Hitchcock’s psychological ghost stories. Also discussed are gothic and costume horror noirs set in the 19th century (The Picture of Dorian Gray, Hangover Square); the noir elements of more recent films; and the film noir aspects of the Hannibal Lecter movies and other serial-killer thrillers.
The website for Popular Science magazine has an interesting brief piece titled “If Evolution Had Taken a Different Turn, Could Dragons Have Existed?” The article notes that several of the features of dragons are found in various animals, just not all of them in a single creature. And although it would have taken several interesting turns for natural selection to produce a dragon, the article theorizes that it might have been possible. See the article here.
I learned through a link to my blog from The Grimm Tea Party that Disney Studios has a live-action film on gargoyles in the works. A few websites are reporting on this, including The Hollywood Reporter, which states that
The studio is in the process of hiring Zoe Green to develop a story revolving around the stone creatures for a feature project being produced by Lauren Shuler Donner and Jack Leslie via the Donners’ Co.
The project seeks to build a mythology around the carvings, originally designed in medieval times to act as spouts but later took on roles as powerful symbols to ward off or attract evil. The story is being developed, but it is known to be set in modern times.
Readers may remember the Gargoyles cartoon television series produced by Buena Vista Television (1994-1996), which inspired a comic, video game, and other merchandise according to The Gargoyles Fans Website. Although little information is available on the proposed live-action film, it purporedly will not be an adaptation of the 90s cartoon. I’d like to see Disney take on something with a darker edge to take advantage of the potential in the gargoyle, but it will likely be lighter family fare. I just hope it will be a good film effort that makes the most of these architectural and mythical monsters. Until we find out what Disney comes up with, we’ll have to be content with films like Jeepers Creepers that involves one of the best gargoyle-like monsters to reach the silver screen.
Joseph Laycock continues to demonstrate that he is the up and coming religion and vampire scholar for the next generation. He recently wrote an article for Religion Dispatches titled “Vampire Bible: Will Smith and The Legend of Cain.” The article begins with the recent announcement that Will Smith will play the Old Testament biblical character of Cain as a vampire. Laycock then discusses the various articulations of the idea of Cain as vampire, including that in the role-playing game Vampire: the Masquerade, as well as expressions of literature, both historic and modern. 
A little over a week ago the 
The website for Popular Science magazine has an interesting brief piece titled “If Evolution Had Taken a Different Turn, Could Dragons Have Existed?” The article notes that several of the features of dragons are found in various animals, just not all of them in a single creature. And although it would have taken several interesting turns for natural selection to produce a dragon, the article theorizes that it might have been possible. See the article 
I learned through a link to my blog from 
