SLEEPING WITH THE ALIENS
WEIRD ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND
by Paul Meehan
The enigma of alien abduction is one of the enduring mysteries of our time. Beginning with the famous case of Betty and Barney Hill in 1961, in which a couple were allegedly abducted while driving down a New Hampshire highway late one night, these reports of extraterrestrial kidnappings have continued unabated into the 21st Century. While a minority of abductees claim that the experience is a positive one, most of those who have purportedly been taken relate terrifying stories about being subjected to strange medical experiments and mysterious mind games.
Alien abductions reached the zenith of their popularity in 1987 with the publication of horror writer Whitley Strieber’s book Communion and UFO researcher Budd Hopkin’s Intruders, which were serious explorations of the phenomenon that made the New York Times bestseller list. Because abduction reports were so similar to each other and presented a very limited narrative format (people are picked up, prodded and let go), the experience has not translated well onto the screen. Only two theatrically-released features were based on real-life cases, the film version of Strieber’s Communion (1989) and the abduction account of Arizona logger Travis Walton, Fire in the Sky (1993). Two telefilms, NBC-TV’s The UFO Incident (1975), a faithful rendition of the Hill abduction case starring James Earl Jones and Estelle Parsons and CBS’s Intruders, based on the Hopkins book, were the two most powerful screen treatments of the abduction theme.
Now comes writer/director Olatunde Osunsanmi’s The Fourth Kind (2009) with a tale of alien abduction allegedly based on 65 hours of “archival footage” of “actual case histories” relating to a series of purported abductions in the Nome, Alaska area in October of 2000. The film’s title is a reference to the typology of UFO sightings formulated by the legendary ufologist Dr. J. Allen Hynek that was used for the title of Steven Spielberg’s UFO opus Close Encounters of the Third Kind, with abduction being the fourth level of an ET encounter. Resident Evil star Milla Jovovoch plays Alaskan psychiatrist Abigail Tyler, who is mourning her husband Will after he was knifed to death by an unknown assailant in their home and is caring for her two children. Abigail is counseling Nome residents with sleep disorders who all tell the same story of waking up in the middle of the night and seeing a scary-looking owl staring at them and hearing voices speaking in a strange language. When one of her patients, Tommy (Corey Johnson), goes nutzoid after a hypnosis session and kills his family and himself, Nome Sheriff August (Will Patton) suspects that Abigail’s therapy was somehow responsible for the tragedy. Abigail and her psychiatrist colleague, Dr. Abel (Elias Koteas) fire back by citing dozens of mysterious deaths and disappearances that have occurred in the Nome area since the 1960s. “There’s something going on in this town that we don’t understand,” she warns the Sheriff.
Things continue to go bump in the night as Abby finds a weird-looking mark on her body and suspects that she herself may have been abducted and that aliens may have been responsible for her husband’s death. An expert in ancient Near Eastern tongues identifies the language on the police tapes of Tommy’s murder/suicide as ancient Sumerian, the first written language in history dating back to the Fourth Millennium B.C.E. The mysterious voice seems to be saying, “Our creation…examine, ruin and destroy,” in the ancient language Then another patient, Scott (Enzo Cilenti) insists on being hypnotized in the wake of an abduction experience he describes as “the worst you could ever imagine,” and is possessed by an alien force during the session that causes him to levitate and go into convulsions that literally break his back. A chagrined Sheriff August orders Abby confined to house arrest after this debacle, but a UFO descends on her house in the middle of the night to abduct Abby’s young daughter, Ashley (Mia McKenna Bruce). Despite the fact that a police officer witnessed the UFO while the police video recorder conveniently goes blank, August still blames Abby for her daughter’s disappearance. In the movie’s climax, Dr. Elias hypnotizes Abigail in an attempt to probe her own abduction memories and ultimately solve the riddles of her husband’s murder and her daughter’s disappearance.
Writer/director Osunsanmi presents this narrative using split screens that reportedly show the “real” Abigail Tyler (as portrayed by an uncredited actress) and her patients on “documentary” videos on one half of the screen going through the identical actions that are dramatized by Jovovich and the actors on the other half. Osunsanmi even becomes an actor in his own movie when he appears as Abigail’s interviewer in a tape purportedly made at Chapman University, a real college in Orange, California. In an effort to take The Fourth Kind “back over the line from fiction to reality,” (in the film’s own words), the movie attempts to pass off bogus video archival footage of therapy sessions and police videotapes as real documents. In addition, the release of The Fourth Kind was accompanied by a clever ad campaign designed to mislead audiences into believing that the events depicted are factual, even going so far as to set up a phony website about Dr. Abigail Tyler’s Alaskan medical practice and manufactured Internet stories about her. A September 1, 2009 investigative piece written by Kyle Hopkins for the Anchorage Daily News convincingly debunks the existence of Dr. Tyler and the events depicted in the film. As for the mysterious deaths and disappearances, of which there have been about 20 since the 1960s, an FBI investigation conducted in 2005 concluded that most of the deaths were related to alcoholism and exposure to the elements in Nome’s harsh environment, with no hint of alien involvement.
In cinematic terms, The Fourth Kind does establish considerable screen tension and uses the Blair Witch-inspired technique of filming people who are acting intensely frightened in order to induce similar feelings in the audience. Osunsamni’s style is documentarian, utilizing shaky hand-held camera setups, naturalistic lighting, time-coded video and split screen cinematography. The photogenic Milla Jovovich carries much of the film with her earnest portrayal of the tormented Abigail, but she is sometimes upstaged by the intense performance of the odd-looking unknown actress playing the “real” Dr. Tyler, who often appears onscreen in the same split frame. Professional thesps Will Patton and Elias Koteas lend their support, but none of the supporting characters is drawn in any depth. The film seems to take its cue from The Mothman Prophecies (2002), both in its subject matter of mysterioso goings-on in a backwater stretch of rural America and in its coy avoidance of showing anything overtly extraterrestrial. Much of The Fourth Kind was shot in Bulgaria, lending its “Alaskan” locations a temperate, forested look in lieu Nome’s real landscape of frozen Arctic tundra.
While purporting to be a true-life archival record of the abduction phenomenon, The Fourth Kind offers up a smorgasbord of ufological cliches and half-truths. To set the record straight, no abductee has ever murdered anyone as a result of their experiences, nor has anybody ever levitated or suffered back-breaking injury during a hypnotic recall session. Contrary to popular belief, alien abductions are not connected in any way we know of with missing persons cases, murders or unexplained deaths. According to research carried out by legitimate abduction investigators like Budd Hopkins, Raymond Fowler and David Jacobs, abductions are ongoing, intergenerational studies that would be severely impeded by its human subjects dying, and although abductees report painful and terrifying experiences, no one has been seriously harmed during abductions. The Sumerian language angle is derived from the work of rogue archaeologist Zecharia Sitchin, a theme which has been amplified in recent novels by Whitley Strieber but does not appear in mainstream abduction research. On the other hand, the film’s owl imagery has frequently been reported as what is termed a “screen memory” of gray aliens used to mask their true appearance, but whether this is a function of the human mind or an illusion produced by the aliens is open to debate.
Despite its many flaws and execrable advertising campaign, The Fourth Kind does manage to capture the mind-numbing terror of the abduction phenomenon, as anyone who has listened to the hypnotic regression tapes of Betty and Barney Hill can attest. But it’s also possible that the director is describing an entirely different phenomenon, that of sleep paralysis. This is an experience that occurs in a twilight state between sleep and wakefulness in which one seems to awaken paralyzed in bed. Some kind of being or entity is perceived to enter the room and approach the bed. The “entity” then begins to exert pressure on the sleeper’s chest until they awaken, only to find themselves alone in the room. Sometimes anomalous lights can be perceived, and sexual arousal can be a feature of the experience. Sleep paralysis is frequently found in people who suffer from bouts of sleepwalking, or somnambulism, and is also related to hypnopompic and hypnogogic sleep hallucinations. Alaska, where there are months on end of darkness or sunlight, is a prime location for sleep disorders (think of Al Pacino trying to get some shuteye in the Land of the Midnight Sun in the 2002 crime thriller Insomnia).
It’s easy to see how episodes of sleep paralysis, which is reported in many cultures around the world, could be interpreted as a close encounter with a ghost, a vampire, an incubus—or an alien. Indeed, all alleged alien abductions that begin in a sleep state are suspect. The abduction experiences described in The Fourth Kind all occur during sleep, and I suspect that director Osunsanmi has had a personal experience of sleep paralysis that provided the inspiration for this film. In other words, he may have been “sleeping with the aliens.”
Over the last week two areas of interest came together to make for an interesting tale here at TheoFantastique.
On Halloween, like many horror and Halloween fans, I spent a good portion of my day enjoying various horror films on television. I had several options to choose from, but one station did a better job than others for my personal tastes in providing a series of worthy options, and that was Turner Classic Movies. Over the course of the day TCM played a number of interesting pieces, including one I remember seeing as a child that I always enjoyed but which receives little air time or critical recognition, Diary of a Madman, starring Vincent Price. Although the film’s host for TCM provided less than flattering commentary for the film, I hope to elevate the film with a little additional commentary, as well as an interesting piece of folkloric and paranormal connection.
Diary of a Madman debuted in 1963 and it tells the story Simon Cordier, a magistrate, played by Price, who has recently condemned a man to death for the senseless murder of several human beings. The man is scheduled to be executed, but prior to his death he askes to see Cordier to whom he tells again, as he did during his trial, that he was innocent of his crimes because some type of invisible entity took him over and forced him to kill. Cordier finds the claims ridiculous, as he did during the man’s trial, and suddenly the prisoner lunges out at the magistrate who fights back in defense, only to accidentally kill the prisoner. This sets the stage for a series of strange occurences for Cordier, who soon encounters an invisible creature called a Horla, the same entity that had possessed the prisoner who now controls the magistrate and causes him to commit murder.
As stated above, this film receives little replay on television these days, and little critical mention by horror fans or writers. While it may not rise to the level of some of Price’s other works, in this reviewer’s estimation it is a solid and entertaining piece of horror some forty six years later.
I discovered another item over the last week that connects to this film and another area of research interest for me. On Halloween, along with Gordon Melton, author of The Vampire Book: The Encyclopedia of the Undead, I was a guest on The Drew Marshall Show, Canada’s largest spiritual radio talk show, with the subject matter of the paranormal. Over the course of the program I was asked if I had ever had an experience that really scared me, and I told of my fears of what I believed to be an entity in my grandmother’s closet which would appear at night and render me unable to move or call out. My research into coming to grips with my childhood experiences as an adult overlaps with the writer who provided the inspiration for Diary of a Madman.
Diary of a Madman is based upon the novel Le Horla by Guy de Maupassant. Today I discovered de Maupassant’s own description of an experience similar to my own:
I sleep – for a while – two or three hours – then a dream – no – a nightmare seizes me in its grip, I know full well that I am lying down and that I am asleep… I sense it and I know it… and I am also aware that somebody is coming up to me, looking at me, running his fingers over me, climbing on to my bed, kneeling on my chest, taking me by the throat and squeezing… squeezing… with all its might, trying to strangle me. I struggle, but I am tied down by that dreadful feeling of helplessness which paralyzes us in our dreams. I want to cry out – but I can’t. I want to move – I can’t do it. I try, making terrible, strenuous efforts, gasping for breath, to turn on my side, to throw off this creature who is crushing me and choking me – but I can’t! Then, suddenly, I wake up, panic-stricken, covered in sweat. I light a candle. I am alone.
The experience of de Maupassant, which has been shared by innumerable people across cultures, and which may have formed the basis for Le Horla, and later Diary of a Madman, is often interpreted in light of the paranormal folklore of differing cultures. This phenomenon, known as sleep paralysis and sometimes called the “Old Hag” syndrome or phenomenon, may account for paranormal experiences across the centuries such as the incubus and succubus, some reports of spirit or demonic sexual attacks, and contemporary UFO abduction narratives. In terms of the latter, Paul Meehan, interviewed here previously on UFOs and psychic phenomenon in cinema, will write a guest review here on The Fourth Kind next week wherein sleep paralysis may play a factor in the analysis and explanation of this film.
So when my experiences and research efforts over the last week come together, it may be that a neglected piece of Vincent Price’s horror film work finds its origins in a physiological and psychological experience that we explain with reference to the paranormal.
I first heard of W. Scott Poole through the Religion Dispatches website that involves scholars interacting with pop culture and religion. Scott wrote an article on Jennifer’s Body that I commented on here, and which attracted a lot of interest at the now defunct HorrorBlips. Scott is associate professor of history at the College of Charleston, and the author of Satan in America: The Devil We Know (Rowman & Littlefield, 2009). After some time, and overcoming a number of challenges, we were able to connect for an interview on the thesis of his book as expressed in American horror and pop culture.
TheoFantastique: Scott, thanks for writing a great book that addresses an interesting thesis. Can you summarize your thesis for readers as we begin our discussion?
W. Scott Poole: The book is a kind of biography of the American Devil, an examination of how this theological and literary concept (and pop culture icon) has changed over time. I argue that there has been, since the colonial era, an American obsession with Satan and I try to suggest that this obsession comes in part because of a deeply held American belief in national innocence. If you believe the notion of “American exceptionalism,” that the United States is in some sense always the good guy on the world stage, then you desperately need an ultimate villain. Satan has provided that and I hope my readers will be stunned at how prevalent the use of satanic imagery has been by various groups in American society who see him behind ever enemy, foreign and domestic.
The book also asserts that the 20th century was a kind of “satanic century” in the sense that the Devil comes to the fore in both pop culture and popular religious movements. Beginning in the 1960s, and connected with the social dislocations and social anxieties produced in that era, fascination with the Devil became common, especially early on with conservative Christians who began to see his influence throughout the culture.
TheoFantastique: As you discuss your thesis you draw upon aspects of popular culture as illustrations and examples, some of which we will discuss in our interview. What is the relationship between religious faith and popular culture, and how might mythic ideas from aspects of pop culture inform our personal and national narratives?
W. Scott Poole: Clifford Geertz famously said (and I paraphrase) that we are all suspended in webs of meaning. I think scholars have to take into account that these webs include the powerful strand of popular culture.
I see images of the Devil popular religious movements and popular culture as coming out of a common matrix, overlapping and reinforcing one another in all kinds of surprising ways. I think I expected to find that the major story when it comes to pop culture images of the devil and evangelical Christian or Fundamentalist images is that they were at war with one another. What I found was much more interesting…they actually borrow heavily from one another, even when they are claiming to be at war.
Pop culture, in my view, always informs and shapes what we think of as more substantial narratives…whether those be theological or national narratives. I know some believe that the there is little substantive in pop culture, that its very nature is ephemeral. I am struck by how powerful pop culture images are and how they draw strength out of what seems to me to be root paradigms in human cultural and religious experience. The notion of apocalypse has, for centuries, been one of those root paradigms and in the last ten to fifteen years everything from the Left Behind phenomenon to Buffy the Vampire Slayer to the films of George Romero has made use of this imagery, shaped and reshaped it while never getting away from the central questions about death and dissolution of the social and human order it raises.
TheoFantastique: Given the focus of exploration of TheoFantastique I am particularly interested in your discussion of the satanic in film. How significant have cinematic depictions of demonic evil been in influencing the American consciousness?
W. Scott Poole: Films dating from the silent era have played a role in what I see as a kind of satanic cultural revival in the 20th century. Comic devils, horrifying devils, sympathetic devils of one kind or another are so common at the cineplex that I think many moviegoers don’t even notice, or at least are so deluged with demonic beings that they don’t notice what a cultural obsession this is.
While I certainly don’t think all beliefs about the Devil are formed solely by films, I do think that film exists in a dialectical relationship with religious belief. For many Americans, portrayals of the Devil on film act as what Peter Berger might call “plausibility structures,” cultural way stations that reconfirm, or simply add color and texture, to beliefs that have come out of folk traditions and institutional churches.
TheoFantastique: How early does Satan or demonic themes appear in American cinema?
W. Scott Poole: Very early, in the era of the silents. It’s very striking to me that some of the earliest European films dealt with both the devil, such as the 1913 film The Student of Prague. It’s almost a kind of “return of the repressed” to use Freudian language. Supposedly the 18th and 19th centuries had created a post-enlightenment intellectual milieu and yet, filmmakers portray these powerful mythic images the moment that it becomes possible in this new medium. In American film, images of Satan become part of the “vamp” tradition in which the Devil is portrayed as using seductive women to corrupt American domestic bliss (usually portrayed by Theda Bara or Adele Farrington).
TheoFantastique: You state that “Turn-of-the-century European (particularly Parisian) fascination with Satanism lay at the roots of the horror film in America.” How was this the case, and how did this then develop into the classic Universal horror films?
W. Scott Poole: I talk a bit about what David Skal describes as the emergence of “satanic chic” in nineteenth century Paris. There was a deep romantic fascination with the Devil and a kind of “literary Satanism” represented by the works of Charles Baudelaire and the work of the Symbolist poets more generally. The infamous Grand Guignol Company, with its theatrical representations of morbid topics and gruesome death enjoyed most of its success on the European continent but still included some of the basic themes that would eventually emerge in American horror films. What I argue in the book about most of the Universal films is that they actually play on some of the basic satanic themes that emerged in Europe, using much of the imagery, while also being careful not to make the Devil into the central monster. Tod Browning’s Dracula is dressed as the Mephistophelean character that stage musicians had evoked (because, remember, popular 19th century magicians often evoked the Devil in their advertising to increase the mysticism and mystery of their acts). The Wolf Man is presented to us as being under a kind of satanic curse (remember that glowing pentagram in his hand). Still, in an America where evangelical Protestantism would go from strength to strength throughout the 20th century, there was a tentative approach to any notion of what we would call “religious horror.”
TheoFantastique: Can you provide a few examples of how horror films, in the past and continuing on into the present, have drawn upon Satan as a figure for the demonization of the Other?
W. Scott Poole: One of the more interesting films from the classic period of the Universal monsters in Karloff and Lugosi in The Black Cat (1934). It’s fairly shocking to me that this film ever gets made in this period since it actually manages to evoke everything from Satanism to incest to necrophilia. American audiences only saw a heavily edited, really heavily censored, version of this film that portrayed Karloff as a satanic grand master of an evil cabal and Lugosi as almost his equally diabolical opponent. What made this possible is that both are portrayed (very easily in Lugosi’s case) as rather diabolical foreigners and the environment they inhabit is a rather decadent European landscape of complete with Bauhaus architecture. The theme that the dark memories of the First World War set off this struggle as something happening “over there”-the foreign Other rather than something in the heart of America.
Jumping ahead a bit (we will come back, I know, to the late 60s/early 70s) I firmly believe that white, middle class anxieties over the Other helped produce a significant amount of satanic horror in the 1980s. Thoroughly forgettable films like The First Power portrayed the Devil as able to inhabit human bodies and it was the bodies of the homeless and the drug abusers who proved especially susceptible. Even very good films from the 80s like Angel Heart traded in this kind of stuff to a degree, with African folkways and magical traditional portrayed as gateways for the Devil.
More recently, I’ve become interested in how horror in which Satan or the demonic is featured does not only portray women as victims but actually as demonic avatars. To me this, reaches back to some of those silent “vamp” tales I spoke of earlier. I’ve written about Jennifer’s Body in this connection.
The Exorcist deals with some of the same themes though I know we will be talking more about that in a moment.
TheoFantastique: How have horror films like The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby, and The Omen drawn upon and informed Catholic and Protestant evangelical conceptions of evil and the satanic in popular culture?
W. Scott Poole: These films are crucial to understanding the place of Satan in both pop culture and popular religion today. All three are products of their particular cultural moment that also tell us something about the direction of American religion and cultural conflict over moral issues. Rosemary’s Baby is, actually, a very subversive document in many ways, telling a story about the efforts of seemingly normal upper middle class people (who are really Satanists) to control Rosemary’s body and force her to bear the antichrist. Often missed is the fact that this narrative is told against the backdrop of Pope Paul VI’s visit to New York, Rosemary’s descriptions of herself as a lapsed Catholic who has married outside of the Church and is not “breeding” like her sisters. Combine all this with the fact that the film appears eight years after the FDA approved Enovin (“the Pill”) and in 1968, the year of the highly controversial papal encyclical Humanae Vita and you have a very interesting window into the emerging crisis in the American Catholic Church.
The Exorcist has been viewed by some as fairly simplistic Catholic propaganda because it portrays the Church as equipped with the power of exorcism. It really isn’t that simple, on a number of levels. I agree, for example, with a number of horror historians who see it as a comment on the state of the family, a very conservative comment in which a single mother has no idea how to handle her adolescent daughter and relationships cannot be restored, the Devil cannot be cast out, until two representatives from the patriarchal tradition come and fix it. I would also note, as Michael Cuneo says in his book American Exorcism, Protestants as well as Catholics seize on this movie and its imagery as a kind of response to perceived secularization in American society. A wave of fascination with possession and exorcism engulfed American religious life after the film appeared and really continues to this day. Recently, Joseph Laycock has followed up on this discussion in a very fine article that sees The Exorcist as the beginning of a kind of folk religious revival which you have explored with him in a recent interview.
I think The Omen is important as a kind of register for some of the latter part of the 20th century’s obsessions with the coming apocalypse. The Catholic Church figures in this narrative but less as an enemy of the Devil and more as an institution that has been corrupted by him. Some have seen it as a kind of Protestant version of The Exorcist.
It is significant to me that Omen appears around the time that Hal Lindsey’s Late Great Planet Earth purported to forecast the rise of the Antichrist based on a creative reading of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures alongside the daily newspaper. A generation of evangelicals gets their information about the end of the world from a combination of Lindsey and The Omen. This prepares the way for the pop culture juggernaut Left Behind. Of course, all of these materials are drawing on about a hundred years of what scholars of American religion refer to as “premillenial dispensationalism,” an interpretive tradition popular in American Christian Fundamentalism in which the end of human history is understood as a distinct age, preceded by a “rapture” of true Christians that heralds a period of “tribulation” on earth that will include the rise of the Antichrist. While The Omen certainly doesn’t follow this tradition very closely, it borrows significant elements from it.
TheoFantastique: As you raise this important topic and then critique the size and role of Satan in American culture, and its popular religion, are you worried that many won’t be able to step back and think reflexively and that you might be seen as watering down the concern for the diabolical, if not in league with it yourself (however unwittingly)? How would you respond to those who might have these concerns?
W. Scott Poole: I do think about this and it actually came up in a public talk I gave Halloween week. I think though that anyone who reads the book will understand that my critique is of a naïve understanding of the nature of evil rather than any effort to try and dilute our conceptions of evil. One of the smartest of the many smart things that scholar Jeffrey Burton Russell said about the idea of Satan is that in the early 1970’s Americans were willing to believe the Devil possessed a teen-age girl but not that he possessed a national government. I point out that in the 1980s, at the same time that “rumor panics” about satanic covens convinced some Americans that most missing children were being kidnapped and tortured by Satanists, millions of children in the US were sinking far beneath the poverty line, living on a nutritional scale similar to developing nations in dangerous neighborhoods gutted by the crack epidemic that was itself a product of a vast and growing inequality of wealth in this country.
So I hope readers will step back and reflect on what “watering down a concept of the diabolical” might really mean. Perhaps you can have a strong, vibrant and even exotic belief in Satan and have a limited, naïve, and simplistic notion of the nature of evil?
TheoFantastique: In your Epilogue you write: “The devil’s greatest trick is not to convince us that he does not exist. It is, instead, to convince us that he lives in our enemies, that he surrounds us, and that he must be destroyed, no matter the cost, no matter the collateral damage. … The devil is the negation and hatred of the Other…” As I reflected on these words I was struck that in 2001 a handful of individuals who were convinced that the United States is the Great Satan committed great acts of violence that led to loss of life, and in response American political leaders were motivated in part by the belief that the attackers were the ones acting as agents of Satan. With this tendency to see the other as diabolical evil while missing one’s own moral blindspots, do you have any suggestions for how we might reflect more self-critically on pop culture as an expression of our dark shadows?
W. Scott Poole: As someone who consumes vast and possibly unhealthy amount of popular culture, I feel very strange saying this but here goes: there has to be a moral and spiritual component to our interaction with pop culture, maybe especially for those of us who love its dark shadows. This does not mean that we cannot have that experience of pure aesthetic enjoyment that powerful narrative provides. But we also have to step back and ponder what we love, not because of a puritanical worrying over what “message” is being conveyed but because it will only increase our love and enjoyment of these things if we make sense of their context and of the many different levels every pop culture document works on.
So, for example, I love The Exorcist. I think it’s one of the great films, in any genre of the 20th century (it would at least be on my top 20 list in fact). At the same time, I hate portions of its message because I have made myself aware of the social and historical context it comes out of. It’s also powerful enough as a work of art that it transcends that context and can be enjoyed in all the complex ways we enjoy any kind of art.
TheoFantastique I was struck in reading a book on television favorites like The Twilight Zone and the many episodes which featured Satan, or growing up in the 1970s and seeing made for television movies like Satan’s Triangle or Satan’s School for Girls. Your book had to limit the scope of discussion, but how might television have been as influential as film, or possibly more, in developing our popular conceptions of Satan and the battle against evil?
W. Scott Poole: In my view, made for TV movies often contain even more crude imprints of current cultural obsessions than do film. They are less interesting to me for this reason though they are certainly a part of this flood of interest in the Devil that begins in the late 60s. I have a vague memory of a film from the 80s that was a sort of satanic Stepford wives in which a middle class family discovers that their “perfect suburb” is really run by Satanists. This fed directly off the various conspiracy theories common to that era.
TheoFantasique: You also touch on the unfortunate instances of satanic ritual abuse and satanic panics. Related to this it is worth noting an irony in the case of the West Memphis Three, three teens in the 1990s convicted of allegedly murdering two young boys as they were allegedly influenced by occultism. This case is described in the book Devil’s Knot which is currently being made into a motion picture by director Scott Derrickson, an evangelical who also directed The Exorcism of Emily Rose. Any thoughts?
W. Scott Poole: I would say I touch on the many tragic instances of rumor panics about satanic ritual abuse that were based on various cultural anxieties rather than on any empirical evidence. To me, the West Memphis case is an especially horrible example of this. Here you have three teenagers convicted of a deeply disturbing crime based on little more than the fact that they wore Metallica t-shirts and checked out “occult” books from the library. This, to me, provides an example of how the satanic panic became more than urban legend and ended up destroying lives.
It’s of course interesting that Scott Derrickson will be making a film about this. I actually wonder if it needs a film given the excellent documentaries that have already been produced. Moreover, in Exorcism of Emily Rose, he took an actual case in which a priest had been accused, probably rightly, of negligent homicide in the death of a troubled young woman and raised the question about whether something truly supernatural had been at work. I hope he doesn’t plan the same for the West Memphis case but obviously we will have to see. I hope he makes it a film about the complexities of evil, rather than about visits from the Devil.
TheoFantastique: Scott, again, please accept my thanks for your fine book. I hope it receives the critical and popular attention it deserves.
W. Scott Poole: Thanks, John, for some great questions.
TheoFantastique is usually the place for in-depth exploration of issues related to the fantastic. But the flips side involves a fan’s enjoyment as well. With this post I take a stroll down memory lane to fondly remember a toy that this monster kid had growing up in the 1970s.
Those fascinated by the fantastic don’t know how easy they have it these days. There are any number of films and television programs, DVDs, books, and thousands of websites, not to mention various conventions that can be explored to enjoy whatever aspect of the fantastic that is desired. Growing up in the 1970s, on the tale end of the monster kid phenomenon that had begun a decade or two prior, it wasn’t quite so easy. We had to work hard at it in order to satisfy our monstrous fetish. One way this was done was to secure whatever toys became available that connected to the fantastic. I have a soft spot in my heart for one such toy, Milton Bradley’s Shrunken Head Apple Sculpture kit with Vincent Price on the box cover, a favorite of mine growing up, who also did the television advertisements for the kit. Although you supplied the apples, the kit included beads, glue, paint, hair, string, and a plastic apparatus that was put on a lamp and which was designed to hold the carved apple as it dehydrated into a form resembling a shrunken human head. I know know if my mom was very happy with my grotesque art project connected to her living room lamp for a few days, but I sure had fun in the process. I only wish I had held onto this and other monster toys from the period. Those interested in learning more about the kit can Google it and visit sites like X-Entertainment, and can even order this retro toy at eBay.
Update: Another item from my childhood came to mind the other day, a model that I built in the early 1970s, and I was able to track it down on the Internet. It was the “Dead Man’s Raft” by MPC based upon Walt Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean ride. One of the interesting features was its “zap action”, a rubber band providing tension on the skeleton in the chest who would pop out when the chest was opened and slam the knife in his hand into a treasure map. I found this on eBay listed from a seller in an unopened, sealed box with an asking price of $495! An only slightly more reasonable copy of the complete model is available at The Pop Top Shop for $295. That page also includes examples of the other Pirates models available in the 1970s, and a 1968 AMT model of the USS Enterprise from the original Star Trek that I also remember building. For background information and photos of various monster toys from the 1970s and other decades visit The Gallery of Monster Toys.
I was reflecting today on the horror and science fiction films I saw over Halloween, including a weekend long running of the Planet of the Apes franchise films and some of the 1970s television program. I also reflected on the usual news of a nuclear North Korea, Iran moving toward nuclear weapons and assembled AR-10 rifle, Muslim on Muslim violence in Pakistan, and the rest of the all too common inhumanity to humanity that takes place each day.
I find it interesting that Planet of the Apes came out at the end of the 1960s, around the same time as the Star Trek television series aired, yet both portray dramatically different assessments of the human condition, and the potential to transcend it. In Star Trek we have a humanistic optimism where Gene Roddenberry portrayed a twenty-third century humanity that moved beyond human depravity through education and technology. On the other hand we have a more pessimistic view of human nature through post-apocalyptic self-destruction in Planet of the Apes as portrayed in its screenplay through the imagination of Rod Serling and his fellow scriptwriters. In light of human history, including that which has unfolded since the 1960s and into the present, I think Serling and Planet of the Apes had it right. Perhaps this is best summarized in a scene near the conclusion of Planet of the Apes where Cornelius reads from the sacred scrolls of the apes with the Lawgiver’s denunciation of man. I think the scroll might be on to something in its indictment of humanity.
TheoFantastique: Joe, as a younger scholar who likely did not see The Exorcist when it appeared in theaters in the 1970s, what is the personal interest in it for you personally and as a researcher in religion and theology?
Joseph Laycock: As I allude to in the paper, I first saw The Exorcist when it was re-released in 2000. I saw the premiere at the SXSW music and film festival in Austin, Texas. I remember there was a bat flying around the theater. (Austin is home to the largest urban bat colony in the world). I sat in the back row and the man sitting in front of me turned out to be William Peter Blatty himself. Afterwards he went before the audience and took questions. There were a lot of film buffs and he seemed slightly annoyed by their inquiries. He must have repeated three times that nothing was meant to be symbolic and that everything in his story was based on actual experience.
I didn’t get around to reading the novel until the summer of 2008, but when I did I immediately wanted to write a paper on it. I think what struck me most was not the supernatural elements but the little things, like a character chanting “Namu Myoho Renge Kyo.” I remember thinking that The Exorcist is a sort of time capsule of what America’s religious landscape looked like circa 1970. Similarly, the description of Father Karras’ crisis of faith and his struggle to reconcile it with his scientific training has an amazing verisimilitude that I thought could only come from actual experience. The final catalyst in starting this project was working with Dr. Jon Roberts of Boston University. Roberts uses The Exorcist in a course on American religious history for the very reasons I’ve described.
TheoFantastique: How influential was The Exorcist both on the original audiences who watched it decades ago, and in the subsequent development of aspects of pop culture?
Joseph Laycock: In the 1970s, The Exorcist was on the New York Times best-seller list for fifty-five weeks. Its commercial success paved the way for Stephen King and other best-selling horror novelists. But it was the film adaptation in 1973 that is most remembered.
A Time article described a line 5,000 people long to buy tickets. And in almost every screening of the film, people would become overwhelmed and have to leave, faint, and, of course, vomit. There are numerous articles from 1973 describing theaters soaked in vomit after showing The Exorcist. The film even appears in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, because it was linked to cases of psychosis. It also created a demand for actual exorcisms. Numerous charismatic “deliverance ministries” arose after the film.
Obviously, nothing like that happened when I saw The Exorcist in 2000. Since the re-release you can find Regan’s demonic face covered with vomit grinning at you from T-shirts and even bobble-head toys. The “hipster” culture has been accused of “fetishizing authenticity” as they plunder all of post-war culture searching for fresh artifacts of retro chic. Sadly, I think this has become the fate of The Exorcist. On the other hand, only a handful of horror movies are remembered in this fashion. I think Generation Y has fetishized The Exorcist precisely because they can sense its authenticity.
TheoFantastique: Can you sketch the ways in which the film has been interpreted critically and how this contrasts with your own interpretive approach?
Joseph Laycock: Relatively little has been written on the novel, but volumes have been written on the film. One thing I noticed was resistance to the idea that this could actually be a story about religion. Numerous theorists (including Stephen King) have read possession as code for something else that we fear either consciously or sub-consciously. According to most film theorists, The Exorcist is actually about fear of the counter-culture, fear of children, fear of women, etc. Conversely, many critics who thought The Exorcist was actually about demonic possession found it distasteful. S.T. Joshi, for instance, characterizes Blatty as a Catholic evangelist and The Exorcist as a sort of hellfire sermon.
While psychoanalytical readings are interesting, I don’t believe they can explain the behavior of audiences watching The Exorcist in 1973. I think those reactions can be attributed to a very literal fear of demonic possession. Furthermore, I think these readings of the film point to a disconnect between popular religion and the idea of secularization. The secularization narrative is so powerful, that even when audiences are fainting from terror while watching The Exorcist, it is assumed that this is the catharsis of some repressed and previously unknown fear, rampant in our collective subconscious, because the idea that modern Westerners could actually be afraid of the devil seems an impossibility.
TheoFantastique: How might The Exorcist reflect author William Peter Blatty’s life experiences?
Joseph Laycock: Blatty has described himself as a “relaxed Catholic” and his spiritual life is reflected in both the Catholic character Father Karras and the secular character Chris MacNeil. Like Karras, Blatty was raised by his mother in extreme poverty and was extremely troubled by her death. He attended Georgetown University, a Jesuit school, which serves as the setting for The Exorcist. Blatty suffered the same doubts as Father Karras and described a longing for a miracle that might shore up his faith. This “miracle” came in 1949 when a story appeared in The Washington Post about a boy from Mount Ranier, Maryland who had become possessed and been successfully exorcised. Blatty had already heard rumors of the exorcism through the Jesuits and successfully tracked down the exorcist. However, he would not begin writing his novel for another twenty years. After Georgetown, Blatty learned Arabic and worked for the US Information Agency in Beirut. His time in the Middle East became the inspiration for the opening scene of The Exorcist in Iraq.
Chris MacNeil and her family are based directly on the actress Shirley MacLaine who was once Blatty’s neighbor. MacLaine was an actress and single mother with a young daughter. MacLaine’s French housekeepers were also turned into characters, as was the British director J. Lee Thompson. Although MacNeil is not religious she experiments with a variety of spiritual practices, including using a Ouija board “to access her unconscious.” In fact, Blatty used a Ouija board after the death of his mother and, according to MacLaine, once organized a séance at her house.
TheoFantastique: Can you describe secularization theory and how The Exorcist would seem to counter this in your thesis regarding folk piety?
Joseph Laycock: There are two versions of what has been called, “The cultural myth of universal secularization.” In one version, belief in the supernatural is unable to compete with scientific rationalism: Accordingly, religion will be forced to renounce supernaturalism or else die out. In another variant, religion will continue to exist but only as a very private phenomenon with no social or political significance. While both these trends have occurred in Western culture, most sociologists of religion now agree that any sort of universal secularization is unlikely to happen anytime soon.
However, the secularization narrative carried a lot of weight when Blatty was writing his novel. The Exorcist was written in 1969, three years after Time magazine ran its famous cover asking “Is God Dead?” A Gallup poll taken in January 1970 indicated that 75 percent of survey respondents felt religion was losing influence. This is the highest percentage ever recorded since Gallup began this poll in 1957. I argue that by simply showing the religious elements from his own life-world in his novel, Blatty created a counter-narrative to the myth of universal secularization. I also think that this critique is part of the appeal of The Exorcist. For people who wanted to believe in demons, The Exorcist gave them permission to do so even if the intellectual elite didn’t.
The Achilles’ heel of the secularization narrative is folk piety. Folk piety, or popular religion, is distinct from ecclesiastical religion, the official doctrines of the church. Since the Protestant Reformation, the Catholic Church has been forced to take an increasingly guarded position about the supernatural. Issues of exorcism and the demonic in particular, are often regarded as a source of embarrassment by the modern church. This trend would seem to support the idea of universal secularization. However, supernaturalism lives on in the form of folk piety. The Exorcist portrays numerous examples of supernaturalism and the fantastic from American folk piety such the belief in demons, the use of Ouija boards, parapsychology, and rumors of Satanic cults.
Today, sociological data suggests that the America Blatty presents in The Exorcist is accurate. While ecclesiastical religion may frown at talk of demons, we have numerous polls indicating that many Americans do believe that angels and demons are active in the world. Furthermore, these beliefs are not always private but are continually leaking into the political sphere. One example of this comes from a research report on a Christian picket of pornography. 98 percent of the picketers reported a belief in an active personal “transcendent” force of evil that was directly involved in pornography. Another example is Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, who has openly described his participation in an exorcism. Clearly, supernaturalism is in no danger of disappearing anytime soon.
TheoFantastique: One aspect of disenchantment that I find intriguing, and which I wish more ecclesiastical authorities would become aware of, is Weber’s idea that you discuss in your paper wherein “church apologists had a hand in bringing about ‘the disenchantment of the world’ as they defended their doctrines through rationalization, banishing the supernatural to an increasingly transcendent role.” Doesn’t this mean that ecclesiastical authorities have to walk a fine line in late modernity in seeking both rationality and a level of enchantment?
Joseph Laycock: Weber argues that church apologists were forced to “rationalize” their doctrines or else be accused of superstition. So in ecclesiastical religion, the supernatural became increasingly less immanent and more transcendent. These changes made religious doctrine more resistant to the critiques of rationalists, but they also made religion less meaningful to practitioners.
The process of disenchantment can be seen quite starkly in the Christian tradition of exorcism. There are virtually no demons at all in the Hebrew Bible. By contrast, the world of the New Testament is full of demons. Christians have the power to cast them out and, in their own way, demons affirm that Jesus is the messiah and that God is immanent in the world. It seems that the early Christian church had a rich tradition of exorcism. Early writings suggest that Pagans sometimes went to Christians for exorcisms, and this may have furthered the spread of Christianity.
This changed after the Protestant Reformation, which Weber cites as a seminal moment in the history of disenchantment. Exorcists were accused of being in league with the demons (a similar accusation is made against Jesus in the Gospel of Luke). Not wanting to lose face in front of their Protestant critics, Catholic authorities began to regulate who could perform an exorcism and to consolidate what had been essentially a folk tradition into the formal rite of exorcism that appears in the Ritual Romanum, written in 1614. (A passage from this text appears in the novel).
With the rise of medical science, exorcism became even more regulated and increasingly deferential to scientific authority. While the church has not denied the reality of possession entirely, the criteria for a case of genuine possession are now so demanding that an official exorcism is nearly impossible to obtain in developed countries. Of course, rationalism is not necessarily a bad thing, but it has left many Catholics dissatisfied. Those seeking an exorcism now frequently turn to groups that have splintered from the Catholic Church or to charismatic Protestant movements.
For Weber, there was no happy medium to be found: We can either stubbornly cling to supernaturalism, or we can stoically choose the path of rationalism and disenchantment. Both reactions can be found among American Catholic clergy and The Exorcist actually exasperated these differences. I think that the ad hoc solution lies in the division of labor between ecclesiastical religion and folk piety: The church can worry about reconciling religion and reason, while the lay people are free to pursue meaning through supernaturalism. In some cases, Catholic clergy have arranged “under the table” exorcisms in order to maintain this division of labor.
TheoFantastique: How is folk piety expressed through the rite of exorcism and ouija boards in the film and its cultural context?
Joseph Laycock: Ouija boards were incredibly popular when Blatty was writing The Exorcist. There was also a Ouija board connected to the Mount Ranier exorcism. Structurally, using a Ouija board is very similar to conducting an exorcism. Both activities involve calling out, engaging, and then dismissing a supernatural being and they are both regarded as perilous endeavors. Not surprisingly, the Catholic Church has attempted to control both practices. A campaign to warn American Catholics about the spiritual dangers of Ouija boards was launched as early as 1918.
Blatty seems to have experimented with Ouija boards for the same reason he was interested in exorcisms: He wanted a direct experience of the supernatural that ecclesiastical religion could no longer provide. I think that most people who are interested in these activities have similar motives.
TheoFantastique: You conclude that The Exorcist “fueled a resurgence of folk piety” for audiences of the 1970s. How might contemporary films that touch on the demonic, particularly in the context of apocalyptic, serve the same function in our time?
Joseph Laycock: Millennial expectations are often not amenable to established religious institutions. In 2006 Pope Benedict XVI commented that the Book of Revelation is not about imminent catastrophe but the struggle of Christian churches in Asia in the first century. Benedict’s historical-critical reading still has a message that is relevant for modern Christians, but it makes poor fodder for charismatic religious movements or Hollywood movies. Recent apocalyptic films like Knowing and the upcoming Legion draw on folk piety rather than ecclesiastical religion. These films take a few elements from the Christian tradition and combine them with occultism, extra-terrestrials, and fears of planet-wide disasters. The result is a supernatural story that seems somehow both strange and familiar.
Tonight I saw Paranormal Activity, which (spoiler alert!) I think is actually a re-telling of the Book of Tobit. So far this film has grossed over $48 million and seems destined to be a cult classic. It may be the closest thing the millennial generation will ever have to The Exorcist. As the title suggests, it derives its plausibility more from fringe science than from Catholic tradition but the same elements are there including demonology and the ubiquitous Ouija board. Although no one vomited, as the credits rolled someone shouted, “That was the scariest movie I’ve seen in my life!” What is interesting is that the events on the screen were not scary. Most of the shrieks and gasps were in response to things as mundane as thumps or a door slamming. These elements are frightening because of what Julia Kristeva calls “intertextuality.” Regardless of their religious affiliation, the audience knew from folk piety what a door slamming at 3 AM signifies. It this knowledge, and the belief that such things might actually happen, that makes the slamming door scary.
Obviously, a film like Paranormal Activity could not have been created, let alone frightening, if there was not already widespread interest in investigating the paranormal. But it is also likely that in response to this film more people will discover their houses are haunted, conduct amateur experiments in parapsychology, and report belief in demons on Gallup polls. As with The Exorcist and exorcism, art imitates life and life imitates art.
TheoFantastique: Joe, thanks again for discussing your article. I appreciate your research interests.
You never know where the fantastic in pop culture will surface, and where religion and the fantastic will intersect. I have been doing some research lately for a couple of essays on Neopaganism I need to write for a book on world religions. Today I looked at Magic and Witchcraft by Nevil Drury (Thomas & Hudson, 2003), and in his chapter on “Technopagans and Digital Magicians” there was an interesting reference to the artist H. R. Giger, perhaps best known for his creation of the alien in the series of Alien films which first appeared thirty years ago. Under the subheading of “Dark Archetypes” Drury writes of Giger:
While many Neopagan responses to cyberspace are innovative and essentially positive, there is an underbelly – a darker realm which feeds on fear and powerlessness in a rapidly changing world. One of the archetypes that embodies these feelings most strongly is that of the Alien – the space-entity created by H. R. Giger, which featured in the Oscar-winning film of the same name and which has since become an icon of the cyberculture.
Drury continues:
Many of Giger’s most surreal artworks are now on permanent display at his museum in Castle St. Germain in Gruyeres, Switzerland, which opened in June 1998. The paintings draw strongly on the left-hand path of Western magic as well as on fantasy and horror fictions, as in his extraordinary The Necronomicon of 1978. There is an unquestionable potency – even a macabre beauty – in his biomechanoid creations, but his nightmare fusions of the human and mechanical also breathe a sense of no escape– a sense that we are all trapped in a virtual hell of our own making. Perhaps this is a portent of our times. …There is no doubt that, in terms of his art, Giger is a magician – conjuring dramatic visions that propel us into the darker recesses of the psyche.
But while placing Giger in the category of techno and digital magician, Drury clarifies his interpretation of Giger and his work in this context:
While he has studied the works of Aleister Crowley, like many other cyberspace enthusiasts, eh is not a magician in the conventional sense. He does not perform rituals, engage in invocations, or summon spirits. But one could hardly find a better temple of the black arts than the Spell Room at the H. R. Giger Museum, where the walls display several of his most powerful paintings and murals. It would seem that, when the thin veil across Giger’s psyche is slightly drawn aside, tempestuous visions of evil and alienation come forth. It is almost as if the dark gods were emerging from his nightmares.
Giger’s work and other material can be found at his website.
I continue to enjoy putting together the posts and content that becomes the exploration of the fantastic in pop culture that is TheoFantastique. With this post I let readers know about “coming attractions,” beyond my own commentary the topics and individuals I will be talking with and about on this fantastic journey. In no particular order:
Joseph Laycock is an independent scholar who I have interviewed previously on his book Vampires Today. He has submitted an article to the Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion titled “The Folk Piety of William Peter Blatty: The Exorcist in the Context of Secularization.” This article presents the thesis that “ The Exorcist represents a cultural moment in which the perceived decline of supernaturalism inspired a resurgence of folk piety.” It is always interesting to explore a significant facet of this influential horror film and I look forward to discussing this with Joe.
Speaking of the demonic and Satanic, W. Scott Poole, who recently wrote an article for religion dispatches that contrasted the depiction of the feminine in Jennifer’s Body with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, is the author of Satan in America: The Devil You Know (Rowman & Littlefield, 2009). In this volume he explores America’s relationship with the figure of Satan, but thus far interviews on his book have not discussed his treatmetn of horror films on this issue. Scott will be here to address this neglect.
I recently “met” Corvis Nocturnum, a vampire who contacted me after reading the interview with Joseph Laycock to express his appreciation for the volume and the spirit of the interview. Nocturnum is the author of Allure of the Vampire: Our Sexual Attraction to the Undead (CreateSpace, 2009). Amazon describes this work as follows:
The mere mention of vampires used to be enough to make people think of a nocturnal predator. But over the centuries the vampire has changed from monstrous villain to sexual object, for both men and women alike. Allure of the Vampire examines our intimate attraction to these beings in a detailed manner. Now, join occult author Corvis Nocturnum as he reveals the fascinating evolution of this icon as it has lured and enticed us in folklore, film and books from the days of ancient civilization to the living breathing inhabitants of our modern subculture, the vampire community.
In the near future Nocturnum will appear here for an interview on this volume.
Finally, as a teen I loved many of the made-for-television horror films of the 1970s. Many of these appeared on the ABC TV Movie of the Week. These included offerings like Duel, Trilogy of Terror, and The Night Stalker. Michael Karol has written a volume that discusses these and other films in The ABC TV Movie of the Week Companion: A Loving Tribute to the Classic Series (iUniverse, 2008). Karol will be here to discuss these interesting pieces of pop culture that still hold up years later for horror fans.
Another book that touches on the psychic realm caught my eye when thumbing through the catalog by McFarland. It is Seers, Witches and Psychics on Screenby Karin Beeler (McFarland, 2008). Beeler is an associate professor in the English department and Acting Director for the Centre for Teaching, Learning, and Technology at the University of Northern British Columbia in Prince George, Canada. She is also the author of Tattoos, Desire and Violence: Marks of Resistance in Literature, Film and Television (McFarland, 2006). Beeler carved out some time in her academic schedule to discuss Seers and the idea behind women visionary characters.
TheoFantastique: Karin, thank you making time in a busy academic schedule to discuss your book. How did you come to develop a personal interest in the topic of “visionary women’?
Karin Beeler: My interest in the topic of “visionary women” stems from my curiosity about alternative ways of “seeing” or “knowing.” I am interested in exploring how these alternative forms of perception challenge and sometimes even intersect with more established kinds of analysis. Institutionalized knowledge systems are often equated with the “rational” realm (e.g. science, technology). In other words, we live in an information age that appears to provide us with all the answers, and yet every once in a while we may need to acknowledge the need to shift our gaze and looking at things differently.
I think that the representation of visionary women in television and film serves as a way of exploring how different kinds of abilities can be expressed in societies that are attempting to recognize the plurality or hybridity of human experience. These images of women with visionary powers also extend the definition of heroism that has often been presented in the limited context of a physical, masculine power. These women use what has been traditionally conceived of as a passive power in an active way and offer different models of heroism in a postfeminist age. River Tam in Joss Whedon’s Firefly and Serenity, for example, is an interesting blend of a psychic and a woman warrior figure.
TheoFantastique:Can you define some of the forms of expression you explore in terms of the female visionary, and “third wave feminism” or “postfeminism”?
Karin Beeler:In this book I discuss the female visionary (seer, witch, psychic warrior, medium or psychic investigator) in the context of third wave feminism or postfeminism. Third wave feminism emerged in the late 1980s as a new generation’s response to some of the ideas of second wave feminism, and the term postfeminist is often used to discuss this new expression of feminism. I choose the terms “third wave feminism” and “postfeminism” synonymously to recognize the contradictions and diversity that can characterize feminine experience as represented in television and film about women with visionary powers. The female visionary in these visual media is by no means a homogeneous entity; she may take the form of an African-American woman like Oda Mae Brown in the film Ghostwho reinvents herself. The female visionary may be represented as a teenage psychic warrior Cassandra figure like River Tam in Firefly and Serenity, as a twenty-something witch and sister in Charmed, as a mother of three like Alison Dubois in Mediumor as a postfeminist savior like Tru Davies in Tru Calling; the latter experiences the rewinding of a day with all of the day’s predictable and unpredictable outcomes.
TheoFantastique: One of the characters you discuss is Cordelia Chase of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel. How does her use of her visions represent empowerment and “hybridization”?
Karin Beeler: Cordelia is a character that has generated a good deal of critical interest by scholars and fans of the series Angel. She is often viewed as a disempowered character who plays second fiddle to the vampire Angel in the popular television series. While she is sometimes cast as the suffering seer figure reminiscent of Cassandra, I argue that she moves beyond this mythic prototype by crossing boundaries and identities, often to help others but also to help herself. For example, she chooses to become part-demon to alleviate the pain she experiences when she receives visions: “So, demonize me already” (“Birthday” 3.11). Throughout the series she occupies a morally ambiguous or “in-between” space partly because of her ironic remarks, which also establish her hybrid identity. When she is possessed by the demonic entity known as Jasmine, she acquires yet another new identity. When Cordelia gives birth to Jasmine who appears as a kind of supernatural light, Cordelia may symbolize the kinds of alternatives available to women in a postfeminist reproductive era, from adoption to surrogate motherhood.
TheoFantastique: In another section of your book you move to consideration of psychic women investigators. You write that there has been rise in women featured in this way in films between 1990 and 2007. To what do you attribute this rise of interest in the psychic or visionary woman?
Karin Beeler: The psychic investigator appears to be a paradoxical concept because the investigative process is often equated with the rational and the known while psychic experience has often been equated with the supernatural. The psychic investigator as presented in television and film culture combines a curious mixture of the “rational” and the “intuitive,” thus suggesting that “science” or technology alone cannot provide all of the answers. The psychic’s ability is legitimized in these representations because she validates certain emotional connections and experiences that the scientific establishment or police investigators might ignore. The “clues” that the psychic characters or individuals provide, offer an alternate way of seeing that empowers individuals not affiliated with a formal institution (e.g., the police force, the medical establishment). These investigators may have certain extraordinary abilities (e.g. psychic powers), but they are also presented as very ordinary people (mothers, wives) who want to help others in distress. The figure of the psychic investigator may also reflect the ease with which we move from one form of experience to another today — from “real” to virtual worlds, or from natural to supernatural contexts when we watch different television or film genres (documentary versus fantasy).
TheoFantastique: In your discussion of female psychic investigators you write that “psychic reality shows are a hybrid form or genre that creates a third space for women with alternative forms of knowledge and power.” How do you see female audience members appropriating or participating in this in their own lives?
Karin Beeler: A psychic reality show like the Canadian production Rescue Mediums creates an interesting blend of the “real” and the supernatural. Without carrying out a formal study of the television audience, it is difficult to say how many people watched the show because they believed in supernatural, psychic phenomena and felt that their own beliefs in the afterlife were validated or whether they watched the show for entertainment purposes because the format incorporates elements of other well known television genres (documentary, reality television, home living/domestically oriented television programs). While these kinds of psychic television programs may have their detractors, I would argue that these psychic reality shows can still encourage women in a number of positive ways; Rescue Mediums shows two women collaborating with one another and respecting one another’s abilities as they try to solve a mystery. Jackie and Christine, the two rescue mediums have their individual personalities, but they work together, thus espousing a post-feminist model of recognizing individual differences while also drawing strength from their joint efforts. Adopting a strategy of individual effort and cooperation with others is a model that women viewers may find valuable in solving problems in their own lives.
TheoFantastique: In another chapter you discuss the television program Ghost Whisperer. You write that in our post-9/11 world that the interest in such psychic scenarios may be due to our desire to have “some sense of closure” in regards to death and our relationship with lost loved ones. What kind of commentary might this be on the ways in which Americans process death and perhaps fail to make the most of our loved ones in the present?
Karin Beeler: Some of the Ghost Whisperer episodes (“Free Fall” and “The One”) include storylines and images that echo the chilling events of September 11, 2001 when planes crashed into the Twin Towers in New York city. Even though these fictional Ghost Whisperer episodes have some supernatural content (with the appearance of “ghosts”), they probably resonate in a way that only American audiences can fully understand because of the way the population is still “haunted” by the memories of the 9/11 events. Ghost Whisperer and other series that involve the living and the dead searching for some kind of closure after experiencing a traumatic event reflect how people today need to take time to mourn and remember the past. For example, in this age of medical advances and high tech gadgets, death is sanitized and people are not given enough of an opportunity to mourn. At the same time, people who lose their loved ones also need some form of psychological closure to heal themselves. By focusing on the often traumatic experiences of the “dead” and their relationship to the living, a series such as Ghost Whisperer could be suggesting that Americans (and this probably applies to many other nations as well) should consider the importance of connecting with relatives and friends while they are still with us since life has an element of unpredictability. The events of 9/11 make us realize that any conversation we have with someone could be our last, so we should be mindful of how we communicate with others.
TheoFantastique: How do contemporary portrayals of visionary women in film and television compare to more ancient forms? What are the general similarities and differences?
Karin Beeler:As someone with a background in comparative literary studies, I have always been interested in the connections between old and new ways of seeing. For example, I enjoy examining how ancient or medieval representations of the feminine (e.g., the figure of Cassandra and the figure of Joan of Arc) are re-inscribed or resisted in more recent narratives. I think that mythic or legendary characters offer powerful narratives and psychological insights into human behavior that still appeal to modern day audiences even though the specific manifestation of these truths may change across cultures and over time. Feminist theory and the validation of women in many different kinds of endeavors also allow us to create a greater variety of possibilities for women as characters in television and film. The figure of the Trojan seer Cassandra as represented in Greek literature, for example, has been constrained by the limitations placed on women in the patriarchal society of ancient Greece. As a result, she is often relegated to the status of the mad, marginalized woman whose life is defined by pain and disempowerment. Joan of Arc, was called a witch and burned at the stake; even though she was later recognized as a saint by the Church, her elevated status as an idealized woman still remains problematic. Contemporary portrayals of Cassandra or Joan of Arc figures often subvert limitations associated with these earlier images by showing how the modern representations resist patriarchal structures. That is not to say that the contemporary Cassandras like River in Firefly and Serenity and Joan of Arc figures like Joan in Joan of Arcadia or Jaye in Wonderfalls do not suffer; there is certainly an element of suffering because of their association with these mythical or legendary prototypes, but their difficulties are often lessened through the injection of humor or individual empowerment that allows them to experience a greater sense of agency.
TheoFantastique: Karin, again, thank you for your time, and for your discussion of your book. I encourage others to pick up a copy.
Karin Beeler: Many thanks for giving me the opportunity to “speak” about my book.
THE BOX: Movie Trailer
I’ve seen a trailer for a movie, The Box, that looks intriguing that I’ll pass along here. Following is the plot summary fromt the Internet Movie Database:
Norma and Arthur Lewis, a suburban couple with a young child, receive a simple wooden box as a gift, which bears fatal and irrevocable consequences. A mysterious stranger, delivers the message that the box promises to bestow upon its owner $1 million with the press of a button. But, pressing this button will simultaneously cause the death of another human being somewhere in the world; someone they don’t know. With just 24 hours to have the box in their possession, Norma and Arthur find themselves in the cross-hairs of a startling moral dilemma and must face the true nature of their humanity.
As I did a little Internet research The Box has a few promising possibilities. First, it is based upon the Richard Matheson short story “Button, Button.” Second, the film is directed by Richard Kelly, the writer responsible for the cult films Donnie Darko. Beyond this the film has already played at a film festival in Sweden and seems to have been well received. The Box opens November 6 in the U.S.
TheoFantastique is pleased to present its first guest posting, a review of The Fourth Kind by Paul Meehan, author of several books including Tech-Noir: The Fusion of Science Fiction and Film Noir (McFarland, 2008), Cinema of the Psychic Realm: A Critical Survey (McFarland, 2009), and Saucer Movies: A UFOlogical History of the Cinema (The Scarecrow Press, 1998).
Things continue to go bump in the night as Abby finds a weird-looking mark on her body and suspects that she herself may have been abducted and that aliens may have been responsible for her husband’s death. An expert in ancient Near Eastern tongues identifies the language on the police tapes of Tommy’s murder/suicide as ancient Sumerian, the first written language in history dating back to the Fourth Millennium B.C.E. The mysterious voice seems to be saying, “Our creation…examine, ruin and destroy,” in the ancient language Then another patient, Scott (Enzo Cilenti) insists on being hypnotized in the wake of an abduction experience he describes as “the worst you could ever imagine,” and is possessed by an alien force during the session that causes him to levitate and go into convulsions that literally break his back. A chagrined Sheriff August orders Abby confined to house arrest after this debacle, but a UFO descends on her house in the middle of the night to abduct Abby’s young daughter, Ashley (Mia McKenna Bruce). Despite the fact that a police officer witnessed the UFO while the police video recorder conveniently goes blank, August still blames Abby for her daughter’s disappearance. In the movie’s climax, Dr. Elias hypnotizes Abigail in an attempt to probe her own abduction memories and ultimately solve the riddles of her husband’s murder and her daughter’s disappearance.
In cinematic terms, The Fourth Kind does establish considerable screen tension and uses the Blair Witch-inspired technique of filming people who are acting intensely frightened in order to induce similar feelings in the audience. Osunsamni’s style is documentarian, utilizing shaky hand-held camera setups, naturalistic lighting, time-coded video and split screen cinematography. The photogenic Milla Jovovich carries much of the film with her earnest portrayal of the tormented Abigail, but she is sometimes upstaged by the intense performance of the odd-looking unknown actress playing the “real” Dr. Tyler, who often appears onscreen in the same split frame. Professional thesps Will Patton and Elias Koteas lend their support, but none of the supporting characters is drawn in any depth. The film seems to take its cue from The Mothman Prophecies (2002), both in its subject matter of mysterioso goings-on in a backwater stretch of rural America and in its coy avoidance of showing anything overtly extraterrestrial. Much of The Fourth Kind was shot in Bulgaria, lending its “Alaskan” locations a temperate, forested look in lieu Nome’s real landscape of frozen Arctic tundra.
Over the last week two areas of interest came together to make for an interesting tale here at TheoFantastique.
I first heard of 
W. Scott Poole: Very early, in the era of the silents. It’s very striking to me that some of the earliest European films dealt with both the devil, such as the 1913 film The Student of Prague. It’s almost a kind of “return of the repressed” to use Freudian language. Supposedly the 18th and 19th centuries had created a post-enlightenment intellectual milieu and yet, filmmakers portray these powerful mythic images the moment that it becomes possible in this new medium. In American film, images of Satan become part of the “vamp” tradition in which the Devil is portrayed as using seductive women to corrupt American domestic bliss (usually portrayed by Theda Bara or Adele Farrington).
W. Scott Poole: I talk a bit about what David Skal describes as the emergence of “satanic chic” in nineteenth century Paris. There was a deep romantic fascination with the Devil and a kind of “literary Satanism” represented by the works of Charles Baudelaire and the work of the Symbolist poets more generally. The infamous Grand Guignol Company, with its theatrical representations of morbid topics and gruesome death enjoyed most of its success on the European continent but still included some of the basic themes that would eventually emerge in American horror films. What I argue in the book about most of the Universal films is that they actually play on some of the basic satanic themes that emerged in Europe, using much of the imagery, while also being careful not to make the Devil into the central monster. Tod Browning’s Dracula is dressed as the Mephistophelean character that stage musicians had evoked (because, remember, popular 19th century magicians often evoked the Devil in their advertising to increase the mysticism and mystery of their acts). The Wolf Man is presented to us as being under a kind of satanic curse (remember that glowing pentagram in his hand). Still, in an America where evangelical Protestantism would go from strength to strength throughout the 20th century, there was a tentative approach to any notion of what we would call “religious horror.”
W. Scott Poole: One of the more interesting films from the classic period of the Universal monsters in Karloff and Lugosi in The Black Cat (1934). It’s fairly shocking to me that this film ever gets made in this period since it actually manages to evoke everything from Satanism to incest to necrophilia. American audiences only saw a heavily edited, really heavily censored, version of this film that portrayed Karloff as a satanic grand master of an evil cabal and Lugosi as almost his equally diabolical opponent. What made this possible is that both are portrayed (very easily in Lugosi’s case) as rather diabolical foreigners and the environment they inhabit is a rather decadent European landscape of complete with Bauhaus architecture. The theme that the dark memories of the First World War set off this struggle as something happening “over there”-the foreign Other rather than something in the heart of America.
W. Scott Poole: These films are crucial to understanding the place of Satan in both pop culture and popular religion today. All three are products of their particular cultural moment that also tell us something about the direction of American religion and cultural conflict over moral issues. Rosemary’s Baby is, actually, a very subversive document in many ways, telling a story about the efforts of seemingly normal upper middle class people (who are really Satanists) to control Rosemary’s body and force her to bear the antichrist. Often missed is the fact that this narrative is told against the backdrop of Pope Paul VI’s visit to New York, Rosemary’s descriptions of herself as a lapsed Catholic who has married outside of the Church and is not “breeding” like her sisters. Combine all this with the fact that the film appears eight years after the FDA approved Enovin (“the Pill”) and in 1968, the year of the highly controversial papal encyclical Humanae Vita and you have a very interesting window into the emerging crisis in the American Catholic Church.
It is significant to me that Omen appears around the time that Hal Lindsey’s Late Great Planet Earth purported to forecast the rise of the Antichrist based on a creative reading of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures alongside the daily newspaper. A generation of evangelicals gets their information about the end of the world from a combination of Lindsey and The Omen. This prepares the way for the pop culture juggernaut Left Behind. Of course, all of these materials are drawing on about a hundred years of what scholars of American religion refer to as “premillenial dispensationalism,” an interpretive tradition popular in American Christian Fundamentalism in which the end of human history is understood as a distinct age, preceded by a “rapture” of true Christians that heralds a period of “tribulation” on earth that will include the rise of the Antichrist. While The Omen certainly doesn’t follow this tradition very closely, it borrows significant elements from it.
TheoFantastique I was struck in reading a book on television favorites like The Twilight Zone and the many episodes which featured Satan, or growing up in the 1970s and seeing made for television movies like Satan’s Triangle or Satan’s School for Girls. Your book had to limit the scope of discussion, but how might television have been as influential as film, or possibly more, in developing our popular conceptions of Satan and the battle against evil?
TheoFantastique is usually the place for in-depth exploration of issues related to the fantastic. But the flips side involves a fan’s enjoyment as well. With this post I take a stroll down memory lane to fondly remember a toy that this monster kid had growing up in the 1970s.
Joseph Laycock is an independent scholar and doctoral candidate at Boston University, and author of 
Obviously, nothing like that happened when I saw The Exorcist in 2000. Since the re-release you can find Regan’s demonic face covered with vomit grinning at you from T-shirts and even bobble-head toys. The “hipster” culture has been accused of “fetishizing authenticity” as they plunder all of post-war culture searching for fresh artifacts of retro chic. Sadly, I think this has become the fate of The Exorcist. On the other hand, only a handful of horror movies are remembered in this fashion. I think Generation Y has fetishized The Exorcist precisely because they can sense its authenticity.
Joseph Laycock: Blatty has described himself as a “relaxed Catholic” and his spiritual life is reflected in both the Catholic character Father Karras and the secular character Chris MacNeil. Like Karras, Blatty was raised by his mother in extreme poverty and was extremely troubled by her death. He attended Georgetown University, a Jesuit school, which serves as the setting for The Exorcist. Blatty suffered the same doubts as Father Karras and described a longing for a miracle that might shore up his faith. This “miracle” came in 1949 when a story appeared in The Washington Post about a boy from Mount Ranier, Maryland who had become possessed and been successfully exorcised. Blatty had already heard rumors of the exorcism through the Jesuits and successfully tracked down the exorcist. However, he would not begin writing his novel for another twenty years. After Georgetown, Blatty learned Arabic and worked for the US Information Agency in Beirut. His time in the Middle East became the inspiration for the opening scene of The Exorcist in Iraq.
The Achilles’ heel of the secularization narrative is folk piety. Folk piety, or popular religion, is distinct from ecclesiastical religion, the official doctrines of the church. Since the Protestant Reformation, the Catholic Church has been forced to take an increasingly guarded position about the supernatural. Issues of exorcism and the demonic in particular, are often regarded as a source of embarrassment by the modern church. This trend would seem to support the idea of universal secularization. However, supernaturalism lives on in the form of folk piety. The Exorcist portrays numerous examples of supernaturalism and the fantastic from American folk piety such the belief in demons, the use of Ouija boards, parapsychology, and rumors of Satanic cults.
TheoFantastique: How is folk piety expressed through the rite of exorcism and ouija boards in the film and its cultural context?
Joseph Laycock: Millennial expectations are often not amenable to established religious institutions. In 2006 Pope Benedict XVI commented that the Book of Revelation is not about imminent catastrophe but the struggle of Christian churches in Asia in the first century. Benedict’s historical-critical reading still has a message that is relevant for modern Christians, but it makes poor fodder for charismatic religious movements or Hollywood movies. Recent apocalyptic films like Knowing and the upcoming Legion draw on folk piety rather than ecclesiastical religion. These films take a few elements from the Christian tradition and combine them with occultism, extra-terrestrials, and fears of planet-wide disasters. The result is a supernatural story that seems somehow both strange and familiar.
You never know where the fantastic in pop culture will surface, and where religion and the fantastic will intersect. I have been doing some research lately for a couple of essays on Neopaganism I need to write for a book on world religions. Today I looked at Magic and Witchcraft by Nevil Drury (Thomas & Hudson, 2003), and in his chapter on “Technopagans and Digital Magicians” there was an interesting reference to the artist H. R. Giger, perhaps best known for his creation of the alien in the series of Alien films which first appeared thirty years ago. Under the subheading of “Dark Archetypes” Drury writes of Giger:
I continue to enjoy putting together the posts and content that becomes the exploration of the fantastic in pop culture that is TheoFantastique. With this post I let readers know about “coming attractions,” beyond my own commentary the topics and individuals I will be talking with and about on this fantastic journey. In no particular order:
Finally, as a teen I loved many of the made-for-television horror films of the 1970s. Many of these appeared on the ABC TV Movie of the Week. These included offerings like Duel, Trilogy of Terror, and The Night Stalker. Michael Karol has written a volume that discusses these and other films in The ABC TV Movie of the Week Companion: A Loving Tribute to the Classic Series (iUniverse, 2008). Karol will be here to discuss these interesting pieces of pop culture that still hold up years later for horror fans.
Another book that touches on the psychic realm caught my eye when thumbing through the catalog by McFarland. It is 
Karin Beeler:In this book I discuss the female visionary (seer, witch, psychic warrior, medium or psychic investigator) in the context of third wave feminism or postfeminism. Third wave feminism emerged in the late 1980s as a new generation’s response to some of the ideas of second wave feminism, and the term postfeminist is often used to discuss this new expression of feminism. I choose the terms “third wave feminism” and “postfeminism” synonymously to recognize the contradictions and diversity that can characterize feminine experience as represented in television and film about women with visionary powers. The female visionary in these visual media is by no means a homogeneous entity; she may take the form of an African-American woman like Oda Mae Brown in the film Ghostwho reinvents herself. The female visionary may be represented as a teenage psychic warrior Cassandra figure like River Tam in Firefly and Serenity, as a twenty-something witch and sister in Charmed, as a mother of three like Alison Dubois in Mediumor as a postfeminist savior like Tru Davies in Tru Calling; the latter experiences the rewinding of a day with all of the day’s predictable and unpredictable outcomes.
Karin Beeler: Cordelia is a character that has generated a good deal of critical interest by scholars and fans of the series Angel. She is often viewed as a disempowered character who plays second fiddle to the vampire Angel in the popular television series. While she is sometimes cast as the suffering seer figure reminiscent of Cassandra, I argue that she moves beyond this mythic prototype by crossing boundaries and identities, often to help others but also to help herself. For example, she chooses to become part-demon to alleviate the pain she experiences when she receives visions: “So, demonize me already” (“Birthday” 3.11). Throughout the series she occupies a morally ambiguous or “in-between” space partly because of her ironic remarks, which also establish her hybrid identity. When she is possessed by the demonic entity known as Jasmine, she acquires yet another new identity. When Cordelia gives birth to Jasmine who appears as a kind of supernatural light, Cordelia may symbolize the kinds of alternatives available to women in a postfeminist reproductive era, from adoption to surrogate motherhood.
TheoFantastique: In another chapter you discuss the television program Ghost Whisperer. You write that in our post-9/11 world that the interest in such psychic scenarios may be due to our desire to have “some sense of closure” in regards to death and our relationship with lost loved ones. What kind of commentary might this be on the ways in which Americans process death and perhaps fail to make the most of our loved ones in the present?
Karin Beeler:As someone with a background in comparative literary studies, I have always been interested in the connections between old and new ways of seeing. For example, I enjoy examining how ancient or medieval representations of the feminine (e.g., the figure of Cassandra and the figure of Joan of Arc) are re-inscribed or resisted in more recent narratives. I think that mythic or legendary characters offer powerful narratives and psychological insights into human behavior that still appeal to modern day audiences even though the specific manifestation of these truths may change across cultures and over time. Feminist theory and the validation of women in many different kinds of endeavors also allow us to create a greater variety of possibilities for women as characters in television and film. The figure of the Trojan seer Cassandra as represented in Greek literature, for example, has been constrained by the limitations placed on women in the patriarchal society of ancient Greece. As a result, she is often relegated to the status of the mad, marginalized woman whose life is defined by pain and disempowerment. Joan of Arc, was called a witch and burned at the stake; even though she was later recognized as a saint by the Church, her elevated status as an idealized woman still remains problematic. Contemporary portrayals of Cassandra or Joan of Arc figures often subvert limitations associated with these earlier images by showing how the modern representations resist patriarchal structures. That is not to say that the contemporary Cassandras like River in Firefly and Serenity and Joan of Arc figures like Joan in Joan of Arcadia or Jaye in Wonderfalls do not suffer; there is certainly an element of suffering because of their association with these mythical or legendary prototypes, but their difficulties are often lessened through the injection of humor or individual empowerment that allows them to experience a greater sense of agency.
